The Rules of Engagement: Analysis

The character of Nigel, dignified and likeable at first, but given to psychobabble, gradually falls victim to a sort of novelistic passive aggression. The existence somewhere in his background of an analyst* is inferred by the narrator, indeed imagined in some detail, though never confirmed. For her part she's 'too proud, or too ashamed (they are the same thing) ever to have confided, to have confessed in any company' (ch. 14).

Brookner herself was asked by at least one interviewer whether she'd undergone analysis. She hadn't. And she wasn't about to start. It would take too long. And she might doubt the intelligence of the interrogator. It's a breathtaking answer.

But she was a devotee of Freud. Her novel Strangers has an epigraph by Freud, a rare honour in Brookner. One thinks of Herz too, in The Next Big Thing, talking to an uncomprehending GP of Freud's experience on the Acropolis, of having 'gone beyond the father' (ch. 7). Or one remembers this treasurable line from chapter 13 of Incidents in the Rue Laugier:

...those who did not rely on their inner resources, as she had been obliged to do, were forever condemned to weep in other women's drawing-rooms...

*We learn that a similar character, Patrick, in A Misalliance, also has an analyst, and the revelation is something he never quite recovers from.

Viennese Brookner

References to the Austrian capital are scattered through Brookner's novels. The following is probably not a full list:

• Hotel du Lac: Edith Hope has Viennese ancestry. She goes with her English father to the Kunsthistorisches Museum to see 'a picture of men lying splayed in a cornfield under a hot sun'. This is a puzzle. It sounds like Bruegel's Harvesters (which isn't in Vienna, though the museum houses several of the artist's surviving pictures of the seasons). See an earlier post here.
• There's a Viennese background to that most Freudian of Brookners, A Family Romance, Toni Ferber hailing from (where else?) Berggasse. Later her granddaughter Jane visits the city, drops into Demel's, eats Sachertorte, finds it disappointing. Demel's is extant, but like many such establishments now a touristy Lacanian simulacrum of its probable former self. Getting inside looks to be no mean feat: one would have to elbow one's way through a crowd of snapping gawpers, and there's surely a waiting list months long. See an earlier post here.
• George Bland, in A Private View, knows Vienna: the Tintoretto Susannah and the Elders sheds unwelcome light on his own private view of Katy Gibb.

• Incidents in the Rue Laugier: Max Kroll, a minor character, one of Brookner's exiles, was a bookseller in old Vienna.
• The Next Big Thing: Herz remembers visiting Vienna - in particular the modernist Wittgenstein Haus, one of his 'artistic delights'.

Pictures of my recent visit to Vienna can be found on Twitter @brooknerian. Feel free to like, retweet and, if you don't already, follow. Happy New Year!

No Good Could Come of It

Her father [a Viennese ophthalmologist] was moderately successful in his profession, which was something of an irony, as his own eyes were weak and occasionally watery, which gave him a melancholy appearance. This ocular melancholy might even have masked something more profound, as if genuine grief were manifesting itself in this singularly appropriate symbol. Vienna was alive with metaphors: no explanation was too far-fetched.

A Family Romance, ch. 2

Was there ever a more Freudian Brookner than A Family Romance? There's its title, of course (though its applicability to the events of the novel isn't entirely obvious*), and there's Jane's maternal grandmother's Viennese background. I remembered from earlier readings that Toni Ferber ended up, like Freud, in Maresfield Gardens, London, but I had forgotten her journey had started in none other than the Berggasse in Vienna, and that the consulting-room of Dr Meyer, the ophthalmologist, was, like Freud's, just across the landing from his apartment.

Jane's English father had understandable doubts:

He thought the ambience perfervid, haunted by the ghost of Freud and other Viennese associations. Even the conjunction of the Berggasse and Maresfield Gardens was, he thought, too apt, too prompt, too symbolic to be a mere accident: no good could come of it.

(For more on Brookner and Freud, see comments in her several interviews, especially the 2009 Telegraph interview.)

*Jane 'was not encouraged to formulate any family romance, although I was to do this later in the books I wrote for children' (ch. 2). Thus, curiously negatively, the (British only) title refers to something that the novel rejects. But in steering wide of a too closely Freudian form of fiction, Brookner perhaps avoids a crime identified by Virginia Woolf: that in becoming 'cases' characters cease to be individuals ('Freudian Fiction', 1920 essay collected in A Woman's Essays).

Also they should not be too old

For all its glory England is a land for rich and healthy people. Also they should not be too old. 

Sigmund Freud, London, 1938

Epigraph to Strangers

Some authors fill the opening pages of their novels with often incoherent quotations from other literary texts. Brookner rarely required such scaffolding, and when she did - in Family and Friends, A Closed Eye and Strangers - she selected from the best: Goethe, James, Freud. The Freud quote, probably from one of his letters, is a brilliant find, and, along with the playful Author's Note that follows, sets the tone for a novel that promises to be different from what has gone before, edgier and, if this were possible, even more unconsoling.

Among Strangers

Paul Sturgis, the hero of Brookner's last full-length novel, fears he will die among the strangers of the book's title.

The novel's epigraph is from Freud, whom Brookner revered: England, says Freud, for all its glory, is not a place for the old.

An unnamed neighbour of Brookner's, appended a comment to A. N. Wilson's obituary essay on the Mail Online, referenced in an earlier post. Brookner's death was precipitated by quite a serious fire in her flat, from which she was rescued. The fire was caused by her smoking. But she was not given enough care in hospital. The nurses were, we learn, overworked. She was not got out of bed, was not rehabilitated.

This is difficult to read. One often reads Brookner novels with one's heart in one's mouth. But this was Brookner's life.

Doctors without Borders, beneficiary in Brookner's will