Human Voices
Fitzgerald, Penelope
Commonweal 11 September 10,1999 A LISTENER'S GUIDE Edward T. Wheeler The trouble with memory "is that it develops its own defenses, against truth telling and in consequence against...
...Commonweal 11 September 10,1999 A LISTENER'S GUIDE Edward T. Wheeler The trouble with memory "is that it develops its own defenses, against truth telling and in consequence against history"—so writes the eighty-three-year-old Penelope Fitzgerald, an adult witness to the Battle of Britain, in reviewing a recent book on London during the Blitz...
...Fitzgerald is an uncanny, if understated, stylist...
...Before turning to novels she had written biographies of the painter Edward Coley Burne-Jones and of her illustrious uncles, the brothers Knox, including the Scripture scholar and Catholic convert, Ronald...
...The novel, set in the BBC's Broadcasting House, attempts to record the truth of human voices against the lies of war, those "consolations" by which government radio hides or distorts what is happening...
...Her style is so distinctive that the novels give pleasure by making us ask how she achieves her effects...
...Her father was, for a time, editor of Punch...
...She took a first-class degree in English from Oxford, married in 1941, and published her first work of fiction (still unavailable in the United States) when she was sixty-one...
...Fitzgerald faced these problems, truth telling and memory's defenses, as a novelist in Human Voices, published almost twenty years ago in Britain and issued in the United States this spring for the first time...
...In the process, the book cannot but also raise the paradoxical relationship between fact and fiction: how can fiction be true...
...So heavy a philosophic weight might seem too much for so brief a work to bear, but its extraordinary style turns the tension in the paradox into a genuine aesthetic pleasure—even if the paradox itself goes unresolved...
...In raising her three children, she resided in England and abroad, in circumstances sufficiently unusual to give her subjects for her work...
...Much honored in Britain (Booker Prize winner in 1979, and shortlisted three times), Fitzgerald received acclaim here only recently for The Blue Flower, a historical novel on the life of Novalis, the German Romantic poet...
...But first, who is Penelope Fitzgerald and why is her twenty-year-old novel being reprinted...
Vol. 126 • September 1999 • No. 15
