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Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee

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I like to read biographies of authors. When the biography is as good as this one, I like to stop and read the author’s books just before they are discussed. Yes, the works stand alone; you don’t need to know details of the author’s life to appreciate them. But as a writer, I am curious about how her experiences shaped the author’s perspective and choices.

I’ve been particularly curious about Penelope Fitzgerald for two reasons: I’ve loved her novels, and she was 60 years old when her first novel was published. She did publish two nonfiction books, one when she was 58 and the other the same year as her first novel. I wondered how her life story meshed with the stories described so vividly in Tillie Olsen’s Silences.

Indeed, it does. While working at the BBC during WWII, she married Desmond Fitzgerald, whom she’d met at Oxford. Within six months, he’d been sent to North Africa with the Irish Guards. Like so many soldiers, he returned damaged in ways less visible than a missing leg. His misadventures meant that the family lived in poverty, even being homeless for a while before gratefully moving into a council flat. Working to support the family and raise her children left Fitzgerald little time for writing, but she was storing up ideas and experiences that enabled her to produce nine novels and three biographies in just 20 years.

In this rich and readable biography, Hermione Lee gives us not just Fitzgerald’s story, but also a discerning evaluation of her work. Lee incorporates excerpts from Fitzgerald’s speeches and writings: letters, reviews, essays. Without being didactive, she suggests places in the novels where Fitzgerald made use of her experiences. Fitzgerald’s first five novels draw on her own past, but even the later novels reveal traces of past preoccupations and concerns.

Lee gives us the events and people that shaped and influenced Fitzgerald as a writer. For example, knowing that her beloved father, Edmund “Evoe” Knox, wrote for Punch, adds a new perspective to her brisk, humorous prose. Her father and his siblings provided a rich, if unusual, environment for the young writer.

In talking about the novels, Lee traces some common threads, such as, “Bourne-Jones attracted her, too, because she felt a strong imaginative pull towards characters at odds with their world: the depressives, the shy, the unworldly, the emotionally inarticulate.”

Her own experiences enabled her to sympathise with such characters. In an interview, Fitzgerald spoke of “the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?”

In her later works, she experimented with an impressionistic style, putting together fragments that push the reader to actively engage with the story. This style is most effectively used in The Blue Flower, her story based on the life of the German Romantic poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis. It is especially effective because it mirrors his own style. In an early notebook, Fitzgerald wrote, “Novalis wrote: One can imagine stories which have no coherence, but only association of events, like dreams, or poems which at most have single verses which can be understood, like fragments of the most various objects.”

Lee pins down another aspect of this novel, saying, “she has been thinking all her writing life about the relation between biography, history and fiction. Now she merges the genres to create a new kind of book.”

What most impressed me in this account of Fitzgerald’s life and work was the incredible amount of research she did for each book, not just for the biographies, but for each novel as well. For Beginning of Spring, for example, Lee says, “there is a great deal of homework in her notebooks on printing works, alongside notes on merchants, railway stations, ministries, churches, birch trees, dachas and mushrooms.” Some extensive reading may only be come a detail, such as the sandstone towers of a market in Moscow.

For me, this remarkable biography sheds new light on Fitzgerald’s novels. Plus I love that it sent me back to read all the novels again.

What biography have you read recently that gave you new insight?

World War One: History in an Hour, by Rupert Colley

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As we approach the 100th anniversary of the start of the first Battle of the Marne on 5 September 1914, I want to mention this excellent introduction to WWI. Colley has written a number of these History in an Hour books intended to give you basic information about a subject in an easily digestible form. At only 60 pages and illustrated by photographs, this ebook provides an accessible and accurate primer on the war, from Sarajevo to the Paris Peace Conference. Appendices identify key people and provide a timeline for easy reference.

I've long been interested in this war and have three shelves of books on the subject to prove it. As Colley says in his Introduction:

This, the first ‘world' war, was not just about armies winning and losing battles, but whole populations mobilized for war, at the mercy of the enemy, civilians starved and bombed. It was an industrial war where a country's whole economic output was geared to war; a war of empires that pulled in combatants from nations across the globe. It was a war of land, air and sea, a war of politics, espionage, and also the Home Front. For the first time in history, this was total war.

For me, immersed in the literature of England as I have been all my life, August 1914 was when the world changed. It spelled the end of the British and Ottoman Empires, but more importantly it was when the long enlightenment ended and the modern era began, when notions of duty and honor were replaced by cynicism and disillusionment. At the outbreak of the war, Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon, the Foreign Secretary from 1905-1916, said, “ The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time”.

Aside from facts memorised in school, I first came to the war through its poets: Rupert Brooke who died before he could lose his idealism, Wilfred Owen who learned to write a new kind of poetry in the trenches and mental hospitals, Siegfried Sassoon whose satiric poetry reflected his disenchantment, and others, all of whom seemed to know each other.

In “The Send-Off”, Owen wrote:

Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.
Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead.
. . .

Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild trainloads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to still village wells
Up half-known roads.

Once I started going to Europe and visiting the sites, I began reading more widely, memoirs, histories, even a modern guide to the war's locations. I became fascinated by the role played by supply chain logistics, the Spanish Flu pandemic, the Russian Revolution, and the much-delayed entry of the U.S. Reading Timothy Findley's book The Wars brought home to me what wrestling with the mud must have been like. As Colley says of the Battle of Passchendaele, “guns disappeared into it, tanks sunk in it, a quarter of the men killed at Passchendaele drowned in it.” I began to understand J.R.R. Tolkien’s remark that the Dead Marshes where Frodo and Sam saw the faces of the dead looming up at them through the mud and water had their source in the Battle of the Somme.

And of course, the war was not won. It ended with an armistice, which as it turned out, only provided a breathing space until the war resumed as what we now call World War II.

With all I have read, I still found it good to come back and review the facts of the war in this short book.

Which WWI poets have you read?