The Afterlife by Penelope Fitzgerald

...Whatever the source, firsthand experience or the accumulated under-standing that stems from years of the writer's life, Fitzgerald amply justifies that assured and ironic smile that graces the cover of this book...

...Most of these pieces were written within the last fifteen years of her life...

...they speak from the other side of the grave in marvelous refutation of the debility of aging...

...The number of marginal tick marks I made increases dramatically, especially as Fitzgerald's recollections of her childhood and married life open out to incidents that she turned into fiction...

...It culminated, in terms of her reputation in this country, with a National Book Critics Circle Award for her historical novel, The Blue Flower, an account of the German Romantic poet, Novalis...

...In The Gospel of Life, John Paul II wrote that "over and above all scientific debates and those philosophical affirmations to which the magisterium has not expressly committed itself, the church has always taught and continues to teach that the result of human "Catln/, tali 10)0 plrrtSt 1,1ii1' in llt<' 1011'S lilt', latr>t Ill) (,~r• i Ill lhr urJ,co nor r,~tirr, urt~L..uk, t0 5, a 10th Ol MARK ANDERSON Commonweal 35 July 16, 2004...

...If Archbishop Raymond Burke's pronouncement finally encourages Catholic Democrats to acknowledge publicly that we are the inheritors of a church tradition that believes in collective responsibility for the poor and oppressed, then it will have been worthwhile...

...She achieved fame as a novelist late in her life, her career starting when she was well into her fifties...

...There is little Fitzgerald says that is not worth reading...

...JOSEPH F. BRINLEY St...

...The biographer has not so much to reconstruct her [Charlotte Mew's] life as to account for what life did to her...

...The effect is unnerving...

...Even as philosophically savvy a bishop as John Paul makes no claim that the church can rely on rational means alone to justify its position on abortion...

...In your editorial, you maintain that the church has already "embraced religious pluralism, freedom of con-science, and democratic rights" in the manner called for in The Declaration on Religious Freedom...

...The last part of The Afterlife is conceivably the most inviting: autobiographical accounts and essays or assertions about the novelist's tasks...

...BRIAN O'DWYER New York, N.Y...

...She can as easily open up what were dusty worlds of "lesser lights" of the last century (again drawing on her personal acquaintance with the writers) as comment with a novelist's under-standing on formal artistic challenges and the response of her contemporaries...

...Johnson that only a blockhead does not write to earn money...

...None of the above Your editorial "Kerry, the Catholic" perfectly articulates my own difficulty with Kerry's prochoice politics...

...not surprisingly, she re-viewed many biographies, collections of letters, and reprinted editions of Victorian and Edwardian authors...

...This over-looks the fact that the church's argument against abortion is ultimately a religious one...

...The earlier Off Shore won Britain's Booker Prize in 1979...

...She had within living memory strong connections with the late Victorian world...

...Unfortunately, we have let the religious right define the dialog thus far...

...olt t with Christohhcr Corrlutt and 11aiiihi Kirkby Edward T. Wheeler ctogenarian Penelope Fitzgerald, full-length and full-face, stares in wry scrutiny from the jacket of The After-life...

...What she has to say about the Victorians, or Bloomsbury, Yates, the Pre-Raphaelites, or more modern writers has at times an oracular quality...

...And of Stevie Smith, the English poet who died in 1971, she comments: "[Smith] said that she was straightforward but not simple, which is a version of waving but not drowning...

...She offers bald statements about her program as a novelist, and in "Last Words" she matter-of-factly contemplates her own death...

...Is Kerry sincere in stating his personal opposition to abortion...

...Those sentences could as easily appear in one of Fitzgerald's novels, and that acute ability to render character is a strength in a critic and reviewer...

...She was also the quirky biographer of Edward Burne-Jones, Charlotte Mew, and the Knox brothers, among whom were Catholic apologist Fr...

...The title it-sell proclaims that this is a posthumous collection of the English novelist's re-views, articles, and lectures—all the more reason to shiver a bit when fixed by the eyes on the cover photograph...

...Legislators are obviously publicly Church & state In your editorial "Kerry, the Catholic" (June 18), you maintain that, in its opposition to abortion, the church is not "trying to impose its religious views on others...

...I wonder...

...Fitzgerald died at eighty-three, just over three years ago...

...Ronald Knox and the editor of Punch, Evoe, her father...

...All of us are more than the sum of our individual genetic codes, important as they maybe...

...This collection also gives us many assessments of women writers, some of whom Fitzgerald knew as friends or acquaintances...

...Still, the greater memorial lies in the pages that precede these: the work in Commonweal 34 July 16, 2004 words she has done as reviewer and essayist...

...Edward T. Wheeler is dean of the faculty at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut...

...Louis, Mo...

...I also tell them that what their parents wanted was "a baby," and then they came—a divinely demanding surprise to their parents...

...Reading a good biography means thinking of unfulfilled conditionals...

...the honest care and respect she pays to those who made their living by the writer's trade...

...On Evelyn Waugh, she is brutal: "During the second half of his life [he] became the victim of his own game, not of Let's PreVALERRY tend, but of Let's Pretend to Pretend...

...to compare her stance with the bishops' on fundamental moral issues would have been unheard of just four years ago...

...Two/4B, section 170, especially numbers 10 and following...

...The writer is president of the National Democratic Ethnic Leadership Council...

...The years of success are the biographer's nightmare...

...Fitzgerald's other evident strength is her own experience as a biographer...

...The biographer is bound by facts, but must go ahead, like the miner's canary, to test the air for falseness and out-of-date conventions...

...If this were true, however, the bishops would be calling for Catholic politicians to seek common ground with other persons of good will in making civil law on abortion, and those who followed Catholic teaching would no longer be vulnerable to charges that they were simply trying to legislate their own religious beliefs...

...FRANS JOZEF VAN BEECK, SJ Getting religion Amy Sullivan's article ("Kerry & Religion," June 4) offers hope that the controversy regarding prochoice politicians will prompt committed Catholic Democrats to attest to their religious beliefs rather than hiding from them...

...A cut-and-paste culling of her comments about the task of the biographer could provide a tract for anyone who cared to write a "life of...

...She writes with a firsthand knowledge of that world and speaks with real authority on William Morris and his circle...

...procreation, from the first moment of its existence, must be guaranteed that unconditional respect which is normally due a human being in his or her totality and unity as body and spirit (italics mine...

...I CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 4) To my third correspondent I confess I still tell young people that knowing they were wanted at birth is a grace, regardless of the abortion issue...

...Unfortunately, I must refer my sharp-witted fourth correspondent to one of my books for a detailed argument...

...We can take her at her word: she accepted this burden as a writer...

...She asserts, in effect, with Dr...

...Find the whole story in God En-countered, vol...

...The effort of Congress-woman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn...

...Yet it is only fair to let Fitzgerald say overtly what she took on as a writer of fiction: I have remained true to my deepest convictions—I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as a comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it...

...She presented to the world the face that is invented when reticence goes over to attack and be-comes mystification...

...Friends and patrons begin to crowd the page...

...The pages of The Afterlife offer a dizzying spread of insights into authors as diverse and separated in time as Jane Austen, C. S. Lewis, and Amy Tan...

...She recalls being put off by Dorothy Sayers's comments at her Ox-ford college high table, remembering the writer as "austere, remote, almost cubical...