Being reviewed:
Advertisement
The late English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, author of short brilliant works including The Blue Flower and The Bookshop, often mined her own life for material. The Booker Prize–winning Offshore, for instance, described a bohemian family’s makeshift life on a houseboat on the Thames, until the craft eventually sank. Fitzgerald, herself, had tried during a difficult time to make a life with her young son and two daughters on a houseboat—which eventually sank.
But one strange adventure of Fitzgerald’s went unrecorded in her work. In 1952, with her young son Valpy, she took a trip to Mexico—leaving behind in London her husband and their toddler daughter—on an improbable, whimsical quest for an inheritance she had only the faintest reason to think might materialize. It is the kind of odd place and period that would make a great setting for a Fitzgerald novel; yet it never did.
The American novelist Jessica Francis Kane steps into this omission with a bold and colorful work narrating Penelope’s journey with her six-year-old son and their extended stay in the large, busy house of two ex-pat widows in a mining town she calls “Fonseca.” Kane’s epigraph is a typically slanted line of Fitzgerald’s: “Unfortunate are the adventures which are never narrated.” (As if the adventures themselves are disappointed by the oversight.) With the explicit cooperation of Valpy Fitzgerald and his sister Tina, Kane performs a remarkable act of homage to Penelope Fitzgerald’s life and work in Fonseca which is, in its own right, a moving and nuanced novel. Kane gives that lost adventure its proper fictional place, after all.
Sylvia Brownrigg (SB): How did you make the leap from being a fan of Penelope Fitzgerald’s work to wanting to create her as a fictional character?
Jessica Francis Kane (JFK): It might be most accurate to say I dragged my feet. I was very reluctant to write from her perspective. I tried many other possibilities first—writing from the perspective of another passenger on the Greyhound bus with Penelope and Valpy is the one I got the farthest with. I also tried starting the book in London and on the Queen Mary. It wasn’t until I just put mother and son on the doorstep of the house in Mexico and imagined how I would feel having brought a child so far on such a confusing journey that I finally got started on the version of the book as it stands. At that point, I began rereading her novels as I was working, transcribing sentences that struck me as characteristic of her, or perhaps autobiographical in some way, into a file I called “The Lines.” This became a kind of scaffolding for me to build her into a fictional character.
SB: Your novel is gritty and detailed on how lack of money makes the Fitzgeralds’ life fraught, hampering the couple’s ability to continue their ambitious literary magazine World Review. The desperate hope for a windfall from these two elderly relatives in Mexico drives Penelope to take this fantastic trip with her young son.
Did you bring your own experience to bear on this subject which so shapes your Penelope (as well as the historical one): Namely, how money, a subject often taboo among writers, affects what and how one writes?
JFK: I have always been compelled by this aspect of Fitzgerald’s biography. She didn’t really get started writing novels until she was 60. How many more might she have written if she’d had financial stability sooner? I can hardly compare my background to hers, but I did have to have a work-study job in college, and I went to work immediately afterward. I could never take an unpaid internship. When I first discovered Fitzgerald’s novels, I was financially stable (thanks to my husband’s job), but still worried about what it would mean if I stepped back from work for even a short time to write. There is always a job to be done in Fitzgerald’s novels, and I admire that. I try to write that way, too.
My idea was to write a story that might show where some of the elements of Fitzgerald’s own later fiction came from.
SB: There are so many wonderful comic details and repetitions in Penelope and Valpy’s time at “Mirando” (the name you give the house they visit) and in Fonseca: the mountains which are farther away than they seem; the ghost said to live in the northeast corner of Mirando; the coming and going of various supplicants hoping for funds for their special projects. Fitzgerald’s own novels, similarly, have such sharp, surprising details—the pig’s ear in schnapps from The Blue Flower comes to mind. I am curious whether some of Fonseca’s details came from Fitzgerald’s own writings, or were they from your imagination?
JFK: My idea was to write a story that might show where some of the elements of Fitzgerald’s own later fiction came from. You could say I tried to reverse-engineer some of those wonderful details and characters: the supplicants at the British Museum in her first novel, The Golden Child; the poltergeist in The Bookshop and also the dear Sea Scouts. I’m delighted to say the line about the mountains is my own. I love how repetition can become humorous without much effort.
SB: I loved the scenes with the artist Edward Hopper and his painter wife Jo, about whom he is both dismissive and frequently unkind, while she is independent, yet tolerant of her subservient position. The friendship Penelope strikes up with Jo gives a nice counterweight to her otherwise often emotionally isolated time (apart from a hint of possible romance). When you realized that Hopper and Fitzgerald had overlapped during their time in that part of Mexico, was it hard to take the leap to make them friends?
JFK: I was terrified. But Fitzgerald knew and cared about art, and of course wrote about it for World Review. Her very first book, published in 1975, was a biography of the pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones. So, when I began researching the town of Saltillo and learned the Hoppers had been there previously and were there again the same winter, it was just too tantalizing a possibility to pass up. Fitzgerald lost her mother when she was 18; Jo Hopper was old enough to be her mother. I liked the idea of bringing their two different artistic marriages into proximity and exploring a few weeks of friendship between the two women that winter of 1952.
SB: Fitzgerald famously moved from setting novels in England—such as Human Voices, about her wartime work at the BBC—to those set in other countries and other periods: The Beginning of Spring, The Blue Flower. How do you explain her never having mined this Mexico episode, which unfolded much as you describe, for one of her novels?
JFK: It was the question foremost on my mind as I worked. Why didn’t she write this book? What held her back? She gives us a few clues in her essay from 1980 titled “Following the Plot.” She says she was sorry to let the story go, but felt she didn’t have “the capacity to relate the wide-spreading complications of the Mexican legacy.” Which just makes it all the more intriguing! What complications? Another sentence in the essay that is revealing: “Everyone has a point to which the mind reverts naturally when it is left on its own.” One day while I was working, possibly rereading “Following the Plot” for the hundredth time, I had the thought that Mexico was that place for Fitzgerald. After that, my story of her Mexico trip started to fall into place.
SB: Lastly, you interweave letters from Fitzgerald’s own children—Valpy, her son, and her daughter Tina—in to the rest of the fictional narrative. I gather these are real letters they wrote to you! Can you say something about how you got into correspondence with them both, and how you decided to include the letters in the book?
JFK: Another intimidating moment in the writing of this novel! I sold the book to Penguin Press based on a few early chapters and was writing when I got an email from Terence Dooley, the literary executor of the Fitzgerald estate and her son-in-law. (He is married to Tina). He said the family had learned of the novel and wanted to be in touch. When I tell audiences this on book tour, they smile, but I was so worried. I put everything I had into my response, explaining what her novels meant to me, what I hoped to do in the book, and somehow, miraculously, both Tina and Valpy were responsive and welcoming. Very soon the pandemic was upon us, so all through that time we were emailing, and I was working very slowly (I had two teenagers at home trying to adapt to online school). I loved their emails, their voices were so unique, and one day I realized that the only way forward with the book was to include them somehow. I wanted other Penelope Fitzgerald fans to be able to read them, too, and I loved the way this structure gave the book a stereoscopic quality, as you have story and memory not always agreeing with each other. 
This article was commissioned by B. R. Cohen.
