The Brooknerian

Another delightful vouchsafement: on YouTube, the full 1984 Booker ceremony:

What do you do when you've finished Henry James? You reread, of course - recommended for many authors, though usually I leave at least ten years. With James there is an added dimension: the presence in print of two distinct versions of most of his novels and many of his tales. The New York Edition, a grand magnum opus collected works, afforded him the opportunity in late career and having written all his major work to review and amend. He set to with enthusiasm, taking everything line by line and penning prefaces that, though often impenetrable, represent the foundation of twentieth-century criticism. James's focus was at the level of the sentence and the word. No major text-level changes were made, though there are instances of the New York Edition developing and embroidering paragraphs. The ending of The Portrait of a Lady is an example. I read The Princess Casamassima some years ago, in the original 1886 version published by Penguin. Tracking down the 1909 revised edition...

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.

Brookner's second novel, Providence , published in 1982, has several extended scenes set in Kitty Maule's tutorial room. For Kitty Maule read Anita Brookner, a lazy but inevitable parallel. The tutorials focus on a nineteenth-century French novel, Adolphe by Benjamin Constant, about a young man's affair with an older woman. Now in 2022 we add to the mix a third slim volume, Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes. Elizabeth Finch is a tutor, not in French literature (like Kitty Maule) or art history (Brookner) but in 'Culture and Civilisation'. The viewpoint in the tutorial room isn't Elizabeth/Kitty/Anita's, but rather a Julian Barnes substitute, a student named Neil who soon becomes fascinated by his inspirational teacher. Finch shares many of Brookner's peculiarities: her appearance, her clothes, her big eyes, her hair, her smoking, her voice, her diction, her handwriting, her high seriousness, her lunch habits (seventy-five minutes max.). Or rather she sha...

Although he set out to be a man of letters, he did not in fact write much until the active part of his life was over, and this of course is what sets him apart as a writer: he has the authority of a man whose preoccupations are not exclusively literary and who is informed at all times by memories of the immense experiences behind him. The Genius of the Future , 1971