Brookner Interview Discoveries #2: Great Expectations

The second of my interview discoveries, 'Great Expectations', is from the Observer on 27 March 1983, marking the publication of Brookner's Look at Me. The interview was conducted by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, who would continue an interest in Brookner's works. Here she is on Brookner's 1998 novel Falling Slowly:

She is one of a handful of living writers who can turn a sentence so graceful that to read it is a lascivious pleasure, and she can string those sentences together to make paragraphs - whole chapters even - that unfurl surely and musically until they climax, or fall away into silence with a superbly exact authority to which it is delicious to submit. There is a constant delightful tension between the austerity of her message and the voluptuousness of her medium.

Brookner interviews have ritualistic tendencies, and Hughes-Hallett's certainly covers the usual ground: 'I regard myself as being completely invisible'; how the young Anita learnt false lessons from the classic books she read in her solitary childhood:

I grew up thinking that patience would be rewarded and virtue would triumph. It has been demonstrated to me that this is not true. It was a terrible realisation.

and her reasons for starting a second career as a novelist:

I thought if I could write about it I might be able to impose some structure on my experience. It gave me a feeling of being in control.

But of greatest interest are some unfamiliar biographical details. For many years, we learn, Brookner allowed her life to be determined by someone else's needs. 'A man. He became very ill. He has since died.' There was also, Hughes-Hallett tells us, another lost love in Brookner's past, 'on which she is not to be drawn, but she divulges clues':

Perhaps I was naive in expecting that these matters would be less complicated than they prove to be. As an art historian I am accustomed to reading signs, but sometimes I forgot to do so in real life. [...] People who are going to be good at reading the signs can do it at the age of 18 months. The others never learn.

We see her in her 'attic' at the Courtauld, on which the world 'doesn't impinge'. And we see her still hopeful:

I have great expectations. One waits to be sprung.

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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' ...

Cousin Henry by Anthony Trollope

It's funny what can put you off a book. Harold Macmillan, it is said, liked to go to bed with a good Trollope, and indeed was often of an afternoon to be found lolling around Downing Street with an old novel. (David Cameron emulated Macmillan - but he called it chillaxing, and Trollope probably wasn't involved.) I once went to a play in London about the Profumo affair, and the Macmillan character waxed patricianly lyrical about Trollope, saying he was currently flicking through Cousin Henry and finding it awfully jolly. I'm a bit of a Trollope fan, or I was once. In fact I've read most of his novels, but some time back. The ones I haven't managed are the early ones ( Castle Richmond and the like) and one or two from the later period that simply haven't appealed. Cousin Henry is one of these. It may be I just find its World's Classics cover slightly repellent. Cousin Henry is one of Trollope's shorter novels. This is actually a point in its di...

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.

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...

'Babbling with Brookner': Interview Discovery

Val Hennessey's interview with Anita Brookner in You Magazine, 9 August 1987, marks the publication of Brookner's seventh novel A Friend from England . The piece, 'Babbling with Brookner', anticipates Julian Barnes's warning to a later interviewer: 'You will find yourself babbling'. Hennessey is a fan, Brookner her 'literary heroine'. She once bumped into Brookner outside Waitrose and said embarrassing fannish things. Brookner 'stood shifting uneasily from foot to foot, wide-eyed and fearful, like a trapped hare'. Later they met by chance on a number 14 bus. Both Brookner and Hennessey were shopping for outfits, Brookner for 'something tweedy and dull': she gets off and is seen heading into The Scotch House, a purveyor of quality Scottish clothing. Hennessey phones Brookner to arrange an interview. Brookner expresses alarm and consternation: she finds interviews 'an ordeal'. On arrival Hennessey compliments Brookner on her ...

'...and the forest drooped glimmeringly'

1983's Look at Me finishes with a night walk through London. The walk, which extends over a whole chapter, as if in real time, is harrowing: it's one of the most abject episodes in Brookner. A nocturnal traipse of a different kind occurs towards the end of George Meredith's 1859 novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel . The hero, as emotionally turbulent as Brookner's protagonist, though for different reasons, moves through a forest in Germany, experiencing everything from dusk to dawn, with a tempest in between. The chapter is satirised in Forster's Howards End (1910). Leonard Bast, visiting the Schlegel sisters, expresses his admiration for Meredith's novel and describes his own emulation of Richard Feverel's night walk. The Schlegels are less enamoured. They know the novel, but find it laughable. They mock, for example, the glimmeringly drooping forest. Such different reactions to a nineteenth-century masterpiece place the characters socially. The sisters, ...

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...

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...

Verfall einer Familie: Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

'I found your address in a letter from your mother to mine; it was tucked between pages 123 and 124 [*] of Buddenbrooks [**] which Mother was reading before she died. I have been unable to read the book since that awful day, but I recently took it down when I asked Doris, my maid, to dust the shelves.' Anita Brookner, The Next Big Thing , ch. 13 (Letter from Fanny Bauer to Julius Herz) Who does not enjoy a family saga? Virginia Woolf, never a populist, had much success with The Years , and Buddenbrooks (1901) remains Thomas Mann's best-loved novel. It covers the years from high Biedermeier 1835 to the very different 1870s in the lives of the Buddenbrook family, a bourgeois*** north-German clan. I've visited Lübeck and the Thomas Mann museum (the ' Buddenbrookhaus ') several times, but in my pre-blogging days, when I took no photographs. But I remember a sedate city, autumn leaves underfoot, and a vaguely marine atmosphere, as of cold seas not too ...

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.

The Brooknerian

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