Omniscience: Penelope Fitzgerald

My jaw drops in amazement and awe whenever I reread Penelope Fitzgerald. How does she do it? How does she imagine her characters in such depth and their professions and historical period from the inside, magically larger than life but completely convincing, indubitably the real thing?

 

The Gate of Angels opens on an evening in Cambridge in 1912 when a gale is blowing up Mill Road near the cemetery and the workhouse. Cows have been overturned and lie wallowing on their backs with their legs in the air, their horns festooned with willow branches. Fred Fairly is cycling up the road on an old bicycle with ‘Palmer tyres, which left a pattern of  long lines like wires, on a wet glass-clear road.’

 

The image is exact and precise, perfect.  I read that sentence and knew that is how it was, I could see the thin Palmer tyre tracks  for myself. But how on earth does she know these things?

 

So there is Fred Fairly at St Angelicus, the college in Cambridge barred to women. He has an improbable car accident and come around to find himself in bed naked next to an equally naked young woman, the redoubtable Daisy Saunders. Anything might happen and does. It makes for a giddying read — there is the rectory with its surprising suffragettes, the grim London  hospital to which James Elder is taken after his attempted suicide, the ghost stories, the mysterious opening of the gate, the misunderstandings and questions about faith and doubt. Penelope Fitzgerald was related to Ronald Knox the famous wit and Catholic convert/apologist and her Edwardian Cambridge is executed perfectly. As is that hospital just before the horrors of the First World War revealed the inadequacies of Victorian medical knowledge.

 

Although the Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald are out and being discussed in heated detail at the moment along with aspects of her life — her husband drank, the houseboat she lived in sank twice, she was bad with money — I don’t expect any answers when it comes to that omniscience. She is one of those writers, like Jane Austen, who just knew what she was talking about. Her innocents are all enchanting and harmful, blundering through life, unaware of what they are doing to those around them and the threat they pose to those who love them.

 

My favourite Fitzgerald novel remains the incomparable Blue Flower. I took this home to review several years ago, in the mid-’90s, and was so blown away by the first page that I read only that page again and again for days. It is the famous scene of the laundry day in an 18th-century Jena household. Described from inside history, quite unforgettably. The characters remain more real to me than actual people I have known: the irrepressible Bernard saved from drowning once but who will drown after the last page… Friedrich von Hardenberg, Novalis, in search of that eternal blue flower of the Alps, young Sophie the callously  laughing and unlikely Muse who comes to the engagement party in a white cap because she has gone bald and who is to die so horribly in an operation performed without anaesthetic. There is no topic Fitzgerald cannot tackle and write about from the inside. She may well be our leading English novelist of the 20th century.

From The Blue Flower:

‘we are the enemies of the world and foreigners to this earth. Our grasp of it is a process of estrangement. Through estrangement itself I earn my living from day to day. I say, this is animate but that is inanimate. I am a Salt Inspector, this is rock salt. I go further than this, much further, and say this is waking, this is a dream, this belongs to the body, that to the spirit, this belongs to space and distance, that to time and duration. But space spills over into time, as the body into the soul, so that one cannot be measured without the other.’