The Blue Flower

But they are Saxons, these characters, and know how to make a good dinner even if their hearts are breaking. Itemised meals that seem to mean something else, like auguries, arrive in their season: cherries dark as leaves or starlings, the amarelles for Kirsch the darkest of all, fiery schnaps flavoured with peppermint, all the better for the seething of a pig’s neck fat, ears and nostrils.

‘Let time stand still until she turns around,’ thinks Fritz, first beholding his love, in tune with his heartbeat. In so seasonal, worshipful and abbreviated a way of life, music is never far away; we hear even the piano’s (possibly not yet invented) third pedal at Fritz and Sophie’s engagement party.

So suggestive with extraneous spirits is this chapter, in which a sudden and opinionated first person arrives just the once, to remark upon an unidentifiable snatch of music amid the Bach and hymns by Zinzendorf, that it is as though we are for one moment let into a secret within the secret; we hear and see ghosts. But we cannot know what it is. We know merely that, should we develop further capacity to imagine, we would see – albeit briefly – ‘something’, quite clearly. We are looking for the blue flower.

By now we may have suspicions as to its nature; even if we are right, what is to say that death cannot be changed, by being thought about otherwise, by the turn from dark into light; is not the dark its own kind of light?

There is little sense that this other way of thinking must necessarily involve Christ. The clergy come in for less of the satire for which their visits to the house of fiction have primed them; idle, vain and unfeeling doctors receive the brunt with their casual cruelty and patronising cant, and a landlady whose dithery taste for the pain of others is gratified in a harsh moment of authorial grip and withdrawal of anything but Sophie’s pain imagined by the inextricably involved reader. We are thrown onto our expertly readied imaginations and we flinch, writhe, do not credit, accept; and have to go on.

No character is trapped in the place the novelist has made for him. They walk, and the floorboards creak, they breathe and the window mists, they live and love and die, in Sophie’s case with her repeatedly reopened wound kept open still, to release the backed-up poison, with the use of a worked silk thread. Sheets, wearing thin, turned sides to middle, by now a colour milder than white, through which the broad summer sunshine may be seen, outlive the human souls whom we met first amid a great laundering.

Just as there is no self-regarding plangency of tone, there is no officious marshalling of characters. No points are laboured; all are sharp, and let the light in. Sophie’s first agony arrives in the form of something that glitters. The novelist with her surgical haberdashery is keeping our reading wound fresh. She offers no anaesthetic but clarity and beauty.

Returning from what will be his last visit to his mortally sick Philosophy, Hardenberg approaches his family home. He is late. ‘Fritz paid the fine which was collected from all latecomers.’

It is the fine that we are here to pay again and again, the price of love.

Penelope Fitzgerald lives up to her ancestors.

Candia McWilliam

2013

Epigraph

‘Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.’

F. von Hardenberg, later Novalis,

Fragmente und Studien, 1799–1800

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