So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald. Penelope Fitzgerald

respect to Wittgenstein, I do hope you liked Ray Monk’s biography – I had to help judge the Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the year before last, and I thought it far and away the best book, even though some good ones were sent in, perhaps because Ray M. is a philosopher himself, although, as it turned out, a young and cheerful one – anyway he got the prize and I am sure he deserved it.

      On the other hand, in respect to Skidelsky, I consider that Ham in fact has been singularly patient with this absurdly irritating man – I daresay he knows a lot about Keynes, but he’d have to be ashamed of himself if he didn’t. Thinking about Skidelsky, and even feeling irritated by him, is a waste of precious time. – What I should like to know is what you’re going to undertake next. If only there was someone with your persuasiveness and ruthless energy to defend the Public Library Service. Here in dreaded Haringey, to which Highgate unwillingly belongs, they’re going to close all 7 branch libraries, the music and the mobile libraries, because reading isn’t a priority leisure resource. It’s all very depressing. Last year we managed to get the closures put off and I had to go to a party with non-alcoholic champagne made with pears, at 10 o’clock in the morning.

      I so much enjoyed seeing you, thankyou once again for asking me –

      love

      Mops

      

      I take it the tortoise isn’t stirring yet

      

       27a Bishop’s Road

       Highgate, N6

      11 September [c.1995]

      Dear Ham and Penny,

      What a lovely lunch party – if I wasn’t afraid you might think me sentimental, or perhaps even feeble-witted, I could say how happy it made me to sit and talk to people I’m so fond of and to see you both again, and Janet, (this ought to be easy enough but hasn’t proved to be so at all), and then Alyson,^* who I hardly expected to come but of course she did, calm and smiling as ever, though whether she really always feels so calm I can’t tell. I enjoyed myself so much, and still haven’t said anything about the lunch itself, which, after Penny had said, as a kind of afterthought, ‘I must do some cooking’, seemed to produce itself by magic and was so delicious.

      Janet’s energy, and genuine interest in everything, is wonderful – I had thought it a merciful dispensation of nature that I like things less and less (though a few things more and more) but Janet makes me feel that’s not so, and I must try to wake up a little.

      Thankyou again, it was a Sunday to remember –

      love, Mops

      

      Just looking at the photograph of Jonathan Pryce as L. S. (he is a parent at the church school where Thomas and Sophie go) – I’ve never seen Carrington but I have seen Lytton Strachey and I think the Pryce make-up (I last saw him as Fagin) is very successful. But I suppose it’s an easy one to do. –

      

      [summer 1996 – after PMF’s 80th birthday party]

      Dear Ham –

      I’m so glad you and Penny enjoyed the party and it was lovely to see you – the last day of summer.

      By ‘one stroke’ I meant the kind of bike people used to have, with an engine you switched on when you were going uphill.

      I don’t agree that the children in my novels are precious. They’re exactly like my own children, who always noticed everything.

      As to ‘may’ for ‘might’, it is frightful, and we must do all we can to eradicate it. I think it’s American and they think it’s the subjunctive. –

      Love to you and Penny – Mops

      

      - Hibernating time now I imagine.

      

       27a Bishop’s Road, N6

       15 February [late 1990s]

      My dear Ham,

      Thankyou so much for sending me the evidence, which only confirms what I’ve always thought, that the intensely unpleasant atmosphere of Bloomsbury (which must have come close to choking poor Leonard, for example) has lingered on in what racing people call their ‘connections’. There is a Byzantine feeling, they will all end up poisoning each other. That is the moral.

      Your statement of course is surely very restrained, as there are so many things you might have mentioned – the colour photographs in the Newsletter for example – but it was better to leave it as you have, as an absolutely clear account of a deliberate decision to make you resign. They took advantage of your not being there. Their next step, I suppose, will be to elect somebody as Chairman, or President, or whatever, of the Friends, in spite of having said that they weren’t going to.

      Judging from the few societies I belong to, something like this always happens – (I think Alyson would confirm that it particularly does at the William Morris). – Another example would be the Arts Council where Lord Gowrie seems to have jockeyed Michael Holroyd off the literature panel for no reason whatever except a love of pushing and shoving. But I’m sure that you were right to resign now and, as I find it difficult to imagine you without something to organise – something worth while, I should add – I suppose and hope that you’re looking round, or at least leaving yourself open for the next field of action.

      I myself can’t organise the (proverbial) whelk-stall and you know I would never try to give advice, but sympathy I do give. You worked so hard and I don’t think they could have got it all started at all without you. I wonder if they mentioned that at their committee meeting.

      love to you and Penny – Mops

      

      P.S. Our urban fox has gone lame and lies pathetically on the compost box – I don’t like to disturb it to put any more leaves in – It also seems to have lost part of its brush.

      

       27a Bishop’s Road, N6

      26 June [late 1990s]

      Dear Penny and Ham,

      Thankyou so very much for inviting me yesterday and the royal treatment you gave me, a lift back across 3 counties. It was such a nice lunch, and although I must restrain myself from talking about the quails, I did want to tell you that they are very special as far as I am concerned because my mother, who’d always been used to plain living and hard thinking and a large vicarage family, and was presented at court, as people used to be then, after she was married, had her one and only chance of trying quail that day at the palace and missed it, because the tray was taken away while her back was turned.

      I do so hope everything goes well on Friday. I was just looking through the old Charleston mags yesterday evening and I still think they were better. There was an enterprising friendly feeling about them, but I suppose that belonged to the earlier stages. And I did like your colour pix, Ham –

      many thanks and love to all of you –

      Mops

       Tina Fitzgerald ^*

       Flat 5144 Earls Court Rd.

       London, sw5

      Thursday [Easter, 1964]

      Dearest Tina,

      I do hope the crossing was all right, as we had a very stiff breeze in the Earls Court Rd. s.w.5. But Daddy tells me that Mrs Taylor had brought half a bottle of brandy and a tea-spoon to quell any cases of sickness – I don’t know if she had to resort to this.

      Of