The Brooknerian

'[B]y the paradox implicit in achieved art', Brookner makes her protagonists' predicaments as satisfying as poetry: this was John Bayley's judgement on A Private View in the Spectator in 1994. Tessa Hadley, another Brookner enthusiast or apologist, makes a similar point in her excellent new introduction to Brookner's last novel, Strangers (see here ): Describing the novels in bald terms of plot can’t come near what it is in Brookner’s writing that’s so addictive, fascinating, pleasure-giving. It’s the old paradox: the more this novelist writes her characters into their bleak corner, the more her readers get their delight. The squeeze of their sadness is so exquisite, in her language. It's a powerful piece, serious in its psychological reading ('the fateful circling of desire: Paul's need to get away succeeded by his longing to return') and original in its depiction of the Brookner reading experience: Brookner’s subject matter is distinctive because...

Further to recent posts on Brookner photographs and harder-to-find images in particular, I offer this from The Times , June, 1994: John Voos's portrait accompanies a review of A Private View . The piece, by Philip Howard, is often quoted: 'Anita Brookner is our Henry James'. By way of a title, a line from Browning - 'When the long dark evenings come' - completes an excellent evaluation of one of Brookner's finest novels. The photo is an oddity in the oeuvre: Brookner in the act of speaking. Was it posed? Was it taken at an event? The blurred background suggests the familiar setting of Brookner's London flat. The hard undeceived wistfulness of her gaze, the precision of her discourse, the discontented romanticism of her outlook are all captured by a master photographer.

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.

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...

Somebody once saw one of Anita Brookner’s shopping lists. She lent a student a book; the list fell out. It was for only two items: slimming biscuits and a small pot of Marmite. Evidently, concluded the speaker, she was very keen to be very thin. She was indeed thin, though perhaps she didn’t want to be. Speaking of the other positive things that had accrued to her from her entry into the life of a writer of fiction she said she even put on a little weight. At first writing had been, as it is for Frances in Look at Me , penitential, a penance for not being lucky, but later Anita Brookner had only good things to say. Her second career, if not perhaps as involving as her first, brought its rewards, made her well. What were slimming biscuits? Evidently some healthful preparation, now obsolete. She was, when I met her , very thin, almost brittle. As thin and as brittle – one might ask – as her fiction? In her fiction, in 1992’s Fraud in particular, there are themes of food anxie...

I think I'd just finished my Finals and was heading off for a short break in Paris. I seem to recall seeing the book in the Paddington Menzies. I didn't in those days buy hardbacks (unlike Brookner, who was famed for it), but was first on the waiting list at my local library. By the end of the month I'd finished it, and it remains one of my favourites. I bought this copy recently. It is pristine. Brookner's dating of her signature is unusual.

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...

He is far gone, she thought. A Misalliance , ch. 11 Early Brookner, later Brookner. What are the differences? Chapter 11 of A Misalliance comprises a three-way conversation between Blanche, her ex-husband, and her old admirer Patrick Fox. The tone, typical of the early novels, is witty, comic, sarcastic, aphoristic. It reads a little like Wilde or Coward. And Patrick Fox's love with Sally, one of the novel's several unsuitable attachments, is played for laughs. But fast-forward just a few years to A Private View , and we have George Bland and his obsession with Katy Gibb - and few laughs, and no repartee. A Misalliance summarises several early Brookner themes - flirting with other lives, mismatched pairs - but we must look to later novels for truly serious analysis.

'I plan to become dangerous and subversive,' says Blanche in chapter 5 of A Misalliance , before (as she puts it) 'raving on about Henry James'. 'A silly girl,' says Blanche of Milly* Theale in  The Wings of the Dove . 'She should have bought that rotter outright. What else is money for?' And so Blanche continues to purchase the company of her own new acquaintances, Sally and her daughter. Quantities of ten-pound notes are placed under the lid of a chipped teapot in Sally's ruinous kitchen. It is not the only time in Brookner that protagonists buy the time of others. One thinks of Elizabeth in 'At the Hairdresser's' or George Bland in A Private View . Each time the donation of funds is effected in clandestine ways, bringing analogous transactions into the mind of Brookner's knowing and fallen ideal reader. Not that Blanche's wealth is really quite in the same ballpark as Milly Theale's. But Sally's former mythic ex...

A 'pure' novel, said Anita Brookner in interview, should cast a moral puzzle; everything else is mere negotiation. '[T]o follow a scruple to its ultimate conclusion is Edith Wharton's whole concern,' she writes in her Introduction to that author's novel The Reef . '[I]t is a chance to see what can be achieved in the pursuit of moral truths.' Brookner's 'Wharton phase' centred on the 1980s, when, following her Booker win, she was much in demand. She wrote Introductions to The Custom of the Country and to two volumes of Wharton's short stories. In 1994, when she introduced the 'less popular, and indeed less well known' novel  The Reef , Brookner's star was arguably on the wane. How do Brookner's Introductions read? Do they, as some have claimed, feel like essays on her own fiction? Certainly the Introduction to The Reef is different in emphasis from the earlier Intros cited above, which are happy to recount the details...

Brookner is making waves in Spain at the moment. An article in today's El Mundo ( here ), 'Anita Brookner, Style and Loneliness', marks the publication of a translation of her first novel A Start in Life . The article speaks of Brookner as one of the finest British and European novelists of the twentieth century. The translation itself is introduced by a Julian Barnes essay, which seems to be the one he wrote for the Guardian in 2016 ( here ). El Mundo  complains that Brookner has been absent since the 90s from Spanish publication schedules. A similar situation obtains, I think, in France. I recall many happy long-ago evenings browsing yellow-canopied Left Bank bookstores for Brookner translations, and finding lots. L'automne de M. Bland was one title I managed delightedly to decipher. But more recently - nothing. One hopes the Spanish will lead the way.

What's your favourite Brookner line? Something positively freighted with many things Brooknerian. Something perhaps only Anita Brookner could have written. Look at Me A novel replete with quotability. I'm going to choose one of the most extreme, almost self-parodic lines, from the truly chilling chapter 11: Frances's desolate trek through a hostile nighttime London: This must be the most terrible hour, the hour when people die in hospitals. (Larkinian too. Think 'Ambulances' or 'The Building' - each room farther from the last and harder to return from.) Falling Slowly Miriam is imagining the thoughts of her contemporaries, those with lives more conventional than her own. You are not one of us, she imagines them thinking. You do not shop for cornflakes, fish fingers, baked beans. You will not grow fat. You do not take family holidays, the car loaded with junk. You only look astonishingly young, but you must be getting on. Too late for you, then. Y...

The book may be short but the style is long: loping conversational sentences convey and dignify the story of Simon Axler, a famous actor in his middle sixties. But his abilities have deserted him: 'Something fundamental has vanished. Maybe it had to go. Things go.' And then his marriage fails and he checks into a psychiatric hospital. Later there's a liaison with a much younger woman, who was once a lesbian, and some risky sex, and the story ends in disaster. 'A man's way is laid with a multitude of traps, and Pegeen had been the last. He'd stepped hungrily into it and taken the bait like the most craven captive on earth.' The Humbling (2009) was criticised (and ridiculed) on publication for its graphic depictions of sex between the mismatched pair. In fact the scenes are both brief and pertinent, always presenting Axler in a fresh guise: at one point 'spying, lascivious' - perhaps like the greybeards in that Tintoretto painting, Susannah and the ...

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...

The Courtauld used to be in Portman Square. [This piece of Brookneriana dates from the mid-70s. It found it inside a printed copy of a celebrated lecture Brookner gave on Jacques-Louis David. I don't know who 'Louise' is or was.] I remember visiting the Courtauld in perhaps late 1989 or early 1990. And it was gone. Visit research had been wanting. The Courtauld moved into Somerset House about that time, a year of so after Brookner retired. Brookner attended the Courtauld's 75th anniversary celebrations at Somerset House in the mid-to-late 2000s: I myself visited the Courtauld Gallery a few weeks ago, nearly thirty years after my first attempt. I wasn't sure whether I'd find much of interest. The place is famed for its Impressionists collection, and I'm not keen on them. Nor can I think of a single mention of the Courtauld in Brookner's novels. She probably didn't like to mix business with pleasure. The gallery is medium-sized an...

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...

New to Anita Brookner? Let me suggest a route into and through what a critic (unfavourably but memorably) once called the long dark corridor of her fiction . Start with a late-period novel. Brookner's fiction divides roughly but usefully into three phases: the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s. The early work is inconsistent but often brilliant; the middle period is more settled, more even. In Brookner's last works we see a return to the unpredictability she started with, now allied to a greater assuredness of form and style. Start with The Next Big Thing ( Making Things Better ) (2002). Also try The Bay of Angels (2001) and The Rules of Engagement (2003). Scarier than the scariest horror story. Next try the essential early Brookner: Look at Me (1983). A remarkable and quite extreme laying out of the Brookner manifesto. The final chapters contain some of the bleakest and most unsettling passages in the whole of English literature. Temper this with the novel of the followi...

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...

Old age is the great unwritten subject. Let me specify. Novels about old age, written by old people, are rare. Great writers of the past either didn't write about old age, or included old people as peripheral figures, or were young themselves when they wrote about the old, or wrote about 'old' people we wouldn't now consider as such. To take a few disparate examples: Trollope's 'old man' in An Old Man's Love is only fifty; Lear was written by a man in his forties; Vita Sackville-West wrote All Passion Spent * when she was thirty-eight. Authentic depictions of old age in present-day literature are increasing, but remain novelties. One thinks of Diana Athill's memoirs or Clive James's late poems. Then there is Anita Brookner. We had intimations in A Private View , Visitors and The Next Big Thing , but Strangers and, especially, 'At the Hairdresser's' are Brookner's plainest examples. The story of Elizabeth Warner, her fear and vu...