The Means of Escape: Stories

First Mariner Books edition 2001

Copyright © 2000, 2001 by the Estate of Penelope Fitzgerald

Introduction copyright © 2001 by A. S. Byatt

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

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ISBN 978-0-618-15450-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

eISBN 978-0-544-22811-5

v1.0613

Introduction

I KNEW Penelope Fitzgerald—never well—for a long time. We taught together in the 1960s at a very English institution called the Westminster Tutors, which prepared seventeen-year-olds for the entrance exams, now abolished, to Oxford and Cambridge Universities. I was very young and harassed in those days, with two small children. I met Penelope over coffee between tutorials from time to time. Looking back, I see that the teaching suited both of us, concentrating as it did on the very clever and the very willing, taught in groups of two or three. Penelope later reproduced some of the atmosphere of that eccentric place—including its smell—in At Freddie’s, in which the formidable Miss Freeston, who ran the Tutors, has become Freddie, the principal of a school for child actors. It would not have occurred to me at the time that Penelope might do anything of the kind—and possibly not to her, either. The portrait of Freddie is both wicked and just, attentive and judging. What I registered about Penelope at the time was an interest in precision. I remember remarking casually that I had corrected a student for writing about the protagonists of a drama. My mother, I said, had told me that the word should never be used in the plural. Why? asked Penelope. Because it came from the Greek, I said, and the protagonist in Greek drama was the leading actor—there was only one—and the second actor was called the deuteragonist. It was like unique, which is an adjective you shouldn’t qualify with very or rather because a thing either is unique or it isn’t. These distinctions pleased Penelope, who liked exactness where it was possible. For the next thirty years, when we met, she reminded me of this conversation.

The other thing I remember about Penelope was her understanding of, and fear for, very intelligent children. Children in her fiction are—as real children are—wiser and more resourceful than fragile adults. Consider the families in both Offshore and Innocence, as well as Bernhard in The Blue Flower and the perfectionist boy actor in At Freddie’s. She taught my daughter at the Tutors long after I had left, and told me rather pointedly that I did not seem to realize that my daughter had a touch of genius. Since I had said nothing about that, and would have felt it wrong to boast, I felt harshly judged. She appeared mild and retiring, and could be suddenly sharp and incisive. I was also grateful that she had noticed my daughter. When, later, I read her account of her family—from which she scrupulously almost excludes herself, recording her own birth simply as a grandchild—I understood better her own relationship to pure brilliance and eccentricity, the way she was at home with intelligence and careful about those in whom it might not be cherished or recognized. She was a brilliant student herself, who became a good biographer and a good teacher. She discovered her own genius as a novelist, I feel, as she went along, rising apparently effortlessly to the stories and forms provided by her own intelligence. Another occasion when I felt she had judged me myself for falling short was when she told me that no one had noticed that Human Voices turned on a German poem by Heine. She felt that I might write something about it so that people would understand. But at that stage I did not understand it myself. I thought she was a good comic English novelist who had read Muriel Spark well. It was only when I read the late, remote novels about other times and places that I came to be able to take on the moral ferocity, the elegance of mind, the bleakness and generosity of her vision. People in England still tended to see her as a good English biographer—of Burne-Jones, of the eccentric Charlotte Mew, who appealed to students of women’s writing—who happened to write novels. Her masterpiece as a biographer seems to me to be her composite biography of her father and his brothers, The Knox Brothers. It is a portrait of English intelligence, religion, oddity, pigheadedness, and wisdom, written with a completely self-effacing directness and unobtrusive wit. She was the granddaughter of a bishop, the niece of two very different priests, and, like her family, religious. Hermione Lee, interviewing her for New Writing, pressed her on her feminism, her political beliefs. Penelope corrected her. She hoped her work reflected her spiritual life.

I now think she was one of the best novelists of my lifetime. What follows is based on an article I wrote for the Threepenny Review in San Francisco at a time when many of her novels were out of print in the States. The success of The Blue Flower, for which she won the National Book Award—the first non-American to do so—changed that. I am glad she must have known, before she died, that readers were beginning to understand her full subtlety and mastery. She would never have put herself forward, but she knew how good she was.

Penelope Fitzgerald wrote discreet, brief, perfect tales. Her first novel was published in 1977 when she was already over sixty. She won the Booker Prize in 1979 for Offshore, a comedy with an edge about a family barely surviving on a houseboat on the Thames. Her early novels are English—kindly studies of the endless absurdity of human behavior, seen simultaneously with an unwavering moral gaze. She was interested in traditional forms—the plotted detective story, the supernatural tale. In 1986, with Innocence, she began to write about other countries—Italy, Russia, Germany—and other centuries. This looking outward from English manners was in the air at the time, and there has been a flowering of historically and geographically various fiction in Britain. But Fitzgerald’s later novels are quite extraordinarily good. They made me at least reread the earlier ones with closer attention, consider the delicious sentences, come to the conclusion that Fitzgerald was Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention. But she has other qualities, qualities I think of as European and metaphysical. She has what Henry James called the imagination of disaster. She can make a reader helpless with inordinate private laughter. (I will give examples.) She is also one of those writers whose sentences, however brief, are recognizable as hers and no one else’s, although they are classically elegant and unfussy.

Consider the description of the BBC during the Second World War in Human Voices. Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth. It goes on Without prompting, the BBC had decided that truth was more important than consolation, and in the long run would be more effective. The novel is a wonderful combination of deadpan English comedy and surreal farce, from the death in the studio of a French general whose post-Dunkirk message turns out to be a passionate plea to the English to surrender to Hider immediately, to the recording, for a program called Lest We Forget Our Englishry, of six hundred bands of creaking. To be accurate some are a mixture of squeaking and creaking.

They’re all from the parish church of Hither Lickington, Sam explained eagerly. It was recommended to us by Religious Broadcasting. What you’re hearing is the hinges of the door and the door itself opening and shutting as the old women come in one by one with the stuff for the Harvest Festival. The quality’s superb, particularly on the last fifty-three bands or so.

Sam is Director of Recorded Programmes, one of Fitzgerald’s fatally dangerous narrow-minded innocents, a technical perfectionist who flirts plaintively and indifferently with a seraglio of assistants. His obsession is part of what makes up the awkwardly powerful survival of the BBC. He is loved by an assistant (with perfect pitch) from Birmingham called Annie Asra. Fitzgerald named this person, also singleminded, for a poem, Der Asra, by Heine. The Asra are a tribe of slaves "welche sterben, wenn sie lieben" (who die when they love). German Romantic orientalism is an odd component of so very English a novel, and Fitzgerald’s surprise that no one noticed the reference was perhaps innocently unrealistic. But it is also a pointer to un-English preoccupations.

Innocence (1986) opens with a delicious and chilling account of a sixteenth-century Italian noble family, the Ridolfi, who were midgets. The cosseted and innocent midget daughter has a dwarf companion who suddenly grows to a normal height. To the midget mistress this is a monstrous misfortune. After much kind reflection she decides it would be best to put out the other girl’s eyes and cut off her legs at the knees, so that she would never know the increasing difference between her and the rest of the world.

This tale resonates through the novel about the fortunes of a modern Ridolfi (of normal height), Chiara, in the 1950s, who falls in love at first sight (at the opera) with a handsome doctor of southern socialist stock, with whom she has nothing in common except love and a singlemindedness reminiscent of Annie Asra in wartime London. Both Chiara and her Salvatore are, in their innocence, dangerous to themselves and others; both are also hopeful and lovable. What is remarkable about this tale (of only 220 pages) is the completeness of its Italianness, political, religious, moral, and physical. There is a monsignor, an old comrade, a dying lady who founded a charity, a farming cousin who finds words unnecessary; there are political and family intrigues and a curious and purely Italian mixture of passion and heartlessness. There is a moving scene with an ancient haute couture designer; there is a suddenly appalling brief scene where the child Salvatore is taken to see the dying politician Gramsci in the hospital, and finds not socialist inspiration but a medical vocation in the horror of his decay. There is a huge, ungainly English aristocratic friend of the delicate Chiara who lumbers emotionally and forcefully through the story. It is an exquisite mosaic where every tiny piece is part of an intrigue and a world, olives and lemons, clothes and manners. Tragedy is possible, and farce is omnipresent, both belied by the light, decorous storytelling. Every time I reread it, I find another unobtrusive flicker of connection between the sixteenth-century tale and the modern one. My moment of inordinate private laughter was over the table in the ultramodern Villa Hodgkiss, a truly Italian overdesigned misfit.

In the centre was placed, in fact fixed, a round table of pale green marble, with the shapes of twelve plates, twelve knives, twelve forks, let into the surface in darker green mosaic. On an evening such as this when only eight guests were dining, none of the real plates, knives or forks quite covered