The Brooknerian

Observer : Where do you think your ideas come from? Anita Brookner: I wish I knew. I'd tap into them straight away. I think it's mostly dreams and memories, isn't it, as with all novelists? […] Obs : Where will the next idea come from? AB: I don't know, that's the point. I have no control. I'm a great believer in unconscious processes. They usually work. Observer interview, 2001 ( Link ) Dreams are potent if mysterious motors in the novels, especially the later fiction. The Next Big Thing , Leaving Home and 'At the Hairdresser's' all begin with dreams. Information is received, considered, and not always found to be of use. Visitors ends with a dream, but it is a vouchsafement earlier in the novel - of a field of folk - that stays in the memory, lambent, puzzling. Brookner invokes not so much Piers Plowman as a Forties and Fifties heaven, a lost England, old decent values, kindness... Martin Amis, though not a Brooknerian, s...

Brookner, rather like James (as in so many other ways) is an unmusical writer, by which I mean music is referred to infrequently in the novels. Brookner characters (distinct, I might aver, from Brooknerians) prefer Radio 4, Britain's main speech network. 'Falling slowly' is a quote from Radio 4's daily Shipping Forecast. In A Misalliance , Blanche's dull ascetic suitor is represented by his predilection for the Brandenburg Concertos. Lewis Percy has more Romantic tastes: he listens to Mahler 6 at one point, and sobs at Manon . Mrs May, in Visitors , longs for the noble sound of Schumann or Brahms, and I think it is Zoe in The Bay of Angels who also listens to Schumann. And in one of the early 90s novels, Brief Lives or A Closed Eye , characters attend a performance of Swan Lake . Brookner's musical choices, then, are somewhat conventional, and her comments a little bland, in contrast to the sophistication of her references to the visual arts. (A postsc...

My grandfather on my mother's side saw England as the most liberal country in the world: he adored it and adopted every English mode that he could find. But European habits of thought - melancholy, introspection - persisted, and it's a bad mix: it was thicker than the English air.  Brookner, interviewed by John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview , 1985 I return, you see, to the Haffenden exchange, the Ur-text for Brookner's several interviews. Periodically I long for Europe, and for middle-Europe in particular. Not that my experiences of the continent aren't perhaps irredeemably  touristique .  But ah, Mitteleuropa ! The place names, the names of streets, the hotels, the modern art galleries! The cosy restaurants and cafés, the railway stations with their boards showing destinations impossibly eastern! The sedate matrons shopping in the morning, the buzz of guttural conversation, the precisely reconstructed town squares! The icy rivers, the large skies, the ...

In dealing with an author as private and even as secretive as Anita Brookner, one has to make much out of not a lot of material. For years I would listen to things like Desert Island Discs , but never once did Sue Lawley say, ‘My castaway this week is a novelist and art historian…’ But sometimes one made wonderful discoveries. In the days before the Internet I would pay visits to London libraries to examine files of back-issues of the Times Literary Supplement and the Spectator . I remember a marvellous afternoon one autumn in Senate House. I was leafing through old copies of the Spectator when I discovered a strange essay: ‘A Stooge of the Spycatcher: Anita Brookner explains how she was used by Blunt and Wright’. ( Link ) I had of course heard about Spycatcher , which the Thatcher government had sought to ban. I knew also about Anthony Blunt, and his unmasking. So I read with interest. Phoebe Pool, possibly a model for Delia Halloran in Look at Me , was dying. It was the 196...

Brookner was a migraine sufferer, as she revealed in 1993 in a review of Oliver Sacks's treatise on the condition. 'The neural tumult,' we read, 'may produce a feeling of such dread and helplessness as to encompass certain elements of the human condition.' Brookner continues with 'a report from the front': I learn from this book (and I allow that this may occur from actually reading the book) that my headaches are in fact migrainous and not untypical, and that the sensation of waking from a dream with the onset of a migraine is fairly standard. In fact it is probable that the precipitating dream, which is accompanied by a feeling of panic or horror, may be implicated in the migraine itself. Waking, which is always abrupt, is not caused by anything as specific as the alarm going off or the radio coming on. A rapidly beating heart may continue for an hour, to be succeeded by a pain over the left eye. More interesting than the pain, which is unpleasant bu...

The rue Laugier, Paris, sometime in the late 1990s

Anita Brookner was in no way the favourite to win the Booker-McConnell Prize in October, 1984. It was a strong year, with many more 'Booker-friendly' novels in the running. There was some carping afterwards. Anthony Burgess, speaking on a literary talk show, made a comment about 'menstrual cramps in Swiss hotels'. Brookner's shock is evident in the first photo, as the prize is announced. She was later interviewed on television, by Melvyn Bragg or Selina Scott (I once had a video of the clip, but cannot locate it now). She said winning had left her 'absolutely poleaxed'.

Brookner has been interestingly served  by her covers. Early editions showed either paintings mentioned in the text or images of pensive single women. Commissioned artwork was also seen, especially for Hotel du Lac , and the image of a table on a balcony became representative of the novel in later editions. In the 1990s Penguin took over the publication of Brookner's paperbacks and later, through the Viking imprint, the hardbacks too. Initially Penguin favoured paintings, but towards the 2000s they settled on photographic covers. The posthumous republication by Penguin of almost all of Anita Brookner's novels was a minor event, though the covers aren't always successful. Many of the images seem to be set in the 1950s and 60s, but A Private View (for example) is set, as we learnt in a previous post, firmly in the Nineties. A Private View - Cape hardback edition A Private View - first Penguin paperback A Private View - second Penguin paperback A Priv...

References in A Private View (1994), that most painterly of Brookners, range from Tintoretto to Odilon Redon and Walter Sickert. (Brookner has George Bland visit the Sickert exhibition at the Royal Academy, thus placing the action of the novel in the winter of 1992-3.) But most memorable for me is Bland's vision of himself at some debilitated future moment, glad to be able to recall a detail from a landscape by Rubens. One wonders: Which might it be? One knows the Rainbow Landscape in the Wallace Collection or the View of Het Steen in the National Gallery - or perhaps it is the Kermis in the Louvre? I cherish them all - and all because of George Bland, all because of Brookner.

There are problems in Brookner's work: her attitude towards narrative point of view, for example. Let's consider, for instance, focalisation, the angle of vision through which a story is focused. It – along with its derivative, focaliser – is a modern term; Henry James spoke of reflectors. Brookner tends to switch among three methods: the first-person narrator; the third person narrator with a single focaliser (i.e. when everything in the novel is filtered through that character's consciousness, with no access possible to the thoughts and impressions of other people); and, lastly, the third-person narrator with access to the thoughts and feelings of a range of (though not all) characters. An example of this last method is Fraud , in which each chapter is given over to a particular focaliser. The characters to whose impressions the reader has no recourse are, importantly, those bold predators with whom the author has no empathy, though perhaps a lot of sympathy: the volcani...

I have been reading Villette , which puts me in mind of A Family Romance . Dolly, the aunt - squat, European - lives in Brussels at the start: Jane Manning remembers a discordant childhood visit to the rue de la Loi. She remembers the menacing arch of the Cinquantenaire, which seemed to mark the edge of the known universe. She remembers thinking there was not another child in the whole of the city. I have stayed in Brussels many times, and one sees Brooknerians there, or their European versions. But I have never seen the Cinquantenaire. I once gave A Family Romance to a girlfriend. It was an ill-judged gift. It is one of the intensest, most Brooknerian Brookners, depicting a clash of cultures between English Jane and European Dolly. (And as ever, whose side is Brookner on?) This novel was, as I say, unappreciated by my girlfriend, who preferred John Grisham. But thereby perhaps I found out what I needed to know. She was not a Brooknerian.

There's a line in Look at Me about getting by on style alone: Frances Hinton refers to her physical appearance on the eve of her last visit to the Frasers', but the line might apply to writing as much as to anything else. You always have to reread, especially with Brookner. I often think, rereading, that I've never quite got to the bottom of precisely how and where Anita Brookner stands in relation to her personages – whether she scorns or loves them, disdains or endorses their little ways. It is possible to underestimate the really very radical strength of her disenchantment, her disaffection. Her novels, when you reread them, can be truly shocking. As I've said before, one's heart is in one's mouth. I reread Look at Me in the aftermath of Brookner's death. Frances never does condemn her tormentors. She can only condemn herself. She longs for a voice, but none is available. She will be a writer one day, but only as a penance for her lack of luck....

Anita Brookner, who is an international authority on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting, teaches at the Courtauld Institute of Art. In 1968 she was Slade Professor at Cambridge, the first woman ever to hold this position. She is the author of Watteau, the Genius of the Future ; Greuze and Jacques-Louis David . She has written five novels: A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me, Hotel du Lac , which won the Booker Prize in 1984 and Family and Friends in 1985. (1985) Anita Brookner was born in London in 1928 and, apart from three postgraduate years in Paris, has lived there all her life. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988, when she abandoned her title of Reader in the History of Art at the University of London for the anonymity of a small flat in Chelsea and the cultivation of certain fictional characters who may one day appear in future novels. (1991) Anita Brookner was born in London in 1928 and, apart from three p...

Goncharov's Oblomov is referred to twice in the novels: memorably at the opening of Visitors and also (I think) in A Friend from England . In interview Brookner called it her favourite novel. This was possibly a posture. It is a weird contrarian comedy about a Russian aristocrat who deliberately mucks up his life, failing at everything. 'Brookner is in the Chekhov league,' said A. N. Wilson of Undue Influence . (For more on A. N. Wilson, see an earlier post, 'Anita died. I read it in The Times ...') 'More memorable than any fiction was Chekhov's Last Moments by Leo Rabeneck, published in the TLS for 2 July 2004,' wrote Anita Brookner in the Spectator 's 'Books of the Year' that year. 'Rabeneck was present at this most iconic of deaths, and his account of how it took place - after that glass of champagne - is more than consoling: uplifting.' (As you might expect, I sought out the piece. It describes Chekhov’s stylish death,...

'Ah, good reading is a creative act!' declares the bumptious old professor in Deconstructing Harry . One book leads to another, one author to the next. I think I became a Jamesian because I was first a Brooknerian. I remember once reading that Anita Brookner reread The Spoils of Poynton every year. Did I imagine this? I cannot find the reference. It may have been in one of those celebrity vox pops the Spectator used to do on various topics (the piece about tisane in an earlier post is from one of those) or perhaps it's in one of the interviews - or perhaps, indeed, I dreamt it. The Spoils of Poynton is a Brooknerian reading experience, which is probably why she chose it. The opposition between the sensitive, high-strung Fleda Vetch, for whom happiness is a kind of pearl-diving plunge, and the assorted vulgarians that circle her, is pure Brookner. One thinks of dreamy Anna Durrant in Fraud , or Frances Hinton in Look at Me , at the mercy of the venal careless Frasers.

'The only publicity from which the hotel could not distance itself was the word of mouth recommendations of patrons of long standing.'

Brookner's titles (and for this post American titles are also considered) are a mixed bag. Classically, novel titles referred to people and places ( Clarissa , The Small House at Allington ) or derived from quotations ( Pride and Prejudice , Far From the Madding Crowd ). References to themes and plot points ( Great Expectations , The Moonstone ) were less common. More figurative titles crept in after James. Names Lewis Percy (1989) Dolly (1993) Places Hotel du Lac (1984) A Friend from England (1987) Incidents in the Rue Laugier (1995) The Bay of Angels (2001) 'At the Hairdresser's' (2011) Quotations A Start in Life / The Debut (1981) (Cf. Balzac's novel of the same name) A Misalliance (1986) (Cf. Maupassant's 'Mesalliance') Brief Lives (1990) A Closed Eye (1991) A Family Romance (1993) Falling Slowly (1998) Abstract nouns Providence (1982) Fraud (1992) Plural nouns Latecomers (1988) Visitors (1997) Strangers (2009...

An intriguing piece of memorabilia, this - culled from the blog of the London Library ( Link ). Brookner, we learn, served on its Committee between 1987 and 1991. Several Brooknerians are frequenters, I think, including George Bland in A Private View and Miriam in Falling Slowly .

She looked, Anita Brookner, to Henry James 'for moral scruple' (Haffenden interview, 1985), and not a few Brookner personages spend the long dark autumn afternoons and evenings of their lives in conclave with the Master. There is, for example, Paul Sturgis in Strangers , regretting the loss of an evening he had planned to devote to the later novels, which, as his creator says, 'entail scrupulous attention'. Or there's Miriam in Falling Slowly , in a coda to both the novel and her life, sitting daily with other casualties in a public garden. She reads What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age and The Tragic Muse . There was nothing cheap about Henry James, she thinks. She likes too his reputation for modesty. He had deferred to worldlings, as if he were not more worldly than any of them. Brookner explores such themes elsewhere. 'What exactly did Maisie know? Something that was not meant to be known, so that the corrupt reader, so much more corrupt than James himsel...

'After an evening walk - but these are becoming more dangerous - a cup of tea is mandatory. But for more sedative evenings a tisane will have to do. Since most of them are vaguely emetic, it is a job to find one that is refreshing. Mixed fruit has proved to be acceptable - with a teaspoon of honey to give an impression of well-being.' Spectator , 1990s

The Internet likes its aphorisms, and Brookner is a reliable if idiosyncratic source. Many quotes derive from Hotel du Lac - the famous hare and tortoise passage, for example - and others from the available interviews. Brookner gave a mere handful of interviews in her time, and only a few have found a home on the web. Below are links to several such exchanges. The Paris Review piece, a classic early example, not as extreme as the Haffenden debacle, but still astonishing, includes an example of Brookner's handwriting. Link to 1987 Paris Review interview The second, from the 1990s, follows the publication of A Private View . It contains interesting material about Brookner's family, and indicates the state of critical opinion at the time: Brookner is to be considered alongside Elizabeth Bowen and Barbara Pym, if not Proust or James. The interviewer's tone is a little condescending. Link to 1994 Independent interview The rest of the examples are from the 2000s. The ...

I come now to a treat for Brooknerians. I have a copy of a pamphlet, Brookner's 'Jacques-Louis David: A Personal Interpretation' (London, 1974): it is the text of a lecture given by Dr Brookner. 'Lecture on Aspects of Art, Henriette Hertz Trust, of the British Academy', reads the title page. I bought it some years ago at a Gerrards Cross book fair for £25. The lecture was read on 30 January 1974: it seems to be a condensation of Brookner's study of the painter – whom I also rate highly, and whenever I’m in Brussels I always like to look at the Davids. And one thinks of was-it- Providence ? – that make-or-break lecture Kitty Maule must make before an august assembly. Was this that lecture? Probably not. The date’s too late. By 1974 Brookner was an established art historian. The pamphlet is dedicated to Anthony Blunt, not yet unmasked, and is part of a lecture series that includes 'Some Uses and Misuses of the Terms Baroque and Rococo as applied to Archit...

A selection of Brooknerian paintings: Boucher, The Rising of the Sun , The Setting of the Sun . Who can forget that moment in A Family Romance when Jane Manning plunges from the heat of London in 1976 into the entrance hall of the Wallace Collection and, drowning in coolness and blueness, gazes up at the great Bouchers? Delaroche, Execution of Lady Jane Grey . Claire Pitt and a friend visit this painting in Undue Influence , a curious novel, costive and backward-looking (when it was published, it was the last of the yearly Brookners, and one might have been forgiven for thinking it her swansong). Delacroix, Jacob and the Angel . Herz, in The Next Big Thing , visits Paris and the church of St-Sulpice solely in order to see this painting again. I was in Paris when the novel came out. I remember buying it in the W. H. Smith's in rue de Rivoli; taking it back to my hotel to read; and then, a pure Brooknerian, setting out the next morning for St-Sulpice. Titian, Bacchus ...

Brooknerianism is a way of life. Alone and at a low ebb in Vienna one early spring day, I asked myself: What would a Brooknerian do? And so I headed into the Kunsthistorisches Museum and sat for an hour before one of the Bruegels - not a particularly Brooknerian choice, but the behaviour was Brooknerian. Such routines, such forms, are not to be scorned. And it's form that's going to save us all, says Brookner in an early interview (the Haffenden, I believe). In Brookner's anthology, Soundings , there's an essay on Rosa Bonheur that begins with a vignette of Brookner herself, at large in provincial Continental cities, indolent, homesick, seeking neglected minor artworks in unpopular museums. The essay dates from 1981, when Brookner was at the start of her late-life and very prolific second career as a novelist. The floodgates had opened, as she said: she wished she could write all the time: it released her from the despair of living. But in the meantime she had all tho...

One or two of the critics who, in the late Eighties and early Nineties, trashed Brookner, came round to her in the end. Having been misunderstood as genteel and parochial, and bracketed with Jane Austen and Barbara Pym, Brookner's wider credentials, in the new century, were beginning to be appreciated. But it was too late. Critics began to speak of her as a European writer. Mark Lawson, on reading Strangers , penned a full recantation. He had been one of those young men in the 1980s who had so disdained the likes of A Misalliance and Lewis Percy . Now, older, he 'got' her at last, suggesting she be placed alongside no less a luminary than Samuel Beckett. High praise indeed. Link to Lawson review

Not long ago I reread Lewis Percy . What had been stodgy twenty years ago seemed lightsome and timeless now. It is an unBrooknerian novel, not least on account of its suburban setting. This isn't a world of mansion flats and Chelsea. But in its allegiances the novel is characteristic. Lewis's loyalty, we read, isn't to the stale diminished life he leads in the suburbs but to the content of the books he cherishes - surely Stendhal. There is no more Brooknerian statement of intent. Lewis Percy , as Brookner herself acknowledged in an article in the Independent in November 1990, was roundly condemned by critics. But she remained true to what she thought of as her suburban novel, which a walk down Wandsworth Bridge Road on the way to the hairdresser's had inspired. Seduced into side-roads she found 'a distracting melancholy, an intensification of longing, and a landscape to mirror both'. Innocence was,she opined, her theme. But surely Brookner is the least i...

Paul Sturgis, the hero of Brookner's last full-length novel, fears he will die among the strangers of the book's title. The novel's epigraph is from Freud, whom Brookner revered: England, says Freud, for all its glory, is not a place for the old. An unnamed neighbour of Brookner's, appended a comment to A. N. Wilson's obituary essay on the Mail Online, referenced in an earlier post. Brookner's death was precipitated by quite a serious fire in her flat, from which she was rescued. The fire was caused by her smoking. But she was not given enough care in hospital. The nurses were, we learn, overworked. She was not got out of bed, was not rehabilitated. This is difficult to read. One often reads Brookner novels with one's heart in one's mouth. But this was Brookner's life . Doctors without Borders, beneficiary in Brookner's will

James had three incarnations: James the First, James the Second, and the Old Pretender. The novels of Anita Brookner (a writer who, at first glance, doesn't seem to 'develop' - to borrow a term from Larkin) fall perhaps into four phases. The four novels culminating in the Booker win ( A Start in Life , Providence , Look at Me and Hotel du Lac ) are sombre reads, solid, not starry, never presumptuous. Seemingly in receipt of dithyrambs for every subsequent effort, Brookner became in her second phase (beginning with Family and Friends ) a little - shall we say? - smug, a little complacent. Those novels of the mid to late Eighties feel over-assured, at times too ambitious. Brookner worked best in reaction against the prevailing culture. Critical opinion turned sour in the 1990s. Thus, with Brief Lives , begins her third phase. These are masterly books, Jamesian, the language as mandarin as James's, the themes unfashionable but enduring. The last phase comes i...

Baden-Baden, the summer capital of Europe, is a destination of choice for many a Victorian literary personage. Lady Glencora and Plantagenet Palliser honeymoon there in Can You Forgive Her?  Baden-Baden features in Confidence , a minor James novel, which I haven't read. It is renamed but identifiable in the opening pages of Daniel Deronda . Today, more than a century afterwards, one imagines those long ago days as not so very distant. In fact all has changed, much separates then and now, and what remains is a mere simulacrum (great Brooknerian word).

Anita Brookner died at the age of 87 on 10 March, 2016 – impossible date. She experienced her own next big thing just days after the centenary of Henry James’s death. The conjunction remained unlauded in the many obituaries I examined, most of which seemed to be culled from one another and thick with clichés, the usual tired stuff about this most misunderstood and, by then, all but forgotten writer. But her passing gave her a moment of publicity. For a while, if you typed ‘Anita’ into Google, her name appeared in the list of suggestions. She was suddenly everywhere. ‘Oh, Anita!’ tweeted one friend, as if she had committed some sort of faux pas . Indeed, during the week that followed, I was aware of the vulgarity of most death notices, and of much such comment. How she would have hated some of the pieces. How she would have squirmed at the freedom with which people now spoke of her. She lost dignity, was fair game – an historical figure now, her reputation up for grabs. In fact I re...

Brooknerians dream of France - of Paris in particular. Lewis Percy always longs to return. A whole life, for Maud in Incidents in the Rue Laugier , is predicated on a youthful episode in that unremarkable Parisian street (which I visited once - and it was adamantine, very Right Bank, giving little away). But the novels that concern themselves with more mittel -European themes and places are also to be considered. Julius Herz in The Next Big Thing , for example, remembers the Thirties in Germany. The horror that prompted his childhood translation to England remains all but undefined, even unspoken, so subtle is Brookner's technique. But a whole world is lamented. Herz recalls holidays in Baden-Baden, rides in a fiacre along the Lichtenthaler Allee, coffee at the Kurhaus. I vacationed there one summer. Ah, Mitteleuropa - so solid, so gracious! Mitteleuropa - which somehow survives a century of torment! One feels, there, very far from England and its brutality, its vulgarity. Br...

Perhaps I was not always a Brooknerian. But I became one early - too early. I was seventeen, and I happened on a copy of Hotel du Lac in my local library. I had heard of the author, and knew her to be acclaimed, but I knew nothing more. I took the book home and read it quickly, absorbed by the atmosphere of the hotel, the dense beauty of the prose, the social comedy. I was later to visit the real Hotel du Lac, in Vevey. The becalmed resort, the anaesthetic lake, high and near, were as depicted. I had tea in the hotel garden. That was in 1993. I visited again a couple of years ago, and the hotel had become slightly too corporate. (Visiting Brooknerian locales is part of being a Brooknerian, as later posts will show. I once spent an expensive holiday in Baden-Baden on the strength of a couple of lines in The Next Big Thing .) Did I become a Brooknerian at seventeen, in that little library, which smelt as I remember of furniture polish and dust? Or had I always been destined? I don...

Brookner's voice - rich, alto - can be heard via the link below. The closing moments of the broadcast, in which Brookner wistfully remembers her old life, contrasting it with her later career as a novelist, are especially treasurable. Link to 'The Reunion' (BBC, 2011)

I met Anita Brookner only once. I was in a London street with my French friend Marie Delemotte. It was August 1992, and I was nineteen. Marie was much older - ours was a cross-generational friendship - and when I excitedly told her the identity of the rather elderly-looking woman tottering towards us on the pavement, my friend, unimpressed, said, with what I probably would have called Gallic insouciance, 'Oh, go to her! Why not?' But my heart was thumping. Here was my heroine, my favourite author - here in a London street, at two o'clock on a summer's afternoon - here, in the flesh, or the somewhat exiguous flesh, for the woman approaching us was very thin and seemed frail. She walked with a stick. But Brookner would only have been in her sixties in 1992, and was to live another twenty years and more. She wore a white blouse, a white skirt and a red blazer with large shoulders. Her hair, bright auburn, looked newly coiffed. The street was Elm Park Gardens, Brookner...