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

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СКАЧАТЬ It is interesting that their backgrounds in some respects mirror Desmond’s and Penelope’s. Pierce is an Irish Catholic; Hannah is from Ulster (where the Knoxes have their roots). Shakespeare’s ‘King John’, with its murder of innocents, is the play being rehearsed in the book, for Freddie is a serious headmistress. The character derives from Miss Freeston, head not of Italia Conti, where Penelope began her teaching in the early 1960s, but of Westminster Tutors, the eccentric Oxbridge crammer where she was still teaching. However Freddie is given some of the traits and fearsome reputation of Lilian Baylis, the much-loved dragon of the Old Vic, the theatre that flew the flag for Shakespeare in London for so many years.

      Penelope wrote to Richard Ollard about the cover design for At Freddie’s:

      I wanted a high wall with a broken basket of fruit at the bottom of it, having evidently fallen, one of the Covent Garden baskets. That gives some movement, because it’s evidently fallen from somewhere. I did think of the stage children as to some extent expendable products, like the fruit.

      Ollard, the fourth publisher to do so, politely turned down ‘The Poetry Bookshop’ project four times. In the face of Penelope’s lively persistence, which makes for entertaining reading, and with the reduction of its focus to a study of the life of Charlotte Mew, and how it gave rise to her few, haunting poems, in the end he gracefully bowed to the inevitable. She wrote to him as the publication date neared:

      the interesting things about CMew are that: 1. she was a poet, otherwise I shouldn’t bother to write about her 2. she was a lesbian 3. she was unhappy 4. she has a curious lifespan as a writer, from the nineties to the 1920s…I fear none of the papers would be interested in an extract about a lesbian who didn’t make it…The interest, to me, is that she’s a divided personality who had to produce so many versions of herself at the same time. Perhaps we all do.

      Chris Carduff, in his first assignment as an editor, oversaw the Addison Wesley edition in the US, and sensibly and logically enriched it with a selection of Mew’s poems.

      It is curious how many successful writers have been drawn to write wonderful books about unsuccessful ones. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (but she had so few) is a tragic, deeply literary book, of similar length and structure to her novels. It was her last biography. From now on, nonetheless, all her fiction would include people who had really existed. The two worlds were merging.

      In the letters to Richard Ollard, as befitted their flourishing friendship, she discussed freely the upheavals in her life provoked by the decision of my wife and myself to move to the country and bring up our children there. Now she would live between Somerset and London. In Theale she gardened, helped sometimes with Fergus (though she wasn’t terribly good with babies and toddlers; she preferred children to have reached the age of reason), relaxed as much as she ever did, and we hoped that she would be able to write. However she found that ‘I personally can only write in London, I love the noise and squalor and the perpetual distractions and the temptation to take an aircraft somewhere else’, and so Jean Fisher helped her to find a base, at 76 Clifton Hill, St John’s Wood, in the house of a friend of a friend where she lived in ‘a kind of attic, overlooking the tree-tops, with gold wallpaper’. This arrangement worked well until 1987, when her work for the writers’ association PEN International and the Arts Council, her research at the British Museum reading room for her books, and her tireless reviewing, kept her more and more in London, and her daughter Maria and son-in-law John generously agreed to convert the coachhouse of their new house in Bishop’s Road, Highgate for her. They looked after her there for the rest of her life.

      During the years at Clifton Hill she was taking her writing in a new direction. An examination of her manuscripts in the Harry Ransom Humanities Center at the University of Texas seems to indicate that, however intense the thought and technique that went into them, her first four novels almost wrote themselves. Her pure fiction is entrancing, but now she was attempting to combine this with the novel of ideas, the metaphysical novel. She had been considering writing about Italy, and specifically Florence, for a decade, the book that after many evolutions became Innocence. An early version of the Ridolfis appears in a first draft, which was to have been about the great Florentine flood, and might even have been intended to be a detective story. It is Francis King she credits with putting her on track: ‘you’ll hardly remember, having been to so many other places since, that you told me the story of the Italian family and their dwarfs yourself’. This cruel legend or parable from the 1560s is retold by Penelope with a wealth of vivid apparently historical detail as the first chapter of Innocence, shedding its mysterious light and darkness over the Shakespearean comedy of tangled loves, with the rumbling of politics beneath, set in a 1950s Italy seemingly known and recreated from within. The Ridolfis of those earlier days were midgets. When their daughter’s companion starts outgrowing her her legs must be cut off at the knees.

      The twentieth-century Ridolfis retain ‘a tendency to rash decisions, perhaps always intended to ensure other people’s happiness’. Stuart Proffitt, who took over as her editor on Richard Ollard’s retirement, suggested ‘Happiness’ as a title, but Penelope remarked that the novel could as easily be called ‘Unhappiness’. The happiness in question is marital. Constant misunderstandings drive the lovers, Chiara and Salvatore, together and apart. By the end their young stormy marriage seems to have been saved by a hair’s breadth, to be provisionally permanent. Salvatore throws up his hands:

      ‘What’s to become of us? We can’t go on like this.’

      ‘Yes, we can go on like this. We can go on exactly like this for the rest of our lives.’

      As well as telling a story, Penelope now sought to evoke a culture, and an historical period. Every page gives evidence of a lightly worn, instructive and relevant erudition: about viticulture, law, medicine, architecture, the cinema, fashion, economics, and, above all, politics. For Gramsci, the influential communist reformer who wrote of the ethical society, is the historical figure introduced here, his ideas appealing to Penelope in much the same way as did those of William Morris. Lastly, one should point out the striking, if idealised, resemblance of Chiara to Penelope herself, particularly in the cover-picture she chose for Innocence, one of Pontormo’s angels, from his Annunciation. The virtues of her new method were immediately recognised by the critics, and her reputation began to grow: she was again shortlisted for the Booker, the third of her four novels to be so honoured.

      Through vicissitudes of archive-keeping, the letters to Stuart Proffitt about this and her next two novels have (I hope temporarily) disappeared. However, for The Beginning of Spring, her next novel, we do have the letters to Harvey Pitcher, author of The Smiths of Moscow, credited by Penelope as having been vital to her research. These, like many of the letters in the ‘Writing’ section, show how meticulous and indefatigable she was in this aspect of her work, with what a sense of adventure and enjoyment she undertook it. On one level The Beginning of Spring, first called Nellie and Lisa, is once again a brilliant tragicomedy of marital misunderstanding, memorable like Offshore for its depiction of children not unlike her own. The spring is also the Russian revolutionary spring, for she chose historical periods, which seemed to promise change, emancipation and spiritual rebirth. The novel’s first conception also dates back at least a decade. In Texas is a notebook entitled The Greenhouse, with an early draft of the story of the English expatriate printer which takes the firm on into the May Revolution itself, but this proved unworkable. Pitcher’s book and The Times’ Russian Supplements of the period provide the realistic detail, but the uncanny imaginative power that makes a countrified chaotic Moscow almost tangible surely springs from a deep knowledge of and affinity with Russian literature, especially the Tolstoy of Resurrection and Master and Man, whose idiosyncratic Christian socialism infuses the novel. More than this, in The Beginning of Spring, uninsistently, symbolically, mysteriously, the presence of the supernatural is felt, and it will continue to startle and unsettle (as do the ghosts of the future in the birch wood here) in her last two novels and late СКАЧАТЬ