Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices

Nothing in Penelope Fitzgerald’s funny, poignant, sometimes shocking work is actually lighthearted, but she lived in a time and place of more irony than outrage. Her own life was chaotic—she came from a family of literary men, began publishing biographies at 58, and was sixty when she published her first novel, a mystery. She wrote The Golden Child to distract her dying husband, a veteran whose alcohol addiction began during the war and whose legal troubles (including getting caught forging checks) made both of their lives difficult. That book was published without its last several chapters, which devastated her, but she kept going. She had a lot to write about. She raised three children (she writes wonderfully about children). Her life had been dramatic: homelessness after the check forging incident, a poltergeist, and the sinking of the barge where she lived (it actually sank twice). She wound up writing her extraordinary novels in all kinds of odd corners. Though she started late, she published nine “microchip novels,” three biographies, and a story collection (which came out after her death). Some of these books came from her life experiences, and then, later in life, she turned to historical fiction. Throughout, she kept her ironic curiosity and her sense of the constant presence of imminent disaster. 

Some of her books I’ve read over and over (At Freddie’s, Offshore, The Blue Flower, Gate of Angels, and The Beginning of Spring), others only a few times. They’re all brilliant. I’ve just returned, for maybe only the third time, to Human Voices, a fond and sharp-tongued depiction of something rather like the job she had at the BBC, where she was a features producer in the 1940s. Sam, RPD, a charming, oblivious narcissist, and his superior and protector, Jeff, the apparently detached director, are doing essential and also inessential cultural work (Sam is obsessed with things like recording the creaking of a church door), but the heart of the book is with the young assistants. The novel gets quite abstract in places, and also gives us wonderful portraits of the assistants, in and out of love and trouble, full of absurd ideals and odd quirks. There’s also quite a lot of fascinating detail about how the Broadcasting House worked, or didn’t, even as the war came to England. In a moment of daily outrage and heartbreak, I found it weirdly reassuring to read about this very different community in a very different wartime.

Here’s the beginning:  

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 were 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.’ 

‘Has he poured them out to Della?’  

‘Well, perhaps not Della.’  

‘What happens if you’re not much good at listening? Does he get rid of you?’ 

Vi explained that some of the girls had asked for transfers because they wanted to be Junior Programme Engineers, who helped with the actual transmissions. That hadn’t been in any way the fault of RPD. Wishing that she didn’t have to explain matters which would only become clear, if at all, through experience, she checked her watch with the wall clock. An extract from the Prime Minister was wanted for the mid-day news, 1'42" in, cue Humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide.

I love that long first paragraph, which (in a very Fitzgerald move), meticulously explains the immediate situation, rather than giving us an overall look at Broadcasting House. It both plunges us into the middle of the action and offers lively, off-kilter exposition that creates curiosity rather than a weary feeling of being in a lecture we didn’t sign up for. Who are these people?  

The opening paragraph is followed by dialogue that’s wonderfully theatrical, not in the sense of being highly dramatic, but in the sense of allowing the conversation to do the work of exposition,  gracefully and swiftly. As in a play, the characters set up the situation, introduce offstage characters before they appear, and create narrative questions for us to follow. But unlike a play, the omniscient narrative voice is free to drop into the characters to give us their interior lives and to explain, as if offhand, the workings of their world.  

Reading this opening, I’m curious about whether there will ever be any consequences for RPD, why Lise is depressed, why RPD wouldn’t pour out his troubles to Della, what will happen to Vi— who is probably the young worker actually keeping things together—and what is going to happen in this real/surreal workplace. How much, and at what points, will the real war smash into their lives? Also, what routines, practices, and peculiar moments are coming? Who are these people, and how do they damage or help each other in wartime? 

In one way, it’s all too familiar a circumstance: these girls understand, and nearly expect, that they could be “jumped” by the men they work for. This doesn’t happen in the novel, but it’s the situation that Fitzgerald gives us in a book that looks closely at power dynamics. Why do they stay? What would be lost if they didn’t take charge of those five thousand recordings a week? Maybe not much, maybe something essential. In Penelope Fitzgerald, it’s often hard to tell whether something irreparable would be lost if people stopped their peculiar devotion to art, ideals, or the preservation of history. But it’s clear she thinks it would be. The book emphasizes the BBC’s commitment to telling the truth. In any war, in all the death and lies, there’s a hunger for that.  

From the preface by Hermione Lee:  

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.

The conversation I excerpted goes on, but we can pause, for the moment, on that splendid, funny, heartbreaking pair of sentences that so capture both Vi and the time: “Wishing that she didn’t have to explain matters which would only become clear, if at all, through experience, she checked her watch with the wall clock. An extract from the Prime Minister was wanted for the midday news, 1'42" in, cue Humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide.”

Other Reading and Marriage to the Sea News

I’m on social media a lot right now because my new book, Marriage to the Sea, came out last week, which means I’m seeing a lot of footage of—and late night comic bits about—wasteful, cruel, depraved violence, and also the responses to that from people trying to find ways to encompass it, block it out, intervene, and sometimes all of these together. In addition to my own actions in response, I escaped into reading a pair of beautifully written vengeful paranormal horror novels (Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House and Hell Bent), in which the elite power-abusers get taken down by magic and trickery. (I believe, still, in the long slow work of democracy and in reclaiming elections, marching, calling, voting, supporting candidates, etc., but sometimes imaginatively one wants to go on vacation to a world where people have more vivid and immediate powers. Sometimes you just want some blue fire and trickable demons.) 

In my own literary life, since I last wrote to you, I had a wonderful AWP conference with many connections and reconnections. I was part of a couple of readings, did a book signing, and moderated a panel on “Haints, Haunts, & Shapeshifters” that brought us a beautifully engaged audience. I’m happy with how it all went, and, most of all, the chance to meet in person friends I’ve only known online and to deepen older friendships. I also loved the wonderful Four Way Books virtual reading hosted by The Norwich Bookstore, as well as my memorably joyous SF launch conversation with David Haynes (and our class on “Writing the Family Constellation,” which is another inspiration for thinking about Penelope Fitzgerald), hosted by The Backstory Above. I even had the pleasure of seeing some MPP readers in person, along with other old and new friends. Thank you to everyone who came, who’s gotten the book so far (and for anyone who’s missed it, you can check out the description here: I hope you’ll get a copy if it seems like something you’d be interested in). 

Meanwhile, Marriage to the Sea was chosen by Alta for a list of new books “on and of the West” that they were excited to see published this March, and my first podcast interview dropped. It was a huge pleasure to talk with John Parker for the This Queer Book Saved My Life podcast. The book I chose was Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, and we talked about passion, what beautiful language releases in us, and also what it means to be bi+ and how that’s changed over time.  

The next upcoming public event is in NYC on April 1, at P&T Knitwear, and I’m looking forward very much to having Ann Packer and Joan Silber as my conversation partners. More details on that at my events page. If you’re interested in getting more news etc. along the way, one of the best places to find me is Instagram (@sarahstoneauthor).  

Wishing you the best possible end to March and beginning of April. What will have happened by the next time we’re in touch? Hoping that, through action of all kinds, large and small (No Kings!), and through reading and sometimes writing or art or music-making, we can help each other hold on as we make our way to the other side.