Penelope Fitzgerald’s Tone of Command

“I’m sorry I’m late, but my house sank.” So explained Penelope Fitzgerald to her students at the cramming school where she taught in the early sixties, after her family’s houseboat on the Thames went down.. She led a very peculiar life, according to a new biography reviewed by James Wood in The New Yorker. Early academic and journalistic success was followed by failure that got worse and worse, reaching its lowest point when she, her husband (an alcoholic and disbarred lawyer), and their three children lived in a homeless shelter for four months.

Only late in life (at 58) did Fitzgerald publish her first book, a biography of the Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones, and then at sixty a second biography, of her father and his three brothers, the astonishingly gifted and eccentric Knox brothers (her father Edmund became the editor of Punch), and the first of a series of much-praised novels. She’s probably not much read by American Christians, though her books are morally serious and sharply observant and sometimes very funny — she writes like a sparer, more astringent, and less amused Evelyn Waugh. She treats her subjects even more cooly than he did, and from a greater distance, but while he saw them as subjects for satire, she doesn’t satirize but observes them.

Wood’s descriptions of her novels will explain what I mean. He also makes some shrewd suggestions to explain the reasons she wrote as she did. Among them:

She came from a brilliant and eminent family, with long connections to both the Church of England and Oxford University, and the tone of command is everywhere in her writing.

Authority is part of the obscure magic of her achievement as a novelist. If one of the commonest critical responses to her work seems to be laudatory bafflement — “How does she do it?” — the beginning of an answer is that she proceeds with utmost confidence that she will be heard and that we will listen, even to her reticence. Her fictions sit on the page with the well-rubbed assurance of fact, as if their details were calmly agreed upon, and long established. And though you might expect work of irritating certitude, Fitzgerald’s confidence in her material is oddly disarming; she seems somehow to take life as it comes, as if we were always entering her novels in the middle of how things just are.

Wood says that Fitzgerald “maintained a strong Christian faith, and was a lifelong churchgoer. But you will find no revealing personal statement, either in this biography or in her writing, about the status of that faith.” That she was a strong Christian surprises me a little. Though I’ve very much liked the novels I’ve read and the biography The Knox Brothers, and enjoyed the essays of hers I’ve read just as much, I would have guessed that she was one of those English writers formed by a high and serious but not supernaturalist type of Christianity, in the tradition of Matthew Arnold.

A writer I’d commend to those who read novels, though she is not everyone’s kind of writer.