So I Have Thought of You

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  best wishes, Penelope

  27 Bishop’s Road

  Highgate

  16 October 1999

  Dear Julian,

  I’m so sorry but my back is too bad at the moment to allow me to crawl out in the evening – I ought never to have accepted in the first place, but I did and do like Brian Moore’s books so much – I’m returning this ticket you sent me as it says seating is limited and so it might be needed elsewhere – anyway enough of all this and best wishes for the evening – Penelope

  Michael Holroyd*

  76 Clifton Hill, NW8

  18 September 1984

  Dear Michael, I just want to thank you most sincerely for writing about C.Mew in the Good Book Guide, and also (since it seems to me that all biographers apply to you sooner or later) that although it’s true that I’ve been collecting material for years on Leslie Hartley, and knew him well, I don’t know that I shall ever be able to write his life, so if anyone else wants to have a go (and this is the answer I give them when they write to me every few months or so) they are welcome, but they won’t find it easy. This is because: 1. Leslie’s sister who breeds deerhounds and is in every way delightful, but much firmer than Leslie, won’t consider giving permission for the use of any material which might reflect the slightest discredit on her brother, or suggest that he died of drink 2. a mysterious paternity case was brought against him towards the end of his life, which was heard by a judge in chambers, so I can’t see the papers 3. Leslie, who was very interested in ghosts, appears to be haunting his old home near Bath, now a leisure and canoeing centre called ‘Misty Waters’. And so on, and so on.

  best wishes

  Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road, N6

  31 January [c.1988]

  Dear Michael,

  Thankyou so very much for your kind words about Charlotte Mew and myself in the Telegraph – and indeed to the BBC as I think you suggested, perhaps in passing, that she might figure in their Visiting Lives. Partly as a result of that the book is going to come out in trade paperback and that’s another step forward from ‘said to be a writer’. I can only hope for a little at a time, and I’m sure you know how grateful I am for your help,

  best wishes,

  Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road

  Highgate, N6

  21 February 2000

  Dear Michael,

  I am truly sorry to make you read the same letter twice, particularly when you have (always) so much to do, but I’m writing once again to resign from the committee of the RSL* because arthritis (although I’m told the word means nothing) makes it such a business for me to get from one place to another. At Hyde Park Gardens I even had to appeal to Mark Amory to open the front door for me (which he did of course with the greatest politeness), but I felt then that this wouldn’t do for a committee member.

  You asked me to be one of the judges for the Heinemann and Holtby prizes and I will finish doing that, of course. Meantime, all good wishes for the move and all your other undertakings. And surely you couldn’t have found a better place for the society to start its new century. – I’ve sometimes thought you looked a bit tired, but never in the least defeated – not for a moment –

  with best wishes

  Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road

  Highgate, N6

  5 March 2000

  Dear Michael,

  Thankyou for your letter and I’m sure you’ve come to the right decision about the history of the RSL, which perhaps the Society would never have undertaken if they’d known what a business it was going to be. I didn’t know, of course, that poor Isabel was ill, and I don’t know how much she minds about the history, except that it’s impossible not to feel fiercely protective about anything one writes.

  I think I went through the possible nominations for honours with Mark before. Do you remember, you were away, and we tried to take the opportunity to get your name on the list, but in vain.

  Thankyou for saying I can stay on the committee in my rather unsatisfactory condition. You never believe the time will come when you can’t walk everywhere, but it does –

  best wishes

  Penelope

  Alberto Manguel*

  27a Bishop’s Road

  Highgate, N6

  12 July 1998

  Dear Alberto Manguel,

  I can’t tell you how pleased I was to have that copy of Max Beerbohm’s lecture on Lytton Strachey.

  I remember giving it to my father. – He came up to London as a young man before the first world war with the idea of earning his living by writing, and one of his ambitions was to meet the great Max Beerbohm. At last he summoned up courage to ask him to lunch. Thankyou very much for your kind and generous thought –

  best wishes

  Penelope Fitzgerald

  27a Bishop’s Road

  Highgate, N6

  14 September 1998

  Dear Alberto Manguel,

  Thankyou so very much for your kind letter, and I’m so glad to have your approval for The Blue Flower, which took me a long time to write because my German is so slow. I had Novalis’ complete letters &c. out from the London Library for two years, and they never asked for it back, much to their credit, I think.

  If you would like to use a line, any line, as an epigraph, I should consider it an honour, although I think that particular one was mine, in imitation of Novalis, or rather of his Fragmente. I was very much interested to learn that Borges asked to have Heinrich von Ofterdingen read to him during his last illness. There is something ‘noble’ about it, perhaps that appealed to him.

  At the end of your fine book you say that ‘The history of reading has no end.’ I treasure these words and can only pray they’re true. I am assistant-judging the Booker Prize this autumn, and one of the novels sent in doesn’t even exist – it has to be downloaded from the internet –

  With all my best wishes for whatever you’re undertaking –

  Penelope Fitzgerald –

  Masolino d’Amico*

  27a Bishop’s Road

  Highgate, N6

  6 January 1999

  Dear Masolino d’Amico,

  Thankyou for your letter, and I’m delighted to hear that you are translating The Beginning of Spring, but the terrible thing which I have to confess to you is that I don’t know the answer to your question. In fact, although I have done a bit of amateur hand printing, I’m afraid there are several things wrong with this passage. On p. 41 I’ve got ‘T. spent no time in distributing the print from the reserves’ when it ought to be ‘back from the reserves’ and now there’s this matter of washing the dirty type – it would be inked, of course, but not dirty, unless it had been dropped on the floor, but that I’m sure T. would never do.

  However, I’m quite sure that by ‘slip’ here, I meant a long straight holder or container, onto (or into) which he put the type while it was still damp from washing. But why he did this I can’t think, although I must have got the idea from somewhere. You are the only person who has noticed, and I feel deeply ashamed of this. The German translator, Christa Krüger, has put ‘Messinglineal’ for ‘brass slip’ i.e. a brass ruler. Do you think that would do?

  Please accept my apologies and best wishes for the New Year – Penelope Fitzgerald

  27a Bishop’s Road

  London, N6

  10 June 1999

  Dear Masolino d’Amico,

  Of course I should have loved to come to Italy, as would anyone in their right senses, but alas! I am too old.

  However please do come and see me if you are in London at the end of June and I’ll do my best to give a satisfactory interview – best wishes Penelope Fitzgerald

  27a Bishop’s Road

  London, N6

  [postcard]

  27 July [1999]

  Thankyou so much for sending me your interview. I feel very proud to be on the front page of the Stampa supplement, and very grateful to you for your translations.

 
What a relief it will be to get to the seaside and leave Rome to the tourists and pilgrims for a while –

  best wishes – Penelope

  Richard Holmes*

  27a Bishop’s Road

  London, N6

  20 July 1997

  Dear Richard – This is to thank you so much for your very kind and very discerning review of The Blue Flower which reminded me that I only ‘started to write’ (as they say at the University of the 3rd Age) as a result of reading your piece about Monty James in the Times, so many years ago. I’ve still got it, although it’s almost falling to pieces –

  very best wishes

  Penelope

  Mandy Kirkby*

  27a Bishop’s Road

  Highgate

  19 May 1995

  Dear Mandy,

  Thankyou very much for the page proofs of Blue Flower, which I’m returning as you ask, and thankyou too for the most helpful yellow stickers (and for your note about the jacket). I believe now we ought to have had a map, as Stuart said, but I’m not capable of making one, and didn’t like to take one straight out of someone else’s book.

  The ghost at the Southwold-Walberswick crossing is said to be a mother waiting for her child who was supposed to be coming back on the last ferry. The white dog, which I have actually seen, was something to do with Dunwich, I think, and the poltergeist** was horrid.

  Still doggedly going on with the Independent Foreign Fiction awards, only to find that one of the books we’ve got on the short list has been pulped by Macmillans already – the whole book business is getting very depressing –

  best wishes

  Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road

  Highgate

  25 April 1997

  Dear Mandy,

  Thankyou very much for the cover proofs – delighted to see the child Cicero † in his rose-coloured socks again, I once used to live quite near the Wallace and it’s then that I saw him so often.

  I also want to congratulate you on biking (but surely not all the way?) to Standen.* I love the house (Webb designed everything, even the electric fittings) but can’t understand what you say about the garden. What can they have done with it – it should be full of flowers at the moment, specially narcissi. As my little book says, Webb quarrelled with the landscape gardener over the layout and then ‘Margaret Beale took the planting into her own hands and her notebooks record a typical amateur’s enthusiasm for an abundance of colourful and unusual plants at variance with the quiet, restful effect Webb would have hoped for.’ Surely the National Trust can’t have got rid of everything. The flowers were mostly in the lower garden, of course. –

  Don’t do too much cleaning, nobody gives you proper credit for it –

  best wishes Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road

  Highgate

  17 June 1997

  Dear Mandy,

  How nice to hear from you, thankyou for the paperback covers. I like them, although I wish there wasn’t an Egyptian artefact on The Golden Child, as I took such pains to make it not Egyptian, but I’ve now begun to see (and about time, too, you may say) that one mustn’t make a fuss about nothing. (By ‘nothing’ I mean something that no-one cares about except oneself.) I’m very glad they’re being reissued, anyway.

  I’m struggling, at the moment, to answer the deeply learned questions of the German translator of The Blue Flower, who has a doctorate in Early Romantic literature. She knows so much more than I do that I feel deeply ashamed. There is a conference, too, this summer, somewhere in East Germany, on Novalis, and Professor Schulz (from Australia, but one of the five editors of Novalis’ Collected Works, and I think the only surviving one) is going (not to complain, as I feel I truly deserve, about my omissions and errors) but to make a presentation, whatever that means, of The Blue Flower. He writes in such a kindly, old-fashioned German-scholarly way that I feel taken back in time, and, once again, that I can’t live up to it, although I once could.

  I hope you have had a great time in Dublin. I haven’t been there for a long long while – my husband’s aunt used to be Mother Superior of the Dominican deaf-and-dumb school out at Cabra –

  all best wishes

  Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road

  Highgate, N6 4HP

  7 October [1999]

  Dear Mandy,

  I was so glad to see you again, and didn’t feel I congratulated you enough on your decision (which you announced so calmly) to buy a house. It’s such a proud moment to stand on your own doorstep, however tired you feel.

  Here is a list of my short stories:

  The Axe (Times Anthology of Ghost Stories, Cape 1975)

  The Prescription (London Review of Books. New Stories 8, Arts Council 1983)

  At Hiruhamara (British Council New Writing Minerva 1992, also The Oxford Book of Short Stories OUP 1998)

  The Means of Escape (British Council New Writing 4, Vintage 1995)

  Desideratus (British Council New Writing 6, Vintage 1997)

  Not Shown (Daily Telegraph, also on Telltale Tapes, but I can’t find the date)

  Beehernz (The BBC paid for this in August 1997 but I’m not sure

  when it appeared. It was commissioned by their music mag. And reprinted in one of their publications)

  The Red-Haired Girl (TLS paid for it Oct 30 1998 but I’m not quite sure (again!) when it appeared).

  I’m sure there are a few others, but I can’t lay my hand on them.* I must apologise for this miserable list, and can’t believe they could really be turned into a book. Anyway, one of them, Desideratus, was my ‘sleeper’ – editors always ask to see more than one, and I used to send it out so they could reject it and keep the other one. At last I had to part with it, though, as I had nothing else left – **

  with best wishes

  Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road

  Highgate

  London, N6 4HP

  10 November 1999

  Dear Mandy,

  Thankyou very much for your letter (8 Nov) and I should be happy for you to publish my short stories although I’m afraid they are rather an odd collection, only there’s just two things 1. I’m very slow at writing them, so I don’t know how long it would take me and 2. I already owe HarperC money although I’m not sure how much as it was paid on July 11 1997 (according to my notes, which are not reliable) but must have accumulated interest since then. I’d love to do something about this debt – what do you think?

  best wishes

  Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road

  Highgate, N6 4HP

  23 December 1999

  Dear Mandy,

  Thankyou for the 2 copies of the contract form. There are just two points I’m worried about – one is at the bottom of page 3 – the work has been published, and in what territories I’ve no idea. The other is on page 7, par: 8 – about the option on my next (entirely notional) work of fiction – do I have to sign that one?

  I hope you have a really restful Christmas with no troublesome authors, no trouble either with the drains or the rubbish collection, just plenty of beautiful snow –

  all best wishes

  Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road

  Highgate, N6 4HP

  19 January 2000

  Dear Mandy,

  Thankyou so much for your letter and the new contract form, I was rather disappointed that it now says: illustrations, none. Although at one point I think you did say something about wood engravings, or at least wood cuts – not specially done, I don’t mean that – but maybe they got swept under the carpet. – I still hope to write another story for this collection, which wouldn’t of course be ‘previously published’.

  Still I mustn’t make a fuss about nothing, although as I hardly need to tell you, what seems nothing to the publisher is often immensely important to the writer.

  I’m so glad you had a restful Christmas – mine wasn’t at all, it was an electronic Christmas – Ria had a n
ew laptop and the children all had things which flashed and made irritating half-audible noises. But I had a wonderful time just the same.

  Do let me know about the illustrations, Mandy. It seems to me the only hope for this book is for it to look nice. I did an introduction for Penguin for a new edition of Jim Carr’s A Month in the Country and it’s printed now and looks quite dreadful, in tiny print fit for mice to read –

  with best wishes

  Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road

  Highgate, N6 4HP

  16 March 2000*

  Dear Mandy,

  I’m sorry I’ve taken so long to thank you for sending me the photocopies. The trouble, but I ought not to call it that, is that Chris** has gone through The Knox Brothers so carefully and made so many queries that I’m hard put to it to answer them. I can’t help feeling that it makes things more difficult that he’s now back in Boston and Counterpoint are in Washington, but no matter.

  The letter was not from S. Vickers but from a woman in Sandbach who was distressed because she’d thought of opening a bookshop and having read The Bookshop now felt she ought not to. Perhaps she’s right – in any case Miss Garnet’s Angel has come out looking really nice and I hope Clare Alexander, who I used to teach and who, I now remember, was the first person to write to me about it, will be pleased.

  Janet Silver† has been ringing up and although she speaks very clearly I find what she says rather confusing. She says she wants to call the Houghton Mifflin ed. of the short stories The Means of Escape, which I’ve no objection to, and that this is ‘the theme of them all’, (perhaps it is, I don’t know) and that it (I mean the American edition) can’t have any illustration because that wouldn’t be consistent with the other titles, which don’t have any. She seems rather upset, and in a great hurry, says everything must be ready for their catalogue by Monday. Do you think The Means of Escape might go first in the Flamingo ed., as it’s the longest story anyway?