Incidents in the Rue Laugier reread: very sexy

Her next novel - which, her annual cycle working as it does, she has already finished - is 'about a passionate love affair', she says, and 'very sexy, though the act itself is never described. Physical description is never necessary. It's reductive. These matters are secret. Or should be. It's a matter of truth, too. Much sexual description is boasting, self-promotion, display. I would want sex to remain unknown by those to whom it's not relevant. I don't know why I have to go out with a placard.'

Interview in the Independent, 1994

The novel is, of course, Incidents. Is it indeed 'very sexy'? It is certainly picturesque in its depiction of late summer in rural France: 'A golden light lay on the park; beyond the spacious lawns the trees of the little wood stood motionless'. There's a kind of faintly clichéd Go Between atmosphere to the thing. I am sure my earlier readings were more indulgent.

One further point about chapter 4. This line: 'This was something she was used to do'. One finds these lapses from time to time. One guesses that by 1995 Brookner was difficult to edit. One must console oneself by recalling the inelegances one sometimes encounters in Jane Austen: things like the superlative being used to distinguish between a pair of items. Always fun to find.

The Rules of Engagement: Labyrinthine

The Rules of Engagement is late Brookner, and there are moments of true neo-Jamesian opacity, even evasiveness. I shared some time ago on Twitter a massive 117-word sentence I found in the novel. And here's another passage, not quite on the same scale but still labyrinthine:

One fears for the loss of one's innocence, even when that innocence is little more than ignorance. And also the blamelessness that blinds one to the superior sophistication of others and makes of that very sophistication a mystery which might reveal itself to have some value, even some merit, a capacity which one had been denied but which it might have been in one's interest to have acquired. (Ch. 12)

The Next Big Thing: May or Might

He knew that he was in danger of losing his head, may already have lost it, but submitted to the experience, even welcomed it.

The arrival of Ted Bishop, accompanied by his infant grandson, roused him from what may have been a brief trance. 

There may even have been jealousy behind the iron closeness that united Fanny and her mother; neither was allowed to break their primitive agreement.

Anita Brookner, The Next Big Thing, chapters 10, 11, 17

Now reread those sentences. Is there a problem? I'm not so sure. Plainly they're in the past tense. And 'may' is certainly the present tense modal of which 'might' is the past tense version. Yes, yes. But should Brookner really therefore have written 'might' instead of 'may'? Many writers would, without misgivings, have written those sentences.

The problem, I think, is with the additional meanings or functions of 'might', i.e. its use not just as the past tense of 'may' but also as a means of expressing simple future intentions or possibilities in a language devoid of a future tense (I might go to the shops later), plus its common deployment in sentences expressing the hypothetical future or past (I might go to the shops later, if it doesn't rain / I might have gone to the shops if circumstances had been different). Use of 'may have' rather than 'might have' in sentences such as Brookner's above avoids these associations.

But here's Adam Mars-Jones on the subject, in a review that's not untypical of the way Brookner was received in some quarters during parts of her career:

The only sign of an awareness of contemporary language in The Next Big Thing is an unconscious one: for all her fastidiousness she succumbs to the confusion about 'may' and 'might'. He knew that he may have lost his head. He saw that she may have known. If her prose is to be lifeless, let it at least be correct.

Two Scottish Aunts and an American Academic

'Just till tomorrow, dear. Then we're off home to our garden. We've had a lovely show this past year. Even the apples were good. Could you take a few home with you, Jane? I know Mary has sufficient. If you come by tomorrow, dear, we can let you have a couple of pounds with pleasure.'

A Family Romance, ch. 8

Elsewhere the Scottish aunts speak of 'wee Marigold'. The word 'sufficient' recalls an earlier scene in which one or the other asks 'Have you had a sufficiency, Peter?' At one point Brookner examines the ladies' use of the verb 'to take', as in 'Will you take a scone, Jane?': 'their favourite verb, although no two people could have been more giving' (ch. 5).

*

'Janet's copper beech. I confess to a little envy: I haven't one of my own. But I can always look at hers. We have tea together at her house, when it's at its best, in October. Have you noticed that when the leaves fall they turn a dark ox-blood red. I dare say you have a fine garden at home.'

Ch. 9

I confess to; I dare say; a fine garden: we might be in Henry James. But I think Brookner missed a trick with 'in October': surely an opportunity for 'in the fall'? Note too the sentence 'I haven't one of my own', where a British speaker might say 'I haven't got' or 'I don't have'.

*

I wouldn't say Brookner has a tin ear for this sort of thing, but I do find these examples too studied and self-conscious. If she'd ever had a Welsh character, I guess he or she would once or twice have said 'look you'.

Flawed Stylists

...these were the virtuous prerequisites for vindication of some sort, for a triumph which would confound the sceptics... 

...approaching some beneficent outcome which would make even my father's death assume acceptable proportions. 

...I resigned myself to a lesson in reality which would be instructive but largely unwelcome.

The Bay of Angels, Ch. 1

The grammatical difference between that and which is subtle, and often inconsistently observed, even by the best writers. Kingsley Amis, one of the best, also a pedant, defined the distinction well in his grammar book The King's English (Harper Collins, 1997), adding that plenty of good writers have got it wrong from time to time while many bad ones have got it right. That Brookner's so Augustan prose isn't after all without its imperfections is one of the many adorable things about her. Jane Austen is another example of a flawed stylist - employing, for example, superlatives when comparing only two items, and probably mixing up her relative pronouns. (I'm unsure, not having read Austen for some time, and indeed in this context being somewhat loath to mention her.)

The Historic Present

In my freshman prize copy of A Dictionary of Stylistics (Longman, 1991), by one of my old teachers, Katie Wales, I find the historic present defined as the 'special use of the present tense in oral or written, anecdotal or literary narrative, where the past tense might be expected, the shift creating a more dramatic or immediate effect'.

Professor Wales cites the use of the form in jokes, in newspaper headlines, in Pope's Iliad, and in Anita Brookner's Family and Friends.

The form has continued its popularity with literary novelists. Consider Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell novels.

There was a minor media spat a few years back, regarding the use of the historic present in BBC history programmes: 'It gives a bogus, an entirely bogus, sense of immediacy,' said John Humphrys.

Brookner's deployment of the historic present in Family and Friends evolves out of the authorial voice's examination of a set of old photographs. In Brookner's hands the effect of the form is less one of immediacy than of distance, though this may be a result of other aspects of Brookner's prose, which here is at its most mandarin. But the historic present contributes much to the overall, highly artful impact. In some way the foreignness of the Dorns, the formality of their mittel-European manners, are mirrored and represented.