In an earlier post I asked:
In which novel by Anita Brookner is there a reference to the Victorian novelist George Meredith?
I had already got Olivia's Christmas present, a first edition of The Ordeal of Richard Feveral [sic*], her favourite novel, and I also saw the smile that would break up her little face when I gave it to her. (Ch. 5)
The antagonist Alix pooh-poohs this ('Well, I think we can do better than that'). A preference for worthy Victorian fiction represents for Alix all that is wrong in Olivia. Brookner presents Olivia as Alix's passive foil; the reader is invited to take Olivia's part. Olivia, disabled, from a socialist family, is the embodiment of virtue, not least in her liking for George Meredith. Brookner's favouring of Olivia verges on the sentimental, even on the infantilising: 'her little face'.
I said the question called for deep-cut knowledge - and I mean not just of Brookner but of literature. Meredith's reputation after his death in 1909 took a dive from which it never recovered. Forster in Aspects of the Novel was sniffy (1927). Woolf, otherwise a devotee, acknowledged the decline when, a year later, she wrote a centenary essay.
When Brookner published Look at Me in 1983, Meredith wasn't as completely out of print as he is today. Diana of the Crossways, The Tragic Comedians, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and The Egoist were still to be found quite easily.
Just as writers of an earlier age might assume in their readers a familiarity with the languages of antiquity, so Brookner in the early 80s could refer to George Meredith with the expectation that a gloss wouldn't be required.
But what of more than forty years later?
No one would demand that commercial publishers should keep alive texts that don't sell. But it they ain't there, they won't be bought. In this way a culture dies.
Meredith is on my mind at the moment because, at a loss for a book to read, I picked up for £3 in a local secondhand bookshop an early edition of Lord Ormont and His Aminta. I knew nothing about it, didn't even recognise the title. It's a difficult but hypnotic read, justifying Wilde's description of Meredith's style: 'chaos illumined by lightning'. Woolf, perhaps influenced by Wilde, uses a similar metaphor for this intermittent brilliance:
For pages all is effort and agony; phrase after phrase is struck and no light comes. Then, just as we are about to drop the book, the rocket roars into the air; the whole scene flashes light; and the book, years after, is recalled by that sudden splendour.
* The spelling error: The title is The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. For more on this topic, type 'spelling' into The Brooknerian's search bar.
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