I’d say that Penelope Fitzgerald gets the reviewer she deserves when Julian Barnes undertakes to examine her letters (link). I wanted to write “the novelist” Penelope Fitzgerald undergoes a review by “the novelist” Julian Barnes, but that’s just the point: in each case, the reviewer and the reviewed, the title “novelist” is a bit off kilter; both Barnes and Fitzgerald do things with the novel that stretch the definition of the form at least as far as did, say, The Satyricon or The Tale of Genji. Which is precisely why Firtzgerald deserves Barnes: it is the sheer originality of the one that makes him so fitly qualified to appreciate the sheer originality of the other.
Barnes is suitably reverent in the of the sheer unexpectedness of Fitzgerald: even in a nation of eccentric old ladies, just how was it that she went from being nobody in particular to one of the most original talents of her age. Barnes also exhibits, although he does not attempt to isolate, although he does not seek to over-explain, some prime examples of just what made Fitzgerald so much herself. He’s also subtly appreciative of just what a hard time she had, making her own way in the face of, inter alia, the smugly patronizing dismissals of her presumed betters. Barnes says:
[W]hen public recognition came, it followed no obvious trajectory, and was attended by a certain level of male diminishment. In 1977 her non-fiction publisher, Richard Garnett, informed her dunderheadedly that she was "only an amateur writer", to which she responded mildly, "I asked myself, how many books do you have to write and how many semi-colons do you have to discard before you lose amateur status?" The following year, after having been shortlisted for the Booker prize with The Bookshop, she asked her fiction publisher, Colin Haycraft, if it would be a good idea to write another novel. He jocundly replied that if she went on writing fiction he didn't want it blamed on him, and in any case he already had too many short novels with sad endings on his hands. (Unsurprisingly, Fitzgerald took herself off to another publisher, and Haycraft claimed he had been misunderstood.) … The BBC's resident bookheads also treated her condescendingly: radio's Frank Delaney told her she "deserved to win because my book was free of objectionable matter and suitable for family reading"; while television's Robert Robinson gave her patronisingly little airtime on The Book Programme and scarcely concealed his view that she shouldn't have won. And after she died, even her memorial meeting was disfigured by the turkey-cocking of a young male novelist.
Happily, Fitzgerald gave as good as she got:
[She displayed] a clear moral sense and a sharp dismissal of those she found wanting. Robert Skidelsky is "this absurdly irritating man", Lord David Cecil's lecture on Rossetti was "abysmal", Rushdie's latest novel is "a load of codswallop". Then there is "the dread Malcolm Bradbury", who "seems to be made of some plastic or semi-fluid substance which gives way or changes in your hands", and who patronises her work ("I felt like throwing the pale green mayonnaise over him"); and Douglas Hurd, Booker chairman, with his pitiful notion of what a novel should be.
To be fair Barnes himself is no slouch in the snidely-dismissive department. Or I think that’s what it is: I am still trying to sort out the implications of describing a particular entery as “Pooterishness with a difference: first, it is self-aware; and second, there is a high-boho dash to it.” Pooterish maybe and high-boho for sure, and Barnes induces you, if not actually to read the letters, at least to salute the talent that produced them.
Hat tip: Joel.
Update: this link won't last past July 29, but evidently Barnes is outing Fitzgerald this week on BBC's A Good Read. Joel adds: "honorary book fair participants."
No comments:
Post a Comment