The Brooknerian

I haven't yet been able to find the covers, but these are apparently the fresh spines of some Brookner novels to be republished in June: An intriguing selection, focusing on the 1980s ( A Start in Life , Look at Me* , Latecomers ) and the 2000s ( The Bay of Angels , The Next Big Thing ). I am pleased to see The Next Big Thing , a late masterpiece and as raw and edgy as anything she ever wrote. I should perhaps reconsider The Bay of Angels . But what of the great, settled, magisterial novels of the 90s - A Family Romance, A Private View, Visitors ? *Disappointing to see the continuing capitalisation of the preposition, inaugurated in the cover refresh of ten years ago.

For Christmases of the classic Brooknerian sort, one heads to Fraud ( here )   and A Family Romance ( here ). A later Brookner, The Rules of Engagement,  offers variations on the theme. ...her happy voice on the telephone, as she told me that she had been invited to the Fairlies on Christmas Day for lunch, or was it dinner? whatever that punitive meal was called... The narrator's own seasonal plans are at this point 'obstinately' shapeless, and later resolve into an organised walk with baffled Japanese students. In the narrator's, or Brookner's, hesitancy over what to call the Yuletide feast, one learns everything about her sense of exclusion - though here the narrator, unlike so many Brooknerians, is solidly English. In A Family Romance the celebratory meal is firmly 'lunch'. I'm not sure what I'd decide. The meanings, in England at least, of lunch, dinner, tea and supper are determined by class and slippery as eels. One plumps for one or another ...

Rumour has it the sky has seldom been as blue since pre-industrial times. One is reminded of the skies of Tiepolo, or of Boucher - as experienced so memorably at the Wallace Collection by the protagonist of Brookner's A Family Romance . Tiepolo, Rest on the Flight into Egypt : last seen at the recent exhibition in Stuttgart Boucher, The Rising of the Sun

Carl Spitzweg, Engl änder in der Campagna , 1845, Berlin Having read and enjoyed Scott's The Talisman , set in the Middle East, I next selected Trollope's  The Bertrams  from my shelves a) because it's also partially set in the Holy Land and b) because it's by now one of the few Trollopes I haven't read. It's a mark of age to have made such headway into so massive an oeuvre. I never thought, when I began, that I'd make it this far. Earliest Trollope ( The Bertrams (1959) is number eight) plus a few oddities from later (e.g.  The Landleaguers  and  The Vicar of Bullhampton ) remain for another year. Will I ever read La Vendée ? You can never tell. One book leads to another. Trollope was the best travelled of the Victorian novelists; he actually visited Jerusalem and its environs, which Scott never did (not that you'd know it from reading The Talisman ). The foreign episode in The Bertrams takes up a lengthy section near the start, and it is ver...

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)

I wish there were a word-count facility on my e-reader: it might yield some interesting results. I noticed during my recent reread of Fraud (1992) something I'd only half-recognised before: how Brookner's chapters have a tendency towards being extremely regular in length. I reckon if I were to count the words in each of Fraud' s chapters the results would be remarkably close. How did she do this? She wrote in longhand, and cleanly, with few corrections (a page of the MS of Family and Friends (1985) is to be found online alongside the Paris Review interview) - so it was probably just a case of her allocating herself a set number of sheets of paper per chapter. But why did she do it? She was certainly a writer, and probably a person, who lived according to her routines. Imposing such structures and patterns on the job of composition would have given momentum to a writing process that, as John Bayley says somewhere, possibly wasn't experienced at the full fever p...

References to the Austrian capital are scattered through Brookner's novels. The following is probably not a full list: Hotel du Lac : Edith Hope has Viennese ancestry. She goes with her English father to the Kunsthistorisches Museum to see 'a picture of men lying splayed in a cornfield under a hot sun'. This is a puzzle. It sounds like Bruegel's Harvesters (which isn't in Vienna, though the museum houses several of the artist's surviving pictures of the seasons). There's a Viennese background to that most Freudian of Brookners, A Family Romance , Toni Ferber hailing from (where else?) Berggasse. Later her granddaughter Jane visits the city, drops into Demel's, eats Sachertorte, finds it disappointing. Demel's is extant, but like many such establishments now a touristy Lacanian simulacrum of its probable former self. Getting inside looks to be no mean feat: one would have to elbow one's way through a crowd of snapping gawpers, and there's s...

Followers of this blog may remember my main motivation for re-reading David Copperfield this summer. My other reason was a preference for immersing myself in long Victorian fictions during the vacation, but my chief impulse derived from an interest in reacquainting myself with Anita Brookner's A Family Romance , a novel that connects with Dickens's both directly and obliquely. Brookner, speaking through her heroine Jane, focuses on Dickens's characterisation (though she is aware that such an interest might not pass muster in the academic world). Jane loves Betsey Trotwood, but finds the Micawbers tiresome. She has an almost visceral fear of Uriah Heep. I too love Betsey Trotwood. Her gradual softening as David Copperfield proceeds, and the story of her doomed marriage, are affectingly told. The characters of Uriah and his mother ('Be umble, Ury! Make terms!') are likewise masterful. Uriah's slipperiness, his writhing and general fishiness, are triumphs ...

'Let them think of you as always singing and dancing.' Anita Brookner, A Family Romance , ch. 1 Characters in Dickens have their catchphrases, which help to establish them in the reader's mind, distinguish them from others among a cast of hundreds, and re-establish them when they return after an interval away. Catchphrases are also a staple of comedy writing, especially in TV sitcoms - something we're used to nowadays, which possibly makes us more forgiving than E. M. Forster was in Aspects of the Novel:  he castigated the practice as an indicator of 'flat' characterisation. 'I never will desert Mr Micawber,' says Mrs Micawber time and again in David Copperfield . 'Forster is generally snobbish about flat characters, and wants to demote them, reserving the highest category for rounder, or fuller characters,' says James Wood in his entertaining How Fiction Works , an Aspects of the Novel for today. Dolly in Brookner's A Family Roma...

I chose out of the way places, out of season: almost any town in France or Germany, however devoid of scenic interest, provided the sort of ruminative space which I seemed to require. Anita Brookner,  A Family Romance , ch. 8 1. To Düsseldorf: out of the way, though in season. To the Kunstpalast, in rain, under a heavy sky. Some Cranachs, older and younger, some Rubens, one or two Caspar David Friedrichs, some very engaging nineteenth-century history paintings, some Kirchners. But altogether the collection seemed slightly at a low ebb. Unprepossessing building: red-brick, monumental, 1930s: 'degenerate art' was exhibited here once, for purposes of ridicule. 2. Chapter 40 of  David Copperfield . Mr Peggotty - a wanderer in search of Little Em'ly - speaks of his journey through France and into Italy. He returns via Switzerland, responding to a tip-off. As with other pre-aviation era narratives, one is aware here of the great distances involved, the sense of the Alps...

As for the written word, this disciple of Marcel Proust and Henry James re-reads the classics, but scorns the 'negligible' fiction of today. Nabokov – dandy, émigré, melancholy wit – is the last great novelist for her. 2002 Independent interview Taking it slowly, savouring its Jamesian rhythms, I've at last got to the end of my reread of A Family Romance . Dolly, its focus, appears at intervals throughout the novel, in different iterations or manifestations. Take this memorable vignette from chapter 7: ...her bitter European face, as revealed in sleep, in the half light of the car, the effervescent mask for once cast aside and the grim working woman revealed. And in chapter 8 we see her later still, at sixty-eight, reduced, all but friendless, with navy-blue hair and no make-up and wearing flat shoes. This late incarnation of Dolly is very striking and the scene well handled. One is reminded of Nabokov and the end of Lolita, when   he presents Lolita as gro...

The Prerogative Court, Doctors' Commons Illustrated London News  1 June 1850 The languid stillness of the place was only broken by the chirping of this fire and by the voice of one of the Doctors, who was wandering slowly through a perfect library of evidence, and stopping to put up, from time to time, at little roadside inns of argument on the journey. David Copperfield , ch. 23 David begins work, apprenticed to Doctors' Commons, a legal backwater that seems very agreeable: he commends the 'dreamy nature of this retreat'. Such undemanding havens have attractions for Brookner's characters too, not least Jane Manning in A Family Romance , who goes to work at a press cuttings agency (somewhat unimaginatively called ABC Enterprises), where she is immediately looked after by 'the dearest women', Margaret and Wendy (ch. 5). But this is Brookner, not Barbara Pym, or for that matter Dickens. Nothing can be allowed to remain too cosy for long. Class...

'Just till tomorrow, dear. Then we're off home to our garden. We've had a lovely show this past year. Even the apples were good. Could you take a few home with you, Jane? I know Mary has sufficient. If you come by tomorrow, dear, we can let you have a couple of pounds with pleasure.' A Family Romance , ch. 8 Elsewhere the Scottish aunts speak of 'wee Marigold'. The word 'sufficient' recalls an earlier scene in which one or the other asks 'Have you had a sufficiency, Peter?' At one point Brookner examines the ladies' use of the verb 'to take', as in 'Will you take a scone, Jane?': 'their favourite verb, although no two people could have been more giving' (ch. 5). * 'Janet's copper beech. I confess to a little envy: I haven't one of my own. But I can always look at hers. We have tea together at her house, when it's at its best, in October. Have you noticed that when the leaves fall they turn a ...

My own spelling isn't perfect. I consider perfect spelling a slightly spurious accomplishment. I'm possibly in good company here. More than once in A Family Romance , we get 'negligeable' (elsewhere in the same novel Brookner uses the more standard English spelling).* But think about it: if you'd been an editor presented with an Anita Brookner manuscript, would you have had the nerve to question her spelling? *As a fluent French speaker she probably had in mind the French négligeable .

I was reading David Copperfield at the time and was aware that my mother, like Barkis, was going out with the tide. A Family Romance , ch. 5 Not only was it of prime importance to a woman like Dolly to have a man of her own, but that same man, if he were willing (Barkis again), would, in marrying her, confer on her a status which she had not enjoyed for many years. Ibid ., ch. 6 Barkis is a relatively minor character in David Copperfield . He marries Peggotty (David acts as a go-between, delivering the 'if willing' message), is mean with his money, and fades away - going out like the tide . That wonderful phrase is probably what got Brookner's attention: it's more than a little Brooknerian. The second Barkis reference, in chapter 6 of A Family Romance , is more demanding. I wonder: if I hadn't read David Copperfield , or I wasn't reading it alongside A Family Romance , would I have the faintest idea what Brookner was going on about? Phiz, I ...

'I'm rather tired, my dear,' said Toni, playing the old lady card. Suddenly she could not wait to get home. A Family Romance , ch. 3 It is always amusing to catch Anita Brookner reusing material. Take this, from the  1994 Independent interview : It pleases me to play the old lady card. It's quite useful at times. But if it were true, it wouldn't be a card, would it? I'd be a poor thing. I'd feel sorry for myself. Which I don't think I do.

I've explored the topic of servants before, and they're very evident in A Family Romance too. There's the Mannings' Miss Lawlor (an ideal servant: she barely speaks), and Dolly's Annie Verkade, who, like 'a butler in a grander establishment', takes a pride in 'expressionless efficiency' (ch. 4). Brookner admits it's unusual for someone to have a live-in maid in the period, which we have to be reminded is actually the 1980s. And indeed it would have been most surprising. But this is the Brookner world, cushioned from at least some of the harsher realities of life. In David Copperfield Peggotty, like Miss Lawlor, is inherited, and ideal in her way. In Henry James's story 'Brooksmith' the eponymous butler is so perfect he's an 'artist'. The tale is, however, powered by an unspoken queer dynamic; it doesn't end well for Brooksmith. But none of these writers, not even Dickens - the least conservative of the three, and...

I grew impatient with those who wasted [David Copperfield's] time: I saw nothing amusing in Mr Micawber ... I realised why I was so impatient with Mr Micawber. And Dolly was not only Mr Micawber, she was Mrs Micawber as well, hinting that she had come down in the world... A Family Romance , ch. 6 Nothing amusing in Mr Micawber?! When a stranger came on the scene in chapter 11 of David Copperfield , with a 'certain condescending roll in his voice, and a certain indescribable air of doing something genteel', I found myself newly fascinated. I had forgotten how Micawber was introduced, and how early, but I welcomed him as an old friend, and looked forward to his every return. I don't often disagree with Brookner, but on the subject of Mr Micawber I must make an exception.

An account of my 2017 sentimental journey to Vevey, Switzerland, scene of Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac ... 1. Zurich: previously only travelled through. I arrived early, and nothing was ready, and it was a Sunday and raining and the streets were empty. Thoughts of panic and flight beset me. But by noon I’d planned the coming days and booked my train ticket to Vevey and my room was cleaned. I was glad of the ideal company of Brookner ( A Family Romance ) and Dickens ( David Copperfield ), mightn’t have got through otherwise: I chose my summer reading well this year. ‘I led the same secretly unhappy life; but I led it in the same, lonely, self-reliant manner.’ 2. Still half-lost in the unfamiliar streets, I found my way to the edge of the Zürichsee and a two-hour cruise: it seemed the Brookner thing to do, and the weather was as it is for Mr Neville and Edith in fiction and on another lake: grey-blue distances, indistinct horizons. I lunched at Rapperswil and retur...