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Friday 18 July 2008

Perfection in a small space

James fascinated Fitzgerald. In part it was the period of pre-Great War academic life, which she loved; one of her best novels, The Gate of Angels, is set in Cambridge in Monty's time, and contains a first-rate pastiche of a James short story, and The Knox Brothers is a long teasing-out of that particular intellectual world. But mostly it was one glancing, allusive, dry artist responding to another. (I feel rather smug about the whole matter of the Penguin introduction; Penguin asked me to write one, and I said I would only do it if Fitzgerald declined, so much did I want to read her thoughts on him. Happily, she proved, in this instance, susceptible to temptation.)

That sense, so often in James, of something colossal at the last being revealed through a tiny turn of phrase, or even a single word, proved one of Fitzgerald's most remarkable devices. One would not use the expression ' twist in the tail', but at the end of many of her most marvellous things there is a sense of a great window suddenly opening. The last sentence of her Russian novel, The Beginning of Spring, resolves the whole drama; at the end of The Gate of Angels, a door opens and everything changes; the entire tragedy of her great last novel, The Blue Flower, is contained in the epilogue.

That visionary final twist of the screw is unforgettably indulged in these short stories. If you miss the significance of the word 'a watch' in the last paragraph of 'The Red-Haired Girl', you will not just not understand the depth of love the heroine bears for its painter hero, but miss the point of the whole story. There is a glorious twist at the end of 'The Means of Escape' when we realise that we, as well as its sad heroine, have entirely misconstrued the motives of the escaped convict. Most impressive, in every sense, is the terrifying conclusion of her earliest published work of fiction, the ghost story 'The Axe', when nothing is happening, nothing is seen, and one can hardly read on:

If what I have next door is a visitant which should not be walking but buried in the earth, then its wound cannot bleed, and there will be no stream of blood moving slowly under the whole width of the communicating door. However I am sitting at the moment with my back to the door, so that, without turning round, I have no means of telling whether it has done so or not.

More articles from: Philip Hensher | this section

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