Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont: now a major motion picture!

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 herself) as Mrs Arbuthnot. Everyone seems to be trying too hard.

Everyone except Joan Plowright as Mrs Palfrey. She seems to be in a different film. She notably underplays her part. She's sombre, serious. When playing against Anna Massey - the apparently terrifying Mrs Arbuthnot - Plowright, simply by virtue of the integrity of her performance, has the psychological upper hand, which somewhat undermines the intention of their scenes together.

The director knows she's the film's best asset. Plowright gets multiple close-ups. When she's in shot, the film holds back on the rather sentimental and at times comic score.

The relationship between Mrs Palfrey and Ludo is handled well. Their scenes together have much of the ambiguity they have in the novel. The scene in which he sings to her and she becomes tearful is appropriately uncomfortable.

Altogether it's a diverting if not wholly successful film. It isn't slavish to the novel, but at times it's held back by it. The tone is askew throughout, but Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is worth watching simply for Joan Plowright's wonderfully natural but luminous acting. The drooping of her right eyelid is heartbreaking.

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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' ...

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.

Photo Op #3

The new Penguin paperback edition of Strangers (2009), with its introduction by Tessa Hadley (see here ) and its thick gatefold or French fold cover, is an opulent affair. Oddly, its livery is distinct from other recent reissues, instead mimicking an earlier version of Hotel du Lac . Of interest is the inclusion of an author photograph. It's a shot from a 1986 set by Peter Jordan. It's the session where Brookner sits at her dining table, a book open before her, bookshelves and peace lilies behind. She wears an open-necked cream blouse and a small wristwatch. Other shots from the session show Brookner holding her neck, leaning her chin on her hands, folding her arms, smiling, turning aside. The one chosen for Strangers is suitably equivocal - folded arms, slight turn of the head, left eyebrow slightly more raised than normal, downward-angled lips. It's the first time a photo of Brookner has appeared on a British edition since the hardback of Visitors in 1997, the last und...

Further Soundings #2

In a post a while back ( here ), I recalled pitching unsuccessfully a volume of Brookner's essays... *** Anita Brookner Mme de Blazac and I: Memoirs, Essays and Reviews 1981-2011 1. ‘Mme de Blazac’, memoir, LRB , 19 June 1997 2. On Abel Gance’s film Napoleon, film review, LRB , 16 April 1981 3. ‘The Bibliotheque Nationale’, essay/memoir, TLS , 5 October 1984 4. ‘The People and the Place’, review of Parisians by Graham Robb, Spectator , 10 April 2010 5. ‘Repose is Taboo’d by Anxiety’, review of Migraine by Oliver Sacks, Spectator , 23 October 1993 6. ‘Even Less Fiction than Stranger ’, review of Le Premier Homme by Albert Camus, Spectator , 14 May 1994 7. ‘The Master of the Indirect’, review of Henry James: Collected Stories , Spectator , 11 Dec 1999 8. ‘Sexual Tour...

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...

'What I too fatally lacked was her tone.'

I've been listening to a couple of Brookner audiobooks. Joanna David's take on The Rules of Engagement is competent, and her middle-class tones suit the character of the novel's narrator. But there's a complacency to her reading, too cosy for a novel as dark and late as this. Diana Quick is the ideal reader of Undue Influence . Her accent is RP, but less strident than David's. Quick's tone has a lowered, falling quality, appropriate for this sad novel. There's also a slight accent, not traceable, possibly just the effect of clipping. There are other actresses who display this: Eleanor Bron, say, or Siân Phillips. Quick's is an older woman's voice. Claire, the narrator of Undue Influence , is meant to be twenty-nine. Yet her storytelling always feels as if long in retrospect, though the novel is set in the modern day. This isn't the only example in Brookner of an unsettling freewheeling as to chronology. There's no evidence of Anita Brookner...

Secretive as a Heron

It is hardly surprising that even such an eminent life-writer as Lee might wonder whether Brookner would have given this book her blessing. Brookner was as secretive as a heron. The fine mystery of the writer, to quote Dickens on Shakespeare, must surely be left undisturbed. ー From an excellent review ( here ) by Laura Cumming in the Observer of Hermione Lee's forthcoming biography.

Anecdotally

I last saw [Anita Brookner] in the summer of 2010, when the publisher Carmen Callil brought her to lunch. She was frailer, and needed a stick. I had made potted crab, to which she said she was allergic, to my embarrassment (should I have known?). Instead she took a little cheese, some green salad and a roast tomato; she declined the beetroot. We asked about her life. She said that she went out early every morning to her Sainsbury's Local for 'a croissant, a petit pain and a loaf'. 'Every day, Anita?' 'I eat a lot of bread.' She had been rereading Stefan Zweig and applauded that most Brooknerianly-titled novel Beware of Pity . She agreed with Carmen that the one advantage of age was that the trials of the heart were behind you. She stated that she had no religious feelings or beliefs at all. She still rented her television (no digibox or Freeview), and still smoked eight or 10 cigarettes a day. 'Do you have your first after breakfast, Anita?' 'O...

Photo Op #2

Further to recent posts on Brookner photographs and harder-to-find images in particular, I offer this from The Times , June, 1994: John Voos's portrait accompanies a review of A Private View . The piece, by Philip Howard, is often quoted: 'Anita Brookner is our Henry James'. By way of a title, a line from Browning - 'When the long dark evenings come' - completes an excellent evaluation of one of Brookner's finest novels. The photo is an oddity in the oeuvre: Brookner in the act of speaking. Was it posed? Was it taken at an event? The blurred background suggests the familiar setting of Brookner's London flat. The hard undeceived wistfulness of her gaze, the precision of her discourse, the discontented romanticism of her outlook are all captured by a master photographer.

Stendhal Again

We had the recent post * about the after-dinner cigar, and one from a short while back on the connections between or among Brookner, Sebald and Stendhal, and yesterday I enormously enjoyed reading a text** by Jack Robinson (Charles Boyle) from CB Editions , An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H. B. ,*** which I discovered by chance in the Guardian Review . The text is powered by its footnotes - and what pleasure there is in finding on pp. 4-5 a quotation from Brookner's 1980 TLS review of a Stendhal biography, collected in Soundings : 'Anita Brookner', says Robinson, '...approves [Beyle's] furious attempts "to measure up to the rules of the game, even when [my [i.e. Robinson's] italics] there was no game being played ".'**** Though Brookner isn't directly referenced again, the italicised line is mentioned twice more, on p. 81 and p. 128. The other echoes are numerous. Beyle, while watching a mosquito bite on his ankle, reme...

The Brooknerian

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