The Brooknerian

'Not as grand as we. They date from the sixteenth century. It is on my father's side that we go back - back, back, back. The family antiquaries themselves lose breath. At last they stop, panting and fanning themselves, somewhere in the ninth century, under Charlemagne. That's where we begin.' Henry James, The American Whose side is James on? Fineness in a writer is sometimes to be measured in this way. Does James align himself with an ancient French family, a scion of which vocalises the above patrician words? Or is he with 'the American', the new man of the novel's title, Christopher Newman? Such ambiguities are to be found in Anita Brookner too, in those many, many novels of hers exploring the clash between the outsiders and insiders of this world. Such clashes are irreducible, and this is perhaps why she wrote so much. Ever potent because ever unresolved. The passage from The American set me remembering. The Princess Michael of Kent, when sh...

So the English summer ends in a blaze of unwonted heat, and I reflect on my reading. In Switzerland I read Henry James, as followers will have noted. I'm still a little puzzled as to why I didn't get on with Confidence . I'm presently reading The American , which is earlier still, and it is a pure pleasure. Every page, every line, has something to savour. I can't quite decide whether I've read it before. It's the classic 'International Theme' novel in which American manners clash with the ways and mores of old Europe. I would like to have read Confidence in a revised form, but it doesn't exist: James didn't include the novel in his New York Edition. The version of The American one chooses to read is, I think, crucial - it affects one's reading experience and even says a little about one's character. Absolutely I favour the later version. The differences between an early James and its revised form are in evidence practically everywhere...

Continental galleries have an atmosphere distinct from their English counterparts. Walk into the National Gallery, say, or especially Tate Modern and you might be on a station concourse or in a shopping centre. The lack of an entrance fee probably explains the difference as much as any notions of greater European sophistication. In Europe you don't wander in and wander out. Your visit is an event. I was practically the only visitor to the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in the small central German city of Kassel. Misjudging the distance and incline, I toiled up the Wilhelmshöher Allee towards a curving palace on a hill. Coolness descended among rooms of huge canvases: airy generous displays of masterpieces by Rubens, Jordaens, Van Dyck and Rembrandt: whole salons devoted to each, with side-aisles full of smaller pictures by their workshops or contemporaries. Several works stand out: this Jupiter and Callisto by Rubens... ...this Rubens Mary with saints and sinners... ...

Carl Spitzweg, Engl änder in der Campagna , 1845, Berlin Having read and enjoyed Scott's The Talisman , set in the Middle East, I next selected Trollope's  The Bertrams  from my shelves a) because it's also partially set in the Holy Land and b) because it's by now one of the few Trollopes I haven't read. It's a mark of age to have made such headway into so massive an oeuvre. I never thought, when I began, that I'd make it this far. Earliest Trollope ( The Bertrams (1959) is number eight) plus a few oddities from later (e.g.  The Landleaguers  and  The Vicar of Bullhampton ) remain for another year. Will I ever read La Vendée ? You can never tell. One book leads to another. Trollope was the best travelled of the Victorian novelists; he actually visited Jerusalem and its environs, which Scott never did (not that you'd know it from reading The Talisman ). The foreign episode in The Bertrams takes up a lengthy section near the start, and it is ver...

We have a fairly clear idea what Henry James thought about his own novels. He revised many and wrote illuminating Prefaces for the summative New York Edition, released near the end of his life. And he left several out*. One to be excommunicated was Confidence of 1879 - an early work, but not that early. Either side of it sit The Europeans and Washington Square , both favourites and always in print. But Confidence is forgotten. I'd never read it - and I'm at the stage where I'm reduced to mere rereading. I decided this summer to give Confidence a try. Who was it who first described Confidence as a light and awkward comedy ? It's something that comes up often in relation to the novel. My money's on Leon Edel. Otherwise there's almost nothing anywhere. And yet it's a short to medium-sized work, written when James was close to entering his middle phase and the decade of The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians.  How could Confidence have been all but l...

Switzerland again Though not Brooknerland this time. To Zurich first, and the top of its local mountain, the  Ü etliberg, where I stayed. This involved a train ride and a steep trek through a forest. In the city I revisited the Kunsthaus, admiring this Rubens sketch of Orpheus and Eurydice leaving Pluto and Proserpina - such a range of emotions so swiftly depicted - and drama of a different kind in this large, almost monumental Vuillard - the planar masses crowding and bulging, the figures trapped and overwhelmed, and yet alive and throbbing in their still potent domestic maelstrom: Later I mooched about a huge open-air fleamarket and bought these cartes de visite  for two francs each. Their reverses are fascinating. Several are addressed to 'Elsa' or 'Else'. One is from 'Amelie', another from 'Clary Barth', a third from 'Judy Bietenholz'. All employ the phrase 'soeur de pension': they were friends at a girls' ...