So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald. Penelope Fitzgerald

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of her early literary hopes and experiment in country-living in the late 1950s; Offshore, so redolent of the early 1960s and London’s river, her lowest point; At Freddie’s, her first teaching job, and the London stage in the days before the National Theatre, when, incidentally, she was beginning her self-apprenticeship to become a writer. Neither should her last three ‘historical’ novels, including The Blue Flower, be assumed to be free of autobiographical elements: Nellie in The Beginning of Spring, Daisy in The Gate of Angels, Fritz’s mother, all have aspects of Penelope, and her child characters always owe much to her own children. In choosing her periods she was chiefly guided, as she declared in interviews, by the wish to write of moments of optimism and ideological ferment, ‘when people really thought things might get better’, when the debates between science and religion, revolution and the unalterable, had not yet apparently ended in atomic bombs, tyranny and unbelief.

      From the first, as we see everywhere in these letters, Penelope was most conscientious in undertaking the duties inherent in being a writer of reputation. Though she never enjoyed committees, she worked for PEN, the Arts Council, and later became Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature. A cause near her heart was that biographers should be recognised by grant-awarding bodies as creative writers. She was successful in fighting for this, as in her energetic support of Public Lending Right, which very belatedly ensured that writers were paid for the lending-out of their books by libraries. Her friendships with Francis King, Sybille Bedford and Michael Holroyd originated in this work. She met J. L. Carr, Thomas Hinde, Edward Blishen and A. L. Barker (known as Pat, author of short stories of fine sensibility, not to be confused with the equally estimable novelist Pat Barker) through her tutoring of fiction courses for the Arvon Foundation. She encouraged and advanced the careers of other writers not only through her tireless reviewing (there was almost no English paper she didn’t write for, reviewing regularly for the Evening Standard, the London Review of Books, the TLS, the Tablet, the New York Times and the Washington Post) but also by judging for most of the literary prizes, biography, poetry and fiction, including, twice, the Booker. She argued fiercely for Roddy Doyle’s The Van, and Magnus Mills’ The Restraint of Beasts, managing to get them both onto the respective shortlists. Among other young writers she championed were Glyn Maxwell, Candia McWilliam and Claire Messud. Among those who reviewed her, or whom she reviewed, and who are represented in this collection are Hilary Mantel, the biographer Richard Holmes and Sir Frank Kermode.

      From 1995 onwards, as she entered her eighties, though she continued to work as hard as ever, and retained her all her formidable intellectual acuity, Penelope’s health and mobility began to decline. She suffered badly from rheumatism and from the slow weakening of her heart. She was no longer able to get to the British Museum reading room where she had spent so many happy years in research, following the circuitous trails which led to her biographies and later novels. The beautiful round reading room itself closed, and she couldn’t contemplate transferring her affections to the new British Library. Now for the first time she began to complain of a lack of inspiration. It troubled her that she had accepted a generous advance for a new novel, the idea for which stubbornly refused to come to her. In the meantime she wrote, to commission, her wonderful introductions to Emma, Middlemarch and, repaying the debt to friendship, J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, and also her amazing last three stories. How to classify her short fiction? Are they fables, parables, folk-tales, poems even? She insisted that each demanded more effort to write than a novel. They range across the whole world in setting, from New Zealand to Tasmania, Mexico, Istanbul (twice), Brittany, Jerusalem (by implication), Iona, far Somerset, the Home Counties, London, and across four centuries.

      Though under no external pressure to repay her advance, in 1999 she gratefully accepted her publishers’ suggestion that she collect her stories into a volume. The title, The Means of Escape, was supplied by Janet Silver of Houghton Mifflin, who considered that the story provided a unifying theme, which Penelope doubted, feeling rightly that the stories are as unsettlingly different from one another as are her novels. Two at least of them could have been novels. Christian motifs proliferate throughout them: the uninvited guest, the unfaithful servant, the unawakened soul, the buried talent. There are ghosts and hauntings. There are two great cries of protest: ‘She belonged to the tribe of torturers. Why pretend they don’t exist?’ and ‘Make no mistake, you pay for every drop of blood in your body.’ Yet there is always the faith that good will prevail. Through character or fate, self-knowledge and grace may be gained or regained. There remains, against all odds, the possibility of salvation.

      The Means of Escape was written during the concentrated struggle to perfect The Blue Flower. It is rich enough to have become the vicarage novel that Penelope was perhaps always on the verge of writing. The story is characterised by a black humour. Evil uncomprehended by innocence flickers through it – a stench, a hood, an elected silence. The shameless may escape, the dutiful never.

      The Likeness was to have been a novel based on the Ionides family from Burne-Jones. It is now a romantic high comedy, based on misunderstanding. The Axe, Penelope’s first published fiction, from 1975, is both a memorably chilling ghost story in its own right and a brilliant ‘take’ on Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. At Hiruharama is an example of the anecdote or tall tale, which evades the narrator as it assumes a moral and pictorial solidity of its own. The Prescription is a violent fable about dishonesty. Not Shown hints at an English murder.

      Penelope’s three great last stories were written and published in 1997 and 1998. They are absolutely ambiguous; yet there is an urgency to be understood in them. They seem to be about inspiration at different stages of life: the human cost of joy. Desideratus sees a resourceful boy wrest the coin he has been given from the pallid ghost of his weaker self. He must earn his talent through travail. The Red-Haired Girl, unwilling model to an uncomprehending painter, tells him, before she disappears, what he’s missed in his search for the picturesque: ‘You don’t know what I want and you don’t know what I feel.’ In Beehernz, a famous conductor who has become a hermit to block out the noisy music of the world, hears a young woman sing a folk setting of Goethe’s Gefunden: ‘I went in the woodland/Nothing to find’ but it goes on ‘I saw in the shadow/A stone-flax stay’. Too long a prisoner of his mute keyboard, he has recaptured his visionary sense, symbolised by a blue wayside flower, the linseed.

      Though all attempts to describe and define a life are doomed to failure, it is tempting to see Penelope’s as describing a dramatic arc from dazzling early success, a promising career as literary editor, a comfortable, if hubristic, establishment in Hampstead, down to destitution and humiliation, the half-way house for the homeless, and thence ever upwards, by dint of hard work, study and inspiration, until at eighty she was at the peak of her achievement, reputation and earnings, passing for the first time, as she ruefully remarks in the letters, into a higher tax bracket. Her one final ambition was to see in the new Millennium. This also she achieved. Several of the series of letters follow her right up to the days before her first stroke, when she was eighty-three, busier than ever, reviewing for papers on both sides of the Atlantic, judging a prize, preparing a new American edition of The Knox Brothers (a family of which she was by now the most remarkable member) and proof-reading her stories, The Means of Escape, for publication by Flamingo and Houghton Mifflin. She survived a month longer, able to talk a little to her children, until she suffered two further strokes and died on 28 April 2000. She is buried in the churchyard of St Mary’s, Hampstead.

      It occurred to me, during my researches for this book, to wonder where she worshipped when, at her lowest point, she lived offshore on Grace. The boat is described in the book as being moored on Battersea Reach; in reality it had been moored at Dakin’s yard, World’s End, but directly opposite St Mary’s Battersea. Inside that lovely eighteenth-century church, the first thing that one sees, among a wonderful collection of modern stained-glass windows, Blake and the grain of sand, Turner, Franklin and the promise of happiness, on the left side of the door is a large and beautiful blue flower.

       СКАЧАТЬ