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So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald
Penelope Fitzgerald

Terence Dooley


A fascinating collection of letters from the great English novelist – and prolific correspondent – Penelope FitzgeraldAcclaimed for her exquisitely elegant novels – including the Booker Prize-winning ‘Offshore’ – and superb biographies, Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most admired authors in Britain during the last century. ‘So I Have Thought Of You’ is an invaluable addition her distinguished oeuvre.Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most distinctive voices in British literature. The prizewinning author of nine novels, three biographies, and one collection of short stories, she died in 2000.









So I Have Thought of You

The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald

Edited By Terence Dooley

Preface by A.S. Byatt








Will dich im Traum nicht stören,

Wär schad un deine Ruh.

Sollst meinen Tritt nicht hören –

Sacht, sacht die Türe zu!

Schreib im Vorübergehen

Ans Tor dir: Gute Nacht

Damit du mögest sehen

An dich hab” ich gedacht.

An dich hab” ich gedacht.




Table of Contents


Cover Page (#u62ae94d5-3620-54d7-9d0b-4b111967961a)

Title Page (#u0daf2a2b-07ce-5742-a258-c94d34359d9a)

Epigraph (#u808dfc29-3608-5e21-9d31-9f6f22ca31f6)

PREFACE BY A.S. BYATT (#u6fae6181-2aa3-5a06-8ab8-1bc689951762)

INTRODUCTION (#ub7eae756-9945-530b-87fb-d0a60661c7bb)

A NOTE ON THE TEXT (#u6f2c1e63-bc31-5081-88a2-7443e92e28b3)

I. FAMILY AND FRIENDS (#u4d387528-4d29-5fd1-a9cc-981b711870ec)

Hugh Lee (’Ham’)


(#ubd02877a-448a-580b-afd1-77d9024faa6b)

Tina Fitzgerald


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Maria Fitzgerald


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Maryllis Conder (’Willie’)


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Rachel Hichens and Elizabeth Barnett


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Mary Knox


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Helen Knox


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II. WRITING (#u4b61a1ce-c284-5928-932b-82fd10067f36)

Richard Garnett


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Harold Macmillan


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Mavis Batey


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Malcolm Muggeridge


(#u73229678-02de-5791-a1f3-ff267059095d)

Colin Haycraft


(#u431a2b87-bb6d-5059-97c0-580721b0da57)

Francis King


(#ude084996-1775-5423-a5d5-bf8657ac18f6)

Norah Hartley


(#ue6ee12dc-cbf9-5dcd-b912-6bc08d176287)

Mary Lago


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J. Howard Woolmer


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Richard Ollard


(#u572ef9e7-3b34-57e3-8dfc-d68660434a02)

Stuart Proffitt


(#ub2ecb73b-f3a6-5b60-96e4-8b44c6fad45f)

James Saunders


(#u3c668736-c6e3-54f4-9773-531e078a49bd)

Graham Chesney


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A. L. Barker


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Harvey Pitcher


(#u5c7cd320-38fc-5a7f-9207-a3ecdf159f84)

Frank Kermode


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Hilary Mantel


(#u63f4ca60-0996-5d2f-bb13-2155cbe40a67)

Bridget Nichols


(#u8172bc67-21cb-59ea-b5f9-dc33c7194ca3)

Alyson Barr


(#u08958a44-3f18-54e2-8f9f-ff339bfa6f11)

Dorothy Coles


(#uc7accc08-f62d-54ae-94a4-4a140a382157)

J. L. Carr


(#uf40262a6-dacd-561a-9a25-ec3c6972738f)

Sybille Bedford


(#ufa62ad39-7aee-553a-beee-85a8a4951241)

Julian Barnes


(#u3acfbdc3-2980-5f08-8941-e8473011fff7)

Michael Holroyd


(#ue8950fd9-8236-52ec-a300-57eee4666e0c)

Alberto Manguel


(#u6e56e9bc-4dbd-5c88-9d30-ddc6c63ac7f7)

Masolino d’Amico


(#ud0fc9886-fd58-5e5e-a42e-6beeb883d325)

Richard Holmes


(#u630eb634-9596-502a-ae21-78a62ea5e2f5)

Mandy Kirkby


(#uc31c8c04-5c7a-55fd-a29d-a174a612545e)

Chris Carduff


(#ueabb59db-27ed-52de-814e-496a1ed34f7a)

The Kitchen Drawer Poem (#uc602d199-6a9c-58c6-a571-c185d4daa6b4)

Index (#u1e211152-8744-5662-8d79-9ffb1a64b0d0)

Acknowledgements (#u7c02c1b2-d96e-5df7-a06e-a4b9ee6efb9a)

Also by Penelope Fitzgerald (#uca5a0529-4fb9-5c6b-9de5-244c5b62d23d)

Copyright (#u67e31462-058c-5e69-9069-28d427853bbd)

About the Publisher (#u37e068ef-d98f-5f9d-b5ec-021c27feef6a)




PREFACE BY A.S. BYATT (#ulink_a4bd78f2-5a17-5b1f-a217-627c0207c788)


Penelope Fitzgerald and I taught together in the 1960s at the Westminster Tutors, an institution which prepared students, almost all female, for the long-abolished Entrance Exams to Oxford and Cambridge. We sat together in the small staff room on sagging sofas, amid a rich and pervasive smell of old upholstery and decaying dogs. Penelope was contradictory. She could appear vague and self-effacing and was. She could also say formidably knowledgeable and percipient things about literature. She was generous and exacting. She once rebuked me for not understanding that one of her pupils had a touch of genius. It was a concept that meant a great deal to her, which I did not understand at the time. It did not occur to me, young as I was and obsessed with literature and small children, that she might herself have more than a touch of genius. I don’t know if it occurred to her. I didn’t know her very well. She was interesting to know, but not easy to get to know well.

Her son-in-law, Terence Dooley, points out wisely in his introduction to this collection of letters, that friends and relations of novelists are not always best pleased when they first discover that, and what, the novelists have been writing. I was surprised, and pleased, as I struggled on with my own children and my own teaching and my own need to write, to see that Penelope had become a novelist. I had not been surprised to be told that she had written a biography of Burne-Jones. She was just and scholarly. I had not read her other biographies. When she won the Booker Prize with Offshore I was delighted, and immediately read it. (I did not know that this prize was to be such a trouble and such a problem to Penelope, until I read Terence Dooley’s account of it.) I think I then read almost all her books, more or less as they came out. I admired them. They had a finished, separate quality. They were works of art, in excellent prose. They were funny and terrible. I did not ask whether they had anything to do with her life – whether she had owned a houseboat that sank, or a bookshop. There was something self-sufficient about even those early works. The writer knew exactly what belonged in a particular tale, and how to arrange it. I admired the craft, still without thinking of genius.

She said to me about Human Voices that she wished I would write something in the TLS or somewhere to point out that it was based on a German poem, by Heine, ‘Der Asra’. I hadn’t noticed that, and I don’t know how she expected anyone to do so. ‘Asra’ to me was Coleridge’s transposition of Sara in his diaries and love letters. But I felt challenged, and I reread Human Voices, and I read ‘Der Asra’, a perfect, moving, chilling, brief poem and I saw that Penelope Fitzgerald was not an English lady writer – in a lot of these letters she is putting on an act as one – but someone with an austere, original talent, unlike anyone else writing in this country at this time. I don’t think I then said ‘genius’ to myself. It isn’t a word I much use.

In the light of these letters we can see what parts of Fitzgerald’s own life served as raw material for the earlier novels. This makes me, as a writer and reader, feel uneasy. The connections, the sources, are there, and yet there is something hermetic, something completed, about good novels of the kind Fitzgerald wrote. Deliberately personal novels like Dundy’s The Dud Avocado or Jong’s Fear of Flying almost take off from their authors’ lives and flow back into them. Fitzgerald had made messy life into finished art – even if it was a finished observation about the messiness of life.

It was when I read the last three novels, Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, and The Blue Flower, that I came to understand – hindered by the fact that I had met her long before I read them – that she was a great writer. Each is different; each takes a whole world of history, knowledge, politics and literature and turns it into something at once suggestive and complete, full of newly created people and newly connected ideas. One is Italian, one is Russian, one is German. All are about tragi-comic, fallible human beings living personal lives in a world that is political and spiritual, which is sketched in with the sureness of an artist who knows enough (which means a very great deal) to know exactly what details of daily life, or philosophical thought, to put elegantly in place to make a whole. This is perhaps most remarkable of all in Von Hardenberg’s Prussia. She told me once she had read the records of the salt mines from cover to cover in German to understand how her hero was employed – and then in a few sketched details she places the mines, in his daily life and in his thought about the scientific and spiritual world.

It was at this point only that I read The Knox Brothers, her biography of her father and uncles. I read the book looking for its author, not for its subjects. And I have come to see how much the austere perfectionist – with a wicked sense of humour – is descended from that family of bishops, saints, dons, idealists, intellects. She effaces herself, referring to her birth only as that of a ‘daughter’, and her observations (only about twice, moreover) as those of ‘a niece’. I’m not sure I’ve read a better- written biography. The quality of the writing is derived partly from an exact, matter-of-fact, wildly funny wit in the descriptions. The other part comes from a scrupulous respect for the spiritual lives, as they themselves saw them, of the four brothers. Hermione Lee once asked her in an interview if she would say anything about her feminist or political beliefs. Fitzgerald corrected her; she hoped the readers would be interested in her spiritual beliefs.

The Knox Brothers opens with their grandfather, the missionary Thomas French, who travelled and died taking Christianity to the Afghans and the North West Frontier. Penelope Fitzgerald comments:

Today he would certainly be asked: why not leave these people to their own beliefs? Why press on them something they did not ask for and do not want? To this his reply would be: ‘The viewing of the unseen world instead of the visible things of time – this cannot be a shallow matter; it must be deep or not at all – no halves in such a business.’

The four brothers, in very different ways, inherited this absolute vision. Ronald Knox became a Catholic and distressed his father, an Anglican bishop. Wilfred made unworldly, precise vows of poverty and celibacy and joined the (Anglican) Oratory of the Good Shepherd. Penelope Fitzgerald comments sharply on people who saw him as a delightful eccentric, unconcerned like the birds of the air:

This idea was particularly irritating. Wilfred was the young man who had chosen his ties in the Burlington Arcade, and he loved good wine, good tea and the best tobacco. But renunciation must never be seen in terms of loss.

Dillwyn, a mathematician who helped break the codes of the Enigma machine, was as resolute an unbeliever as those two brothers were believers. Penelope respects that. She describes him in 1916, recruiting Ronnie – ‘an unlikely figure in clerical garb’ – to Naval Intelligence:

To Dilly, all the long-drawn out [family] suffering over his youngest brother was a matter of unrealities; we pray, no one answers, the Churches dispute to the death over how to go on speaking to someone who is not there.

It is in Dillwyn’s logical and startling company that ‘his niece, confined for what seemed an eternity to a boarding school at nearby High Wycombe’, makes a rare appearance. He brings her back late, and confronts the outraged housemistress, who said ‘Rules are made to be kept’, with the answer: ‘But they are defined only by being broken.’

It has rightly been said that Penelope wrote wonderfully about children. Terence Dooley makes the caveat that she liked children, not when they were babies or infants, but ‘when they had reached the age of reason’. (’Ronnie’s niece’ makes another appearance, rebuked by Evelyn Waugh for wanting to leave Ronnie’s sixtieth birthday party early ‘to look after her baby’. Waugh ‘snapped "Children! Nonsense! Nothing so easily replaceable."’)

She tells us, of the Knox family, when their mother was sickening: ‘There was an atmosphere, so frightening to children, of things not being quite right, and of discussions behind closed doors.’ She says of her father that ‘the blow of this death was one from which, in a very long life, he never quite recovered. It gave him, at twelve years old, a spartan endurance and a determination not to risk himself too easily to life’s blows, which might, at times, have been mistaken for coldness.’

The children in whom Penelope, as a writer, is most interested are indeed – like the Knoxes – like Penelope herself: beings who combine clarity of thought with a sense of the existence of the unseen world. They are also perfectionists. The boy actor, in At Freddie’s, practising a jump from a wall again and again may well have died in the search for perfection. Both Hardenberg and his young brother have the same absolutism. They inconvenience others, damage them even, yet are to be loved and understood and respected. There is something of the same quality in the midget child in Innocence, and by extension in the young Italians in that book. The quality is indeed a form of innocence. There is a comic version of it in the boy, observed by Penelope’s father at Rugby, who stopped the school clock with an accurately aimed squash ball. It turned out that the boy had been practising the shot for two years. The headmaster called this ‘un-English’.

Eddie did not agree. The patient, self-contained, self-imposed pursuit of an entirely personal solution seemed to him most characteristically English.

It is in this sense – for she resembled her family, and knew it, as well as observing it clearly – that Penelope Fitzgerald is an English novelist. She is not a novelist of manners, though she observes them wickedly, nor of class, though she understands it. She writes very English versions of European metaphysical fables, embodying them in idiosyncratic reality.

I spoke to her, possibly for the last time, at one of the award parties for the Cohen Prize. She looked distracted, as she usually did at parties. I asked her if she was writing, and she looked at me searchingly and asked: ‘How do you think of a novel?’

I don’t know how she thought of the ones she wrote. I don’t know what they can have been like in the planning – they seem as though they had to be as they are. She made it appear a question of extreme difficulty. I do not think reading her letters will really answer it either – though they illuminate other things. Instead, their reader will enjoy being in the company of Penelope’s courtesy and intelligence. And then will ask for him or herself: ‘How do you think of a novel?’ And understand the difficulty of the question.





INTRODUCTION (#ulink_fe5b1d24-e56b-5e30-8c04-872dd8d989fb)

I: Family and Friends


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.




II: Writing


For someone who was not at all business-like, Penelope managed her literary career decisively and with acumen. She would never employ an agent, and money is rarely mentioned in these letters. She was concerned first that her projects would be published, then that the books would look right, be error-free, reviewed, read and understood. About her writing she kept her own counsel, but she relied on her editors for much reassurance, help, advice and friendship. In finding four publishers in as many years (this was necessitated by the scope of her interests, and her shifts between the genres) she had only her talent and persistence to recommend her. She was probably introduced to Michael Joseph, who published her first book, Edward Burne-Jones, by Jean Fisher, whose cousin was the managing director of the firm. By a lucky coincidence, she had printed the first story of Raleigh Trevelyan, the editor who first read her biography, in her magazine World Review in the early ‘50s. They admired each other’s writing and became friends. Sadly, publishers’ archives are parlously preserved in these days, and I haven’t been able to trace any of her letters to him. The book’s status is an awkward one, because, as Penelope remarks, as a non-member of the art history establishment she wasn’t really allowed to have written it. Literary biographies are usually written about writers. It was patchily but well reviewed and, despite remaining the standard work on its subject, since no-one has discovered more about Burne-Jones, nor written as entertainingly about his loves and sorrows, nor with such enthusiasm and skill about his art, it is nonetheless the least read of her books, the only one now out of print, and never to have been available in America. This is a pity, for its non-readers have missed many wonderful vivid scenes, as when Robert Browning, woken by his geese, sees from his windows Burne-Jones desperately trying to prevent his mistress-muse, Mary Zambaco, from throwing herself off the bridge over the Regents Canal. Penelope’s correspondence with the eminent American Burne-Jones scholar, Mary Lago, shows like minds, whose interest in one subject draws them on and outwards, at the most unexpected tangent, to the next. The seeds of several of her later projects are in this vast, living, late-Victorian world.

The biography, though, didn’t sell, and her next project didn’t sound any more commercial to the rather middlebrow publishing house of Michael Joseph (as Raleigh Trevelyan recently recalled, they preferred to publish books about horses and dogs). It was politely turned down. But there were good reasons to believe Macmillan might be interested in The Knox Brothers, for Harold Macmillan had been much influenced by the Catholic chaplain, Ronald Knox, as an undergraduate at Oxford, and they always remained friends. He appears in the book as ‘C’. Harold Macmillan’s letter of congratulations to Penelope is most touching: ‘you have brought out marvellously well the characteristics of these remarkable men…you have made it all so living and, to me, in my old age deeply moving’.

The first of the revealing sets of letters to editors that form the core of this book is to Richard Garnett at Macmillan: ‘All writers are intimidated by all publishers,’ she remarked to him, and he sounds more intimidating than most, though Penelope politely stood up to him, in part by quoting his brusqueries back to him: ‘It worried me terribly when you 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.’ And again: ‘I recall that my heart sank when you said "I have the right to expect accuracy".’ Garnett was a scrupulous editor, but Penelope won most of the skirmishes over accuracy, even over how best to explain the complex workings of the Enigma decoding machine.

To describe the Knoxes’ many achievements required an overview of several quite distinct disciplines and milieux. Sons of Bishop Knox of Manchester, two of her uncles became priests of quite different stripe. Ronnie, much to his father’s distress, was the most public convert to Catholicism since Newman. A Christian apologist famous between the wars for his witness, he was much in demand in the newspapers and on the radio. He also wrote much-praised learned theological works, was renowned as a wit – his book Let Dons Delight being a particular favourite with the public – translated the Bible, and, while chaplain at Oxford, penned a best-selling series of detective novels. Wilfred, the least known of the brothers, was an Anglican chaplain at Cambridge, wrote profound devotional works, and inspired a generation of clergymen. Penelope’s father Eddie (or ‘Evoe’, his chosen sobriquet), the longest lived of the family, dying in 1970 at the age of ninety, made humour his speciality, writing graceful light verse and prose for Punch. Collected every Christmas in volume form, it was very popular. He edited the paper between the wars and brought it to its highest point of success and circulation. Dillwyn began as a brilliant classicist, and editor of the Herodas papyri. His subsequent career, though shrouded in mystery at the time (Penelope had to break the Official Secrets Act to write about it), has probably had the most long-lasting effects of all the Knoxes’ achievements, as he was instrumental in breaking the German codes in both wars. The letters to Mavis Batey, his assistant at Bletchley Park, illuminate this aspect of Penelope’s research.

She began the book a year or so after her father’s death, as a memorial to him and her uncles, rarely mentioning herself, and even then only as ‘the niece’ and ‘the daughter’. Her research had the good effect of reuniting her with her cousins, and igniting a warm friendship in particular with Oliver Knox, Dilly’s son, which would last until the end of her life. The Knox Brothers is a skilful and original family biography, interleaving four contrasting stories with a wealth of feeling and detail. It also captures a whole period of British life, the memory of which was beginning to fade in very different times. This was immediately appreciated, and, with its appearance, in 1977, Penelope could be said to have arrived. With her Burne-Jones she had repaid a debt to an artist who, in an epiphanic childhood moment, when the sun shone through his stained-glass window, ‘The Last Judgement’, in Birmingham cathedral, had awoken in her a sense of ideal beauty in art. In The Knox Brothers she captured a quality of mind, personality, temperament and values that defined her. When Francis King seemed to mock the brothers’ sometimes unremitting brilliance and sanctity, she replied ‘I loved them’. Now she need no longer consider herself the daughter or the niece. Free of that long shadow, she could delve into herself. She would essay fiction.

In fact she had already begun, but in a recognisably Knoxian mode, with a comic detective story, perhaps a false start. We do not know quite how she came to offer The Golden Child to Colin and Anna Haycraft at Duckworth, as the firm cannot trace the correspondence relating to the book, but she certainly, and soon, came to regret it. In September 1977 she wrote to Richard Garnett at Macmillan:

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 are, it doesn’t matter, and no-one will notice…everyone has to do the best they can.

But Duckworth were known for the ruthless editing of manuscripts, in the service of a house style: the nouvelle; indeed they were said to have improved Beryl Bainbridge’s first novels by this process. With Penelope it ever after rankled, yet even in its truncated form The Golden Child has much to amuse, with its egomaniacal establishment villains, and its unpromisingly named sleuth, Professor Untermensch. He, like Dilly Knox, is an expert decoder, in this case of Garamantian hieroglyphs, which Penelope draws herself, and with which she has a great deal of fun, as in their corresponding phonemes: Poo, Sog, Hak, Mum, etc.

If the book itself has to be decoded, it is not Penelope’s fault, and it was enjoyed when it appeared in 1977, in the same year as The Knox Brothers, though it was only mentioned in round-ups of crime fiction, a category to which it does not quite belong, as it has serious points to make about fakery, and about the corruption and denaturing of art through money and politics.

Penelope seemed to have taken the mutilation of The Golden Child philosophically, but she would have worse to contend with from Duckworth, as the correspondence with Colin Haycraft about her next book demonstrates all too clearly. With the money from The Knox Brothers she had embarked on a long-dreamt-of voyage to China. From the perspective of all that distance, she had the revelation all writers await. She saw as in a blinding light how to transmute the events of her own life into serious fiction. The first fruits of this earth-tremor was to be The Bookshop.

No woman is a hero to her son-in-law, and yet, when I first came across this book (till then unaware of its very existence) lying in boundproof form on her kitchen table, where it had been written, and took advantage of Penelope’s temporary absence to read it in one sitting, I did have a sense of ‘What? And in our house?’ I had no doubt that this was the real thing, and still feel grateful for the stolen privilege of being one of the first people to read it. Ever after that Penelope had an extra dimension of mystery to me. I immediately wrote her a note to express my amazed and delighted appreciation; it would have been too embarrassing to confess in person. I was touched, much later, to come across the never-referred-to note among her papers in Texas.

The Bookshop is not especially autobiographical, but it does seem to grind an axe in its depiction of Southwold as ‘Hardborough’, an exemplar of provincial mean spirit, the petty exercise of power, and philistinism. It is eloquent on the great beauty of the region, only spoilt for her by the loss, through the family’s insolvency, of ‘Blackshore’, their home, the large former oyster warehouse on the Hard, on which the bookshop was modelled. (But an earlier loss, the failure of her magazine World Review, which, in the end, ‘hadn’t been wanted’ must surely also underlie the book.) The real bookshop, in the High Street, remained open for many years, ably run by Mrs Neame, the old friend of the book’s dedication, whose assistant Penelope became, after her financial misfortunes. In reality, the family made a good many kind supportive friends there, though mainly among the intellectual bohemia of nearby Walberswick, including the Freuds, Sampsons and Fiennes. The moral atmosphere of the book, perhaps also some of the form (each chapter a scene), comes, as is mentioned in the blurb, from the Scènes de la Vie de Province of Balzac’s Human Comedy, which she studied with Tina, to help her with her ‘A’ level. The style, however, with its dry compassionate humour, could already be nobody but Penelope. It is still one of her most popular books, particularly abroad, in Europe and America, where it is seen as a very English classic. It has just been reissued in France with the misleading, but certainly striking, title L’Affaire Lolita. It was reviewed, in 1978, with respect and enthusiasm, and, with almost unheard-of good fortune for a first novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

With all of this Duckworth should have been well contented. However, with hindsight, Penelope should have thought better of entering a small pool of lady writers, all sharing some of the same traits, one of whom – Anna Haycraft (her pen-name Alice Thomas Ellis) – was also the nominal fiction editor. With Colin she got on, admiring his jovial eccentricity and classical scholarship. She had hoped he would accompany her to the Booker dinner, but he did not, adducing the improbable lack of a dinner jacket. Shortly after this it was inexplicably implied to Penelope that Duckworth had a surfeit of elegant nouvelles and she should return to crime-writing, which would sell better. Though we see Colin Haycraft hastily backtracking, the damage was done. She was deeply hurt. She would take her next novel to Collins. Here at last she fell on her feet: she had found a publishing home.

It is impossible to overstate Penelope’s energy and creativity in the late 1970s. There would be five novels in as many years, as well as an enormous amount of work on two biographies, each dear to her heart as projects, both of which she had to abandon, one from scruple, the other in the face of determined resistance from publishers. Although she would say little to friends or editors about her fiction (and that little misleading, for the novels must speak for themselves), the letters are full of fascinating detail about the unwritten biographies.

‘The Poetry Bookshop’ was the first conceived of these, and its intended theme is, if anything, more compelling and urgent today: the loss, through the unforeseen side-effects of modernism, of the lyric voice of English verse – the voice that spoke to the ordinary reader’s heart, the loss therefore (by now almost complete) of the mass audience for serious poetry. The book would have concerned itself with the rehabilitation of the Georgians, whose headquarters was at Harold and Alida Monro’s poetry bookshop in Devonshire Street (now Boswell Street) in Bloomsbury. Yeats, Frost, Edward Thomas, Lawrence, Wilfred Owen, even Eliot, all passed through its portals, but Penelope was especially interested in the minor figures: Monro himself, Anna Wickham, F. S. Flint and Charlotte Mew, with their, as she discovered, often tragic and tormented lives, who never quite made it, but each produced a handful of perfect lyrics. How one regrets this book, which she did not abandon until all four of her publishers had turned it down in succession. Yet fragments of it survive, first in the story of Harold Monro, in her introduction to J. Howard Woolmer’s scholarly bibliography of publications of the Poetry Bookshop, especially of its beautiful illustrated rhyme sheets, a treasured childhood memory of Penelope’s. Her letters to Woolmer trace the development of a warm transatlantic relationship between bookseller (albeit a very grand one) and collector, which becomes a meeting of minds as we see them sharing the details of their research. He most generously gave her some of the precious rhyme sheets when he realised she couldn’t afford them, and put her in the way of more money, most necessary to impecunious authors, by persuading her to sell her papers to Texas, and thus no doubt saving many of them, for she was modestly careless in such things.

To Richard Ollard, her great support and ally at Collins over the next years, we owe the eventual publication of the other fruit of ‘The Poetry Bookshop’ research: her wonderful dark biography Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, which reads so much like one of her novels. Ollard, like Raleigh Trevelyan also a distinguished writer, was senior literary editor at Collins, and perhaps the last of the ‘gentleman publishers’. They suited each other; she could rely on him. ‘You can always consult Richard if anything worries you,’ his assistant, Sarah, told Penelope. They became friends, as they remained to the end of her life. With him (as with several other correspondents, notably Francis King who gave her much encouragement) she discussed, in a spirit of high comedy, her difficulties and adventures in the preparation of her life of Leslie (L. P.) Hartley. The book, which sounded more promising than ‘The Poetry Bookshop’ to publishers, was still promised to Colin Haycraft, despite their rift.

What became of it? She had to overcome the implacable opposition of Lord David Cecil, Hartley’s literary executor, even to begin it. Cecil had been the love of Hartley’s life. Long married, he didn’t perhaps wish to acknowledge the basis of their youthful friendship. Anthony Powell kindly intervened to persuade him that Penelope would be the ideal person to tell Hartley’s story with the tact needed, and she worked hard on the book for three years from 1977. It wasn’t so much the gondoliers, the murderous, manipulative man-servants, the oceans of gin, the snobbery (all those duchesses), the extreme right-wing politics, the pot-shots at swans from his house on the River Avon, that dissuaded her from proceeding, but the affection she developed for his loving sister, Norah. How could she present the dissipation of his achievement of the ‘40s and ‘50s, the coarsening of his clear, careful voice (an echo of it is audible in The Bookshop, as Haycraft points out) in a good light? Could she betray the memory of their own friendship, of his support during her first literary career, her editorship of World Review, when she often published him, by the honest depiction of his long decline, all too visible in the desperately feeble novels and stories of his later years? She couldn’t, and wouldn’t. Somewhat wistfully, she gave up on the project in the early 1980s. These letters give a strong sense of what a biography it might have been.

The book she did deliver to Richard Ollard in 1979 was Offshore. Here one feels distinctly in Fitzgeraldland, or, in this case, afloat on the brackish, swirling, hardly benevolent waters of a great tidal river, uncertainly tethered to a land that has brought no luck. Though the characters couldn’t be more English, the tragicomedy of their fates (tragi-farce she called it) sounds notes more common in European fiction. It was sometimes painful to read for her family. All art, the adult characters invented or composite, there is much in it that was recognisably the case: ‘Grace’, the houseboat, probably bought for its name as much as its cheapness, appears as itself, as does Stripey the cat, and the two little girls are called Tina and Maria in the manuscript. Reality dances with imagination in a treacherous way, games are being played with remembered facts, though not with the feelings beneath them. In the third chapter, Nenna, who is as distanced from Penelope as she is like her, finds her thoughts becoming ‘a kind of perpetual magistrate’s hearing’ about her marriage and her motives for her actions. After many ordeals, the drama is resolved in irresolution. The boat never actually goes down.

Offshore was enthusiastically reviewed, shortlisted for the Booker, and then, against all expectations, won it. But what should have been a triumph had decidedly mixed results.

The Booker has an honourable reputation for selecting the best and most interesting novels of the year, even if they don’t always win, and it is now a venerable and respected institution, guaranteeing a (sometimes vast) increase in sales for the winner, and boosting reputations; but that only began to happen a year or so after Penelope won. Then, shamefully, in the early years when the prize ceremony received fairly shoddy television coverage, the lucky six authors shortlisted, whose only sin was to have written praiseworthy novels, were lined up as in a coconut shy to be insulted by media pundits, who gave no very convincing impression of having read the books in question. That year the firm favourite was A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul, a fine novel that Penelope later recommended for another prize. It would have been an equally worthy winner, but it is said, with truth, that judging literary competitions is like comparing gazelles with tigers. Journalists had already written their pieces, and were affronted by not even having heard, in most cases, of Penelope. What followed could be described as a field day of ignorant and exceedingly unfair indignation. The Critics on Radio 3 (which had praised The Bookshop to the skies), called the result a disgrace and a very bad day for modern fiction, or something of the kind. ‘When I got to the Book Programme, soaking wet because I’d had to be photographed on a bale of rope on the Embankment, R[obert] Robinson was in a very bad temper and complained to his programme executive "who are these people, you promised me they were going to be the losers?"’ wrote Penelope to Francis King. ‘I’ll never forget the Book Programme,’ Penelope wrote to Richard Ollard; ‘I was delighted to hear that you are printing off a few more Offshores. I thought it had got shipwrecked altogether by so many unpleasant remarks.’

It may have set back her career. Her next two novels, though liked, did not receive the appreciation they deserved. Hasty readers and reviewers missed the depths of Human Voices and At Freddie’s: it was too easy to take them only for the dazzling entertainments that in one sense they are. Her ellipses and puzzles often led them to wonder if she had left something out, if the apparent holes in her plots were accidental, but really she intended her readers to work, to solve the mysteries the stories hinge on for themselves. She tried to define Human Voices for the blurb that Richard Ollard was writing, and makes clear its complexity:

It is really about the love-hate relationship between 2 of the eccentrics on whom the BBC depended, and about love, jealousy, death, child-birth in Broadcasting House and the crises that go on to produce the 9 o’clock news on which the whole nation relied during the war years, heartbreak &c, and also about this truth telling business.

The original title, ‘Ten Seconds From Now’, seemed only to refer to the urgency and danger of the times, to the effort of the whole nation to avert evil by upholding the truth, in which Penelope participated as a programmes assistant at the BBC. The preferred title, ‘Human Voices’, taken from Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’, is apt both in its reference to the disembodied broadcasters, and to the pain of young love: for ‘human voices wake us and we drown’. Another poem also underlies the book, as she points out helpfully or unhelpfully to Ollard in the same letter: ‘(Incidentally, as no-one reads Heine I suppose no-one will understand the name Asra, but that’s by the way.)’ Annie Asra, the heroine of Human Voices, like all Penelope’s female protagonists, represents her in some aspects. Heine’s poem ‘Der Asra’ is about a slave slowly dying for love of his mistress. All his tribe, the Asra, in fact die if they fall in love, and Annie is clearly a member of it. The unsuitability of the people we fall in love with is one of Penelope’s themes. She goes so far as to wonder, in one of her novels, whether men and women are ever quite the right thing for each other. However, she certainly believed in love unto death.

At Freddie’s was originally called ‘What! Are They Children?’, but although the precocious boy actors are its ultimate focus, it is also about the theatre and its monstres sacrés, unhappy love, life’s casualties, and the impossibility of teaching children what they don’t require to know, what they don’t already intuit as necessary to them. The teachers in the novel, Pierce and Hannah, quickly realise that it is only their support and kindness that their charges need. It is interesting that their backgrounds in some respects mirror Desmond’s and Penelope’s. Pierce is an Irish Catholic; Hannah is from Ulster (where the Knoxes have their roots). Shakespeare’s ‘King John’, with its murder of innocents, is the play being rehearsed in the book, for Freddie is a serious headmistress. The character derives from Miss Freeston, head not of Italia Conti, where Penelope began her teaching in the early 1960s, but of Westminster Tutors, the eccentric Oxbridge crammer where she was still teaching. However Freddie is given some of the traits and fearsome reputation of Lilian Baylis, the much-loved dragon of the Old Vic, the theatre that flew the flag for Shakespeare in London for so many years.

Penelope wrote to Richard Ollard about the cover design for At Freddie’s:

I wanted a high wall with a broken basket of fruit at the bottom of it, having evidently fallen, one of the Covent Garden baskets. That gives some movement, because it’s evidently fallen from somewhere. I did think of the stage children as to some extent expendable products, like the fruit.

Ollard, the fourth publisher to do so, politely turned down ‘The Poetry Bookshop’ project four times. In the face of Penelope’s lively persistence, which makes for entertaining reading, and with the reduction of its focus to a study of the life of Charlotte Mew, and how it gave rise to her few, haunting poems, in the end he gracefully bowed to the inevitable. She wrote to him as the publication date neared:

the interesting things about CMew are that: 1. she was a poet, otherwise I shouldn’t bother to write about her 2. she was a lesbian 3. she was unhappy 4. she has a curious lifespan as a writer, from the nineties to the 1920s…I fear none of the papers would be interested in an extract about a lesbian who didn’t make it…The interest, to me, is that she’s a divided personality who had to produce so many versions of herself at the same time. Perhaps we all do.

Chris Carduff, in his first assignment as an editor, oversaw the Addison Wesley edition in the US, and sensibly and logically enriched it with a selection of Mew’s poems.

It is curious how many successful writers have been drawn to write wonderful books about unsuccessful ones. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (but she had so few) is a tragic, deeply literary book, of similar length and structure to her novels. It was her last biography. From now on, nonetheless, all her fiction would include people who had really existed. The two worlds were merging.

In the letters to Richard Ollard, as befitted their flourishing friendship, she discussed freely the upheavals in her life provoked by the decision of my wife and myself to move to the country and bring up our children there. Now she would live between Somerset and London. In Theale she gardened, helped sometimes with Fergus (though she wasn’t terribly good with babies and toddlers; she preferred children to have reached the age of reason), relaxed as much as she ever did, and we hoped that she would be able to write. However she found that ‘I personally can only write in London, I love the noise and squalor and the perpetual distractions and the temptation to take an aircraft somewhere else’, and so Jean Fisher helped her to find a base, at 76 Clifton Hill, St John’s Wood, in the house of a friend of a friend where she lived in ‘a kind of attic, overlooking the tree-tops, with gold wallpaper’. This arrangement worked well until 1987, when her work for the writers’ association PEN International and the Arts Council, her research at the British Museum reading room for her books, and her tireless reviewing, kept her more and more in London, and her daughter Maria and son-in-law John generously agreed to convert the coachhouse of their new house in Bishop’s Road, Highgate for her. They looked after her there for the rest of her life.

During the years at Clifton Hill she was taking her writing in a new direction. An examination of her manuscripts in the Harry Ransom Humanities Center at the University of Texas seems to indicate that, however intense the thought and technique that went into them, her first four novels almost wrote themselves. Her pure fiction is entrancing, but now she was attempting to combine this with the novel of ideas, the metaphysical novel. She had been considering writing about Italy, and specifically Florence, for a decade, the book that after many evolutions became Innocence. An early version of the Ridolfis appears in a first draft, which was to have been about the great Florentine flood, and might even have been intended to be a detective story. It is Francis King she credits with putting her on track: ‘you’ll hardly remember, having been to so many other places since, that you told me the story of the Italian family and their dwarfs yourself’. This cruel legend or parable from the 1560s is retold by Penelope with a wealth of vivid apparently historical detail as the first chapter of Innocence, shedding its mysterious light and darkness over the Shakespearean comedy of tangled loves, with the rumbling of politics beneath, set in a 1950s Italy seemingly known and recreated from within. The Ridolfis of those earlier days were midgets. When their daughter’s companion starts outgrowing her her legs must be cut off at the knees.

The twentieth-century Ridolfis retain ‘a tendency to rash decisions, perhaps always intended to ensure other people’s happiness’. Stuart Proffitt, who took over as her editor on Richard Ollard’s retirement, suggested ‘Happiness’ as a title, but Penelope remarked that the novel could as easily be called ‘Unhappiness’. The happiness in question is marital. Constant misunderstandings drive the lovers, Chiara and Salvatore, together and apart. By the end their young stormy marriage seems to have been saved by a hair’s breadth, to be provisionally permanent. Salvatore throws up his hands:

‘What’s to become of us? We can’t go on like this.’

‘Yes, we can go on like this. We can go on exactly like this for the rest of our lives.’

As well as telling a story, Penelope now sought to evoke a culture, and an historical period. Every page gives evidence of a lightly worn, instructive and relevant erudition: about viticulture, law, medicine, architecture, the cinema, fashion, economics, and, above all, politics. For Gramsci, the influential communist reformer who wrote of the ethical society, is the historical figure introduced here, his ideas appealing to Penelope in much the same way as did those of William Morris. Lastly, one should point out the striking, if idealised, resemblance of Chiara to Penelope herself, particularly in the cover-picture she chose for Innocence, one of Pontormo’s angels, from his Annunciation. The virtues of her new method were immediately recognised by the critics, and her reputation began to grow: she was again shortlisted for the Booker, the third of her four novels to be so honoured.

Through vicissitudes of archive-keeping, the letters to Stuart Proffitt about this and her next two novels have (I hope temporarily) disappeared. However, for The Beginning of Spring, her next novel, we do have the letters to Harvey Pitcher, author of The Smiths of Moscow, credited by Penelope as having been vital to her research. These, like many of the letters in the ‘Writing’ section, show how meticulous and indefatigable she was in this aspect of her work, with what a sense of adventure and enjoyment she undertook it. On one level The Beginning of Spring, first called Nellie and Lisa, is once again a brilliant tragicomedy of marital misunderstanding, memorable like Offshore for its depiction of children not unlike her own. The spring is also the Russian revolutionary spring, for she chose historical periods, which seemed to promise change, emancipation and spiritual rebirth. The novel’s first conception also dates back at least a decade. In Texas is a notebook entitled The Greenhouse, with an early draft of the story of the English expatriate printer which takes the firm on into the May Revolution itself, but this proved unworkable. Pitcher’s book and The Times’ Russian Supplements of the period provide the realistic detail, but the uncanny imaginative power that makes a countrified chaotic Moscow almost tangible surely springs from a deep knowledge of and affinity with Russian literature, especially the Tolstoy of Resurrection and Master and Man, whose idiosyncratic Christian socialism infuses the novel. More than this, in The Beginning of Spring, uninsistently, symbolically, mysteriously, the presence of the supernatural is felt, and it will continue to startle and unsettle (as do the ghosts of the future in the birch wood here) in her last two novels and late stories.

Her next novel, The Gate of Angels, is also set in the first decade of last century, on the cusp of the modern era. It revolves around an accident, which may have been caused by a ghost, and culminates in a miracle. Fred, the Cambridge scientist, and Daisy, the London nurse down on her luck, live in minutely recreated social spheres which are set never to collide. Yet ‘Chance is one of the manifestations of God’s will’ and they wake up naked in a Samaritan stranger’s bedroom, having been knocked off their bicycles by a carter who has vanished into thin air. (This incident was a real one, recounted in Edward Burne-Jones.) Penelope is at her most formally experimental and teasing in her late fiction, but she gave some clues as to the interpretation of this novel to an enquiring reader, Bridget Nichols:

The Gate of Angels is about the questions of faith and generosity…Dr Matthews is a portrait of Monty James. I set my novel in the Cambridge of 1912 because that was the height of the so-called ‘body/mind controversy’, with the scientists of the Cavendish in controversy with professing Christians, championed by James who was then Provost of Kings.

Dr Matthews, like M. R. James, tells ghost stories, and, in one of Penelope’s intertextual serious games, tells one here to explain the bicycle accident to himself by means of a local haunting. He adds plausibility to it, by seeming to ground it in his own youthful experience, telling it in the first person, something James never did. ‘Do I believe in such things?’ Matthews asks himself, and goes on: ‘Well, I am prepared to consider the evidence, and accept it if I am satisfied.’ That places retain the evil that was done in them, and that apparently ordinary people, like Daisy, for whom the gate of Angels opens, may have some healing force of goodness in them, these were certainly things that Penelope believed. She also wants us to accept the miraculous as part of life.

The Gate of Angels was the fourth of Penelope’s books to be shortlisted for the Booker, and it was on three other shortlists. Though it did not win, it received wonderful reviews, especially from other writers, and sold very well. Much was now expected of her. It was extraordinary enough to have started on a literary career so late, to have run it entirely on her own terms, only writing what she chose, never faltering either in excellence or variety; but perhaps the most remarkable thing of all was that her next and last novel, published when she was seventy-eight, should have been generally hailed as her masterpiece, and, despite its complexity and intellectual scope, become a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic.

If The Blue Flower is certainly a novel and a work of the imagination, it is a most original one in that its hero and most of its characters were real people, yet it transcends the genres of biography and historical fiction: it seems to be an enquiry into what it means to be alive. With imperfect German but great concentration on what was germane to her artistic purposes, Penelope studied Mähl and Samuel’s Complete Works, Diaries, and Letters (including letters to him) of Novalis, the Romantic poet. It took her two years, and gave her ample material to write the story of his tragically curtailed life, if that had been her intention, but it wasn’t. What fascinated her was the blue flower itself. She is on record as saying that in an ideal life she wouldn’t have gone to Oxford to read English, but would have become an artist. Much of her writing in World Review (and her first book, Burne-Jones) was on art. In the ‘70s, one of her many projects was a book on flower symbolism in the original pre-Raphael painters of the Quattrocento. In this she saw a Christian mysticism that went to the heart of her beliefs. It appears from the very chaotic drafts of The Blue Flower in her archive in Texas (where also is the folder on flower symbolism) that she wanted to incorporate the anachronical story of the discovery of the blue poppy in the high Himalayas in the early twentieth century by Colonel Eric Bailey – from whom it derives its botanical name, Meconopsis Baileyi – and a mysterious Jesuit priest. All this is the pollen that led her to the poet Novalis and his incomplete mystical novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the beginning of which she quotes teasingly in the wonderful seventeenth chapter ‘What is the Meaning?’: ‘…I long to see the blue flower…’ In Novalis, the flower is a remnant of the golden age when plants and animals spoke and told their secrets to mankind. In a dream he sees it mutate into a sweet girl’s face: ‘Du hast das Wunder der Welt gesehen.’ You have seen the wonder of the world.

Fritz, the young poet who has not yet rechristened himself, but is already for those around him a genius in whose presence ‘everything is illuminated’, finds his meaning and wisdom in Sophie, an absolutely ordinary Saxon girl, yet one who has moral grace, whose likeness cannot be taken, who is indefinable. If love is the answer to the first question expressed as a chapter-heading, how is it altered by the second: ‘What is pain?’ Sophie has ‘opened the door’ to Fritz, but now she succumbs to tuberculosis, undergoes appalling operations without anaesthetic, dies. Fritz is of little comfort or practical help to her during this time, though after her death he takes the symbolic name Novalis and writes his great philosophical poem Hymns to the Night in her memory.

Almost incidentally to its high themes, The Blue Flower recreates the whole fabric of life in eighteenth-century Prussia, food and drink, taxes and laws, roads, landscape, seasons, philosophy and salt mining, and establishes the characters of the twenty or so people closest to Fritz in the course of his bildung, with their own concerns and point of view, characters at every stage of development, so that for every reader there is one who speaks to his or her heart. Inexplicably it missed every British prize list when it came out in 1995, but the reviews were outstanding, again especially from other writers, and in the end-of-year round-ups it was book of the year, with 25 mentions, and went on to sell 25,000 copies in hardback.

Stuart Proffitt, Penelope’s editor for her last four novels, did much to promote and advance her career, and her gratitude to him (and their warm friendship) is evident in the letters that survive. Her dream had been to be published in paperback, and this was realised with the advent of Collins’ Flamingo imprint. It meant even more to her to see a stranger reading one of her books, and laughing at one of her jokes on the tube – a modest ambition perhaps, but one achieved. Her letters to Stuart demonstrate his devotion and kindness. She was distressed when he felt obliged to leave HarperCollins on a matter of principle not unconnected with the new owner. Still, Flamingo’s excellent care of her continued under the new team of Philip Gwyn-Jones, Karen Duffy and Mandy Kirkby. They found time to escort her to the readings, signings, events and festivals, which she was becoming too frail, and would have been too shy, to attend alone. Another devoted editor who was to achieve much for her now came back into her life.

Several publishers, including the redoubtable Nan Talese at Doubleday, had already attempted to ‘break’ her in America, without great success. It was feared, and Penelope herself thought, that she was ‘too British’. Chris Carduff had returned to publishing after some years spent editing The New Criterion, and was now employed at the Boston firm of Houghton Mifflin. He persuaded his boss, Janet Silver, to publish The Blue Flower in the US in 1997. It received a most enthusiastic and erudite review from Michael Hoffman, the lead and front cover of the New York Times Books section. That year for the first time the National Book Critics Circle Award was opened to foreign authors and Penelope won it, beating Roth’s American Pastoral, DeLillo’s Underworld and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. She particularly appreciated winning this prize, as it is judged by 700 book reviewers. There was some grumbling, as at her Booker Prize, for here again she was an unknown David against Goliaths, but it was politer, and soon to be silenced by a chorus of praise. The Blue Flower went on to sell 100,000 copies, and all her other novels followed it into print in America, permitting a timely retrospective of her career. Each of her books was admiringly reviewed as somebody’s favourite. The Bookshop, in particular, after twenty years, but recapturing the 1950s, was now recognised as a British classic.

In fact her novels had brought back all the periods of her active non-writing life, of her long literary silence. Human Voices described her young woman’s war service at the BBC, and the unique role that institution played in the upholding of truth and the national spirit in those years; Innocence recalled the 1950s, her young married years, when she was publishing Alberto Moravia and the younger Italian writers in World Review; The Bookshop, the failure of her early literary hopes and experiment in country-living in the late 1950s; Offshore, so redolent of the early 1960s and London’s river, her lowest point; At Freddie’s, her first teaching job, and the London stage in the days before the National Theatre, when, incidentally, she was beginning her self-apprenticeship to become a writer. Neither should her last three ‘historical’ novels, including The Blue Flower, be assumed to be free of autobiographical elements: Nellie in The Beginning of Spring, Daisy in The Gate of Angels, Fritz’s mother, all have aspects of Penelope, and her child characters always owe much to her own children. In choosing her periods she was chiefly guided, as she declared in interviews, by the wish to write of moments of optimism and ideological ferment, ‘when people really thought things might get better’, when the debates between science and religion, revolution and the unalterable, had not yet apparently ended in atomic bombs, tyranny and unbelief.

From the first, as we see everywhere in these letters, Penelope was most conscientious in undertaking the duties inherent in being a writer of reputation. Though she never enjoyed committees, she worked for PEN, the Arts Council, and later became Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature. A cause near her heart was that biographers should be recognised by grant-awarding bodies as creative writers. She was successful in fighting for this, as in her energetic support of Public Lending Right, which very belatedly ensured that writers were paid for the lending-out of their books by libraries. Her friendships with Francis King, Sybille Bedford and Michael Holroyd originated in this work. She met J. L. Carr, Thomas Hinde, Edward Blishen and A. L. Barker (known as Pat, author of short stories of fine sensibility, not to be confused with the equally estimable novelist Pat Barker) through her tutoring of fiction courses for the Arvon Foundation. She encouraged and advanced the careers of other writers not only through her tireless reviewing (there was almost no English paper she didn’t write for, reviewing regularly for the Evening Standard, the London Review of Books, the TLS, the Tablet, the New York Times and the Washington Post) but also by judging for most of the literary prizes, biography, poetry and fiction, including, twice, the Booker. She argued fiercely for Roddy Doyle’s The Van, and Magnus Mills’ The Restraint of Beasts, managing to get them both onto the respective shortlists. Among other young writers she championed were Glyn Maxwell, Candia McWilliam and Claire Messud. Among those who reviewed her, or whom she reviewed, and who are represented in this collection are Hilary Mantel, the biographer Richard Holmes and Sir Frank Kermode.

From 1995 onwards, as she entered her eighties, though she continued to work as hard as ever, and retained her all her formidable intellectual acuity, Penelope’s health and mobility began to decline. She suffered badly from rheumatism and from the slow weakening of her heart. She was no longer able to get to the British Museum reading room where she had spent so many happy years in research, following the circuitous trails which led to her biographies and later novels. The beautiful round reading room itself closed, and she couldn’t contemplate transferring her affections to the new British Library. Now for the first time she began to complain of a lack of inspiration. It troubled her that she had accepted a generous advance for a new novel, the idea for which stubbornly refused to come to her. In the meantime she wrote, to commission, her wonderful introductions to Emma, Middlemarch and, repaying the debt to friendship, J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, and also her amazing last three stories. How to classify her short fiction? Are they fables, parables, folk-tales, poems even? She insisted that each demanded more effort to write than a novel. They range across the whole world in setting, from New Zealand to Tasmania, Mexico, Istanbul (twice), Brittany, Jerusalem (by implication), Iona, far Somerset, the Home Counties, London, and across four centuries.

Though under no external pressure to repay her advance, in 1999 she gratefully accepted her publishers’ suggestion that she collect her stories into a volume. The title, The Means of Escape, was supplied by Janet Silver of Houghton Mifflin, who considered that the story provided a unifying theme, which Penelope doubted, feeling rightly that the stories are as unsettlingly different from one another as are her novels. Two at least of them could have been novels. Christian motifs proliferate throughout them: the uninvited guest, the unfaithful servant, the unawakened soul, the buried talent. There are ghosts and hauntings. There are two great cries of protest: ‘She belonged to the tribe of torturers. Why pretend they don’t exist?’ and ‘Make no mistake, you pay for every drop of blood in your body.’ Yet there is always the faith that good will prevail. Through character or fate, self-knowledge and grace may be gained or regained. There remains, against all odds, the possibility of salvation.

The Means of Escape was written during the concentrated struggle to perfect The Blue Flower. It is rich enough to have become the vicarage novel that Penelope was perhaps always on the verge of writing. The story is characterised by a black humour. Evil uncomprehended by innocence flickers through it – a stench, a hood, an elected silence. The shameless may escape, the dutiful never.

The Likeness was to have been a novel based on the Ionides family from Burne-Jones. It is now a romantic high comedy, based on misunderstanding. The Axe, Penelope’s first published fiction, from 1975, is both a memorably chilling ghost story in its own right and a brilliant ‘take’ on Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. At Hiruharama is an example of the anecdote or tall tale, which evades the narrator as it assumes a moral and pictorial solidity of its own. The Prescription is a violent fable about dishonesty. Not Shown hints at an English murder.

Penelope’s three great last stories were written and published in 1997 and 1998. They are absolutely ambiguous; yet there is an urgency to be understood in them. They seem to be about inspiration at different stages of life: the human cost of joy. Desideratus sees a resourceful boy wrest the coin he has been given from the pallid ghost of his weaker self. He must earn his talent through travail. The Red-Haired Girl, unwilling model to an uncomprehending painter, tells him, before she disappears, what he’s missed in his search for the picturesque: ‘You don’t know what I want and you don’t know what I feel.’ In Beehernz, a famous conductor who has become a hermit to block out the noisy music of the world, hears a young woman sing a folk setting of Goethe’s Gefunden: ‘I went in the woodland/Nothing to find’ but it goes on ‘I saw in the shadow/A stone-flax stay’. Too long a prisoner of his mute keyboard, he has recaptured his visionary sense, symbolised by a blue wayside flower, the linseed.

Though all attempts to describe and define a life are doomed to failure, it is tempting to see Penelope’s as describing a dramatic arc from dazzling early success, a promising career as literary editor, a comfortable, if hubristic, establishment in Hampstead, down to destitution and humiliation, the half-way house for the homeless, and thence ever upwards, by dint of hard work, study and inspiration, until at eighty she was at the peak of her achievement, reputation and earnings, passing for the first time, as she ruefully remarks in the letters, into a higher tax bracket. Her one final ambition was to see in the new Millennium. This also she achieved. Several of the series of letters follow her right up to the days before her first stroke, when she was eighty-three, busier than ever, reviewing for papers on both sides of the Atlantic, judging a prize, preparing a new American edition of The Knox Brothers (a family of which she was by now the most remarkable member) and proof-reading her stories, The Means of Escape, for publication by Flamingo and Houghton Mifflin. She survived a month longer, able to talk a little to her children, until she suffered two further strokes and died on 28 April 2000. She is buried in the churchyard of St Mary’s, Hampstead.

It occurred to me, during my researches for this book, to wonder where she worshipped when, at her lowest point, she lived offshore on Grace. The boat is described in the book as being moored on Battersea Reach; in reality it had been moored at Dakin’s yard, World’s End, but directly opposite St Mary’s Battersea. Inside that lovely eighteenth-century church, the first thing that one sees, among a wonderful collection of modern stained-glass windows, Blake and the grain of sand, Turner, Franklin and the promise of happiness, on the left side of the door is a large and beautiful blue flower.

Terence Dooley




A NOTE ON THE TEXT (#ulink_66433d92-2e45-5858-ab00-503d8b87b3ae)


Penelope’s handwriting is clear, graceful and original, her own creation. In her youth it was a simplified italic, each letter carefully formed and rarely joined up to the next. Later, the characters connect more often, though never for a complete word; it gives an artistic impression. It is a pleasure to read and transcribe, because there is never any doubt about what she has written.

Her punctuation has been preserved, with its occasional inconsistencies, or survivals from an earlier era (Mrs: for Mrs), its underlinings for emphasis or titles, its capitals for jokes. The ampersands, which looked so well in the blue ink italic, look like so many snails in black print, therefore they are now and. She wrote thankyou as one word, and I have not altered this.

Individual letters haven’t been cut, save in one or two cases where the fun being had at someone’s expense would never have been intended to be read by that person. She sometimes misspelt names; these have been corrected where possible.

I have kept the correspondences separate, in this way the nuances of the different relationships and the tone of voice may be better appreciated. A rough chronology has been followed in both sections. Penelope rarely included the year in her dates, so internal ordering has been more than usually difficult. It is now as accurate as we can get it, relying on family knowledge and internal evidence.



I. FAMILY AND FRIENDS (#ulink_65389856-e2d4-51b9-b489-4cd63d086f73)




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