The Brooknerian

On Tuesday 1 December 1992 the diarist James Lees-Milne made one of his regular jaunts to London, where he visited Richard Shone's Walter Sickert exhibition at the Royal Academy. He had one or two things to say about the show, noting that the later paintings, done from photos, looked like photos, but were still fascinating - transient scenes immortalised - and liking the 'early stuff' -  'Whistlerish'. His main beef - he wouldn't be James Lees-Milne if he didn't have a complaint - was with the gallery lighting. As I've explained before (see here ), Anita Brookner's 1994 novel A Private View is set fairly precisely in late 1992. In chapter 4, one Sunday, the protagonist George Bland visits the Sickert exhibition at the RA. Bland's ruminations prove somewhat more extensive than Jim Lees-Milne's, though the gallery's lights aren't commented on. If the visits to the RA of Lees-Milne and Brookner that winter had coincided, would the p...

A 'pure' novel, said Anita Brookner in interview, should cast a moral puzzle; everything else is mere negotiation. '[T]o follow a scruple to its ultimate conclusion is Edith Wharton's whole concern,' she writes in her Introduction to that author's novel The Reef . '[I]t is a chance to see what can be achieved in the pursuit of moral truths.' Brookner's 'Wharton phase' centred on the 1980s, when, following her Booker win, she was much in demand. She wrote Introductions to The Custom of the Country and to two volumes of Wharton's short stories. In 1994, when she introduced the 'less popular, and indeed less well known' novel  The Reef , Brookner's star was arguably on the wane. How do Brookner's Introductions read? Do they, as some have claimed, feel like essays on her own fiction? Certainly the Introduction to The Reef is different in emphasis from the earlier Intros cited above, which are happy to recount the details...

The Custom of the Country is blessed with 'a most intricate and satisfying plot', according to the blurb on my Brookner-curated Penguin edition. The novel is certainly intricate. Things just keep on happening. In the constant edgy changefulness of her narrative Wharton is closer to a modern like Thomas Hardy than a modernist like Henry James. James's plots are more ordered and formal - never loose, never baggy. As for Brookner, hers are sometimes of the one sort, sometimes of the other. Her most Jamesian plots are to be found in the tight focus of novels like  A Private View,  whereas the likes of, say,  Lewis Percy proceed with a Hardy-style 'one damn thing after another' unpredictability. When she wrote an Introduction to the contemporaneous The Reef , Brookner called The Custom of the Country 'the broadest and most jovial of Edith Wharton's novels', in contrast with which The Reef was praised for its Jamesian 'dramatic unity'. The two im...

There were two Edith Whartons, the grand New York lady ('every inch a lady,' says Anita Brookner in her Introduction to The Custom of the Country ), and the artistic, almost bohemian European: we see something of the latter in action in the novel, when Undine and Ralph are on their honeymoon in Italy, Switzerland and Paris. '[S]trange specimens from the depths slip through the wide meshes of the watering-place world' - the Baroness Adelschein, who is tolerated because she is amusing but would be dropped at home, and the 'Parisianized' Mrs Shallum and her 'wax-featured' husband. Such figures point towards The Age of Innocence and Ellen Olenska, who knows that world too well, and realises it is no place for Newland Archer. Brookner's Continent was altogether less raffish. She went to the same sorts of places, but gone were the louche outcasts of society Wharton depicts. And they're surely gone now. Go to Switzerland now, and you'll find on...

The Custom of the Country (1913) isn't one of Wharton's novels of 'Old' New York. Forensically it depicts the twentieth-century world, and the reader is struck by just how modern it feels. Where in British novels of the time would one find such a reverence for celebrity, such an impulse towards instant communication, such a rejection of anything out of date? Where would one find characters called Indiana Frusk? Where would one find chewing-gum? Modern it might be, but it isn't modernist. It's told in steady deliberate sentences, heavy with irony, Jamesian in shape. You need to read the novel slowly, not because it is difficult to read, but because it seems too easy. You need to slow down, weighing each carefully deployed word. Wharton is both insider and outsider, and in this she resembles her disciple Anita Brookner who provides an Introduction to my Penguin edition. Brookner went through a Wharton 'phase' in the 1980s, and it's fun to spot in ...

The Rules of Engagement closes with a sequence   equivalent to the more celebrated conclusions to some of Brookner's earlier novels. Betsy, who has shadowed or haunted the narrator through the novel, and through life, is gravely ill. It's unsettling news: the 'seismic revelation' that nothing is secure. Betsy's decline is affectingly told. What other writer would or could have written of Betsy, as she recalls her adopted, adored family, who have abandoned her, 'This last was an exhalation of pure longing'? And it's blazingly hot, just like the final moments of Providence : Brookner is never afraid to use the weather to ramp up the tension. But in The Rules of Engagement she pulls the rug from under us. We fully expect the novel to end with Betsy's death, and so it does, but it occurs offstage. The final, brief chapter unexpectedly moves forward in time, giving Brookner further opportunities to turn the screw. (There's even a motorcycle accident...

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. Julian Barnes's  Guardian  obituary tribute, March 2016 Should he have known?* Well, perhaps he had some residual memory of  The Rules of Engagement : 'Are you brave enough to eat seafood?' I asked. 'I believe it's good here, although I've never liked it. I once had a bad experience with dressed crab.'** (Ch. 14) *(The issue wasn't one of religion; Brookner wasn't an observant Jew.) **I'm not really sure whether dressed is the same as potted. I've never eaten crab, let alone put it in a pot or given it a dress.

The character of Nigel, dignified and likeable at first, but given to psychobabble, gradually falls victim to a sort of novelistic passive aggression. The existence somewhere in his background of an analyst* is inferred by the narrator, indeed imagined in some detail, though never confirmed. For her part she's 'too proud, or too ashamed (they are the same thing) ever to have confided, to have confessed in any company' (ch. 14). Brookner herself was asked by at least one interviewer whether she'd undergone analysis. She hadn't. And she wasn't about to start. It would take too long. And she might doubt the intelligence of the interrogator. It's a breathtaking answer. But she was a devotee of Freud. Her novel Strangers has an epigraph by Freud, a rare honour in Brookner. One thinks of Herz too, in The Next Big Thing , talking to an uncomprehending GP of Freud's experience on the Acropolis, of having 'gone beyond the father' (ch. 7). Or one ...

The Rules of Engagement is late Brookner, and there are moments of true neo-Jamesian opacity, even evasiveness. I shared some time ago on Twitter a massive 117-word sentence I found in the novel. And here's another passage, not quite on the same scale but still labyrinthine: One fears for the loss of one's innocence, even when that innocence is little more than ignorance. And also the blamelessness that blinds one to the superior sophistication of others and makes of that very sophistication a mystery which might reveal itself to have some value, even some merit, a capacity which one had been denied but which it might have been in one's interest to have acquired. (Ch. 12)

Whether the constant evasiveness and jokiness were a particularly English feature I could not decide, but I did miss the sort of overheard remark I had so relished in Paris, the willingness to discuss first principles and to invest passion in one's own arguments. The Rules of Engagement , ch. 10 This is a theme of Brookner's: the shallow jokiness of the English. Not that it works too well here: the narrator of The Rules of Engagement is, after all, English herself, however much she might feel like an exile. Brookner's protagonists can be divided into those who are (if such a thing were possible) fully English, and those whose identity is more complex. Brookner's was complex, and she was persuasive when she said (in interview with John Haffenden in the mid-1980s): I've never been at home here... People say I'm so serious and depressing, but it seems to me that the English are  never  serious - they are flippant, complacent, ineffable, but never serious ...

If I were to live the life of an exile I could do so much more comfortably by remaining where I was, surrounded by familiar possessions, my position unambiguous. The Rules of Engagement , ch. 9 Brookner's novels, as well as falling into phases (I propose the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s as reasonably distinct periods: not quite James I, James II and the Old Pretender but just a little along those lines), can be grouped thematically into pairs and groups. The reader who might baulk at the notion of a well-heeled Englishwoman feeling like an exile in the heart of London should read Brookner's previous novel The Next Big Thing about a real exile. The two novels are in communication with one another: it's a kind of auto-intertextuality.

The word is used three times in The Rules of Engagement . It might pass without notice were it not for the following, from some years later. In The Rules of Engagement 'blithe' describes the innocent, romantic Betsy. Here, in Brookner's  2009  Telegraph  interview  the word takes on more equivocal associations: In  Strangers  it is the tentative, introspective Sturgis who is confronted with the impulsive, carefree and monstrously self-obsessed Vicky Gardner, whose only interest in him is in what he can provide for her.  The person who thinks seriously about life, Brookner's books suggest, who proceeds cautiously and conscientiously, will be punished for their virtue, end up alone and dissatisfied, while the person who takes a wholly unreflecting and rather selfish view of life pays no price for it.  'But haven't you noticed that?'  She gives an amused smile. 'Think of Tony Blair. Unrealistic. Selfish. Happy as a clam!'  Didn't Pla...

I should be re-admitted if I exhibited all those marls of benign normality - holidays, dinner parties - that are the province of the maintained and protected... The Rules of Engagement , ch. 8 I've checked that sentence in both the printed first edition and the electronic version. Both show 'marls'. Surely 'marks' is meant? You don't really expect compositorial errors in a modern book, but it isn't the only example in Brookner. See an earlier post here .

'Normal': that dread and difficult word resonates through The Rules of Engagement . A quick search reveals thirty-nine uses. Many writers avoid it, or put it in quotes, or make fun of those who espouse its importance. Think of Jeanette Winterson: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? But Elizabeth is one of Brookner's most debilitated protagonists. At her lowest point, grieving, she writes: I should have to invent a life that others would see as normal... (Ch. 8) Her lover Edmund is 'normal'. Not just of a better class, and more moneyed, but somehow superior in some essential and unquestionable way. In earlier novels Brookner might have railed against this state of affairs, this 'normality'. But we're in the late phase here. There's a real sense of defeat and acceptance.