Penelope Fitzgerald was born in 1916 into a distinguished family of Church of England clergy, thinkers, writers, and editors characterized by what her biographer, Hermione Lee, calls “alarming honesty, caustic wit, shyness, moral rigour, willpower, oddness, and powerful banked-down feelings.” She got off to a brilliant start in life, seemingly with every advantage. At Somerville College, Oxford, the papers she wrote so impressed her finals examiners that one of the dons asked to keep them and had them bound in vellum. After university, she established herself as a literary journalist, wrote for the TLS and Punch (whose editor was her father, E.V. Knox), worked at the bbc during the war, and with her husband Desmond, a barrister, edited a magazine called World Review. But by her forties things had gone badly wrong and she found herself mired in poverty with three children to raise. Her husband’s self-confidence had been shattered by combat in North Africa during the war; he turned to drink, was disbarred, and lost his ability to cope.
In 1977, when she was sixty, she published her first novel, The Golden Child, a murder mystery written to entertain Desmond while he was dying. She described herself as “an old writer who has never been a young one.” Her work, she said, focused on “the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?” I am not the first to write about Penelope Fitzgerald for The New Criterion; I can particularly recommend two articles published in 2000, the year of her death: an eloquent unsigned obituary, and “Between head & heart: Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels” by Tess Lewis.
Her early novels, including The Bookshop (1978), Offshore (1979), and Human Voices (1980), were drawn from her own experience: in addition to working at the bbc, she had helped run a bookshop and had lived on a leaky houseboat moored on the Thames which sank not once but twice. But her imagination took flight when she turned to other times and other settings, producing several historical novels that established her uniqueness. My two favorites are The Beginning of Spring (1988), set in Russia just before the revolution, and her last book, The Blue Flower (1995), set in Germany during the early Romantic period. “She likes to set her books on the cusp of change,” Lee writes. What is both charming and brilliant is how the author portays, in the first of these novels, centuries-old Russian civilization and the stirrings of dissatisfaction with it, and in the other, wild flights of Romantic fancy arising within a society that feels curiously medieval. These currents form a background that hovers somewhere around the edges of the novels’ plots, affecting the characters subtly and interestingly but never intruding as the center of attention. For example, in Grüningen, Switzerland, where some of the action of The Blue Flower takes place, “mention of the goings-on of the French caused no distress. When George appeared in a tricolour waistcoat there was not even a murmur of surprise.”
In addition to her novels, Fitzgerald wrote three biographies: the first one in 1975 about the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones; second, The Knox Brothers (1977), a group biography of her father and his brothers; and lastly Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (1984), an account of the eccentric late Victorian poet and her circle. The best-known of the Knoxes may have been Fitzgerald’s uncle Ronald, an Anglican priest, a translator of the Bible, and a friend of G. K. Chesterton’s who became, like Chesterton, a convert to Roman Catholicism. He was also the author of detective novels and the subject of a biography by Evelyn Waugh. The distinction Fitzgerald draws between fiction and biography is illuminating: “On the whole, I think, you should write biographies of those you admire and respect,” she said, “and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.”
This remark casts an interesting light on the characters in her novels. Frank Reid in The Beginning of Spring, an engaging middle-aged Englishman living in Moscow, is adept at running a successful printing business and navigating the complex network of relationships, customs, and unspoken understandings that underlie life in tsarist Russia, but his understanding of people, women in particular, is limited. Lee describes him as “one of her bewildered, likeable men, who is trying to do the right thing under puzzling circumstances.” Young Fritz von Hardenberg in The Blue Flower—who in real life later wrote, under the name Novalis, the visionary novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), a seminal work of German Romanticism—is supremely self-confident and charming but strikingly oblivious to the feelings of others. Frank, whose English wife Nellie leaves him unexpectedly, becomes smitten with a Russian woman, Lisa Ivanovna, whom he has brought into his house to look after his children. And Fritz falls in love, after knowing her for fifteen minutes, with Sophie, a twelve-year-old girl whom everyone else thinks of as quite ordinary. Bringing up the subject of the transmigration of the soul, Fritz asks her,
“Should you like to be born again?”
Sophie considered a little. “Yes, if I could have fair hair.”
Fitzgerald’s novels can be read as comedies of manners with resemblances to Jane Austen’s books. Certainly she would have ratified Puck’s assertion, “What fools these mortals be.” The novels’ minor characters are real, fully fleshed-out people, not types or instruments of the plot. Fritz’s mother, the Freifrau Auguste, responding to her daughter Sidonie’s suggestion that there should be a chair in a guest’s room so he would have a place to put his clothes at night, replies,
“His clothes! It is still too cold to undress at night. I have not undressed myself at night, even in summer, for I think twelve years.” “And yet you’ve given birth to eight of us!” cried Sidonie.
A running source of amusement in The Beginning of Spring is Frank’s English assistant at the press, Selwyn Crane, a disciple of Tolstoy who, “ascetic, kindly smiling, earnestly questing, not quite sane-looking, seemed to have let himself waste away, from other-worldliness, almost to transparency.” He comes over, uninvited, to console Frank after Nellie has left him. “My dear fellow, here I am. After such news, I couldn’t leave you by yourself.” Frank replies drily, “That’s what I would have preferred, though.” Selwyn writes poetry in Russian, and Frank’s press is publishing a volume of it called Birch Tree Thoughts, a title that makes me laugh every time I think about it. “Selwyn pronounced his title, as always, in a different and sadder tone, which in England would be reserved for religious subjects.”
Any reader of Fitzgerald’s historical novels, with their precise evocations of vanished times in cultures remote from her own, is bound to wonder how she could know so much about, say, the life of a commercial printer in prerevolutionary Russia or intellectual controversies in eighteenth-century Germany. Though she had studied Russian and visited Moscow, the novelist’s main sources for The Beginning of Spring—or so she wrote in a letter to Penelope Lively—were the 1914 Baedeker guide to Russia and the Russian supplements of The Times. The first sentence of The Beginning of Spring is “In 1913 the journey from Moscow to Charing Cross, changing at Warsaw, cost fourteen pounds, six shillings and threepence and took two and a half days.” There you go. She kicks off The Blue Flower with the same matter-of-fact surehandedness: “Jacob Dietmahler was not such a fool that he could not see that they had arrived at his friend’s home on the washday.” She doesn’t have to try to win you over—as soon as you read a paragraph or two, you’re already on board. As a result, the books, as the novelist Julian Barnes puts it, “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.”
When she wrote her novel about Russia, it quite naturally became a Russian novel. Everything has a Russian flavor, even taking a taxi:
Frank . . . walked some way down Lipka Street to find a sledge with a driver who was starting work, and not returning from the night’s work drunk, half-drunk, stale drunk, or podvipevchye—with just a dear little touch of drunkenness.
In answer to Frank’s question about why he lives alone in Moscow,
the driver replied that women were only company for each other. They were created for each other, and talked to each other all day. At night they were too tired to be of any use.
“But we weren’t meant to live alone,” said Frank.
“Life makes its own corrections,” replies the driver. I don’t think people talk that way in most novels from the Anglo-Saxon world.
Late medieval Germany and Russia up to World War I both had room for the experience of spiritual occurrences for which there is no place in our modern rationalist understanding. Fritz von Hardenberg, walking in the graveyard in Weißenfels near his home, sees
a young man, still almost a boy . . . standing in the half-darkness, with his head bent, himself as white, still, and speechless as a memorial. The sight was consoling to Fritz, who knew that the young man, although living, was not human, but also that at the moment there was no boundary between them.
Frank Reid’s daughter Dolly, staying at the Reids’ dacha with her temporary governess, Lisa Ivanovna, wakes up in the middle of the night, walks out onto the porch, and finds Lisa about to walk into the forest. Lisa takes her along, walking through the leafy half-darkness, when Dolly
began to see on each side of her, among the thronging stems of the birch trees, what looked like human hands, moving to touch each other across the whiteness and blackness. “Lisa,” she called out. “I can see hands.”
What is going on here has been explained in various ways by commentators on Fitzgerald’s work. Is Lisa secretly the head of some cult or revolutionary group? The working notes Fitzgerald made for herself even seem to suggest that interpretation. But in the novel as she actually wrote it, this isn’t at all clear. Lisa addresses them:
I have come, but I can’t stay . . . . You came, all of you, as far as this on my account. . . . As you see, I’ve had to bring this child with me. If she speaks about this, she won’t be believed. If she remembers it, she’ll understand in time what she’s seen.
The political explanation makes sense, but at the same time these presences seem to be as much creatures of the forest as the birch trees and their leaves.
That we don’t quite know who these creatures are, that we don’t know exactly what Lisa is up to, that we never quite understand why Frank’s wife has left him—there are many things not completely explained in the book. The same indeterminacy applies to The Blue Flower and to Fitzgerald’s other books as well. The hyper-reality of her precisely rendered settings and practical details of daily life form a solid backdrop. Character, motivation, and the meaning of events tend to be left unexplained. It’s a very appealing quality, since the same indeterminacy and ambiguity prevails in our own lives.
