Brookner Interview Discoveries #1: Finding the Art of Fiction

Regular visitors to this blog will know of my devotion to Anita Brookner's interviews. Five are available on the web - the Paris Review interview, the 1990s Independent interview, and three from the 2000s (the Observer, the Independent again, and the last interview in 2009 in the Telegraph). In printed form there are the Olga Kenyon and the John Haffenden interviews, both from the 1980s. The Haffenden exchange remains to my mind the best Anita Brookner interview.

You will conceive of my delight at discovering several fresh interviews on the Guardian/Observer archive website. I propose to cover these over the coming days.

We start with a piece in the Guardian on 27 May 1981, 'Finding the art of fiction', published to coincide with the publication of Brookner's first novel A Start in Life.

As well as giving in remarkably finished form her later familiar responses to questions about her motivations for writing ('Socially she has always had the sensation of being invisible') and her love of Dickens and 'her idol' Stendhal, Brookner also speaks at some length about the art criticism for which she was then best known: David, Delacroix, Ingres, Greuze. For her study of the latter, she 'had to visit almost every French provincial city, usually in the dead of winter. I was young, I thought the discomfort exhilarating'. Her parents, we learn, were against the expedition. The interviewer writes:

They were sure she would be recruited into prostitution. Had she told them very few academics are? 'No such luck,' she replies.

Brookner speaks further of her mother, once a concert singer; she gave it up to marry. When she sang at home friends would exclaim at the choice she had made, and Brookner's father's face would blacken. In her singing her passion showed. The young Anita would start to cry. 'She, and not I, should have been the liberated woman.'

Brookner says she would like to write a biography of Ingres, a passionate happy man. Her students, she says, start by liking Delacroix and come round to Ingres. A biography of Ingres would 'take her to Montauban where she might start French life all over again, and this time, stay there'.

Her lives of Watteau, David and Greuze offer cheer: 'if they got their lives wrong they got their pictures right'.

Brooknerian Taste

If Brookner in her novels tells us how to live, in her art criticism she teaches us to see and distinguish and value. I enjoyed my visit to the Wallace Collection, but I suspect I may be among the viewers she identifies here:

Greuze's pictures have an immediate appeal - to the sentimental and untutored, of whom, fortunately, there are still many. (Greuze, Conclusion)

Her reaction to the uneven oeuvre of Jean-Baptiste Greuze, perhaps rather more than to that of Jacques-Louis David, subject of her other major study, gives insight into her taste. She dislikes much of Greuze's work, but singles out a handful of works for our appreciation and instruction:

The painter who could respond so openly to the civilized charm of the Marquise de Bezons, who could remember the exact stance of a bashful country girl, who could paint Wille and Sophie Arnould and the luminous infant Bertin* is one who deserves a permanent place not only in histories of art but in the affections of those who try, with a seriousness equal to Greuze's own, to understand the evolution of his century. (Ibid.)

*The Bertin painting featured on the book's dustjacket.

Marquise de Bezons, Baltimore

Study for L’Accordée de Village
Chalon-sur-Saône, Musée Denon

Portrait of Wille
Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André Collection

[Formerly thought to be] Portrait of Sophie Arnould
Wallace Collection

Portrait of E.-F. Bertin, Louvre

Tired Soiled Colours

...exhibited in the Salon of 1800 was the last Jeune fille qui pleure la mort de son oiseau (Louvre) which is not so much a study in double meaning as a fascinating piece of mannerism. The heavy hair has acquired a serpentine life of its own and twines in and out of the knotted drapery. The hands are boneless and affected, the head very large in proportion to the body. The effect is increased by the tired soiled colours...

Brookner, Greuze, ch. 7

This is not to say that Brookner's own style ever became affected, coagulated - but that she knew the dangers awaiting an artist over the long term. Greuze painted what his audience and presumably he liked to see, and thereby lost objectivity, thereby grew unable to see his own shortcomings. Brookner certainly had her detractors, though her supporters outnumbered them. And no one was probably as sceptical as Brookner herself - never quite enamoured of the idea of being a writer of fiction, and, while maintaining the integrity of a peculiar and very individual vision, ever alert to the need to keep her colours fresh.

On Samuel Richardson

Richardson's novels, far-fetched and of poor quality in any language...

Anita Brookner, Greuze, ch. 2

Brookner's chief beef with Samuel Richardson is a well-worn one: his didacticism: 'one was expected to read his novels in the virtuous anticipation of being instructed'. She condemns his 'almost professional assurance that virtue will triumph'; such uplift is 'spurious'. And she has her suspicions that many of his readers would have gained 'more than a little excitement' from the more lurid aspects of his fiction.

I don't often disagree with Anita Brookner (I probably wouldn't be writing this if I did). I agree with her as far as Richardson's first novel, Pamela, is concerned, a dull and ridiculous book if ever there was one, and I haven't read his last, Sir Charles Grandison (who has, other than Jane Austen?), but I tend to think of Clarissa as one of the greatest novels in any language - absorbing, immersive, and not a little mad. Clarissa set out the rules of engagement for all the great psychological novels that were to come, not least among them the novels of one Dr Brookner. Perhaps Brookner struggled with the not inconsiderable logistics of reading such a monstrously oversize text, no readable printed edition of which has been available for some time. I recently read Clarissa over the course of a year on my e-reader. It's what Kindles were invented for.

On the Verge of Decadence

It was all too obvious to the spectator that this was another allegory of lost innocence, but it appeared, to Mme Roland, among others, a remarkably decent work. It is certainly, for a subject of this type, a very painterly one. The luscious tender flesh, still painted with Rubens shadows of grey and blue, is now on the verge of decadence; the plump hands are becoming mannered. The dress, roughly painted with stiff loaded brush-strokes, sets off the melting Greuzian softness of the head, and the colours of the accessories (pink roses, green leaves, dark grey-blue sky) overflatter the tender passages. Yet in spite of all this the girl seems to have been painted as a study, i.e. objectively, and the stillness of the figure, a quality rare in Greuze, almost triumphs over the double entendre.

Anita Brookner on Greuze's La Cruche Cassée (Louvre) in Greuze (1971), ch. 7

Brookner struggles with Greuze. She struggles to like him and struggles to praise him. She isn't much of a fan, but in this early work, Greuze: The Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-Century Phenomenon, she's stuck with penning a short- to medium-length study of him.

As always the reader gains both knowledge and insight from Brookner's art history. She does what all such guides should do: she makes us see a painting in fresh ways or as if for the first time. But we might also be inclined to look for parallels with Brookner's novels and with Brookner's own practice as an artist. In the passage above the typical Brooknerian descriptive battery is in full deployment. What's more, we see, in her weighing up of Greuze's balancing of painterly objectivity and decadent voluptuousness, something of the conflicts she would explore in her fiction. Further, in the phrase, 'on the verge of decadence', we perhaps have a fairly succinct setting out of the effect of Brookner's celebrated writing style.

What Would Brookner Do?

I found the following on Twitter. I've no idea where it originates, but it's good. Good advice too. I like the 'triumphantly'.

Sensibilité, Greuze and Anita Brookner

The mid-eighteenth fashion for sensibility - sensibilité, as Brookner calls it - will be familiar to English students like myself, bringing back memories of being force-fed Richardson's Pamela, Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling and, with more enjoyment, Sterne's A Sentimental Journey. Sensibility soon became a sort of cult, ripe for send-up by Jane Austen, but at its start it was less a rejection of than a complement to Enlightenment reason, as well as being a rehearsal for Romanticism.

Brookner's focus in Greuze: The Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-Century Phenomenon (1972) is largely art-historical; she places sensibility more precisely 'between the more important and recognizable styles of Rococo and Neoclassicism'. At the same time she traces in some detail the movement's origins in the religious conflicts of the previous century and the earlier eighteenth. Traditional piety, thrown into disrepute, left a gap, a gap filled by the likes of Jean-Baptiste Greuze's moral homilies. But the original idea of sensibilité, Brookner tells us, 'became gradually obscured by the penumbra of sensations it aroused'. It grew mystical, amoral, licentious. The granting of a preeminent status to the life of the senses excused a multitude of sins.

Let us consider sensibility in Brookner's novels. She has her affecting scenes, often involving sickbeds and deathbeds. There's one in chapter 9 of A Friend from England, as Dorrie Livingstone suffers and recovers in the London Clinic. Not that irony is in abeyance; we would hardly expect that of the novel's spiky narrator. But other Brookner scenes are as sentimental as the Greuzes below. One thinks of moments in A Family Romance or the ending of Look at Me, as the old retainer Nancy takes care of the defeated Frances.

The early Brookner of Greuze is no fan of sensibilité, nor indeed of Jean-Baptiste Greuze: 'His paintings,' she says at the outset, 'with certain exceptions, appear to us tawdry, if not obscene ... he appealed to a vein of feeling that has now become extinct'. That was in 1972. I think we're less stringent now, and (for good or ill) more sentimental, and I think too that Brookner in the novels that were to come, and which she perhaps didn't have an inkling of in the early Seventies, grew more accepting, more compassionate, more sensible.

Greuze, Le Paralytique, Hermitage

Greuze, La Dame de Charité, Lyon

Greuze, Le Fils Puni, Louvre