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.'

In love

She lived a life, then wrote about it: that was the myth. The writing part of her life, that second life, second career, was somehow posthumous. But it possibly wasn’t like that. And how could it have been? A. N. Wilson, after her death (and this could have been said only then), wrote of having met her at a party in the late 1980s or 90s. The party was given by a London publisher with whom Anita was (wrote Wilson) hopelessly in love. She was in her sixties, he in his forties. She seemed to disappear from the party. Later he found her, in the man’s bedroom, sitting on his bed, on which were piled all the guests’ coats. She was staring sadly ahead and had been sitting there for more than an hour. It was, said Wilson (unnecessarily), the closest she would get to this man’s bed.

One prefers the myth. The great writer, high and dry, with her messy life behind her. But search in the archives, deep in the protean early years of her novel-writing, and you come upon white-hot glimpses. From 1983, for example: we learn Brookner allowed her life to be determined by someone else’s needs: a man, who became ill and died. There was also, the interviewer tells us, another love affair in Brookner’s past, on which, like Frances in Look at Me, she was not to be drawn. Simply, said Brookner, she was not good at reading signs. She thought that as an art historian she had learnt the skill, but in life you either develop it young or not at all.

Family and Friends: Private Meanings

I don't altogether shy from making links between an author's life and her fiction, though perhaps I ought to. Brookner's media critics, especially the hostile ones, never down the years showed any reluctance. But Family and Friends must have seemed resistant to such analysis. The four novels she'd written up till then had been of the classic Brookner 'lonely heroine' type. But here we have a family portrait, even a family saga. And yet I keep finding parallels and analogues. Brookner, like Dickens, seems not to have been able to avoid investing her work with private meanings.

Take Mimi and her hospital work in chapter 8. We know from an early interview (here) that Brookner did voluntary work at a local hospital, even on Christmas Day. Or Alfred and his purchase of Wren House in the same chapter. Perhaps readers wouldn't, on publication of Family and Friends, yet have recognised the significance. But gradually over the course of Brookner's writing career we would come to appreciate the dangers and horrors to be expected in the English countryside, provinces and even suburbs.

We have a vignette of Brookner herself outside her habitual London milieu, when she visited Rosamond Lehmann in Suffolk (here). Carmen Callil recalls 'Anita sternly going for walks and drinking tea'. The 'sternly' is telling.

Brookner Interview Discoveries #3: Novelist with a Double Life

The last of my discoveries, 'Novelist with a Double Life', admittedly more of a 'profile' than a fresh interview, is from the Observer on 7 August 1988, marking the publication of Latecomers.

Latecomers, we learn, has no author biography on its dustjacket, no rundown of the recently retired Brookner's academic achievements. 'That's over,' she says. 'It is no longer relevant. I've consigned it to the past.'

But that past is celebrated, in particular her kindness as a teacher. 'To be taught by Anita was to be loved by Anita - you had to accept both,' says an unnamed ex-student.

Balancing the academic and novel-writing sides of her life became like 'schizophrenia'. A friend recalls: 'In the same week that she published her scholarly monograph on David, on which she'd been working for years, she got far more publicity about a review she'd written in the TLS about a cookery book ..., saying "Yuk!"'

A colleague remembers her elation at winning the Booker Prize, speaking of the 'kilowatts coming off her': 'She positively glowed.'

Brookner 'considers herself a person of extravagance and excess', and is unfailingly generous: 'If you go out for a coffee, you find it quite hard to pay for the KitKats* when it's your turn,' says a friend.

Though not religious she 'likes and shares the "geniality" of her race. "I don't think anyone could call me cheerful. But I'm quite content."' On Christmas Day she helps serve lunch to patients in a nearby hospital.

She continues her search for the 'ideal, perfect, appropriate home': 'But I think the great step forward is the knowledge that I will never find it. But I will always seek it.'

*

*Oddly enough, this is not the only mention in the Brookner literature of this popular biscuit. See also here.

Brookner Interview Discoveries #2: Great Expectations

The second of my interview discoveries, 'Great Expectations', is from the Observer on 27 March 1983, marking the publication of Brookner's Look at Me. The interview was conducted by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, who would continue an interest in Brookner's works. Here she is on Brookner's 1998 novel Falling Slowly:

She is one of a handful of living writers who can turn a sentence so graceful that to read it is a lascivious pleasure, and she can string those sentences together to make paragraphs - whole chapters even - that unfurl surely and musically until they climax, or fall away into silence with a superbly exact authority to which it is delicious to submit. There is a constant delightful tension between the austerity of her message and the voluptuousness of her medium.

Brookner interviews have ritualistic tendencies, and Hughes-Hallett's certainly covers the usual ground: 'I regard myself as being completely invisible'; how the young Anita learnt false lessons from the classic books she read in her solitary childhood:

I grew up thinking that patience would be rewarded and virtue would triumph. It has been demonstrated to me that this is not true. It was a terrible realisation.

and her reasons for starting a second career as a novelist:

I thought if I could write about it I might be able to impose some structure on my experience. It gave me a feeling of being in control.

But of greatest interest are some unfamiliar biographical details. For many years, we learn, Brookner allowed her life to be determined by someone else's needs. 'A man. He became very ill. He has since died.' There was also, Hughes-Hallett tells us, another lost love in Brookner's past, 'on which she is not to be drawn, but she divulges clues':

Perhaps I was naive in expecting that these matters would be less complicated than they prove to be. As an art historian I am accustomed to reading signs, but sometimes I forgot to do so in real life. [...] People who are going to be good at reading the signs can do it at the age of 18 months. The others never learn.

We see her in her 'attic' at the Courtauld, on which the world 'doesn't impinge'. And we see her still hopeful:

I have great expectations. One waits to be sprung.

Brookner Interview Discoveries #1: Finding the Art of Fiction

Regular visitors to this blog will know of my devotion to Anita Brookner's interviews. Five are available on the web - the Paris Review interview, the 1990s Independent interview, and three from the 2000s (the Observer, the Independent again, and the last interview in 2009 in the Telegraph). In printed form there are the Olga Kenyon and the John Haffenden interviews, both from the 1980s. The Haffenden exchange remains to my mind the best Anita Brookner interview.

You will conceive of my delight at discovering several fresh interviews on the Guardian/Observer archive website. I propose to cover these over the coming days.

We start with a piece in the Guardian on 27 May 1981, 'Finding the art of fiction', published to coincide with the publication of Brookner's first novel A Start in Life.

As well as giving in remarkably finished form her later familiar responses to questions about her motivations for writing ('Socially she has always had the sensation of being invisible') and her love of Dickens and 'her idol' Stendhal, Brookner also speaks at some length about the art criticism for which she was then best known: David, Delacroix, Ingres, Greuze. For her study of the latter, she 'had to visit almost every French provincial city, usually in the dead of winter. I was young, I thought the discomfort exhilarating'. Her parents, we learn, were against the expedition. The interviewer writes:

They were sure she would be recruited into prostitution. Had she told them very few academics are? 'No such luck,' she replies.

Brookner speaks further of her mother, once a concert singer; she gave it up to marry. When she sang at home friends would exclaim at the choice she had made, and Brookner's father's face would blacken. In her singing her passion showed. The young Anita would start to cry. 'She, and not I, should have been the liberated woman.'

Brookner says she would like to write a biography of Ingres, a passionate happy man. Her students, she says, start by liking Delacroix and come round to Ingres. A biography of Ingres would 'take her to Montauban where she might start French life all over again, and this time, stay there'.

Her lives of Watteau, David and Greuze offer cheer: 'if they got their lives wrong they got their pictures right'.