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 read about her death not in The Times but on a website. For I lived in modern times. I had been conducting one of my regular searches of Brookner-related material, though there had been nothing for some time. One wondered about her last years, imagined the horror of being old and incapacitated in a hospital ward, and of dying among strangers.
There were two notable essays in the
British papers, one by A. N. Wilson in the Mail,
the other in the Guardian by Julian
Barnes. Barnes’s was the meatiest, including details I never knew – her brand
of cigarettes (Sovereign, an oddly low-rent variety for such a stylish woman);
her fondness for the Crillon, when in Paris; her speech at the Booker (‘I
usually go on for fifty minutes – with slides’). He wrote of the way she
invented her own life, after the deaths of her parents lent her that freedom.
He wrote of her guardedness, and of how she politely but firmly curbed any too
enthusiastic or adolescent suggestions he might have made. Would she like to
come with him to the NFI to see early films of Paris? ‘I don’t think so...’ But
he had last seen her in 2010. Again one wondered about her last years.
The piece by Wilson was altogether more disappointing.
She never married. She wished she had. She once said she could get the record
as the world’s loneliest woman. All that. The Anthony Blunt affair was
described in some detail. (Wilson plainly had a certain Spectator article, ‘A Stooge of the Spycatcher’, open before him as
he wrote.) But there was one revelation, not that it redounded too greatly to Wilson’s
credit either as a gentleman or as a friend. It was the late Eighties, early
Nineties. She was in her sixties and attending a party given by a publisher
some years her junior. She was, wrote Wilson, hopelessly in love with this man.
Wilson hadn’t known she was at the party till he went to the man’s bedroom to
collect his coat. There he found Anita Brookner staring miserably ahead, having
been there for perhaps more than an hour. ‘It was clear this was the only
chance she would get of being near this man’s bed,’ Wilson concluded.
The vulgarity, the intrusiveness, the
humiliation of death was complete.
Or, in the words of another great writer and great favourite of mine, Alice Munro:
ReplyDelete"She was outraged at having to sit there and listen to people's opinions of her. Everyone was wrong. She was not timid or acquiescent or natural or pure.
When you died, of course, these wrong opinions were all there was left."
From "Floating Bridge", a story ostensibly about a woman who might be facing a terminal diagnosis.