Incidents in the Rue Laugier reread: Paris

Chapter 5 finds us at last in the rue Laugier and again on familiar Brookner ground: Paris. Characters free but anxious and disenchanted in Paris abound: Sturgis in Strangers, Herz in The Next Big Thing. Paris is here, as there, bigger and more dangerous than in the characters' dreams and memories.

I recognise in myself such feelings. I haven't been to Paris in more than a decade, but I used to be a regular. I think on my last visit, in something like 2009, I was, like Edward in Incidents, debilitated by the unexpected largeness of the place, its monumentalism. In dreams one traverses great spaces with ease, and there is little traffic.

John Bayley said of George Bland in Brookner's 1994 novel, A Private View, as he endures a crisis of nerves in Nice, that one might contemplate his situation indefinitely. But the plot must go on. And so it must here too.

Masking and Unmasking

Will anyone ever get round to writing Anita Brookner's biography? It is less likely than it might have been once. The golden age of literary biography was in the last century. Simply, the economics of publishing probably wouldn't support a latter-day Bevis Hillier or Norman Sherry, whose multi-volume John Betjeman and Graham Greene lives respectively were the fruit of decades of work (Sherry was said to have visited every place Greene ever set foot in).

Then there are the lesser 'hack' biographies that often appear more quickly after an author's death. These are culled largely from material already in the public domain. Such a biographer might find so private and retiring figure as Anita Brookner a recalcitrant subject for such a job. She was a public figure, but only up to a point, and only really from her fifties onwards. Any more comprehensive life would entail a lot of research and a lot of interviews.

She herself gave few interviews and rarely appeared on the radio or TV. One gets a sense of her 'curating' her life as it happened. Such endeavours are doomed to fail, but can frustrate the unwary. But one of the incidents over which she had less control was her involvement in the Anthony Blunt affair. In short, her boss and mentor at the Courtauld Institute, former Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, and pillar of the Establishment, Sir Anthony Blunt was unmasked in 1979 as having worked as a Soviet agent. There was a media furore and Blunt was stripped of his honours. Brookner remained loyal, visiting him in his enforced retirement, and supplying him with art books from the Courtauld's library. It was only later in the 1980s, with the publication of the notorious Spycatcher book, that Brookner learned of how Blunt had used her in a small way in the 1960s to obtain information unwittingly from a minor person of interest. Brookner's horror when she realised the full personal extent of Blunt's treachery and double-dealing was immense. She expressed her wounded feelings in an excoriating Spectator article in 1987.

One cannot but think that such dismay must have informed, affected, confirmed a worldview already familiar within her developing fictional oeuvre. And yet how would others see the matter? How was the Blunt scandal seen at the time? Ungenerously, it would appear, if a recently collected poem by Sir John Betjeman is anything to go by (Harvest Bells: new and uncollected poems, 2019).

I've never found Betjeman altogether hilarious, though I confess a liking for his later persona, but that's because I like most things from the 60s, 70s and 80s, love that time and that world.

In 'Lines on the Unmasking of the Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures' Betjeman is at his most jovial and sniggering:

Poor old Bluntie! So they got him,

'Mole Revealed' they say 'at last'.

On a bleak November morning,

What an echo from the past!...

Who'd have guessed it - 'Blunt a traitor'

And an homosexualist?...

 

... Now the nine-day wonder's over,

Back he goes to Maida Vale.

In his comfy little Rover,

Home to gin and ginger ale...

The volume's editor seeks in a note to explain the tone. Apparently Blunt made Betjeman feel he had wasted his talent in the pursuit of popularity; the poet felt, he wrote in a letter, 'trivial and shallow' beside his old acquaintance.

The Maida Vale detail is incorrect. In fact Blunt (no longer Sir Anthony) retired to a flat near the Courtauld: at the cocktail hour he would entertain old colleagues, Brookner among them (though she doubtless left early and didn't partake). Putney Vale Crematorium, a few years after 1979, was the scene of Blunt's funeral. If you type 'Anthony Blunt funeral' into a search engine you'll find photos of the affair, including one in which Anita Brookner is identifiable.

Sadder and More Confusing

An undoubted Establishment figure - Keeper of the Queen's Pictures no less - Sir Anthony Blunt was exposed as a spy in the 1960s (an episode of The Crown deals with the affair), though the information wasn't publicised until Mrs Thatcher came to power in 1979. Anita Brookner, who worked with and for Blunt at the Courtauld, was unaware of his secret past. (She would later discover, on publication of Peter Wright's Spycatcher, that she had herself been unwittingly used to gather information possibly useful to the Soviets.)

Max Hastings, writing in the Spectator in August 1980, laid into those he saw as forgiving or making light of Blunt's misdemeanours: all those former students, colleagues and hangers-on who continued to be seduced by his charisma and didn't demonstrate the sort of kneejerk condemnation Hastings (and the Leaderene, no doubt) would have seen as confirmation of the right stuff.

Brookner's letter to the Spectator of a few weeks later was nuanced and oblique. In her second life as a novelist, soon to be inaugurated, we would come to recognise this tone - and its deployment as a bulwark against very real horror and pain.

I owe my entire career to Anthony Blunt. With a number of co-signatories – from England, France, Germany, Italy, and America – I and some of my colleagues wrote to The Times last November to state our gratitude to our former teacher. The letter was not printed. I also attended a meeting of Convocation at which it was proposed to strip Anthony Blunt of his Emeritus Professorship: a ludicrous and intemperate occasion which was preceded by a lecture on the solar system – the very stuff of black comedy. 

But it should also be placed on record that some of us do not attend those dinner parties at which the matter is laughed away. Indeed, the position has grown sadder and more confusing since November. There is an inescapable moral point, but it is not the one hammered home by Mr Hastings. Those who mislead by omission find it such a trivial offence. Those on whom such an offence is practised find it devastating. You must understand that it is difficult to reconcile the very real memory of the charismatic influence with realisation that one kind of truth can run parallel with unsuspected powers of deception. Some of us are still trying to make sense of these respective positions. For my part, I must confess, without success.

Consolations #3

The reason people don’t read Scott anymore is that they think he’s prolix. They are right. There’s no getting around the fact: he’s a deeply prosy, long-winded writer. If the only thing that will hold your attention is a string of staccato action set-pieces you will surely struggle with him. But the secret to enjoying him is to accept this. Instead of impatiently yearning for things to hurry up, you need to surrender yourself to the prose, to sink into it as into a warm bath.

Adam Roberts, 'The Victorian novel: a guide to reading in lockdown', Spectator, 16 May 2020

Adam Roberts was one of my teachers at university in the early 1990s. He's still there but is now also an acclaimed science-fiction author. His recent Spectator recommendations gratify me in that they accord with my own preferences: Scott (The Antiquary, Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian), Thackeray (The Newcomes) and Eliot (Daniel Deronda). I applaud his impeccable taste, in particular his defence of Sir Walter Scott - in which happy task he joins no less than Virginia Woolf.

I happen to be reading Rob Roy at the moment, and I read The Bride of Lammermoor a few weeks back. I agree with Professor Roberts that Bride is uncharacteristic - over melodramatic - and Rob Roy a masterpiece. In essence it's a Waverley encore, but so much more assured.

I found a different sort of melodrama - arch, brittle - in my reread of The House in Paris. If Scott is a warm bath, Bowen is an icy shower. One should not perhaps read for style alone, but for me it's Bowen's chief strength:

Round the curtained bedhead, Pompeian red walls drank objects into their shadow: picture-frames, armies of bottles, boxes, an ornate clock showed without glinting, as though not quite painted out by some dark transparent wash.

The Sum of Her Books

The Spectator Annual 1992

Lived through, the Nineties seemed a dull and disappointing decade after its glitzier predecessor. Now one looks back with longing on an era of civilised quietude and gentility.

The cover says it all: Mr Major temporarily distracted from a game of cricket on a sunny afternoon. Within: a time capsule; names long-forgotten or still very much with us; antique attitudes (Auberon Waugh's 'Why we over-50s are quite happy with Europe'); Jeffrey Bernard's incomparable 'Low Life' columns; and a piece by Anita Brookner, 'How to be very, very popular', a review of a novel by Mary Wesley.

(I get confused between Mary Wesley and Rosamunde Pilcher, whose nostalgic countrified books were also once very, very popular. They continue to be so, oddly, in Germany: at Christmas in Stuttgart I had a stilted conversation with an old lady who knew little of England other than what she had gleaned from the work of Rosamunde Pilcher.)

I find Mary Wesley, about whom, and about whose popularity, Brookner is unusually sniffy - I find Wesley more or less out of print now. Whereas Brookner...

I guess the Spectator editors had a small laugh when they gave Brookner A Dubious Legacy to read. Brookner knows the joke is on her, depicting herself as a 'critic, perhaps a little morose at being excluded from what seems to be universal enjoyment and appreciation'.

She finds the novel slight, unreal and tedious. 'A certain doggedness is needed to keep one's eye on the page.'

And yet she admires Wesley, her determination, the 'sheer grit of composing a novel a year'. A novel a year? Perhaps Brookner is comparing herself, just as prolific, with Wesley? If so, it is Wesley who comes off worse. Mary Wesley, also a late starter, and later than Brookner, older than Brookner too, may seem worldly and cynical, with her ancient eye, but Brookner detects a soft sentimentality beneath the facade. She has a lot of fun at the expense of Wesley's swaggering appearance in press photos. But Brookner's own portraits were just as stagy.

'The lady herself is clearly more than the sum of her books,' Brookner concludes. One would hardly know where to place Anita Brookner herself in such an equation.

But Tidy

James Lees-Milne, sharp, catty, camp, Edwardian-born gentleman of letters, one-time Country Houses Secretary at the fledgling National Trust, sported in his later years a slightly risible halo-style 'do'. When, in June 1986, he goes with an old chum to the Royal Society of Literature to listen to Anita Brookner's lecture on the Brothers Goncourt, he finds himself distracted by her hair: 'like a bird's-nest, but tidy,' says he.

He calls her 'a funny little woman, sharp, delicate features, slight of build, soft-spoken'. Her lecture is excellent, and inspires him to read the Goncourts' novels. But, he tells his friend, afterwards he remembers little of what she said (perhaps because he was thinking rather too much about her riah).

It often surprises me (but it probably shouldn't) how infrequently Brookner's name crops up in the diaries and letters of her contemporaries. A couple of mentions in the Roy Strong journals, but practically nothing elsewhere.

Brookner suggested she was a 'devotee' of Lees-Milne when she chose Michael Bloch's biography of the diarist as one of her 'Christmas Books' in the Spectator in 2009 (here). She took the opportunity to set out what were perhaps her own preferred criteria for the genre of life-writing:

Absolute discretion combined with extensive knowledge make this a dignified achievement.

The Faint Thrill of Horror

Brookner on James is always fascinating and often provoking, not least in her 1987 review of Leon Edel's classic biography of the writer (Spectator, 1 August 1987 here). Henry James crops up more than once in Brookner's novels. In Falling Slowly (1998), for example:

She marvelled that Henry James knew so much about women and children, yet remained a bachelor, and by all accounts a man of the greatest integrity. She liked that about him, that and his reputation for modesty. He had deferred to worldly friends, as if he were not more worldly than any of them. (Ch. 16)

I agree with the last bit, but take issue with the rest. Integrity, yes - but modesty is perhaps a step too far. Similarly in her Edel review her reading goes askew. Henry James: 'essentially timid, prudent, virginal, secret and pure'?! She seems at pains to absolve him of any accusation of impropriety; she seems to want to limit What Henry Knew:

[E]ven when using libidinal language, as he does in the truly awful novel called Watch and Ward, an early work, he does not appear to know what he is doing, and his late ardent friendships with young men are not so much homoerotic as pre-sexual.

I think we all, when reading the writers of the past, especially those we revere, construct them afresh for our own purposes and sometimes in our own image. Brookner, like Edel, sees a particular James, but such is James's inexhaustibility we might just as equally posit another: supremely the very opposite of timid, prudent, virginal, secret and pure.

But what interests me about her Leon Edel piece is the following passage, in which I seem to hear a more personal note, as if Brookner were writing about herself and her own devotion to art and to work. (But of course I may myself be guilty here of constructing an author for my own purposes.)

He was fully in charge of his life, yet saw, when he was two thirds of the way through it, that he had used it up, and that there was to be no second chance. This is the message of the story called The Middle Years, and is condensed in the phrase that might be his epitaph: the madness of art. For despite Henry James's essential sobriety, his industry, and his blamelessness, one is left with the impression that his is a supreme case of misdirection. And the faint thrill of horror that this life inspires, a horror that deepens to anguish as one reads on in this meticulous and loving biography, condensed from its original five volumes to a seamless new version, must surely spring from the dawning realisation that there is no second chance, a realisation with which James lived even as a famous and venerated public figure, surrounded by the love of friends and with the evidence of a lifetime's work in print.

Six Spectator Sparklers

Anita Brookner's hack work output was prodigious. Here's a selection from three decades of her Spectator reviews and articles. Many more are freely available on the Spectator archive and main sites.

(Click on the titles below to link to the original articles.)


'A Stooge of the Spycatcher', July 1987

The painful astonishment of a deceived soul: that line from Adolphe, via Brookner's Providence, might well be applicable here. Her dismay at being mentioned in Peter Wright's notorious Spycatcher is palpable even at this distance. But the dignity with which she sets out her 'great and steady anger' in this Spectator reply awards Brookner the undoubted moral victory.

'Repose is taboo'd by anxiety', October 1993

This piece on Oliver Sacks's Migraine is magisterial. An essay both restrained and candid.


'Even less fiction than Stranger', May 1994

Brookner, Kafka, Camus, Existentialism: who could ask for more? The 'grandeur de l'homme sans espoir': not for the first time, one senses Brookner writing about herself while ostensibly giving her invaluable verdict on others.


'The master of the indirect', December 1999

Brookner, 'our Henry James' according to one critic, here reads the Master's tales. Her views are as ever instructive, not only as to James's work but also as to her own. She has something to say on being English and being European. The English, she says, are for James synonymous with the Europeans. One doesn't think Brookner herself believed this.


'Sexual tourism à gogo', September 2001

I choose this not just for its rather treasurable title. It also represents an aspect of Brookner's review work that can be ignored: her willingness to engage with writers who would seem, at first blush, rather dissimilar from herself. But wait - look at her words here on Houellebecq's 'paganism' and think of all those references in Brookner's novels to the gods of antiquity. And think of Claire Pitt in Undue Influence, or George Bland in A Private View, and their adventures in foreign climes.


'A singular voice', July 2011

One of Brookner's last reviews. Here she considers Barbara Pym, with whom she was herself bracketed, certainly in the early days. Brookner's judgement on Pym, a 'domestic ironist', is markedly cool. There are mentions of Jane Austen, never a good sign in an Anita Brookner essay.

The Brooknerthon

New to Anita Brookner? Let me suggest a route into and through what a critic (unfavourably but memorably) once called the long dark corridor of her fiction.

1. Start with a late-period novel. Brookner's fiction divides roughly but usefully into three phases: the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s. The early work is inconsistent but often brilliant; the middle period is more settled, more even. In Brookner's last works we see a return to the unpredictability she started with, now allied to a greater assuredness of form and style. Start with The Next Big Thing (Making Things Better) (2002). Also try The Bay of Angels (2001) and The Rules of Engagement (2003). Scarier than the scariest horror story.
   
2. Next try the essential early Brookner: Look at Me (1983). A remarkable and quite extreme laying out of the Brookner manifesto. The final chapters contain some of the bleakest and most unsettling passages in the whole of English literature. Temper this with the novel of the following year, Hotel du Lac - not quite a comic reworking of Look at Me, but certainly much lighter.
   
3. Stay with the early phase for the moment and experience the full flowering of a quality often missed in Brookner's novels: compassion. Try Family and Friends (1985) or Latecomers (1988). 'Searchingly gentle,' said Ruth Rendell of the latter.
   
4. You'll probably need a break by now. Why not take a sidestep into the world of Brookner's criticism? She wrote for the TLS, the LRB, the Burlington, and prolifically for the Spectator. The Spectator's archive website is far from perfect, but it's free, and with a little effort you'll find Brookner gems aplenty.
5. The real solid substantial part of the Brookner oeuvre came in the 1990s. Magisterial is the word. Try A Family Romance (Dolly) (1993), A Private View (1994) or Visitors (1997). Unshowy, unfashionable, and made for the future.
   
6. Brookner's art criticism is of enormous value and always instructive. Easiest to get hold of are Soundings (1997) and Romanticism and Its Discontents (2000).
   
7. Finish your journey (with still much to enjoy) with either Brookner's bleak last novel Strangers (2009) or her funny sprightly first, A Start in Life (The Debut) (1981). You choose. You'll know what you like by then.

The long dark corridor of her fiction

The Modern World

I accept the fact that we are all atomized and there is little we can do about it.

'At the Hairdresser's', Ch. 2

In late Brookner the modern world intrudes more and more. There are mobile phones, and, in The Rules of Engagement, a tentative reference to email. Yet Brookner wasn't really at all out of touch. Her reading, in particular, was varied and surprising. Frederic Raphael, for example, was surprised by and not a little sniffy about her championing of Michel Houellebecq’s works. Brookner belied her reputation, decrying the moral censorship Houellebecq was subject to, and presenting a worldliness her fans wouldn't have been taken aback by:

He is, after all, in the grip of a major idea, with which he appears to have come to terms, namely that there are no penalties for indulging in the most extreme forms of sexual licence, that monogamous partnerships have passed into history, and that it is entirely natural to pursue sexual pleasure until such time as age and infirmity take their inevitable toll. 

Such paganism would seem to commend itself, and is in any case a well worn argument. 

Spectator, 29 September 2001

I mention all this because of Brookner's use of the very contemporary word 'atomized' in 'At the Hairdresser's'. Houellebecq's famous 1998 novel Les Particules élémentaires was given this title in English (and no, I won't be commenting on the whole -ize / -ise question):

A Correct Development

All these books dwell on life's more uncomfortable moments, but that is in order, making straightforward fictions seem slightly old-fashioned. It is even seen as a correct development. According to an excellent book by Georges Minois, Histoire du Mal de Vivre: De la Mélancolie à la Dépression (La Martinière), we should all be feeling uncomfortable, even afflicted. As well as dwelling on the reasons for this Minois provides a thorough survey of melancholia from classical times to the present day, with poignant witness statements from various sources. He concludes that historical pessimism, together with the loss of good authority (something from which we suffer at the present day), has accelerated the process. He also cites the consumer society, the infantilising effect of popular culture and consequent absence of catharsis, the lack of intimate satisfaction, and the medicalisation of what is essentially a metaphysical condition. He offers no hope, not even from the pharmaceutical industry, which has done so much to make this state of mind a commonplace. The crisis (for it is one) must be alleviated by other means. What those means might be he prudently does not say.

Spectator, 'New books from France', 27 December 2003

Having recently reread several examples, I find myself wondering about the oddness of Anita Brookner's late novels. 'It may be that another form is called for, but of that there is no sign,' she says elsewhere in the above essay. In her own fiction of this period, it was perhaps the case that she gestured beyond the old-fashioned, the straightforward, that she was in some way questing blindly towards a new form. She didn't find it, but for sure she was 'leaving home'.

Eternal Vigilance

Was Anita Brookner an Existentialist? As a young woman in Paris in the 1950s she must often have seen the principle actors. In her fiction she takes Existentialist positions, more than once adapting for her own purposes a famous proto-Existentialist line from the nineteenth century: 'Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.' 'And my own recovery? That, I feared, would have to be postponed indefinitely. It would be safer, and wiser, to assume an endless vigilance,' says Zoe in The Bay of Angels at one of her lowest points.

Providence is the novel that explores Existentialism most blatantly. Brookner discusses the novel and the movement at length in the Paris Review interview:

INTERVIEWER
All your heroines follow 'an inexorable progress toward further loneliness,' as you say of Kitty Maule in Providence. It seems to me very deterministic. Is there nothing we can do to alter our fate?
BROOKNER
I think one’s character and predisposition determine one’s fate, I’m afraid. But Providence seems deterministic because it is a novel, and a novel follows its own organic structure.
INTERVIEWER
At the same time you say that existentialism is the only philosophy you can endorse. Now existentialism with its emphasis on personal freedom seems the opposite of determinism.
BROOKNER
I don’t believe that anyone is free. What I meant was that existentialism is about being a saint without God: being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society. Freedom in existentialist terms breeds anxiety, and you have to accept that anxiety as the price to pay. I think choice is a luxury most people can’t afford. I mean when you make a break for freedom you don’t necessarily find company on the way, you find loneliness. Life is a pilgrimage and if you don’t play by the rules you don’t find the Road to Damascus, you find the Crown of Thorns. In Hotel du Lac the heroine, Edith Hope, twice nearly marries. She balks at the last minute and decides to stay in a hopeless relationship with a married man. As I wrote it I felt very sorry for her and at the same time very angry: she should have married one of them - they were interchangeable anyway - and at least gained some worldly success, some social respectability. I have a good mind to let her do it in some other novel and see how she will cope!
INTERVIEWER
You also said that existentialism is a romantic creed. How so?
BROOKNER
Because romanticism doesn’t make sense unless you realize that it grew out of the French Revolution in which human behavior sank to such terrible depths that it became obvious no supernatural power, if it existed, could possibly countenance it. For the first time Europeans felt that God was dead. Since then we have had Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, whose activities make the French Revolution seem like a picnic. The Romantics tried to compensate the absence of God with furious creative activity. If you do not have the gift of faith, which wraps everything up in a foolproof system and which is predicated on the belief that there is a loving Father who will do the best for you, then, as Sartre said, you have to live out of that system completely, and become your own father. This is a terrible decision, and, as I said, in existential terms freedom is not desirable, it is a woeful curse. You have to live with absence. Nowadays I wonder if it is really possible to live without God, maybe we should dare to hope... I don’t know. I’m not there yet.

Brookner was plainly enamoured of Existentialism, inasmuch as it captured, perhaps, many of her themes. When writing of Camus, in an extended Spectator article, her words take flight:

Beached in a bar in Amsterdam, he regales his listeners with a sort of moral striptease, in which he sets out to prove that no one is innocent. Even Jesus, he says, was not innocent: was he not implicated in that earlier massacre of those earlier innocents? Was he not indulging in irony when he said of the vacillating Peter that on that rock he would build his church? We are thus without exception participators in the fallen condition. This is a persuasive intellectual argument which reveals its emotional roots: rage, disappointment, despair. It is an argument which delivers an authentic existential hit: 'O mon ami, savez-vous qu'est la créature solitaire, errant dans les grandes villes?' Here there is a plangent, even Baudelairian undertone which is at odds with the narrator's uncompromising monologue and the simplicity of its style. Gone are the stark phrases: this is writing of prizewinning standard. 

As ever, in writing of her literary heroes - those saints for the godless - Brookner is, one senses, also writing about herself.

A Season in Hell

Had you been the reviews editor of the Spectator in Anita Brookner's heyday, what would you have sent her to read? Some selectiveness would have been required.

She tended to get American and British literary fiction, books about writers, anything bleak, and anything French.

Tomber sept fois, se relever huit, by Philippe Labro (as far as I can work out, never translated into English) was reviewed by Brookner in 2003. It was a good match. We don't know whether Brookner ever suffered a crack-up of the kind described in the book and summarised in her review; she never, after all, 'revealed all'; though she admitted to periods of 'inwardness' (see, for instance, her 1994 Independent interview).

But what interests me about the piece are the many Brooknerian connections. We have, for example, the title, 'A season in hell', recalling Rimbaud. We find also a favourite quote from D. H. Lawrence: 'Look! We have come through!', which, I think, concatenates through Brookner's Latecomers. We find a reference to an 'altered state'. And haunting everything is the ghost of Brookner's revered Freud.

Labro's experience might have been rather too extreme for someone of Brookner's sensibilities, but every line of her review shines with sympathy and solidarity. Even in her hack work, Brookner weaves her own mythology, a complex intertextual web.

Postmodern Brookner

Brookner tended to avoid conflict, not to say contact, with her literary peers, but Martin Amis expressed deep annoyance at her review of his novel Night Train. Brookner had written:

It may be post-modem; it is certainly post-human. There are few facts that are without disclaimers, few acts that are unambiguous. To read it is to undergo a temporary brain dysfunction […] a narrative which sets out to celebrate the demotic but ends up so out of hand that it is experienced as an assault on the reader's good faith.

Spectator, 26 September 1997

Brookner distrusted postmodernism ('Updike goes post-modern,' (Spectator 27 February 1993) she commented uncertainly, in her review of Memories of the Ford Administration). One hears less about postmodernism nowadays, but it was all the rage when I was young. And Brookner's postmodern novel? Surely Incidents in the Rue Laugier?

...those few notations - 'Dames Blanches. La Gaillarderie. Place des Ternes. Sang. Edward' - around which I have constructed this fantasy ... And it is a fantasy: I have no idea what any of it means... (Ch, 15)

A Fleeting Moment of Authenticity

The writer, particularly the writer of fiction, is different from the storyteller … The storyteller lives in the real world: she has a life, as the current locution would have it. But the writer has two lives. He, or more probably she, is the hapless character who goes to the supermarket, performs domestic tasks, and is invariably worsted in arguments, and that other one … the cold logician who observes a beginning, a middle and an end, who determines causality, although subject, like everyone else, to the irrationality of circumstance.
 […]
 I am convinced that writing is a displacement activity that gives one the illusion of an honest day's work. That may be its main function, but it is set in train by a different psychic arrangement. The strange organic process by which a body of written work is achieved has less to do with will than with wish. What that wish may be is rooted in the personal history of a writer, and is paradoxically known but also secret. But if wish — a desire to resolve something left frustratingly incomplete — is the engine that inspires the beginning of the enterprise, will is needed for the continuation, and a level of tension, sometimes extreme tension, must be endured to reach the point at which a degree of satisfaction, i.e. the conclusion, is arrived at.
 Thus the process is both involuntary and deliberate, and inevitably a mixture of both. This is rarely comfortable, although it may be energising. One would rather be out in the world, pursuing more recognisable objectives, living the sort of life in which activities are recorded by more recognisable standards. Why do it, then? Perhaps in order to be sincere, perhaps because the impulse is too strong to be ignored, perhaps because one wants one's fleeting moment of authenticity. Writing is rarely undertaken in a spirit of grandiosity; rather the opposite. In answer to the question, 'What are you working on?', there is a reluctance, even an inability to give a good account of oneself. The reaction to the inevitably evasive reply is disappointment. This disappointment is experienced on both sides.
[…]
[Writers, especially women writers] have in fact inherited the Romantic tradition, in which art is allied to tragedy and doom. To bear this burden, while at the same time purloining fragments of real life, i.e. other lives, may well lead to various forms of alienation. Yet the writer's life, perhaps particularly the female writer's life, is without incident. The surreptitious function goes on undetected and is experienced in isolation. The moral conundrum is never answered, but is somehow resolved on the page. This has led to the suspicion that writing is 'therapeutic'. How could it be? To juggle with conflicting imperatives would, in any other occupation, be more trouble than it was worth, and would in any event guarantee a condition of permanent unease.
'I'm the other one', review of Margaret Atwood's Negotiating with the Dead, Spectator, 9 March 2002 (Link)

This magisterial disquisition, hardly at all a review of Atwood's book, is highly revealing and well worth quoting at length. Brookner is able to view the writing process as it were from the outside. Atwood, by contrast, dates her writing life from her teens: she was a born writer; it was a vocation. Was it a vocation for Anita Brookner? Brookner, as we see, takes an unillusioned stance. Not that she doesn't admit the Romantic myths surrounding a writing life. But in conjuring Romanticism, Brookner returns to a theme from her early interviews. This is a Brooknerian Romanticism, almost indistinguishable from existentialism. Existentialism, she said, was a kind of late flowering of the earlier movement. For there was grandeur in a life sans espoir - to borrow a phrase of Camus's. Was there grandeur in writing? If there was, it was fleeting, provisional. Brookner, having come to fiction late, almost as an afterthought, had little truck with the romance or the game of the writer's life, and something of this may have lain behind the antagonism she experienced from other writers and critics.

A Stooge of the Spycatcher

In dealing with an author as private and even as secretive as Anita Brookner, one has to make much out of not a lot of material. For years I would listen to things like Desert Island Discs, but never once did Sue Lawley say, ‘My castaway this week is a novelist and art historian…’

But sometimes one made wonderful discoveries. In the days before the Internet I would pay visits to London libraries to examine files of back-issues of the Times Literary Supplement and the Spectator. I remember a marvellous afternoon one autumn in Senate House. I was leafing through old copies of the Spectator when I discovered a strange essay: ‘A Stooge of the Spycatcher: Anita Brookner explains how she was used by Blunt and Wright’. (Link)

I had of course heard about Spycatcher, which the Thatcher government had sought to ban. I knew also about Anthony Blunt, and his unmasking. So I read with interest. Phoebe Pool, possibly a model for Delia Halloran in Look at Me, was dying. It was the 1960s. Blunt, for whom Brookner worked, persuaded his colleague to visit Miss Pool; afterwards he would ask her what the old woman had said.

Brookner suspected nothing sinister in the arrangement: Miss Pool was simply an eccentric frequenter of the Courtauld’s library. Yet in 1987, when the book Spycatcher was published, it was made clear that Pool had held treacherous information of interest to Blunt and Wright. Brookner indignantly insisted on her own innocence and condemned the fantasy of moral immunity nurtured by those who had used her:

With the hindsight of 1987 I feel a great and steady anger. My anger is not so much directed at Blunt and Wright as at the fictions of immunity they both embraced. Such fictions are very dangerous in real life, although they go down well in other spheres: 'With one bound Jack was free.' I believe that both Blunt and Wright shared this dangerous ideology, and that Peter Wright continues to maintain it. As time goes by their involvement with each other should provide novelists with more excellent material. But the verdict of history will be to condemn them both as indistinguishable.

One might make, in conclusion, a link between the secretiveness of Brookner and the secretiveness of spies. But that would be cheap. One notes instead the value Brookner placed on ‘accountability’: it was the essence of true friendship, she said in interview. (One notices also, by the by, a certain distaste for fiction. Brookner was perhaps never a whole-hearted purveyor of fiction. There were times when she felt positive about it, when it seemed to release her from the despair of living; but nothing lasted and it always had to be done again. It was, as she told Haffenden, outside the natural order, and a penance for being unlucky.)

Home is so Sad

'After an evening walk - but these are becoming more dangerous - a cup of tea is mandatory. But for more sedative evenings a tisane will have to do. Since most of them are vaguely emetic, it is a job to find one that is refreshing. Mixed fruit has proved to be acceptable - with a teaspoon of honey to give an impression of well-being.'

Spectator, 1990s