The Brooknerian

For all its glory England is a land for rich and healthy people. Also they should not be too old.  Sigmund Freud, London, 1938 Epigraph to Strangers Some authors fill the opening pages of their novels with often incoherent quotations from other literary texts. Brookner rarely required such scaffolding, and when she did - in Family and Friends , A Closed Eye and Strangers - she selected from the best: Goethe, James, Freud. The Freud quote, probably from one of his letters, is a brilliant find, and, along with the playful  Author's Note  that follows, sets the tone for a novel that promises to be different from what has gone before, edgier and, if this were possible, even more unconsoling.

Larkinian: UK first edition, 2009 Jamesian: UK paperback reprint, 2016 It's my belief that Brookner hasn't been well served by her covers, or rather that very few of them have captured the true Brooknerian vibe. The original edition of Strangers seems a case in point - a lazy cover, depicting a vaguely Brookner-style building, but one that, to me at least, looks too suburban. I do not like the lighting either. Brooknerians don't burn the midnight oil. The image has, to my mind, something of a sense of Philip Larkin's high windows. Paul Sturgis, the main character of the novel, is possibly a little Larkinian, but only a little. Far, far superior is the cover of the recent paperback reprint. We move from London to Venice, a minor setting in the novel but perhaps its touchstone. Brookner, as has been noted, is nothing if not European. And the image itself is very fine. One is reminded of those frontispiece photographs Henry James commissioned for his New York...

Every reader who feels sympathy with the genre of the novel, and with its potential subtleties, will realise ... how wholly and satisfyingly different each of [Brookner's] turns out to be. George Eliot is a one-track performer beside her. But there is no point in such a comparison, for as a novelist Anita Brookner is both infinitely various and adorably unique. John Bayley, Spectator review, 1994 Bayley's characteristically gushing pronouncement comes to mind because I've been reading George Eliot recently. Eliot's output seems less prolific than Brookner's, but of course her novels are generally much longer. Eliot's variousness is not in doubt. Consider her different settings - from fifteenth-century Florence in Romola to the contemporary Jewish underworld in Daniel Deronda . But her characters and their concerns, their cruxes and their dilemmas, are perhaps fairly continuous. What then of Brookner? Bayley was writing in 1994, in the middle years of Brook...

One could go on raking this image for ever. Its faded colours, reminiscent of family photos from the era (1987). The bank of windows outside. The author / art historian, content and not too thin. The cards on the sill. The heavy typewriter. The bottles of Tippex. The piles of paper. The calendar on the otherwise municipally unadorned walls. The hard desk chair. The ashtray.

Brookner rated Latecomers highly. It, rather than Hotel du Lac ,  she said in interview , should have won the Booker. Latecomers is for sure a confident book, and it has an 'important' Booker-pleasing theme. But I find it, along with Lewis Percy , published a year later, a little  over -confident: Olympian, indulgent. There is less sense in these books of Brookner's affinity or kinship with the lives she so omnisciently appraises. There is some dilution too, some sense of a diffuse focus. There are too many characters, too much multi-plottedness. But Fibich's realisation towards the end of Latecomers , that he wishes he had stayed with his mother rather than getting on the Kindertransport , is finely handled and powerfully affecting: 'I should have gone back,' whispered Fibich. 'I should not have left. I should have got off the train.' (Ch. 14) But it is Fibich's return visit to Berlin in Chapter 13 that interests me currently. I've been t...

Now, with age, comes a new tranquillity ... a new bravery. Mme. David and her daughter are charmless women and no attempt is made to rearrange them, to work an act of artistic leger-de-main with their shawls and their sleeves and their head dresses, as would have been managed by Ingres ... to convey depths of hidden fascination. David's great gift to the portraiture of women is to show them not as they would wish to be shown as temple prostitutes, but rather as sturdy, confident creatures, no less competent but far less vain than men. Mme. David, still dressed in the satin shift, false curls and feathers she wore to court, reveals no hidden depths of erotic experience. She has no illusions about her appearance and neither has the spectator ... This revision of the concept of the female portrait, this fully frontal confidence and honesty, this refusal to embroider or even to arrange, must be counted as one of the aging David's most vital achievements. Brookner, Jacques-Louis...

Yes, I have this blog, and yes, I'm on Twitter, but in my everyday life I'm practically a secret fan. This is probably the only way to be. In numerous ways I honour the Brooknerian life, but my tributes are clandestine. I travel to Brooknerian places, and to hidden corners of those places. In Paris to St-Sulpice, in Switzerland to Vevey, in London to certain little gardens where characters, in defeat, have sat and read Henry James. I visit galleries and particular pictures. In London, M. Blauw  and the Titian Ariadne . In Vienna, Susanna and the Elders . In Ghent, a kleptomaniac. I sometimes wear Eau Sauvage, because George Bland wore it. I drink herbal teas and call them tisanes. Away from Brookner, I let Brookner guide my reading. I read the whole of Dickens, James and Trollope, because of Brookner. I often listen to the Shipping Forecast, though I haven't yet taken to playing the World Service through the night. As followers will recall, I once walked the length ...