Penelope Fitzgerald - Human Voices

Haggard is the more impressive and more senior. In the book’s biggest dramatic broadcast scene he is in charge of a live address given by a fictional French Pétainist, General Pinard, who arrives at Broadcasting House to address Britain. Fitzgerald places this scene only a few days before De Gaulle’s famous and indomitable BBC broadcast to his defeated countrymen. It is a wonderful set-piece brimming with incident and comedy which illustrates Haggard’s wholly admirable and almost reckless independence of thought and action. Fitzgerald uses this moment to expose a deeply embedded BBC senior managerial trait when faced with improvisation – a nervous rigidity and lack of imagination. But more importantly she celebrates the BBC’s dogged refusal to allow anybody from outside to intimidate it.

Pinard, something of an Anglophile, is ‘always cheerful, and most important of all, nearly always a loser’. His speech takes a swipe at Churchill, ‘the courageous drunkard whom you have made your Prime Minister’ and adds tartly that ‘the French are a nation who have always cared about their army, while you have never cared about yours’. As he reaches his climax to an audience of fifteen million, he has a terrible coughing fit.

And at this point, at what would have been the most dramatic moment in the history of broadcasting, Fitzgerald memorably captures a central and largely forgotten aspect of the first fifty years of the BBC – the obsession with the technicalities of broadcasting: ‘“He’s overloading,” said the programme engineer, in agony.’

Human Voices is in part a reflection on the BBC’s engineering roots, the nature of sound and of broadcasting authenticity. Brooks in particular is forever trying to perfect the art and science of radio while all the time his department is under threat from the primacy of live news – delivered live. A BBC meeting of hierarchs, from which he is typically excluded, decides that ‘the direct human voice must be used whenever we can manage it – if not, the public must be clearly told what they’ve been listening to – the programme must be announced as recorded, that is, Not Quite Fresh’.

But Brooks, as ever resentful and frustrated, does not relent: ‘“All my energies are concentrated, and always have been, and always will be, on one thing, the recording of sound and of the human voice. That doesn’t make for an easy life, you understand.”’

This gives Fitzgerald a great deal of scope to describe the anatomy of a professional passion and the largely unintended punishment it can inflict on others. Brooks goes round the country with a half-deaf German refugee, Dr Vogel, to capture the sounds of genuine British wheezing and coughing, or the hinges of church doors creaking (‘The quality’s superb, particularly on the last fifty-three bands or so’). He can’t abide the absence within the BBC of recordings of German Stuka bombers and seeks with manic intensity to invent a new windshield to improve the performance of microphones in the open air.

This search for aural perfection is a central preoccupation of the entire novel. It provides more than the framework for the almost ideological struggle for resources and prestige between live and recorded programmes. It also leads to an early but defining moment in the relationship between Brooks’ unchallengeable expertise and the latest member of his seraglio – young Annie Asra from Selly Oak, a place described with reference to its sound as having ‘scrupulously fair intonation … neither rising nor falling, giving each syllable its equal weight, as though considering its feelings before leaving it behind’.

Annie is the daughter of a piano tuner but not musically sophisticated. Brooks wants to teach her about sound quality and balance. She is more than happy to learn but memorably seeks to correct him on the matter of pitch. She meets an amazed and indignant response and it seems that she will never be forgiven.

Annie is the most interesting of all the women in the novel. Most of the other members of Brooks’ seraglio have assorted boyfriend issues – aggravated by the separation of war. Lise is rather hopeless, Vi is full of solid decency, Della is flirty – and so on. Brooks, clearly thoroughly attractive to women, needs them all to listen to and be supportive of his grievances against all-comers. Annie is willing, calm, frank, clear-sighted, strong-willed and patient. She is delighted to have left her job at a Midlands hosiery store to be at the BBC (‘to help the war effort’). She is far from plain but has no concern for glamour and can neither flatter nor deceive, not least herself. There is something downbeat and pessimistic about her. When she falls in love and it is unrequited her fate is summed up thus: ‘She was free to stay here and be unhappy, just so long as she didn’t become ridiculous; for that she didn’t think she could forgive herself.’

Few authors depict the stoic virtues as well as Fitzgerald. She has a forensic eye and ear for domestic and romantic suffering borne in a minor key. If she doesn’t exactly celebrate an acceptance of fate and incomplete happiness, she evidently has profound respect for the ability to cope – and she applies it not only to her characters and to the BBC but to wartime Britain too. This is never done in a way that simply conforms to clichés of a unique British national fortitude. Indeed, she places some distance between herself and her characters’ observations of the temperaments of various nations – but she nevertheless is in tune with those who respond phlegmatically to the physical damage and disruption of war.

When the American journalist, McVitie (Mac), who has some of the attributes of the real Ed Murrow, arrives to report on Britain’s battle to survive he is impressed, but provides a highly attractive counterpoint to British reticence. He comes freighted with oranges (a luxury), energy, fraternal goodwill and enterprise. We learn little about his inner life but he neatly encapsulates a very different and more swashbuckling journalistic realm than that depicted within the BBC. His night-time trip with Haggard to a tube station, to decide a bet as to whether he knows any ‘ordinary men’, is a brilliant cameo of the physical damage wrought by the Luftwaffe, and of a journalist’s resourcefulness and guile.

There is one other big character in the book and that is Broadcasting House (BH) itself, ‘a ship with the wrong sort of windows’ – just north of Oxford Circus – then and now the BBC’s home. Much of the novel is set in and immediately around the building. Even in normal times the BBC is prone to claustrophobia. Here the introversion is pervasive. The bombs fall on it and near it, and the pre-war BH rhythms and routines are dislocated. The concert hall becomes the scene of a well-meaning but ridiculous first aid course with Haggard subverting proceedings as best he can. And its function as an overnight dormitory sees a child born amid sleeping and snoring. It becomes hard for Brooks and Haggard to leave it even if they had wanted to:

Their life in BH had become so secluded and so strange that it was difficult to remember at times where wives or friends could come from.

Fitzgerald left the BBC at the end of the war. Both before Human Voices was published and since, many have written accounts of its wartime role. None has so penetrated its physical and moral skin. She may only have been in her mid-twenties when she was there but she palpably understood the BBC’s profound, fussy, sometimes vain but largely heroic and invaluable commitment to the truth – and expressed it in the form of a concise, witty and beautiful novel. Would that the BBC had more friends like her.

Mark Damazer

2013

Inside Broadcasting House, the Department of Recorded Programmes was sometimes called the Seraglio, because its Director found that he could work better when surrounded by young women. This in itself was an understandable habit and quite harmless, or, to be more accurate, RPD never considered whether it was harmless or not. If he was to think about such things, his attention had to be specially drawn to them. Meanwhile it was understood by the girls that he might have an overwhelming need to confide his troubles in one of them, or perhaps all of them, but never in two of them at once, during the three wartime shifts in every twenty-four hours. This, too, might possibly suggest the arrangements of a seraglio, but it would have been quite unfair to deduce, as some of the Old Servants of the Corporation occasionally did, that the RP Junior Temporary Assistants had no other duties. On the contrary, they were in anxious charge of the five thousand recordings in use every week. Those which the Department processed went into the Sound Archives of the war, while the scrap was silent for ever.