Brookner’s ‘About the Author’ pieces, those little spiels of
biography that adorned the dustjacket flap or the inside front cover of her books,
and which in the early, primitive, pre-Internet days of my fandom were almost
my only source of information about her, were brief and non-committal,
often terse, and sometimes rather defiantly ludic. But one fact was never
withheld: that Brookner, having been born in London and lived there most of her
life, had spent three postgraduate years in Paris.
Brooknerians
dream of Paris. They long for it. It lures them. The reality is often quite
different. Julius Herz in The Next Big Thing, not in the pink of health, heads
for the French capital for the day, and finds it exhausting, monumental. This
isn’t the Paris he remembers, that place of charm, of charming youthful
encounters. He doesn’t belong any more. It isn’t his Paris.
Key
Paris episodes are to be found in A Start in Life, Family and Friends, Lewis
Percy, Fraud, Incidents in the Rue Laugier, Leaving Home and Strangers. One’s
favourites shift and alter. I used to love the romance of the Paris scenes in Incidents
– I even once visited the rue Laugier (it was oddly unevocative) – or Family
and Friends. The scene in the latter, at the Hôtel Bedford et West End, where Mimi waits for her lover, who does not come, who never would have come,
affected me deeply in my youth, and on early Paris visits I would walk up and
down the rue de Rivoli in search of that hotel, which I didn’t find.
A Start
in Life and Lewis Percy process memories of Brookner’s student days, in the
Fifties. We know for certain that her first sojourn in the city was from 1950,
when Anthony Blunt brokered for her a scholarship to the École du Louvre, and
that her parents were against the plan. They thought she might be conscripted
into prostitution! (No such luck, an older Dr Brookner later commented.) A
plaintive cry went up: Come home! They tried everything. They kept her short of
funds.She lived in poverty. But as she said elsewhere, sometimes you have to
save your own life. But when exactly her famed three postgraduate years in
Paris actually were is anyone’s guess. They were probably in the 1950s, but
in her later brief memoir about her Paris landladies Brookner describes much
later residences. She was probably shuttling fairly constantly between London
and Paris, like characters in Falling Slowly and Leaving Home.
The two
contrasting cities – the one dark, restrictive, costive, the other full of
light and openness and good fellowship – function in Brookner’s novels much
like the Old and New Worlds in the novels of Henry James. It’s Brookner’s
International Theme. But the reality is often another matter, as it was for
poor Julius Herz. He heads into a church in the Latin Quarter to see a favourite
painting, but really nothing works. And in Brookner’s final novel, Strangers,
we get, right at the end, our final Paris visit. The story’s over, Brookner’s
run out of road, but she still has pages to fill, and this is where she comes
into her own. She sends her protagonist on a wild goose chase to Nice, and then
back up through Paris, where nothing is as he remembers it. And he’s old, like
Herz, and gets alarmingly tired. It is always to the safety of London that
Brooknerians must return.
I first
went to Paris when I was about twenty, with a couple of friends. We drove, took
the ferry – this was before the Channel Tunnel opened – and stayed in a pure
dive of a youth hostel in one of the banlieues. Later, and many times, I returned by myself,
staying in various small hotels closer to the centre. Once I met Marie, my
French friend, the woman I’d been with in London when I met Anita Brookner.
Marie had lived in Paris in her student days, possibly during the événements of
1968. (Brookner wasn’t a soixante-huitard, was most likely completing her year
as Slade Professor at Cambridge at the time, and looked back rather sceptically
on those allegedly heavenly, blissful days. There’s a critique in her novel The
Rules of Engagement.)
Marie
took me to the rue Mouffetard, where she had lodged. She showed me
Sainte-Chapelle and Notre Dame, and we wandered along the Seine and browsed the
booksellers’ wares. We ate omelettes in a Left Bank crêperie called something
like Miam-Miam. She took pleasure in pointing out at another table a group of
students who were, she said, involved in a deep philosophical discussion. This
was real life, this was real living. That was her lesson.
I was
in Paris alone in 2002, when I bought the newly released The Next Big Thing
from the W. H. Smith store on the rue de Rivoli and took it back to my dark
little hotel room to read with horrified, enervated delight. I was in Paris
another time, on a summer’s evening, reading Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Magical
long-ago days. But during those later visits the
disenchantment was unignorable. I think I last went there in 2009, and I hated
it. It was so large, so adamantine, and so international. There were still all
the old movie-set locations - but take a step away from them and you might be
anywhere. I saw it was a city to which, like Mimi in Family and Friends, I
would never return.
How
often Anita Brookner went back there in her later years we don’t know, though
Herz’s dismal daytrip on the Eurostar in The Next Big Thing has an air of
authenticity. But in her fiction, in almost every book, there is at least a
mention, some memory of heady days. But precisely when those days were in her
real life, and what they comprised, and who was there, and what happened, we’ll
probably never know. Brookner wasn’t averse to speaking of her past, but she
spoke legendarily. She was good at covering her tracks and she was never going
to reveal all.
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