The Brooknerian

The Custom of the Country (1913) isn't one of Wharton's novels of 'Old' New York. Forensically it depicts the twentieth-century world, and the reader is struck by just how modern it feels. Where in British novels of the time would one find such a reverence for celebrity, such an impulse towards instant communication, such a rejection of anything out of date? Where would one find characters called Indiana Frusk? Where would one find chewing-gum? Modern it might be, but it isn't modernist. It's told in steady deliberate sentences, heavy with irony, Jamesian in shape. You need to read the novel slowly, not because it is difficult to read, but because it seems too easy. You need to slow down, weighing each carefully deployed word. Wharton is both insider and outsider, and in this she resembles her disciple Anita Brookner who provides an Introduction to my Penguin edition. Brookner went through a Wharton 'phase' in the 1980s, and it's fun to spot in ...

Undue Influence , which starts out so breezily, so lightly, with its short chapters and rapid character brushstrokes, gradually reveals darker undertones. It's very much a transitional novel. Coming at the end of the 1990s, it says goodbye to the greater substantiality of Brookner's novels during those years. We're heading now into more perilous uncertain territory. Claire Pitt, with her 'black heart' and her secret liaisons in French cathedral cities, never fully revealed or even clearly indicated, is a forerunner of Zoe in The Bay of Angels and far more disaffected and dysfunctional than any of her forebears, Rachel in A Friend from England , for example, or Frances in Look at Me . There's a growing opacity in the writing. Claire, that 'merry adventurer' (ch. 8), brings back from her mysterious holidays postcards and photos for her mother: rood screens, tympanums, choirstalls, misericords, clerestories, elevations: Brookner takes a perverse pleasure...

People seemed to behave more reasonably in those remote days. The companionship engendered by the late War had not entirely fragmented. Nobody jogged. Nobody went to the gym. Brookner, 'Benedict Nicolson',  Independent Magazine , 10 September 1994 Not long ago  we said a few words about booze, a most unBrooknerian topic. Continuing this series, let's look at sport and exercise. Sport first: no one in Brookner watches it, plays it, thinks about it. There are no visits to football fixtures; the Brooknerian year is not punctuated by even the most genteel of sports. Compare the way the aristos in Trollope live their lives in tune with the sporting rituals of the Season. There are still people today whose years are structured in this way. But they're not to be found in Brookner. But there are always joggers. Anna Durrant, in chapter 8 of Fraud , enduring the loneliest Christmas day on record, nevertheless spots a few determined joggers. But they represent otherness r...

Silence, exile, and cunning, James Joyce's desiderata for an artist's life, seemed to have been discovered by Heather with the rapidity and the inevitability of one who led a charmed existence. A Friend from England , ch. 8 The famous Joyce quote, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , serves Brookner's purpose here, at least to an extent (more relevantly we might recall Jane in A Family Romance , exiling herself to Dijon and 'stealthily' beginning to write); but it is still surprising to see such an unBrooknerian writer being recruited on to Brookner's team.

At last, though, we see what Brookner is up to. Rachel is sent to Venice for the crisis - 'the ultimate nightmare: a city filled with water' - and does indeed find herself sinking. Like Strether in The Ambassadors (late James hangs, somewhat stiflingly, over the whole novel), she goes to fetch Heather back from the life she has chosen, and finds herself at risk. 'Perhaps I was beginning to find a symbolism in her undistinguished adventure and the light it was shedding on my own life.' What we are reading is not a social comedy or novel of sensibility, but an allegorical debate between a false life of repression and a true life of risks and engagements. And it is the 'Brookner heroine' who is defeated.  But how narrow the terms of the debate are, with no alternatives for women other than self-deceiving freedom or sexual dependency! And how faintly the opposition is drawn! And how neurotic and obscure the narrative is! - as troubling as Giorgione's paintin...

We had  the recent post * about the after-dinner cigar, and one from a short while back  on the connections between or among Brookner, Sebald and Stendhal, and yesterday I enormously enjoyed reading a text** by Jack Robinson (Charles Boyle) from CB Editions , An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H. B. ,*** which I discovered by chance in the  Guardian Review . The text is powered by its footnotes - and what pleasure there is in finding on pp. 4-5 a quotation from Brookner's 1980 TLS review of a Stendhal biography, collected in Soundings : 'Anita Brookner', says Robinson, '...approves [Beyle's] furious attempts "to measure up to the rules of the game, even when [my [i.e. Robinson's] italics] there was no game being played ".'**** Though Brookner isn't directly referenced again, the italicised line is mentioned twice more, on p. 81 and p. 128. The other echoes are numerous. Beyle, while watching a mosquito bite on his ankle, reme...

I picked up a book from the pile on the table at my elbow, and read, 'Lacking more serious occupations since 1814, I write, as one might smoke a cigar after dinner, in order to pass the time.' I put the book down again, disheartened by this dandyish attitude, so impossibly urbane as to be permanently beyond my reach. A Friend from England , ch. 7 The line about the cigar is from Stendhal, but I've never located it. I have The Life of Henry Brulard on my shelves but I've had no luck with that. The Journals? The Correspondence? It's not an especially relevant line; Rachel isn't a writer. But she thinks of herself as a dandy, so that's probably it. It's more a case of an author putting forward one of her own enthusiasms. But it is also a case of something Brookner has form for: undercutting and demythologising the very activity she's engaged in. Time and again Brookner finds ways of sneering at the strange second career she enjoyed so much s...

In one of Anita’s later novels, the female protagonist, when having supper alone in her flat, regularly has a glass of white wine. Being interested in wine, I couldn’t help noticing that each time supper occurred, the wine was different: first a chardonnay, then a pinot grigio, then a sauvignon, and so on; but the last wine to be drunk in the book was, unexpectedly, sweet – a sauternes. I wondered if such changingness might be significant, intended perhaps as an emblem of the protagonist’s volatility. At lunch I mentioned this theory, and referred to that puzzling late switch from dry to sweet. ‘Oh no,’ replied Anita unconcernedly, ‘I just went into a shop and copied down the names.’ Julian Barnes, Guardian , March 2016 No one ever gets drunk in an Anita Brookner novel. The character identified by Julian Barnes is probably Blanche in A Misalliance - a very mild toper, all things considered. Very mild in comparison with, for example, the folk to be found in an average Kingsle...

I often had thoughts of retiring myself, but of course that was impossible at my age. A Friend from England , ch. 5 Rachel's retirement fantasies are indeed somewhat impossible, given that she's only in her early thirties, but the subject was probably on Brookner's mind in 1986, when presumably she wrote A Friend from England (1987). She would retire from the Courtauld at the age of sixty in 1988. We might ask ourselves about the post-retirement Brookners and whether there is any distinctiveness. I would guess Brookner's writing schedule made  Brief Lives (published 1990, almost certainly written in 1989) the first she wrote in 'the anonymity of a small flat in Chelsea', as her 'About the Author' spiel put it in those years. Brief Lives, A Closed Eye, Fraud - indeed all the 1990s novels - have a new density, a new focus. There is a greater concentration on domestic, or at any rate on indoors life. There is a greater interest in ageing and on...

Significantly, the Colonel had begun to make himself scarce: I could picture him tiptoeing like a marauder from the scene. A Friend from England , ch. 7 In the half hour or so that I spent outside I seemed to see Oscar rising continually from the bed, his face grey, his arm flung out in warning, or in remonstrance.  Ibid ., ch. 9 My last sight of him was of an untidy figure stumping off in the direction of Marble Arch. I saw his back, bent, silhouetted against the glow of a rapidly sinking sun. Ibid ., ch. 11 Brookner often presents us with such moments. The Colonel, marauding, and Oscar, his arm flung out, hail from Mannerist scenes, while that untidy figure stumping towards Marble Arch would seem perhaps to belong in a canvas by Walter Sickert. *** Would Brookner rather have been a painter than a novelist? We know the answer to that question because John Haffenden asked it in his mid-80s interview with the writer: Yes, I think you love the world more as a pa...

The mid-eighteenth fashion for sensibility - sensibilité , as Brookner calls it - will be familiar to English students like myself, bringing back memories of being force-fed Richardson's Pamela , Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling and, with more enjoyment, Sterne's A Sentimental Journey . Sensibility soon became a sort of cult, ripe for send-up by Jane Austen, but at its start it was less a rejection of than a complement to Enlightenment reason, as well as being a rehearsal for Romanticism. Brookner's focus in  Greuze: The Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-Century Phenomenon (1972) is largely art-historical; she places sensibility more precisely 'between the more important and recognizable styles of Rococo and Neoclassicism'. At the same time she traces in some detail the movement's origins in the religious conflicts of the previous century and the earlier eighteenth. Traditional piety, thrown into disrepute, left a gap, a gap filled by the likes of...

Is A Friend from England (1987) a homophobic novel? I have heard it so described. I'm hesitant about judging novels of the past by present standards and mores; nevertheless the question requires some consideration. The truth about Michael Sandberg's sexuality is hinted at through the early part of the novel, and then rather stagily revealed at the end of chapter 6, when, in a 'peculiar' male-dominated wine bar ominously called the Titanic, the narrator sees him wearing blue eyeshadow and glossy lipstick. In the preceding pages there are indications, all of them a little heavy-handed: he is 'infantile ... not to be taken entirely seriously, happiest and most himself in places of light entertainment'; he is seen laughing 'uproariously'; he is pictured in his 'whining pathetic' boyhood. It is Oscar Livingstone, Michael's father-in-law, who most clearly betrays attitudes that are 'of their time'. Of a minor character, he remarks, ...

This blog's current strapline - 'out of sheer dandyism' - comes from A Misalliance, ch. 3. In the following year's Brookner, A Friend from England , we find another striking phrase: I was no longer the dandy of my imaginings, invulnerable, amused, passing lightly through life, with my feelings well protected. (Ch. 6)

But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. Virginia Woolf, 'On Being Ill' (1926 essay, reprinted in 1930 in the edition below) Woolf's celebrated essay asks why illness hasn't taken its place with love, battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. She considers how common illness is, how 'tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed': in short she waxes lyrical. She references Shakespeare, De Quincey, Keats, Proust, all in the opening paragraph, conceding perhaps that Proust and De Quincey did have things to say on the matter. But literature, she tells us, 'does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent'. Interesti...

Rachel, an 'extremely emancipated young woman', as Brookner told the  Paris Review  - and a young woman 'whom they will not be able to think is me!' - seems at first glance an experiment with a new, unfamiliar and possibly unsympathetic character. She's emotionally cold, sexually liberated, ruthless in her 'sensible arrangements', and is spoken of as a feminist. At the time many critics saw Rachel as unBrooknerian, at any rate 'an extreme case in the Brookner hospital', according to Hermione Lee . But knowing the complete oeuvre, we may think differently now. Rachel is atypical only if you don't know your Brookner, if you credit too far Brookner's often disingenuous, stagy pronouncements in the various interviews, and if you think Brookner's some kind of super-sophisticated Barbara Pym. In fact there's nothing unusual about the narrator of A Friend from England . She's Zoe, she's Emma, she's George Bland. In chapter 5, f...

I had no doubt that in the ballrooms of his youth the Colonel had been noted for his charm and his way with women. It was a style which he had carefully taught his son, who had never, as far as I could remember, uttered a serious word. Badinage was obviously the favoured means of exchange in the Sandberg establishment. A Friend from England , ch. 5 This is a serious condemnation. Brookner hates the Sandbergs, with their plausibility, their polished manners, their uncertain income, their slippery identity, their sibilant speech: most of all she hates them for their jokiness. One thinks of Paul Sturgis in Strangers , longing for the sort of proper conversation he loved in the books of his youth: Werther , Adolphe ( Strangers , ch. 7), but having to make do with 'opacity', 'social niceness'. Rachel in A Friend from England is a different proposition: she long ago decided to live her life on the surface ( A Friend from England , ch. 5). But discussion of the 'inn...

Who does not enjoy a set piece, by which I guess I mean an extended scene depicting a social occasion? Brookner goes in for them infrequently, but usually memorably. Disastrous meals are a feature: one thinks of Look at Me 's climactic meal, or the dinner party in Fraud . Such scenes, with their food, their clothes, their vulgar demotic dialogue, can unbalance a novel as finely woven as an Anita Brookner. In A Friend from England , for example in the engagement party and wedding scenes in chapter 3, Brookner seeks a middle way: dense paragraphs, indirect speech, a painterly attention to detail and manner and impression. This is in keeping with the estranged, disillusioned mood of the narrator. Rachel has things in common with Anthony Powell's almost disembodied narrator in his Music of Time sequence. Powell also has a fondness for a set piece, but his are on an epic scale. I remember a scene in one of the early novels, A Buyer's Market or The Acceptance World,  that goe...

And Dorrie thought of Heather as not only a loved child but as someone who might cause Oscar to worry. They saw each other exclusively in personal terms. A Friend from England , ch. 1 [Ralph Touchett] was so charming that her sense of his being ill had hitherto had a sort of comfort in it; the state of his health had seemed not a limitation, but a kind of intellectual advantage; it absolved him from all professional and official emotions and left him the luxury of being exclusively personal. James, The Portrait of a Lady , ch. 33

I felt as if I were in the presence of a distinct culture, rather like the one that had prevailed in the Russian novels I so enjoyed, in which endless days are spent sitting on terraces ... I had the same sensation of time being endlessly capacious, and memory and melancholy being equally tyrannical... A Friend from England , ch. 1 Was there ever a finer description not so much of reading a great Russian novel as of reading an Anita Brookner? That sense of time's elasticity. Brookner's time-schemes, as we have seen, are often difficult to follow, and this may be deliberate. We cast off, and the marker buoys are few and far between, and soon we're in water that's very deep indeed. The passage above goes on to quote from what Brookner, possibly with her tongue in her cheek, said was  her favourite novel , Goncharov's Oblomov : What meads, what kvasses were drunk, what pies were baked at Oblomovka! The dedicated Brooknerian will recognise this also from the ...

regret > verb ( regretted , regretting ) [ with obj. ] feel sad, repentant, or disappointed over (something that has happened or been done, especially a loss or missed opportunity): she immediately regretted her words ¦  [ with clause ] I always regretted that I never trained.   [...]  archaic : feel sorrow for the loss or absence of (something pleasant): my home, when shall I cease to regret you! The New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1998 I've now and then noticed this about Brookner: her odd use of the verb to regret . I find it in Chapter 1 of A Friend from England (1987): ...Oscar sometimes regretted his little office and his box files... or this similar line from Chapter 3 of Strangers (2009): He regretted ... the structure of the working day. As you might imagine, I'm all in favour of  Brooknerese , but this is perhaps a step too far, especially as Brookner often and more frequently uses the more common meaning of regret . There are twenty-...