A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  We walked long distances, my mother and I, and so did most of Balcombe’s inhabitants. Often we were delivering messages, or returning borrowed objects, or telling the baker and the grocer, who delivered three times a week, that what they had sent was not quite what had been asked for. On the way there and back, across the fields and by the roadside, I had my collecting to do. Feathers, pheasant feathers in particular, were needed for Red Indian headdresses. My brother, when he was at home, was a warrior brave and I was Minnehaha. Then there were horseshoe nails, cast horseshoes, snail shells, beechnuts, pignuts, flints, and wayside flowers. When I got home, everything was laid out on my bedroom windowsill to be counted and recounted, one of the most reassuring activities of all for a small child. Cataloguing easily becomes poetry. My mother read to me from Walter de la Mare’s Peacock Pie about the poor widow who planted her garden with weeds:

  And now all summer she sits and sews

  Where willow-herb, comfrey, bugloss blows,

  Teasel and tansy, meadowsweet,

  Campion, toadflax and rough hawksbit;

  Brown-bee orchis, and Peals of Bells;

  Clover, burnet, and thyme she smells…

  The naming of names, as de la Mare very well understood, is halfway to having magical power over things.

  From time to time Lady Denman, the most important benefactress in the neighbourhood, took me out for what was then called a joy ride in her chauffeur-driven motorcar. My brother was nearly four years older than I was and had started school, so the treat was for myself and one or two other children of the same age, sitting stiffly and wordlessly beside the chauffeur or next to Lady Denman herself in the leather-and-petrol-reeking (though sumptuous) interior. To me it was bitterly disappointing. You could see so much from a trap, where you sat high up above the fields and hedges, which seemed to be snatched away from each side of the road as the horse pounded forward. Not quite as good as a trap, but better than kind Lady Denman’s Daimler, was a ride home on the last cow when they were brought in for afternoon milking. You had to sit sideways because a cow’s backbone is as sharp as a rail and the view was limited, but the movement was delightful. The cow took not the slightest notice of me, but continued to chew as she walked. Ahead of us the majestic stomachs and udders of her companions swayed gently from side to side, and as they idled down the lane they left a trail of sweet grass-eater’s breath.

  We returned to London when I was five and a half. When I look back to my years in Sussex I have to tell myself that not everything was perfect. I was frightened of chained farm dogs, and still more of ganders. I didn’t like Sussex bacon-and-suet pudding, which Mrs Ticehurst praised because it would stick to our ribs. Sometimes I was overwhelmed, standing in a field under an open blue sky, by a kind of terror at the enormity of the turning earth. I never remember feeling anything like that in London. But Balcombe was the place where for three years I had no real anxieties, and looked forward every night, as I fell asleep, to waking up the next day. My father was one of a large family, and he used to tell me that they were so happy in one of their homes (Kibworth Rectory in Leicestershire) that in later years they could always cure themselves of sleeplessness by thinking about it. I, too, if I can’t sleep, think of Balcombe.

  Country Living, 1999

  Schooldays

  Twice in your life you know that you are approved of by everyone: when you learn to walk, and when you learn to read. I began to read just after I was four. The letters on the page suddenly gave in and admitted what they stood for. They obliged me completely and all at once, in whole sentences, so that I opened a book in my lair under the dining-room table and read aloud, without hesitation: ‘My hoop can only run by my side, and I often wish it was a dog and could bark.’ I was praised, and since then have never been praised so much.

  In 1924, therefore, when we left Sussex and came to live in Hampstead, I went to kindergarten as a reader. The teacher gave me credit for this, but she also recognized that a six-year-old child wants to know not just some things but everything, immediately. When we sat down to draw one morning and she found that none of us could do a cow—didn’t, in fact, know whether it got up with its front legs or its hind legs first—she walked us straight across the Heath to Highgate, where there was a farm in those days, and told us to watch the cows for ourselves. In this way I learned in London what I had never noticed in the country. Afterwards, in the dairy, we had glasses of milk, one between two, and these, I am sure, she paid for herself.

  I was perfectly happy at this school. Hampstead is a hill village and I walked to school up flights of steps with my sandals in my shoe bag and my exercise books, which had on the back of them calculations in gallons, pecks, troy weight, furlongs, and farthings. These were for ‘sums,’ which were then thought to have something to do with mathematics. I had a red tam o’shanter and a Liberty smock. The smock was embroidered in chain stitch, as was my shoe bag, which bore the words SHOE BAG. At home, at teatime, the hot-water jug was under a flannel cover marked HOT WATER. My mother seemed always to be at home, and by six o’clock my father was back from his work at the Punch office. I felt secure. The terms passed reassuringly, from springs to the yellow fogs of autumn, when we brought fresh skeleton leaves from the pavements to show to teacher. But at eight years old I was sent, like my brother before me, into exile and imprisonment. No one doubted that it would be best for me to go to a preparatory boarding school at Eastbourne.

  They looked after us very well. The South Coast air was good for us. When we were sent out for a walk Matron told us to breathe deeply, because our parents had made great sacrifices to give us the benefit of the air. We paraded up and down the Front, strictly forbidden to put a foot on the white line at the edge, and back to the Meads between clumps of tansy and veronica. All the flowers had the curious quality of looking as though they were pressed dry, even when they first came out. As for the lessons, I came from an Evangelical background and never expected to gain anything of value without hardship. You couldn’t hope for poetry, English, music, and painting every day of the week. Wednesday (ballroom dancing, gym, geometry) was, admittedly, so terrible to me that simply to reach bedtime and know that it was over seemed an achievement in itself. But often I didn’t begin worrying about next Wednesday until quite late on Sunday evening. It was nobody’s fault, therefore, that I felt as wretched as I did. But homesickness, though I suppose it has never been clinically diagnosed, is a real illness. Indeed, many of the little girls were in worse condition than me, because they came from families in the Colonial Service. In our atlases many areas of the world were coloured pink; their parents lived there, and only came on leave at rare intervals. These were the children who cried longest at night in the dormitories. Again, the town itself, a bland resort dedicated to morning coffee and tennis, could in no way be blamed if I associated it with horror. That came about quite by chance.

  In my first winter term, when, as a treat, we were taken to the skating rink, a small boy, also from one of Eastbourne’s myriad prep schools, said to me confidentially, ‘Will you help me find it?’ A skate had passed over his finger as he lay on the ice and if we could only find it, some grown-up would put it together again. But so many people flashed by, and so confusingly. A little later, I saw him being led away.

  My consolations at school were the three sweets we were given after lunch, the poetry I knew by heart, and the sea. Anyone who sleeps within earshot of the sea must be considered lucky. And Debussy, after all, was sitting in one of Eastbourne’s deck chairs when he first heard the sounds of La Mer. The English Channel whispered in the darkness, above the snuffling of the homesick. In winter we were allowed to watch, at a safe distance, the white and greenish heads of foam crashing over the rails and flinging pebbles broadside across the Front.

  My fondness for reading persisted and after four years I won a scholarship to Wycombe Abbey, but for me this was quite overshadowed by my failure to become a Girl Guide. To ‘get your wings’ and fly up from the Brow
nies to the Guides, you had to pass in General Information, knitting, and rice pudding. Our puddings, each in a small white dish rimmed with blue, were put into the kitchen range and were supposed to be cooked by inspection time. I don’t know why my pudding came out almost raw. It must have been jostled into the coolest place, at the bottom of the oven, I suppose. When I saw it I braced myself for failure but not for being called, as I was, a disgrace to the ideals of Baden-Powell. I still think that was putting things too strongly.

  Six years later, safely at Oxford, I thought the whole process was over, but, of course, I was wrong. When my children began their education—although my daughters never went to boarding school—my memory opened its register and through them I lived my experiences again. It isn’t until their last report card that we are truly free. Their schooldays are over then, and so are ours.

  Vogue, 1980

  ASPECTS OF FICTION

  Following the Plot

  Suppose I were to try to write a story which began with a journey I made to the north of Mexico twenty-seven years ago, taking with me my son, then aged five. We were going to pay a winter visit to two old ladies called Delaney who lived comfortably, in spite of recent economic reforms, on the proceeds of the family silver mine. They had lived in Fonseca ever since they were girls—one was sister-in-law to the other. Their relations in Ireland had died, they were alone in the world, and it was hoped that because of some distant friendship they might take kindly to my son and leave him all their money. Indeed, if I had understood their letters correctly, they had suggested the idea themselves.

  The old ladies lived in a shuttered mansion in the French style, surrounded with pecan trees; the house was always cool because of the double height of the rooms. In the half-darkness of these rooms, as I discovered the very first evening I arrived, they were drinking themselves steadily to death. For two hours or so every morning there was a lucid period, and that was the time for callers. The manager of the mine came then, and so did everyone in Fonseca who was interested in the Delaneys’ wealth and therefore wanted to get rid of me and my son as soon as possible. If I got as far as this, I should have to stop. The details are accurate, these things happened in Fonseca, and many more were to follow. I take it that the novel proceeds from truth and re-creates truth, but my story, even at this stage, gives me the impression of turning fiction into fiction. Is it the legacy, or the silver, or the Latin American background, testing ground of so many twentieth-century writers? I know that in any case I could never make it respectable (by which I mean probable) enough to be believed as a novel. Reality has proved treacherous. ‘Unfortunate are the adventures which are never narrated.’ And I am sorry to let it go, because of what seemed to me the natural energy of the plot.

  Watching a good plot is like watching something alive, or if it is adroit and sinuous enough, something struggling for life. Between the once-born and the twice-born plot (which makes the reader, even if he is reading it for the twentieth time, want to interfere at every stage), the difference, of course, is great. But I am easily satisfied in this respect. The test lies in the plot’s independence of characters, and even of names: only relationships are necessary, as in rhythm without music. I would place very high—irrespective of whether they were borrowed or not—the plots of Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale,’ Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Galdos’s Miau, W. W. Jacobs’s short story ‘Head of the Family,’ and Somerset Maugham’s still shorter one, ‘The Servant Who Went to Samarra’. Thinking of these, I can remember how I became an addict.

  I was brought up in a journalist’s home and in a family where everyone was publishing, or about to publish, something. We children also tried to write, and our elders were resigned to this. Being dipped in ink began for us, I suppose, at about six or seven when we were first allowed to use it, and we were given the back of old galley proofs to write on. What was more, although my father once pointed out that there was no difference between journalism and literature except that journalism is paid and literature isn’t, we expected to become rich by writing novels, or, if not novels, then short stories, for it was still the heyday of the railway magazines—The Strand, Nash’s, Pearson’s, The Windsor.

  For these stories, which were also called ‘tales’ and even ‘yarns,’ the author had to find a plot, rather as the academic painter once had to look for his annual subject. It was the main thing. But writers, temperamentally less hopeful than painters, have always suspected that the supply is not inexhaustible. Gérard de Nerval put the entire number of dramatic situations at twenty-four; his calculations were based on the seven deadly sins, ruling out Sloth and Lust as not likely to produce significant action. Goethe, quoting the author of Turandot, suggested thirty-six, but added that Schiller, who set to work methodically on the problem, hadn’t managed even to get as far as that. All this looks unpromising, but the ‘yarn’ business was so important in the late Twenties that the magazines offered, so to speak, their own remedy. Among the back pages there were advertisements for Plotfinders. They could be ordered by mail and sent in plain envelopes, presumably because writers in those days were thought to live in boarding houses where they would not want their affairs known.

  The Plotfinders consisted of revolving cardboard circles with three concentric rings of slots. Through these, you could read off characters and actions and vary and recombine them until the donnée made its appearance. Seaside landlady, landlady’s daughter, hero, hero’s friend, jealous rival or enemy, vicar, elderly lady or aunt, practical joker (the influence of Kipling here), comedy foreigner, censorious neighbour, returning husband or foreigner, mysterious lodger. All, of course, were interchangeable, ready both to act and to be acted upon. Many years later, when I heard Lévi-Strauss lecture on his Mythologies, he told us to do what amounted to the same thing—plier et replier le mythe—with King, Queen, Mother, Father, Brother, Sister, Sister-in-Law, and, among the Pueblo and Algonquin Indians, the Ceremonial Clown and the Ancestor of Owls.

  Since our Plotfinder was for ‘sunshine stories,’ the action suggested was largely romantic, but the main object, in every case, was the ‘turn,’ introduced by the linking words after all, suddenly, to the general astonishment/consternation, unexpectedly, little realizing that, through an absurd misunderstanding. More expensive models, I suppose, would have produced a double or multiple effect. I have sometimes wondered since who should be considered the presiding genius of the ‘turn’—perhaps Mark Twain, who wrote a sixty-thousand-word novel to lead up to the surprise in the last sentence. But even the greatest novelists, those who stand in the way of all subsequent comers and threaten them with bankruptcy, use it at times. Ulysses ends with the returning husband climbing into his house, only to find that the door, after all, is open; he introduces a mysterious lodger/son into the home, little realizing that his wife has taken a fancy to him. This is quite within the capacities of the Plotfinder, and I am sure Joyce meant it to be.

  The short stories I wrote at the age of eight and nine did not bring me the success I hoped for, and years of formal education in English literature gradually taught me the uneasy moral status of plots. If they were of the extravagantly ingenious kind, they had to be ‘forgiven’ or ‘overlooked’ on behalf of the writer. They were ‘strained,’ and, worse still, they strained the reader, or ‘made demands’ on him. Dickens and Hardy were overlooked in this way. Clearly, the acceptable story was imposed by life upon fiction without hope of appeal. By the time I reached university the final ‘turn’ was not much in favour either. Indeed, the novels I admired most at that time, Afternoon Men, The Root and the Flower, Confessions of Zeno, A Passage to India, all avoided it, although for Forster this must surely have been a considerable sacrifice.

  When at last I tried to write fiction again, I was more cautious. Everyone has a point to which the mind reverts naturally when it is left on its own. I recalled closed situations that created their own story out of the twofold need to take refuge and to escape, and which provided their own limitations.
These limitations were also mine. I knew that I hadn’t the capacity to relate the wide-spreading complications of the Mexican legacy, however well I remembered them. As time went on, more pretenders had arrived, even one who claimed to be a Delaney, and moved into the house. On the other hand, the manager was eliminated. Seeking to extend his sphere of influence, he began to drink level with the old ladies, slipped on the polished French Provincial staircase, and cracked his skull. My son and I were blamed for these and other disasters, and we left on the long-distance bus without a legacy, but knowing what it was to be hated. We had been characters in a yarn, and I am only sorry not to be a yarn-spinner.

  In the novel’s domain, plots were the earliest and the poorest relations to arrive. For the last two hundred years there have been repeated attempts to get them to leave, or at least to confine themselves to satire, fantasy, and dream. Picaresque novels, however, both old and new, are a kind of gesture towards them, acknowledging that although you can easily spend your whole life wandering about, you can’t do so in a book without recurrent coincidences and, after all, a return. And the readers of books like plots. That, too, is worth consideration.

  London Review of Books, 1980

  Hearing Them Speak