A House of Air. Hermione Lee

All the same, when you get there, you may still feel much left unsaid or unexplained.

      There is often that sense of something withheld in her novels, as in the mysterious forest encounter in The Beginning of Spring, or the meaning of the story of the ‘blue flower,’ never completed, never spelled out. As Fritz tells Sophie in that novel: ‘If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching.’ At the end of the story ‘Desideratus’ (in her posthumously published collection The Means of Escape) the boy who has lost his keepsake and been on a strange journey to recover it, is told: ‘You have what you came for.’ But his quest journey remains baffling and mysterious. And she doesn’t care much for explanations. In that 1997 interview she told me (as she often told interviewers) that her books were so short because she didn’t like to tell her readers too much: she felt it insulted them to over-explain. She says here in an essay on Charlotte Mew (which preceded her moving and eloquent biography of the poet) that she is a writer who ‘refuses quite to be explained.’ She is amused by Byron’s impatience with Coleridge’s metaphysics: ‘I wish he would explain his explanation.’ She likes readers to have their wits about them, and she likes exercising her own, as with her pleasure in Beckett’s dialogue:

      What a joy it is to laugh from time to time, [Father Ambrose] said. Is it not? I said. It is peculiar to man, he said. So I have noticed, I said…Animals never laugh, he said. It takes us to find that funny, I said. What? he said. It takes us to find that funny, I said loudly. He mused. Christ never laughed either, he said, as far as we know. He looked at me. Can you wonder? I said.

      She comments: ‘This kind of dialogue shows us what we could say if we had our wits about us, and gives us its own peculiar satisfaction.’

      Beckett’s hollow laughter is a surprising preference for Fitzgerald, who is not herself a player with words or a lugubrious comic. And there are other surprises here. There are pieces on writers we might have guessed she would like—Sarah Orne Jewett for her deep, quiet knowledge of a small community, its silences, pride, and cruelties; John McGahern for his poetic realism, his attention to ‘small acts of ceremony,’ and his ‘magnificently courteous attention to English as it is spoken in Ireland’; William Trevor for his empathy with the innocent and the dispossessed; Olive Schreiner for her strangeness, dreaming, and courage. But there are others she champions more unexpectedly: Roddy Doyle, Carol Shields, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce (even Finnegans Wake). This is not a narrow, prissy, or parochial critic.

      At the heart of her intellectual passions is a political commitment to an English tradition of creative socialism, a vision at once utopian and practical, of art as work and of the usefulness of art to its community. Her English heroes are Blake, Ruskin, Burne-Jones, William Morris, Lutyens. She is inspired by Morris’s dedication to ‘the transformation of human existence throughout the whole social order.’ (Though, as in The Beginning of Spring, she sees the comedy and pathos of Utopianism too, manifested in the early twentieth century in ‘Tolstoyan settlements, garden cities and vegetarianism tea-rooms, Shelley’s Spirit of Delight…and the new Rolls-Royce.’) She deeply admires Morris’s painful mixture of neurosis, work ethic, resolution, and struggle for self-control. But she likes her idealists best at their most down-to-earth: Ruskin on the joy of shelling peas (‘the pop which assures one of a successful start, the fresh colour and scent of the juicy row within…’) or the cunning arrangements at Burne-Jones’s studio at The Grange: ‘the huge canvases could be passed in and through slits in the walls, there were hot-water pipes, and a skylight so that it could be used for painting with scaffolding.’ The work of Morris that most delights her is the Kelmscott Press and his experiments with typography.

      She pays great attention to serious craftsmanship, practised skills, and technical mastery. (There is always a job to be done in her novels: running a bookshop or a school, keeping a barge afloat.) The best compliment she can pay to the biographies she often reviews is ‘calm professionalism.’ She is just as interested in non-verbal professions; there is a great deal about art in this book. She tells us about Francis Oliphant’s failed attempts at glass painting. William de Morgan’s luminous tiles, Charles Ashbee’s high-minded devotion to handicrafts (all the same, ‘he was an architect whose houses stood up’), and Edward Lear’s heavenly Mediterranean paintings. She has an eye for illustrations—John Minton’s decorations for Elizabeth David’s first cookery book, ‘a kind of delicious ballet in and out of the text,’ or Ernest Shepard (her step-mother’s father) and his feeling for line (‘You can recognize it in…a study of…a young man cutting long grass…The braces are only just sketched in, but you can see how they take the strain’). She loves small well-made books, like J. L. Carr’s ‘delightful tiny booklets’, The Little Poets (‘I only wish I had a complete set now’). One of her favourite quotations is from the socialist woodworker Romney Green, who held that ‘if you left any man alone with a block of wood and chisel, he will start rounding off the corners.’

      Romney Green was a friend of Harold Monro, founder of the Poetry Bookshop, which had a quirky, idealistic, and influential life from the 1910s to the early 1930s. This is Fitzgerald’s golden age: she doesn’t like ‘Georgian’ to be used as a term of abuse. Born in 1916, she remembered hearing Walter de la Mare reading at the Poetry Bookshop, and many of her best-loved writers are connected to that period and that atmosphere: A. E. Housman, Edward Thomas, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Stevie Smith. Again, one of the things she liked best about the Poetry Bookshop was the look of its rhyme sheets, which, ‘in the spirit of William Blake,’ and using some of the best illustrators of the time (including John and Paul Nash, David Jones, and Edward Bawden), were designed for ‘the verse and the picture to make their impression together.’ ‘We tacked them on our walls, above our beds and our baths.’

      Harold Monro was a lost cause in the end, a pathetic and gloomy alcoholic, and the Bookshop was carried on gallantly for a while, and then wound up, by his passionate Polish widow, Alida. As in her novels, Fitzgerald is drawn to failures, and some of her most vivid characterizations here, in life as in fiction, are of despairing figures whose struggles and defeats are at once funny and terrible. She is drawn to the sad minor characters in minor English novels. There is the poor faded shabby-genteel Mrs Morgan in Mrs Oliphant’s The Rector (‘She cannot afford to complain. Time has robbed her of the luxury of ingratitude’). There is the ‘uncompromisingly plain Anne Yeo’ in Ada Leverson’s Love’s Shadow, ‘hideously dressed in a mackintosh and golf-cap and “well aware that there were not many people in London at three o’clock on a sunny afternoon who would care to be found dead with her.”’ There is the unmarried Monica in E. M. Delafield’s Thank Heaven Fasting, a prisoner of early-twentieth-century middle-class English domestic servitude: ‘Heavy meals come up from the basement kitchen, clothes are worn which can’t be taken off without the help of a servant, fires blaze, bells are rung, hairdressers arrive by appointment—every morning and evening bring the spoils of a comfortable unearned income. It is the only home Monica has ever known, and we have to see it turn first into a refuge for the unwanted, and then into a prison.’ You might not call Penelope Fitzgerald, at first glance, a feminist writer, but she is one.

      So conscious of how cruel life can be to its victims, she is generally kind herself. However, she should not be mistaken for a pushover, and can be lethal about poor work. One biographer, busy seeing off his predecessor as ‘conventional,’ is dealt with thus: ‘This leads you to expect a bold treatment of some debatable points, but that would be a mistake.’ Another is described as writing with ‘flat-footed perseverance.’ She is often at her most ironical when writing about biography, a form that fascinates and exasperates her (and that, in her lives of Charlotte Mew and the Knox brothers, she made entirely her own). She always insists on the need for the fullest possible historical context, and she knows all about the problems of the genre: ‘The years of success are a biographer’s nightmare.’ ‘The “middle stretch” is hard for biographers.’ ‘Perhaps the worst case of all for a biographer, nothing definable happened at all.’

      In any life-story, she is alert to cruelty, tyranny, or unfairness, and she has no time for horrible behaviour—severely recalling Larkin, on an Arts Council Literature Panel, saying (in response to a query about the funding of ‘ethnic arts centres’) that ‘anyone lucky enough to be allowed to settle here had a duty to