I love Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000). She is such a clever writer. A touch here, a dab there, and she has built up a whole little world.

As Julian Barnes remarks, we instinctively ask: "'How does she do that?' -- how does she convey what she knows in such a compact, exact, dynamic and resonant way?" Part of the answer, according to Hugh Adlington, lies in her own admission: "As I’m a hopelessly addicted writer of short books I have to see to it that every confrontation and every dialogue has some reference to what I hope will be understood as the heart of the novel."

I don't know how you would replicate that technique, but it works amazingly well.

I'd already read The Blue Flower and The Bookshop, and earmarked a few others. This one, first published in 1980, was inspired by Fitzgerald's own experience working for the BBC during WWII (many of the characters are based on recognizable figures). It was ratcheted up the list when I read Kate Atkinson's Transcription, whose protagonist also has a BBC phase (post-war this time).

For Fitzgerald, the BBC is "a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force, and an amateur theatrical company that wasn’t too sure where next week’s money was coming from". She articulates very clearly in this quirky, often funny book how ridiculous it all is in many ways, and yet you end the novel with respect not mockery.


I read Human Voices, as I read so many other things, on the invaluable Internet Archive. Fortunately, I'd finished it before the library suffered a huge cyberattack, and had to be taken offline. But I'm desperately sorry to hear that such a valuable public resource has been besieged in this way

The action of Human Voices starts in the spring of 1940. There is little plot, as such. Rather, we follow a host of differently ranked BBC workers as they adjust to the looming threat of a German invasion. The tone is conversational. The book ends with the sudden death of one of the characters, and a series of question marks over most of the others.

War-time London is depicted coolly but powerfully. Heavy bombing raids begin in August; people sleep in Underground stations; National Cheese becomes a thing.


London in the Blitz

Broadcasting House (BH) turns its concert-hall first into a venue for First Aid courses, and then into a dormitory for staff. The institution soldiers on:

"The gossip of the seven decks increased the resemblance of the great building to a liner, which the designers had always intended. BH stood headed on a fixed course south. With the best engineers in the world, and a crew varying between the intensely respectable and the barely sane, it looked ready to scorn any disaster of less than Titanic scale. Since the outbreak of war damp sandbags had lapped it round, but once inside the bronze doors, the airs of cooking from the deep hold suggested more strongly than ever a cruise on the Queen Mary. At night, with all its blazing portholes blacked out, it towered over a flotilla of taxis, each dropping off a speaker or two."


Sheltering from bombs in a tube station

Fitzgerald tells us of a meeting, whose subject "was the familiar one of how to carry on. Engineering had skilfully ensured that the BBC, switching from one transmitter to another, need never go off the air. Maintenance was probably at work already on the broken pipes. Catering brewed away remorselessly in the basement, but the problem remained: what should the voices say?

"ADDG [Acting Deputy Director General, another of the ubiquitous acronyms that Fitzgerald sends up] sighed. 'You can't make "Heavy damages and casualties have been reported" sound reassuring.' He wore a kindly, puzzled, clerical frown. 'More encouraging music, I think, and talks from serving airmen, if the RAF will let us.'"

This key question -- what should the voices say? -- takes us to one of the novel's most important themes: Truth.

Fitzgerald writes: "Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth. Without prompting, the BBC had decided that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective. And yet there was no guarantee of this. Truth ensures trust, but not victory, or even happiness. But the BBC had clung tenaciously to its first notion, droning quietly on, at intervals from dawn to midnight, to tell, as far as possible, exactly what happened. An idea so unfamiliar was bound to upset many of the other authorities, but they had got used to it little by little, and the listeners had always expected it."

I find it quite poignant, even slightly scary, that the BBC -- as we're witnessing in the British Isles right now -- again feels obliged to make the idea of truth the centrepiece of its current promotion campaign: "No matter how hard it gets, we'll never give up. We'll be watching. We'll be ready. Because it's the pursuit of truth that gives us our calling. The fight for truth is on."

Back then, as more and more of Europe fell to Hitler, "they were broadcasting in the strictest sense of the word, scattering human voices into the darkness of Europe, in the certainty that more than half must be lost, some for the rook, some for the crow, for the sake of a few that made their mark".

Fitzgerald continues, perhaps revealing in the process her motivation for writing: "And everyone who worked there, bitterly complaining about the short-sightedness of their colleagues, the vanity of the news readers, the remoteness of the Controllers and the restrictive nature of the canteen’s one teaspoon, felt a certain pride which they had no way to express, either then or since."

I was particularly interested in the details of the Monitoring Section, on account of my seven-year association with this rarely acknowledged part of the World Service: "The atmosphere of this section was deeply studious. High up in the building, refugee scholars in headphones, quietly clad, disguising their losses, transcribed page after page of Nazi broadcasts in a scholar's shorthand. When they broke for coffee, Beethoven's last quartets were played." One of the monitors, Dr Heinz Vogel, is killed in a bombing raid, "one of the BBC's first casualties".


Fitzgerald, as per the photo in the book

In a letter, Fitzgerald herself summed up the novel like this: "It is really about the love-hate relationship between 2 of the eccentrics on whom the BBC depended, and about love, jealousy, death, childbirth in Broadcasting House and the crises that go on behind the microphone to produce the 9 o’clock news on which the whole nation relied during the war years, heartbreak &c, and also about this truth telling business."

The characters who carry the weighty message of the feather-light plot are fascinating.

Let's start with Sam Brooks, aka RPD (Recorded Programmes Director). He is married, but has little to do with his wife, it seems; he's a perfectionist, married to his calling. His department is known as the Seraglio, "because its Director found that he could work better when surrounded by young women". It's not quite as sleezy as it sounds, but yes, it's definitely suspect: "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." He tells them all that they remind him of a picture he can't quite identify...

Here's an illuminating exchange between a newbie and an old hand:

-- If Mr Brooks says he thinks I'm beautiful, will he mean it?
-- He means everything he says at the time.

Eddie, one of the producers, also muses about RPD: "There was something magnificent after all, in the way he squandered young people and discarded them and looked round absent-mindedly for more. It implied great faith in his own future."

Yet Brooks is technically brilliant, endlessly pursuing aural fidelity, and intent on building arcane aural archives. He is devastated when directives from On High start to emphasize live, rather than recorded, broadcasting.

Jeff Haggard, or DPP (Director of Programme Planning), is in many ways Brooks's minder. Haggard, too, is a veteran of several marriages, and apparently has no fixed abode. There's always a taxi waiting for him after work (a habit that ends up occasioning his death in an explosion). Haggard is astute, intelligent, and debonair. He's the one who pulls the plug when a French general starts urging surrender live on air. He's the one who remarks to an American journalist friend: "We're only really at home in the middle of total disaster... We're mad, and, if we win this war, we're going to be very poor."


Lincoln, where Fitzgerald was born

Annie Asra is employed as one of Brooks's assistants. She doesn't emerge until well into the book, but she becomes the novel's most symbolic character. In terms of judging a human voice, she can't be bettered, as she has perfect pitch. And for her, truth is truth, literal truth. She admonishes a producer: "You talk so daft"; and she tells Brooks that a singer he admires is flat, a comment that completely floors him.

Asra falls in love with her much older and frankly problematic boss, and this is perhaps the only aspect of the plot that I had cause to wonder about. Fitzgerald muses at one point, "Hers must have been the last generation to fall in love without hope in such an unproductive way", and Henry Oliver contextualizes this plot point by noting that Asra is the first in a series of Fitzgerald women characters who conceive a passion for "men with significant failings". With regard to Asra and Brooks, he concludes: "As with so many of her characters, we feel slightly wary of their happiness at the end."

As well we might. Asra's unusual name is in some ways the key to the whole novel -- something that critics, to Fitzgerald's great annoyance, generally missed. She even suggested to A.S. Byatt that she "write something" so that people would get the point...

Which is what? Well, there's a poem by Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) called Der Asra. It's about a young slave who grows paler and paler as he watches the beautiful daughter of the Sultan walking every evening by the fountain with the splashing white water. One evening she asks him for his name and lineage. He replies: "My name is Mohammad; I come from Yemen; and I am from the tribe of Asra, who perish when they love."

In the novel, Adlington points out, neither Asra herself nor anyone else knows the origin of the name: "But Fitzgerald assumes that the reader will know, thereby setting up dramatic irony about Annie’s fate."


Heine

And while we're on the subject of literary allusions, the title, Human Voices, would seem to come from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot, which concludes:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Adlington again: "Eliot reminds us that the world of the imagination, of art and idealism, can only keep us for so long, before reality intrudes and we return tragically to the human realm. Human Voices, then, not only takes us back to the offices and corridors of Broadcasting House in 1940. It also asks profound questions about reality and unreality, what it is to be absorbed in art or idealism, music, sound or love."


Poetry, where Prufrock was first published in 1915

There's yet another literary connection embedded in the text. Haggard also muses on "this truth telling business", as Fitzgerald put it in her letter, through a train of thought about Prospero and Arial, the figures from Shakespeare's The Tempest that had graced the "prow" of Broadcasting House since 1933. The mythology they represent is ambiguous: "Prospero was shown preparing to launch his messenger onto the sound waves of the universe. But who, after all, was Aerial? All he ever asked was to be released from his duties. And when this favoured spirit had flown off, to suck where the bee sucks, and Prospero had returned with all his followers to Italy, the island must have reverted to Caliban. It had been his, after all, in the place. When all was said and done, oughtn't he to preside over the BBC? Ariel, it was true, had produced music, but it was Caliban who listened to it, even in his dreams. And Caliban... never told anything but the truth, presumably not knowing how to. Ariel, on the other hand, was a liar, pretending that someone's father was drowned full fathom five, when in point of fact he was safe and well. All this was so that virtue should prevail. The old excuse."

In all, this was another little Fitzgerald jewel, gossamer in consistency, iron in impact. As A.S. Byatt says, "Penelope Fitzgerald writes discreet, brief, perfect tales..." I intend to read more of them.