FROM TLS
Fitzgerald’s juvenilia – and the long silence that followed it
Edmund Gordon Penelope Fitzgerald – who was quite capable of dissembling in interviews – liked to tell journalists that she wrote her first novel, The Golden Child (1977), to entertain her dying husband. Already over sixty when it was published, she was, by implication, a late starter, but not a slow developer. Her first masterpiece, The Bookshop, appeared the following year, and she was soon dismissing The Golden Child as “almost unintelligible” and “scarcely worth reading”.
Fitzgerald’s publishers have drawn attention to her late emergence and seemingly effortless development as a novelist. Stuart Proffitt, her editor at Collins, has described The Golden Child as “the only piece of juvenilia I know of by a sixty-one year old”. In recent editions of her work, the biographical note begins “Penelope Fitzgerald did not embark on her literary career until the age of sixty”. This Cinderella narrative is made compelling by Fitzgerald’s subsequent productivity and critical success. Over the next two decades she published, on average, a novel every two years; she won the Booker Prize (for Offshore, 1979), and became the first non-American to win the National Book Critics’ Circle Award (for The Blue Flower, 1995 – perhaps her greatest achievement).
Her novels are remarkable for their precision of insight, their economy of expression and their luminous evocation of period and place. Their atmosphere is at once tranquil and troubling. They are nimbly written and intuitively structured, patterned rather than plotted, with scenes unfolding tangentially like harmonies and counter-harmonies in a piece of music. She once praised John McGahern for his attention to “small things”, and her own work often gives as much space to moments of incidental beauty as to the key elements of the narrative: towards the end of The Beginning of Spring (1988) there is a four-and-a-half-page description of a birch wood; in Offshore, the heroine’s explosive fight with her husband is followed by a meandering description of her taxi ride home.
The Golden Child lacks many of these distinctive qualities. But if it is, therefore, an apprentice work, it does not (as Fitzgerald also implied) account for her full apprenticeship; nor does it represent her juvenilia. In fact, contrary to what she let her interviewers and publishers believe, this late-flowering genius had started writing in childhood.
She came from what she described as “a writing family” – “a family where everyone was publishing, or about to publish”. Her father, Edmund (better known as “Evoe”) Knox, was the editor of Punch, and a prolific writer of light verse, who published several volumes of his journalism and poetry; her uncles were the prominent theologian, crime writer and Bible translator Ronald Knox, the cryptographer and classics scholar Dillwyn Knox, and the Anglo-Catholic priest Wilfred Knox. (Fitzgerald produced a tender and witty portrait of her father and her uncles in The Knox Brothers, 1977.) Her mother, Christina, wrote abridgements of classic novels for use in schools, and had been one of the first woman students at Oxford.
It is hardly surprising that, growing up in a family of such literary distinction, Fitzgerald should have begun writing at an early age. In her notebook plans for The Means of Escape, her collection of short fiction (published a few months after she died in 2000), she lists as possible inclusions two stories from the 1920s, written before she had even reached her teens. These stories, “The Victoria Line” and “Matilda, Matilda”, never made the finished collection, nor have they surfaced since Fitzgerald's death – whether they were serious candidates for publication is, perhaps, doubtful, but the suggestion alone renders their loss more than usually regrettable.
Her earliest surviving writings appeared in her school magazine, the Wycombe Abbey Gazette, in 1936, when she was seventeen. Penelope Knox, as she then was, is listed as the magazine’s editor for her house, as well as a member of the school’s library staff and literary committee. She contributed several reviews of school plays, and of lectures by visiting speakers, as well as her first known poem, “The Veteran”, a mock-heroic depiction of a milkman’s horse, which, having been used in battle, is primed to charge whenever it hears a bugle played; when it hears one in London, the effort of charging with the milk-cart attached to its back proves too much, and it dies. The style of the poem is clearly influenced by her father’s light verse (collected as In My Old Days in 1972):
They took him to a manufacturing store,
Which purchased horses whose brief life had fled;
“A dead horse?” said the secretary, and sped
Upstairs, the general manager to tell.
“A dead horse?” that commercial magnate said,
“The potted meat department. Mince him well.
We’ll call it ham and chicken. It will sell.”
“The Veteran”, slight as it is, suggests that some of the preoccupations that would inform Fitzgerald’s novels were already in place before she left school. She was drawn, throughout her writing life, to images of weak or tormented animals, just as the characters she treated with the greatest sympathy were, in her own phrase, “those who are born to be defeated”. Another old milkman’s horse appears a few years later in one of her sketches for the Oxford paper, the Cherwell, and the motif is reprised twice in her mature work – in Fritz Von Hardenberg’s decrepit horse, “the Gaul”, in The Blue Flower, and in the horse that takes Frank Reid to the station in The Beginning of Spring (the scene in that novel in which a group of children tease and set fire to a bear cub is, in a similar vein, one of Fitzgerald’s most disturbing set pieces).
In October 1935, Fitzgerald went up to Somerville College, Oxford, where she became a regular contributor to the two main University newspapers, the Cherwell and the Isis. There is no way of knowing for certain quite how much she wrote for them (the Oxford press during the 1930s was governed by a tone of high-minded urbanity, and the majority of articles and reviews appeared anonymously); but enough pieces were printed under the name Penelope Knox, or the initials PMK, to suggest that the full extent of her contributions must have been much greater. In March 1937, she became co-editor of the Cherwell with another undergraduate, Steven Watson, and retained the post until December of that year.
The Cherwell and the Isis were far closer to one another in the 1930s, in terms of content and approach, than are their present-day descendants. Both contained a mixture of humorous sketches, feuilletons and writing on the arts (into which categories most of Fitzgerald’s signed contributions fall) as well as earnest debate on subjects of institutional moment (such as “The Role of Women in the Union”), and political (specifically anti-Nazi) polemic. Other regular contributors at that time included Philip Toynbee, who was Fitzgerald’s exact contemporary, and Iris Murdoch, another Somerville student, whose first piece for the Cherwell appeared a few weeks before Fitzgerald’s last.
Fitzgerald’s contributions are clearly the work of someone not long out of school: their tone is frequently whimsical; they sometimes feel sketchy; their influences can weigh down on them. Yet they are also guided by Fitzgerald’s distinctive intelligence and wit – and despite their flaws they can be seen to prefigure her mature voice. Already, there is the eccentric narrative trajectory, both discursive and propulsive, that would characterize her great novels, as well as the skilfully suppressed emotion, the sense that in every sentence more is implied than is ever made explicit. There is also, in some of them, the compressed vitality of language that illuminates her later fiction. In a passage that anticipates the descriptions of nature in The Beginning of Spring, she writes of “a few doubtful struggling flakes” of snow; in another, she describes “dawn breaking damply on the Epsom downs”. These pieces are juvenilia but they show a writer coming to terms with her talents, and working out how best to deploy them.
The first of them appeared in the Isis at the beginning of Fitzgerald’s third term at the university. Addressed to her fellow freshmen, it takes the form of a translation manual and survival guide for those who are “driven into a situation in which it is absolutely essential to talk to someone at Oxford”. Written in the satiric style of Punch, it delivers a firm reproof to several forms of undergraduate pretension:
Question: “As Voltaire remarks, ‘C’est que j’ai vécu.’” Means: “I’m determined to get this quotation off at some point.” What to do: Start talking in German.
Question: Complete silence. Means: “I am a Blue of some description.” What to do: Relax.
A few months later, Fitzgerald made the first of many signed contributions to the Cherwell – an article entitled “On Going Abroad”, in which she argued (what today might be a commonplace) that in the age of aviation and global tourism “the superiority of the travelled man is a mere anachronism”. The article is typical of Fitzgerald’s early writing in its mixture of polemic, reportage and fantasy, and its scattering of sharp epigrammatic jokes. “A journey ought to broaden the imagination; it usually narrows it to a series varying from one to twenty-five anecdotes”; “One of the great advantages of travel, evidently, is the number of things which are found inadequate or useless on return”. This disarming tendency to interject pithy, authoritative comments on her own narratives would survive into her mature work.
Like most of the pieces Fitzgerald wrote for the Cherwell, “On Going Abroad” is written in the first person, but the narrator is deliberately evasive about her identity, speaking of herself in terms either vague or comically implausible. There is, indeed, as little sense of confession in Fitzgerald’s writing from this period as can be found in any of her later work – perhaps even less. Resemblances between some of her Cherwell narrators’ personalities are, however, striking. The narrator of “I Was Afraid” (the title of which, like that of Fitzgerald’s novel Human Voices (1980) suggests an allusion to J. Alfred Prufrock) describes her pathological nervousness, her inhibitive fear of “everything”; similarly, the narrator of “Look Stranger” (this time the borrowing is from W. H. Auden) talks about her agonizing loneliness since leaving school, and her discomfort among her university peers. Both these pieces are narrated by Oxford undergraduates, but a generous dose of the fantastic and the absurd (“I carry a water-pistol to ward off confidence tricksters”; “I used to spring across the Parks, gibbering strangely and frightening the cricketers”) prevents us from identifying the speakers too closely with Fitzgerald herself.
If her contributions to the Oxford papers do not directly reveal her personality, they make up for that by indicating the development of her interior life. We are able to follow, through them, both her expansion as a writer, and the rush of her ideas about reading. “The Curse of a Literary Education”, for example, is narrated by a student whose immersion in literature prevents her from responding naturally to her surroundings. She goes on a country walk: “My mind, which is supposed to be resting, is immediately thronged with a hundred scraps of prose and poetry . . . . At every stream I think ‘but I go on for ever’; at every flower ‘thoughts that do sometimes lie too deep for tears’”. In a similar (but wittier and more interesting) vein, the narrator of “Wicked Words” complains that her middle-class upbringing has left her deficient in one respect – “school developed our characters”, she opines, “but it did not teach us how to swear”. Nor can she learn anything from her well-heeled fellow students. She turns to literature as her guide, but it is equally unhelpful. There follows a rich stream of pastiche, beginning with a parody of a popular novel from (Fitzgerald’s precision here indicates the seriousness of her intentions) “about 1870”: “Lord Findlay’s complexion clouded; his brow darkened, and there broke from him a few oaths of such violence that Belle, unable to contain her agitation, ran out of the parlour in a fit of tears”.
The success with which Fitzgerald imitates, in this piece, a variety of contrasting styles is testament to her rapidly increasing command. This is her example of the descriptions of swearing in “the more modern kind” of 1930s fiction:
“So you’re leaving me?” he jerked out, roughly.
She nodded, mute and fascinated by his altered face.
With an uncontrolled movement he upset first one, then the other suitcase, took a cigarette, slumped into a chair; then, quietly, he called her every filthy name he knew.
“Wicked Words” demonstrates Fitzgerald’s aversion to the kind of genteel English fiction she is sometimes characterized as writing. But it also, through its confident parodying of more than half a century’s popular literature, suggests the breadth of her reading. That she was, at this stage of her life, already thinking deeply about literature is clear from the book and theatre reviews she wrote. These reviews display her intelligence, as well as her uncompromising standards.
Despite her evident ability and ambition as a writer, Fitzgerald put her name to only two straightforward works of fiction during her time at Oxford. The first, “A Curious Incident”, shares some of the concerns (specifically, an interest in the potential conflict between physical and intellectual happiness) that drive The Gate of Angels (1990). The story describes a wealthy industrialist, Mr Wetherby, who has let his house and garden out for a meeting of a provincial philosophical club, pompously known as “The Higher Thought Society”. The plot is driven by Wetherby’s attempts to relieve his boredom with a glass of whisky, which are frustrated by the presence of Professor Mortice, “an advanced exponent of the science of plain living and high thinking”; it ends with the revelation that Wetherby’s constant hovering near the drinks cabinet is in turn obstructing the Professor’s designs on it. In an essay for the London Review of Books in 1980, Fitzgerald wrote: “years of formal education in English literature gradually taught me the uneasy moral status of plots . . . . By the time I reached university the final ‘turn’ was not much in favour”. She must have been aware, even when she wrote “A Curious Incident”, of how unfashionable its structure was, but she was clearly as unconcerned about literary trends as she would always remain.
The second story, “A Desirable Resident”, is about a bankrupt dealer in “banned editions” called Mr Burgess, who has bought himself a new house in Essex, leaving his wife and his debts behind him in London. When he meets one of his new neighbours, Burgess’s craven behaviour is so alien to the man’s mentality that his desperate admissions are taken as risqué jokes:
“What made you retire, eh? You’re young yet, you know. Not reached the sere and yellow, what?”
Mr. Chadwick did not often let slip the chance of a literary allusion.
“I didn’t retire. I defaulted for two thousand pounds, and ran off with anything I could lay hands on.”
Mr. Chadwick laughed heartily. His new friend was a funny man. Defaulted! Excellent! Vague visions floated before his eyes of Mr. Burgess doing the comic lead in the Chelmsford Park Amateur Operatic Club, or taking the floor at a charity smoking concert.
The style of these early stories bears little resemblance to the voice for which Fitzgerald would become known. There is no such explicit drollery in her mature work; the jokes in her novels are rarely told in the authorial voice. The humour in Offshore or The Beginning of Spring, for example, arises largely in the dialogue, or in the characters’ private thoughts – it is, as Fitzgerald herself once put it, the comedy of “misunderstandings and missed opportunities”, and for that reason it is often tinged with sadness.
The discovery of Fitzgerald’s student writing casts a new light on her literary development. What now seems clear, but was missing from her own account, is that writing had always been her vocation. In 1939, shortly after leaving Oxford, she contributed two pieces to the TLS (a short article about Nazi censorship entitled “War on Wit”, and a review of Carleton Stanley's Matthew Arnold), and several film reviews to Punch. She was beginning, in her publisher’s phrase, to “embark on her literary career”. Yet it would be almost forty years before her first book appeared; and apart from a handful of essays and one short story, all of them dating from the 1950s, there is no evidence that she wrote anything for publication in the intervening period.
What could account for so long a suspension of her creativity? Hermione Lee, who is writing Fitzgerald’s biography, will no doubt be much concerned with that question; in a piece about Fitzgerald’s annotated books, published in the Guardian on April 3, she observed that “it would be too simple to say that ‘marriage stopped her writing’”. Such an interpretation would be complicated by Fitzgerald’s joint editorship with her husband of World Review, a magazine for which she wrote pieces on art and architecture between 1950 and 1953. Even so, speculation about Fitzgerald’s late emergence as a writer will tend to focus on her married life. She and her husband Desmond Fitzgerald (a former officer with the Irish Guards who was decorated for gallantry in the Second World War, but was left traumatized by his experiences there) never had much money, and for a time they were very poor: after their houseboat sank in the early 1960s, taking with it most of their possessions, they were forced into a homeless shelter until council accommodation was found. Even the less outwardly turbulent periods of their relationship seem to have been fraught with tensions and difficulties. Terence Dooley, Fitzgerald’s son-in-law and literary executor, has written of the “often furious” arguments her children can remember – “over bills unpaid, repossessions looming, and Desmond's drinking”.
It would be understandable if the difficulties of her domestic life made her less interested in writing the kind of breezy comic narratives she had been drawn to at Oxford. But her deeper literary instincts evidently survived. In the late 1960s Fitzgerald began teaching, first at the Italia Conti Stage School, then at Queen’s Gate School in Kensington and finally at Westminster Tutors (where A. S. Byatt was one of her colleagues), and little by little her life regained stability. Perhaps those years were a period of necessary silence, during which her early comic impulses were being passed through the darker filters of more recent experience. The Golden Child came eventually, and then – as if suddenly – the full flow of masterpieces that announced her inimitable mature voice.
Edmund Gordon is a freelance writer and reviewer, living in London.
Fitzgerald’s publishers have drawn attention to her late emergence and seemingly effortless development as a novelist. Stuart Proffitt, her editor at Collins, has described The Golden Child as “the only piece of juvenilia I know of by a sixty-one year old”. In recent editions of her work, the biographical note begins “Penelope Fitzgerald did not embark on her literary career until the age of sixty”. This Cinderella narrative is made compelling by Fitzgerald’s subsequent productivity and critical success. Over the next two decades she published, on average, a novel every two years; she won the Booker Prize (for Offshore, 1979), and became the first non-American to win the National Book Critics’ Circle Award (for The Blue Flower, 1995 – perhaps her greatest achievement).
Her novels are remarkable for their precision of insight, their economy of expression and their luminous evocation of period and place. Their atmosphere is at once tranquil and troubling. They are nimbly written and intuitively structured, patterned rather than plotted, with scenes unfolding tangentially like harmonies and counter-harmonies in a piece of music. She once praised John McGahern for his attention to “small things”, and her own work often gives as much space to moments of incidental beauty as to the key elements of the narrative: towards the end of The Beginning of Spring (1988) there is a four-and-a-half-page description of a birch wood; in Offshore, the heroine’s explosive fight with her husband is followed by a meandering description of her taxi ride home.
The Golden Child lacks many of these distinctive qualities. But if it is, therefore, an apprentice work, it does not (as Fitzgerald also implied) account for her full apprenticeship; nor does it represent her juvenilia. In fact, contrary to what she let her interviewers and publishers believe, this late-flowering genius had started writing in childhood.
She came from what she described as “a writing family” – “a family where everyone was publishing, or about to publish”. Her father, Edmund (better known as “Evoe”) Knox, was the editor of Punch, and a prolific writer of light verse, who published several volumes of his journalism and poetry; her uncles were the prominent theologian, crime writer and Bible translator Ronald Knox, the cryptographer and classics scholar Dillwyn Knox, and the Anglo-Catholic priest Wilfred Knox. (Fitzgerald produced a tender and witty portrait of her father and her uncles in The Knox Brothers, 1977.) Her mother, Christina, wrote abridgements of classic novels for use in schools, and had been one of the first woman students at Oxford.
It is hardly surprising that, growing up in a family of such literary distinction, Fitzgerald should have begun writing at an early age. In her notebook plans for The Means of Escape, her collection of short fiction (published a few months after she died in 2000), she lists as possible inclusions two stories from the 1920s, written before she had even reached her teens. These stories, “The Victoria Line” and “Matilda, Matilda”, never made the finished collection, nor have they surfaced since Fitzgerald's death – whether they were serious candidates for publication is, perhaps, doubtful, but the suggestion alone renders their loss more than usually regrettable.
Her earliest surviving writings appeared in her school magazine, the Wycombe Abbey Gazette, in 1936, when she was seventeen. Penelope Knox, as she then was, is listed as the magazine’s editor for her house, as well as a member of the school’s library staff and literary committee. She contributed several reviews of school plays, and of lectures by visiting speakers, as well as her first known poem, “The Veteran”, a mock-heroic depiction of a milkman’s horse, which, having been used in battle, is primed to charge whenever it hears a bugle played; when it hears one in London, the effort of charging with the milk-cart attached to its back proves too much, and it dies. The style of the poem is clearly influenced by her father’s light verse (collected as In My Old Days in 1972):
They took him to a manufacturing store,
Which purchased horses whose brief life had fled;
“A dead horse?” said the secretary, and sped
Upstairs, the general manager to tell.
“A dead horse?” that commercial magnate said,
“The potted meat department. Mince him well.
We’ll call it ham and chicken. It will sell.”
“The Veteran”, slight as it is, suggests that some of the preoccupations that would inform Fitzgerald’s novels were already in place before she left school. She was drawn, throughout her writing life, to images of weak or tormented animals, just as the characters she treated with the greatest sympathy were, in her own phrase, “those who are born to be defeated”. Another old milkman’s horse appears a few years later in one of her sketches for the Oxford paper, the Cherwell, and the motif is reprised twice in her mature work – in Fritz Von Hardenberg’s decrepit horse, “the Gaul”, in The Blue Flower, and in the horse that takes Frank Reid to the station in The Beginning of Spring (the scene in that novel in which a group of children tease and set fire to a bear cub is, in a similar vein, one of Fitzgerald’s most disturbing set pieces).
In October 1935, Fitzgerald went up to Somerville College, Oxford, where she became a regular contributor to the two main University newspapers, the Cherwell and the Isis. There is no way of knowing for certain quite how much she wrote for them (the Oxford press during the 1930s was governed by a tone of high-minded urbanity, and the majority of articles and reviews appeared anonymously); but enough pieces were printed under the name Penelope Knox, or the initials PMK, to suggest that the full extent of her contributions must have been much greater. In March 1937, she became co-editor of the Cherwell with another undergraduate, Steven Watson, and retained the post until December of that year.
The Cherwell and the Isis were far closer to one another in the 1930s, in terms of content and approach, than are their present-day descendants. Both contained a mixture of humorous sketches, feuilletons and writing on the arts (into which categories most of Fitzgerald’s signed contributions fall) as well as earnest debate on subjects of institutional moment (such as “The Role of Women in the Union”), and political (specifically anti-Nazi) polemic. Other regular contributors at that time included Philip Toynbee, who was Fitzgerald’s exact contemporary, and Iris Murdoch, another Somerville student, whose first piece for the Cherwell appeared a few weeks before Fitzgerald’s last.
Fitzgerald’s contributions are clearly the work of someone not long out of school: their tone is frequently whimsical; they sometimes feel sketchy; their influences can weigh down on them. Yet they are also guided by Fitzgerald’s distinctive intelligence and wit – and despite their flaws they can be seen to prefigure her mature voice. Already, there is the eccentric narrative trajectory, both discursive and propulsive, that would characterize her great novels, as well as the skilfully suppressed emotion, the sense that in every sentence more is implied than is ever made explicit. There is also, in some of them, the compressed vitality of language that illuminates her later fiction. In a passage that anticipates the descriptions of nature in The Beginning of Spring, she writes of “a few doubtful struggling flakes” of snow; in another, she describes “dawn breaking damply on the Epsom downs”. These pieces are juvenilia but they show a writer coming to terms with her talents, and working out how best to deploy them.
The first of them appeared in the Isis at the beginning of Fitzgerald’s third term at the university. Addressed to her fellow freshmen, it takes the form of a translation manual and survival guide for those who are “driven into a situation in which it is absolutely essential to talk to someone at Oxford”. Written in the satiric style of Punch, it delivers a firm reproof to several forms of undergraduate pretension:
Question: “As Voltaire remarks, ‘C’est que j’ai vécu.’” Means: “I’m determined to get this quotation off at some point.” What to do: Start talking in German.
Question: Complete silence. Means: “I am a Blue of some description.” What to do: Relax.
A few months later, Fitzgerald made the first of many signed contributions to the Cherwell – an article entitled “On Going Abroad”, in which she argued (what today might be a commonplace) that in the age of aviation and global tourism “the superiority of the travelled man is a mere anachronism”. The article is typical of Fitzgerald’s early writing in its mixture of polemic, reportage and fantasy, and its scattering of sharp epigrammatic jokes. “A journey ought to broaden the imagination; it usually narrows it to a series varying from one to twenty-five anecdotes”; “One of the great advantages of travel, evidently, is the number of things which are found inadequate or useless on return”. This disarming tendency to interject pithy, authoritative comments on her own narratives would survive into her mature work.
Like most of the pieces Fitzgerald wrote for the Cherwell, “On Going Abroad” is written in the first person, but the narrator is deliberately evasive about her identity, speaking of herself in terms either vague or comically implausible. There is, indeed, as little sense of confession in Fitzgerald’s writing from this period as can be found in any of her later work – perhaps even less. Resemblances between some of her Cherwell narrators’ personalities are, however, striking. The narrator of “I Was Afraid” (the title of which, like that of Fitzgerald’s novel Human Voices (1980) suggests an allusion to J. Alfred Prufrock) describes her pathological nervousness, her inhibitive fear of “everything”; similarly, the narrator of “Look Stranger” (this time the borrowing is from W. H. Auden) talks about her agonizing loneliness since leaving school, and her discomfort among her university peers. Both these pieces are narrated by Oxford undergraduates, but a generous dose of the fantastic and the absurd (“I carry a water-pistol to ward off confidence tricksters”; “I used to spring across the Parks, gibbering strangely and frightening the cricketers”) prevents us from identifying the speakers too closely with Fitzgerald herself.
If her contributions to the Oxford papers do not directly reveal her personality, they make up for that by indicating the development of her interior life. We are able to follow, through them, both her expansion as a writer, and the rush of her ideas about reading. “The Curse of a Literary Education”, for example, is narrated by a student whose immersion in literature prevents her from responding naturally to her surroundings. She goes on a country walk: “My mind, which is supposed to be resting, is immediately thronged with a hundred scraps of prose and poetry . . . . At every stream I think ‘but I go on for ever’; at every flower ‘thoughts that do sometimes lie too deep for tears’”. In a similar (but wittier and more interesting) vein, the narrator of “Wicked Words” complains that her middle-class upbringing has left her deficient in one respect – “school developed our characters”, she opines, “but it did not teach us how to swear”. Nor can she learn anything from her well-heeled fellow students. She turns to literature as her guide, but it is equally unhelpful. There follows a rich stream of pastiche, beginning with a parody of a popular novel from (Fitzgerald’s precision here indicates the seriousness of her intentions) “about 1870”: “Lord Findlay’s complexion clouded; his brow darkened, and there broke from him a few oaths of such violence that Belle, unable to contain her agitation, ran out of the parlour in a fit of tears”.
The success with which Fitzgerald imitates, in this piece, a variety of contrasting styles is testament to her rapidly increasing command. This is her example of the descriptions of swearing in “the more modern kind” of 1930s fiction:
“So you’re leaving me?” he jerked out, roughly.
She nodded, mute and fascinated by his altered face.
With an uncontrolled movement he upset first one, then the other suitcase, took a cigarette, slumped into a chair; then, quietly, he called her every filthy name he knew.
“Wicked Words” demonstrates Fitzgerald’s aversion to the kind of genteel English fiction she is sometimes characterized as writing. But it also, through its confident parodying of more than half a century’s popular literature, suggests the breadth of her reading. That she was, at this stage of her life, already thinking deeply about literature is clear from the book and theatre reviews she wrote. These reviews display her intelligence, as well as her uncompromising standards.
Despite her evident ability and ambition as a writer, Fitzgerald put her name to only two straightforward works of fiction during her time at Oxford. The first, “A Curious Incident”, shares some of the concerns (specifically, an interest in the potential conflict between physical and intellectual happiness) that drive The Gate of Angels (1990). The story describes a wealthy industrialist, Mr Wetherby, who has let his house and garden out for a meeting of a provincial philosophical club, pompously known as “The Higher Thought Society”. The plot is driven by Wetherby’s attempts to relieve his boredom with a glass of whisky, which are frustrated by the presence of Professor Mortice, “an advanced exponent of the science of plain living and high thinking”; it ends with the revelation that Wetherby’s constant hovering near the drinks cabinet is in turn obstructing the Professor’s designs on it. In an essay for the London Review of Books in 1980, Fitzgerald wrote: “years of formal education in English literature gradually taught me the uneasy moral status of plots . . . . By the time I reached university the final ‘turn’ was not much in favour”. She must have been aware, even when she wrote “A Curious Incident”, of how unfashionable its structure was, but she was clearly as unconcerned about literary trends as she would always remain.
The second story, “A Desirable Resident”, is about a bankrupt dealer in “banned editions” called Mr Burgess, who has bought himself a new house in Essex, leaving his wife and his debts behind him in London. When he meets one of his new neighbours, Burgess’s craven behaviour is so alien to the man’s mentality that his desperate admissions are taken as risqué jokes:
“What made you retire, eh? You’re young yet, you know. Not reached the sere and yellow, what?”
Mr. Chadwick did not often let slip the chance of a literary allusion.
“I didn’t retire. I defaulted for two thousand pounds, and ran off with anything I could lay hands on.”
Mr. Chadwick laughed heartily. His new friend was a funny man. Defaulted! Excellent! Vague visions floated before his eyes of Mr. Burgess doing the comic lead in the Chelmsford Park Amateur Operatic Club, or taking the floor at a charity smoking concert.
The style of these early stories bears little resemblance to the voice for which Fitzgerald would become known. There is no such explicit drollery in her mature work; the jokes in her novels are rarely told in the authorial voice. The humour in Offshore or The Beginning of Spring, for example, arises largely in the dialogue, or in the characters’ private thoughts – it is, as Fitzgerald herself once put it, the comedy of “misunderstandings and missed opportunities”, and for that reason it is often tinged with sadness.
The discovery of Fitzgerald’s student writing casts a new light on her literary development. What now seems clear, but was missing from her own account, is that writing had always been her vocation. In 1939, shortly after leaving Oxford, she contributed two pieces to the TLS (a short article about Nazi censorship entitled “War on Wit”, and a review of Carleton Stanley's Matthew Arnold), and several film reviews to Punch. She was beginning, in her publisher’s phrase, to “embark on her literary career”. Yet it would be almost forty years before her first book appeared; and apart from a handful of essays and one short story, all of them dating from the 1950s, there is no evidence that she wrote anything for publication in the intervening period.
What could account for so long a suspension of her creativity? Hermione Lee, who is writing Fitzgerald’s biography, will no doubt be much concerned with that question; in a piece about Fitzgerald’s annotated books, published in the Guardian on April 3, she observed that “it would be too simple to say that ‘marriage stopped her writing’”. Such an interpretation would be complicated by Fitzgerald’s joint editorship with her husband of World Review, a magazine for which she wrote pieces on art and architecture between 1950 and 1953. Even so, speculation about Fitzgerald’s late emergence as a writer will tend to focus on her married life. She and her husband Desmond Fitzgerald (a former officer with the Irish Guards who was decorated for gallantry in the Second World War, but was left traumatized by his experiences there) never had much money, and for a time they were very poor: after their houseboat sank in the early 1960s, taking with it most of their possessions, they were forced into a homeless shelter until council accommodation was found. Even the less outwardly turbulent periods of their relationship seem to have been fraught with tensions and difficulties. Terence Dooley, Fitzgerald’s son-in-law and literary executor, has written of the “often furious” arguments her children can remember – “over bills unpaid, repossessions looming, and Desmond's drinking”.
It would be understandable if the difficulties of her domestic life made her less interested in writing the kind of breezy comic narratives she had been drawn to at Oxford. But her deeper literary instincts evidently survived. In the late 1960s Fitzgerald began teaching, first at the Italia Conti Stage School, then at Queen’s Gate School in Kensington and finally at Westminster Tutors (where A. S. Byatt was one of her colleagues), and little by little her life regained stability. Perhaps those years were a period of necessary silence, during which her early comic impulses were being passed through the darker filters of more recent experience. The Golden Child came eventually, and then – as if suddenly – the full flow of masterpieces that announced her inimitable mature voice.
Edmund Gordon is a freelance writer and reviewer, living in London.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento