What a commentary it is, too, on Pasternak’s Povest – reading this I’ve always felt sorry for the unfortunate Mrs Frestein for having taken on such a very unsatisfactory tutor and companion, she’d have done very much better with English ones.
I enclose Burne-Jones with all its faults – the bibliography is now hopelessly out of date and the illustrations were always dreadful, but nothing can be done about it now.
with very best wishes for 1989 –
Penelope
P.S. The Muir & Murrilees flag – I had no idea they had one, and took it from the Arding & Hobbs flag – I always look to see if it’s flying when I go through Clapham Junction as it indicates a sale – (but they lowered it for some reason when Lord Mountbatten was murdered, and perhaps on other sad occasions). I very much look forward to your book.
I’m glad you went to see Lorraine Price – it’s hard to know what to do about Cormell Price – he is interesting but not quite interesting enough for a biography, it seems.
I expect you know Felicity Ashbee, C. R. Ashbee’s daughter, who has such a wonderful set of photos of ‘Russian types’ – but now I’m hesitating because I can’t remember whether her family lived in Moscow or Petersburg wh: would be no use for M & M.
27a Bishop’s Road
London, N6
5 July [1989]
Dear Harvey,
Thankyou so much for your letter, and I was relieved to find that you don’t object to Burne-Jones, at least as a designer of windows. Yes, he was a great admirer of, and correspondent with, young women (one or two of whom bowled him over completely). If the Muirs settled in Holland Park, then they would have been near ‘the Greeks’, the celebrated Ionides family, and Watts studio, and Eva Muir became Mrs Richmond, didn’t she? The Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones by Georgiana Burne-Jones (vol 2 p 206) reveals (what I’m sure you know) that the brown bear had to go to the zoo, and that Eva (addressed as Dear Bearwarden) promised in 1890 to take B-J to see it, but didn’t – because he was too old, he claims, but adds ‘never by any chance let the old interfere with plans, never for a moment let them be in the way. They are so soon pacified.’ B/J’s only contact (which can’t be called a contact) with Russia was when he was a young man and his friend Cormell Price went in 1860 as a tutor to the Orloff-Davidoff family (having answered an ad. in the Times). He (Cormell Price) wasn’t happy, however. His great-grand-daughter has his Russian diaries, but they aren’t as informative as they ought to be.
Ellen Terry may have been an angel at the first night party for Helena in Troas – and she certainly was an angel, but it may well have been Ellen’s daughter Edy, who appeared as an angel in the last act of the Lyceum Faust – interesting that Oscar W. appeared with straight hair, as I think he only began to have it curled in 1883.
I’m very sorry to tell you that I have no Burne-Joneses left, and indeed I sometimes wonder if there are any copies left in the world. Americans sometimes write reproachfully, saying they’ve had to Xerox the whole book – not my fault really and if only there were enough of them (the Americans I mean) perhaps it might be reprinted.
I was very interested to hear about my 3rd cousin Andrew, because he must be the grandson of Frederick, who rebelled against his father and nearly bit right through his hand. – As to Southwold, I think it’s kill or cure in that east wind. My dear old friend Phyllis Neame who ran, as I told you, the Sole Bay bookshop, survived, and only died this January, though not quite 109 I think, and she was asking about new books until the last. It was from her that I learnt about ‘stickers’, and I can hardly believe that Lily is one – only there’s one thing I have noticed, and that is that the writer’s favourite book is scarcely ever the same as the public’s – let me take an example, Shakespeare only published his sonnets under his own name, didn’t he? and evidently relied on them to make him immortal – and they’ve got used, too, to your doing something else, another kind of book –
best wishes
Penelope
27a Bishop’s Road
London, N6
15 September [1992]
Dear Harvey,
Thankyou so much for sending me The Search for Maud Macintosh.
Of course I remember Ronald Chapman’s The Laurel and the Thorn, which was a much more sympathetic book than Blunt’s, I thought, and I was very sorry to hear that his eyesight had failed. But he’s lucky to have you to take over this particular interest of his, when he must have lost so many other things.
The trouble (if it is a trouble) with this totally fascinating story, or reconstruction, is that it has so many attractive diversions and byways. The Sterling Mackinlays, for example – I remember Jean’s performance so well and she used to come round to schools – and Viola Garvin – and the whole strangely oppressive atmosphere of the Watts gallery where I spent so long reading the Watts correspondence when I was trying to find out about Burne-Jones. I thought I was working hard and indeed I was, but I’m overwhelmed by the skill and patience you and Ronald Chapman have put into your researches.
But the question you ask is ‘Who then is M.M., and who was buried in Nuthurst churchyard?’ and so I had to put aside a lot of the deeply interesting things you say about the Watts household and about Lily herself, as in a sense not strictly relevant. Among other things, the letter, I believe, full of (rather odd) character though it is, seems to me to have nothing to do with the case. Anyone can see that the writing is not the General’s, no matter what any number of graphologists say, and it’s impossible that in Dec 1879 he should make no reference to the pregnancy. Nor was Chelsea a ‘right’ address for a retired military man and his wife in the 1870s – nor was the general’s name Lew. I shouldn’t have thought the letter was addressed to Mary Fraser-Tytler either. You say she ‘circulated freely’ in the seventies, but I don’t think more so than, say Frances Graham (the first of these girls to be allowed to act as hostesses to her own parties) and she (Mary) would have been in the same class at the Slade as Kate Greenaway. However, there the letter is, but I can’t think it will help in the matter of Maud.
Now let me tell you my story, to add to all the other versions.
The name Maud, still more Maudie, Macintosh, strikes me at once and very forcibly as a stage name. The trouble about trying to trace her through Mander and Mitchenson would be that even they can’t do anything if there are no reviews, notices, playbills, or photographs, and Maudie’s career must have been very short if she took up with the General, say, in 1877. But I am sure she was an unsuccessful, pretty, only just respectable young singer (’a singer’ because of Lily’s inherited love of music, and the influence on Maud of those hymns) – I should think she appeared, or tried to, in burlesques, comediettas and subscription concerts, but then met the General, and became his ‘annuitant’. The relationship between Maud and the Rev. McCarogher is absolutely typical of the period. (To take an example, which I’m getting from Claire Tomalin’s marvellous The Invisible Woman – in 1879 the Rev. William Benham (the Margate clergyman to whom Ellen Ternan later confessed her ‘affair’ with Dickens) invited a friend to give a sermon on the importance of establishing links between the church and the theatre.) Where did Maud and McCarogher meet? In Freiburg or Baden Baden. Maud had been sent there at the General’s expense to have the baby, but after meeting the McCaroghers, and receiving spiritual help and advice and Christian friendship, she decided to go back to England with them and stay at the Rectory with them in Nuthurst until the birth, I don’t mean that Maud’s repentance wasn’t sincere. I’m sure that it was.
But of course, although she was still an annuitant, she couldn’t, as a penitent, go on living as the General’s mistress. What an awkward spot he was in, with two London addresses to pay for, two sick women on his hands, and, at the age of 63, another child to provide for. No wonder he sent for his son, who seems to have behaved admirably, and the General too did his best. There is real affection in his ‘dear Maudie’.
As to the grave: the General evidently
came to Comeragh Road when Maud was dying, and it was most likely then that she gave him her New Testament, and told him that she would like the burial to be entrusted to her kind confessor, the Rector of Nuthurst. The memorial inscription I am sure she chose herself. It’s the choice of a Victorian penitent. She was at rest at last.
Let me remind you that you are a novelist too!
I am sending your T/S back rather than showing it to anyone else because I believe that handing papers round is a sure way to lose bits of them, and I’m sure that every copy of The Search for M M is precious.
very best wishes
Penelope
P.S. The passage about the bear from The Beginning of Spring was set for A-level prose appreciation by the Associated Board last year. So I suppose I’m getting on little by little.
27a Bishop’s Road
London, N6
22 June [1995]
Dear Harvey,
Thankyou very much indeed for Muir & Murrilees. I only wish I’d had it before I tried to write about Moscow in 1912, instead of trying to manage with the Times Russian supplements – but never mind that, it’s a marvellous piece of research and I should imagine you feel rather sorry to finish it, with Meta and Stuart Hogg lying in their quiet churchyard.
The comparison with Whiteleys worked extremely well – I wonder by the way why Selfridges made such a point when they opened, of there being no admission fee? Surely none of the department stores had one? Perhaps Marks and S. did though, at their Penny Bazaar.
When The Beginning of Spring was on, I think, 2 of the A-level syllabuses, I used to go round and give little talks (quite uselessly, as the candidates always told me I couldn’t be right because it wasn’t what they’d got down in their notes). I used to tell them about M & M’s carpet department.
Hollyer’s beautiful photographs stand out as always. The hands in the portrait of the 3 Muir sisters are so well placed, and ‘the girls’ in their Liberty dresses might well be going down B-Jones’s The Golden Stairs (which he did in 1863).
Surely you have to write next about Maud Macintosh? I never did see how the General could be thought of as writing the ‘sweet and bonny’ letter, but I also don’t think that ‘you won’t love me as I most wish to be loved’ – the meaning of which is only too plain – can be interpreted as ‘you share this prejudice against cousins marrying &c’ – in that case, surely, it would have to be ‘you can’t love me’ – wouldn’t it?
(To judge from the papers at the Watts Gallery, Mary Watts was a great goer-through and crosser-out of letters, but that was in later life, of course.) – Meantime I think you only need a stroke of chance or luck, such as often comes the way of patient biographers, for the whole mystery to come clear, and I don’t see how you can possibly feel a sense of failure when you’ve got such a long way already. – What is so odd is that the people concerned, it seems, both did, and didn’t, want to conceal everything.
I am sending what I am afraid is only a wretched proof copy of my (short) book due out this September – but they will have to change the jacket as the story is based on the early life of Novalis and if the artist wants to put handwriting all over the place it should be German gothic and not English looking-glass writing – perhaps he thinks there’s not much difference –
with thanks and best wishes – Penelope
Frank Kermode*
25 Almeric Road
London, SW11
2 November 1979
Dear Professor Kermode,
I hope you won’t mind my writing to you, partly because I’ve relied so long and so much on The Sense of an Ending in trying to teach university candidates something about fiction – most of them, too, with a half-finished novel of their own in a drawer back at home – but also to thank you for what you wrote about me in The London Review of Books. Could I make one comment – you said in passing that the ‘apocalyptic flood’ at the end of Offshore wasn’t a success and I expect it isn’t, but it isn’t really meant as apocalyptic either – I only wanted the Thames to drift out a little way with the characters whom in the end nobody particularly wants or lays claim to. It seems to me that not to be wanted is a positive condition and I hoped to find some way of indicating that. – I realise too that the danger of writing novels, even very short ones, is that you get to take yourself too seriously –
Yours sincerely,
Penelope Fitzgerald
25 Almeric Road
London, SW11
20 November 1980
Dear Professor Kermode,
I hope that you won’t mind my writing to you once again to thank you for your remarks in the London Review of Books, on my own behalf and, if it’s allowable, on William de Morgan’s too – all my 2-volume copies of his novels went to the bottom of the Thames except for It Never Can Happen Again, which I’ve always liked because the characters quote from The Haystack in the Floods* but are also worried by their motor-car which won’t go because ‘a certain hexagonal nut’ is missing – that is diachronic in a sense, I suppose. – At least de Morgan’s novels were entirely his, whereas he had the pottery made for him, and only decorated it himself.
Yours sincerely,
Penelope Fitzgerald
27 Bishop’s Road
Highgate
3 October [1995]
Dear Sir Frank,
I hope you won’t mind my writing to thank you for your review of The Blue Flower. I started from D. H. Lawrence’s ‘fatal flower of happiness’ at the end of The Fox, having always wondered how DHL knew it was blue, and never quite managed to find out all I wanted to, partly because Novalis’ letters to Sophie have disappeared, buried in her grave I daresay.
I was so glad you defended Novalis against Carlyle. The person who really understood him, it seems to me, was George Macdonald, but nobody reads Phantasies now.
I don’t know whether you’d agree that writing, like teaching, produces considerable spells of depression and moments of great happiness which seem to justify everything – that’s what I felt, anyway, when I read the LRB this week –
with thanks and best wishes –
Penelope Fitzgerald
Hilary Mantel*
27a Bishop’s Road
[postcard]
[1995]
Dear Hilary – For some reason I can’t account for I got an invitation to your Hawthornden Prize giving several days after it had taken place – which of course doesn’t matter, but I do want to congratulate you on the award, and say how much I enjoyed An Experiment in Love – and so did my daughter – and so I’m sure will her daughter in a few years time – best wishes Penelope (Fitzgerald)
27a Bishop’s Road
[postcard]
[1997]
Dear Hilary – I wish I could agree with you that death is the least of the things that divide people, but I do want to say how good I thought Terminus was, and how moving, all the more so from the distance, or strangeness, that you’ve put between the narrator and the reader, although we feel brought together by the very last sentence –
best wishes
Penelope (Fitzgerald)
Bridget Nichols*
27a Bishop’s Road
Highgate
London, N6
26 February 2000
Dear Bridget Nichols,
Thankyou very much for your letter, which I’ll answer as best I can.
Certainly you are quite right in thinking The Gate of Angels is about the questions of faith and generosity, and also that 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, and made an unforgettable comment on the situation in his ghost story ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to you, My Lad’.
St Angelicus was not a real college, but I calculated there would just be room for it if I made its back wall run down Jesus Lane, and k
ept it very small. Dr Sage was based on Maudsley, the great alienist for whom the Maudsley Hospital in Denmark Hill is named.
Best wishes for your work –
Penelope Fitzgerald
Alyson Barr*
27a Bishop’s Road
Highgate, N6
27 March [c.1995]
Dear Alyson,
Thankyou so much for the Stanley Spencer p.c. – a terrifying scene, and yet he was so kind and gentle, walking over the Heath with his easel when I was a child.
I’ve been ill with what I’m told is asthma, but I’m not at all sure that it is, since last September – I was down staying with Tina and found I couldn’t walk up to the village shop (the village is on the edge of Dartmoor, but it isn’t very steep) and had to sit in the churchyard while the children went on to get their sweets – well, anyway, this illness has gone on so long that everyone is sick and tired of hearing about it and I am still creeping about the place and finding it hard to get up hills and steps – me, who was brought up in Hampstead NW3. Other people, however, seem to be getting mysteriously ill and Ham (Hugh) even in hospital, though he seems to have cured himself by sheer will power – (I thought it was so characteristic of him that he had thought of a number of reforms and reorganisations which would improve the day-to-day running of the hospital while he was there as a patient). I’m so glad that he’s better, and able to get down to Devonshire.
It makes me see how time passes when I think that I first suggested an Iceland trip goodness knows how long ago, but with ponies – now I don’t think I’d be able to stick it out in a coach, but I still think ponies would be the right way to do it. I wonder if you’re going on the N. France coach trip? It doesn’t tell you who is doing the guiding, and if it’s John Purkis, amiable as he is, you do sometimes get more information than you can manage. I suppose, as Morris said, one ought not to grumble at this?
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