Julian Barnes: Innocence

And just as Fitzgerald takes care over the novel’s prehistory, she also – much less obviously, and on only a couple of occasions – attends to what will happen beyond its conclusion. Both moments occur in Part Two. Chapter 2 begins:

Looking at the photographs of a wedding taken nearly thirty years ago one can’t believe that so many, who now look as they do, once looked like that .

This is followed by a description of Chiara’s wedding photographs – in other words, we are in 1985, the year of the novel’s composition. So who is looking at them, who is this ‘one’ who ‘can’t believe’ in what time has wrought? Is it the author, is it the reader, or one of the characters, or all three of us sitting side by side? It might be a reasonable assumption at this point that the novel intends to expand upon those thirty years before its end. As it would, even more strongly, with the second flash-forward, in chapter 23. Here Barney, having set her sights on her third possible He, confidently announces to Chiara that ‘You must let us know … if you’re ever in Chipping Camden.’ Fitzgerald continues:

Chiara had never heard of this place, it was entirely new to her. But during the later stages of her life, at times when things were not going well for her, the bewildering phrase used to come back to her without warning.

But that is all we are allowed. There is to be no filling-in of the three decades, of what those in the photographs look like ‘now’, and of which things did not go well, and exactly how badly they went, for Chiara in her twenties, thirties and forties. Is this frustrating? Yes. Is it unfair? A little. Is it calculated? Exactly so.

But the novel is full of such surprises (it is also probably the only one of Fitzgerald’s to contain the word ‘fuck’). It is as shrewd and calculating as its main characters are not. It rarely goes where we think it will (a lesser novelist, for instance, would almost certainly have ‘allowed’ Barney to end up with Cesare); nor does it end as we might expect. A concatenation of circumstances – three misunderstood positives adding up in Salvatore’s mind to one massive negative – leads Chiara’s husband to Cesare’s estate where he asks to borrow a shotgun. Could it be that Chiara Ridolfi’s ‘innocence’, like that of her sixteenth-century ancestors, is about to have similar sanguinary consequences? In a scene perfectly poised between seriousness and absurdity, Salvatore asks Cesare if he will try to prevent him from killing himself. Cesare, who suffers from a kind of conversational innocence – never saying anything unless obliged to, and then speaking only truthfully – replies, ‘I don’t know.’ As if to prove it, he hands Salvatore the gun and unprotestingly lets him go off to shoot himself. A further concatenation of circumstances prevents this happening. Distraught, Salvatore asks, ‘What’s to become of us? We can’t go on like this.’ Cesare replies: ‘Yes, we can go on like this. We can go on exactly like this for the rest of our lives.’ There is a Beckettian allusion here, and Fitzgerald was an admirer of the playwright. But she was not a Beckettian writer herself. Her cosmology was less bleak, and also part-lit by religious belief. So the word ‘miracle’ is dropped in as an explanation of how Salvatore is saved from suicide (not as big and obvious a ‘miracle’ as at the end of The Gate of Angels , but even so one the author deems worth naming as such). The closing scene is in fact less Beckettian than Chekhovian: in the gulf between a ‘modern, scientific’, self-made character and a decent if dozy backdated bunch living out of their time; in the botched – or interrupted – attempt at suicide; and in the admission that work and life must continue, because that is what has been allotted to us.

Penelope Fitzgerald was nearly seventy when Innocence – the first of her four late, great novels – was published in 1986. It was profoundly not of its time or of its time’s mood. Though set in the recent past, it was not the fashionable recent past: the overlooked Fifties rather than the flashier Sixties. Nor was it one of those charming Anglo-Tuscan novels which play genteelly on the clash of cultures and serve to remind English readers of pleasant summer holidays. It is, on the contrary, a fully Italian novel, peopled with Italian characters, and whose English ones are brash and baffled outsiders. Its title announces its high-minded theme, while its original cover (chosen by Fitzgerald herself) showed a detail from Pontormo’s Visitation in the church of San Michele, Carmignano, near Prato. When Innocence came out, it was mostly well reviewed, though not shortlisted for the Booker Prize, whose jury – of four women and one man – gave the prize that year to Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils . Amis’s last decade was one of sour and narrowing decline and loosening syntax; Fitzgerald’s last decade was one of artistic reinvention, heightened ambition, and a constant, generous yet amused interest in the world. Writers, over the long run, are judged by the truths they detect about the human condition, and the artistry with which they represent those truths. Penelope Fitzgerald’s Innocence will last as long as mature and careful novel-readers continue to exist.

Julian Barnes

2013

Part One

1

Anyone can tell when they are passing the Ridolfi villa, the Ricordanza, because of the stone statues of what are known as ‘the Dwarfs’ on the highest part of the surrounding walls. You see them best from the right hand side of the road, driving towards Val di Pesa. Strictly speaking they are not dwarfs, but midgets, that’s to say they represent adults of less than 1.3 metres, pathologically small, but quite in proportion.

Because the villa’s grounds slope sharply away to the southwest nothing, from the road, can be seen beyond them. You just see the coping and the gestures of the midgets, poised against the airy blue wash of the sky. Some of these gestures are welcoming, as though signalling to the passer-by to come in, some suggest quite the contrary. You can buy coloured postcards of the villa, but the statues don’t look quite the same as they do in old engravings, or even in the older postcards. Perhaps some of them have been replaced.

The owner of La Ricordanza, in 1568, was a member of the Ridolfi family, certainly, but a midget, married to a midget, and with a daughter, born to them after many disappointments, who was also a midget. They seem to have been by no means the only family in this predicament, or something like it, at the time. There were, for example, the Valmarana at Monte Berico, just outside Verona. Here the daughter of the house was a dwarf, and in order that she should never know that she was different from the rest of the world, only dwarfs were allowed into the Villa Valmarana as her playmates and attendants. At the Ricordanza, however, Count Ridolfi consulted a medical man of scholarly reputation, Paolo della Torre, who practised at Torre da Santacroce. Paolo advised him in a letter that it was all very well for the Valmarana, who had an abundance of dwarfs in both the villages beneath their walls. Travellers through those parts used to make a detour to see these dwarfs, and if none appeared the carriage-driver would offer to get down from his seat and root them out of their dwellings to be looked at. It was not realized at the time that the inhabitants of Monte Berico suffered from a lung disease and the low concentration of oxygen in their blood produced a high incidence of dwarfism.

‘Such people would not be suitable to serve your worship,’ Paolo went on. ‘I would advise you not to lament the scarcity of them at the Ricordanza. In respect to stock, or race, we must remember that, in Macchiavelli’s words, Nature has implanted in everything a hidden energy which gives its own resemblance to everything that springs from it, making it like itself. We can see the truth of this in the lemon tree, whose smallest twig, even if the tree is unfortunate enough to be barren, still has the fragrance which is the soul of the lemon.’ This letter was relevant, and it was civilized, but it was not helpful. With great difficulty and many enquiries the Ridolfi followed up reported instances of midget families, so that by the time she was six their only child had a retinue suitable to her position, a tiny governess, a tiny doctor, a tiny notary, and so forth, all to size. The child never went out, and was confident that the world consisted of people less than 1.3 metres high. To amuse her, a dwarf (not a midget) was sent for from Valmarana, but without success. She pitied him, because she thought how much he must suffer from knowing that, as a dwarf, he was different from anyone else at Ricordanza. Then, in trying harder and harder to make her laugh, he fell and cracked his head, which made the little girl cry so bitterly that he had to be sent away.