Penelope Fitzgerald by Hermione Lee

Author:Hermione Lee [Lee, Hermione]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-35235-2
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2014-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

The idea for a book on the Poetry Bookshop went back much further than her friendship for L. P. Hartley, and was tinged, like The Knox Brothers, with a strong feeling of nostalgia. It grew out of her Georgian childhood: the rhyme sheets on her bedroom walls, the visits to the Bookshop in Bloomsbury, the sightings of Walter de la Mare and Eleanor Farjeon, Harold and Alida Monro. She had been trying to collect Poetry Bookshop rhyme sheets, lost since childhood, for years. The Poetry Bookshop connected with her feelings for Morris and Burne-Jones and her Ruskinian passion for the useful arts. Like The Knox Brothers, it was a “group” subject, structured within a small-scale community, with no outstanding hero-figure. The idea for the book came out of a fascination with Harold Monro, and led eventually to a life of Charlotte Mew, both sad, even tragic, figures. An atmosphere of aspiration, melancholy and disappointment hung over their lives. So there was a strong link between “The Poetry Bookshop,” a book that was never written, and The Bookshop, the novel about a failed literary endeavour, which overtook it.

As she researched it, characters she had glimpsed and read in her youth came into focus. She went to see the sad old poet Patric Dickinson in Rye (“says his life has been devoted to poetry but not a word of his poetry is read & never will be”). She took copious notes on the writers that Monro published, edited, promoted and befriended, in his pioneering magazines, Poetry Review, Poetry and Drama, Georgian Poetry, and at the Bookshop, with its regular readings. Of the network that converged on the Bookshop before, during and after the Great War—Hulme, Aldington, Edward Thomas, the craftsman Romney Green, Lawrence, Anna Wickham—she was especially interested in F. S. Flint, and wrote pages of notes about him. But all that was compressed into a short paragraph in a 1988 piece on the Poetry Bookshop, written as an introduction for a bibliography compiled by the American scholar Howard Woolmer. She and Woolmer found that they shared a lifelong enthusiasm for tracking down the rhyme sheets, and exchanged many letters about their quest.26 He understood her feelings: “If only I could return to childhood just for a day and get all my rhymesheets back!” But, as she said wistfully, they were meant to be ephemeral, “literally blown away with the wind.” The thought of them evoked her most plangent tone:

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