Friday, July 6, 2018

Penelope Fitzgerald / A Life by Hermione Lee / Review by Robert McCrum

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee – review

Hermione Lee writes passionately about a novelist whose brilliant career began at the age of 60

Robert McCrum

Sunday 17 November 2013

he novelist Penelope Fitzgerald endured a life of two unequal halves, of failure followed by success. Put them together – as Hermione Lee has done in this brilliant and passionate biography – and you find a haunting tale of blighted hope, personal tragedy and rare, late fulfilment.

Beyond the poignancy of a long life that began during the great war and ended in the year 2000, this biography also holds up a cracked mirror to its century, though its subject might have disdained the idea. The flip side to Fitzgerald's preference for privacy was an instinctive refusal to admit any self-regard.

That was bred in the bone. Fitzgerald came from the kind of English tribe, the Knox family, that was clannish, competitive and defended against outsiders by private codes and language. Her grandfather was a bishop. Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin were household gods. Her journalist father, Edmund, was "Eddie" or "Teddy" or – when he wrote for Punch – "Evoe" (pronounced "ee-vee"). Penelope, who was always "Mops", was doomed to domesticity within a paternalistic world.

Growing up a Knox was a challenge for the young girl. Like many children with conspicuous relatives, she wanted to do her own thing but not give anything away. All her life, she wore a kind of disguise, inspired by her family, using her formidable intelligence to cover her tracks and avoid personal exposure. "Sharp as a knife is old Penelope," wrote one friend, "and goes to great lengths to pretend not to be."

This is the enigma that Lee sets out to penetrate, articulating the greatness, as she sees it, of the novels Fitzgerald published between the ages of 60 and 80. These include The Bookshop, Offshore (winner of the 1979 Booker prize), The Beginning of Spring and The Blue Flower. Among the many pleasures of this sad life is the subtle and perceptive way in which Lee makes a creative connection between Fitzgerald's 60-year incubation of her genius and the complex riches of her final years.

At first, Mops shone at Oxford. "Her name," gushed Isis, "is famous at the Union and the English school." Within a sought after group known as Les Girls, she was "the blonde bombshell" from Somerville, and of course she got a first. "When I go down," she told the readers of Isis, "I want to start writing."

But then the war came, and she began to work for the BBC. Here she fell in love, hopelessly and perpetually, with an older man who remains unidentified. Wartime allowed no room for emotional self-indulgence. In 1942 Mops Knox married a dashing Irish Guards officer, Desmond Fitzgerald, and her postwar path was set. By 1948 she was living in Hampstead as a wife and mother, contributing to the BBC, with most of her Oxford promise shattered. This part of her life would be consigned to silence.

Now her literary ambitions became absorbed in co-editing, with Desmond, a short-lived cultural magazine, the World Review, which flourished brilliantly until its inevitable demise in 1953. Her marriage, meanwhile, was in trouble, though she would never acknowledge this. In 1957 the Fitzgeralds left London in hurry, amid a suspicion of unpaid bills, and moved to Southwold.

Fitzgerald's fleeting escape to the seaside, leavened by part-time work in a local bookshop, was dogged by indigence. By 1960, aged 43, with a failing marriage and an alcoholic husband, she moved into a leaky, semi-derelict houseboat on Chelsea Reach, a period Lee describes as "bleak, difficult and dangerous". Things went downhill fast. Desmond, caught stealing money from his chambers, was disgraced. Then the houseboat sank, with the loss of all Fitzgerald's possessions. By the late 1960s she was living in a squalid council flat, making ends meet as a supply teacher, a middle-aged failure with no prospects and, apparently, no future.

Never underestimate the steel of the true artist. It was from these depths, defying the odds, that the novelist Fitzgerald emerged, especially once her three children had left home. Her first three novels – Human Voices, The Bookshop and Offshore – cashing the literary cheques of bitter experience, drew on her life at the BBC, in Southwold, and on Chelsea Reach. Typically, to her close family, she pretended that her writing was a hobby not the belated start of her professional life. She could never quite shake off the habits of misdirection.

When Desmond died, she was free. Between 1978 and 1982, Fitzgerald experienced a creative surge in which she published four novels, established herself as a writer of consequence and won the Booker prize for her tragi-comedy, Offshore. This latter success is emblematic of her career. Only a handful of critics, notably Frank Kermode and Victoria Glendinning, understood her gifts. Even to herself, she was the outsider. When, against the odds, she snatched the prize from the favourite, VS Naipaul, she had a lot of fun with the literary press who cast her as a dotty old lady with ruddy cheeks. She said she would use the prize money "to buy an iron and a typewriter".

In truth, this late recognition gave her the confidence to complete the two novels, both masterpieces – The Beginning of Spring and The Blue Flower – that make her biggest claim on posterity. In the world of books, there are only two bets: the here-and-now and the yet-to-come. Fitzgerald always struggled with the former. Thanks to this sympathetic biography, her afterlife shows signs of becoming finally blessed with understanding, admiration and respect.

THE GUARDIAN