The Second Circle

Review

Fitzgerald's stylistic arsenal is formidable, produced by a mind of great intellectual and artistic reach: she uses anonymous interlocutors with ease, tends to cut as late or later into the action as few writers since Chekhov, stylishly switches from direct to indirect speech, deploys metonymy and anecdote artfully, and is unfailingly familiar with the arcane vocabularies of her locales. One is always aware of a writer restless to develop her stories in unexpected ways. When she is clever she is very clever and when she is funny she is very funny, but Penelope Fitzgerald's abiding interest lies outside the cerebral, in the realm of impulse and impulsiveness. She depicts unconventional loves with an understanding and comprehension which bespeak a great heart, matched by the resolve to lay bare the mixture of altruistic and self-serving motives that, good or bad, we are all prey to. There is also a refreshing variation among her books which recalls Greene or Mann. Read the blurbs of her other titles and you feel like reading them all. Her books sound interesting. And most intriging among them is The Blue Flower, a short novel of fifty-five chapters which tells the story of an eighteenth century poet-nobleman who falls in love with a fourteen year old girl.

Baron Friedrich Leopold Von Hardenberg, Novalis, was born in Prussian Saxony in 1772. Like all good German Romantics, he was as gifted an intellectual as he was poet. He studied law at the University of Jena. In his early twenties, having fallen deeply in love--and at first sight no less--he became engaged to Sophie von Kühn. Within three years she was dead of tuberculosis, precipitating a grief transmuted and passed down to us in his Hymns to the Night (Hymnen an die Nacht). It is this crazy love (Novalis, engaged again in 1801, was himself to die of TB before the wedding day) that forms the heart of The Blue Flower.
     Penelope Fitzgerald's elliptical style, propensity to withhold information, and her fondness for brief, brilliantly lit episodes told from shifting perspectives--the whole thankfully governed by great storytelling and rapid, memorable characterization--suits well her Romantic subject matter.  And the subject in turn is entirely suited to Fitzgerald's preferred method of anonymous interlocutors, obscure correspondences, and inklings of one sort or another. But Fitzgerald also possesses the thoroughly modern conviction that the heart of the historical is domestic life and the individual experience. Thus the student Novalis has to empty the ailing Schiller's chamberpot. The poet himself noted in Goethe a predilection for connecting "small, insignificant incidents with important events". Just so with his later chronicler: Fitzgerald introduces us to the young Baron Von Hardenburg in the midst of household laundry. (Not that she shrinks from the rich personalities of the time--the Schlegels, Schiller, Fichte, and Goethe himself all make memorable appearances).
    Fitzgerald's Sophie von Kühn is plain and giggly, though honest and remarkably courteous given the attentions of her unexpected suitor. The best anyone else seems able to say for her is that she has pretty hair. Nonetheless, for the poet she represents moral grace and human perfection, the being to whom, unbidden, his heart has opened (in its way Novalis' love is a Romantic equivalent of another literary nobleman's, Don Quixote's, love for Dulcinea, and, of course, the dapper spectre of Humbert Humbert cannot but peep over the pages as we read).
    But perhaps, for all his theoretical massaging of reality, it is the family as much as the girl he is in love with: the spontaneous and joyful Von Kühns are reminiscent of Tolstoy's Rostov clan. The Von Hardenburgs, by contrast, are a large and bustling family with spirited, precocious children, sensitive spirits that suffer under the yoke of a father in thrall to the harsh doctrines of a local Protestant sect. It is striking how the well-being of these households flow so directly from the temperamental disposition of their Heads.
    Striking too is the fact that Fitzgerald's characters, at least the ones she is interested in, hard-working men and harder-working women, speak their mind without reservation--and without being talkative. (Novalis, we are told, does speak a mile a minute, but we rarely see him do so and, besides, unlike rattling vessels, he is merely driving away at problems, so to speak, ex camera).

A final note: Penelope Fitzgerald employed the delightful habit, now unfashionable, of naming her chapters. Titles run from "A Quarter of an Hour" to "How to Run a Salt Mine". And there is no shortage of chapters to name: in 226 pages there are 55 chapters and an Afterword. It ought not to succeed, a narrative so broken up it risks amounting to a manual of stylistics. But succeed it does; and magnificently, out of a steady depiction of Novalis' philosophical and spiritual growth for one, but also because the prose, often so jumpy and elliptical as to be disconcerting, flows from a poetic intensity rare in the generations succeeding this singular writer.

Fin Keegan
 

Other reviews by Fin Keegan at The Second Circle:

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare
Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin
The "Loire-Atlantique" Cycle by Jean Rouaud
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
Pereira Declares by Antonio Tabucchi
Justine by Alice Thompson
Brief Reviews including Donald Antrim and John Lanchester
A Profile of the Harvill Press
A Profile of the Editions de Minuit