Brookner Puts Her Feet up

Christopher Hampton's film of Brookner's 1984 Booker-winning novel, Hotel du Lac, was broadcast on BBC2 on Sunday 2 March 1986 at 10.05 p.m. Brookner would be watching it 'at home, with my feet up, just like anyone else'. The interview she gave the Radio Times on the occasion of the broadcast is light and airy, as befits the medium. But Brookner is Brookner, and darkness glimmers.

'People like the Puseys always win ... You can't keep them at bay. You can only repossess yourself from time to time by examining things really clearly.'

'I like writing, but it's a nerve-wracking, dangerous business.'

'Writers are like stateless persons. They can't easily be absorbed.'

'I don't aspire to anything. I'm non-aligned, I'll settle for being marginal.'

Lively Curiosity

Anita Brookner was never one for easy hyperbole, only for that which was earned and justified by time. One wonders what she would have made of 2020. No doubt she would have reserved judgement.

Her essays and reviews are often at their most piquant when considering something from which she withholds praise. I've been reading 'Descent into the Untestable', a review in Soundings of a book of 1980 on regression in the arts from the eighteenth into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Analysis of large movements, notions such as the Enlightenment and Romanticism, will be familiar to readers of Brookner. In Providence (1982), Kitty Maule and her students mount lofty seductive arguments: Existentialism as a late manifestation of Romanticism - and the like.

But Dr Brookner herself would caution her own pupils: Art doesn't love you and cannot console you. Here she argues for the limitations of art. 'Artistic traditions are self-generating and at best reflexive. One cannot live by the light of ideas expressed in pictures, although their images will colour one's thinking'.

Mr Harbison, the author of the book under review, fails in Brookner's eyes to provide the necessary underpinning. Pictures, she counsels, occasionally need the corroboration of the written word: 'Quite simply, a different kind of information is being imparted'. Look at the writing, she says, and you'll find that the eighteenth century, though it may have been when it all went wrong, might also have been the last time when 'it might just have come out right'. She repeats this line, I think, in an early interview. It is the writers, not the painters, who will save us - those writers who are, as she said, saints for the godless. Montesquieu and Diderot she reveres: 'neither of them afflicted with any beliefs they could not verify'. Fragonard and David do no more than 'weight the argument'.

If we ever wondered why Brookner turned always from art to writing, or perhaps why she never herself seems to have picked up a brush, the answer is here. Here also is her answer to suggestions of the Apocalypse, for the unfortunate Mr Harbison apparently believes we are living at the end of the world:

If the Apocalypse is really just around the corner the correct attitude would seem to be one of lively curiosity.

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.

A Misalliance: Not a Night Club

'Life is not a night club,'

says Blanche to her old friend Patrick in chapter 8 of A Misalliance when he reveals unwise feelings for the flaky Sally and an even flakier association with an analyst. It's a good line, and I've pointed out before that A Misalliance is a quotable novel. And here's Anita Brookner herself in interview in 1994:

...if someone said to her, not that she was gloomy and sad, but that her novels were, how would she reply? 'I'd agree. I don't intend them to be like that, but I think they're an accurate reflection. Life is not a nightclub, and some of the reviews I've had, particularly from women, which assume that it is, seem to have been quite defensive. These women are angry. They believe they can get what they want from life. Maybe they're just lucky enough not to have found that out that they can't.'

The Rules of Engagement: Analysis

The character of Nigel, dignified and likeable at first, but given to psychobabble, gradually falls victim to a sort of novelistic passive aggression. The existence somewhere in his background of an analyst* is inferred by the narrator, indeed imagined in some detail, though never confirmed. For her part she's 'too proud, or too ashamed (they are the same thing) ever to have confided, to have confessed in any company' (ch. 14).

Brookner herself was asked by at least one interviewer whether she'd undergone analysis. She hadn't. And she wasn't about to start. It would take too long. And she might doubt the intelligence of the interrogator. It's a breathtaking answer.

But she was a devotee of Freud. Her novel Strangers has an epigraph by Freud, a rare honour in Brookner. One thinks of Herz too, in The Next Big Thing, talking to an uncomprehending GP of Freud's experience on the Acropolis, of having 'gone beyond the father' (ch. 7). Or one remembers this treasurable line from chapter 13 of Incidents in the Rue Laugier:

...those who did not rely on their inner resources, as she had been obliged to do, were forever condemned to weep in other women's drawing-rooms...

*We learn that a similar character, Patrick, in A Misalliance, also has an analyst, and the revelation is something he never quite recovers from.

The Rules of Engagement: English Jokes

Whether the constant evasiveness and jokiness were a particularly English feature I could not decide, but I did miss the sort of overheard remark I had so relished in Paris, the willingness to discuss first principles and to invest passion in one's own arguments.

The Rules of Engagement, ch. 10

This is a theme of Brookner's: the shallow jokiness of the English. Not that it works too well here: the narrator of The Rules of Engagement is, after all, English herself, however much she might feel like an exile. Brookner's protagonists can be divided into those who are (if such a thing were possible) fully English, and those whose identity is more complex. Brookner's was complex, and she was persuasive when she said (in interview with John Haffenden in the mid-1980s):

I've never been at home here... People say I'm so serious and depressing, but it seems to me that the English are never serious - they are flippant, complacent, ineffable, but never serious - and this is maddening.

The Rules of Engagement: Betsy's Blitheness

The word is used three times in The Rules of Engagement. It might pass without notice were it not for the following, from some years later. In The Rules of Engagement 'blithe' describes the innocent, romantic Betsy. Here, in Brookner's 2009 Telegraph interview the word takes on more equivocal associations:

In Strangers it is the tentative, introspective Sturgis who is confronted with the impulsive, carefree and monstrously self-obsessed Vicky Gardner, whose only interest in him is in what he can provide for her.  The person who thinks seriously about life, Brookner's books suggest, who proceeds cautiously and conscientiously, will be punished for their virtue, end up alone and dissatisfied, while the person who takes a wholly unreflecting and rather selfish view of life pays no price for it. 

'But haven't you noticed that?' 

She gives an amused smile. 'Think of Tony Blair. Unrealistic. Selfish. Happy as a clam!'  Didn't Plato say the unexamined life is not worth living?  She gives the faintest smile. 'Plato could be wrong too. I think the unexamined life is much better. Much more comfortable.' So you wish you had been…  'Blithe…' It rolls off her tongue, wrapped in longing. A lovely word, I say.  'It's an old-fashioned word. You don't hear it much.'  So you envy the blithe?  'Oh yes.'

The Rules of Engagement: Russian Roulette

I have come to believe that there can be no adequate preparation for the sadness that comes at the end, the sheer regret that one's life is finished, that one's failures remain indelible and one's successes illusory.

The Rules of Engagement, ch. 5

These lines were quoted on the flyleaf of the UK first edition. They come amid what amounts to a Brooknerian manifesto of belief, taking in such familiar themes as the gods of antiquity; the notion of living a posthumous life; the pointlessness of living a virtuous life; the need to take chances and defy safety. We even get a line about playing Russian roulette with one's life, which echoes a practically identical comment in Brookner's 2002 Independent interview:

I think you should play Russian roulette with your life, frankly [...] because there's so little time.

The Ratner Word

There was always something facile, even hysterical, about these [early] reviews (I should know; I wrote one). The annual Brookner offered a cheap shot to young critics, eager to savage a scandalous bearer of bad tidings about ageing and loneliness. Yet now she agrees with those snapping puppies. 'I hate those early novels. I think they're crap. Maybe I needed to write them. I far prefer what I'm doing now.' Yes, she does use the Ratner* word. It's like hearing a duchess cuss. Why are they crap? 'They're morbid, they're introspective and they lead to no revelations.' Has she a favourite among her works? 'I don't like any of them very much.'

Boyd Tonkin, Independent interview, 2002

Elsewhere Brookner said she wrote only a first draft. There were no revisions. There just wasn't time.

There just wasn't time. This is significant. She came late to fiction. She was fifty-three when A Start in Life was published. Had she started earlier, might she have considered a wider kind of revisionism - something of the kind undertaken by Henry James, who, in the last years of his career, took on the punishing task of revising and republishing the bulk of his output? It was indeed onerous - it made him ill - and the New York Edition didn't sell well. There are stories of remaindered copies being used for waste paper, or kindling, or something (my memory's vague), during the Great War.

James was a born writer, like Edith Wharton (Brookner calls her that in her Introduction to Wharton's short stories), and Brookner probably wasn't. It seems only born writers, writers who start alarmingly young, are likely to play the revising game. Brookner was content to write off chunks of her early work, but she wouldn't have considered rewriting it. She still had work to do. There just wasn't time.

Revisions, anyhow, can be disastrous. I won't hear a word against James, early, mid or late, original or revised - but I would like to consider a poem by W. H. Auden, 'Brussels in Winter', which exists in two versions:

Wandering the cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains silent in the frost,
The city still escapes you, it has lost
The qualities that say ‘I am a Thing.’

Only the homeless and the really humbled
Seem to be sure exactly where they are,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like the Opera.

Ridges of rich apartments rise tonight
Where isolated windows glow like farms:
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn the stranger right
To warm the heartless city in his arms.

(1938)

Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.

Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.

Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.

(1966)

What is lost? Some conversational idiosyncrasy, I think. Some immediacy. But clarity is gained. 1960s Auden wants to be clear; he wants to avoid what he calls in the Foreword to his Collected Shorter Poems 'slovenly verbal habits'.

Had Brookner revised her early novels she might perhaps have eliminated one or two minor inelegances. Issues with tone in A Start in Life. Clumsy shifts in point of view in Lewis Percy. But at what cost?

*

*Gerald Ratner ran a British High Street jewellery chain. In 1991 he made an ill-advised speech in which he described his goods as 'crap', this being what he saw as the secret of his success. The comment wasn't well received, to say the least.

Family and Friends: A True Chronicle

Brookner spoke at length about Family and Friends to Olga Kenyon in Women Writers Talk (1989).

'It's my family,' she said. 'Of course they're rendered into fiction because I didn't know them till I was about seventeen - when I began to see them as separate people.'

It was indeed a family photo that sparked the novel: a cousin showed her a wedding picture with her grandmother dominating the group. 'I gave the photograph back, but the following day I began to write Family and Friends. I had always avoided writing about my family. They had given me a good deal of trouble in real life.'

Although, largely from lack of knowledge, she fictionalised the early lives of the uncles and aunts in the novel, 'somewhere in the course of this invention, I discovered I was writing what amounted to a true chronicle. Whether this was an obscure form of unconscious memory, whether it was intuition, or whether it was the exhilaration of disposing of these characters whom I had always seen as immensely powerful, I have no idea.'

She felt 'freed' by the writing - she wrote 'without qualms'.

As I neared the end I was too frightened that I might lose the conclusion - which I did not know yet - and so I merely sat in the garden and wrote in a notebook. I felt an enormous tension; but my ending, when it came, surprised me into laughter. I felt like a spectator at my own game.

The novel 'laid many ghosts for me. I hope I've given those ghosts something new to talk about'. It was 'the only one of my books I truly like'.

Being in control was a motive in writing the novel. 'Maybe as in psychoanalysis you abreact the whole thing and it comes out right.'

The main characters in Family and Friends had their analogues in life. Mimi was Brookner's mother; there was an Alfred, and there were two who broke free, as in the novel.

And free will is a heavy burden to lay on anyone, particularly if they are not too bright.

Brookner's characters, Kenyon suggested, 'don't always seem in touch with the twentieth century'.

Brookner's reply:

Yes. They are nineteenth-century families, without the nineteenth century to give support.

Family and Friends: Lili and Ursie

Lili and Ursie come to the Dorns' as maids - 'harsh' and 'hectic', given to weeping when certain pieces of music are being played. The girls are 'foreign', but Brookner will go no further. Something similar is in the air when an impoverished woman arrives on Sofka's doorstep, selling small items, and Sofka recognises her as one Irma Beck, whom she knew 'in the past, in another country'.

We're in chapter 8 by now, more than halfway through the novel, and Brookner cannot any longer step around the realities of her story. But the stories of Lili and Ursula, of Frau Beck, are told with great subtlety: restraint, Brookner suggests, is the only correct response to such horror.

We know the episodes have an autobiographical origin. Here she is talking to the Independent in 1994:

There was the added complication that in the 1930s the house filled up with Jewish refugees, who could come if they found a sponsor, I think, and if they went into domestic service. In the war, again, there were refugees living in the house, until such time as the police turned up to take them off to the Isle of Man and they went to be interned and were never seen again: history does not relate what happened to them. There was a tragic element in childhood. My parents weren't religious, but you couldn't help but be conscious of being Jewish at that time. I knew terrible things were going on, and were coming close, and I suppose that couldn't help but seem menacing.

Family and Friends: The Westminster Bridge Road

Brookner, as I've said before, doesn't always like too much detail, or not in a narrative as finely spun as Family and Friends. I'm on chapter 4, and still we don't know what the Dorns' factory manufactures. But we do now know its location: the Westminster Bridge Road. Nearly a decade later, in 1994, in interview (here), Brookner would reveal perhaps this detail's autobiographical origin.

She was, she says, 'born into the purple of trade' in Herne Hill, a suburb near Dulwich, on 16 July 1928. Her maternal grandfather had come to England as a young man from Warsaw, and had set up as a tobacco importer, with a factory on Westminster Bridge Road. 'I didn't know him: he'd already died when I was born. My mother said that in his last illness he raised a Corona cigar to his lips, and drew on it. He supplied Edward VII with his cigarettes. There was an engraved cigarette case from the King, which vanished with one of the maids.'

These things are always intriguing. In some novels, maybe even here, Brookner can be very specific in her references. Chapter 4 moves towards events in Paris - and the 'ineffable blue Parisian evening' is memorably conjured. Her characters find themselves at the Hôtel Bedford et West End. It's some time since I read Family and Friends, but I register great personal nostalgia as I encounter these scenes again, remembering as I do my own youthful Parisian afternoons and evenings, walking up and down the rue de Rivoli in search of that hotel, and not finding it.

Family and Friends: Everybody Marries

Will the boys marry? Well, of course they will, in so far as everybody marries.

Anita Brookner, Family and Friends, ch. 1

Perhaps a little more than loneliness - too awkward a subject? - marriage is a recurring theme in Brookner's interviews. Everyone should marry several times, Brookner tells Boyd Tonkin in 2002. Or consider the interview with Blake Morrison from 1994:

…a recurrent dilemma of her novels is: Should I marry? This has also been the dilemma of much great (not merely romantic) fiction of the past. But Brookner's characters often receive the wrong kind of proposal, or bolt from the impending ceremony, or marry in haste and repent at leisure. The choice between lonely self-possession and companionable self-immolation - this is her theme. How much has this to do with her own life?
'What can I say? I have had offers of marriage but I didn't accept them. I possibly never met anyone to whom I could really entrust my life. I suppose it stems from early childhood.'
In what way?
'Well, I was always wary of my parents' plans for me. And I never really wanted to be taken over, or to have to give up anything else. It would have meant giving up work.'
But did she never think: working as an art historian need not rule out marriage - I could have both?
'No, I never thought that. From the outset the work absorbed me and I felt passionately about it. Of course I fell in and out of love like anybody does, but I think I knew that I was always going to live on my own.'
Yet she was attracted by the idea of marriage? 'I thought when I was young I would give everything up to be happily married. But you grow out of that, I think. By 30 a sort of wariness had crept in - I began to recognise men and what they were doing it for. These are people with their own agenda, who think you might be fitted in if they lop off certain parts. You can see them coming a mile off.'
In this sense she's like her heroines, then, who tend to receive unsuitable proposals, unsuitable because they have nothing to do with love? 'Yes. Or even sex.'

Just Do Mention Jane Austen

I never felt very easy about Jane Austen: I think she made a tremendous, far-reaching decision to leave certain things out. She forfeited passion for wit, and I think that led her to collude with certain little strategems which are horrifying in real life. She wrote about getting husbands.

Anita Brookner speaking to John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, Methuen 1985

Observer: What did you read as a child?
Brookner: Ah! Dickens. My father fed me Dickens. Two novels for my birthday, two novels for Christmas until I'd read the lot. And after that I think it was H.G. Wells, for some reason. I've been talked about in the same context as Jane Austen. I didn't stick that label on myself, other people did. Quite inaccurate. I've never got on very well with Jane Austen.

2001 Observer interview 'Just don't mention Jane Austen'

I decided to reread Pride and Prejudice - tried to read it with an innocent eye, as if for the first time, as if I didn't know anything about it.

Something of an impossible task, I found. For one thing I felt haunted by film and television Darcys and Elizabeths. Just couldn't shake them off. So I tried, as Nabokov would have advised, to focus on the author.

What does Jane Austen think of the limited and oppressive world she depicts or rather creates? She's both an insider and an outsider, at once disaffected and invested in it. Take the interaction between Mr Bennet and Elizabeth on first meeting Mr Collins:

Mr Bennet's expectations were fully answered. His cousin was as absurd as he had hoped, and he listened to him with the keenest enjoyment, maintaining at the same time the most resolute composure of countenance, and, except in the occasional glance at Elizabeth, requiring no partner in his pleasure. (Ch. 14)

This is subtly but not radically subversive; it is subversion from within, and probably as far as Austen is prepared to go. Her world is simultaneously cosy and comfortless. She's a satirist, but a conservative satirist.

Pride and Prejudice isn't comic throughout. It shows its eighteenth-century, Richardsonian roots in its sombre passages, in extended discussions and conversations about friendship and conduct. Austen might be said to achieve a balance between the modes of that century, between the comedy of Smollett and Sterne and the high seriousness of Samuel Richardson.

Additionally Austen is good at undercutting her comedy. Mr Bennet's 'You have delighted us long enough', aimed at the talentless Mary, is a famous put-down, but Austen's quiet authorial follow-up renders Mr Bennet a cynic and Lizzy ever more the human and moral centre of the book:

Mary, though pretending not to hear, was somewhat disconcerted; and Elizabeth, sorry for her, and sorry for her father's speech, was afraid her anxiety had done no good. (Ch. 18)

What is there in Brookner's cavils? Austen does indeed write about getting husbands, but the lives of the Bennet sisters and their circle are far more socially precarious than the existence of anyone in Brookner. Miss Lucas's 'pure and disinterested desire of an establishment', for example (ch. 22), carries with it the burden of rather shocking knowledge. Jane Austen may have left certain things out, but they're never far from the surface.

It's a realistic, unromantic world. As such it is unBrooknerian. For all its apparent bleakness and astringency, Brookner's world is strongly glamorous and full of art. Brookner heroines are not realistic, not given to compromise - not least because they don't need to compromise. The resources of Austen's personages, both inner and outer, are more limited. In the unusually lengthy chapter 43 Elizabeth visits Pemberley for the first time and her views on Mr Darcy undergo a change, not only in response to the positive comments she hears of him from his servants but also because, having seen his magnificent and tasteful house, she realises what a thing it would be to become its mistress. This is certainly honest, but also mercenary, and we might well register some disapproval (and indeed at the end of the novel Austen returns to the moment, giving a less objectionable interpretation). A little later in chapter 43 Elizabeth shows scant regard for Pemberley's 'many good paintings'. 'Elizabeth knew nothing of the art,' Austen tells us. Sketches of the Darcy family are more to Elizabeth's taste - more interesting, more intelligible. There is always irony in Austen but here it doesn't seem to be directed at Elizabeth but more at those (such as a lady or gentleman in an Anita Brookner novel) who might prefer Darcy's great pictures. Jane Austen is no bluestocking, and nor is Lizzy: that is the message. But Austen is possibly a philistine - and I wonder whether that's one of the reasons she's now such a national treasure. (Poor Mary's bookishness is likewise a matter for ridicule and disdain.)

I ended my revisiting of Pride and Prejudice slightly baffled, and more than slightly awed. Jane Austen made, perhaps, a tremendous, far-reaching decision to leave certain things out. But one might equally suggest she merely withholds those things, and the pleasure of the text lies in tracing their outlines. A thing I would say for sure: I do not always enjoy the novels I read. But I enjoyed Pride and Prejudice, enjoyed it with a continuous pleasure. And it is a pleasure that's to be found, as Nabokov correctly said, in the company of the author.

To me at least, please do mention Jane Austen.

* * *

One reason I've been reading Pride and Prejudice again (not having read it since my teens) is that 2017 is the bicentenary of Jane Austen's death - an event marked by the Bank of England in its own special way. Of course no one really knows exactly what Jane Austen looked like: she lived before the age of photography, and her sister Cassandra's sketch in the National Portrait Gallery is not very accomplished. But the Bank of England chose instead a mid-Victorian prettified portrait created for a relation's memoir of the author. But this is in keeping. The designs on English banknotes since the mid-1990s have, it seems to me, tended towards the fussy and the chintzy. And the portrait of the Queen on the front is neither idealised nor a perfect likeness.

(The Pride and Prejudice quotation on the note is also worth a word or two. See a well-considered Guardian piece here.)

Undue Influence: Closing Remarks

After Undue Influence (1999) there came an unprecedented gap in the publication pattern Anita Brookner had established over nearly twenty years. There was something in 2000, but it was a book of art criticism, Romanticism and Its Discontents. In 2001 the fiction resumed, but Brookner told Robert McCrum she hadn't intended to write the novel of that year. Undue Influence might well therefore have been Brookner's last novel.

We read Undue Influence now, or I do, as pointing forward to the darker novels of the 2000s. For sure it is a bleak tale, all the more so for the breeziness of its opening chapters. The sly author lulls you into the impression that this is some kind of easy-going Brookner-lite, before steadily turning the screw. Towards the end you realise you're keeping company with a narrator who may well be mentally ill, and a writer who's intent on ruthlessly clearing the decks of extraneous plot so that she can concentrate on heaping the maximum humiliation on her hapless protagonist.

How Claire Pitt suffers! Brookner deprives her of every support. I always find very terrible that moment when she considers spending an entire holiday in Hyde Park. The novel's ending, as grim but more concise than the conclusion to Look at Me, never fails to shock, even though on rereading the reader has probably been able to spot the careful way Brookner has seeded the whole novel with clues.

One of the novel's concluding lines:

It was the greatest failure of my life and no future success could ever obliterate it.

- brings to mind again the question of the time scheme. The suggestion here is of a long retrospect, which is at odds with the closer focus at work throughout the novel. But if this suggests a lack of novelistic polish, it also, I think, successfully evokes the unfinished rawness of the heroine's truly terrible experience.

***

The Brooknerian will now take a break, returning in a week or two with consideration of, among other things, Brookner's relationship with a writer who's currently in her bicentenary year. Yes, just do mention Jane Austen!

Mixed Motives

'It must be a mixed motive, I think,' said Mr Wickfield, shaking his head and smiling incredulously.
'A mixed fiddlestick!' returned my aunt. 'You claim to have one plain motive in all you do yourself. You don't suppose, I hope, that you are the only plain dealer in the world?'

David Copperfield, ch. 15

[Brookner:] Motives are never unmixed, are they?
[Haffenden:] Your own heroines are given to be unmixed.
[Brookner:] Poor little things, I feel sorry for them. They're idiots: there's no other word for them. And I don't know any more than they do.

John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, 1985

A Central European Jean Rhys: Edith Templeton

 

I am apostolic about the novels of Edith Templeton, a Czech who writes in impeccable English: they are extremely restrained and tell strong stories about life in old-style central Europe, with recognisable passions and follies. Lovely, lovely novels.

Anita Brookner, interviewed by John Haffenden, 1985

In the 1980s Anita Brookner wrote introductions to several of Templeton's novels, published by Hogarth. I haven't read them, so cannot comment, but I recently got hold of The Surprise of Cremona (1954), a travel book reissued in the 2000s with an introduction by Brookner:

My only meeting with Edith Templeton took place in her flat in Bordighera some time in the mid-1980s. I found an isolated and eccentric woman: I saw from the expression on her face as we were introduced that the same judgement had been passed on myself.

Earlier, in the Spectator (here), Brookner had spoken of this rather delicious encounter (and in Bordighera too, a setting for Brookner's 1985 novel Family and Friends):

I met her once, in her flat in Bordighera, where I went to interview her; I found a tiny distracted woman with a plaintive voice, eager to talk about anything except her work. When guided towards literary matters she became icily and pungently intelligent. I carried away with me an impression of a central European Jean Rhys, a natural expatriate, but in this instance devoid of the self-pity which makes Jean Rhys so monotonous. Sly, well-born, homeless, but unflappable, it was easy to picture her taking up temporary residence in various old-fashioned watering places, sipping coffee, and training her gaze on the complacent residents. Bordighera, with its beneficent sunshine and well-ordered appointments, seemed as good a place as any, since she could be relied upon to discover, behind its temperate façades, evidence of malpractice, betrayal and opportunistic sex.

*

Like many travelogues The Surprise of Cremona is a little on the boring side - but pleasantly boring, stylishly boring. The tone is patrician but not grand. Edith Templeton is in several ways a Brooknerian traveller - an exile, alone, watchful, often to be found in art galleries - but also better connected, more social: always ready with her 'letters of introduction'. But we learn very little directly about Templeton herself. She stays on the surface, is restrained to the point of coldness. But her medium is clear: we can see, or may think we can see, through the ice to the likely emotions beneath.

She is good on café life and hotel life. She suffers setbacks but remains apparently blithe. She wears her learning lightly. She takes us not only to Cremona but through Parma, Mantua, Ravenna, Urbino and Arezzo, and in each place she knows exactly where to go. She is a sophisticate and a stylist and her descriptions are acute. A female hotelier has an 'air of devilment'; a professor gives 'a winsome leer with his dusky ruins of teeth'. But Templeton, though rakish and exceptional in the 1950s, has perhaps an uncertain literary status in the twenty-first century, as Brookner points out in her introduction. Templeton's over-confident self-consciousness, her self-sufficiency, may well render her extinct as a type.

The book finishes, and must finish, with the writer's arrival in Como, where she meets her Aunt Alice. The magic enchantment of lonesome travel is at an end.

This Disciple

As for the written word, this disciple of Marcel Proust and Henry James re-reads the classics, but scorns the 'negligible' fiction of today. Nabokov – dandy, émigré, melancholy wit – is the last great novelist for her.

2002 Independent interview

Taking it slowly, savouring its Jamesian rhythms, I've at last got to the end of my reread of A Family Romance. Dolly, its focus, appears at intervals throughout the novel, in different iterations or manifestations. Take this memorable vignette from chapter 7:

...her bitter European face, as revealed in sleep, in the half light of the car, the effervescent mask for once cast aside and the grim working woman revealed.

And in chapter 8 we see her later still, at sixty-eight, reduced, all but friendless, with navy-blue hair and no make-up and wearing flat shoes.

This late incarnation of Dolly is very striking and the scene well handled. One is reminded of Nabokov and the end of Lolita, when he presents Lolita as grown-up, pregnant, ruined, and this is the version the narrator at last falls in love with.

Or one hears echoes of Proust's Swann when Dolly, explaining the attractiveness of her worthless paramour, says, 'Harry was my type; do you understand?'

Near the end of A Family Romance is a line that some critics at the time found difficult to accept, but which seems to grow in integrity as the years go by. As I've said before, Brookner's are novels for the future.

But I realised then that love was unpredictable, that it could not be relied upon to find a worthy object, that it might attach itself to someone for whom one has felt distaste, even detestation, that it is possible to experience an ache in the heart because the face that responds to one's own circumspect smile is eager, trusting.

The Old Lady Card

'I'm rather tired, my dear,' said Toni, playing the old lady card. Suddenly she could not wait to get home.

A Family Romance, ch. 3

It is always amusing to catch Anita Brookner reusing material. Take this, from the 1994 Independent interview:

It pleases me to play the old lady card. It's quite useful at times. But if it were true, it wouldn't be a card, would it? I'd be a poor thing. I'd feel sorry for myself. Which I don't think I do.

The Romance of the Open Road

Living as we do through an era of technological change, we might look back not only at the time that came before but also at other moments of transformation.

In chapter 5 of David Copperfield, in midsummer weather and the evening very pleasant, David travels by mail coach from Yarmouth to London. The journey takes seventeen hours. With fascination and nostalgia Dickens conjures the lost or vanishing world of coaching - a world that by the time of the publication of David Copperfield (1849-50) the railways had all but swept away; a world, moreover, that linked him with the concerns of his first fictions - The Pickwick Papers, in particular - and earliest reading - Smollett, Fielding, both referenced several times and with great fondness in David Copperfield.

We all live in the digital age now, but I remember the time before. While I was at school I never once touched a computer, and I'm only in my middle forties.

Brookner's novels belong to the last years of the analogue era. In her final novels there are one or two tentative mentions of 'e-mail' (she hyphenates the word) and mobile phones. But little more.

Observer: Pencil or pen?
Brookner: Pen.
Obs: In manuscript?
B: I haven't got any of these machines.
Obs: And do you type them up later on?
B: Yes, I do that. 

2001 Observer interview