The Beginning of Spring. Penelope Fitzgerald

      For a long time I had a picture of Penelope Fitzgerald pinned above my desk, something I’d cut out of the book pages of a newspaper and that always looked a little crumpled and fragile. It was the photograph that is used everywhere, a head-and-shoulders shot in which she looks out of the frame with a slight and slightly tired smile. The photographer (or so I imagine it) has encouraged her to put a hand against the side of her head in a way that is thought to enliven this sort of picture. She is, I suppose, in her late sixties, it’s hard to tell. She’s wearing a striped blouse buttoned to the neck, a black cardigan, puffy in the sleeves, and there’s a glimpse of something worn under the blouse, something warm, as if the picture was taken in a cold house on a cold day. Did she enjoy having her picture taken? Probably not; I don’t know many writers who do. But something comes over, carried in the tension between the coolly assessing gaze and that half-smile, the lips closed but not tightly. A mouth ready to speak, perhaps to laugh out-loud.

      It is foolish, of course, to read things into a picture of someone you do not know, though I did meet her once, an evening in autumn 1995 when she came to Waterstones in Bath to read from her latest (and as it turned out her last) novel, The Blue Flower. I was in my early thirties and most of the way through writing my first novel. I was also, other than the bearded bookseller overseeing the wine, the only male at the event. There were not many of us there. I sat at the end of a row near the back. Penelope Fitzgerald I mistook at first for one of the audience. Then she was suddenly alone on the one chair facing our direction and she smiled, spoke quietly but clearly and seemed interested in us. Was there, she asked, anyone in the audience who was writing their own book? I don’t know if she really expected a hand to go up but for a few seconds I was aware of her gaze moving quickly among us and for the briefest moment she paused as she came to me – a pause that, almost certainly, had no cause other than my gender and relative youthfulness – but I felt seen, and immediately took the moment as evidence of my possessing a secret writerly soul, hidden from most but not from her.

      Though grateful to her, and glad to have been there, I did not run home that night with an armful of her books – all signed – and bury myself in them. More than a year passed before I started to read her seriously and have that rush of excitement that comes all too rarely in a reading lifetime. I started with the late novels – Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower – and these, in truth, remain my favourites. I couldn’t think why I had not properly known about her before, had not known how extraordinarily good she is. Why wasn’t everyone talking about her? Why had that reading in Bath not been standing room only?

      On the back of my edition of The Beginning of Spring – an edition now looking as loved books do, as though it has been through the spin cycle of the washing machine – there’s a line from a review by Jan Morris that begins simply, ‘How is it done?’ How indeed. The novel shares with the others in that late quartet some quality of the uncanny, an elusiveness, a sense of things being hidden in plain view. The plot, such as it is, could be summarised in a sentence or two; the plot is not the point (it rarely is in the books I like). Things happen, people come and go, shots are fired (just one, in fact) but what’s going on, what it’s all about other than Life itself, life as it slides past mysteriously like scenes on a riverbank, I cannot really say.

      The novel takes place in Russia the year before the onset of the Great War and a question likely to rise in the mind of any reader is how on earth can someone living in England in the second half of the 20th century know so much about the minutiae of day to day life in Moscow in 1913? And it’s not simply the knowing, it’s how this knowledge is set down – the when and the where of it. Research of course – what else can it be? Witchcraft? – but research so fantastically thorough, so deeply absorbed, it appears on the page as a seamless continuation of the narrative. Never a moment when we hear the noise of scenery being dragged on stage, never a moment when we doubt her.

      In the busy opening pages of the book, Frank Reid, the novel’s hero, having just received the news that his wife has left him, gazes distractedly into the courtyard of his house, ‘where the winter’s stack of firewood was down by now to its last quarter. The neighbours’ oil lamps shone out here and there beyond the back fence. By arrangement with the Moscow Electrical company, Frank had installed his own twenty-five watt lighting.’

      It’s just a glance, a pause in the flow of the action about the length of a breath, but it brings with it the image and idea of an entire world, and makes a slim book – under two hundred and fifty pages – feel like a big book, a book perhaps like the classic Russian novels Fitzgerald must have known well. And typing out those few lines I’m reminded of how matter-of-fact her sentences are. Restrained, clipped, unambiguous. There’s no high style in Fitzgerald, no ornamentation. Get in, say it and get out. Don’t stand there asking to be loved. A way of writing perfectly suited to the short story, the novella, the short novel. Plain water in a plain glass – or that’s what it seems until your head starts to spin.

      It’s worth saying at this point what should perhaps have been said earlier: Penelope Fitzgerald is often a very funny writer and The Beginning of Spring is often a very funny book. Frank Reid is the straight man around whom the Moscow carnival spins. He is not a highly imaginative man, and though he has grown up in Moscow and speaks the language and has a deep empathetic understanding of the people, a love of them, his manner is that of a sober Edwardian gentleman, intelligent but slightly narrow, a man intent on doing the right thing while frequently being unsure what that might require of him. It is, if you like, the comedic inversion of a Marx Brothers film (that’s Duck Soup rather than Das Kapital). Instead of three crazies causing blissful mayhem in an apparently orderly world, we have an apparently orderly man surrounded by mayhem he will not, ultimately, be able to constrain. But with Fitzgerald, comedy rarely comes without some suggestion of its reverse. In one of the novel’s most brilliantly achieved scenes, Frank looks for someone to help him take care of his three young children (Fitzgerald’s children always have the power to unnerve adults and have in her books no obvious sentimental appeal). He turns to his friend and fellow businessman, Arkady Kuraitin. ‘Arkady had children – how many Frank couldn’t say, because extra ones, perhaps nephews and nieces, perhaps waifs, or even hostages, seemed to come and go.’

      Unluckily for Frank, the first occasion his children go to the Kuraitin household coincides with the arrival there of a bear cub sent as a present by one of Kuraitin’s business contacts. When it arrives, his children, in the hope of pleasing their guests, or out of sheer devilment, try to make the animal dance but it won’t. Baulked, they settle on a new game. The bear is fed saucers of vodka and is soon hopelessly drunk:

      Losing its perilous balance it held out its paws like small hands and reeled onto the carpet where its claws gave it a better hold, while a gush of urine sprayed across the pattern of red and blue. For some reason one of its ears had turned inside out, showing the lining of paler skin. It rolled over several times while the dark patch spread, then sidled at great speed out of the door. All the children laughed, Dasha and Ben as well, they were all laughing and disgusted together … the bear … lumbered from end to end of the table making havoc among glass and silver, dragging at the bottle of vodka that stood in each place, upending them like ninepins and licking desperately at what was spilled. The service door flew open and the doorman, Sergei, came in, crossed himself, and without a moment’s hesitation snatched up a shovel, opened the doors of the white porcelain stove and scooped out a heap of red hot charcoal which he scattered over the bear. The tablecloth, soaked in spirits, sent up a sheet of flame. The bear screamed, its screams like those of a human child.

      There is so much to notice in this scene – its deft choreography (at least five children to manoeuvre), its slide from farce into horror – but we fly through it, longing to see where Fitzgerald will take us next, and it is only when we return for a second go that we can relish a detail such as the bear’s ear having a ‘lining of paler skin’. Earlier in the same scene she writes that the bear’s fur ‘grew at all angles, except along the spine which was neatly parted …’ This is not really ‘research’ any more. It’s being someone who pays close attention to the world, someone on whom nothing is lost.

      The Beginning of Spring is a well organised book and