Light as Air

Gallery-going nowadays can be a strain. Warders have been made into martinets: you must walk in this direction, wait here, move on, never linger. Some appear resentful you should wish to indulge in anything as frivolous as art. In the Palace of Holyroodhouse I asked a question about a painting of George IV's visit to Edinburgh in 1822. Who was the man kneeling before the king? The kilted attendant performed a pantomime first of not hearing - I had to repeat - then of appearing not to recognise my words as English. I said again: 'Do you know who is presenting a gift to the king?'

'I do.'

'Well, who is it?!'

Eventually, sulky, and with unaccountable emphasis: 'The Duke of Hamilton.'

Wilkie, Entrance of George IV at Holyroodhouse
(Scott stands, at ground level, second from the left.)

The palace is picturesque, laid out and furnished in decadent Carolean style. Beside the house rises the wildness of Arthur's Seat.

The art, like much in royal palaces, is hit and miss. Some, such as a whole hall's worth of hastily painted pictures of every Scottish monarch, including the legendary (they've all been given Charles II's nose), is poor. As always, sooner or later one finds a Cranach, this one an Adoration of the Magi:

I liked this Lely of Catherine of Braganza:

My afternoon was similarly mixed: hounded by warders round the few spaces deemed safe in the Scottish National Gallery. Much is missing. I noted this Cranach, an Allegory of Melancholy...

...enjoyed seeing this James Drummond of the Porteous Riots, a real event and scene in The Heart of Midlothian...

...and marvelled at this Tiepolo sketch of Antony and Cleopatra - just because it's Tiepolo. I sense quite a few Brookner personages would have been drawn to this marvellous light-as-air picture, not just Blanche Vernon.

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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' ...

'Proustian in scope'

...now her account is closed the novels may be seen for what they are: a literary chronicle of life's journey from middle to old age... If this sounds unexpectedly Proustian in scope, it shows how ill-served she was by her detractors and the orthodoxies of the sales cycle. Andy Miller's review of the Brookner biography in this week's Spectator is the one I've been waiting for. It's no exaggeration to credit dedicated readers such as Andy Miller with the reassessment of Brookner's literary reputation in the decade since her death. I'd suggest it's the tireless curatorial and promotional work of Miller and other influential fans that permitted a biographer of Hermione Lee's stature to consider adding Anita Brookner to her list of illustrious subjects. Authors usually take a posthumous dip in popularity and visibility; some never recover. It took Henry James more than half a century to find his readership. That Brookner is now being taken so seriously,...

'Spikier, sharper, cooler than anyone had noticed'

(But we noticed, we might rejoin.) We continue our selection of British reviews of the Brookner biography: see the Literary Review here . The cover is of interest too.

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.

Further Soundings #2

In a post a while back ( here ), I recalled pitching unsuccessfully a volume of Brookner's essays... *** Anita Brookner Mme de Blazac and I: Memoirs, Essays and Reviews 1981-2011 1. ‘Mme de Blazac’, memoir, LRB , 19 June 1997 2. On Abel Gance’s film Napoleon, film review, LRB , 16 April 1981 3. ‘The Bibliotheque Nationale’, essay/memoir, TLS , 5 October 1984 4. ‘The People and the Place’, review of Parisians by Graham Robb, Spectator , 10 April 2010 5. ‘Repose is Taboo’d by Anxiety’, review of Migraine by Oliver Sacks, Spectator , 23 October 1993 6. ‘Even Less Fiction than Stranger ’, review of Le Premier Homme by Albert Camus, Spectator , 14 May 1994 7. ‘The Master of the Indirect’, review of Henry James: Collected Stories , Spectator , 11 Dec 1999 8. ‘Sexual Tour...

Secretive as a Heron

It is hardly surprising that even such an eminent life-writer as Lee might wonder whether Brookner would have given this book her blessing. Brookner was as secretive as a heron. The fine mystery of the writer, to quote Dickens on Shakespeare, must surely be left undisturbed. ー From an excellent review ( here ) by Laura Cumming in the Observer of Hermione Lee's forthcoming biography.

'What I too fatally lacked was her tone.'

I've been listening to a couple of Brookner audiobooks. Joanna David's take on The Rules of Engagement is competent, and her middle-class tones suit the character of the novel's narrator. But there's a complacency to her reading, too cosy for a novel as dark and late as this. Diana Quick is the ideal reader of Undue Influence . Her accent is RP, but less strident than David's. Quick's tone has a lowered, falling quality, appropriate for this sad novel. There's also a slight accent, not traceable, possibly just the effect of clipping. There are other actresses who display this: Eleanor Bron, say, or Siân Phillips. Quick's is an older woman's voice. Claire, the narrator of Undue Influence , is meant to be twenty-nine. Yet her storytelling always feels as if long in retrospect, though the novel is set in the modern day. This isn't the only example in Brookner of an unsettling freewheeling as to chronology. There's no evidence of Anita Brookner...

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...

Photo Op #3

The new Penguin paperback edition of Strangers (2009), with its introduction by Tessa Hadley (see here ) and its thick gatefold or French fold cover, is an opulent affair. Oddly, its livery is distinct from other recent reissues, instead mimicking an earlier version of Hotel du Lac . Of interest is the inclusion of an author photograph. It's a shot from a 1986 set by Peter Jordan. It's the session where Brookner sits at her dining table, a book open before her, bookshelves and peace lilies behind. She wears an open-necked cream blouse and a small wristwatch. Other shots from the session show Brookner holding her neck, leaning her chin on her hands, folding her arms, smiling, turning aside. The one chosen for Strangers is suitably equivocal - folded arms, slight turn of the head, left eyebrow slightly more raised than normal, downward-angled lips. It's the first time a photo of Brookner has appeared on a British edition since the hardback of Visitors in 1997, the last und...

Montagu Mansions

Series 5 of the BBC's A House through Time, available on the iPlayer in the UK, features Montagu Mansions, home to Claire Pitt in Undue Influence. The first UK edition of the novel shows the location on the cover.

The Brooknerian

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