The Brooknerian

An elegant sufficiency, content, Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books... Lines from Thomson's refined poem 'The Seasons' open each chapter of Barbara Pym's 1987 novel Civil to Strangers . Except that it wasn't written in 1987 but in 1936. Rarely do authors enjoy such prolific afterlives as Pym, who died in 1980. Civil to Strangers , her second novel, written in her twenties (her first was Some Tame Gazelle , not published till 1950), has a slightly uncanny timeless quality, not only because of its unusual publication history, but perhaps because of the way Barbara Pym saw the world, or did then. There is no sense of the passing of time, of time being finite. Everything has the potential to be comfortable and contented. Young characters dream of genteel retirement, but it's a state they envision lasting for ever. The novel, published as part of a longer collection, is short and light. It tells the story of Adam and Cassandra Marsh-Gibbon, a young marr...

James Lees-Milne, sharp, catty, camp, Edwardian-born gentleman of letters, one-time Country Houses Secretary at the fledgling National Trust, sported in his later years a slightly risible halo-style 'do'. When, in June 1986, he goes with an old chum to the Royal Society of Literature to listen to Anita Brookner's lecture on the Brothers Goncourt, he finds himself distracted by her hair: 'like a bird's-nest, but tidy,' says he. He calls her 'a funny little woman, sharp, delicate features, slight of build, soft-spoken'. Her lecture is excellent, and inspires him to read the Goncourts' novels. But, he tells his friend, afterwards he remembers little of what she said (perhaps because he was thinking rather too much about her riah). It often surprises me (but it probably shouldn't) how infrequently Brookner's name crops up in the diaries and letters of her contemporaries. A couple of mentions in the Roy Strong journals, but practically noth...

There was always something facile, even hysterical, about these [early] reviews (I should know; I wrote one). The annual Brookner offered a cheap shot to young critics, eager to savage a scandalous bearer of bad tidings about ageing and loneliness. Yet now she agrees with those snapping puppies. 'I hate those early novels. I think they're crap. Maybe I needed to write them. I far prefer what I'm doing now.' Yes, she does use the Ratner* word. It's like hearing a duchess cuss. Why are they crap? 'They're morbid, they're introspective and they lead to no revelations.' Has she a favourite among her works? 'I don't like any of them very much.' Boyd Tonkin, Independent interview, 2002 Elsewhere Brookner said she wrote only a first draft. There were no revisions. There just wasn't time . There just wasn't time. This is significant. She came late to fiction. She was fifty-three when A Start in Life was published. Had she sta...

January 1962 finds Miss Brookner viewing the work of Réquichot in the rue de Miromesnil. His main invention, she sees, is a sort of 3D collage box: animals, birds and flowers cut from glossy magazines. The spectator 'gazes back through the glass as into an aquarium': This is basically the Victorian scrap-book or screen re-thought and equally absorbing on a winter's afternoon with a slight temperature. Not perhaps the highest art, she concludes. But she foresees for the fellow a bright future in window-dressing: All rather ridiculous but, to quote Henry James, 'the French spirit is able to throw a sort of grace even over a swindle of this general order'.

Where was Anita Brookner during the Paris événements of May 1968? Evidently not in Paris, to judge from her review of Mavis Gallant's Paris Notebooks ( Observer , 10 January 1988). (Brookner was probably in Cambridge, working out her year as Slade Professor.) Brookner knew about revolutions - the French kind in particular - and was in no doubt that this was one. But was it, in Wordsworth's words, 'very heaven'? Probably not, but it makes for 'excellent reading'. And so too does the Brookner account, even if not firsthand, of that strange Parisian moment from fifty years ago: Certain scenes were so surreal that they seem to have been enacted from 'A Tale of Two Cities', such as the incident in Les Halles when truckdrivers, wading through crates of overturned cherries, fought with manifestants , then gave up and pressed the fruit to their mouths, chins running with juice, to be joined by the whores of the district: Dickens shading into Zola. Most ...