Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (3 page)

A
FEW YEARS BEFORE
her death, I appeared on a panel at York University with Penelope Fitzgerald. I knew her slightly, and admired her greatly. Her manner was shy and rather distrait, as if the last thing she wanted was to be taken for what she then was: the best living English novelist. So she comported herself as if she were some harmless jam-making grandmother who scarcely knew her way in the world. This wasn’t too difficult, given that she was indeed a grandmother, and also – one of the minor revelations in her collected letters – a jam (and chutney) maker. But the disguise wasn’t convincing, since every so often, as if despite herself, her rare intelligence and instinctive wit would break through. Over coffee I asked her to sign my two favourite novels of hers:
The Beginning of Spring
and
The Blue Flower
. She hunted around for a long while in the heavy plastic carrier bag – purple, with a floral design, I remember – which contained her day’s requirements. A fountain pen was eventually discovered, and after considerable pausing and reflection, she wrote – as it seemed, as I hoped – a private, encouraging message to a younger novelist on each title page. I put the books away without looking at the inscriptions.

The event proceeded. Afterwards, we were driven to York station to travel back to London together. When invited, I had been given the option of a modest fee and standard-class travel, or no fee and a first-class ticket. I had chosen the latter.
The train drew in. I assumed that the university could not possibly have given an octogenarian of such literary distinction anything other than a first-class ticket. But when I set off towards what I assumed to be our carriage, I saw that she was heading in a more modest direction. Naturally, I joined her. I can’t remember what we talked about on the journey down; perhaps I mentioned the odd coincidence that we had each made our first hardcover fictional appearance in the same book (
The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories
, 1975); probably I asked the usual daft questions about what she was working on and when the next novel would appear (I later learned that she frequently lied to interviewers). At King’s Cross I suggested that we share a cab, since we both lived in the same part of north London. Oh no, she replied, she would take the Underground – after all, she had been given this splendid free travel pass by the Mayor of London (she made it sound like a personal gift, rather than something every pensioner got). Assuming she must be feeling the day even longer than I did, I pressed again for the taxi option, but she was quietly obstinate, and came up with a clinching argument: she had to pick up a pint of milk on the way from the Underground station, and if she went home by cab it would mean having to go out again later. I ploddingly speculated that we could very easily stop the taxi outside the shop and have it wait while she bought her milk. ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ she said. But no, I still hadn’t convinced her: she had decided to take the Underground, and that was that. So I waited beside her on the concourse while she looked for her free pass in the tumult of her carrier bag. It must be there, surely, but no, after much dredging, it didn’t seem to be findable. I was by this point feeling – and perhaps exhibiting – a certain impatience, so I marched us to the ticket machine, bought our tickets, and squired her down the escalator to the Northern Line. As we waited for the train, she turned to me with an expression of gentle concern. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘I
do seem to have involved you in some low forms of transport.’ I was still laughing by the time I got home and opened her books to read those long-pondered inscriptions. In
The Beginning of Spring
she had written ‘best wishes – Penelope Fitzgerald’; while in
The Blue Flower –
a dedication that had taken considerably more thought – she had put ‘best wishes – Penelope’.

Like her personal manner, her life and literary career seemed designed to wrong-foot, to turn attention away from the fact that she was, or would turn into, a great novelist. True, she came from a cultured background, having one father and three uncles among the multi-talented Knox brothers, whose communal biography she later wrote. Her father was editor of
Punch
; her mother, one of the first students at Somerville College, Oxford, also wrote. Penelope was in turn a brilliant student at Somerville: one of her finals examiners was so astounded by her papers that he asked his fellow dons if he could keep them, and later, apparently, had them bound in vellum. But after this public proof of distinction, throughout what might for others have been their best writing years, she became a wife and working mother (at
Punch
, the BBC, the Ministry of Food, then in journalism and teaching). She was fifty-eight by the time she published her first book, a biography of Burne-Jones. She then wrote a comic thriller,
The Golden Child
, supposedly to amuse her dying husband. In the period 1975–84 she published two more biographies and four more novels. Those four novels are all short, and written close to her own experiences: of running a bookshop, living on a houseboat, working for the BBC in wartime, teaching at a stage school. They are adroit, odd, highly pleasurable, but modest in ambition. And with almost any other writer you might think that, having used up her own life, she would – being now in her very late sixties – have called it a day. On the contrary: over the next decade, from 1986 to 1995, she published the four novels
–
Innocence
,
The Beginning of Spring
,
The Gate of Angels
and
The Blue Flower –
by which she will be remembered. They are written far from her obvious life, being set, respectively, in 1950s Florence, pre-revolutionary Moscow, Cambridge in 1912 and late-eighteenth-century Prussia. Many writers start by inventing away from their lives, and then, when their material runs out, turn back to more familiar sources. Fitzgerald did the opposite, and by writing away from her own life she liberated herself into greatness.

Even so, when public recognition came, it followed no obvious trajectory, and was attended by a marked level of male diminishment. In 1977 her non-fiction publisher, Richard Garnett, informed her dunderheadedly that she was ‘only an amateur writer’, to which she replied mildly, ‘I asked myself, how many books do you have to write and how many semicolons do you have to discard before you lose amateur status?’ The following year, after having been shortlisted for the Booker Prize with
The Bookshop
, she asked her fiction publisher, Colin Haycraft, if it would be a good idea to write another novel. He jocundly replied that if she went on writing fiction he didn’t want it blamed on him, and in any case already had too many short novels with sad endings on his hands. (Unsurprisingly, Fitzgerald took herself off to another publisher, and Haycraft claimed he had been misunderstood.) I remember Paul Theroux telling me how, as a Booker judge in 1979, he had been doing his preliminary reading while travelling through Patagonia by train, and books he considered not even worth discussing would be skimmed out of the window into the passing pampas. Some months later he found himself with a polite smile on his face as the prize was awarded to Fitzgerald for
Offshore
. The BBC’s resident bookheads also treated her condescendingly: radio’s Frank Delaney told her she ‘deserved to win because my book was free of objectionable matter and suitable for family reading’; while television’s Robert Robinson gave her patronizingly
little airtime on
The Book Programme
and scarcely concealed his view that she shouldn’t have won. And after she died, even her memorial meeting was disfigured by the turkey-cocking of a young male novelist.

You could perhaps argue that she won the Booker with the ‘wrong’ novel – which would hardly be revolutionary in the history of the prize – though the real dishonour was that she failed to win it again for any of her last four novels.
The Blue Flower
, chosen more times than any other as Book of the Year in 1995, was not even shortlisted – the prize going that year to Keri Hume’s
The Bone People
. However, Fitzgerald did have a few happy memories of her Booker victory night: ‘The best was when the editor of the
Financial Times
, who was on my table, looked at the cheque and said to the Booker McC chairman, “Hmph, I see you’ve changed your chief cashier.” Both their faces were alight with interest.’

There are many such moments in her letters – moments when the professional observer of human beings finds sustenance and reward where others might find boredom or rudeness. Her life, on this evidence, was largely domestic, frequently peripatetic, and attended by regular economic crises. The magazine she edited,
World Review
, collapsed; her husband Desmond had trouble with drink; the houseboat they lived on sank not just once but twice, carrying with it such archives as she possessed (including all her wartime letters to her husband). Rescue at one point came in the shape of a council flat in Clapham, where the novelist collected Green Shield stamps and used tea bags to dye her hair. Her writing had to be fitted into the occasional breathing spaces left by family life; and she made little money until the late success of
The Blue Flower
in America (where it won a National Book Critics Circle Award in the first year the prize was opened to non-nationals). It was a matter of rueful pride to her – and should serve as a warning to aspirant novelists – that she didn’t pass into the higher tax bracket until she was
eighty. She was also accident-prone, given to falling off ladders and out of windows, getting herself locked in the bathroom and suffering other obscurer incidents (‘I was knocked down by a bus queue and have a round bruise on my arm, just like the mark of Cain’). She tended to take the blame for things that were not her fault, even feeling guilty towards her publishers when her books didn’t sell. Nor did she like to offend: on one occasion, she went to vote, and as she left the polling station, ‘to my disgust the Conservative lady outside snatched away my card, saying, “I’m only taking
ours
, dear” – I didn’t like to say I was Liberal for fear of hurting her feelings – she had put a nice green hat on and everything – I often see her in church.’

That ‘nice green hat’ is a pure writer’s touch; and her spirit of fantasy is often waiting to transform observed reality. This is from one of her wartime letters:

The logical implication being that this would have been quite normal (if Danish) behaviour had her brother indeed been such a billetee. There is, at times, something more than a little Pooterish about the life she describes. Thus: ‘I have been mending my sandals with plastic wood (unfortunately Woolie’s only had “antique walnut”) and rather good new plastic soles, also from Woolie’s.’ But it is Pooterishness with a difference: first, it is self-aware; and second, there is a high-boho dash to it. She knew what she was doing, and writing. At the same time, this
was
her life.

Alongside the mildness and the blame-taking, however, there lay a clear moral sense and a sharp dismissal of those she found wanting. Robert Skidelsky is ‘this absurdly irritating
man’, Lord David Cecil’s lecture on Rossetti was ‘
abysmal
’, Rushdie’s latest novel is ‘a load of codswallop’. Then there is ‘the dread Malcolm Bradbury’, who ‘seems to be made of some plastic or semi-fluid substance which gives way or changes in your hands’, and who patronises her work (‘I felt like throwing the pale green mayonnaise over him’); or Douglas Hurd, Booker Prize chairman, with his pitiful notion of what a novel should be. Of Peter Ackroyd’s life of Dickens, she merely notes, with mild wryness, ‘I don’t see how a life of Dickens written by someone who has no sense of humour whatever can be a success.’ And here she is on her own critical standing: ‘I’m said to be of the school of Beryl Bainbridge which is a good correction to vanity, I expect.’

‘On the whole,’ she told her American editor in 1987, ‘I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.’ Fitzgerald is tender towards her characters and their worlds, unpredictably funny, and at times surprisingly aphoristic; though it is characteristic of her that such moments of wisdom appear not author-generated, but arising in the text organically, like moss or coral. Her fictional personnel are rarely vicious or deliberately evil; when things go wrong for them, or when they inflict harm on others, it is usually out of misplaced understanding, a lack less of sympathy than of imagination. The main problem is that they cannot see the terms and conditions which come attached to life: moral grace and social incompetence are often in close proximity. As Salvatore, the neurologist in her ‘Italian’ novel
Innocence
, puts it, ‘There are dilettantes in human relationships just as there are, let’s say, in politics.’ The aristocratic family into which he is to marry, the Ridolfis, have ‘a tendency to rash decisions, perhaps always intended to ensure other people’s happiness’. Such people tend to think that love is sufficient in itself, and that happiness might be its merited consequence. They speak their minds at the wrong time and in the wrong way; they
deal in a kind of robustly harmful innocence. It is a quality shared equally between the sexes, but not mutually recognised. Thus Salvatore – unaware of his own, more intellectual forms of naivety – is driven to exasperation by the strength and sheer carelessness of the innocence displayed by the two women in his life: