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Life of Brookner

There are secrets for privacy and silence; let them only be cultivated on the part of the hunted creature with even half the method with which the love of sport - or call it the historic sense - is cultivated on the part of the investigator… Then at last the game will be fair and the two forces face to face; it will be 'pull devil, pull tailor,' and the hardest pull will doubtless constitute the happiest result. Then the cunning of the inquirer, envenomed with resistance, will exceed in subtlety and ferocity anything we to-day conceive, and the pale forewarned victim, with every track covered, every paper burnt and every letter unanswered, will, in the tower of art, the invulnerable granite, stand, without a sally, the siege of all the years. 'She and He: recent documents': essay by Henry James on George Sand, 1897 Samuel Johnson was 53 years old when he met his future biographer James Boswell. For the next twenty or so years, Boswell developed a close friendship with h...
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Discreet

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.
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Political

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.
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Final

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 .)
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Bibliographic

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...
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A Thing to Live up to

‘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.
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'Proustian in scope'

...now her account is closed the novels may be seen for what they are: a literary chronicle of life's journey from middle to old age... If this sounds unexpectedly Proustian in scope, it shows how ill-served she was by her detractors and the orthodoxies of the sales cycle. Andy Miller's review of the Brookner biography in this week's Spectator is the one I've been waiting for. It's no exaggeration to credit dedicated readers such as Andy Miller with the reassessment of Brookner's literary reputation in the decade since her death. I'd suggest it's the tireless curatorial and promotional work of Miller and other influential fans that permitted a biographer of Hermione Lee's stature to consider adding Anita Brookner to her list of illustrious subjects. Authors usually take a posthumous dip in popularity and visibility; some never recover. It took Henry James more than half a century to find his readership. That Brookner is now being taken so seriously,...
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