Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore

“They walked together down the King’s Road, went into Woolworths, and were dazzled.”

“Richard was the kind of man who has two clean handkerchiefs on him at half past three in three morning.”

“Heinrich was exceptionally elegant. An upbringing designed to carry him through changes of regime and frontier, possible loss of every worldly possession, and, in the event of crisis, protracted stays with distant relatives ensconced wherever the aristocracy was tolerated, from the Polish border to Hyde Park Gate, in short, a good European background, had made him totally self-contained and able with sunny smile and the formal handshake of the gymnase to set almost anybody at their ease…”

“Partisan Street…was, as has been said, considered a rough place – a row of decrepit two-up, two-down brick houses, the refuge of crippled and deformed humanity. Whether they were poor because they were lame, or lame because they were poor, was perhaps a matter for sociologists, and a few years later, when their dwellings were swept away and replaced by council flats with rents much higher than they could afford, it must be assumed that they disappeared from the face of the earth.”

“In this, its heyday, the King’s Road fluttered, like a gypsy encampment, with hastily-dyed finery, while stage folk emerged from their beds at a given hour, to patrol the long pavements between Sloane Square and the Town Hall. …A paradise for children, a riot of misrule, the queer looking shops reversed every fixed idea in the venerable history of commerce. Sellers, dressed in brilliant colours, outshone the purchasers, and, instead of welcoming them, either ignored them or were so rude that they could only have hoped to drive them away. The customers in return sneered at the clothing offered to them, and flung it on the ground. There were no prices, no sizes, no way to tell which stock was which, so that racks and rails of dresses were transferred as though by a magic hand from one shop to another. The doors stood open, breathing out incense and heavy soul, and the spirit was that of the market scene in the pantomime when the cast, encouraged by the audience, has let the business get out of hand.”

“The barge anchors were unrecognisable as such, more like crustaceans, specimens of some giant type long since discarded by Nature, but still clinging to their old habitat, sunk in the deep pits they had made in the foreshore."

Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore

 

Birthday Post

Currently Reading: Almost finished Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald’s third novel. Winner of the Booker in the year I was born, although of course I wasn’t aware of that at the time. At Christmas of the same year, a copy of Jacques Henri Lartigue’s Diary of a Century was given as a gift. I know this because the copy I came across and acquired from a charity shop yesterday contained an inscription to that effect. As ever when you find something like this, you’re left wondering who these people were and what the book that’s now yours might have meant to them.

It took me a few weeks to get around to writing my previous post on The Bookshop. I’m really struggling to make this blog the kind of reading diary I want it to be. My post on Geoff Dyer’s Working the Room has become rather longer than expected. And I still haven’t gone back to the piece on China, which I read as long ago as last September. We’re leaving for India tomorrow, so I expect all of this is going to have to wait a few weeks until we get back. Assuming it doesn’t get swamped with work.

So, what else have I read for pleasure recently? Nicola Barker’s earliest short stories, collected as Love Your Enemies. I was following her work for a while, but then stopped after Behindlings. I do agree with her that the British public’s treatment of David Blaine’s stunt was appalling, but I don’t need an entire novel to tell me that. And I was put off Darkmans by a review which compared it (unfavourably) to Alan Garner’s The Owl Service. Her fiction does seem to have ballooned somewhat since her earliest novels and stories, which doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Behindlings might have been a long novel, but was also a fantastic piece of literary fiction, evoking the circumscribed lives of the inhabitants of the kind of England which I rarely encounter in our literary fiction with a beautiful skewed poetry.

What else? Poetry by Phillip Larkin and Coleridge. Larkin might be the minor poet that some of his detractors take him to be, but he still wrote a handful of beautiful poems. He loses me a bit in those poems where he attacks matrimony. Not just because I’m happily married (although I am), but because that’s where he comes closest to misanthropy and misogyny, which is otherwise contained in his more successful (and memorable) poems. Coleridge, I should have read when I was 15. That yearning after the absolute.

And Margery Allingham’s Tiger in the Smoke. My first Albert Campion, for all that the supposed hero at the centre of the series is rather absent from this one. A commentator on another blog I follow recently made the point about the genre conventions of crime fiction, that they aren’t really as restrictive as some people think, because you can just pay lip service to the conventions and then go off on whatever tangent you like. I wonder though if they aren’t more restrictive for those writers who are attempting to write a more realistic fiction. This might possibly help to explain my growing boredom with Ian Rankin’s work for instance.

Margery Allingham, I think I always pigeonholed with Agatha Christie and the like. The sort of crime fiction I think of as getting adapted into films for Sunday evening viewing. And in fact, I’m sure I can remember watching one with my Mum. Tiger in the Smoke is far stranger than I expected, somehow straddling the lines between realism and outright fantasy. An utterly bonkers plot is placed with a foggy post war London evoked with considerable fidelity to time and place. The plot, such as it is, is just an excuse to relax and enjoy the scenes, the characters, the dialogue. It’s a confident performance, a phrase I’ve chosen deliberately. She seems to share with Dickens that sense of a theatrical London. As well as a taste for rather flamboyant names for her characters. I mean, a villain called Jack Havoc? I ask you! As her narrative voice acknowledges in a brief aside, ‘…technicolor was inadequate for that fantasy.’ Quite.

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

I’ll come to the actual novel in a moment. Before I do, I’d like to take a look at the two covers above. Which of the two do you prefer? If it’s the one on the right, then I’m afraid that we shall have to agree to disagree. It’s a shame I couldn’t find a clearer image online, but actually, I suppose it’s not too bad, part of a uniform set of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels reissued a few years ago. Certainly, I like it more than the cover of The Blue Flower, which is a horrible digital image. This at least is an image of something which is actually real, even it misrepresents the contents on sale in the shop of the book’s title, which are modern hard and paperbacks from the 1950s. These look like Victorian books, in rather poor condition too from the looks of the spines. Paperbacks, of course, don’t convey the sense of knowledge and timelessness that we get from an old decaying hardback. What I really dislike about the most recent editions is the wide expanse of blank space with which they frame their single images. The cover from the earlier edition (the edition I’m thankful to say mine was) presumably comes from a time when book publishers routinely put works of art on the covers of their books. A practice which now seems confined to lines of classic fiction. Although even there, Vintage appear to have broken with convention.

The cover here, a detail from the painting Cicero Reading, makes some of the same associations as the later image. It’s not a dogeared paperback with a cracked spine he’s reading. It’s also an image of antiquity, both the Classical past of the real Cicero and the Italian Renaissance when that past was rediscovered and the painting from which the detail comes. It conveys powerfully a sense of leisure and wealth. Not wealth in the sense of financial wealth, although of course that is present, and is often the only thing which permits a person to enjoy the leisure depicted, but also a sense of cultural wealth. The wealth that comes from being able to appreciate art and literature, to discriminate, to possess taste. So often in the humanist culture which has developed since the European Renaissance we seem to frame this inheritance explicitly in terms derived from the culture in the Italian states in the 14^th and 15^th centuries.

I think I’ve mentioned covers once or twice before on this blog. And no doubt I shall continue to do so. Clearly, it goes without saying that anyone who doesn’t judge a book by its cover, for whom that isn’t part of their response to a book, is missing out, is something of a fool. And this cover does resonate with some of the themes of this short novel, since the bookshop and the values it represents is ultimately driven out of the East Anglian village of Hardborough, to be replaced by an Arts Centre.

The first of Penelope Fitzgerald’s books I read was The Blue Flower, her last. I can't improve on A.S. Byatt's blurb, ‘A masterpiece. How does she do it?’ Since then I’ve worked my way back through the other historical novels that make up the second half of her fiction writing career, and now I’m starting on the novels written out of her autobiographical experiences. No doubt I shall end with her very first book, The Golden Child, before moving onto the biographies. Although this isn’t, perhaps, explicitly an historical fiction then, it still feels very clearly set in its historical moment of 1959. Early on there’s even a rather pompous bank manager who opines about the, ‘vastly different world which the 1960s may have in store for us.’ More subtly there are references to the devastating floods of 1953 which the official post war memory supposedly blotted out, a marvellous evocation of children receiving their 11-plus results in which we are suddenly privy to what success or failure is going to mean to an entire generation once their lives have played out, and of course the publication of Lolita is an important plot point. Even more subtly than that, there’s possibly even a hint of the way in which the whole post-war project failed in the political machinations which ultimately drive out Florence Green. Like Florence, Mrs Gammart is an incomer to the village of Hardborough, but also a meddler, someone who likes to impose her views on others, and the closest the novel has to a villain.

As ever with Penelope Fitzgerald’s writing there’s an elusiveness to it, so much packed into such a short space. You have to keep your wits about you, else you’ll miss important action, since it’s often elided, or occurs between scenes. And she has a wonderful ability to sum up a character and their history in only a single line, whilst still somehow respecting a sense of the mysteriousness of human beings. On Florence Green, we’re memorably told on the first page, ‘She had a kind heart, though that is not of much use when it comes to self-preservation.’ It generalises from the specificity of the character in a way which is almost aphoristic. I particularly liked the line about Mr. Brandish, the aged aristocratic figure whom the sly narrative voice informs us in some way is Hardborough through his aristocratic and family connections – the fact that as far as the rest of the village is concerned, he’s always been there – and whom Florence somehow befriends despite their only meeting the once: ‘Shabby, hardly presentable, he was not the sort of figure who could ever lose dignity’, which captures a certain lost aristocratic grandeur. Of course, ultimately that was displaced by the Mrs. Gammarts of the world.

England, c. 1399-1422.

English inns had the reputation of being warm and welcoming: foreign visitors commented that (amazing as it might seem to us) hostesses greeted guests with kisses.

Miri Rubin, The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages