William Morris and Co.

Ever since reading Penelope Fitzgerald's biography of Edward Burne-Jones last year, I've been vaguely circling the Arts and Crafts movement and their predecessors cum fellow travelers the Pre-Raphaelites. A. S. Byatt's lovely little new book-length essay on William Morris and the (essentially unrelated) artist and designer Mariano Fortuny pushed me a little further on the path, and now I find myself flipping back and forth between Fiona MacCarthy's bio biography of Morris and a volume of Morris's letters.

Both are rewarding in exactly the way that reading about that period and group tends to be: even when presented with warts, they're hard not to admire--serious but not self-serious, dedicated to beauty yet aware of its practical limits in the world, looking backwards for what could be reclaimed even as they (or at least Morris) tried to build a better future. And then there are the books: they loved, loved, loved books. Morris would buy them for his friends, a typical extravagance generated by his discomfort with his inherited wealth. Here, from MacCarthy's biography, is an account of how the set, in their Oxford years, received the publication of Ruskin's Edinburgh lectures in 1854:

"I was working in my room," wrote Burne-Jones, "when Morris ran in one morning bringing the newly published book with him: so everything was put aside until he read it all through to me. And there we first saw about the Pre-Raphaelites, and there I first saw the name of Rossetti. So for many a day after that we talked of little else but paintings which we had never seen."

At a time when it wasn't possible to simply look up an image of a painting after hearing about it, books were the next best thing--the fire Ruskin's descriptions kindled is palpable in Burne-Jones's account. No wonder the book was revered. As Fitzgerald wrote in her Burne-Jones book, "Without the concept of the book as hero, Victorian idealism can hardly be understood." In Morris's Novel on Blue Paper, a character "long[s] so much for more and more and more books." Little wonder that Morris turned to book making and literary translation.

Morris's designs, and particularly his wallpapers and stained glasses, continue to enchant more than a century later, drawing us in with their clear lines and repeating patterns, then surprising us with singular details. His letters, personable and lively, are also full of such detail. Complaining about the town of Lewes, he says that as you approach,

you can see Lewes lying like a box of toys under a great amphitheatre of chalk hills: the ride is very pleasant: Lewes when you get there lies on a ridge in its valley, the street winding down to the river (Ouse) which runs into the sea at Newhaven: on the whole it is set down better than any town i have seen in England: unluckily it is not a very interesting town in itself: there is a horrible workhouse or prison on the outskirts, and close by a hideous row of builders' houses: there are three old Churches in it, dismally restored, but none of them over-remarkable: there is the remains of a castle, 14th century: but it is not grand at all. Never the less it isn't a bad country town, only not up to its position.

Though I'd quibble with him about Lewes, at least as it exists today, there is a clarity of expression here that calls to mind a line I came across in Joseph Conrad's writing recently: "To take a liberty with technical language is a crime against the clearness, precision, and beauty of perfected speech." Morris isn't using technical language here, of course, but he is deploying a technical eye, one that sees detail that he then carefully conveys in words.

Here he is applying the same analytic clarity to the difficult-to-explain work of creating, in a letter to Georgina Burne-Jones:

I have perhaps rather more than enough of work to do, and for that reason or what not, am dwelling somewhat low down in the valley of humiliation--quite good enough for me doubtless. Yet it sometimes seems to me as if my lot was a strange one: you see, I work pretty hard, and on the whole very cheerfully, not altogether I hope for mere pudding, still less for praise; and while I work I have the cause always in mind, and yet I know that the cause for which I specially work is doomed to fail, at least in seeming; I mean that art must go under, where or how ever it may come up again. I don't know if I explain what I'm driving at, but it does sometimes seem to me a strange thing indeed that a man should be driven to work with energy and even with pleasure and enthusiasm at work which he knows will serve no end but amusing himself; am I doing nothing but make-believe, then, something like Louis XVI's lock-making? There, I don't pretend to say that the conundrum is a very interesting one, as it certainly has not any practical importance as far as I am concerned, since I will without doubt go on with my work, useful or useless, till I demit.

In one long paragraph, we have a version of the struggle that would define Morris's life: what does a man whose greatest skill is creating objects of breathtaking beauty--but often of little utility--do if he also believes powerfully that social and economic difference should be leveled? How to be for beauty in a world of utility? A century later, surrounded by far, far more objects of limited utility--and, for all the dross, a hitherto unimaginable access to beauty--we've not come close to answering that question.

"Lewis had his enemies, but he had their measure."

One of the many pleasures of Penelope Fitzgerald's biography of Edward Burne-Jones is the thumbnail portraits she offers along the way of the people in Burne-Jones's orbit. In addition to fairly extensive accounts of major figures like William Morris, John Ruskin, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Fitzgerald presents countless quick sketches of fascinating Victorian and early Edwardian figures. This sizing up of the Gladstone family that accompanies Burne-Jones's first encounter with Mary Gladstone is a good example:

The sixth of Gladstone's children, she had been brought up in the huge brilliant rough-and-tumble of Gladstones, Lytteltons and Glynnes at Hawarden, where there were enough people in the family to sing the Messiah straight through, and where everyone was sympathetic, but no one listened to what anyone else was saying. At nearly twenty-eight she was only just beginning to feel that she was not a nonentity--not, in the peculiar language used by the Glynnes, a "phantod" or complete idiot.

The incidental character who most firmly arrested my attention, however, was prominent lawyer George Lewis:

Lewis really was, and chose to give the effect of being, like a character out of Dickens--probably Jagger in Great Expectations. He was born, like Ned, in 1833, but as Jew was not allowed to go to Oxford: he studied at the new University College and was articled at seventeen as his uncle's solicitors' clerk. He liked to recall his first client, a very large woman whose son was accused of robbing the till in a public house. In the years that followed he specialised in fraud and commercial libel, and became the defence solicitor, it seemed, for half the Victorian world. By maintaining a network of underworld contacts he got to know enough about all the adventurers and criminals in London to save many clients from blackmail. He was Parnell's solicitor, and Parnell trusted him; he prepared Whistler's petition in bankruptcy; he acted in the Balham case and was the only man to know who really poisoned Charles Bravo; he handled the difficult Baccarat case and helped to extricate the Prince of Wales. "Oh, he know everything about us all, and forgives us all," said Oscar Wilde, whose real collapse began after Lewis refused to act for him any further .Yet Lewis shared his father's reputation as a reformer and poor man's lawyer. He was proud of his Jewish ancestry and kept on the dark warren-like chambers in Holborn where he and his brothers and sisters had been born. Here visitors were sometimes admitted to the gas-lit strong-room where the great black deed-boxes were turned to the wall so that no names could be seen. Lewis had his enemies, but he had their measure. He committed nothing to paper--all his secrets would die with him--and a man who had no vices except a weakness for a good cigar could not be got at.

Could it be possible to read that paragraph and not want immediately to know more about this man? Fitzgerald's biography is only loosely annotated, offering sources for quotations, but not for general information, so I don't yet know where one might start in a quest to learn more about Lewis. But it has to be possible, no? Investigations will be underway shortly; I'll report back when I know more!

Edward Burne-Jones and the associations and shared enthusiasms of youth

As a sidebar to my nascent efforts to see whether Penelope Fitzgerald's notebooks hold enough riches that a selected volume might be extracted, I'm finally reading the last couple of her books I'd not previously gotten to. This week, I began the final one, her biography of late Pre-Raphaelite artist and designer Edward Burne-Jones.

From the pages and pages of notes and letters and reference inquiries I found in her papers at the Harry Ransom Center, I know that the book is built on a huge amount of research and thought--it felt like she had gathered enough material that she could also have written a biography of Burne-Jones's friend William Morris, and possibly of John Ruskin as well. Part of Fitzgerald's genius, both as a novelist and as a biographer, is her ability to synthesize mountains of research and present it in a way that makes the story flow almost effortlessly. We know there's a supporting structure beneath the prose, but its presence is never distracting.

Edward Burne-Jones has that quality: it feels almost like a book we are being told, rather than reading. It's conversational and straightforward, with just the right amount of perceptive authorial interjection, like this one, which closes a paragraph on Ruskin:

Ned told Frances Graham [of the adult, but odd Ruskin], "He was a most difficult child." But this mattered nothing in comparison with the warmth of meeting another "scorner of the world." This was Ruskin's message as well as Newman's. It is to the credit of humanity that whenever it has been clearly put, there have always been people to attend to it.

I'm still in the early years of Burne-Jones's life, when he and Morris, at the edge of the successful circles that Ruskin inhabits, are trying to figure out what they're going to do with their futures. Whatever is is, they know they want to do it in tandem, and initially they consider founding a monastery. But they are young, and their sights shift to founding a magazine:

While the magazine was in the planning stages, Burne-Jones found, at Cornish's shop in New Street, the book which was to mean more to him than any other--Malory's Morte d'Arthur. It was the Southey edition, and since it was expensive he read a little every day and bought cheap books "to pacify the bookseller." But Morris, when he heard of it, bought it at once, and generously lent it to his friend while he dashed off on family visits.

What could be more enchanting than the image of Burne-Jones buying books he's not that interested in solely so he can continue with his discoveries in the one he is? This was at a time when, as Fitzgerald points out, "Arthurian legends were so little known that they formed a kind of secret bond." She continues:

It was, therefore, in the two-up, two-down house in Bristol Road that Burne-Jones confirmed his idea of life as a quest for something too sacred to be found, and ending with the death of a king and a friend betrayed, which would be the ultimate sadness (Morte Arthur saunz guerdon). In the city beyond, Joseph Chamberlain was just beginning operations in the firm which was to produce twice as many steel screws as the whole of the rest of Britain. Crom and Ned walked round the back-garden, reading in particular the story of Perceval's sister, who died giving her life-blood to heal another woman, and asked that her body should be put on a ship which departed without sail to the city of Sarras. Without the concept of the book as hero, Victorian idealism can hardly be understood. Morris returned, was enchanted immediately, and had the book bound in white vellum. It was the Quest without Tennyson, and it seems that at first they were embarrassed to speak about it to anyone but Crom, so deeply did they feel the spell of this lost world and its names and places. Yet Burne-Jones must also have noticed that Guinevere and the Haut Prince laughed so loudly that they might not sit at table, that Sir Lancelot went into a room as hot as any stew and found a lady naked as a needle, that the Queen, through Sir Ector, sharply demanded her money back from him, and that a gluttonous giant raped the Duchess of Brittany and slit her unto the navel. In fact Burne- Jones's letters show that he did notice this and that he could overlook in the Morte what he could not stomach in Chaucer. Malory's wandering landscape became in its entirety "the strange land that is more true than real," but not just as an escape, the refuge of the romantic without choice. He found what is of much more importance to the artist, a reflection of personal experience in the fixed world of images.

Fitzgerald accomplishes so much in that paragraph. She shows us the seductive romance of valorous medieval world these friends were conjuring into being among themselves. She draws from that an image of the late Victorian imagination itself--"the concept of the book as hero" an unforgettable way to put it. And she traces the ways Burne-Jones was influenced by, and drew on, the Morte in his art.

The Arts and Crafts and Pre-Raphaelite movements are the artistic moments that I find most personally enticing. I'm not one for utopias, and I don't believe there ever was a golden age anyone living in it would have recognized as such, but the combination of skill, hard work, attention to detail, care for craftsmanship, and brotherhood and idealism of that era are nonetheless powerfully compelling.

More from Penelope Fitzgerald's Charlotte Mew and Her Friends

No time to offer much in the way of commentary today, but I thought you'd at least enjoy the following passage from Penelope Fitzgerald's biography of poet Charlotte Mew. Noting that the years just before World War I was a period of proliferating, successful poetry anthologies, Fitzgerald writes:

It was the great time for small, thin-paper, verse anthologies, with a ribbon for a bookmark, which went easily into the side-pocket, and were taken for long tramps in the fresh air, returning with grass and pressed flowers between the pages. The Golden Treasury (1897) was one of the first of these, and there was no sign of their running out. It was true that these little volumes, even when they were by the newer poets, were often not very demanding. John Drinkwater, for example, in Poems of Love and Earth (1912) thanks God for (1) sleep; (2) clear day through the little leaded panes; (3) shining well water; (4) warm golden light; (5) rain and wind (apparently at the same time) as (2); (6) swallows; (7) wallflowers, tulips, primroses and "crowded orchard boughs"; (8) good bread; (9) honey-comb; (10) brown-shelled eggs; (11) strong-thewed young men; (13) an old man bent over his scythe; (14) the great glad earth and "heaven's trackless ways." There was a great deal of this kind of thing at the lower and easier end of the repertoire, where eggs were always brown, the women always kind, and the earth always glad.

One of Fitzgerald's greatest qualities as a fiction writer, one she carries over to biography, is her sympathy with well-meaning folly and silliness. She takes an amused stance, but one that never leads to dismissal or condemnation. Looking back from a hundred years on, we see much that was silly about the Edwardians, but we have to admit that there is much to admire as well.

Fitzgerald's appreciation for good intentions gives the last lines of that paragraph special poignancy:

The poetry was meant to give pleasure and it was, after all, the last body of English poetry to be actually read, by ordinary people, for pleasure.

The Golden Treasury remains available today; I had a gilt-edged version when I was a boy, with, yes, a ribbon.

Penelope Fitzgerald on The Yellow Book and the New Woman

In preparation for a trip to the Harry Ransom Center to investigate the Penelope Fitzgerald archives, I'm reading one of the two books by her that I'd not read, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (1984). (The other being her biography of Edward Burne-Jones.) In her biography of Fitzgerald, Hermione Lee characterizes the book as "the crucial turning point, the hinged door between what, in another writer, you might call 'early' and 'late' work," in part because of the copious research involved. All of Fitzgerald's earlier novels had been rooted in some way in her own experience; all of her later ones would be set in different places and different times, and would require substantial research to give their slim extents their hefty backbones of believability.

Mew herself was a minor poet, all but forgotten today, though Brad Leithauser, in his introduction to a 1988 American edition of the book, makes a strong case for the quality of her limited output. In Mew, Fitzgerald found a subject who brought together themes that we can trace elsewhere in her own life and work: a woman forced by circumstance to make her way on her own; a woman who determines to be a writer, and does so; and a woman playing a part in establishing new terrain for women at a time when old norms were being upended. That last comes into particular focus in the course of one short paragraph about Mew and her fellow writers on the legendary decadent-era magazine The Yellow Book:

That summer she entered the new world of the New Woman. It was an exhilarating place, which Netta Syrett describes in her autobiography The Sheltering Tree and Evelyn Sharp in Unfinished Adventure. Although the public, discreetly prompted by Lane, thought of The Yellow Book as bizarre and decadent, and though its male writers were often alcoholic, weak-willed and tired of life, its women were strong. Evelyn Sharp, who was one of them, wrote that they "felt on the crest of the wave that was sweeping away the Victorian tradition," and that everything must go. Netta, Evelyn and Ella d'Arcy, like Charlotte, had seen The Yellow Book announcement and sent in their first contributions to Lane. They were also among Lane's Keynotes--that is, they contributed to a special "advanced" series of stories, each with their own Keynote, designed by Beardsley. "Petticoat" Lane liked to be seen with women round him "and we fell in and out of love," said Evelyn, "with or without disaster, like other people." They would find time for marriage some day, but not yet, there was too much in hand. Everything was open for discussion. Netta Syrett, in particular, talked unconcernedly about sex, for her uncle, the writer Grant Allen, was a frank materialist and had brought her up to do so. But this was only one aspect of a world that had grown limitless, but still had to be put to rights. Skimming from one end of London to the other on their bicycles, without fear, without chaperones, they lodged two and two in flats, or in the newly opened Victorian Club in Sackville Street, which had small, cold, candle-lit bedrooms for professional women. If need arose they could emerge soignees and glittering, in the full evening dress of the nineties. These young women were not Bohemians, they were dandies. They complained when the down-and-out Frederick Rolfe, on his visits to Harland's flat, left lice on the furniture. Aubrey Beardsley was "a dear boy" to them. They had no intention of drifting or failing, they meant to rise with the coming twentieth century.

So much is covered in that one long paragraph. The acknowledgment for example, neither overstated nor unduly celebrated, that the women of this circle (like the women in Barbara Pym's world)  were the capable, competent ones, saddled with men who were neither. The specificity of detail that conjures up how very different London suddenly looked to a woman experiencing new freedom--Bicycles! Bedsits! And the distinction between true Bohemians and these women, who still saw value in some social conventions, wanting merely the right to choose for themselves which they would observe. There are aspects here that are familiar from the lives of Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, though their rebellion was both more pointed and more contained; you also detect echoes of Daisy Saunders, from The Gate of Angels, though Daisy starts lower in class, and (perhaps therefore) has lower ambitions. Or, if we flip genders, we can see hints of Forster's Leonard Bast, striving for something that, a few years earlier, would have been explicitly unattainable.

It's an enchanting vision, and the tragedy at the heart of Fitzgerald's bio is that, like Leonard Bast, Mew wasn't quite ever able to make it over the bar. Freedom was not as easy to seize, nor to hold, as it at first seemed, and her life would be a series of frustrations and reverses. But for that one moment--with echoing glimmers here and there throughout the rest of Mew's life--Fitzgerald brings an era, and its new possibilities, to shimmering life.

Wish me luck in my archival research. If it goes well, you'll hear much, much more about it down the line.

Penelope Fitzgerald's notebooks

This week has found me happily reading Hermione Lee's biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, after the UK edition inexplicably mouldered on my shelves for almost a year. Maybe it's because, at more than four hundred pages, it at first seemed excessive, for the wholly silly reason that surely Fitzgerald, that master of leaving out, ought to have a slim life?

Halfway through, I'm so, so glad for the length--and for Twitter, which has allowed me to share line after line that Lee has dredged up from Fitzgerald's many working notebooks and diaries. In her novels and nonfiction, Fitzgerald was such a good writer of sentences, marrying elegance, concision, and meaning, and her presumably far less polished notebooks turn out to have their share. A quick selection:

The whole art of happiness consists in staying in one place.

Borges likes to keep complications, but reduce them to their most economical form.

I've come to see art as the most important thing but not to regret that I haven't spent my life on it.

One is only middle-aged once.

I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or, even, profoundly lost.

To live in the country with dog cat an apple tree books a listener--not only good but the only good.

Even evil spirits keep in touch with themselves.

I could go on and on. The impression Lee gives is that Fitzgerald didn't maintain a single, long-term notebook, like Anthony Powell, or a system, like F. Scott Fitzgerald. Rather, she seems to have kept a working notebook for each book, and other notebooks throughout the years for other reasons. When teaching, for example, she had notebooks in which she worked and planned. (That's where the Borges quote comes from.) One of Lee's great achievements in the biography is to make clear how much groundwork Fitzgerald was laying in those notebooks for here eventual, late, arrival as a fiction writer. It ends up being tremendously exciting, watching Fitzgerald making notes for teaching that are at the same time notes for herself on how novels work, or sketching a character in her notebook and clearly beginning to develop some of the precision and judgment that would mark her fiction.

The reason this blog exists is that rocketlass suggested I start one so I would stop reading aloud at parties. (Which she was right to do. Good god.) But the true initial spur to whatever writing about books I've done in the past decade was Fitzgerald's posthumous collection of nonfiction, The Afterlife. Looking back, I have no idea why I picked it up: I knew her name, but I'd read nary a word of her novels. Yet I bought the book and was instantly won over by her perceptiveness and sensibility. Within weeks I had read all her novels and written my first book review, which, submitted cold to the Bloomsbury Review, would also be my first published review. I wrote then,

What comes across most clearly is her appreciation of hard work, craft, and dedication.

Yesterday, ten years later, in an interview about my collection of Donald Westlake's nonfiction, I talked about Westlake's dedication to craft, and boiled down the lessons I learned from close engagement with his writing to these:

Be clear. Be concise. Be concrete. And the work will not do itself.

Thus are laid out the continuities between these two favorite writers, the points of connection between two wildly disparate worlds and aesthetics. Taste is no respecter of genre; attentive reading discovers links between separate spheres.

And now to hope for an edition of Fitzgerald's notebooks--a book I would turn to again and again over the years. A boy can dream, right?

Penelope Fitzgerald on Barbara Pym

Before I leave Barbara Pym for a while, here's one last, quick post in honor of her centennial. In a review of Pym's A Few Green Leaves, Penelope Fitzgerald--who, though nearly Pym's contemporary, didn't truly get established in her writing career until much later, and who clearly felt Pym's influence--offers a description of the mostly hidden stakes that quietly underlie conversations in Pym's works:

In her nine novels Barbara Pym stuck serenely to the [world] she knew best: quiet suburbs, obscure office departments, villages where the neighbours could be observed through the curtains, and, above all, Anglican parishes. . . . This meant that the necessary confrontations must take place at cold Sunday suppers, little gatherings, visits, funerals, and so on, which Barbara Pym, supremely observant in her own territory, was able to convert into a battleground. Here, even without intending it, a given character is either advancing or retreating: you have, for instance, an unfair advantage if your mother is dead, "just a silver-framed photograph," over someone whose mother lives in Putney. And in the course of the struggle strange fragments of conversation float to the surface, lyrical moments dear to Barbara Pym.

"An anthropologist," declared Miss Doggett in an authoritative tone. "He does some kind of scientific work, I believe."

"I thought it meant a cannibal--someone who ate human flesh," said Jane in wonder.

"Well, science has made such strides," said Miss Doggett doubtfully.

Or:

"Well, he is a Roman Catholic priest, and it is not usual for them to marry, is it?"

"No, of course they are forbidden to," Miss Foresight agreed.

"Still, Miss Lydgate is much taller than he is," she added.

In such exchanges the victory is doubtful: indeed, Miss Doggett and Miss Foresight are, in their way, invincible.

Pym's conversational battles, like her humor, are so subtle that an inattentive or unsympathetic reader could easily miss them entirely. Unlike Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose characters fight with words like naked blades and in not a few cases are ready to back up their thrusts with actual violence, Pym's characters leave the social surface unruffled; in fact, a fear of troubling the waters is at the root of many a silent retreat. Pym's dialogue, and what it represents, is part of a lineage that stretches back to Austen--but surely Penelope Fitzgerald was not its last practitioner? Anyone have nominations for the Pym of today, in that regard?

There ain't no party like a Penelope Fitzgerald party!

January's trawl through writers' letters continues, and today the aim is to inspire you, in this drear midwinter, to seek out laughter and nonsense and company worth leaving the warm house for. Penelope Fitzgerald writes to her friend Hugh Lee on November 13, 1940:

I hear Oxford is violently gay and in general suggests those bits in comedy films where you see champagne glasses superimposed on merry-go-rounds to suggest dissipation, so when I come up I do hope you will be able to show me some of it.

Dissipation awaits--you just have to bundle up and seek it out!

In Russia . . .

Wednesday's post drew on an odd little novel that Melville House just republished as part of their Neversink Library, William Gerhardie's Futility (1922). Gerhardie was born of British parents in Russia, and he lived there until enlisting in the British army at the outbreak of World War I, when he was seventeen. Futility a novel of comic despair, is drawn from his experiences as part of the British military's attempts to disrupt the Bolshevik Revolution in the years right after the war. It offers delicately funny portraits of a family of minor aristocrats who blithely continue their feckless ways as the revolution rages around them, and of the young narrator's amusement, irritation, and unrequited love.

Gerhardie has a suitable eye for the absurd, which is of course required for anyone, Russian or not, writing about Russia in that period (or any?), and the book is full of the sort of silliness, self-regard, and charming grandiosity that we are familiar with from Tolstoy's comic characters, or the most dissolute of Dostoevky's passionate lunatics--wrapped round with Gerhardie's wry observations of them. This assessment of the family patriarch is a good example:

Nikolai Vasilievich was very bitter. He had regarded the war almost as a deliberate attempt of providence to complicate his already very complicated domestic situation, and considering that providence had had the satisfaction of achieving its pernicious end, it seemed he could not understand the necessity of a revolution. "Malignity! Malignity!" he muttered, lowering the blinds, as if to show that he, at any rate, would have nothing to do with it.

I enjoyed this bit as well, with its Russian take on English lit:

"You in England are fortunate indeed. You have serious, moral writers who think of the good of the race and really teach you something positive, constructive and worth while. You have Byron and Oscar Wilde . . . "

Like so many other people in Russia, Fanny Ivanovna believed that England has three great outstanding writers: Byron, Shakespeare, and Oscar Wilde.

I'll admit to surprise that Dickens isn't of their number, given Dostoevsky's and Tolstoy's regard for him.

There are also scenes of straight comedy, like this account of a night in new lodgings alongside the narrator's superior, a British Admiral:

Then in the small hours of the morning [the Admiral]  was wakened by the noise of a dog that ran through the half-open door of his bedroom in pursuit of a cat. I heard the Admiral strike a match, then jump out of bed and fumble with his stick under the bed and cupboards and chest of drawers, evidently looking for the animals. I went in to him and offered my services in the chase.

"Can you see the dog?" came the Admiral's sturdy voice from under a cupboard.

"I'm looking for the cat, sir."

"Cat! Where did that come from?"

"I saw it run into your room after a rat."

"Nonsense!"

"I did, sir, and the dog ran in after the cat."

We fumbled with our sticks.

"I don't believe there was a rat," said the Admiral.

"There was, sir. I saw it myself."

"I don't mind the dog so much. Cats I hate. But I can't stick the rat. Why did you tell me?"

I did not answer this.

"Can't find them, sir," I said, rising.

"They've gone, I hope," said the Admiral.

"They've hidden themselves somewhere, I think."

"Damn them! I shan't be able to sleep all night."

"Good night, sir," said I.

The Admiral could not sleep. I heard him get out of bed and fumble with his stick beneath the furniture. I think the uncertainty of the whereabouts of the animals disturbed his peace of mind. Then I heard him creep into bed, and all was still. I could just hear the rain drum against the window-pane; and I thought that by now the cat had probably eaten up the rat.

The comedy isn't up to the level of Waugh, or even Anthony Powell--of whose scenes of army life that vignette recalls--but it's satisfying nonetheless, and the "only in Russia" aspect of it makes it all the more fun. (If only the dog had been followed by a bear!)

Thinking of Russian bears makes me realize that the book that Futility most reminds me of is Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring. It, too, tells of an Englishman in Russia as the revolution nears, and while that book has an air of mystery and a beautiful spareness of prose that Gerhardie's can't match (and, to be fair, doesn't attempt), in their pictures of a culture half-grasped, yet forever elusive, they feel like kin. And given how highly I think of Fitzgerald's achievement in that novel, that's high praise.

Alice Thomas Ellis, Penelope Fitzgerald, and more

In the comments to my recent post on Alice Thomas Ellis, reader zmkc left a link to a post she'd written about Ellis's husband, Colin Haycraft, an editor who was at least in part responsible for shepherding not only Ellis, but also Penelope Fitzgerald and Beryl Bainbridge into print.

If you enjoy any of those writers, zmkc's post is well worth checking out. Along with some delicious quotations from one of Ellis's novels, she also reflects on the pleasures afforded by the brevity of the work of all three women:

As well as providing us with the pleasure of Bainbridge, Fitzgerald and Ellis's writing, Haycraft also argued in defence of the short novel (apparently, he wrote something called 'a satire' on the subject for the Times Literary Supplement, but, as it was well before the advent of the internet, I can find no trace of it). I support that view, not because I don't enjoy Dickens or George Eliot or Tolstoy, but because I think the lengthy novels that are published nowadays are rarely up to the standard of their predecessors. Nowadays they are often really just sloppily edited - or completely unedited - short novels (there's a slim volume lurking inside every fat volume, or something like that).

Oh, and there's a bonus of some A. N. Wilson-bashing, a pastime I always enjoy. Much as I appreciate his biography of Tolstoy and his book on the Victorians, I feel he's still got a ways to go before he's fully paid out for the jaw-dropping mean-spirited pettiness of his memoir of his friendship with Iris Murdoch and John Bayley.

As for Alice Thomas Ellis, I'm sure you'll be hearing more from me soon--I'm waiting impatiently for the Chicago Public Library to dig up copies of a couple more of her novels.

Drink and dissipation--it is, after all, Monday

This week finds me still pressed enough by responsibilities that blogging will once again be light and unreliable. That situation seems likely to obtain until late July, at which point I hope to be back in form.

For today, I'll offer another quick dip into Penelope Fitzgerald's volume of letters, So I Have Thought of You. To her friend Hugh Lee, Fitzgerald, not quite twenty-four, wrote on November 13, 1940,

I hear Oxford is violently gay and in general suggests those bits in comedy films where you see champagne glasses superimposed on merry-go-rounds to suggest dissipation, so when I come up I do hope you will be able to show me some of it.

That image of drunken debauchery returned to my mind this morning when I was flipping through Jerry White's London in the Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing and got to the section on drinking. In a paragraph rich with interpolated quotations that make for my favorite type of history writing, White writes,

Drink played a large part in the culture of every rank in eighteenth-century London. James Boswell's drinking bouts, for instance, faithfully but shamefacedly recorded in his diaries, might make a slim volume on their own. At the chaplain's table at St James's Palace in December 1793, "that exquisite wine" champagne confined to France by the wartime blockade, the company had to make do with "madeira, sherry, hock, port, and claret, and good malt liquor; and I took enough to warm me rather too much." "Madeira, sherry port, old hock circulated" at a private dinner given by a vintner two or three months later, "and we had a glass both of burgundy and champagne. And lastly came an elegant dessert and Scotch pints of very capital claret"--a Scotch pint some three times larger than the English variety: "The generous bottle circulated so as to produce in my a total oblivion till I found myself safe in my own bed next morning. "Even his twelve-year-old son Jamie, at Westminster School, was forced by the scholars "to drink burgundy until he was intoxicated." When John Yeoman, a Somerset dairy farmer and potter, spent a night in London on a visit in 1774, "we made to free with the Duce of the Vine. Mr. Forrester Was quite full, went home to his house Where he was so Sick that it flew out att both ends like a Bedlamite."

Some points:

1. Yes, please, to the one-volume edition of Boswell's indulgences and hangovers!

2. A Scotch pint is more than 48 ounces? Good god, no wonder Dorothy Dunnett's Niccolo and Crawford of Lymond were such champion drinkers.

3. I did not know that among the stereotypical characteristics of inhabitants of Bedlam was dual evacuation. Ew.

Crossing the ocean, White quotes Ben Franklin, "a water drinker," who tells of his fellows at the printing house in which he worked as a young man:

We had an alehouse boy who attended always in the house to supply the workmen. My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o'clock, and another when he had done his day's work.

As someone who usually regrets a second martini and always regrets--and thus nearly always avoids--a third, I am consistently astonished by the quantities put back by drinkers past. And it's not only the far distant--read the Johns O'Hara or Cheever, or Dashiell Hammett and attend to the drinking, and it's hard not to become queasy. To bastardize L. P. Hartley: the soaks of the past, they were another country.

I'll close with another line I happened to read today, from Karl Ove Knausgaard's autobiographical novel My Struggle:

[W]e went out almost every night, and on one of the nights, I can remember [my older brother] Yngve was surprised but also proud that I could drink five bottles of wine and still more or less behave.

I'm guessing that "more or less" is doing quite a bit of work there. And it's important, for a full visual picture of the drunken teen, to know that this was Norway in 1985 or so and the prevailing style was punk-influenced new wave. Oh, and the novel is largely about how Knausgaard's father drank himself to death and how Knausgaard coped with that. As everyone from the Gin Lane reformers to the WCTU would tell you, there are consequences.

Penelope Fitzgerald writes her publisher

As summer, with its mix of work travel and personal travel (and, let's be honest, the occasional need to simply sit in the park and read Donald Westlake) gets into gear, I feel I should issue an advance apology: the next several weeks may see more sporadic blogging than usual.

Under cover of that excuse, all I have today is a passage from one of Penelope Fitzgerald's letters. In my day job in the marketing department at the University of Chicago Press, I send out a weekly roundup of the publicity garnered by our books, and I have taken to opening it each week with a quotation from a letter by a writer. I enjoy the excuse that gives me every single week to dip into yet another collection of letters and--in order that I not repeat any author until I absolutely have to--to explore collections I'd never before thought of looking into. Nine months in, and I have to repeat an author; we'll see as the months wear on how long I'm able to hold the line.

So here's last week's, found in So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, taken from a letter Fitzgerald sent to Richard Ollard, her American editor at Houghton Mifflin, on August 23, 1981:

I do want to ask whether you couldn't (or could) manage to get At Freddie's out in the summer, I'm sure it would make no difference to Collins because as you said to me hardbacks can't be sold anyway, I just feel I shall lose heart if it's got to wait till next autumn. Barbara (Pym) always used to come out in June . . . and you are in her group someone said to me firmly the other day you either have to be in hers or Beryl's. This made me vow never to go to a literary party again and I shan't, either. --But please if you can find a moment do see if you can shift me back from the autumn.

I love this letter for the link to Barbara Pym, of course, but also as an exemple of Fitzgerald's relationship to her publishers as seen through the letters: she comes across as simultaneously demanding and accommodating, knowing what she wanted and, often, being willing to push until she got it--yet at the same time not being too difficult and retaining a sense of perspective. In another letter to Ollard, she writes, after seeing finished copies of Human Voices,

my family tell me I was getting above myself anyway in objecting to the jacket and it serves me right that I've turned dark blue on the back flap.

And, lest you think that is simply passive aggression, I should explain that she goes on to thank him for the fact that the book's design bulks it up and makes it look longer, a good thing for a novelist whose works are as deceptively lean as Fitzgerald's.

To close out this month of haints and scares, here's a link to a piece I edited for my friend John Williams's lit site, The Second Pass. I asked a number of writers, critics, and bloggers with whom I've discussed scary stories before--Ed Park, John Crowley, James Hynes, Jenny Davidson, Joseph G. Peterson, James Morrison, Andrea Janes, John Eklund, and Will Schofield--to write a couple hundred words about a favorite. The selections vary nicely, from the Victorian golden age of the ghost story to the present, Mars to Maine, psychic visions to psychological trauma. I hope you're as pleased as I am by the recommendations; I also find myself quite cheered by the realization that the Internet made this whole article possible: of the nine contributors, six are people I met first or know solely because of the world of online writing about books.

I picked "Desideratus," a story by Penelope Fitzgerald in which she turns her love of ambiguity and keen eye for strangeness to an incident that, while wholly natural, feels as chillingly strange as any good ghost story. Fitzgerald's too often lumped casually with influences like Jane Austen and Barbara Pym, but she loved M. R. James--to the extent of including a great James pastiche in her novel The Gate of Angels, and the collection from which "Desideratus" is taken, The Means of Escape, actually includes one story, "The Ax," that's constructed with all the precision and chills of a classic Alfred Hitchcock Presents sort of ghost story. Like all of Fitzgerald's work, it's well worth seeking out.

WIth Halloween upon us, you could do worse than to light your jack-o-lantern, set the bowl of candy on the porch, bar the door, and settle in with this collection of recommendations. Make sure your cat is on your lap when you start: you know how they love to jump out at exactly the heart-stoppingly wrong moment--I do, after all, want you with us, in non-ghostly form, for next year's stories.

"So many potty ladies, so many biographies!"

I wrote quite a bit about So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald when it was published in England in 2008, so I was pleased to discover today that it finally reached America officially last month, being published in paperback by Fourth Estate.

I wrote about the book for the Constant Conversation tonight, but no volume of letters worth its salt is ever exhausted, so I've got a couple of additional bits to share here.

First, this paragraph from a letter Fitzgerald sent to Colin Haycraft, her editor at Duckworth, on April 11, 1978, when she was in the midst of her ultimately unsuccessful attempt to write a biography of L. P. Hartley:

I did succeed in getting invited to LPH's childhood home, unchanged since 1900, with the old brass electric light fittings and baths &c., and by talking to his sister I got the psychological key to his novels, every novelist has one, I suppose, the situation his mind goes back to when he's alone--and I also discovered that his manservant was trying to poison him with veronal and that was why his bank manager locked him up and forced him to make a will, not in the manservant's favour--I was surprised when Frabcus [King, her friend] commented on this, that surely anyone would prefer to be murdered by someone they loved, rather than have them leave and blackmail you--these seemed to him the only alternatives, but I can think of so many other duller ones.

Good god, can I ever!

Then there's this line from a note she sent her editor, Richard Ollard, after a domestic accident that sent her to the emergency room:

The next case brought in after me was an O/D-M/D--overdose, marital disagreement.

DSo I Have Thought of You is so full of pleasures that no one who has fallen for Fitzgerald's brilliantly lean, piercingly perceptive novels should be without it.

Tolstoy's zoo

{Photo by rocketlass.}

At one point in War and Peace, Natasha--her surfeit of energy having temporarily trapped her in that odd state common to teens of being simultaneously listless and frenetic--orders her maid, almost inexplicably, to bring her a rooster. By the time the rooster has been located, Natasha has already considered and discarded several other thoughts and activities, and has as little interest in the rooster as would a person brought one out of the blue:

During this conversation, a maid stuck her head in at the back door of the sitting room.

"They've brought the rooster, miss," the girl said in a whisper.

"Never mind, Polya, tell them to take it away," said Natasha.

But the rooster did serve a purpose: it got me thinking about the animals of War and Peace. My notes make it:

A bear
Horses
Hunting dogs
A wolf and her cubs
A hare

The bear, of course, is the greatest of these, costarring with Pierre and Dolokhov in one of the novel's--and Tolstoy's--finest scenes, the debauched night that begins with the bear dancing and ends with it tied to the back of a policeman, floating in the Moika.

I can't bear--sorry--to refer to that scene without quoting Pierre's rationalization for being there in the first place after promising his good friend Prince Andrei mere hours before that he wouldn't go near the party:

"It would be nice to go to Kuragin's," he thought. But at once he remembered the word of honor he had given Prince Andrei not to visit Kuragin.

But at once, as happens with so-called characterless people, he desired so passionately to experience again that dissolute life so familiar to him, that he decided to go. And at once the thought occurred to him that the word he had given meant nothing, because before giving his word to Prince Andrei, he had also given Prince Anatole his word that he would be there; finally he thought that all these words of honor were mere conventions, with no definite meaning, especially if you considered that you might die the next day, or something so extraordinary might happen to you that there would no longer be honor or dishonor. That sort of reasoning often came to Pierre, destroying all his decisions and suppositions. He went to Kuragin's.

Quite. As someone who does not generally give in to impulse when it contradicts earlier plans*, I find myself loving Pierre more at that moment than at any other in all 1,200 pages of War and Peace.

The bear, meanwhile, brings to mind another, later bear, this one in Penelope Fitzgerald's strange, beautifully written novel of Russia, The Beginning of Spring (1988). I turned to the scene with the bear in that novel tonight and was immediately impressed by how Tolstoyan the bear's backstory feels:

Frank . . . asked her, out of civility, what Mitya's present was. It was a tame bear-cub, or perhaps not tamed, sent dow from the North. The prices of ordinary brown bear fur, for rugs and coats, had gone down terribly since they had put proper heating into the Trans-Siberian railway. Still, this one's mother had been shot for sport by one of Arkady's business contacts and generously he had ordered them to box up the cub and put it on the train for Moscow.

Still, I was surprised when later on that same page Fitzgerald made her reference to Tolstoy overt:

Frank had never been much amused by the dancing bear [he recalled from his childhood], nor, as far as he could see, was anyone else. This was only a cub, though. When he got back to Reidka's he told Selwyn what he had arranged, largely for the relief of repeating it aloud. At least he can't make it have anything to do with Tolstoy, he thought. But it turned out that at the New Year Lev Nicolaevich had himself taken the part of the performing bear, wearing a skin which had been lined with canvas. According to Selwyn, this enabled him to give a more spiritual turn to the whole occasion.

After reading that I found myself imagining Tolstoy as the author of Bambi . . . oh, what drama he would bring to the forest fire!

"And I thought, Suppose one of them had an omniscient valet?", or, P. G. Wodehouse on Jeeves

The two highlights for me of the new fourth volume of The Paris Review Interviews--reason enough on their own for me to buy the book--are the interview with Haruki Murakami, which I drew on yesterday, and the one from 1975 with P. G. Wodehouse.

Wodehouse comes across as amiable and a bit goofy, but at the same time every bit the master craftsman and hard worker his fans know him to have been. The interview is sprinkled with wonderful moments--like when Wodehouse says, "I'm bad at remembering things, like when flying really became fashionable," or "It's a shame when things like spats go out"--but what has inspired today's post is one of the standard questions that Wodehouse must have fielded hundreds of times, but to which this time he gave an interesting answer:

INTERVIEWER

Did you ever have a butler like Jeeves?

WODEHOUSE

No, never like Jeeves. My butlers were different, though I believe J. M. Barrie had one just like Jeeves.

Really? Now this calls for a trip to the bookshelves, where from Lisa Chaney's Hide-and-Seek with Angels: A Life of J. M. Barrie (2005), we learn about Barrie's manservant Frank Thurston, who entered Barrie's service in the 1920s and does seem to have been remarkable:

Thurston's ability to enter and leave a room with absolute silence was a reflection of his enigmatic and, some thought, slightly sinister personality. To compound the mystery he had somehow familiarised himself not only with Spanish and French, but also with Latin and Greek. In addition to admirably fulfilling his role as skilled and urbane butler, it soon became clear that Thurston was a man of startling learning. Cynthia [Asquith] wrote of him:

Dictionaries and various learned tomes soon cluttered up the pantry, where I would constantly find him reading Latin or Greek while he polished the silver.
Thurston had an astonishing memory for other things besides living and dead languages. He could supply any forgotten date or quotation. One day Barrie remarked that the only line in an Oxford quotation that survived was "A rose red city half as old as Time." Though we all knew this line, no one of us could remember the name of the poet.

When Cynthia's husband, Beb, confessed that he couldn't remember the name of the "rose red city" and no one else at the table could either, Thurston, passing around the meat, finally said, "Was it not Petra, Sir?"

In light of Thurston's surprising erudition, Chaney tells us, Barrie took to warning his guests that

if they were thinking of reading a thriller in bed they would be advised "to hide it between a Pliny and the latest theory of Ethics."

While Robert McCrum's recent biography of Wodehouse barely mentions Barrie, and Thurston not at all, it does appear
(if Google Book Search's frustratingly limited preview isn't leading me astray) that N. T. P. Murphy at least touched on the question of Thurston as an inspiration for Jeeves in his In Search of Blandings: An Investigation into the Sources That Inspired P. G. Wodehouse (1986), writing that, through the accounts of Wodehouse's friend Denis Mackail, Thurston "played a part in the 'growth' of Jeeves in the early part of the 1920s."*

All of which makes me wonder how Thurston would have handled an odd incident involving Barrie that I've related before, but which seems worth sharing once again. It's from Penelope Fitzgerald's loving, perceptive group biography of her uncles, The Knox Brothers (1977), and, appropriately or not, it's the first thing that comes to my mind when Barrie is brought up:

Desmond MacCarthy, the most genial of Irish critics, had been at King's, and wanted to help [Fitzgerald's uncle Edmund Knox], as he wanted to help everybody he met. He also knew everybody. Eddie must come to him and ask advice from James Barrie, who was at the height of his fame, though he could sometimes be a little disconcerting, unless the side of him which spoke to adults, and which he called "McConachie," happened to be foremost. Buoyed up by MacCarthy's confidence, the two of them called at 133 Gloucester Terrace, where they found the room empty, except for a large dog, with which Barrie used to play hide-and-seek in the Park. While they waited, Eddie in sheer nervousness hit his hand on the marble mantelpiece. It began to bleed profusely. MacCarthy was aghast. Barrie could not bear the sight of blood. They tried to staunch it with handkerchiefs, and with the cuffs of MacCarthy's soft shirt, which became deeply stained. Barrie appeared at the doorway, took one look at them, and withdrew. Kind-hearted though he was, he was obliged to send down a message that he could not see them.

For that matter, how would Jeeves himself have handled it? Bertie's scrapes, though plentiful and harrowing, were rarely the sort to draw blood. Most likely, I suppose, is that no such incident would have occurred, Jeeves having quietly sanded all the corners of the mantelpiece at some point in the past in anticipation of just this sort of danger.

Passing once more through The Gate of Angels

{Photo by rocketlass.}

William Hazlitt having convinced me to act on a recent desire to do some re-reading of favorite authors, late last week I pulled a half-dozen or so titles from my shelves from which to choose. I got no farther than the first page of the book on top of the stack, Penelope Fitzgerald's The Gate of Angels (1990), before my choice was made.

Here's the opening paragraph that won me over:

How could the wind be so strong, so far inland, that cyclists coming into the town in the late afternoon looked more like sailors in peril? This was on the way into Cambridge, up Mill Road past the cemetery and the workhouse. On the open ground to the left the willow-trees had been blown, driven and cracked until their branches gave way and lay about the drenched grass, jerking convulsively and trailing cataracts of twigs. The cows had gone mad, tossing up the silvery sweeping leaves which were suddenly, quite contrary to all their experience, everywhere within reach. Their horns were festooned with willow boughs. Not being able to see properly, they tripped and fell. Two or three of them were wallowing on their backs, idiotically, exhibiting vast pale bellies intended by nature always to be hidden. They were still munching. A scene of disorder, tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason.

So much in that paragraph to consider! It opens with a note of surprise at a strikingly unexpected image, then its finely observed details--the silvery leaves, the decorated cows' horns, the "vast pale bellies"--cascade one upon another under the force of the rushing wind until the scene springs to life before us with all the strangeness with which it strikes the struggling cyclists who are out in it. Land is turned into sea, inanimate trees writhe like wounded animals, and cows are topsy-turvy. This may be nothing but the onset of an ordinary thunderstorm, yet Fitzgerald's careful description seems to suggest that something deeper is amiss.

"A scene of disorder" is right: this is Cambridge in 1912, that late Edwardian period when everything--religious belief, scientific knowledge, gender roles, class relations, and more--was being called into question. While the fact that the cows remain unperturbed by their topsy-turvy state suggests that perhaps nature may be more resilient and mutable than human doctrine, that would surely be at best cold comfort to those people who were trying to assemble a life in the midst of all that uncertainty.

In that intellectual and social ferment Fitzgerald sets the story of a junior fellow in physics at a mouldering Cambridge college who is hopelessly in love with a nameless woman he met through a bicycle accident; the woman herself, Daisy, a trainee nurse from the lower working class, is looking merely for the independence and security that are at that moment still almost entirely unavailable to an unattached young woman. As she tells the story of the pair's awkward, halting progress towards one another, Fitzgerald also paints a portrait of an era--and, for this book, more than any of her others, is a romance--of the way that love can transcend even the greatest uncertainties.

Fitzgerald's style, as in all her novels, is economic to the point of asperity, a concision that gives her every narrative pronouncement the force of an Olympian judgment. Here, for example, is how she introduces an explanation of Daisy's whereabouts:

In fact there was no mystery about Daisy's movements. Mystery is a luxury and would have been quite beyond her means.

That quiet precision--and the trust in Fitzgerald's eye that it engenders--makes the reader more attentive when she chooses to offers a mass of detail, as in this staggering account of the kitchenware that plagues a middle-class housewife:

She looked at the sink, loaded down with all that was necessary when a husband had his daily meals in the house. . . . [T]oast-racks, egg-cups, egg-cosies, hot water jugs, hot milk strainers, tea-strainers, coffee-strainers, bone egg-spoons, sugar-tongs, mustard-pots manufactured of blue glass inside, metal outside, silver fruit knives (as steel in contact with fruit-juice was known to be poisonous), napkins with differently coloured rings for each person at table, vegetable dishes with handles in the shape of artichokes, gravy boats, dishcovers, fish-forks with which it was difficult to eat fish (but fish-knives were only for vulgarians), muffin-dishes which had to be filled with boling water to keep the muffins at their correct temperature, soup-plates into which the soup was poured from an earthenware container with a lid, cut-glass blancmange dishes, knife-rests for knives, fork-rests for forks, cheese dishes with lids the shape of a piece of cheese, compotiers, ramekins, pipkins, cruets, pots. All of these were not too much (on a clean cloth, too, with the centre fold forming a straight line the whole length of the table) for Mr Wrayburn to expect--Mrs Wrayburn did not think it unreasonable, nor did Daisy--and most of them were in the sink at the moment, waiting, in mute reproach, to be washed and dried.

A single long paragraph, and the period's gender relations are set before us in all their absurdity.

As I noted above,The Gate of Angels is a decidedly light, even romantic novel. Despite the topsy-turvy opening, we rarely worry that all won't end well (though it's hard not to remember that the slaughter of World War I looms, sure to exact a brutal toll from the characters Fitzgerald depicts). At the same time, it offers the pleasures of humor, gentle irony ("Professor Flowerdew . . . had told him that he could not hold out any great hopes for the future of the material universe. On the other hand, he had spoken very highly of Fred."), and deeply perceptive empathy that are the hallmarks of all Fitzgerald's fiction--plus the unexpected bonus of a splendid interpolated ghost story in the style of M. R. James! Like all her novels, it rewards close attention, and re-reading: merely attending to what Fitzgerald leaves out, and what she gets across despite, is a lesson for any writer.

Fitzgerald herself offered a joke about her concision in a letter about the novel to her friend Harold Woelmer in 1990:

I'm already getting letters to say that there seems to be some mistake as it is so short and some pages must be missing out of their copy. It's Collins's fault for not putting The End, like we used to have at the movies in the dear old days.

More self-deprecatingly, in a later letter to her editor, she thanks him for the cover design of the paperback, noting that she'd received one letter from a reader assuring her that the cover was the best part of the book.

No matter the cover design, that reader is not to be trusted: Penelope Fitzgerald never published a word not worth your time.If you've not read her, you have a treat ahead.

The Paris Review

Following my George Plimpton post, it seems right that I praise the marketing department at Picador for the ingenious promotional scheme they came up with for The Paris Review Interviews, Volume III (2008): they arranged with a couple of blogs--including Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, and Mark Sarvas's Elegant Variation--to run contests through which they would give away sets of the three volumes.

The contests required readers to identify interview subjects through a snippet of an answer, which was not only fun but good marketing--after reading a few days of stumpers (and probably trolling the Paris Review archives to try to find the answer) you couldn't help but be impressed by the quality of the collections.

To make it even better, I actually won a set last week, by identifying the interview subject who gave E. M. Forster the back of his hand in this exchange:

INTERVIEWER

E. M. Forster speaks speaks of his major characters sometimes taking over and dictating the course of his novels. Has this ever been a problem for you, or are you in complete command?

AUTHOR

My knowledge of Mr. Forster's works is limited to one novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.

Initially the savagery of "trite little whimsy" made me think of Evelyn Waugh, but I eventually decided that Waugh couldn't have so successfully avoided Forster's novels, settling instead on Nabokov--it was "whimsy" and "quills" that did it, along with the flat brutality of "galley slaves."

On receiving my set today, I was pleased to see that the topic of E. M. Forster does come up in the interview with Waugh in Volume III. Conducted in 1963, when Waugh was well into what Penelope Fitzgerald calls his "I am bored; you are frightened" phase, the interview features the usual Wauvian combination of crankiness and intelligence. At one point, he mutters, looking out the window over Hyde Park, "The horrors of London life! The horrors of London life!"

Forster's name surfaces when the interviewer asks about his famous distinction between flat and round characters. Having always had difficulty with the false simplicity of those categories, I appreciate Waugh's repudiation of them:

WAUGH

All fictional characters are flat. A writer can give an illusion of depth by giving an apparently stereoscopic view of a character--seeing him from two vantage points; all a writer can do is give more or less information about a character, not information of a different order.

INTERVIEWER

Then do you make no radical distinction between characters as differently conceived as Mr. Prendergast and Sebastian Flyte?

WAUGH

Yes, I do. There are protagonists and there are characters who are furniture. One gives only one aspect of the furniture. Sebastian Flyte was a protagonist.

INTERVIEWER

Would you say, then, that Charles Ryder was the character about whom you gave the most information?

WAUGH

No, Guy Crouchback. [A little restlessly] But look, I think that your questions are dealing too much with the creation of character and not enough with the technique of writing. I regard writing not as investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech, and events that interest me.

Would it be better to be Waugh's furniture or Nabokov's galley slave? And, to keep the theme running, when I think of a writer who is "obsessed with the use of language," I think first of Nabokov, but Waugh runs a close second

Finally, I can't resist closing with this exchange about writers Waugh likes, in part because it includes a couple of my own favorites:

INTERVIEWER

What about Ronald Firbank?

WAUGH

I enjoyed him very much when I was young. I can't read him now.

INTERVIEWER

Why?

WAUGH

I think there would be something wrong with an elderly man who could enjoy Firbank.

INTERVIEWER

Whom do you read for pleasure?

WAUGH

Anthony Powell. Ronald Knox, both for pleasure and moral edification. Erle Stanley Gardner.

INTERVIEWER

And Raymond Chandler!

WAUGH

No. I'm bored by all those slugs of whiskey. I don't care for all the violence either.

INTERVIEWER

But isn't there a lot of violence in Gardner?

WAUGH

Not of the extraneous lubricious sort you find in other American crime writers.

"Extraneous lubricious sort"--now that could have come from the mouth of Nabokov!

Getting lost in October Country

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Every October, I do my best to spend at least some time reading stories of ghosts, haints, fetches, ghouls, and other unpleasant manifestations. This October has, sadly, found me too busy to get very far in that project, so that all I have to share right now is a bit from a letter from Penelope Fitzgerald to her editor Mandy Kirkby of May 19, 1995, collected in the wonderful So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald:

The ghost at the Southwold-Walberswick crossing is said to be a mother waiting for her child who was supposed to be coming back on the last ferry. The white dog, which I have actually seen, was something to do with Dunwich, I think, and the poltergeist was horrid.

This is one of those occasions that makes one wish that collections of letters as a matter of course incorporated both sides of the correspondence. What did Kirkby ask to elicit this response? Readers of Fitzgerald's The Bookshop will recognize the poltergeist (and not be surprised that the ghost in the novel, convincingly eerie, was drawn from life), while the ferry ghost seems pretty straightforward--but what was the white dog? And what were the circumstances of Fitzgerald's sighting of it? I've written before about a certain matter-of-factness the English seem to bring to relations the appearance of the presumably ghostly, and this seems a perfect example.

But for those intrepid readers who are not English, and who refuse to simply accept intrusions from the unlikely spirit world as commonplace, that little taste of ghostliness will surely not be enough. Fortunately, prompted by Maud Newton, James Hynes has put together a list of ten great scary stories at his blog. The ones I already know are frightening and uncanny enough that later this week I'll be making the effort to seek out the rest.

And if that list doesn't include enough scares for you, you're welcome to dip into the I've Been Reading Lately archives and enjoy my numerous ghost-and-goblin posts from last October. Or you can simply reflect at length on various Sarah Palin-as-President scenarios . . .

Five postscripts

This is the point where, back in an earlier century, I would have turned the letter on its side and begun writing across what was already there. Fortunately for your sanity, technology has saved you from having to read the enormity that would be the result of such a technique employed in my hideous handwriting.

1 In writing about So I Have Thought of You, the new collection of Penelope Fitzgerald's letters, I can't believe that I forgot to mention why a good portion of the letters from the first half or so of her life are missing: they were in her houseboat, Grace, when it sank in the Thames. Fans of her Booker Prize-winning Offshore (1979), a novel about an eccentric community of houseboat owners struggling to survive on the muddy banks of the Thames, may not be surprised--at least until they learn that this was the second time Grace sank. Once, for most of us, would have been enough.

2 Maud Newton and I corresponded off and on over several weeks recently about the possible fate of Iris Murdoch's letters, with me worrying that Murdoch's innate secretiveness surely meant that she was a burner of letters. But it took Jenny Davidson to suggest that the answer might be on my bookshelves: demonstrating yet again that she's a scholar while I'm just a dilettante, she pointed out that Peter Conradi, in his Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001), probably at least mentions whether he had recourse to her letters. The resulting list tidbits about the topic, which I fired off in an e-mail to Jenny and Maud, is now part of a post at Maud's site. Short answer: there was probably some serious burning.

3 To close my post Wednesday about Sybille Bedford' s A Legacy, I drew on some praise for the book that Nancy Mitford included in a letter to Evelyn Waugh. Waugh, on the other hand, though he "read it straight through with intense pleasure," disagrees with me about its second half being the richer portion:

For the first half--up to the marriage of Jules & Melanie--I was in full agreement '"one of the best novels I ever read" as you say. After that I found a slight falling off, as though the writer had suddenly taken a stiff dose of Henry James, particularly in the long talks between Sarah & Caroline. Also I think it was clumsy to have any of the narrative in the first person. The daughter relates things she cannot possibly ever have known as though she were an eye witness. But these are small blemishes. What a brilliant plot!

Later in the letter, he, ponders, tongue in cheek, on the identity of the book's author:

I wondered for a time who this brilliant "Mrs Bedford" could be. A cosmopolitan military man, plainly, with knowledge of parliamentary government, and popular journalism, a dislike for Prussians, a liking for Jews, a belief that everyone speaks French in the home . . .

4 In her introduction to the 1999 Counterpoint edition of A Legacy, Bedford notes that the book was less than a success on publication, though Waugh gave it a strong review in the Spectator. "Such reception as it had was mostly bewildered or hostile or both." Even her publisher was less than fully committed to the book, though for extra-literary reasons:

George Weidenfeld was in the midst of troubles of his own--wives and Cyril Connolly--he gave me lunch at the Ritz on a bad day for him and was openly sad.

From Jeremy Lewis's Cyril Connolly: A Life (1997) we learn that this was the period when Weidenfeld, his marriage having collapsed, was busy diving into an affair with Connolly's wife, Barbara Skelton.

It began, Skelton claims, when Connolly himself told her that, as he had fallen for Lucien Freud's wife, Caroline Blackwood (who wanted nothing to do with him), he wouldn't mind her finding "a rival attraction of her own . . . provided he was a gentleman." It didn't take long: accidentally brushing hands at the theatre, Weidenfeld and Skelton "were suddenly aware of an intense and mutual physical attraction"; things proceeded apace, with childishness, misbehavior, and hideous scenes on all sides. Evelyn Waugh, rarely inclined to be generous about another's troubles, complained that

Connolly's cuckolding is a great bore. I dined with him and he went on and on.

Connolly's mother, on the other hand, was more vitriolically understanding, opening her argument with the unintentionally ridiculous line,

I think it is the last straw that it should it be your publisher. . . . I think a lioness would have repaid you more [than Barbara has]--animals have not spite and deliberate cruelty. . . . [P]ut her out of your mind and leave her to her present keeper.

Divorce ensued, followed by a quick marriage between Skelton and Weidenfeld that the bridegroom described as "a dismal affair, more like a wake than a wedding." The marriage itself was as brief and unpleasant as the affair had been long and passionate:

Life as a publisher's wife proved entirely uncongenial to Barbara. She claimed that she hated being woken every morning to the rustle of newspapers, was bored by Wiedenfeld's business talk and tireless ambition, and refused to play the part of the compliant, charming publishing hostess, despite his begging her to "Gush! Gush! You must be more gushing!"

It's not hard to see why Anthony Powell fixed on Skelton as the model for Pamela Widmerpool, isn't it? Skelton wrote two volumes of memoir, which I'm beginning to think I need to read.

5 This final item doesn't quite qualify as a true postscript, as I haven't really written about Cyril Connolly in recent weeks, but as he's a topic that's perpetually bubbling under the surface in these parts, you can consider it a postscript to I've Been Reading Lately in general. From his journal for 1931, a few lines for a city summer:

London now completely summer. Trees, tawdriness spreading west from Tottenham Court Road, evening pavements crowded with aimless sex. V. Woolf asked Elizabeth what unnatural vice was--"I mean what do they do?"

And that's all for tonight, for I find myself once again, as Connolly jotted down elsewhere in his journal, "Proust-ridden." The Prisoner calls.