Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction

Christopher Knight

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315450995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Christopher J. Knight's Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction is a study of the British author Penelope Fitzgerald (1916 – 2000), attending to her nine novels, especially as viewed through the lens both of "late style" (she published her first novel, The Golden Child, at age sixty) and, in her words, of "consolation, that is, for doubts and fears as well as for naked human loss." As in Shakespeare's late, religiously inflected, romances, the two concerns coincide; and Fitzgerald's ostensible comedies are marked by a clear experience of the tragic and the palpable sense of a world that verges on the edge of indifference to human loss. Yet Fitzgerald, her late age pessimism notwithstanding, seeks (with the aid of her own religious understandings), in each of her novels, to wrestle meaning, consolation and even comedy from circumstances not noticeably propitious. Or as she herself memorably spoke of her own "deepest convictions": "I can only say that however close I've come, by this time, to nothingness, I have remained true to my deepest convictions—I mean to 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 a comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?" The recipient of Britain's Booker Prize and America's National Book Critics Circle Award, Penelope Fitzgerald's reputation as a novelist, and author more generally, has grown, since her death, significantly, to the point that she is now widely judged one of Britain's finest writers, comparable in worth to the likes of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

1 The Golden Child and the anxious relation to detective fiction

It is as though every […] writer to prove his fitness for serious literature, had to write a detective story.

—C. P. Snow

[O]ur continued obsession with detective fiction suggests something remarkably adjacent to traditional theological concerns, and its lonely, world-weary hard-drinking advocates—think Luther—have become the priests and theologians of our day.

—Giles Fraser

The literature of detection

In her 1937 essay “The Literature of Detection,” composed for Oxford University’s student newspaper The Cherwell, Penelope [Knox] Fitzgerald, in the course of reviewing her uncle Father Ronald Knox’s detective novel Double Cross-Purposes, sets out to define the detective story, beginning with the claim that “[i]f a picture is half-way between a thought and a thing, a detective story stands half-way between a book and a soulless aberration” (LD 188). It is not the most exalting point d’appui. Fitzgerald respects the form, yet if “[t]here is no idea of a modern novel” (LD 188), for the reason that its practitioners—James, Conrad, Hemingway, Barnes, Stein, Joyce, Lawrence, Proust, Woolf, etc.—made definition a fraught undertaking, one can, she thinks, feel on safer ground when addressing oneself to the parameters of the detective novel:

The detective novel commands respect in this—that it has a certain standard, a classic conception by which it may measure itself. There is no idea of a modern novel; but the serious detective writer should be conscious of a definite pattern, three hundred pages long (almost exactly) and selling at seven and six; containing not less than one murder and not more than three, with some comic relief, some sentimental passages describing local scenery and either a police detective or an amateur with some credentials for his investigation. (LD 188)

Others requirements, writes Fitzgerald, include “fair play in presenting available clues, whether of character or circumstance” and a penchant for seeing fortunes reversed, entailing “an entire shifting of suspicion, a disruption of the conclusions already reached and a shedding of new light” (LD 188). Evidence for Fitzgerald’s requirements could be found, she suggests, in the gamut of Golden Age detective authors, among whom she mentions Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Milward Kennedy, Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher, C. H. Kitchin, and Freeman Wills Crofts. There is also the obligatory bow in the direction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who showed the subsequent generation how the genre was to be done, and from whose height there can only have been a falling off: a “‘boxed’ problem of the length of an average early Sherlock Holmes story allows just the right space for presentations and adornment of the facts, including a measure of false suspicion. Too much space has led modern detective writers into very devious ways—into gloating over food and wine, raptures over moorland scenery, and morasses of unwanted comic relief” (LD 188).

The genre, thinks Fitzgerald, is both the beneficiary and victim of its conventions, conventions that when well-manipulated assume the spirit of a spritely game, and when not, plunge the narrative into cliché and dullness. These conventions, albeit abbreviated, were essentially those enumerated by her uncle in “The Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction,” a 1929 mock-religious instruction guide for those wishing to make their own contributions. The closed in nature of the genre—its provinciality (“No Chinaman must figure in the story”); its haughtiness (“The stupid friend of the detective”); its two-plus-two equals four materialism (“All supernatural or prenatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course”)—makes itself evident here (R. Knox, “Introduction”). It is, as Fitzgerald writes, a genre that, when successful, finds itself “resting, a golden mean, between two possibilities of excess” (LD 188). And although the interwar period came to be known as the genre’s Golden Age, Fitzgerald, writing at its end, was not unmindful of the blight that had already begun to set in, to the point that she recognized the need of a defensive posture. Not surprisingly, the essay’s last note, while conceding a certain dullness in her uncle’s most recent effort, is elegiac: “The literature of pursuit and arrest must retain its backbone; we are glad to see its decay, its Silver Age period, retarded” (LD 188).

Of course, the subsequent war did not put to rest the genre; it continued, and still continues, to find practitioners keen to work out, to press forward, its variables beneath the rubric of what Fitzgerald again calls “a certain standard, a classic conception by which it may measure itself” (LD 188). But the Second World War did matter; it did rupture the provincial space, the little Englandism, in which the classic instances of the genre best thrived. In an insightful comment at the end of his 1944 essay “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?,” Edmund Wilson, tracing the genre’s history from Poe through Dickens to its more recent past, wrote that the detective story had managed to keep “its hold; had even, in the two decades between the great wars, become more popular than ever before” (661). There was, he said, “a deep reason for this,” connected to a larger cultural anxiety: “The world during those years was ridden by an all-pervasive feeling of guilt and by a fear of impending disaster which it seemed hopeless to try to avert because it never seemed conclusively possible to pin down the responsibility” (“Why Do” 661). Yet pinning “down the responsibility” was exactly what detective fiction did best:

Nobody seems guiltless, nobody seems safe; and then, suddenly, the murderer is spotted, and relief!—he is not, after all, a person like you or me. He is a villain—known to the trade as George Gruesome—and he has been caught by an infallible Power, the supercilious and omniscient detective, who knows exactly where to fix the guilt. (“Why Do” 661)

For Wilson, the genre’s interwar success had to do with an enhanced anxiety regarding evil’s pervasiveness offset by the genre’s assurances that the evil was by its nature containable, the murderer could and would be revealed.¹ With the return of war, this assuredness found itself noticeably undercut. The Blitz, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Stalingrad, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Hamburg, fifty plus million dead, with civilian outnumbering military casualties by approximately two to one—all these and analogous horrors made the assumptions of the English detective story seem passé. Or as Wilson, satirizing the genre’s upper-crust, village-vicar aspect, as evidenced in Dorothy Sayers’s The Nine Tailors, wrote in his follow-up essay, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”:

The first part of it is all about bellringing as it is practiced in English churches […]. I skipped a good deal of this, and found myself skipping, also, a large section of the conversations between conventional English village characters […]. There was also a dreadful stock English nobleman of the casual and debonair kind, with the embarrassing name of Lord Peter Wimsey, and […] I had to skip a good deal of him, too. (678)²

It is possible, I think, to hold on to one’s affection for Lord Peter while also conceding the justice of Wilson’s rebuke. It is akin to the rebuke that Fitzgerald herself delivers in “The Literature of Detection”: “But these excellent novels raise the question as to how dull a novel can be, and live?” (LD 188). The genre is entertaining, it seductively entices, and although it has its successful practitioners, it does not, in this way of thinking, exactly count as literature if by this we reference a standard exemplified by the likes of Woolf, Joyce, and Proust, novelists who have, writes Wilson, “organized their books with an intensity which has been relatively rare” among novelists and that would seem precluded from a genre that makes the fulfillment of expectation (a whole Decalogue) a desideratum (“Who Cares” 681). As Wilson writes, “It is not difficult to create suspense by making people await a revelation, but it does demand a certain talent to come through with a criminal device which is ingenious or picturesque or amusing enough to make the reader feel that the waiting has been worthwhile” (“Why Do” 659). So it is that he judges even Sayers as working “in a field which is mostly on a sub-literary level” (“Who Cares” 678–79).

The novel’s inception

I myself like Sayers, and think Wilson’s judgment overly harsh. But the judgment helps us to understand Fitzgerald’s ambivalence and defensiveness when speaking to her own contribution to detective fiction: her first novel The Golden Child (1977). The story about its composing is now, for Fitzgerald readers, almost familiar. When her husband Desmond was dying of cancer, Fitzgerald thought that she might divert him with something on the order of a thriller or mystery, it being her notion, as she told Caroline Moorehead, that this is what “men most like reading: thrillers and history” (Moorehead interview). Of course, Desmond had already shown himself a gifted historian, with the 1949 publication of A History of the Irish Guards in the Second World War, a history of his own regiment that was thrown into major conflict, with significant casualties, in Northern Africa in 1943. But thrillers or mysteries were in his wife’s genes, and Fitzgerald, inspired by the world traveling Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition, chose to write one. Whether “it would [not] have been easier to go to the store and buy him [Desmond] some murder mysteries” is a thought put into our heads by the New Yorker critic Joan Acocella (85), but clearly the exhibition captured Fitzgerald’s attention in a way that required something more. The 1972 exhibition, which took up a half-year residency in the British Museum, drew more than a million and a half visitors, most of whom were asked to wait long hours before being admitted inside. As John Russell Taylor has noted, the Tutankhamun exhibition proved a turning point for those international museums in a position to stage shows on a large scale. It “was undeniably the first of the international blockbusters” and was notable for the fact that it brought into the Museum a visitor whose motives for attending were less reflective of aesthetic or intellectual values than those associated with spectacle or things theatrical (J. R. Taylor).

Later mass-audience exhibitions would play up even more successfully the showmanship, an element the British Museum directors were, it has been said, at first hesitant to countenance but which they too would come around to seeing as part of their mandate (J. R. Taylor). But the fact is that Tutankhamun, since his 1922 unearthing by the English archaeologist Howard Carter (paralleled in the novel by Sir William’s own unearthings), began this way, as spectacle. Or as Ben MacIntyre, speaking to the journalistic roguery that went far toward creating the originating story, writes, “It is a story of archaeologists working underground to unearth the most beautiful and sacred treasures, while above ground journalists slugged it out in an unholy media scrum” (B. MacIntyre). This “media scrum[’s]” catalyst was a deal made between Lord Carnarvon, the expedition’s financer, and the Times, giving the latter exclusive rights to the news and photographs emanating from the tomb. Not surprisingly, rival newspapers were less than pleased, and sent off to Luxor their own group of reporters to do everything they could to upstage the Times’ efforts. They did so fairly successfully, with the result that compromised excavators, secret codes, imagined curses and out-of-hand expenses helped to create a circus-like atmosphere both in Egypt and at home. Lord Carnarvon, who defended himself against the charge of enrichment by saying that his overriding motive had been to secure his wife’s privacy (disrupted by reporters’ middle-of-the-night calls), would comment about the outsized attention: “It is a very curious thing how this discovery has excited the public, all the most unlikely people, from the King down to the policeman, taxi driver and common labourer” (qtd. in B. MacIntyre). For his trouble, Lord Carnarvon became among the first to suffer the consequences of the Curse, the press-inspired legend that whoever should enter Tutankhamun’s tomb would meet with an early demise (Legend). Lord Carnarvon died less than two months after entering the tomb. And his departure was soon followed by the departures of Arthur Mace and Albert Lythgoe, both key players in the tomb’s uncovering. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself put the matter, there was “an evil elemental” at play (qtd. in B. MacIntyre).³

Fitzgerald clearly knew the Valley of Kings story, for it informs her own, as when Sir William says to Hawthorne-Mannering, “‘Carnarvon died at five minutes to two on the morning of the 5^th of April 1923. I knew him well, poor fellow! The public enjoys the idea of a curse, though’” (GC 22). It made some sense, then, that Fitzgerald should find herself wondering whether there was not something too Barnum-like about the 1972 Tutankhamun show. Looking back, in 1986, she told Diana Hinds, “It struck me that it wasn’t genuine—they kept lowering the lights. And so I thought if this came out, the director would have to commit suicide …” (Hinds interview 34). And at the time of publication, she wrote to Richard Garnett, her editor for The Knox Brothers (1977), that

I did write this mystery story, largely to get rid of my annoyance: 1. about the Tutankhamen Exhib: as I’m certain everything in it was a forgery, and: 2. about someone who struck me as particularly unpleasant when I was obliged to go to a lot of museums &c. to find out about [Edward] Burne-Jones [the subject of her first biography]. (L 240)

Who the “someone” is remains a mystery. This aside, the letter also remains interesting for the reason that, first, Fitzgerald is found expressing misgivings about the novel, misgivings that repeat themselves whenever she is called upon to speak to it:

I thought quite well of the book at first but it’s now almost unintelligible, it was probably an improvement that the last chapters got lost, but then 4 characters and 1000s of words had to be cut to save paper, then the artwork got lost (by the printer this time) so we had to use my roughs and it looks pretty bad, but there you have it, it doesn’t matter, and no-one will notice. (L 241)

Second, in this same letter but in a different vein, Fitzgerald is found taking umbrage at the suggestion that she might be thought an “amateur”: “It worried me terribly when you [Garnett] told me I was only an amateur writer and I asked myself, how many books do you have to write and how many semi-colons do you have to discard before you lose amateur status?” (L 241) Garnett, it would appear, had been misled by Fitzgerald’s fits of self-deprecation. He should not have been, however, for coinciding with such were expressions that made it clear that this was someone who wished, expected, and had every right to be taken seriously. So it is that in the letter’s closing paragraph, Fitzgerald—her resentment coming out most forcefully—writes: “I shouldn’t write such a long letter as I know that reading can’t be a recreation for you, but it was so nice to have a letter that didn’t enclose a bread recipe, particularly as bread-making is one of the things I can do and be sure it’ll turn out right, unlike my attempts to get good notices” (L 241).

Garnett, who had been told, in a previous exchange, that Fitzgerald was caught up in “explain[ing] the difference between irony and satire to my VI form,” might have shown himself more sensitive to the registers of Fitzgerald’s tone (L 236). Still, as Hilary Spurling has argued, Fitzgerald’s correspondence carried with it certain Pooterish dissemblings: “Penelope Fitzgerald read The Diary of a Nobody by the Grossmith Brothers more than 20 times before she published anything herself, and her letters are clearly modeled on their deadpan technique” (21). Spurling and Fitzgerald’s careers crossed at a crucial, life-changing moment for the latter, for Spurling was not only a member of the Booker Prize committee that awarded the 1979 prize for best novel to Fitzgerald’s Offshore, but she was, she says, instrumental in shifting the committee’s support away from William Golding’s Darkness Visible:

We’d spent the entire afternoon at loggerheads, settling at the last minute by a single vote for William Golding’s Darkness Visible, by which time the atmosphere had grown so heated that I said I’d sooner resign than have any part in a panel that picked a minor Golding over a major imaginative breakthrough [A Bend in the River] by Naipaul. So we compromised by giving the prize to everybody’s second choice, the small, slight, melancholy but beautifully judged and executed Offshore.

(Spurling 21)

A Bend in the River is, as Spurling speaks of it, a magnificent novel, though the misogynistic violence that Salim, the novel’s protagonist, participates in has become, through biography, more and more linked with Naipaul himself,⁴ to the point that had the committee gone with Spurling’s first choice, it might now seem a matter for reappraisal. In this sense, the “melancholy but beautifully judged and executed Offshore” proved a wiser and more sustainable selection. Spurling’s regrets perhaps color her representation of Fitzgerald’s genius for “snatch[ing] humiliation from success” (21). And yet, though Spurling speaks with a certain jealous spite, she is on to something when she observes that, in the incident of the Booker Prize, and the discordant publicity that surrounded it, Fitzgerald displayed an ability to turn tables several times: “The one thing that is quite clear from these collected letters is that in fact she was herself manipulating the situation, not the other way around” (21). Like A. S. Byatt, who told the New York Times’s Arthur Lubow, before his interview with Fitzgerald, that “[s]he’s prepared to play the scatty old lady […]. But there’s a steely intelligence under that gentle scattiness” (qtd. in Lubow), Spurling sees in Fitzgerald someone who was expert at creating a self-protective persona designed, paradoxically, both to deflect attention (i.e., hostile attention) and to garner it. A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “Music at the close”
• 1 The Golden Child and the anxious relation to detective fiction
• 2 The second saddest story: Despair, belief, and moral perseverance in The Bookshop
• 3 Offshore: “Between the Hither and the Farther Shore”
• 4 Human Voices: Voice, truth, and human fortitude
• 5 At Freddie’s, or “All my pretty ones”
• 6 Innocence: An allegory of fall; or perspectival judgment on innocence and happiness
• 7 The Beginning of Spring: Resisting “Irreligious Triviality”
• 8 Concerning the unpredictable: The Gate of Angels and the challenge to modern religious belief
• 9 The Blue Flower and a world elsewhere
• Conclusion: “The Gift of Death”
• Works cited
• Index