The Next Big Thing: At the NPG

...an arresting image from the National Portrait Gallery of a dressmaker pinning the skirt of an impassive client who resembled Fanny Bauer (black hair, dark eyes, prominent crimson mouth, and bad-tempered expression)...

Anita Brookner, The Next Big Thing, ch. 9

Brookner in her late work - when, as it were, a decent time had passed since her retirement from the Courtauld - returned in something like earnest to her earlier calling*. There were the books of criticism, Soundings and Romanticism and Its Discontents. And there were novels like The Next Big Thing, with its numerous art references. Here Herz is looking through his collection of old art postcards. But I confess I can't identify the image of a dressmaker and her impassive client. Can anyone help?

* though Julian Barnes believes art criticism and novel writing occupied quite separate parts of her mind. He speaks of how she would light up and be transformed when asked over dinner her views on, say, the painter Boucher.

Undue Influence: Closing Remarks

After Undue Influence (1999) there came an unprecedented gap in the publication pattern Anita Brookner had established over nearly twenty years. There was something in 2000, but it was a book of art criticism, Romanticism and Its Discontents. In 2001 the fiction resumed, but Brookner told Robert McCrum she hadn't intended to write the novel of that year. Undue Influence might well therefore have been Brookner's last novel.

We read Undue Influence now, or I do, as pointing forward to the darker novels of the 2000s. For sure it is a bleak tale, all the more so for the breeziness of its opening chapters. The sly author lulls you into the impression that this is some kind of easy-going Brookner-lite, before steadily turning the screw. Towards the end you realise you're keeping company with a narrator who may well be mentally ill, and a writer who's intent on ruthlessly clearing the decks of extraneous plot so that she can concentrate on heaping the maximum humiliation on her hapless protagonist.

How Claire Pitt suffers! Brookner deprives her of every support. I always find very terrible that moment when she considers spending an entire holiday in Hyde Park. The novel's ending, as grim but more concise than the conclusion to Look at Me, never fails to shock, even though on rereading the reader has probably been able to spot the careful way Brookner has seeded the whole novel with clues.

One of the novel's concluding lines:

It was the greatest failure of my life and no future success could ever obliterate it.

- brings to mind again the question of the time scheme. The suggestion here is of a long retrospect, which is at odds with the closer focus at work throughout the novel. But if this suggests a lack of novelistic polish, it also, I think, successfully evokes the unfinished rawness of the heroine's truly terrible experience.

***

The Brooknerian will now take a break, returning in a week or two with consideration of, among other things, Brookner's relationship with a writer who's currently in her bicentenary year. Yes, just do mention Jane Austen!

A Disconcerting Opacity

Brookner often takes us to Paris, but not so often to the Louvre. In late, late Brookner, in Strangers (2009), Sturgis gives the Louvre a miss, putting it 'definitively behind him', preferring an 'improvised existence' for which no one will take him to task (Ch. 25).

In gentler, more expansive mid-period Brookner, in Fraud (1992), Anna Durrant dutifully puts in time at the museum. But it is not the 'great discordant machines of the Romantics' that claim her attention but the portraits of Ingres, 'calm, replete, satisfied with their immensely enviable situation in this world, and careless of the world to come' (Ch. 12).

Anna remembers Baudelaire's remark that he found it hard to breathe when faced with an Ingres portrait: he felt as though the oxygen had been sucked out of the atmosphere. This is evidently a favoured description, which Brookner returns to in her essays on Ingres in Soundings (1997) and Romanticism and Its Discontents (2000). Ingres is indeed several times the object of Brookner's somewhat appalled fascination. In the novels we find characters visiting the National Gallery and gravitating towards Mme Moitessier and her impossible dress.* Mme Moitessier is perhaps like one of those Brookner monsters, a Dolly, a Julia, adamantine in her self-regard and unassailability.

In Soundings Brookner discusses the painting at length:

She sits in her crowded boudoir with her famous finger to her temple, dominating with ease her challenging dress. Her gaze is both remote and replete; its descent from the Mona Lisa is not difficult to trace. At first sight it is an arrogant work. Yet on further contemplation the hard-edged image seems to fade and become more opaque, and Mme Moitessier undergoes a transformation from upper-class fortune-teller to Delphic oracle. Nor is this merely a matter of contrasting the personality she presents to us with her mirror image, that not quite accurate reflection seen in a glass darkly, as if the other side of her were in a different room. By concentrating on the shadowy depths of the portrait, and laying emphasis where it is least expected, Ingres endows the foreground with a disconcerting opacity. Central to the confusion of meanings is the door off to the left, a door through which no one will ever enter or leave.

*Unfortunately I can't find the references, but I know they're there.

Disengagement, Disillusionment, Ennui

Observer: So you've now finished the book, and you're a free woman?
Anita Brookner: Very boring.
Obs: You're bored?
AB: Oh terribly.

2001 Observer interview

I'm getting bored with my characters – my character.'  That suggests you are getting bored with yourself.  'Completely.'  What, I ask, could anyone offer to stave off that boredom?  'But you have! Meaningful conversation. I've enjoyed this. It's been rigorous.' 

The afternoon light is fading – the moment of that 'slight failure of nerve'. And what will you do now, I ask, rising to leave.  'Make a cup of tea. Go and get an evening paper. Talk to the Indian newsagent. Come home. Have a bath. Watch Channel 4 News.' She gives a slight smile. 'You're getting the detail now. Then take a sleeping pill, then bed. What time? Oh, nine.'  And then tomorrow get up and do the same thing all over again?  'That's right.' 

Her eyes sparkle mischievously. 'Bored stiff! Well maybe not bored. Resigned, shall we say…'

2009 Telegraph interview

Being bored, being subject to ennui, is a Brooknerian experience. But let me explore it in the context of Brookner's art criticism. Time and again she returns to Delacroix's painting of 1827, Death of Sardanapalus. Liberal-minded critics of the day saw it, she tells us, as 'a poem of destruction' ('Baudelaire', The Genius of the Future). It was Baudelaire who saw that it wasn't about destruction; it was 'about ennui, about spleen, about the inability to feel no matter how violent the impulse'. She quotes Baudelaire's sonnet, inspired by the picture:

Il n’a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébété  

Où coule au lieu de sang l’eau verte du Léthé.

('...in vain he has tried to rekindle this benumbed corpse in which flows, not blood, but the green waters of Lethe.')

Sardanapalus 'represents the Silver Age of Romanticism, an age of disengagement, of ... disillusionment,' she writes in Romanticism and Its Discontents (Ch. 5).

All of which is very excessive, very extreme, and perhaps at odds with the rather more domestic boredom experienced by Brookner's fictional personages or indeed by Anita Brookner herself. But never be in any doubt that this is where she begins, that what appears at first blush merely domestic, even cosy, is in fact part of a longer, wider, harsher, and far from conventional spectrum.

Moorish Fantasies

Delacroix, Fantasia Arabe, Staedel Museum, Frankfurt

The journey to Morocco facilitated both renewal and greater emancipation from the standards still prevalent in the studios and in the Salon [...] The brilliant sunlight of the landscape [...] the outdoor scenes have a silvery-yellow, almost Veronese light...

 'Delacroix: Romantic Classicist', Romanticism and Its Discontents

Later in the same essay, written before The Next Big Thing, Brookner considers Jacob and the Angel:

That other detail, of the caravan of animals and servants being sent off to Esau, represents Delacroix's last Moorish fantasy.

See also the following earlier posts: Julius and the Angel and A Private View.

The Consolations of Art

The search for happiness, which Stendhal decided was entirely possible, has been rejected, has been replaced by the consolations of art. In the first and heroic phase of Romanticism it was possible to believe in personal fulfilment, if only in reduced circumstances. In the second and disillusioned phase the world is regarded as a vale of tears... 

Romanticism and Its Discontents, Ch. 5 

 

I always went to fiction for consolation, or indeed for company; and to be able to operate in that area seemed to me so desirable that I decided to try. 

Radio interview extract, part of Radio 4 obituary programme Last Word

It is always good and surprising to hear Brookner's voice. As far as I know only the above extract and another BBC programme, The Reunion, are available online. In the 1980s Brookner made herself more available, but recordings are hard to come by. I believe a Brookner scholar took the following stills from a TV arts show archived at the BFI:

As for Last Word, I remember hearing it as it was broadcast. I was driving home, and I knew Brookner would be on it. She played second billing to the magician Paul Daniels, a figure from my childhood. A few Christmases ago I stood behind him in the checkout queue at a branch of Poundland.