The Blue Flower

That description embodies the physical processes, the mental sequence and, always present with Penelope Fitzgerald, the effect upon the spirit that come with the playing of a phrase in music, the resolution of a mathematical problem or the manufacture of a satisfactory sentence. It has, too, a strict regard for several forms of veracity: practical, felt, aesthetic, metaphorical.

Of herself, Penelope Fitzgerald writes in the same essay, ‘Well, those were my ancestors and I should like to have lived up to them. I should like to have been musical, I should like to be mathematical, and above all I should like never to have told a lie.’ It’s interesting that the verb form changes with the desire to be mathematical, as though there were more hope of that, as though she dismisses outright the other two, acknowledging truthfully the impossibility of true truthfulness. As for living up to them …

The Blue Flower (1995), her last novel, burdened often, and very often by other novelists, including this one, with words as inexact and lumpy as ‘masterpiece’ and ‘genius’, addresses the short shining transit of the life of the philosopher and poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), later to take the name Novalis, author of Hymns to the Night and of a novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, that contains mention of ‘the blue flower’, an idea of profound importance to the philosopher-poets of that mind-crowded time and place. He was author of much more, work that strives (to put it over-simply) to reconcile observable phenomena with a sublime principle.

‘Mathematics is human reason itself in a form everyone can recognise. Why should poetry, reason and religion not be higher forms of Mathematics? All that is needed is a grammar of their common language.’ These thoughts are put in the mind of Hardenberg by Fitzgerald, who discovers in this book something approaching that common language, in its poetry, its reason and its spirit.

The eldest of a large family, Hardenberg appeared at the start to be dull but turned out to be quite brilliant. His life was full of such flips of transfiguration, dark to light to dark again. This making light out of the dark is repeatedly effected by Fitzgerald, who has turned into this novel his, definingly Romantic, life. She has kept throughout a certain Germanness of diction, acutely listened out for rather than inserted: articles sit in front of some proper nouns; no word or phrase is offered in the German without setting a crumb-trail worth following.

Penelope Fitzgerald is a novelist who elevates her readers through teaching them how to read her. She freely offers her own great intelligence to all her readers, as to her humblest protagonist. Her approach to her material is interior, never merely the stretching of an aestheticised membrane over prefigured event. To see her manuscript is to confirm what the finished artefact has told us: in her rounded yet italic hand, each letter sits in its row like a bead on the abacus of straight thought, doing the exact work its position and character demands. The miracle is that these beads are also as alive as peas, to be sown and set, fertile, tender, reaching, tenacious, and when harvested and dried down as hard as hail throwing itself at the window in the reader’s head. She does not strew effect, uses shock sparingly and administers it – often violently – through silence, a woven veil or a sideways unrequited look.

Hardenberg’s position in the minor Saxon nobility of the late eighteenth century had limited opportunities. His family had estates, a household, a respectable allocation of linen, duties, a nag or two, habits of generosity; not money. The father was a devout adherent of the Moravian Church, a Christocentric group of a certain spiritual climate, dwelling (in the words of Penelope Fitzgerald’s uncle Ronald Knox) with monotonous sentimentalism, ‘only less distressing in German than in English’, on the wound in Christ’s side.

Other modes of thought, though, are stirring, and not far off. At Jena, one of the universities attended by Hardenberg, Goethe walks along in plain view, an old man of over forty. Schelling, Hegel and Hölderlin lodge together. The philosopher Fichte and the Romantic Schlegel teach Hardenberg. Fichtieren, to romanticise Fichte-style, is a fashion among the students. At one point, there is a duelling accident. Two good-sized bits of finger are lopped off. Fritz’s medical student friend Dietmahler makes him carry the part-fingers for safekeeping in the ideal receptacle that is his mouth. One has a heavy ring. Can you unfeel that? The novelist has transmitted to the reader the very taste of subjectivity.

Hardenberg was sent to learn from Kreisamtmann Coelestin Just the business of overseeing the processes of the mining of salt, in order to make a living beyond that of the savourless life of a writer-scholar. By this point he already has the intermittent transformative sense that beauty is where it falls; that everything is illuminated.

Trying to assemble information for her projected life of L. P. Hartley, Penelope Fitzgerald interviewed Princess Clary, who said, ‘My dear, how can you write the life of a writer? If he had entered into politics, if he had commanded an army in warfare, but what life can a writer have?’

A chance visit, paid in the company of Just, to a family as large as his own but more prone to laughter, changed Fritz von Hardenberg’s life.

He fell in love with Sophie von Kuhn when she was twelve. We first see her, an ordinary enough girl, standing at a window wishing for something to happen, be it only a fall of snow.

We are given Sophie in full: she is impious, ordinary-looking, greedy, fond of fart and sex jokes. She has nice hair and dark eyes – like those of Raphael in the self-portrait he made at twenty-five. We never doubt her lover’s transforming serious love of and for her. We too come to see and to care, in the irrational incremental way of love. This short book induces in its reader many forms of the topple into love: with big families, with children, with ‘the one’, ‘the other’, with an idea, with thought, with nature.

The blue flower, signifying that elusive thing which can connect the individual self to an understanding of greater external existence, finds its equivalent in the novel which itself is a concrete rendering of the abstraction it contemplates. The Blue Flower constitutes for its reader a blue flower. Hardenberg came to call Sophie his Philosophy. This, to a novelist of such metaphysical mind, must have been a folding together of concept and embodiment impossible to resist.

‘As a hopelessly addicted writer of short books I have to try to see to it that every confrontation and every dialogue has some reference to what I hope will be understood as the heart of the novel,’ Penelope Fitzgerald writes, three years before her death. She is pinning the numberless stars in their places with each word written, and calling them each by their names. She is very clear here about why, but how does she see so feelingly – and set it down?

Penelope Fitzgerald was in the provident habit of unravelling and reknitting garments for her family (‘I have unpicked the famous red gloves and am knitting them up again for you!’ she writes to her daughter Maria in 1972). That curative use of ‘up’ is surely Shakespearean. And this ‘knitting up’ is what she does with her areas of preoccupation (it’s too simple to call it research) and her novels.

She embodies and suggests, giving a life to the physical such that it radiates metaphysically. Stars, in all their forms, are here, from dust (Novalis’s first book was Blutenstaub, that is Pollen, a rich dust) to light, through the stellar forms of snowflakes and the squarer salt crystals arriving under sunlight in low pans with the stealth of frost-flowers, the ‘sparkling chatter of the harpsichord’. Here is, also, the violent entropic subtraction of death in youth, leaving a burnt place behind in the creation – a bright star gone – the graphic bursting bark of a human cough never far away as the white death of consumption awaits within. Sentences capturing, describing, transmuting, extinguishing or measuring light (with cypress shadows) are equalled in number by those that describe darkness or concealment, either social or, dreadfully, anatomical, the dark of the body where tumours assemble themselves and the blood waits to declare itself on linen. This light into darkness, dark into light is a faithful mirroring by the novelist.

It is not fantastical or worked up, not ‘heightened’ at all, although a German for ‘imagination’ is Fantasie. In dealing with such matters it is hard to avoid a kind of tense, high, exalted note used by prose-technicians who may wish to ramp up mood or emotion. But in this novel, the increments by which we are led in these new lives through their autumn and ‘forewinter’ and tipped into a deep grief show a novelist and a character devoid of kitsch. She plucks life of its feathery detail, as with the geese at Tennstedt, stripped of their down alive twice before slaughter.

As Penelope Fitzgerald writes in Charlotte Mew and her Friends, ‘Terminal illness is a great simplifier of daily life, everything being reduced to the same point of hope against hope.’ That sense of intensified life we swear after disaster that we will cleave to, Fitzgerald manages to keep alive yet sweetly unhectic in her writing.

The very structure of the book is constellated. Each short chapter of the fifty-five works with what has been and what will be so that we see the unavoidability of what supervenes for each character, as we see stars where once they were; stars might be said to be, as we observe them, fictions. Because we understand more than we know ourselves to, on account of the work the author has done to hold us in perfect trust, we feel an accretive ache as each character moves towards her or his fate; suddenly we have ‘known all along’. When we reread, the urge to hold it back, as in life, beats stark. We are given to ‘know’ subconsciously what we cannot know with our whole mind because the novelist has fully imagined each person who arrives; each carries his fate, as we each do, within our own allotted time.

That these are people who have lived, who are not ‘made up’, is of less rather than more help to a novelist unless she be one of deep imagination and assimilated learning. Bones ground to make novelistic bread often stick in the reader’s craw. It is one of the objections dearly held by those who hold ‘historical novels’ in contempt. Some fun is had in this novel at the expense of those unimaginative self-designated realists who think that artists are tricksy prestidigitators.

Certain conditions prevail in The Blue Flower. Time is short. You may be betrothed at twice seven, worn out by nursing and marriage at three times seven, off the market at twenty-eight. Men, too, have a tight span in which to be and to act. New babies are born annually to married women; some, in the way of it, die. Pregnant women who are unmarried may visit the ‘Angel-Maker’ to resolve things. Angels offer annoyance or solace in fraternal or in spirit form. Fritz sees one such spirit and sometimes wishes he saw rather less of another angel more robust and accident-prone; he will get his undesired wish. As he has occasion later to say, ‘If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching.’

Children speak no pappy or truncated language here but utter their thoughts; there is no time for the approximations of baby talk in a world where revolution is massing in France, and Buonaparte is making himself felt. For Fritz’s six-year-old brother, ‘the Bernhard’, thought is blood, as Fitzgerald has it in The Gate of Angels.

The great are teased. In a world where linen is counted, Goethe has two overcoats on account of his fear of draughts and no small talk to spare even for the mortally sick Sophie von Kuhn, who is reduced to ‘venturing that Jena is a larger town than Grüningen’. Goethe is sententious and a bit creepy about Sophie to Fritz’s brother Erasmus. The great poet has forgotten perhaps the transformative nature of love, that can make of a potato-fed (or bread-and-butter-fed) girl of human clay a persisting star in the mind of a man. He cannot ‘read’ that it is not for Fritz, his brother, that Erasmus cares, but for Fritz’s intended, for he too has fallen in love with Sophie. There is love surplus and love unmet to twist the heart in this novel. The lonely consequence of sparing your loved one’s feelings are terribly demonstrated by Karoline Just, who gives life to a man who has never existed, to spare Hardenberg pain for not loving her as she loves him.

But they are Saxons, these characters, and know how to make a good dinner even if their hearts are breaking. Itemised meals that seem to mean something else, like auguries, arrive in their season: cherries dark as leaves or starlings, the amarelles for Kirsch the darkest of all, fiery schnaps flavoured with peppermint, all the better for the seething of a pig’s neck fat, ears and nostrils.

‘Let time stand still until she turns around,’ thinks Fritz, first beholding his love, in tune with his heartbeat. In so seasonal, worshipful and abbreviated a way of life, music is never far away; we hear even the piano’s (possibly not yet invented) third pedal at Fritz and Sophie’s engagement party.

So suggestive with extraneous spirits is this chapter, in which a sudden and opinionated first person arrives just the once, to remark upon an unidentifiable snatch of music amid the Bach and hymns by Zinzendorf, that it is as though we are for one moment let into a secret within the secret; we hear and see ghosts. But we cannot know what it is. We know merely that, should we develop further capacity to imagine, we would see – albeit briefly – ‘something’, quite clearly. We are looking for the blue flower.

By now we may have suspicions as to its nature; even if we are right, what is to say that death cannot be changed, by being thought about otherwise, by the turn from dark into light; is not the dark its own kind of light?

There is little sense that this other way of thinking must necessarily involve Christ. The clergy come in for less of the satire for which their visits to the house of fiction have primed them; idle, vain and unfeeling doctors receive the brunt with their casual cruelty and patronising cant, and a landlady whose dithery taste for the pain of others is gratified in a harsh moment of authorial grip and withdrawal of anything but Sophie’s pain imagined by the inextricably involved reader. We are thrown onto our expertly readied imaginations and we flinch, writhe, do not credit, accept; and have to go on.

No character is trapped in the place the novelist has made for him. They walk, and the floorboards creak, they breathe and the window mists, they live and love and die, in Sophie’s case with her repeatedly reopened wound kept open still, to release the backed-up poison, with the use of a worked silk thread. Sheets, wearing thin, turned sides to middle, by now a colour milder than white, through which the broad summer sunshine may be seen, outlive the human souls whom we met first amid a great laundering.

Just as there is no self-regarding plangency of tone, there is no officious marshalling of characters. No points are laboured; all are sharp, and let the light in. Sophie’s first agony arrives in the form of something that glitters. The novelist with her surgical haberdashery is keeping our reading wound fresh. She offers no anaesthetic but clarity and beauty.

Returning from what will be his last visit to his mortally sick Philosophy, Hardenberg approaches his family home. He is late. ‘Fritz paid the fine which was collected from all latecomers.’

It is the fine that we are here to pay again and again, the price of love.

Penelope Fitzgerald lives up to her ancestors.

Candia McWilliam

2013

Epigraph (#ulink_1b904a3f-32b8-5efe-acea-dbf65cdb75a7)

‘Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.’

F. von Hardenberg, later Novalis,

Fragmente und Studien, 1799–1800

1 (#ulink_517716ee-edfb-5d09-a0ae-0e70d12e7b3c)

Washday (#ulink_517716ee-edfb-5d09-a0ae-0e70d12e7b3c)

JACOB Dietmahler was not such a fool that he could not see that they had arrived at his friend’s home on the washday. They should not have arrived anywhere, certainly not at this great house, the largest but two in Weissenfels, at such a time. Dietmahler’s own mother supervised the washing three times a year, therefore the household had linen and white underwear for four months only. He himself possessed eighty-nine shirts, no more. But here, at the Hardenberg house in Kloster Gasse, he could tell from the great dingy snowfalls of sheets, pillow-cases, bolster-cases, vests, bodices, drawers, from the upper windows into the courtyard, where grave-looking servants, both men and women, were receiving them into giant baskets, that they washed only once a year. This might not mean wealth, in fact he knew that in this case it didn’t, but it was certainly an indication of long standing. A numerous family, also. The underwear of children and young persons, as well as the larger sizes, fluttered through the blue air, as though the children themselves had taken to flight.

‘Fritz, I’m afraid you have brought me here at an inconvenient moment. You should have let me know. Here I am, a stranger to your honoured family, knee deep in your smallclothes.’

‘How can I tell when they’re going to wash?’ said Fritz. ‘Anyway, you’re a thousand times welcome at all times.’

‘The Freiherr is trampling on the unsorted garments,’ said the housekeeper, leaning out of one of the first-floor windows.

‘Fritz, how many are there in your family?’ asked Dietmahler. ‘So many things?’ Then he shouted suddenly: ‘There is no such concept as a thing in itself!’

Fritz, leading the way across the courtyard, stopped, looked round and then in a voice of authority shouted back: ‘Gentlemen! Look at the washbasket! Let your thought be the washbasket! Have you thought the wash-basket? Now then, gentlemen, let your thought be on that that thought the washbasket!’

Inside the house the dogs began to bark. Fritz called out to one of the basket-holding servants: ‘Are my father and mother at home?’ But it was not worth it, the mother was always at home. There came out into the courtyard a short, unfinished looking young man, even younger than Fritz, and a fair-haired girl. ‘Here, at any rate, are my brother Erasmus and my sister Sidonie. Nothing else is wanted while they are here.’

Both threw themselves on Fritz. ‘How many are there of you altogether?’ asked Dietmahler again. Sidonie gave him her hand, and smiled.