Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (4 page)

Fitzgerald’s deep understanding of the complexities and ramifications of innocence makes the children in her fiction not just convincing simulacra, but active motors in the plot. In 1996 an old friend, Hugh Lee, made the bizarre complaint that he found her fictional children ‘precious’. Denying this, she replied: ‘They’re exactly like my own children, who always noticed everything.’ And, having noticed, would voice innocence’s damaging truths. In 1968 the novelist reported a conversation with – or rather, denunciation by – her younger daughter:

It is at such moments that writers have a small advantage over non-writers: the painful moment can at least be stored
for later use. Twenty years on, here is Dolly, the plain-speaking young daughter of Frank Reid, owner of a printing works in pre-revolutionary Moscow. When Frank’s wife Nellie inexplicably abandons the family and returns to London, Frank asks Dolly if she wants to write to her mother. Dolly replies, ‘I don’t think I ought to write.’ Frank, whose innocence means that he is devoid of self-righteousness, asks, ‘Why not, Dolly? Surely you don’t think she did the wrong thing?’ Dolly gives him a reply neither he nor we expect: ‘I don’t know whether she did or not. The mistake she probably made was getting married in the first place.’

Many readers’ initial reaction to a Fitzgerald novel – especially one of the last four – is, ‘But how does she know that?’ How does she know (
The Beginning of Spring
) about methods of bribing the police in pre-revolutionary Moscow, and about techniques of printing, and that all packs of playing cards were confiscated at the Russian border? How does she know (
Innocence
) about neurology and dressmaking and dwarfism and Gramsci? How does she know (
The Gate of Angels
) about atomic physics and probationary nursing and the opening of Selfridges? How does she know (
The Blue Flower
) about eighteenth-century Thuringian laundry habits and the Brownian system and Schlegel’s philosophy and salt-mining? The initial, dully obvious answer is: she found out. A. S. Byatt once asked her the last of these questions, and received the answer that Fitzgerald ‘had read the records of the salt mines from cover to cover in German to understand how her hero was employed’. But when we are asking ‘How did she know?’ we are really also asking ‘But how does she do that?’ – how does she convey what she knows in such a compact, exact, dynamic and resonant way? She had a novelist’s (and a shy person’s) fear of being boringly informative: ‘I always feel the reader is very insulted by being told too much,’ she said. But it is more than just a taste for economy. It is the art of using fact and detail so that it becomes greater
than the sum of its parts.
The Blue Flower
opens with a famous scene of washday in a large house, with all the dirty bedlinen and shirts and undergarments being thrown down from the windows into the courtyard. When remembering this scene and its density of effect, I always think it must last a whole chapter – even though, in a Fitzgerald novel, that need mean no more than seven or eight pages. But whenever I check, I find that in fact it lasts less than two pages – pages which, alongside this domestic scene-setting, also manage to announce key themes of German Romantic philosophy and inconvenient love. I have reread this scene many times, always trying to find its secret, but never succeeding.

Mastery of sources and a taste for concision might lead you to expect that the narrative line of Fitzgerald’s novels would be pre-eminently lucid. Far from it: there is a kind of benign wrong-footingness at work, often from the first line. Here is the start of
The Beginning of Spring
:

This sounds almost journalistically clear, and it is in a way, until you reflect that almost any other novelist would have started a Russian novel featuring mainly English personnel by having a character travel – and so take the reader with him or her – from London to Moscow. Penelope Fitzgerald does the opposite: she opens with a character leaving the very city where all the action is going to take place. But the sentence seems so straightforward that you hardly notice what is being done to you. And here is the first line of
The Blue Flower
:

Again, another novelist would have been content to write ‘Jacob Dietmahler could see that they had arrived …’ – altogether more banal. A double negative in the first sentence trips our expectation of uncomplicated entry into a novel; further, it sets up the narrative question ‘So in that case, just what degree of a fool
was
Jacob Dietmahler?’ Also, Fitzgerald writes ‘on the washday’, where others would be content with the normal English ‘on washday’. The definite article hints quietly at the German behind it –
am Waschtag –
and lets us feel, at a nearly subtextual level, that we are in a different time, a different place. It eases our fictional way. For that is one initially puzzling aspect of these last four novels: they do not feel anything like ‘historical novels’, if historical novels are books in which we as modern readers are transported back in time thanks to a writer instructing us in the necessary background and foreground. Rather, they feel like novels which just happen to be set in history, and which we enter on equal terms with the characters we find within them: it is as if we are reading them in the time they are set, rather than now – and yet we remain in our own period.

Fitzgerald’s benign wrong-footingness culminates in scenes where the whole world, as physically experienced and relied upon, is given a sudden tilt. At the start of
The Gate of Angels
a violent rainstorm turns Cambridge upside down – ‘tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason’; while at that novel’s end, the titular gate miraculously opens in what might be a quasi-religious moment, or an outrageous plot device lifted from ghost stories – or, perhaps, both. Then there is that epiphanic scene near the end of
The Beginning of Spring
. Dolly wakes in the middle of the night at the family dacha to find Lisa, the temporary (Russian) governess to the Reid children, dressed to go out; reluctantly, she takes Dolly with her. They walk down a path away from the light in the dacha’s front window until a moment when,
‘although the path seemed to run quite straight, the light disappeared’. The forest closes in on them. Among the birch stems Dolly begins to see ‘what looked like human hands, moving to touch each other across the whiteness and blackness’. In a clearing, men and women stand pressed each against the trunk of a tree. Lisa explains to the tree-people that, although she knows they have come there on her account, she can’t stay; she must go back with the child. ‘ “If she speaks about this, she won’t be believed. If she remembers it, she’ll understand in time what she’s seen.” ’ They go back along the path, and Dolly returns to bed; but the forest has invaded the dacha. ‘She could still smell the potent leaf-sap of the birch trees. It was as strong inside the house as out.’ Does Dolly understand what she’s seen – and do we? Is the scene – for which we have only the child’s point of view – a dream, a hallucination, the memory of a sleepwalker? If not, what is its register? Are the woods coming to life, as they do in the pantheistic poetry of Selwyn Crane, the novel’s Tolstoyan dreamer? Does the scene symbolise female awakening or personal liberation, for Dolly, or for Lisa, or both? Perhaps Dolly has witnessed the preparations for some pagan rite of spring (only a few pages later, Stravinsky’s name is quietly mentioned). Or might the secret meeting in the forest be straightforwardly political, even revolutionary (Lisa, we later discover, is a politico)? Some, even all these interpretations are possible, and, mysteriously, not incompatible with one another. This short passage occupies a mere three pages of text, but, as with the laundry scene in
The Blue Flower
, it expands into something much larger in the memory. And again we ask ourselves: how does she do that?

One of our better-known novelists once described the experience of reading a Fitzgerald novel as riding along in a top-quality car, only to find that after a mile or so, ‘someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window’; another, while praising
The Beginning of Spring
, called it ‘scatty’. These
judgements seem to me profoundly misconceived. In
The Beginning of Spring
, there is a scene in which Frank Reid reflects briefly on the Russian system of bribery. There has been a break-in at his press; the malefactor fires a revolver at Reid, who apprehends him, but decides not to report the matter to the police. However, he fails to offer the street’s nightwatchman, who must have been aware of the incident, a hundred roubles, ‘somewhere between tea-money and a bribe’, for his silence. As a result, the watchman goes to the police:

Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with the colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route maps. Instead of a journey through the city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way. And their structure and purpose may not be immediately apparent, being based on the tacit network of ‘loans, debts, repayments and foreclosures’ that makes up human relationships. Nor do such novels move mechanically; they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does, except with a greater purpose and hidden structure. A priest in
The Beginning of Spring
, seeking to assert the legibility of God’s purpose in the world, says, ‘There are no accidental meetings.’ The same is true of the best fiction. Such novels are not difficult to read, since they are so filled with
detail and incident and the movement of life, but they are sometimes difficult to work out. This is because the absentee author has the confidence to presume that the reader might be as subtle and intelligent as she is. Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels are pre-eminent examples of this kind.

I
N
A
PRIL
1849, a thirty-year-old English poet arrived in Rome. British writers had been coming here on a regular basis for a century and more. In 1764, the city’s effect on Gibbon was so powerful that ‘several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could descend to a cool and minute investigation’. In 1818 Shelley found its monuments ‘sublime’. The following year the city ‘delighted’ Byron: ‘it beats Greece – Constantinople – everything – at least that I have ever seen’. And in 1845 Dickens arrived for his first visit, later telling his biographer John Forster that he had been ‘moved and overcome’ by the Colosseum as by no other sight in his life, ‘except perhaps by the first contemplation of the Falls of Niagara’.

The young English poet was in good spirits, and happier than at any previous time in his adult life. His great early crisis – one mixing religious belief and employment, and causing him to resign his fellowship at Oxford because he could no longer subscribe to the XXXIX Articles – was over; a post at University College, London awaited him in the autumn. He was a classicist as well as a poet, and so we might expect Rome to produce a similar effect on him as it had on his literary predecessors. But neither the city of the ancient Romans nor that of the modern popes impressed him. He wrote to his mother:

If you want a one-word introduction to the tone, sensibility and modernity of Arthur Hugh Clough, you have it in that single, italicised (by him, not me) word:
rubbishy
. He will not subscribe to the required tenets of his country’s established religion if his conscience and intellect tell him otherwise; similarly, he will not subscribe to presumptions of grandeur and beauty if his eyes and aesthetic antennae tell him otherwise. Nor was this some initial irreverence, the grumpy consequence of baggage loss or digestive calamity. It was an opinion Clough confirmed by writing it into the opening canto of a poem he composed during his three-month stay in the city: