Penelope Fitzgerald's Variety

            Penelope Fitzgerald is one of my favorite British novelists. She did not begin publishing until she was in her sixties, but she eventually won England’s top literary award, the Booker Prize, as well as the National Book Critics Award in this country. What is almost as remarkable as the quality of her nine novels is their variety. She does not repeat herself in plot or setting or characters, though she does have some themes that recur. I find the same light touch, the same humor, and the same tendency to surprise in all her books, but that is the extent of their likeness.

 Her first book, The Golden Child (1977) is a mystery based on the Tutankhamen exhibition which came to London’s British Museum in 1972. But the museum in the book is not quite the British Museum, though it resembles it; the Golden Child of the title, a gold-encrusted mummy, is not quite Tutankhamen; his country of origin is not Egypt but Garamantia; and the museum director is not quite Lord Kenneth Clark, though he looks and acts like him. And unlike the Tutankhamen exhibit, this one turns out to be a fake; the thousands of people in folded queues in the famous courtyard are unaware that the mummy in the gilded sarcophagus is not the adolescent king but a much more modern corpse covered with gold-leaf. Fitzgerald never worked at the British Museum, but she spent a good deal of time there researching her three biographies of Edward Burne-Jones, the Knox Brothers (her father and uncles), and Charlotte Mew.

            The quirky staff of the museum, besides the Kenneth Clark look-alike, includes a precious aristocrat his coworkers call the May Queen, a ubiquitous assistant known only as Jones—whose name turns out to be Jones Jones—the cantankerous old Sir William, discoverer of the real treasure of the Golden Child, and Sir William’s sleepy, insouciant, six-months’ pregnant secretary Dousha Vartarian.

            Fitzgerald shows a Dickensian playfulness about names, such as that of Professor Untermensch, the expert on hieroglyphics. The book has a parody Frenchman, a sort of combination of Jacques Derrida and Claude Levi-Strauss. There’s a little touch of P. G. Wodehouse and more than a little reminder of Waugh as the museum employee at the bottom of the food chain is the one singled out for a trip to Moscow that is filled with intrigue and eventually uncovers the real Golden Child artifacts and the international Cold War politics that dictate that a fake one be sent to England. The British Diplomat of the donor country for the exhibit, is, according to the museum director, “Pombo Greene, whom I have known, since he was in my election at Eton, to be exceptionally foolish and incompetent.”

            The book has an orthodox mystery plot with a couple of murders, but its strength is social comedy, and its conclusion is a farcical scene which satisfies our desire for poetic justice. Fitzgerald did not feel the need to write another mystery.

The Book Shop (1978) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which Fitzgerald won the next year for Offshore. It’s a short book (123 pages in the attractive Mariner Books reprints of all her novels) about a widow, Florence Green, who has lived in the aptly-named Hardborough for eight years when she decides to open a bookshop. (Fitzgerald’s worked briefly in a bookshop in the small town of Southwold, in Suffolk.) Florence buys Old House, a fifteenth-century house that’s been vacant, though haunted by what the locals call a “rapper,” for some years. She is opposed passively by a town apathetic to books and actively by Mrs. Gamart, the local Lucia, who wants Old House for an arts center. Florence perseveres, aided by the friendship of old Mr. Brundish, whose house antedates hers, and for a while she prospers. The book is often funny, and recalls E. F. Benson, Muriel Spark, and Barbara Pym.

In Offshore (1979), the people who live on the boats moored on Battersea Reach gather, when they need to, onboard the biggest and smartest boat there, Lord Jim, a converted minesweeper owned by Richard Blake, formerly of the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserves. His wife Laura is not happy about living on Lord Jim, and is about to leave Richard. “Was there not, on the whole of Battersea Reach, a couple, married or unmarried, living together in the ordinary way?” the author asks somewhat disingenuously. Nenna James’s husband Edward simply wouldn’t live on the boat she bought while he was in South America, so she lives on Grace with her girls Martha and Tilda, who take care of themselves and their somewhat feckless mother; their little family is the focus of Fitzgerald’s narrative. “Nenna’s thought, whenever she was alone, took the form of a kind of perpetual magistrate’s hearing,” she writes.

Maurice, a male prostitute, lives on a boat he’s renamed after himself, with its hold full of stolen goods left by one of his disreputable friends. Willis, a marine painter, is trying to sell his leaking boat Dreadnought, but it sinks before he can manage to find a buyer. When Fitzgerald lived for a while on a houseboat in Battersea, it sank not once, but twice. Woodrow lives aboard Rochester, and although his wife spends the summer in Wales, where he also goes in the winter, the two of them take in on Rochester whoever needs taking in during the book’s action, after shipwreck or abandonment.

The book’s climax is precipitated by Nenna’s visit to her husband in his room in Stoke Newington. They quarrel—and Fitzgerald is very good at describing quarrels between people who have loved or do love each other; there’s another such description in The Gate of Angels. Nenna somehow gets back to the Reach without her shoes or her purse, and Richard takes her in for the night. The next night Richard is assaulted by Maurice’s larcenous acquaintance, Nenna and the girls plan to go to Canada—from which she emigrated—with her sister, and Maurice and Nenna’s husband go adrift in Maurice’s barge as a storm hits the Reach.

Human Voices (1980) comes out of Fitzgerald’s working during the war for the BBC, “dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth.” It’s also about the general innocence of the people involved in the project. But there is a study of a wholly selfish character, the Director of Recorded Programmes, Seymour or Sam Brooks, to whom Annie Asra, the Birmingham girl who eventually falls in love with him says, “There’s two ways to be selfish. You can think too much about yourself, or you can think too little about others. You’re selfish both ways.” Sam is supported until the end of the book by Jeff Haggard, another director at the BBC, but Jeff cuts Sam loose just about the time Sam resigns and goes off with Annie. Jeff is killed at the very end when he mistakes a German parachute bomb for the taxi that awaits him every night outside the BBC’s seven-decked building that looks like an ocean liner.

Fitzgerald taught at a drama school in London called the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, and her experience there was part of the inspiration for At Freddie’s (1982). Freddie Wentworth is the Temple Stage School for young actors in Covent Garden. Her protégés are currently performing in Peter Pan and other entertainments, but it’s Shakespearian preparation she prides the school on, and the clever and mendacious Mattie Stewart is currently performing as Prince Arthur in King John at the Nonesuch, shortly to be replaced by the more talented Jonathan Kemp. The children are taught academic subjects by the hopelessly inept but completely honest Pierce Carroll, who is in love with the other teacher, Hannah, also from Northern Ireland. He’s taken the job because it’s the only thing he can get; she’s taken it because she loves the theater (she floats the idea that one may be attracted even to a life’s work in a hospital or convent or theater by the smell). Hannah does not love Pierce, but is infatuated with a drunk but competent character actor in the production of King John.

            Freddie survives threats of bankruptcy, being taken over by a shrewd investor, and being co-opted by a national youth theater school.

Fitzgerald said after writing At Freddie’s that she was finished writing about things in her own life and wanted to go in a new direction; Innocence (1986), the first result of this free indulgence of her imagination, is set in Italy in the 1950s. A stormy love affair starts between a twenty-nine year old doctor, Salvatore Rossi, and Chiara Ridolfi, just out of school and nineteen. He comes from a poor rural family in the south and his father worshipped Antonio Gramsci, whom Salvatore saw dying when the boy was ten. Chiara comes from an old aristocratic family of decaying fortunes; they have a villa, the Ricordanza, a farm at Valsassina which now produces a little wine for sale, and a palazzo in Florence. The Ricordanza is named after the verse in Dante where Francesca asks whether memory in her situation is the worst misery in hell or a small consolation.

Chiara’s school friend, the formidable Barney (Lavinia Barnes) comes to help. Complicating rather than helping are Chiara’s gentle, retiring father, Count Giancarlo Ridolfi, his sister Maddalena, and his nephew Cesare, who runs the farm. Chiara and Salvatore marry, but his bristliness and Chiara’s direct, unswerving honesty make for continued friction, which becomes public in a funny scene at a villa party given by a family friend, Professor Pulci. One of Fitzgerald’s themes is the irrational manner in which those who love each other can get into and sustain arguments. Another is the notion of children recognizing that in a particular situation they are older than their parents. Something she repeats here is the way deception becomes easier with practice. And as always, we wonder how she knows so much about Italian farming, Gramsci, and various other arcane matters.

Another departure from familiar locales and situations is The Beginning of Spring (1988). This is the Fitzgerald novel that makes it onto Robert McCrum’s list of the hundred best novels, a list published by The Guardian in 2015. Frank Reid, born and raised in Moscow, has an English wife, Nellie, and three children, the amazing self-possessed ten-year-old Dolly, five-year-old Ben, and two-year-old Annushka (Annie). “You are used to everything Russian,” his servants tell Frank. “God has given you patience, to take the place of your former happiness.”

            In March, 1913, Nellie leaves Moscow with the children, but then sends them back and goes on to England by herself. After Easter, as spring begins, she comes back. What happens in between is a Fitzgerald tour de force about what it’s like to live in Moscow shortly before the revolution and about a dozen of her inimitable characters, including Frank’s accountant, the Tolstoyan/Puritan Selwyn Crane; Frank’s Rabelaisan business associate Kuriatin; the enigmatic department store clerk Lisa Ivanovna, who comes to take care of Frank’s children; the impulsive student Volodya, who breaks into Frank’s printing shop and fires a gun at him; Frank’s brother-in-law Charlie, who comes to Moscow to visit with no news of Nellie; Frank’s peasant compositor Tvyordov, and various servants, bureaucrats, and businessmen.

The Gate of Angels (1990) is a favorite of mine among Fitzgerald’s novels. It is set at Cambridge in 1912, just before quantum physics takes over the discipline. Fred Fairly has a Junior Fellowship and is assistant to Herbert Flowerdew, Professor of Observable Physics at St. Angelicus College in Cambridge. Flowerdew scoffs at the work being done by the bright lights around him—Rutherford, J. J. Thomson, Max Planck, Niels Bohr. The master of Angelicus is blind, and the Provost of James’s, who writes ghost stories, comes to dine sometimes (M. R. James was Provost of King’s College.)

Fred feels obliged to tell his father, the rector of Blow, that he’s lost his faith—yet he ends up defending the idea of the soul at a debate of the Disobligers’ Society. Fred meets Daisy Saunders in a bicycle/farm cart accident, and they are both put, unconscious, in the same bed by a neighbor, Mrs Wrayburn. But Fred loses track of Daisy. Then we get her story, and how she came to be in Cambridge; her work at Blackfriars Hospital and her dismissal for talking about a patient whom she was trying to save from suicide, her going to Cambridge where one of the doctors has an asylum, and her taking up with Thomas Kelly, who arranges a hotel room for them, which Daisy never goes to. Fred finds Daisy and they go out together. He proposes. Then, unaccountably, there is a court hearing about the farm cart that caused the accident, and Kelly shows up to give evidence. Fred hits Kelly and pursues Daisy, who quits her job at the asylum and is ready to go back to London, but finds herself back in Cambridge just when the master of Angelicus has an attack. She helps him, and that slight delay means she meets Fred, and there the book ends.

Many people believe The Blue Flower (1995), Fitzgerald’s final novel, which won the National Book Critics Award, is her finest book, and it is certainly a wonderful demonstration of her originality and mastery, though it’s not my favorite.

            The blue flower of the title is mentioned in the first paragraph of a prose piece Fritz (Friedrich) von Hardenberg (who later called himself Novalis) reads to important women in his life.  He reads it to his betrothed Sophie, who at twelve Fritz, and no one else, thinks looks like a self-portrait of Raphael at twenty-five. He reads it to Sophie’s sister, the capable and very down-to-earth Mandelsloh, and finally he reads it to Karoline Just, the daughter of the man Fritz is apprenticed to as tax-collector’s clerk. Of these Karoline, who loves Fritz and thinks he’s wasting himself on Sophie, comes closest to understanding the blue flower, which later becomes the symbol for the unattainable among the early Romantics in Germany.

            Fritz, even before he is influenced by the philosopher Fichte or meets Friedrich Schlegel, is an idealist; “there is no real barrier between the seen and the unseen,” his friends say of him. “The whole of existence dissolves itself into a myth.” But he lives among those who are anything but idealists. When he complains to Karoline’s father that copy clerks ought not to exist, Just says “a revolution would not remove them; you will find that there were copy clerks at the foot of the guillotine.”

            Fritz fails to see that Sophie isn’t even as clever as her sister, the Mandelsloh, who says memorably “We who are dull accept that intelligent people should run the world and the rest of us should work six days a week to keep them going, if only it turns out that they know what they’re doing.” Fritz doesn’t, really; he has, in addition to his idealism about the world, an idealism about what one can do in it that resembles Thoreau’s “go confidently in the direction of your dreams . . . .” “Courage,” says Fritz, “is the power to create your own life . . . so that every day and every night is what you imagine it.” Even Fritz thinks Sophie is presumptuous for not being a believer in God, and when she says perhaps a miracle might make him one, he chides her: “Miracles don’t make people believe! It’s the belief that is the miracle.” Wasn’t that Hume?