The Brooknerian

Some notes on the seminar scene in chapter 4 of Brookner's Providence : Kitty's '[A] novel is not simply a confession, you know. It is about the author's choice of words' reminds me of Evelyn Waugh's line, 'I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in language, and with this I am obsessed.' When the Paris Review asked Brookner about Kitty's comment, she replied, 'I am not conscious of having a style. I write quite easily, without thinking about the words much but rather about what they want to say. I do think that respect for form is absolutely necessary in any art form - painting, writing, anything. I try to write as lucidly as possible. You might say lucidity is a conscious preoccupation.' The key quote from the Preface to the Third Edition of Constant's Adolphe , ' ce douloureux étonnement d'une âme trompée ' is given in the Penguin translation as 'the pain and bewilderment of a soul d...

The scene had, for her, a strange exoticism: the hideous room, the north light, the dull atmosphere, compounded by the smells of cigarette smoke and sheets of photocopied paper, the muted and rumpled appearance of everyone except Maurice and herself, the enormous amount of luggage they managed to bring in - bags, briefcases, mackintoshes - the ceremonial plate of chocolate biscuits handed round by Jennifer's assistant, all this seemed to her stranger and more desirable than the home life of her grandparents with their variants on normal dress and erratic impromptu meals. Anita Brookner, Providence , ch. 3 Anyone who has ever, in a British educational setting, sat through a staff meeting or committee meeting will recognise and enjoy the description above. But it isn't just the precision of the detail, and the period detail at that - the pungent photostats, the smoke. It is also the exoticism of the scene that gives it its savour and makes us see it afresh. Brookner's ...

Some day, unless a miracle took place, she would spend all her time in this kitchen and it would become her permanent and only home, instead of the temporary staging post she had always thought it might be. But this was too dangerous to contemplate... Anita Brookner, Providence , ch. 2 Providence , in its opening stages, seems light and witty: any jeopardy is manageable, within bounds, or wistfully past. But we get these little shafts of steel. This is, after all, even so early in the oeuvre, fully and absolutely Brookner.

Chapter 2 of Providence focuses on Kitty's university life. Both she and her lover Maurice have flats in London, from where they commute to their 'provincial' university; we are told the financial supporters of the institution, the Friends, hail from the 'surrounding countryside'. I suspect Brookner means Reading. She was a visiting lecturer at the University of Reading from 1959 to 1964. It gives Providence a particular, perhaps rather charming non-Londoncentric air. Campus life, the provinces: this could be David Lodge.

What a strange, assured, idiosyncratic beginning. No action, practically no dialogue, all retrospect and introspection. We find ourselves in the Parisian world of Kitty Maule's grandparents. There's a hint, too, as ever, of something 'further east'. Providence (1982) was Anita Brookner's second novel, published a year after her first. Reading it now - now that we have the entire corpus - we recognise many things from later works. But  Providence is an urtext. Take the grandmother's dressmaking workroom in the rue Saint-Denis, with its seamstresses and its 'young and outrageous girls'. What does this recall? And of course, yes, the rue Saint-Denis appears a decade or so later, and similarly, in A Family Romance . See an earlier post  here .

I'm planning a reread of Providence , which makes use of Adolphe , but let me consider Constant's 1816 novel from another angle: ...he thought he might have done better, even prospered, in another era, or even another place, where the natives, the citizens, were more helpful, more curious, and indeed more candid. He longed to have lived in one of those confessional novels he had read as a young man -  The Sorrows of Young   Werther, Adolphe  - in which whole lives were vouchsafed to the reader, with all their shame, yet as if there were no shame in the telling. Here, now, one was consciously checked by a sort of willed opacity, a social niceness that stalled one's attempts to make real contact. Brookner, Strangers , Ch. 7 As Brookner said in interview, Adolphe is the story of a moral catastrophe; it's about what you do when you're the cause of a disaster. Adolphe is a bored, ennui-laden young man: he decides the time has come for him to fall in love. He...

The 'great flood-gates of the wonder-world' are swung open: the reader is 'world-wandering' like the crew of the Pequod through the 'lashed sea's landlessness': 'How I snuffed that Tartar air! - how I spurned that turnpike earth!' I do not read only Anita Brookner. I like to have, in the background, a monumental, old, preferably nineteenth-century novel on the go. This has long been my habit. I don't think any of us would really cope if we were actually transported back to that long-lost time, but I like to think some of us would know some of the ropes. Moby-Dick, or The Whale , which I'm about a third of the way through, is a departure for me. It reads like Dickens, Joyce and Shakespeare. It's a deeply strange and addictive book. It's also very straightforward, with, as Martin Amis says in his recent essay collection, an enormous amount of padding. It's highly literary ('I have swam [ sic ] through libraries and sailed th...

Some final comments on Brookner's Fraud : It's a novel about care and caring. This struck me only towards the end. Anna cares for her mother. Mrs Marsh is wary lest her own daughter become her carer (ch. 15). Even the predatory Vickie has 'a child's right to care and constant attention' (ch. 16). The novel's conclusion is markedly hard, cold, less than compassionate. Was Anna, in caring for her mother, truly a victim of fraud? I'm unconvinced by Anna in her final iteration. How long will she remain so blithe, so uncaring? Where is she now? Fraud is also a novel about food. It brings together themes from previous novels, and advances them: Anna is all but anorexic. The set-piece scene in chapter 16 - the Hallidays' dinner party - compares with the restaurant episode at the end of Look at Me . There's terrible food - a terrine, cold and slippery as ice cream - and much horrifying conversation. There may not be a revelation, but the scene is neverthe...

He was strangely contented. Every morning he devoted to being ill, and every afternoon to getting better. He listened to The Archers and the afternoon play. This was his favourite time. With the advent of the news and the more serious programmes he was reminded that he was fifty-one, a responsible citizen, and a businessman who was due in New York the following week, all of which information struck him as highly unwelcome. Anita Brookner, Fraud , ch. 15 I don't know whether non-British readers will appreciate the authenticity and charm of this passage. Brookner is speaking here of BBC Radio 4, the nation's main speech radio channel. Many people structure their day according to its comforting and predictable rhythms; I have done this myself. In the small hours it goes off air and the frequency plays the World Service, which George Bland in A Private View listens to through the night. Menus plaisirs , but pleasures all the same.

The tone, from the start, is unsettling, uncanny: over-detailed, affectless, and then with sudden accesses of poetry and metaphor. Of the heroine's pinewood furniture: 'The swaying tall pines among the litter of cones on the forest floor have been subdued into silence and into obedient bulks'. What is Spark's game? For she's certainly playing a game. Like Anna in Anita Brookner's Fraud , Lise in Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat (1970) has gone missing - or rather is about to go missing. Or rather is about to be brutally murdered. Spark, in typical postmodern Sparkish fashion, larks around with chronology. We know early on, even before Lise has arrived at her final destination - an unnamed probably Mediterranean city - that she is to die. We find out by the end how this comes about, and why. The ending is chillingly bleak. Lise is unknowable, even by Spark ('Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?'), an author who's in the driver'...

I'm interested by the middle chapters of Fraud . Here, as in other Brookners, especially later ones, the reader is conscious of authorial unease. In essence she's run out of story, run out of road. It's a predicament that often propels Brookner into new discoveries. These can be raw and difficult, especially in the 2000s novels. But Fraud is Brookner at her mildest, at her most content. So we get Mrs Marsh and her friend Lady Martin 'taking tea' together in chapter 13. I wonder, reading this, what another writer would have made of the same circumstance. If Barbara Pym were writing the scene - or Jane Austen. But this being Brookner, the chapter soon descends into pitiless analysis, bleak self-knowledge, and existential anxiety. Embracing Lady Martin at the end, Mrs Marsh cannot but be aware, beneath her friend's Jolie Madame , of 'the smell of mortality'. Then we have Dr Halliday and his terrible wife. Another stock situation given the Brookner treat...

One looks forward to those chapters in Anita Brookner's novels when she sends her personages away on holiday. One thinks of Alan Sherwood in Vif, Paul Sturgis in Venice, and any number of characters in Paris. One such vacation is enjoyed or endured by Anna Durrant in chapter 12 of Fraud . It's January, and brightly cold ('sunshine as ruthless as the workings of the human heart'), and Anna is visiting her old friend Marie-France. But dissent and deception are in the air. Marie-France, after a lifetime's nunlike spinsterhood, has contracted to marry a faintly dubious friend of the family. Anna, excluded, must spend much of her time alone - for which we're surely grateful. Brooknerian wanderings follow, including (of course) a trip to the Louvre. Eschewing the Romantics' 'great discordant machines', Anna focuses on the portraits of Ingres: Mme Rivière, 'reclining fatly on her blue velvet cushions'; Mme Marcotte, 'in unbecoming brown, her...

So he delivered the papers before he went to school, getting up at five in the frozen winter mornings, before it was light, and going home again to the fuggy warmth of the shop, with its cloying gas heater, and warming himself in the back room while his mother cooked him a huge fried breakfast. Chapter 11 of Fraud begins with a depiction of Dr Halliday's Leicester youth. I'm not sure whether the ugly word 'Londoncentric' existed in 1992, but Fraud , like much of Brookner, is definitely it. The reader is always on the alert when Brookner strays into the English provinces. The tone of this passage is not quite condescending, but certainly rather indulgent, soft-focus. It works to an extent, but probably only insofar as it's a portrayal not so much of a place as of a time: the postwar period, that fabled era of kindness and solidarity Brookner celebrates most powerfully in Visitors , in Mrs May's dream of a field of folk.

She raised the window and leaned out, trying in vain to catch the smell of turned earth, to sense an emergent spring, but it was too early in the year: the air was sour, lightless. Anita Brookner, Fraud , ch. 10 In the recent Backlisted podcast  Andy Miller spoke persuasively of Brookner's narrative technique, likening it to the work of a painter: Brookner gradually fills her canvas, a touch here, a touch there - focusing for a time on a particular area, perhaps returning to it later, and so on. This is seen very much in Fraud , chapter 10: a dream returns Anna and her creator to the story of Mrs Durrant's disastrous second marriage. We might have thought that part of the story done and dusted, but there is still much to be learnt: Brookner is rarely what might be called a chronological writer. The chapter is painterly in another sense. The depiction of January, and, relatedly, of Anna's desiccated emotions ('In middle life, she knew, the feelings wit...

This day would end, like all the others, and she would look back in pity at the person who had endured it. So I come to chapter 8 of Fraud . I've read it before, of course, and I've even written about it here (see A Brooknerian Christmas ). The chapter reads like a collection of Brookner's greatest hits. We have early waking, a flat that's never quite warm enough, striped upholstery, tentative confrontations with neighbours and old acquaintances, flâneurism, obsessive rumination, a cup of tisane, a struggle to eat the smallest of meals, and all the while the marking off of the empty hours as they go by. I notice one or two new things: the 'demons' circling the extreme discipline of Anna's life; and Nick Marsh, Vickie Halliday and even Mrs Marsh being seen as a 'band of grotesques'. Suddenly we're no longer in 1990s London but in some dark long-ago Europe, in the world of Hieronymus Bosch. I also see the following chapter, covering Mr...

Once more, rereading Brookner, one comes across intriguing repetitions. Take Mrs Marsh's 'night thoughts' in Fraud (ch. 7). Lying in bed, with (like George Bland in A Private View ) the World Service playing in the background, she entertains memories of shopkeepers she remembers from her earliest youth. Sturgis recalls such stores in Strangers , and Mrs May in Visitors similarly conjures the neighbourhood of her childhood. Then, in Fraud , but briefly, there's 'Dolly', Mrs Marsh's mother's glamorous friend. So there are three characters with that name in Anita Brookner. There's the legendary aunt in A Family Romance / Dolly of course, but there's also a woman named Dolly Edwards who appears in a dream at the beginning of Leaving Home . As I say, intriguing. Are there other Dollys?

She was aware that she was uncomfortable to be with, had little to offer but her maidenly accomplishments and her letter-writing and her too careful clothes. [...] Within that carapace she was an adult woman, but one who had no voice because of her lifelong concealment, which now no one would question. Fraud , ch. 6 Let me compare Fraud 's Anna Durrant with Look at Me 's Frances Hinton of nine years before. Frances too, in a famous passage, has 'no voice at the world's tribunals' ( Look at Me , ch. 6), but arguably her 'accomplishments' are more substantial than Anna's: she works, she enjoys success in her writing. Whereas Anna's life is much more isolated and reduced. This is a pattern in Brookner. Character types recur, but supports are stripped away. When reading Fraud for the first time the reader may wonder whether Anna will survive. She has disappeared. Her disappearance has come to the attention of the police. She may be dead, by wha...

Since then Anna had maintained her ambiguous poise, although she knew that it was brittle. Anita Brookner, Fraud , ch. 4 In her middle period - and Fraud sits more or less at the centre of the corpus - Brookner seems to revel in her unexpected second career. She delights in fiction, almost in what we might call storytelling. She writes about characters like Anna Durrant, who might have been invented by that born novelist Henry James. Anna's a lot like Fleda Vetch in The Spoils of Poynton - that deep little person for whom happiness is a pearl-diving plunge, that deep little person who really can only exist and survive in fiction, and Jamesian fiction at that. Henry James of course isn't content with the fairy tale, and at the end of the novel Fleda emerges into 'clearer cruder air'. Brookner too seeks to break into Anna Durrant's ambiguous poise, render it brittle. But as with James it's an affair of style. Style buoys up Anna and Fleda, creating out of ...

Mrs Marsh was intrigued in spite of herself. Anna, she reflected, was not without power, even if that power were confined to the mystery which she both contained and partly concealed. Anita Brookner, Fraud , ch. 3 This reminds me of both Visitors and Strangers (see an earlier post  here ). It's postmodern metafiction à la Brookner. For at this stage of the novel this is precisely how the reader sees Anna Durrant. Henry James has already been evoked, and it's a strongly Jamesian tale. Anna's mystery - not least the mystery of her disappearance - is a mystery to be solved, but it is also what makes her potent, a mystery to be appreciated and delighted in and perhaps maintained.

Today, 6 November, marks a year since I started The Brooknerian . I shall celebrate, I think, with a weak tisane.

Mrs Marsh. Let's think for a moment about that name. To refer to a character so formally, and a character to whose inner life the reader is given full access, is surely unusual and even subversive. It's determinedly old-fashioned. Its male equivalent is the simple surname, as in the cases of Bland in A Private View or Sturgis in Strangers . Mrs Marsh   has more than a little in common with Mrs May in Visitors : similar names, both widows, both fond of the painter Turner. Mrs May is the central consciousness in that later novel, and at the time critics reacted with some consternation to a character whom they were invited to know so well and yet whose authorial denomination seemed so antique, so distancing. But none of this is about propriety but about how such characters think of themselves: some people think of themselves in one way, others in another - a point Brookner makes about Miriam at the start of Falling Slowly: On her way to the London Library, Mrs Eldon, who stil...

Mrs Marsh, in Fraud , may not be Brookner, but Brookner has awarded her several Brooknerian tastes. Only three chapters in, and already Mrs Marsh has referred to Proust and Henry James (the famous line from The Ambassadors ), and now Baudelaire: Mes ancêtres, dans des appartements solennels, tous idiots ou maniaques. One wonders: what do we gain? what does such a line bring to the novel? Not a great deal, in part because it is unreferenced, unexplained. But this is perhaps the point. Brookner is a writer who is very artful, by which I mean full of art. She is also a writer who's exclusive, elitist, but in the best way. She demands: Keep up with me, meet my standards. She isn't going to condescend, she isn't going to make allowances. And we, as readers, are surely grateful for her forbearance.

In Fraud 's second chapter Brookner focuses on Mrs Marsh, sturdy, viable, rough-hewn, taciturn, sensible. Mrs Marsh, one senses, isn't quite a self-portrait. Mrs Marsh is a character who turns up from time to time in Brookner: the no-nonsense Englishwoman. Not that her obverse, Anna Durrant, is in any way not English. Anna is no Kitty Maule, no Edith Hope. There's no Jewishness, no  Mitteleuropa , in Anna's background. But Anna and her mother don't quite fit. They live a fairy-tale life in Albert Hall Mansions; the atmosphere, brilliantly, is described as 'eerily emollient'. Anna's arrival on the scene is preceded by the sound of a sewing machine, as if she were the Lady of Shalott. Anna's father was a musician in the pit at Drury Lane. One has visions of almost Thackerayan artistic penury. Privately Mrs Marsh considers the Durrants rather common. One little mystery about Mrs Marsh - whether she's a Catholic - is cleared up in chapter 3. ...

They were handicapped, and although this might not matter for Amy Durrant it mattered terribly for the daughter, who had, past infancy, never known a father, and was thus eternally unprepared for the rules of engagement between the sexes in the least predictable and sentimental of games. Brookner, Fraud , ch. 2 The rules of engagement ... Always interesting to find Brookner utilising or, as here, anticipating the titles of her other novels.