After her death at eighty-three, in 2000, there might have been a danger of this extraordinary voice fading away into silence and neglect. But she has been kept from oblivion by her executors and her admirers. The posthumous publication of her stories, essays and letters is now being followed by a biography (Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee, Chatto & Windus, 2013), and by these very welcome reissues of her work. The fine writers who have provided introductions to these new editions show what a distinguished following she has. I hope that many new readers will now discover, and fall in love with, the work of one of the most spellbinding English novelists of the twentieth century.
Penelope Fitzgerald, in an all-too-short autobiographical piece entitled ‘Curriculum Vitae’, writes that she could ‘honestly say that I never shell peas in summer without thinking of Ruskin and of my grandfather’. That grandfather, like the one on her father’s side, was a bishop who ‘had started out with next to nothing’. He fell under the influence of Ruskin, who would describe, ‘with keenest relish’, the joy of shelling peas – ‘the pop which assures one of a successful start, the fresh colour and scent of the juicy row within, and the pleasure of skilfully scooping the bouncing peas with one’s thumb into the vessel by one’s side’.
That description embodies the physical processes, the mental sequence and, always present with Penelope Fitzgerald, the effect upon the spirit that come with the playing of a phrase in music, the resolution of a mathematical problem or the manufacture of a satisfactory sentence. It has, too, a strict regard for several forms of veracity: practical, felt, aesthetic, metaphorical.
Of herself, Penelope Fitzgerald writes in the same essay, ‘Well, those were my ancestors and I should like to have lived up to them. I should like to have been musical, I should like to be mathematical, and above all I should like never to have told a lie.’ It’s interesting that the verb form changes with the desire to be mathematical, as though there were more hope of that, as though she dismisses outright the other two, acknowledging truthfully the impossibility of true truthfulness. As for living up to them …
The Blue Flower (1995), her last novel, burdened often, and very often by other novelists, including this one, with words as inexact and lumpy as ‘masterpiece’ and ‘genius’, addresses the short shining transit of the life of the philosopher and poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), later to take the name Novalis, author of Hymns to the Night and of a novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, that contains mention of ‘the blue flower’, an idea of profound importance to the philosopher-poets of that mind-crowded time and place. He was author of much more, work that strives (to put it over-simply) to reconcile observable phenomena with a sublime principle.
‘Mathematics is human reason itself in a form everyone can recognise. Why should poetry, reason and religion not be higher forms of Mathematics? All that is needed is a grammar of their common language.’ These thoughts are put in the mind of Hardenberg by Fitzgerald, who discovers in this book something approaching that common language, in its poetry, its reason and its spirit.
The eldest of a large family, Hardenberg appeared at the start to be dull but turned out to be quite brilliant. His life was full of such flips of transfiguration, dark to light to dark again. This making light out of the dark is repeatedly effected by Fitzgerald, who has turned into this novel his, definingly Romantic, life. She has kept throughout a certain Germanness of diction, acutely listened out for rather than inserted: articles sit in front of some proper nouns; no word or phrase is offered in the German without setting a crumb-trail worth following.
Penelope Fitzgerald is a novelist who elevates her readers through teaching them how to read her. She freely offers her own great intelligence to all her readers, as to her humblest protagonist. Her approach to her material is interior, never merely the stretching of an aestheticised membrane over prefigured event. To see her manuscript is to confirm what the finished artefact has told us: in her rounded yet italic hand, each letter sits in its row like a bead on the abacus of straight thought, doing the exact work its position and character demands. The miracle is that these beads are also as alive as peas, to be sown and set, fertile, tender, reaching, tenacious, and when harvested and dried down as hard as hail throwing itself at the window in the reader’s head. She does not strew effect, uses shock sparingly and administers it – often violently – through silence, a woven veil or a sideways unrequited look.
Hardenberg’s position in the minor Saxon nobility of the late eighteenth century had limited opportunities. His family had estates, a household, a respectable allocation of linen, duties, a nag or two, habits of generosity; not money. The father was a devout adherent of the Moravian Church, a Christocentric group of a certain spiritual climate, dwelling (in the words of Penelope Fitzgerald’s uncle Ronald Knox) with monotonous sentimentalism, ‘only less distressing in German than in English’, on the wound in Christ’s side.
Other modes of thought, though, are stirring, and not far off. At Jena, one of the universities attended by Hardenberg, Goethe walks along in plain view, an old man of over forty. Schelling, Hegel and Hölderlin lodge together. The philosopher Fichte and the Romantic Schlegel teach Hardenberg. Fichtieren, to romanticise Fichte-style, is a fashion among the students. At one point, there is a duelling accident. Two good-sized bits of finger are lopped off. Fritz’s medical student friend Dietmahler makes him carry the part-fingers for safekeeping in the ideal receptacle that is his mouth. One has a heavy ring. Can you unfeel that? The novelist has transmitted to the reader the very taste of subjectivity.
Hardenberg was sent to learn from Kreisamtmann Coelestin Just the business of overseeing the processes of the mining of salt, in order to make a living beyond that of the savourless life of a writer-scholar. By this point he already has the intermittent transformative sense that beauty is where it falls; that everything is illuminated.
Trying to assemble information for her projected life of L. P. Hartley, Penelope Fitzgerald interviewed Princess Clary, who said, ‘My dear, how can you write the life of a writer? If he had entered into politics, if he had commanded an army in warfare, but what life can a writer have?’
A chance visit, paid in the company of Just, to a family as large as his own but more prone to laughter, changed Fritz von Hardenberg’s life.
He fell in love with Sophie von Kuhn when she was twelve. We first see her, an ordinary enough girl, standing at a window wishing for something to happen, be it only a fall of snow.
We are given Sophie in full: she is impious, ordinary-looking, greedy, fond of fart and sex jokes. She has nice hair and dark eyes – like those of Raphael in the self-portrait he made at twenty-five. We never doubt her lover’s transforming serious love of and for her. We too come to see and to care, in the irrational incremental way of love. This short book induces in its reader many forms of the topple into love: with big families, with children, with ‘the one’, ‘the other’, with an idea, with thought, with nature.
The blue flower, signifying that elusive thing which can connect the individual self to an understanding of greater external existence, finds its equivalent in the novel which itself is a concrete rendering of the abstraction it contemplates. The Blue Flower constitutes for its reader a blue flower. Hardenberg came to call Sophie his Philosophy. This, to a novelist of such metaphysical mind, must have been a folding together of concept and embodiment impossible to resist.
‘As a hopelessly addicted writer of short books I have to try to see to it that every confrontation and every dialogue has some reference to what I hope will be understood as the heart of the novel,’ Penelope Fitzgerald writes, three years before her death. She is pinning the numberless stars in their places with each word written, and calling them each by their names. She is very clear here about why, but how does she see so feelingly – and set it down?
Penelope Fitzgerald was in the provident habit of unravelling and reknitting garments for her family (‘I have unpicked the famous red gloves and am knitting