SOURCE: “A Still, Small Voice: The Novels of Penelope Fitzgerald,” in New Criterion, Vol. 10, No. 7, March, 1992, pp. 33–42.

[In the following essay, Bawer traces the distinctive characteristics of Fitzgerald’s fiction and asserts that these features are most prominent in The Gate of Angels.]

Among the many symptoms of the American literary scene’s current infirmity is that stateside publishers have been slow to take on, and readers on these shores slow to discover, the English novelist of manners Penelope Fitzgerald. Though British critics have justly compared her to such writers as Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Barbara Pym, and Anita Brookner—all of whom have long enjoyed sizable readerships here—and though back home she has received one Booker Prize and been nominated for three others, two of her eight novels have yet to appear in U.S. editions and her name is nowhere near as well-known hereabouts as that of Pym or Brookner.¹ Why is this so? The answer is not simply that Fitzgerald, now in her seventy-fifth year, is decidedly English in setting and sensibility (so, after all, are Pym and Brookner); nor is it merely a matter of her novels’ temperate tone and modesty of scale. (To read through the reviews of her books is to find, time and again, such words and phrases as “slight,” “delicate,” “unpretentious,” “economy and understatement,” “an impression of sharpness and shortness,” “in no sense a ‘big’ book”; more than one critic has compared her novels to watercolors.) Nor is it that, like Pym and Brookner, she is a writer of unsensational stories. For Fitzgerald’s novels are not only unsensational: they are elliptical, elusive, episodic, at times exasperating in their deliberate slenderness of plot and lack of resolution; their most essential relationships, pivotal incidents, and intense confrontations tend to happen offstage or to be rendered very concisely.

Instead of action, what Fitzgerald often gives us are apparent digressions, among them conversations in which trivial matters may receive as much attention as important ones—but in which her characters, in one way or another, tellingly reveal themselves. She is less interested in storytelling, per se, than in the qualities that draw people together and the differences that estrange them, in the abiding and numinous mystery that the world is to human beings and that human beings are to one another, and in the disjunction between what they are and what they pretend to be (or imagine or hope themselves to be). She celebrates those who defy mean self-interest in the name of some higher cause—art, truth, love, or even a vague longing for something better—even as she is acutely aware of the hurtful ways that people can treat their nearest and dearest in the name of such causes, and of their often less praiseworthy underlying motives: a fear of losing independence, a need to control, a craving for power. She is fascinated by the dynamic of romantic love and family devotion, but never yields to anything that might be taken as a sentimental impulse; in book after book she reminds us that good and bad can coexist in one heart, and that otherwise unimpressive—and even somewhat ridiculous—people can display remarkable qualities of character. At their best, her dramatis personae exhibit those most English of virtues: decency, honesty, quiet fortitude, a sense of duty, an uncomplaining acceptance of one’s role and responsibilities in life.

Penelope Fitzgerald’s first novel appeared a mere fifteen years ago, when she was nearly sixty. (It was preceded by two biographies, one of Edward Burne-Jones and the other of Fitzgerald’s father, an editor of Punch, and her uncles, the cryptographer Dillwyn Knox and the priests Wilfred and Ronald Knox; she has since published a third biography, of the English poet Charlotte Mew.) Though now chiefly notable as the fictional debut of a writer whose artistry has since grown in leaps and bounds, The Golden Child is a competent whodunit, the sort of mystery that is set mostly in a single institution and whose success depends largely on the author’s ability to make that setting interesting. In this case the institution is an unnamed London museum, obviously modeled on the British Museum; and the characters—many of whom might have been plucked out of an Evelyn Waugh novel—are mainly museum officials who, almost to a man, care less about art than about their own careers. During a mega-exhibition of the Golden Treasure of Garamantia, an ancient African civilization, there takes place a series of odd and troubling incidents, chief among them the murder of the distinguished resident archeologist, Sir William Simpkin. Whodunit? Why? The solution turns out to be hidden in a message composed in Garamantian pictographs and carved on a clay tablet in an exhibition display case.

If The Golden Child falls short of being a first-rate mystery, it is because Fitzgerald’s artistic priorities clash head-on with those of the genre in which she has chosen to work. A murder mystery should be tidy and schematic; the characters may be shot through with ambiguities, and the mystery richly nuanced, but in the end there should be a firm sense of order restored, of pieces falling neatly into place. But to Fitzgerald one of the important points about life is that the pieces never fall neatly into place; she is less interested in devising jigsaw-like plots than in exploring the perplexities of the human condition. To be sure, in an apparent attempt to fit her characters neatly into their assigned roles in the mystery, Fitzgerald tries to reduce most of them to familiar comic-novel types; yet the very resistance to contrivance that makes her later novels feel so credible prevents her, in The Golden Child, from tailoring these characters as dexterously as a top-notch mystery writer would to the needs of her plot. Especially unsatisfactory is Waring Smith, the protagonist (and the first of Fitzgerald’s many innocents). He is a surprisingly sketchy creation; his motives are never clear, so one has less sympathy for him than one might otherwise—a state of affairs that is hardly unusual in Fitzgerald (who was once told by Ronald Knox that one should write biographies about people one loves and novels about people one dislikes) but is less than desirable in a mystery. What’s more, Waring is so terribly passive that it’s not even he who solves the case; again, such passivity might work in a literary novel, but not in this genre.

To be sure, Fitzgerald’s ironies of circumstance and temperament are far sharper than her plotting. Already in this book she is a forthright critic of manners and morals. The Garamantia exhibition is plainly an allusion to the King Tut extravaganza that helped usher in the age of the museum mega-show; and Fitzgerald captures perfectly the inanity of an era in which armies of people who wouldn’t cross the street to look at a Matisse can be persuaded by relentless publicity and media hype to line up in the freezing cold for hours to view a historically inconsequential exhibition of little artistic merit. In good English fashion, moreover, she gets in a few digs at Continental art and scholarship. We learn, for example, that Waring and his wife frequently “go out … to see films by leading French and Italian directors about the difficulties of making a film.” Fitzgerald skewers both the oppressive seriousness of Germans—a Heidelberg Garamantologist’s book is entitled Garamantischengeheimschriftendechiffrierkunst—and Gallic silliness: a pretentious impromptu oration by Rochegrosse-Bergson, a French scholar, includes a trendy nihilistic flourish to the effect that “[o]ur art—for every man, let us admit it, is an artist—is to achieve absolutely nothing!” The audience for this “arrant nonsense” consists of a pair of British journalists, of whom Fitzgerald offers a sardonic description: “exquisites for whom life could hold no further surprises, and removed by their foreign educations from crass British prejudices, [the journalists] sat in their Italian silk shirts and deerskin jackets, waiting, in a kind of energetic idleness. …Trained in French lycées, they were unable to resist [Rochegrosse-Bergson’s] rounded sentences which now dropped a couple of tones to announce the coming peroration.” These few words provide the reader with a veritable beginner’s catalogue of qualities (all of them somewhat connected to Continental ways and means) that Fitzgerald holds in disesteem: pretension, foppishness, “energetic idleness,” overassurance, a snobbish attitude toward middle-class bigots, a fashionably nihilistic or grotesquely scholarly approach to art. Though The Golden Child is far from a masterwork, then (alongside her later novels it looks decidedly primitive), it has wit and personality, and one comes away from it with a clear sense of Fitzgerald’s impatience with shabby contemporary values and with the wretched prospects for Western civilization in an age of hype, self-seeking, phoniness, and philistinism, high and low.

The Golden Child is the first of several Fitzgerald novels to focus on a cultural institution and on a cast of characters who are, shall we say, not all devoted in equal measure to the good, the true, and the beautiful. In her second novel, The Bookshop (1978), set in 1959, a widow named Florence Green buys the Old House, a centuries-old building in her sleepy East Suffolk village, and turns it into a bookshop. Like Waring Smith, she is something of an innocent—a well-meaning, quietly plucky, but rather naïve adult with commendable moral and artistic instincts but an insufficient awareness of the degree to which other people are driven by selfishness, jealousy, and power-hunger. In place of the self-seeking museum officials in The Golden Child, The Bookshop gives us Mrs. Gamart, a society matron who, seeing her role as the local doyenne of culture threatened by Florence’s shop, resurrects a plan to turn the site into an arts center and proceeds to use all her influence to have the building confiscated by the government. How does Florence react? If one expects her to be yet another mild-mannered, virtuous underdog who triumphs over the villainous powers-that-be, one will be disappointed. Nor should one expect her motives to be overly clear: as it is not entirely obvious why Waring Smith works in a museum and not, say, in some civil-service job, neither can one understand why Florence Green, of all people, has decided to go into the book-selling business. Confronted with the newly published Lolita, after all, she can’t even decide whether to stock it—“I haven’t been trained to understand the arts,” she explains, “and I don’t know whether a book is a masterpiece or not”—and has to turn to the well-read village recluse for an opinion. How, one cannot but wonder, did such a woman fasten upon the idea of opening a bookshop?

Here, as in The Golden Child, Fitzgerald contemplates with a jaundiced eye the rampant popularization of culture. An entire wall of Florence’s shop is covered by paperbacks: “cheerfully coloured, brightly democratic, they crowded the shelves in well-disciplined ranks. They would have a rapid turnover and she had to approve of them; yet she could remember a world where only foreigners had been content to have their books bound in paper. The Everymans, in their shabby dignity, seemed to confront them with a look of reproach.” A whole cultural outlook—the sort that some might call elitist and xenophobic—is conveyed in this brief passage. Nor is this the only time that Fitzgerald weighs in one such issues. When Mrs. Gamart tells Florence that she and others in the village have long wanted to turn the Old House into an arts center, Florence at first thinks it possible to have both a bookshop and an arts center in the building and innocently decides that, in order to run the latter efficiently, “she herself would have to take some sort of course in art history and music appreciation—music was always appreciated, whereas art had a history.” The aged village recluse, meanwhile, is unimpressed by Mrs. Gamart’s plans: “How can the arts have a centre?”

The Bookshop was followed by the Booker Prize-winning Offshore (1979), which has less in common with Fitzgerald’s other early efforts than with her later works, and which I shall discuss in connection with them. It was succeeded by Human Voices (1980), a novel about wartime London—or, to be specific, about the BBC in 1940, a place where, as in the museum of The Golden Child, some officials are identified not by name but by title (a device which nicely underscores the importance to Fitzgerald of roles and responsibilities). A temperate, lightly plotted book, Human Voices covers a few months in the lives of two programming directors, the Director of Programme Planning (DPP) and the Director of Recorded Programming (RPD), and of several young men and women who serve as assistants. Most important of these assistants is Annie Asra, a Birmingham piano tuner’s sensible daughter, who falls senselessly in love with the eccentric, middle-aged RPD. Given the promising situation—inside BBC headquarters during the Blitz!—a reader may well find himself frustrated at the lack of high drama in these pages. But the frustrations he will experience are those of life itself: Fitzgerald reminds us that heroism is not necessarily glamorous and is often, indeed, a matter of quiet dedication to monotonous tasks. She reminds us, too, that heroes, like saints, can be selfish and stupid, maddeningly quirky and abundantly flawed: though the Beeb’s employees “bitterly complain[ed] about the shortsightedness of their colleagues, the vanity of the newsreaders, the remoteness of the Controllers and the restrictive nature of the canteen’s one teaspoon,” the Corporation’s loyalty to the truth (despite temptations to conceal unpleasant facts for purposes of national morale) filled them with “a certain pride which they had no way to express, either then or since.” In the end, the book is a tribute to the unsung and quintessentially English heroism of imperfect people.

At Freddie’s (1982) is something of a tribute as well. Like Human Voices, it is an account of several months in the lives of several people; this time around, though, we’re at the Temple School, a.k.a. Freddie’s, an ever-destitute but widely revered London academy for child actors whose elderly founder and leader, Frieda Wentworth, a.k.a. Freddie, is a legendary figure in the theater world. Among the principal characters are two young teachers, one of whom falls in love with the other, and a pair of students, a brilliantly gifted nine-year-old named Jonathan and a vain, showoffy type (and future movie star) named Mattie. As Florence’s bookshop is threatened by Mrs. Gamart, so Freddie’s is endangered by a vulgar entrepreneur who wants to change it into a school for television-commercial actors; but, surprisingly, the real joker in the deck turns out to be Freddie herself, who, in her heart of hearts, proves to be devoted not to the theater but to the perpetuation, at any cost, of her own power. (Meanwhile, the school’s talentless, lovestruck young teacher—whom Freddie hired only because he would accept low pay—proves to have great strength of character.) As if to emphasize that what ultimately matters is not fame or power but art, the novel concludes with a memorable glimpse of the one true artist in the place, Jonathan, who, interested not in celebrity but in the perfection of his craft, remains past dusk in the schoolyard, repeatedly practicing a leap from a wall for his role in King John.

Jonathan, we are told, “was born to be one of those actors who work from the outside inwards. To them, the surface is not superficial.” The surface has never been superficial to Fitzgerald either, though there are times in The Golden Child, The Bookshop, Human Voices, and At Freddie’s when her meticulous portraits don’t communicate quite as much as she presumably wants them to. This is far less true of her other four novels, in which Fitzgerald, though no more than ever inclined to engage in extensive mind-reading, manages with far greater success to convey, for all her concision, a phenomenally rich sense of place and character and moral tone. These later novels (though they are not all strictly “later,” since I include among them the third, Offshore) are more ambitious and ambiguous than those already discussed; Fitzgerald’s vision seems larger, subtler, more complex. She focuses less on institutional than on family relations, and even reaches beyond England for her main settings; while infatuations figure in Human Voices and At Freddie’s, moreover, such later books as Innocence and The Gate of Angels examine full-fledged romances and marriages.

Fitzgerald is also more explicit, in these later novels, about her interest in matters of the spirit. The niece of two eminent priests, she takes what might be described, to an extent, as a Christian view of her creations: she notes their transgressions and names them bluntly, even bitingly, but if she scorns the sin she has compassion for the sinner. Such words as “soul” and “saint” crop up frequently in her pages, though one might miss them because of the casual, colloquial way in which they are generally introduced. (In Innocence, for example, she describes the perturbed young hero as rushing out of a room “like a lost soul.”) Fitzgerald is preoccupied, moreover, with the nature of innocence—its assets and liabilities, moral and practical, and the myriad forms it takes, whether in small children or in supposedly sophisticated adults—and emphasizes that innocence and righteousness do not necessarily go hand in hand. Sometimes her innocents are people who lack sufficient knowledge of the world; sometimes they are very worldly folk indeed—scientists, physicians, and journalists—who possess an overweening confidence in the ability of rational investigation to determine objective truth, and about whose smug, unquestioning reverence for such things as behaviorism and the scientific method Fitzgerald can be trenchantly sardonic. Surely one reason why she shrinks from directly rendering her novels’ climactic events is that she is intensely aware of the difficulty of pinning down the precise truth of a human situation.

This is not to suggest, of course, that Fitzgerald’s position is that of many a contemporary academic theorist who claims that nothing is knowable. On the contrary, she patently believes in truth, and believes, too, that fundamental human truths are worth pursuing. Yet she is hesitant to delve too deeply into the human soul. So heavily, indeed, does she rely on dialogue and physical action to convey character that at times one almost gets the impression that there is, to her, something unseemly about rummaging around too much inside a protagonist’s head. In any event, her emphasis is invariably not on exploring her characters’ souls but on examining their conduct in the company of others. When she makes general statements, accordingly—some of which are attributed to the narrator, others to various characters—they tend to be commentaries not on psychological but on social verities: “Morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct.” “Total approval is never convincing.” “Honourable men are rare, but not necessarily interesting.” “Politics and business can be settled by influence, cooks and doctors can only be promoted on their skill.” Manifestly, these aphoristic remarks are the work of someone who is clear-eyed but funny about human failings, someone who has firm and unromantic convictions about art, life, and civilization. Yet her best novels are characterized by a reflectiveness, a probing curiosity, an acute awareness of the contingency of the human condition that separates her dramatically from the callow certitude of many a glib, solipsistic contemporary novelist.

Such is the case, certainly, with Offshore. Set in a community of Thames barges on London’s Battersea Reach during the early 1960s, the book focuses on thirty-two-year-old Nenna James, a former music student who lives with her daughters, Martha and Tilda, on a barge named Grace. Nenna bought the barge, we learn, while her engineer husband, Edward, was in Central America on a construction job; Edward, now back in London and unwilling to join them in their unorthodox new residence, has instead taken a room in a drab-sounding neighborhood that Nenna can’t even bring herself to visit: “In Christ’s name, who ever heard of such a place?” Fitzgerald doesn’t offer a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down verdict on all this. Nor does she tell us, in so many words, precisely why Nenna decided to move onto a barge and why she now obstinately refuses to give it up. (There are, significantly, no flashbacks to the marriage, of which we are offered the skimpiest, most objective record.) Doubtless the explanation is not a simple one, for Nenna is not a case study out of a textbook but a character who feels at every moment perversely, perplexingly, and poignantly real. By way of dialogue and gesture, however, and the occasional brief flashlight glimpse beneath Nenna’s edgy, stubborn, and confused surface, Fitzgerald delicately plants in one’s mind the notion that marriage has been for Nenna a string of failures and disappointments, including the frustration of her musical ambitions, and that the approach of middle age and the absence of Edward have combined to bring to a head her long-suppressed fears and resentments and to propel her into extreme, perhaps even reckless, action. In moving offshore, Nenna has moved away from the mainstream of middle-class existence, to experiment with a life on the margins that may, in her mind, provide a gratifying tie to her musical ambitions of yore and to her passing youth.

In addition to bringing Nenna and her daughters to vibrant life in very little space, Fitzgerald affords us engaging glimpses of the other lives on the Reach—those of Willis, an old man whose leaky boat finally sinks; Maurice, a sad, aimless gay man; and Richard, a married business executive with whom Nenna has a brief fling. Though the sometimes protracted episodes involving these other characters cannot be defended on strict grounds of dramatic structure, they don’t feel superfluous: on the contrary, they all help to fill in the picture of life on the Reach, to illuminate the odd little corner of the world into which Nenna has chosen to withdraw. It should be noted that the Thames functions here in several ways: not only as a symbol of sexuality (especially female sexuality) and of the unremitting flow of time, but also as an image, paradoxically, both of life (it is, note well, a river of life on which the heroine and her children are kept afloat by a boat named Grace) and (as in Huckleberry Finn) of escape from life and its responsibilities. A number of events here might be interpreted symbolically: for instance, when a priest comes to ask why the girls haven’t been attending school, he slips on Grace’s deck. But Fitzgerald isn’t insistent about such symbolic implications, and the novel’s details are presented so realistically that a reader might well overlook their possible figurative significance.

Much the same might be said about Innocence (1986), which chronicles the romance and marriage of two bullheaded young Italians in 1955. Salvatore Rossi is a peasant boy from a rural village who has grown up to be a brilliant and successful “nerve doctor” in Florence. Excitable, antireligious, and devoted to science, he is the son of two parents with their own strong attachments: his mother (who named him for the Savior) was a devout Christian, his father an equally devout Communist. Indeed, it was a traumatic boyhood visit to his father’s hero, Antonio Gramsci—who, by that time, was a hideous, broken-down old jailbird—that made Salvatore resolve never to risk his life, health, or freedom for his principles or to be emotionally dependent on anyone. His beloved is Chiara, a beautiful student at an English convent school who is the daughter of an ancient and noble Florentine family, the Ridolfi.

In the novel’s opening pages, we are vouchsafed an anecdote from Ridolfi history. In the sixteenth century, the Ridolfi were midgets; a beloved daughter, kept within the walls of the family estate so that she would be protected from the knowledge of her difference from others, had a mute midget playmate who unexpectedly began to grow to normal size; whereupon the Ridolfi child, to protect her friend from the knowledge of her apparent differentness from others, had the girl’s eyes put out and her legs amputated at the knees. Neither Fitzgerald nor any of her characters ever spells out a moral to this anecdote, or explains the implied thematic link between it and the story of Salvatore and, Chiara; but over the course of the novel the anecdote resonates frequently, the pitch changing ever so slightly every time. Part of the point, certainly, is that innocence, far from being a guarantee of virtue, can be a wellspring of cruelty and horror; that people are capable of doing foolish and even wicked things to those they love in an attempt to improve them, to make them conform to some vision of normality or rightness; that the innate differences between people, whether of stature or sensibility, can form insuperable barriers between them; and that, in some way or another, the attributes of one’s parents remain ineradicable, perhaps even disfiguring, elements of one’s own identity. Family is character; family is fate.

The lovers’ first encounter in Innocence might well be an episode from a romance novel. Introduced during an intermission at the Teatro della Pergola after a crude performance of Brahms’s Third Violin Sonata, Salvatore asks Chiara politely whether she enjoyed the music; she replies: “Of course not.” He falls for her immediately, and she is so taken with him that she lets him lead her out into the rain before returning to the auditorium. (Like Forster’s A Room with a View, this novel is about a capable, experienced young man of humble origins who, amid picturesque Italian settings, introduces a sheltered, well-to-do girl to sensuality in Italy.) But nothing else here is remotely reminiscent of a romance novel. Obsessed with Chiara, Salvatore makes no effort to see her. Months pass; finally she appears at his office, only to be upbraided by him for coming. She flees; he writes her a letter, then tears it up. Perplexed by his behavior, Chiara invites Barney, a no-nonsense English schoolmate, to Italy and asks her advice. At Barney’s suggestion, she arranges for herself and Salvatore to be invited to lunch by mutual acquaintances, but they both hesitate to go; the vacillations that precede their meeting are recounted in elaborate detail.

Not so, however, the ensuing affair, which begins offstage and is recounted very succinctly. Ditto the first months of Salvatore and Chiara’s marriage: instead of seeing them together, we hear about their relationship in conversations between Chiara and Barney (who tells her: “You’re just an innocent who hopped into bed with the first man you saw when you got out of the convent”) and between Salvatore and his friends. The narrator sums up the marriage in businesslike fashion: “Chiara and Salvatore quarrelled, but not so successfully as they made love. Chiara had no gift for quarrelling at all and could scarcely understand how it was done, nor, really, had Salvatore, since his argument was with himself, and he was therefore bound to lose. … They loved each other to the point of pain and could hardly bear to separate each morning.” The main problem with the marriage, as this quotation suggests, lies with Salvatore, who is unable to enjoy the blessing of his and Chiara’s love; insecure, irrational, and suspicious, he comes to feel that he was unwise to tell Chiara everything about himself, and is sure that she doesn’t need him, that she must be unhappy, that she’s a dilettante when it comes to romance, and that she’s secretly arranging to regain the family property that he sold in order to afford to marry her.

A friend opines that Salvatore has “a sickness and craziness about him because he has cut himself off from the place where he was born.” (Note the words cut off—a reminder of the story of the leg amputation.) Salvatore, for his part, feels “that both Marta [his ex-mistress] and Chiara took advantage of him by attacking him with their ignorance, or call it innocence. A serious thinking adult had no defence against innocence because he was obliged to respect it, whereas the innocent scarcely knows what respect is, or seriousness either.” But who’s the innocent here? At one point Salvatore says that the only thing he hopes to be spared is “to know exactly what kind of man I am”: what is he hoping for here, after all, except to retain a kind of innocence? One of the things that this novel is about, ultimately, is the ways in which people deprive themselves and others out of innocence—an innocence that, paradoxically, may generate guilt, and that may take the form of deficient self-knowledge or a lack of worldly experience. Chaucer’s “Franklin’s Tale” poses the question: “Which was the mooste fre?” Perhaps one question that Innocence seeks to pose is: which is the more innocent, Salvatore or Chiara? “What’s to become of us?” Salvatore asks a cousin of Chiara’s in the novel’s closing pages. “We can’t go on like this.” “Yes, we can go on like this,” comes the reply. “We can go on exactly like this for the rest of our lives.” And that’s part of the point in this novel, which concludes on a note of hope but intimates that, people being the troubled and troublemaking creatures that they are, the very notion of a happily-ever-after ending—or, for that matter, of an innocence without unsavory repercussions—is a patent absurdity.

What with its sumptuous settings, its colorful cast of aristocrats, politicians, and Vatican priests, its Latin outbursts of temper and its torrid passions (which run several degrees hotter than the passions in any previous Fitzgerald novel), Innocence differs significantly from its predecessors. Some reviewers seem to have thought it odd for so English a writer as Fitzgerald to set a story in Italy, but it makes a certain kind of sense: there’s something in a pure English temperament that just naturally assumes a tempestuous, irrational romance of this sort should be set in hotter climes. (Think of Romeo and Juliet.)

Fitzgerald’s Italian novel was followed by her Russian novel. The Beginning of Spring (1988) is set in Moscow on the eve of revolution. It is 1913, and Frank Reid, the Russian-born English owner of a printing firm, has been abandoned by his wife, Nellie, for reasons that are apparently a mystery to him. Hiring a taciturn young woman named Lisa to take care of their three children, he asks her to cut her hair, presumably because he finds her attractive and wants her to look less tempting (shades of the Ridolfi mutilation!). More than ever in Fitzgerald, there are abundant references here to God and the soul: if Fitzgerald seems, at least in part, to have set Innocence in Italy so that she could write about extravagant passions, she seems to have set The Beginning of Spring in Russia so that she could allow certain of her characters to converse at length, and with relative unrestraint, about spiritual matters. Frank, who does “everything quickly and neatly, without making a business of it,” considers himself a rational being, but isn’t sure: “Perhaps, Frank thought, I have faith, even if I have no beliefs.” More openly meta-physical-minded than Frank is his accountant, Selwyn Crane, a religious poet and Tolstoy disciple who is described by Frank’s servant as “a good man, … always on his way from one place to another, searching out want and despair.” “If you have a fault,” Selwyn tells Frank, “it is that you don’t grasp the importance of what is beyond sense or reason.” Yet, as the beloved Freddie turns out to be the resident demon of At Freddie’s, so it is the seemingly righteous Selwyn who proves to have been the reason for Nellie’s disappearance: as he confesses remorsefully, they were having an affair and arranged to run off together—a plan that he did not repudiate until after Nellie had already deserted Frank.

The Beginning of Spring is set in the year before the outbreak of World War I; Fitzgerald’s most recent novel, The Gate of Angels—which, though published in England in 1990, did not appear in America until this winter—takes place a year earlier. (One can well understand why Fitzgerald would want to set two novels in that period, which marks the boundary between the British Empire-dominated world of the Victorians and Edwardians and the modern era.) Like Innocence, it follows two strong-willed young people down their separate paths to each other and through a romance marked by disagreement, misunderstanding, and estrangement; as in both Innocence and The Beginning of Spring, it is not until the very last sentence that Fitzgerald, in the most matter-of-fact way, introduces the possibility of reconciliation.

Fitzgerald gives us straightforward accounts of both these young people’s lives. Fred Fairly, a former choirboy and the son of a provincial rector, has been appointed a Junior Fellow at the fictitious Saint Angelicus, the smallest college at Cambridge; known colloquially as Angels, the college is a sort of secular monastery whose charter forbids its fellows, all mathematicians and scientists, to marry. Like Salvatore, Fred is basically a good sort, a well-educated man of science with a callow reverence for rationality. “These are wonderful years in Cambridge,” says Fred; science is in its glory days, and he has decided to clear his mind “of any idea that could not be tested through physical experience.” Since this includes, to his way of thinking, the idea of God, he has decided that he is no longer a Christian. Informed of this decision, his father is not surprised: “When you told me that you wanted to study Natural Sciences at university, which led, fortunately I suppose, to your present appointment, I took it for granted that you would sooner or later come to the conclusion that you had no further use for the soul.” To be sure, like any good scientist, Fred is willing to keep an open mind about these things: “He had no acceptable evidence that Christianity was true, but he didn’t think it impossible that at some point he might be given a satisfactory reason to believe in it.”

The young lady for whom Fred falls is also something of a rationalist. A lower-class girl from the south of London, Daisy has studied to be a nurse because she wants to know how the body works. She is at once hard-nosed and sympathetic: “Hating to see anyone in want, she would part without a thought with money or possessions, but she could accept only with the caution of a half-tamed animal.” Dismissed from a London hospital for violating professional bounds to help a patient, she travels to Cambridge in search of a job and is followed by a sleazy middle-aged newspaper reporter, Kelly, who seeks to take advantage of her helplessness. The two of them are bicycling to the hotel where he plans to rob her chastity when they—and Fred, who happens to be directly behind them on his Royal Sunbeam—are knocked unconscious in a road accident caused by a carter named Saul (which, if one choose to notice it, may be taken as an allusion to Saint Paul, né Saul of Tarsus, the transfiguring event of whose life also took place on a road). Awakening next to Daisy in a strange bed, Fred is smitten as quickly as Salvatore is with Chiara.

Several of the signal characteristics of Fitzgerald’s fiction are more pronounced in this novel than in any of its predecessors. For one thing, if her books have always tended toward brevity and directness—their chapters short, their style plain, crisp, and unadorned—the tendency is even more manifest in The Gate of Angels. Also, though her protagonists have often been quite calculatedly ordinary, Fred and Daisy, with their humble backgrounds and almost parodically down-to-earth names, could hardly seem less exotic—to an English reader, anyway. (They may seem especially so to readers who come to the new novel with vivid memories of the foreign settings and characters of Innocence and The Beginning of Spring.) Moreover, Fitzgerald’s powers of selectivity and compression are at their zenith here. Finally, if Fitzgerald’s preoccupation with spiritual matters has been increasingly evident in her last few novels, such matters figure even more prominently in The Gate of Angels, and her apprehension of that which lies beyond sense and reason is communicated with greater force and beauty than ever before in her oeuvre. Partly because her description of each homely particular is well-nigh allegorical in its simplicity—and partly because the place names that she chooses to include (e.g., Jesus Lane, Christ’s Pieces, Bishop’s Leaze) serve to remind us, in an unaggressive way, that everything around us is a part of the divine creation—the reader of The Gate of Angels begins to feel, before too long, as if the novel’s very landscape is gently but unmistakably aglow with its own miraculousness. And what is the significance of the wind that stirs up in the first line of the novel, and then again at the very end, when, after having resolved to part forever, Fred and Daisy meet once more by what may or may not be purest chance? This is, let it be said, the rarest of novels in which an eleventh-hour coincidence, because it is in perfect figurative harmony with all that has gone before, feels not at all like an authorial contrivance but like a genuine moment of grace, a gentle brush with the hand of providence—a still, small voice in the madding crowd.

One of the things that figure importantly here is a historical anecdote. Early on, Fitzgerald tells us that Saint Angelicus “had no real existence at all, because its foundation had been confirmed by a pope, Benedict XIII, who after many years of ferocious argument had been declared not to be the Pope at all.” Obstinately, Benedict refused to accept the verdict and spent the rest of his very long life holding papal audiences. Fred, we are told, is also obstinate: “Like Benedict XIII himself, he might be asked to admit defeat, but would never recognise it as legitimate, or even respectable.” This story of Saint Angelicus’s founding, like that of the Ridolfi ancestors at the beginning of Innocence, resonates throughout the book. By suggesting that the college has “no real existence,” Fitzgerald is playing something of an ontological game with the reader: for the college doesn’t exist, of course, outside the world of the novel; but it does exist within the novel, Pope or no Pope. But what does it mean to say that it exists when the narrator says that it doesn’t? Fitzgerald’s game forces the reader to attend throughout the book to questions of reality and unreality, and, in particular, to the delicate intimations of another reality—one of spirit—with which Fitzgerald permeates her narrative. This is all very effectively done, and indeed it points to what may be this author’s most distinctive achievement: namely, her ability to combine, in one novel, a convincingly detailed realistic surface with a sublime sense of the transcendent. In none of her novels has this been quite as elegantly and affectingly accomplished as in The Gate of Angels.

Note

1. Only four of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels are currently in print in America: Offshore (141 pages, ＄7.95), Innocence (224 pages, ＄7.95), and The Beginning of Spring (187 pages, ＄8.95) are in paper from Carroll & Graf; The Gate of Angels (167 pages, ＄19) is newly out in cloth from Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.