Human Voices

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Human Voices

  PENELOPE FITZGERALD

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Preface by Hermione Lee, Advisory Editor

  Introduction

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Other Works

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface by Hermione Lee, Advisory Editor

  When Penelope Fitzgerald unexpectedly won the Booker Prize with Offshore, in 1979, at the age of sixty-three, she said to her friends: ‘I knew I was an outsider.’ The people she wrote about in her novels and biographies were outsiders, too: misfits, romantic artists, hopeful failures, misunderstood lovers, orphans and oddities. She was drawn to unsettled characters who lived on the edges. She wrote about the vulnerable and the unprivileged, children, women trying to cope on their own, gentle, muddled, unsuccessful men. Her view of the world was that it divided into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’. She would say: ‘I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost.’ She was a humorous writer with a tragic sense of life.

  Outsiders in literature were close to her heart, too. She was fond of underrated, idiosyncratic writers with distinctive voices, like the novelist J. L. Carr, or Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, or the remarkable and tragic poet Charlotte Mew. The publisher Virago’s enterprise of bringing neglected women writers back to life appealed to her, and under their imprint she championed the nineteenth-century novelist Margaret Oliphant. She enjoyed eccentrics like Stevie Smith. She liked writers, and people, who stood at an odd angle to the world. The child of an unusual, literary, middle-class English family, she inherited the Evangelical principles of her bishop grandfathers and the qualities of her Knox father and uncles: integrity, austerity, understatement, brilliance and a laconic, wry sense of humour.

  She did not expect success, though she knew her own worth. Her writing career was not a usual one. She began publishing late in her life, around sixty, and in twenty years she published nine novels, three biographies and many essays and reviews. She changed publisher four times when she started publishing, before settling with Collins, and she never had an agent to look after her interests, though her publishers mostly became her friends and advocates. She was a dark horse, whose Booker Prize, with her third novel, was a surprise to everyone. But, by the end of her life, she had been short-listed for it several times, had won a number of other British prizes, was a well-known figure on the literary scene, and became famous, at eighty, with the publication of The Blue Flower and its winning, in the United States, the National Book Critics Circle Award.

  Yet she always had a quiet reputation. She was a novelist with a passionate following of careful readers, not a big name. She wrote compact, subtle novels. They are funny, but they are also dark. They are eloquent and clear, but also elusive and indirect. They leave a great deal unsaid. Whether she was drawing on the experiences of her own life – working for the BBC in the Blitz, helping to make a go of a small-town Suffolk bookshop, living on a leaky barge on the Thames in the 1960s, teaching children at a stage-school – or, in her last four great novels, going back in time and sometimes out of England to historical periods which she evoked with astonishing authenticity – she created whole worlds with striking economy. Her books inhabit a small space, but seem, magically, to reach out beyond it.

  After her death at eighty-three, in 2000, there might have been a danger of this extraordinary voice fading away into silence and neglect. But she has been kept from oblivion by her executors and her admirers. The posthumous publication of her stories, essays and letters is now being followed by a biography (Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee, Chatto & Windus, 2013), and by these very welcome reissues of her work. The fine writers who have done introductions to these new editions show what a distinguished following she has. I hope that many new readers will now discover, and fall in love with, the work of one of the most spellbinding English novelists of the twentieth century.

  Introduction

  Penelope Fitzgerald, brilliant Oxford student and already a clever if unpublished writer, was employed as a BBC features producer at the end of 1940 – the year in which Human Voices is set. She may not have been at the bottom of the pile but neither was she part of an elite graduate corps that the BBC brilliantly recruited and exploited in the last decades of the century.

  In 1940 Fitzgerald could hardly have expected anything senior or with real prospects. The BBC had not yet discovered the merits of young female talent. As with almost all areas of public life, it was controlled entirely by men who largely required women to make the tea, do the typing and scurry through its corridors to store, retrieve and organise the material that would ensure the BBC could provide truthful information and a bit of light relief to a nation enduring the impact of the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the military collapse of its closest ally, France.

  If Fitzgerald’s contribution to the BBC’s war effort was marginal she at least had a ringside seat while its mandarins, then as now laden with acronyms, established its reputation as an independent, if imperfect, force for the good by telling the truth – or at least large chunks of it. The BBC had not done nearly as well during the General Strike of 1926, when its first director general, Lord Reith, much preferred the idea of buttressing the government, over any idea of the BBC as a trusted source of information. When Human Voices was published in 1980, at the beginning of the Thatcher era, the BBC still drew much strength and credibility, both at home and abroad, from its performance in World War Two.

  Fitzgerald’s view of the wartime BBC is unsparing, but her respect for its achievement is palpable throughout. Her summary of its public service credo may have been a response to the specific events of 1940 but has never been bettered in any subsequent crisis by any historian at any point in the BBC’s history:

  Broadcasting House was in fact 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.

  Her two central male characters, Sam Brooks and Jeff Haggard, are flawed broadcasting heroes. Brooks is head of Recorded Programmes, Haggard the director of Programme Planning. Their professional interests at the BBC are not aligned. Brooks is forever frustrated by having to cede airtime and resources to the needs of live broadcasting, Haggard’s domain. But they share a profound sense of duty: detached and understated in Haggard’s case, obsessive and narcissistic in Brooks’. They also share a pronounced disregard for the pettifogging, very senior managers who get in their way and for any government or military interest bent on turning the BBC into a more conventional state broadcaster. They never talk about the BBC’s independence – the first word the BBC normally uses to defend itself against outside pressure – they simply practise it.

  The relationship between these two men, each with largely unexplored marital difficulties, gives the novel much of its shape. They do not go in for verbal intimacy, nor do they have time to socialise and, unlike others in the building, they don’t drink much.

  Brooks is attractive, apparently oblivious to the interests of the women who work for him (his ‘seraglio’) and constantly complains, angrily and wittily about those who do not recognise the importance of his work. Haggard is laconic, understated and frequently called in to support his needy and vulnerable friend. He does so with almost terminal reluctance.

  Haggard is the more impressive and more senior. In the book’s biggest dramatic b
roadcast scene he is in charge of a live address given by a fictional French Pétainist, General Pinard, who arrives at Broadcasting House to address Britain. Fitzgerald places this scene only a few days before De Gaulle’s famous and indomitable BBC broadcast to his defeated countrymen. It is a wonderful set-piece brimming with incident and comedy which illustrates Haggard’s wholly admirable and almost reckless independence of thought and action. Fitzgerald uses this moment to expose a deeply embedded BBC senior managerial trait when faced with improvisation – a nervous rigidity and lack of imagination. But more importantly she celebrates the BBC’s dogged refusal to allow anybody from outside to intimidate it.

  Pinard, something of an Anglophile, is ‘always cheerful, and most important of all, nearly always a loser’. His speech takes a swipe at Churchill, ‘the courageous drunkard whom you have made your Prime Minister’ and adds tartly that ‘the French are a nation who have always cared about their army, while you have never cared about yours’. As he reaches his climax to an audience of fifteen million, he has a terrible coughing fit.

  And at this point, at what would have been the most dramatic moment in the history of broadcasting, Fitzgerald memorably captures a central and largely forgotten aspect of the first fifty years of the BBC – the obsession with the technicalities of broadcasting: ‘“He’s overloading,” said the programme engineer, in agony.’

  Human Voices is in part a reflection on the BBC’s engineering roots, the nature of sound and of broadcasting authenticity. Brooks in particular is forever trying to perfect the art and science of radio while all the time his department is under threat from the primacy of live news – delivered live. A BBC meeting of hierarchs, from which he is typically excluded, decides that ‘the direct human voice must be used whenever we can manage it – if not, the public must be clearly told what they’ve been listening to – the programme must be announced as recorded, that is, Not Quite Fresh’.

  But Brooks, as ever resentful and frustrated, does not relent: ‘“All my energies are concentrated, and always have been, and always will be, on one thing, the recording of sound and of the human voice. That doesn’t make for an easy life, you understand.”’

  This gives Fitzgerald a great deal of scope to describe the anatomy of a professional passion and the largely unintended punishment it can inflict on others. Brooks goes round the country with a half-deaf German refugee, Dr Vogel, to capture the sounds of genuine British wheezing and coughing, or the hinges of church doors creaking (‘The quality’s superb, particularly on the last fifty-three bands or so’). He can’t abide the absence within the BBC of recordings of German Stuka bombers and seeks with manic intensity to invent a new windshield to improve the performance of microphones in the open air.

  This search for aural perfection is a central preoccupation of the entire novel. It provides more than the framework for the almost ideological struggle for resources and prestige between live and recorded programmes. It also leads to an early but defining moment in the relationship between Brooks’ unchallengeable expertise and the latest member of his seraglio – young Annie Asra from Selly Oak, a place described with reference to its sound as having ‘scrupulously fair intonation … neither rising nor falling, giving each syllable its equal weight, as though considering its feelings before leaving it behind’.

  Annie is the daughter of a piano tuner but not musically sophisticated. Brooks wants to teach her about sound quality and balance. She is more than happy to learn but memorably seeks to correct him on the matter of pitch. She meets an amazed and indignant response and it seems that she will never be forgiven.

  Annie is the most interesting of all the women in the novel. Most of the other members of Brooks’ seraglio have assorted boyfriend issues – aggravated by the separation of war. Lise is rather hopeless, Vi is full of solid decency, Della is flirty – and so on. Brooks, clearly thoroughly attractive to women, needs them all to listen to and be supportive of his grievances against all-comers. Annie is willing, calm, frank, clear-sighted, strong-willed and patient. She is delighted to have left her job at a Midlands hosiery store to be at the BBC (‘to help the war effort’). She is far from plain but has no concern for glamour and can neither flatter nor deceive, not least herself. There is something downbeat and pessimistic about her. When she falls in love and it is unrequited her fate is summed up thus: ‘She was free to stay here and be unhappy, just so long as she didn’t become ridiculous; for that she didn’t think she could forgive herself.’

  Few authors depict the stoic virtues as well as Fitzgerald. She has a forensic eye and ear for domestic and romantic suffering borne in a minor key. If she doesn’t exactly celebrate an acceptance of fate and incomplete happiness, she evidently has profound respect for the ability to cope – and she applies it not only to her characters and to the BBC but to wartime Britain too. This is never done in a way that simply conforms to clichés of a unique British national fortitude. Indeed, she places some distance between herself and her characters’ observations of the temperaments of various nations – but she nevertheless is in tune with those who respond phlegmatically to the physical damage and disruption of war.

  When the American journalist, McVitie (Mac), who has some of the attributes of the real Ed Murrow, arrives to report on Britain’s battle to survive he is impressed, but provides a highly attractive counterpoint to British reticence. He comes freighted with oranges (a luxury), energy, fraternal goodwill and enterprise. We learn little about his inner life but he neatly encapsulates a very different and more swashbuckling journalistic realm than that depicted within the BBC. His night-time trip with Haggard to a tube station, to decide a bet as to whether he knows any ‘ordinary men’, is a brilliant cameo of the physical damage wrought by the Luftwaffe, and of a journalist’s resourcefulness and guile.

  There is one other big character in the book and that is Broadcasting House (BH) itself, ‘a ship with the wrong sort of windows’ – just north of Oxford Circus – then and now the BBC’s home. Much of the novel is set in and immediately around the building. Even in normal times the BBC is prone to claustrophobia. Here the introversion is pervasive. The bombs fall on it and near it, and the pre-war BH rhythms and routines are dislocated. The concert hall becomes the scene of a well-meaning but ridiculous first aid course with Haggard subverting proceedings as best he can. And its function as an overnight dormitory sees a child born amid sleeping and snoring. It becomes hard for Brooks and Haggard to leave it even if they had wanted to:

  Their life in BH had become so secluded and so strange that it was difficult to remember at times where wives or friends could come from.

  Fitzgerald left the BBC at the end of the war. Both before Human Voices was published and since, many have written accounts of its wartime role. None has so penetrated its physical and moral skin. She may only have been in her mid-twenties when she was there but she palpably understood the BBC’s profound, fussy, sometimes vain but largely heroic and invaluable commitment to the truth – and expressed it in the form of a concise, witty and beautiful novel. Would that the BBC had more friends like her.

  Mark Damazer

  2013

  1

  Inside Broadcasting House, the Department of Recorded Programmes was sometimes called the Seraglio, because its Director found that he could work better when surrounded by young women. This in itself was an understandable habit and quite harmless, or, to be more accurate, RPD never considered whether it was harmless or not. If he was to think about such things, his attention had to be specially drawn to them. Meanwhile it was understood by the girls that he might have an overwhelming need to confide his troubles in one of them, or perhaps all of them, but never in two of them at once, during the three wartime shifts in every twenty-four hours. This, too, might possibly suggest the arrangements of a seraglio, but it would have been quite unfair to deduce, as some of the Old Servants of the Corporation occasionally did, that the RP Junior Temporary Assistants had no other duties. On the contrary, they we
re in anxious charge of the five thousand recordings in use every week. Those which the Department processed went into the Sound Archives of the war, while the scrap was silent for ever.

  ‘I can’t see what good it would be if Mr Brooks did talk to me,’ said Lise, who had only been recruited three days earlier, ‘I don’t know anything.’

  Vi replied that it was hard on those in positions of responsibility, like RPD, if they didn’t drink, and didn’t go to confession.

  ‘Are you a Catholic then?’

  ‘No, but I’ve heard people say that.’

  Vi herself had only been at BH for six months, but since she was getting on for nineteen she was frequently asked to explain things to those who knew even less.

  ‘I daresay you’ve got it wrong,’ she added, being patient with Lise, who was pretty, but shapeless, crumpled and depressed. ‘He won’t jump on you, it’s only a matter of listening.’

  ‘Hasn’t he got a secretary?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Milne, but she’s an Old Servant.’

  Even after three days, Lise could understand this.

  ‘Or a wife? Isn’t he married?’

  ‘Of course he’s married. He lives in Streatham, he has a nice home on Streatham Common. He doesn’t get back there much, none of the higher grades do. It’s non-stop for them, it seems.’

  ‘Have you ever seen Mrs Brooks?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How do you know his home is nice, then?’

  Vi did not answer, and Lise turned the information she had been given so far slowly over in her mind.

  ‘He sounds like a selfish shit to me.’

  ‘I’ve told you how it is, he thinks people under twenty are more receptive. I don’t know why he thinks that. He just tries pouring out his worries to all of us in turn.’