Two Figures by a Fountain
Two Figures by a Fountain is the novella Briony Tallis writes as a thirteen-year-old in 1935, based on the scene she witnesses at the Triton fountain between Cecilia Tallis and Robbie Turner. The work marks her transition from fairy tales and moralistic drama to an attempt at impartial psychological realism, and its rejection by Cyril Connolly at Horizon magazine in 1940 forces her to confront the evasions in her writing and her life. Decades later, the novella becomes the seed of her final novel, Atonement, in which she rewrites the ending to give the lovers a happy reunion.
Composition and Ambition
Briony writes the novella in the immediate aftermath of the fountain scene, which she observes from the nursery window on the morning of 1 June 1935. She sees Cecilia strip to her underwear, climb into the fountain, and emerge with pieces of the broken Meissen vase, while Robbie Turner looks on. The episode strikes Briony as illogical and charged with adult mystery, and she senses she could write it three times over, from three points of view, without judging any of the participants as good or bad. She imagines herself hurrying to her bedroom with a clean block of lined paper and her marbled Bakelite fountain pen, seeing the simple sentences unfurling at the nib's end. The excitement lies in the prospect of freedom from the cumbrous struggle between heroes and villains, and in showing separate minds as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds are equally alive. She believes that only in a story can one enter different minds and demonstrate their equal value, and that this is the only moral a story need have. Six decades later, she will describe how at thirteen she wrote her way through a whole history of literature, from folktales through drama to an impartial psychological realism she discovered for herself one special morning during a heat wave in 1935. She is well aware of the extent of her self-mythologizing and gives her account a self-mocking, mock-heroic tone, knowing that it is not the long-ago morning she is recalling so much as her subsequent accounts of it.
The Rejection by Horizon
In the spring of 1940, while training as a probationer nurse at St. Thomas's Hospital, Briony sends the completed typescript of Two Figures by a Fountain to Horizon magazine. She has typed it out with her forefingers during a week in Primrose Hill, borrowing her uncle's typewriter and working more than eight hours a day until her back and neck ache. The finished pile runs to one hundred and three pages. She wraps it in brown paper, takes the bus to Bloomsbury, and delivers it to the office in Lansdowne Terrace. Three months later, she receives a rejection letter signed by Cyril Connolly. The letter is unusually long—Connolly notes that their letters of rejection are usually no more than three sentences—and it is both encouraging and devastating. Connolly praises some good images, singling out "the long grass stalked by the leonine yellow of high summer," and acknowledges that the novella captures a flow of thought and makes attempts at characterization. But he criticizes the work for owing too much to the techniques of Virginia Woolf, for lacking a sense of forward movement, and for having no underlying pull of simple narrative. He suggests that the child at the window whose account is read first—her fundamental lack of grasp of the situation—is nicely caught, but that nothing much happens after a beginning that has such promise. He asks whether the girl might come between the two adults in some disastrous fashion, or bring them closer, and whether the young couple might use her as a messenger. He advises Briony to create some tension, some light and shade within the narrative itself, and reminds her that even sophisticated readers retain a childlike desire to be told a story and to know what happens. He also notes that Elizabeth Bowen, who read the typescript, initially found the prose "too full, too cloying" but was then "hooked for a while." Connolly ends by inviting Briony to submit short stories and to visit the office for a glass of wine.
Self-Confrontation and Atonement
The rejection letter forces Briony to recognize the evasions in her writing. She comes to see that the interminable pages about light and stone and water, the narrative split between three points of view, the hovering stillness of nothing much seeming to happen—none of this can conceal her cowardice. She realizes that the evasions of her little novel are exactly those of her life: everything she does not wish to confront is also missing from the novella and is necessary to it. What she lacks is not the backbone of a story but backbone itself. The letter arrives on the same day that the first casualties from Dunkirk are admitted to the hospital, and Briony spends the night working among the wounded, an experience that deepens her understanding of suffering and responsibility. The novella thus becomes the seed of her lifelong project of atonement. Over the next fifty-nine years, she writes half a dozen different drafts, each one pitiless until the final version, in which she lets the lovers survive and flourish. She knows that as a novelist she has absolute power over outcomes, and that there is no one outside herself to forgive her. The attempt, she concludes, was all. The final draft, completed in March 1999, is the novel Atonement itself, in which Two Figures by a Fountain is transformed from a static psychological study into a narrative that confronts the crime, the war, and the possibility of redemption.
