A lovely - and loving - essay by Julian Barnes on Penelope Fitzgerald in today's Guardian. It's fascinating to see how casually she was treated by the literary world, as though she were the writing equivalent of Grandma Moses rather than the most astute, technically audacious and wide-ranging English novelist of the past fifty years. I think Barnes is mistaken to dismiss The Bookshop as one of the minor novels before the big four, but the essay is a pleasure to read and a useful amuse-bouche as we wait for the letters.The photograph is by Jane Bown.
Penelope Fitzgerald's cropped up twice these past few days. Once on a just-read March 5 post from the House of Mirth, which posted this wonderful short letter she wrote to a bookseller who thought she might be interested in buying some books on Cairo. A second time in the Guardian, in an interesting article by Rachel Cooke about the essential role played by Virago in her literary education, a judgement I wholeheartedly endorse. She writes:
I once asked a famous British novelist who he regarded as the great post-war 20th-century novelist, and when he said 'Penelope Fitzgerald', even I - very shaming, this - was temporarily flummoxed.
I don't know who the famous British novelist is (any ideas?), but I agree with him. So it's very good news that her letters are due out in May, from Fourth Estate, as So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald.
In a country that sees fit to knight Cliff Rìchard, the decision to give a gong to Salman Rushdie, if only as a nod towards the idea that fiction has at least as much value as Summer Holiday and a brief affair (ahem) with a female tennis player, is a welcome one. Of course there are writers I’d prefer. It would have been good, for example, to see Penelope Fitzgerald damed (to coin a verb) before she died, or Sybille Bedford. Basil Bunting might have enjoyed a knighthood, though I doubt it. Ian Hamilton Finlay certainly wouldn’t, but it would have been fun to offer him one, just to see. Of living writers, James Hamilton-Paterson deserves far more recognition, although possibly not from the queen and Yo! Blair, who barely read, or, in the latter’s case, write. And what about J.H. Prynne, or Christine Brooke-Rose, or Stewart Home? (OK, my little joke.)
But it isn’t welcome to everyone. I’ve always assumed that fatwa is short for fatuous waffle, on the grounds that any statement produced by a celibate sclerotic in a long black frock is unlikely to have much sense to it. The problem is that fatuous waffle hurts, and can even kill, as some of Rushdie’s translators and collaborators could attest if there really were the life beyond.
Maybe it’s time we came up with some sort of death threat we can fling back. The targets, as holy books have it, are legion. Some Muslim, for example, who said that Rushdie deserved to die a thousand times after the publication of Satanic Verses, coincidentally my favourite Rushdie novel, and has since been knighted, a man whose name I shall not seek out for the benefit of this post because it would do him too much honour (honour on honour). Or Shirley Williams, one of the thousands of anxious appeasers to superstition. Or all those people, including Jack Straw, who say that Rushdie is unreadable, as if that were the issue.
A lovely - and loving - essay by Julian Barnes on Penelope Fitzgerald in today's Guardian. It's fascinating to see how casually she was treated by the literary world, as though she were the writing equivalent of Grandma Moses rather than the most astute, technically audacious and wide-ranging English novelist of the past fifty years. I think Barnes is mistaken to dismiss The Bookshop as one of the minor novels before the big four, but the essay is a pleasure to read and a useful amuse-bouche as we wait for the letters.
