The Brooknerian

You may have noticed I'm taking a break from Anita Brookner at the moment. Everything palls after a time, and of course there's nothing new. I remember the years when I read her year by year, the excitement of receiving those Jonathan Cape, later Viking, hardbacks. A Proustian vouchsafement is still mine whenever I hold, say, A Closed Eye , with its view of Lausanne, or A Private View , with its blue Ian McEwanish female silhouette. I get the very touch and taste of youth again. Where now? I'm reading Spenser's The Faerie Queene right now. ('The day is spent, and commeth drowsie night...') But I'm tempted perhaps to sink into middle Brookner sometime soon - A Private View, Incidents in the Rue Laugier ... What extraordinary novels they were and are. Almost unremarked at the time, except for the regulation polite or disparaging notices in the quality dailies. But no one seemed to recognise how truly odd they were, how strange and revolutionary the Brookne...

A Misalliance , disowned by Brookner, out of print for years in the UK, is a minor but significant novel. It might be called transitional. The character of Sally, feckless, sybaritic, entitled, is a preparation for the monsters to come: Julia in Brief Lives , Dolly in A Family Romance , both more fully realised. Blanche's marriage lays the ground similarly for those stories of marriage Brookner would tackle in later books: in Lewis Percy , in A Closed Eye , to name only two. A Misalliance is not to be lost. And it is very quotable. One seems to hear Brookner working out her very philosophy. The unease she felt at the National Gallery, the curious faintness that had overcome her at the sight of the archaic smile of the kouros in the Athens Museum, seemed to her an essential commentary on her own shortcomings. I could have saved my own life, she thought. But I was too weak, shackled by the wrong mythology. (Ch. 7)

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. Anita Brookner, 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.)

My recent booking of a night at the Hôtel du Lac set me thinking not only about Brookner's most famous novel but also about other hotel-set works of literature. There's an early Arnold Bennett, there's Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel , there's Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont . And there's Larkin's poem 'Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel' ( High Windows , 1974). Larkin was notoriously phobic about 'abroad', but his hotel could be located as easily in Mitteleuropa as in the Midlands. The poem, ostensibly a description of an all but deserted hotel on a Friday evening, is packed with strangeness. Light 'spreads darkly downwards'; empty chairs 'face each other'; the dining-room 'declares / A larger loneliness of knives and glass'; silence is 'laid like carpet'. The vivifying of the inanimate owes much, perhaps, to Elizabeth Bowen. There are also strong Brooknerian echoes, or rather prefigurin...

I have  spoken before  about Brookner's covers, the many disappointments and misfires. Recently, when the cover for the forthcoming Penguin Essentials edition of A Start in Life was unveiled, there was consternation in some quarters. A Penguin Essentials publication has a certain cachet. Next stop Penguin Classics, one might have thought. An opportunity missed Studying Corot's Between Lake Geneva and the Alps for a recent post made me think of the cover of the UK hardback edition of A Closed Eye , which always seemed to me to get it right. It showed part of John Inchbold's View above Montreux , 1880, in the V&A. Not an outlandish choice, perhaps, but well judged. The image captures, I think, in its deadness, its pallor, some of the horrified sense of defeat Harriet feels in her Swiss exile.

Friendship sometimes demands less than full disclosure, and it may be more comfortable to abstain from an accountability which may leave one open to criticism. Leaving Home , Ch. 18 Olga Kenyon: ...Which qualities do you value most in a friend? Brookner: I think accountability, that's to say explaining actions with full knowledge of emotions and procedures. You get it in Russian novels: the complete confession. Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy, and it is the  Grail . Women Writers Talk  (Lennard, 1989) If such characters persist through my novels that's because I don't know much about them, not because I know them too well. I write to find out what makes them tick. 1994  Independent  interview It's an easy mistake to make, especially with the novels written in the first person. But really Brookner must be given at least a little credit when she says her novels aren't about herself. Of course those first-perso...

He seemed to be writing it in a life parallel to the real life he lived with his wife ... Sometimes he felt himself to be more truly authentic when contemplating a shift in the fortunes of a fictional character than when talking to Tissy... Lewis Percy , Ch. 8 This was surely the stuff of fiction? A strong plot, unusual characters, a threatened outcome: who could ask for worthier diversion? And she was, after all, an observer. Visitors , Ch. 4 Now that the Brookner oeuvre is complete and we can view it as a whole, we begin to see new and interesting patterns in the carpet. Preceding posts reveal to me a minor theme she pursued during the middle part of her career. In Lewis, Lizzie, Jane and Maffy we see several kinds of young writer. In Dorothea May we see an old non-writer but also a woman living the same sort of life as her younger Brooknerland compatriots. The writing lives of Lewis (1989), Lizzie (1991), Jane (1993), Maffy (1995) and Dorothea (1997) are, one notes, n...

She was not aware of loneliness so much as of endeavour: her future career as a writer, of which there was as yet no sign, would, she thought, in time validate her entire existence. Until then she would adopt - had already adopted - a regime which would steel her against rejection and disappointment ... friends were a burden for which she had neither the time nor the inclination. Her own silence, her own solitude seemed to her entirely preferable. It was with relief that she entered the empty flat in the evenings; after eating her yoghourt and her apple she was free to read or to write in her diary ... She had a vision of a writer's life as clean, economical, controlled. The lack of a subject bothered her until she remembered that she did not need to think about this matter until she was forty. In the meantime she composed a list of aphorisms and quotations ... She trained herself to be cynical although she still missed her mother,of whom she thought with pain and terror. A Clos...