Lively Curiosity

Anita Brookner was never one for easy hyperbole, only for that which was earned and justified by time. One wonders what she would have made of 2020. No doubt she would have reserved judgement.

Her essays and reviews are often at their most piquant when considering something from which she withholds praise. I've been reading 'Descent into the Untestable', a review in Soundings of a book of 1980 on regression in the arts from the eighteenth into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Analysis of large movements, notions such as the Enlightenment and Romanticism, will be familiar to readers of Brookner. In Providence (1982), Kitty Maule and her students mount lofty seductive arguments: Existentialism as a late manifestation of Romanticism - and the like.

But Dr Brookner herself would caution her own pupils: Art doesn't love you and cannot console you. Here she argues for the limitations of art. 'Artistic traditions are self-generating and at best reflexive. One cannot live by the light of ideas expressed in pictures, although their images will colour one's thinking'.

Mr Harbison, the author of the book under review, fails in Brookner's eyes to provide the necessary underpinning. Pictures, she counsels, occasionally need the corroboration of the written word: 'Quite simply, a different kind of information is being imparted'. Look at the writing, she says, and you'll find that the eighteenth century, though it may have been when it all went wrong, might also have been the last time when 'it might just have come out right'. She repeats this line, I think, in an early interview. It is the writers, not the painters, who will save us - those writers who are, as she said, saints for the godless. Montesquieu and Diderot she reveres: 'neither of them afflicted with any beliefs they could not verify'. Fragonard and David do no more than 'weight the argument'.

If we ever wondered why Brookner turned always from art to writing, or perhaps why she never herself seems to have picked up a brush, the answer is here. Here also is her answer to suggestions of the Apocalypse, for the unfortunate Mr Harbison apparently believes we are living at the end of the world:

If the Apocalypse is really just around the corner the correct attitude would seem to be one of lively curiosity.

The Great Desert of Life

He had nothing to do, his occupation was gone, and it seemed to him that he should never find it again.

Henry James, The American, 1879 edn.

He had nothing to do, his occupation was gone, had simply strayed and lost itself in the great desert of life.

The American, 1907 edn.

The days before him were empty, and the emptiness was as much of a burden as it had always been.

Brookner, Strangers, 2009

The curiously downbeat ending to The American takes the reader by surprise. Newman has lost his great love, but surely he'll be reunited with her by the end? This is a nineteenth-century novel! But time passes, and he wanders listlessly around Europe and America, his malaise not so much tragic in a Shakespearean way ('his occupation was gone' echoing a line in Othello) as proto-Existentialist.

Brookner's Sturgis suffers a similar dying fall as he gathers up what remains to him at the end of the author's last novel Strangers. Like Newman, Sturgis wanders aimlessly, though less extensively. But Sturgis is truly old, as only modern people find themselves to be old, whereas James's old man is merely in his forties.

Once more I side with the greater riches of Henry James's 1907 New York Edition of The American, especially in the masterly closing moments. And I am pleased to have been treated to a copy of Henry James's New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship, which, years back, I remember looking through whenever I visited the old Border's in Oxford Street. A series of essays, it takes in several of the gloriously wilder outposts of 90s scholarship.

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.

Six Spectator Sparklers

Anita Brookner's hack work output was prodigious. Here's a selection from three decades of her Spectator reviews and articles. Many more are freely available on the Spectator archive and main sites.

(Click on the titles below to link to the original articles.)


'A Stooge of the Spycatcher', July 1987

The painful astonishment of a deceived soul: that line from Adolphe, via Brookner's Providence, might well be applicable here. Her dismay at being mentioned in Peter Wright's notorious Spycatcher is palpable even at this distance. But the dignity with which she sets out her 'great and steady anger' in this Spectator reply awards Brookner the undoubted moral victory.

'Repose is taboo'd by anxiety', October 1993

This piece on Oliver Sacks's Migraine is magisterial. An essay both restrained and candid.


'Even less fiction than Stranger', May 1994

Brookner, Kafka, Camus, Existentialism: who could ask for more? The 'grandeur de l'homme sans espoir': not for the first time, one senses Brookner writing about herself while ostensibly giving her invaluable verdict on others.


'The master of the indirect', December 1999

Brookner, 'our Henry James' according to one critic, here reads the Master's tales. Her views are as ever instructive, not only as to James's work but also as to her own. She has something to say on being English and being European. The English, she says, are for James synonymous with the Europeans. One doesn't think Brookner herself believed this.


'Sexual tourism à gogo', September 2001

I choose this not just for its rather treasurable title. It also represents an aspect of Brookner's review work that can be ignored: her willingness to engage with writers who would seem, at first blush, rather dissimilar from herself. But wait - look at her words here on Houellebecq's 'paganism' and think of all those references in Brookner's novels to the gods of antiquity. And think of Claire Pitt in Undue Influence, or George Bland in A Private View, and their adventures in foreign climes.


'A singular voice', July 2011

One of Brookner's last reviews. Here she considers Barbara Pym, with whom she was herself bracketed, certainly in the early days. Brookner's judgement on Pym, a 'domestic ironist', is markedly cool. There are mentions of Jane Austen, never a good sign in an Anita Brookner essay.

A Failure of Nerve

I am now alone, which takes a bit of getting used to; one has to nerve oneself every day. It really is existential living.

Haffenden interview, Methuen 1985

Once the morning had been got through my failure of nerve would be without witnesses...

'At the Hairdresser's' (2011), Ch. 5

Eternal Vigilance

Was Anita Brookner an Existentialist? As a young woman in Paris in the 1950s she must often have seen the principle actors. In her fiction she takes Existentialist positions, more than once adapting for her own purposes a famous proto-Existentialist line from the nineteenth century: 'Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.' 'And my own recovery? That, I feared, would have to be postponed indefinitely. It would be safer, and wiser, to assume an endless vigilance,' says Zoe in The Bay of Angels at one of her lowest points.

Providence is the novel that explores Existentialism most blatantly. Brookner discusses the novel and the movement at length in the Paris Review interview:

INTERVIEWER
All your heroines follow 'an inexorable progress toward further loneliness,' as you say of Kitty Maule in Providence. It seems to me very deterministic. Is there nothing we can do to alter our fate?
BROOKNER
I think one’s character and predisposition determine one’s fate, I’m afraid. But Providence seems deterministic because it is a novel, and a novel follows its own organic structure.
INTERVIEWER
At the same time you say that existentialism is the only philosophy you can endorse. Now existentialism with its emphasis on personal freedom seems the opposite of determinism.
BROOKNER
I don’t believe that anyone is free. What I meant was that existentialism is about being a saint without God: being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society. Freedom in existentialist terms breeds anxiety, and you have to accept that anxiety as the price to pay. I think choice is a luxury most people can’t afford. I mean when you make a break for freedom you don’t necessarily find company on the way, you find loneliness. Life is a pilgrimage and if you don’t play by the rules you don’t find the Road to Damascus, you find the Crown of Thorns. In Hotel du Lac the heroine, Edith Hope, twice nearly marries. She balks at the last minute and decides to stay in a hopeless relationship with a married man. As I wrote it I felt very sorry for her and at the same time very angry: she should have married one of them - they were interchangeable anyway - and at least gained some worldly success, some social respectability. I have a good mind to let her do it in some other novel and see how she will cope!
INTERVIEWER
You also said that existentialism is a romantic creed. How so?
BROOKNER
Because romanticism doesn’t make sense unless you realize that it grew out of the French Revolution in which human behavior sank to such terrible depths that it became obvious no supernatural power, if it existed, could possibly countenance it. For the first time Europeans felt that God was dead. Since then we have had Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, whose activities make the French Revolution seem like a picnic. The Romantics tried to compensate the absence of God with furious creative activity. If you do not have the gift of faith, which wraps everything up in a foolproof system and which is predicated on the belief that there is a loving Father who will do the best for you, then, as Sartre said, you have to live out of that system completely, and become your own father. This is a terrible decision, and, as I said, in existential terms freedom is not desirable, it is a woeful curse. You have to live with absence. Nowadays I wonder if it is really possible to live without God, maybe we should dare to hope... I don’t know. I’m not there yet.

Brookner was plainly enamoured of Existentialism, inasmuch as it captured, perhaps, many of her themes. When writing of Camus, in an extended Spectator article, her words take flight:

Beached in a bar in Amsterdam, he regales his listeners with a sort of moral striptease, in which he sets out to prove that no one is innocent. Even Jesus, he says, was not innocent: was he not implicated in that earlier massacre of those earlier innocents? Was he not indulging in irony when he said of the vacillating Peter that on that rock he would build his church? We are thus without exception participators in the fallen condition. This is a persuasive intellectual argument which reveals its emotional roots: rage, disappointment, despair. It is an argument which delivers an authentic existential hit: 'O mon ami, savez-vous qu'est la créature solitaire, errant dans les grandes villes?' Here there is a plangent, even Baudelairian undertone which is at odds with the narrator's uncompromising monologue and the simplicity of its style. Gone are the stark phrases: this is writing of prizewinning standard. 

As ever, in writing of her literary heroes - those saints for the godless - Brookner is, one senses, also writing about herself.