Crisis Management

I'm surely not alone in suffering the odd reading quandary. I flit from book to book, feel restless, unrooted. My time is limited, my tastes restricted. I prefer longer novels and rarely enjoy short works. I favour the nineteenth century. How I ever found Anita Brookner is anyone's guess. But I do like style.

Down long years I read all of Trollope, James, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and the like. Some time back I started on Scott - long avoided - and adored him. Rereading is always an option, but one likes new things. They brighten and lighten.

I settled on Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South a few weeks ago. I'm back teaching (if to a rather ridiculously small group ('bubble', if you will)), so time is at a premium. North and South is an elegantly written novel, full of social, political and human interest, and it takes us into regions and corners of Victorian England other novelists ignored or, as in the case of Hard Times, obfuscated with satire and moments of cosiness. But it is just a little second-rate. It's worthy, it works like clockwork, but it's also plodding and predictable and lacking in the humour of Cranford, the only other Gaskell I've read.

Oh, but what next? I'm hooked on a miniseries about the women's movement, Mrs America, currently showing in the UK, and it may send me back to The Bostonians for the remainder of the summer. I have also in mind Scott's The Pirate, Thackeray's Pendennis, Woolf's The Years and Smollett's Humphrey Clinker. But all the while one longs for the wonderful discovery, something new and fresh, something that fills one's dreams.

Addictive Reading

Too often disappointing, sometimes one's reading truly works, in the way it worked in childhood. How often as an adult does one experience that? When I first read Hotel du Lac, at seventeen, one summer. When I read The Small House at Allington, another summer, in Rome. When I read Anthony Powell, tears smarting in my eyes in an Amsterdam hotel breakfast-room as I learned, via a throwaway remark, of poor Stringham's death.

Rereading almost never matches up. Or else one identifies with new things. In Great Expectations I am cold now to the story of Pip's love for Estella. But I break down when Pip tells Magwitch, at the last, that his lost child lives and is now a lady. Or when old Pip returns to the forge to find Jo and Biddy and their own little son - and Pip sees himself: 'sitting on my own little stool looking at the fire, was - I again!'

Guilty reading can be compulsive too. I'm halfway through May at 10, Anthony Seldon's almost day-by-day account of the Theresa May premiership. It's a horror story. I wince on every page. Why would anyone with so few of the required skills put herself through the hell of being Prime Minister? It's the human details that shine through: a shattered Mrs May falling asleep during a meeting; May's too rare moments of largesse - wine and crisps from Waitrose; her unlucky encounter with a rowdy stag-party of Englishmen at a tourist spot in Estonia. Her security team feared the worst, but the revellers were delighted to meet her, and all wanted selfies.

On e-reading

I listened to a rather hopeful piece on Radio 4 recently (I spend far too much time listening to Radio 4) about how consumers may be falling out of love with online retailers and returning to actual shops, and how Internet giants are beginning to set up bricks-and-mortar outlets in order to give shoppers the more tangible, human experience they apparently crave.

It set me thinking about e-books and e-reading. I was, as in most things, a late adopter. I bought a device in about 2014 because I wanted to read Clarissa. I'm like that. And I managed it. I simply never could have read the only print edition of Richardson's eighteenth-century masterwork available, the biggest Penguin ever. From then on, I was a convert. I read James on my Kindle, I read Dickens, I read Anita Brookner. And I found myself reading more smoothly and quickly - not least because I was able to adjust for my own comfort the size and spacing of the text. I suspect in myself a mild undiagnosed dyslexia.

But I also read more shallowly. I found I couldn't remember what I had read. I glided; I no longer plunged.

There are practical considerations. I like the search facility on e-readers; I like being able to highlight passages. But I don't like not always having a feel for the shape of a book. In a print edition, if I'm not quite enjoying it but reading it because it's worth reading and 'good for me' (this goes for almost all of my reading, truth to tell), I'm always doing things like flicking forward and finding out how much of a chapter remains or rereading an earlier passage to remind myself who a certain character is. You can't do any of that so easily with an e-reader.

A short while ago someone gave me several lovely 1990s World's Classics editions of Scott. (I'm a growing fan of Scott and a big fan of those particular liveries.) The print is small and the pages are yellowing, and I had Scott on my Kindle so I turned to that. But I could make little headway. Real books had reclaimed me at last. What's more, I found myself a different, better reader - a retrained reader almost.

I shall still keep my Kindle for vacations, for lounging in foreign climes, sipping a gin and tonic and darting promiscuously between a piece of James travel writing, a Shakespeare play, and an essay by Sebald. But at home, when the long dark autumn and winter evenings come, one looks for consolations more homely, more timeworn.

A Brookner Break

You may have noticed I'm taking a break from Anita Brookner at the moment. Everything palls after a time, and of course there's nothing new. I remember the years when I read her year by year, the excitement of receiving those Jonathan Cape, later Viking, hardbacks. A Proustian vouchsafement is still mine whenever I hold, say, A Closed Eye, with its view of Lausanne, or A Private View, with its blue Ian McEwanish female silhouette. I get the very touch and taste of youth again.

Where now? I'm reading Spenser's The Faerie Queene right now. ('The day is spent, and commeth drowsie night...') But I'm tempted perhaps to sink into middle Brookner sometime soon - A Private View, Incidents in the Rue Laugier... What extraordinary novels they were and are. Almost unremarked at the time, except for the regulation polite or disparaging notices in the quality dailies. But no one seemed to recognise how truly odd they were, how strange and revolutionary the Brookner project was. She wrote as it were clandestinely, knowing she would be overlooked, or not closely read, knowing she could say whatever she wanted, and safe in the knowledge that by then she was hidden in plain sight.

Who Reads Her?

I've long been a studier of reading habits. In my youth I worked in a public library, which had a functional if primitive computer system. This enabled me, illicitly, to track the borrowings of my peers. (In those days borrowing books from a public library was quite a regular activity.) Or I would stand at the issue desk - wanding barcodes, but scrutinising titles. I worked in that library system for six or seven years - and do you know, I don't think I ever issued or discharged an Anita Brookner. Or do I misremember?

Yet Brookner date labels were full of stamped dates, so people must have been reading her. It's just I never encountered them. And in the years since, I don't think I've ever seen anyone reading a Brookner. On the train. On the bus. On the beach. Of course the prevalence of Kindles and tablets makes spying on others' reading harder now. But still.

I know people do read her. I know you do. I know it from Twitter. But I've never met another reader. Or rather I have. I've met folk who say they once read Hotel du Lac and didn't progress further. But have I ever met another fan?

All this no doubt says much about me. But I think it also says something about reading Anita Brookner, and about readers of Anita Brookner. We read, as it were, in secret. We prefer the private view. Almost as if there were something disreputable on offer. I venture to suggest there's certainly something very subversive and shocking and not quite suitable for polite society.

Fraud: No Voice

She was aware that she was uncomfortable to be with, had little to offer but her maidenly accomplishments and her letter-writing and her too careful clothes. [...] Within that carapace she was an adult woman, but one who had no voice because of her lifelong concealment, which now no one would question.

Fraud, ch. 6

Let me compare Fraud's Anna Durrant with Look at Me's Frances Hinton of nine years before. Frances too, in a famous passage, has 'no voice at the world's tribunals' (Look at Me, ch. 6), but arguably her 'accomplishments' are more substantial than Anna's: she works, she enjoys success in her writing. Whereas Anna's life is much more isolated and reduced.

This is a pattern in Brookner. Character types recur, but supports are stripped away. When reading Fraud for the first time the reader may wonder whether Anna will survive. She has disappeared. Her disappearance has come to the attention of the police. She may be dead, by whatever means. (She has, for example, her sleeping pills, though later in the novel she explicitly rejects suicide.) The blurb on my paperback copy of the novel shuts down any such possibility, but I remember the summary on the original hardback being more reticent. Fraud felt then, as first-time Brookners often feel, genuinely dangerous, a sense that to a large extent piquantly lingers during a reread.

Comfort Reading

Art doesn't love you and cannot console you, said Anita Brookner. It's a discomforting assertion. When I examine my own intake or uptake of art - by which I mean my reading, for primarily I'm literary, verbal - I realise consolation is one of the chief things I look for. My sudden blogging, my sudden and tardy engagement with the Internet, after years of silence, has somewhat changed my reading habits. I now read more, and with more purpose. I look at what others are reading and am influenced. Or else I'm reduced, made to feel subtly inferior. These other folk - how quickly and how widely they read!

Much of my reading is now rereading. I read new things infrequently. I try new authors hardly at all. I favour books about certain types or classes of character and set in certain locations. I'm really very choosy, very small-minded. I've come to the end of Trollope, an almost exclusive preference of mine through my twenties and thirties. I never thought I'd exhaust him. I've read all of Dickens and James too, other favourites, and often feel at something of a loss.

Rereading is inherently a limited activity, though of course it also has things to offer. I know what to expect and I know I'll also probably gain something new. But I have a fear. One day I'll pick up an old favourite and it'll mean nothing. It will have lost its savour. Such fears should not be underrated: reading, for some people, isn't just a pastime. It's deeply bound up with, indeed part of, their inner lives. And as we know from Brookner, one must cherish and protect one's inner life almost at any cost.

***

I'm currently reading Lotte in Weimar by Thomas Mann. It's actually new to me, though followers of this blog will know I've read Mann before (like several Brooknerians - Elizabeth Warner in 'At the Hairdresser's', who puts aside Doctor Faustus, or Julius Herz in The Next Big Thing, who finds a significant old letter in a copy of Buddenbrooks). I've also been to Lübeck several times. (The Thomas Mann house is, like the Goethehaus in Frankfurt, an artful post-war reconstruction.)

If Lotte in Weimar is comfort reading for me, I suspect it was comfort writing for its author. Published in 1939 while Mann was in exile from his homeland (Buddenbrooks having been publicly burnt) the novel is set in the early nineteenth century and tells of real-life Werther* heroine Lotte's arrival in Weimar forty-four years after her youthful association with Goethe. I am sorry the novel isn't better known in English.

Here is George Steiner on Mann:

Thomas Mann is a towering presence in modern literature. The analogy with Goethe, which he himself invoked, is often justified. The leviathan series of novels that chronicled the decay of the old European order, and its descent into the night of the inhuman, stands unrivalled. Our current politics, our aesthetics, our images of personal hurt carry the impress of Death in Venice, of The Magic Mountain, of Doctor Faustus. The epithet 'Olympian' has been attached to Thomas Mann. In an important sense, it is erroneous. There is nothing remote about these classics. They ache at us.

*Brookner's Family and Friends begins with an epigraph from Goethe's most famous novel. And the cold calculations of Elective Affinities are discussed in Altered States.

The Experience

I've been what you might call an Anita Brookner fan for more than twenty-five years, but looking back through my reading records I find I haven't read her all the time. Whole years went by. During the period in which she published annually, each year's novel might be my only Brookner. But I kept the faith in other ways, stayed true to authors she revered. At one time I loved Trollope. For years I anaesthetised myself with those long Victorian novels. When I came to the end of a novel I would feel angst-ridden and unmoored unless I had another to hand. Anthony Trollope himself was known to start writing his next book almost the very day after he had finished the last. There was obsession, there was neurosis, in such an arrangement, surely, and there was in mine too. But the novels of Anthony Trollope, I recall, gave me lots of pleasure. He got me beyond youth. Patiently and diligently I followed the careers of his churchmen and politicians. I grew discreet and inward, like Plantagenet Palliser. I also loved the byways of Trollope’s novels, chapters and groups of chapters in which the plot meandered far and wide, into unexpected places. This sets me wondering about the experience of reading certain authors. Reading the novels of Anita Brookner is a particular experience. One feels immersed, one feels overcome, one feels seduced. The rhythms of the sentences, the paragraphs, the chapters gradually exert a hold. It is almost physical. One's pulse, one's breathing slows. One has entered an altered state, and is at Brookner's mercy.