Part of the unwritten contract between authors and their readers is that we agree to suspend our scepticism for the duration of the novel. We know we are being told a story, that the events described didn’t ‘really’ happen and the characters never lived, but nevertheless we put our disbelief to the backs of our minds and go along with the idea that they did. In return the novelist will either take us somewhere we could never go in real life – to the Moon and Back, to the Centre of the Earth – or will portray a realistic scene that could, in theory, have happened. Realistic novels depend on a degree of authenticity. They don’t need to be hyper-real; we don’t really care if some of the fine detail of the recreation doesn’t stand up to academic scrutiny or for minor historical inaccuracies. The test is does it feel real. In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf discusses this issue, using the term ‘integrity’ to describe this aspect of writing:

‘What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. ..It is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition, which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible.’

Readers will have their own standards and criteria for deciding which authors achieve this standard, who have the ability to reveal to us the truth. But the opening paragraph of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels struck me as being particularly inauthentic, and I thought it might be useful to examine why. Inauthenticity in a realistic novel, when there is no suggestion that the author is deliberately breaking the literary equivalent of the fourth wall (for comic effect, for example, or to emphasise that this is, after all, just fiction) is for me a cardinal sin.

The Gate of Angels opens with this vivid, comedic description of a storm:

“How could the wind be so strong, so far inland, that cyclists coming into the town in the late afternoon looked more like sailors in peril? This was on the way into Cambridge, up Mill Road past the cemetery and the workhouse. On the open ground to the left the willow-trees had been blown, driven and cracked until their branches gave way and lay about the drenched grass, jerking convulsively and trailing cataracts of twigs. The cows had gone mad, tossing up the silvery weeping leaves which were suddenly, quite contrary to all their experience, everywhere within reach. Their horns were festooned with willow boughs. Not being able to see properly, they tripped and fell. Two or three of them were wallowing on their backs, idiotically, exhibiting vast pale bellies intended by nature to be always hidden. They were still munching. A scene of disorder, tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason.”

How, one might also ask, could an author get an opening paragraph so badly wrong, so profoundly inauthentic?

This paragraph is often quoted by reviewers, cited as either an example of Fitzgerald’s powers of descriptive writing, or her comedic genius, sometimes both. One online review describes it “as compressed as poetry—and funny, too”. But when I read it I was struck by its dishonesty, the obvious way that it has been constructed to make a fairly clumsy point.

In her biography of Fitzgerald, Hermione Lee claims that Fitzgerald’s inspiration for the opening of the novel came when she saw “through a Cambridge bus window some cows in ecstasy over willow branches that had been broken off by strong winds; she viewed this as an instance of reason giving way to imagination in ‘this orderly University city”. Ah yes, the good old struggle between reason and imagination. I have my doubts. There’s no question that the author is trying to contrast here the wild disordered weather with the serenity of the university, introducing the broader themes running through the novel of the opposition between reason and imagination, science and faith, and so on – strong, traditional themes no doubt, if laid on a bit thick. She is also trying to engage our attention, so we keep reading (not unreasonably) and entertain – the scene is deliberately comic and absurd. But the paragraph is so full of implausibilities and false similes that the point is completely undermined. Instead of contemplating how ridiculous academics can be when blown off course by the powers of imagination, I for one had a far less constructive reaction.

For a start, if the storm is sufficiently strong to blow branches off willow trees, the chances of any cyclists venturing out and about, let alone riding three abreast as they do in a paragraph or two, would be slim. Am I being too serious, too literal here? The simile comparing these distressed cyclists to sailors in peril is I would guess intended to conjure thoughts of the Tempest or Twelfth Night. But it doesn’t really work. Cyclists are not at all like sailors. Can you honestly say when you read that line you had a mental image of a storm-tossed ship? Using metaphor to describe something that is nothing like the thing being described can be effective – the evening in Eliot’s Prufrock is not literally “spread out against the sky, Like a patient etherized upon a table” but we know what he means. But Fitzgerald isn’t T S Eliot. and this comparison just invites the comment “Well they wouldn’t, would they?”.

And then there are these mysterious horned cows and their strange behaviour. Cows can have horns of course. But in a storm would horned cows really toss broken-off branches into the air? The author suggests it is because the leaves (not the branches?) are “everywhere within reach…quite contrary to all their experience”. Now I am not sure if the author ever spent a moment looking at a willow tree, but their predominant feature is their “aspect” whereby their branches brush the ground – often cited as the origin of the “weeping” adjective. But the author needs some explanation for the cows’ behaviour, and this will do as good as any.

But there’s more. Because these disorientated cows get the branches stuck in their horns (somehow). The branches then obstruct their view, and not being able to see properly they trip and fall. Of course they do. The fallen cows then lie there munching idiotically, unable to get up. This is surely a case of an image being asked to do too much work. I suspect what happened here is that the author thought she needed an image of futility and stupidity. Cows with their legs in the air, stilling munching away, will do the job? But how to get the cows on their back? I know, they have tripped over, because they have got branches in their horns which blinded them. Which requires a tree and fallen branches. So working backwards you arrive at the image, rather than the image inspiring the idea.

At which point the author had lost my trust. I had been shown behind the facade to see the author typing away, constructing a laboured image to make a point, all realism and authenticity, all integrity, left behind. The question I was left with was this – was this deliberate? Did the author consciously create an implausible scene of cows and willows to remind the reader that they are reading a novel, an artificial construct in which neither the cows nor the willows, or anything else actually exist? I don’t think so – setting the novel is a real street in a real city, with characters who meet and talk about real historical people suggests otherwise. The author goes to great length to place her narrative in a realistic setting with believable characters. So we are left with what – just clumsy writing? Or worse, dishonest, inauthentic writing? I’m still not sure.

Supplemental: Authenticity in literature with reference to Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels