“Of all the novelists in English of the last quarter-century,” writes Philip Hensher, “she has the most unarguable claim on greatness.” As a Fitzgerald completist, I can’t disagree. It can be hard to convey to anyone who hasn’t read her quite how she achieves this greatness. She can write about desperate things – power and powerlessness, cruelty and betrayal – with a lightness of touch and a deftness of exposition that prove oddly exhilarating. There’s a luminous sense of a hinterland to her people and their behaviour, such that even peripheral characters, in the instant that they claim our attention, wholly convince us of their quiddity. Penelope Fitzgerald wrote few short stories: her one collection, The Means of Escape, was published posthumously. I’ve selected ‘The Axe’ for the simple reason that it’s one of the few ghost stories to have given me a frisson since I fell for the genre as a teenager. (Fitzgerald was good at ghosts: see the M. R. James pastiche in her novel The Gate of Angels and an alarming poltergeist in The Bookshop.) Part of the effectiveness of ‘The Axe’ lies in its dingy, everyday setting. It has psychological and emotional truth. It’s one of the most memorable iterations of her recurrent theme, as defined by her biographer Hermione Lee: “the courage of those who are born defeated and the weakness of the strong.” The story takes the form of a letter addressed by a junior manager to his superior concerning the professional fate of his clerical assistant, W.S. Singlebury, whose sacking he has been charged with. The context in which this letter is being composed is revealed in the final paragraph. It’s a creepy ending to a story whose long-term resonance in the imagination depends not so much on the supernatural as on our glimpse of a narrow and endurable life made intolerable by callous authority.
First published in The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories, Jonathan Cape, London, 1975. Collected in The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald, Flamingo, London, 2000
A Personal Anthology 