As a novelist Penelope Fitzgerald drew at first quite directly on her own life, discovering, in her late shift of circumstance and perspective, the potential for making distinctive art out of several earlier episodes in an often difficult and ramshackle career. Her period working in a Southwold bookshop had fed The Bookshop (1978), and in Offshore (1979) she turned to the years, her lowest and most difficult, living on an old Thames sailing barge on Battersea Reach; later, Human Voices (1980) would draw on her years of employment at the BBC during the war, and At Freddie’s (1982), her most exuberantly comic novel, on her time as a teacher at the Italia Conti stage school. Offshore too is at times very funny, though tonally it is the most mercurial of all her books. She herself called it a ‘tragi-farce’.
At its centre is a young Canadian woman, Nenna James, forced at last to accept that the English husband who has abandoned her and their two children will never come back to her. Nenna, who has unfulfilled artistic interests (she trained as a violinist), lives on a houseboat called Grace, just as Fitzgerald had done; but she has married much younger: she is thirty-two and her elder daughter eleven – a reminder and a warning that Fitzgerald, who was married at twenty-five, had three children, and lived on the Thames for two years in her mid-forties, reused her own life as freely and selectively as she liked. Flowing through and around Nenna’s story is a study of the people living alongside her on interconnected boats. In The Bookshop Fitzgerald had created a vulnerable female protagonist effectively starved of a history, and in a sparsely realised setting: it is a tale of Gothic exaggerations and simplicities. But already in Offshore you see her mature and concise ability to give whole lives in touches of discreet detail. The other boat owners – smart Richard Blake and his disenchanted landlubber wife, the all-too-accommodating rent boy Maurice, the old marine painter Sam Willis, who wants to sell his boat before it sinks – appear in a tableau in the opening scene, but their group portrait is constantly developing, since change and flux are the essence of the book, and Fitzgerald moves between the strands of her story with insouciant wit and ease. It is the novel in which she finds her form – her technique and her power. Her procedure, always prizing the ‘spare, subtle and economical’, is aptly at its most fluid in Offshore.
Fitzgerald professed herself drawn as a writer to ‘people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost … They are ready to assume the conditions the world imposes on them, but they don’t manage to submit to them, despite their courage and their best efforts … When I write it is to give these people a voice.’ In Offshore, her barge dwellers, ‘creatures neither of firm land nor water’ may aspire to the ‘sensible’ and ‘adequate’ conditions of life on the Chelsea shore. ‘But a certain failure, distressing to themselves, to be like other people, caused them to sink back, with so much else that drifted or was washed up, into the mud moorings of the great tideway.’ She wrote later that she regretted translations of her title that suggested ‘far from the shore’ – the point was the unsteady nature of the craft anchored mere yards away from the bank, and the ‘emotional restlessness of my characters, halfway between the need for security and the doubtful attraction of danger’.
All of course have their own reasons, and some manage better than others – Fitzgerald as ever has a keen understanding of the worried and hard-up. The novel’s astute psychological portraits show her clear but sympathetic grasp of their mental habits, the notions they have long depended on, but that will not save them in the end. Practical Richard, advising poor Willis about readying his boat for sale, can’t understand that he is ‘dealing with, or rather trying to help, a man who had never, either physically or emotionally, felt the need to replace anything’. Willis indeed ‘had come to doubt the value of all new beginnings and to put his trust in not much more than the art of hanging together’. (As it happens, a new beginning – or anyway a dramatic change – will be forced upon him.) Nenna is more alert to her own failures of reason, and submits to long imaginary hearings before a magistrate, in which her ideas of her marriage and its prospects are subjected to withering forensic scrutiny. Even affluent, efficient, honourable Richard, ‘the kind of man who has two clean handkerchiefs on him at half past three in the morning’, is touchingly shown as the victim of habits of mind bred in him by social and naval training: ‘This last reflection … seemed to tidy up the whole matter, which his mind now presented as a uniform interlocking structure, with working parts.’ Tragi-farce keeps them all in motion, its ambiguous terms never resolving into one or the other state. In a piece written ten years later Fitzgerald revealed that the original of Maurice, ‘an elegant young male model’ who lived on the boat next door, and had cheered up his weary and shabby middle-aged neighbour by taking her to Brighton for the day, had shortly afterwards gone back to Brighton and drowned himself. ‘But when I made him a character … I couldn’t bear to let him kill himself. That would have meant that he had failed in life, whereas, really, his kindness made him the very symbol of success in my eyes.’ Such private, fluctuating and unreconciled scales of value are at the heart of Fitzgerald’s depiction of human interaction.
And then there are the two little girls. Children in Fitzgerald’s fiction often show a disillusioned maturity lacking in their unhappy seniors. From the ten-year-old Christine Gipping in The Bookshop, who tells the childless widow Florence that ‘life has passed you by’, to the unflappable and ‘totally in charge’ twelve-year-old Dolly in The Beginning of Spring, they tend to be managers, speakers of truth and piercers of parental evasion. ‘They’re unusual kiddies,’ says Dolly’s visiting uncle; ‘I’m not sure that Nellie and me were ever permitted to join in quite as freely as that.’ The forebears of Fitzgerald’s fictional children can perhaps be found in the articulate nurseries and schoolrooms of Ivy Compton-Burnett, though to a friend who found them ‘precious’ Fitzgerald replied, ‘I don’t agree … They’re exactly like my own children, who always noticed everything.’ Even so, they can’t all be exactly like them, and they may owe something too to the self-possessed child actors whom Fitzgerald had taught, and whom she presents in At Freddie’s speaking whole paragraphs in dialect and shaping their brief careers with manic determination. Children, as she shows in Offshore, are inseparably both mimics and originals.
In Martha and Tilda, Fitzgerald wrote two of her most haunting and amusing juvenile roles. The only children in the book, they are also, as perpetual truants from school, her way of exploring its setting and its history. The six-year- old Tilda, whose whole world is the river, and who studies it knowingly from her perch atop Grace’s mast, passes long hours in a mingled daydream of past and present. Of course, anyone going down to Battersea Reach today will find a riverscape bewilderingly different from that Fitzgerald lived in fifty years ago, and at a further large remove from the late-Victorian Chelsea the children still catch glimpses of. High-rise council housing, glass ziggurats and sail-shaped condominiums crowd the river frontage, and the boats just upriver of Battersea Bridge where Grace had her mooring are now distinctly more prosperous. Here, though, through much of the nineteenth century, was Greaves’s Boatyard, and two generations of the Greaves family were boatmen – working notably for Turner, then for Whistler, who captured the old wooden Battersea Bridge from young Walter Greaves’s boat and taught him in turn to paint and etch the local river scenes in ways that mimicked his own. It is Whistler’s great nocturne, Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge, the supreme transfiguration of this once scruffy part of the Thames, that Willis takes Tilda to see on their expedition to the Tate. ‘Whistler was a very good painter,’ he tells her, and his practical insight into the subject – ‘Tide on the turn, lighter taking advantage of the ebb’ – is typical too of Fitzgerald’s own expertise as a novelist, here not researched but learnt from every heave and creak of the boat in all the river’s seasons and moods. She is generally a wary lyricist, but the brief and precise observations of the tides and lights of the river in the novel are also