The Brooknerian

Is A Friend from England (1987) a homophobic novel? I have heard it so described. I'm hesitant about judging novels of the past by present standards and mores; nevertheless the question requires some consideration. The truth about Michael Sandberg's sexuality is hinted at through the early part of the novel, and then rather stagily revealed at the end of chapter 6, when, in a 'peculiar' male-dominated wine bar ominously called the Titanic, the narrator sees him wearing blue eyeshadow and glossy lipstick. In the preceding pages there are indications, all of them a little heavy-handed: he is 'infantile ... not to be taken entirely seriously, happiest and most himself in places of light entertainment'; he is seen laughing 'uproariously'; he is pictured in his 'whining pathetic' boyhood. It is Oscar Livingstone, Michael's father-in-law, who most clearly betrays attitudes that are 'of their time'. Of a minor character, he remarks, ...

This blog's current strapline - 'out of sheer dandyism' - comes from A Misalliance, ch. 3. In the following year's Brookner, A Friend from England , we find another striking phrase: I was no longer the dandy of my imaginings, invulnerable, amused, passing lightly through life, with my feelings well protected. (Ch. 6)

But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. Virginia Woolf, 'On Being Ill' (1926 essay, reprinted in 1930 in the edition below) Woolf's celebrated essay asks why illness hasn't taken its place with love, battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. She considers how common illness is, how 'tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed': in short she waxes lyrical. She references Shakespeare, De Quincey, Keats, Proust, all in the opening paragraph, conceding perhaps that Proust and De Quincey did have things to say on the matter. But literature, she tells us, 'does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent'. Interesti...

Rachel, an 'extremely emancipated young woman', as Brookner told the  Paris Review  - and a young woman 'whom they will not be able to think is me!' - seems at first glance an experiment with a new, unfamiliar and possibly unsympathetic character. She's emotionally cold, sexually liberated, ruthless in her 'sensible arrangements', and is spoken of as a feminist. At the time many critics saw Rachel as unBrooknerian, at any rate 'an extreme case in the Brookner hospital', according to Hermione Lee . But knowing the complete oeuvre, we may think differently now. Rachel is atypical only if you don't know your Brookner, if you credit too far Brookner's often disingenuous, stagy pronouncements in the various interviews, and if you think Brookner's some kind of super-sophisticated Barbara Pym. In fact there's nothing unusual about the narrator of A Friend from England . She's Zoe, she's Emma, she's George Bland. In chapter 5, f...

I had no doubt that in the ballrooms of his youth the Colonel had been noted for his charm and his way with women. It was a style which he had carefully taught his son, who had never, as far as I could remember, uttered a serious word. Badinage was obviously the favoured means of exchange in the Sandberg establishment. A Friend from England , ch. 5 This is a serious condemnation. Brookner hates the Sandbergs, with their plausibility, their polished manners, their uncertain income, their slippery identity, their sibilant speech: most of all she hates them for their jokiness. One thinks of Paul Sturgis in Strangers , longing for the sort of proper conversation he loved in the books of his youth: Werther , Adolphe ( Strangers , ch. 7), but having to make do with 'opacity', 'social niceness'. Rachel in A Friend from England is a different proposition: she long ago decided to live her life on the surface ( A Friend from England , ch. 5). But discussion of the 'inn...

Who does not enjoy a set piece, by which I guess I mean an extended scene depicting a social occasion? Brookner goes in for them infrequently, but usually memorably. Disastrous meals are a feature: one thinks of Look at Me 's climactic meal, or the dinner party in Fraud . Such scenes, with their food, their clothes, their vulgar demotic dialogue, can unbalance a novel as finely woven as an Anita Brookner. In A Friend from England , for example in the engagement party and wedding scenes in chapter 3, Brookner seeks a middle way: dense paragraphs, indirect speech, a painterly attention to detail and manner and impression. This is in keeping with the estranged, disillusioned mood of the narrator. Rachel has things in common with Anthony Powell's almost disembodied narrator in his Music of Time sequence. Powell also has a fondness for a set piece, but his are on an epic scale. I remember a scene in one of the early novels, A Buyer's Market or The Acceptance World,  that goe...

And Dorrie thought of Heather as not only a loved child but as someone who might cause Oscar to worry. They saw each other exclusively in personal terms. A Friend from England , ch. 1 [Ralph Touchett] was so charming that her sense of his being ill had hitherto had a sort of comfort in it; the state of his health had seemed not a limitation, but a kind of intellectual advantage; it absolved him from all professional and official emotions and left him the luxury of being exclusively personal. James, The Portrait of a Lady , ch. 33

I felt as if I were in the presence of a distinct culture, rather like the one that had prevailed in the Russian novels I so enjoyed, in which endless days are spent sitting on terraces ... I had the same sensation of time being endlessly capacious, and memory and melancholy being equally tyrannical... A Friend from England , ch. 1 Was there ever a finer description not so much of reading a great Russian novel as of reading an Anita Brookner? That sense of time's elasticity. Brookner's time-schemes, as we have seen, are often difficult to follow, and this may be deliberate. We cast off, and the marker buoys are few and far between, and soon we're in water that's very deep indeed. The passage above goes on to quote from what Brookner, possibly with her tongue in her cheek, said was  her favourite novel , Goncharov's Oblomov : What meads, what kvasses were drunk, what pies were baked at Oblomovka! The dedicated Brooknerian will recognise this also from the ...

regret > verb ( regretted , regretting ) [ with obj. ] feel sad, repentant, or disappointed over (something that has happened or been done, especially a loss or missed opportunity): she immediately regretted her words ¦  [ with clause ] I always regretted that I never trained.   [...]  archaic : feel sorrow for the loss or absence of (something pleasant): my home, when shall I cease to regret you! The New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1998 I've now and then noticed this about Brookner: her odd use of the verb to regret . I find it in Chapter 1 of A Friend from England (1987): ...Oscar sometimes regretted his little office and his box files... or this similar line from Chapter 3 of Strangers (2009): He regretted ... the structure of the working day. As you might imagine, I'm all in favour of  Brooknerese , but this is perhaps a step too far, especially as Brookner often and more frequently uses the more common meaning of regret . There are twenty-...

Rereading dredges up memories. Rereading Chapter 1 of A Friend from England , I was a student again and it was a sleepy afternoon in a lecture hall in the early 1990s. I attended a traditional university. English Literature meant Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth. The canon crept tentatively into the twentieth century and finished in about 1950. There was a seminar called Contemporaneities, taking in Derrida, Lacan, et al , but it was after hours and considered rather daring. I went several times, and left baffled. But I remember a linguistics course I took, and one amazing session when our lecturer carried out a close reading of a Brookner passage. It was the paragraph in Chapter 1 of A Friend from England that runs from 'The house - a substantial but essentially modest suburban villa' to 'For she was daintily houseproud'. The lecturer (who is, I think, now a presenter on BBC Radio 4) wanted to show how Brookner communicated her sophisticated horror at the ...

And so I find myself rereading one of the  'lost' Brookners , long out of print in Britain, unavailable as an e-book. My copy is a Flamingo from the early 90s. It's all but falling apart: reading it I get a sense of its vulnerability. It's second-hand; originally I probably read a library copy. I start to wonder about the book's previous owner, whose name is written inside. I'm not keen on the cover image. Altogether too benevolent. I much prefer the original hardback, which showed Giorgione's Tempest .

They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar. Dickens, Little Dorrit Then she turned resolutely, and followed the path which Anna had taken, out into the bright, dark, dangerous and infinitely welcoming street. Fraud For reasons that don't need to be gone into, I found myself this afternoon reading aloud the conclusion to Little Dorrit , and memories returned of the closing lines of Brookner's Fraud . Art may not love us and may not console us, but it certainly enriches our lives.

I have  spoken before  about Brookner's covers, the many disappointments and misfires. Recently, when the cover for the forthcoming Penguin Essentials edition of A Start in Life was unveiled, there was consternation in some quarters. A Penguin Essentials publication has a certain cachet. Next stop Penguin Classics, one might have thought. An opportunity missed Studying Corot's Between Lake Geneva and the Alps for a recent post made me think of the cover of the UK hardback edition of A Closed Eye , which always seemed to me to get it right. It showed part of John Inchbold's View above Montreux , 1880, in the V&A. Not an outlandish choice, perhaps, but well judged. The image captures, I think, in its deadness, its pallor, some of the horrified sense of defeat Harriet feels in her Swiss exile.

We had some fun a little while back with Mme Récamier - reclining on her couch, turning to the viewer, and with that lamp. Now let us reconsider Mme Moitessier 's equally famous pose:

'About the Author' jacket pieces have always fascinated me, probably because I grew up in a time of information scarcity, i.e. before the Internet. I've listed Brookner's 'About the Author' texts  in a previous post : what I noted was the way the information grew sparser as the decades went by. In early versions we were given her academic credentials; mid-period pieces were both detailed and ludic ('She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988, when she abandoned her title of Reader in the History of Art at the University of London for the anonymity of a small flat in Chelsea and the cultivation of certain fictional characters who may one day appear in future novels.'), whereas the biographies accompanying her last novels were terse, reluctant, almost brusque. Which brings me to 'At the Hairdresser's' (2011). A new form - an e-book, a novella - and so, perhaps, a new start. This 'About the Auth...

Corot, Between Lake Geneva and the Alps , 1825 Private Collection Corot, View of Rome from Monte Pincio , 1826 Minnesota Corot, The Colosseum, seen through the Arcades of the Basilica of Constantine , 1825 Musée du Louvre A typical, that is to say an early, Corot will always present the spectator with less than the eye actually encompasses ... For Corot the mind is at the service of the eye, to modulate, to control, to unify and to present ... A strange dreamy, creamy placidity will be achieved, as if the site were viewed under an immobile and cloudless sky on an uneventful afternoon ... The result will be an image of extraordinary clarity and peace, strong enough to becalm the spectator into thinking that he too might find so tranquil a scene. He will not, for it does not exist in nature. 'The Eye of Innocence', 1980 TLS essay in Soundings In Corot, Brookner identifies an essentially unBrooknerian artist, one whose youthful work is of greater int...

For W. G. Sebald, in Vertigo * (English translation, 1999), the life of Stendhal offers insights into 'the various difficulties entailed in the act of recollection'. Visiting the scene of the Battle of Marengo, Stendhal, or Beyle as Sebald correctly but playfully insists on calling him throughout, experiences a 'vertiginous sense of confusion' as he acknowledges the gulf between his fantasy and the stark reality before him. Thus Stendhal is put to work for Sebald; Stendhal becomes a Sebaldian. Stendhal has other functions for Anita Brookner. In Soundings (1997), in a review of a Stendhal biography, Brookner emphasises his contributions to Romanticism, his commitment to the 'supreme emotional adventure'. In Strangers (2009)   he is invoked several times. Stendhal, Sturgis's one-time favourite author, collapsed in the street and was taken to a cousin's house, where he died. 'That was the way to go, the relative, whether liked or disliked, put in char...

Brookner often takes us to Paris, but not so often to the Louvre. In late, late Brookner, in Strangers (2009), Sturgis gives the Louvre a miss, putting it 'definitively behind him', preferring an 'improvised existence' for which no one will take him to task (Ch. 25). In gentler, more expansive mid-period Brookner, in Fraud (1992), Anna Durrant dutifully puts in time at the museum. But it is not the 'great discordant machines of the Romantics' that claim her attention but the portraits of Ingres, 'calm, replete, satisfied with their immensely enviable situation in this world, and careless of the world to come' (Ch. 12). Anna remembers Baudelaire's remark that he found it hard to breathe when faced with an Ingres portrait: he felt as though the oxygen had been sucked out of the atmosphere. This is evidently a favoured description, which Brookner returns to in her essays on Ingres in Soundings (1997) and Romanticism and Its Discontents (2000). Ingr...

I can remember being admonished at uni for praising Sidney's sincerity in Astrophil and Stella . 'Sincerity is undemonstrable,' intoned my professor. One can go too far in the other direction - make authors too knowing, too self-conscious. Hilary Mantel  in her otherwise brilliant review of Strangers   fashions for us a cynical, detached Brookner, a Brookner who, with an 'authorial snigger', coolly observes the misfortunes of her characters: We hear the barely suppressed sound of the author laughing up her sleeve ... In this book as elsewhere, she subverts her characters ruthlessly and exposes them to humiliation, not only in the eyes of other characters but the eyes of her reader. Mantel speaks of Brookner's 'subtle, uncomfortable high comedy'. Comedy? That old thing again . As for sincerity, as for authorial detachment, Brookner's own ambivalent feelings towards her characters (or 'personages', as she calls them), expressed in th...

Indirection: a Brooknerian word: One had simply to exist, in a state of dreamy indirection, for the plot to work itself out. The Bay of Angels , Ch. 1 And in a review of William Trevor's stories , she praises their Chekhovian plotlessness, discretion, indirection. She might, of course, be speaking of her own fiction, but for the moment I want to think about reading. Having recently reread Brookner's twenty-first century novels, I find myself like Elizabeth Warner in 'At the Hairdresser's' at a loose end with 'nothing to read'. Some re-readers proceed chronologically; others follow leads. I might be tempted, for example, inspired by the Venetian scenes in Strangers , to read A Friend from England next - alongside The Wings of the Dove , say. I don't know. Perhaps I shouldn't be so ordered; perhaps I should, like Polonius, by indirections find directions out.

I am now alone, which takes a bit of getting used to; one has to nerve oneself every day. It really is existential living. Haffenden interview, Methuen 1985 Once the morning had been got through my failure of nerve would be without witnesses... 'At the Hairdresser's' (2011), Ch. 5

'I'll give him a call. You'll be quite safe with him.' This was met with some cheerful sniggering, which I ignored... 'At the Hairdresser's', Ch. 4 'Chris is taking you home?' asked Sally, at reception. 'No, not today.' 'Was he okay? Only he can be a bit...' Ibid ., Ch. 8 Fissures open up all over the place in this most troubling of texts. Are the girls in the salon in league with Chris? They certainly recommend the arrangement. What do they know? There are other unfathomables, not least Chris's ambiguous sexuality, resonant in the first of the quotes above. If 'At the Hairdresser's' had evolved into a novel, as I suspect had been the intention, Brookner would probably have explored these matters more fully. But the work's very spareness presents us with a degree of potential not found in her other fiction.

Twice in 'At the Hairdresser's' Elizabeth complains that she has nothing to read. She reads only the classics now, and is presently engaged with Thomas Mann. But he is found wanting. To have nothing to read may seem a minor grumble, but for Elizabeth the situation is grave. Her routines are important to her: 'any break ... held a superstitious indication of ultimate change' (Ch. 4). Having nothing to read means she has no way of filling her days. This leaves her perilously open to offers. For reading, read writing. There are some writers for whom writing is a compulsion: it is their drink, their drugs. Trollope was one, starting the next book notoriously soon on the heels of the previous. He continued writing right up to the wire, though he was in considerable distress. With 'At the Hairdresser's' Anita Brookner comes to an end. What was her life like when she had nothing to write?

Just why and how does 'At the Hairdresser's' generate in the reader such a sense of unease and alarm? Elizabeth Warner may be Brookner's most vulnerable protagonist - and it isn't just that she's physically dependent, but there's a moral vulnerability too, a disposability 'to make-believe affections' (Ch. 7), a dangerous openness to suggestions. She is, quite simply, only too happy to fall in with Chris's plans. All the while she has her suspicions, knows that what is being presented to her is very probably a performance, a fiction, knows that the nature of the relationship cannot bear too close a level of scrutiny. Indeed Brookner goes further, setting out in provocative terms the compromises being entered into: I was wasting money, I knew that, but his presence was agreeable, and it seemed a fair exchange. I knew perfectly well that I was paying for his company, as I had never in my life done before... (Ch. 6)  And I had nothing to read. Bu...

Old age is the great unwritten subject. Let me specify. Novels about old age, written by old people, are rare. Great writers of the past either didn't write about old age, or included old people as peripheral figures, or were young themselves when they wrote about the old, or wrote about 'old' people we wouldn't now consider as such. To take a few disparate examples: Trollope's 'old man' in An Old Man's Love is only fifty; Lear was written by a man in his forties; Vita Sackville-West wrote All Passion Spent * when she was thirty-eight. Authentic depictions of old age in present-day literature are increasing, but remain novelties. One thinks of Diana Athill's memoirs or Clive James's late poems. Then there is Anita Brookner. We had intimations in A Private View , Visitors and The Next Big Thing , but Strangers and, especially, 'At the Hairdresser's' are Brookner's plainest examples. The story of Elizabeth Warner, her fear and vu...

I accept the fact that we are all atomized and there is little we can do about it. 'At the Hairdresser's', Ch. 2 In late Brookner the modern world intrudes more and more. There are mobile phones, and, in The Rules of Engagement , a tentative reference to email. Yet Brookner wasn't really at all out of touch. Her reading, in particular, was varied and surprising. Frederic Raphael , for example, was surprised by and not a little sniffy about her championing of Michel Houellebecq’s works. Brookner belied her reputation, decrying the moral censorship Houellebecq was subject to, and presenting a worldliness her fans wouldn't have been taken aback by: He is, after all, in the grip of a major idea, with which he appears to have come to terms, namely that there are no penalties for indulging in the most extreme forms of sexual licence, that monogamous partnerships have passed into history, and that it is entirely natural to pursue sexual pleasure until such time as ...

I have been reading John Banville's The Untouchable , which was inspired by the life of Anthony Blunt. I was hopeful of finding in its pages a character based on Brookner. None is detectable. She herself  reviewed the novel , maintaining as ever an obliquity, not to say an opaqueness, in her references to her former boss. I have heard it said she was the only one of his colleagues who didn't realise he was gay. This was advanced as proof of her maidenly unworldliness. It was surely anything but - for was there ever more of a worldling than Anita Brookner? It was evidence, rather, either of an admirable discretion or of a respectful incuriosity. One would hope for more of her kind in this intrusive, over-sharing age.

He had been immersed in a reverie ... He had been back in the old house, although this time the house had a wider context, was grounded in the neighbourhood of his childhood ... a greengrocer, a chemist... Strangers (2009), Ch. 6 I go back in my mind to all the rooms I have slept in, remember in detail the streets of my earliest perambulations: that chemist on the corner... 'At the Hairdresser's' (2011), Ch. 2 These two final fictions share details and themes. This is true of other contiguous novels in the Brookner canon, but Strangers is separated by four years from its predecessor, an unprecedented gap; such isolation gives Strangers and 'At the Hairdresser's' a special affinity with one another.

OK, so no takers. The grand cash prize will have to roll over to another time. Percy (Lewis Percy; 'Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy'; Percy Grainger) Nice (Lawrence: 'The English Are So Nice') Providence (Milton) Benedict (Cumberbatch; Nicolson) Seagull(s) (Simon's house in  The Bay of Angels  is Les Mouettes.) Dolly Chiltern Look at Me Stendhal (See 'In Pursuit of Happiness',  Soundings ) Fanny (Mrs Assingham is a character in  The Golden Bowl. )

All gone now, all over, and himself the survivor. The Next Big Thing , Ch. 1 All gone now, myself the unlikely and unwilling survivor... 'At the Hairdresser's', Ch. 1 One comes across these echoes in Brookner. It is often the case with prolific writers. Is 'All gone now ... survivor' a quotation, or simply a phrase Brookner liked?

Anita Brookner is probably the last English novelist to write about servants. As late as Strangers (2009) we meet a comic caretaker ('Call me Arthur'), with his plans to retire to Essex and possible ambitions in the direction of underfloor heating. Such details carry all sorts of class-conscious freight. Essex, for the benefit of foreign followers of this blog, has a particular reputation in the popular British imagination, and as for underfloor heating... We're back in the territory of the Livingstones in A Friend from England , and all their pools-funded vulgarity. Arthur himself has several forebears, notably the Dickensian Hipwood in A Private View . Then there are all the female chars and retainers, with their comic ramblings and salty turns of phrase. 'Class and caste distinctions were the lingua franca of insult and comedy,' writes my old tutor Alison Light of Interwar mistress-servant relations, real and fictional, in Mrs Woolf and the Servants (Fig Tree ...

Unpicking a Brookner time-scheme can be a queasy business; the extreme case is Incidents in the Rue Laugier , in which the narrative purports to conclude some considerable time after the book's publication date. Some works, however, have distinct, controlled chronologies. Bland's trip to see an exhibition of Sickert's works allows us to date the action of  A Private View very precisely, as we have seen . That novel has much in common with Strangers (2009), and we can use a surprisingly similar means of dating its events. In Chapter 23 Sturgis and Sarah visit an exhibition dedicated to the Camden Town Group at Tate Britain,  a show that ran from February to May 2008.  It concentrated on the core of the Group - Gore, Gilman, Bevan, Ginner - with Sickert as a key player.

Brookner's critiques of other novelists always claim our attention. In the novels they're rather thin on the ground, in contrast to her extended references to the fine arts*. Proust, whom ( thanks to Julian Barnes ) we know Brookner read and reread avidly, is a case in point. There are mere scattered mentions of the writer in, for example, Strangers , and Proust's famous first line is quoted in Incidents in the Rue Laugier . These are, like Brookner's other literary references, conventional and less than illuminating. For illumination we must go to her critical writings. I hope one day someone will publish a collected edition of Brookner's reviews and essays. There is the online Spectator archive, but its search facility is far from satisfactory. One comes upon Brookner essays more by chance than design. I found this the other day, a review of a volume of Proust's letters. As ever in her non-fiction Brookner makes brilliant points, not least in the way she ...

Brookner surname; animal in a Hockney painting; Australian composer D. H. Lawrence deplored the English for being this; a biscuit; a favourite Brookner location Rhode Island location; Brookner title; 'I may assert eternal __________, / And justify the ways of God to men.' Sherlock ; Brookner's early mentor; sixteen popes Simon's Baie des Anges house; Chekhov play Brookner title; singer; character in The Body in the Library Herz's street; savage red-haired lord in Trollope; English hills Album by the Moments; novels by Brookner and Jennifer Egan 'France's least likely diplomat'; Sturgis's one-time favourite; collapsed on the pavement of the rue Neuve-des-Capucines Changed to Annie (Ring) in the film of The Age of Innocence ; what heroine of Look at Me doesn't like to be called; Mrs Assingham Answers soon

Let's put 'At the Hairdresser's' (2011) to one side for the moment, and consider Strangers (2009) as Brookner's final novel. She possibly didn't expect it to be her last, yet it has a conclusive, a summative, air. She revisits themes, references, locations, character-types. Paul Sturgis may be traced to George Bland in A Private View  (1994) most obviously, but he has antecedents in all those Brooknerians who find themselves flirting with other lives (the earliest example is possibly Blanche in  A Misalliance (1986)). On the other side there's Mrs Gardner, a fairly hateful figure - hateful in a way Katy Gibb never was. Katy Gibb ( A Private View ) I've always found rather fascinating (but I'm probably as morally susceptible as George Bland). Katy Gibb and George Bland are both tremendously 'there',  as John Bayley remarks , and Sturgis and Mrs Gardner somehow aren't as substantial. Strangers is a thinner, more exiguous novel: one can see ...

He saw that his acts of good will, towards both Helena and Mrs Gardner, had been interpreted as something of an insult, an act of charity which both had rejected with hauteur. He felt a renewed distaste for his own calculations. Strangers , Ch. 20 This links with an over-quoted remark of Brookner's, about real love being a pilgrimage, carried out without strategy. (It comes from either the Haffenden or the Kenyon interview, and crops up with dreary regularity on Twitter.)

She admits to having periodically suffered from depression. That might have made some people seek an analyst. But friends speak of Brookner's 'rich interior life'. And she doesn't find depression a thing to feel depressed by. 'Depression can be quite fruitful if it leads to thoughtfulness, inwardness. Certainly my parents' deaths, certainly disappointments in love have led to periods, yes, quite long periods of depression - but they haven't been entirely defeating, you see, they've been quite nourishing. Because you're very receptive when you're in that state: in fact, it's invaluable.' Independent interview, 1994 She had no inner life, it seemed. This to him was phenomenal, he to whom the inner life was all. Strangers  (2009), Ch. 16 Mrs Gardner, who, crucially, Sturgis does not fall in love with - this is no second Katy Gibb - is the woman in Strangers with, phenomenally, no inner life. Hers is a 'vagrant personality...

... I decided that I could only get by on style ... Look at Me , Ch. 10 He would go to Paris, if only to prove himself as good as his word. It was all a question of style. Strangers , Ch. 26 I cannot emphasise enough the complex pleasures of Strangers . I wonder what a reader new to Brookner would make of it. On almost every page there are echoes of earlier novels. As for the plot, what there is of it is stretched so thinly that Brookner must rely at times only on her formidable style. This is, of course, what we really want.

Quite obstinately, I prefer the stately dance of reason to any conclusion more rapidly arrived at, however persuasive the display ... And so difficult is this prejudice to shake off that I now look upon myself as one of those unfortunates who have lost their faith but are still unable to recant... TLS , 5 October 1984 Kitty Maule [in Providence ] says about Romanticism that in certain situations reason doesn't work, and that's the most desolating discovery of all. Haffenden interview, Novelists in Interview , 1985 If only he could fall in love again! Only in that climate of urgency could he make decisions ... He was left with reason, which, at his stage of life, would propel him in directions which were uncertain, and which he would have to negotiate alone. Strangers (2009), Ch. 15 Against his expectations the age of reason was proving something of a disappointment. Ibid ., Ch. 20 Reason and Romanticism: a key Brooknerian binary. That reason might have as many...

Strangers is not a funny book. There is a misjudged caretaker, Arthur, who seems to have stepped out of a 1950s comedy, but little else. There is, though, an exchange between Sturgis and his old girlfriend about loneliness. Sarah is affronted at being asked whether she's lonely - 'Are you lonely, indeed' - and Sturgis says, 'I sometimes wish that someone would ask me the same question. It would give me a chance to...' And of course Sarah knows him too well, and Brookner knows herself too well: 'That's why they don't ask you,' Sarah rejoins. 'It would set you off for hours.' (Ch. 14) One is reminded of this, from Julian Barnes: When she won, she went up to the dais, received the cheque, turned to the audience with immaculate poise, and began: 'Usually, when I stand up, I go on for about 50 minutes' – then a pause of perfect length, before she added – ' with slides .' Guardian , 18 March 2016

...the fascination of a character encountered in a book. He regretted the questions he had not asked, but had respected her preoccupations as belonging to a quasi-fictional 'Vicky Gardner', who, in the fullness of time, would be explained to him. This, he was forced to conclude, was the extent of his attraction to her. Nothing could be less sensual, less sexual. He was interested only in the unfolding of the story... Strangers , Ch. 10 Sturgis's story, as I've noted earlier, links with Mrs May's in Visitors , especially in this passage: ...she realised that this journey might have to be repeated, and she could not repress a very slight feeling of interest. This was surely the stuff of fiction? A strong plot, unusual characters, a threatened outcome: who could ask for worthier diversion? Visitors , Ch. 4 Such passages carry risks. We're in a hall of mirrors, something a little close to the madness of, say, James's Sacred Fount , in which the nar...

What he was after was something smaller, a landscape, his own, from which he could view a mystical sunset, and where he might capture that fabled rayon vert , that brief streak of light before the darkness closed in. Strangers , Ch. 7 The rayon vert , though never so named, and here given metaphorical force, will be familiar to Brooknerians. In A Family Romance Jane walks down a London street and the sky is of the palest green. Or else, from The Bay of Angels , Zoe and Adam wandering out into a 'beautiful greenish dusk'.

... he thought he might have done better, even prospered, in another era, or even another place, where the natives, the citizens, were more helpful, more curious, and indeed more candid. He longed to have lived in one of those confessional novels he had read as a young man - The Sorrows of Young Werther, Adolphe - in which whole lives were vouchsafed to the reader, with all their shame, yet as if there were no shame in the telling. Here, now, one was consciously checked by a sort of willed opacity, a social niceness that stalled one's attempts to make real contact. Strangers , Ch. 7 Once more, in Strangers , Brookner takes stock of her strange second career. Werther takes us back to  Family and Friends , Adolphe to  Providence . Brookner herself, though very private, was not known for the kind of vapid small-talk she deplored in the English. A recent diary piece by Julian Barnes amusingly makes this point: Towards the end of the first year of Anita Brookner’s d...

He remembered asking directions of an elderly man once in Paris, to be met with the words, 'Monsieur, il ne faut pas partir d'ici.'* That was the nub of the matter, a false start... Strangers , Ch. 7 One listens closely for echoes as one reads Brookner's last novel,  Strangers . The elderly Parisian and his repressive reply crop up more than once in the novel, and return one to the beginning and to an early interview: My own life was disappointing - I was  mal partie, started on the wrong footing; so I am trying to edit the whole thing. Paris Review *I must apologise for making a hash of the quote in earlier versions of this post. I'm not a good French speaker.

Some sort of reluctant sympathy had been drawn out of him, but he recognised this for what it was, the residue of unused feelings from earlier times. Strangers , Ch. 5 The touchstone, the benchmark, is George Bland in A Private View . His successors are Mrs May in Visitors , Herz in The Next Big Thing, and Sturgis in Strangers . In each of these later iterations Bland's mad passion, his great adventure, is in some way lessened or sublimated. Sturgis is plagued by a divorcee, Mrs Gardner, who, it seems, merely irritates him. He is drawn to her, but is never 'violently in love', like poor Bland. But the echoes are unmistakable: He saw his madness for what it was, the final upheaval of an unlived life... A Private View , Ch. 10

And there were the compensations: the high standards of care. Roland would have been soothed by the fine housekeeping, the attention paid to his comfort. He himself was almost persuaded that such a bargain, such an arrangement, could be justified. But it was light years away from the real thing. It was the sort of marriage that no romantic worth his salt could contemplate. There would be consolation in the prospect, but little sincerity. The absence, or loss, of sincerity might in the long run prove too high a price to pay. Strangers , Ch. 3 There is a sense, in Strangers , probably only because it turned out to be her last full-length novel, of Brookner taking a last walk around the block, of her stating her case for the last time. Her allegiance, finally, is with Romanticism. That's the message. Or the message in this particular passage. As she goes on, she always twists and shifts. Nothing is quite for keeps. The conflicts, to the last, remain unresolved. But there is, as...

...it seemed to him a terrible thing to live without witnesses, as if he had failed to make good the inevitable deficiencies of both past and present, had never created a family of his own, so that he was haunted by a feeling of invisibility, as if he were a mere spectator of his own, his only life, with no one to identify him, let alone with him, in the barren circumstances of the here and now. Strangers , Ch. 3 Later in Strangers Brookner quotes Larkin's 'Home is so Sad', last referred to in A Private View . This time she acknowledges Larkin, actually uses his name. For a fan like me, it's a moment to treasure. In the quote above, too, I get a Larkinian thrill. His only life. I'm not sure what Larkin means exactly by 'an only life' in the following lines from 'Aubade', nor indeed why Brookner makes the point as she does. But some connection is surely in operation. The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse - The good not done, the love ...

Latecomers (1988), Ch. 13: It was dusk when he reached Berlin,and a huge dark blue sky, moonless and starless, stretched over the curiously silent city. He realised that he was unaccustomed to these quiet wide streets, these blank-faced apartment houses with their austere windows, this isolation of a landlocked place far from the winds of the sea and the subtle odours of grass and river water ... His taxi took him efficiently to the Kurfürstendamm, where the sky was momentarily obliterated by city lights, high buildings bearing advertisement signs like heraldic devices or the badges of ancient guilds, the outline of a ruined church which reminded him of a rotten tooth, and cautious tables outside cafes at which nobody sat. At the Kempinski the welcome was efficient, smiling, deft, but lacked, he thought, effusiveness. ... Dahlem was much more like what he expected to remember, a suburb of silent villas painted yellow, with pitched roofs and green shutters. The museum, like a gia...

The Heat of the Day Elizabeth Bowen, title of 1949 novel The sun rose on a landscape still pale with the heat of the day before. Bowen, A World of Love (1955), Ch. 1 Leaving Home Anita Brookner, title of 2005 novel ...fantasies about the life he would lead when old enough to seek his freedom. Or indeed to leave home, though, strangely enough, home it had remained. Brookner, Strangers (2009), Ch. 1 There is a trend among Brookner scholars to view her oeuvre as one giant text, each installment a version of the others, every iteration in conversation or conflict with the rest. Themes concatenate across novels, especially in novels that are contiguous. We see it also at the level of the sentence, as above, and not only in Brookner. In some ways such moments are nods to the fans, small secret rewards. There's a sense of private knowledge, a sense of participating in a dialogue others aren't attuned to.

Throughout the obedient years of childhood he had privately observed that God was unjust, or, even worse than that, He was indifferent. To the pronouncement, I am that I am, went the unspoken addendum, Deal with it. Boasting to Job of His omnipotence, His superiority to Job's peaceable sinless life, He offered no justification for any of this, merely issued a report. And Job had acceded, perhaps because it is preferable to be inside than outside, silently making his accommodation with the idea of injustice, of disproportion. And had been rewarded for his docility with the restoration of his fortune, as if he had let bygones be bygones. Strangers , Ch. 1 I see this passage as a companion piece to Brookner's earlier  essay on the Book of Job . Her interpretation, her indignation, remain consistent, though her language has grown refreshingly modern: Deal with it. It is interesting too to get Brookner's view on a key Brooknerian theme: insiders and outsiders. It's bet...