At 82, Penelope Fitzgerald is the first non- American to win a United States national critics’ prize. She spoke to Peter Lennon
There was something patronising about the pleasure with which the British media reported how modest and surprised Penelope Fitzgerald, aged 82, was at winning the American National Book Critics’ Circle fiction award, the first time a non-American writer had won the prize. The implication was that amazement and modesty were the appropriate responses for a grandmother.
In her study in London’s Highgate, I attempted to put it to her that she had no reason to be modest – the 1979 Booker Prize (for Offshore); three later novels also shortlisted; shortlisted again for the Whitbread and Sunday Express awards; and now she had shouldered aside the small American literary mountain which is Philip Roth and outpaced the much-hyped Don DeLillo. But she was having none of it.
”Well all modesty is considered false modesty,” she said. ”I don’t really think it is modesty, I think it is a temperament, that you feel you are either one of life’s winners or life’s losers.”
”People have been trying very hard to disabuse you,” I said.
She laughed.
I quoted AS Byatt: ”Jane Austen’s nearest heir, for precision and invention,” and Adam Mars-Jones: ”A minor miracle of sympathy and crispness.”
”No amount of success can persuade you you are a success?” I said.
”No, no, no,” she said softly, but permitting no doubt. ”I suppose it’s rather gloomy. I have never been a young writer,” she said (she was 63 when her first novel, The Golden Child, was published), ”and never belonged to a group, so really I have missed out.”
You still could have gone to town as a literary figure?
”I suppose I could have done. But I didn’t.”
Her father EGV Knox, editor of Punch during World War II, used to gloomily pace his room, composing comic verse for the paper while a printers’ boy sat in the hall waiting for the result.
But simple labels of modesty or gloominess won’t stick. There is nothing obviously gloomy about Fitzgerald. There is a touch of anxiousness; but she has a ready, light laugh and developed sense of the absurd. What characterises her is a kind of alert repose. In response to a question she will often go into lengthy thought, expressions playing across her face like wind on water: then she comes out with a quick, neat, if sometimes subtly evasive reply.
Under the heading of matters which do not concern her comes delivering acceptance speeches for awards. She let her American publisher write and deliver hers.
”What did he say you said?”
”I don’t know,” she said, perfectly indifferent.
Matters which require a brief answer get a brief answer. Why did the barge on the Thames in which she lived with her husband and three children sink? ”Holes,” she said. What was she doing in the first place, squatting in a spongy barge at Chelsea Reach in the 1960s, a few steps from the swinging King’s Road? ”It was cheap.”
The men in her books, such as Fred Fairly in The Gate of Angels, a Cambridge physicist who has lost his religious faith, are often innocent, helpless creatures.
”I think women are stronger than men. I make them stronger in my novels. The sort of men I like are life’s losers. They struggle gallantly, but they really ought to be left in peace. Life is just a bit too much for them.”
It might not be too fanciful to deduce the genesis of her literary career from this. Her husband was ”in the travel business”. Here he was in the most helpless of situations, a travel man not only moored to an unmoveable boat that eventually sank, but also tethered by terminal illness. She wrote that first novel, The Golden Child, to amuse him. It came out of a notion she got that the reason the lighting for the 1922 Tutankhamen exhibition was so dim was that the mummy was a fake.
Then came Offshore, about the boat, which won the Booker. Her career followed a classical pattern. First she drew on her own experience: Human Voices (1980), about her time as a sound assistant working on the BBC Forces request programme during the war. ”Many of them were dead before their requests got on the air,” she said. Then The Bookshop, based on a time as an assistant in a bookshop, and The Gate of Angels (1990), on her experience of university life.
The opening of The Gate of Angels contains a very early example of mad cows. On the road to Cambridge she noticed heavy winds had blown trees down flat and cows were gambolling crazily, driven mad by this unique opportunity to nibble at the tops of trees.
Her style of writing is deceptively calm: the tone is quiet, resigned to the foolishness of people, amused but not censorious. You recognise immediately someone with a delicious sense of words and natural ease in handling them.
Having exhausted known environments, she turned to foreign territory and times past. She borrowed from the London Library the diaries and private documents of Friedrich von Hardenberg, an 18th-century philosopher later known as Novalis, who had complicated ideas about the nature of language. He fell in love at first sight with a girl of 12. She died at 15; he died aged 29.
Out of two years of research (never once troubled by the obliging London Library) came the book that won the American National Book Critics’ Circle Prize, The Blue Flower.
We discussed the popular idea that characters can run away from their creator. She said it was nonsense: you have to be in control. I told how EM Forster explained a 30-year silence by saying he had started a book in which all the characters waiting on a railway platform got on a train, went off, and he could never get them back again.
”Whimsical creature,” said Fitzgerald disapprovingly.
She had once admired Forster’s APassage to India and Howards End, but while tutoring students for Oxford and Cambridge university entrance exams, she submitted him to the ultimate test of continual repetition. With his ready symbols and balanced structure, he was perfect for teaching writing, but over time she found the works just did not stand up.
Surprisingly, the book which survived this rigorous test, and on whom English boys and girls were ready to make a special effort, was James Joyce’s APortrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
I tried Gustave Flaubert. ”Only men like Flaubert,” she said.
Because he is patronising to his women? She gave a guarded nod.
”Jane Austen does not describe the characters,” she said. ”She does not even say whether they are dark or fair. But usually when they come on you know they are on.” Here was clear approval.
Fitzgerald’s first published work was a life of the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne- Jones, who, when given a book he disliked, ran a red-hot poker through it. ”Every one had red-hot pokers in those days,” she said, with an air of regret that such instruments of literary criticism were no long readily available.
Television adaptations of the classics got a hot stab. ”I hope there will be an end to them,” she said. ”Surely they have nearly reached the end and we shan’t be plagued with these desperate representations.”
At her feet were two piles of books. She is a judge for this year’s Booker Prize and is already well into reading 200 entries. The smaller pile, of two books, she nodded to with respect; the larger pile of rejects she gave a scalding glance – and swore me to secrecy about the names of the two authors who have so far escaped the hot poker.