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.

Brookner's first novel, A Start in Life , was nearly turned down by the publisher Jonathan Cape, who received from a reader a very negative report. Her characters were apparently 'grey' and 'without interest'. Fortunately Liz Calder worked at the house and took a look at the manuscript. She read the novel's now-famous opening sentence, 'Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature', and realised she was in the presence of greatness. Calder and Cape went on to publish many of Brookner's novels. An intriguing anecdote, which I found by chance. I was browsing the Brookner signed novels on the Internet bookstore sites, and came across several editions with a note by Calder in which she described her association with the author. I've no idea why Calder wrote the note, but we can be grateful that she did.

There was always something facile, even hysterical, about these [early] reviews (I should know; I wrote one). The annual Brookner offered a cheap shot to young critics, eager to savage a scandalous bearer of bad tidings about ageing and loneliness. Yet now she agrees with those snapping puppies. 'I hate those early novels. I think they're crap. Maybe I needed to write them. I far prefer what I'm doing now.' Yes, she does use the Ratner* word. It's like hearing a duchess cuss. Why are they crap? 'They're morbid, they're introspective and they lead to no revelations.' Has she a favourite among her works? 'I don't like any of them very much.' Boyd Tonkin, Independent interview, 2002 Elsewhere Brookner said she wrote only a first draft. There were no revisions. There just wasn't time . There just wasn't time. This is significant. She came late to fiction. She was fifty-three when A Start in Life was published. Had she sta...

I greatly enjoyed this week Rumaan Alam's appreciation of Brookner in the New York Times ( here ) and the Mookse and the Gripes' relaunched podcast, which focuses on Brookner's first four novels ( here ). Both make insightful reference to what Alam calls Brookner's life's 'remarkable second act', that period from 1981 when, in her fifties, she suddenly began writing fiction: the floodgates, as she said, were open. It gives hope to us all.

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.

It doesn't yet feel like mature Brookner, but in Providence you do get the sense of an author finding her feet. The middle stretches are of interest: Brookner seems to proceed 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, but 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 (' R...

Regular visitors to this blog will know of my devotion to Anita Brookner's interviews. Five are available on the web - the Paris Review interview, the 1990s Independent interview , and three from the 2000s (the Observer , the Independent again, and the last interview in 2009 in the Telegraph ). In printed form there are the Olga Kenyon and the John Haffenden interviews, both from the 1980s. The Haffenden exchange remains to my mind the best Anita Brookner interview. You will conceive of my delight at discovering several fresh interviews on the Guardian / Observer archive website . I propose to cover these over the coming days. We start with a piece in the Guardian on 27 May 1981, 'Finding the art of fiction', published to coincide with the publication of Brookner's first novel A Start in Life . As well as giving in remarkably finished form her later familiar responses to questions about her motivations for writing ('Socially she has always had the sensation o...

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.

Why were some of Anita Brookner's novels published in the US with different titles? This seems at best a faintly disreputable practice, at worst an assault on the integrity of an already published text. I can think of other authors who have suffered the indignity, though it tends to be reserved for less thoroughgoingly literary writers (Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse). Ivy Compton-Burnett's Manservant and Maidservant was, however, given the somewhat unwieldy US title Bullivant and the Lambs . I can't think of traffic in the opposite direction, but there are probably examples. Is it a case of US publishers asserting their authority? Or are there cultural or other reasons that certain titles 'work' in Britain but not in America? A Start in Life (UK) / The Debut (US) For a novel that references Balzac, The Debut  is an interesting alternative, echoing Balzac's  Un début dans la vie . A Misalliance (UK) / The Misalliance (US) Do Americans prefer t...

From the terse to the lyrical, Anita Brookner’s opening lines are often memorable. A Start in Life (1981) Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. With concision and aplomb Brookner sets out her stall. This is how to get yourself noticed. Brief Lives (1990) Julia died. I read it in The Times this morning. My French friend, Marie , never a Brookner fan, disliked Brief Lives , especially the opening; she objected to its bleakness and negativity. ‘Yes – and?’ I probably replied. It’s certainly a startling start to a novel, and if this almost gnomic line hasn’t found its way on to a T-shirt somewhere, then someone is missing a trick. Incidents in the Rue Laugier (1995) My mother read a lot, sighed a lot, and went to bed early. A beautiful, rhythmic sentence, with Proustian resonances – and that second comma is surely the mark of a stylist (Brookner, in one of her book reviews, praises an author’s use of such a comma). O...

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along... Auden, 'Musee des Beaux Arts' One always gets a frisson, in Brussels, standing before Bruegel's Fall of Icarus . Standing before it yesterday I had some memory of Brookner too. A long search brought me at last to Chapter 20 of A Start in Life: 'About suffering, they were never wrong, the Old Masters,' said Auden. But they were. Frequently. Death was usually heroic, old age serene and wise. And of course, the element of time, that was what was missing. Duration.

On further reflection she decided that she might be happier in an hotel. A Start in Life , Ch. 3 Brooknerians, or Brookner at any rate, always write, always say, ' an hotel', never ' a '. It is a small, a very small, even a narcissistic difference. She would have said o- tel , never ho -tel. I recommend Brooknerians look out and listen out for this distinction, and think of Brookner, and feel rewarded.

...he did not in fact write much until the most active part of his life was over, and this of course is what sets him apart as a writer: he has the authority of a man whose preoccupations are not exclusively literary and who is informed at all times by memories of the immense experiences behind him. 'Stendhal', essay in The Genius of the Future (1971) Brookner's description of Stendhal, written some years before she herself became a novelist, might easily be applied prophetically to herself. In considering this point, I decided to go back as it were to the beginning, to A Start in Life (1981), which I hadn't read for about twenty years. I'd always thought of the early novels as a little ungainly, even as juvenilia. This was plainly ridiculous. A Start in Life, though its tone is lighter and wittier than later works, is an assured and in no way immature performance. It is perhaps, to a degree, autobiographical, as first efforts are often reputed ...

A rare mention of Brookner in a populist format. OK, semi-populist. In the 20 December edition of University Challenge ( available  on the BBC i-player for a while) there were three Brookner questions: Brookner's first published novel A Start in Life tells the story of Ruth Weiss [spelt 'Vice' on the subtitles!], an authority on which French author, best known for The Human Comedy ? In 1967 Brookner became the first woman to hold which professorship of fine art at Cambridge? It was endowed by the founder of the school of art at University College, London. Brookner won the Booker Prize in 1984 for which novel set near Lake Geneva? The contestants, celebrity alumni rather current students, got 1) and 3) correct, but answered 'Turner' to 2). There was a little grimacing when the topic was introduced, but otherwise the tone was respectful - respectful in a way that probably wouldn't have been the case some years ago.

James had three incarnations: James the First, James the Second, and the Old Pretender. The novels of Anita Brookner (a writer who, at first glance, doesn't seem to 'develop' - to borrow a term from Larkin) fall perhaps into four phases. The four novels culminating in the Booker win ( A Start in Life , Providence , Look at Me and Hotel du Lac ) are sombre reads, solid, not starry, never presumptuous. Seemingly in receipt of dithyrambs for every subsequent effort, Brookner became in her second phase (beginning with Family and Friends ) a little - shall we say? - smug, a little complacent. Those novels of the mid to late Eighties feel over-assured, at times too ambitious. Brookner worked best in reaction against the prevailing culture. Critical opinion turned sour in the 1990s. Thus, with Brief Lives , begins her third phase. These are masterly books, Jamesian, the language as mandarin as James's, the themes unfashionable but enduring. The last phase comes i...