A Private View: Chapter by Chapter: 5, 6

• Chapter lengths: Brookner lived by her routines, and in most of her novels (though not the last ones) her chapters are noticeably even in length. A Private View is like this but (along with the previous one, A Family Romance) unlike too, in that its chapters are about double the normal Brookner length (twenty rather than ten pages). It suits A Private View in particular, which focuses on a short period of time in the protagonist's life. Chapter 5, for example, covers a single day. But why impose on oneself a chapter-length format anyhow? Such structure was necessary for the likes of Trollope, who was writing for serial publication, but not in the late twentieth century. I guess Brookner was one of those artists whom restriction rather than freedom made creative.
• Sickert. For more on the Royal Academy's 1992 Sickert exhibition, click on the label below. (I find Bland pays a second, weekday visit to the exhibition, but on a Monday not a Tuesday, so, again, he failed to cross paths with Jim Lees-Milne.)
• Brookner skewers with a passion Katy's 'airy Californian make-believe' of encounter groups and self-affirmation. In this way she places herself in a determinedly English tradition. Kingsley Amis does something similar in Jake's Thing.
• There's a nod to Stefan Zweig in chapter 6, in the line about being 'beware of pity'. Zweig had a vogue in the early twenty-first century, but Brookner was there already.
• Bland's upholstery - pink and green stripes - is rather jollier than Brookner's grey and white stripes, visible on the National Portrait Gallery website (here) in a photo of the time.

Jim, George, Walter and the RA

On Tuesday 1 December 1992 the diarist James Lees-Milne made one of his regular jaunts to London, where he visited Richard Shone's Walter Sickert exhibition at the Royal Academy. He had one or two things to say about the show, noting that the later paintings, done from photos, looked like photos, but were still fascinating - transient scenes immortalised - and liking the 'early stuff' -  'Whistlerish'. His main beef - he wouldn't be James Lees-Milne if he didn't have a complaint - was with the gallery lighting.

As I've explained before (see here), Anita Brookner's 1994 novel A Private View is set fairly precisely in late 1992. In chapter 4, one Sunday, the protagonist George Bland visits the Sickert exhibition at the RA. Bland's ruminations prove somewhat more extensive than Jim Lees-Milne's, though the gallery's lights aren't commented on.

If the visits to the RA of Lees-Milne and Brookner that winter had coincided, would the pair have acknowledged one another? Probably not. They weren't really acquainted, though Lees-Milne had heard Dr Brookner lecture in the 1980s. Much later, on the posthumous publication of a biography of Lees-Milne, Brookner indicated that she was a 'devotee' of his diaries.

At the Courtauld

The Courtauld used to be in Portman Square.

[This piece of Brookneriana dates from the mid-70s.
It found it inside a printed copy of a celebrated lecture Brookner gave
on Jacques-Louis David. I don't know who 'Louise' is or was.]

I remember visiting the Courtauld in perhaps late 1989 or early 1990. And it was gone. Visit research had been wanting. The Courtauld moved into Somerset House about that time, a year of so after Brookner retired.

Brookner attended the Courtauld's 75th anniversary celebrations at Somerset House in the mid-to-late 2000s:

I myself visited the Courtauld Gallery a few weeks ago, nearly thirty years after my first attempt. I wasn't sure whether I'd find much of interest. The place is famed for its Impressionists collection, and I'm not keen on them. Nor can I think of a single mention of the Courtauld in Brookner's novels. She probably didn't like to mix business with pleasure.

The gallery is medium-sized and not too popular. You also have to pay, which is usually a good sign. I visited alongside several tourists and lots of old and middle-aged folk who seemed to be up for the day from the suburbs and provinces.

One or two paintings made me think of Brookner's 1994 novel A Private View. I've always loved the bit where George Bland imagines himself in future years being consoled by the memory of the corner of a Rubens landscape. I thought Brookner might have had in mind the Rainbow Landscape in the Wallace Collection or the View of Het Steen in the National Gallery, but she might equally have meant this Landscape by Moonlight, 1635-40, acquired in the 1980s:

In other rooms I found a small collection of Sickerts - Portrait of Mrs Barrett, 1906, and Dawn, Camden Town, c. 1909 (though this one's only on loan) - which reminded me of Bland's trip to see a Camden Town Group exhibition, and also of Sturgis's similar later visit in Strangers.

I was interested to learn that the artist and critic Roger Fry supported the founding of the Courtauld in 1932. The gallery holds his Portrait of Nina Hamnett, 1917. I remembered the character in Brookner's Providence known only as the Roger Fry Professor. (The gallery also has a Fry self-portrait, acquired in the 1990s.)

Dating Strangers

Unpicking a Brookner time-scheme can be a queasy business; the extreme case is Incidents in the Rue Laugier, in which the narrative purports to conclude some considerable time after the book's publication date. Some works, however, have distinct, controlled chronologies. Bland's trip to see an exhibition of Sickert's works allows us to date the action of A Private View very precisely, as we have seen.

That novel has much in common with Strangers (2009), and we can use a surprisingly similar means of dating its events. In Chapter 23 Sturgis and Sarah visit an exhibition dedicated to the Camden Town Group at Tate Britain, a show that ran from February to May 2008. It concentrated on the core of the Group - Gore, Gilman, Bevan, Ginner - with Sickert as a key player.

Closing Remarks

Let's put 'At the Hairdresser's' (2011) to one side for the moment, and consider Strangers (2009) as Brookner's final novel. She possibly didn't expect it to be her last, yet it has a conclusive, a summative, air. She revisits themes, references, locations, character-types. Paul Sturgis may be traced to George Bland in A Private View (1994) most obviously, but he has antecedents in all those Brooknerians who find themselves flirting with other lives (the earliest example is possibly Blanche in A Misalliance (1986)). On the other side there's Mrs Gardner, a fairly hateful figure - hateful in a way Katy Gibb never was. Katy Gibb (A Private View) I've always found rather fascinating (but I'm probably as morally susceptible as George Bland). Katy Gibb and George Bland are both tremendously 'there', as John Bayley remarks, and Sturgis and Mrs Gardner somehow aren't as substantial. Strangers is a thinner, more exiguous novel: one can see this superficially in the briefness of its chapters, in comparison with the denser, longer chapters of earlier novels. In Strangers Brookner wants to finish and have done. She always wants to do that, but never is it so obvious. Or rather she finds, towards the close, that she's run out of plot, and must invent a trip to Nice and then a return via Paris. Sturgis's seemingly never-ending, protracted, frustrating travels are experienced, as they are by the reader, on the edge of nightmare. Nevertheless, a lesson is earned:

The evidence was all too clear: he could undertake no more excursions. He lay down on the bed, let himself drift off into sleep, not without a sense of nightmare. But this was standard now... (Ch. 25)

He has arrived, like Bland, at the end of his adventures, and Brookner has too. There will be no more excursions, no more novels. There will be 'At the Hairdresser's', but this will be a much more limited affair. With Strangers we all but finish the Brooknerian journey, grateful for a final fling, this rayon vert before the darkness comes down.

The Corner of a Rubens Landscape

References in A Private View (1994), that most painterly of Brookners, range from Tintoretto

to Odilon Redon

and Walter Sickert.

(Brookner has George Bland visit the Sickert exhibition at the Royal Academy, thus placing the action of the novel in the winter of 1992-3.)

But most memorable for me is Bland's vision of himself at some debilitated future moment, glad to be able to recall a detail from a landscape by Rubens. One wonders: Which might it be?

One knows the Rainbow Landscape in the Wallace Collection

or the View of Het Steen in the National Gallery -

or perhaps it is the Kermis in the Louvre?

I cherish them all - and all because of George Bland, all because of Brookner.