January 17, 2014
The Morning After: What Do We Do Now?
Harriet trick-or-treating at Book City on Halloween
I don’t want to go to Book City since the news. I feel like if I stay home, I can pretend that none of this is happening, but of course it makes no difference and my heart is broken. (And in a way this loss has been drawn out–I’ve been missing Book City’s second floor for years. Who ever would have imagined that the early to mid ’10s of our century would prove a golden age? It was full of war and dreadfulness. Would have been shocked to think we’d look back at all fondly.) Anyway, I am not doing a great job of moving on here, which is the point of this post, but let us do so.
Here is what I am going to do. I will suck it up and shop at Book City for as long as I have the privilege to do so. (I have a yearning for Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop now. Wonder if they have it in stock? I wonder if they can still order books that aren’t in stock. Hmmm.) And I am going to frequent the other great bookshops in our area–Little Island Comics has great kids books, and Parentbooks is actually moving a few blocks closer to our house, and they have a nice selection of children’s books too. Expanding my radius a bit, great books are on sale at the Bob Miller Book Room, the UofT Bookstore, and Good Egg in Kensington Market. (More about our local bookshops here.)
I am going to champion my favourite books and authors by following Carrie Snyder’s advice for how to support good books and good book culture.
I am going to start asking myself more often, “What would Jane Jacobs do?” (This was Jane Jacobs’ local bookshop as well, so the question is more relevant than it might immediately appear.)
And I am going to continue to appeal to someone—someone brave, creative, smart and with some funds—to please fill the gap which will be left by Book City’s closure. The problem I think is that anyone lately with the chutzpah to so such a thing sometimes lacks the savvy and business acumen to pull the whole thing off. There could be a connection i.e. anyone who’d open up a bookshop these days must lack necessary smarts to run a business, but this isn’t always the case. I think that book selling is a bit of an art, and not everyone can do it. You have to have experience and expertise to do it right. I think about a local indie bookshop that shut recently, and how their stock was terrible–never once did they have the books I wanted on their shelves, and when I ordered books, they messed the orders up. How they were lacking the casual friendliness and focus on customer service that Book City has taught me to take for granted.
No more. But yes, there is a hole here. So the last thing I am going to do here is have faith that something excellent is going to come along and fill it.
January 16, 2014
The Saddest News
A few years ago, I misread a headline that Book City in Bloor West Village was closing as my local Book City closing (Bloor Street in the Annex), and was devastated for a moment. The relief I felt upon realizing my mistake was absolutely epic, but I always suspected that the moment was a glimpse of things to come. I’ve been lucky to this long stay immune to the indie bookshop closure plague, but it seems that my luck is finally up with the announcement today that Book City’s flagship location would indeed be closing, and I cried and cried and cried.
Of course, one could say, the loss of a store is not a real thing. But then it is a real thing, which is the whole point of a proper bookshop. Real things are people, like Jen who phoned me yesterday afternoon to confirm my order for the collected letters of Penelope Fitzgerald. Like John, who has worked there since 1976, and everybody else who takes my special orders, rings through my giant stacks of books, rings through my customer discount without even seeing my card because they know my name. My husband went into Book City shortly after Iris’s birth, and came home with a present from Rachel. I have tweeted that I’m coming in for a particular book, and they’ll have it behind the counter for me by the time I’m at the shop. Such excellent, knowledgable, expert customer service, and all these people are going to be out of a job. I am so sad for each and every one of them.
We used to live in Little Italy, and it wasn’t until we moved nearly six years ago that I realized what I’d been missing all my life: a bookshop just around the corner. It is the ultimate destination. I do all my Christmas shopping there, and if I’ve ever given you a book for any other occasion, that’s where it’s come from. Any time Stuart and I go out on a date, we make a late-night stop in. We took Harriet trick-or-treating there on Halloween. After Harriet was born, it was the first place I ever ventured. During Harriet’s first year when I was bored and alone, I became a regular. The shop staff (Hi, Suzanne!) were some of the brightest spots in my life. Harriet wanders around the shop like she owns it, and I feel like she has grown up there. It makes me so sad that Iris won’t have that experience. I have bought so many books because someone has been smart enough to display it at the counter knowing it was precisely what I wanted/needed. So many bookish discussions at the counter. Running into bookish friends in their natural habitats. On lazy Saturdays when we have to go somewhere, it is generally where we go. I look around my library and see that most of my books have come from there. Memorable visits, like the day Harriet bought Wonder Woman. Pre-ordering Donna Tartt and Zadie Smith, and getting my mitts on those books the day they come out. When we were on austerity measures after Stuart lost his job 3 years ago, and for Mother’s Day my gift was to buy some books and it was such a pleasure. I love that whenever I’ve wanted a poetry book from a small press, I could be reasonably assured of seeing it on the shelf. I was so looking forward to The M Word being on sale there.
It has been an honour to pay full(ish–I had my customer discount after all) price for books in exchange for having an excellent independent book shop in my neighbourhood. I wish that more people could see how much we gain for such a transaction. Books cost money because they are items of value, and I think that in our society’s hunger for deals and discounts, in that we have made everything about dollar signs, we have forgotten what value is. Anyone who has let Chapters/Indigo drive out their local indies will soon be sorry when that whole enterprise shuts down and they’re left with no place to buy books at all. And then there is Amazon, who has seen fit to forfeit profit in order to ruin everybody else, but I promise you that their prices will no longer be so reasonable once they’ve finally achieved their grand monopoly. And how about conditions in their warehouses? Also, real things: Amazon does not qualify.
And I know I have been spoiled, to take for granted that I could walk around the corner and to pick up nearly any book I desired. There are those who will say I need to get with the times, who find my elitism repugnant, who find that Costco serves their book buying needs just fine, thank you very much. But those people must not know that they’re missing. These are not the people I want designing our society. People who have never known how a bookshop really can be the heart of a neighbourhood, and what a hole is left when one disappears. All this is partly sentimental, which I think is what they call it when I despair about the loss of things that make me happy, but it is also practical–where will I buy my books now? I am fortunate to have some excellent specialty bookshops in my neighbourhood still, but no place for new adult books unless I go out of my way. And I guess what I’ve always liked about my life and where we live is that I’ve never had to go out of my way to buy a book. Book-buying has always been right there on the main thoroughfare, along with Sweet Fantasies Ice Cream. In short, life has been complete. I have been so lucky. I am not sure this is a bad thing and think it should be wider-spread, not rare. Can you imagine how much better and smarter the world could be if everybody had such a place around the corner to go?
It is shameful that the Annex will no longer contain a proper bookstore–how far this storied neighbourhood has fallen. And I implore some brave soul with capital to make a new venture, please. I promise to come and spend lots of money.
See also: Jon Paul Fiorentino on the need for fixed book pricing in Canada: “FBP may seem, to some, to be counter intuitive to the free market sensibilities we have in North America, but consider this: The book marketplace is one of the only marketplaces where vendors can return merchandise to their suppliers for a full refund whenever they want. Books are clearly not typical merchandise. They are as much cultural artifacts as they are goods for sale. In fact, books represent the source of our cultural and intellectual reality. So why should they be treated with the same notion of disposability as jeans or candy bars? FBP is good for bookstores because it levels the playing field and eliminates undercutting. It’s good for independent publishers because it allows them to control their print runs, stay in competition with larger houses, and take risks on less popular but innovative and vital authors. It’s good for authors because it secures a level of remuneration with regard to the fixed net price their royalties will be paid out at, and it’s good for consumers because it diversifies the marketplace and gives them more options.”
January 14, 2014
On Seven Months Part 2: I Want My Hat Back
Things started disappearing a few weeks after Iris was born.
First was our picnic blanket, which is a strange thing to lose. Last seen when the baby was two weeks old, the afternoon we ate cheese and bread on the grass by Robarts Library while the baby slept in the stroller. The outing had been an exercise in normalcy, and one at which we succeeded marvellously. But when it came time for Harriet’s play school picnic a week and a half later, our picnic blanket–actually an king-size sheet with a green leaf print that I’d bought at Walmart for a dollar back when I still bought things at Walmart–was nowhere to be found. We ate our lunch that day on a table cloth. “It will turn up,” was the thing we said, because we always say this and often it’s true. But our picnic blanket never did. We soon replaced it with a waterproof outdoor mat that we bought with a gift certificate our friends had given us when Iris was born. It was an upgrade. The loss of our picnic blanket was mysterious, but not a tragedy.
In November, we lost Iris’s snowsuit. Well, not a snowsuit exactly, but this blue fleece suit with a hood that was perfect for autumn, one that was worn and pilly because Harriet had worn it four years before. Iris had worn it to swimming lessons, but I’d carried her home without it under my coat because she was sleeping and I didn’t want to disturb her. She was warm enough. But we got home to find that the blue suit was nowhere, and though I enquired at the community centre’s Lost and Found a few times over the next week, it didn’t turn up there either. But then the season was changing, we had a real snowsuit waiting. The blue suit had been coming to the end of its life anyway.
You already know how in November, I also lost our passports. Mid-journey in Amsterdam airport, resulting in a missed flight, so much panic, plans for emergency visits to consulates in farflungdom. Passports did turn up, but only after airline staff had unpacked our baggage three times, and then finally we unpacked them once more under the instructions of the immigration police. Perhaps if we’d tried this technique with the first disappearance, we might have found the picnic blanket.
And then somehow I have lost my pink fleece sweater, one that is old and worn, so farewell, I suppose, but it is cold in my house, and moreover, the sweater wasn’t entirely frumpy. I thought maybe it had gotten mixed in with the three garbage bags of stuff we’d assembled to be donated to charity, but searches turned up nothing. This loss has left a sizeable hole in my already meagre wardrobe.
None of this makes any sense. I am meticulously organized. I have known to have fits of anxiety when Harriet’s puzzles are missing a piece and scour the house until we find it. For me, the definition of “laid-back” is when I put away her toy eggs without the full dozen in the plastic carton, and I always feel sort of proud of myself when this happens. I lost my quarter-teaspoon a few years ago, and this was such an odd occurrence that it stands out. I have been mis-measuring my salt ever since. It must have fallen down behind the cupboards.
This is why when the immigration police told me to unpack our bags just one more time, I protested. “Really,” I said. “They couldn’t be there. I never would have put them–” But there they were. How odd not to know one’s own mind, let alone one’s own bag. Since Iris arrived, it is as though the fabric of our daily life has been stretched so thin and enormous things keep falling through the fibres. The metaphor is simply too perfect, and sometimes I suspect I’ve walked into a short story plot. This kind of confusion is what happens when you read far more than you sleep.
On Sunday afternoon, I lost my hat. And then I kind of lost my mind, because I was just so tired of losing things. And it wasn’t like the blanket or the blue suit, things we could get along without, things with which I could follow my dictum that things are just things and not worth getting upset over. Because I love my hat. It is a red felted cloche with a fuchsia flower, a one-of-a-kind that I bought at a craft fair last winter. It cost $45, which is a lot for a hat, but it was a beautiful hat, and it covered my ears. I have a big head, so such hats are hard to come by.
I had been writing this blog post in my head for a few days before the hat actually got lost, and it had begun to seem really disturbing, like my life had taken on the blog post’s trajectory rather than the other way around.
With the loss of the hat, I had officially had enough. I am a fervent unbeliever in Mommy-Brain, which offends me first because it’s this self-perpetuated myth that motherhood makes us stupid, which does us no favours, and also because my brain has never been as sharp as its been since my girls were born, the world suddenly full of brilliant and surprising connections and I really do find the experience of being a mother absolutely inspiring like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. But yes, I am tired. And I keep losing things. I was imagining a place (beneath the floorboards, perhaps?) where all the missing things were gathered. It was the violation of the laws of physics that was my main concern with this troubling string of events, never mind Mommy Brain—how can an object simply disappear?
(We flirted with a hypothesis: Iris was the obvious suspect. Nothing had gone missing before she arrived in our household. What if Iris was a thief?)
Then we found my hat. I couldn’t believe it. The first time I retraced my steps, I’d come up with nothing, as with all the other missing things. It was all part of the same plot, and it was beginning to be infuriating, not to mention boring. But yes, the surprise twist. I present once again at another Lost and Found, and the attendant comes back with precisely what I am looking for held in his very hand. And suddenly it didn’t matter anymore that on the way to the Lost and Found, my purse strap had snapped in two and it was beginning to seem that my whole life was unravelling. Because it wasn’t. I had my hat back, and everything terrible seemed a little less inevitable after that.
We walked home and I didn’t even need my hat. The temperature was above zero, something spring-like in the air, and the sun was out. For the first time in a long time, we held hands without mittens, and our mittens were either tucked safely in our pockets or tied to our coat with string.
January 12, 2014
Tenth of December by George Saunders
In 2013, for the first time ever, I’d read almost all of the year’s best fiction, at least as determined by the New York Times. Life After Life, Americanah, The Goldfinch, The Flamethrowers–all of these were huge and satisfying reading projects for me this year. (One would note that these are all books by women. I believe their appearance on this list all together is because 2013 really was a banner year for books by women, but also because it was the year in which Pamela Paul [a woman] became editor of the New York Times Book Review, a most fortuitous confluence of events.) The one book on the list I hadn’t read was Tenth of December, a short story collection by George Saunders, and it had been keeping such excellent company on that list that I decided I had to read it too, for my own reading pleasure as well as for the sake of completeness.
When I started to read, I had no idea what I was getting into. We begin, “Three days shy of her fifteenth birthday, Alison Pope paused at the top of the stairs.” And was there ever a better opening sentence, in terms of rhythm, euphony, use of a moment stopped in time? The smallest pause, and the story begins its movement forward, unrelenting. It is a common complaint of the modern short story that within it nothing happens, and herein the work of George Saunders is resolutely an exception. Although as Alison Pope descends the stairs, where we’re going doesn’t get any clearer. “Say the staircase was marble,” and here we are in the realm of the hypothetical. A strange kind of voice, punctuated by physical gestures, “{eyebrows up}”, catchphrases and short bursts of francais (ballet, it is). And then it is clear–aha! Here were are in the head of a teenage girl, Alison Pope, just three days shy of her fifteenth birthday. She’s home alone and here is her interior monologue, and it is full of affectation and she’s imagining herself as the heroine of our story (oh, but isn’t she though). She is faintly ridiculous, but here is the thing–George Saunders loves her. He believes in Alison Pope, in a benignly teasing way. And it is this kind of faith on which the entire collection is constructed.
In a sense, Alison Pope is a type, and so Kyle Boot, her neighbour (over-helicopter-parented neurotic nerd) but they’re both invested with specificity in their oh-so realized voices, and moreover, Saunders permits both of them (and all of his characters) to go beyond type. As Alison is descending her stairs, she is contemplating big questions in her peculiar sunny way: are people good and is life fun? Alison Pope is voting yes, and then comes a knock at her door, the cruel world fighting to get in. Conspiring to rid the sun from the world of Alison Pope, and the only person positioned to save her from such a fate is a most unlikely hero, Kyle Boot. Here is plot; here is a man with a knife. Because there are men with knives–George Saunders knows that. But he also knows that they don’t always win. That shadow doesn’t negate the light.
I tore through these stories in a hurry, leaping from one to another and having to re-find my feet on each landing. We move from skewed domestic tales (Tom Perrotta meets stylistic innovation?): to a convicted murderer partaking in pharmaceutical experiments which ultimately offer him a chance at redemption; a story in form of a pseudo-motivational email from a middle-manager; the diary of a man in some distant future who is disappointed with his life and decides to make his daughter proud by investing in the latest fad–foreign women displayed as lawn ornaments–and thus begins the downward spiral of his life; the amazing, explosive story “Home” (which it occured to me I’d read in the 2011 New Yorker Summer Fiction issue) about a war veteran returned home broken to his imperfect life; and the title story in which a nerdy boy with an overactive imagination (whose mom is my favourite person in the whole book, and the boy’s perception of her is beautiful and heartbreaking) meets in the woods a terminally ill man who is determined to end his life.
Though very different in tone, Saunders’ collection has the same preoccupations as the Giller-winning Hellgoing by Lynn Coady, moral questions in an amoral world. What is good and what is evil? Are there such things as either? How do we know how to be in a world without God? And is it possible to even get the chance to answer these questions when the speed of life’s locked in at status-quo?
I come to Saunders without context, save for the New York Times list, but in reading the book made another CanLit connection–Jessica Westhead and her short story collection And Also Sharks. This one quite similar in tone and approach, funny and broken characters who show their cracks, created in utmost sympathy. Stories which remain solidly on the side of goodness, even as they acknowledge the realities of life itself.
January 11, 2014
On Seven Months
As it was when Harriet was a baby, seven months has been a turning point. The baby has become vertical. She sits and eats her dinner with us in her chair. She has a sense of humour. I can put her down and she can play by herself, thereby ensuring that dinner gets made. She and Harriet are beginning to play together. We have found equilibrium as a family of four. And yet seven months is turning point in another sense, such as we’ve turned a corner and smashed into a wall. It would be more troubling if we hadn’t been precisely here before, but it’s still exhausting and frustrating. Six nights out of seven, she won’t be put down to sleep in the evenings, and then we take turns sitting on the sofa drinking wine by ourselves while the other is upstairs trying to get her to settle. Because we’ve been here before, we know enough not to turn it into a power struggle, we know that baby needs what she needs, and that “sleep habits” are indeed something a child of 18 months can indeed acquire out of the blue. I always expected that we’d end up here again, but oh, it’s not a fun place, even if you’re only visiting. (She is upstairs, screaming right now, and just spat out her soother and it sailed down the stairs.) We know we know we know, and it could be a million things–she is teething (or just evil?), and on antibiotics since this morning for cellulitis. I spent 4 hours last night at the emergency room having that cellulitis diagnosed, so you can see why I had hopes for having earned a more enjoyable way to spend my time tonight than the screamy baby relay. When I am refreshed enough to be philosophical about the whole thing, I know she is little, in need, that I love her, and these days are fleeting (and it’s the nights that are the trouble; the days themselves are fine, and I’m not even really tired because once I come to bed, she is happy enough to sleep beside me), but more often on these nights, I’m just impatient and angry. There is nothing like a baby to take one to the limits of herself. My own limits, as I learned very early in my mothering days, are closer than I’d like to admit.
January 9, 2014
The Silver Button and Wanderlust
I have been besotted with Rebecca Solnit ever since reading The Faraway Nearby last fall, so I was very pleased to receive two more of her books for Christmas. I read Wanderlust: A History of Walking first as it was written before the other, and I loved once again being absorbed in a Solnitian world where the connections between books and place are so strong, and where one thing leads to another, just as one step does. (“One foot in front of the other,” is Harriet’s mantra as we embark on the 1.3 km walk to school every morning. It is a long walk if the walker is 4 years old, particular lately through snow and ice. ) And it is because one thing leads to another that one can’t sum up a Rebecca Solnit book properly, and I therefore must resort to ecstatic sharing. I loved learning about how closely the history of English garden design connects to the history of walking, about how the idea of walking being natural takes for granted civilization (i.e. law and order), and the gender politics of walking and (for women) the sexualization of the street—how different is the term “tramp” depending on to whom it is applied.
The first paragraph of Wanderlust:
Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.
Which reminds me of the exquisite picture book that I bought Harriet/myself for Christmas this year. The Silver Button is a new book by Bob Graham, one of our favourite authors and the force behind the wonderful Oscar’s Half-Birthday. It’s a story that takes place within a single moment, illuminating the connections, the beauty and the perfections of the world. The perspective moves from a space on the floor in a single room to eventually comprise an entire city and beyond toward the global as Jodie puts the finishing touches on her drawing of a duck and her brother Jonathan rises to his feet to take his very first step. “He swayed, he frowned, he tilted forward, and took his first step. He took that step like he was going somewhere….”
These two books are an unlikely but absolutely perfect pair.
January 8, 2014
On Supporting CWILA in 2014
I wrote a short post for the CWILA Blog about why I will be donated to Canadian Women in Literary Arts once again in 2014.
First, because the pies are making a difference. Quite a few people don’t like what they stand for, or don’t like what they’re saying (or something. Truth be told, I don’t really understand, though I’ve tried) but they those pies are changing our publications for the better. The 2013 CWILA numbers reflect a significant change from 2012, writers and editors now working with an awareness of gender representation in what they read, write and publish. And that’s huge. I want to make sure the count continues into the future, is even expanded, and that the “counters” are properly compensated for their work.
Read the whole thing here.
January 7, 2014
My Opinions (and the Anthology as a Revolutionary Act)
When I was 19, I had a notebook that I’d covered with a piece of green corduroy that had previously been part of a pair of my pants. On one page, I wrote a heading with each letter outlined in a different colour Crayola marker, and the heading was “My Opinions”. And below, I tried to capture them all, my perspectives on such things as capital punishment (against), war (totally averse), abortion (well, I guess I respect choice, though I could never go down such a road myself). I don’t remember what I must have been for: universal suffrage, maybe? The abolition of acid rain? Sex, probably, but only hopefully. I think this was around the time I used to say things like, “I’m not a feminist, I’m a humanist,” so really, my opinions were likely best not held in a permanent record. It is not a total loss that I don’t have that green notebook anymore.
(I do remember that on the page following my summary of opinions, there was a recipe for mocha cake.)
I thought about this today as I read a really interesting New Yorker profile of novelist Jennifer Weiner. It was a respectful, considered piece that managed to make some space for nuance, to highlight how smart Weiner is and what important ideas she conveys about how fiction by women is perceived by readers and reviewers. And yet it also shows the trouble with Jennifer Weiner, which is her conflation of literary and commercial fiction, and this inane idea that not joining a rah-rah sisterhood is a feminist betrayal.
I’m been turning my head inside out for years now trying to make sense of Jennifer Weiner and her activism, basically trying to articulate a one sentence burst under the heading “My Opinions”, but the words don’t fit. If I added up all the blog posts I’ve ever written on this subject, I think they would fill up that entire green corduroy notebook, and I still wouldn’t have it figured out.
While I find the whole thing infinitely frustrating though, I am starting to realize that the turning my head inside-out might be the very point, instead of a pithy line I could deliver with a bullet. That these figures or ideas that rattle us or make us uneasy are doing a service, serving a purpose. “But when we paraded through the catcalls of men and when we chained ourselves to lampposts to try to get our equality– dear child, we didn’t foresee those female writers,” said Dorothy Parker, and sometimes (often?) the very worst parts of the feminism are the other feminists, but maybe why this is why feminism is excellent (and also why it will never become a totalitarian regime). We keep each other in check, we rub one another the wrong way, we ruffle feathers, we don’t sing kumbaya.
Here’s an opinion: the non-fiction literary anthology is a revolutionary act. This is apropos of something, and I mean it. The literary anthology, second-tier non-fiction. The kind of book that couldn’t win a prize if it tried (because it isn’t eligible). There is no cohesion, but this is the very point. The complexity of many voices, all of them singing a different tune. Not cacophony, which is noise, but heteroglossia instead. Resolving nothing, but reflecting reality. Sometimes as close to solidarity as we’re ever going to get.
January 6, 2014
Book Haul/Book Stamp
We really did have the nicest December, mostly because the weather was always terrible we just kept cancelling our plans and staying home. We visited the art gallery on Christmas Eve, which might have to become a tradition because the place was empty and we had an excellent time. We also pulled off a string of going out for lunch three days in a row, which is how we roll and how we love it. In terms of book haul, we received some wonderful children’s books for Christmas that I expect to be writing about here in the weeks ahead. And my own book stack was pretty impressive, as the photo makes clear (and check out my new Cath Kidston mug. Guaranteed to make winter days brighter). The Genesis book is from the photography exhibit that we loved and went to see over and over. So nice to have a bit of it to live with us forever. And two Rebecca Solnits–I just finished reading Wanderlust yesterday. She is so so wonderful.
And speaking of wonderful, my husband made a dream come true this Christmas by giving me my very own book stamp: “From the Library of Kerry Clare”. It’s a beautiful stamp, and the ink goes on so smoothly that the stamp looks like it’s printed. It has been suggested to me that because I have a book stamp now that maybe I might start lending out my books, but no, of course not. Let’s not be totally ridiculous.
(What bookish gifts did you receive this year?)
January 5, 2014
Penelope Fitzgerald and the Holiday Read
After we’d gone book-shopping on our recent trip to England, I sat down to read that weekend’s Guardian Books with its books of the year round-up, and found reader after reader citing Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee. Now, my relationship with Penelope Fitzgerald is complicated. She’s an English author called Penelope, which is usually all it takes, but I find her books difficult, inexplicable. There is something there but it’s just beyond my range as a reader. In short, I’m not one of those who “gets” Penelope Fitzgerald. But in my failure to grasp her work, she fascinates me. (If more difficult writers wrote short books, this might be something I experienced more often.) I also love a good biography, and so after reading so many recommendations for the book, I was awfully sorry to find myself stranded on the Fylde Coast with nary a bookshop for miles and miles.
The airport bookshop, I decided, would be my salvation, so I was awfully sorry to discover that the WH Smith in Manchester Airport Terminal 3 barely had books at all, let alone this one. (My expectations were high: it was at the Manchester Airport WH Smith that I bought my first Elizabeth Bowen novel in 2009. I don’t know if this was a different terminal, or if all the airport bookshops have been economic downturned.) We returned home to Canada without the book, and I requested it for Christmas, then was informed that it would be for sale in Canada until after the holidays. So ever it was not to be.
Until just before Christmas, a friend who knew none of this managed to get her hands on a copy and wrapped it up just for me. Penelope Fitzgerald was mine! I started to read it on Christmas Eve, and this fantastic book became the centre of my holiday.
What a life! Daughter of a prominent family, from a world that is never to return after WW2. Her father edited Punch, her stepmother was Mary Shepherd, who illustrated Mary Poppins, who was the daughter of the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh. Her mother was at Oxford with Dorothy Sayers and Rose Macaulay. Even the incidental intersections: the house her parents were meant to rent when Fitzgerald was 2 was inhabited by Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murray.
Fitzgerald finishes at Oxford and writes book and theatre reviews for Punch, scripts for the BBC. She marries Desmond Fitzgerald, her “Irish soldier”–one of many men in the book who are also shattered by their experiences of war. The embark on a career as literary bohemians, editing a literary magazine together and having three children who add to the disarray of their household. (In the background: miscarriages, at least one stillbirth. Fitzgerald becomes a larger than life character by her biographer’s hand, but still remains elusive.)
Several rented houses are fled from suddenly. The literary magazine folds. Desmond Fitzgerald gets into trouble. Penelope begins supporting her family by teaching, after a stint working part-time in a Suffolk bookshop. She moves them all back to London, where they really cannot afford to live, so she secures them lodgings on a leaky barge which becomes their home from 2 years. (The Penelope Fitzgerald books I’ve read are Offshore [which won the Booker Prize in 1979], The Bookshop and Human Voices, all of which are illuminated by these insights into her biography.)
The barge sinks… Which is a major challenge to Fitzgerald as a biographical subject, so much of her archive winding up at the bottom of the Thames. There is much hardship as she struggles to secure housing for her family, eventually ending up in a council flat in South London where she is happy enough to be settled. And here begins her literary career, publishing her first book at age 60. She writes a biography of her father and his brothers and poet Charlotte Mew before turning to fiction. And it is from this point on that she’s an overnight success. Etc. etc.
What a book! It makes me want to go back and reread the Fitzgerald novels I’ve encountered, to see if finally I can grasp them with such knowledge of their context. It makes me want to read everything she ever wrote, in particular her penultimate novel The Blue Flower, said by many to be a masterpiece. To understand her as un-English makes it all so much clearer, to think of her work in the context of Beckett’s. Her complexity as a person, as a character–impossible and infinitely loveable. Unabashed and brilliant. When she died, I cried. I have to get my hands on her collected letters, because I just want more more more of her.
