SOURCE: “Elements of Compression in the Novels of Penelope Fitzgerald,” in Essays in Arts and Sciences, Vol. XXVI, October, 1997, pp. 1–14.

[In the following essay, Gitzen studies Fitzgerald’s use of compression in her novels, tracing common features including a short time span, a restriction of plot, and a minimum number of prominent characters.]

Despite more than a decade of lavish critical praise, the fiction of Penelope Fitzgerald has as yet been the subject of little if any sustained commentary or analysis. This neglect is all the more difficult to understand in light of the award to one of her novels, Offshore (1979) of the Booker Prize and the shortlisting for the same prize of three others, The Bookshop (1978), The Beginning of Spring (1988), and The Gate of Angels (1990). As a useful beginning, critical attention might focus upon the methods adopted by Fitzgerald to achieve that remarkable compression which constitutes the most distinctive feature of her narratives. The Blue Flower (1995), her longest novel to date, occupies 226 pages, while the average length of her volumes is 160 pages. The author wittily describes herself as a writer of “microchip novels,” and the critic Valentine Cunningham has adopted the term nouvelle in acknowledgement of both the intensity and the brevity of Fitzgerald’s best work.¹

Fitzgerald’s milieu is social comedy, within which she invariably focuses upon the activities of a small group of characters and prefers to feature comedy’s traditional subject of romantic love. She understands that successful compression in fiction requires above all restriction in both plot or narrative incident and passage of time, and that, as in short stories, the number of prominent characters must be kept to a minimum. The time span of her narratives typically is a year or less. The events in Innocence, arguably her most ambitious and complex work, transpire in little more than twelve months and involve only five or six major characters. As suggested by its title, The Beginning of Spring covers a time span of only a few weeks and centers upon the activities of three characters. These narratives revolve around one or two events: a middle-aged woman’s unsuccessful attempt to operate a bookstore; a father’s search for a suitable governess for his children; the meeting, brief courtship, and marriage of a young doctor and a Florentine noblewoman; the career conflict caused by the love affair between a fledgling academic and a would-be nurse.

In the interest of rapid pace, Fitzgerald occasionally accelerates events by introducing to each other two characters who, with an alacrity worthy of Shakespearean comedy, instantly fall in love. More typically, one immediately falls in love, while the other remains cool or is attracted to a third person. Impulsive acts also contribute to the brevity of the narratives. The Beginning of Spring is set in train by the impulsive departure of Frank Reid’s wife and closes abruptly (but symmetrically) with her equally sudden and unexpected return. Coincidence also plays its part in shortening the narratives. The Gate of Angels opens with the collision of two bicycles on a Cambridge byway, an accident which serves to introduce to one another the bicyclists, Daisy Saunders and Fred Fairly. It ends with a second fortuitous collision of sorts when Daisy unexpectedly encounters Fred while hurrying to the train station with the intention of leaving him. In Innocence an opportune phone call from his wife prevents a distracted neurologist from committing suicide. In Offshore a storm arrives on cue to signal both the end of a marriage and the conclusion of the novel.

Fitzgerald obviously recognizes that restriction of setting or locale is also suited to compressed narratives. Her strict rationing of backgrounds is particularly noteworthy in the three novels to date located in London, in each of which the action proceeds with a stage-like economy requiring no more than four major settings. The chief characters of Offshore dwell on a barge and a converted minesweeper, both of which are moored in the Thames at Battersea Reach. The majority of the novel’s scenes occur on these two vessels. Human Voices centers upon BBC personnel in the early days of World War II and accordingly takes place largely in Broadcasting House, with occasional excursions to a French restaurant or to the Hammersmith home of one of the young female characters. The central locale of At Freddie’s is the Temple School, an academy for child actors situated in Covent Garden. Additional scenes occur in the Nonesuch Theatre, “just off the Strand,” and in the bed-sitter rented by one of the school’s teachers. While these three novels are among Fitzgerald’s shortest, even in the longer and considerably more complex Innocence the majority of the action transpires in three settings, all of them family properties in or near Florence.

Complementing these neatly restricted locales is a judiciously focused character-portrayal. Fitzgerald is perhaps unique among current English novelists in identifying and delineating her characters primarily according to single, dominant virtues. In most of her novels one or more of the major characters exemplifies one or two traditional virtues. Among the most appealing of such figures is Daisy Saunders of The Gate of Angels. Daisy has been born in London into a life of poverty and hard work. At the age of eighteen she is accepted as a nurse-in-training at Blackfriars Hospital. Her choice of the nursing profession is itself indicative of the generosity of spirit which moves her and which is underlined when the author describes her as “generous … the kind of girl who’d give you the teeth out of her head, if she could get them loose.” Though admirable in itself, generosity is linked with vulnerability. Daisy remains blessedly unaware of “how dangerous generosity is to the giver,” but as if to drive home the lesson, her kindhearted attempt to assist one of her patients requires her to break a hospital rule and leads to her dismissal.

Fitzgerald has no time to waste upon protracted romances. Even the shyest of her suitors, such as Fred Fairly, act with sturdy impetuousness. On their first excursion into the country, Fred asks Daisy to marry him. Although fond of Fred and touched by his proposal, Daisy hesitates. Her unwillingness to accept on the spot arises in part, as the author explains, from her habitual generosity of spirit: “All her life she had been at a great disadvantage in finding it so much more easy to give than to take. 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.”² As the narrative develops, it assumes the dimensions of old-fashioned melodrama, with Daisy’s virtue being threatened by an unscrupulous journalist, who eventually (and quite improbably) is knocked unconscious by the jealous Fred. This encounter fails to clear the way entirely for the marriage, and a distraught Daisy is hurrying to the train station, intending to return to London, when she passes an open door in the wall of one of the Cambridge colleges. Unknowingly, she is gazing into the inner courtyard of Fred’s college, St. Angelicus. In other words, an angelic figure stands before “the Gate of Angels.” From within she hears “a very faint … human cry of distress,” and, as is her wont, “without thinking twice about it, she walk[s] straight in” to find in the inner courtyard “an elderly man,” the blind Master of the college, in a mild state of shock. Daisy comforts him but fails to understand either the reason for his shock (the inexplicably opened door in question) or the general excitement occasioned by her innocent arrival within the walls of a college where no women are permitted. The door through which she has entered has opened mysteriously on only two other occasions in the college’s 500-year history. Though currently renowned as a center for scientific study, the college was founded as an institution of Christian learning, and the rare appearance at its door of Christian charity has been recognized and welcomed. In this instance, too, charity is rewarded, since the brief delay of her detour into the college grounds causes Daisy shortly thereafter to meet Fred unexpectedly as he returns to his quarters at the college.

Daisy’s generosity is spontaneous and unwilled, though no less estimable on that account than duty, the learned and deliberately practiced virtue which is exemplified in Richard Blake of Offshore. Richard is the chief male character of this novel, the counterpart to and briefly the lover of Nenna James, its female protagonist. Nenna and her two children inhabit one of a cluster of barges moored at Battersea Reach. Nearby lies Richard’s converted minesweeper, Lord Jim. One circumstance common to these two is an aversion on the part of their spouses to living aboard a vessel. Nenna’s husband, Edward, refuses to join her on the barge, while Richard’s wife, Laura, is intensely uncomfortable aboard ship and eventually deserts her husband to dwell ashore. Nenna has long admired Richard, having found him a model of the dutiful gentleman, a part which he plays in the novel’s opening scene. A meeting of the water-dwellers has convened to consider the wish of one of them to sell his vessel, despite its being unseaworthy. Richard has taken the chair and is conducting the meeting, recognizing it as his duty: “Duty is what no-one else will do at the moment. Fortunately, he did not have to define duty. War service in the RNVR, and his whole temperament before and since, had done that for him.”³ It is explained also that “politeness, observation and helpfulness” have been instilled in Richard from early boyhood. Though uneasy about the proposed sale of the leaking barge, he considers it his duty to offer assistance. Just as Daisy Saunders’ generosity takes its toll of her, so Richard’s sense of duty also exacts a high price from him, when one evening aboard one of the barges he unhesitatingly confronts a stranger who is in fact a thief. The intruder strikes him with a heavy wrench, seriously injuring him. Though his wife returns to his hospital bedside, she also takes steps to dispose of Lord Jim immediately and to purchase a house for herself and Richard in the country where she has long wished to live.

Among the virtues which most appeals to Fitzgerald, perhaps because of its rarity, is absolute honesty, an attribute exemplifed on occasion by Fred Fairly of The Gate of Angels. It is in the figure of another male suitor, however, that Fitzgerald has enshrined a comically conspicuous honesty. This individual is Pierce Carroll, an instructor at the child actors’ academy in At Freddie’s. When the proprietress hires him and reveals that, owing to her poverty, Pierce’s salary, both at present and in the future, must remain “quite low”, he replies bluntly, “It’s very low, I should describe it as exploitation, but it’s as much as I can expect with my qualifications.”⁴ Evidently, he is incapable of diplomacy, for after remarking to his employer that the surroundings in her school suggest that money is indeed in short supply, he reassures her that strict economy is estimable, “particularly in anyone who’s well advanced into old age.” Whatever may be her private reaction to this tactless observation, it combines with Pierce’s other remarks to arouse her interest, for she has heard in them “the weak, but pure, voice of complete honesty.” In his utter truthfulness and straightforwardness, Pierce is incongruously situated teaching would-be actors, whose art requires them to impersonate others. Indeed, he is perplexed by the aspiration of his students to earn a living by transforming themselves into a series of different characters. In his opinion it is “a sufficient achievement to be an individual at all, what you might call a real person.” Pierce’s manner of wooing is as direct and disconcerting as his conduct of daily affairs. He proposes that his colleague, Hannah Graves, should marry him and join him on his family’s farm in County Londonderry, where they might establish a business building and selling houses. He is willing to abandon his teaching career, in which he foresees little prospect of success: “I think we should admit that most teachers are a good deal more competent than I am. Promotion would pass me by.”⁵

Once more the issue of vulnerability arises, for Hannah fails to return Pierce’s affection, being instead attracted to an actor who treats her casually. Although she permits Pierce to spend one night with her, it is a gesture more of pity than of mutual feeling. In a futile effort to ease the pain of rejection, Hannah politely lies that Pierce’s original proposal was so business-like in character that she was unable to take it seriously. She reminds him that on that occasion, when she did not give him her immediate assent, he merely folded his papers, replaced them in his briefcase “and never blinked an eyelid.” He replies, “I might have done, perhaps, if I’d been acting.”⁶ Clearly he has learned nothing from his students, who act or play roles, including the role of student actor, both on and off the stage. Whatever the occasion, he can summon only a true and honest response, thereby causing Hanna to recognize in him the potentially humiliating combination of practical incompetence or lack of ambition and emotional innocence.

Though he is outspokenly honest to a fault, Pierce is not above censure on other counts. When he discovers Hannah’s fondness for the middle-aged actor, Boney Lewis, his very honesty compels him to manifest a tiresome jealousy. Embarrassed by his churlishness, he can only protest that, given a choice of sins, he “wouldn’t have chosen jealousy.” In admitting to one sin Carroll calls attention to Fitzgerald’s distinctive methods of character-portrayal. Just as she prefers to focus upon one or two dominant virtues which govern a character’s behavior, so conversely she deliberately limits and thereby highlights the faults (if any) attributed to each.

While Fitzgerald’s personae as a whole are much more notable for their virtues than for their vices, their estimable behavior does not assure wellbeing. Florence Green, the aspiring bookseller, whose distinctive virtue is kindness, eventually is reduced to poverty and homelessness. The dutiful Richard Blake suffers a punctured lung, loses his beloved Lord Jim, and is forced to retire to the country. Honest Pierce Carroll not only relinquishes his claims to Hannah Graves but, despite having no future prospects, resigns his teaching post to spare both Hannah and himself needless distress.

If their virtue has contributed to the misfortunes of the above characters, it has caused no serious injuries to others. In contrast, Innocence illustrates the potential of an unadulterated virtue to cause widespread comic disorder and distress. Set in Florence in the year 1955, the novel centers upon the affairs of the remnants of the ancient and noble Ridolfi family. It opens by recounting a bizarre family legend: in 1568 the Ridolfi villa was inhabited by midgets—the Count, the Countess, and their only daughter. Desiring that their daughter should always consider herself normal in stature, the parents never permitted her to leave the villa and surrounded her with midget attendants, among them a playmate of her own age who, to general consternation, subsequently “began to grow at a very noticeable rate” and soon towered over her companion. Assuming her playmate’s height to be abnormal, and wishing to spare her a lifetime of humiliation, the Ridolfi daughter innocently proposed that her friend should be blinded and her legs amputated at the knee. This fable’s implicit moral that innocence may be cruel anticipates well-intentioned calamities to come, most of which are precipitated either by the innocent honesty of the present daughter of the Ridolfis or by that of the young doctor who eventually becomes her husband.

Chiara Ridolfi is only eighteen and still attending the aptly named Holy Innocents school in England when, during the interval of a concert, she is introduced to the young neurologist, Dr. Salvatore Rossi. They have been listening to a histrionic performance of a Brahms sonata by a gypsy violinist. Dr. Rossi inquires politely, “You enjoyed the Brahms?” To his delight, Chiara replies simply, “Of course not.”⁷ The doctor esteems his new acquaintance as utterly truthful and trustworthy. A typical Fitzgerald suitor, he immediately becomes obsessed with Chiara, who in return is smitten with him, so much so that, upon returning from her final school term in England, she promptly calls at his office. This unexpected visit both excites and angers him. Indeed, the very presence of his beloved seems to exasperate him, but despite this paradoxical circumstance, at only their third meeting the couple make love in a bedroom of the Ridolfi villa. Chiara’s father learns enough of this episode to suspect what has transpired but determines “to avoid asking Chiara about it, because she would tell him the truth.” The author’s emphasis upon Chiara’s spontaneous honesty underlines the inseparability of her constitutional innocence from her honesty, itself perhaps Fitzgerald’s favorite virtue. Protagonists governed by honesty may well be dramatic but are unsubtle, more easily and rapidly portrayed and known than those impelled by multiple and shadowy motives. The attraction of such figures for a novelist bent upon compression is obvious.

In preparation for his marriage, Dr. Rossi pays a final visit to his mistress, Marta, to explain that the two of them must part. Although he is himself an emotional innocent (or at least appears utterly incapable of controlling his emotions), on this occasion he reflects that the innocence of both his mistress and his bride-to-be gives them the power to exploit vulnerability in the more sophisticated: “A serious thinking adult [has] no defense against innocence because he [is] obliged to respect it, whereas the innocent scarcely knows what respect is, or seriousness either.”⁸ To exemplify the potential of innocence to create discord, the newlyweds’ first public quarrel occurs in the midst of a dinner party when Chiara spontaneously offers to provide temporary lodging for a young English art historian. Instant jealousy prompts her husband to exclaim that they can accept no lodgers. Chiara is temperamentally unfitted to understand the reasons for this outburst since, in the wryly ironic words of the author, “The Ridolfi family were so constituted as not to feel jealousy and as a result they never suspected it. This was a serious fault in them, as it would be in anyone.”⁹

The novel’s climax arises because of an act of misplaced benevolence typical of the ingenuousness of the Ridolfis. Chiara’s aunt Maddalena repurchases in Salvatore’s name a parcel of land which he has recently sold to acquire the necessary funds for a house. He erroneously concludes that this gift is the work of his wife, who, he believes, is bent upon placating him. As though mindful of the proposal of Chiara’s distant ancestor that her playmate’s legs should be amputated, he grimly acknowledges the unexpected ability of his nineteen-year-old wife “to cut down a grown man.” He deems himself to be an “unnecessary person,” of whom Chiara has “no need whatever.” Amusingly, he repeatedly describes his wife as “not rational,” while with his usual impulsiveness he resolves upon immediate suicide. Fortunately, a timely phone call from Chiara (and one during which she manifests a brilliant rationality) brings him to his senses. While the innocent forthrightness of these lovers causes considerable pain to them both as well as discomfort or inconvenience to their friends and family, it also affords joy to the pair of them while lending a refreshing sharpness and directness to their conduct.

Fitzgerald’s gift for pinpointing or encapsulating character or situation in a few apt and incisive phrases constitutes one of her most engaging methods of achieving both intensity and compression. It has prompted Penelope Lively to assert, “There are few who can match her when it comes to nailing a character in a few words.”¹⁰ Victoria Glendinning likewise has praised as “extraordinary” Fitzgerald’s “compression of … characterization” and her ability to “sum people up in a single sentence that begs as many questions as it answers but is worth pages of analysis.”¹¹ This talent is evident when Fitzgerald characterizes the frequent quarrels between Chiara and Salvatore as unsatisfactory for the simple reason that “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.”¹² Nevertheless, Salvatore is quarrelsome, and his disputatious stance discomfits the priggish English art historian, Burton, who, while exchanging sharp words with him, registers “the unfairness of being confronted by a man who was apparently even more ready to take offence than he was himself.”

Even in the cases of characters who have received sympathetic portrayals, these pithy observations, replete with aphoristic succinctness and shrewdness, frequently are unflattering. Of honest Pierce Carroll we are informed, “He had no ability to make himself seem better or other than he was. He could only be himself, and that not very successfully.”¹³ Characters far less estimable than Carroll are subjected to proportionately withering scrutiny, as for instance Milo North, the selfish and dilatory young TV executive of The Bookshop, whose “fluid personality tested and stole into the weak places of others until it found it could settle down to its own advantage.” Not only the adults, but also the children who frequent Fitzgerald’s narratives are the subjects of these capsule pronouncements. One such concerns twelve-year-old Martha, daughter of Nenna James, who differs from her parents in being a model of self-reliance and purposeful capability and who has acquired the maturity of judgment to recognize, as children may, “that their parents are younger than they are.” Martha has a spiritual sister in Christine Gipping, the assistant in Florence Green’s bookshop. Brisk, businesslike, and precocious, she readily and capably performs a variety of complex tasks. Though sympathetically portrayed, Christine is also accorded a comically ironic self-assurance: “Christine liked to do the locking up. At the age of ten and a half she knew, for perhaps the last time in her life, exactly how everything should be done.”¹⁴

Pronouncements such as these are the province of the omniscient author, and Fitzgerald’s fondness for them helps to explain why all of her novels to date consist of third-person narratives. Her implied presence in the text permits the freedom for occasional comments which suddenly sharpen the outlines of one or another of her characters. It also facilitates occasional statements, directed less to individual characters than to humanity in general, which reflect this writer’s charitable but penetrating appraisal of human nature. Thus, when Fred Fairly reacts favorably to the diffidence of a fellow character, the author explains that Fred himself is unassuming, “and only the humble can value humility.” Somewhat more astringently, the ambivalent kindness shown to Daisy Saunders by her fellow probationers when she is dismissed from Blackfriars Hospital is accounted for on the grounds that “Disgrace contaminates, even though it makes everyone else feel a little safer.”¹⁵

In keeping with the strict economy of Fitzgerald’s methods, certain features of her settings may be accorded such prominence as to acquire symbolic dimensions, permitting them to intensify and heighten situations or themes. Thus, The Gate of Angels focuses attention upon St. Angelicus College itself, emphasizing its comparatively small size and exclusiveness, as well as its defensive appearance. The point is made that the building resembles not a monastery but a fortress, toylike in size, “but a toy of enormous strength, with walls 3 1/2 feet thick.” This fortress is a male preserve, not even admitting female domestic staff, and, in striking contrast to its Christian and spiritual origins, it has become a bastion of empirical science. Although in the year 1912 atomic physics is under study within St. Angelicus, at least one resident scientist, Professor Flowerdew, skeptically warns of “the folly of basing any kind of scientific research on unobservables.” Together with the atom, Professor Flowerdew ranks God and the soul as additional “unobservables,” and dismisses the reliance upon such intangibles as “nothing more than a comforting weakness.”

Although Fred Fairly attends gravely to Professor Flowerdew’s pronouncements, the essay topic which he assigns to his physics class, asking them to “devise a rational system of measuring human happiness,” indicates a willingness on his part to ponder intangibles and a desire that his fellow scientists should do likewise. He reminds his students that “scientists are not dispassionate,” and that anyone’s emotional state may seriously affect his ability to carry out research. At this moment his own emotions are running high, as he assumes that he and Daisy have parted, but fortunately Daisy too is subject to ready emotions, and her impulsively charitable entry of the college as an “angel of mercy” not only breaches the citadel of empiricism but indirectly presents the two lovers with a felicitous opportunity for reconciliation.

Once again in The Beginning of Spring a tangible image serves to highlight and exemplify both visible and invisible phenomena. Rather, two images, a young peasant woman and a birch forest, when combined, signal and symbolize the rebirth associated with spring. The novel’s chief setting is Moscow at the end of winter, where an English businessman named Frank Reid has been inexplicably deserted by his wife. His immediate need is to locate a suitable governess for his three children. Lisa Ivanovna, the beautiful and extremely young woman hired for the job, radiates a haunting serenity which not only calms the restive children but irresistibly draws Frank into her arms. While she accepts and returns his embraces, she maintains an eerie, inner self-possession and reserve, “as though … she was listening to something else a little beyond his range.”

Lisa’s symbolic significance in the narrative increases at the approach of Easter, the season of rebirth and spiritual renewal, when she spends a week with the children at the family dacha deep in a birch forest. Fitzgerald emphasizes how the year’s cycle is mirrored in the annual changes experienced by the birch trees. The trees are portrayed as ceaselessly alive and in motion, each having “five or six different movements.” The birch trees’ vital presence permeates the dacha. The scent of their leaves perfumes the air, and in July when the “mealy” seed-bracts fall, they drift indoors and pile up in corners. At night in their beds residents of the dacha hear no human sounds, “only the voice of the birch trees.” It is the merger between Lisa and these trees one moonlit night which signifies the onset of the Russian spring. Dolly, the eldest of the Reid children, has followed Lisa into the birch forest, whose leaves already have begun to form, generating a pervasive scent. When the pair reach a clearing, Dolly is startled to discover that “by every birch tree, close against the trunk, [stands] a man or a woman. They [stand] separately pressing themselves each to their own tree.”¹⁶ So indistinguishable from the birch trees are these people that their faces, turned toward the new arrivals, appear as “patches of white against the whiteish bark.” Lisa, then, is a leader of a secret organization, probably a revolutionary. The year is 1913, and massive change is soon to sweep across Russia. The posture of those who are pressed against the trees as though sharing in their existence, however, invests the scene with a quasi-allegorical atmosphere, marking it as a rite of spring. When Dolly returns to her dacha bedroom, the odor of “the potent leaf-sap of the birch trees” remains “as strong inside the house as out.” Coincidentally, Frank Reid’s sanctimonious accountant Selwyn Crane is the author of a volume of poems entitled Birch Tree Thoughts. When asked facetiously, “What do birch trees think?” Crane soberly replies that the thoughts of birch trees are as spontaneous as those of women: “Just as a woman’s body … moves at her heart’s promptings, so the birch tree moves in the winds of spring.”¹⁷ His words prove prophetic, for immediately after the forest meeting Lisa mysteriously disappears. Meanwhile the storm windows are ceremoniously removed from the Reids’s Moscow home, and the outer windows are thrown open for the first time in months, admitting the sounds of “bells and noises” and also the fresh “spring wind.” Here as in the birch-forest dacha natural fertility merges with uniquely human space. At this pregnant moment a cab pulls up outside, bringing Frank’s wife, Nellie, back to her family.

Of the numerous central or dominant images developed by Fitzgerald, none is more pervasive nor more instrumental in enhancing character, situation, or motif than the Thames which is a constant presence throughout Offshore. The vessels inhabited by the barge-dwellers are homes of both land and water, since at low tide they rest on the mud of the riverbed. Ever conscious of the turning tide, the barge-dwellers regulate their daily affairs by its movements. Even Tilda James, a child of six, has memorized the schedule of tides and can chant, “High water Gravesend 3 a.m., London Bridge 4, Battersea Bridge 4.30.”¹⁸ Situated between land and water, these people regard themselves as amphibians. Like most “tideline creatures,” they are “not easily dislodged” but they fear being displaced and forced to move permanently to land, an environment in which others of their type have failed to adapt.

The Thames with its powerful tides is, of course, an appropriate setting for love-scenes, a fact recognized by poets from Spenser to Eliot and intuitively understood by Nenna James, who longs to persuade her husband, Edward, to join her on the barge. On one of the rare occasions when they do make love aboard the vessel, Nenna experiences a joy “which flowed like the current, with its separate eddies, of the strong river beneath them.” The novel’s central love-scene centers upon a night dinghy-ride, during which Richard Blake and Nenna make their way upriver to Wandsworth Bridge and then “switch off and drift down with the tide” to tie up at Richard’s vessel, Lord Jim.

Even the novel’s comically chaotic final scene owes its power to the behavior of the Thames during a storm. Having learned of Nenna’s eminent departure for Canada, an intoxicated Edward James, in search of his wife, has blundered aboard the barge of her equally inebriated neighbor, Maurice. He is clinging to the barge’s ladder at the moment when high wind and waves combine to tear away the vessel’s anchor and mooring-ropes, setting it and its two passengers adrift on the tide. The image of Maurice’s barge lurching toward the open sea fittingly symbolizes the character and situation of its two hapless and fugitive occupants. It also imposes poetic justice upon Edward, whose stubborn aversion to boats has contributed much to his wife’s distress.

With compression as a guiding principle, Fitzgerald has seized upon and exploited a valuable fact—namely that naked honesty is so uncommon a quality as to create a dramatic effect, particularly when it features prominently in emotional exchanges between characters. Not for her protagonists are the laborious and circuitous ways of Henry James’s characters, who seek a wealth of information about one another, yet who dodge and feint and conceal their motives and eventually, if they are to prevail, either must prove able to read one another’s minds or to interpret actions rather than words. In contrast, Fitzgerald’s characters are seldom long in doubt about the true state of their mutual affairs, and their knowledge often produces dramatic effects. In Human Voices a young woman employed in the BBC complains to her boss that he is selfish and thereby awakens his love for her. Similarly, Chiara’s truthfulness instantly wins Salvatore’s heart. While this diligent focus upon honesty or upon some other virtue such as kindness expedites her narratives, furnishes her characters with an appealing and amusing intimacy, and at length becomes a trademark of Fitzgerald’s fiction, it also limits the variety and dimension of her characterization and produces a degree of single-minded predictability in the behavior of the figures in question. Furthermore, it restricts enlargement of character in the course of a narrative. That it succeeds as frequently as it does is a tribute to her inventiveness in shaping individual and distinctive circumstances for her personae, in placing them in a multitude of fresh and imaginative settings, the vast majority of which are accurately observed and furnished with authentic detail, and to her skill in centering her narratives upon dominant or controlling images which lend a poetic unity and intensity to her fiction.

Notes

1. “Suffocating Suffolk,” The Times Literary Supplement 17 November 1978: 1333.

2. The Gate of Angels (London: Harper/Collins, 1990) 118.

3. Offshore (London: Collins, 1988) 9.

4. At Freddie’s (London: Collins, 1989) 21.

5. At Freddie’s 105.

6. At Freddie’s 147.

7. Innocence (London: Collins, 1987) 31.

8. Innocence 136.

9. Innocence 176.

10. “Backwards and Forwards,” Encounter June/July 1982: 86–91.

11. “Between Land and Water,” The Times Literary Supplement 23 November 1979: 10.

12. Innocence 165–166.

13. At Freddie’s 21.

14. The Bookshop (London: Harper/Collins, 1989) 64.

15. The Gate of Angels 97.

16. The Beginning of Spring (London: Harper/Collins, 1989), 174.

17. The Beginning of Spring 114.

18. Offshore 64.