“The old dog, who had been napping in her corner, and was very well aware that the shooting season wasn’t due to open for another long stretch of existence, looked up at the cupboard with a flicker of hope.”
Occasionally when I’m swimming laps I’ll notice out of the corner of my goggled eye that the person in the next lane is swimming much faster than I am. And quite often, maddeningly, that person appears to be working much less hard than I am. No gasping, no splashing. Just a flick of the leg here, a casually drawn arm there, and suddenly my neighbor, having executed a liquid flip-turn at the far wall, is gliding back in my direction.
This is how I feel when I read Penelope Fitzgerald. She’s so good — and so good at hiding the work that goes into being good — that it can appear almost unfair. Her novels rarely exceed two hundred pages; they make going on for the standard four- or five-hundred pages seem like a mortifying organizational failure.
Here’s how Philip Roth, no slouch, writes about a well-off man visiting a farm: “It was called Organic Livestock, and it produced and bottled the raw milk that could be found in local general stores and in some of the region’s supermarkets and was available, at the farm, for steady customers who purchased three or more gallons a week.”
And here’s how Penelope Fitzgerald does it: “The Count marveled, not for the first time, at how much of the agricultural day consists of moving things from one place to another.”
What calm mastery! What light-footed humor! What balance! (Notice how the music of the sentence collapses if you cut that not for the first time).
Her books proceed so gracefully, in fact, that it’s easy to imagine that this is just how she naturally writes; if my neighbor in the pool were a dolphin, you wouldn’t wonder at her technique, you’d simply admire her. But Fitzgerald is — both dauntingly and encouragingly for us kickboard-clutchers — no dolphin. Her manuscripts, she’s said, are about twice the length of her published books. Her research is legendary (I’m fairly sure that, having read The Blue Flower, I’m now licensed to operate a salt mine). She didn’t publish her first novel until she was sixty.
It’s this last biographical fact, I suspect, that accounts for Fitzgerald’s singular power — the thing that makes her more than merely another literary athlete pounding out sets of lucid description at the artistic gym beside Muriel Spark and Julian Barnes. She is — perhaps due to the decades spent marinating in professional longing, perhaps due to disposition — our poet laureate of disappointment, of failure. Her characters are perpetually running out of money. Their marriages collapse. Their houseboats sink.
Failure has become a badge of honor in our culture, a way station on the route to an IPO and TED Talk virality. Fitzgerald takes Failure™ off of the business self-help shelf and gives it back its authentic smelly, humiliating, irredeemable tang. “Gentilini looked with a certain amount of anxiety at his young colleague, and asked him whether at the moment he was finding existence hard.” No one makes writing look easier than Fitzgerald; no one makes living look harder. And this is not merely a cute paradox about Fitzgerald’s books — it’s their value proposition. The prose redeems the pain. The light-footedness — which seems at first to be merely a stylistic virtue — turns out to be an instruction in how to live.
Toward the end of Innocence, her Italian novel, a man named Salvatore finds himself (naturally) in a state of suicidal despair. His relationship is hopeless; his entire life has been the elaboration of a wrong turn. So he goes out to his cousin Cesare’s farm and asks if he can borrow the shotgun that Cesare keeps in the shed. “They went out together through the front door, acknowledging that this was a formal occasion of sorts. The night was pitch dark and starless, breathing relief after the disagreeable heat of the day, and like all country nights it was unquiet, with rustlings and creakings.”
Cesare opens the gun cabinet. And — “The old dog, who had been napping in her corner, and was very well aware that the shooting season wasn’t due to open for another long stretch of existence, looked up at the cupboard with a flicker of hope. The end of her tail moved itself.”
I don’t know what you’d call that quality — that ability to notice, and to appreciate, the accidental hilarity that attends even our bleakest moments — but it is medicine to me. The prose is impeccable (notice how nimbly Fitzgerald enters the dog’s mind: it reckons time not in days but in stretches of existence). The perspective is, almost literally, divine.
Whenever I think about Fitzgerald I remember (and not just because of the aforementioned houseboat) a quote that’s occasionally attributed to Voltaire: “Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.” No one sees our predicament more clearly than Fitzgerald does — the ominous lurches, the freezing water sloshing ever higher — and no one’s singing offers better consolation. How lucky we are to have her onboard.