Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) Read Online Free PDF Page A

to Moscow. Penelope Fitzgerald does the opposite: she opens with a character leaving the very city where all the action is going to take place. But the sentence seems so straightforward that you hardly notice what is being done to you. And here is the first line of
The Blue Flower
:
    Jacob Dietmahler was not such a fool that he could not see that they had arrived at his friend’s home on the washday.
     
    Again, another novelist would have been content to write ‘Jacob Dietmahler could see that they had arrived …’ – altogether more banal. A double negative in the first sentence trips our expectation of uncomplicated entry into a novel; further, it sets up the narrative question ‘So in that case, just what degree of a fool
was
Jacob Dietmahler?’ Also, Fitzgerald writes ‘on the washday’, where others would be content with the normal English ‘on washday’. The definite article hints quietly at the German behind it –
am Waschtag –
and lets us feel, at a nearly subtextual level, that we are in a different time, a different place. It eases our fictional way. For that is one initially puzzling aspect of these last four novels: they do not feel anything like ‘historical novels’, if historical novels are books in which we as modern readers are transported back in time thanks to a writer instructing us in the necessary background and foreground. Rather, they feel like novels which just happen to be set in history, and which we enter on equal terms with the characters we find within them: it is as if we are reading them in the time they are set, rather than now – and yet we remain in our own period.
    Fitzgerald’s benign wrong-footingness culminates in scenes where the whole world, as physically experienced and relied upon, is given a sudden tilt. At the start of
The Gate of Angels
a violent rainstorm turns Cambridge upside down – ‘tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason’; while at that novel’s end, the titular gate miraculously opens in what might be a quasi-religious moment, or an outrageous plot device lifted from ghost stories – or, perhaps, both. Then there is that epiphanic scene near the end of
The Beginning of Spring
. Dolly wakes in the middle of the night at the family dacha to find Lisa, the temporary (Russian) governess to the Reid children, dressed to go out; reluctantly, she takes Dolly with her. They walk down a path away from the light in the dacha’s front window until a moment when,‘although the path seemed to run quite straight, the light disappeared’. The forest closes in on them. Among the birch stems Dolly begins to see ‘what looked like human hands, moving to touch each other across the whiteness and blackness’. In a clearing, men and women stand pressed each against the trunk of a tree. Lisa explains to the tree-people that, although she knows they have come there on her account, she can’t stay; she must go back with the child. ‘ “If she speaks about this, she won’t be believed. If she remembers it, she’ll understand in time what she’s seen.” ’ They go back along the path, and Dolly returns to bed; but the forest has invaded the dacha. ‘She could still smell the potent leaf-sap of the birch trees. It was as strong inside the house as out.’ Does Dolly understand what she’s seen – and do we? Is the scene – for which we have only the child’s point of view – a dream, a hallucination, the memory of a sleepwalker? If not, what is its register? Are the woods coming to life, as they do in the pantheistic poetry of Selwyn Crane, the novel’s Tolstoyan dreamer? Does the scene symbolise female awakening or personal liberation, for Dolly, or for Lisa, or both? Perhaps Dolly has witnessed the preparations for some pagan rite of spring (only a few pages later, Stravinsky’s name is quietly mentioned). Or might the secret meeting in the forest be straightforwardly political, even revolutionary