DA THE GUARDIAN
From the margins: Hermione Lee on Penelope Fitzgerald
Since her death ten years ago this month, Penelope Fitzgerald's reputation has grown steadily. Once dismissed as a minor lady writer, she is now recognised as one of the finest British novelists of the last century. Her biographer Hermione Lee has been granted access to her manuscripts, letters and, best of all, her library of books with their many personal annotations
Penelope Fitzgerald, that quiet genius of late-20th-century English fiction, who was born during the Great War at the end of 1916, began to publish in 1975. Over the next quarter of a century, she wrote the nine novels, three biographies (of Edward Burne-Jones, Charlotte Mew and the Knox brothers, her father and uncles), and the many essays and reviews that brought her such critical acclaim and a devoted following. In 1995, her haunting masterpiece, The Blue Flower, made her famous in her 80s. Since her death in 2000, the publication of her stories (The Means of Escape), essays (A House of Air) and selected letters (So I Have Thought of You), brought out by her executor and son-in-law, Terence Dooley, and by HarperCollins, have sustained her posthumous reputation.
And that reputation has shifted, during and after her lifetime. When Offshore, her novel about 1960s life on the Thames river-boats, won the Booker prize in 1979, she was treated dismissively as a minor lady writer with quirky, poignant comic talents – a kind of lesser Barbara Pym – who had unaccountably won out over VS Naipaul. It took some time for readers to recognise the power, the subtlety, the absolute originality, the strangeness, the wisdom and the depth of Fitzgerald's work.
I am writing Penelope Fitzgerald's biography, and her family has trustingly let me loose on those materials of hers that they still possess. (An incalculable slice of her life's record went down with Grace, the Thames barge which inspired Offshore, when it sank in the early 1960s. Much of her written archive is in the Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities in Austin, Texas, some of it sold by Fitzgerald in 1989, some later.) What I am looking at is a biographer's dream. There are boxes, shelves and drawers-full of photograph albums, family documents, fragments of early drafts much crossed out and scribbled over, fascinating plot summaries and sketches for stories and novels that never came to fruition, research notes for an unwritten biography of her friend LP Hartley and everything from birthday cards and bills to invitations and vaccination certificates.
The family's archive – which offers the delight, and the challenge, of not having been immaculately sorted and catalogued, as it is in Texas – suggests to me a person at once harum-scarum and duty-bound, distractable and resolute. Rather as in Virginia Woolf's archives (which has dog-prints on some of the manuscript pages, or sketches for improvements to Monk's House on the back of notes for an essay on Henry James), there are signs of improvisation everywhere. Check-lists of possible speakers for a lecture programme Fitzgerald is organising are kept on the outside flap of a dog-eared manila file; notes for a review are scribbled sideways on an official notice from BT; the year's appointments are put in, with many loops and arrows and squiggles, all over a series of small wall calendars. Women writers, as she often used to say in interviews, are always being interrupted.
The family archive contains many of Fitzgerald's books. I wrote that sentence as flatly as I could, but in fact it makes my biographer's pulse race wildly. This is the second time in my life I have been given access to such an extraordinary source of knowledge about my subject. I had the good fortune to look at all that remains of Edith Wharton's magnificent collection, before her books went back to her American home, The Mount, and I made much use of them in my biography of her. Fitzgerald's collection could not be more different. These are not beautiful, expensively bound, well-ordered books with high-flown dedications from famous fellow authors. No, they are the battered, treasured, much-used library of a working woman, mostly paperbacks, stuffed full of notes, marks, clippings and reviews, written all over from cover to cover in Fitzgerald's clear, steady, italic handwriting. But these books are like Wharton's much grander library in this respect: they provide the entry point to a remarkable writer's reading life.
They also raise one of the key questions about this life story. Fitzgerald was an evasive character, extremely private, deliberately oblique in interviews. So there are a number of mysteries in her life, areas of silence and obscurity. One of these has to do with "lateness". How much of a late starter, really, was she? She always said in interviews that she started writing her first novel (The Golden Child) to entertain her husband, Desmond Fitzgerald, when he was ill. But, like many of the things she told interviewers, there is something a little too simple about this. At least one story was published before that first novel, and her archive reveals how much was going on in her interior life before she started publishing.
Penelope Knox came from a writing family, "a family where everyone was publishing, or about to publish", and has written about that environment with eloquence, tenderness and wit in The Knox Brothers and in pieces about her childhood. Her uncles – the cryptographer and classics don Dillwyn, the Anglican priest Wilfred, the famous Roman Catholic convert Ronald – were intellectuals of idiosyncratic brilliance, competitive, eccentric and learned. Her aunt, Winifred Peck, was a prolific and talented novelist in the Angela Thirkell vein. Her father, "Evoe" Knox, was the editor of Punch and a fine comic journalist. Her mother, who died when Penelope was 18, had been an English student at Somerville College, Oxford, and wrote abridgments of classic literature (Pilgrim's Progress, The Pickwick Papers) for schools. Her stepmother Mary was a gifted artist, the daughter of the illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh, EH Shepard. Her brother Rawle, a dominant and energetic character as a boy, became a journalist after his incarceration in a Japanese prison-of-war-camp. He also wrote a life of Shepard in 1979, to which Penelope contributed a vivid chapter. They had collaborated before, like many middle-class children of their era, on a nursery magazine. As a child, Penelope was an early reader ("I was praised, and since then have never been praised so much") and an early writer.
In a 1998 interview with me, she vaguely alluded to all the poems and stories and epics she must have written in her childhood. "The stories I wrote at the age of eight and nine did not bring me the success I hoped for," she noted wrily in an essay of 1980. Perhaps all that juvenilia went down with the sinking of Grace.
At boarding school, where she was mostly homesick and unhappy, she contributed to the school magazine, the Wycombe Abbey Gazette. At Oxford in the 1930s, where she followed in her mother's footsteps to Somerville, she was co-editor and contributor to the student newspaper, Cherwell. In the war, after leaving Oxford with a first to work at the BBC (the basis for Human Voices), she was writing sharp, funny film reviews for Punch, and a few anonymous reviews for the TLS. It has all the makings of someone who was going to start publishing books in her 30s. Then she married and started a family, a boy and two girls. Again, it would be too simple to say that "marriage stopped her writing". In the early 1950s she and her husband co-edited a short-lived literary and cultural magazine called World Review, to which she contributed reviews and essays, on subjects ranging from Italian architecture, Mexican "muralismo" art and modern Spanish painters to Alberto Moravia and Christopher Fry. Other contributors, who became her friends, included Stevie Smith and LP Hartley.
In the early 1960s, the Fitzgerald family fell on hard times: they were poor, unsteady, nomadic and struggling. (These unhappy years were used for Offshore and The Bookshop.) To make ends meet, Fitzgerald started teaching, first at the Italia Conti Stage School (rich material for At Freddie's), and then, through the 1960s and 1970s, at Queen's Gate, a private girls' school in Kensington, where she taught A-level English, and at Westminster Tutors, where she tutored for Oxbridge entrance exams. A large number of the books she left behind her are her teaching books, and, with a few notebooks, they fill the gap of the silent years, long years in her 40s and 50s when she could have been starting to write her own books – as eventually she did, "during my free periods as a teacher in a small, noisy staff room, full of undercurrents of exhaustion, worry and reproach".
These are the teaching texts of an enormously conscientious person, with (as she said of herself) an unshakable work ethic. There are plot summaries, chapter résumés, careful tracings of themes and patterns (as in her much-marked copy of Ulysses, keeping pace with what she calls Joyce's "terrifyingly exhaustive mind"), cross-references minutely observed, and exam questions with her stamp on them: "If sainthood is to be judged by influence and example, what do we think of the whiskey priest?"; "Robert Browning is always unwilling to speak the whole"; "In what respect is Leo's story [in Hartley's The Go-Between] an illustration of English social history during the first 50 years of the 20th century?"; "A short enough book to contain two suicides, two ruined lives, a death, a girl driven insane: it may seem odd to find that the keynote of the book [The Good Soldier] is restraint". In her copy of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory she has drawn an elaborate map of the whiskey priest's journeyings, complete with little towns and mountains. In her edition of Pope, she has constructed a neat graph, in columns, of the values in "The Rape of the Lock" ("Beauty and Honour", "Reason", "Structure of Society", etc). Her 1935 edition of Milton (marked "Knox") has two layers of notes, one in pencil from her student days (scholarly notes on textual variants in "Lycidas") and one in pen, her teaching notes: "Hell not too definitive, must be a place of moral darkness." There are thorough marginal notes, made in 1968, to Barthes' Elements of Semiology, or to the first volume of The Pelican Guide to Modern Theology (the second volume seems to have got lost), where she shows, in 1969, particular interest in the relation between religion and unbelief: "How are we to be Christians when God is dead?" she marks, in the chapter on Bonhoeffer.
Every so often she kicks up her heels. Her copies of Joyce and Beckett (in whom she is deeply interested) are full of little jokes to herself, as when the citizen in the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses goes out "to the back of the yard to pumpship", and she notes: "Has to pee just like Bloom. We're all human." In Molloy, in the early passage about "Ma", the line "I got into communication with her by knocking on her skull" has the marginal note: "How to communicate with your parents." Under the title of Donne's poem "The Baite" ("Come live with me and be my love") she notes, in teacherly fashion, one of her pupil's interpretations: "Ms Sloane: An invitation to his Mrs to come and fish." TS Eliot's play is given the subtitle: "The Archbishop Murder Case". On the title-page of Frank Kermode's Romantic Image, presumably for the benefit of whichever student she had lent it to, she writes: "My only copy of this work of culture – please return." And for her own benefit, in her battered old Signet paperback of Middlemarch, she marks, as she often does, details of when and why the book was bought. "1982. Most reluctantly bought when Nancy told me I'd got to teach George Eliot, whereas she'd previously said TS Eliot. 1995. Why on earth was I reluctant?"
These reminders to herself about her book purchases (not only in her school books) often turn into gloomily funny stories. W Graham Robertson's Time Was (full of anecdotes about Burne-Jones) is marked: "July 1981. Bought at Hatchard's, where the man in the paperback department said ah! Your novel is still going well, Mrs Fitzgerald . . . I don't think it is, but I felt quite happy. Time was!" Of Mary Bennett's short family memoir, The Ilberts in India 1882-1886, she writes: "Such a good book. Bought from the BACSA [British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia] in April 1995. I rang up and asked 'is that the publication department?' A man's voice replied 'as far as it exists, I am it.'"
Often, the teacher's notes take fire, and you see the novelist having a conversation with her books. When she is reading Jane Austen, her notes are all about education, morality, self-deception, openness; sometimes she sounds rather like her predecessor. Of Emma on Box Hill: "Emma has failed in her great virtue – generosity. We love her spirit and hate to see her humbled." Of Lady Russell in Persuasion: "A right-feeling but wrong-judging parent, who does as much harm as an unfeeling one." On the last page of that novel: "Autumnal shadow even at the end of the book." Of Darcy in Pride and Prejudice: "We feel he is serious among lightweights"; of Elizabeth "she punishes herself too much". Of the characters in Mansfield Park: "We like Tom, though not Julia or Maria – how does JA do this?" "No spite and no arrière pensée in Lady Bertram's remarks. She always simply speaks what is in her mind." "Mrs Norris is terrible, but there is a great fund of misdirected energy here." Of Fanny's mother: "We see relentlessly what a difference some money makes."
Sometimes she will start a whole line of thought about a writer, as in reading Virginia Woolf's The Waves ("The virtues of courage, sympathy and intelligence cry aloud from her books"), or Browning ("My opinion: B's problem is, why so much, and why so odd?"), or Byron ("The most interesting person we meet in Don Juan is Byron himself"), or Beckett's Godot ("An attempt to show how man bears his own company . . . The play is about the way we endure daily life"). Sometimes she is curious but impartial: "Hughes is a mime, can take on the voices and thoughts of creatures . . . And these birds, animals and situations give him a sense of certain possibilities of instinctual life or simple moral life, while the failure, cruelty and inefficiency of human life fills him with contempt." Sometimes she gets irritated, as when reading Howards End and noting Forster's "unsuccessful poetic passages", places where "he is lecturing us", and his "childish religious beliefs: God must be like Forster".
What interests her extremely is the way in which novelists deal with particular technical challenges. She notes how they manage to move large numbers of people around in a room, as at the ball in Mansfield Park ("JA's confident management of a large scene"), or how they will drop in words or details to be picked up later (such as Ford's use of "know" and "heart" on the first page of The Good Soldier), or how they establish what she calls "movement and counter-movement", like James in Washington Square, or how well they use dialogue, as in the funeral scene in Ulysses ("Joyce's Irish dialogue at its absolute best").
Preoccupations that will come into her own novels are everywhere aired in these marginalia. She particularly likes fictional treatments of "restraint", emotions trammelled or kept down, as when marking, in Middlemarch, "a delicate chapter, low-keyed emotions but minutely traced". She often notes the balance between order and chaos in a work of art, as in the poems of Thom Gunn ("the poems seem lucid and orderly, but what they are describing is irrational"), or in Beckett's Happy Days: "The form is to remain strictly formal, yet the subject is to be chaos." She is interested – again in Beckett – in stand-offs between mind and body: "Are they [Vladimir and Estragon] mind and body? . . . Beckett is drawn to this dualism. He represents it as a man riding a bike and reading a newspaper, ringing a bell from time to time – mind and body going about their own business." The theme will return, especially in The Gate of Angels, which begins with a man riding a bike in a high wind.
Above all she notices minor characters, ordinary people, obscure onlookers to the main action whom other readers might not have spotted. Who apart from her has made a note of Christopher Jackson, the carpenter, mentioned once, hired to build the stage for the family theatricals in Mansfield Park? ("JA's art, this character never appears.") In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, it is not the glorious and triumphant utterances of Honest and Valiant-for-Truth crossing the river ("Death, where is thy sting?") which she marks, but the presence of the unnamed "many" who accompanied them to the riverside. Her note reads: "Real people in background". It's those people she notices: the poor, the ordinary, as represented by the chorus in Murder in the Cathedral: "Who will intercede for them?"
She is a sympathetic reader whose notes are unembarrassed about identifying with, or feeling sorry for, fictional characters. Pages are often marked "poor Fanny", or "poor Fred" (Middlemarch) or "poor Elizabeth-Jane" (The Mayor of Casterbridge). Her sympathies are often for women's lives and feelings, as in her heartfelt notes about the cruelty done to Catherine Sloper in Washington Square ("No one sees her as she really is"), or her underlining, in her collected Shakespeare, of these lines in Two Gentlemen of Verona: "Of many good I think him best . . . I have no other but a woman's reasons; / I think him so because I think him so." Many of her notes on writers are biographical, and in some cases – as in her absorbed annotations of Dorothy Wordsworth's journals ("What was the affecting conversation with William? . . . Coleridge comes, tension rises . . .") – you can see her wanting to write a life-story, or a novel, about her.
What a sharp, observant, humorous teacher she must have been. In one of her teaching notebooks, she makes a list of names of the pupils she was tutoring, some for their 1966 A-level paper (Katherine Weld, Lindsay Parker, Anna Taylor, Stella Donner, Clare Christie-Miller, Fanny Strachey, Celyn Wickham), and some (Rebecca Roberts, Judith Evans, Virginia Bliss, Anne Wilkinson, Mary Crocker, Sarah Bellord) for their Oxbridge entrance exam, with a timetable of what they have to cover ("Next term do 'Vision of Judgment' . . . Give back essay on Passage to India . . . Must start Johnson"). Forty years or so on, where are those Fitzgerald pupils? I would love to know.
Fitzgerald's years of teaching – it's evident from her letters – were often hard grind, exhausting and frustrating, in that staffroom full of "exhaustion, worry and reproach". There is a poignant note inside the back cover of her teaching notebook for 1969, a long time before she started to publish: "I've come to see art as the most important thing but not to regret I haven't spent my life on it." Yet the conversations she was having with writers in her teaching books show that she was always thinking about art and writing: they show how the deep river was running on powerfully, preparing itself to burst out.
This is also the case, of course, with the books that have to do with her own interests, rather than her teaching. These are invaluable for the story of her thinking life, as much for what falls out of them as for what is written inside them. Inside her copy of Stevie Smith's The Frog Prince there is a typed account of a visit she made in 1969, with her daughter Tina, to Smith for lunch at her house in Palmer's Green. It is a brilliantly acute sketch, typically poised between exact observation and the desire to tell a story:
Combination of shrewd business woman, genuine artist, lonely middle-aged woman anxious to please, and mad-woman. House where she had lived for 61 years with her aunt . . . not changed in all that time . . . Upstairs, aunt's bedroom just as she left it when she died, freezing cold . . . Downstairs in the basement, stone sink, ancient stove with stovepipe, might have come out of La Bohème, faint mould . . . a cupboard with bits of tarnished silver . . . fluted gilt teacups, Japanese teapots, no lids, nutcrackers, dim cruets; Stevie struggling mysteriously with the lunch, a large tough chicken . . . There were squares of carpet on the floor – we thought they were samples and she was choosing a new one – they were samples, but she had got them free and was sticking them together to make a carpet. Evidently it was too late for her now to learn to cook; she looked dwarfed by the huge thick plates and forks; she had bought some large white tombstone-like meringues from the local shop; felt distressed by her going to this trouble.
Her copy of Philip Henderson's large life of William Morris (one of Fitzgerald's chief heroes, whom she wrote about in Edward Burne-Jones and elsewhere) is bulging with postcards, thank-you notes from the William Morris Society, clippings about other books on Morris and pieces of Morris fabric. Her copy of Hartley's Eustace and Hilda, bought in 1970, has, written inside the back cover, notes of a conversation she had with Princess Clary, his friend in Venice, when she was planning to write his biography. The princess has told her who inspired each character in the novel, and given her some anecdotes: "LPH could row a gondola, but not steer it with a pole. You have to learn that very young . . . Berenson only let you talk on subjects where you were an expert, and LPH scared to meet him . . . Princess C had to stop LPH drinking at 10am in Venice." She is feeling her way, sniffing out the telling, intriguing details she may want to use.
When she was writing biography, or when her fiction moved from the material of her own life to historical subjects (though the autobiographical and the historical are complicatedly mixed together in all her work), Fitzgerald was as thorough and conscientious a researcher as she had been a teacher. One of the remarkable things about her novels is the way they suppress and lightly deploy a deep mine of knowledge, so that a whole history of a place and a time – as that exam question on The Go-Between proposes – seems to open out behind them. Signs of research are everywhere on her bookshelves: picture books on Cambridge in the early 20th century, for The Gate of Angels, books on Russia for The Beginning of Spring (including a paperback Dr Zhivago crammed full of clippings from the early 1970s – Isaiah Berlin on the philosophy of Georges Sorel, John Bayley on Pasternak). In interviews about The Blue Flower, she often talked about how much reading she did for the book, and about how careful she was to bury all that homework. This literary archive uncovers some of that burying, and shines a strong clear light on to Fitzgerald's professional and intellectual life.
But it is a personal, intimate archive, too, and some of the books hold nice traces of family and friendship. Funny, gossipy notes fall out of a dedicated first edition of a novel by her friend Francis King. A business letter to her father from TS Eliot is tucked inside her copy of his Poems. In her Virago copy of Ada Leverson's The Little Otleys, there is a 1982 letter from Francis Wyndham (Leverson's grandson) about Fitzgerald's review of Leverson's reissued novel, praising Fitzgerald's work on Charlotte Mew.
One tiny volume shows up an especially pleasing set of associations. This is Max Beerbohm's pamphlet-essay on Lytton Strachey, published in 1943. It is dedicated: "Daddy, Love from Mops, Christmas 1943". (Mops was Penelope Knox's family name.) A pencil scrawl above, perhaps a bookseller's, notes: "To EV Knox from his daughter Penelope Fitzgerald". Tucked into the pamphlet is a postcard, dated 6 July 1998, which reads: "Dear Penelope Fitzgerald, Among the books chance puts in our hands are a few that were never meant for us: this one, of course, was meant to come back to you, and it gives me great pleasure to be able to redirect it. With all best wishes, Alberto Manguel." In So I Have Thought of You, Fitzgerald's letters, there is a note to Manguel (novelist and author of A History of Reading), written on 12 July 1998, thanking him for sending the book. "I can't tell you how pleased I was," she writes. "I remember giving it to my father. He came up to London as a young man before the first world war . . . and one of his ambitions was to meet the great Max Beerbohm." Manguel writes to her once more, later that year, praising The Blue Flower, and asking to use a line of it as an epigram for his next book. In return, she writes kindly about his book on reading: "At the end of your fine book you say that 'The history of reading has no end'. I treasure these words and can only pray that they're true." The remark is typical in its generosity, its passion for what matters to her, and its guarded optimism.
Penelope Fitzgerald, that quiet genius of late-20th-century English fiction, who was born during the Great War at the end of 1916, began to publish in 1975. Over the next quarter of a century, she wrote the nine novels, three biographies (of Edward Burne-Jones, Charlotte Mew and the Knox brothers, her father and uncles), and the many essays and reviews that brought her such critical acclaim and a devoted following. In 1995, her haunting masterpiece, The Blue Flower, made her famous in her 80s. Since her death in 2000, the publication of her stories (The Means of Escape), essays (A House of Air) and selected letters (So I Have Thought of You), brought out by her executor and son-in-law, Terence Dooley, and by HarperCollins, have sustained her posthumous reputation.
And that reputation has shifted, during and after her lifetime. When Offshore, her novel about 1960s life on the Thames river-boats, won the Booker prize in 1979, she was treated dismissively as a minor lady writer with quirky, poignant comic talents – a kind of lesser Barbara Pym – who had unaccountably won out over VS Naipaul. It took some time for readers to recognise the power, the subtlety, the absolute originality, the strangeness, the wisdom and the depth of Fitzgerald's work.
I am writing Penelope Fitzgerald's biography, and her family has trustingly let me loose on those materials of hers that they still possess. (An incalculable slice of her life's record went down with Grace, the Thames barge which inspired Offshore, when it sank in the early 1960s. Much of her written archive is in the Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities in Austin, Texas, some of it sold by Fitzgerald in 1989, some later.) What I am looking at is a biographer's dream. There are boxes, shelves and drawers-full of photograph albums, family documents, fragments of early drafts much crossed out and scribbled over, fascinating plot summaries and sketches for stories and novels that never came to fruition, research notes for an unwritten biography of her friend LP Hartley and everything from birthday cards and bills to invitations and vaccination certificates.
The family's archive – which offers the delight, and the challenge, of not having been immaculately sorted and catalogued, as it is in Texas – suggests to me a person at once harum-scarum and duty-bound, distractable and resolute. Rather as in Virginia Woolf's archives (which has dog-prints on some of the manuscript pages, or sketches for improvements to Monk's House on the back of notes for an essay on Henry James), there are signs of improvisation everywhere. Check-lists of possible speakers for a lecture programme Fitzgerald is organising are kept on the outside flap of a dog-eared manila file; notes for a review are scribbled sideways on an official notice from BT; the year's appointments are put in, with many loops and arrows and squiggles, all over a series of small wall calendars. Women writers, as she often used to say in interviews, are always being interrupted.
The family archive contains many of Fitzgerald's books. I wrote that sentence as flatly as I could, but in fact it makes my biographer's pulse race wildly. This is the second time in my life I have been given access to such an extraordinary source of knowledge about my subject. I had the good fortune to look at all that remains of Edith Wharton's magnificent collection, before her books went back to her American home, The Mount, and I made much use of them in my biography of her. Fitzgerald's collection could not be more different. These are not beautiful, expensively bound, well-ordered books with high-flown dedications from famous fellow authors. No, they are the battered, treasured, much-used library of a working woman, mostly paperbacks, stuffed full of notes, marks, clippings and reviews, written all over from cover to cover in Fitzgerald's clear, steady, italic handwriting. But these books are like Wharton's much grander library in this respect: they provide the entry point to a remarkable writer's reading life.
They also raise one of the key questions about this life story. Fitzgerald was an evasive character, extremely private, deliberately oblique in interviews. So there are a number of mysteries in her life, areas of silence and obscurity. One of these has to do with "lateness". How much of a late starter, really, was she? She always said in interviews that she started writing her first novel (The Golden Child) to entertain her husband, Desmond Fitzgerald, when he was ill. But, like many of the things she told interviewers, there is something a little too simple about this. At least one story was published before that first novel, and her archive reveals how much was going on in her interior life before she started publishing.
Penelope Knox came from a writing family, "a family where everyone was publishing, or about to publish", and has written about that environment with eloquence, tenderness and wit in The Knox Brothers and in pieces about her childhood. Her uncles – the cryptographer and classics don Dillwyn, the Anglican priest Wilfred, the famous Roman Catholic convert Ronald – were intellectuals of idiosyncratic brilliance, competitive, eccentric and learned. Her aunt, Winifred Peck, was a prolific and talented novelist in the Angela Thirkell vein. Her father, "Evoe" Knox, was the editor of Punch and a fine comic journalist. Her mother, who died when Penelope was 18, had been an English student at Somerville College, Oxford, and wrote abridgments of classic literature (Pilgrim's Progress, The Pickwick Papers) for schools. Her stepmother Mary was a gifted artist, the daughter of the illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh, EH Shepard. Her brother Rawle, a dominant and energetic character as a boy, became a journalist after his incarceration in a Japanese prison-of-war-camp. He also wrote a life of Shepard in 1979, to which Penelope contributed a vivid chapter. They had collaborated before, like many middle-class children of their era, on a nursery magazine. As a child, Penelope was an early reader ("I was praised, and since then have never been praised so much") and an early writer.
In a 1998 interview with me, she vaguely alluded to all the poems and stories and epics she must have written in her childhood. "The stories I wrote at the age of eight and nine did not bring me the success I hoped for," she noted wrily in an essay of 1980. Perhaps all that juvenilia went down with the sinking of Grace.
At boarding school, where she was mostly homesick and unhappy, she contributed to the school magazine, the Wycombe Abbey Gazette. At Oxford in the 1930s, where she followed in her mother's footsteps to Somerville, she was co-editor and contributor to the student newspaper, Cherwell. In the war, after leaving Oxford with a first to work at the BBC (the basis for Human Voices), she was writing sharp, funny film reviews for Punch, and a few anonymous reviews for the TLS. It has all the makings of someone who was going to start publishing books in her 30s. Then she married and started a family, a boy and two girls. Again, it would be too simple to say that "marriage stopped her writing". In the early 1950s she and her husband co-edited a short-lived literary and cultural magazine called World Review, to which she contributed reviews and essays, on subjects ranging from Italian architecture, Mexican "muralismo" art and modern Spanish painters to Alberto Moravia and Christopher Fry. Other contributors, who became her friends, included Stevie Smith and LP Hartley.
In the early 1960s, the Fitzgerald family fell on hard times: they were poor, unsteady, nomadic and struggling. (These unhappy years were used for Offshore and The Bookshop.) To make ends meet, Fitzgerald started teaching, first at the Italia Conti Stage School (rich material for At Freddie's), and then, through the 1960s and 1970s, at Queen's Gate, a private girls' school in Kensington, where she taught A-level English, and at Westminster Tutors, where she tutored for Oxbridge entrance exams. A large number of the books she left behind her are her teaching books, and, with a few notebooks, they fill the gap of the silent years, long years in her 40s and 50s when she could have been starting to write her own books – as eventually she did, "during my free periods as a teacher in a small, noisy staff room, full of undercurrents of exhaustion, worry and reproach".
These are the teaching texts of an enormously conscientious person, with (as she said of herself) an unshakable work ethic. There are plot summaries, chapter résumés, careful tracings of themes and patterns (as in her much-marked copy of Ulysses, keeping pace with what she calls Joyce's "terrifyingly exhaustive mind"), cross-references minutely observed, and exam questions with her stamp on them: "If sainthood is to be judged by influence and example, what do we think of the whiskey priest?"; "Robert Browning is always unwilling to speak the whole"; "In what respect is Leo's story [in Hartley's The Go-Between] an illustration of English social history during the first 50 years of the 20th century?"; "A short enough book to contain two suicides, two ruined lives, a death, a girl driven insane: it may seem odd to find that the keynote of the book [The Good Soldier] is restraint". In her copy of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory she has drawn an elaborate map of the whiskey priest's journeyings, complete with little towns and mountains. In her edition of Pope, she has constructed a neat graph, in columns, of the values in "The Rape of the Lock" ("Beauty and Honour", "Reason", "Structure of Society", etc). Her 1935 edition of Milton (marked "Knox") has two layers of notes, one in pencil from her student days (scholarly notes on textual variants in "Lycidas") and one in pen, her teaching notes: "Hell not too definitive, must be a place of moral darkness." There are thorough marginal notes, made in 1968, to Barthes' Elements of Semiology, or to the first volume of The Pelican Guide to Modern Theology (the second volume seems to have got lost), where she shows, in 1969, particular interest in the relation between religion and unbelief: "How are we to be Christians when God is dead?" she marks, in the chapter on Bonhoeffer.
Every so often she kicks up her heels. Her copies of Joyce and Beckett (in whom she is deeply interested) are full of little jokes to herself, as when the citizen in the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses goes out "to the back of the yard to pumpship", and she notes: "Has to pee just like Bloom. We're all human." In Molloy, in the early passage about "Ma", the line "I got into communication with her by knocking on her skull" has the marginal note: "How to communicate with your parents." Under the title of Donne's poem "The Baite" ("Come live with me and be my love") she notes, in teacherly fashion, one of her pupil's interpretations: "Ms Sloane: An invitation to his Mrs to come and fish." TS Eliot's play is given the subtitle: "The Archbishop Murder Case". On the title-page of Frank Kermode's Romantic Image, presumably for the benefit of whichever student she had lent it to, she writes: "My only copy of this work of culture – please return." And for her own benefit, in her battered old Signet paperback of Middlemarch, she marks, as she often does, details of when and why the book was bought. "1982. Most reluctantly bought when Nancy told me I'd got to teach George Eliot, whereas she'd previously said TS Eliot. 1995. Why on earth was I reluctant?"
These reminders to herself about her book purchases (not only in her school books) often turn into gloomily funny stories. W Graham Robertson's Time Was (full of anecdotes about Burne-Jones) is marked: "July 1981. Bought at Hatchard's, where the man in the paperback department said ah! Your novel is still going well, Mrs Fitzgerald . . . I don't think it is, but I felt quite happy. Time was!" Of Mary Bennett's short family memoir, The Ilberts in India 1882-1886, she writes: "Such a good book. Bought from the BACSA [British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia] in April 1995. I rang up and asked 'is that the publication department?' A man's voice replied 'as far as it exists, I am it.'"
Often, the teacher's notes take fire, and you see the novelist having a conversation with her books. When she is reading Jane Austen, her notes are all about education, morality, self-deception, openness; sometimes she sounds rather like her predecessor. Of Emma on Box Hill: "Emma has failed in her great virtue – generosity. We love her spirit and hate to see her humbled." Of Lady Russell in Persuasion: "A right-feeling but wrong-judging parent, who does as much harm as an unfeeling one." On the last page of that novel: "Autumnal shadow even at the end of the book." Of Darcy in Pride and Prejudice: "We feel he is serious among lightweights"; of Elizabeth "she punishes herself too much". Of the characters in Mansfield Park: "We like Tom, though not Julia or Maria – how does JA do this?" "No spite and no arrière pensée in Lady Bertram's remarks. She always simply speaks what is in her mind." "Mrs Norris is terrible, but there is a great fund of misdirected energy here." Of Fanny's mother: "We see relentlessly what a difference some money makes."
Sometimes she will start a whole line of thought about a writer, as in reading Virginia Woolf's The Waves ("The virtues of courage, sympathy and intelligence cry aloud from her books"), or Browning ("My opinion: B's problem is, why so much, and why so odd?"), or Byron ("The most interesting person we meet in Don Juan is Byron himself"), or Beckett's Godot ("An attempt to show how man bears his own company . . . The play is about the way we endure daily life"). Sometimes she is curious but impartial: "Hughes is a mime, can take on the voices and thoughts of creatures . . . And these birds, animals and situations give him a sense of certain possibilities of instinctual life or simple moral life, while the failure, cruelty and inefficiency of human life fills him with contempt." Sometimes she gets irritated, as when reading Howards End and noting Forster's "unsuccessful poetic passages", places where "he is lecturing us", and his "childish religious beliefs: God must be like Forster".
What interests her extremely is the way in which novelists deal with particular technical challenges. She notes how they manage to move large numbers of people around in a room, as at the ball in Mansfield Park ("JA's confident management of a large scene"), or how they will drop in words or details to be picked up later (such as Ford's use of "know" and "heart" on the first page of The Good Soldier), or how they establish what she calls "movement and counter-movement", like James in Washington Square, or how well they use dialogue, as in the funeral scene in Ulysses ("Joyce's Irish dialogue at its absolute best").
Preoccupations that will come into her own novels are everywhere aired in these marginalia. She particularly likes fictional treatments of "restraint", emotions trammelled or kept down, as when marking, in Middlemarch, "a delicate chapter, low-keyed emotions but minutely traced". She often notes the balance between order and chaos in a work of art, as in the poems of Thom Gunn ("the poems seem lucid and orderly, but what they are describing is irrational"), or in Beckett's Happy Days: "The form is to remain strictly formal, yet the subject is to be chaos." She is interested – again in Beckett – in stand-offs between mind and body: "Are they [Vladimir and Estragon] mind and body? . . . Beckett is drawn to this dualism. He represents it as a man riding a bike and reading a newspaper, ringing a bell from time to time – mind and body going about their own business." The theme will return, especially in The Gate of Angels, which begins with a man riding a bike in a high wind.
Above all she notices minor characters, ordinary people, obscure onlookers to the main action whom other readers might not have spotted. Who apart from her has made a note of Christopher Jackson, the carpenter, mentioned once, hired to build the stage for the family theatricals in Mansfield Park? ("JA's art, this character never appears.") In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, it is not the glorious and triumphant utterances of Honest and Valiant-for-Truth crossing the river ("Death, where is thy sting?") which she marks, but the presence of the unnamed "many" who accompanied them to the riverside. Her note reads: "Real people in background". It's those people she notices: the poor, the ordinary, as represented by the chorus in Murder in the Cathedral: "Who will intercede for them?"
She is a sympathetic reader whose notes are unembarrassed about identifying with, or feeling sorry for, fictional characters. Pages are often marked "poor Fanny", or "poor Fred" (Middlemarch) or "poor Elizabeth-Jane" (The Mayor of Casterbridge). Her sympathies are often for women's lives and feelings, as in her heartfelt notes about the cruelty done to Catherine Sloper in Washington Square ("No one sees her as she really is"), or her underlining, in her collected Shakespeare, of these lines in Two Gentlemen of Verona: "Of many good I think him best . . . I have no other but a woman's reasons; / I think him so because I think him so." Many of her notes on writers are biographical, and in some cases – as in her absorbed annotations of Dorothy Wordsworth's journals ("What was the affecting conversation with William? . . . Coleridge comes, tension rises . . .") – you can see her wanting to write a life-story, or a novel, about her.
What a sharp, observant, humorous teacher she must have been. In one of her teaching notebooks, she makes a list of names of the pupils she was tutoring, some for their 1966 A-level paper (Katherine Weld, Lindsay Parker, Anna Taylor, Stella Donner, Clare Christie-Miller, Fanny Strachey, Celyn Wickham), and some (Rebecca Roberts, Judith Evans, Virginia Bliss, Anne Wilkinson, Mary Crocker, Sarah Bellord) for their Oxbridge entrance exam, with a timetable of what they have to cover ("Next term do 'Vision of Judgment' . . . Give back essay on Passage to India . . . Must start Johnson"). Forty years or so on, where are those Fitzgerald pupils? I would love to know.
Fitzgerald's years of teaching – it's evident from her letters – were often hard grind, exhausting and frustrating, in that staffroom full of "exhaustion, worry and reproach". There is a poignant note inside the back cover of her teaching notebook for 1969, a long time before she started to publish: "I've come to see art as the most important thing but not to regret I haven't spent my life on it." Yet the conversations she was having with writers in her teaching books show that she was always thinking about art and writing: they show how the deep river was running on powerfully, preparing itself to burst out.
This is also the case, of course, with the books that have to do with her own interests, rather than her teaching. These are invaluable for the story of her thinking life, as much for what falls out of them as for what is written inside them. Inside her copy of Stevie Smith's The Frog Prince there is a typed account of a visit she made in 1969, with her daughter Tina, to Smith for lunch at her house in Palmer's Green. It is a brilliantly acute sketch, typically poised between exact observation and the desire to tell a story:
Combination of shrewd business woman, genuine artist, lonely middle-aged woman anxious to please, and mad-woman. House where she had lived for 61 years with her aunt . . . not changed in all that time . . . Upstairs, aunt's bedroom just as she left it when she died, freezing cold . . . Downstairs in the basement, stone sink, ancient stove with stovepipe, might have come out of La Bohème, faint mould . . . a cupboard with bits of tarnished silver . . . fluted gilt teacups, Japanese teapots, no lids, nutcrackers, dim cruets; Stevie struggling mysteriously with the lunch, a large tough chicken . . . There were squares of carpet on the floor – we thought they were samples and she was choosing a new one – they were samples, but she had got them free and was sticking them together to make a carpet. Evidently it was too late for her now to learn to cook; she looked dwarfed by the huge thick plates and forks; she had bought some large white tombstone-like meringues from the local shop; felt distressed by her going to this trouble.
Her copy of Philip Henderson's large life of William Morris (one of Fitzgerald's chief heroes, whom she wrote about in Edward Burne-Jones and elsewhere) is bulging with postcards, thank-you notes from the William Morris Society, clippings about other books on Morris and pieces of Morris fabric. Her copy of Hartley's Eustace and Hilda, bought in 1970, has, written inside the back cover, notes of a conversation she had with Princess Clary, his friend in Venice, when she was planning to write his biography. The princess has told her who inspired each character in the novel, and given her some anecdotes: "LPH could row a gondola, but not steer it with a pole. You have to learn that very young . . . Berenson only let you talk on subjects where you were an expert, and LPH scared to meet him . . . Princess C had to stop LPH drinking at 10am in Venice." She is feeling her way, sniffing out the telling, intriguing details she may want to use.
When she was writing biography, or when her fiction moved from the material of her own life to historical subjects (though the autobiographical and the historical are complicatedly mixed together in all her work), Fitzgerald was as thorough and conscientious a researcher as she had been a teacher. One of the remarkable things about her novels is the way they suppress and lightly deploy a deep mine of knowledge, so that a whole history of a place and a time – as that exam question on The Go-Between proposes – seems to open out behind them. Signs of research are everywhere on her bookshelves: picture books on Cambridge in the early 20th century, for The Gate of Angels, books on Russia for The Beginning of Spring (including a paperback Dr Zhivago crammed full of clippings from the early 1970s – Isaiah Berlin on the philosophy of Georges Sorel, John Bayley on Pasternak). In interviews about The Blue Flower, she often talked about how much reading she did for the book, and about how careful she was to bury all that homework. This literary archive uncovers some of that burying, and shines a strong clear light on to Fitzgerald's professional and intellectual life.
But it is a personal, intimate archive, too, and some of the books hold nice traces of family and friendship. Funny, gossipy notes fall out of a dedicated first edition of a novel by her friend Francis King. A business letter to her father from TS Eliot is tucked inside her copy of his Poems. In her Virago copy of Ada Leverson's The Little Otleys, there is a 1982 letter from Francis Wyndham (Leverson's grandson) about Fitzgerald's review of Leverson's reissued novel, praising Fitzgerald's work on Charlotte Mew.
One tiny volume shows up an especially pleasing set of associations. This is Max Beerbohm's pamphlet-essay on Lytton Strachey, published in 1943. It is dedicated: "Daddy, Love from Mops, Christmas 1943". (Mops was Penelope Knox's family name.) A pencil scrawl above, perhaps a bookseller's, notes: "To EV Knox from his daughter Penelope Fitzgerald". Tucked into the pamphlet is a postcard, dated 6 July 1998, which reads: "Dear Penelope Fitzgerald, Among the books chance puts in our hands are a few that were never meant for us: this one, of course, was meant to come back to you, and it gives me great pleasure to be able to redirect it. With all best wishes, Alberto Manguel." In So I Have Thought of You, Fitzgerald's letters, there is a note to Manguel (novelist and author of A History of Reading), written on 12 July 1998, thanking him for sending the book. "I can't tell you how pleased I was," she writes. "I remember giving it to my father. He came up to London as a young man before the first world war . . . and one of his ambitions was to meet the great Max Beerbohm." Manguel writes to her once more, later that year, praising The Blue Flower, and asking to use a line of it as an epigram for his next book. In return, she writes kindly about his book on reading: "At the end of your fine book you say that 'The history of reading has no end'. I treasure these words and can only pray that they're true." The remark is typical in its generosity, its passion for what matters to her, and its guarded optimism.
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