Читать книгу So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald - Penelope Fitzgerald, Simon Callow - Страница 6

Penelope Fitzgerald was shy and awkward with anyone who was not an old friend or a family member. If writers are often monsters of egoism, she was not. Confident only in her fearsome sense of artistic rightness and in her abundant knowledge, she had no great conceit of herself; she feared herself ineffective socially, a voice unlikely to be heard. In person, one felt her reserves of sharp kindness, intelligence and sympathy. She was stern. She willed one to come up to the mark. She could be devastatingly funny.

In letters she could say all that she wanted to say, and couldn’t quite face to face. She did so in a way that was truthful, witty and persuasive, but above all focused on the person she was writing to. She intended to be entertaining, to offer consolation or to celebrate. She is vividly alive in these letters, and, because she has their recipients so clearly in mind, their characters become clear to us too. Though she writes eloquently, she is unselfconscious and unguarded – it is quite evident that she wrote without thought of publication. It was part of her modesty that Penelope left no instructions about what should or shouldn’t be published after her death. I think these letters will give her readers, without the frisson of gossip and malice, a rounded picture of what she was really like, a sense of the passage of her days, an impression of her career and interests, and the same pleasure they gave to those who first opened them.

Who could have predicted a time when the epistolary art would cease to be a part of ordinary communication, and would pass into history? Every morning when Penelope first sat down at her writing-table she attended to her correspondence. What is collected here must be a small fraction of what she in fact wrote and sent.

Her fame came so late in life that there was no reason for anyone to keep her letters, apart from affection, and she lost her personal records, including her husband Desmond’s and her (copiously illustrated) letters, written when he was serving overseas, when the family’s houseboat, Grace, sank for the second and last time, in 1963, which also made it difficult to trace Hampstead and Suffolk friends from the earlier, more prosperous periods of her married life. There is therefore a hole in the middle of this collection which engulfs her work as a programmes assistant at the BBC, the early years of her marriage, her editorship of World Review, her child-bearing and -rearing years, and her financial disasters. The years when, as Cervantes said to explain his own long silence, she was living her life: the years before she came to write.

I was fortunate when I began on this book to be given two meticulously kept series of letters: that of Chris Carduff, Penelope’s American editor at Addison Wesley and then at Houghton Mifflin, and that of J. Howard Woolmer, bookseller and bibliographer, who corresponded with Penelope about the Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury and who brokered the sale of her papers to the University of Texas. A third and most fascinating series was sent to me by Hugh Lee – known as ‘Ham’ for his perceived acting abilities – and covers the early war years when Penelope was just down from Oxford and working for Punch and then for the Ministry of Food. She had met Ham through her childhood friend, Jean Fisher. They formed part of a set of young Oxford graduates, the men training to be officers, those women who had not joined up drafted into the ministries. It was a time of amitiés amoureuses, with Penelope an ever-sympathetic confidante when these went wrong, and an unquenchable babbling brook of light-hearted, fantastic invention. The letters are full of gaiety and exuberance, and, despite the sombre times, are without the darker notes of her later writing. They give a rare glimpse of what the children’s generation never know about their parents: what they were like when they were young and silly and brimming with hope.

They break off about the time Penelope was falling in love with Desmond Fitzgerald, himself a recent Oxford graduate, and, like Ham’s group, a year younger than her. A few months after they married he went off to fight with the Irish Guards in North Africa. He was awarded the MC for holding Hill 212 in the face of terrible odds, a battle that led to the capture of Tunis. He would have received the Victoria Cross, but for the dreadful technicality that he was the only surviving officer. ‘It was lonely on that hill,’ he wrote later in his History of the Irish Guards, the hill now marked by a large white cross bearing the names of those killed there and the words Quis separabit? Ever after he suffered nightmares, and he found it difficult to adapt to civilian life.

Twenty-three years pass between the last letter to Hugh and the first to Tina, her elder daughter. There was never any distance between Penelope and the page, so that to read one of the flimsy blue airmail forms in her beautiful blue italic hand, one and a half pages with an arabesque border of afterthoughts, and every corner filled, was and is to feel her beside you. And, I wondered, thinking back to 1970, when I first read one over Tina’s shoulder, and remembering the delightful letter itself, and all it contained, how many of them she might have saved from all our travels and moves. Happily, there were a good many, scattered through drawers, cupboards and attics, interleaved with a miscellany of memories. They begin the year after Grace sank, when she was putting her life back together after eight years of free fall, and afford glimpses of her early literary adventures. We also see her imagination taking flight in her places of retreat: St Deiniol’s library in Hawarden, with its Burne-Jones connections, and the abbey on Iona, and on the package holidays she was now able to take, thanks to Desmond’s job with the travel firm Lunn Poly, despite the desperate scrimping – hair dyed with tea bags, Green Shield stamps saved for small comforts – that plagued her everyday life. We also get, as in the series of letters to her younger daughter, Maria, a most moving portrait of motherhood, which always took precedence over literature for Penelope.

I was talking one day to Maria about the (often furious) parental rows she remembers from the early years of her childhood, over bills unpaid, repossessions looming, and Desmond’s drinking, and about how secure the children nonetheless felt in the love of two kind, intelligent and funny people who simply couldn’t manage the world, despite their best efforts, so that it mattered less that they never knew where they would be living next, or where they would be going to school, there was a kind of adventure in it, when she suddenly absented herself and returned a little later from her cellar with a heavy black plastic bag. Inside was the complete set of letters her mother had written to her while she was up at Oxford, the only time in fact that they lived in different cities. All were in their postmarked envelopes, significant in that the letters are almost all undated as to year, and so exist in a seasonal but otherwise indeterminate present. There are two or three letters a week for each of her nine terms at the university and they provide an unusually detailed portrait of her state of mind at an unsettling period of her life when much was changing, and make on the whole for sadder reading than those to Tina:

‘Autumn: Departure of Daughters’

Oh my dark & light brown daughters

When you go to find new faces

Our place & me are put in our places

Our place may take what name it pleases –

It stares & stares, and all it sees is

That it is not a home.

Oh my dark & light brown daughters

When you go to find new places

Our place must face that it has no faces –

Tidiness, emptiness and peace is

All it has, and all it sees is

That it is not a home

Penelope put this poem away, in a drawer, without showing it to anyone, except these daughters. Its note continues to be sounded from time to time throughout the letters to her youngest child, the last to go away to find new places.

Now in her mid-fifties, she was working terribly hard: a full week’s teaching in two different jobs, three days at Queens Gate, Kensington, two days at Westminster Tutors, vast piles of exam-board marking as well as her own, with only Saturdays to spare for the mountainous research and writing of her first two books, the Burne-Jones and Knox Brothers biographies. After a difficult start (teaching R.E. at the stage school Italia Conti, remembered in At Freddie’s) she had become a valued and inspiring English teacher, the texts she was studying with her pupils – Jane Austen, but also Lawrence, Conrad, Forster, Joyce and Beckett, much modern poetry, philosophy, theory, history of art (we still have the tattered, meticulously annotated paperbacks) – all no doubt fuelling the future motor of her fiction. For, almost imperceptibly to her family, as she rarely spoke of work in progress, she was at last becoming what her old friends had always thought she would be: a writer, and this was confirmed by the acceptance of Edward Burne-Jones in 1973. It should have been an exciting and exhilarating time; intellectually and creatively it must have been, but personally it was a time of anxiety, loneliness and fear.

There had been ten years of comparative stability. Desmond and she had repaired their finances, made a rather stylish island home in their Clapham council flat, and seen their three children into and through Oxford. After the disasters of the previous decade, this had taken a great deal of persistence and bravery. Now they could say to each other: look, we have come through. A historian by training, he was able to help her in her research and they travelled happily together, at weekends and in the holidays, all over England, and to France, interviewing and absorbing atmospheres. In 1974 it became clear, though both delayed facing it (and their local GP was no help whatsoever), that Desmond was unwell. Penelope states barely in one of the later letters to Maria that she could not imagine living without one of her daughters nearby. The extent of her father’s illness, when it was eventually discovered, was kept hidden from Maria until she had completed her finals, but then she had to be told of his operation, in the reticent terms used in those days, which didn’t make anything any better.

Tina and I had married in 1973, and now we bought a three-storey house off Battersea Rise – the 25 Almeric Road of the letters – so that her parents could come and live with us. Desmond continued to go to work, growing frailer and thinner, but still as funny, endearing and patient. He died in the summer of 1976. In the first of the letters to her old friend, Maryllis, Penelope describes the morning of his death, at home, the district nurse reading to him: ‘such a kindly person, not much of a nurse but a very good woman, and she helped me to see him out of this world and read a Bible chapter, absolutely naturally, as only a West Indian could do’. In the same letter she reflects: ‘the truth is I was spoilt, as with all our ups and downs Desmond always thought everything I did was right’.

Penelope kept four close friends from her childhood and youth: Maryllis Conder (’Willie’), Jeanie Fisher (later Lady Talbot), Rachel Hichens and Janet Probert. Marriage, child-rearing, work and geographical distance separated them for long years after the war, but Jeanie and Maryllis in particular became a great support to her in her widowhood.

‘Your mother has been my dearest friend,’ wrote Willie to Maria. They met at Wycombe Abbey, ‘a terrible place’, as Penelope remembered it. She was thinking of its aping of boys’ boarding schools, the sport, the cricket, the rituals, but it was principally terrible to both of them because of their home-sickness: they cried themselves to sleep for the first three weeks of every term. English Literature, however, was inspiringly taught (’under Daisy’) and was a shared consolation. They would both go on to study it at Oxford, though Penelope’s great enthusiasm was Art and Maryllis’s Music. They sat together in class, laughed at the same absurdities, and Mops (as Penelope was always known to friends) would help Willie with her essays. At the end of their last term at Wycombe, Penelope’s mother, Christina, died. Her father, Evoe, was too grief-stricken to speak of her, and she went to stay with Maryllis and her family in Devon. ‘It was a painful visit,’ Maryllis said, ‘but she told me later that it had helped her.’ During the war, as young women, they would meet unfailingly every week for lunch. ‘How clearly I can see her walking down Sloane St with me in her cherry coat.’

It is a strange thing that some good friends (and even family members) don’t always welcome the transformation of a person known so well into a successful writer, almost as if they had been hiding something from them and had now to be seen in a different light. Maryllis emphatically didn’t fall into this category, but devoted a corner of her study to Penelope’s books and drawings, her idiosyncratic Christmas cards which gave such pleasure. She also kept a selection of her letters (’in my Mops letters file box’), which covers the last twenty-five years of her life. ‘You know what a wonderful letter-writer she was.’

Willie and her husband Mike had restored a beautiful small Jacobean manor house, ‘Terry Bank’, near Kirkby Lonsdale. It had always been in the Conder family and still retains some of its original furniture. It is a tranquil place in a serene setting. Here, or to their converted lighthouse on Alderney, they invited Penelope every year. ‘We had some very happy times together, unforgettable’. In the dramatic hillside garden they created on the bank behind the house they planted the Himalayan Blue Poppy (Meconopsis baileyi: The Blue Flower) in her honour. The letters provide a remarkable record of friendship and a continuing conversation. They discuss their children and grandchildren, plantings in their gardens. There is the occasional glimpse of Penelope’s busy literary career. They sympathise with each other over their ailments. Maryllis wrote to Tina after Penelope’s death that her mother had appeared to her at night in her room to console her and to tell her not to worry. It sounds the sort of thing she would do.

Another loving friendship of a whole life is detailed in the letters to Rachel Hichens (and her daughter Elizabeth Barnet, Penelope’s goddaughter). Each married a Cornish vicar, and they were and are rich in good works in a way with which Penelope had almost complete sympathy, only regretting that she couldn’t match it herself. Rachel was the daughter of the writer Alfred Ollivant. She and Penelope met through their mothers’ friendship, in Hampstead, when they were both about six years old. She told her daughter that she believed Penelope’s childhood to have been overshadowed by her mother’s illness. She worked at Bletchley Park during the war, where Dillwyn Knox was working on breaking the German codes. (He often tried to recruit his niece to help him, but unsuccessfully.) After both women married, they saw each other only occasionally, but Elizabeth often stayed with her godmother in London as a young woman, and found her and her family ‘so interesting’.

Mary Knox, Penelope’s stepmother (and illustrator of Mary Poppins, daughter of E. H. Shepard, illustrator of Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows) was only seven years older than Penelope, something that might have been resented, but wasn’t. They were frequent companions, so that letters were not really necessary. Nonetheless, many were written, though sadly only a few have survived. I hope they show how dear she was to Penelope, and to all the family.

These collections, which I am most grateful to have been given, depict Penelope as she was with those she loved, but inevitably those who ‘answered some of her long marvellous letters but kept none’ have had to be omitted: Jean Fisher, her friend from prep school, a source of practical kindness and help, as close a friend as Maryllis, if not quite such a kindred spirit – books were off limits; Rawle, her brother, to whom she pays tribute in A House of Air; finally her son, Valpy, of whom she writes in a never completed late essay, with perhaps rather whimsical and unjust exaggeration: ‘I’m not sure that he knows how to write a letter, and I think it possible that he doesn’t read them.’ She took the greatest possible pride in his achievements, as in those of her daughters. The last paragraph of her essay reads:

Once when we were living on the Suffolk coast and the mechanics of daily living had got altogether too much for me, Valpy who must have been about thirteen, looked at me thoughtfully and said he’d take me out for a row. We had a proofed canvas boat, the Little Emily, down on the marshes. She was anchored to a stake in the bank. Quite often one or other of the local boys would ‘borrow’ her and leave her wherever they felt like it. We had to go looking for her in the maze of reeds and narrow waterways. However, that afternoon she was lying patiently in her proper place. We got in and Valpy rowed for an hour or so under the immense shining East Coast sky, a watercolours sky. We went as far as the old pumping mill, through great banks of flowering sedge with grey leaves as sharp as saws. We rowed back, tied up, took out the rowlocks and walked home without saying anything, because nothing needed to be said. I felt more at peace then I think than I had ever done before.