The Brooknerian

I supposed it might be impossible to track Brookner's journalistic output in its entirety. That was until I read Hermione Lee. Though she offers no bibliography - it would probably stretch to too many pages - she appears to have found and read everything. The hugeness of the endeavour is not to be underestimated. I learn that Brookner, in a small piece for the Sunday Times , listed the novels of Sir Walter Scott as a 'blind spot'. She disliked Samuel Richardson too, which I did know. She preferred, of course, his French contemporaries. Both Richardson and Scott are favourites of mine, as long-term readers of this blog will know. When I say Richardson, I mean only Clarissa , the first, finest and most extreme psychological novel in the language. As for Scott, I consider all the novels of the 1810s masterpieces, and there are quite a few greats in the subsequent decade, including Ivanhoe , Redgauntlet , Kenilworth and Quentin Durward . I favour The Fortunes of Nigel too, not ...

Of the many Brookner obituaries ten years ago, one of the least acceptable was A. N. Wilson's in the Daily Mail (see here ).* Wilson recounted having met Brookner at a party given by a publisher. He found her in the man's bedroom, among the guests' coats. She was, he surmised, hopelessly in love. A friend of Brookner's, a publisher, features in Hermione Lee's biography. The man still being alive, Lee's tone is careful. He himself describes a long, close friendship. 'But, from her point of view, it may well have been a different story,' Lee subjoins. And in the index? No mention of A. N. Wilson. Enough said, as they say. *** *The online copy ( here ) of the article is incomplete, stopping mid-sentence before the paragraph about the publisher. I don't know the reason for this.

Brookner never wore her politics on her sleeve, or so it appeared. The biography offers greater certainty. We learn that Brookner was a card-carrying member of the SDP in the 1980s, that she considered training to fight for Israel in the 1960s, and that towards the end of her life, during the period of the Conservative / Lib-Dem coalition, she advised her carer to vote Labour and never Tory. The question of the political allegiances of some authors has been explored before in this blog. I was surprised to read that Brookner had made such clear assertions, but of course in a biography we're thinking as much about the person as the artist. In her art, I'd maintain that Brookner's is a conservative imagination: her novels move inevitably towards the restoration of the status quo ante . All, at the close, may be changed; but, in the words of another writer, everything must change if everything is to stay the same.

Brookner's ashes were, we learn, looked after for a decade by her second cousin Ian Shine. Shine, who lives in the USA, eventually entrusted them to Hermione Lee. Lee told the Cheltenham Literature Festival she scattered them under a willow tree in Paris, and 'said goodbye to Anita Brookner'. (See here .)

For all her meticulousness, Hermione Lee's biography, probably deliberately, leaves an avenue unexplored. She refers to and quotes from, but does not describe further or materially analyse, a number of previously unknown works by Anita Brookner. There are the appointment diaries: none from the 1950s and 60s, but some from the 1970s onwards: In the 1970s diaries there are a few French addresses, not all decipherable. Brookner's difficult handwriting is a maddening part of the challenge. Where did these diaries come from? How did they survive Brookner's determined 'cull' of her archive? And what do they look like? Where are they now? None of these matters is of interest to Lee, but may be to others in the future. In particular, Lee quotes an entry that appears to be a draft of a key line in Providence . One would like to see this page. One thinks of the images to be found in the writings of W. G. Sebald, one of Brookner's discoveries: cryptic notebook jottings, lu...

‘Brookner’ was a thing to live up to, even for Anita Brookner, a formal elegance, a field of intelligence, which conditioned both her life and her art. An long, extraordinary review from Andrew O'Hagan in the LRB - see here . O'Hagan is the author of the very fine Caledonian Road , and on the BBC Radio 4 show Take Four Books he cited The Princess Casamassima as an influence. Brookner would have approved.