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    Human Voices
    Human Voices
    Human Voices
    Ebook183 pages3 hours

    Human Voices

    By Penelope Fitzgerald

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    From the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’, ‘The Blue Flower’ and ‘Innocence’, this is a funny, touching, authentic story of life at Broadcasting House during the Blitz.

    The human voices of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel are those of the BBC in the first years of the World War II, the time when the Concert Hall was turned into a dormitory for both sexes, the whole building became a target for enemy bombers, and in the BBC – as elsewhere – some had to fail and some had to die.

    It does not pretend to be an accurate history of Broadcasting House in those years, but ‘one is left with the sensation’, as William Boyd said, reviewing it in the ‘London Magazine’, ‘that this is what it was really like.’

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateMar 7, 2013
    ISBN9780007373819
    Human Voices
    Author

    Penelope Fitzgerald

    Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most distinctive voices in British literature. The prize-winning author of nine novels, three biographies and one collection of short stories, she died in 2000.

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    Reviews for Human Voices

    3.5/5

    128 ratings10 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I didn't really get this book, I didn't particularly enjoy it and I am just glad it was only brief.
    • 3/5
      Fitzgerald’s trademark well-written prose: measured, concise, lucid, and a little arch. The BBC, in its hulking Portland Place bulwark, takes on the challenges of War. Not yet 2 decades old, in 1940, it is already permeated with institutional habits and precepts, venerating its “Old Servants”, tolerating their inefficiencies and egos, quirks and fetishes, promoting them out of harm’s way. Admirably and surprisingly, for the author, it develops and maintains an unshakable self-belief in the ethos of chronicling and disseminating the world as it truly is. Young and callow folk, perhaps like Fitzgerald herself who worked at the BBC during the war years, interact with the Old Servants and the Blitz, the military and defence services: the ordeal of war is also opportunity, a coming of age in their work and personal lives.
    • 1/5
      Human voices is apparently based on the author's own war-time experiences working at Broadcasting House for the BBC Radio. Unfortunately, the novella is largely, merely descriptive, describing a rather boring set of people who are mostly not very interesting. A very tisesome and boring read.
    • 4/5
      My first read by Penelope Fitzgerald. I found her story of wartime BBC behind the scenes surprisingly poignant and very well-written. Annie's character was utterly fascinating in an understated way that intrigued me with every scene she was in. The ending just about broke my heart. I'm looking forward to reading more of Fitzgerald's works now.
    • 3/5
      I loved the ingredients of this story - Penelope Fitzgerald's style and wit, the glimpse into the past of both London during the Second World War and the BBC, the character vignettes - but unfortunately the novel as a whole failed to come together for me. Two ridiculous men, whose job titles are a jumble of letters, and the underlings who serve them at Broadcasting House (beautifully described as looking like an ocean liner with the wrong kind of windows) navigate a range of national and personal obstacles ('We're only really at home in the middle of total disaster'). Other than that, I'm not sure there is a plot, and the final twist in the tale is just pointlessly cruel. However, I will not be put off reading more of Penelope Fitzgerald's stories because of this non-starter.
    • 4/5
      "Human Voices" isn't a long book, and it's not a particularly difficult read. Still, I read it twice before writing this review. It is, much like its setting -- the BBC's Broadcast House during the Second World War -- an oddly self-contained and emotionally restrained novel. It's also a good one, and I'm a little surprised that less than five hundred readers have it in their libraries. Its concerns range from the BBC's arcane bureaucratic structure during this period -- which seems to have been dictated as much by tradition as much as by organizational charts -- to the nature of love and friendship. Fitzgerald uses her characters here to ask what it means to love somebody whose particulars you despise. And it's beautifully written. As is startling common in Fitzgerald's novels, there are sections that last just a few pages but describe her characters so perfectly you might as well have read an entire novel about their experiences. Her writing is, as usual, rich, dense, and marvelously accurate. More specifically, her description of how one of her characters, a certain Annie, grew up with her father, a piano tuner, and made her way to the BBC is particularly good, the sort of thing you could use as an example of what really good writing is.

      But mostly, "Human Voices" is about the importance of telling the truth, which, according to the author, who worked at the BBC during this period, the Beeb committed it to doing, as much as it could. And it's also about getting the job done: this book makes you understand how aware Britons were during the Second World War of how precarious their survival was, and how doing any job took an enormous amount of mental fortitude. It's a good description of what George Orwell called "writing inside the whale," working under conditions so dangerous as to be unimaginable, yet still managing, somehow, carry on. There are some lighthearted bits in "Human Voices," but most of it is, understandably, suffused with dread. Weeks seem to last months, and months years. Characters float in and out of the story, die suddenly, and undergo huge life changes in just a few paragraphs. "Human Voices" characters know that they are living in momentous times, and, by and large, act accordingly. Many of them have flaws, but, by the time I finished this one for the second time, I had found a lot to admire about just about all of them. Recommended.
    • 3/5
      During the 1980s, Penelope Fitzgerald became a (or should that be ‘an’?) habituée of the Booker Prize shortlist, after having won with her third novel, Offshore, in 1979. She was, however, rather a late starter when it came to novels, waiting until nearly the age of sixty before publishing her first book. She had, however, had a long literary career, editing the magazine World Review along with her husband during the 1950s, and through it being responsible for the initial publication of several significant works, including J D Salinger’s collection For Esme, With Love and Squalor. Prior to that, she had worked for the BBC during the Second World War.

      This novel draws upon her wartime experiences at Broadcasting House, which she portrays in a loving, though far from hagiographical, way. In this novel, set in 1940, just after Churchill’s accession to Downing Street, truth was paramount, and the Beeb strove to render as impartial an account as possible of the progress of the war. Of course, for the overwhelming majority of the country, the BBC meant radio in those days, television being very much a minority interest.

      While its campaign to retain independence from governmental influence was being maintained, it was also riven by internal strife, between the Department for Recorded Programmes and the Directorate of Programme Planning, responsible for live broadcasts. Sam Brooks, the head of the former, is a dreamer, forever seeking to capture the essence of Englishness through recordings of everyday activity (perhaps not too dissimilar from the segments of ‘Slow Radio’ that have become so integral to Radio 4’s Broadcasting House programme on Sunday mornings), while his live broadcast counterpart, Jeffery Haggard, is eager to have every news bulletin, and any political speeches, delivered live across the air.

      Fitzgerald indulges in some gentle and entertaining satire, such as when the ageing French General Pinard, having freshly escaped from the German Occupation back home, is invited to address the country. His speech goes off at a wholly unexpected tangent before he succumbs, almost fortuitously, to what proves to be a fatal coughing fit.

      It is, however, principally a novel about individuals, and their relationships, and Fitzgerald deftly captures the friendships, interdependencies and petty jealousies of people from different backgrounds forced to work together in often uncomfortable proximity. Reflecting its time, all of the women fulfil sadly subservient roles within the BBC, although they emerge as by far the stronger characters. How different might the story have been if there had been a Carrie Gracie on hand to galvanise their spirits.
    • 4/5
      Set amidst the arcane workings of the BBC at its Broadcasting House headquarters in central London during the darkest days of WWII, Human Voices follows the passions and whimsy of senior staff and junior staff as they struggle to make themselves heard in a world turned on its edge. Fitzgerald’s BBC emerges from her direct experience at the time, but even thirty or sixty years after the events depicted, much of the aura of the BBC remains. The Corporation, as it is sometimes called, is like a hulking vessel being manoeuvred by minuscule human tugboats. Yet somehow, as Fitzgerald makes clear, it really is individuals, real live human beings who make this beloved institution function. And perhaps that is why so many of us are committed to it despite its faults.

      At times the writing is brilliantly funny. At times it is incredibly atmospheric, almost as chaotic as the myriad of storylines and interests racing through the city at that time. But it is the characters, or rather the characters with Character that make this story come to life. Fitzgerald abjures caricature. The characters, however peculiar they might appear, are entirely recognisable British figures. That she can make us care for them is a remarkable testament to her skill. And while the madcap nature of some of the events links this novel back to her first hilarious effort with The Golden Child, the studied intelligence of the presentation of an entire complex, even byzantine, structure points towards Fitzgerald’s late great novels.

      Pleasantly recommended.
    • 4/5
      This is a really unusual little book. Takes a chapter or two to get into the groove of the gentle and clever humour. Whilst its wildly different in themes to another of her books (Blue Flower); there is a similar approach to the treatment of characters ... you don't really get to know them, beyond their contribution at specific events.
    • 4/5
      Human Voices tells a story of the going-ons in BBC during World War II. The war is tragic, yes, but Fitzgerald takes on a comic narration. What else is there left when we can only laugh at our pain? There are many beautiful lines in this book like "Annie fell in love with RPD absolutely and hers must have been the last generation to fall in love without hope in such an unproductive way" (96) and "The BBC is doing gits bit. We put out the truth, but only contingent truth, Annie! The opposite could also be true! We are told that German pilots have been brought down in Croydon and turned out to know the way to the post-office, that Hitler has declared that he only needs three fine days to defeat Great Britain, and that there is an excellent blackberry crop and therefore it is our patriotic duty to make jam. But all this need not have been true, Annie! If the summer had not been fine, there might have been no blackberries" (102). Despite the beautiful prose like poetry, most people dislike the book because they don't get her but even if you do, I have to admit Fitzgerald's brilliance shines through but not always.

    Book preview

    Human Voices - Penelope Fitzgerald

    Preface by Hermione Lee, Advisory Editor

    When Penelope Fitzgerald unexpectedly won the Booker Prize with Offshore, in 1979, at the age of sixty-three, she said to her friends: ‘I knew I was an outsider.’ The people she wrote about in her novels and biographies were outsiders, too: misfits, romantic artists, hopeful failures, misunderstood lovers, orphans and oddities. She was drawn to unsettled characters who lived on the edges. She wrote about the vulnerable and the unprivileged, children, women trying to cope on their own, gentle, muddled, unsuccessful men. Her view of the world was that it divided into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’. She would say: ‘I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost.’ She was a humorous writer with a tragic sense of life.

    Outsiders in literature were close to her heart, too. She was fond of underrated, idiosyncratic writers with distinctive voices, like the novelist J. L. Carr, or Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, or the remarkable and tragic poet Charlotte Mew. The publisher Virago’s enterprise of bringing neglected women writers back to life appealed to her, and under their imprint she championed the nineteenth-century novelist Margaret Oliphant. She enjoyed eccentrics like Stevie Smith. She liked writers, and people, who stood at an odd angle to the world. The child of an unusual, literary, middle-class English family, she inherited the Evangelical principles of her bishop grandfathers and the qualities of her Knox father and uncles: integrity, austerity, understatement, brilliance and a laconic, wry sense of humour.

    She did not expect success, though she knew her own worth. Her writing career was not a usual one. She began publishing late in her life, around sixty, and in twenty years she published nine novels, three biographies and many essays and reviews. She changed publisher four times when she started publishing, before settling with Collins, and she never had an agent to look after her interests, though her publishers mostly became her friends and advocates. She was a dark horse, whose Booker Prize, with her third novel, was a surprise to everyone. But, by the end of her life, she had been short-listed for it several times, had won a number of other British prizes, was a well-known figure on the literary scene, and became famous, at eighty, with the publication of The Blue Flower and its winning, in the United States, the National Book Critics Circle Award.

    Yet she always had a quiet reputation. She was a novelist with a passionate following of careful readers, not a big name. She wrote compact, subtle novels. They are funny, but they are also dark. They are eloquent and clear, but also elusive and indirect. They leave a great deal unsaid. Whether she was drawing on the experiences of her own life – working for the BBC in the Blitz, helping to make a go of a small-town Suffolk bookshop, living on a leaky barge on the Thames in the 1960s, teaching children at a stage-school – or, in her last four great novels, going back in time and sometimes out of England to historical periods which she evoked with astonishing authenticity – she created whole worlds with striking economy. Her books inhabit a small space, but seem, magically, to reach out beyond it.

    After her death at eighty-three, in 2000, there might have been a danger of this extraordinary voice fading away into silence and neglect. But she has been kept from oblivion by her executors and her admirers. The posthumous publication of her stories, essays and letters is now being followed by a biography (Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee, Chatto & Windus, 2013), and by these very welcome reissues of her work. The fine writers who have done introductions to these new editions show what a distinguished following she has. I hope that many new readers will now discover, and fall in love with, the work of one of the most spellbinding English novelists of the twentieth century.

    Introduction

    Penelope Fitzgerald, brilliant Oxford student and already a clever if unpublished writer, was employed as a BBC features producer at the end of 1940 – the year in which Human Voices is set. She may not have been at the bottom of the pile but neither was she part of an elite graduate corps that the BBC brilliantly recruited and exploited in the last decades of the century.

    In 1940 Fitzgerald could hardly have expected anything senior or with real prospects. The BBC had not yet discovered the merits of young female talent. As with almost all areas of public life, it was controlled entirely by men who largely required women to make the tea, do the typing and scurry through its corridors to store, retrieve and organise the material that would ensure the BBC could provide truthful information and a bit of light relief to a nation enduring the impact of the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the military collapse of its closest ally, France.

    If Fitzgerald’s contribution to the BBC’s war effort was marginal she at least had a ringside seat while its mandarins, then as now laden with acronyms, established its reputation as an independent, if imperfect, force for the good by telling the truth – or at least large chunks of it. The BBC had not done nearly as well during the General Strike of 1926, when its first director general, Lord Reith, much preferred the idea of buttressing the government, over any idea of the BBC as a trusted source of information. When Human Voices was published in 1980, at the beginning of the Thatcher era, the BBC still drew much strength and credibility, both at home and abroad, from its performance in World War Two.

    Fitzgerald’s view of the wartime BBC is unsparing, but her respect for its achievement is palpable throughout. Her summary of its public service credo may have been a response to the specific events of 1940 but has never been bettered in any subsequent crisis by any historian at any point in the BBC’s history:

    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.

    Her two central male characters, Sam Brooks and Jeff Haggard, are flawed broadcasting heroes. Brooks is head of Recorded Programmes, Haggard the director of Programme Planning. Their professional interests at the BBC are not aligned. Brooks is forever frustrated by having to cede airtime and resources to the needs of live broadcasting, Haggard’s domain. But they share a profound sense of duty: detached and understated in Haggard’s case, obsessive and narcissistic in Brooks’. They also share a pronounced disregard for the pettifogging, very senior managers who get in their way and for any government or military interest bent on turning the BBC into a more conventional state broadcaster. They never talk about the BBC’s independence – the first word the BBC normally uses to defend itself against outside pressure – they simply practise it.

    The relationship between these two men, each with largely unexplored marital difficulties, gives the novel much of its shape. They do not go in for verbal intimacy, nor do they have time to socialise and, unlike others in the building, they don’t drink much.

    Brooks is attractive, apparently oblivious to the interests of the women who work for him (his ‘seraglio’) and constantly complains, angrily and wittily about those who do not recognise the importance of his work. Haggard is laconic, understated and frequently called in to support his needy and vulnerable friend. He does so with almost terminal reluctance.

    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

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