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 flat.
Brookner counters, 'Oh it's too small. Only one bedroom. I long for another room. My dream would be to have a large house, full of family which I haven't got, and lots of children, and if I had that I'd never have written a single word.'
She talks of Hotel du Lac and the mixed blessings of a Booker win. 'Hotel du Lac was an unpopular choice; a lot of people let me know that - oh yes - it was very hurtful ... So I've been very cautious since then. I've made myself obscure.'
She smokes 'thoughtfully' as she speaks. The smoking is neither commended nor censured. Adverts for cigarettes are found liberally through the magazine.
She speaks of her imminent retirement from teaching. 'I might get another job. I might try charity work. I might do more writing. I hope so, but with twice as much time I'll probably do half as much work. I'd rather like to do a paper round.'
She defends herself against the charge that her novels are autobiographical. 'I'm energetic, happy, not at all the miserable woman I've been made out to be ... I do live alone. I would say that I am not gregarious, that I receive more invitations than I accept, but it is largely because I am pretty tired in the evenings. The so-called "Brookner woman" has been exaggerated. The one things all my characters have in common is that they are inexperienced in the ways of the world: I am certainly not.'
Each book, we are told, takes her six months to write, after which she celebrates with a long walk and usually succumbs to a virus.
'All my books are impossibly romantic. And if I have an overriding theme in my novels it is innocence and what brings it down. The interesting thing is that everyone loses innocence in a different way. It's nothing to do with sex, it's to do with morals. It's knowing whether or not to take a step which you feel is ill-advised, or even wrong.
'You know, I'm finding this interview worse than a tutorial...' Brookner complains, and the tension in the room is, for Hennessey, 'almost palpable'. She breaks the pause by telling Brookner she looks younger, smaller, softer than in her photographs. Brookner smiles. 'Good. I'm doomed to look terrible in photographs. But I was plainer as a young girl, very plain. I could never have got by on looks. I've always envied women whose appearance did the work for them.'
Hennessey takes with her a photographer of her own, an up-and-coming Alistair Morrison, who captures a nervous-looking Brookner at her table and in a mirror, both characteristic poses. The flat's decor is familiar from other photo sessions: the peace lilies, the bookshelves, the mirror, the print on the wall.
Notes
* The You Magazine was and is the colour supplement of the Mail on Sunday, a popular British newspaper, middlebrow, middle class and right-leaning. The magazine is aimed at female readers.
* Val Hennessey is still an active reviewer with the Mail.
* In the 1990s Brookner purchased another flat in her block, in fact right next door. She set it up as a base for writing, furnishing it sparsely with a day-bed and a phone no one knew the number of.
* Visible titles on Brookner's shelves: a book of aphorisms, and books called Mental Powers and Tour de France. Many of the books appear to be classics in French, probably Balzac, Flaubert and the like, in cheap editions from the 1950s and 60s.
* The artwork on Brookner's wall is an
antique engraving called ‘La Marchande de Coco’, drawn by Carle Vernet and engraved by Philibert Louis Debucourt
around 1810-1820. It depicts a tender scene from Parisian street life during
the First Empire, showing a female vendor offering a herbal drink to a decorated
Napoleonic soldier.
* Hennessey depicts Brookner as a 'trapped hare', an echo of the famous lines in Hotel du Lac. Brookner is, though trapped, the hare, not the tortoise.
* Waitrose, an upmarket British supermarket, features in other interviews. 1994, Independent: 'I'm a suburban matron now - I do nothing else but go to
Peter Jones and Waitrose, or sit here reading. It's very easy to interrupt me.'
* Brookner's retirement plans are either truthful or an artful dodge. We'll never know how seriously she took her second career as a writer of novels. At this stage she was only a third of the way through her output. Did she really see the thing so lightly?
* The reference to charity work is interesting. We know Brookner left a legacy to the charity Doctors Without Borders, and that she would sometimes spend her Christmas Day in work with the needy.
Comments