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Five Brilliant Brookner Beginnings

From the terse to the lyrical, Anita Brookner’s opening lines are often memorable. A Start in Life (1981) Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. With concision and aplomb Brookner sets out her stall. This is how to get yourself noticed. Brief Lives (1990) Julia died. I read it in The Times this morning. My French friend, Marie , never a Brookner fan, disliked Brief Lives , especially the opening; she objected to its bleakness and negativity. ‘Yes – and?’ I probably replied. It’s certainly a startling start to a novel, and if this almost gnomic line hasn’t found its way on to a T-shirt somewhere, then someone is missing a trick. Incidents in the Rue Laugier (1995) My mother read a lot, sighed a lot, and went to bed early. A beautiful, rhythmic sentence, with Proustian resonances – and that second comma is surely the mark of a stylist (Brookner, in one of her book reviews, praises an author’s use of such a comma). O...
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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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Her Motto

The critic Andrew Graham-Dixon (see here ) remembers: When I first studied the history of art, at the Courtauld Institute in London, one of my tutors was the formidable Anita Brookner. Her special subject was French painting of the Romantic period, but it was her approach to art in general that I found enlightening, and eye-opening. I remember one of her instructions in particular: 'Always remember, when you're looking at a painting, that every last detail is important: nothing is there by accident.' She said this so often, that I came to think of it as her motto. I recently saw Graham-Dixon lecture on his latest subject, a fresh interpretation of Vermeer. Andrew Graham-Dixon at the event I attended Afterword : Her finest art-critical motto was surely 'Art doesn't love you and cannot console you' (see earlier post here ). I have often considered it as an alternative motto for this blog.
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