Reassessment

This may, by now, come as a surprise, but Brookner was once disregarded, downgraded and even mocked by her peers.

For illustration, consider the comments of Jeanette Winterson (here) and Anthony Burgess (here).

Why the hostility? Coming to fiction after a successful career elsewhere, was Brookner seen as an interloper, a hobbyist, straying from her lane?

Something has changed. Time has passed. A major biography is in the offing. Mentions of Brookner in the press nowadays are not only more frequent but more admiring.

Writing last year in the Guardian (here), in their 'Books of my life' column, the writer Geoff Dyer - lauded by, among others, Zadie Smith - spoke of Brookner in respectful and, one feels, revisionary terms:

... the first 12 novels by Anita Brookner, a subtle and quietly pathological writer. When someone writes essentially the same book over and over you’re in receipt of an enacted philosophical consciousness. Having said that, Brookner’s persistent and gradually shrinking sameness led me to pause at about the halfway mark: 12 down, a dozen to go.

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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' ...

Her Motto

The critic Andrew Graham-Dixon (see here ) remembers: When I first studied the history of art, at the Courtauld Institute in London, one of my tutors was the formidable Anita Brookner. Her special subject was French painting of the Romantic period, but it was her approach to art in general that I found enlightening, and eye-opening. I remember one of her instructions in particular: 'Always remember, when you're looking at a painting, that every last detail is important: nothing is there by accident.' She said this so often, that I came to think of it as her motto. I recently saw Graham-Dixon lecture on his latest subject, a fresh interpretation of Vermeer. Andrew Graham-Dixon at the event I attended Afterword : Her finest art-critical motto was surely 'Art doesn't love you and cannot console you' (see earlier post here ). I have often considered it as an alternative motto for this blog.

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...

Cover Story #3

Part of Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series, to be published later in the year:

Video Brookner

This mere four-minute piece ( click here for the BBC Archive #OnThisDay feed ) should be top of the list for any Brooknerian, not least because it is, to my knowledge, the only video of the author freely available. Anita Brookner made only rare media appearances. Buried in archives are, I know, a Channel 4 interview with Hermione Lee and a programme (in the 100 Great Paintings series) Brookner made in 1980, still only an art historian, on, I think, Delacroix. We should be gladdened by this marvellous vouchsafement. There she is: stylish and a-swagger; trenchant in her commitment to the truth.

Mr Bennett and Mrs Woolf

In 1924 Virginia Woolf published a pamphlet called 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown'. Mrs Brown was a sample fictional character. Woolf imagined conjuring her out of the ether, and the woman's challenge: 'Catch me if you can.' Mr Bennett was the popular novelist Arnold Bennett, representative for Woolf of an older generation of writers. He was famous for a range of novels, especially those set in the 'Five Towns' of the Staffordshire Potteries. 'The foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else': Woolf, apparently approving, quoted these words of Bennett's, only to dismantle them in a fashion that affected his reputation for generations to come. He, along with his confreres Wells and Galsworthy - 'Edwardians' she called them - simply couldn't offer truths about human nature. Only 'Georgians' could, in which camp she placed Mr Lawrence, Mr Forster, Mr Joyce and Mr Eliot. Mrs Woolf too, no doubt. And why? Be...

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.

'Fifty-five minutes, with slides': Brookner at the Booker

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.

A Challenging and Absorbing Task

On the tenth anniversary of Anita Brookner's death, Hermione Lee gives an insightful portrait of the author (see here ). Professor Lee's forthcoming biography was an exercise in life-writing not without its difficulties: Brookner was an intensely private person who made away with most of her archive, kept her friends in separate compartments, and had secrets she never revealed.

Walking along King's Road

In yesterday's Telegraph features magazine, Mick Brown was one of the contributors to a piece called 'The celebrities who are actually nice ... and those who aren't' (available here ). Mick Brown interviewed Anita Brookner in 2009 in what was to be her last interview. It is an often-cited exchange and very fine (available behind the Telegraph 's paywall). In Brown's recollection, Brookner was 'one of the most fascinating people I've ever met': '80, pin-neat figure, fragile and watchful'. Her flat, he recalls, was as if preserved in aspic at some point in the 1960s. A few weeks later he glimpsed her from a bus: 'walking along King's Road, head down into the wind'. He wanted to get off and give her a hug. As if inevitably, and probably blessedly, when the bus did stop, Brookner had vanished.

The Brooknerian

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