The Brooknerian

She had always been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realise that the position of an unmarried, unattached ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction. Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn (1977), ch. 1 A look at the subject matter of several novels of the time may suggest otherwise. But this was Barbara Pym's personal experience; it's a  cri de coeur . Pym, writing Quartet in Autumn after years of rejection, saw little prospect of its being published. The novel has a recklessness: she's perhaps writing for herself alone, or for a coterie of fans such as Philip Larkin, who read and commented on the manuscript. The heartening and miraculous story of the novel's eventual publication, after Pym was celebrated in a TLS article, is well known. A Booker nomination followed, and the reissue of her 1950s novels, along with the release of several works that had failed t...

The 'great flood-gates of the wonder-world' are swung open: the reader is 'world-wandering' like the crew of the Pequod through the 'lashed sea's landlessness': 'How I snuffed that Tartar air! - how I spurned that turnpike earth!' I do not read only Anita Brookner. I like to have, in the background, a monumental, old, preferably nineteenth-century novel on the go. This has long been my habit. I don't think any of us would really cope if we were actually transported back to that long-lost time, but I like to think some of us would know some of the ropes. Moby-Dick, or The Whale , which I'm about a third of the way through, is a departure for me. It reads like Dickens, Joyce and Shakespeare. It's a deeply strange and addictive book. It's also very straightforward, with, as Martin Amis says in his recent essay collection, an enormous amount of padding. It's highly literary ('I have swam [ sic ] through libraries and sailed th...

The tone, from the start, is unsettling, uncanny: over-detailed, affectless, and then with sudden accesses of poetry and metaphor. Of the heroine's pinewood furniture: 'The swaying tall pines among the litter of cones on the forest floor have been subdued into silence and into obedient bulks'. What is Spark's game? For she's certainly playing a game. Like Anna in Anita Brookner's Fraud , Lise in Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat (1970) has gone missing - or rather is about to go missing. Or rather is about to be brutally murdered. Spark, in typical postmodern Sparkish fashion, larks around with chronology. We know early on, even before Lise has arrived at her final destination - an unnamed probably Mediterranean city - that she is to die. We find out by the end how this comes about, and why. The ending is chillingly bleak. Lise is unknowable, even by Spark ('Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?'), an author who's in the driver'...

The best sure cure for homesickness, which can strike at any point on a foreign holiday, is a detective story. I shall unashamedly take Patricia Highsmith, whom I am re-reading, and who does not seem to date in the very least, and hope that Ripley - her amoral character - will give me the independence to sail through any uncomfortable encounter. I shall also take Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton , which is a kind of detective story, and read breathlessly until the new owner of the property is revealed. 'Holiday Reading', Observer , 4 July 1993 I've mentioned The Spoils of Poynton before. I vaguely remember Brookner saying she reread it regularly, even annually, marvelling at its technical qualities. But I've never found the reference. Perhaps this is what I remember, though I didn't take the Observer in those days. The Spoils of Poynton is one of James's transitional works, the first or one of the first of the later 1890s novels he wrote after ...

Some obvious and not so obvious ideas for a winter break... St-Sulpice, Paris Paris is classic Brookner territory, but where to go? The rue Laugier? The old Bibliothèque Nationale, where a young Brookner was once the recipient of a magnificent bunch of flowers? The Luxembourg Gardens, to sit on an iron chair? The Crillon, where, according to Julian Barnes, Brookner was given a maid's room? No, head for the Latin Quarter and the church of St-Sulpice. Once inside, look carefully around the gloomy interior for Delacroix's Jacob and the Angel . It will help if you have a copy handy of Brookner's masterpiece, The Next Big Thing . Hyde Park, London Perhaps you want to re-enact Frances Hinton's nightmarish trek across the park and down the Edgware Road towards Maida Vale in Look at Me ? Or, for brighter moments, you might wish to drive through the park, like Mrs May on that heady summer evening in Visitors ? Hyde Park has it all. Poor Claire Pitt in Undue Influence even...

John Bayley, old-style gentleman of letters, consort to Iris Murdoch, controversial chronicler of her decline, cuts a not wholly satisfactory figure in the Brookner literature. He's a fan, but he's more of a fan of the likes of Barbara Pym and Jane Austen, and this pushes his Brookner criticism a little off centre. Here he is in the Guardian in December 2003, yet again getting it just that little bit wrong: Anita Brookner is on top form with The Rules of Engagement , which carries a plot line as strong as any of Jane Austen's (after reading a Brookner I always want to re-read a Barbara Pym and I chose her last and in some ways best, A Few Green Leaves )...  

In Brookner's  Hotel du Lac Edith Hope picks up a volume of short stories, the 'beautifully named' Ces plaisirs, qu’on nomme, à la légère, physiques . Colette, she reflects, will see her through: 'that sly old fox'. Asked by John Haffenden whether Colette's book had significance for her, Brookner replied, 'Only the title.' It was Colette's extreme adamantine viability that attracted her. She admired the author as all the characters in her own fiction flock to those on whom the gods smile and who have the gift of living successfully. Colette's 'virility', her 'innocent' sensuality, are themes in Brookner's piece in the  Observer  in March 1991 on Herbert Lottman's biography of the writer. But as ever with Brookner's reviews of such works, some hesitation is evident as to the validity or even the decency of the art of biography: Her life is contained in all her works, where it is described with exquisite discretio...

There are in this world of ours many separate fandoms, and sometimes they overlap. Often they overlap fairly predictably. So an Anita Brookner fan is probably also going to be at least some sort of a devotee of Henry James (that's me) or Edith Wharton (not me). Other authors who crop up in this regard include Barbara Pym (a not too enormous yes) and Jane Austen (ditto), writers whose world views perhaps aren't quite so aligned with Brookner's. But the coincidences I look for are the stranger ones. Who would have thought the fandoms of Anita Brookner and, for example, Doctor Who might converge? But I find more than a few folk. Myself included. There - I trust I've succeeded in surprising you. I have other enthusiasms. But I have yet to find Brookner fans who are also, say, Kingsley Amis fans or fans of certain 1980s sitcoms. But I live in hope.

One can easily imagine Anita Brookner meeting someone like Edith Templeton in somewhere like Bordighera. But Brookner and Catherine Cookson? They never actually met, but they might have. But we know Brookner read her - once. That alone inspires astonishment (and gives her an advantage over me). I read one of her novels, which ran to over 500 pages, and did not entirely manage to crack the code of its popularity, but then the novel was not intended for soft southerners. I found it artless, seamlessly written, and plotted only in the sense that everything came out right in the end, yet I could see that it possessed a certain transparency which would inspire trust and loyalty in her readers. Observer , 27 November 1988 Cookson's stories, Brookner goes on to say, are 'for the public library, destined to be read at home on a quiet afternoon', and indeed it was during my own library years that I came across Cookson. For those who do not now recognise the name, Catherine Co...

If Anita Brookner's Collected Journalism were ever published it would run to several volumes. One discovers things all the time. I've been looking through the Guardian / Observer archives, and today I come across some fresh Stendhal material. Was there ever a more Brooknerian figure? Writers, in writing of other writers, not invariably write about themselves, and this is surely the case with Brookner and Stendhal. Her review in June 1994 of Jonathan Keates biography is a straightforward retread of familiar ground, including an outing for that favourite line of Brookner's, about the after-dinner cigar. (See  here .) But a piece from January 1991, about a translation of Lucien Leuwen , delivers the most authentic hits. We find here the Brooknerian ideal just as much as the Stendhalian. And note how Brookner undermines everything with her little line within brackets. The idea that fulfilment can be achieved by courage, chivalry, a resolute indifference to past events,...

I never felt very easy about Jane Austen: I think she made a tremendous, far-reaching decision to leave certain things out. She forfeited passion for wit, and I think that led her to collude with certain little strategems which are horrifying in real life. She wrote about getting husbands. Anita Brookner speaking to John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview , Methuen 1985 Observer : What did you read as a child? Brookner: Ah! Dickens. My father fed me Dickens. Two novels for my birthday, two novels for Christmas until I'd read the lot. And after that I think it was H.G. Wells, for some reason. I've been talked about in the same context as Jane Austen. I didn't stick that label on myself, other people did. Quite inaccurate. I've never got on very well with Jane Austen. 2001 Observer interview 'Just don't mention Jane Austen' I decided to reread Pride and Prejudice - tried to read it with an innocent eye, as if for the first time, as if I didn...

When Eileen Simpson, who has written a remarkable and moving book, went back to visit the convent, which she now realised for the first time was an orphanage, she was told by the gardener that it had been turned into an old people's home. Old people are orphans by definition. Thus those who were spared the experience at the beginning will come to it at the end. She avoids this reflection. She remains a wise and resilient adult in her middle years. The rest may be too difficult to contemplate. Anita Brookner, review of Orphans: Real and Imaginary by Eileen Simpson,  Observer , April 1988

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize pleases me greatly, and it would have pleased Anita Brookner, who championed Ishiguro’s work, especially his earlier novels. She particularly liked his much maligned fourth novel The Unconsoled (see her Spectator review here ), a work I’ve never quite plucked up the courage to reread. It infected my dreams. I saw Ishiguro in Edinburgh in August 2000. He was a short, slightly plump figure with long mobile fingers and a clipped, patrician voice. He was speaking about his fifth novel, When We Were Orphans , which, like The Remains of the Day , is set around the second world war. He worried, he said, that the war might be a ‘technical convenience’ these days, but felt that the great questions of our age might be tackled better by not setting a novel in the modern affluent free world. Servitude had been the theme of The Remains of the Day . The English and the Japanese soul were, he said, similar, in their reverence for order, though he was ‘never awar...

Anita Brookner's hack work output was prodigious. Here's a selection from three decades of her  Spectator reviews and articles. 'A Stooge of the Spycatcher', July 1987 The painful astonishment of a deceived soul: that line from Adolphe , via Brookner's Providence , might well be applicable here. Her dismay at being mentioned in Peter Wright's notorious  Spycatcher is palpable even at this distance. But the dignity with which she sets out her 'great and steady anger' in this Spectator reply awards Brookner the undoubted moral victory. 'Repose is taboo'd by anxiety', October 1993 This piece on Oliver Sacks's Migraine is magisterial. An essay both restrained and candid. 'Even less fiction than Stranger ', May 1994 Brookner, Kafka, Camus, Existentialism: who could ask for more? The 'grandeur de l'homme sans espoir': not for the first time, one senses Brookner writing about herself while ostensibly giving he...

The Backlisted Brookner team: John Mitchinson, Lucy Scholes, Andy Miller and Una McCormack. On the bench beside Andy, under the Look at Me paperback, is, I think, a copy  of John Haffenden's excellent  Novelists in Interview . For much of my life as an Anita Brookner fan I never met or had contact with anyone who'd read her, let alone liked her as devotedly as I did. In the broadcast media there was a similar dearth. Over the years, while she was publishing, Anita Brookner was occasionally mentioned on BBC radio arts review programmes,  Front Row  and  Kaleidoscope  and the like, but the tone was often disappointingly slighting. It's only in this age of the Internet that I've become properly aware of other readers, other fans, and it was therefore with enormous pleasure that I listened today to the  Brookner-themed Backlisted podcast . An exemplary programme, packed with insight and not a few anecdotes. I'd never heard the one about t...

'And it is not true that people have nothing to fear, if they speak the truth. They have everything to fear.' Ivy Compton-Burnett, Two Worlds and Their Ways  (1949) No blame should attach to the telling of the truth. But it does, it does. We know that from Anita Brookner, before whom there was Ivy Compton-Burnett. In fact she's quite a different kind of artist, though there are a number of congruences. Both began publishing regularly and in earnest in the second part of their lives. Both presented the public with a carefully maintained and very austere public image. Both had what can at best be described as a less than rosy view of the world. Just as I became interested in Brookner during the time I worked in a public library, so I came to Ivy Compton-Burnett among the stacks. The Penguin A First Omnibus always attracted me, and I tried to read it. It baffled and defeated me. I tried again years later, and registered a similar response. For those who aren...

The last of my discoveries, 'Novelist with a Double Life', admittedly more of a 'profile' than a fresh interview, is from the Observer on 7 August 1988, marking the publication of Latecomers . Latecomers , we learn, has no author biography on its dustjacket, no rundown of the recently retired Brookner's academic achievements. 'That's over,' she says. 'It is no longer relevant. I've consigned it to the past.' But that past is celebrated, in particular her kindness as a teacher. 'To be taught by Anita was to be loved by Anita - you had to accept both,' says an unnamed ex-student. Balancing the academic and novel-writing sides of her life became like 'schizophrenia'. A friend recalls: 'In the same week that she published her scholarly monograph on David, on which she'd been working for years, she got far more publicity about a review she'd written in the TLS about a cookery book ..., saying "Yuk!"...

The second of my interview discoveries, 'Great Expectations', is from the Observer on 27 March 1983, marking the publication of Brookner's Look at Me . The interview was conducted by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, who would continue an interest in Brookner's works. Here she is on Brookner's 1998 novel Falling Slowly : She is one of a handful of living writers who can turn a sentence so graceful that to read it is a lascivious pleasure, and she can string those sentences together to make paragraphs - whole chapters even - that unfurl surely and musically until they climax, or fall away into silence with a superbly exact authority to which it is delicious to submit. There is a constant delightful tension between the austerity of her message and the voluptuousness of her medium. Brookner interviews have ritualistic tendencies, and Hughes-Hallett's certainly covers the usual ground: 'I regard myself as being completely invisible'; how the young Anita learnt false l...

Regular visitors to this blog will know of my devotion to Anita Brookner's interviews. Five are available on the web - the Paris Review interview, the 1990s Independent interview , and three from the 2000s (the Observer , the Independent again, and the last interview in 2009 in the Telegraph ). In printed form there are the Olga Kenyon and the John Haffenden interviews, both from the 1980s. The Haffenden exchange remains to my mind the best Anita Brookner interview. You will conceive of my delight at discovering several fresh interviews on the Guardian / Observer archive website. I propose to cover these over the coming days. We start with a piece in the Guardian on 27 May 1981, 'Finding the art of fiction', published to coincide with the publication of Brookner's first novel A Start in Life . As well as giving in remarkably finished form her later familiar responses to questions about her motivations for writing ('Socially she has always had the sensation of...

The Courtauld used to be in Portman Square. [This piece of Brookneriana dates from the mid-70s. It found it inside a printed copy of a celebrated lecture Brookner gave on Jacques-Louis David. I don't know who 'Louise' is or was.] I remember visiting the Courtauld in perhaps late 1989 or early 1990. And it was gone. Visit research had been wanting. The Courtauld moved into Somerset House about that time, a year of so after Brookner retired. Brookner attended the Courtauld's 75th anniversary celebrations at Somerset House in the mid-to-late 2000s: I myself visited the Courtauld Gallery a few weeks ago, nearly thirty years after my first attempt. I wasn't sure whether I'd find much of interest. The place is famed for its Impressionists collection, and I'm not keen on them. Nor can I think of a single mention of the Courtauld in Brookner's novels. She probably didn't like to mix business with pleasure. The gallery is medium-sized an...

A fascinating piece from the website of the James Allen's Girls' School: Alumna Kath Davies was in the same class as Anita Brookner. 'During our last year at JAGS, a group of us chose to spend time on holiday, helping with a farmer's harvest in Kent. We shared a large tent as accommodation. Anita, a very quiet girl, did not readily join in with us all, especially when we put on a singing and dancing* show (being silly, I'm sure!). I saw her again at an old girls' meeting. Her friends there very much admired her career – and she always wore glamorous clothes!' The site includes a photo of Brookner as a prefect at the school in 1945-6: *She would have disappointed Dolly.

Followers of this blog may remember my main motivation for re-reading David Copperfield this summer. My other reason was a preference for immersing myself in long Victorian fictions during the vacation, but my chief impulse derived from an interest in reacquainting myself with Anita Brookner's A Family Romance , a novel that connects with Dickens's both directly and obliquely. Brookner, speaking through her heroine Jane, focuses on Dickens's characterisation (though she is aware that such an interest might not pass muster in the academic world). Jane loves Betsey Trotwood, but finds the Micawbers tiresome. She has an almost visceral fear of Uriah Heep. I too love Betsey Trotwood. Her gradual softening as David Copperfield proceeds, and the story of her doomed marriage, are affectingly told. The characters of Uriah and his mother ('Be umble, Ury! Make terms!') are likewise masterful. Uriah's slipperiness, his writhing and general fishiness, are triumphs ...

'Let them think of you as always singing and dancing.' Anita Brookner, A Family Romance , ch. 1 Characters in Dickens have their catchphrases, which help to establish them in the reader's mind, distinguish them from others among a cast of hundreds, and re-establish them when they return after an interval away. Catchphrases are also a staple of comedy writing, especially in TV sitcoms - something we're used to nowadays, which possibly makes us more forgiving than E. M. Forster was in Aspects of the Novel:  he castigated the practice as an indicator of 'flat' characterisation. 'I never will desert Mr Micawber,' says Mrs Micawber time and again in David Copperfield . 'Forster is generally snobbish about flat characters, and wants to demote them, reserving the highest category for rounder, or fuller characters,' says James Wood in his entertaining How Fiction Works , an Aspects of the Novel for today. Dolly in Brookner's A Family Roma...

'They are all surprised, these inconsiderate young people, fairly and full grown, to see any natural feeling in a little thing like me! They make a plaything of me, use me for their amusement, throw me away when they are tired, and wonder that I feel more than a toy horse or a wooden soldier! Yes, yes, that's the way. The old way!' 'It may be with others,' I returned, 'but I do assure you it is not with me.' David Copperfield , ch. 32 One of the fascinating things about Victorian fiction is the way some authors stray into areas that have since become hot topics. Terrorism, for example. One reads James's The Princess Casamassima or Conrad's The Secret Agent differently now, from a twenty-first century perspective. Or feminism: James's The Bostonians,  or the likes of Baroness Banmann in Trollope's Is He Popenjoy?,  take on new dimensions. Or attitudes towards Jewish people. What do we bring to a reading of  Daniel Deronda , knowing ...

In Dickens what I marvel at more than anything is his management of different plot strands. He maintains control throughout, but there is also a freedom, an unpredictability, a sense of one plot merging into another. David Copperfield hasn't the wild free-wheeling quality of, say, a Thackeray novel ( Pendennis acts as an excellent comparison), but nor has it the rigidness of structure of early- and middle-period Trollope. ( Can You Forgive Her? is an example of this sort of schema at work: three women, three love plots, a few chapters given over to each in rotation.) Anita Brookner's plots, while never predictable, tend towards the schematic, especially in those that focus on a cast of characters. Olga Kenyon asked Brookner about this in Women Writers Talk in 1989, in relation to Family and Friends : Kenyon: You've chosen a family saga, but concise, controlled, through a series of family photographs. Why did you choose that form? Brookner: Because it was easier. It ...

'It must be a mixed motive, I think,' said Mr Wickfield, shaking his head and smiling incredulously. 'A mixed fiddlestick!' returned my aunt. 'You claim to have one plain motive in all you do yourself. You don't suppose, I hope, that you are the only plain dealer in the world?' David Copperfield , ch. 15 [Brookner:] Motives are never unmixed, are they? [Haffenden:] Your own heroines are given to be unmixed. [Brookner:] Poor little things, I feel sorry for them. They're idiots: there's no other word for them. And I don't know any more than they do. John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview , 1985

A curiosity among Elizabeth Bowen's works, The Shelbourne (1951) is the history of a famous Dublin landmark. It is also a celebration of hotel life - 'a world revolving upon itself'. For Bowen the Shelbourne was a place of safety and stability in a time of uncertainty. We begin in the early nineteenth century with the original building, where Thackeray stayed. He found the Shelbourne quirky, was famously disconcerted to find his bedroom window held open with a broom: 'Thackeray-lovers ... still prowl around the Shelbourne asking which of these windows the Broom propped up. Knowing so much, they should know enough to know that the hotel has been rebuilt since the author stayed there.' Though Bowen is sniffy about such literary pilgrims, it is clear that she herself has a more than sentimental attachment to the Shelbourne. The hotel was reconstructed and modernised in the 1860s: the dimensions of its interiors, not least, were expanded to accommodate the huge clo...

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. Anita Brookner,  A Family Romance , ch. 8 1. To Düsseldorf: out of the way, though in season. To the Kunstpalast, in rain, under a heavy sky. Some Cranachs, older and younger, some Rubens, one or two Caspar David Friedrichs, some very engaging nineteenth-century history paintings, some Kirchners. But altogether the collection seemed slightly at a low ebb. Unprepossessing building: red-brick, monumental, 1930s: 'degenerate art' was exhibited here once, for purposes of ridicule. 2. Chapter 40 of  David Copperfield . Mr Peggotty - a wanderer in search of Little Em'ly - speaks of his journey through France and into Italy. He returns via Switzerland, responding to a tip-off. As with other pre-aviation era narratives, one is aware here of the great distances involved, the sense of the Alps...