A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Of course you want to hear their voices. Having summoned up these human beings, you want to know what they sound like. In the novels I used to read, and still do for that matter, people spoke ‘sharply,’ ‘reluctantly,’ ‘with unaffected warmth,’ ‘with a touch of bitterness.’ They spoke of ‘taking her hand in his,’ or ‘whipping out a gun.’ These last two, of course, are actions, and must be described if anything is going to be understood at all, but when I’m writing myself I have a slight sense of failure every time I put in a ‘sharply’ or a ‘reluctantly.’ The characters and the situation between them ought to have made it clear already how sharp or how reluctant they are. When the dialogue begins, the tempo slows down to the pace of the story itself. The reader understands very well that he is being drawn close in. He, too, is relieved to hear what the voices are like.

  What is the first thing he is going to hear? The first novel I did was called The Bookshop. In the opening paragraph Florence Green, who is worried about whether she should open a bookshop in a small town on England’s East Coast, dreams of a heron she once saw

  flying across the estuary and trying, while it was on the wing, to swallow an eel which it had caught. The eel, in turn, was struggling to escape from the gullet of the heron and appeared a quarter, a half, or occasionally three-quarters of the way out. The indecision expressed by both creatures was pitiable. They had taken on too much.

  I now think this was a mistake, because dreams in fiction are just as tedious as people’s dreams in real life. I should have done better to start straight away with Florence Green courageously asking the bank manager for a loan, so that the first speaking voice would be the manager’s, suggesting in itself the strength of the sluggish opposition ranged against her.

  At the beginning of The Gate of Angels Fred Fairly, a lecturer in physics, is biking into Cambridge on a stormy day. Acquaintances catch up with him one by one.

  He was shouting. It was like sea-bathing…A whole group went by, then one of them detached himself and was riding alongside.

  ‘Skippey!’

  He couldn’t hear what Skippey said, so dropped back and came up on the other side, the lee side.

  ‘You were saying?’

  ‘Thought is blood,’ Skippey replied.

  Fred speaks for the first time in public, so that there is likely to be a difference between what he is saying and what he would like to say. In this way I hoped to get the words to work twice for me.

  You can, of course, write a novel entirely in dialogue. One writer who did this was a late-nineteenth-century woman of the world called (or calling herself) ‘Gyp.’ Henry James admired her, and thought of doing the same thing in The Awkward Age, but fortunately didn’t. And you can manage without dialogue, as Swift did in Gulliver’s Travels, where all the conversations are reported (except, I think, the Lilliputian words ‘Hekina degul’ and ‘Borach mivola’). This is all the more remarkable because Gulliver, as a traveller’s tale, is necessarily a monologue, and in a monologue above all you feel the need of another voice breaking in, a very different one if possible—like, for instance, Mr Antolini, the corrupt schoolmaster in The Catcher in the Rye.

  But exactly when ought speech to be reported, and when ought it to be out loud? One of the few advantages the novelist has over the dramatist (and they are getting fewer all the time) is that his passages of dialogue last for a limited time only. The storyteller’s instinct, or perhaps his judgement, tells him when they have gone on long enough to make their greatest impact, and when to let the voices fall silent. Kafka’s The Trial (as translated by Willa and Edwin Muir) opens with the famous incident of K.’s arrest at his lodgings.

  ‘I’d better get Frau Grubach—’ said K., as if wrenching himself away from the two men (though they were standing at quite a distance from him) and making as if to go out. ‘No,’ said the man at the window, flinging a book down on the table and getting up. ‘You can’t go out, you are arrested.’ ‘So it seems,’ said K. ‘But what for?’ he added. ‘We are not authorized to tell you that. Go to your rooms and wait there. Proceedings have been instituted against you, and you will be informed of everything in due course.’…‘You’ll soon discover that we’re telling the truth,’ said Franz, advancing on him simultaneously with the other man. They both examined his nightshirt and said he would have to wear a less fancy shirt now, but that they would take charge of this one and the rest of his underwear and, if his case turned out well, restore them later.

  The change to reported speech distances you from K.’s visitors, and makes any hope of understanding them, or of the case ‘turning out well,’ seem less and less likely.

  While the talking is going on, the novelist has a welcome feeling of relaxation and freedom. There are so many possible variations in dialogue, the most musical of all the novelist’s techniques. Confrontation is, of course, only one of them. TV probably conditions us too much to disagreement and insults, the staple of the comedy script. A novelist can allow time, if he wants to, for conversations that just tick over, the dialogue of contentment. Nothing is more extraordinary in War and Peace than the last chapters, where the happy (but not perfect) marriages are, as John Bayley has said, ‘the equivalent of the Russian victory over Napoleon.’ At the Bolkonskys’ country home, when Pierre comes back from the wars, the children are in ecstasy because the governess has finished a pair of stockings, and, by a secret known only to herself, has knitted both of them at once. ‘Two of them, two of them,’ the children shout. Tolstoy doesn’t suggest that this happiness can last. The French invasion lies behind these people, the December revolution is just ahead, but through the children’s voices he shows what the nature of happiness is.

  Kazuo Ishiguro, the most restrained of contemporary novelists, uses a high proportion of dialogue. His narrators, although apparently as clear as daylight, are ambiguous because they are always self-deceiving. In A Pale View of Hills the narrator, Etsuko, is a Japanese woman living in England. She has to come to terms with the present (her daughter has committed suicide) but also with her past. She recalls the 1950s, when she was living in the muddy wasteland outside Nagasaki, and the people who mattered to her then—her irritable husband, her bewildered father-in-law, her friend Mrs Fujiwara who had lost everything and was reduced to keeping a noodle shop, her strange new acquaintance Sachiko who declared or pretended that her American lover was going to pay for her passage back to the States. These are all unsensational people who talk in a quite unsensational way, but with a certain formality and repetitiveness that is understood as Japanese convention.

  ‘In any case, Etsuko, why would he have gone to all this trouble if he wasn’t absolutely sincere? Why would he have gone to all this trouble on my behalf? Sometimes, Etsuko, you seem so doubting. You should be happy for me.’

  ‘Yes, of course, I’m very happy for you.’

  ‘But really, Etsuko, it would be unfair to start doubting him after he’s gone to all this trouble. It would be quite unfair.’

  Gradually these repetitions begin to sound like a ritual whose meaning we are afraid to understand. None of the speakers ever raises their voices. Ishiguro has the chance, at any point, to change the whole tone of his book and to introduce shock or violence, but he never does. Behind everything, however, that is said or done there are recurrent images of hanging and drowning, rope and water. The sinister enigma of Etsuko’s daily life is never quite solved. Nor is the nightmare of Japanese history.

  Ishiguro excels at one-to-one dialogue, and it has to be admitted that this is the easiest kind to write. I used to find that after I had got quite a long way with a book I hadn’t managed a single scene where more than two people were talking to each other. I still have this difficulty.

  In D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers William, the collier’s eldest son, who has been working in London as a clerk, brings his smart fiancée back to meet the family at Christmas.

  She glanced round the kitchen. It was small and curious to her, with its glittering kis
sing-bunch, its evergreens behind the pictures, its wooden chairs and little deal table. At that moment Morel came in.

  ‘Hello, dad!’

  ‘Hello, my son! Tha’s let on me!’

  The two shook hands, and William presented the lady. She gave the same smile that showed her teeth.

  ‘How do you do, Mr Morel?’

  Morel bowed obsequiously.

  ‘I’m very well, and I hope so are you. You must make yourself very welcome.’

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ she said, rather amused.

  ‘You will like to go upstairs,’ said Mrs Morel.

  ‘If you don’t mind; but not if it is any trouble to you.’

  ‘It is no trouble. Annie will take you. Walter, carry up this box.’

  ‘And don’t be an hour dressing yourself up,’ said William to his betrothed.

  Annie took a brass candlestick, and, too shy almost to speak, preceded the young lady to the front bedroom, which Mr and Mrs Morel had vacated for her. It, too, was small and cold by candle-light. The colliers’ wives only lit fires in bedrooms in case of extreme illness.

  ‘Shall I unstrap the box?’ asked Annie.

  ‘Oh, thank you very much!’

  It isn’t only the cross-currents of feeling here that Lawrence does so well, but the integration of five voices and five distinct points of view to make the whole complex family-kitchen situation. He worked hard on his dialogue, as his manuscript corrections show, and yet it was so much a natural element to him that he could risk all kinds of bizarre effects. In Kangaroo the speakers can hardly hear each other over the roar of the sea, and in The Captain’s Doll the lovers’ voices are carried away by the noise of the car, so that the Captain has to shout in Hannele’s ear: ‘When my wife died I knew I couldn’t love any more.’ Women in Love, which begins with dialogue, also ends with it. Ursula tells Birkin that it’s out of the question for him to have ‘eternal union’ with one man, as well as one woman:

  ‘You can’t have it, because it’s false, impossible,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ he answered.

  Lawrence is also, when he wants to be, a faultless impersonator. He can ‘do’ voices, tones, accents and dialects, although this is something a lot of writers are good at; it may have been why they started to write in the first place. Joyce, I suppose, took impersonation about as far as it can go, imitating even the cab horse. Novelists, however, quite often prefer to heighten the dialogue and, in general, to make the speakers more acute and knowing and more articulate than they are likely to be in real life. Henry James did this, Ivy Compton-Burnett did, so did Samuel Beckett in his novels:

  What a joy it is to laugh from time to time, [Father Ambrose] said. Is it not? I said. It is peculiar to man, he said. So I have noticed, I said…Animals never laugh, he said. It takes us to find that funny, I said. What? He said. It takes us to find that funny, I said loudly. He mused. Christ never laughed either, he said, as far as we know. He looked at me. Can you wonder? I said.

  This kind of dialogue shows us what we could say if we had our wits about us, and gives us its own peculiar satisfaction.

  I ought perhaps to try to say something about the great high points, but I should like to end instead with one of dialogue’s special effects which, as far as I know, has never had a name given to it.

  Before they separated, however…Mr Bob Sawyer, thrusting his forefinger between two of Mr Pickwick’s ribs, and thereby displaying his native drollery, and his knowledge of the anatomy of the human frame, at one and the same time, inquired, ‘I say, old boy, where do you hang out?’

  Mr Pickwick replied that he was at present suspended at the George and Vulture.

  If Dickens had made Pickwick say ‘I am at present suspended &c &c’ the effect would be gone, vanished into the vast limbo of failed ironies.

  In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, kindly Mrs Musgrove has to think what to say to Mrs Croft, who is an Admiral’s wife.

  ‘What a great traveller you must have been, ma’am!’ said Mrs Musgrove to Mrs Croft.

  ‘Pretty well, ma’m, in the fifteen years of my marriage, although many women have done more. I have crossed the Atlantic four times, and have been once to the East Indies, and back again; and only once, besides being in different places about home—Cork, and Lisbon, and Gibraltar. But I never went beyond the Straits—and never was in the West Indies. We do not call Bermuda or Bahama, you know, the West Indies.’

  Mrs Musgrove had not a word to say in dissent; she could not accuse herself of having ever called them anything in the whole course of her life.

  Does Mrs Musgrove in fact say anything at all? Again, in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon, the speaker is Cassandra, a teacher of classical languages who has been made redundant by the cuts. She is also doomed, like her Greek prototype, to foretell the future, but in vain.

  Tomorrow he’ll say Sandra my love when shall I see you again I’ll be free tomorrow, I’ll be free Friday Saturday Sunday. Friday Saturday Sunday I must prepare my classes correct papers no I must weed the vegetable garden clean the pigsties wash my hair meet Orion invent Andromeda from time to time unheeded and unhinged discover the grammar of the universe.

  What has been said so far? Nothing. ‘If he were someone in a nineteenth-century novel I might ironically detach him,’ Cassandra thinks, but Amalgamemnon is a post-modernist novel and Christine Brooke-Rose uses ‘non-realized tenses’ to conjure up spoken voices. However, like Dickens and Jane Austen, she can remind us that one of the privileges of dialogue is silence.

  from The Agony and the Ego: The Art and Strategy of

  Fiction Writing Explored, edited by Clare Boylan.

  Penguin, 1993

  WHY I WRITE

  First, because something inside me compels me to tell stories. I mean that I get great satisfaction out of making people believe that this event happened at that time. Unlike history, fiction can proceed with confidence.

  For example: a few years ago we were living on a Thames barge, and on the boat next door lived an elegant young male model. He saw that I was rather down in the dumps, a middle-aged woman shabbily dressed and tired, and he took me on a day-out to the sea, to Brighton. We went on all the rides and played all the slot machines. We walked for a while on the beach, then caught an open-top bus along the front. What happiness!

  A few days later he went back to Brighton, by himself, and walked into the sea until it had closed over his head and he drowned. But when I made him a character in one of my books, I couldn’t bear to let him kill himself. That would have meant that he had failed in life, whereas, really, his kindness made him the very symbol of success in my eyes.

  I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or, even, profoundly lost. They are ready to assume the conditions the world imposes on them, but they don’t manage to submit to them, despite their courage and their best efforts. They are not envious, simply compassless. When I write it is to give these people a voice.

  I write to make money. I think that, even today, the most widely held view of the writer is of one who creates something, and even makes money out of it, starting from almost nothing, using memory, imagination, time, making marks on paper. He begins by dying of starvation in a garret, then he buys himself a word processor and soon he finds himself needing an accountant. In the eyes of the public he must be either a magician or a fraud. But this unfounded reputation does not upset the writer unduly. In a world full of dangers it is comforting to be considered, even wrongly, a crafty so-and-so.

  ‘Libération, reprinted in ‘Pourquoi écrivez-vous?’

  Livre de Poche, 1989

  Translated by Terence Dooley

  How I WRITE: DAISY’S INTERVIEW

  If the subject is how, rather than why, then I think you have to distinguish between male and female novelists. I believe that most women will always be kitchen-table writers and worse still that they become irreversibly conditioned to it. Just as Napoleon, if he had ten minutes to spare, allow
ed himself to go to sleep for ten minutes exactly, so a woman, in my experience, can pick up her draft novel and go on with it, precisely until the telephone, the doorbell, the egg timer, or the alarm clock rings. Women adapt in a peculiar way to the battle against Time and Nature. I started writing during my free periods as a teacher in a small, noisy staff room, full of undercurrents of exhaustion, worry, and reproach, and for a long time after I gave up my day job I missed the staff room, and, sitting in peace and quiet, could scarcely get anything written. I had thought of both of them—peace and quiet—as the absence of certain things. That’s not so, they are positive, but to my dismay I found they worked against each other. In the tranquillity of my own room, overlooking a garden with a large pear tree, I found I was waiting obsessively for an interruption and even ready to welcome it.

  The patron saint of all kitchen-table novelists must be Margaret Oliphant (1828—1897)—Mrs Oliphant, as she always called herself. I once wrote the introductions for five of her novels for Virago, and in that way got to know her. She married an invalid artist cousin, for whom, if we read about him, we feel distinctly sorry—but, however that may be, he died of TB, leaving Margaret Oliphant pregnant, with nothing much beyond his debts. She paid these off, raised her children, saw every one of them die, and made herself responsible for her alcoholic brother and numerous other relations. In consequence she had to write at night, usually to pay off money that had already been spent. She wrote 98 novels, 25 biographies, about 50 short stories, some of them strikingly good. When her friend James Barrie said that ‘she was of an intellect so alert that one wondered she ever fell asleep,’ he was poeticizing an almost frightening way of life.