When, a few years ago, an early-modern manuscript translation of Tacitus was discovered in Lambeth Palace, the writer's identity was at first a mystery (see here). The piece was in the neat hand of a scribe, but scribbled marginal corrections gave clues as to the translator: Queen Elizabeth I herself, whose late penmanship was notoriously appalling. Chirographic disregard for the reader was a marker of status in the period, and Elizabeth's ministers would provide fair-copy transcriptions of her correspondence.
Brookner's handwriting, though more even and consistent than Elizabeth's, or indeed late Henry James's, is also difficult to read. It's the kind of script you have to take a run at, letting the likely sense carry you forward.
On AbeBooks at present, an autograph letter to a reader:
These things show up from time to time. I own two myself (see here and here). Brookner corresponded willingly but guardedly with her fans.
The present letter, to a Mrs Chappell, is surprisingly revealing, offering a view into Brookner's writing process:
Yes, I do enjoy writing, but I find it takes a great deal of stamina. I usually find myself thinking about a book about a year before I start to write it.
Some points:
- In early interviews (and in Look at Me, 1983) Brookner depicts writing as a penitential activity, something that makes her ill. By 1987, it seems, she is starting to enjoy herself, and this is seen in later interviews, where the process figures, conversely, in salutary terms: she even, she says, gains weight.
- She trusts to unconscious processes - 'I usually find myself...'
- '...about a year before...': writing is an annual business, no doubt tied at this point in her life to the rhythms of the academic year.
- 'I find it takes...': Brookner is in her late fifties in 1987. She came to fiction late. Though close to retirement from her day job, she's a relative tyro as a novelist. Her peers: who would they be? She was only six years younger than, say, Kingsley Amis, who won the Booker two years after Brookner. But he published Lucky Jim in 1954.
- The letter ends with Brookner regretting she has no photograph to send. This is familiar. She is making a point: she's not a celebrity; this second career of hers is not fully serious, but a sort of hobby. She was fond of quoting Stendhal, a line about writing being like a post-prandial cigar - a line that cleverer folk than I have failed to locate (see here).
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