Miss Mowcher

'They are all surprised, these inconsiderate young people, fairly and full grown, to see any natural feeling in a little thing like me! They make a plaything of me, use me for their amusement, throw me away when they are tired, and wonder that I feel more than a toy horse or a wooden soldier! Yes, yes, that's the way. The old way!'
'It may be with others,' I returned, 'but I do assure you it is not with me.'

David Copperfield, ch. 32

One of the fascinating things about Victorian fiction is the way some authors stray into areas that have since become hot topics. Terrorism, for example. One reads James's The Princess Casamassima or Conrad's The Secret Agent differently now, from a twenty-first century perspective. Or feminism: James's The Bostonians, or the likes of Baroness Banmann in Trollope's Is He Popenjoy?, take on new dimensions. Or attitudes towards Jewish people. What do we bring to a reading of Daniel Deronda, knowing what we know?

Phiz, I make the acquaintance of
Miss Mowcher (David Copperfield
illustration)

Here I want to think about authors' treatment of disability and difference. In David Copperfield Miss Mowcher is at first a mere grotesque, but in chapter 32, on her second appearance, she takes on greater complexity (and later still, near the end, she's given a surprise heroic role). One thinks of other differently abled characters in Dickens: my favourite is Jenny Wren, the dolls' dressmaker, in the late novel Our Mutual Friend. In essence, Dickens's attitudes soften and broaden as his career progresses: think of Quilp in the early work The Old Curiosity Shop, who is simply a monster - a splendid monster, but a monster all the same. In the same way Dickens's portrayal of Jewish characters improves in later novels.

Mahoney, She shook that emphatic little
forefinger of hers at parting,
(Our Mutual Friend illustration)

But Dickens's younger pal and comrade Wilkie Collins is probably the Victorian novelist most interested in and sympathetic to disability and difference. Blindness, deformity and mental instability all feature in his novels, and not always sensationally.

In Anita Brookner's Look at Me Frances's friend Olivia is disabled, and Frances, compensating for others' prejudice, is at pains to emphasise Olivia's saintliness and inoffensiveness. Of course the Frasers' highly contrasting attitude towards Olivia, especially Alix's attitude, gives fresh insight into their cruel carelessness:

'Sounds delirious,' Alix broke in. 'What exactly is the matter with that girl?' (Ch. 5)

The Challenge of the Multiplot Novel

In Dickens what I marvel at more than anything is his management of different plot strands. He maintains control throughout, but there is also a freedom, an unpredictability, a sense of one plot merging into another. David Copperfield hasn't the wild free-wheeling quality of, say, a Thackeray novel (Pendennis acts as an excellent comparison), but nor has it the rigidness of structure of early- and middle-period Trollope. (Can You Forgive Her? is an example of this sort of schema at work: three women, three love plots, a few chapters given over to each in rotation.)

Anita Brookner's plots, while never predictable, tend towards the schematic, especially in those that focus on a cast of characters. Olga Kenyon asked Brookner about this in Women Writers Talk in 1989, in relation to Family and Friends:

Kenyon: You've chosen a family saga, but concise, controlled, through a series of family photographs. Why did you choose that form?
Brookner: Because it was easier. It was not a difficult book to write; it was almost entirely free of anxiety. A chapter to each one is almost the easiest form.

Mixed Motives

'It must be a mixed motive, I think,' said Mr Wickfield, shaking his head and smiling incredulously.
'A mixed fiddlestick!' returned my aunt. 'You claim to have one plain motive in all you do yourself. You don't suppose, I hope, that you are the only plain dealer in the world?'

David Copperfield, ch. 15

[Brookner:] Motives are never unmixed, are they?
[Haffenden:] Your own heroines are given to be unmixed.
[Brookner:] Poor little things, I feel sorry for them. They're idiots: there's no other word for them. And I don't know any more than they do.

John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, 1985

Any Hour You Like: The Shelbourne by Elizabeth Bowen

A curiosity among Elizabeth Bowen's works, The Shelbourne (1951) is the history of a famous Dublin landmark. It is also a celebration of hotel life - 'a world revolving upon itself'. For Bowen the Shelbourne was a place of safety and stability in a time of uncertainty.

We begin in the early nineteenth century with the original building, where Thackeray stayed. He found the Shelbourne quirky, was famously disconcerted to find his bedroom window held open with a broom: 'Thackeray-lovers ... still prowl around the Shelbourne asking which of these windows the Broom propped up. Knowing so much, they should know enough to know that the hotel has been rebuilt since the author stayed there.' Though Bowen is sniffy about such literary pilgrims, it is clear that she herself has a more than sentimental attachment to the Shelbourne.

The hotel was reconstructed and modernised in the 1860s: the dimensions of its interiors, not least, were expanded to accommodate the huge clothes of the time - a 'more roomy age'. A typical Bowen reflection, on the topic of the Shelbourne's wardrobes:

Of these many still survive: in their cedar-scented, cavernous insides to-day's wispy clothes hang like ghosts.

The hotel reached its peak in the late Victorian period - 'gay days at once ephemeral and immortal' - and featured directly in a novel of the time, George Moore's A Drama in Muslin, which Bowen discusses at length.

Into the twentieth century, and politics intrude. We see guests, fearful of insurgents, sleeping in corridors, a scene not unlike the London Underground during the Blitz. But the Shelbourne comes through, and Bowen ends with a hymn of praise delivered from the top of the hotel, looking out over Ireland, 'under a world of sky':

Sea gleams in the distance; cloud shadows bowl softly over the mountains; below, Dublin spreads out its humming plan, shading off into the empty horizons [...] In the heart of this stands the Shelbourne, four-square, stout and surviving, scene of so many destinies which might seem to be transitory yet become immortal when one considers how they have left their mark. Nothing goes for nothing. Here, in these floors of rooms, under my feet, hopes in the main have triumphed, behaviour and order have stood firm. Now in the haze over the city clocks begin to strike. Beads of traffic run round the Green. A car detaches itself, slows down, pulls up in front of the glass porch. The porter comes out - someone is arriving. It is any hour you like of a Shelbourne day...

This, then, is no regular history. It's an Elizabeth Bowen jeu d'esprit - original, eccentric, unconfined. It's peculiarly rather akin to Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Like Woolf, Bowen traces her subject thrillingly through time - and through literature.

The Shelbourne survives into the present day.
It is possible to sleep in the
Elizabeth Bowen Suite.

German Notebook

I chose out of the way places, out of season: almost any town in France or Germany, however devoid of scenic interest, provided the sort of ruminative space which I seemed to require.

Anita Brookner, A Family Romance, ch. 8

1.
To Düsseldorf: out of the way, though in season. To the Kunstpalast, in rain, under a heavy sky. Some Cranachs, older and younger, some Rubens, one or two Caspar David Friedrichs, some very engaging nineteenth-century history paintings, some Kirchners. But altogether the collection seemed slightly at a low ebb. Unprepossessing building: red-brick, monumental, 1930s: 'degenerate art' was exhibited here once, for purposes of ridicule.

2.
Chapter 40 of David Copperfield. Mr Peggotty - a wanderer in search of Little Em'ly - speaks of his journey through France and into Italy. He returns via Switzerland, responding to a tip-off. As with other pre-aviation era narratives, one is aware here of the great distances involved, the sense of the Alps as a barrier to be overcome. One thinks of the Dorrits travelling south, or of Palliser and Lady Glencora on their wedding tour.

3.
To Cologne, to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum. I know it well and like the layout. A room of Courbets: Lady on a Terrace (1858), Breakfast after the Hunt (also 1858), The Beach (1865) and Château de Chillon (1873). The Beach is particularly fine, could be a piece of abstract expressionism.

(Brookner, when she saw an exhibition of his paintings in 1978, commented not wholly approvingly on the sleepiness and duskiness of Courbet.)

Cologne in summer had a party atmosphere: dense crowds, wedding parties, costumed stag and hen groups. I was once in Cologne at Christmas, and outside the cathedral were gathered hundreds of children dressed up as the Three Kings. I was there another time, during the carnival, and I was the only person not in a lurid costume.

4.
To Bonn, to see the Beethoven statue.

Beyond Kentish Town lay Cologne, their Sunday drives to Bonn to contemplate the statue of Beethoven... 

Brookner, Falling Slowly, ch. 8

Bonn has other Brooknerian associations:

'At first all went well; we had a beautiful house in Poppelsdorf, a suburb of Bonn, and Alois's sister, Margot, was very welcoming and attentive. The surroundings were pleasant and there were servants who looked after everything, so that it was quite easy to adjust after life in the hotel.'

The Next Big Thing, ch. 13

From the Hauptbahnhof I walked down Meckenheimer Allee, past townhouses, mansion blocks, trees meeting in an archway over the narrow road. An air of Sunday calm. Ghostly, fairy-tale dwellings. My pictures don't do justice to the quality of the light.

5.
To Frankfurt: I took a break from Dickens and read James's The American Scene. It's the most dazzling and difficult of James's works, and a glass or two of something or other usually helps. I read of 'impudently new' New York, the skyscrapers like extravagant pins in a cushion, the boats on the Hudson moving like bobbins in a great tapestry. All the while, on screens, today's America underwent an eclipse.

Frankfurt am Main, a.k.a. Mainhattan

6.
David Copperfield again: Mr Peggotty is still questing after Emily, who absconded with Steerforth. At no point is the possibility properly entertained of Emily's agency in the affair, though Mrs Steerforth is roundly condemned for suggesting Emily 'seduced' Steerforth. The narrative, the discourse, has only such terms. And Emily must be found and saved - and she shall be thankful for such salvation. Now we learn she's left Steerforth, and David fears she may have ended up on the streets. The precise nature of such a life is conveyed by Dickens with dog-whistle subtlety. How sad and limited Little Em'ly's options are, and also how limited are the ways in which her story is presented.

7.
To the Städel Museum, one of my favourite collections. A good set of nineteenth-century paintings and a fine range of Old Masters. Also a floor of post-1945 art. The museum's small exhibition space is often well used, offering detailed, quite specialist shows. On my last visit I saw some Watteau drawings. This time: another Brookner fan-pleasing show: French lithographs by, among others, Delacroix (Shakespeare illustrations) and Géricault (typically challenging subject matter: a beggar, a bare-knuckle fight, soldiers in retreat from Moscow).

In the main collection: a View of Frankfurt by Courbet, and a photo by Julia Margaret Cameron of Mrs Herbert Duckworth, later Virginia Woolf's mother. Oh, Mrs Ramsay!

And to prove I don't only look at old art, here I am (with Warhol's Goethe) reflected in a work comprising a wall of mirrored tiles:

8.
Going back to Düsseldorf after several days in Frankfurt felt like returning to a gentler world.

The natural banks of the Rhine at Düsseldorf:

I thought I might give the Kunstpalast another look, and indeed I was better disposed towards it. This time I found an exhibition of Andreas Achenbach's paintings and drawings, the same show I saw in Baden-Baden last year: scenes oddly full of the atmosphere of the Yarmouth sections of David Copperfield: shore life, fishermen, shipwrecks.

A highlight of the collection proper, though made little of, is Cranach's Das ungleiche Paar / Der verliebte Alte (c. 1530), nowhere near as exquisite as the Frankfurt Venus but still stylishly planar and yet very human. One thinks of George Bland and his reckless passion for Katy Gibb in Brookner's A Private View. Brookner's comparison is with Tintoretto's Susannah and the Elders in Vienna, but it could be this too.

More Summer Plans

The Brooknerian will be taking another break for a week or so. I'm off to Mitteleuropa once more, to Düsseldorf, Cologne, Frankfurt, Bonn.

In Bonn I plan to visit the statue of Beethoven. I wonder if you can work out why.

King Charles I

What is it with David Copperfield and Charles I? There's Mr Dick and his 'Memorial', into which the story of the doomed king keeps intruding. Then there's the statue of Charles I at Charing Cross, which David sees on his visit to London towards the middle of the novel.

But what of this? Adams, the head boy at Doctor Strong's school, calculates how long it will take the teacher to finish his Greek dictionary.

He considered that it might be done in one thousand six hundred and forty-nine years, counting from the Doctor's last, or sixty-second, birthday. (Ch. 16)

What's Dickens's game?

A Central European Jean Rhys: Edith Templeton

 

I am apostolic about the novels of Edith Templeton, a Czech who writes in impeccable English: they are extremely restrained and tell strong stories about life in old-style central Europe, with recognisable passions and follies. Lovely, lovely novels.

Anita Brookner, interviewed by John Haffenden, 1985

In the 1980s Anita Brookner wrote introductions to several of Templeton's novels, published by Hogarth. I haven't read them, so cannot comment, but I recently got hold of The Surprise of Cremona (1954), a travel book reissued in the 2000s with an introduction by Brookner:

My only meeting with Edith Templeton took place in her flat in Bordighera some time in the mid-1980s. I found an isolated and eccentric woman: I saw from the expression on her face as we were introduced that the same judgement had been passed on myself.

Earlier, in the Spectator (here), Brookner had spoken of this rather delicious encounter (and in Bordighera too, a setting for Brookner's 1985 novel Family and Friends):

I met her once, in her flat in Bordighera, where I went to interview her; I found a tiny distracted woman with a plaintive voice, eager to talk about anything except her work. When guided towards literary matters she became icily and pungently intelligent. I carried away with me an impression of a central European Jean Rhys, a natural expatriate, but in this instance devoid of the self-pity which makes Jean Rhys so monotonous. Sly, well-born, homeless, but unflappable, it was easy to picture her taking up temporary residence in various old-fashioned watering places, sipping coffee, and training her gaze on the complacent residents. Bordighera, with its beneficent sunshine and well-ordered appointments, seemed as good a place as any, since she could be relied upon to discover, behind its temperate façades, evidence of malpractice, betrayal and opportunistic sex.

*

Like many travelogues The Surprise of Cremona is a little on the boring side - but pleasantly boring, stylishly boring. The tone is patrician but not grand. Edith Templeton is in several ways a Brooknerian traveller - an exile, alone, watchful, often to be found in art galleries - but also better connected, more social: always ready with her 'letters of introduction'. But we learn very little directly about Templeton herself. She stays on the surface, is restrained to the point of coldness. But her medium is clear: we can see, or may think we can see, through the ice to the likely emotions beneath.

She is good on café life and hotel life. She suffers setbacks but remains apparently blithe. She wears her learning lightly. She takes us not only to Cremona but through Parma, Mantua, Ravenna, Urbino and Arezzo, and in each place she knows exactly where to go. She is a sophisticate and a stylist and her descriptions are acute. A female hotelier has an 'air of devilment'; a professor gives 'a winsome leer with his dusky ruins of teeth'. But Templeton, though rakish and exceptional in the 1950s, has perhaps an uncertain literary status in the twenty-first century, as Brookner points out in her introduction. Templeton's over-confident self-consciousness, her self-sufficiency, may well render her extinct as a type.

The book finishes, and must finish, with the writer's arrival in Como, where she meets her Aunt Alice. The magic enchantment of lonesome travel is at an end.

I pick up my pen. I start writing.

I had not been walking long, when I turned a corner and met her. I tingle again from head to foot as my recollection turns that corner, and my pen shakes in my hand.

David Copperfield, ch. 26

A dread falls on me here. A cloud is lowering on the distant town, towards which I retraced my solitary steps. I fear to approach it. I cannot bear to think of what did come, upon that memorable night; of what must come again, if I go on.

Ch. 32

Dickens is clear. David writes David Copperfield at some distant point in the story's future - ostensibly the contemporary reader's present. He recollects the events of his life - though not quite always in tranquillity. At times, as above, we see him at his desk, affected in the here and now by the events of long ago.

Anita Brookner's handling of I-voice narration is, in places, a little less certain. Let's consider the closing pages of Look at Me, where Brookner, like Dickens, 'breaks frame':

After that last sentence, I moved to the bed and switched on the bedside lamp.

Up to that point she had been narrating, from a distance, the events of the story. Now we seem to be invited to see the narrator writing 'to the moment', in the manner of Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe, or the writer of a diary.

But wait - let's go back a few pages. Here we find the narrator wondering whether her tormentors will ring her again. 'Of course, this might not happen,' she writes, and repeats the famous lines from the novel's start: 'Once a thing is known...'

We're unmoored, unsettled. When is the time of writing? The beginning of the novel, with its trenchant, hard-learnt words, suggested a narrative written, like Dickens's, in long retrospect. But the end of Look at Me plays fast and loose with such comfortable notions. We're all with Frances now, temporally trapped - trapped in the thick of the terrible action: like her, we'll never quite leave this moment. The final lines compound our sense of having been cast into a dizzying abyss:

Nancy shuffles down the passage, and I hear her locking the front door. It is very quiet now. A voice says, 'My darling Fan.' I pick up my pen. I start writing.

This Disciple

As for the written word, this disciple of Marcel Proust and Henry James re-reads the classics, but scorns the 'negligible' fiction of today. Nabokov – dandy, émigré, melancholy wit – is the last great novelist for her.

2002 Independent interview

Taking it slowly, savouring its Jamesian rhythms, I've at last got to the end of my reread of A Family Romance. Dolly, its focus, appears at intervals throughout the novel, in different iterations or manifestations. Take this memorable vignette from chapter 7:

...her bitter European face, as revealed in sleep, in the half light of the car, the effervescent mask for once cast aside and the grim working woman revealed.

And in chapter 8 we see her later still, at sixty-eight, reduced, all but friendless, with navy-blue hair and no make-up and wearing flat shoes.

This late incarnation of Dolly is very striking and the scene well handled. One is reminded of Nabokov and the end of Lolita, when he presents Lolita as grown-up, pregnant, ruined, and this is the version the narrator at last falls in love with.

Or one hears echoes of Proust's Swann when Dolly, explaining the attractiveness of her worthless paramour, says, 'Harry was my type; do you understand?'

Near the end of A Family Romance is a line that some critics at the time found difficult to accept, but which seems to grow in integrity as the years go by. As I've said before, Brookner's are novels for the future.

But I realised then that love was unpredictable, that it could not be relied upon to find a worthy object, that it might attach itself to someone for whom one has felt distaste, even detestation, that it is possible to experience an ache in the heart because the face that responds to one's own circumspect smile is eager, trusting.

The Dreamy Nature of this Retreat

The Prerogative Court, Doctors' Commons

Illustrated London News 1 June 1850

The languid stillness of the place was only broken by the chirping of this fire and by the voice of one of the Doctors, who was wandering slowly through a perfect library of evidence, and stopping to put up, from time to time, at little roadside inns of argument on the journey.

David Copperfield, ch. 23

David begins work, apprenticed to Doctors' Commons, a legal backwater that seems very agreeable: he commends the 'dreamy nature of this retreat'. Such undemanding havens have attractions for Brookner's characters too, not least Jane Manning in A Family Romance, who goes to work at a press cuttings agency (somewhat unimaginatively called ABC Enterprises), where she is immediately looked after by 'the dearest women', Margaret and Wendy (ch. 5). But this is Brookner, not Barbara Pym, or for that matter Dickens. Nothing can be allowed to remain too cosy for long. Class tensions start to intrude: Margaret and Wendy also live in Battersea, but in council flats, not Prince of Wales Drive. Later the agency changes hands and Margaret and Wendy move on, and all the charm is lost. But Jane remains loyal in her way to the now renamed JH Enterprises. When questioned by some American academics about her workplace experiences, Jane is recalcitrant:

Any discrimination? I am demanded. Only being taken out to dinner by the boss, I reply, by which time I am regarded with the purest suspicion. (Ch. 9)

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? Because 'in or about December 1910 human character changed'.

It's a devastating statement, and delivered with customary acid archness. Virginia Woolf goes on to suggest how the novels of Arnold Bennett et al might approach the problem of the imaginary Mrs Brown. She speaks of Edwardian novels' obsession with the 'fabric of things', with Mrs Brown's material circumstances. '[T]hey leave one with so strange a feeling of incompleteness and dissatisfaction. In order to complete them it seems necessary to do something - to join a society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque.' Bennett's vision of Mrs Brown is archetypal: 'Mrs Brown is eternal, Mrs Brown is human nature'. But Mrs Brown herself, 'an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety', somehow escapes. A new sort of writing is called for: spasmodic, obscure, fragmentary. A sort of writing that might be supplied by a certain Mrs Woolf?

Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett somehow survived Woolf's hatchet job. Bennett has a society dedicated to him, and many of his novels remain in print. I find that 2017 is the 150th anniversary of his birth. But before now I've never actually read him.

The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902)
is currently in print,
published by Vintage Classics,
but I rather like this 1970s Penguin edition.

And so was brought to a close the complex chain of events which had begun when Theodore Racksole ordered a steak and a bottle of Bass at the table d'hôte of the Grand Babylon Hotel.

I don't think I'm guilty of any spoilers in starting this review with the last line of what amounts to a mystery novel. Except that the incongruous order of beef and beer, which, when haughtily declined, prompts the American millionaire Racksole to purchase the whole hotel, is merely coincidental with the coming to fruition of the rightly named 'complex chain of events' - a fairly preposterous set of conspiracies involving European princelings, the millionaire's plucky daughter, disguise, revolvers, secret passages, Jewish financiers (the novel is casually antisemitic), and high jinx on boats at sea.

It's a thriller. It's a potboiler. It's what Graham Greene would have called an entertainment. It probably wasn't the Bennett novel Virginia Woolf had in mind. But it might have been. I can see what she meant about his handling of character. He gives us plenty of solid detail, but characters' interior lives are those of types rather than of real people. This has the effect of making them oddly unmemorable. The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902) is, like all such books, probably best read 'in one sitting'. But I'm too slow a reader for that, and it's a problem here. For example, I read one chapter one day about a woman in a red hat, and the next day I picked up the book again and read the next chapter, and the woman was referred to, and I found I had no memory of her at all.

Bennett is at his strongest in his depiction of setting. The hotel (I read The Grand Babylon Hotel as part of my 'hotels in literature' series), a vast palace on the Embankment, is vividly present, as are other locations, including Ostend.

The Grand Babylon Hotel seems to have a stubborn resilience in print, and this will probably continue. There will always be people, fans of John Buchan and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who like this sort of thing and thrill to Bennett's belief that 'human nature remains always the same, and that beneath the thin crust of security on which we good citizens exist the dark and secret forces of crime continue to move, just as they did in the days when you couldn't go from Cheapside to Chelsea without being set upon by thieves' (ch. 10).

But I don't think I'll be reading any more Arnold Bennett. As ever - bravo, Mrs Woolf!

Two Scottish Aunts and an American Academic

'Just till tomorrow, dear. Then we're off home to our garden. We've had a lovely show this past year. Even the apples were good. Could you take a few home with you, Jane? I know Mary has sufficient. If you come by tomorrow, dear, we can let you have a couple of pounds with pleasure.'

A Family Romance, ch. 8

Elsewhere the Scottish aunts speak of 'wee Marigold'. The word 'sufficient' recalls an earlier scene in which one or the other asks 'Have you had a sufficiency, Peter?' At one point Brookner examines the ladies' use of the verb 'to take', as in 'Will you take a scone, Jane?': 'their favourite verb, although no two people could have been more giving' (ch. 5).

*

'Janet's copper beech. I confess to a little envy: I haven't one of my own. But I can always look at hers. We have tea together at her house, when it's at its best, in October. Have you noticed that when the leaves fall they turn a dark ox-blood red. I dare say you have a fine garden at home.'

Ch. 9

I confess to; I dare say; a fine garden: we might be in Henry James. But I think Brookner missed a trick with 'in October': surely an opportunity for 'in the fall'? Note too the sentence 'I haven't one of my own', where a British speaker might say 'I haven't got' or 'I don't have'.

*

I wouldn't say Brookner has a tin ear for this sort of thing, but I do find these examples too studied and self-conscious. If she'd ever had a Welsh character, I guess he or she would once or twice have said 'look you'.

On Brookner's Spelling

My own spelling isn't perfect. I consider perfect spelling a slightly spurious accomplishment. I'm possibly in good company here. More than once in A Family Romance, we get 'negligeable' (elsewhere in the same novel Brookner uses the more standard English spelling).*

But think about it: if you'd been an editor presented with an Anita Brookner manuscript, would you have had the nerve to question her spelling?

*As a fluent French speaker she probably had in mind the French négligeable.

Going out with the Tide

I was reading David Copperfield at the time and was aware that my mother, like Barkis, was going out with the tide.

A Family Romance, ch. 5

Not only was it of prime importance to a woman like Dolly to have a man of her own, but that same man, if he were willing (Barkis again), would, in marrying her, confer on her a status which she had not enjoyed for many years.

Ibid., ch. 6

Barkis is a relatively minor character in David Copperfield. He marries Peggotty (David acts as a go-between, delivering the 'if willing' message), is mean with his money, and fades away - going out like the tide. That wonderful phrase is probably what got Brookner's attention: it's more than a little Brooknerian.

The second Barkis reference, in chapter 6 of A Family Romance, is more demanding. I wonder: if I hadn't read David Copperfield, or I wasn't reading it alongside A Family Romance, would I have the faintest idea what Brookner was going on about?

Phiz,
I find Mr Barkis 'going out with the tide',
ch. 30 of David Copperfield

The Old Lady Card

'I'm rather tired, my dear,' said Toni, playing the old lady card. Suddenly she could not wait to get home.

A Family Romance, ch. 3

It is always amusing to catch Anita Brookner reusing material. Take this, from the 1994 Independent interview:

It pleases me to play the old lady card. It's quite useful at times. But if it were true, it wouldn't be a card, would it? I'd be a poor thing. I'd feel sorry for myself. Which I don't think I do.

An Ideal Servant

I've explored the topic of servants before, and they're very evident in A Family Romance too. There's the Mannings' Miss Lawlor (an ideal servant: she barely speaks), and Dolly's Annie Verkade, who, like 'a butler in a grander establishment', takes a pride in 'expressionless efficiency' (ch. 4). Brookner admits it's unusual for someone to have a live-in maid in the period, which we have to be reminded is actually the 1980s. And indeed it would have been most surprising. But this is the Brookner world, cushioned from at least some of the harsher realities of life.

In David Copperfield Peggotty, like Miss Lawlor, is inherited, and ideal in her way. In Henry James's story 'Brooksmith' the eponymous butler is so perfect he's an 'artist'. The tale is, however, powered by an unspoken queer dynamic; it doesn't end well for Brooksmith.

But none of these writers, not even Dickens - the least conservative of the three, and hailing from a section of society only a little above what James unblushingly, at the close, depicts as 'servile' - ever truly questions the status quo.

Frank Reynolds
'Peggotty and Little David', 1910

Reading as if for life

...and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.

David Copperfield, ch. 4

Whatever I had within me that was romantic and dreamy, was encouraged by so much story-telling in the dark...

Ch. 7

[The old books] were my only comfort; and I was as true to them as they were to me, and read them over and over I don't know how many times more.

Ch. 10

And so I lost her.* David Copperfield's words not mine, but never bettered. During the days which followed I read the book urgently, obsessively, in order to reassure myself of David's eventual victory over circumstance.

A Family Romance, ch. 6

Strange how one book leads to another. David Copperfield's treasured books comprise the classics of the eighteenth century. Smollett's Peregrine Pickle is a favourite. One wonders: was David's an expurgated edition? For my part I've never read it, though I want to and indeed I've tried to. (I once downloaded an edition on to my e-reader, but it was bowdlerised - and I didn't want to miss the best bits.)

Reading obsessively, reading 'as if for life' - that's surely the grail.

Peregrine Pickle saves Emilia

*For comments on Brookner's use of this quote, see an earlier post.