Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes

Brookner's second novel, Providence, published in 1982, has several extended scenes set in Kitty Maule's tutorial room. For Kitty Maule read Anita Brookner, a lazy but inevitable parallel. The tutorials focus on a nineteenth-century French novel, Adolphe by Benjamin Constant, about a young man's affair with an older woman.

Now in 2022 we add to the mix a third slim volume, Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes. Elizabeth Finch is a tutor, not in French literature (like Kitty Maule) or art history (Brookner) but in 'Culture and Civilisation'. The viewpoint in the tutorial room isn't Elizabeth/Kitty/Anita's, but rather a Julian Barnes substitute, a student named Neil who soon becomes fascinated by his inspirational teacher.

Finch shares many of Brookner's peculiarities: her appearance, her clothes, her big eyes, her hair, her smoking, her voice, her diction, her handwriting, her high seriousness, her lunch habits (seventy-five minutes max.). Or rather she shares almost all of the idiosyncrasies Julian Barnes set out in his Guardian obituary piece about his friend in 2016: 'There was no one remotely like her'. It was a fine tribute, as is Elizabeth Finch, but our representations of others can sometimes become caricatures; at all events they're more often than not more about ourselves than anything approaching a truth.

But Barnes knows this, knows Finch will always remain 'exotic and opaque'. She dies less than a third of the way through the novel, which then becomes a sort of Aspern Papers, as Neil inherits her private notebooks. A lengthy investigation into one of Finch's pet projects, the life of Julian the Apostate, follows. Brookner celebrates paganism throughout her novels, notably in A Misalliance. But Finch is perhaps a Brookner who never, so unexpectedly, and so late in her life, wrote fiction:

'Perhaps she'd even tried to write a novel,' I ended.

'I very much doubt that.'

'No, you're right.'

Elizabeth Finch is a mainstreaming of the Brookner myth, and a bonne bouche for Brooknerians, all the more for the fact that Anita Brookner herself isn't referenced once. But she's there on every page.

Providence: Kitty's Last Seminar

Notes on the seminar scene in chapter 11 of Brookner's Providence:

• Says Kitty of Adolphe's ending: 'For the first time we are aware of the author's consciousness rather than his recital.' Later she says Adolphe is interesting for its juxtaposing of intense emotion with very dry language. And Brookner? 'There is a constant delightful tension between the austerity of her message and the voluptuousness of her medium,' wrote Lucy Hughes-Hallett in 1998.
• '[I]t is characteristic of the Romantic to reason endlessly in unbearable situations, and yet to remain bound by such situations. [...] For the Romantic, the power of reason no longer operates. Or rather, it operates, but it cannot bring about change.' The Romantic dilemma, or indeed the Brooknerian, in a nutshell.
• 'We are dealing with a work of fiction, and I simply want to make the point that in this period fiction, indeed all creative endeavour, becomes permeated with the author's own autobiography.' How far is Brookner's fiction permeated with her own autobiography?
• 'Déclassée women like myself frequently are [well-dressed]'. Was Brookner 'déclassée'?

Providence: Kitty Maule's Seminar

Some notes on the seminar scene in chapter 4 of Brookner's Providence:

• Kitty's '[A] novel is not simply a confession, you know. It is about the author's choice of words' reminds me of Evelyn Waugh's line, 'I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in language, and with this I am obsessed.' When the Paris Review asked Brookner about Kitty's comment, she replied, 'I am not conscious of having a style. I write quite easily, without thinking about the words much but rather about what they want to say. I do think that respect for form is absolutely necessary in any art form - painting, writing, anything. I try to write as lucidly as possible. You might say lucidity is a conscious preoccupation.'
• The key quote from the Preface to the Third Edition of Constant's Adolphe, 'ce douloureux étonnement d'une âme trompée' is given in the Penguin translation as 'the pain and bewilderment of a soul deceived' and by Brookner's tutee as 'the painful astonishment of a deceived soul'. John Haffenden, interviewing Brookner, commented on this line, saying that he thought it was what Providence was about. He also remarked on the end of the chapter, where Kitty recalls a line of Adolphe but cannot remember what follows it. In fact what comes next is none other than 'the painful astonishment of a deceived soul'. 'How clever of you to pick that up,' said Brookner.
• Kitty is notably indulgent towards her students. 'To be taught by Anita was to be loved by Anita': see Brookner Interview Discoveries #3.
• We have a mention of Mme du Deffand, who later features in Altered States (see here).
• Larter speaks of Existentialism as a Romantic phenomenon. Asked about this by John Haffenden, Brookner replied, 'I would now say that it is anti-Romantic: it gets rid of all the hopes and the beliefs that things are worth pursuing'. For more on this, see here.
• Kitty sets a task for next time. Her students are to list key words in Adolphe, starting with imprudences, règles sévères, faiblesse and douleur profonde. That's Brooknerian homework for you.

Adolphe by Benjamin Constant

I'm planning a reread of Providence, which makes use of Adolphe, but let me consider Constant's 1816 novel from another angle:

...he thought he might have done better, even prospered, in another era, or even another place, where the natives, the citizens, were more helpful, more curious, and indeed more candid. He longed to have lived in one of those confessional novels he had read as a young man - The Sorrows of Young Werther, Adolphe - in which whole lives were vouchsafed to the reader, with all their shame, yet as if there were no shame in the telling. Here, now, one was consciously checked by a sort of willed opacity, a social niceness that stalled one's attempts to make real contact.

Brookner, Strangers, Ch. 7

As Brookner said in interview, Adolphe is the story of a moral catastrophe; it's about what you do when you're the cause of a disaster. Adolphe is a bored, ennui-laden young man: he decides the time has come for him to fall in love. He chooses his woman, the mistress of an aristocrat, and she returns his simulated affection - which soon and suddenly becomes the real thing. The 'magic of love' is his, a feeling 'closely allied to religion'.

The woman, Ellenore, leaves her Count, and this is where the problems really begin. Adolphe fast falls out of love, though Ellenore remains devoted - or dependent. He suffers regret, mistakes pity for love, laments his squandered youth, longs to escape, and all the while the years pass by. He's stuck with Ellenore, and she's ten years older, and her attractions for Adolphe can only fade. The novel is unsparing in its presentation of differing male and female desires and expectations. The novel is also about guilt: 'I had crushed the one who loved me, broken this heart which like a twin soul had been unfailingly devoted to mine in tireless affection, and already I was overcome by loneliness.' This is the disaster Brookner speaks of, and naturally there's no good ending.

Adolphe is fairly autobiographical, and this is probably why it's a difficult read: the material hasn't been fully shaped; the story is raw and perhaps therefore rather shocking. There is no payoff: no lesson learnt, no satisfying moment of clarity - though there's one effort in the direction of an epiphany, a Caspar David Friedrich moment ('Daylight was waning, the sky was still, the countryside was becoming deserted) that relieves the narrator a little of his self-absorption but ultimately leads nowhere.

Brookner once spoke of a (male) reader who said to her something like 'You write French novels, don't you?' She took it as a high compliment. One can see what was meant. Adolphe, not just in its subject matter and its psychological intensity, is Brooknerian in its style too: its tendency to show rather than tell; even little things like the habit Brookner has in some of her early novels of not paragraphing direct speech.

Not having picked up Providence for some time, I'll be interested to see how my revisiting of Brookner's second novel is informed by reading Constant's Adolphe.

Living on the Surface

I had no doubt that in the ballrooms of his youth the Colonel had been noted for his charm and his way with women. It was a style which he had carefully taught his son, who had never, as far as I could remember, uttered a serious word. Badinage was obviously the favoured means of exchange in the Sandberg establishment.

A Friend from England, ch. 5

This is a serious condemnation. Brookner hates the Sandbergs, with their plausibility, their polished manners, their uncertain income, their slippery identity, their sibilant speech: most of all she hates them for their jokiness. One thinks of Paul Sturgis in Strangers, longing for the sort of proper conversation he loved in the books of his youth: Werther, Adolphe (Strangers, ch. 7), but having to make do with 'opacity', 'social niceness'. Rachel in A Friend from England is a different proposition: she long ago decided to live her life on the surface (A Friend from England, ch. 5). But discussion of the 'inner life', its value, its existence in others, comes up time and again in the novel*. Rachel may try to live dispassionately, but it is more because she knows the passion she is capable of and all Brooknerians are capable of than because she has none. She intimately knows the depths; fears, like Phlebas the Phoenician, death by water.


*For example:

...it seemed to me that she was a creature of some depth, shrewd ... but also possessing an admirable reticence, with the wit to know how to protect her inner life from the gaze of the curious. I appreciated this last trait: it is one I possess myself. (Ibid.)