Her son-in-law, Terence Dooley, points out wisely in his introduction to this collection of letters, that friends and relations of novelists are not always best pleased when they first discover that, and what, the novelists have been writing. I was surprised, and pleased, as I struggled on with my own children and my own teaching and my own need to write, to see that Penelope had become a novelist. I had not been surprised to be told that she had written a biography of Burne-Jones. She was just and scholarly. I had not read her other biographies. When she won the Booker Prize with Offshore I was delighted, and immediately read it. (I did not know that this prize was to be such a trouble and such a problem to Penelope, until I read Terence Dooley’s account of it.) I think I then read almost all her books, more or less as they came out. I admired them. They had a finished, separate quality. They were works of art, in excellent prose. They were funny and terrible. I did not ask whether they had anything to do with her life – whether she had owned a houseboat that sank, or a bookshop. There was something self-sufficient about even those early works. The writer knew exactly what belonged in a particular tale, and how to arrange it. I admired the craft, still without thinking of genius.
She said to me about Human Voices that she wished I would write something in the TLS or somewhere to point out that it was based on a German poem, by Heine, ‘Der Asra’. I hadn’t noticed that, and I don’t know how she expected anyone to do so. ‘Asra’ to me was Coleridge’s transposition of Sara in his diaries and love letters. But I felt challenged, and I reread Human Voices, and I read ‘Der Asra’, a perfect, moving, chilling, brief poem and I saw that Penelope Fitzgerald was not an English lady writer – in a lot of these letters she is putting on an act as one – but someone with an austere, original talent, unlike anyone else writing in this country at this time. I don’t think I then said ‘genius’ to myself. It isn’t a word I much use.
In the light of these letters we can see what parts of Fitzgerald’s own life served as raw material for the earlier novels. This makes me, as a writer and reader, feel uneasy. The connections, the sources, are there, and yet there is something hermetic, something completed, about good novels of the kind Fitzgerald wrote. Deliberately personal novels like Dundy’s The Dud Avocado or Jong’s Fear of Flying almost take off from their authors’ lives and flow back into them. Fitzgerald had made messy life into finished art – even if it was a finished observation about the messiness of life.
It was when I read the last three novels, Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, and The Blue Flower, that I came to understand – hindered by the fact that I had met her long before I read them – that she was a great writer. Each is different; each takes a whole world of history, knowledge, politics and literature and turns it into something at once suggestive and complete, full of newly created people and newly connected ideas. One is Italian, one is Russian, one is German. All are about tragi-comic, fallible human beings living personal lives in a world that is political and spiritual, which is sketched in with the sureness of an artist who knows enough (which means a very great deal) to know exactly what details of daily life, or philosophical thought, to put elegantly in place to make a whole. This is perhaps most remarkable of all in Von Hardenberg’s Prussia. She told me once she had read the records of the salt mines from cover to cover in German to understand how her hero was employed – and then in a few sketched details she places the mines, in his daily life and in his thought about the scientific and spiritual world.
It was at this point only that I read The Knox Brothers, her biography of her father and uncles. I read the book looking for its author, not for its subjects. And I have come to see how much the austere perfectionist – with a wicked sense of humour – is descended from that family of bishops, saints, dons, idealists, intellects. She effaces herself, referring to her birth only as that of a ‘daughter’, and her observations (only about twice, moreover) as those of ‘a niece’. I’m not sure I’ve read a better- written biography. The quality of the writing is derived partly from an exact, matter-of-fact, wildly funny wit in the descriptions. The other part comes from a scrupulous respect for the spiritual lives, as they themselves saw them, of the four brothers. Hermione Lee once asked her in an interview if she would say anything about her feminist or political beliefs. Fitzgerald corrected her; she hoped the readers would be interested in her spiritual beliefs.
The Knox Brothers opens with their grandfather, the missionary Thomas French, who travelled and died taking Christianity to the Afghans and the North West Frontier. Penelope Fitzgerald comments:
Today he would certainly be asked: why not leave these people to their own beliefs? Why press on them something they did not ask for and do not want? To this his reply would be: ‘The viewing of the unseen world instead of the visible things of time – this cannot be a shallow matter; it must be deep or not at all – no halves in such a business.’
The four brothers, in very different ways, inherited this absolute vision. Ronald Knox became a Catholic and distressed his father, an Anglican bishop. Wilfred made unworldly, precise vows of poverty and celibacy and joined the (Anglican) Oratory of the Good Shepherd. Penelope Fitzgerald comments sharply on people who saw him as a delightful eccentric, unconcerned like the birds of the air:
This idea was particularly irritating. Wilfred was the young man who had chosen his ties in the Burlington Arcade, and he loved good wine, good tea and the best tobacco. But renunciation must never be seen in terms of loss.
Dillwyn, a mathematician who helped break the codes of the Enigma machine, was as resolute an unbeliever as those two brothers were believers. Penelope respects that. She describes him in 1916, recruiting Ronnie – ‘an unlikely figure in clerical garb’ – to Naval Intelligence:
To Dilly, all the long-drawn out [family] suffering over his youngest brother was a matter of unrealities; we pray, no one answers, the Churches dispute to the death over how to go on speaking to someone who is not there.
It is in Dillwyn’s logical and startling company that ‘his niece, confined for what seemed an eternity to a boarding school at nearby High Wycombe’, makes a rare appearance. He brings her back late, and confronts the outraged housemistress, who said ‘Rules are made to be kept’, with the answer: ‘But they are defined only by being broken.’
It has rightly been said that Penelope wrote wonderfully about children. Terence Dooley makes the caveat that she liked children, not when they were babies or infants, but ‘when they had reached the age of reason’. (’Ronnie’s niece’ makes another appearance, rebuked by Evelyn Waugh for wanting to leave Ronnie’s sixtieth birthday party early ‘to look after her baby’. Waugh ‘snapped "Children! Nonsense! Nothing so easily replaceable."’)
She tells us, of the Knox family, when their mother was sickening: ‘There was an atmosphere, so frightening to children, of things not being quite right, and of discussions behind closed doors.’ She says of her father that ‘the blow of this death was one from which, in a very long life, he never quite recovered. It gave him, at twelve years old, a spartan endurance and a determination not to risk himself too easily to life’s blows, which might, at times, have been mistaken for coldness.’
The children in whom Penelope, as a writer, is most interested are indeed – like the Knoxes – like Penelope herself: beings who combine clarity of thought with a sense of the existence of the unseen world. They are also perfectionists. The boy actor, in At Freddie’s, practising a jump from a wall again and again may well have died in the search for perfection. Both Hardenberg and his young brother have the same absolutism. They inconvenience others, damage them even, yet are to be loved and understood and respected. There is something of the same quality in the midget child in Innocence, and by extension in the young Italians in that book. The quality is indeed a form of innocence. There is a comic version of it in the boy, observed by Penelope’s father at Rugby, who stopped the school clock with an accurately aimed squash ball. It turned out that the boy had been practising the shot for two