Incidents in the Rue Laugier reread: the power of Kroll

What are we to make of chapters 10 and 11? The story is over and Brookner's vainly trying to pad things out? Edward visits his shop in London, and a new character, Max Kroll, appears: Mittel-european, his accent both sibilant and cockney, a prototype for Julius Herz in The Next Big Thing or Max Gruber in Falling Slowly? Then the rather studied detail about the books: Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann (for more, see here and here). Then in the next chapter we find ourselves in Eastbourne at the heart of Edward's middle-class family, a world away from Dijon and the rue Laugier. Why? Why all this detail, all this plot? I suggest it's about absence rather than presence: the extended absence of Tyler, a representation of the disappearance he has effected from lives for whom he is the only emotional capital: not just Maud's, but Edward's too.

The Faint Thrill of Horror

Brookner on James is always fascinating and often provoking, not least in her 1987 review of Leon Edel's classic biography of the writer (Spectator, 1 August 1987 here). Henry James crops up more than once in Brookner's novels. In Falling Slowly (1998), for example:

She marvelled that Henry James knew so much about women and children, yet remained a bachelor, and by all accounts a man of the greatest integrity. She liked that about him, that and his reputation for modesty. He had deferred to worldly friends, as if he were not more worldly than any of them. (Ch. 16)

I agree with the last bit, but take issue with the rest. Integrity, yes - but modesty is perhaps a step too far. Similarly in her Edel review her reading goes askew. Henry James: 'essentially timid, prudent, virginal, secret and pure'?! She seems at pains to absolve him of any accusation of impropriety; she seems to want to limit What Henry Knew:

[E]ven when using libidinal language, as he does in the truly awful novel called Watch and Ward, an early work, he does not appear to know what he is doing, and his late ardent friendships with young men are not so much homoerotic as pre-sexual.

I think we all, when reading the writers of the past, especially those we revere, construct them afresh for our own purposes and sometimes in our own image. Brookner, like Edel, sees a particular James, but such is James's inexhaustibility we might just as equally posit another: supremely the very opposite of timid, prudent, virginal, secret and pure.

But what interests me about her Leon Edel piece is the following passage, in which I seem to hear a more personal note, as if Brookner were writing about herself and her own devotion to art and to work. (But of course I may myself be guilty here of constructing an author for my own purposes.)

He was fully in charge of his life, yet saw, when he was two thirds of the way through it, that he had used it up, and that there was to be no second chance. This is the message of the story called The Middle Years, and is condensed in the phrase that might be his epitaph: the madness of art. For despite Henry James's essential sobriety, his industry, and his blamelessness, one is left with the impression that his is a supreme case of misdirection. And the faint thrill of horror that this life inspires, a horror that deepens to anguish as one reads on in this meticulous and loving biography, condensed from its original five volumes to a seamless new version, must surely spring from the dawning realisation that there is no second chance, a realisation with which James lived even as a famous and venerated public figure, surrounded by the love of friends and with the evidence of a lifetime's work in print.

The Next Big Thing: The Present and the Past

That world no longer existed, or if it did would have undergone a change...

Anita Brookner, The Next Big Thing, ch. 6

With almost Nabokovian ardour Brookner conjures Herz's past, that ride down the Lichtenthalerallee in Baden-Baden, coffee in the Kurhaus gardens. A remarkably similar scene occurs in Falling Slowly, suggesting perhaps an autobiographical origin. Baden-Baden is indeed different now: a resort for the super-rich, no longer for the merely bourgeois. The bourgeois past, Herz finds, is to be found only in his reading: in Thomas Mann's short stories or in Buddenbrooks. Elsewhere in The Next Big Thing the modern world intrudes. Mobile phones, email. Globalisation. People trafficking? The seamstresses who work in a neighbouring flat at the start of the novel appear to be illegal immigrants. Their employer, Mrs Beddington, admits as much to Herz. He notices the girls' absence during the summer: perhaps they've gone home ('to homes he had difficulty in imagining' (ch. 6)) or on holiday, though later the repellent Mrs Beddington tells him, laughing, 'Girls like that don't go on holiday'. In fact she's shut up shop: 'they're on their own' (ch. 9).

The past in The Next Big Thing has a 'refulgence' (ch. 5), but Brookner is a realist too, especially in this, one of her later novels, into which a cheerless and subtly horrifying new world impinges more and more.

Lines of Beauty

What's your favourite Brookner line? Something positively freighted with many things Brooknerian. Something perhaps only Anita Brookner could have written.

Look at Me
A novel replete with quotability. I'm going to choose one of the most extreme, almost self-parodic lines, from the truly chilling chapter 11: Frances's desolate trek through a hostile nighttime London:

This must be the most terrible hour, the hour when people die in hospitals.

(Larkinian too. Think 'Ambulances' or 'The Building' - each room farther from the last and harder to return from.)


Falling Slowly
Miriam is imagining the thoughts of her contemporaries, those with lives more conventional than her own. You are not one of us, she imagines them thinking. You do not shop for cornflakes, fish fingers, baked beans. You will not grow fat. You do not take family holidays, the car loaded with junk. You only look astonishingly young, but you must be getting on.

Too late for you, then. You will just have to make do with the rest of your life, with only yourself for company. (Ch. 9)

Latecomers
Fibich, years later, safe in middle age, remembers getting on the Kindertransport, leaving his mother behind in Berlin. They would never meet again. Now in England, in the 1980s, in a London restaurant, he breaks down.

'I should have gone back,' whispered Fibich. 'I should not have left. I should have got off the train.' (Ch. 14)

A Misalliance
Now for something a little (but only a little) lighter:

Since living alone she had experienced varying degrees of exclusion, and, out of sheer dandyism, had made an ironical survey of the subject. (Ch. 3)

Out of sheer dandyism. All those hate-filled unthinking critics all those years: how could they have got Anita Brookner so wrong? How could they have overlooked her impeccable but subversive dandyism?


'At the Hairdresser's'

I am not lonely except in company. (Ch. 3)

What can one say to this? Echoing Larkin again, I think: 'nothing to be said'. Other than 'Brooknerianism in a nutshell', perhaps?


Visitors
For my next, a touch of aphoristic robustness.

Mrs May knew what families were for: they were for offering endless possibilities for coercion. (Ch. 2)

A Private View
Katy Gibb has gone, leaving George Bland disconsolate. Katy was an impossible proposition; their lives were incompatible. But he had been in love.

He made tea and drank it gratefully, yet in the act of eating a biscuit his face contracted once more with grief. (Ch. 11)

George Bland and that biscuit.


Family and Friends
Mimi, wounded for ever by events in her past, mourns her life - though it is not Frank for whom she yearns but the missing element in herself that would have brought him to her side.

It is as much as she can do now to avoid pain, simply to avoid pain. (Ch. 10)

The formal construction. And that repetition. Compare Providence in the climactic scene:

I lacked the information, thought Kitty, trying to control her trembling hands. Quite simply, I lacked the information.

This could go on and on. Let me end for now with something evocative from Altered States (ch. 13) and something hopeful (yes, that) from Fraud (ch. 8) - both, I note, deploying exclamation marks. As I may have said before, always look out for Anita Brookner's exclamation marks.

The melancholy of London flats at nightfall! 

Then the marvellous thought struck her: but there is no need to live like this!

London flats, nightfall, melancholy

Fraud: Mrs Marsh

Mrs Marsh. Let's think for a moment about that name. To refer to a character so formally, and a character to whose inner life the reader is given full access, is surely unusual and even subversive. It's determinedly old-fashioned. Its male equivalent is the simple surname, as in the cases of Bland in A Private View or Sturgis in Strangers.

Mrs Marsh has more than a little in common with Mrs May in Visitors: similar names, both widows, both fond of the painter Turner. Mrs May is the central consciousness in that later novel, and at the time critics reacted with some consternation to a character whom they were invited to know so well and yet whose authorial denomination seemed so antique, so distancing. But none of this is about propriety but about how such characters think of themselves: some people think of themselves in one way, others in another - a point Brookner makes about Miriam at the start of Falling Slowly:

On her way to the London Library, Mrs Eldon, who still thought of herself as Miriam Sharpe...

Brookner Interview Discoveries #2: Great Expectations

The second of my interview discoveries, 'Great Expectations', is from the Observer on 27 March 1983, marking the publication of Brookner's Look at Me. The interview was conducted by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, who would continue an interest in Brookner's works. Here she is on Brookner's 1998 novel Falling Slowly:

She is one of a handful of living writers who can turn a sentence so graceful that to read it is a lascivious pleasure, and she can string those sentences together to make paragraphs - whole chapters even - that unfurl surely and musically until they climax, or fall away into silence with a superbly exact authority to which it is delicious to submit. There is a constant delightful tension between the austerity of her message and the voluptuousness of her medium.

Brookner interviews have ritualistic tendencies, and Hughes-Hallett's certainly covers the usual ground: 'I regard myself as being completely invisible'; how the young Anita learnt false lessons from the classic books she read in her solitary childhood:

I grew up thinking that patience would be rewarded and virtue would triumph. It has been demonstrated to me that this is not true. It was a terrible realisation.

and her reasons for starting a second career as a novelist:

I thought if I could write about it I might be able to impose some structure on my experience. It gave me a feeling of being in control.

But of greatest interest are some unfamiliar biographical details. For many years, we learn, Brookner allowed her life to be determined by someone else's needs. 'A man. He became very ill. He has since died.' There was also, Hughes-Hallett tells us, another lost love in Brookner's past, 'on which she is not to be drawn, but she divulges clues':

Perhaps I was naive in expecting that these matters would be less complicated than they prove to be. As an art historian I am accustomed to reading signs, but sometimes I forgot to do so in real life. [...] People who are going to be good at reading the signs can do it at the age of 18 months. The others never learn.

We see her in her 'attic' at the Courtauld, on which the world 'doesn't impinge'. And we see her still hopeful:

I have great expectations. One waits to be sprung.

German Notebook

I chose out of the way places, out of season: almost any town in France or Germany, however devoid of scenic interest, provided the sort of ruminative space which I seemed to require.

Anita Brookner, A Family Romance, ch. 8

1.
To Düsseldorf: out of the way, though in season. To the Kunstpalast, in rain, under a heavy sky. Some Cranachs, older and younger, some Rubens, one or two Caspar David Friedrichs, some very engaging nineteenth-century history paintings, some Kirchners. But altogether the collection seemed slightly at a low ebb. Unprepossessing building: red-brick, monumental, 1930s: 'degenerate art' was exhibited here once, for purposes of ridicule.

2.
Chapter 40 of David Copperfield. Mr Peggotty - a wanderer in search of Little Em'ly - speaks of his journey through France and into Italy. He returns via Switzerland, responding to a tip-off. As with other pre-aviation era narratives, one is aware here of the great distances involved, the sense of the Alps as a barrier to be overcome. One thinks of the Dorrits travelling south, or of Palliser and Lady Glencora on their wedding tour.

3.
To Cologne, to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum. I know it well and like the layout. A room of Courbets: Lady on a Terrace (1858), Breakfast after the Hunt (also 1858), The Beach (1865) and Château de Chillon (1873). The Beach is particularly fine, could be a piece of abstract expressionism.

(Brookner, when she saw an exhibition of his paintings in 1978, commented not wholly approvingly on the sleepiness and duskiness of Courbet.)

Cologne in summer had a party atmosphere: dense crowds, wedding parties, costumed stag and hen groups. I was once in Cologne at Christmas, and outside the cathedral were gathered hundreds of children dressed up as the Three Kings. I was there another time, during the carnival, and I was the only person not in a lurid costume.

4.
To Bonn, to see the Beethoven statue.

Beyond Kentish Town lay Cologne, their Sunday drives to Bonn to contemplate the statue of Beethoven... 

Brookner, Falling Slowly, ch. 8

Bonn has other Brooknerian associations:

'At first all went well; we had a beautiful house in Poppelsdorf, a suburb of Bonn, and Alois's sister, Margot, was very welcoming and attentive. The surroundings were pleasant and there were servants who looked after everything, so that it was quite easy to adjust after life in the hotel.'

The Next Big Thing, ch. 13

From the Hauptbahnhof I walked down Meckenheimer Allee, past townhouses, mansion blocks, trees meeting in an archway over the narrow road. An air of Sunday calm. Ghostly, fairy-tale dwellings. My pictures don't do justice to the quality of the light.

5.
To Frankfurt: I took a break from Dickens and read James's The American Scene. It's the most dazzling and difficult of James's works, and a glass or two of something or other usually helps. I read of 'impudently new' New York, the skyscrapers like extravagant pins in a cushion, the boats on the Hudson moving like bobbins in a great tapestry. All the while, on screens, today's America underwent an eclipse.

Frankfurt am Main, a.k.a. Mainhattan

6.
David Copperfield again: Mr Peggotty is still questing after Emily, who absconded with Steerforth. At no point is the possibility properly entertained of Emily's agency in the affair, though Mrs Steerforth is roundly condemned for suggesting Emily 'seduced' Steerforth. The narrative, the discourse, has only such terms. And Emily must be found and saved - and she shall be thankful for such salvation. Now we learn she's left Steerforth, and David fears she may have ended up on the streets. The precise nature of such a life is conveyed by Dickens with dog-whistle subtlety. How sad and limited Little Em'ly's options are, and also how limited are the ways in which her story is presented.

7.
To the Städel Museum, one of my favourite collections. A good set of nineteenth-century paintings and a fine range of Old Masters. Also a floor of post-1945 art. The museum's small exhibition space is often well used, offering detailed, quite specialist shows. On my last visit I saw some Watteau drawings. This time: another Brookner fan-pleasing show: French lithographs by, among others, Delacroix (Shakespeare illustrations) and Géricault (typically challenging subject matter: a beggar, a bare-knuckle fight, soldiers in retreat from Moscow).

In the main collection: a View of Frankfurt by Courbet, and a photo by Julia Margaret Cameron of Mrs Herbert Duckworth, later Virginia Woolf's mother. Oh, Mrs Ramsay!

And to prove I don't only look at old art, here I am (with Warhol's Goethe) reflected in a work comprising a wall of mirrored tiles:

8.
Going back to Düsseldorf after several days in Frankfurt felt like returning to a gentler world.

The natural banks of the Rhine at Düsseldorf:

I thought I might give the Kunstpalast another look, and indeed I was better disposed towards it. This time I found an exhibition of Andreas Achenbach's paintings and drawings, the same show I saw in Baden-Baden last year: scenes oddly full of the atmosphere of the Yarmouth sections of David Copperfield: shore life, fishermen, shipwrecks.

A highlight of the collection proper, though made little of, is Cranach's Das ungleiche Paar / Der verliebte Alte (c. 1530), nowhere near as exquisite as the Frankfurt Venus but still stylishly planar and yet very human. One thinks of George Bland and his reckless passion for Katy Gibb in Brookner's A Private View. Brookner's comparison is with Tintoretto's Susannah and the Elders in Vienna, but it could be this too.

I pick up my pen. I start writing.

I had not been walking long, when I turned a corner and met her. I tingle again from head to foot as my recollection turns that corner, and my pen shakes in my hand.

David Copperfield, ch. 26

A dread falls on me here. A cloud is lowering on the distant town, towards which I retraced my solitary steps. I fear to approach it. I cannot bear to think of what did come, upon that memorable night; of what must come again, if I go on.

Ch. 32

Dickens is clear. David writes David Copperfield at some distant point in the story's future - ostensibly the contemporary reader's present. He recollects the events of his life - though not quite always in tranquillity. At times, as above, we see him at his desk, affected in the here and now by the events of long ago.

Anita Brookner's handling of I-voice narration is, in places, a little less certain. Let's consider the closing pages of Look at Me, where Brookner, like Dickens, 'breaks frame':

After that last sentence, I moved to the bed and switched on the bedside lamp.

Up to that point she had been narrating, from a distance, the events of the story. Now we seem to be invited to see the narrator writing 'to the moment', in the manner of Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe, or the writer of a diary.

But wait - let's go back a few pages. Here we find the narrator wondering whether her tormentors will ring her again. 'Of course, this might not happen,' she writes, and repeats the famous lines from the novel's start: 'Once a thing is known...'

We're unmoored, unsettled. When is the time of writing? The beginning of the novel, with its trenchant, hard-learnt words, suggested a narrative written, like Dickens's, in long retrospect. But the end of Look at Me plays fast and loose with such comfortable notions. We're all with Frances now, temporally trapped - trapped in the thick of the terrible action: like her, we'll never quite leave this moment. The final lines compound our sense of having been cast into a dizzying abyss:

Nancy shuffles down the passage, and I hear her locking the front door. It is very quiet now. A voice says, 'My darling Fan.' I pick up my pen. I start writing.

Last Lines

Traditional or progressive? Brookner is commonly described as the former. A study of Brookner's endings can be instructive in this regard.

A number of her novels begin in a notional present and then move into the past. By the end the narrative has returned to the beginning. The ending isn't perhaps in a lot of doubt, though there may be shocks and surprises along the way. Falling Slowly is an example of this kind of novel.

Others - A Private View, for example - are presented more chronologically. George Bland has his adventure, and at the end at least a version of the status quo is restored.

At the sentence level, several of the novels attempt a moment of epiphany (e.g. Fraud), often delivering a not always persuasive, or earned, sense of hope (Leaving Home ends like this).

What we don't find, except possibly in Incidents in the Rue Laugier, is (Middlemarch-style) a rundown of the Nachgeschichte, details of the various characters' ultimate fates.

Aspects of Brookner's practice, then, are more modern, and less traditional, than we might suppose.

***

And my favourite Brookner ending? It's probably the closing lines of Brief Lives, I guess - Brookner at her most darkly mordant:

So irrelevant did her death seem that I almost looked forward to discussing it with her, felt something like a quickening of interest. 'What was it like?' I should have asked. 'Not all that bad,' I can hear her say in her most famously throw-away tone. 'You might give it a try one of these days.'

A Superbly Exact Authority

She is one of a handful of living writers who can turn a sentence so graceful that to read it is a lascivious pleasure, and she can string those sentences together to make paragraphs - whole chapters even - that unfurl surely and musically until they climax, or fall away into silence with a superbly exact authority to which it is delicious to submit. There is a constant delightful tension between the austerity of her message and the voluptuousness of her medium.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett on Falling Slowly, Sunday Times (1998)

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, the Brooknerian salutes you.

Endings

Brookner's, like Trollope's, is a conservative imagination. 'George must decide how much - or how little - he can do to transform the status quo,' reads the blurb to my edition of A Private View. Many a Brooknerian strives to break free, only to see the old dispensation restored. Not that Brookner doesn't provide final moments of epiphany, largely unearned. We might cite the closing lines of Fraud or what happens in the last sentence of Lewis Percy. Such endings give her work a novelistic shape, though Brookner knows their limitations:

There are moments when you feel free, moments when you have energy, moments when you have hope, but you can't rely on any of these things to see you through. (Haffenden interview, 1985)

The restoration of the status quo is achieved most memorably in the moments of shock and revelation that end, say, Providence or Undue Influence. The conclusion to Hotel du Lac is of another order.

[Haffenden:] [Edith] wins her freedom ... by accident, but the end - when she changes the wording of her telegram from 'Coming home' to 'Returning'- is ambiguous.
[Brookner:] 'Coming home' would be coming back to domestic propriety: 'home' implies husband, children, order, regular meals, but 'Returning' is her more honest view of the situation. (Ibid)

Brooknerians long for change but also fear it and reject it. They know the key discovery of the Romantics, that it is better to travel than to arrive. They know what arrival looks like; they see it in those around them. Let us finish with Miriam in Falling Slowly as she imagines the scorn and contempt of her contemporaries:

You are not one of us, said their eyes; you do not slop around untidily, push your hair back behind your ears, dress in the first thing that comes to hand. You do not shop for cornflakes, fish fingers, baked beans. You will not get fat. You do not take family holidays, the car loaded with junk. You only carry a briefcase, look astonishingly young, yet you must be what? getting on, anyway. Too late for you, then. You will have to make do with the rest of your life, with only yourself for company. (Ch. 9)

The Statue of Beethoven

[Max] had even bought a loose-leaf notebook at Ryman's, but then it occurred to him that what the world expected was a fully fledged biography, with details of the illustrious persons he had known, whereas he desired to recall sweet small incidents, family dignity, unassuming love. No publisher would be interested in such a thing; refugees' stories were all too common. The notebook was empty, although he had thought of a title: The Statue of Beethoven. 

Falling Slowly, Ch. 10

My mind returns to Mitteleuropa. I have a forthcoming holiday, between Christmas and Silvester, not to Baden-Baden this time but Frankfurt and Cologne, and shall be offline for the while, reliant instead on my trusty Moleskine.

Max in Falling Slowly seems at first glance a forerunner of Julius Herz, not least because he shares an identical memory. But Max Gruber is more of a showman, potent and mercurial, somewhat akin to the Ostrovski figure in the latter novel. Nevertheless the following two extracts are very striking. Not quite self-plagiarism, but close.

Beyond Kentish Town lay Cologne, their Sunday drives to Bonn to contemplate the statue of Beethoven, their summer holidays in Baden Baden, sedate family walks along the Lichtenthalerallee, the cup of coffee in the Casino gardens, where the orchestra played... 

Falling Slowly (1998), Ch. 8

He was with his family in a fiacre in Baden-Baden, being driven down the Lichtenthalerallee towards the Casino, where they would drink coffee to the sound of a small orchestra. 

The Next Big Thing (2002), Ch. 6

What's more, the city of Bonn is a feature of both novels. Fanny Bauer, in The Next Big Thing, lives there in her later life. I might, I guess, visit the place next week. But like many a Brooknerian I'll probably at the last moment suffer a failure of nerve.