On Spark and Comprehensibility

Do you read for pleasure? I do, and I know it is wrong. I know I should read to be challenged and discomforted. But I want consolation. I'm nervous of very short novels, and almost never read short stories. Having to work out what's going on and who everyone is! The stress and anxiety of it!

Some writers make almost no effort to put the reader at their ease. Muriel Spark is one of these, especially in her later work. I read Aiding and Abetting (2000) recently, and it was an alienating experience. Two men, each purporting to be Lord Lucan, consult a psychoanalyst in Paris. The analyst has her own preposterous secret: she is wanted for fraud after pretending to be a stigmatic and harvesting money from the gullible. Then we're in Scotland with two fresh characters who are in pursuit of one of the Lucans. Then Spark starts to tell the story as though one (or possibly both) of the Lucans were the real thing. The novel ends in Africa and involves cannibalism.

Aiding and Abetting flies by, and at times it's a romp. But it's a difficult read. I don't like to feel I'm only just keeping my head above water. I want to be taken just a little by the hand, and I want things to make sense. And it makes me rather uncomfortable when I get the feeling that the author, who will always know more than I, is quietly having a diabolical little laugh at my expense.

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Top Ten Brookner

The much-loved Backlisted podcast ( here ) returns with a 'lockdown' episode that includes a lot of Anita Brookner talk. Prompted by discussion about Hotel du Lac , never the most representative Brookner, the chat meanders pleasantly on to the potential for compiling an Anita Brookner 'Top Ten'. At a loose end myself, though this week at the chalkface entertaining the children of keyworkers, I considered the question myself. I'm sure there are similar such lists elsewhere on this blog - I forget, and I don't particularly want to consult them anyhow. Of course, Brookner - like Henry James, like Trollope, indeed like many prolific authors - passed through phases. Brookner's novels, I contend, fall into three, neatly divided by the decades she wrote in: the raw, vital 80s; the settled magisterial 90s; the bleak, experimental 2000s. A Brookner novel from the 80s seems very different from any of her final works - just as 'James I', 'James II' ...

Her Motto

The critic Andrew Graham-Dixon (see here ) remembers: When I first studied the history of art, at the Courtauld Institute in London, one of my tutors was the formidable Anita Brookner. Her special subject was French painting of the Romantic period, but it was her approach to art in general that I found enlightening, and eye-opening. I remember one of her instructions in particular: 'Always remember, when you're looking at a painting, that every last detail is important: nothing is there by accident.' She said this so often, that I came to think of it as her motto. I recently saw Graham-Dixon lecture on his latest subject, a fresh interpretation of Vermeer. Andrew Graham-Dixon at the event I attended Afterword : Her finest art-critical motto was surely 'Art doesn't love you and cannot console you' (see earlier post here ). I have often considered it as an alternative motto for this blog.

Christopher Hampton's Hotel du Lac

However often I watch it, I'm always surprised. A film of an Anita Brookner novel seems as outlandish as an adaptation of, say, late James. But The Golden Bowl and, more skilfully, The Wings of the Dove have been successfully translated to the screen in recent decades. Their plots, though, underneath the verbiage, are very simple, even sensational. Hotel du Lac , similarly, is one of Brookner's more structured, plotted works. Rights to the novel were bought before its Booker success. Initially Anita Brookner had been approached to write an original screenplay, but she said she wouldn't know how to. Instead she offered the soon-to-be published Hotel du Lac . (This is revealed in the 2002 commentary that accompanies the DVD of the 1986 TV film. The commentary is a dull, low-powered affair. No Brookner, of course.) Anna Massey plays Edith. I've often found Massey a distractingly distinctive actor. Like Judi Dench she manages somehow, in any role, alwa...

Cover Story #3

Part of Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series, to be published later in the year:

Video Brookner

This mere four-minute piece ( click here for the BBC Archive #OnThisDay feed ) should be top of the list for any Brooknerian, not least because it is, to my knowledge, the only video of the author freely available. Anita Brookner made only rare media appearances. Buried in archives are, I know, a Channel 4 interview with Hermione Lee and a programme (in the 100 Great Paintings series) Brookner made in 1980, still only an art historian, on, I think, Delacroix. We should be gladdened by this marvellous vouchsafement. There she is: stylish and a-swagger; trenchant in her commitment to the truth.

Mr Bennett and Mrs Woolf

In 1924 Virginia Woolf published a pamphlet called 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown'. Mrs Brown was a sample fictional character. Woolf imagined conjuring her out of the ether, and the woman's challenge: 'Catch me if you can.' Mr Bennett was the popular novelist Arnold Bennett, representative for Woolf of an older generation of writers. He was famous for a range of novels, especially those set in the 'Five Towns' of the Staffordshire Potteries. 'The foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else': Woolf, apparently approving, quoted these words of Bennett's, only to dismantle them in a fashion that affected his reputation for generations to come. He, along with his confreres Wells and Galsworthy - 'Edwardians' she called them - simply couldn't offer truths about human nature. Only 'Georgians' could, in which camp she placed Mr Lawrence, Mr Forster, Mr Joyce and Mr Eliot. Mrs Woolf too, no doubt. And why? Be...

Brookner Biography Announced

A brief post to let Brooknerians know the moment has arrived: a biography commissioned by Chatto & Windus, to be written by Hermione Lee. Hermione Lee interviewed Brookner on television in the 80s. Brookner joins illustrious company. Lee has lifed, among others, Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton.

Walking along King's Road

In yesterday's Telegraph features magazine, Mick Brown was one of the contributors to a piece called 'The celebrities who are actually nice ... and those who aren't' (available here ). Mick Brown interviewed Anita Brookner in 2009 in what was to be her last interview. It is an often-cited exchange and very fine (available behind the Telegraph 's paywall). In Brown's recollection, Brookner was 'one of the most fascinating people I've ever met': '80, pin-neat figure, fragile and watchful'. Her flat, he recalls, was as if preserved in aspic at some point in the 1960s. A few weeks later he glimpsed her from a bus: 'walking along King's Road, head down into the wind'. He wanted to get off and give her a hug. As if inevitably, and probably blessedly, when the bus did stop, Brookner had vanished.

'Fifty-five minutes, with slides': Brookner at the Booker

A welcome arrival on YouTube: a recording of the 1984 Booker Prize dinner at which Anita Brookner learned of her win. Brookner's surprise is genuine; it was a strong year. The clip includes Julian Barnes (see last week's post) and Brookner's future biographer Hermione Lee.

Less Than One Sentence

Like buses, the Brookner mentions come thick and fast. In the 'NB' column of this week's TLS , her book reviewing is wryly celebrated: 'An occasional pleasure in the literary pages: the long book review that shows barely any interest in the book under review'. We learn of a 1976 review Brookner wrote of a biography of George Sand. The review's 3,000 words comprised, the biographer complained, only seven about the book: a contravention, she felt, of 'a literary Trades Description Act'.

The Brooknerian

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