ABSTRACT
As for Ford’s earlier novel with its now sacrosanct opening line, I grant that “saddest” and “ever” might, in the instance of the Fitzgerald novel, be a bit too absolute, but The Bookshop is, in fact, a story steeped in sadness, a
sadness punctuated by the novel’s closing defeat: the protagonist, the widowed Florence Green, who, funded by her late husband’s small legacy, has sought to open and maintain a reputable bookshop in the Suffolk coastal town of Hardborough (modeled upon Southwold, where Fitzgerald herself lived for a time, also finding occupation in a haunted bookshop), only to be met by flinty indifference that, in turn, makes space for a marked hostility emanating from the town’s self-appointed patroness, Violet Gamart. As Raven, a farmer and church sexton, tells Florence at the onset, the townspeople have “‘lost the wish for anything of rarity,’” thus making the prospect of a bookshop a likely bad wager (12). But Raven also acknowledges her courage-“‘I know you don’t frighten’”—a trait needed at the moment, for he has asked her, in the Council field through which she had been walking, to grab hold of an aging gelding’s tongue while he files its teeth (11). It is a singular image-“Florence seized with both hands the large slippery dark tongue, smooth above, rough beneath, and, like an old-time whaler, hung gamely on to it to lift it clear of the teeth” (11)—in a first chapter that begins with a remarkable, predatory image of a flying heron seeking to swallow an eel seized upon in the estuary beneath them:
She had once seen a heron flying across the estuary and trying, while it was on the wing, to swallow an eel which it had caught. The eel, in turn, was struggling to escape from the gullet of the heron and appeared a quarter, a half, or occasionally three-quarters of the way out. The indecision expressed by both creatures was pitiable. They had taken on too much. (5)
As if borrowed from the sphere of sleep’s hauntings,2 the image, Darwinian and predacious, will be recalled more than once, and it sets up, right at the start, the theme of survival-and the challenges that make survival, especially for the less fit and self-assertive, a chancy matter. The novel, naturally, focuses most upon Florence’s challenges, and as she, courage aside, is “small, wispy and wiry, [and] somewhat insignificant from the front view, and totally from the back” (5), these chances do not appear very good, especially as her “kind heart” comes across as a liability:
She had a kind heart, though that is not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation. For more than eight years of half a lifetime she had lived at Hardborough on the very small amount of money her late husband had left her and had recently come to wonder whether she hadn’t a duty to make it clear to herself, and possibly to others, that she existed in her own right. Survival was often considered all that could be asked in the cold and clear East Anglian air. Kill or cure, the inhabitants thought-either a long old age, or immediate consignment to the salty turf of the churchyard. (5)
There is a trace of self-pity here, for Fitzgerald, however mindful of those forces that make survival difficult, should never willingly see kindness, reflective of a spiritual grace, reshape itself to do nature’s bidding,
even as the belief in the source of this grace is put to the test. Still, Fitzgerald’s Florence does have courage. The narrator tells us that “courage and endurance are useless if they are never tested” (15), and tested they will find themselves. Like Fitzgerald herself, who in a 1973 self-admonishing letter to her daughter Maria writes, “One must justify one’s existence” (L 127), Florence evinces determination without predicating it upon self-deception-“Florence did not deceive herself about her own importance” (17)—and yet does find support in convictions (religious in essence) that remain secure even as the times, and her own passing age, appear to corrode this resolve. For one, the novel opens in the summer of 1959, and Florence, who has been “self-supporting” since “the age of sixteen,” finds the bank manager, Mr. Keble, taunting her to recall just how “‘little understanding’” both he and she possess “‘of the vastly different world which the 1960s may have in store for us’” (7). This taunt also unintentionally comes, with a child’s honesty, from Christine Gipping,3 the ten-year old girl whom Florence has hired to lend a hand after school. On first meeting, the girl sharply addresses the matter of her employer’s fragile appearance: “‘You look old, but you don’t look strong’” (46). And although Florence’s physical stamina finds itself called into question even by herself-“I need help […] it was folly to think that I could manage this all by myself” (45)—her moral or spiritual resolves remains quite strong. It may appear a simple ethos, that is until one is required to put it into practice, but Florence is steadfast in her conviction “that character was a struggle between good and bad intentions” (55). Her observations respecting Milo North, a youngish, handsome Hardborough man, employed in London by BBC television (though to do what is unclear), puts the articulation into her head, and he is more than ready to let others mistake manners-not much more, in effect, than class polish and physical handsomeness-for character. As the narrator comments,
What seemed delicacy in him was usually a way of avoiding trouble; what seemed like sympathy was the instinct to prevent trouble before it started. It was hard to see what growing older would mean to such a person. His emotions, from lack of exercise, had disappeared almost altogether. Adaptability and curiosity, he had found, did just as well. (18-19)
Though they are opposites, Florence and Milo befriend one another, more or less, the less becoming most manifest toward the end of the novel when Milo betrays Florence in such a way that makes inescapable the conviction that for him “‘the easiest thing to do’” (110) is, in essence, the only thing to do, he showing little willingness to conceive of human action in the light of an ethical imperative. Yet, before this final betrayal, they do find themselves drawn to one another. For Florence, Milo’s youthful urbanity recalls her own youth, when as a young woman in the 1930s and 1940s, she worked for the London bookseller Müller’s, in Wigmore Street, where she met her
husband Charlie Green, “the poetry buyer” (6). It was a time of camaraderie, of the sort that youth makes possible but that gives way to time and distance, as Florence becomes painfully aware:
It was on occasions like this that she particularly missed the good friends of her early days at Müller’s. When she had come in and taken off her suede glove to show her engagement ring, a diamond chip, there had been a hearteningly long list of names on the subscription list for her present, and it was almost the same list when Charlie had died of pneumonia in an improvised reception camp at the beginning of the war. Nearly all the girls in Mailing, Despatch and Counter Staff had lost touch; and even when she had their addresses, she found herself unwilling to admit that they had grown as old as she had. (14)
This unwillingness on Florence’s part to concede that her peers have also aged betrays a touch of vanity, for the refusal reflects a personal (albeit an altogether familiar) desire not “to have years told.”4 It is to the younger man alone that Florence shares the emotion that she harbors for both her husband-“‘I was very happily married, since you ask’” (19)—and the past, even as she lets slip an acknowledgment that complicates this past happiness: “‘I loved him, and I tried to understand his work. It sometimes strikes me that men and women aren’t quite the right people for each other’” (19). One hears a note of ambivalence here, the sort that Freud, in Mourning and Melancholia, identifies with the loss of a loved one whose death “constitutes an excellent opportunity for the ambivalence in love-relationships to make itself felt and come to the fore” (161). Later, Milo, no stranger to ambivalence, will confide to Florence that his partner Kattie has left him for someone else, at which point we are told, again in somewhat paradigmatic Freudian fashion,5 that “Florence was quite fond of him” (96).
