and fall in love with, the work of one of the most spellbinding English novelists of the twentieth century.
‘Those who have only known Christminster as undergraduates often think the lives of its residents are very uneventful,’ the novelist Robert Liddell wrote in his The Last Enchantments, set in an ancient university town. Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels is a scrupulous reconstruction of the life of another ancient university town, Cambridge, at a particular moment, that omits the principal purpose of the university in search of the eventful. The education of the young hardly impinges on the action; the life of the mind hardly seems to encompass the life of the undergraduate on which almost all other university novels depend – Fraill and Cork are the lightest bit-parts, as their names suggest. Fitzgerald’s focus is on the unseen and the overlooked, and events which can transform lives take place among the effectively invisible population – visiting day-trippers, local bourgeoisie, a junior don.
Fitzgerald’s novels are all very interested in the unnarrated event that the reader will know all about, but which the characters can’t envisage. A terrible accident may happen at the end of both Human Voices and At Freddie’s, but we can’t know for certain. We have to construct that unnarrated event, like the deaths of characters in The Blue Flower, consigned to a summary epilogue. The mind wonders, and constructs the agonising particulars on a scale that only requires, it appears, an economic allusion on the part of the novel itself.
The technique is most powerfully present in two of the last novels with historical themes. The Gate of Angels and The Beginning of Spring take place at the same time, 1912 and 1913. Both appear to know nothing about the historical catastrophes fast approaching. When Fred says that ‘these are wonderful years in Cambridge’ and looks with cross-national admiration at the retirement photograph of Ernst Mach, the Austrian physicist, a delicate irony is at work. We know that Fred’s students and Mach’s will soon be firing at each other, but the novel does not seem to know it. Like atoms, the future here is ‘unobservable’. In exactly the same way, there seems to be no knowledge or forewarning in The Beginning of Spring, set in an Englishman’s family in Moscow in 1913, that this comfortable way of life is about to vanish forever. The novel, with an ideal sense of unknowing, has thought its way back into a fragile existence, now normally obliterated by hindsight. The Beginning of Spring takes it for granted that revolutionary groups exist, and that if the reader will not forget about the Russian Revolution, the characters cannot know about it.
With her devotion to the unobservable and the barely glimpsed, it was to be expected that Fitzgerald had some interest in the ghost story. Almost her last publication was an introduction to a Penguin collection of M. R. James’s ghost stories; almost her first fictional publication was a chillingly authentic ghost story with the real M. R. James touch, ‘The Axe’. In the Penguin introduction, she draws attention to James’s real-life disdain for science and abstract thinking in general. It was starting to impinge on his own studies of the unseen. The life of Cambridge before the Great War was divided into the investigations of M. R. James and those of the Cavendish laboratory. ‘What truly distressed him, however, was the division of King’s into the Pious and the Godless, while in the Cavendish laboratory young physicists were at work constructing new models of a world without God. It was not scientific accuracy that Monty objected to but a sense that mankind was occupying the wrong territory.’
That division of humans at work at the invisible, between scientists and those in thrall to the numinous, to ghosts and angels, drives this novel too. It contains a brilliant pastiche of an M. R. James story. At the heart of Fitzgerald’s world is a sense that pre-occupations with the invisible come down to an investment in blood and flesh, too. ‘Thought is blood,’ Skippey says at the beginning; it is not the first time the point is made in a Fitzgerald narrative, nor will it be the last. Often, M. R. James’s ghost stories culminate in a physical sensation: his antiquaries have gone for long years without feeling another’s touch, and the feel of ‘a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and moving slowly over it’ (‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’) has a horrid intimacy. The Gate of Angels recreates that moment of intimacy disrupting the touchless life of the mind, not just in the ghost story (‘Someone was hauling against me, stroke by stroke …’) but in another register, in the love story.
At the tender heart of The Gate of Angels is Fitzgerald’s most entrancing heroine, Daisy; a person who does not belong in Cambridge and who transforms it. The painful clarity of Daisy’s hard-won path out of extreme poverty through nursing, only to lose it again, is one of those moments where a novelist’s fierce personal conviction appears to be making itself felt. Only with the appearance of Hermione Lee’s biography of Fitzgerald in 2013 did it become apparent with what good reason Fitzgerald feared extreme poverty, and what experience she had of losing everything. Daisy is brought together with Fred in the most deliberately arbitrary manner; their worlds do not belong together, and their collision disrupts all hierarchies and conventions. They are placed together, thanks to Daisy’s convenient wedding ring, naked in a double bed, and their relationship proceeds from there. A nice touch; Fred’s nakedness is less alarming to Daisy than her acknowledgement of it is to him.
What brings Daisy and Fred together is a clarity of vision, interrupted in Fred’s case by a storm of emotion. Both of them have been forced to see things lucidly by economic circumstances; Fred’s watch ‘was a silver watch, belonging to his father, given to him when he took up his appointment, and yet not quite given to him either, since when he went back on vacations his father tended to borrow it back’. In his many jobs at his college ‘… assistant organist, assistant librarian, deputy steward and assistant deputy treasurer … the words assistant, deputy, and so forth didn’t mean that there was necessarily anyone above him to do the work, only that he must do it without being paid’. Daisy has no illusions; south London has stripped her of those, and she rides the tram with a hat-pin and someone else’s wedding ring, against assault. When they meet in extraordinary circumstances, they are free to see the world as it really is; that neither of them really do is witness to the transformative power of the encounter. Fred’s confusion is immediately apparent, and Daisy seems to understand more at first: ‘Fred was appalled. “Don’t you know what you are to me?” he asked. Daisy considered. “I suppose I do know, Fred. To tell you the truth, a child of six would notice it.”’ But her delusions take longer to unwind, and shock her more thoroughly.
They are at home, with their capacity for precision and clarity, in the world of Fitzgerald’s novels. Fred remarks at one point that the word of a writer of fictions is not to be trusted; but he only partakes in, and does not absorb, Fitzgerald’s style. It is a matter not just of observing emotions exactly, but of placing their drama within an exactly notated physical context. In one virtuoso passage, Mrs Wrayburn considers her life:
Every day (in addition to cups, plates and dishes) demanded toast-racks, egg-cups, egg-cosies, hot water jugs, hot milk strainers, mustard-pots manufactured of blue glass inside, metal outside, silver fruit knives (as steel in contact with fruit-juice was known to be poisonous), napkins with differently coloured rings for each person at table, vegetable dishes with handles in the shape of artichokes, gravy boats, dishcovers, fish-forks with which it was difficult to eat fish (but fish-knives were only for vulgarians), muffin-dishes which had to be filled with boiling water to keep the muffins at their correct temperature, soup-plates into which the soup was poured from an earthenware container with a lid, cut-glass blancmange dishes, knife-rests for knives, fork-rests for forks, cheese dishes with lids the shape of a piece of cheese, compotiers, ramekins, pipkins, cruets, pots.
The exactness of detail doesn’t serve to suggest lavishness, but an array of things which their owners’ devotion to the unseen and the speculative seeks to escape. For us, however, it creates a world of credibility. The particularity of Fitzgerald’s observation, her research and her invention makes even the oddest and most unexpected actions of her plot believable. Only afterwards does the reader wonder – can cows be upturned by the wind like that? Has the novelist invented a St Angelicus College? Can a period detail as perfect