On the Verge of Decadence

It was all too obvious to the spectator that this was another allegory of lost innocence, but it appeared, to Mme Roland, among others, a remarkably decent work. It is certainly, for a subject of this type, a very painterly one. The luscious tender flesh, still painted with Rubens shadows of grey and blue, is now on the verge of decadence; the plump hands are becoming mannered. The dress, roughly painted with stiff loaded brush-strokes, sets off the melting Greuzian softness of the head, and the colours of the accessories (pink roses, green leaves, dark grey-blue sky) overflatter the tender passages. Yet in spite of all this the girl seems to have been painted as a study, i.e. objectively, and the stillness of the figure, a quality rare in Greuze, almost triumphs over the double entendre.

Anita Brookner on Greuze's La Cruche Cassée (Louvre) in Greuze (1971), ch. 7

Brookner struggles with Greuze. She struggles to like him and struggles to praise him. She isn't much of a fan, but in this early work, Greuze: The Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-Century Phenomenon, she's stuck with penning a short- to medium-length study of him.

As always the reader gains both knowledge and insight from Brookner's art history. She does what all such guides should do: she makes us see a painting in fresh ways or as if for the first time. But we might also be inclined to look for parallels with Brookner's novels and with Brookner's own practice as an artist. In the passage above the typical Brooknerian descriptive battery is in full deployment. What's more, we see, in her weighing up of Greuze's balancing of painterly objectivity and decadent voluptuousness, something of the conflicts she would explore in her fiction. Further, in the phrase, 'on the verge of decadence', we perhaps have a fairly succinct setting out of the effect of Brookner's celebrated writing style.

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Top Ten Brookner

The much-loved Backlisted podcast ( here ) returns with a 'lockdown' episode that includes a lot of Anita Brookner talk. Prompted by discussion about Hotel du Lac , never the most representative Brookner, the chat meanders pleasantly on to the potential for compiling an Anita Brookner 'Top Ten'. At a loose end myself, though this week at the chalkface entertaining the children of keyworkers, I considered the question myself. I'm sure there are similar such lists elsewhere on this blog - I forget, and I don't particularly want to consult them anyhow. Of course, Brookner - like Henry James, like Trollope, indeed like many prolific authors - passed through phases. Brookner's novels, I contend, fall into three, neatly divided by the decades she wrote in: the raw, vital 80s; the settled magisterial 90s; the bleak, experimental 2000s. A Brookner novel from the 80s seems very different from any of her final works - just as 'James I', 'James II' ...

Her Motto

The critic Andrew Graham-Dixon (see here ) remembers: When I first studied the history of art, at the Courtauld Institute in London, one of my tutors was the formidable Anita Brookner. Her special subject was French painting of the Romantic period, but it was her approach to art in general that I found enlightening, and eye-opening. I remember one of her instructions in particular: 'Always remember, when you're looking at a painting, that every last detail is important: nothing is there by accident.' She said this so often, that I came to think of it as her motto. I recently saw Graham-Dixon lecture on his latest subject, a fresh interpretation of Vermeer. Andrew Graham-Dixon at the event I attended Afterword : Her finest art-critical motto was surely 'Art doesn't love you and cannot console you' (see earlier post here ). I have often considered it as an alternative motto for this blog.

Christopher Hampton's Hotel du Lac

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...

Video Brookner

This mere four-minute piece ( click here for the BBC Archive #OnThisDay feed ) should be top of the list for any Brooknerian, not least because it is, to my knowledge, the only video of the author freely available. Anita Brookner made only rare media appearances. Buried in archives are, I know, a Channel 4 interview with Hermione Lee and a programme (in the 100 Great Paintings series) Brookner made in 1980, still only an art historian, on, I think, Delacroix. We should be gladdened by this marvellous vouchsafement. There she is: stylish and a-swagger; trenchant in her commitment to the truth.

Cover Story #3

Part of Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series, to be published later in the year:

Walking along King's Road

In yesterday's Telegraph features magazine, Mick Brown was one of the contributors to a piece called 'The celebrities who are actually nice ... and those who aren't' (available here ). Mick Brown interviewed Anita Brookner in 2009 in what was to be her last interview. It is an often-cited exchange and very fine (available behind the Telegraph 's paywall). In Brown's recollection, Brookner was 'one of the most fascinating people I've ever met': '80, pin-neat figure, fragile and watchful'. Her flat, he recalls, was as if preserved in aspic at some point in the 1960s. A few weeks later he glimpsed her from a bus: 'walking along King's Road, head down into the wind'. He wanted to get off and give her a hug. As if inevitably, and probably blessedly, when the bus did stop, Brookner had vanished.

Mr Bennett and Mrs Woolf

In 1924 Virginia Woolf published a pamphlet called 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown'. Mrs Brown was a sample fictional character. Woolf imagined conjuring her out of the ether, and the woman's challenge: 'Catch me if you can.' Mr Bennett was the popular novelist Arnold Bennett, representative for Woolf of an older generation of writers. He was famous for a range of novels, especially those set in the 'Five Towns' of the Staffordshire Potteries. 'The foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else': Woolf, apparently approving, quoted these words of Bennett's, only to dismantle them in a fashion that affected his reputation for generations to come. He, along with his confreres Wells and Galsworthy - 'Edwardians' she called them - simply couldn't offer truths about human nature. Only 'Georgians' could, in which camp she placed Mr Lawrence, Mr Forster, Mr Joyce and Mr Eliot. Mrs Woolf too, no doubt. And why? Be...

Brookner Biography Announced

A brief post to let Brooknerians know the moment has arrived: a biography commissioned by Chatto & Windus, to be written by Hermione Lee. Hermione Lee interviewed Brookner on television in the 80s. Brookner joins illustrious company. Lee has lifed, among others, Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton.

Brookner on the Telly

In a much earlier post I lamented the unavailability of Anita Brookner's contribution to the 100 Great Paintings series (BBC, 1981). During the time I was away from the blog, the BBC reshowed the episode, and it has now found its way to YouTube:

Less Than One Sentence

Like buses, the Brookner mentions come thick and fast. In the 'NB' column of this week's TLS , her book reviewing is wryly celebrated: 'An occasional pleasure in the literary pages: the long book review that shows barely any interest in the book under review'. We learn of a 1976 review Brookner wrote of a biography of George Sand. The review's 3,000 words comprised, the biographer complained, only seven about the book: a contravention, she felt, of 'a literary Trades Description Act'.

The Brooknerian

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