Book of the Year

When I arrived in the college, I had already moved about a good deal among the layers of society; and I had not come to the end of my journey yet. I had the luck to live intimately among half a dozen different vocations. Of all those I had the chance to see, the college was the place where men lived the least anxious, the most comforting, the freest lives.

This very nearly became a book of a few days. I'd never read C. P. Snow before, assuming him a bargain-basement Anthony Powell. The novel sequence Strangers and Brothers was always going to be compared with A Dance to the Music of Time. Snow's roman fleuve is less literary, flatter in tone, less continuous. One can dive in at any point, rather as with Trollope. The Trollope analogue is apposite: politics, in several arenas - here, those of a Cambridge college - are the novel's themes. More, Snow said he wanted to write as it were a nineteenth-century novel about the twentieth.

But I was not immediately won over. The fellows of the college are engaged in electing a new Master. All are white men - it's 1937 - and there are a lot of them. I found myself irritably flicking back and forth to remind myself who was who. Snow, again like Trollope, specialises in character, and the reader perhaps shouldn't hope to keep up with all the details.

Gradually, though, I became involved. Who would win the vote? Who was up, who down? The atmosphere of the novel seduces too. That atmosphere is hermetic: not a single scene takes place outside the college. In something of a further iteration of the classical unities, a year passes, winter to winter; this is a wintry novel, right from the start.

It is probably also a novel for one's later years. Snow is interested in middle and old age, which he expertly dissects:

Just as a mature man dismisses calf love with a smile, because he can no longer feel it (though it may once have caused him the sharpest pain), so Pilbrow, that vigorous old man, smiled indifferently at the triumphs and sufferings of the middle-aged. Suddenly one encountered blankness at a point where one expected sympathy and response. He looked just as he had looked ten years before; he could still feel passionately about his deepest concerns; but those concerns were narrowing, and one knew at last that he was growing old.

'Half a dozen different vocations': I have since treated myself to two further Snows. Corridors of Power is said to be Yes Minister minus the jokes; and The Conscience of the Rich is about an Anglo-Jewish family in what we - or I, at least - would now call Brooknerian London.

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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' ...

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...

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.

'Babbling with Brookner': Interview Discovery

Val Hennessey's interview with Anita Brookner in You Magazine, 9 August 1987, marks the publication of Brookner's seventh novel A Friend from England . The piece, 'Babbling with Brookner', anticipates Julian Barnes's warning to a later interviewer: 'You will find yourself babbling'. Hennessey is a fan, Brookner her 'literary heroine'. She once bumped into Brookner outside Waitrose and said embarrassing fannish things. Brookner 'stood shifting uneasily from foot to foot, wide-eyed and fearful, like a trapped hare'. Later they met by chance on a number 14 bus. Both Brookner and Hennessey were shopping for outfits, Brookner for 'something tweedy and dull': she gets off and is seen heading into The Scotch House, a purveyor of quality Scottish clothing. Hennessey phones Brookner to arrange an interview. Brookner expresses alarm and consternation: she finds interviews 'an ordeal'. On arrival Hennessey compliments Brookner on her ...

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...

Anecdotally

I last saw [Anita Brookner] in the summer of 2010, when the publisher Carmen Callil brought her to lunch. She was frailer, and needed a stick. I had made potted crab, to which she said she was allergic, to my embarrassment (should I have known?). Instead she took a little cheese, some green salad and a roast tomato; she declined the beetroot. We asked about her life. She said that she went out early every morning to her Sainsbury's Local for 'a croissant, a petit pain and a loaf'. 'Every day, Anita?' 'I eat a lot of bread.' She had been rereading Stefan Zweig and applauded that most Brooknerianly-titled novel Beware of Pity . She agreed with Carmen that the one advantage of age was that the trials of the heart were behind you. She stated that she had no religious feelings or beliefs at all. She still rented her television (no digibox or Freeview), and still smoked eight or 10 cigarettes a day. 'Do you have your first after breakfast, Anita?' 'O...

'...and the forest drooped glimmeringly'

1983's Look at Me finishes with a night walk through London. The walk, which extends over a whole chapter, as if in real time, is harrowing: it's one of the most abject episodes in Brookner. A nocturnal traipse of a different kind occurs towards the end of George Meredith's 1859 novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel . The hero, as emotionally turbulent as Brookner's protagonist, though for different reasons, moves through a forest in Germany, experiencing everything from dusk to dawn, with a tempest in between. The chapter is satirised in Forster's Howards End (1910). Leonard Bast, visiting the Schlegel sisters, expresses his admiration for Meredith's novel and describes his own emulation of Richard Feverel's night walk. The Schlegels are less enamoured. They know the novel, but find it laughable. They mock, for example, the glimmeringly drooping forest. Such different reactions to a nineteenth-century masterpiece place the characters socially. The sisters, ...

Stendhal Again

We had the recent post * about the after-dinner cigar, and one from a short while back on the connections between or among Brookner, Sebald and Stendhal, and yesterday I enormously enjoyed reading a text** by Jack Robinson (Charles Boyle) from CB Editions , An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H. B. ,*** which I discovered by chance in the Guardian Review . The text is powered by its footnotes - and what pleasure there is in finding on pp. 4-5 a quotation from Brookner's 1980 TLS review of a Stendhal biography, collected in Soundings : 'Anita Brookner', says Robinson, '...approves [Beyle's] furious attempts "to measure up to the rules of the game, even when [my [i.e. Robinson's] italics] there was no game being played ".'**** Though Brookner isn't directly referenced again, the italicised line is mentioned twice more, on p. 81 and p. 128. The other echoes are numerous. Beyle, while watching a mosquito bite on his ankle, reme...

A Fraudulent Encounter

I met Anita Brookner only once. I was in a London street with my French friend Marie Delemotte. It was August 1992, and I was nineteen. Marie was much older - ours was a cross-generational friendship - and when I excitedly told her the identity of the rather elderly-looking woman tottering towards us on the pavement, my friend, unimpressed, said, with what I probably would have called Gallic insouciance, 'Oh, go to her! Why not?' But my heart was thumping. Here was my heroine, my favourite author - here in a London street, at two o'clock on a summer's afternoon - here, in the flesh, or the somewhat exiguous flesh, for the woman approaching us was very thin and seemed frail. She walked with a stick. But Brookner would only have been in her sixties in 1992, and was to live another twenty years and more. She wore a white blouse, a white skirt and a red blazer with large shoulders. Her hair, bright auburn, looked newly coiffed. The street was Elm Park Gardens, Brookner...

Brookner lights up

Her exquisite manners disarm and put visitors at ease, and at the same time secure a reasonable distance. She speaks in a deep, gentle voice with fluency and deliberation in equal measure, and sometimes in 'short, military sentences,' as she once said of Stendhal. Occasionally she smokes a very slim cigarette. Shusha Guppy's introduction to the 1987 Paris Review interview Her reasonableness is disarming: When I said that I was worried about her smoking, she replied 'So am I' and lit another one, thus acknowledging my concern while indicating that it was none of my business. Shusha Guppy, 'The Secret Sharer', World and I , July 1998 'Oh, Katie, we must do something about that fringe,' she would say, offering me one of her untipped Woodbine cigarettes and balancing a small tin on her knee as an ashtray. Katie Law, Evening Standard: see an earlier Brooknerian post. Lunch never took longer than 75 minutes; she usually ordered fish...

The Brooknerian

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