Ebay Brookner

The available photographs of Anita Brookner date almost exclusively from her fifties onwards. We have a school photo, but nothing from her later youth or early middle age. Most available photos are staged publicity shots. They follow conventions. Brookner no doubt gave as much thought to the tenor of such images as she evidently did to the character of the information she was willing to disclose in the few interviews she allowed. She doesn't often smile.

A set of 'new' photos is available to view on Ebay at the moment (type 'Anita Brookner photo'). They comprise a collection of images turned out of an old newspaper archive. We see Brookner reading Spycatcher on her familiar striped sofa. We see her in a flowered dress smiling (this is from 1989, at a Lewis Percy signing). We see her clutching Hotel du Lac at the 1984 Booker Prize dinner. And we see a rare impromptu shot of a startled Brookner in what looks like a hotel lobby. I suspect this was taken on one of her few trips to the US.* Worth a look.

* There are one or two toothsome tales of Brookner in New York - in particular of her lunch with a Boston reporter. She felt, she told the journalist, too European for New York, and insisted their interview take place within the safe confines of a formal restaurant.

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.

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.)