The Humbling by Philip Roth

The book may be short but the style is long: loping conversational sentences convey and dignify the story of Simon Axler, a famous actor in his middle sixties. But his abilities have deserted him: 'Something fundamental has vanished. Maybe it had to go. Things go.' And then his marriage fails and he checks into a psychiatric hospital. Later there's a liaison with a much younger woman, who was once a lesbian, and some risky sex, and the story ends in disaster. 'A man's way is laid with a multitude of traps, and Pegeen had been the last. He'd stepped hungrily into it and taken the bait like the most craven captive on earth.'

The Humbling (2009) was criticised (and ridiculed) on publication for its graphic depictions of sex between the mismatched pair. In fact the scenes are both brief and pertinent, always presenting Axler in a fresh guise: at one point 'spying, lascivious' - perhaps like the greybeards in that Tintoretto painting, Susannah and the Elders, which Brookner invokes more than once. Axler, like Brookner's George Bland or Julius Herz, both is and isn't a 'dirty old man', and this is the book's strength. Like Brookner, Roth doesn't hold back on the physical horrors of ageing, but, again like Brookner, refuses to deny his hero the gift of self-knowledge and self-awareness:

The failures were his, as was the bewildering biography on which he was impaled.

Brookner (surprisingly?) loved her Roth. Surprising? Scarcely. We don't know whether she read The Humbling, but if she did she would have recognised thematic (stylistic too) connections with, inter alia, her own A Private View and The Next Big Thing. The Humbling is indeed a shocking read, but shocking in the best way: as in Brookner, it's the depth of the psychology, the analysis, the clairvoyance, that truly astounds and confounds the reader.

Viennese Brookner

References to the Austrian capital are scattered through Brookner's novels. The following is probably not a full list:

• Hotel du Lac: Edith Hope has Viennese ancestry. She goes with her English father to the Kunsthistorisches Museum to see 'a picture of men lying splayed in a cornfield under a hot sun'. This is a puzzle. It sounds like Bruegel's Harvesters (which isn't in Vienna, though the museum houses several of the artist's surviving pictures of the seasons). See an earlier post here.
• There's a Viennese background to that most Freudian of Brookners, A Family Romance, Toni Ferber hailing from (where else?) Berggasse. Later her granddaughter Jane visits the city, drops into Demel's, eats Sachertorte, finds it disappointing. Demel's is extant, but like many such establishments now a touristy Lacanian simulacrum of its probable former self. Getting inside looks to be no mean feat: one would have to elbow one's way through a crowd of snapping gawpers, and there's surely a waiting list months long. See an earlier post here.
• George Bland, in A Private View, knows Vienna: the Tintoretto Susannah and the Elders sheds unwelcome light on his own private view of Katy Gibb.

• Incidents in the Rue Laugier: Max Kroll, a minor character, one of Brookner's exiles, was a bookseller in old Vienna.
• The Next Big Thing: Herz remembers visiting Vienna - in particular the modernist Wittgenstein Haus, one of his 'artistic delights'.

Pictures of my recent visit to Vienna can be found on Twitter @brooknerian. Feel free to like, retweet and, if you don't already, follow. Happy New Year!

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.