The Brooknerian

Val Hennessey's interview with Anita Brookner in  You Magazine,  9 August 1987, marks the publication of Brookner's seventh novel  A Friend from England . The piece, 'Babbling with Brookner', anticipates Julian Barnes's warning to a later interviewer: 'You will find yourself babbling'. Hennessey is a fan, Brookner her 'literary heroine'. She once bumped into Brookner outside Waitrose and said embarrassing fannish things. Brookner 'stood shifting uneasily from foot to foot, wide-eyed and fearful, like a trapped hare'. Later they met by chance on a number 14 bus. Both Brookner and Hennessey were shopping for outfits, Brookner for 'something tweedy and dull': she gets off and is seen heading into The Scotch House, a purveyor of quality Scottish clothing. Hennessey phones Brookner to arrange an interview. Brookner expresses alarm and consternation: she finds interviews 'an ordeal'. On arrival Hennessey compliments Brookner on her ...

1983's Look at Me finishes with a night walk through London. The walk, which extends over a whole chapter, as if in real time, is harrowing: it's one of the most abject episodes in Brookner. A nocturnal traipse of a different kind occurs towards the end of George Meredith's 1859 novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel . The hero, as emotionally turbulent as Brookner's protagonist, though for different reasons, moves through a forest in Germany, experiencing everything from dusk to dawn, with a tempest in between. The chapter is satirised in Forster's Howards End (1910). Leonard Bast, visiting the Schlegel sisters, expresses his admiration for Meredith's novel and describes his own emulation of Richard Feverel's night walk. The Schlegels are less enamoured. They know the novel, but find it laughable. They mock, for example, the glimmeringly drooping forest. Such different reactions to a nineteenth-century masterpiece place the characters socially. The sisters, ...

'[B]y the paradox implicit in achieved art', Brookner makes her protagonists' predicaments as satisfying as poetry: this was John Bayley's judgement on A Private View in the Spectator in 1994. Tessa Hadley, another Brookner enthusiast or apologist, makes a similar point in her excellent new introduction to Brookner's last novel, Strangers (see here ): Describing the novels in bald terms of plot can’t come near what it is in Brookner’s writing that’s so addictive, fascinating, pleasure-giving. It’s the old paradox: the more this novelist writes her characters into their bleak corner, the more her readers get their delight. The squeeze of their sadness is so exquisite, in her language. It's a powerful piece, serious in its psychological reading ('the fateful circling of desire: Paul's need to get away succeeded by his longing to return') and original in its depiction of the Brookner reading experience: Brookner’s subject matter is distinctive because...

When, a few years ago, an early-modern manuscript translation of Tacitus was discovered in Lambeth Palace, the writer's identity was at first a mystery (see here ). The piece was in the neat hand of a scribe, but scribbled marginal corrections gave clues as to the translator: Queen Elizabeth I herself, whose late penmanship was notoriously appalling. Chirographic disregard for the reader was a marker of status in the period, and Elizabeth's ministers would provide fair-copy transcriptions of her correspondence. Brookner's handwriting, though more even and consistent than Elizabeth's, or indeed late Henry James's, is also difficult to read. It's the kind of script you have to take a run at, letting the likely sense carry you forward. On AbeBooks at present, an autograph letter to a reader: These things show up from time to time. I own two myself (see here  and here ). Brookner corresponded willingly but guardedly with her fans. The present letter, to a Mrs Chappe...

Further to recent posts on Brookner photographs and harder-to-find images in particular, I offer this from The Times , June, 1994: John Voos's portrait accompanies a review of A Private View . The piece, by Philip Howard, is often quoted: 'Anita Brookner is our Henry James'. By way of a title, a line from Browning - 'When the long dark evenings come' - completes an excellent evaluation of one of Brookner's finest novels. The photo is an oddity in the oeuvre: Brookner in the act of speaking. Was it posed? Was it taken at an event? The blurred background suggests the familiar setting of Brookner's London flat. The hard undeceived wistfulness of her gaze, the precision of her discourse, the discontented romanticism of her outlook are all captured by a master photographer.

Is Brookner our contemporary? It might be a strange question to ask of a writer active so recently, whose last work of fiction was published in 2011. But even then there was less labelling, less ready codification of social and emotional malaise. In 2011 we heard talk of mental health less often, though not quite as infrequently as in 1981, when Brookner's first novel came out. Hermione Lee, Brookner's later biographer, offers an insightful, psychoanalytical review ( here ) of A Friend from England , one of Brookner's 1980s novels, inexplicably now out of print. Though the protagonist, Rachel, hasn't read Freud, 'Freud,' says Lee, 'would have wanted to read her': [S]he is an extreme case in the Brookner hospital, off in her own isolation ward. Time and again Brookner's characters worry the reader. Nominatively determined Herz, in The Next Big Thing , endures cardiac discomfort, but his visit to his GP baffles the harassed young doctor, with talk of F...

She rarely gives interviews... Such would be the excited refrain any time a journalist did breach the walls of the Courtauld Institute or the flat in Elm Park Gardens. Anita Brookner was interviewed in print only a handful of times, mostly in the 1980s, possibly once in the 90s, and twice in the 2000s. She featured in broadcast media hardly ever: on TV a few times around the time of the Booker win, and on radio equally infrequently. As the Countess Olenska says of the van der Luydens in The Age of Innocence , Brookner kept herself rare . Her few exchanges with journalists were stagey, dandyish affairs, expressed in language as mandarin and radical as anything to be found in her fiction. As in her novels, repetition and variation drove the performance. The Brookner academic Peta Mayer has written about repetition in Brookner's interviews. We might also recall Herz in The Next Big Thing / Making Things Better and his fantasies about being interviewed by an infinitely sympathetic, in...