A Biographer on a Biographer

“I’ve never been able to write short stories,” declares Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000). “In my whole life I’ve only written three.” (In the end she wrote twelve.) “Biographies and novel are the forms that I feel I can just about manage. … They are the outcome of intense curiosity about other people and about oneself.” To write biographies and novels as she did—at times she kept one of each kind going simultaneously—demands an imaginative life within the pages, one that needs to be established by many instances, with perhaps more drama and perhaps more solidarity than the short story allows.

Hermione Lee, who has written several well-received biographies herself, including her previous masterpiece on Virginia Woolf, is particularly adept in establishing the peculiar nature of her human subject here, as if she actually admires her. And Penelope Fitzgerald herself assembled an immense amount of factual data and imaginary insight regarding the subjects in her novels, just as she did for the actual and historic characters of her biographies. It is well known that she read all the relevant transactions (in German) of the salt mines in which the hero of The Blue Flower was an official. But take the following description of a fictional character without historical documentation, from Innocence (1986): “Giancarlo [impoverished nobleman and father of the novel’s heroine] had always treated memory as a matter of convenience. So, it seemed, was old age. … The great advantage, he claimed, which made him inclined to welcome decay, was that the substitutes were such an improvement on the originals. Glasses were stronger than eyes, and replaceable. ‘Frescobaldi told me [says Giancarlo] that he experienced the greatest happiness of his life when he got his first false teeth. They eat so rapidly nowadays at the Frescobaldi that one is often home by ten o’clock.’” The dottiness and innocence of the man jump from the page. This charm is what his daughter’s fiancé, the savagely logical Dr. Rossi, will have to come to terms with. Yet, in both novels and biographies, explanation is sparse. Fitzgerald assumes a propos “that her readers will be cultured and educated and will know about things like Unto This Last or Gladstone’s pamphlet on the Eastern Question.” Hermione Lee comments: “The virtue of this biography [of Edward Burne-Jones], we see at once, will be its inwardness.” And she quotes from Fitzgerald’s notebooks: “Raptus: Beethoven’s word for slow succession of musical statements: you meditate over each.” Lee notes, “This sentence occurs in Fitzgerald’s instruction to herself about how the book might be shaped.”

Yet there are deliberate gaps in both novels and biographies which make it clear that at times the reader has to work out an explanation for himself. Lee follows suit. When, for example, Fitzgerald’s family makes a “flit” from Southwold to London, we readers have to infer that they are escaping from creditors. When Lee states that Penelope and her husband, Desmond, ceased to “share a bed,” the point is not discussed, as it would surely be in less thoughtful circles. Desmond’s heavy and yet heavier drinking is not discussed either. It simply happened: other men who had known terrible warfare drank heavily too. When he was awarded a medal and was congratulated, he laughed and said that his comrades, who deserved it as much, were dead. Apparently no one directly tackled his heavy drinking. There is a partial and unsatisfactory explanation; but, of course, explanations are best avoided. She does not discuss Desmond’s plight, and Lee manages to write of his petty theft in his law offices and subsequent unemployment without personal condemnation. It is part of the attraction of both author and biographer that they reveal a scrupulous moral viewpoint—more scrupulous on Fitzgerald’s part, of course, as she has her personal life to protect. The family suffered hell from poverty and natural calamity and still survived. Even Valpy, the son, who of the three children suffered most, managed to do...