Brookner Biography Announced

A brief post to let Brooknerians know the moment has arrived: a biography commissioned by Chatto & Windus, to be written by Hermione Lee. Hermione Lee interviewed Brookner on television in the 80s. Brookner joins illustrious company. Lee has lifed, among others, Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton.

Borderland

How near the past is. Travelling by train from London to Edinburgh, I passed halts I'd previously only read of. Beyond Newcastle the land grew gradually wilder, mistier: forests, rocky descents, expanses of heath stretching into foggy distances, sudden glimpses of the grey sea. I was reading Scott at the time, appropriately. The Scottish Borders is his world as much as the Highlands, probably more so.

Always I come back to Virginia Woolf's assessment of a scene in The Antiquary:

...all come together, tragic, irrelevant, comic, drawn, one knows not how, to make a whole ... which, as always, Scott creates carelessly, without a word of comment, as if the parts grew together without his willing it, and broke into ruin again without his caring.

In Guy Mannering, Scott's second novel, Scott tells, early on, of the disappearance of a small child. It is a distressing episode. Later, much later, when the child, now a man, is restored, the scene is overwhelmingly affecting - because it is so long earned, and because Scott makes it human and stays on just the right side of sentimental. The following is a spoiler. Let it be a taster:

‘There,’ said the Colonel, ‘I can assure Mr. Brown of his identity; and add, what his modesty may have forgotten, that he was distinguished as a young man of talent and spirit.’

‘So much the better, my dear sir,’ said Mr. Pleydell; ‘but that is to general character. Mr. Brown must tell us where he was born.’

 ‘In Scotland, I believe, but the place uncertain.’

 ‘Where educated?’

 ‘In Holland, certainly.’

 ‘Do you remember nothing of your early life before you left Scotland?’

 ‘Very imperfectly; yet I have a strong idea, perhaps more deeply impressed upon me by subsequent hard usage, that I was during my childhood the object of much solicitude and affection. I have an indistinct remembrance of a good-looking man whom I used to call papa, and of a lady who was infirm in health, and who, I think, must have been my mother; but it is an imperfect and confused recollection. I remember too a tall, thin, kind-tempered man in black, who used to teach me my letters and walk out with me; and I think the very last time - ’

 Here the Dominie could contain no longer. While every succeeding word served to prove that the child of his benefactor stood before him, he had struggled with the utmost difficulty to suppress his emotions; but when the juvenile recollections of Bertram turned towards his tutor and his precepts he was compelled to give way to his feelings. He rose hastily from his chair, and with clasped hands, trembling limbs, and streaming eyes, called out aloud, ‘Harry Bertram! look at me; was I not the man?’

 ‘Yes!’ said Bertram, starting from his seat as if a sudden light had burst in upon his mind; ‘yes; that was my name! And that is the voice and the figure of my kind old master!’

 The Dominie threw himself into his arms, pressed him a thousand times to his bosom in convulsions of transport which shook his whole frame, sobbed hysterically, and at length, in the emphatic language of Scripture, lifted up his voice and wept aloud. Colonel Mannering had recourse to his handkerchief; Pleydell made wry faces, and wiped the glasses of his spectacles; and honest Dinmont, after two loud blubbering explosions, exclaimed, ‘Deil’s in the man! he’s garr’d me do that I haena done since my auld mither died.'

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 large tear gushed reluctantly

Christmas, 1900, and Henry James is visited at Lamb House by his young niece Peggy, whom he plies with sweets and good food. Into the old oak parlour he plants her, directing her to read the novels of Sir Walter Scott. The weather is poor, and Peggy, a good reader, gets through Redgauntlet, Old Mortality, The Pirate and The Antiquary.

All a Novelist Needs: the title of a book by Colm Toíbín on Henry James. One wonders whether James took a similar view of Sir Walter Scott.* For my part, I avoided Scott for years, limiting my attention to what seemed like the more conventional and familiar worlds of Dickens, Trollope and George Eliot. That Scott was read simply by university literature students, interested in how later, greater writers had been 'influenced', seemed the accepted view. I retain a sharp cold memory of sitting one early morning at seventeen in a deserted refectory in the youth hostel in the rue Vitruve, Paris, struggling to read the opening pages of Waverley, as prep for my undergraduate course.

Scott is an unpredictably elusive writer. When his writing works, it works wonderfully, creating 'carelessly' a 'complete presentation of life', as Virginia Woolf says: 'tragic, irrelevant, comic, drawn, one knows not how, to make a whole'.

And with perseverance one can discover remarkable moments, equal to whole passages in Dickens, such as this encounter between an old courtier and King James I in The Fortunes of Nigel:

These suggestions, however reasonable in the common case, gave no comfort to Lord Huntinglen, if indeed he fully comprehended them; but the blubbering of his good-natured old master, which began to accompany and interrupt his royal speech, produced more rapid effect. The large tear gushed reluctantly from his eye, as he kissed the withered hands, which the king, weeping with less dignity and restraint, abandoned to him, first alternately and then both together, until the feelings of the man getting entirely the better of the Sovereign’s sense of dignity, he grasped and shook Lord Huntinglen’s hands with the sympathy of an equal and a familiar friend.

*

*Elsewhere James commends Scott for being a late starter as a novelist. It would have been well, he says, that writers such as Balzac had waited. No doubt James would have admired others who bided their time, Anita Brookner in particular.

A Report from the Front

...an art, if not of actual improvisation, then of rapid execution, of kaleidoscopically swift movement across a mental landscape of remembered physical reality, imagined characters and events and literary texts, quotations and narrative figures both actual and postulated.

Tony Inglis, Introduction to Scott's The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Penguin, 1994

Who cannot fail to be seduced by such a depiction? It's the dreamlike vividness of Scott that fills my imagination as I read further and deeper into his world. And the relationship with literature. When literature is one of the most important things in your life, you can't help but call Scott a kindred spirit. And it's the three-dimensional quality he conjures in your mind - like Dickens, but less ordered, more reckless than Dickens. Things, you feel, might go absolutely anywhere. Or rather, perhaps, the four-dimensional - for Scott is all about time.

I'm reminded of Virginia Woolf's peerless comment on The Antiquary:

the scene in the cottage where Steenie Mucklebackit lies dead; the father's grief, the mother's irritability, the minister's consolations, all come together, tragic, irrelevant, comic, drawn, one knows not how, to make a whole ... which, as always, Scott creates carelessly, without a word of comment, as if the parts grew together without his willing it, and broke into ruin again without his caring.

Elsewhere I've been reading - or rereading - Roderick Hudson, an early novel by Henry James. I say rereading and I say early, but there is always a factor to be borne in mind with James: the question of our texts. Roderick Hudson was written in the 1870s and then heavily revised thirty years later. I read the novel in the later version, with the earlier edition near at hand: something of an arcane activity, and certainly dilettante - but hey. In fact you don't need to check where the later James hand has been at work. It's obvious. Much of the text is 1875, with minor adjustments. But then there comes a sudden flowering of extended metaphors - metaphor upon metaphor - and you know you're now in Lamb House and it's 1907.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: I'm not especially a Brontë fan, but recently I've been reading according to a new regime. Whatever appeals in charity shop, I buy and read. It's a long novel and consists of a central flashback sequence told in diary form. Some have criticised this structure, but it seemed to me strikingly modern, or modernist: rather 1930s (I'm thinking of The House in Paris or Tender is the Night). The tone of the novel is striking. We're far from the tradition of the English comic novel. Anne Brontë is relentlessly sober, serious, minatory. Rarely in English fiction is drinking so demonised.

Last of all I've been reading a spot of Conrad: Lord Jim. Lord Jim, like the Brontë, also plays with narrative and narration, but much more radically. It's the story of a young man whose progress is eclipsed in a single confused moment. It's about failure, and the glamour of that failure. The first two thirds are brilliant, the last section harder to navigate.

In April I was in Berlin. I visited the palace of Sans Souci, in Potsdam, having enjoyed Waldemar Januszczak's BBC series on the Rococo. I should have done a little more research, because it's actually several palaces spread over a vast campus. I was quite tired at the end of that day. Back in Berlin I looked up old haunts, among them the museums in the Kulturforum, viewing paintings, viewing porcelain, adding to my collection of postcards, though I didn't buy one of Gainsborough's Joshua Grigby, because it didn't quite reproduce the 'subtle pink' of the man's coat, so lauded by Brookner in her novel Latecomers.

'We shall never see these shores again...'

All comes together in Scott, said Virginia Woolf - 'tragic, irrelevant, comic, drawn, one knows not how, to make a whole, a complete presentation of life, which ... Scott creates carelessly, without a word of comment, as if the parts grew together without his willing it, and broke into ruin again without his caring'.

Nowhere is this truer than in the closing pages of Redgauntlet, Scott's last major Scottish novel. A third, fictitious, Jacobite uprising has foundered; the Hanoverian ascendancy is merciful; two minor characters kill each other; two major figures find love; and an ageing Bonnie Prince Charlie bids an affecting farewell to his native land. The novel ends as Von Karajan said of Brahms's Fourth, in 'complete catastrophe', and yet it somehow also completes a whole, though we can't quite know how. And afterwards? Afterwards it dissolves - dissolves into history or a fantasy of history, leaving not a rack behind but lingering long in the imagination.

The Comforts of Scott

Mr Ramsay, the patriarch in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, loved it. Nineteenth-century families would act out tableaux from it. The Antiquary (1816), to the Victorians, meant comfort and nostalgia - but of the highest order. It cannot be ignored. Sir Walter Scott, of course, can't be ignored, but The Antiquary in particular must not be lost - however scantly its manifest eccentricities might recommend it.

For one thing it isn't a costume drama with a fast plot. This isn't Ivanhoe. Instead it is the story of a mysterious young Englishman, calling himself Lovel, who arrives in a Scottish seaside town in the 1790s, only twenty years before the novel was written. Lovel comes in contact with Jonathan Oldbuck, the antiquary of the title, a uniquely entertaining and frustrating character, obsessed with books and history. There's a violent storm and a heroic rescue, and it becomes clear that Lovel has some back-story that involves Isabella, a local aristocrat's daughter. But Scott is chary with the details, and the reader must read on, once more fascinated and frustrated.

It's a flimsy story, but weirdly alluring. 'It was early in a fine summer's day, near the end of the eighteenth century...' the novel begins, and who cannot be charmed by such a line? Possibly, I concede, those whose imaginations are less conservative may not be enamoured by Scott's view of the world and the past. They might gasp in disbelief at the minutiae with which the novel concerns itself. They might despair of Scott's depiction of, celebration of, the settled order - typified by the honourable beggar, Edie Ochiltree. But Scott isn't for everyone, and certainly isn't appreciated by most readers nowadays, though he was by many of the Victorians who came after him, and that's why we can't and shouldn't avoid him. We think of the novels of his time and we think of Jane Austen. The Victorians would have said 'Who?', and thought only of Sir Walter. He was a major European phenomenon.

Like her own father Virginia Woolf had a passion for Scott and for The Antiquary. She praised its 'complete presentation of life'. Her father, and perhaps also she herself, always shed tears towards the end of the novel, when Scott's plot meanders (but Scott proceeds through indirection) into an episode of loss in a fisherman's family:

the scene in the cottage where Steenie Mucklebackit lies dead; the father's grief, the mother's irritability, the minister's consolations, all come together, tragic, irrelevant, comic, drawn, one knows not how, to make a whole ... which, as always, Scott creates carelessly, without a word of comment, as if the parts grew together without his willing it, and broke into ruin again without his caring.

Sometimes I fear I may be getting to the end of the nineteenth century. But there is always Scott. If you have never read him, start with Waverley. My favourites are Ivanhoe (I'm in good (?) company here, as Tony Blair was known to keep Ivanhoe by his Downing Street bed) and Kenilworth, as I'm partial to a spot of Merrie England.

Henry Liverseege, Edie Ochiltree,
Sir Arthur Wardour and Isabella in the Storm,
Whitworth, Manchester

Verfall einer Familie: Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

'I found your address in a letter from your mother to mine; it was tucked between pages 123 and 124 [*] of Buddenbrooks [**] which Mother was reading before she died. I have been unable to read the book since that awful day, but I recently took it down when I asked Doris, my maid, to dust the shelves.'

Anita Brookner, The Next Big Thing, ch. 13 (Letter from Fanny Bauer to Julius Herz)

Who does not enjoy a family saga? Virginia Woolf, never a populist, had much success with The Years, and Buddenbrooks (1901) remains Thomas Mann's best-loved novel. It covers the years from high Biedermeier 1835 to the very different 1870s in the lives of the Buddenbrook family, a bourgeois*** north-German clan. I've visited Lübeck and the Thomas Mann museum (the 'Buddenbrookhaus') several times, but in my pre-blogging days, when I took no photographs. But I remember a sedate city, autumn leaves underfoot, and a vaguely marine atmosphere, as of cold seas not too far away.

Thomas Mann and his wife Katja
revisiting the otherwise destroyed
house in 1953

The novel, like many great novels (or long novels), conquers by stealth. Slowly, slowly it works its magic. The novel's main character is probably Antonie (Tony) Buddenbrook, first seen as an eight year-old. Rather like Trollope's Plantagenet Palliser, Tony, while remaining the novel's emotional heart, is never wholly emotionally accessible, though we see the key moments of her life: an adolescent holiday romance, her two less-than-successful marriages, her triumphs and humiliations and compromises.

Tony's brother is Thomas, who becomes, like his father, the head of the Buddenbrook business and a politician. At the height of his success he builds a new house in another part of the town - a house across the road from a little flower shop - the florist's in which, twenty years before, his first love worked. And she's still there:

'Oh,' the senator said, raising his head with a little jerk, and with clear, friendly eyes gazed straight into Frau Iwersen's face for a second. And then, without saying another word, he took his leave with a polite wave of the hand.

The gradual accumulation of narrative power and import over time (the flower-shop romance was several hundred pages back) is again Trollopian. But the impressionistic moment of recognition between Senator Buddenbrook and Frau Iwersen, which the reader must attempt to understand and interpret alone (Did he build that new house in order to regain contact with the woman? Did he remember her secretly all those years?), is more modernist.

The novel's subtitle, 'The Decline of a Family', is significant, and an ominous presence over earlier, more prosperous passages. The family's deterioration, when it comes, is seen in forensic detail. And where and when do the problems truly begin? Thomas Buddenbrook thinks he knows. Things never went well after that move to a new house. And it was he, his own mood, that was to blame. And how far is everything connected to the presence of that little flower shop across the way?

'My mood has not sunk to below zero because of a business loss. It's just the other way around. I truly believe that, and that's why things are as they are.'

Nothing will ever be glad confident morning again. He is aware of having reached a summit, and that 'the tangible tokens of happiness and success first appear only after things have in reality gone into decline'. From this point in the novel all bourgeois cosiness vanishes, and one reads on anxiously into territory Mann would colonise in later works. The intensity with which Mann scrutinises Thomas Buddenbrook renders him almost a prototype for the agonised protagonist in 'Death in Venice'.

Sometimes he would look out at the gray gables and to the passersby or let his eyes rest on the centennial plaque hanging on the wall, the one with the portrait of his father, and he would think about his family's history and tell himself that this was how it all ended, that what was happening now was the final chapter.

Contrasting with Thomas's conservatism and concern for the world of commerce (with which he has in any case lost faith) is Hanno, his sensitive artistic son. The opposing values of father and son are dramatised as brilliantly as E. M. Forster would do a decade later in Howards End. A memorable chapter late in Mann's novel covers Hanno's summer holiday on the Baltic coast. At the end, back home, Hanno speaks to his aunt Antonie, who remembers her own youthful experiences on vacation in the same resort. But now it is stylised, a formalised memory without freshness or urgency. The moment is deeply affecting. Buddenbrooks is a long, long novel, but sometimes a novel has to be long if it is to earn such power, such resonance.

It ends with another tour de force, a forty-page chapter covering a day in the life of Hanno, now a teenager at school. Gradually we realise what Mann is about. The school, Prussianised, brutal, macho, utilitarian, represents the modern world, or rather the new confident united Fatherland that has come into being during the course of Buddenbrooks. Injustices are meted out against the innocent. The weak collude with the strong. The boys side collectively with their aggressors, thankful for their own deliverance. Difference is roundly punished.

It is, of course, deeply, chillingly prophetic.

*

* I suspect this may be a reference to the early scenes with Herr Grünlich, Antonie Buddenbrook's importunate and unwanted suitor. For Grünlich (perhaps) read Julius Herz; for Antonie, Fanny. Or perhaps Herz is Morten Schwarzkopf, the young man Antonie has a holiday romance with at about the same point in the novel. In any case, the connections between Buddenbrooks and Brookner's The Next Big Thing, and particularly between Tony Buddenbrook and Fanny Bauer, are of interest. There are, for example, their marriages, which end poorly. I note that both characters have second husbands (Permaneder in Mann, Schneider in Brookner) who are named Alois. Alois Permaneder and Alois Schneider both turn out, after the wedding, to be worth less than seemed to be the case before.

There are other parallels. Brookner's Herz has a musical brother who ends in a sort of asylum. In Buddenbrooks Thomas's brother Christian is committed to an institution, and Hanno is a promising pianist.

** I recommend John E Woods's translation for Everyman's Library.

*** '[T]he landscape, so well remembered, so totally familiar, of the bourgeois past', comments Brookner in relation to Thomas Mann in The Next Big Thing (ch. 12).

Undue Influence: Moths That Fly by Day

It was only August, but the summer was virtually finished. Thick cloud was rarely pierced by anything resembling normal sunshine, and what heat there was was excessively humid, spoiled. Only that morning I had found a large moth spreadeagled on my bedroom wall, with no tremor at my approach. This attitude seemed to mirror my own inertia, although inertia now seemed to me something of a luxury I could no longer afford.

Anita Brookner, Undue Influence, ch. 15

That moth: one is reminded irresistibly of Virginia Woolf and that late essay of hers.

Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellow-underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us. They are hybrid creatures, neither gay like butterflies nor sombre like their own species...

Virginia Woolf, Anita Brookner: moths that flew by day.

Any Hour You Like: The Shelbourne by Elizabeth Bowen

A curiosity among Elizabeth Bowen's works, The Shelbourne (1951) is the history of a famous Dublin landmark. It is also a celebration of hotel life - 'a world revolving upon itself'. For Bowen the Shelbourne was a place of safety and stability in a time of uncertainty.

We begin in the early nineteenth century with the original building, where Thackeray stayed. He found the Shelbourne quirky, was famously disconcerted to find his bedroom window held open with a broom: 'Thackeray-lovers ... still prowl around the Shelbourne asking which of these windows the Broom propped up. Knowing so much, they should know enough to know that the hotel has been rebuilt since the author stayed there.' Though Bowen is sniffy about such literary pilgrims, it is clear that she herself has a more than sentimental attachment to the Shelbourne.

The hotel was reconstructed and modernised in the 1860s: the dimensions of its interiors, not least, were expanded to accommodate the huge clothes of the time - a 'more roomy age'. A typical Bowen reflection, on the topic of the Shelbourne's wardrobes:

Of these many still survive: in their cedar-scented, cavernous insides to-day's wispy clothes hang like ghosts.

The hotel reached its peak in the late Victorian period - 'gay days at once ephemeral and immortal' - and featured directly in a novel of the time, George Moore's A Drama in Muslin, which Bowen discusses at length.

Into the twentieth century, and politics intrude. We see guests, fearful of insurgents, sleeping in corridors, a scene not unlike the London Underground during the Blitz. But the Shelbourne comes through, and Bowen ends with a hymn of praise delivered from the top of the hotel, looking out over Ireland, 'under a world of sky':

Sea gleams in the distance; cloud shadows bowl softly over the mountains; below, Dublin spreads out its humming plan, shading off into the empty horizons [...] In the heart of this stands the Shelbourne, four-square, stout and surviving, scene of so many destinies which might seem to be transitory yet become immortal when one considers how they have left their mark. Nothing goes for nothing. Here, in these floors of rooms, under my feet, hopes in the main have triumphed, behaviour and order have stood firm. Now in the haze over the city clocks begin to strike. Beads of traffic run round the Green. A car detaches itself, slows down, pulls up in front of the glass porch. The porter comes out - someone is arriving. It is any hour you like of a Shelbourne day...

This, then, is no regular history. It's an Elizabeth Bowen jeu d'esprit - original, eccentric, unconfined. It's peculiarly rather akin to Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Like Woolf, Bowen traces her subject thrillingly through time - and through literature.

The Shelbourne survives into the present day.
It is possible to sleep in the
Elizabeth Bowen Suite.

German Notebook

I chose out of the way places, out of season: almost any town in France or Germany, however devoid of scenic interest, provided the sort of ruminative space which I seemed to require.

Anita Brookner, A Family Romance, ch. 8

1.
To Düsseldorf: out of the way, though in season. To the Kunstpalast, in rain, under a heavy sky. Some Cranachs, older and younger, some Rubens, one or two Caspar David Friedrichs, some very engaging nineteenth-century history paintings, some Kirchners. But altogether the collection seemed slightly at a low ebb. Unprepossessing building: red-brick, monumental, 1930s: 'degenerate art' was exhibited here once, for purposes of ridicule.

2.
Chapter 40 of David Copperfield. Mr Peggotty - a wanderer in search of Little Em'ly - speaks of his journey through France and into Italy. He returns via Switzerland, responding to a tip-off. As with other pre-aviation era narratives, one is aware here of the great distances involved, the sense of the Alps as a barrier to be overcome. One thinks of the Dorrits travelling south, or of Palliser and Lady Glencora on their wedding tour.

3.
To Cologne, to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum. I know it well and like the layout. A room of Courbets: Lady on a Terrace (1858), Breakfast after the Hunt (also 1858), The Beach (1865) and Château de Chillon (1873). The Beach is particularly fine, could be a piece of abstract expressionism.

(Brookner, when she saw an exhibition of his paintings in 1978, commented not wholly approvingly on the sleepiness and duskiness of Courbet.)

Cologne in summer had a party atmosphere: dense crowds, wedding parties, costumed stag and hen groups. I was once in Cologne at Christmas, and outside the cathedral were gathered hundreds of children dressed up as the Three Kings. I was there another time, during the carnival, and I was the only person not in a lurid costume.

4.
To Bonn, to see the Beethoven statue.

Beyond Kentish Town lay Cologne, their Sunday drives to Bonn to contemplate the statue of Beethoven... 

Brookner, Falling Slowly, ch. 8

Bonn has other Brooknerian associations:

'At first all went well; we had a beautiful house in Poppelsdorf, a suburb of Bonn, and Alois's sister, Margot, was very welcoming and attentive. The surroundings were pleasant and there were servants who looked after everything, so that it was quite easy to adjust after life in the hotel.'

The Next Big Thing, ch. 13

From the Hauptbahnhof I walked down Meckenheimer Allee, past townhouses, mansion blocks, trees meeting in an archway over the narrow road. An air of Sunday calm. Ghostly, fairy-tale dwellings. My pictures don't do justice to the quality of the light.

5.
To Frankfurt: I took a break from Dickens and read James's The American Scene. It's the most dazzling and difficult of James's works, and a glass or two of something or other usually helps. I read of 'impudently new' New York, the skyscrapers like extravagant pins in a cushion, the boats on the Hudson moving like bobbins in a great tapestry. All the while, on screens, today's America underwent an eclipse.

Frankfurt am Main, a.k.a. Mainhattan

6.
David Copperfield again: Mr Peggotty is still questing after Emily, who absconded with Steerforth. At no point is the possibility properly entertained of Emily's agency in the affair, though Mrs Steerforth is roundly condemned for suggesting Emily 'seduced' Steerforth. The narrative, the discourse, has only such terms. And Emily must be found and saved - and she shall be thankful for such salvation. Now we learn she's left Steerforth, and David fears she may have ended up on the streets. The precise nature of such a life is conveyed by Dickens with dog-whistle subtlety. How sad and limited Little Em'ly's options are, and also how limited are the ways in which her story is presented.

7.
To the Städel Museum, one of my favourite collections. A good set of nineteenth-century paintings and a fine range of Old Masters. Also a floor of post-1945 art. The museum's small exhibition space is often well used, offering detailed, quite specialist shows. On my last visit I saw some Watteau drawings. This time: another Brookner fan-pleasing show: French lithographs by, among others, Delacroix (Shakespeare illustrations) and Géricault (typically challenging subject matter: a beggar, a bare-knuckle fight, soldiers in retreat from Moscow).

In the main collection: a View of Frankfurt by Courbet, and a photo by Julia Margaret Cameron of Mrs Herbert Duckworth, later Virginia Woolf's mother. Oh, Mrs Ramsay!

And to prove I don't only look at old art, here I am (with Warhol's Goethe) reflected in a work comprising a wall of mirrored tiles:

8.
Going back to Düsseldorf after several days in Frankfurt felt like returning to a gentler world.

The natural banks of the Rhine at Düsseldorf:

I thought I might give the Kunstpalast another look, and indeed I was better disposed towards it. This time I found an exhibition of Andreas Achenbach's paintings and drawings, the same show I saw in Baden-Baden last year: scenes oddly full of the atmosphere of the Yarmouth sections of David Copperfield: shore life, fishermen, shipwrecks.

A highlight of the collection proper, though made little of, is Cranach's Das ungleiche Paar / Der verliebte Alte (c. 1530), nowhere near as exquisite as the Frankfurt Venus but still stylishly planar and yet very human. One thinks of George Bland and his reckless passion for Katy Gibb in Brookner's A Private View. Brookner's comparison is with Tintoretto's Susannah and the Elders in Vienna, but it could be this too.

Mr Bennett and Mrs Woolf

In 1924 Virginia Woolf published a pamphlet called 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown'. Mrs Brown was a sample fictional character. Woolf imagined conjuring her out of the ether, and the woman's challenge: 'Catch me if you can.'

Mr Bennett was the popular novelist Arnold Bennett, representative for Woolf of an older generation of writers. He was famous for a range of novels, especially those set in the 'Five Towns' of the Staffordshire Potteries. 'The foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else': Woolf, apparently approving, quoted these words of Bennett's, only to dismantle them in a fashion that affected his reputation for generations to come.

He, along with his confreres Wells and Galsworthy - 'Edwardians' she called them - simply couldn't offer truths about human nature. Only 'Georgians' could, in which camp she placed Mr Lawrence, Mr Forster, Mr Joyce and Mr Eliot. Mrs Woolf too, no doubt. And why? Because 'in or about December 1910 human character changed'.

It's a devastating statement, and delivered with customary acid archness. Virginia Woolf goes on to suggest how the novels of Arnold Bennett et al might approach the problem of the imaginary Mrs Brown. She speaks of Edwardian novels' obsession with the 'fabric of things', with Mrs Brown's material circumstances. '[T]hey leave one with so strange a feeling of incompleteness and dissatisfaction. In order to complete them it seems necessary to do something - to join a society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque.' Bennett's vision of Mrs Brown is archetypal: 'Mrs Brown is eternal, Mrs Brown is human nature'. But Mrs Brown herself, 'an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety', somehow escapes. A new sort of writing is called for: spasmodic, obscure, fragmentary. A sort of writing that might be supplied by a certain Mrs Woolf?

Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett somehow survived Woolf's hatchet job. Bennett has a society dedicated to him, and many of his novels remain in print. I find that 2017 is the 150th anniversary of his birth. But before now I've never actually read him.

The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902)
is currently in print,
published by Vintage Classics,
but I rather like this 1970s Penguin edition.

And so was brought to a close the complex chain of events which had begun when Theodore Racksole ordered a steak and a bottle of Bass at the table d'hôte of the Grand Babylon Hotel.

I don't think I'm guilty of any spoilers in starting this review with the last line of what amounts to a mystery novel. Except that the incongruous order of beef and beer, which, when haughtily declined, prompts the American millionaire Racksole to purchase the whole hotel, is merely coincidental with the coming to fruition of the rightly named 'complex chain of events' - a fairly preposterous set of conspiracies involving European princelings, the millionaire's plucky daughter, disguise, revolvers, secret passages, Jewish financiers (the novel is casually antisemitic), and high jinx on boats at sea.

It's a thriller. It's a potboiler. It's what Graham Greene would have called an entertainment. It probably wasn't the Bennett novel Virginia Woolf had in mind. But it might have been. I can see what she meant about his handling of character. He gives us plenty of solid detail, but characters' interior lives are those of types rather than of real people. This has the effect of making them oddly unmemorable. The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902) is, like all such books, probably best read 'in one sitting'. But I'm too slow a reader for that, and it's a problem here. For example, I read one chapter one day about a woman in a red hat, and the next day I picked up the book again and read the next chapter, and the woman was referred to, and I found I had no memory of her at all.

Bennett is at his strongest in his depiction of setting. The hotel (I read The Grand Babylon Hotel as part of my 'hotels in literature' series), a vast palace on the Embankment, is vividly present, as are other locations, including Ostend.

The Grand Babylon Hotel seems to have a stubborn resilience in print, and this will probably continue. There will always be people, fans of John Buchan and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who like this sort of thing and thrill to Bennett's belief that 'human nature remains always the same, and that beneath the thin crust of security on which we good citizens exist the dark and secret forces of crime continue to move, just as they did in the days when you couldn't go from Cheapside to Chelsea without being set upon by thieves' (ch. 10).

But I don't think I'll be reading any more Arnold Bennett. As ever - bravo, Mrs Woolf!

No Good Could Come of It

Her father [a Viennese ophthalmologist] was moderately successful in his profession, which was something of an irony, as his own eyes were weak and occasionally watery, which gave him a melancholy appearance. This ocular melancholy might even have masked something more profound, as if genuine grief were manifesting itself in this singularly appropriate symbol. Vienna was alive with metaphors: no explanation was too far-fetched.

A Family Romance, ch. 2

Was there ever a more Freudian Brookner than A Family Romance? There's its title, of course (though its applicability to the events of the novel isn't entirely obvious*), and there's Jane's maternal grandmother's Viennese background. I remembered from earlier readings that Toni Ferber ended up, like Freud, in Maresfield Gardens, London, but I had forgotten her journey had started in none other than the Berggasse in Vienna, and that the consulting-room of Dr Meyer, the ophthalmologist, was, like Freud's, just across the landing from his apartment.

Jane's English father had understandable doubts:

He thought the ambience perfervid, haunted by the ghost of Freud and other Viennese associations. Even the conjunction of the Berggasse and Maresfield Gardens was, he thought, too apt, too prompt, too symbolic to be a mere accident: no good could come of it.

(For more on Brookner and Freud, see comments in her several interviews, especially the 2009 Telegraph interview.)

*Jane 'was not encouraged to formulate any family romance, although I was to do this later in the books I wrote for children' (ch. 2). Thus, curiously negatively, the (British only) title refers to something that the novel rejects. But in steering wide of a too closely Freudian form of fiction, Brookner perhaps avoids a crime identified by Virginia Woolf: that in becoming 'cases' characters cease to be individuals ('Freudian Fiction', 1920 essay collected in A Woman's Essays).

On Being Ill

But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record.

Virginia Woolf, 'On Being Ill' (1926 essay, reprinted in 1930 in the edition below)

Woolf's celebrated essay asks why illness hasn't taken its place with love, battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. She considers how common illness is, how 'tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed': in short she waxes lyrical. She references Shakespeare, De Quincey, Keats, Proust, all in the opening paragraph, conceding perhaps that Proust and De Quincey did have things to say on the matter. But literature, she tells us, 'does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent'. Interestingly, in view of her own medical history, Woolf's main concern is with physical illness - chiefly influenza.

Woolf asks; Brookner replies. In A Friend from England (1987), Altered States (1996) and elsewhere, characters get the flu, and Brookner's focus on their sufferings, and her descriptions of the effects of illness, effects both physical and as Woolf would say 'spiritual', surely owe something to the earlier writer's thoughts on the subject.

...the experience weakened me at some fairly critical level ... Overnight I seemed to have come into contact with my own mortality. Even when the fever had passed and I was well enough to get up, I moved cautiously, testing my movements, like an old woman ... Those days of recovery were some of the worst I can remember ... I remember spending obscure and submissive afternoons in my small living-room, conscious of the dust I was too weak to displace, feeling subdued and sad as I contemplated the unlovely corners of what had always seemed to me to be a perfectly adequate flat. The iron smell of the over-efficient central heating was in my nostrils as I sat all day ... My attitude to the dark was amorous and fearless: I was more than half in love with easeful death...

A Friend from England, ch. 6

Illness serves as a corrective: one emerges from it sober but diminished. One learns that one's continuation cannot be taken for granted, or, as the poet puts it, never glad confident morning again. My brush with mortality - and it was only a bad attack of the flu - made me grateful and tender-hearted...

Altered States, ch. 8

There are several things to note. One is Brookner's unwonted quoting of English poets (Keats, Browning), French writers being generally more her thing. (Poets, says Woolf, are the writers we turn to in illness; we are unfit for the 'long campaigns' of prose.) Another is Brookner's emphasis on the emotional effects of physical illness. She does not talk of mental illness. She may be with Woolf there: the mind is a 'slave' to the body; the mental derives from the physical.

Both authors afford illness a special status. It delivers special knowledge, special vouchsafements. Illness is indeed an 'altered state', and it has value. We are as if reborn, remade. As Woolf memorably puts it:

Directly the bed is called for, or, sunk deep among the pillows in one chair, we raise our feet even an inch above the ground on another, we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters.

Dr Brookner and the Servants

Anita Brookner is probably the last English novelist to write about servants. As late as Strangers (2009) we meet a comic caretaker ('Call me Arthur'), with his plans to retire to Essex and possible ambitions in the direction of underfloor heating. Such details carry all sorts of class-conscious freight. Essex, for the benefit of foreign followers of this blog, has a particular reputation in the popular British imagination, and as for underfloor heating... We're back in the territory of the Livingstones in A Friend from England, and all their pools-funded vulgarity.

Arthur himself has several forebears, notably the Dickensian Hipwood in A Private View. Then there are all the female chars and retainers, with their comic ramblings and salty turns of phrase. 'Class and caste distinctions were the lingua franca of insult and comedy,' writes my old tutor Alison Light of Interwar mistress-servant relations, real and fictional, in Mrs Woolf and the Servants (Fig Tree / Penguin, 2007). Dr Light was, I recall, no fan of Brookner. She didn't much approve of Virginia Woolf's attitudes towards her servants, but was (and probably still is, for all I know) a serious Woolf fan, and a fan will forgive almost anything.

The Romola Factor

I've been reading George Eliot's Romola, a novel with a forbidding reputation. Many great novelists carry such burdens. When reading Dickens I left Barnaby Rudge till last. And I've never managed to get more than a few pages into Virginia Woolf's The Waves. (Barnaby Rudge is actually rather brilliant, and I've high hopes of Romola.)

Which, I wonder, is the prodigal among Anita Brookner's family of novels, ready one day for rehabilitation and the fatted calf? I've explored in a previous post the precarious status of A Friend from England and A Misalliance. But my money's on Lewis Percy. It's different in tone and setting from other Brookners. On publication (like Barnaby Rudge) it got a very bad press. I've considered its merits in another earlier post. Let's all give it a hearing one of these days.

Leighton, 'The Blind Scholar and His Daughter'
Romola