A talent for the unexpected
Philip Hensher
A HOUSE OF AIR by Penelope Fitzgerald Flamingo, £20, pp. 552, ISBN 0007136420 penelope Fitzgerald excelled in the art of summary. As a novelist, she had the unfailing knack of implying whole lives, emotional states, social milieus through the exactly chosen physical detail, or a single trick of behaviour. She had the confidence, too, to pass explicit judgment on some fact of existence in a well-turned epigram, and, as in Jane Austen, the novelist occasionally breaks through and tells us a general truth about money, love or morality which the action is more vaguely illustrating.
All these qualities, added to an extraordinarily energetic curiosity, make her a rewarding and illuminating essayist. These pieces, largely about literature, are full of exact and surprising evocations, and concise, responsible judgments bearing the weight of a great deal of thought and knowledge. One could quite happily do nothing but quote a great number of these brilliant sentences to convey how original and thoughtful Fitzgerald always was. 'I think of Tennyson as one of the greatest of the English-rectory-bred wild creatures.' Emily Tennyson is usually thought of as one more sickly Victorian woman, ruling from her sofa'. Charlotte Mew 'was the sort of person whose luggage is carried by helpful young men'. Radclyffe Hall 'continued to hold her head high, even in the face of English jokiness'.
These summaries bear the imprint of great learning and original thought; it would be difficult to improve on her description of one aspect of Edwardian society: 'Fabianism and Utopianism, through Tolstoyan settlements, garden cities and vegetarianism tea-rooms, through Shelley's Spirit of Delight and the Spirit of Ecstasy and the new RollsRoyce.' It is perfectly true that there was a vogue for Shelley around then, and the epigraph to Elgar's second symphony is the passage about the Spirit of Delight. But it takes a certain sort of genius to see that as characteristic of the age, which it certainly is, and a different sort of one to preserve the period phrasing of 'vegetarianism tea-rooms'.
This knack of summing up a person, place or time is intimately linked to Fitzgerald's virtues as a novelist. Frequently, evoking something, she will fasten on something apparently inessential, which in fact conveys far more than anything obviously important would do. Here she is on a childhood memory of Hampstead:
At 11 am on Armistice Day, no matter what day of the week it was, the traffic stopped dead for two minutes. That was hard on the horses if they were on one of Hampstead's steep hills, and the drivers sometimes threw out a drag. like a kind of anchor, to keep from slipping.
Few people would think to 'place' the relationship of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Stephen in precisely this way, but it is instantly evocative and truthful: 'I associate these close conspiracies of sisters with "long" families in many-storeyed and -railinged London houses.' The detail of the railings might seem an extravagance, but how beautifully it shows us the entire atmosphere of late Victorian sisterhood. Often these deft summary images are deeply surprising, and therefore vivid; the image of Dorothy L. Sayers, if you keep her books in mind, is quietly hilarious: 'she sat there in black crepe de Chine, austere, remote, almost cubical'.
From many, if not most writers, such ruthless summaries might seem unfair. Fitzgerald commands assent, because everything in her writing shows her to be acutely observant, in life as well as in reading. In her essay on Emma, for instance, she stresses something which, as far as I know, nobody has ever thought significant before, that the Woodhouse estate includes a piggery; readers who overlook this have, I think, a tendency to underestimate how extensive the grounds must be.
It displays a general clear-sightedness, an ability to look and read without prejudice. Fitzgerald, in her essays on art and literature, writes simply about what interests her, not about any generally accepted canon of greatness. In the case of accepted masters, she has some surprising enthusiasms; writing about Tennyson, she directs us to 'the last five verses of "To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava" ', a poem I had never read, but she is quite right — a remarkable stretch of hysterical despair.
But much of this book is about the peculiar virtues of some overlooked writers: Mrs Oliphant, William de Morgan's and William Morris's novels. Ada Leverson, Sarah Orne Jewett. and of course Charlotte Mew, who is the subject of the most harrowing of all Fitzgerald's books. These studies of largely forgotten writers are quite exemplary: they are the product of alert interest rather than indiscriminate enthusiasm, and say, responsibly, what can be said in each case. They sparkle with amusing comment and piquant detail —how wonderful to know that Queen Victoria said to a prolific and mildly tiresome novelist, 'I too work hard, Mrs Oliphant.' They unfailingly make you want to read an unfamiliar writer, or generously confirm what had seemed rather a guilty private pleasure.
Enthusiasm, however, is treated by Fitzgerald as rather a selfish vice, and she writes about authors of less or no merit with exactly the same responsible curiosity. A very funny review of a life of Radclyffe Hall makes it quite plain that it is a had biography of a bad writer, but no
fan could express so deep an understanding of Hall. Angus Wilson comes in for similar treatment, and again you wonder that a writer whom Fitzgerald can so little recommend should nevertheless command her patient and thorough examination. The fact is that Fitzgerald had so little egotism that she treated her personal judgment as secondary to the objective question of whether such a writer is interesting or not. One of the most devastating judgments in this book is on a very eccentric study of Lewis Carroll, treating the Alice books as romans d clef about Victorian intellectual society. 'The only consolation.' Fitzgerald says, 'is that the authors seem to be enjoying themselves so much.' For that sort of writer, she never had any time at all.
Paradoxically, that personal and professional modesty made her a wonderful chronicler of her own life and her fascinating, extraordinary family. In her joint biography of her fathers and uncles, The Knox Brothers, she makes hardly one identifiable appearance, though it is all about what came down to her and what she herself saw. Here, her family and memories make occasional, tantalising appearances —a childhood recollection of hearing Walter de la Mare read, family anecdotes, diaries and letters. And there are sonic marvellous but frustratingly short memoirs, telling us something of an extraordinary life, full of eccentric pearls of wisdom. She very much liked these unexpected observations, and twice quotes Romney Green's saying that 'if you leave any man alone with a block of wood and a chisel, he will start rounding off the corners'. The best one here, however, is her conviction that 'there is a strong human instinct which prompts anyone who sees a neat stack of anything to move it somewhere else'. Her personal modesty and instinct would never have permitted her to propose writing an autobiography; but given these wonderful vignettes, what an autobiography she would have written!
There is hardly one piece here which doesn't deserve reprinting. Perhaps only the travel pieces are slightly disappointing. Fitzgerald was a traveller in the head, to Moscow or 1950s Tuscany, and the piece about a trip to the Holy Land is slightly fretful and unengaged. But otherwise even the brief reviews of ephemeral biographies for tabloid newspapers are as unfailingly elegant and thoughtful as the long scholarly pieces about one of Fitzgerald's major interests. The sad aspect of the book, however, is that every single piece was written and published in the last 20 years of Fitzgerald's life, and most of them in the last ten years. She led a useful and busy life before she ever published a book, and never openly regretted the late flowering of her career; but one can't help feeling that the world should have taken notice earlier of so extraordinary and magical a mind.
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