Cartomania

'Mute oblongs' Brookner calls the photographs Herz lugubriously sifts in The Next Big Thing. A photo sets the ball rolling in Family and Friends; and a Brookner favourite, W. G. Sebald, of course, began the vogue of actually interspersing tracts of text with wordless rectangles that at once somehow reveal and remystify the past.

All photos, of whatever age, are both accessible and resistant. I've considered this in recent weeks as I've traded a collection of cartes de visite I picked up in a job-lot years ago. Patented in the 1850s, this species of visiting card became extremely popular in the following decade. (Oddly enough, I cannot think of references to cartomania in novels of the time, though the likes of Trollope and Thackeray both trotted down to one of the numerous studios that sprang up everywhere. There is an image of Thackeray wearing trousers so aged they have patches on them.) Suddenly the past bursts into the light. The thousands of people, famous and unknown, who posed have a watchful look, not unlike the Tudor noble men and women we see in the drawings of Holbein.

Also fascinating is the community of collectors, and what appeals. I sold cheaply a fishwife scene, little realising Victorian tradespeople were much sought after. A face with character, something indefinable, sells fast, full-length images are preferred, older men are hard to shift, a pet will be snapped up.

The cartes below range from the 1860s to the 1900s. The gentleman in the centre is named, an undistinguished man, but his dates are to be found on the Internet. The girl in the bottom right is one Clair Barth of Bern. The scrawl on the back is otherwise inscrutable. But it is something. Most of these oblongs, of which there are many hundreds on auction sites, remain entirely mute.

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

Chapter by Chapter #2

I wish there were a word-count facility on my e-reader: it might yield some interesting results. I noticed during my recent reread of Fraud (1992) something I'd only half-recognised before: how Brookner's chapters have a tendency towards being extremely regular in length. I reckon if I were to count the words in each of Fraud's chapters the results would be remarkably close.

How did she do this? She wrote in longhand, and cleanly, with few corrections (a page of the MS of Family and Friends (1985) is to be found online alongside the Paris Review interview) - so it was probably just a case of her allocating herself a set number of sheets of paper per chapter.

But why did she do it? She was certainly a writer, and probably a person, who lived according to her routines. Imposing such structures and patterns on the job of composition would have given momentum to a writing process that, as John Bayley says somewhere, possibly wasn't experienced at the full fever pitch of passionate engagement.

In the 1990s, in A Family Romance (1993) and A Private View (1994), Brookner experimented with chapter length. The chapters in those novels are approximately double the usual Brookner length. She returns to her old pattern in some later novels.

In the 2000s things seem to be up in the air again, matching perhaps the edgier tone of those last novels. Brookner's first and final chapters had always been subject to irregularity, but chapter 3 of The Bay of Angels (2001) is intriguing and a little disconcerting for being only four pages long.

The Challenge of the Multiplot Novel

In Dickens what I marvel at more than anything is his management of different plot strands. He maintains control throughout, but there is also a freedom, an unpredictability, a sense of one plot merging into another. David Copperfield hasn't the wild free-wheeling quality of, say, a Thackeray novel (Pendennis acts as an excellent comparison), but nor has it the rigidness of structure of early- and middle-period Trollope. (Can You Forgive Her? is an example of this sort of schema at work: three women, three love plots, a few chapters given over to each in rotation.)

Anita Brookner's plots, while never predictable, tend towards the schematic, especially in those that focus on a cast of characters. Olga Kenyon asked Brookner about this in Women Writers Talk in 1989, in relation to Family and Friends:

Kenyon: You've chosen a family saga, but concise, controlled, through a series of family photographs. Why did you choose that form?
Brookner: Because it was easier. It was not a difficult book to write; it was almost entirely free of anxiety. A chapter to each one is almost the easiest form.

A Central European Jean Rhys: Edith Templeton

 

I am apostolic about the novels of Edith Templeton, a Czech who writes in impeccable English: they are extremely restrained and tell strong stories about life in old-style central Europe, with recognisable passions and follies. Lovely, lovely novels.

Anita Brookner, interviewed by John Haffenden, 1985

In the 1980s Anita Brookner wrote introductions to several of Templeton's novels, published by Hogarth. I haven't read them, so cannot comment, but I recently got hold of The Surprise of Cremona (1954), a travel book reissued in the 2000s with an introduction by Brookner:

My only meeting with Edith Templeton took place in her flat in Bordighera some time in the mid-1980s. I found an isolated and eccentric woman: I saw from the expression on her face as we were introduced that the same judgement had been passed on myself.

Earlier, in the Spectator (here), Brookner had spoken of this rather delicious encounter (and in Bordighera too, a setting for Brookner's 1985 novel Family and Friends):

I met her once, in her flat in Bordighera, where I went to interview her; I found a tiny distracted woman with a plaintive voice, eager to talk about anything except her work. When guided towards literary matters she became icily and pungently intelligent. I carried away with me an impression of a central European Jean Rhys, a natural expatriate, but in this instance devoid of the self-pity which makes Jean Rhys so monotonous. Sly, well-born, homeless, but unflappable, it was easy to picture her taking up temporary residence in various old-fashioned watering places, sipping coffee, and training her gaze on the complacent residents. Bordighera, with its beneficent sunshine and well-ordered appointments, seemed as good a place as any, since she could be relied upon to discover, behind its temperate façades, evidence of malpractice, betrayal and opportunistic sex.

*

Like many travelogues The Surprise of Cremona is a little on the boring side - but pleasantly boring, stylishly boring. The tone is patrician but not grand. Edith Templeton is in several ways a Brooknerian traveller - an exile, alone, watchful, often to be found in art galleries - but also better connected, more social: always ready with her 'letters of introduction'. But we learn very little directly about Templeton herself. She stays on the surface, is restrained to the point of coldness. But her medium is clear: we can see, or may think we can see, through the ice to the likely emotions beneath.

She is good on café life and hotel life. She suffers setbacks but remains apparently blithe. She wears her learning lightly. She takes us not only to Cremona but through Parma, Mantua, Ravenna, Urbino and Arezzo, and in each place she knows exactly where to go. She is a sophisticate and a stylist and her descriptions are acute. A female hotelier has an 'air of devilment'; a professor gives 'a winsome leer with his dusky ruins of teeth'. But Templeton, though rakish and exceptional in the 1950s, has perhaps an uncertain literary status in the twenty-first century, as Brookner points out in her introduction. Templeton's over-confident self-consciousness, her self-sufficiency, may well render her extinct as a type.

The book finishes, and must finish, with the writer's arrival in Como, where she meets her Aunt Alice. The magic enchantment of lonesome travel is at an end.

Where to Start

Anita Brookner acquired a forbidding reputation during her writing career. Critical reception was strongly divided. So - where to start? It was possibly easier then, while she was still writing. If you had never read her, and wanted to, you could read her latest. Now that she's gone, and her body of work is complete, the uninitiated can be daunted by her sheer fecundity, the sheer volume of her fiction: twenty-four novels and a novella over thirty years. Where to start?

It is a difficult question. There's no obvious stand-out novel, by which I mean one that stands out in terms of, say, length or critical appreciation. The obvious answer is Hotel du Lac, which won the Booker Prize in 1984. But Brookner herself didn't think it should have won. Her surprise or shock is clear in a press picture from the Booker event.

She thought Latecomers (1988) should have got the prize - a book with a serious and indeed Booker-friendly theme: the lifelong effects of surviving the Holocaust.

Both Latecomers and Hotel du Lac hail from the Eighties, often cited as Brookner's best decade. You can divide up your Brookners by decade. The Eighties novels are certainly sprightlier in tone and style. Here you'll find the stylistic experimentation of Family and Friends (1985) or the basic and uncompromising Brookner manifesto that is Look at Me (1983).

The Nineties offer different pleasures. You'll find fuller character portraits: the fading actress Julia in Brief Lives (1990), or the monstrous aunt, Dolly, in A Family Romance (1993). You'll find denser, darker novels, with less incident but greater analysis. I say less incident, but there are moments of real horror: the deaths in Altered States (1996) or the ending of Undue Influence (1999). If you don't read Brookner with your heart in your mouth then you must be reading someone else.

Brookner's final five novels, plus one novella, were published in the 2000s. This last phase presents us with fresh challenges. These are Brookner's most raw and least predictable books. Her last novel, Strangers (2009), gives us a portrait of old age that's both terrifying and uncomfortably relevant. The Next Big Thing (2002), another of Brookner's 'guy' novels (Brookner didn't just write about lonely spinsters, as all those lazy critics liked to sneer), a tense and intense drama of consciousness, a novel with a strong European dimension - salutary too, in its way, in these latter days of ours.

So - where to start? I look back at my old 'Recommendations' post, and I find I haven't mentioned several. 'Where to start?' is, of course, a slightly different question. I'd say start with something recent, and something that belies Brookner's reputation. Start with The Next Big Thing. I come back to it again and again. A novel that tells us how to live.

Comfort Reading

Art doesn't love you and cannot console you, said Anita Brookner. It's a discomforting assertion. When I examine my own intake or uptake of art - by which I mean my reading, for primarily I'm literary, verbal - I realise consolation is one of the chief things I look for. My sudden blogging, my sudden and tardy engagement with the Internet, after years of silence, has somewhat changed my reading habits. I now read more, and with more purpose. I look at what others are reading and am influenced. Or else I'm reduced, made to feel subtly inferior. These other folk - how quickly and how widely they read!

Much of my reading is now rereading. I read new things infrequently. I try new authors hardly at all. I favour books about certain types or classes of character and set in certain locations. I'm really very choosy, very small-minded. I've come to the end of Trollope, an almost exclusive preference of mine through my twenties and thirties. I never thought I'd exhaust him. I've read all of Dickens and James too, other favourites, and often feel at something of a loss.

Rereading is inherently a limited activity, though of course it also has things to offer. I know what to expect and I know I'll also probably gain something new. But I have a fear. One day I'll pick up an old favourite and it'll mean nothing. It will have lost its savour. Such fears should not be underrated: reading, for some people, isn't just a pastime. It's deeply bound up with, indeed part of, their inner lives. And as we know from Brookner, one must cherish and protect one's inner life almost at any cost.

***

I'm currently reading Lotte in Weimar by Thomas Mann. It's actually new to me, though followers of this blog will know I've read Mann before (like several Brooknerians - Elizabeth Warner in 'At the Hairdresser's', who puts aside Doctor Faustus, or Julius Herz in The Next Big Thing, who finds a significant old letter in a copy of Buddenbrooks). I've also been to Lübeck several times. (The Thomas Mann house is, like the Goethehaus in Frankfurt, an artful post-war reconstruction.)

If Lotte in Weimar is comfort reading for me, I suspect it was comfort writing for its author. Published in 1939 while Mann was in exile from his homeland (Buddenbrooks having been publicly burnt) the novel is set in the early nineteenth century and tells of real-life Werther* heroine Lotte's arrival in Weimar forty-four years after her youthful association with Goethe. I am sorry the novel isn't better known in English.

Here is George Steiner on Mann:

Thomas Mann is a towering presence in modern literature. The analogy with Goethe, which he himself invoked, is often justified. The leviathan series of novels that chronicled the decay of the old European order, and its descent into the night of the inhuman, stands unrivalled. Our current politics, our aesthetics, our images of personal hurt carry the impress of Death in Venice, of The Magic Mountain, of Doctor Faustus. The epithet 'Olympian' has been attached to Thomas Mann. In an important sense, it is erroneous. There is nothing remote about these classics. They ache at us.

*Brookner's Family and Friends begins with an epigraph from Goethe's most famous novel. And the cold calculations of Elective Affinities are discussed in Altered States.

Beyond the Bridge

Beyond the bridge lay the Paris I had known and loved, and perhaps should never see again with that lift of the heart that had once attended me every morning of my life.

Altered States, ch. 10

Chapter 10 of Altered States is one of the most accomplished in the whole of Brookner. Significantly it is about Paris and significantly it's about a character travelling on his own. Alan goes to Paris, planning a clandestine meeting with Sarah at the George Cinq, but things go farcically awry. There's a bizarre travel-phobic man on the plane; it's raining heavily; the hotel is overbooked. From that point, Alan's attempts to meet Sarah develop from farce into Kafka-style nightmare. He reflects again on her unavailability; he's practically never had a proper conversation with her. She's rather like the love object in Mann's Magic Mountain, the woman with the Kirghiz eyes, whom Hans Castorp never so much as speaks two words to. The chapter ends in full-blown horror: it's Brookner pulling out all the stops. But the setting gives it added weight. Paris: scene of Brooknerian dreams, but also of Brooknerian disillusion. One remembers Mimi waiting hopelessly for Frank in a Paris hotel in Family and Friends, or one looks ahead to Julius Herz and his terrible visit to the city in The Next Big Thing.

Real Contact

... 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.

Strangers, Ch. 7

Once more, in Strangers, Brookner takes stock of her strange second career. Werther takes us back to Family and Friends, Adolphe to Providence. Brookner herself, though very private, was not known for the kind of vapid small-talk she deplored in the English. A recent diary piece by Julian Barnes amusingly makes this point:

Towards the end of the first year of Anita Brookner’s deathtime, I was remembering my meetings and conversations with her. What we talked about: art, books, the literary world, France, friends in common. What we didn’t talk about: her early years, her personal life, politics (I never knew whether or how she voted), or anything practical. No exchange of recipes. No mention of sport. ‘Anita, what do you think of Ireland’s chances in the Six Nations?’ was not a question that ever came to my lips. I remember her telling me that she had just finished a novel and so, for the moment, was ‘doing exactly what I like’. I said, teasingly: ‘Well, in your case that probably means rereading Proust.’ Her eyes widened in alarm: ‘How did you guess?’

London Review of Books, 20 April 2017 

'A Wedding'

Missing from the archive, as it were, are Anita Brookner's short stories. One is rather glad she never wrote them. I've never much enjoyed short stories. Does anyone, really?

In my earliest days as a Brookner fan, I became aware of what seemed to have been a Brookner story, 'A Wedding', published in an old copy of Granta. The 1984 date and the title suggested, perhaps, connections with Hotel du Lac or, more likely, Family and Friends. But I was hopeful for a lost classic.

I searched old bookshops and the like. This was in that golden or that dark time before the Internet. I never found what I was looking for - but of course it's online now, and only a click away.

And of course it's only the opening chapter of Family and Friends.

There were no more such 'stories'. There was 'At the Hairdresser's' in 2011, but that always seems like a short novel. One is indeed relieved Brookner steered clear of the short story form. At their worst short stories are just a way for writers to make a quick buck, while longer projects mature. And they're also very much the province of the 'professional' writer, the writer for whom writing is his or her only occupation. Brookner wasn't like that. She'd already had a career. This isn't to say novel writing was her hobby. But the project was playful, and in that way somehow more serious a concern than it could ever be for her apparent peers.

Recommendations

I fight shy of rankings, league tables and the like, but from time to time I'm asked for recommendations. In purely chronological order, here are my five. (Hotel du Lac, for reasons explored in a post of yesterday, is excluded from consideration (not that it would necessarily have made the list).)


Look at Me (1983)
Not by any means a perfect Brookner, but an essential one. Here we get our first full view of the battle between Brookner's insiders and outsiders. Just whose side is she on?

Family and Friends (1985)
Brookner's most stylish novel, published following the euphoria of the Booker win. Confident, magisterial, this is Brookner placing herself firmly beyond the parochial concerns of the traditional English novel.

A Private View (1994)
The story of ageing George Bland's reckless passion for an itinerant young woman. A dense, intense portrait of sexual obsession.

Visitors (1997)
Essentially the same story as A Private View, but here the passion is sublimated. Wonderful scenes of summer and the end of summer. A close, Jamesian study.

The Next Big Thing / Making Things Better (2002)
In late Brookner the passion is as strong as it always was, but now there's an element of real danger. Now no one gets out alive. A precise, unflinching novel with a European dimension.

The Historic Present

In my freshman prize copy of A Dictionary of Stylistics (Longman, 1991), by one of my old teachers, Katie Wales, I find the historic present defined as the 'special use of the present tense in oral or written, anecdotal or literary narrative, where the past tense might be expected, the shift creating a more dramatic or immediate effect'.

Professor Wales cites the use of the form in jokes, in newspaper headlines, in Pope's Iliad, and in Anita Brookner's Family and Friends.

The form has continued its popularity with literary novelists. Consider Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell novels.

There was a minor media spat a few years back, regarding the use of the historic present in BBC history programmes: 'It gives a bogus, an entirely bogus, sense of immediacy,' said John Humphrys.

Brookner's deployment of the historic present in Family and Friends evolves out of the authorial voice's examination of a set of old photographs. In Brookner's hands the effect of the form is less one of immediacy than of distance, though this may be a result of other aspects of Brookner's prose, which here is at its most mandarin. But the historic present contributes much to the overall, highly artful impact. In some way the foreignness of the Dorns, the formality of their mittel-European manners, are mirrored and represented.

Of Innocence and of Experience

Outside the line of duty I reread Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, and once again found it matchless, a grave description of one of life's great traumas, the passage from innocence to experience.

Spectator, 17 November 2001

Brookner's own characters are rarely depicted in a condition of innocence. We might watch them experience a moment of revelation, a moment of horror; the ending of Undue Influence comes to mind. But were they innocent before? No, more often than not they were beady and watchful, already (at however young an age) denizens of a fallen world.

Family and Friends, in the character of Mimi, is an exception. We see Mimi sitting hopefully in a Paris hotel, waiting for Frank, who will not come. We witness what seems like a genuine loss of innocence, something that colours Mimi's whole life. Nothing afterwards is ever glad confident morning again.

...since that morning when, dry-mouthed and dry-eyed, she got up and dressed herself and left the hotel, she no longer feels part of her time, of her age: she feels invisible. It is as much as she can do now to avoid pain, simply to avoid pain.

Ch. 10

She has become a Brooknerian, and the nature and depth of her degradation and of her discovery are uncompromising. It is not, we learn, Frank for whom Mimi afterwards yearns, but for the missing factor in herself that would have brought him into her life (Ch. 10). One thinks here of Zoe in The Bay of Angels and 'the despair of one whose life is lacking in several essential components' (Ch. 16).

Family and Friends has other things to say on innocence and experience:

To suppose that those who are sexually inactive are also sexually inarticulate is a grave mistake, but one which is made with disheartening frequency.

Ch. 9

Those who are inexperienced, even intact, may not after all be innocent. By contrast, those with the fullest, most extreme lives may persist in a dangerous state of innocence. This reminds me a little of some E. M. Forster lines (I quote from memory): the fetish 'experience' of the innumerable teacups; and the notion of a person having an amount of experience that is out of proportion with his actual adventures.

The Game to be Played

Brookner has frequently been misread as a soft option, a wistful English lady writing short, tender, sorrowful novels a la Rosamond Lehmann, on broken hearts and lost loves. This is quite wrong. She is an obsessive, clinical, severely disenchanted writer.

Hermione Lee, review of A Friend from England, LA Times, 1988

I should like to focus today on Rosamond Lehmann, the dedicatee of Hotel du Lac. In Selina Hastings's 2002 biography of Lehmann, we learn that one of the most pleasurable consequences of Rosamond's late-flowering fame in the 1980s, following the inauguration of the Virago publishing house, was the personal friendships she formed as a result: with Carmen Callil 'whose generous and ebullient nature endeared her to Rosamond' and Anita Brookner, 'whose work Rosamond unreservedly admired - "my favourite novelist" - and of whom she became extremely fond'. Brookner, described by Hastings as 'elegant, fastidious, unusually perceptive', had some reservations about Lehmann's writing, 'although she became devoted to her person'.

I adored her. She was very benevolent towards me ... [although] she never regarded me as an equal: that was the game to be played. One always had to refer to her beauty, which was not apparent any more, of course. And she trailed a glorious past behind her, which didn't deceive me for one moment. She was very insecure and very innocent. I could see that she'd been abandoned. There were lots of names, lots of friends [...] And yet the impression I had was of a woman sitting alone, inconsolable.

(One is reminded perhaps of Julia in Brief Lives?)

Anita and Carmen, writes Hastings, dined sometimes with Lehmann at her London home, where Rosamond would reminisce about her love life, encouraging the younger women to confide to her about their own. On a couple of occasions all three spent the weekend at Lehmann's Suffolk home. We know from Brookner's novels how trips into the English provinces can be rife with danger. Callil recalls 'Anita sternly going for walks and drinking tea'.

[Brookner's obituary or memoir of Lehmann, written shortly after her death in 1990, is worth a read.]

Rosamond Lehmann in earlier life

[And as to Carmen Callil (dedicatee of A Friend from England): In The Modern Library (1999) she selects Family and Friends as one of the 200 best novels since 1950: '[Brookner's] fiction is noted for its subtlety and technical skill but this can be deceptive, and has indeed deceived an odd ghetto of English critics who greet her novels with delighted misunderstanding. Elsewhere it is recognised that in ambush behind her classically beautiful prose ... is a devilry that works on her stories like lemon zest. Family and Friends, in Alfred's final revenge, provides a finale so delicate and precise that you can almost see the keen eye of the author slowly blinking at you.']

On Goethe

Brookner makes reference now and again to Goethe. Family and Friends begins with an epigraph from Werther. At least one later Brookner novel (Altered States?) namechecks Elective Affinities.

The Frankfurt Goethehaus looks at first like a genuine eighteenth-century house but like many old-looking buildings in Germany it is in large part a postwar reconstruction. In another part of the building there's a small art gallery: Tischbein, Fuessli, Hackert, minor Caspar David Friedrich. Brookner's comment somewhere about Friedrich's threadbare religious imagery apparently spoilt for ever Brian Sewell's appreciation of the painter.

Paris 29205

The Paris we all know, or think we know, came into being with the arrival of the Métro, much admired by Proust, who never used it. This was followed a few years later by the telephone (Proust’s number was 29205). The Paris we can remember, or think we can remember, was the Paris of the 1950s and 1960s, when Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir held court at the Flore, and when a new novel by Simenon appeared regularly every few months. 

These were the last of the glory days, when it was possible to feel like a provincial, newly arrived, and undergoing a longed-for transformation, much as Robb, armed with his map and his gift voucher must have felt at the start of his own apprenticeship. New Paris, the Paris of today, is part of Europe, and its concerns are global. The charms of discovery must yield to a different kind of loyalty, to the planet, to the environment. The true Parisian will, of course, shrug this off, and remain embedded in his quartier, will be on polite if not cordial terms with his or her neighbours, and will continue to dress with an eye to fashion. At the same time, the true provincial will still be able to walk from one end of the city to the other, listen to the café conversations of strangers, and admire Baron Haussmann’s accommodating boulevards. 

'The People and the Place', review of Parisians by Graham Robb, Spectator, 7 April 2010

We see Brookner's Paris, in its 'glory days', in the early novels from time to time, later in Lewis Percy and Incidents in the Rue Laugier (ostensibly beginning in the Seventies, but its time-scheme is far from reliable). Later still, in a new century, we follow Julius Herz on a disappointing day-trip on Eurostar.

I first visited in the early 1990s, walked up and down the rue de Rivoli in search of the Hotel Bedford et West End from Family and Friends. I revisited the city on and off through the 1990s and early 2000s, bought a copy of The Next Big Thing in 2002 in the rue de Rivoli branch of W. H. Smith's, a few weeks ahead of its publication in England.

More recent visits have been less agreeable. The city has indeed become, as Brookner says, global. I was last there in 2009 or 2010. It was tourist hell.

The Lost Interview

OK, so it isn't actually lost, but it is little known and hard to come by. Olga Kenyon in her interview with Anita Brookner in Women Writers Talk (Lennard, 1989) takes the following stance: 'Brookner revitalises the romance as she fictionalises its restricting of female potential'. The meeting, one senses, wasn't entirely harmonious, and later Brookner would be interviewed mainly by men.

Kenyon: What were your mother's expectations?
Brookner: She wanted me to be another kind of person altogether. I should have looked different, should have been more popular, socially more graceful, one of those small, coy, kittenish women who get their way. If my novels contain a certain amount of grief it is to do with my not being what I would wish to be. 

[...] 

K: Did your parents ever talk about their past - or the holocaust?
B: No, and I'm grateful for that.
K: I believe you made plans to visit Poland, but didn't go. Why?
B: For a Jew, Poland is not exactly the Promised Land. I would have liked to see my father's family summer house on the river. But I would never have found it, or known if it was the right one, and that would have mattered to me extremely. 

[...] 

K: Why is it that you didn't begin writing till middle age, like Edith Wharton? Had you been writing in secret?
B: No, there were no secret notebooks, not a scrap, not a sentence. 

[...] 

B: ... What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere. It is an art form in itself.
K: Do you rewrite a great deal?
B: No, there are no drafts, no fetishes, no false starts; there simply isn't time. I write straight onto a typewriter, as though the novels had been encoded in the unconscious. I find the process of writing painful rather than difficult. You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you didn't know existed. These books are accidents of the unconscious. It's like dredging, seeing if you can keep it going.
K: Can you explain why you write when it's painful?
B: I can't really explain it. I don't usually enjoy it. There's a terrible exhilaration, like having a high fever, which comes on me. Writing is my form of taking a sedative... 

[...] 

K: [Of Hotel du Lac:] ... you started with a hotel where you'd stayed in Switzerland?
B: I have stayed in that hotel more than once. Nothing like that happened in the real hotel, so I suppose that image did stay in my memory. It was very still; it was very grey; and one was waiting for something to happen. 

[...] 

K: In your fiction you seem to me to give a very true picture of the way it is to be lonely, to be perceptive, to be an observer. Do you feel yourself to be those things?
B: I know all those things, intimately. Yes, I'm all those things. 

[...] 

K: Would you say that one of the major themes is romantic love?
B: Romantic hopefulness - it's constant, in spite of a sense of defeat.
K: Isn't it a little old fashioned today?
B: Romanticism is not just a mode; it literally eats into every life... 

[...] 

K: You said to another interviewer that love is your subject.
B: What else is there? Everything else is merely literature... 

[...] 

K: You said that when writing Family and Friends you were in control. Is that a motive?
B: 'With one bound Jack was free.' It's a kind of involution almost. Maybe as in psychoanalysis you abreact the whole thing and it comes out right... 

[...] 

K: Your characters are not at home in the twentieth century. Is that why your heroines are given such a limited set of alternatives?
B: They are stupid - if they weren't they'd have more options. But the choice is never unlimited, that's the twentieth-century mistake, whereas the nineteenth century was more realistic. You can do this or that, not an unlimited number of things.
K: Is your writing a critique on the options of the twentieth century?
B: No, except that I find the moral position of many modern novelists ridiculous, as if you could start editing your life halfway through... 

[...] 

K: Do you think you are read by men?
B: Yes,I do.
K: And read differently? How?
B: The most pertinent criticism I've had from a male reader was 'You write French books, don't you?' They don't offer comments on the characters, which women always do ... [Men] seem to view it from a certain distance. I haven't taken elaborate soundings, but I just know that the criticism tends to be different. 

[...] 

K: ...Which qualities do you value most in a friend?
B: I think accountability, that's to say explaining actions with full knowledge of emotions and procedures. You get it in Russian novels: the complete confession. Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy, and it is the Grail.

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.