During the years at Clifton Hill she was taking her writing in a new direction. An examination of her manuscripts in the Harry Ransom Humanities Center at the University of Texas seems to indicate that, however intense the thought and technique that went into them, her first four novels almost wrote themselves. Her pure fiction is entrancing, but now she was attempting to combine this with the novel of ideas, the metaphysical novel. She had been considering writing about Italy, and specifically Florence, for a decade, the book that after many evolutions became Innocence. An early version of the Ridolfis appears in a first draft, which was to have been about the great Florentine flood, and might even have been intended to be a detective story. It is Francis King she credits with putting her on track: ‘you’ll hardly remember, having been to so many other places since, that you told me the story of the Italian family and their dwarfs yourself’. This cruel legend or parable from the 1560s is retold by Penelope with a wealth of vivid apparently historical detail as the first chapter of Innocence, shedding its mysterious light and darkness over the Shakespearean comedy of tangled loves, with the rumbling of politics beneath, set in a 1950s Italy seemingly known and recreated from within. The Ridolfis of those earlier days were midgets. When their daughter’s companion starts outgrowing her her legs must be cut off at the knees.
The twentieth-century Ridolfis retain ‘a tendency to rash decisions, perhaps always intended to ensure other people’s happiness’. Stuart Proffitt, who took over as her editor on Richard Ollard’s retirement, suggested ‘Happiness’ as a title, but Penelope remarked that the novel could as easily be called ‘Unhappiness’. The happiness in question is marital. Constant misunderstandings drive the lovers, Chiara and Salvatore, together and apart. By the end their young stormy marriage seems to have been saved by a hair’s breadth, to be provisionally permanent. Salvatore throws up his hands:
‘What’s to become of us? We can’t go on like this.’
‘Yes, we can go on like this. We can go on exactly like this for the rest of our lives.’
As well as telling a story, Penelope now sought to evoke a culture, and an historical period. Every page gives evidence of a lightly worn, instructive and relevant erudition: about viticulture, law, medicine, architecture, the cinema, fashion, economics, and, above all, politics. For Gramsci, the influential communist reformer who wrote of the ethical society, is the historical figure introduced here, his ideas appealing to Penelope in much the same way as did those of William Morris. Lastly, one should point out the striking, if idealised, resemblance of Chiara to Penelope herself, particularly in the cover-picture she chose for Innocence, one of Pontormo’s angels, from his Annunciation. The virtues of her new method were immediately recognised by the critics, and her reputation began to grow: she was again shortlisted for the Booker, the third of her four novels to be so honoured.
Through vicissitudes of archive-keeping, the letters to Stuart Proffitt about this and her next two novels have (I hope temporarily) disappeared. However, for The Beginning of Spring, her next novel, we do have the letters to Harvey Pitcher, author of The Smiths of Moscow, credited by Penelope as having been vital to her research. These, like many of the letters in the ‘Writing’ section, show how meticulous and indefatigable she was in this aspect of her work, with what a sense of adventure and enjoyment she undertook it. On one level The Beginning of Spring, first called Nellie and Lisa, is once again a brilliant tragicomedy of marital misunderstanding, memorable like Offshore for its depiction of children not unlike her own. The spring is also the Russian revolutionary spring, for she chose historical periods, which seemed to promise change, emancipation and spiritual rebirth. The novel’s first conception also dates back at least a decade. In Texas is a notebook entitled The Greenhouse, with an early draft of the story of the English expatriate printer which takes the firm on into the May Revolution itself, but this proved unworkable. Pitcher’s book and The Times’ Russian Supplements of the period provide the realistic detail, but the uncanny imaginative power that makes a countrified chaotic Moscow almost tangible surely springs from a deep knowledge of and affinity with Russian literature, especially the Tolstoy of Resurrection and Master and Man, whose idiosyncratic Christian socialism infuses the novel. More than this, in The Beginning of Spring, uninsistently, symbolically, mysteriously, the presence of the supernatural is felt, and it will continue to startle and unsettle (as do the ghosts of the future in the birch wood here) in her last two novels and late stories.
Her next novel, The Gate of Angels, is also set in the first decade of last century, on the cusp of the modern era. It revolves around an accident, which may have been caused by a ghost, and culminates in a miracle. Fred, the Cambridge scientist, and Daisy, the London nurse down on her luck, live in minutely recreated social spheres which are set never to collide. Yet ‘Chance is one of the manifestations of God’s will’ and they wake up naked in a Samaritan stranger’s bedroom, having been knocked off their bicycles by a carter who has vanished into thin air. (This incident was a real one, recounted in Edward Burne-Jones.) Penelope is at her most formally experimental and teasing in her late fiction, but she gave some clues as to the interpretation of this novel to an enquiring reader, Bridget Nichols:
The Gate of Angels is about the questions of faith and generosity…Dr Matthews is a portrait of Monty James. I set my novel in the Cambridge of 1912 because that was the height of the so-called ‘body/mind controversy’, with the scientists of the Cavendish in controversy with professing Christians, championed by James who was then Provost of Kings.
Dr Matthews, like M. R. James, tells ghost stories, and, in one of Penelope’s intertextual serious games, tells one here to explain the bicycle accident to himself by means of a local haunting. He adds plausibility to it, by seeming to ground it in his own youthful experience, telling it in the first person, something James never did. ‘Do I believe in such things?’ Matthews asks himself, and goes on: ‘Well, I am prepared to consider the evidence, and accept it if I am satisfied.’ That places retain the evil that was done in them, and that apparently ordinary people, like Daisy, for whom the gate of Angels opens, may have some healing force of goodness in them, these were certainly things that Penelope believed. She also wants us to accept the miraculous as part of life.
The Gate of Angels was the fourth of Penelope’s books to be shortlisted for the Booker, and it was on three other shortlists. Though it did not win, it received wonderful reviews, especially from other writers, and sold very well. Much was now expected of her. It was extraordinary enough to have started on a literary career so late, to have run it entirely on her own terms, only writing what she chose, never faltering either in excellence or variety; but perhaps the most remarkable thing of all was that her next and last novel, published when she was seventy-eight, should have been generally hailed as her masterpiece, and, despite its complexity and intellectual scope, become a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic.
If The Blue Flower is certainly a novel and a work of the imagination, it is a most original one in that its hero and most of its characters were real people, yet it transcends the genres of biography and historical fiction: it seems to be an enquiry into what it means to be alive. With imperfect German but great concentration on what was germane to her artistic purposes, Penelope studied Mähl and Samuel’s Complete Works, Diaries, and Letters (including letters to him) of Novalis, the Romantic poet. It took her two years, and gave her ample material to write the story of his tragically curtailed life, if that had been her intention, but it wasn’t. What fascinated her was the blue flower itself. She is on record as saying that in an ideal life she wouldn’t have gone to Oxford to read English, but would have become an artist. Much of her writing in World Review (and her first book, Burne-Jones) was on art. In the ‘70s, one of her many projects was a book on flower symbolism in the original pre-Raphael painters of the Quattrocento. In this she saw a Christian mysticism that went to the heart of her beliefs. It appears from the very chaotic
drafts of The Blue Flower in her archive in Texas (where also is the folder on flower symbolism) that she wanted to incorporate the anachronical story of the discovery of the blue poppy in the high Himalayas in the early twentieth century by Colonel Eric Bailey – from whom it derives its botanical name, Meconopsis Baileyi – and a mysterious Jesuit priest. All this is the pollen that led her to the poet Novalis and his incomplete mystical novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the beginning of which she quotes teasingly in the wonderful seventeenth chapter ‘What is the Meaning?’: ‘…I long to see the blue flower…’ In Novalis, the flower is a remnant of the golden age when plants and animals spoke and told their secrets to mankind. In a dream he sees it mutate into a sweet girl’s face: ‘Du hast das Wunder der Welt gesehen.’ You have seen the wonder of the world.
Fritz, the young poet who has not yet rechristened himself, but is already for those around him a genius in whose presence ‘everything is illuminated’, finds his meaning and wisdom in Sophie, an absolutely ordinary Saxon girl, yet one who has moral grace, whose likeness cannot be taken, who is indefinable. If love is the answer to the first question expressed as a chapter-heading, how is it altered by the second: ‘What is pain?’ Sophie has ‘opened the door’ to Fritz, but now she succumbs to tuberculosis, undergoes appalling operations without anaesthetic, dies. Fritz is of little comfort or practical help to her during this time, though after her death he takes the symbolic name Novalis and writes his great philosophical poem Hymns to the Night in her memory.
Almost incidentally to its high themes, The Blue Flower recreates the whole fabric of life in eighteenth-century Prussia, food and drink, taxes and laws, roads, landscape, seasons, philosophy and salt mining, and establishes the characters of the twenty or so people closest to Fritz in the course of his bildung, with their own concerns and point of view, characters at every stage of development, so that for every reader there is one who speaks to his or her heart. Inexplicably it missed every British prize list when it came out in 1995, but the reviews were outstanding, again especially from other writers, and in the end-of-year round-ups it was book of the year, with 25 mentions, and went on to sell 25,000 copies in hardback.
Stuart Proffitt, Penelope’s editor for her last four novels, did much to promote and advance her career, and her gratitude to him (and their warm friendship) is evident in the letters that survive. Her dream had been to be published in paperback, and this was realised with the advent of Collins’ Flamingo imprint. It meant even more to her to see a stranger reading one of her books, and laughing at one of her jokes on the tube – a modest ambition perhaps, but one achieved. Her letters to Stuart demonstrate his devotion and kindness. She was distressed when he felt obliged to leave HarperCollins on a matter of principle not unconnected with the new owner. Still, Flamingo’s excellent care of her continued under the new team of Philip Gwyn-Jones, Karen Duffy and Mandy Kirkby. They found time to escort her to the readings, signings, events and festivals, which she was becoming too frail, and would have been too shy, to attend alone. Another devoted editor who was to achieve much for her now came back into her life.
Several publishers, including the redoubtable Nan Talese at Doubleday, had already attempted to ‘break’ her in America, without great success. It was feared, and Penelope herself thought, that she was ‘too British’. Chris Carduff had returned to publishing after some years spent editing The New Criterion, and was now employed at the Boston firm of Houghton Mifflin. He persuaded his boss, Janet Silver, to publish The Blue Flower in the US in 1997. It received a most enthusiastic and erudite review from Michael Hoffman, the lead and front cover of the New York Times Books section. That year for the first time the National Book Critics Circle Award was opened to foreign authors and Penelope won it, beating Roth’s American Pastoral, DeLillo’s Underworld and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. She particularly appreciated winning this prize, as it is judged by 700 book reviewers. There was some grumbling, as at her Booker Prize, for here again she was an unknown David against Goliaths, but it was politer, and soon to be silenced by a chorus of praise. The Blue Flower went on to sell 100,000 copies, and all her other novels followed it into print in America, permitting a timely retrospective of her career. Each of her books was admiringly reviewed as somebody’s favourite. The Bookshop, in particular, after twenty years, but recapturing the 1950s, was now recognised as a British classic.
In fact her novels had brought back all the periods of her active non-writing life, of her long literary silence. Human Voices described her young woman’s war service at the BBC, and the unique role that institution played in the upholding of truth and the national spirit in those years; Innocence recalled the 1950s, her young married years, when she was publishing Alberto Moravia and the younger Italian writers in World Review; The Bookshop, the failure of her early literary hopes and experiment in country-living in the late 1950s; Offshore, so redolent of the early 1960s and London’s river, her lowest point; At Freddie’s, her first teaching job, and the London stage in the days before the National Theatre, when, incidentally, she was beginning her self-apprenticeship to become a writer. Neither should her last three ‘historical’ novels, including The Blue Flower, be assumed to be free of autobiographical elements: Nellie in The Beginning of Spring, Daisy in The Gate of Angels, Fritz’s mother, all have aspects of Penelope, and her child characters always owe much to her own children. In choosing her periods she was chiefly guided, as she declared in interviews, by the wish to write of moments of optimism and ideological ferment, ‘when people really thought things might get better’, when the debates between science and religion, revolution and the unalterable, had not yet apparently ended in atomic bombs, tyranny and unbelief.
From the first, as we see everywhere in these letters, Penelope was most conscientious in undertaking the duties inherent in being a writer of reputation. Though she never enjoyed committees, she worked for PEN, the Arts Council, and later became Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature. A cause near her heart was that biographers should be recognised by grant-awarding bodies as creative writers. She was successful in fighting for this, as in her energetic support of Public Lending Right, which very belatedly ensured that writers were paid for the lending-out of their books by libraries. Her friendships with Francis King, Sybille Bedford and Michael Holroyd originated in this work. She met J. L. Carr, Thomas Hinde, Edward Blishen and A. L. Barker (known as Pat, author of short stories of fine sensibility, not to be confused with the equally estimable novelist Pat Barker) through her tutoring of fiction courses for the Arvon Foundation. She encouraged and advanced the careers of other writers not only through her tireless reviewing (there was almost no English paper she didn’t write for, reviewing regularly for the Evening Standard, the London Review of Books, the TLS, the Tablet, the New York Times and the Washington Post) but also by judging for most of the literary prizes, biography, poetry and fiction, including, twice, the Booker. She argued fiercely for Roddy Doyle’s The Van, and Magnus Mills’ The Restraint of Beasts, managing to get them both onto the respective shortlists. Among other young writers she championed were Glyn Maxwell, Candia McWilliam and Claire Messud. Among those who reviewed her, or whom she reviewed, and who are represented in this collection are Hilary Mantel, the biographer Richard Holmes and Sir Frank Kermode.
From 1995 onwards, as she entered her eighties, though she continued to work as hard as ever, and retained her all her formidable intellectual acuity, Penelope’s health and mobility began to decline. She suffered badly from rheumatism and from the slow weakening of her heart. She was no longer able to get to the British Museum reading room where she had spent so many happy years in research, following the circuitous trails which led to her biographies and later novels. The beautiful round reading room itself closed, and she couldn’t contemplate transferring her affections to the new British Library. Now for the first time she began to complain of a lack of inspiration. It troubled her that she had accepted a generous advance for a new novel, the idea fo
r which stubbornly refused to come to her. In the meantime she wrote, to commission, her wonderful introductions to Emma, Middlemarch and, repaying the debt to friendship, J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, and also her amazing last three stories. How to classify her short fiction? Are they fables, parables, folk-tales, poems even? She insisted that each demanded more effort to write than a novel. They range across the whole world in setting, from New Zealand to Tasmania, Mexico, Istanbul (twice), Brittany, Jerusalem (by implication), Iona, far Somerset, the Home Counties, London, and across four centuries.
Though under no external pressure to repay her advance, in 1999 she gratefully accepted her publishers’ suggestion that she collect her stories into a volume. The title, The Means of Escape, was supplied by Janet Silver of Houghton Mifflin, who considered that the story provided a unifying theme, which Penelope doubted, feeling rightly that the stories are as unsettlingly different from one another as are her novels. Two at least of them could have been novels. Christian motifs proliferate throughout them: the uninvited guest, the unfaithful servant, the unawakened soul, the buried talent. There are ghosts and hauntings. There are two great cries of protest: ‘She belonged to the tribe of torturers. Why pretend they don’t exist?’ and ‘Make no mistake, you pay for every drop of blood in your body.’ Yet there is always the faith that good will prevail. Through character or fate, self-knowledge and grace may be gained or regained. There remains, against all odds, the possibility of salvation.
So I Have Thought of You Page 4