The Brooknerian

Brookner: I read a lot in French and I read the Russians. Here's my favourite novel. Observer :  Oblomov . AB: Yes. It's about a man who fails at everything. Obs : I confess I've never read it. AB: It's great. He fails at everything - not through any fault of his own, but through sheer inactivity. I learnt a terrific lesson there. Obs : Do you think failure is a subject to which you're drawn in your fiction? AB: Much more interesting than success.  2001 Observer interview Brookner, ruefully playful, time and again makes a show of objectivity. She writes about failure because, objectively, it is an interesting subject. These personages are not reflections of herself. As she told  Blake Morrison in 1994 : Well, I am a spinster. I make no apologies for that. But I'm neither unhappy nor lonely. I am interested in people who live on their own, people who get left behind, who drop through the net, but who survive. They seem to me qui...

What will be Anita Brookner's future literary existence? It seems unlikely either that she'll sink without trace like the once-lauded Angus Wilson, or that she'll benefit from a series of posthumous publications, as in the cases of Barbara Pym and W. G. Sebald. Authors usually experience a dip in the period after their deaths. Kingsley Amis was all but out of print for a while, before being reissued with new covers that recast him as a writer not of the present but of some vaguely 'classic' or vintage yesteryear. The same may already have happened with Brookner.  As I've noted previously,  the new Penguin covers depict Fifties and Sixties scenes, even for novels plainly set in more recent times. Jane Austen didn't become established until the mid-Victorian era. Trollope went into decline after his death, only to go through a renaissance in World War II, when his tales of a gentler world were newly attractive. And Sir Walter Scott, in his day one of the...

I grew cold and sick reading this remarkable narrative, which embodies a sense of displacement so radical that it would seem to preclude a safe return to everyday existence. This is not vulgar Holocaust literature, still less a witness statement: this is dislocation of a kind most of us are privileged not to know. Spectator, review of Sebald's Austerlitz, 2001 Cold and sick ... displacement ... dislocation . High praise indeed, from Brookner. Time and again in her reviews, especially in the later ones, she commends novels for the unease they induce in the reader. Followers of this blog will know I'm of the opinion that in her writings on other writers Brookner is really writing about herself. I'm a few chapters into a re-read of The Bay of Angels at the moment, and already my heart is in my mouth. In no way is it a cosy or comforting read. The critic John Bayley was of the opinion that even the gloomiest art could be comforting, 'by the paradox implicit i...

...these were the virtuous prerequisites for vindication of some sort, for a triumph which would confound the sceptics...  ...approaching some beneficent outcome which would make even my father's death assume acceptable proportions.  ...I resigned myself to a lesson in reality which would be instructive but largely unwelcome. The Bay of Angels , Ch. 1 The grammatical difference between that and which is subtle, and often inconsistently observed, even by the best writers. Kingsley Amis, one of the best, also a pedant, defined the distinction well in his grammar book The King's English (Harper Collins, 1997), adding that plenty of good writers have got it wrong from time to time while many bad ones have got it right. That Brookner's so Augustan prose isn't after all without its imperfections is one of the many adorable things about her. Jane Austen is another example of a flawed stylist - employing, for example, superlatives when comparing only two items, and ...

In my freshman prize copy of A Dictionary of Stylistics (Longman, 1991), by one of my old teachers, Katie Wales, I find the historic present defined as the 'special use of the present tense in oral or written, anecdotal or literary narrative, where the past tense might be expected, the shift creating a more dramatic or immediate effect'. Professor Wales cites the use of the form in jokes, in newspaper headlines, in Pope's Iliad,  and in Anita Brookner's Family and Friends . The form has continued its popularity with literary novelists. Consider Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell novels. There was a  minor media spat  a few years back, regarding the use of the historic present in BBC history programmes: 'It gives a bogus, an entirely bogus, sense of immediacy,' said John Humphrys. Brookner's deployment of the historic present in Family and Friends evolves out of the authorial voice's examination of a set of old photographs. In Brookner's han...

Outside the line of duty I reread Henry James's Portrait of a Lady , and once again found it matchless, a grave description of one of life's great traumas, the passage from innocence to experience. Spectator , 17 November 2001 Brookner's own characters are rarely depicted in a condition of innocence. We might watch them experience a moment of revelation, a moment of horror; the ending of Undue Influence comes to mind. But were they innocent before? No, more often than not they were beady and watchful, already (at however young an age) denizens of a fallen world. Family and Friends , in the character of Mimi, is an exception. We see Mimi sitting hopefully in a Paris hotel, waiting for Frank, who will not come. We witness what seems like a genuine loss of innocence, something that colours Mimi's whole life. Nothing afterwards is ever glad confident morning again. ...since that morning when, dry-mouthed and dry-eyed, she got up and dressed herself and lef...

George Eliot is disturbed and embarrassed by 'The Lifted Veil'. In a letter to John Blackwood, she describes it as 'a slight story of an outr é kind - not a jeu d'esprit but a jeu de mélancolie '. And Eliot's struggle for control over the material of 'The Lifted Veil' manifests itself both within the tale in the narrator's repeated apologies for going on at such length, and externally when Eliot returns, fourteen years later, to preface the tale with a new epigraph which resolves some of its more disturbing ambiguities. Yet the experience proves cathartic, allowing Eliot to move on to the masterpiece of Middlemarch . John Lyon, Introduction to the Penguin edition of The Sacred Fount by Henry James  Shusha Guppy: Do you ever rewrite what you have written? Brookner: Never. It is always the first draft. I may alter the last chapter; I may lengthen it. Only because I get very tired at the end of a book and tend to rush and go too quickly, so ...

In Strangers it is the tentative, introspective Sturgis who is confronted with the impulsive, carefree and monstrously self-obsessed Vicky Gardner, whose only interest in him is in what he can provide for her.  The person who thinks seriously about life, Brookner's books suggest, who proceeds cautiously and conscientiously, will be punished for their virtue, end up alone and dissatisfied, while the person who takes a wholly unreflecting and rather selfish view of life pays no price for it.  'But haven't you noticed that?'  She gives an amused smile. 'Think of Tony Blair. Unrealistic. Selfish. Happy as a clam!'  Didn't Plato say the unexamined life is not worth living?  She gives the faintest smile. 'Plato could be wrong too. I think the unexamined life is much better. Much more comfortable.' So you wish you had been…  'Blithe…' It rolls off her tongue, wrapped in longing. A lovely word, I say.  'It's an old-fashioned word. You do...

However often I watch it, I'm always surprised. A film of an Anita Brookner novel seems as outlandish as an adaptation of, say, late James. But The Golden Bowl and, more skilfully, The Wings of the Dove have been successfully translated to the screen in recent decades. Their plots, though, underneath the verbiage, are very simple, even sensational. Hotel du Lac , similarly, is one of Brookner's more structured, plotted works. Rights to the novel were bought before its Booker success. Initially Anita Brookner had been approached to write an original screenplay, but she said she wouldn't know how to. Instead she offered the soon-to-be published  Hotel du Lac . (This is revealed in the 2002 commentary that accompanies the DVD of the 1986 TV film. The commentary is a dull, low-powered affair. No Brookner, of course.) Anna Massey plays Edith. I've often found Massey a distractingly distinctive actor. Like Judi Dench she manages somehow, in any role, alwa...

Anita was a neighbour of mine in Chelsea, and several residents in the square were very sorry to hear of her death. We tried to be courteous to her when we met her, but she was always alone, never with a single person in the decades she lived here. It seemed a shame, for such an intelligent woman. She was always very polite, but it was only a brief sentence to any of us that knew her, and met her when she was out walking. I am glad to know that she died in her sleep, but the truth was that she was not given enough care in hospital, due to nurses being short staffed, and she was not got out of bed and given rehabilitation. This was following a serious fire a few weeks ago, due to her smoking, from which she was rescued. We will all miss her, as she was a resident for so many years in the square.  The above was an anonymous reader's comment appended to  A. N. Wilson's Mail Online obituary article * from March last year. I have mentioned both before. Previously I didn't q...

Interviewer: So far all your novels have been the same length, around two hundred pages, with the same group of characters and more or less the same circumstances producing the same results. (Although  Family and Friends  has a bigger cast of characters.) Are you not afraid of being accused of writing to a formula, even though of your own creation? Brookner: I have been so accused! But the latest book,  The Misalliance , is much longer and has a broader canvas. It is quite different from the others... Paris Review  interview, 1987 We have spoken of Richardson's Clarissa , which comes in at around a million words. We have mentioned Dickens and Trollope, some of whose novels are more than three hundred thousand words long. Such vastness suits them. Shorter novels such as Great Expectations can seem too pacy, even rather rushed. A teacher from my university years,  Alison Light , in her studies of Interwar fiction, has talked of shell-shocked readers a...

He paused only to collect [his mother's] library books, sober tales of love and loyalty that reflected the moods of women as he wished to consider them. He often read her books himself, was acquainted with her tastes, which, half-smiling, he acknowledged to be his own. Lewis Percy , Ch. 3 He took out an Elizabeth Bowen and a Margaret Kennedy. He found himself drawn to the books his mother had loved, as if in reading them he could get in touch with her in a way of which she would have approved ... He whiled away several evenings with what he thought of as his mother's type of book, and for a time he was soothed and charmed, although the moment at which he was forced to emerge from these tender fictional worlds was always harsh and painful. Ibid ., Ch. 4 Lewis evidently sees Elizabeth Bowen as a safe, genteel 'lady novelist'. Bowen is unBrooknerian, for sure: her plots are wild and surprising; her language is unconventional and often quite odd, though her synt...

'Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.' Brooknerians shrink from the night. Many a time they ask themselves, at some ridiculously early hour, whether they might decently go to bed. The night represents not so much licentiousness as otherness: an altered state. But licence is also in play. 'More, more,' says Maria in the climactic restaurant scene of Look at Me . 'More, darling. I want you to be good and strong tonight.' It is the point at which the scales fall from Frances Hinton's eyes. She is alone again, was in fact always alone. Her delusion at an end, she must undergo some kind of punishment, and this takes the form of a nighttime walk through London. 'And then I was alone, in that emptying street, with the night's blackness to hide me.' Crossing the park, she is 'unprepared for the darkness and the silence' and 'surrounded by vacancy'. 'The park at night was empty of comfort, a place for outlaws': we...

I was more than happy with my modest position in the library, which he seemed to think rebounded to his disadvantage. 'At the Hairdresser's', Ch. 2 'At the Hairdresser's' is not the only e-text that hasn't been sufficiently proofread. One might expect the odd typo in, say, a free-of-charge public-domain e-book. But not in something from Penguin. I know I need not point out the howler in the quotation above. I am fairly certain the sentence is not as Anita Brookner wrote it.

...Henry had cultivated a middle-aged persona as early in his life as he plausibly could. David Lodge, Author, Author *, Part 2, Ch. 1 Anita Brookner is 46. She was 46 when, half a century ago, I first heard her lecture at the Courtauld Institute, eloquently and meticulously, on Greuze, slipping so easily into French that she convinced her students that they, too, had something of her fluency. In 1980, when mischievous gossip columnists were prompted to discuss her age, she put them down with a peremptory epistle to The Times — ‘I am 46,’ she wrote, ‘and have been for some years.’ She was quite certainly still 46 a month or two ago, lunching with equally young friends in Bibendum’s oyster bar.  Her dust jackets evade this simple fact; they tell us only that she won the Booker Prize in 1984, that her tally of novels is every number up to 22, and that she taught at the Courtauld Institute until 1988 — this last a neat trick, avoiding the terminus post quem that might ...

...we have it on record that in order to get himself into the appropriate mood of tragic solemnity, [Jacques-Louis] David was obliged to read a few refreshing chapters of Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe ... 'Diderot', The Genius of the Future Clarissa - the book that e-readers were made for. I read it one year - it took me most of the year - and it is a wild read. Clarissa and Lovelace are two sides of a coin, and both as mad as one another. But Samuel Richardson, in pioneering the psychological novel as opposed to the merely comic, is the literary ancestor of Henry James and therefore of Anita Brookner. The full enquiry, the full investigation - not that any will ever probably be fuller than Richardson's.

One comes back to nineteenth-century novels again and again, largely because of the sheer beauty of the reasoning: happiness at last, achieved through the exercise of faithfulness and right thinking. That this was still possible if one were a lesser, even a fallen being, I doubted; nevertheless it continued to make a forceful impression. And there was always a marriage, seen as the right true end, and this I did not doubt. The fragmentation of present-day society had meant a loss of hope, so that those who harboured traditional leanings were largely disappointed. The Rules of Engagement , Ch. 15 Followers of this blog will recall that I recently read Villette . I had forgotten that Elizabeth in The Rules of Engagement does the same. Elizabeth is one of Brookner's most disenchanted, disaffected heroines, bearing comparison with Rachel in A Friend from England . Yet Elizabeth balks at Lucy Snowe, whose isolation and periods of debility she might have sympathised with, and which...

Brooknerianism offers scope for Brookner-themed tourism. In my time I've been, of course, many times to Paris; and the South of France ( Family and Friends , A Private View , The Bay of Angels ); and Vevey ( Hotel du Lac - which, some time this year, I've half a mind to stay in); and even a strange border town called Vif ( Altered States ), which I once passed through quite by chance. The University of Texas at Austin doesn't immediately, however, connote. Yet this is where  a cache of Brookner's papers  is stored, purchased in 1995 (no doubt for a not inconsiderable sum). The papers of Anita Brookner consist of ten notebooks containing untitled drafts of her novels and reviews. The notebooks are undated but appear to date from about 1986 to 1994. As a novelist, Brookner writes a first draft by hand, with little revision, and then types a subsequent draft. Handwritten drafts of her novels  A Closed Eye  (1991),  A Family Romance  (1993),  Fra...

Had you been the reviews editor of the Spectator in Anita Brookner's heyday, what would you have sent her to read? Some selectiveness would have been required. She tended to get American and British literary fiction, books about writers, anything bleak, and anything French. Tomber sept fois, se relever huit , by Philippe Labro (as far as I can work out, never translated into English) was  reviewed by Brookner  in 2003. It was a good match. We don't know whether Brookner ever suffered a crack-up of the kind described in the book and summarised in her review; she never, after all, 'revealed all'; though she admitted to periods of 'inwardness' (see, for instance, her  1994 Independent interview ). But what interests me about the piece are the many Brooknerian connections. We have, for example, the title, 'A season in hell', recalling  Rimbaud . We find also a favourite quote from D. H. Lawrence: 'Look! We have come through!', which, I think, c...

By nature a shy and reserved figure, Brookner had a great flair for self-analysis. She also understood her students and their motivations with keen psychological insight – she encouraged the viewer to articulate his own feelings, as well as a vision based on his own character. The work of a particular artist, say, David, had to be analyzed within the larger framework of historical circumstances; yet subjectivity could not be avoided. In the case of David, she saw the revolutionary hope of creating a world of higher morality and virtue dashed as the artist anticipated the Romantic ideal by relinquishing intellectual control. Most crucially, Brookner believed that art had to be emotionally alive, and she advocated Baudelaire’s ‘impeccable naïveté,’ which she termed the ‘ability to see the world always afresh, either in its tragedy or in its hope.’   Her advice was invaluable. Nearly every sentence she uttered is engraved in my memory. My fellow student Cornelia Grassi remembers the ...

Kenyon: Why is it that you didn't begin writing till middle age, like Edith Wharton? Had you been writing in secret? Brookner: No, there were no secret notebooks, not a scrap, not a sentence. Olga Kenyon,  Women Writers Talk , 1989 What, then, is one to make of the following startling piece, published along with the obituaries last year? Piles of exercise books? In bed? In French? Anthony Blunt liked to invent new ‘special subjects’ for third-year undergraduates. One of them was ‘19th-century art criticism in England and France’. Anita Brookner taught our students about Baudelaire while I was deputed to introduce them to Ruskin and Pater. This was in 1966.  Thus we formed an unlikely friendship. Anita would never enter a pub, but we sometimes had a drink in a little cafe opposite the Archives Nationales in Paris, and she liked lunching in the restaurant at Fenwick’s in Bond Street. A quarter of a trout would fill her.  She was smartly dressed, but in tho...

In a  recent post  I discussed Brookner, Brooknerians, and smoking. I am immensely grateful to Bookglutton (@bookglutton1) on Twitter for alerting me (@brooknerian) to the following smokers. In Brief Lives there's Vinnie, Fay's rakish mother-in-law: Her daily routine was to get up at about ten-thirty, smoke the first cigarette of the day, take a bath and dress, and then apply the heavy make-up, without which she looked like a seamed and battered twelve-year-old. (Ch. 3) And in A Misalliance , we find Sally Beamish, a true Brookner monster, a careless insider, careless as the gods of antiquity: As far as Blanche could see, Sally spent those days ... simply lying on her chaise-longue , smoking, and waiting for someone to turn up. (Ch. 5) But what of Blanche, the ostensible Brooknerian, but morally vulnerable, flirting with other lives, and a toper to boot? Yes, we find her taking a drag too. I can find one reference, in Chapter 11; there may be more.

Her exquisite manners disarm and put visitors at ease, and at the same time secure a reasonable distance. She speaks in a deep, gentle voice with fluency and deliberation in equal measure, and sometimes in 'short, military sentences,' as she once said of Stendhal. Occasionally she smokes a very slim cigarette. Shusha Guppy's introduction to the 1987 Paris Review  interview Her reasonableness is disarming: When I said that I was worried about her smoking, she replied 'So am I' and lit another one, thus acknowledging my concern while indicating that it was none of my business. Shusha Guppy, 'The Secret Sharer',  World and I , July 1998 '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. Katie Law, Evening Standard: see an  earlier Brooknerian post. Lunch never took longer than 75 minutes; she usually ordered fish...

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. Lucy Hughes-Hallett on Falling Slowly, Sunday Times (1998) Lucy Hughes-Hallett, the Brooknerian salutes you.

On further reflection she decided that she might be happier in an hotel. A Start in Life , Ch. 3 Brooknerians, or Brookner at any rate, always write, always say, ' an hotel', never ' a '. It is a small, a very small, even a narcissistic difference. She would have said o- tel , never ho -tel. I recommend Brooknerians look out and listen out for this distinction, and think of Brookner, and feel rewarded.

...he did not in fact write much until the most active part of his life was over, and this of course is what sets him apart as a writer: he has the authority of a man whose preoccupations are not exclusively literary and who is informed at all times by memories of the immense experiences behind him. 'Stendhal', essay in The Genius of the Future (1971) Brookner's description of Stendhal, written some years before she herself became a novelist, might easily be applied prophetically to herself. In considering this point, I decided to go back as it were to the beginning, to A Start in Life (1981), which I hadn't read for about twenty years. I'd always thought of the early novels as a little ungainly, even as juvenilia. This was plainly ridiculous. A Start in Life, though its tone is lighter and wittier than later works, is an assured and in no way immature performance. It is perhaps, to a degree, autobiographical, as first efforts are often reputed ...

Answers to  the  recent quiz : A Private View , Ch. 2, 'Home is so Sad' Stendhal: essay in The Genius of the Future Not Lake Geneva but Lake Lucerne Robert Browning, 'The Lost Leader' A Closed Eye Maresfield Gardens Walking, reading Austin in  Visitors , Ch. 15 Dürer's Melencolia I  A teaspoon of honey And a bonus (which I shan't be dignifying with an answer): Which Brookner novel more or less shares a title with an Abba album?

Inspired by that round on  University Challenge, some more Brookner questions: In which Brookner novel is there a reference to a poem by Philip Larkin? To whom was Brookner referring when she wrote: 'he did not in fact write much until the most active part of his life was over, and this of course is what sets him apart as a writer'? The BBC adaptation of  Hotel du Lac  was filmed on the banks of which Swiss lake? Which English poet is quoted at the start of Chapter 8 of Altered States ? Esquives ('Dodges') is the French title of which Brookner novel? Dolly in A Family Romance lives in which Freudian location? What did Brookner list as her recreations in Who's Who ? Which Brookner character is imagined 'low in spirits, undermined as if by some Jamesian vastation'? What connects Brookner’s Look at Me,  Günter Grass’s From the Diary of a Snail and W. G. Sebald’s essay ‘Constructs of Mourning’, published in Campo Santo ? What did Anita Brookner put ...

A rare mention of Brookner in a populist format. OK, semi-populist. In the 20 December edition of University Challenge ( available  on the BBC i-player for a while) there were three Brookner questions: Brookner's first published novel A Start in Life tells the story of Ruth Weiss [spelt 'Vice' on the subtitles!], an authority on which French author, best known for The Human Comedy ? In 1967 Brookner became the first woman to hold which professorship of fine art at Cambridge? It was endowed by the founder of the school of art at University College, London. Brookner won the Booker Prize in 1984 for which novel set near Lake Geneva? The contestants, celebrity alumni rather current students, got 1) and 3) correct, but answered 'Turner' to 2). There was a little grimacing when the topic was introduced, but otherwise the tone was respectful - respectful in a way that probably wouldn't have been the case some years ago.

Delacroix, Fantasia Arabe , Staedel Museum, Frankfurt The journey to Morocco facilitated both renewal and greater emancipation from the standards still prevalent in the studios and in the Salon [...] The brilliant sunlight of the landscape [...] the outdoor scenes have a silvery-yellow, almost Veronese light...  'Delacroix: Romantic Classicist',  Romanticism and Its Discontents Later in the same essay, written before The Next Big Thing , Brookner considers Jacob and the Angel : That other detail, of the caravan of animals and servants being sent off to Esau, represents Delacroix's last Moorish fantasy. See also the following earlier posts:  Julius and the Angel  and  A Private View .

...he trusted that hints would be picked up by members of that band of initiates, the Happy Few, to whom he dedicated La Chartreuse de Parme [...] Just who these people are has never been properly established [...] The true meaning would seem to lie half-way between kindred spirits and ' âmes d’élite ', and the qualification for membership six months of unrequited love and the ability to deal with it in the manner demonstrated in De l'Amour . Many readers of Stendhal confess themselves to be outside the charmed circle. Fortunately those who feel called to examine such a life are already inside it. Soundings , review of Stendhal biography The members of the exclusive circle are, here, Stendhalians. But they might be Brooknerians. Writers, Brookner in particular, when writing of other writers, really only write about themselves.

Brookner has frequently been misread as a soft option, a wistful English lady writing short, tender, sorrowful novels a la Rosamond Lehmann, on broken hearts and lost loves. This is quite wrong. She is an obsessive, clinical, severely disenchanted writer. Hermione Lee, review  of A Friend from England , LA Times , 1988 I should like to focus today on Rosamond Lehmann, the dedicatee of Hotel du Lac . In Selina Hastings's 2002 biography of Lehmann, we learn that one of the most pleasurable consequences of Rosamond's late-flowering fame in the 1980s, following the inauguration of the Virago publishing house, was the personal friendships she formed as a result: with Carmen Callil 'whose generous and ebullient nature endeared her to Rosamond' and Anita Brookner, 'whose work Rosamond unreservedly admired - "my favourite novelist" - and of whom she became extremely fond'. Brookner, described by Hastings as 'elegant, fastidious, unusually perceptive...