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Swiss Notebook: Adventures at the Hôtel du Lac

An account of my 2017 sentimental journey to Vevey, Switzerland, scene of Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac ... 1. Zurich: previously only travelled through. I arrived early, and nothing was ready, and it was a Sunday and raining and the streets were empty. Thoughts of panic and flight beset me. But by noon I’d planned the coming days and booked my train ticket to Vevey and my room was cleaned. I was glad of the ideal company of Brookner ( A Family Romance ) and Dickens ( David Copperfield ), mightn’t have got through otherwise: I chose my summer reading well this year. ‘I led the same secretly unhappy life; but I led it in the same, lonely, self-reliant manner.’ 2. Still half-lost in the unfamiliar streets, I found my way to the edge of the Zürichsee and a two-hour cruise: it seemed the Brookner thing to do, and the weather was as it is for Mr Neville and Edith in fiction and on another lake: grey-blue distances, indistinct horizons. I lunched at Rapperswil and retur...
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Reassessment

This may, by now, come as a surprise, but Brookner was once disregarded, downgraded and even mocked by her peers. For illustration, consider the comments of Jeanette Winterson ( here ) and Anthony Burgess ( here ). Why the hostility? Coming to fiction after a successful career elsewhere, was Brookner seen as an interloper, a hobbyist, straying from her lane? Something has changed. Time has passed. A major biography is in the offing. Mentions of Brookner in the press nowadays are not only more frequent but more admiring. Writing last year in the Guardian ( here ), in their 'Books of my life' column, the writer Geoff Dyer - lauded by, among others, Zadie Smith - spoke of Brookner in respectful and, one feels, revisionary terms: ... the first 12 novels by Anita Brookner, a subtle and quietly pathological writer. When someone writes essentially the same book over and over you’re in receipt of an enacted philosophical consciousness. Having said that, Brookner’s persistent and gradua...
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Answer

In an earlier post I asked: In which novel by Anita Brookner is there a reference to the Victorian novelist George Meredith? Answer: Look at Me (1983): I had already got Olivia's Christmas present, a first edition of  The Ordeal of Richard Feveral  [ sic* ], her favourite novel, and I also saw the smile that would break up her little face when I gave it to her. (Ch. 5) The antagonist Alix pooh-poohs this ('Well, I think we can do better than that'). A preference for worthy Victorian fiction represents for Alix all that is wrong in Olivia. Brookner presents Olivia as Alix's passive foil; the reader is invited to take Olivia's part. Olivia, disabled, from a socialist family, is the embodiment of virtue, not least in her liking for George Meredith. Brookner's favouring of Olivia verges on the sentimental, even on the infantilising: 'her little face'. I said the question called for deep-cut knowledge - and I mean not just of Brookner but of literature. Mere...
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Walking along King's Road

In yesterday's  Telegraph features magazine, Mick Brown was one of the contributors to a piece called 'The celebrities who are actually nice ... and those who aren't' (available here ). Mick Brown interviewed Anita Brookner in 2009 in what was to be her last interview. It is an often-cited exchange and very fine (available behind the Telegraph 's paywall). In Brown's recollection, Brookner was 'one of the most fascinating people I've ever met': '80, pin-neat figure, fragile and watchful'. Her flat, he recalls, was as if preserved in aspic at some point in the 1960s. A few weeks later he glimpsed her from a bus: 'walking along King's Road, head down into the wind'. He wanted to get off and give her a hug. As if inevitably, and probably blessedly, when the bus did stop, Brookner had vanished.
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Question

Quiz question requiring deep-cut Brooknerian knowledge: In which novel by Anita Brookner is there a reference to the Victorian novelist George Meredith? (Answer in a few days)
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The Horror of that Situation

Previously hidden away in a book of 1985, Novelists in Interview , John Haffenden's interview with Anita Brookner is, I find, now available online ( here ). It is a an extraordinary exchange, brilliantly orchestrated by Haffenden, better known as the editor of T. S. Eliot's letters. Interviewer and subject fence smartly and with dazzle. Brookner's responses, aperçus astonishing in their spontaneity, are both honestly raw and elaborately postured. It is the essential interview and the inauguration of a myth.
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Further Soundings

Brookner was a reviewer and an essayist long before she picked up her pen to write fiction. As an established academic, she was a go-to for editors in search of a piece on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, French painting in particular. From the 1980s onwards, by then a novelist, Brookner's focus was more on fiction and literary biography. She appeared in the Observer , the Telegraph , the LRB , the TLS , prolifically in the Spectator . In the latter, for example, she wrote a yearly column called 'Prize-winning Novels from France'. She was often to be found contributing to 'Books of the Year' and 'Summer Books'. Her tastes were both predictable and surprising. She revered James, Wharton, Proust, Stendhal. She also valued the middlebrow women's authors of her youth, Margaret Kennedy, Barbara Pym. She was a significant fan of Updike and Roth. There are many essays I've never read or found. No one, as far as I know, has made a list of her outp...
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Brookner on the Telly

In a much earlier post I lamented the unavailability of Anita Brookner's contribution to the 100 Great Paintings series (BBC, 1981). During the time I was away from the blog, the BBC reshowed the episode, and it has now found its way to YouTube:
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