Grey and without Interest

Brookner's first novel, A Start in Life, was nearly turned down by the publisher Jonathan Cape, who received from a reader a very negative report. Her characters were apparently 'grey' and 'without interest'. Fortunately Liz Calder worked at the house and took a look at the manuscript. She read the novel's now-famous opening sentence, 'Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature', and realised she was in the presence of greatness. Calder and Cape went on to publish many of Brookner's novels.

An intriguing anecdote, which I found by chance. I was browsing the Brookner signed novels on the Internet bookstore sites, and came across several editions with a note by Calder in which she described her association with the author. I've no idea why Calder wrote the note, but we can be grateful that she did.

The Ratner Word

There was always something facile, even hysterical, about these [early] reviews (I should know; I wrote one). The annual Brookner offered a cheap shot to young critics, eager to savage a scandalous bearer of bad tidings about ageing and loneliness. Yet now she agrees with those snapping puppies. 'I hate those early novels. I think they're crap. Maybe I needed to write them. I far prefer what I'm doing now.' Yes, she does use the Ratner* word. It's like hearing a duchess cuss. Why are they crap? 'They're morbid, they're introspective and they lead to no revelations.' Has she a favourite among her works? 'I don't like any of them very much.'

Boyd Tonkin, Independent interview, 2002

Elsewhere Brookner said she wrote only a first draft. There were no revisions. There just wasn't time.

There just wasn't time. This is significant. She came late to fiction. She was fifty-three when A Start in Life was published. Had she started earlier, might she have considered a wider kind of revisionism - something of the kind undertaken by Henry James, who, in the last years of his career, took on the punishing task of revising and republishing the bulk of his output? It was indeed onerous - it made him ill - and the New York Edition didn't sell well. There are stories of remaindered copies being used for waste paper, or kindling, or something (my memory's vague), during the Great War.

James was a born writer, like Edith Wharton (Brookner calls her that in her Introduction to Wharton's short stories), and Brookner probably wasn't. It seems only born writers, writers who start alarmingly young, are likely to play the revising game. Brookner was content to write off chunks of her early work, but she wouldn't have considered rewriting it. She still had work to do. There just wasn't time.

Revisions, anyhow, can be disastrous. I won't hear a word against James, early, mid or late, original or revised - but I would like to consider a poem by W. H. Auden, 'Brussels in Winter', which exists in two versions:

Wandering the cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains silent in the frost,
The city still escapes you, it has lost
The qualities that say ‘I am a Thing.’

Only the homeless and the really humbled
Seem to be sure exactly where they are,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like the Opera.

Ridges of rich apartments rise tonight
Where isolated windows glow like farms:
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn the stranger right
To warm the heartless city in his arms.

(1938)

Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.

Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.

Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.

(1966)

What is lost? Some conversational idiosyncrasy, I think. Some immediacy. But clarity is gained. 1960s Auden wants to be clear; he wants to avoid what he calls in the Foreword to his Collected Shorter Poems 'slovenly verbal habits'.

Had Brookner revised her early novels she might perhaps have eliminated one or two minor inelegances. Issues with tone in A Start in Life. Clumsy shifts in point of view in Lewis Percy. But at what cost?

*

*Gerald Ratner ran a British High Street jewellery chain. In 1991 he made an ill-advised speech in which he described his goods as 'crap', this being what he saw as the secret of his success. The comment wasn't well received, to say the least.

Second Act

I greatly enjoyed this week Rumaan Alam's appreciation of Brookner in the New York Times (here) and the Mookse and the Gripes' relaunched podcast, which focuses on Brookner's first four novels (here). Both make insightful reference to what Alam calls Brookner's life's 'remarkable second act', that period from 1981 when, in her fifties, she suddenly began writing fiction: the floodgates, as she said, were open. It gives hope to us all.

Euro Brookner

Brookner is making waves in Spain at the moment. An article in today's El Mundo (here), 'Anita Brookner, Style and Loneliness', marks the publication of a translation of her first novel A Start in Life. The article speaks of Brookner as one of the finest British and European novelists of the twentieth century. The translation itself is introduced by a Julian Barnes essay, which seems to be the one he wrote for the Guardian in 2016 (here).

El Mundo complains that Brookner has been absent since the 90s from Spanish publication schedules. A similar situation obtains, I think, in France. I recall many happy long-ago evenings browsing yellow-canopied Left Bank bookstores for Brookner translations, and finding lots. L'automne de M. Bland was one title I managed delightedly to decipher. But more recently - nothing. One hopes the Spanish will lead the way.

Providence: Rien ne vaut la France

It doesn't yet feel like mature Brookner, but in Providence you do get the sense of an author finding her feet. The middle stretches are of interest: Brookner seems to proceed through indirection, sending Kitty Maule to a clairvoyant; to a colleague's cottage in Gloucestershire; on an outing with her grandparents; and to Paris. But the focus on the heroine and on the main plot is tighter than in A Start in Life, and this is an advance. The tone, accordingly, is more consistent. There is still humour - the schoolgirls and their teacher in Paris, for example - but it's better integrated and less distracting. The pace is, however, slack. It works in Trollope, this lessening of the tempo in the middle, but readers often need a breather in the course of a long Victorian tome. In a novel as short and slight as Providence the reader may feel uncertain as to where the story is going, may even suspect the writer of not really having a story to tell.

But the Paris scenes ('Rien ne vaut la France') are fresh and full of incident and authenticity. I well remember travelling there as a youngster myself: the ferry crossing, that cafeteria in the rue de Rivoli. Later Maurice arrives, secure and complacent in his faith. He proves a disruptive, alienating presence. He somehow, for all his Englishness, manages to appropriate France, a country Kitty might have thought of as her own.

Brookner Interview Discoveries #1: Finding the Art of Fiction

Regular visitors to this blog will know of my devotion to Anita Brookner's interviews. Five are available on the web - the Paris Review interview, the 1990s Independent interview, and three from the 2000s (the Observer, the Independent again, and the last interview in 2009 in the Telegraph). In printed form there are the Olga Kenyon and the John Haffenden interviews, both from the 1980s. The Haffenden exchange remains to my mind the best Anita Brookner interview.

You will conceive of my delight at discovering several fresh interviews on the Guardian/Observer archive website. I propose to cover these over the coming days.

We start with a piece in the Guardian on 27 May 1981, 'Finding the art of fiction', published to coincide with the publication of Brookner's first novel A Start in Life.

As well as giving in remarkably finished form her later familiar responses to questions about her motivations for writing ('Socially she has always had the sensation of being invisible') and her love of Dickens and 'her idol' Stendhal, Brookner also speaks at some length about the art criticism for which she was then best known: David, Delacroix, Ingres, Greuze. For her study of the latter, she 'had to visit almost every French provincial city, usually in the dead of winter. I was young, I thought the discomfort exhilarating'. Her parents, we learn, were against the expedition. The interviewer writes:

They were sure she would be recruited into prostitution. Had she told them very few academics are? 'No such luck,' she replies.

Brookner speaks further of her mother, once a concert singer; she gave it up to marry. When she sang at home friends would exclaim at the choice she had made, and Brookner's father's face would blacken. In her singing her passion showed. The young Anita would start to cry. 'She, and not I, should have been the liberated woman.'

Brookner says she would like to write a biography of Ingres, a passionate happy man. Her students, she says, start by liking Delacroix and come round to Ingres. A biography of Ingres would 'take her to Montauban where she might start French life all over again, and this time, stay there'.

Her lives of Watteau, David and Greuze offer cheer: 'if they got their lives wrong they got their pictures right'.

Getting it Right

I have spoken before about Brookner's covers, the many disappointments and misfires. Recently, when the cover for the forthcoming Penguin Essentials edition of A Start in Life was unveiled, there was consternation in some quarters. A Penguin Essentials publication has a certain cachet. Next stop Penguin Classics, one might have thought.

An opportunity missed

Studying Corot's Between Lake Geneva and the Alps for a recent post made me think of the cover of the UK hardback edition of A Closed Eye, which always seemed to me to get it right. It showed part of John Inchbold's View above Montreux, 1880, in the V&A. Not an outlandish choice, perhaps, but well judged. The image captures, I think, in its deadness, its pallor, some of the horrified sense of defeat Harriet feels in her Swiss exile.

American Brookner

Why were some of Anita Brookner's novels published in the US with different titles? This seems at best a faintly disreputable practice, at worst an assault on the integrity of an already published text. I can think of other authors who have suffered the indignity, though it tends to be reserved for less thoroughgoingly literary writers (Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse). Ivy Compton-Burnett's Manservant and Maidservant was, however, given the somewhat unwieldy US title Bullivant and the Lambs. I can't think of traffic in the opposite direction, but there are probably examples.

Is it a case of US publishers asserting their authority? Or are there cultural or other reasons that certain titles 'work' in Britain but not in America?

A Start in Life (UK) / The Debut (US)

For a novel that references Balzac, The Debut is an interesting alternative, echoing Balzac's Un début dans la vie.

A Misalliance (UK) / The Misalliance (US)

Do Americans prefer the definite article? (Additionally: I'm not sure about this, but I think Latecomers was published at one time as The Latecomers in the States.)

A Family Romance (UK) / Dolly (US)

I've never much liked the British title. 'Family romance' is a term coined by Freud, and of only vague relevance to Brookner's novel. But Dolly is a safe, traditional, unimaginative alternative.

The Next Big Thing (UK) / Making Things Better (US)

The Next Big Thing sounds a little like a marketing treatise. 'Making things better' is a phrase that's repeated throughout the novel. Is it perhaps that Stateside readers prefer hopeful-sounding titles?

Five Brilliant Brookner Beginnings

From the terse to the lyrical, Anita Brookner’s opening lines are often memorable.

A Start in Life (1981)

Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.

With concision and aplomb Brookner sets out her stall. This is how to get yourself noticed.

Brief Lives (1990)

Julia died. I read it in The Times this morning.

My French friend, Marie, never a Brookner fan, disliked Brief Lives, especially the opening; she objected to its bleakness and negativity. ‘Yes – and?’ I probably replied. It’s certainly a startling start to a novel, and if this almost gnomic line hasn’t found its way on to a T-shirt somewhere, then someone is missing a trick.

Incidents in the Rue Laugier (1995)

My mother read a lot, sighed a lot, and went to bed early.

A beautiful, rhythmic sentence, with Proustian resonances – and that second comma is surely the mark of a stylist (Brookner, in one of her book reviews, praises an author’s use of such a comma). Of course, reading a lot and sighing a lot and going to bed early are just the sorts of Brooknerian behaviours decried by Brookner’s more hostile critics. But Brookner enjoys baiting her detractors.

Visitors (1997)

Towards evening the oppressive heat was tempered by a slight breeze, although this merely served to power drifts and eddies of a warmth almost tropical in its intensity.

Reminiscent of the opening of Hotel du Lac (‘From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey’), Visitors introduces its protagonist hesitantly, tentatively. We are aware of an observing consciousness, but it will take several sentences before Dorothea May emerges into the light. The passivity of the grammar serves to enhance and illustrate that same quality in the heroine.

Strangers (2009)

Sturgis had always known that it was his destiny to die among strangers.

We get to know Mrs May gradually, but many of Brookner’s protagonists, especially the guys, are introduced more directly (‘Herz had a dream’ – The Next Big Thing). In Strangers Brookner has an urgent story to get on with. This is brutal, uncompromising stuff, and there’s simply no time to be lost.​

About Suffering

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along...

Auden, 'Musee des Beaux Arts'

One always gets a frisson, in Brussels, standing before Bruegel's Fall of Icarus. Standing before it yesterday I had some memory of Brookner too. A long search brought me at last to Chapter 20 of A Start in Life:

'About suffering, they were never wrong, the Old Masters,' said Auden. But they were. Frequently. Death was usually heroic, old age serene and wise. And of course, the element of time, that was what was missing. Duration.

An hotel

On further reflection she decided that she might be happier in an hotel.

A Start in Life, Ch. 3

Brooknerians, or Brookner at any rate, always write, always say, 'an hotel', never 'a'. It is a small, a very small, even a narcissistic difference. She would have said o-tel, never ho-tel. I recommend Brooknerians look out and listen out for this distinction, and think of Brookner, and feel rewarded.

Starting the New Year the Anita Brookner way

...he did not in fact write much until the most active part of his life was over, and this of course is what sets him apart as a writer: he has the authority of a man whose preoccupations are not exclusively literary and who is informed at all times by memories of the immense experiences behind him.

'Stendhal', essay in The Genius of the Future (1971)

Brookner's description of Stendhal, written some years before she herself became a novelist, might easily be applied prophetically to herself. In considering this point, I decided to go back as it were to the beginning, to A Start in Life (1981), which I hadn't read for about twenty years.

I'd always thought of the early novels as a little ungainly, even as juvenilia. This was plainly ridiculous. A Start in Life, though its tone is lighter and wittier than later works, is an assured and in no way immature performance. It is perhaps, to a degree, autobiographical, as first efforts are often reputed to be. But it is far more a knowing deployment of a classic form, the Bildungsroman. It manages, however, in spite of such potentially cumbersome baggage, to be much brisker than, say, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield or Pendennis - or, for that matter, several later Brookners.

We also find plenty of purely Brooknerian tropes. There is a set-piece disaster involving food. There is the dream of foreign travel and of living in an hotel. There are Dickensian minor characters: the spinsters in the Edith Grove flats, the 'elderly young man' who owns the property. There are memories of a richer, more authentic European past: the Berlin furniture that might have absorbed the blood of horses; the merest hint of the wider European picture - 'the raggedness and temporary character of [old Mrs Weiss's] translated life'. And there's lots of literary French. Right from the start, then, Brookner gives us the full Brooknerian treatment, brooks no compromise, sets the bar high, and demands that her readers live up to her standards.

There are one or two missteps - extended passages detailing Ruth's father's exploits, patches of comedy involving a Christian Scientist, a multi-plottedness that such a slim novel can't quite sustain. But soon we're back to Ruth and what we might call pure Brooknerianism. There's a significant passage in Chapter 9, when she recalls childhood holidays - and of course they were to places like Baden-Baden and Vevey: walking, resting, the Kurhaus, listening to a band, looking forward to the hours between tea and dinner​.​

Then we are with Brookner in Paris, taking it by storm, as Balzac enjoined. We follow Ruth on her wanderings, for she is the essential Brooknerian flâneuse. We follow her into the Luxembourg Gardens, where there are always iron chairs, and into the Louvre. We admire, with Ruth, the life of the streets, the quality of the light. We are shown her loneliness. We see her dreams.

In Paris Ruth learns to be Parisian; she learns style, she learns Brooknerian boldness: 'she perceived that most tales of morality were wrong, that even Charles Dickens was wrong, and that the world is not won by virtue'.

Ruth visits Balzacian locations, but they do not yield secrets. She conducts a Villette-style romance. She receives a bunch of flowers in the Bibliothèque Nationale. One tries, of course, to read A Start in Life with an innocent eye, but one recognises and prophesies so much. Not that any of it is mere 'prototype Brookner': it all more or less arrives fully formed.

Interleaved with Ruth's Paris adventures are episodes involving her parents in London. Such counterpoint almost succeeds. Brookner, in giving us George and Helen Weiss, sets out several other stalls, preparing us for Hartmann and Herz, for Julia and Dolly, though the tone here, as I noted previously, is determinedly comic.

The closing chapters of the book gesture towards tragedy, but the writing remains epigrammatic and detached. But again, this is not a run-of-the-mill first novel; it is not juvenile. Brookner knows things:

'About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters,' said Auden. But they were. Frequently. Death was usually heroic, old age serene and wise. And of course, the element of time, that was what was missing. Duration. How many more nights would she have to undress her mother, only to dress her again in the morning?

- and once a thing is known it can never be unknown. So we end up with this strange mix of sprightly first novel and later-life disillusionment and sobriety.

In my youth I favoured what is now middle-period Brookner. More recently I've been intrigued by the later works. What, then, have I made of A Start in Life? I enjoyed it - this is scarcely a surprise - but, as I say, I had problems with its tone. Too often, I feel, Brookner dips into the demotic, by way of free indirect style, as in the following:

Mrs Cutler wore her jade green coat and skirt, a silk blouse abstracted from Helen's wardrobe, sling-back court shoes which were murder after half an hour, and her pearl earrings.

It is Mrs Cutler, not Brookner, who would call those shoes 'murder after half an hour'; the effect is awkward and bathetic. And it is perhaps the character of Mrs Cutler who unbalances the novel more generally. But I can't be certain. Is Mrs Cutler a successful character or not? As ever, one is never quite sure whose side Brookner is on.

University Challenge

A rare mention of Brookner in a populist format. OK, semi-populist. In the 20 December edition of University Challenge (available on the BBC i-player for a while) there were three Brookner questions:

1. Brookner's first published novel A Start in Life tells the story of Ruth Weiss [spelt 'Vice' on the subtitles!], an authority on which French author, best known for The Human Comedy?
2. In 1967 Brookner became the first woman to hold which professorship of fine art at Cambridge? It was endowed by the founder of the school of art at University College, London.
3. Brookner won the Booker Prize in 1984 for which novel set near Lake Geneva?

The contestants, celebrity alumni rather current students, got 1) and 3) correct, but answered 'Turner' to 2).

There was a little grimacing when the topic was introduced, but otherwise the tone was respectful - respectful in a way that probably wouldn't have been the case some years ago.

Phases

James had three incarnations: James the First, James the Second, and the Old Pretender. The novels of Anita Brookner (a writer who, at first glance, doesn't seem to 'develop' - to borrow a term from Larkin) fall perhaps into four phases.

The four novels culminating in the Booker win (A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me and Hotel du Lac) are sombre reads, solid, not starry, never presumptuous.

Seemingly in receipt of dithyrambs for every subsequent effort, Brookner became in her second phase (beginning with Family and Friends) a little - shall we say? - smug, a little complacent. Those novels of the mid to late Eighties feel over-assured, at times too ambitious.

Brookner worked best in reaction against the prevailing culture. Critical opinion turned sour in the 1990s. Thus, with Brief Lives, begins her third phase. These are masterly books, Jamesian, the language as mandarin as James's, the themes unfashionable but enduring.

The last phase comes in the 2000s, with The Bay of Angels. The Brookner world narrows, darkens. She no longer writes a novel a year. The prose is fleeter of foot, sometimes even demotic. She gives brisker, lighter interviews. She finishes in 2011 with a novella, 'At the Hairdresser's' - one for the fans, truly a retreading of old ground.

But Brookner's fiction, though it was often so accused, was never as predictable as some supposed. Rereading always uncovers fresh perspectives. George Eliot, as John Bayley once said, was, by comparison, a one-track performer.