I thought quite well of the book at first but it’s now almost unintelligible, it was probably an improvement that the last chapters got lost, but then 4 characters and 1000s of words had to be cut to save paper, then the artwork got lost (by the printer this time) so we had to use my roughs and it looks pretty bad, but there you are, it doesn’t matter, and no-one will notice…everyone has to do the best they can.
But Duckworth were known for the ruthless editing of manuscripts, in the service of a house style: the nouvelle; indeed they were said to have improved Beryl Bainbridge’s first novels by this process. With Penelope it ever after rankled, yet even in its truncated form The Golden Child has much to amuse, with its egomaniacal establishment villains, and its unpromisingly named sleuth, Professor Untermensch. He, like Dilly Knox, is an expert decoder, in this case of Garamantian hieroglyphs, which Penelope draws herself, and with which she has a great deal of fun, as in their corresponding phonemes: Poo, Sog, Hak, Mum, etc.
If the book itself has to be decoded, it is not Penelope’s fault, and it was enjoyed when it appeared in 1977, in the same year as The Knox Brothers, though it was only mentioned in round-ups of crime fiction, a category to which it does not quite belong, as it has serious points to make about fakery, and about the corruption and denaturing of art through money and politics.
Penelope seemed to have taken the mutilation of The Golden Child philosophically, but she would have worse to contend with from Duckworth, as the correspondence with Colin Haycraft about her next book demonstrates all too clearly. With the money from The Knox Brothers she had embarked on a long-dreamt-of voyage to China. From the perspective of all that distance, she had the revelation all writers await. She saw as in a blinding light how to transmute the events of her own life into serious fiction. The first fruits of this earth-tremor was to be The Bookshop.
No woman is a hero to her son-in-law, and yet, when I first came across this book (till then unaware of its very existence) lying in boundproof form on her kitchen table, where it had been written, and took advantage of Penelope’s temporary absence to read it in one sitting, I did have a sense of ‘What? And in our house?’ I had no doubt that this was the real thing, and still feel grateful for the stolen privilege of being one of the first people to read it. Ever after that Penelope had an extra dimension of mystery to me. I immediately wrote her a note to express my amazed and delighted appreciation; it would have been too embarrassing to confess in person. I was touched, much later, to come across the never-referred-to note among her papers in Texas.
The Bookshop is not especially autobiographical, but it does seem to grind an axe in its depiction of Southwold as ‘Hardborough’, an exemplar of provincial mean spirit, the petty exercise of power, and philistinism. It is eloquent on the great beauty of the region, only spoilt for her by the loss, through the family’s insolvency, of ‘Blackshore’, their home, the large former oyster warehouse on the Hard, on which the bookshop was modelled. (But an earlier loss, the failure of her magazine World Review, which, in the end, ‘hadn’t been wanted’ must surely also underlie the book.) The real bookshop, in the High Street, remained open for many years, ably run by Mrs Neame, the old friend of the book’s dedication, whose assistant Penelope became, after her financial misfortunes. In reality, the family made a good many kind supportive friends there, though mainly among the intellectual bohemia of nearby Walberswick, including the Freuds, Sampsons and Fiennes. The moral atmosphere of the book, perhaps also some of the form (each chapter a scene), comes, as is mentioned in the blurb, from the Scènes de la Vie de Province of Balzac’s Human Comedy, which she studied with Tina, to help her with her ‘A’ level. The style, however, with its dry compassionate humour, could already be nobody but Penelope. It is still one of her most popular books, particularly abroad, in Europe and America, where it is seen as a very English classic. It has just been reissued in France with the misleading, but certainly striking, title L’Affaire Lolita. It was reviewed, in 1978, with respect and enthusiasm, and, with almost unheard-of good fortune for a first novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
With all of this Duckworth should have been well contented. However, with hindsight, Penelope should have thought better of entering a small pool of lady writers, all sharing some of the same traits, one of whom – Anna Haycraft (her pen-name Alice Thomas Ellis) – was also the nominal fiction editor. With Colin she got on, admiring his jovial eccentricity and classical scholarship. She had hoped he would accompany her to the Booker dinner, but he did not, adducing the improbable lack of a dinner jacket. Shortly after this it was inexplicably implied to Penelope that Duckworth had a surfeit of elegant nouvelles and she should return to crime-writing, which would sell better. Though we see Colin Haycraft hastily backtracking, the damage was done. She was deeply hurt. She would take her next novel to Collins. Here at last she fell on her feet: she had found a publishing home.
It is impossible to overstate Penelope’s energy and creativity in the late 1970s. There would be five novels in as many years, as well as an enormous amount of work on two biographies, each dear to her heart as projects, both of which she had to abandon, one from scruple, the other in the face of determined resistance from publishers. Although she would say little to friends or editors about her fiction (and that little misleading, for the novels must speak for themselves), the letters are full of fascinating detail about the unwritten biographies.
‘The Poetry Bookshop’ was the first conceived of these, and its intended theme is, if anything, more compelling and urgent today: the loss, through the unforeseen side-effects of modernism, of the lyric voice of English verse – the voice that spoke to the ordinary reader’s heart, the loss therefore (by now almost complete) of the mass audience for serious poetry. The book would have concerned itself with the rehabilitation of the Georgians, whose headquarters was at Harold and Alida Monro’s poetry bookshop in Devonshire Street (now Boswell Street) in Bloomsbury. Yeats, Frost, Edward Thomas, Lawrence, Wilfred Owen, even Eliot, all passed through its portals, but Penelope was especially interested in the minor figures: Monro himself, Anna Wickham, F. S. Flint and Charlotte Mew, with their, as she discovered, often tragic and tormented lives, who never quite made it, but each produced a handful of perfect lyrics. How one regrets this book, which she did not abandon until all four of her publishers had turned it down in succession. Yet fragments of it survive, first in the story of Harold Monro, in her introduction to J. Howard Woolmer’s scholarly bibliography of publications of the Poetry Bookshop, especially of its beautiful illustrated rhyme sheets, a treasured childhood memory of Penelope’s. Her letters to Woolmer trace the development of a warm transatlantic relationship between bookseller (albeit a very grand one) and collector, which becomes a meeting of minds as we see them sharing the details of their research. He most generously gave her some of the precious rhyme sheets when he realised she couldn’t afford them, and put her in the way of more money, most necessary to impecunious authors, by persuading her to sell her papers to Texas, and thus no doubt saving many of them, for she was modestly careless in such things.
To Richard Ollard, her great support and ally at Collins over the next years, we owe the eventual publication of the other fruit of ‘The Poetry Bookshop’ research: her wonderful dark biography Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, which reads so much like one of her novels. Ollard, like Raleigh Trevelyan also a distinguished writer, was senior literary editor at Collins, and perhaps the last of the ‘gentleman publishers’. They suited each other; she could rely on him. ‘You can always consult Richard if anything worries you,’ his assistant, Sarah, told Penelope. They became friends, as they remained to the end of her life. With him (as with several other correspondents, notably Francis King who gave her much encouragement) she discussed, in a spirit of high comedy, her difficulties and adventures in the preparation of her life of Leslie (L. P.) Hartley. The book, which sounded more promising than ‘The Poetry Bookshop’ to publishers, was still promised to Colin Haycraft, despite
their rift.
What became of it? She had to overcome the implacable opposition of Lord David Cecil, Hartley’s literary executor, even to begin it. Cecil had been the love of Hartley’s life. Long married, he didn’t perhaps wish to acknowledge the basis of their youthful friendship. Anthony Powell kindly intervened to persuade him that Penelope would be the ideal person to tell Hartley’s story with the tact needed, and she worked hard on the book for three years from 1977. It wasn’t so much the gondoliers, the murderous, manipulative man-servants, the oceans of gin, the snobbery (all those duchesses), the extreme right-wing politics, the pot-shots at swans from his house on the River Avon, that dissuaded her from proceeding, but the affection she developed for his loving sister, Norah. How could she present the dissipation of his achievement of the ‘40s and ‘50s, the coarsening of his clear, careful voice (an echo of it is audible in The Bookshop, as Haycraft points out) in a good light? Could she betray the memory of their own friendship, of his support during her first literary career, her editorship of World Review, when she often published him, by the honest depiction of his long decline, all too visible in the desperately feeble novels and stories of his later years? She couldn’t, and wouldn’t. Somewhat wistfully, she gave up on the project in the early 1980s. These letters give a strong sense of what a biography it might have been.
The book she did deliver to Richard Ollard in 1979 was Offshore. Here one feels distinctly in Fitzgeraldland, or, in this case, afloat on the brackish, swirling, hardly benevolent waters of a great tidal river, uncertainly tethered to a land that has brought no luck. Though the characters couldn’t be more English, the tragicomedy of their fates (tragi-farce she called it) sounds notes more common in European fiction. It was sometimes painful to read for her family. All art, the adult characters invented or composite, there is much in it that was recognisably the case: ‘Grace’, the houseboat, probably bought for its name as much as its cheapness, appears as itself, as does Stripey the cat, and the two little girls are called Tina and Maria in the manuscript. Reality dances with imagination in a treacherous way, games are being played with remembered facts, though not with the feelings beneath them. In the third chapter, Nenna, who is as distanced from Penelope as she is like her, finds her thoughts becoming ‘a kind of perpetual magistrate’s hearing’ about her marriage and her motives for her actions. After many ordeals, the drama is resolved in irresolution. The boat never actually goes down.
Offshore was enthusiastically reviewed, shortlisted for the Booker, and then, against all expectations, won it. But what should have been a triumph had decidedly mixed results.
The Booker has an honourable reputation for selecting the best and most interesting novels of the year, even if they don’t always win, and it is now a venerable and respected institution, guaranteeing a (sometimes vast) increase in sales for the winner, and boosting reputations; but that only began to happen a year or so after Penelope won. Then, shamefully, in the early years when the prize ceremony received fairly shoddy television coverage, the lucky six authors shortlisted, whose only sin was to have written praiseworthy novels, were lined up as in a coconut shy to be insulted by media pundits, who gave no very convincing impression of having read the books in question. That year the firm favourite was A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul, a fine novel that Penelope later recommended for another prize. It would have been an equally worthy winner, but it is said, with truth, that judging literary competitions is like comparing gazelles with tigers. Journalists had already written their pieces, and were affronted by not even having heard, in most cases, of Penelope. What followed could be described as a field day of ignorant and exceedingly unfair indignation. The Critics on Radio 3 (which had praised The Bookshop to the skies), called the result a disgrace and a very bad day for modern fiction, or something of the kind. ‘When I got to the Book Programme, soaking wet because I’d had to be photographed on a bale of rope on the Embankment, R[obert] Robinson was in a very bad temper and complained to his programme executive "who are these people, you promised me they were going to be the losers?"’ wrote Penelope to Francis King. ‘I’ll never forget the Book Programme,’ Penelope wrote to Richard Ollard; ‘I was delighted to hear that you are printing off a few more Offshores. I thought it had got shipwrecked altogether by so many unpleasant remarks.’
It may have set back her career. Her next two novels, though liked, did not receive the appreciation they deserved. Hasty readers and reviewers missed the depths of Human Voices and At Freddie’s: it was too easy to take them only for the dazzling entertainments that in one sense they are. Her ellipses and puzzles often led them to wonder if she had left something out, if the apparent holes in her plots were accidental, but really she intended her readers to work, to solve the mysteries the stories hinge on for themselves. She tried to define Human Voices for the blurb that Richard Ollard was writing, and makes clear its complexity:
It is really about the love-hate relationship between 2 of the eccentrics on whom the BBC depended, and about love, jealousy, death, child-birth in Broadcasting House and the crises that go on to produce the 9 o’clock news on which the whole nation relied during the war years, heartbreak &c, and also about this truth telling business.
The original title, ‘Ten Seconds From Now’, seemed only to refer to the urgency and danger of the times, to the effort of the whole nation to avert evil by upholding the truth, in which Penelope participated as a programmes assistant at the BBC. The preferred title, ‘Human Voices’, taken from Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’, is apt both in its reference to the disembodied broadcasters, and to the pain of young love: for ‘human voices wake us and we drown’. Another poem also underlies the book, as she points out helpfully or unhelpfully to Ollard in the same letter: ‘(Incidentally, as no-one reads Heine I suppose no-one will understand the name Asra, but that’s by the way.)’ Annie Asra, the heroine of Human Voices, like all Penelope’s female protagonists, represents her in some aspects. Heine’s poem ‘Der Asra’ is about a slave slowly dying for love of his mistress. All his tribe, the Asra, in fact die if they fall in love, and Annie is clearly a member of it. The unsuitability of the people we fall in love with is one of Penelope’s themes. She goes so far as to wonder, in one of her novels, whether men and women are ever quite the right thing for each other. However, she certainly believed in love unto death.
At Freddie’s was originally called ‘What! Are They Children?’, but although the precocious boy actors are its ultimate focus, it is also about the theatre and its monstres sacrés, unhappy love, life’s casualties, and the impossibility of teaching children what they don’t require to know, what they don’t already intuit as necessary to them. The teachers in the novel, Pierce and Hannah, quickly realise that it is only their support and kindness that their charges need. It is interesting that their backgrounds in some respects mirror Desmond’s and Penelope’s. Pierce is an Irish Catholic; Hannah is from Ulster (where the Knoxes have their roots). Shakespeare’s ‘King John’, with its murder of innocents, is the play being rehearsed in the book, for Freddie is a serious headmistress. The character derives from Miss Freeston, head not of Italia Conti, where Penelope began her teaching in the early 1960s, but of Westminster Tutors, the eccentric Oxbridge crammer where she was still teaching. However Freddie is given some of the traits and fearsome reputation of Lilian Baylis, the much-loved dragon of the Old Vic, the theatre that flew the flag for Shakespeare in London for so many years.
Penelope wrote to Richard Ollard about the cover design for At Freddie’s:
I wanted a high wall with a broken basket of fruit at the bottom of it, having evidently fallen, one of the Covent Garden baskets. That gives some movement, because it’s evidently fallen from somewhere. I did think of the stage children as to some extent expendable products, like the fruit.
Ollard, the fourth publisher to do so, politely turned down ‘The Poetry Bookshop’ project four times. In the face of Penelope’s lively persistence, which makes for entertaining reading, and w
ith the reduction of its focus to a study of the life of Charlotte Mew, and how it gave rise to her few, haunting poems, in the end he gracefully bowed to the inevitable. She wrote to him as the publication date neared:
the interesting things about CMew are that: 1. she was a poet, otherwise I shouldn’t bother to write about her 2. she was a lesbian 3. she was unhappy 4. she has a curious lifespan as a writer, from the nineties to the 1920s…I fear none of the papers would be interested in an extract about a lesbian who didn’t make it…The interest, to me, is that she’s a divided personality who had to produce so many versions of herself at the same time. Perhaps we all do.
Chris Carduff, in his first assignment as an editor, oversaw the Addison Wesley edition in the US, and sensibly and logically enriched it with a selection of Mew’s poems.
It is curious how many successful writers have been drawn to write wonderful books about unsuccessful ones. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (but she had so few) is a tragic, deeply literary book, of similar length and structure to her novels. It was her last biography. From now on, nonetheless, all her fiction would include people who had really existed. The two worlds were merging.
In the letters to Richard Ollard, as befitted their flourishing friendship, she discussed freely the upheavals in her life provoked by the decision of my wife and myself to move to the country and bring up our children there. Now she would live between Somerset and London. In Theale she gardened, helped sometimes with Fergus (though she wasn’t terribly good with babies and toddlers; she preferred children to have reached the age of reason), relaxed as much as she ever did, and we hoped that she would be able to write. However she found that ‘I personally can only write in London, I love the noise and squalor and the perpetual distractions and the temptation to take an aircraft somewhere else’, and so Jean Fisher helped her to find a base, at 76 Clifton Hill, St John’s Wood, in the house of a friend of a friend where she lived in ‘a kind of attic, overlooking the tree-tops, with gold wallpaper’. This arrangement worked well until 1987, when her work for the writers’ association PEN International and the Arts Council, her research at the British Museum reading room for her books, and her tireless reviewing, kept her more and more in London, and her daughter Maria and son-in-law John generously agreed to convert the coachhouse of their new house in Bishop’s Road, Highgate for her. They looked after her there for the rest of her life.
So I Have Thought of You Page 3
