The Peripatetic Penelope Fitzgerald

This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

From Granta:

When Penelope Fitzgerald won the Booker for Offshore in 1979, she spent the prize money on a trip to New York for herself, her daughter Tina, and Tina’s husband Terence Dooley (Fitzgerald’s future literary executor). It wasn’t the no-expense-spared jaunt of a lifetime one might assume an unexpected, sixty-three-year-old recipient of the world’s foremost literary prize would take, but rather a package holiday, flights and hotel included.

Fitzgerald, you see, was a keen consumer of the package holiday. Her late husband Desmond, who passed away in 1976, had worked as a travel agent’s clerk – he was employed by Lunn Poly in 1964, and worked there, and then at Cook’s, until the end of his life – providing their family with over a decade of discounted, often free, package tours abroad, of which Fitzgerald always made the most despite the family’s otherwise impoverished circumstances.

There were trips to Spain – a country with which Fitzgerald was obsessed in the 50s and 60s, she and her then fourteen-year-old son Valpy enrolling together on a Spanish language course in Córdoba in 1961 – and other destinations across Europe: Italy, Turkey, Greece, Austria, Crete, Paris and Sicily, to name a few. She and her other daughter Maria took a two-week package tour to Russia in 1975 (from which Fitzgerald drew inspiration for the Moscow-set sections of her first novel, The Golden Child, in which a junior employee at a London museum finds himself sent on a ‘Suntreader Holidays’ trip to Moscow in search of an expert to authenticate ‘The Golden Child’ – the centerpiece in the museum’s current exhibition which is feared to be a fake: ‘The Doll, of course, must not be declared at the customs, either going in or out,’ the museum director explains. ‘That is an advantage of the package tours, on which, I am informed by those who know about them, the luggage is only superficially examined’ – as well as her later work, The Beginning of Spring, which is set in the city in 1913 on the cusp of the Russian Revolution).

. . . .

‘Probably her fellow passengers were unaware that the short, stocky, unglamorous widow-lady, always carrying a small red notebook, was a sharp observer of them and their journey,’ Hermione Lee muses in her biography of the author, before noting that Fitzgerald was equally ruthless when it came to describing herself as she was about her companions: ‘my shabby luggage. My sweaters and trousers much too hot. My fringe scanty. Am I going bald?’ She isn’t exactly the stereotype of an intrepid and seasoned traveller, but she clearly undertook each of her voyages in the spirit of adventure, though none more so than the rather incredible trip she made to Mexico a quarter of a century earlier in the autumn of 1952.

. . . .

Mother and son travelled first to Liverpool, where they boarded the Queen Mary and sailed for New York. After a brief break in New York State, in November they took a Greyhound bus down the length of the country to Saltillo, a small town in northern Mexico, where they stayed until making the return journey home in January.

It’s a trip that’s rendered all the more intriguing because of the veil of mystery that surrounds it. An astonishing journey for a young, pregnant and near-insolvent woman to have made by herself in the early 1950s, when a woman’s place was still very much in the home, two questions spring to mind: Why? And, how?

This is partially answered in an essay Fitzgerald published in the London Review of Books in 1980 under the title ‘Following the plot’. ‘Suppose I were to try to write a story which began with a journey I made to the north of Mexico twenty-seven years ago, taking with me my son, then aged five,’ she begins:

We were going to pay a winter visit to two old ladies called Delaney who lived comfortably, in spite of recent economic reforms, on the proceeds of the family silver mine. They had lived in Fonseca ever since they were girls – one was sister-in-law to the other. Their relations in Ireland had died, they were alone in the world, and it was hoped that because of some distant friendship they might take kindly to my son and leave him all their money. Indeed, if I had understood their letters correctly, they had suggested the idea themselves.

The old ladies lived in a shuttered mansion in the French style, surrounded with pecan trees; the house was always cool because of the double height of the rooms. In the half-darkness of these rooms, as I discovered, the very first evening I arrived, they were drinking themselves steadily to death. For two hours or so every morning there was a lucid period, and that was the time for callers. The manager of the mine came then, and so did everyone in Fonseca who was interested in the Delaney’s wealth and therefore wanted to get rid of me and my son as soon as possible.

. . . .

What attracts me to this particular interlude in Fitzgerald’s life is both the strangeness of it and the fact it sums up the precariousness that typified her existence: an infrequently encountered amalgamation of extreme and long-endured poverty and hardship – both financial and emotional – combined with an equally relentlessly adventurous and ambitious spirit. Also, it’s even more remarkable given how minutely it features in the larger story of her life. As fascinating as it is, it remains unconverted into fiction, a rare anomaly in her early, pre-writing period.

Link to the rest at Granta