Penelope Fitzgerald was born Penelope Mary Knox, daughter of Christina and Edmund – colloquially Evoe – Knox, on December 17th, 1916. To be born a Knox in England is nearly as auspicious as to be born a Peabody or an Adams in the United States, especially if your grandfather on your mother’s side is the bishop of Lincoln and you are baptised by the dean of Lincoln.
You are bound to grow up with secure expectations: an agreeable childhood in Hampstead, at eight off to a preparatory school in Eastbourne for “young ladies” – even if Penelope thought it exile and imprisonment. At 13 she won a scholarship to Wycombe Abbey, a good school, but she hated it. On May 30th, 1935, her mother died of peritonitis. All the Knoxes were at the funeral.
Penelope wrote, years later, that “it was a memorable thing to see all the brothers together”: “Wilfred took the service, Dilly, who rarely entered a church, stood in silent misery at the back, Ronnie, who had not been to an Anglican service for nearly 20 years, knelt in the aisle. Those who saw him, not cut off from the human grief around him, but totally absorbed in communion with God, felt that they had seen prayer manifest.”
Reluctantly, Penelope took up her "senior scholarship" at Somerville College, Oxford. There – "Our Penny from Heaven" – she met the right people and some of the wrong ones. When she went down from Oxford with a brilliant first-class degree, her father, a writer for Punch and eventually its editor and owner, got her a job reviewing films for the magazine, where she exercised her style in praise of Hitchcock, Rex Harrison and Margaret Lockwood. But she combined that work with the war effort, joining the ministry of food and later the features department of the BBC.
It is not known when Penelope met Desmond Fitzgerald, a lieutenant in the Irish Guards often described as dashing. They overlapped at Oxford, where he rioted under the guise of reading history, at Magdalen, but they probably didn’t start going out until later. In the summer of 1939 he went down with a second-class degree and started to read for the Bar at the Middle Temple.
They married on August 15th, 1942, and for a time everything was roses. They started small but in 1951 moved into Chestnut Lodge, a five-storey Queen Anne house on Cannon Place, a good address, with plenty of room for their two daughters, Mary and Christina, and their son, Valpy.
Desmond began to edit World Review, "a magazine of the Arts, Politics, and Law", which turned out to be original enough to publish JD Salinger's For Esmé With Love and Squalor and to call William Empson's The Structure of Complex Words, in 1950, "the most valuable book of the year". In the summer of 1953 the magazine collapsed. The Fitzgeralds could not afford the big house, so they left London and moved to East Anglia, where they rented a house in Southwold, a beautiful village that was never quite dry.
It was not a setting for secure expectations. Desmond, not much in demand as a barrister after his absence on World Review, lived in London with his mother during the week and went down to Southwold at the weekend. Mostly he was drinking. The weekends were spent quarreling about money. They ran up immense debts and soon had to offer their possessions for sale, disposing of them on the street.
Enough was enough. Penelope decided – it was her own decision – in 1960 to move the family back to London. Unable to afford a house, they had to settle for renting a boat named Grace, moored on Chelsea Reach between Battersea Bridge and Albert Bridge, one of the grandest parts of London. The boat was a dud, beyond repair – it sank twice – and meanwhile the Fitzgeralds were allowed to let out waste water, and to use the lavatories, only on a falling tide.
Desmond was not earning enough at the Bar to keep the family afloat. Penelope knew that it was up to her. She found two part-time teaching jobs, first at the Italia Conti stage school in Clapham and, in 1962, at Queen’s Gate School in Kensington and at Westminster Tutors. Teaching was her main source of income for many years.
Worse was ahead. Early in 1962 Desmond began stealing cheques from his chambers and cashing them at local pubs, forging signatures. Caught after a few months, he was charged with nine offences, and he asked that 17 others be taken into consideration. He pleaded guilty to all. His war service may have helped. He was put on probation for two years, a light sentence. But the Bar took a more severe view. On December 4th he was disbarred and expelled from the Inn of the Middle Temple.
Meanwhile, the barge sank for the last time, and Penelope and the children were moved to temporary housing at Flat 5, 144 Earls Court Road, where they stayed for a year. Early in 1964 Desmond, putting the fragments of his life together, got a job at a travel agency, writing out train tickets. He held the job until he died, on August 19th, 1976.
Desmond's death released Penelope to a new life. She grieved, and she wrote her grief. Almost every year she published a short novel based on her life, mostly sad, sometimes dire: The Golden Child (1977), The Bookshop (1978), Offshore (1979) – which won the Booker – Human Voices (1980), At Freddie's (1982), Innocence (1986), The Beginning of Spring (1988) and The Gate of Angels (1990).
Of these the most lovable is Offshore, a fictional deflection of her life on the barge. The scene in which Nenna James traipses to Stoke Newington to find her husband, Edward, and implore him to come back to her and the children, while downstairs Gordon Hodge is trying to play a piece by Chopin, putting a record of it on the gramophone and playing along with it, "always two or three notes behind", until George shouts at her, "You're not a woman!" is Fitzgerald at her best. "I am drawn," she once wrote, "to people who seem to have been born defeated or, even, profoundly lost."
Nearly as fine is the scene in The Gate of Angels where Skippey on his bicycle shouts to Fairly, "Thought is blood." Or chapter six of the same novel, the meeting of the Disobligers' Society. Or Daisy's interview with the matron at Blackfriars Hospital.
Fitzgerald's last novel, The Blue Flower (1995), is the one for which the highest claim is made. Hermione Lee says, in this splendidly affectionate biography: "The author of The Blue Flower is an imaginative genius writing about what 'genius' is." This novel is the only one independent of Fitzgerald's own experience. The genius in the case is the German Romantic poet who thought of himself as Novalis. I recall a glowing sentence from the book: "But the Freiherr had this in common with his eldest son, that he started talking immediately, his thoughts seizing the opportunity to become words."
The book made Fitzgerald famous, well off, a presence on the reading circuit, judging books for prizes, giving the same interview over and over, enjoying her late-won fame. She died on April 28th, 2000. Denis Donoghue’s next book is Metaphor (Harvard University Press, 2014)
