Anita Brookner's Providence: reading guide

Providence: a deep dive into Anita Brookner's second novel, 1982, written just a year after her first. The floodgates, as she said, were open.

What a strange, assured, idiosyncratic beginning. No action, practically no dialogue, all retrospect and introspection. We find ourselves in the Parisian world of Kitty Maule's grandparents. There's a hint, too, as ever, of something 'further east'. We can read it now, of course, with knowledge of the entire Brookner corpus, recognising many things from later works. But Providence is an urtext.

Take the grandmother's dressmaking workroom in the rue Saint-Denis, with its seamstresses and its 'young and outrageous girls'. What bells ring here? Yes, the rue Saint-Denis appears a decade or so later, and similarly, in A Family Romance. See a Brooknerian post here.

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Chapter 2 of Providence focuses on Kitty's university life. Both she and her lover Maurice have flats in London, from where they commute to their 'provincial' university; we are told the financial supporters of the institution, the Friends, hail from the 'surrounding countryside'.

I suspect Brookner means Reading. She was a visiting lecturer at the University of Reading from 1959 to 1964. It gives Providence a particular, perhaps rather charming non-Londoncentric air. Campus life, the provinces: this could be David Lodge.

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Some day, unless a miracle took place, she would spend all her time in this kitchen and it would become her permanent and only home, instead of the temporary staging post she had always thought it might be. But this was too dangerous to contemplate...

Providence, ch. 2

Providence, in its opening stages, seems light and witty: jeopardy is manageable, within bounds, or wistfully past. But we get these little shafts of steel. This is, after all, even so early in the oeuvre, fully and absolutely Brookner.

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The scene had, for her, a strange exoticism: the hideous room, the north light, the dull atmosphere, compounded by the smells of cigarette smoke and sheets of photocopied paper, the muted and rumpled appearance of everyone except Maurice and herself, the enormous amount of luggage they managed to bring in - bags, briefcases, mackintoshes - the ceremonial plate of chocolate biscuits handed round by Jennifer's assistant, all this seemed to her stranger and more desirable than the home life of her grandparents with their variants on normal dress and erratic impromptu meals.

Providence, ch. 3

Anyone who has ever, in a British educational setting, sat through a staff meeting or committee meeting will recognise and enjoy the description above. But it isn't just the precision of the detail, and the period detail at that - the pungent photostats, the smoke. It is also the exoticism of the scene that gives it its savour and makes us see it fresh. Brookner's is the eye of an outsider, or else she occupies the fascinating position of being both outsider and insider. Either way, it's a novelist's ideal.

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Notes on the seminar scene in chapter 4:

Kitty's '[A] novel is not simply a confession, you know. It is about the author's choice of words' reminds us of Evelyn Waugh's line, 'I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in language, and with this I am obsessed.' When the Paris Review asked Brookner about Kitty's comment, she replied, 'I am not conscious of having a style. I write quite easily, without thinking about the words much but rather about what they want to say. I do think that respect for form is absolutely necessary in any art form - painting, writing, anything. I try to write as lucidly as possible. You might say lucidity is a conscious preoccupation.'

The key quote from the Preface to the Third Edition of Constant's Adolphe, 'ce douloureux étonnement d'une âme trompée' is given in the Penguin translation as 'the pain and bewilderment of a soul deceived' and by Brookner's tutee as 'the painful astonishment of a deceived soul'. John Haffenden, interviewing Brookner, commented on this line, saying that he thought it was what Providence was about. He also remarked on the end of the chapter, where Kitty recalls a line of Adolphe but cannot remember what follows it. In fact what comes next is none other than 'the painful astonishment of a deceived soul'. 'How clever of you to pick that up,' said Brookner.

Kitty is notably indulgent towards her students. 'To be taught by Anita was to be loved by Anita': see Brookner Interview Discoveries #3.

We have a mention of Mme du Deffand, who later features in Altered States (see here).

Larter speaks of Existentialism as a Romantic phenomenon. Asked about this by John Haffenden, Brookner replied, 'I would now say that it is anti-Romantic: it gets rid of all the hopes and the beliefs that things are worth pursuing'. For more on this, see here.

Kitty sets a task for next time. Her students are to list key words in Adolphe, starting with imprudences, règles sévères, faiblesse and douleur profonde. That's Brooknerian homework for you.

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Adolphe: Let's consider Constant's 1816 novel from another angle:

...he thought he might have done better, even prospered, in another era, or even another place, where the natives, the citizens, were more helpful, more curious, and indeed more candid. He longed to have lived in one of those confessional novels he had read as a young man - The Sorrows of Young Werther, Adolphe - in which whole lives were vouchsafed to the reader, with all their shame, yet as if there were no shame in the telling. Here, now, one was consciously checked by a sort of willed opacity, a social niceness that stalled one's attempts to make real contact.

Brookner, Strangers, ch. 7

As Brookner said in interview, Adolphe is the story of a moral catastrophe; it's about what you do when you're the cause of a disaster. Adolphe is a bored, ennui-laden young man: he decides the time has come for him to fall in love. He chooses his woman, the mistress of an aristocrat, and she returns his simulated affection - which soon and suddenly becomes the real thing. The 'magic of love' is his, a feeling 'closely allied to religion'.

The woman, Ellenore, leaves her Count, and this is where the problems really begin. Adolphe fast falls out of love, though Ellenore remains devoted - or dependent. He suffers regret, mistakes pity for love, laments his squandered youth, longs to escape, and all the while the years pass by. He's stuck with Ellenore, and she's ten years older, and her attractions for Adolphe can only fade. The novel is unsparing in its presentation of differing male and female desires and expectations. The novel is also about guilt: 'I had crushed the one who loved me, broken this heart which like a twin soul had been unfailingly devoted to mine in tireless affection, and already I was overcome by loneliness.' This is the disaster Brookner speaks of, and naturally there's no good ending.

Adolphe is fairly autobiographical, and this is probably why it's a difficult read: the material hasn't been fully shaped; the story is raw and perhaps therefore rather shocking. There is no payoff: no lesson learnt, no satisfying moment of clarity - though there's one effort in the direction of an epiphany, a Caspar David Friedrich moment ('Daylight was waning, the sky was still, the countryside was becoming deserted') that relieves the narrator a little of his self-absorption but ultimately leads nowhere.

Brookner once spoke of a (male) reader who said to her something like 'You write French novels, don't you?' She took it as a high compliment. One can see what was meant. Adolphe, not just in its subject matter and its psychological intensity, is Brooknerian in its style too: its tendency to show rather than tell; even little things like the habit Brookner has in some of her early novels of not paragraphing direct speech.

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In chapter 6 we find ourselves in uncertain and unfamiliar territory. Kitty, persuaded by her neighbour Caroline, visits a clairvoyant. Kitty is appropriately sceptical - '[s]he was intellectually, as well as morally, uneasy' - but she goes through the experience all the same. The visit is fully described and dramatised; there's even a crystal ball. And Madame Eva's vouchsafements? They're stunningly close to the truth.

What are we to make of all this? I've really no idea. It puzzles me. It's a strange intrusion into the normal rationality of the Brookner world. It seems obvious to me that Caroline, before the visit, fed Madame Eva with details of Kitty's life. But Brookner doesn't acknowledge such a possibility, and the episode is allowed to pass. Why?

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It doesn't yet feel like mature Brookner, but in Providence we get the sense of an author finding her feet. The middle stretches are of interest: Brookner proceeds through indirection, sending Kitty Maule to a clairvoyant; to a colleague's cottage in Gloucestershire; on an outing with her grandparents; and to Paris. But the focus on the heroine and on the main plot is tighter than in A Start in Life, and this is an advance. The tone, accordingly, is more consistent. There is still humour - the schoolgirls and their teacher in Paris, for example - but it's better integrated and less distracting. The pace is, however, slack. It works in Trollope, this lessening of the tempo in the middle: readers often need a breather in the course of a long Victorian tome. In a novel as short and slight as Providence the reader may feel uncertain as to where the story is going, may even suspect the writer of not really having a story to tell.

But the Paris scenes ('Rien ne vaut la France') are fresh and full of incident and authenticity. I well remember travelling there as a youngster myself: the ferry crossing, that cafeteria in the rue de Rivoli. Later Maurice arrives, secure and complacent in his faith. He proves a disruptive, alienating presence. He somehow, for all his Englishness, manages to appropriate France, a country Kitty might have thought of as her own.

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Notes on the seminar scene in chapter 11:

Says Kitty of Adolphe's ending: 'For the first time we are aware of the author's consciousness rather than his recital.' Later she says Adolphe is interesting for its juxtaposing of intense emotion with very dry language. And Brookner? 'There is a constant delightful tension between the austerity of her message and the voluptuousness of her medium,' wrote Lucy Hughes-Hallett in 1998.

'[I]t is characteristic of the Romantic to reason endlessly in unbearable situations, and yet to remain bound by such situations. [...] For the Romantic, the power of reason no longer operates. Or rather, it operates, but it cannot bring about change' - the Romantic dilemma, or indeed the Brooknerian, in a nutshell.

'We are dealing with a work of fiction, and I simply want to make the point that in this period fiction, indeed all creative endeavour, becomes permeated with the author's own autobiography.' How far is Brookner's fiction permeated with her own autobiography?

'Déclassée women like myself frequently are [well-dressed]'. Was Brookner 'déclassée'?

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As she turned to give them a last wave, as she always did, she saw their two faces at the window, white masks that dwindled as she walked backwards down the hill, still waving.

Providence, end of ch. 12

Scenes of waving in Brookner: a topic for a minor study. There will be a leave-taking, the protagonist will depart, and he or she will look back at some significant other or others, often parents. A chapter usually ends here, or, in the case of A Family Romance, a whole book ('waving to me ardently, as if I were her best beloved.'*). There are examples in A Closed Eye and Altered States, and probably elsewhere. Waving? Drowning?

*Lovely deployment of the were-subjunctive there. (I once wrote a dissertation on the use of the were-subjunctive in British English. Brookner made an appearance.)

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The rest of the novel is taken up with preparations for Kitty's make-or-break lecture, which, we are told, she once envisaged as a 'sort of open exchange' but now becomes 'yet another solo performance of high strain' (ch. 13). Everything seems to depend on the outcome of this event: she fantasises about weddings, and about married life as an accepted Englishwoman in Gloucestershire. But by this stage the novel is tense with foreboding. None of this can end well. '[L]ater that night she burned in fires.'

There's a misstep at the start of chapter 13. Several pages are spent with two minor characters, while Kitty is elsewhere. This gives Brookner the chance to show us at length what other people think of her protagonist, but for me the scene's artistic infelicity cancels out any gain.

Chapter 14 opens meanderingly - we see the dreamy days before Kitty's lecture. Brookner goes into some detail. Why? I think she's showing us the reality of Kitty's life, and Kitty's failure to grasp it. Kitty nourishes high hopes of Maurice, but he is completely absent. The painful focus on these empty days before the approaching cataclysm are equivalent to the terrible time that comes after the similar discovery in Look at Me.

The lecture goes well, but there is Maurice's dinner party to come. Again we see Kitty alarmingly alone. Brookner's gaze is steady.

The hot weather is brilliantly conveyed, giving the novel's last chapters a special, momentous quality. Old Church Street bears 'a passing resemblance to a deserted Mediterranean port' (ch. 15). Kitty breathes the stale evening air 'as if she were on the shore of a distant sea'.

The novel moves like clockwork towards the revelation in its final pages. The reader, like Kitty, is left horrified and without markers. A similar trick is pulled in a later Brookner, Undue Influence. One is aware in these novels of Brookner masterminding almost diabolically the humiliation of her heroines.
And we're left wondering: What exactly is wrong with them? What is wrong with Kitty? Why didn't Maurice choose her? Why didn't she win the game? As ever, Brookner hasn't quite got the answers - and that's why we know she'll be back at her writing desk before too long.

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Suggestion for further reading: Julian Barnes's 2022 novel Elizabeth Finch (see here) imagines a version of Brookner in her academic life. An eccentric work, it is nevertheless, as I say in my review, a mainstreaming of the Brookner myth.