There are secrets for privacy and silence; let them only be cultivated on the part of the hunted creature with even half the method with which the love of sport - or call it the historic sense - is cultivated on the part of the investigator… Then at last the game will be fair and the two forces face to face; it will be 'pull devil, pull tailor,' and the hardest pull will doubtless constitute the happiest result. Then the cunning of the inquirer, envenomed with resistance, will exceed in subtlety and ferocity anything we to-day conceive, and the pale forewarned victim, with every track covered, every paper burnt and every letter unanswered, will, in the tower of art, the invulnerable granite, stand, without a sally, the siege of all the years.
'She and He: recent documents': essay by Henry James on George Sand, 1897
Samuel Johnson was 53 years old when he met his future biographer James Boswell. For the next twenty or so years, Boswell developed a close friendship with his subject; later parts of the biography offer almost a daily account of Johnson's life. Johnson emerges from the apparent murkiness of his first half century. Johnson, Boswell repines, left a scant autobiographical record, having consigned to the flames 'the greater part' of such 'memorials' a few days before his death.
The comparisons with Anita Brookner are interesting, not only for the fact that Brookner became a novelist at the age of 53. She had, or she fought, a public life thereafter. She was interviewed, photographed, reviewed, celebrated and vilified. There were no grand book launches, no festival events, no appearances on panel shows, but it was public for Brookner.
Her own future biographer, Hermione Lee, knew her professionally, reviewed several of her novels, and interviewed her. She didn't follow her around, Ã la Boswell: no one did that with Anita Brookner. But when researching Brookner's life, Lee faced a problem similar to Boswell's: a Life with a largely undocumented first fifty years, followed by an ostensibly well-known second half. She faced also a subject who had set out actively to frustrate any future 'investigator'. Early on we are told the extraordinary news that Anita Brookner destroyed all her childhood photographs.
In Henry James's words, it's 'pull devil, pull tailor' from then on, a tug of war. James wanted fairness; he wanted the work to do duty for the life. Does Brookner stand now in her own 'tower of art', an amply forewarned victim defying the siege of all the years?
Lee's assault is friendly to a fault. At times she smooths over, excuses, the ruthlessness with which Brookner kept friends at bay and in different compartments of her life. Not everyone must have found this congenial. And yes, Brookner does by the end retain her occupancy of James's tower, insofar as so much of Lee's biography is dependent on a form of speculative archaeology: the novels and art criticism must deputise for the missing letters, photos and other evidence. But she is, as Lee says on the last page, 'still there, very vividly in many people's minds and memories, in the works of art she loved and studied, and in her writings'.
The gaps are yawning. Brookner's time as an undergraduate, for instance, 'is one of the many passages in her life which she took care to obliterate'. Her years in Paris are likewise hazy. Her celebrated memoir about her Paris landladies (see here) turns out to have been heavily fictionalised.* Time and again Lee must turn from the Life to the Art, scouring long-forgotten pieces in art journals - and 'there is the young Anita Brookner, walking in that empty, formal, seventeenth-century French landscape, her mind working rapidly on all that she had seen'.
An 'implacable cull of the past' was one thing, but the uncertainty extends to the observations of others. At every turn, recollections vary. There were tales of Brookner even before she became 'Anita Brookner'. That name in quotes is the title of Lee's opening chapter; the unknowability was there from early on, a 'lifelong dandyish, witty, controlled, stylish performance, in life and art'. At some point, long before she became a novelist, and we'll probably never know when, Brookner began the enormous task of inventing herself as a legendary figure.
Brookner's determined cull couldn't encompass the archives of others, and it is in such places that Lee locates a handful of early photos. She finds a shot of Brookner in the 50s or 60s in the Luxembourg Gardens, and one of her on a hotel balcony overlooking what appears to be the church of St-Germain-des-Prés. This last, its hues fading in the way only colours from the 60s or 70s decline - my own childhood snapshots, which survive, are the same - is particularly marvellous. Later images, several of them new, are from later middle life. The more trenchant, rebarbative pictures of Brookner in old age - the Lucy Dickens photo, say, in the National Portrait Gallery - are avoided, and the portrait chosen for the cover, from the 1980s, is soft-edged, wistful: Brookner in her heyday.
An evocative chapter depicts Brookner's life as a teacher. In that role she was heavily witnessed, though again memories are divided. Was she inspirational, or dry-as-dust? Was her perfume expensive and French or something 'cheap and loud' from Woolworths? Tales of the Courtauld come thick and fast, but as with all anecdotes, you get a sense of Brookner lying just out of reach, which is where she wanted to be.
Some accounts offer a darker view: 'One long-term colleague had the general feeling that "for some students she could be dangerous. Her love of complication was also a courtship of neuroses... the volume was turned up on their problems."' Lee doesn't dig into such perspectives, and when we learn that 'Legend has it that she would hand out tranquillisers from a large gold box' to nervous students about to take their vivas, it is presented as humorous, a loveable eccentricity.
Lee is and was in awe of Brookner, as indeed anyone would be. She loves the novels and loves the life. There are instances of admiring high comedy throughout: Brookner's remark, 'Your couturier?' to Penelope Lively on meeting her outside Marks and Spencer; or on telling us of Brookner's voluntary work at the Royal Brompton Hospital, Lee's wry aside: 'Imagine being a patient in a ward and having Anita Brookner provide you with your choice of reading before your operation!'
She has her own personal Brookner canon. Of the Eighties novels, she favours A Start in Life, Family and Friends, Latecomers and Lewis Percy. Her favourites of the next decade are Incidents in the Rue Laugier and Falling Slowly. Of Brookner's last novels, she uncontroversially rates The Next Big Thing very highly. Oddly she italicises 'At the Hairdresser's' and numbers it as the author's twenty-fifth novel.
Already we see Lee's tastes shaping those of others. Reviews of the biography have given Incidents in the Rue Laugier the sort of attention it never received at the time of publication. The Next Big Thing's 'late masterpiece' status seems cemented: another book that got little notice in its day. Indeed I remember reading it myself in 2002 and thinking it a rehash of earlier works, a Private View-lite. As Hermione Lee sagely points out, Brookner's fecundity as a writer led to a form of fatigue among reviewers and readers, and it is only now, as we look at her work as a whole, that we re-evaluate, perceive patterns in the carpet.
Lee may prefer the earlier novels, but she honours and wonders at the oddness of the last works: they 'burn on a low flame', are 'involved in a compulsive pursuit. Internalised and meditative, they are studies in waiting, thwarted desire, magical thinking... And they expose the processes of making fiction and its roots in the unconscious... as though the form of the novel itself is being held up to the light and made strange.' She's ultimately a generous biographer, knows she doesn't have all the answers. She invites, perhaps, other views.
The balance of the biography, indeed of any Life, is determined by the evidence and its availability. This makes Lee's detailed account of Brookner's last years and death especially harrowing. 'She began, in the mid-2000s, not to feel in full control,' Lee writes, and by the next decade that control was all but gone. We are given Brookner's medical notes, and Lee has full access to the carer who looked after Brookner to the end. Brookner is pathologised. The biography's final sections are at odds with the discretion of earlier chapters.
We might now ask: Will Brookner sink into oblivion? Or will other assays at biography follow? When Andrew Motion published the Life of his friend Philip Larkin, less than a decade after the poet's death, it seemed definitive. But other interpretations came after. No one will ever equal Hermione Lee's thoroughness with the extant evidence, and I don't expect much further to be unearthed, but other readings will surely be both possible and desirable - and welcomed by Lee, über-fan if ever there was one - as time passes.
Of enduring value will be Lee's insight into Brookner's two careers, as art historian and novelist: far from being 'separate phenomena, one superseding the other', they were intrinsically linked, in parallel: 'both committed to those who take art and life seriously and who, though probably not finding happiness themselves, might be described as "the happy few".'
We will always be grateful to Professor Lee for tackling this most recalcitrant of biographical subjects. She images herself exploring a 'deep forest'; a hall of mirrors might be another comparison. There were those who questioned Lee's decision to take on Brookner. Was she 'important' enough? The old lazy stereotypes came into play. But Lee persisted, and the result establishes Brookner for the future, secure in her tower. In the siege of all the years, this opening sally (if the metaphor allows) may be judged a score draw.
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| Hyacinth Rigaud, Gaspard de Gueidan Playing the Bagpipe, 'one of the most beautiful paintings of the eighteenth century' |
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Afterword: I had often wondered whether Professor Lee knew about The Brooknerian. Of course she did, and she references it several times (a piece on Edith Templeton (here) and the report of my visit to the Hotel du Lac (here)). She cites the blog, among other indications, as encouraging evidence of an enduring interest in Brookner.
* Professor Lee fails to trace the 'Louise' mentioned in the essay. It is therefore possible, as I once surmised, that Louise was the addressee of the 1974 autograph note I own, and which is discussed here.
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