The Brooknerian

I grew impatient with those who wasted [David Copperfield's] time: I saw nothing amusing in Mr Micawber ... I realised why I was so impatient with Mr Micawber. And Dolly was not only Mr Micawber, she was Mrs Micawber as well, hinting that she had come down in the world... A Family Romance , ch. 6 Nothing amusing in Mr Micawber?! When a stranger came on the scene in chapter 11 of David Copperfield , with a 'certain condescending roll in his voice, and a certain indescribable air of doing something genteel', I found myself newly fascinated. I had forgotten how Micawber was introduced, and how early, but I welcomed him as an old friend, and looked forward to his every return. I don't often disagree with Brookner, but on the subject of Mr Micawber I must make an exception.

I reread Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) as part of my 'Hotels in Literature' series (see previous post ). But I was resistant to the 2005 film, largely because I knew it wasn't set in the early Seventies. The producers had made the decision to update the story to the present, and I felt this might be an issue. Within the first ten minutes we get references to Mrs Thatcher and Sex and the City , which sound incongruous. And there is of course a central problem with the set-up: old people simply don't live as residents in hotels any longer. The bigger bugbear is with the film's tone. The supporting players plainly think it's a comedy and are hamming it up. We have the porter Summers, whose face is vaguely familiar from a hundred minor character roles, and Mrs Post is played by Marcia Warren, whom I remember from a forgettable Eighties sitcom called No Place Like Home . Then - God help us - there's Anna Massey (Edith Hope hersel...

1. I rarely read new things now – rarely visit new places either. But now I was in Zurich, previously only travelled through. I arrived early, and nothing was ready, and it was a Sunday and raining and the streets were empty. Thoughts of panic and flight beset me. But by noon I’d planned the coming days and booked my train ticket to Vevey and my room was cleaned. I was glad of the ideal company of Brookner ( A Family Romance ) and Dickens ( David Copperfield ), mightn’t have got through otherwise: I chose my summer reading well this year. ‘I led the same secretly unhappy life; but I led it in the same, lonely, self-reliant manner.’ 2. Still half-lost in the unfamiliar streets I at last found my way to the edge of the Zürichsee and a two-hour cruise: it seemed the Brookner thing to do, and indeed the weather was as it was for Mr Neville and Edith in fiction and on another lake: grey-blue distances, indistinct horizons. I lunched at Rapperswil and returned by train....

The Brooknerian will now be taking another short break. If all goes to plan (my itinerary is dismayingly complex) I should soon be a guest (for one night only) at the Grand Hôtel du Lac, Vevey. I could of course take my laptop with me, and blog from the scene, but I guess I'm old-fashioned. On my travels I prefer my pen, my notebook, my old analogue world. [Two views of the hotel taken on a previous visit in August, 1993:]

...but when he looked up from his soup, which he had been drinking rather greedily, and smiled at her, as he had smiled at her when he was a young boy, her heart smote her and she made a pretext of tiredness after the journey in order to weep a few tears in the privacy of their spare room. She spent a sleepless night watching a square of moonlight reflected in the tall mirror hanging on the dark blue patterned wall to the left of her bed and imagining that she was a girl in Vienna once again, sleeping in a similar bedroom, with a similar polished wood floor, and the same smell of beeswax fustiness that now came back to her with hallucinatory reality. A Family Romance , ch. 3 There's something of an hallucinatory quality to A Family Romance  as a whole. It has to do with the density of the prose and the expansiveness of the chapters. It has also to do with events such as those above not having been experienced by the narrating consciousness but instead imagined and presented w...

She soon had a clientele among the girls, cheerful, stoical, good-natured creatures who petted the baby and took to spending their off-duty moments in the workroom with Fanny. There was nothing downtrodden about these girls; they regarded ordinary married women with scorn and pity. A Family Romance , ch. 3 Brookner's determined blithe tolerance of what would now be called sex work is of some interest. It may be that she's cocking a snook at the political correctness that was coming into its own at the time of A Family Romance 's publication (1993). Or at feminism - of which Brookner wasn't a noted follower. But it probably has its roots in her affection for the modes and mores of the eighteenth century. The girls, during the Occupation, became, we learn, mistresses: they were, as Brookner puts it, 'elevated to the status of regular mistress'. The conservative imagination, far from being outraged by such goings on, instead is almost reassured by a sense o...

My father thought that Dickens would uncover the mysteries of English life. Instead, I grew up thinking that everyone had a funny name. Life was really rather a relief after this panorama of social injustice. 1994 Independent interview The ghost or the shadow of Dickens, hovering over A Family Romance from the beginning, steps into the footlights in chapter 2: Having effectively divorced themselves from home and family, [my parents] felt free to invent their lives, as if they were characters in Dickens. (Brooknerians often feel the need or have the leave to invent their own lives . It's a favourite locution of Brookner's. Incidents in the Rue Laugier , I think, also employs the phrase.) Then there's Brookner's use of Dickensian phrasing. Compare these: ...family ties which [my parents] had long ago sought to sever, so as to be all in all to each other... A Family Romance , ch. 1 ...my mother and I and Peggotty were all in all to one another... Da...

Living as we do through an era of technological change, we might look back not only at the time that came before but also at other moments of transformation. In chapter 5 of David Copperfield , in midsummer weather and the evening very pleasant, David travels by mail coach from Yarmouth to London. The journey takes seventeen hours. With fascination and nostalgia Dickens conjures the lost or vanishing world of coaching - a world that by the time of the publication of David Copperfield  (1849-50) the railways had all but swept away; a world, moreover, that linked him with the concerns of his first fictions - The Pickwick Papers , in particular - and earliest reading - Smollett, Fielding, both referenced several times and with great fondness in David Copperfield . We all live in the digital age now, but I remember the time before. While I was at school I never once touched a computer, and I'm only in my middle forties. Brookner's novels belong to the last years of the ana...

Her father [a Viennese ophthalmologist] was moderately successful in his profession, which was something of an irony, as his own eyes were weak and occasionally watery, which gave him a melancholy appearance. This ocular melancholy might even have masked something more profound, as if genuine grief were manifesting itself in this singularly appropriate symbol. Vienna was alive with metaphors: no explanation was too far-fetched. A Family Romance , ch. 2 Was there ever a more Freudian Brookner than A Family Romance ? There's its title, of course (though its applicability to the events of the novel isn't entirely obvious*), and there's Jane's maternal grandmother's Viennese background. I remembered from earlier readings that Toni Ferber ended up, like Freud, in Maresfield Gardens , London, but I had forgotten her journey had started in none other than the Berggasse in Vienna, and that the consulting-room of Dr Meyer, the ophthalmologist, was, like Freud's, ju...

After tea, when the door was shut and all was made snug (the nights being cold and misty now), it seemed to me the most delicious retreat that the imagination of man could conceive. David Copperfield , ch. 3 All in all my parents were a haven to each other, finding in Prince of Wales Drive, and in the largely wordless company of Miss Lawlor, a peace that neither of them had ever found at home with their contentious parents. A Family Romance , ch. 1 One wouldn't want to stretch a comparison too far, but as I reread David Copperfield and A Family Romance , I really am struck by the similarities. An old ship that's now a house, on the strand at Yarmouth, and a mansion flat in Battersea ('You live in the middle of nowhere, you know,' complains Dolly) - what's the difference? I am hospitably received by Mr Peggotty.

Out of its draped neckline rose a throat that was full at the base and slightly suffused with colour ... Her hair and eyes were dark, her skin a beautiful clear olive and flushed over the prominent cheekbones, but her most characteristic feature was her mouth, which was long and thin, the lips as smooth as grape skins, the lipstick worn away into an outline by her eager tongue ... She had a squat European figure, with shortish legs and a full bosom, the whole thing reined in and made impregnable by some kind of hidden structure. A Family Romance , ch. 1 There's something very painterly about these early-to-mid 90s Brookners. The chapters are long, about double the length of chapters in earlier and later Brookner novels. This adds to the dense, static atmosphere. Descriptions are full and considered. Reading the above description of Dolly, I am reminded of Ingres's Mme Moitessier in the National Gallery (see an earlier post for more on this painting). I know that this f...

David Copperfield : We open with an aunt, a 'discontented fairy', and with scenes before David's birth. This is a novel, so the events are imagined by the writer. It is also a first-person narrative, yet these particular events weren't experienced by the narrator; they're therefore as it were doubly imagined, giving the opening of the novel a slightly unreal or magical quality. Dickens knows this, and makes some effort to explain himself. In the second chapter David is young, but his jewel-bright recollection continues. ...I think the memory of most of us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose. ...if it should appear from anything I may set down ... that I was a child of close observation, or that as a man I have a strong memory of my childhood, I undoubtedly lay claim to both these characteristics. A Family Romance : Here too we start with an aunt: 'the aunt rather than ... my aunt, for anything more intimate would have implied ...

I'm sure I'm not the only person who spends an inordinate amount of time wondering what to read each summer. For me it must be a long novel, preferably a nineteenth-century novel. Such novels give me lots of comfort on my travels. Art cannot console you, said Anita Brookner. But I'm not sure I agree with her there. Last summer, before my blogging days, before The Brooknerian was even a twinkle in my eye, I read or rather reread The Portrait of a Lady . That's one of the perils of getting older: the need to reread. I know I should try to find new things to read. But I know what I like, and, as I say, I'm looking for comfort. 2015 seems to have been a low point. I read, for the first time, Thackeray's The Adventures of Philip . The first and only time. In 2014 it was Clarissa , 2013 The Princess Casamassima , and 2012 He Knew He Was Right . I could go on. This year I toyed with the idea of returning to the first Dickens I properly read, Bleak House . (I ...

If Brookner in her novels tells us how to live, in her art criticism she teaches us to see and distinguish and value. I enjoyed my visit to the Wallace Collection , but I suspect I may be among the viewers she identifies here: Greuze's pictures have an immediate appeal - to the sentimental and untutored, of whom, fortunately, there are still many. ( Greuze , Conclusion) Her reaction to the uneven oeuvre of Jean-Baptiste Greuze, perhaps rather more than to that of Jacques-Louis David, subject of her other major study, gives insight into her taste. She dislikes much of Greuze's work, but singles out a handful of works for our appreciation and instruction: The painter who could respond so openly to the civilized charm of the Marquise de Bezons, who could remember the exact stance of a bashful country girl, who could paint Wille and Sophie Arnould and the luminous infant Bertin* is one who deserves a permanent place not only in histories of art but in the affections of those w...

There can be few plot devices more stimulating to the conservative imagination than the arrival of brilliant strangers.  'It is sometimes very moral to change,' says Felix, one of the Europeans in Henry James's novel of that title. But the irruption into established lives of disruptive influences, and the resulting clash of cultures, are often an opportunity merely for the status quo to be upheld, even renewed - at any rate only very subtly adjusted. One thinks, of course, in this context, of Brookner's Visitors . It has something of the charming summery atmosphere of The Europeans . But really there are numerous examples of Brooknerians who are faced with alternative ways of living. But how much do any of them change, or indeed want to change? And how moral are the changes they so ardently but hopelessly contemplate? Mrs May, at the end of Visitors , looks back on her recent past: its upheavals have been, after all, merely 'diverting', just as she thought t...