Brookner, Stendhal

Although he set out to be a man of letters, he did not in fact write much until the active part of his life was over, and this of course is what sets him apart as a writer: he has the authority of a man whose preoccupations are not exclusively literary and who is informed at all times by memories of the immense experiences behind him.

The Genius of the Future, 1971

A Private View: Chapter by Chapter: 7, 8, 9

• By the time she wrote A Private View Anita Brookner was well established and in mid-career. The novel shows great ease and confidence. Its long passages of introspection are masterly. In chapter 7 we get a metafictional line she probably wouldn't have risked in an earlier novel: 'It was like a detective story, or a novel by Henry James'. Indeed.
• Bland's walk into the suburbs of Fulham is precisely recorded, and the interested reader can now follow his journey on Google Earth.
• The stakes are high for George Bland - but not as high as they are for later Brookner oldsters: in The Next Big Thing, Strangers and 'At the Hairdresser's'. They're in real jeopardy, and so (perhaps) was their creator.
• Bland's vision of a rakish life with Katy in foreign locales 'might have been the supreme emotional adventure'. Supreme emotional adventure: this is a favourite phrase. See an earlier post here.
• 'The beauty of the plan was that each would think he had the best of the bargain': there's something wonderfully antique about this sentence, something you probably wouldn't read very often now, or indeed then. It's the use of 'he' to refer to 'each'. Here 'each' means George and Katy, male and female. What would another writer write? 'They'? 'She'?
• How much time passes? A Private View is surely the most condensed of Brookners, but so involved and 'exhausting' are George Bland's thoughts that the reader loses all track of the days. How much time separates the opening in Nice from, say, the scenes in chapters 7, 8 and 9, more than halfway through the book? Two or three? But no, chapter 1 takes place in November and chapter 9 on 18 December. I could of course go back and trace the time-scheme, but I actually haven't the time - and in any case I reckon it's completely off-kilter. This isn't the only Brookner novels where time is confused and confusing.
• But the dates given in chapter 9 are very specific to December 1992.
• I note Brookner's use of the phrase 'undue influence', which would be called into service again as the title of her 1999 novel.

Cranach, Das Ungleiche Paar,
Akademiegalerie, Vienna

Who Else Should I Read?

• Read Trollope. For decent feelings, she said. In her own novels she references He Knew He Was Right and Orley Farm. I'm not keen on either. I love the later works, not all of which are the gloomy old things of repute. I think the likes of Ayala's Angel are among my favourite novels of any writer.
• Read Roth and Updike. And the rest of the great American warhorses. Brookner always made a thing of her devotion to these most unBrooknerian writers. She was putting it on a bit, no doubt; but she made a good case.
• Read Wharton. Brookner made a case for Wharton too. But I'm not sure she was right. She said she thought of herself as much more like Wharton than James. Again, I don't think she was right.
• Read Sebald. She valued Sebald's sudden emergence, fully formed, on to the literary scene. She liked especially his evocation of old-style life and feelings.
• For much the same reason, read Mann. The bourgeois past, European angst - and Switzerland.
• Read Stendhal. I reckon he wasn't so much her favourite writer as her favourite person. His style, his attitudes, his insouciance.
• Read Goncharov. Brookner said Oblomov was her favourite novel, and she quoted from it twice in her own novels. She liked it, she said, because it was about a man who failed at everything. This was probably something of the truth, but also a bit of a posture. I found Oblomov a dull read, and that line about the meads and kvasses brewed at Oblomovka was a lucky find of Brookner's, but not really representative.
• Read Chekhov. For true Brooknerian sadness and nostalgia, that is. Not that Brookner recommended any particular Chekhovs, though she approved of his life. She approved in particular of his death - in Switzerland, wasn't it, and after a glass of champagne? A stylish way to go, at least in imagination. Brookner wasn't herself a drinker, and champagne gives a number of her characters a headache.
• Read James. Well, of course. She loved The Portrait of a Lady, with its depiction of the passage from innocence to experience. She loved, of the later novels, The Spoils of Poynton, but found The Golden Bowl a little too redolent of the madness of art. For my part, I love that early late period of James's typified by Spoils: short brief astonishing novels, made for the future.
• And of course, of course, read Dickens. She read one a year, having been introduced as a child. Her father saw the author as the key to Englishness. An only and perhaps lonely child, she was surprised when she went to school to find not everyone had a funny name.

Stendhal Again and Again

If Anita Brookner's Collected Journalism were ever published it would run to several volumes. One discovers things all the time. I've been looking through the Guardian / Observer archives, and today I come across some fresh Stendhal material.

Was there ever a more Brooknerian figure? Writers, in writing of other writers, not invariably write about themselves, and this is surely the case with Brookner and Stendhal.

Her review in June 1994 of Jonathan Keates biography is a straightforward retread of familiar ground, including an outing for that favourite line of Brookner's, about the after-dinner cigar. (See here.)

But a piece from January 1991, about a translation of Lucien Leuwen, delivers the most authentic hits. We find here the Brooknerian ideal just as much as the Stendhalian. And note how Brookner undermines everything with her little line within brackets.

The idea that fulfilment can be achieved by courage, chivalry, a resolute indifference to past events, and what he called gaîeté de coeur is the reason why all should read him, for his singular and unique lesson is that heroism is easily available, and that one can, by feeling correctly, achieve the upper hand, even over disastrous situations. The lesson once learnt (but it takes a lifetime) will bring a freedom which no shock or reversal can palliate.

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'.

'Why the country is so mean': Robinson by Jack Robinson

...this country, by all measures one of the wealthiest in the world, appears to be so dilapidated, destitute, shorn of hope ... The UK is rich; there is wealth inequality, but that alone doesn't explain why the country is so mean.

Robinson, ch. 3

Just over a year ago the UK voted to leave the EU. There are still some who celebrate this decision.

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719. Many people still think of it as a charming and harmless tale, even a book for children.

Jack Robinson's Robinson, with quiet subtlety and in detail, links and dismantles both these conceptions. 'Jack Robinson' is Charles Boyle of CB Editions and this is the companion volume to An Overcoat, earlier appreciated on this blog. It is as good and as brilliant as An Overcoat. Each is the A-side of the other.

Novel? Memoir? Literary criticism? Diatribe? Robinson politely requires that we abandon such labels. But what is the book about? It's certainly about Defoe's novel, a text that tells us much that we need to know about Empire, the schools system, British society, masculinity. But Robinson is also about the present, and the referendum result in June 2016. The narrator explores these things in the company of a figure called Robinson. And who is this Robinson? But one must resist the temptation to categorise. That is perhaps the message of the book: that categorisation is what got us into this mess in the first place.

The breadth of literary reference is impressive. No Brookner, but there wouldn't be. (There are no references to Defoe in Brookner's critical work,* nor Robinsons in her novels - at least as far as I know.) But Brooknerians will be pleased by mentions of Rimbaud; of Hyacinth Robinson from James's The Princess Casamassima; and of W. G. Sebald's arrival in the UK in the 1960s. (There is, by the way, another Robinson, an intriguing figure, in Elizabeth Bowen's story 'Summer Night' (1941), not referenced here. But I guess when you start on this path, you can end up seeing Robinsons everywhere.)

(Other squashes are available.)

*though shipwreck is a favourite Brookner metaphor. Take this from The Next Big Thing: 'Those parents ... were too fearful of confronting the shipwreck of their hopes, and lived an obstinate illusion of normality in absolute denial of the facts of the case.' (Ch. 2)

My Virtue Had Been Equal to My Happiness

I was filled ... with the memory of Sarah, and the awesome revelation of our matching physical temper. For the first time in my life I had met a woman with that rare sort of genius, effortless, uninvented, almost unconscious. This was the gift she possessed and I had been its recipient. Like Julien Sorel in another context my virtue had been equal to my happiness. This phrase had puzzled me ever since Mother had persuaded me to read the novel ... She had blushed and said, 'It means that he acquitted himself well, and no further explanation was needed. I'm sure you see the beauty of that, Alan.' I had, in fact, although I had thought the novel difficult. Yet along with its crankiness went a sort of excitement, which convinced me that its author had been young and ardent and romantically fulfilled, even though his hero had ended in prison.

Altered States, ch. 6

Stendhal Again

We had the recent post* about the after-dinner cigar, and one from a short while back on the connections between or among Brookner, Sebald and Stendhal, and yesterday I enormously enjoyed reading a text** by Jack Robinson (Charles Boyle) from CB Editions, An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H. B.,*** which I discovered by chance in the Guardian Review.

The text is powered by its footnotes - and what pleasure there is in finding on pp. 4-5 a quotation from Brookner's 1980 TLS review of a Stendhal biography, collected in Soundings: 'Anita Brookner', says Robinson, '...approves [Beyle's] furious attempts "to measure up to the rules of the game, even when [my [i.e. Robinson's] italics] there was no game being played".'****

Though Brookner isn't directly referenced again, the italicised line is mentioned twice more, on p. 81 and p. 128.

The other echoes are numerous.

Beyle, while watching a mosquito bite on his ankle, remembering that it is always better to be in love than not in love - even if there is no chance, ever, of that love being reciprocated (p. 61)

made me think of Stendhal-fan Sturgis in Strangers, wishing that he were in love:

Only in that climate of urgency could he make decisions. (Ch. 15)

There are other lines that might be applied to Brookner:

More than a spy, Beyle is a double agent, working for both sides (... Classicism/Romanticism, art/life), and he knows it's pointless to deny it. (p. 84)

and:

Beyle asks if I've read Flaubert's letter to Louise Colet in which he spoke of writing 'a book about nothing, a book ... held aloft by the internal force of its style' (p. 37)

Lastly we have Beyle's final collapse, discussed in an earlier post, and in An Overcoat confirmed to have taken place in the rue Neuve des Capucines, though the question of where he was taken afterwards isn't entered into.

An Overcoat is brilliant, absorbing, strange, and highly recommended - not just for Brooknerians.

***

*Disappointingly no one could identify the cigar quote, but An Overcoat sent me back to the Brookner essay mentioned by Jack Robinson. Here Brookner, some years before A Friend from England, uses the cigar line, describing it as a 'fine dandyish moment'.
**Not a novel - too short, and too essayish. A novella? Autofiction? Travelogue? 'Fiction / non-fiction', it says underneath the book's barcode.
***I.e. Henri Beyle
****The quotation in Soundings is very slightly and unimportantly different. Perhaps the original TLS piece was differently phrased. On another point, the games-playing line recalls a similar one highlighted in a post of mine on Brookner and Rosamond Lehmann.

As One Might Smoke a Cigar

I picked up a book from the pile on the table at my elbow, and read, 'Lacking more serious occupations since 1814, I write, as one might smoke a cigar after dinner, in order to pass the time.' I put the book down again, disheartened by this dandyish attitude, so impossibly urbane as to be permanently beyond my reach.

A Friend from England, ch. 7

The line about the cigar is from Stendhal, but I've never located it. I have The Life of Henry Brulard on my shelves but I've had no luck with that. The Journals? The Correspondence?

It's not an especially relevant line; Rachel isn't a writer. But she thinks of herself as a dandy, so that's probably it. It's more a case of an author putting forward one of her own enthusiasms. But it is also a case of something Brookner has form for: undercutting and demythologising the very activity she's engaged in. Time and again Brookner finds ways of sneering at the strange second career she enjoyed so much success in. One recalls her words to Sue MacGregor in 2011:

Sue MacGregor: Anita, what did the Courtauld give you?
Anita Brookner: A whole life, really. Everything that came after ... was ... very dull.
SM: Even the success as a writer?
AB: Oh, that was far less interesting!
SM: Really?
AB: Yes - yes!

The Team

For W. G. Sebald, in Vertigo* (English translation, 1999), the life of Stendhal offers insights into 'the various difficulties entailed in the act of recollection'. Visiting the scene of the Battle of Marengo, Stendhal, or Beyle as Sebald correctly but playfully insists on calling him throughout, experiences a 'vertiginous sense of confusion' as he acknowledges the gulf between his fantasy and the stark reality before him. Thus Stendhal is put to work for Sebald; Stendhal becomes a Sebaldian.

Stendhal has other functions for Anita Brookner. In Soundings (1997), in a review of a Stendhal biography, Brookner emphasises his contributions to Romanticism, his commitment to the 'supreme emotional adventure'. In Strangers (2009) he is invoked several times. Stendhal, Sturgis's one-time favourite author, collapsed in the street and was taken to a cousin's house, where he died. 'That was the way to go, the relative, whether liked or disliked, put in charge,' thinks Sturgis. An anxious passage follows, in which Sturgis or the author weighs up Stendhal's good fortune in having a relative on hand in this way. Thus Stendhal does his Brooknerian duty.

As it happens, Vertigo's chapter on Stendhal ends with details of the incident in question. Stendhal collapsed, we learn, on the evening of 22 March 1842 in the rue Neuve-des-Capucines. Sebald, however, insists Stendhal was then taken to his own apartments in what is now the rue Danielle-Casanova.

What matters is the way writers recruit other writers to their causes, and do so with differing purposes. Where their teams are shared, as they are in the cases of Brookner and Sebald, we get to witness some intriguing interplay, dialogue, and tension.

Sketch of Stendhal by Henri Lehmann, 1841

* Brookner herself reviewed Vertigo, praising its 'freedom ... and also the price that must be paid if such freedom, such extreme non-attachment, is sought by those unfitted to withstand the terrors which must be their accompaniment'.

Already Inside

...he trusted that hints would be picked up by members of that band of initiates, the Happy Few, to whom he dedicated La Chartreuse de Parme [...] Just who these people are has never been properly established [...] The true meaning would seem to lie half-way between kindred spirits and 'âmes d’élite', and the qualification for membership six months of unrequited love and the ability to deal with it in the manner demonstrated in De l'Amour. Many readers of Stendhal confess themselves to be outside the charmed circle. Fortunately those who feel called to examine such a life are already inside it.

Soundings, review of Stendhal biography

The members of the exclusive circle are, here, Stendhalians. But they might be Brooknerians. Writers, Brookner in particular, when writing of other writers, really only write about themselves.

The Supreme Emotional Adventure

An ideal of effortlessness, of the sure-footedness that characterized Napoleon at his most successful, remained with them for life, as did an ideal of Napoleonic rapidity: Constant wrote Adolphe in fifteen days, Hugo wrote Hernani in a month, Stendhal wrote La Chartreuse de Parme in fifty-two days and made only notional revisions. If Stendhal joins up at all with the more standard Romantic artist it is because he shares with them the fantasy of  the supreme emotional adventure. 

'In Pursuit of Happiness', review of biography of Stendhal, Soundings  

[Kenyon:] Do you rewrite a great deal?
[Brookner:] No, there are no drafts, no fetishes, no false starts; there simply isn't time. 

Olga Kenyon, Women Writers Talk, 1989 

Did she revise much when correcting her proofs, I wondered. 'No, just the odd words, but no major revisions.' 

Shusha Guppy, 'The Secret Sharer', World and I, July 1998

[We can confirm Brookner's assertion that she altered just the odd word here and there by examining the handwritten page shown in the Paris Review and comparing it with the final published passage from Family and Friends. A word here and there is transposed; 'often' becomes 'frequently'.]

What are the advantages of redrafting and revision? Some writers indeed make a fetish of it, loading every rift with ore. Barbara Pym quotes this line of Keats in a letter to Larkin. So, certainly greater richness is an outcome, and also elegance. David Lodge describes in The Year of Henry James how he sought to give his novel Author, Author (which Brookner adored) its best chance in a challenging climate by working hard at the redrafting stage to eliminate ungainly repetition.

And what is lost? Probably a freshness, a smoothness, or as Brookner says of Stendhal, perhaps a sense of emotional adventure.