It is such a treat to discover a new author in my 60s! This recent, shamefully late ‘introduction’ to Penelope Fitzgerald originated in a recommendation to read Hermione Lee’s biography of her, as an exemplar of the art of life-writing. ( I’m writing a biography of Alice Curtayne and I am anxious to do it right.) Lee’s book is a great read and a perfect model of biography, so good it spurred me to read the subject’s actual books.
Penelope’s maiden name was Knox, and she was niece to the more famous Fr Ronald Knox (1888-1957), whose name was well-known in Ireland; he was that creature beloved of all Irish Catholics, the PEC (Posh English Convert – Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Ethel Mannin, Alec Guinness etc). Fr Knox was a prolific writer, but his sister, Winifred Peck (1882-1962), Penelope’s aunt, could also spin a good yarn, and maybe this is where Penelope got it. Penelope had the kind of gilded upper-class upbringing that one would expect, going to Oxford almost as a matter of course and getting a job at the BBC, although losing her mother at a young age was a terrible blow. Her father’s second wife was Mary Shepard, who illustrated the Mary Poppins books and whose father Ernest Shepard, illustrated Winnie the Pooh. (That’s enough blood relations for now.)
Penelope married Desmond Fitzgerald, an up-and-coming Irish barrister and a Catholic whose father came from a relatively humble background in Tralee. In later years Desmond’s drinking got him into trouble and he had to leave his chambers, so he worked in a travel agency (and glad to get it) for the rest of his days. At certain times the family experienced dire poverty, living on a squalid barge on the Thames at one stage, and in other dreadful accommodation, but the three children all went to private fee-paying schools, and they all went to university as a matter of course (of course). Eventually Penelope and Desmond were housed by the council in south London. They had their differences but they never split up, or had affairs, and their three children all married young, and contentedly, too. Penelope worked (outside the home) for nearly all her life, in later years as a teacher in a variety of schools. She only started writing novels and biography at the age of 60, and was very prolific from then until her death.
This is the order in which I read the two I read. The Beginning of Spring (1988) is an arrestingly unusual book, about an Englishman, Frank, who has a print works in Moscow in the early twentieth century, and when the novel opens his wife Nellie has just left him and their three children, to go back to England. (Frank, Russian-born, doesn’t feel the pull of home at all, which is what Nellie’s departure is supposed at first to be). Frank has an English friend, Selwyn, an admirer of Tolstoy, there’s an English vicar and his wife, and an unemployed English governess Muriel whom everyone wants Frank to engage, to look after his children, but instead he employs a young woman, Lisa Ivanovna, who seems competent and self-contained. There’s also an emotional male student who tries to interfere with the print works. Some of Frank’s back story with Nellie is given and her relationship with other characters is explored. I’d say that to write more would be a spoiler, but that isn’t true. The plot is weak, and I got the strange feeling at the end that the author had tired of the whole thing and just wanted to draw a line under it. I was disappointed, but still I loved the book and would recommend it for two reasons, firstly because of the descriptions of Moscow and Russian people and houses and clothes and late-winter weather, so vivid that reading it in a London heatwave, I actually shivered once or twice. The second aspect of the book I loved was the way characters spoke; Fitzgerald has a great understanding of the grandiloquent and bathetic way people express their beliefs and reveal their personalities in conversation. Selwyn and the English vicar’s wife each manage to say things that are laugh-out-loud funny. But the author is never cruel, and the poor governess who follows Frank around Moscow in an attempt to get him to hire her, probably the most pitiable character in the book, is not ridiculed.
The same sense of the ridiculous animates an earlier novel of hers, Human Voices (1980), based on her time working for the BBC during the Second World War. It is mainly about the young women who work in the Recorded Programming Department, under dreamer Sam Brooks, who is fond of telling the young women that they remind him of some painting he can’t remember, confiding in them, and holding their hands – but going no further, it would appear. Vi Simmons (19), who works in this department is practical and no-nonsense, from a large family in Hammersmith which is thankfully neither default-eccentric-upper-middle-class nor condescendingly-conveyed cheery working class. Brooks’ main frenemy in Broadcasting House is Jeff Huggard, who is head of another department. When Huggard wisely pulls the plug on a radio interview with a French general who is urging Britain to surrender (after Dunkirk, in 1940), he is strongly reprimanded by his superiors for acting without authority. Had the interview aired, the BBC would have been subjected to the more stringent government controls it was trying hard to avoid. (This is all fiction of course – but probable none the less.) The hierarchy and bureaucracy of the BBC (as of any institution) is brilliantly conveyed. Mr Barnett, who is in charge of Supplies, frets that if America joins the war, all the South American republics will want to join too and they’ll all want desks at the BBC and he’ll have to procure steel filing cabinets and Spanish alphabet typewriters. What is being gently mocked here is not so much British political solipsism (perhaps understandable in 1940) as an inability to see the big picture – but it is that very inability, Fitzgerald manages to convey, that enables the BBC to tell as much of the truth as it can. A motley collection of talented and dedicated people all pulling in different directions and guarding their own patches jealously does not an effective propaganda machine make. There are lyrical and imaginative descriptions of Broadcasting House as an ocean liner with the portholes blacked out, and wartime London is brilliantly, and briefly, evoked. The plot, again, is weak; Annie Asra, introduced late in the book, the stout-hearted, self-contained daughter of a Birmingham piano-tuner, could have come in earlier. And Lise’s eventual fate is less interesting (to me) than the description of the Free French forces melée in Hyde Park when she ventures forth with the glamorous Della to find Frédé, her boyfriend. There is humour on nearly every page. When the French general declines a glass of cognac before going on air there is a slight murmur of disappointment, because now, nobody can have any. When the big concert hall is turned into billets for staff who have to sleep over, and someone expresses the fear that there will (despite efforts to separate the sexes) be ‘goings-on’, Mr Barnett says, ‘Surely not when England’s in danger.’ A pre-war German refugee, Dr Vogel, an expert on recording, was brought all over England (before the war – these are fond memories) by Sam Brooks to take recordings of harvest festivals, which consisted of church doors creaking open regularly and heavy footsteps while successive women brought in exhibits. You have to read this brilliant book. I am not succeeding in putting across its genius at all.
When Penelope Fitzgerald won the Booker Prize for Offshore in 1979 (I have yet to read that one), there was what passes for outcry (outwhinge? outbleat?) among the literary chattering classes. She went on a TV programme where the presenter (some pompous creep whose name I forget) told her what an unworthy winner she was, and some of the panel, including Susan Hill (shame on her) agreed. I don’t have Lee’s biography by me, but what has stuck in my mind is that when Fitzgerald was asked what she conceived to be the purpose of fiction, she responded by saying that human beings have always loved stories, to while away the darkness of the night, and that she believed that fiction should still fulfil that function, passing the time and maybe compensating for the darkness, in an interesting way. This wasn’t good enough for the pretentious panel, of course, but it’s good enough for me.
And I still have loads of her novels to read!
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Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: a life (London: Chatto & Windus 2013). Borrowed from Galway public library inter-library loan system, which was fast and effective.
Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices (London: Collins 1980: Fourth Estate paperback 2014). Bought in Blackwells, Oxford, on a recent brief unexpected trip. There was a whole row of her books but I picked out the thinnest, so as not to overload my bag. I picked well.
______________, The Beginning of Spring (London: Collins 1988). Borrowed from Galway City Library, Westside.
Winifred Peck, Bewildering Cares (London or Edinburgh 1940: Dean Street Press 2016). About a vicar’s wife. Lively but so determinedly unsnobby it rather gives the game away. Still, well-meaning, and one of the heroine’s favourite books is The Spirit of Man, a poetry anthology from 1915 also treasured by my mother, which I have never seen referred to anywhere else.
__________House-Bound (London or Edinburgh 1942: Persephone 2011).House-Bound is quietly amusing, about a newly servantless upper- middle-class woman, Rose, doing her own housework. The reader holds back from ridicule of her alarming, blithering incompetence because Rose acknowledges more than once that many women don’t have her problem because they never had servants anyway. There’s a strong evocation of Edinburgh in the book.
(Alas I do not know the original publishers of either of these books; I parted with my reprints long ago.)
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Clear Classic Books 
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