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

(Lisa, we later discover, is a politico)? Some, even all these interpretations are possible, and, mysteriously, not incompatible with one another. This short passage occupies a mere three pages of text, but, as with the laundry scene in
The Blue Flower
, it expands into something much larger in the memory. And again we ask ourselves: how does she do that?
    One of our better-known novelists once described the experience of reading a Fitzgerald novel as riding along in a top-quality car, only to find that after a mile or so, ‘someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window’; another, while praising
The Beginning of Spring
, called it ‘scatty’. Thesejudgements seem to me profoundly misconceived. In
The Beginning of Spring
, there is a scene in which Frank Reid reflects briefly on the Russian system of bribery. There has been a break-in at his press; the malefactor fires a revolver at Reid, who apprehends him, but decides not to report the matter to the police. However, he fails to offer the street’s nightwatchman, who must have been aware of the incident, a hundred roubles, ‘somewhere between tea-money and a bribe’, for his silence. As a result, the watchman goes to the police:
    From them he would have got considerably less, but very likely he needed the money immediately. Probably he was caught in the tight network of small loans, debts, repayments and foreclosures which linked the city, quarter by quarter, in its grip, as securely as the tram-lines themselves.
     
    Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with the colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route maps. Instead of a journey through the city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way. And their structure and purpose may not be immediately apparent, being based on the tacit network of ‘loans, debts, repayments and foreclosures’ that makes up human relationships. Nor do such novels move mechanically; they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does, except with a greater purpose and hidden structure. A priest in
The Beginning of Spring
, seeking to assert the legibility of God’s purpose in the world, says, ‘There are no accidental meetings.’ The same is true of the best fiction. Such novels are not difficult to read, since they are so filled withdetail and incident and the movement of life, but they are sometimes difficult to work out. This is because the absentee author has the confidence to presume that the reader might be as subtle and intelligent as she is. Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels are pre-eminent examples of this kind.

THE ‘UNPOETICAL’ CLOUGH
     
    I N A PRIL 1849, a thirty-year-old English poet arrived in Rome. British writers had been coming here on a regular basis for a century and more. In 1764, the city’s effect on Gibbon was so powerful that ‘several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could descend to a cool and minute investigation’. In 1818 Shelley found its monuments ‘sublime’. The following year the city ‘delighted’ Byron: ‘it beats Greece – Constantinople – everything – at least that I have ever seen’. And in 1845 Dickens arrived for his first visit, later telling his biographer John Forster that he had been ‘moved and overcome’ by the Colosseum as by no other sight in his life, ‘except perhaps by the first contemplation of the Falls of Niagara’.
    The young English poet was in good spirits, and happier than at any previous time in his adult life. His great early crisis – one mixing religious belief and employment, and causing him to resign his fellowship at Oxford because he could no longer subscribe to the XXXIX Articles – was over; a post at University College, London awaited