Meantime back on the ranch, after the takeover of Addison-Wesley my high-minded book editor has had a moral and aesthetic confrontation and has had to take his leave, although he’s allowed to finish the publicity. I suggested to him that he might try and get a job at Holt’s, as Marian Wood seems just as nice, and just as crazy, as he is. But New York seems rather a bright, unkind place for him to go –
best wishes
Penelope
(2 comments on proposed blurb, which quotes the Washington Post on Innocence: ‘as civilised and intoxicating as a shot of aged brandy’, this I do think is nice, as if I’ve got to be aged I’d rather be brandy than almost anything. – )
I’ve just thought of something else, which is that when the paperback of Innocence was advertised, they didn’t put Now in Paperback – and yet these seem to me to be important words –
27a Bishop’s Road
Highgate
London, N6
27 May [1999]
Dear Stuart,
Thankyou for your letter and I hope all goes well at Hay. I suppose you have an operative, by the way, to turn your Aga on before you come, otherwise I can’t think how you manage?
I’m afraid Arthur Lubow drew a complete blank on his interview – evidently he is a superior Greenwich Village (not SoHo) gay and specialises in interviewing gays and colourful people generally. Ria and I were fascinated by his taking notes in shorthand which nobody does nowadays, while still never taking his eyes off your face. Meanwhile the German television people are supposed to be coming, so I’ll have to straighten the place up again.
I was amazed to hear Monty James mentioned, because I remember a very long time ago you told me you’d never heard of him, and I thought well, that’s it, Monty James is as dead as the dodo, as well as being unbelievably n.p.c., indeed, so are ghost stories, of that kind anyway. But he seems to have survived.
Surely Richard Holmes, (as it happens) knows a lot about him, and wrote a piece about him, it must be all of twenty-five years ago?
Just crawling off for a week’s holiday –
best wishes
Penelope
James Saunders*
185 Poynders Gardens
London, SW4
2 May [c.late 1960s]
Dear Mr: Saunders,
Although I know that this kind of letter is a great nuisance to an author, I am asking for your help – partly because I believe you were a teacher yourself and possibly you still are – please would you stop my A level classes from coming to blows (I can’t call it a discussion) by letting us know whether all the characters in Next Time I’ll Sing To You are ‘inside’ Rudge, that is, different faculties of the mind, or are they his ‘creations’ in the sense that he’s made them up?
We should be very grateful indeed if you could find time to settle this point for us –
yours sincerely,
Penelope Fitzgerald
(Mrs:)
185 Poynders Gardens
London SW4
15 May [c.late 1960s]
Dear Mr Saunders,
Please may I thank you on behalf of my embattled classes for your letter, explaining my point about Next Time I’ll Sing To You (that is, why Dust should feel that Rudge had ‘created’ him). It was very good of you to spare the time to write, and we shall all, needless to say, listen to the June 10th broadcast –
yours sincerely,
Penelope Fitzgerald
Graham Chesney*
27a Bishop’s Road
Highgate, N6
27 January [1995]
Dear Graham Chesney,
Thankyou for your letter, which has just arrived from my publishers.
I’m afraid I can’t be of a great deal of help, because I’ve never lived in Cambridge myself, but my uncle Dillwyn Knox was up at Kings from 1903–7, returning as a fellow in 1909, (and later becoming the most brilliant code-breaker at the Admiralty) and when I was writing the biography of my family (The Knox Brothers, 1977) I had to do a good deal of research into ‘his’ Cambridge. Then later on, when I wanted to write The Gate of Angels, about the early days of nuclear or rather atomic research, and whether Mach was possibly right in thinking it was a misconception, I used the notes I had already made.
Maynard Keynes was perhaps my uncle’s closest friend, although I didn’t bring him into The Gate of Angels.
I had to search for quite a long time, by the way, to find a possible site for a (possible) small and ancient college,
best wishes for your book –
Penelope Fitzgerald
A. L. Barker*
27a Bishop’s Road
London, N6
20 January [1994]
My dear Pat – I just had a note from Sally – the Lavender Lady – to tell me that you of all people have had a stroke – I say ‘of all people’ because you seem to exist like a bird on almost nothing, and indeed there’s almost nothing of you to have a stroke, yet it happened, and I’m very distressed and deeply sympathetic – but the cheering part of Sally’s letter was that you were better and recovering, though she couldn’t tell how long it would take – and she even thought you might have an idea for another book – without which you could hardly be said to be yourself – but you are, thank the lord.
Dear Pat, I’m just off to see my elder daughter and family in soaking Devonshire, but will ring up when I get back. By my count you have had too many illnesses in the last few years – but then, you’ve written some wonderful things!
love and best wishes
Penelope
Doctors can be very irritating – one has to remember that they can’t help it – but perhaps yours isn’t.
27a Bishop’s Road
London, N6
23 February [1994]
Dear Pat,
You know how much we all want to hear you’re better! Or rather, I
know very well that every day you get a little better – I know that, and perhaps that’s the way it will be, a matter of ‘in front the sun climbs slowly, how slowly’ so that you get better without quite knowing how.
Dorothy says she is trying to cope with calls from publishers and agents – which I agree is a great worry – but what an encouraging feeling to have them – I think my publisher has given me up, though he doesn’t precisely say so, as I never get round to producing anything.
In your last few books you’ve been so much concerned with story-telling in itself – are writers talking to themselves, or are there always listeners who need stories? And now you’ve been forcibly propelled into this situation – the story-teller cut short (though not for too long) and finding (when set free again), an absolute wealth of words – a hospital novel I hope – although I know you were in the middle of something else.
I’ve just been watching a video of the consecration of the first woman bishop of Washington D.C. She had a special crook sent from the Yorkshire dales as her crozier. In his Christmas letter Jim Carr said he was all in favour of women priests. I’m sure he’d have enjoyed this video.
Must now see to the pancakes
best wishes and love
Penelope
8 March [1994]
Dear Pat,
Just a note (I know one shouldn’t start letters like this) to say how much you were missed at Francis’ party – I’m sure you’ll have had a lot of letters on the subject, but no matter. I was sorry in a way that it had to be transferred to the Polish Hearth, but of course that comes of being generous and asking so many people. Just as I came in and was going to take off my anorak and hand it to the grand flunkey, the zip stuck – and then in came Peter Day, and kindly and efficiently put it right again – what a wonderful putter-right he is – I’ve only once been to his flat (not the present one) and was stopped by an old lady, a total stranger, on the stairs who told me, quite without prompting ‘how good he has been to me’. – So I got my anorak off and went up to the pale green drawing-room where poor Francis was worrying because the food hadn’t arri
ved, but then it suddenly miraculously did, on large dishes. I was able to get more news of you, encouraging, from Penelope Bennett, and I saw people I hadn’t seen for a long time, including the amazing Raoul, I mean Raleigh Trevelyan’s Raoul – amazing to me because having spent so many years I think as a waiter in Morocco, he has mastered all the writers, all the names of their books, all their life-histories, and all their reviews, and never lets one slip. But there were so many kind hearts and such goodwill in that room – my only disappointment was that I had to go early, and so didn’t hear Peter’s speech.
When I think how ill Francis and Josephine were – how long was it ago? – and how they looked at the party, I can only marvel and say let us be indestructible. And you too, in particular, Pat.
I’m so sorry the Festings are leaving, but I suppose it is his job? I love her book on Lavender. We used to live in Battersea, near Lavender Sweep, and I used to try to imagine what it used to be like when it was all lavender fields.
Everything is moving. The poor TLS have to go out to Docklands and they are being computerised. ‘They are taking away our pencils and rubbers’ I am told ‘we shall have to watch screens, we shan’t know how to manage.’ I think the computer terminals are going to be the death of some of the assistants at the London Library too.
And Maura Dooley off to Swansea. She’s going to be in charge of making it into the City of Poetry and Literature for 1995, but she’ll be much missed. She’s got a nice flat, I believe, down by the harbourfront which has been converted, like all harbourfronts, into experimental theatres and flats which no-one will buy – and David will follow as soon as he can, but of course he’s still with the BBC.
very best wishes
love
Penelope
27a Bishop’s Road
London, N6
25 September [1998]
Dear Pat,
I heard your news from Sally Festing, and I do hope that you are back home again by now. What I’m quite sure about is that you’ve had all your life’s share of illness and bad luck and it must take a turn now for the better and indeed the glorious best.
Alas! I don’t get down to PEN nowadays, it’s such a very long way from Highgate, and then I must admit I’ve got lazier, and much more addicted to sitting in the garden not doing very much – the squirrels have long since given up taking any notice of me. However, I was on the Booker committee (still am, for that matter, because we’ve only got to the short list stage) this year, so had to rouse myself a bit. All the books (115, I think) are standing in piles on the floor of my small sitting-room. Now I’m wondering who I can get to take them away.
The chairman this year was Douglas Hurd, who is certainly, as might be expected, a marvellous hand at managing a committee, but he admitted that his idea of a novel was a good read with a strong ending. Perhaps he’s right, Pat! He was also an amazingly rapid and efficient eater, I suppose from attending so many banquets all over the world – the difficult things, such as the little bits of green salad disappeared in a flash and he was ready to continue the discussion.
As usual, I didn’t agree with anyone, but it was altogether a strong-minded committee. Nigella Lawson looked stunning, and it’s marvellous how she carries on working while her husband is so ill. He’s just had another operation for his mouth cancer, and in the middle of it all, her nanny left, saying she didn’t feel up to the stress.
It seems such a long time ago that we were at Arvon. David Hunter is still on the management committee, and he still goes on lecturing in Yorkshire and Devonshire, although he’s been working for ages now in BBC radio drama – one of the few people the BBC haven’t sacked, it seems.
This is really just to send you love and all best wishes –
Penelope
Harvey Pitcher*
76 Clifton Hill
London, NW8 6 JT
6 March 1988
Dear Harvey Pitcher,
Please may I tell you (I’ll make it as short as I can) that I’ve just finished writing a novel about Moscow,** or rather set in Moscow in 1913, and (I suppose) it will come out with Collins some time this year. – The idea of it came from a Swiss friend whose father was a business man in Moscow and continued to live there and to sell flowers from his greenhouse all through the revolution and into the twenties, although (as happens when you’re writing a novel) the greenhouse has disappeared in the final version.
To get some idea of what Moscow was like at that time I read the Times Russian supplements from 1910 to 1913, but I also read, among other things, your The Smiths of Moscow, which I enjoyed so very much. I’m writing to you now to ask if I can use (if, of course, I acknowledge it properly) your story about the bear who ran riot in the dining-room, though not with the ending which you give it in your book, because that was truth, and mine is only fiction.
I should be very grateful if you could let me know what you feel about this.
Yours sincerely,
Penelope Fitzgerald
76 Clifton Hill
London, NW8 6JT
15 March [1988]
Dear Harvey Pitcher,
Thankyou very much for Lily. I thought you managed the (very difficult, I should think) backwards narrative marvellously, only letting it go once, on p. 117, when Sergei thinks ‘The Moscow Arts Theatre still lay years in the future’ – and that, of course, doesn’t matter. I did, as you say in your introduction, come to understand the characters better, but not Lily, because she’s inexplicable, and to me the most successful thing of all about the book is that you’ve brought to life this delightful but not quite normal and not quite comprehensible person – no-one is sure of her, either in England or in Russia, and she has to remember that she’s supposed to be dying – without inventing any kind of explanation for her, because there is none. I felt very fond of Lily. But nothing will ever make me fond of Olga Knipper.
Thankyou too, very much indeed, for letting me use a version of your bear story. I’m afraid, though, that there are a lot of errors in my Moscow novel, so am sending you one I wrote about Italy,
with best wishes
Penelope Fitzgerald
76 Clifton Hill
London, NW 8 6JT
18 April [1988]
Dear Harvey Pitcher,
Thankyou for your letter and your kind word about Innocence. I read Lily quickly because I was so much interested, but also because I thought that if I was going to follow the narrative backwards it would be much better not to have too many breaks. You’re asked to hang on, I thought.
I was surprised, though, at what you said about biography. It seems to me that (particularly if you have the letters, and if you knew the subject yourself or can get hold of someone who knew the subject) you can know him or her at least as well as anyone you meet in real life. The trouble is that it’s rather difficult to shake the people off when the book is written, and to return to yourself. They’re not to be got rid of so easily.
We used to live in Southwold, down by the harbour at Blackshore (as it was then) but I never knew there was a Mrs Knox in the town. – And certainly I never dreamed there might have been a Morris window in Moscow. I’ve had a chance now to look at A. C. Sewter’s Catalogue of Stained Glass of William Morris and his circle, which includes the firm’s foreign orders and there’s no mention of it there, unless some more information has turned up since 1975, so I’m afraid St Andrews never had any. – Morris’s great friend Cormell Price (Kipling’s headmaster) went to Petersburg as a tutor to the Orloff-Davidoff family from 1860–3, but found the job a ‘purgatory’ – I expect English governesses were more satisfactory, on the whole, than tutors,
best wishes
Penelope Fitzgerald
27a Bishop’s Road
London, N6
9 June [1988]
Dear Harvey Pitcher – Please forgive me if I’ve sent you my change of address before, as I don’t deny that the move is getting me a little bit muddled, though not too much I hope. – I was very
much interested in what you said about The Book Den. Surely running a bookshop, in England at least, is one of the most difficult businesses imaginable, people can come in all day and turn the stock over and read bits of it (which is equivalent to biting the fruit at a greengrocers) and go away having bought nothing, but that ‘traditional practice’. – I have a terrible suspicion that you don’t like Burne-Jones (about whom I wrote my first book!) or Morris & Co. windows. That is a distress to me –
best wishes, Penelope Fitzgerald
27a Bishop’s Road
London, N6
16 December [1988]
Dear Harvey – This is just to say that during the process of moving I did find another copy of Burne-Jones and would be glad to exchange it (as you once suggested) for a copy of When Miss Emmie was in Russia – on the other hand I think (as far as I can make out anything that publishers say) that B-Jones is coming out next year in paperback (of course in a smaller and more miserable form) so perhaps this wouldn’t interest you any longer.
In any case very best wishes for Christmas and 1989 – Penelope
I’ve had a number of complaints that Red Square wasn’t called that before the First World War – but surely I’m right about this, if about nothing else?
27a Bishop’s Road
London, N6
12 January [1989]
Dear Harvey,
Thankyou so much for Miss Emmie. Although I can hardly believe it, it’s the first time I’ve read it – hardly believe it, I mean, because there are innumerable details in it which I had to find out with painful slowness from the Times special Russian supplements and Motoring supplements – but never mind that, what I’m thanking you for is the wonderful way you’ve collected the stories and arranged them in their historical pattern, also their human one, of course. Interviewing your governesses must have made the whole thing worthwhile in itself. – ‘You see, I’ve grown old since then – very foolish of me, but I couldn’t help it’ – how could you better that?
So I Have Thought of You Page 47