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nineveh_ukSometimes, what one really wants is a short book, which is why last month I reread Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower for the first time in a very long time. I think I appreciated it more. Reading it is like walking along a wood-panelled corridor in a rather shabby house, passing door after door and peeping through the keyhole at each upon a brilliantly-lit scene that shows for a moment a glimpse of a place and of the inhabitants' lives.
Fritz/Friedrich von Hardenberg/the philosopher and poet Novalis, at the age of 22 meets and falls in love with Sophie von Kühn, who is twelve. Fitzgerald knows better than to waste time on telling her readers that she is well aware this is inappropriate, to put it mildly. The reader knows that this is ludicrous. Sophie is twelve on her first appearance, not well educated, not particularly inteligent. She loves her family, and she likes beer, smoking her pipe, and watching the Hussars fall over on the frozen river. Fancying oneself in love with her is the end result of a concept of woman as the child of nature, and the way in which incredibly well-educated men look at the intelligent, interesting, sensible, grown up women around them, and enjoy their company, value them, depend upon them, and yet fail to see them as actual human beings. Sophie herself may be tragic, the romance is not.
For Sophie is not only a random 12 year old inspiring a poet philosopher, but dying of tuberculosis, which pervades the novel as much as the country's damp pervades its buildings. Undeniable in the case of Sophie as a black patch on the wall, but lurking also hidden in the plaster, in everybody's lungs*. Sophie is a fool, but she is a child, it's excusable, and as a child she faces her illness with both the lack of understanding and courage required for three surgeries without anaesthesia. Fritz and his brother Erasmus are fools, and it is not excusable. They are equipped with everything they could need to be both Romantic and rational men, yet they are not. "Take some fucking responsibility!" I want to cry to almost every man in the book. The women have to (up to the age it can be handed on to a daughter not yet worn out with child-bearing), you could, too. Recognise, philosopher, that you could have a conversation about Goethe's works with a woman who has read them. But Goethe, too, only comes to see Sophie.
Fitzgerald's first novel was published in her late 50s, she was nearly 80 when this was published. There's hope for us all!
*Since the novel was written, it has been suggested that Friedrich and his siblings may not have succumbed to TB, but to cystic fibrosis.
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