A Month in the Country, and also her amazing last three stories. How to classify her short fiction? Are they fables, parables, folk-tales, poems even? She insisted that each demanded more effort to write than a novel. They range across the whole world in setting, from New Zealand to Tasmania, Mexico, Istanbul (twice), Brittany, Jerusalem (by implication), Iona, far Somerset, the Home Counties, London, and across four centuries.
Though under no external pressure to repay her advance, in 1999 she gratefully accepted her publishers’ suggestion that she collect her stories into a volume. The title, The Means of Escape, was supplied by Janet Silver of Houghton Mifflin, who considered that the story provided a unifying theme, which Penelope doubted, feeling rightly that the stories are as unsettlingly different from one another as are her novels. Two at least of them could have been novels. Christian motifs proliferate throughout them: the uninvited guest, the unfaithful servant, the unawakened soul, the buried talent. There are ghosts and hauntings. There are two great cries of protest: ‘She belonged to the tribe of torturers. Why pretend they don’t exist?’ and ‘Make no mistake, you pay for every drop of blood in your body.’ Yet there is always the faith that good will prevail. Through character or fate, self-knowledge and grace may be gained or regained. There remains, against all odds, the possibility of salvation.
The Means of Escape was written during the concentrated struggle to perfect The Blue Flower. It is rich enough to have become the vicarage novel that Penelope was perhaps always on the verge of writing. The story is characterised by a black humour. Evil uncomprehended by innocence flickers through it – a stench, a hood, an elected silence. The shameless may escape, the dutiful never.
The Likeness was to have been a novel based on the Ionides family from Burne-Jones. It is now a romantic high comedy, based on misunderstanding. The Axe, Penelope’s first published fiction, from 1975, is both a memorably chilling ghost story in its own right and a brilliant ‘take’ on Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. At Hiruharama is an example of the anecdote or tall tale, which evades the narrator as it assumes a moral and pictorial solidity of its own. The Prescription is a violent fable about dishonesty. Not Shown hints at an English murder.
Penelope’s three great last stories were written and published in 1997 and 1998. They are absolutely ambiguous; yet there is an urgency to be understood in them. They seem to be about inspiration at different stages of life: the human cost of joy. Desideratus sees a resourceful boy wrest the coin he has been given from the pallid ghost of his weaker self. He must earn his talent through travail. The Red-Haired Girl, unwilling model to an uncomprehending painter, tells him, before she disappears, what he’s missed in his search for the picturesque: ‘You don’t know what I want and you don’t know what I feel.’ In Beehernz, a famous conductor who has become a hermit to block out the noisy music of the world, hears a young woman sing a folk setting of Goethe’s Gefunden: ‘I went in the woodland/Nothing to find’ but it goes on ‘I saw in the shadow/A stone-flax stay’. Too long a prisoner of his mute keyboard, he has recaptured his visionary sense, symbolised by a blue wayside flower, the linseed.
Though all attempts to describe and define a life are doomed to failure, it is tempting to see Penelope’s as describing a dramatic arc from dazzling early success, a promising career as literary editor, a comfortable, if hubristic, establishment in Hampstead, down to destitution and humiliation, the half-way house for the homeless, and thence ever upwards, by dint of hard work, study and inspiration, until at eighty she was at the peak of her achievement, reputation and earnings, passing for the first time, as she ruefully remarks in the letters, into a higher tax bracket. Her one final ambition was to see in the new Millennium. This also she achieved. Several of the series of letters follow her right up to the days before her first stroke, when she was eighty-three, busier than ever, reviewing for papers on both sides of the Atlantic, judging a prize, preparing a new American edition of The Knox Brothers (a family of which she was by now the most remarkable member) and proof-reading her stories, The Means of Escape, for publication by Flamingo and Houghton Mifflin. She survived a month longer, able to talk a little to her children, until she suffered two further strokes and died on 28 April 2000. She is buried in the churchyard of St Mary’s, Hampstead.
It occurred to me, during my researches for this book, to wonder where she worshipped when, at her lowest point, she lived offshore on Grace. The boat is described in the book as being moored on Battersea Reach; in reality it had been moored at Dakin’s yard, World’s End, but directly opposite St Mary’s Battersea. Inside that lovely eighteenth-century church, the first thing that one sees, among a wonderful collection of modern stained-glass windows, Blake and the grain of sand, Turner, Franklin and the promise of happiness, on the left side of the door is a large and beautiful blue flower.
Terence Dooley
Penelope’s handwriting is clear, graceful and original, her own creation. In her youth it was a simplified italic, each letter carefully formed and rarely joined up to the next. Later, the characters connect more often, though never for a complete word; it gives an artistic impression. It is a pleasure to read and transcribe, because there is never any doubt about what she has written.
Her punctuation has been preserved, with its occasional inconsistencies, or survivals from an earlier era (Mrs: for Mrs), its underlinings for emphasis or titles, its capitals for jokes. The ampersands, which looked so well in the blue ink italic, look like so many snails in black print, therefore they are now and. She wrote thankyou as one word, and I have not altered this.
Individual letters haven’t been cut, save in one or two cases where the fun being had at someone’s expense would never have been intended to be read by that person. She sometimes misspelt names; these have been corrected where possible.
I have kept the correspondences separate, in this way the nuances of the different relationships and the tone of voice may be better appreciated. A rough chronology has been followed in both sections. Penelope rarely included the year in her dates, so internal ordering has been more than usually difficult. It is now as accurate as we can get it, relying on family knowledge and internal evidence.
27a Bishop’s Road
London, N6
21 February [c.1990]
Dearest Ham – No-one but you – absolutely no-one – would find any old letters in a suitcase of their father-in-law’s at the bottom of the carcase of an old freezer. You’re someone to whom things happen.
It’s kind of you to suggest that I might write my autobiography but I shan’t do that as I’ve written something about my family already and also about what (in the tedious little talks I sometimes give) I call my work experience – I used to regret that all the letters and photographs we had went down to the bottom of the Thames, but I see now I’m better off without them. The reason is that as my step-mother gets more and more hazy in her nursing-home (but this is a blessing to her, I truly think, because she doesn’t worry as much as she used to do) we’ve brought home all the old papers from her flat and I’m beginning to go through them, and it’s such a sad business, so many forgotten names, so much wasted effort, that I’ve decided I simply mustn’t leave my children to go through what I’ve accumulated, I must give them to the NSPCC who bring a green bag round every week to collect the waste paper.
I don’t know why I’m rambling on like this,