She had, she said, offers of marriage, but none she could
accept. Whom could she entrust her life to? And how could she be married while
at the same time living the life she wanted to live? How could she be married
while also being an art historian? She told one interviewer she never seriously
thought the puzzle was solvable.
At
some point, she said, a wariness sets in, an understanding of other people’s
motives – of men’s motives, the agendas of men. She didn’t want to be someone
else’s prop. She said she never came close to marrying, because she never
wanted to be married to the men who asked her. But she would have liked
companionship and she would have liked children. Six sons, she said.
One of her favourite pictures was David’s Oath of the Horatii in the
Louvre, an image of three heroic brothers willing to sacrifice themselves for the
good of Rome.
Her parents
wanted her to marry. When she didn’t marry, they wanted her to nurse them. If
she had married she wouldn’t have been so accessible – an irony that wasn’t lost
on her.
And
if she had married, she wouldn’t have been able to write. Or have wanted to, or
needed to. But how does one spend the time in marriage? – the years and the
months and the days and the hours? The novels of the past, ostensibly novels of
marriage, are in fact concerned only with courtship and provide little
instruction on what comes afterwards. Or indeed on what follows a failed
courtship.
Brookner
was as clear-eyed here as everywhere. She didn’t think she’d have been a good
wife, a good mother. She was, she said, too self-absorbed, too inward. But she
still valued the idea of marriage, and in her later, more reckless interviews
she said she wished she had married several times. You should, she more than
once said, play Russian roulette with your own life.
And
marriage is a major theme in Brookner’s fiction. From the middle period onwards
many of her protagonists are married. A Misalliance, Latecomers, Lewis
Percy, Brief Lives, A Closed Eye, Incidents in the Rue
Laugier, Altered States, Visitors, Falling Slowly, The
Next Big Thing, The Rules of Engagement and ‘At the Hairdresser’s’ all
feature heroes and heroines who are married, widowed or divorced. So much for Brookner’s
novels being only about lonely spinsters.
But in Brookner the ending of a marriage is only a matter of
time. You can come across the most shocking scenes, especially in the later
novels, where the iron has entered the soul, and the screw is turned and turned.
Take Altered States: the decline and suicide of the narrator’s wife
Angela. I read it aghast, my heart in my mouth. One’s heart is often in one’s
mouth when one reads these later works, such is the atmosphere of dread.
A third of the way through The Rules of
Engagement, as another example, the heroine’s heavy but inoffensive husband
dies: the experienced Brookner reader has probably already suspected Digby’s
time will soon be up. But the manner of his going is appalling. He is brought
home by his secretary, having obviously suffered a stroke, though this isn’t
named. No medical attention has been sought, and none is enlisted by his wife,
the narrator, who maintains a vigil over him through the few dark days and
nights that follow. Then he dies. These scenes are set, at a guess, in the
1970s, in an age perhaps less medicalised than today. But would you really not
at the very least have called a doctor? The narrator doesn’t, and there’s no
further comment on this. In Brookner we’re beguiled into such acceptances. Why?
Is there a reason? Or is it just a part of the true weirdness and uniqueness of
the Brookner world, the enigma that keeps us reading and kept her writing?
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