The Brooknerian

In an  earlier post  we discussed the conservatism, the limitations, of Brookner's musical references. I went to the Frankfurt Opera on Wednesday, to a performance of Gluck's Ezio , around which there are (as far as I know) no Brooknerian associations. All the same the evening was richly Brooknerian. One was surrounded by dressy mittel -Europeans; Brookner wouldn't have looked out of place. Oldsters in ancient finery; youngsters in smart bright trousers; neurasthenic young girls; glamorous couples; aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, family and friends; velvets, brocades, necklaces, jewels, patent-leather shoes, fancy glasses, fancy scarves, and everywhere the decorous behaviour and measured tones of cultured leisured moneyed Germany.

Brookner makes reference now and again to Goethe. Family and Friends begins with an epigraph from Werther . At least one later Brookner novel ( Altered States ?) namechecks Elective Affinities . The Frankfurt Goethehaus looks at first like a genuine eighteenth-century house but like many old-looking buildings in Germany it is in large part a postwar reconstruction. In another part of the building there's a small art gallery: Tischbein, Fuessli, Hackert, minor Caspar David Friedrich. Brookner's comment somewhere about Friedrich's threadbare religious imagery apparently spoilt for ever  Brian Sewell's  appreciation of the painter.

'May' ( Visitors ) and indeed 'Brookner' ('Like calling yourself Batehoven!'*) were efforts at anglicisation, and not always successful. Brookner's Jews are identifiable, possibly, by their names; in other ways the information is no more than hinted at. It's seldom more explicit than: [Herz] was grateful that [his parents] had died naturally, in their own home, a fate denied to so many of their kind. The Next Big Thing , Ch. 9 In several of the early novels there is a contrast, a conflict, between the uncertain identity of the Jewish protagonist and the solidly Protestant object of her interest. The Haffenden interview explores this point. But in many of Anita Brookner's novels there's little or no mention of Judaism, and the lead characters have very English names: Elizabeth Warner, Alan Sherwood. Brookner described herself as 'a lapsed Jew - if such a thing were conceivable' (Haffenden). The Bruckners / Brookners had come to En...

At the Staedel, a Brooknerian moment: a substantial exhibition of Watteau's drawings. How many of the more than fifty pieces did Brookner know? In the bibliography to the accompanying book, one was sorry not to see her name. The exhibition was set out over several rooms and all but unvisited. At first the figures in the drawings withheld their message, but gradually one grew to appreciate their poised, pointed watchfulness, their effortful staginess. For more on Watteau, see an  earlier post.

Brookner tended to avoid conflict, not to say contact, with her literary peers, but Martin Amis expressed deep annoyance at her review of his novel Night Train . Brookner had written: It may be post-modem; it is certainly post-human. There are few facts that are without disclaimers, few acts that are unambiguous. To read it is to undergo a temporary brain dysfunction […] a narrative which sets out to celebrate the demotic but ends up so out of hand that it is experienced as an assault on the reader's good faith. Spectator , 26 September 1997 Brookner distrusted postmodernism ('Updike goes post-modern,' ( Spectator   27 February 1993) she commented uncertainly, in her review of Memories of the Ford Administration ). One hears less about postmodernism nowadays, but it was all the rage when I was young. And Brookner's postmodern novel? Surely Incidents in the Rue Laugier ? ...those few notations - ' Dames Blanches. La Gaillarderie. Place des Ternes. Sang. ...

Further to an  earlier post: It had been widely predicted and even firmly stated that the winner would be J G Ballard’s  The Empire of the Sun . In the event, the prize went to  Hotel du Lac  by Anita Brookner. As it happens, Brookner, along with Carmen Callil, had come to supper with my partner and me the previous Saturday, an evening mainly devoted to talking about a now forgotten writer, Edith Templeton.* As Brookner left at the end of the evening, I called after her, 'Good luck next Thursday'. This was not well received: 'You of all people ought to know that I was very lucky to have been shortlisted. There's no likelihood whatsoever of my winning. Good night.'  Martyn Goff, ‘Playing Silly Bookers’, New Statesman , 23 October 1998  My own first taste of this experience was in 1984, with  Small World . Like everybody else, I expected J G Ballard to win with  Empire of the Sun . No one was more astonished than Anita Brookner when Richard...

She handed me a brochure which showed a Jacobean-style mansion in a sunlit snowy landscape. Inside was another photograph of a log fire in a marble fireplace wreathed with holly. The first thing to register was the price charged for this three-day Christmas break, which struck me as excessive, although this apparently was what people were prepared to pay for the privilege of being taken in at a problematic time of year ... Feeling slightly sick I noted that Christmas Day would be marked by full English breakfast, morning coffee, with a visit from more carol singers, traditional Christmas lunch, followed by tea with Christmas cake. Dinner would consist of a Scandinavian smorgasbord. A Family Romance , Ch. 7 Brookner loves to be disgusted. The description of Dolly's vulgar Christmas in a Bournemouth hotel runs to a page or more. We are presented with the full horrifying details of the proposed extravaganza. A good deal of cultural knowledge is naturally required to make sense o...

To remain pure a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation. Paris Review interview

In Howards End is on the Landing Susan Hill reviews her collection of books. She eventually gets round to Anita Brookner's novels. Could they, she wonders, have been written by a man? Hill has no answer to this somewhat unpromising question, and indeed can offer little illumination more generally on a writer she's plainly a fan of. Counterfactuals seldom do lead anywhere very profitable. Nor it is especially fruitful to enquire into the gender profile of Brookner's readership. Brookner knew she was read by men as well as by women; the topic is covered in interview. Men probably do read her differently, but there are surely other variables to be borne in mind: race, age, sexuality, class. Ah yes, class. Do non-Brits realise how significant, how over-riding a factor social class is, even today? What was Brookner's? Or was she, as a child of immigrants, somehow outside the system? - like Kitty Maule, 'difficult to place'?

The search for happiness, which Stendhal decided was entirely possible, has been rejected, has been replaced by the consolations of art. In the first and heroic phase of Romanticism it was possible to believe in personal fulfilment, if only in reduced circumstances. In the second and disillusioned phase the world is regarded as a vale of tears...  Romanticism and Its Discontents , Ch. 5    I always went to fiction for consolation, or indeed for company; and to be able to operate in that area seemed to me so desirable that I decided to try.  Radio interview extract, part of Radio 4 obituary programme  Last Word It is always good and surprising to hear Brookner's voice. As far as I know only the above extract and another BBC programme,  The Reunion , are available online. In the 1980s Brookner made herself more available, but recordings are hard to come by. I believe a Brookner scholar took the following stills from a TV arts show archived at ...

An ideal of effortlessness, of the sure-footedness that characterized Napoleon at his most successful, remained with them for life, as did an ideal of Napoleonic rapidity: Constant wrote Adolphe in fifteen days, Hugo wrote Hernani in a month, Stendhal wrote La Chartreuse de Parme in fifty-two days and made only notional revisions. If Stendhal joins up at all with the more standard Romantic artist it is because he shares with them the fantasy of  the supreme emotional adventure.  'In Pursuit of Happiness', review of biography of Stendhal, Soundings    [Kenyon:] Do you rewrite a great deal? [Brookner:] No, there are no drafts, no fetishes, no false starts; there simply isn't time .  Olga Kenyon, Women Writers Talk , 1989  Did she revise much when correcting her proofs, I wondered. 'No, just the odd words, but no major revisions.'  Shusha Guppy, 'The Secret Sharer', World and I , July 1998 [We can confirm Brookner's assertion that she al...

adduce, adventitious, appurtenances, armature, at all events, avatar, beneficient, by dint of, canonical,  chevaleresque , claustration, complaisant, defile,  désinvolture , divagation, inadvertance, ineluctably, infraction, lycanthropic, martinet,  mise en abîme , moue, on one's dignity, otiose, oubliette, provisional, rebarbative, subfusc, suzerainty, temerity, unavailing

The Paris we all know, or think we know, came into being with the arrival of the Métro, much admired by Proust, who never used it. This was followed a few years later by the telephone (Proust’s number was 29205). The Paris we can remember, or think we can remember, was the Paris of the 1950s and 1960s, when Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir held court at the Flore, and when a new novel by Simenon appeared regularly every few months.  These were the last of the glory days, when it was possible to feel like a provincial, newly arrived, and undergoing a longed-for transformation, much as Robb, armed with his map and his gift voucher must have felt at the start of his own apprenticeship. New Paris, the Paris of today, is part of Europe, and its concerns are global. The charms of discovery must yield to a different kind of loyalty, to the planet, to the environment. The true Parisian will, of course, shrug this off, and remain embedded in his quartier, will be on polite if not ...

...an oddly fervid and even neurotic statement from a man whose emotions had previously given evidence of having been put into excellent order and control by the calming influence of Lake Geneva... 'Gericault', Soundings

Brookner's, like Trollope's, is a conservative imagination. 'George must decide how much - or how little - he can do to transform the status quo ,' reads the blurb to my edition of  A Private View . Many a Brooknerian strives to break free, only to see the old dispensation restored. Not that Brookner doesn't provide final moments of epiphany, largely unearned. We might cite the closing lines of Fraud or what happens in the last sentence of Lewis Percy . Such endings give her work a novelistic shape, though Brookner knows their limitations: There are moments when you feel free, moments when you have energy, moments when you have hope, but you can't rely on any of these things to see you through. (Haffenden interview, 1985) The restoration of the status quo is achieved most memorably in the moments of shock and revelation that end, say, Providence or Undue Influence . The conclusion to Hotel du Lac is of another order. [Haffenden:] [Edith] wins her freedom ...

'The loneliest Christmas Day on record,' said one reviewer of Chapter 8 of Fraud . There are episodes in many novels - Trollope has not a few - when the plots are up and running and the author simply marks time. These can be interesting moments, and Anna Durrant's lonely Christmas has its perverse charms. I don't think I've read Fraud since the 1990s, and what comes across now, in comparison with the harsher, more raw novels of the succeeding decade, is the evenness, even the gentleness of the tone. 'Like all successful characters, [Anna] could only exist in a book, but the author is perhaps too wryly conscious of the fact,' said John Bayley in the London Review of Books , and I can see what he meant: there's an enchanted, unreal, fairytale aspect to Anna's terrible Christmas Day. She wakes early, at 5.45, after a blessedly chemical sleep. For a moment she considers staying in bed; but for Brooknerians this is an intolerable fantasy. She bath...

In the Roy Strong Diaries, we see Brookner and Strong in December 1998, walking from the London Library and railing against the (Labour) government, the rise of populism, and the abandonment of what they both sacred: excellence, quality, and aspiration upwards. Brookner, he says, is a lugubrious, profound woman with huge eyes.

[Max] had even bought a loose-leaf notebook at Ryman's, but then it occurred to him that what the world expected was a fully fledged biography, with details of the illustrious persons he had known, whereas he desired to recall sweet small incidents, family dignity, unassuming love. No publisher would be interested in such a thing; refugees' stories were all too common. The notebook was empty, although he had thought of a title: The Statue of Beethoven.  Falling Slowly , Ch. 10 My mind returns to Mitteleuropa . I have a forthcoming holiday, between Christmas and Silvester, not to Baden-Baden this time but Frankfurt and Cologne, and shall be offline for the while, reliant instead on my trusty Moleskine. Max in Falling Slowly seems at first glance a forerunner of Julius Herz, not least because he shares an identical memory. But Max Gruber is more of a showman, potent and mercurial, somewhat akin to the Ostrovski figure in the latter novel. Nevertheless the following two ex...

He looked again at the card. 'Returning 22nd.' That was next Tuesday. Today was the 18th, Friday. That gave him a very small margin in which to conclude this venture. A Private View (1994), Ch. 9 I've been thinking about Brookner's Christmases. There are a number in the 1990s novels, and we'll consider another in a few days' time. I return too to the question of dating A Private View , explored in an earlier post ( Link ). The precision of the above quote confirms my thoughts on the Sickert exhibition. The conclusion of George Bland's mad venture takes place in December 1992. I wonder if there are other such day-and-date combos elsewhere in Brookner.

Why do readers keep on going back for more? Because the compensation for self-control, as Freud believed, is to think yourself more civilised ... Readers are flattered into thinking themselves rather clever and a bit superior: if they can't be happy and successful, they can at least be sensitive .  Alison Light, review of A Family Romance , New Statesman (?), 9 July 1993 Saddest of all, though, is what this sort of writing tells us about our culture ... Brookner shows that we think something drained of life must be full of art.  Rhoda Koenig, review of Altered States, unknown source  This is the dead end of English literature, a cul-de-sac where mannered gestures stand in for creativity, and a careful aura of literariness replaces literature.  Natasha Walter, review of Altered States , Guardian , 14 June 1996  The only sign of an awareness of contemporary language in The Next Big Thing is an unconscious one: for all her fastidiousness she succu...

Brookner's father, meanwhile, had come to England from Poland at 16: 'From Piotrokow Tribunalski; sorry, I can't even spell it. We couldn't pronounce his Christian name, either, and called him Newson.' 1994 interview ( Link ) What strikes me about this quote is the foreignness, even the exoticism of Poland and the Polish in those days. Berlin, too, in Latecomers  (1988), seems outlandish. How far we have come in a few decades. When I was growing up, the likes of Poland or East Germany were indeed scary places, but now I visit them without a second thought. The Brooknerian world has truly opened up.

Brookner, in her essay on Oliver Sacks's book on migraine (see post called 'An Invasion of Unpalatable Memory'), mentions the pain she gets above her left eye. I don't know if there's any connection between this and the raised left eyebrow she had all her life. It is what makes her identifiable in the school photograph recently published by James Allen's Girls' School:

...those Burlington years were ones of great happiness, a happiness which for me covers most of the period. People seemed to behave more reasonably in those remote days. The companionship engendered by the late War had not entirely fragmented. Nobody jogged. Nobody went to the gym. Nobody suffered from stress or received counselling. Acts of kindness seemed more common than at the present time. Of all the acts of kindness that came my way none was greater than Ben's: he conferred on me the precious - and unique - conviction that my presence could be taken for granted. He was a true friend. 'Benedict Nicolson', Independent Magazine , 10 September 1994 One recalls, reading that, Mrs May's dream vision of a 1950s paradise, a field of folk, in Visitors . Benedict Nicolson was editor of the Burlington Magazine from the end of the war until his death in 1978. Brookner identified him as the person to whom she owed her start in life as a writer. 'Ideally one should a...

In terms of your professional life, what particularly attracted you towards the eighteenth century?   The Enlightenment, and the fact that it might just have come out right. The Romantic movement came along and bowled it all over. I do like a rational world, rational explanations and good humour and fearlessness [...] Kitty Maule says about Romanticism that in certain situations reason doesn't work, and that's the most desolating discovery of all. Haffenden, Novelists in Interview , 1985 During her three postgraduate years in Paris in the Fifties, sitting daily in the old Bibliothèque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, Brookner read her way across and through the eighteenth century. (Her days in the library were powerfully described in an article in the Times Literary Supplement I no longer have a reference for; she was once, I remember, the recipient of a bunch of flowers from a gentleman admirer.) In my own way, though I've gained more pleasure from the Victori...

Brookner, as we have seen, was rarely reviewed in ways that weren't extreme. Often, especially in the middle period, the tone was vitriolic. At the other extreme one found pieces lauding her to the heavens, and these often ended up on the covers of her books. The following review, of The Rules of Engagement , is noteworthy not only because it is written by a Courtauld colleague, Brian Sewell, but also because of the level of personal identification admitted to. We aren't, Brooknerians, reading her as some dry academic exercise; we are reading her because she tells the story of our own lives. (Not that Brian Sewell could ever really be called anything other than a Sewellian.) Transposing gender here and there, I recognised every moment of the novel as in some sense the tale of my own life (as I suppose it must be of Miss Brookner’s too), except that in mine coffee and Madeira took the place of tea — the same rebuffs, the same warmth accommodating itself to the same chill, the...

The fact that there was one woman there – called Anita Brookner – who you used to go up for private, individual tutorials with her and she was in the top of the building of number nineteen next door. And she was always feeding the pigeons, had an open window and feeding the pigeons, and I remember her I’d knock on the door and she said ‘Come in’ and her back was turned to me feeding the pigeons. And she said ‘You know one day Flavia I’m going to be a novelist.’ And of course she was.  Hotel du Lac  which I think is the second book but the one that first really made her name in 1984 and how many did she publish since then? Fifteen? But she did write beautifully I mean she was a very good art historian too. So in a sense I suppose she was a bit of a role model. She was very beautiful. Well she’s still alive actually, in her eighties. Very beautiful very elegant French, French dressed. And people didn’t wear scent – scent was very expensive in those days – but she always had the...

'...in imagination only, yet verified by the brochure, the peak of the Dent d'Oche...' [A postscript: There's a hospital in Vevey called the Providence, and a road sign - 'Providence' - just outside the hotel, not seen in these pictures.]

Anita Brookner was as likely to criticise my hairstyle as she was my essays on Baudelaire and French Romanticism. As my tutor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, she would hold her classes in a cramped attic study at the top of the building, in those days housed at 20 Portman Square.  'Oh, Katie, we must do something about that fringe,' she would say, offering me one of her untipped Woodbine cigarettes and balancing a small tin on her knee as an ashtray. She wasn’t joking: her own hair was always perfectly coiffed, making her head seem disproportionately large above her tiny, slender frame. She would sometimes be spotted in the grotty student basement canteen at lunchtime, nibbling on sliced-up apple or breaking a Kit Kat into tiny pieces.  Elegantly dressed in camel Burberry sweaters and skirts long before Kate Moss made them cool, Brookner was a formidable teacher who made her students question everything at those intimate, informal lessons. She would throw in perso...

Or indeed at any other time. Chiltern Street, late 2001:

Well, a Fodor's, actually (1993 edn): Vevey has an air of isolation, of retirement, of Old World gentility, of nineteenth-century stuffiness ... Anita Brookner wrote and set her novel in the Du Lac (subdued relative of the Hotel Trois Couronnes) - readers may be disappointed to find it lacking the discretion and refinement but still flaunting the stuffiness she so precisely described. Though some rooms are newly done up with prim florals or chic burled wood, others retain the kelly-green carpet and mustard chenille of another era in decorating. The lakeside facilities are the hotel's greatest attraction, as there's a graceful sheltered restaurant, a garden, and a pool all just across the street from the waterfront. Rue d'Italie, CH-1800 ... 90 beds, restaurant (reservations, jackets), terrace cafe, outdoor pool, garden. Expensive / very expensive.

Those who raise admiration by their books disgust by their company, said Samuel Johnson. He goes on: A transition from an author's books to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples, and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur, and magnificence; but, when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke. The Rambler , No. 14, 5 May 1750 She was witty, glitteringly intelligent, reserved, and unknowable beyond the point she herself had already decided upon. I can’t think of a novelist less likely to write an autobiography. Julian Barnes in the Guardian , 18 March 2016 ( Link ) Unknowable beyond the point she herself had already decided upon : 'I am not about to reveal all,' she told one of her interviewers. Let us consider onc...

I think it is important for the writer to take chances. To write with a very high degree of detachment ... it doesn't seem to me that one is playing it straight. Christian Science Monitor , 1 March 1985 ( Link ) This is a curiosity - a minor interview, conducted over the phone, with a journalist from the Christian Science Monitor , of all unlikely things. Brookner's tone is genial, indulgent, ironic. She had no truck with religion, knew Jesus didn't want her for a sunbeam. But the interviewer is duly seduced. 'Anita Brookner ... clearly works hard to put the best of herself into her fiction,' we are told - 'producing ... highly finished creations. Yet, remarkably, the unrehearsed, quotidian, "real life" Anita Brookner is as charming, poised, and gallant as her art.' I believe rather - and I know I am not alone in this - that Brookner's interview persona was anything but unrehearsed. To adapt Samuel Johnson's thoughts on the eighteen...

Anita Brookner said somewhere, in one of the interviews, that she was reserving autobiographical information for her own purposes. One might have hoped for some kind of late phase of autobiography, something akin to Henry James's late-career volumes of life-writing. It was not to be. But as we have heard, writers of fiction are the folk who are really telling the truth. All those novels may be seen as one long autobiography, perhaps - or they may well not be. Good to hide, and hear 'em hunt! Better, to be found...

The main hazard [of authorship] will, as usual, be incurred by the author, since his success will be momentary, his failure felt as permanent, and his isolation complete. But since I believe that writers of fiction, in whom I am principally interested, are in some curious way the only people telling the truth, I would expect them to feel pretty unlucky anyway. The Author , Summer 1984 The only people telling the truth : a salutary and reassuring voice, this, from so long ago, in this era of fake news and other horrors.

A Brookner extract is to be found in John Gross's New Oxford Book of English Prose (1998). (Interestingly Brookner is slightly misplaced in the running order. Gross arranges his authors by year of birth, but he seems to have none for her, so he places her somewhere in the 1930s. This is probably a hangover from the muddle over her date of birth, cited by David Sexton in his article in the previous post.) Gross selects eccentrically: the passage in A Family Romance in which Jane travels to the United States. This gets me thinking. It gets me thinking about Henry James and indeed about several other nineteenth-century authors, and how well travelled they were, how wide were the cultural references of, say, Trollope and Dickens. Brookner doesn't otherwise stray outside Europe. We know she travelled to the States. There is a story about her doing a signing in New York and being astonished by the queue outside the bookstore. One thinks of James's International T...

In my youth I worked in a library; the place was more Tissy Harper than Lewis Percy. But it was big and well resourced and there were many opportunities for private study, which for me meant Brooknerian study. There was a microfiche of things like The Times going back years, and a full range of the current daily papers and other public prints. In August 1991, one hot dusty afternoon, I went out to collect the Evening Standard  from a local newsagent's (this was one of my tasks), and was astonished to find a full-page article in it about Anita Brookner. 'Daring to question the morals of Miss B' by David Sexton, which I photocopied for my further instruction, was extraordinary. Even today, in this age of Internet trolls, and knowing as I do how sharply Brookner can divide opinion, the article seems extreme and unnecessary. 'Anita Brookner has always denied her novels are about herself, but DAVID SEXTON discovers many parallels between the writer's characters ...

On his desk he saw the letter which Simmonds had handed to him as they parted the previous evening, but instead took up his volume of Thomas Mann once more, and sank gratefully into the landscape, so well remembered, so totally familiar, of the bourgeois past. The Next Big Thing , Ch. 12 (A question for Brooknerians: Is Herz the only reader of Thomas Mann?) In Mann's Magic Mountain , one of my favourite novels, a young man Hans Castorp travels to a Swiss TB sanatorium to visit an afflicted cousin. But slowly he gets ill himself and ends up staying for seven years, during which time he engages with eccentric fellow patients and has philosophical discussions. The obvious Brookner analogue is Hotel du Lac . But one also recalls Zoe's mother's decline, her invalidisation, in The Bay of Angels .

OK, so it isn't actually lost, but it is little known and hard to come by. Olga Kenyon in her interview with Anita Brookner in Women Writers Talk (Lennard, 1989) takes the following stance: 'Brookner revitalises the romance as she fictionalises its restricting of female potential'. The meeting, one senses, wasn't entirely harmonious, and later Brookner would be interviewed mainly by men. Kenyon: What were your mother's expectations? Brookner: She wanted me to be another kind of person altogether. I should have looked different, should have been more popular, socially more graceful, one of those small, coy, kittenish women who get their way. If my novels contain a certain amount of grief it is to do with my not being what I would wish to be.  [...]  K: Did your parents ever talk about their past - or the holocaust? B: No, and I'm grateful for that. K: I believe you made plans to visit Poland, but didn't go. Why? B: For a Jew, Poland is not exactly ...

The pain began quite suddenly, unlike anything he had experienced before.When his flight was called he got up, fumbled for his pills. His shaking hand sent them flying, rolling across the dirty floor. Making an effort not to gasp he lurched forward, crushing the pills beneath his feet. Then, with the empty box still clutched in his hand, the ghost of a smile still on his face, he struggled mightily, exerting his last strength to join the other travellers on their journey. The Next Big Thing , Ch. 18 When I first read The Next Big Thing , on publication, I wasn't sure of it. Parts of it seemed like rehashes - Sophie Clay was, say, another Katy Gibb. Rereading it earlier this year, I changed my mind, saw things I'd overlooked. The language of the final paragraph (above) especially caught my attention. I recalled the extended passage earlier in the novel (in Chapter 8), when Julius Herz stands before Delacroix's painting Jacob and the Angel . Herz's final might...

He seemed to be writing it in a life parallel to the real life he lived with his wife ... Sometimes he felt himself to be more truly authentic when contemplating a shift in the fortunes of a fictional character than when talking to Tissy... Lewis Percy , Ch. 8 This was surely the stuff of fiction? A strong plot, unusual characters, a threatened outcome: who could ask for worthier diversion? And she was, after all, an observer. Visitors , Ch. 4 Now that the Brookner oeuvre is complete and we can view it as a whole, we begin to see new and interesting patterns in the carpet. Preceding posts reveal to me a minor theme she pursued during the middle part of her career. In Lewis, Lizzie, Jane and Maffy we see several kinds of young writer. In Dorothea May we see an old non-writer but also a woman living the same sort of life as her younger Brooknerland compatriots. The writing lives of Lewis (1989), Lizzie (1991), Jane (1993), Maffy (1995) and Dorothea (1997) are, one notes, n...

She was not aware of loneliness so much as of endeavour: her future career as a writer, of which there was as yet no sign, would, she thought, in time validate her entire existence. Until then she would adopt - had already adopted - a regime which would steel her against rejection and disappointment ... friends were a burden for which she had neither the time nor the inclination. Her own silence, her own solitude seemed to her entirely preferable. It was with relief that she entered the empty flat in the evenings; after eating her yoghourt and her apple she was free to read or to write in her diary ... She had a vision of a writer's life as clean, economical, controlled. The lack of a subject bothered her until she remembered that she did not need to think about this matter until she was forty. In the meantime she composed a list of aphorisms and quotations ... She trained herself to be cynical although she still missed her mother,of whom she thought with pain and terror. A Clos...

The trip to Vienna had taught me something about my own resourcefulness, but had not answered my obscure purpose, a purpose too obscure for me to identify but which manifested itself as a steady discomfort. Vienna had been too beautiful, too distracting. I chose out of the way places, out of season: almost any town in France or Germany, however devoid of scenic interest, provided the sort of ruminative space which I seemed to require. One day, seated at a rickety metal table in a side street cafe in Dijon, I stealthily began to write. A Family Romance , Ch. 8 This is Brooknerianism in a nutshell. The obscurity not just of the Brooknerian personage but of the Brooknerian writing project; the favouring of unpopular Continental locations; the disquieting desire to write ('a steady discomfort'); and the stealth (masterly word)   with which the need is assuaged: great writers tell us how to live, and Brookner tells Brooknerians. It is as much as we can do not to race up to St P...

I return to the topic of an earlier post (‘Comparisons’). One writer whom Brookner was never compared with was Dickens. Yet he was one of her favourite writers. In almost every interview she spoke of how at the age of seven she was set to read Dickens’s novels, which were advertised to her by her uncertain and uprooted family as the key to Englishness. That Dickens felt himself to be excluded from the happy years of his early childhood; that the Dickensian world was itself one of deracination; that that world was ever far from being a reliable portrait of any reality – must have sent out confusing messages to the young Anita. When she went to school, she said, she was quite surprised to find that everyone didn’t have a funny name. She continued to read Dickens at the rate of a novel a year, and throughout her adulthood she pursued the habit. Dickens features significantly from time to time in her fiction: in the Dickensian porters and comic domestics; in the helpful older char...

I bought this early American copy of Providence from George Whitman at Shakespeare and Co:

Until the late Nineties, when photos stopped appearing on her British book jackets, Anita Brookner was represented by the following four images: Elegant (1980s) Compassionate (later 1980s) Magisterial (1990s) Ethereal (later 1990s)

He thought of Hartmann, whom he now saw to be lively, exuberant, festive, not stricken by this fatigue du nord which hung over Berlin. Hartmann, of course, was from Munich, an elegant and already southerly city. Latecomers , Ch. 13 I once, from Munich, took a suburban train to Starnberg, to see the Starnbergersee, solely because of its mention in the opening lines of 'The Waste Land'... Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. The resort, I recall, gave off a sort of civilised reticence, the lake high, a large inscrutable presence. The day was drizzly, murky, and I didn’t tarry long; I'd just wanted to be there for a time. It was very Brooknerian behaviour. (I have looked through Latecomers for mentions of the Starnbergersee, which I seem to retain, but can find only memories of the Englische Garten and of ...

Comparisons have a bad rep. Reading Villette , I'm reminded of an early review of Look at Me : 'a novel sufficiently distinguished to make you blink twice at "Brookner". Blinked at once, it might be "Bronte".' Other early comparisons included Muriel Spark, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and of course Jane Austen - whom Brookner excoriates on more than one occasion. Comparisons with male novelists - Henry James, especially - come a little later. Later still - into the new century - we see references to the great Europeans. '[Brookner's] characters, reflective, displaced and intransigent, are more like those of Camus than of any contemporary British novelist. Her style has a similar purity. Increasingly, Brookner reveals herself as a European novelist, and a major one,' wrote Helen Dunmore of The Bay of Angels (2001), a judgement she repeated in her 2010 Introduction to Latecomers ( Link ): 'Anita Brookner is...

Fortunately, my menopause is now becoming a distant memory, but it was not too much trouble. I don't think I had any noticeable symptoms really, and it was over very quickly.  My attitude is that the menopause is a natural part of life and you don't need to worry too much about it. Just accept it and remember that it does pass. For me, it now seems a very long time ago. Daily Mail , c. 2006 This is a curious slice of Brookneriana. Brookner rarely took part in the media game. One guesses she was rung up by a Mail journalist - her words have a spoken rather than a written feel. In the piece she was presented alongside other celebrities - incongruous company - and the accompanying photograph was one of her most benign.

The writer, particularly the writer of fiction, is different from the storyteller … The storyteller lives in the real world: she has a life, as the current locution would have it. But the writer has two lives. He, or more probably she, is the hapless character who goes to the supermarket, performs domestic tasks, and is invariably worsted in arguments, and that other one … the cold logician who observes a beginning, a middle and an end, who determines causality, although subject, like everyone else, to the irrationality of circumstance.   […]   I am convinced that writing is a displacement activity that gives one the illusion of an honest day's work. That may be its main function, but it is set in train by a different psychic arrangement. The strange organic process by which a body of written work is achieved has less to do with will than with wish. What that wish may be is rooted in the personal history of a writer, and is paradoxically known but also secret. But if wish —...

The women he paints have a sparkling miniature solidity, the men an engaging quirkiness, a sharpness of knee, an intense turn of head which prompt admiration for Watteau's realism; yet these sharp little characters who, even in repose, seem always to be pouting, to be urging, to be inclining their tiny thoughtful heads, exist in a vacuum of apparent purposelessness. Their clothes, of satin slick as the oil into which Watteau translates them, are beautiful, flimsy, and bizarre; the context in which their languid activities take place is grandiose and vague, like a stage set. They look, in fact, like a group of professional actors, either warming up half-heartedly for a performance or enjoying a break in rehearsal, falling into a day-dream while a musician improvises softly on his guitar. Anita Brookner, Watteau , 1967 (It isn't actually the earliest Brookner. That honour goes to the extraordinarily titled An Iconography of Cecil Rhodes , from the mid-50s, which I can on...

[On A Misalliance :] …it wasn’t a very good book, but it wasn’t  that  bad either. I have written it off. I didn’t like it even as I was writing it.  Paris Review interview, 1987 ( Link )  [On the early fiction:] I hate those early novels. I think they're crap. Maybe I needed to write them. I far prefer what I'm doing now … They're morbid, they're introspective and they lead to no revelations … I don't like any of them very much.  Independent interview, 2002 ( Link ) Writers rarely estimate correctly the value of their own work. James disowned The Bostonians , did not include it in his collected edition. Likewise, two early Brookners seem to have slipped from the radar, and are increasingly difficult to source: A Friend from England and A Misalliance . Buy them when you can.

Probably on account of the success of the highly atypical Hotel du Lac (1984), Anita Brookner acquired for a time a curious reputation as a comic writer. Hotel du Lac is indeed a novel somewhat in the English tradition of social comedy. There are several other, less assured funny elements in the early novels - amusing domestics and the like. One remembers a Mrs Cutler. Something of the reputation persisted into later, grimmer times. The Next Big Thing (2002), not remotely a comedy, was described, in its hardback blurb, as 'her ... funniest novel to date'. It was like this for Trollope.When I was growing up,  Barchester Towers  was Trollope's most famous novel, and it is obviously comic. But the bulk of Trollope's output is in the serious rather than the comic mode, however high. Yet Trollope continues to be thought of as funny. Perhaps it is because the English prefer comedies and, as Brookner said, are never serious. Brookner, at the outset, was lazily compared...