Booker winner who lived on a rat-infested barge
Carl Muller
CELEBRITY: Penelope Fitzgerald who died, aged 83 was a woman
who was hailed as "one of the most distinctive and elegant voices in
contemporary British fiction." Born in 1916, she was the second daughter
of 'Evoke Knox', the editor of "Punch" magazine.
One of her uncles was Ronald Knox; another was Dillwyn Knox - the man
who broke the "Enigma Code." Her mother was also a writer who died when
Penelope was 18.
As Penelope recalled, "At home, someone was always correcting proofs
with a pen. From my father's family, I inherited the assumption that
writing was the natural thing to do."
Educated at Wycombe, she won a scholarship to Somerville College,
Oxford, where she was taught by J.R.R. Tolkien and graduated with a
First - but she had not begun to write.
Instead, she joined the BBC during the war and her experiences as a
Recorded Programmes Assistant were to form the basis of one of her best
novels, Human Voices, in which she captured more than any other writer
in telling of the strengths and absurdities of the BBC at war! In the
book she says: "There was always the drama of live broadcasts and that
long-standing custom of referring to the staff by the initials of their
jobs. So I was never Penelope or Fitzgerald, but RPA." But more
seriously, she said: "Broadcasting House was dedicated to the strangest
project of the war, or of any war - that is telling the truth.
Without prompting, the BBC had decided that truth was more important
than consolation, and in the long run, would be more effective."
Huma Voices did not come out till 1980, for Penelope only began
writing when she was 60. While with the BBC, she married Desmond
Fitzgerald in 1941 - the husband she described as a dashing Irish
soldier and lawyer who was some years her senior. From age 60, for the
next 20 years. she wrote a series of exquisitely subtle historical
novels and comedies of manners. She was described by her critics and
labelled by her reviewers as "Jane Austen's nearest heir for precision
and invention."
In the 1960s, after running a literary magazine and a bookshop in
Suffolk, she and her husband set up home in a leading, rat-infested
barge moored on the banks of the Thames in Battersea. It sank twice, and
provided her with the inspiration for Offshore -the novel that won for
her the Booker Prize in 1979. Meanwhile, she also taught English at the
Italian Conti's Drama School, wrote a family biography, The Knox
Brothers, and a biography of the lesbian poet Charlotte Mew.
She also intended to write a memoir of C.P. Hartley, but shelved the
idea when she learned that she needed to track one of Hartley's butlers
down to a male brothel in Norway!
In the 1980s, Penelope decided that she had finished writing about
the things in her own life and launched out on her later novels that
included The Blue Flower (1995), a story about the 18th century German
poet, Novelist. This was her masterpiece, for it won her the American
National Book Critics' Circle Prize. Also, in 1996, she was awarded the
Heywood Hill prize for her lifetime achievement in books.
It's sad that I have been unable to find any of her books in
bookshops in Kandy, but one of these days I'm going to ransack those
famous Maradana book-godowns where one can find anything and everything.
I picked up a 1904 editor of Celtic Myth and Legend, Poetry and Romance
there once upon a time. If I can't dig up the novels of Penelope
Fitzgerald there, I'll eat my non-existent hat! |
