Understated perfection: a loving appreciation of Penelope Fitzgerald

 

Understated perfection:  a loving appreciation of Penelope Fitzgerald

When Penelope Fitzgerald sat down to write her first novel, she was already into her 50s. Born in 1915, educated – among other places – at Oxford, having worked at the BBC, a theatre school and a crammer school, having had children and led a somewhat peripatetic life with her husband, she first published non-fiction and then a first novel in 1977, at the age of 52. After that came a remarkable series of nine novels, most of them short, some of them historical, several of them (partly) autobiographical. What happened? And more importantly: what makes her an exceptional writer?

It's certainly not unusual for writers to, as the phrase goes in Writing Workshops, ‘use what you know’ to get started: use your own life, your own memories, the people you know or knew, situations you went through – then novelise it all, put it through the fictional grinder and there you go. Silly advice? Perhaps, but not in her case: a fabulous novel came out of it in 1978 (The Bookshop), and then some more: Offshore (1979, winner of the Booker Prize for which The Bookshop had been short-listed earlier) is set on a barge, a dwelling Fitzgerald had experiences with. Human Voices (1980) used her memories of working at the BBC during WW2; At Freddie’s (1982) relied on her work at a London theatre school.

But then out came some more novels which, suddenly, were historically inspired: the magical ‘Innocence’ (1982) set in Florence in the 1950s; the frankly extraordinary ‘The Beginning of Spring’ (1988), set in Russia just before the 1917 Revolution; ‘The Gate of Angels’ (1990), set in about the same period (1912) but this time at a Cambridge college; and the German Romanticism-inspired ‘The Blue Flower’ (1995), loosely based on Novalis and which will be her last novel. There are some non-fiction works too, first linked to her own family (Burne-Jones, a famous name in the Arts), then about Charlotte Mew (a poetess); we also have her Letters (‘So I have thought of you’, 2008) and a posthumous book of essays (‘A House of Air’, 2005).

And that’s it. Then she was gone, unobtrusive, largely unknown, humble and self-disparaging, ironic about her status, her books and her prizes, having done her best to avoid the limelight, and leaving behind a legacy of immense proportions: not in terms of how much she’d written, but in terms of quality. And to be fair, her sales figures were not very high for most of her books – although they were better in England than in America. The French, typically avid readers of translations, had to wait until the early 1980s for their first taste of Penelope, and so far only five of her novels have been translated. The Dutch, not slouch themselves when it comes to translating, can only read three of her novels in their language. Spaniards have translated it all, the Italians only a few, the Germans only five, the Danes just the one – not what you’d call international recognition. She herself wrote to her publisher that ‘I am sorry that ‘Human Voices’ won’t sell (…) It’s not in my nature to be spectacular or panoramic’. Since then though, her work has been hailed by many, and certainly by ‘Literature people’: Julian Barnes is a known admirer, Hermione Lee has published a biography of Fitzgerald, and everyone from the great Beryl Bainbridge to Alberto Manguel showered her with love and admiration (and the magnificent Andrew Miller called The Blue Flower ‘a masterpiece’ in last week’s The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/02/andrew-miller-dh-lawrence-forced-me-to-my-feet-i-was-madly-excited - please do read Miller 😊, for example his superb Ingenious Pains, or Pure).

Why, though? Why the respect, why the adulation…why this piece I’m writing now?

Something quickly strikes you when you start reading her: her characters are normal people, with little foibles and little defects and little stories. It sounds silly but it translates into characters who never sound anything less than real: no pretense, no all-knowing high-flying holier-than-thou cardboard figures but every day you and me. They speak their mind to each other, or they don’t but let you know, they say cruel things by accident or by design, they’re oblivious to a lot, selfish or generous: they are real in that nothing they do or say couldn’t be done or said.

Those characters are also part of a world they observe, interact with and remark upon – another seemingly trite statement to make about Literature but actually perhaps not: so many novels treat their setting as a neutral environment in which the sole focal point (the character) moves but does not inhabit. Penelope Fitzgerald does not dissociate the two so easily: The Bookshop takes place in a small English town where minds can be narrow and judgements quickly passed, and where there’s a social hierarchy that underpins what people say and think. In Innocence, set in Florence, the English girl (Barney) helps highlight the Italian persona of the other characters, and the hills of Tuscany (as in Barry Unsworth’s wonderful After Hannibal (1996)) are not only a beauty spot but the backdrop to relations, family feuds and, well, the whole plot.

Ah, the plot – or plots: what about those?

That is another aspect of Fitzgerald that stands out: plots are not her primary concern because what happens is a way to talk about people, to observe situations, to comment on human nature. Plots are not problems that need solving, or, quite frankly, full resolving; they are not intricately thought-out webs of interacting story-lines where you cannot wait to find out what’s what, or who’s who. They tend to be passages in a few lives, moments that can stretch over a few years but are often limited to less than that: a few months in Moscow in The Beginning of Spring or in London (Human Voices), a couple of years in Italy or in an English town, and not even that in Germany or at a theatre school. But it is always enough to create very clear images of those settings so that the focus can come to lie on the characters, their lives, their aspirations and disappointments. In The Beginning of Spring, Frank’s wife has left him to go back to England, putting him in charge of their three children: it’s not a sob-story, or a romantic one, or a fine psychological portrait of a single father, but that thin plot is enough to give consistency to motivations, thoughts and practical questions. The plot moves along but you hardly ever notice it as it’s never the focus. Don’t be fooled, though: those plots are not empty either, nor are they so feeble that they undermine the novels – they don’t. They simply require the reader to embrace the fact that however tightly-plotted her books are (and they really are), those plots never drive the novel forward: the development of characters does.

At this stage you could legitimately ask: well, aren’t those novels a bit…boring maybe? How do they read?

This is the point where style must be discussed – a thorny issue at all times and always difficult to pinpoint. Penelope Fitzgerald’s style is not flamboyant, and she’s certainly not one for Updike-like chiseled jewels that blind you with pyrotechnics. She is closer to, say, Beryl Bainbridge in using normal, plain language that first fools you into thinking there’s nothing to it. Then you realise that there’s a lot to it after all: just like Bainbridge, her sentences contain multitudes, and while she’s less sardonic and, perhaps, less comic than Bainbridge, Fitzgerald handles irony, understated humour and loaded remarks like no other.

She can be profound in an aphoristic way, as in Offshore: ‘Distances are the same to those who don’t meet’. But mostly she packs in lots of nuances and implicit meaning in innocuous-looking sentences. Sometimes it will be to make a general remark: ‘She seemed harmless enough, but harmlessness, as he knew, could be a very hard thing to bear’ (The Beginning…); often it’s to say something about a character’s view of the world while making you laugh (‘Not only does she look like a dismissed governess, but it’s clear that she was born looking like one. And that I consider unusually hard on her’), or a character’s inner substance (‘She said goodbye to him in her distinctive manner, looking down for a moment at his hand in hers as though wondering where she’d got it from’). And sometimes she will manage to both say something about a character while making a more general remark about human nature: ‘She’s going to pieces, Frank thought. ‘No hard feelings’, he said [to her], and in her contempt for such a commonplace remark, she began to feel better, so that they parted almost on friendly terms’ (all quotes from The Beginning of Spring’). The high-mindedness alluded to here, the little tug-of-war between people, the small victories that make us feel good about ourselves: it’s all here in twenty-four words…

But she’s also full of irony, and can use effects extremely well, in a way that is reminiscent of exceptional craftsmen like Michael Frayn: ‘It was impossible for Salvatore to see Chiara again, no matter how many concerts he went to, or to avoid seeing her, no matter how many he failed to go to, because she had left Florence’. Here, Salvatore’s indecision (he wants to see Chiara, but he doesn’t want to be seen to want to see her) is perfectly introduced, balanced by the repetition of ‘concerts’ (he goes to, or fails to go to), ending abruptly and revealing his ineptitude and wrong-headed approach. But she can also floor you with a wonderful image: ‘The wash of tourists and visitors was beginning to recede, leaving behind it the rich silt of currency’ – how much is said here in so very few words, not to mention the rhythm and prosody of that second clause (both quotes in Innocence).

A final word about her style: it’s never precious but nor is it explicit when it comes to, say, sex. Language is, on the whole, clean and free of mannerisms, obscenities or swear-words – there will be a couple of those here and there but always uttered by a character and for a good reason: to bring contrast, to mark a strong emotion, or to allude to the character’s personality. Many of today’s novels have of course no problem with so-called ‘bad language’, or with explicit sex scenes, and reading Penelope Fitzgerald reminds us that indirectness can sometimes be more meaningful than directness. Holding back is a way to pour forth; handling subtleties is a way to signify. There’s no need to be a purist about this of course, and strong language must be used when needed, but it is interesting to ask whether constant swearing and explicit sex always add to the story and characterisation – it does in James Kelman (the swearing, not the sex) but is it always the case?

I wish Penelope Fitzgerald had sold millions of copies, and I wish she could do so today. I wish she could be widely acknowledged as one of the very best writers we’ve had, and one who remains a delight to read and an example to anyone interested in reading, writing, creativity, style and substance combined and, well, dare I say it? Class. Penelope Fitzgerald had class, her novels have class, and she’s a gem, a treasure and a must-read to all.