The Brooknerian

Chapter 12 is rich with Proust, Paris and the return of Tyler, made more powerful by the length of his absence from the text. (Something similar will happen in Brookner's next novel, Altered States .) The meeting with Tyler, though this is not referenced, is surely akin to the reunion at the end of Washington Square . When she parts from Tyler, Maud knows it will be 'for life, as it were'. And so Incidents , such a strange novel, stutters towards its conclusion. Did Brookner conceive the frame narrative afterwards, or was it always intended? I think it might have been the former: this would explain the highly eccentric time scheme. The 'incidents' take place in 1971; Maffy, the daughter, is born in 1980 or thereabouts. Maffy then turns out to be the narrator of the frame narrative, which is written after the deaths of both Edward and Maud, the first of whom dies in his early fifties. The time of writing, therefore, of this narrative, published in 1995, must be well ...

In the absence of more reliable signposts one seeks parallels in literature. In the time ahead, when every day, for many, will seem like Christmas Day, one thinks of Anna Durrant in Anita Brookner's Fraud (1992), the lonely walk Anna takes across a deserted, Pompeii-still London in windless air under a low grey sky. Later in the novel another character, the elderly Mrs Marsh, nurses her son Nick through a bout of the flu. His convalescence is powerfully described, the reduction in his routine, his devotion to the predictable rhythms of the Radio 4 schedule. A recent New Yorker piece ( here ) considered episodes of social distancing in Victorian novels: Bleak House, Jane Eyre . Elsewhere in Brookner there are more than several chapters on illness and recovery. One recalls the end of Look at Me (1983), Frances cared for like a child after her traumatic night walk; or the horribly extended migraine that afflicts the protagonist in A Misalliance (1986) and the blessed ministrat...

She had, she said, offers of marriage, but none she could accept. Whom could she entrust her life to? And how could she be married while at the same time living the life she wanted to live? How could she be married while also being an art historian? She told one interviewer she never seriously thought the puzzle was solvable. At some point, she said, a wariness sets in, an understanding of other people’s motives – of men’s motives, the agendas of men. She didn’t want to be someone else’s prop. She said she never came close to marrying, because she never wanted to be married to the men who asked her. But she would have liked companionship and she would have liked children. Six sons, she said. One of her favourite pictures was David’s Oath of the Horatii in the Louvre, an image of three heroic brothers willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of Rome. Her parents wanted her to marry. When she didn’t marry, they wanted her to nurse them. If she had married she wouldn’t have be...

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...

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.)

She believes that therapy is the answer to the sort of stalemate at which we have arrived, and I dare not tell her that this stalemate suits me well enough, for I intend to proceed no further. Altered States , ch. 17 This is the last in my series of posts on  Altered States . I found it, on rereading, both chilly and chilling. It has the atmosphere of a ghost story, as more than one critic has pointed out. A number of the Nineties Brookners seem to have this low temperature, this sense of dead calm after great storms. Altered States is an autumnal, a wintry book.

'You're mad, Alan. You're a fantasist.' Altered States , ch. 15 Here Sarah and Alan meet for the last time. The meeting has many of the hallmarks of a final showdown, such as novels are supposed to conclude with. But Brookner, like James (and the ending of The Sacred Fount - 'My poor dear, you are crazy, and I bid you good-night!' - is of relevance), makes of these conventions something of her own. The meeting in fact becomes a tussle over the future of Jenny, whose strange story has shadowed Sarah's. In the end Sarah fades into her habitual silence and inaccessibility, declining every overture, every over-thought Brooknerian sally: 'It was always too late. You were too slow, too innocent.'  'And it's the fate of innocents to be massacred, or so we're told.'  'Just leave me alone, will you?'

'Not too unhappy?' he said, getting to his feet.  'Of course I'm unhappy. But it's quite bearable. Even interesting. I'd like to work it out on my own, for however long that takes...' Altered States , ch. 15 One is reminded of Brookner's words in her 1994 Independent interview : Depression can be quite fruitful if it leads to thoughtfulness, inwardness. Certainly my parents' deaths, certainly disappointments in love have led to periods, yes, quite long periods of depression - but they haven't been entirely defeating, you see, they've been quite nourishing. Because you're very receptive when you're in that state: in fact, it's invaluable.

I decided not to go straight back to the office but to go home, make some coffee, and sit in absolute silence for an hour. I wanted solitude, though this is frowned on in a healthy adult. The propaganda goes the other way; one is urged to get out of oneself, as if preferring one's own company were a dangerous indulgence. I wanted, above all else, to be free of attachments, of those personal agendas which are wished on one in any conversation of any depth, and which are as disruptive to the process of contemplation as a telephone ringing in the middle of the night. I was not sick, I was not melancholy: I simply demanded that I might enjoy the peace of the situation I had inherited. Altered States , ch. 14 *** The phrasing of the 'propaganda' line seems to be idiolectic. Compare this from chapter 2 of Hotel du Lac : The propaganda goes all the other way, but only because it is the tortoise who is in need of consolation.

Alan Sherwood in Altered States is, we learn, 'in thrall' to Sarah Miller. He gives her lilies. He blushes. Sarah, for her part, is ever distracted. She's enchanting. Their coming together is 'almost magical'. The novel begins and ends with an autumn-set frame narrative. Brookner's invocations of English poets are rare, and indeed Keats's 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' isn't directly referenced here. But of all Brookner's novels Altered States is the one that, uncharacteristically for its Europhile author, aspires towards a more English version of Romanticism. *** 'A Pre-Raphaelite air of brooding intensity...' ( Altered States , ch. 6)

I sensed that since [Jenny's] most lavish sympathies had brought her nothing in return, she had decided to withdraw them, even cancel them altogether. This had made me even more uncomfortable, as it exactly paralleled my own condition. Altered States , ch. 13 Jenny, also known as Jadwiga and Edwige, returns to the footlights in the later part of the novel. She serves as a foil for both Sarah and the stolid Englishness represented by the narrator and, to an extent, by Sarah too. Jenny reminds us that there are other, European ways of doing things. She reminds us, in a novel that might otherwise seem somewhat parochial, of the wider dimensions of Brookner's work. The passage above recalls an exchange in the John Haffenden interview. I've covered it before ( 'A Creative Power' ), but it bears repeating: [Interviewer:] What all your characters are left with is a resignation which is not even stoicism of the classical order; it's merely learning to put up w...

Anita Brookner acquired a forbidding reputation during her writing career. Critical reception was strongly divided. So - where to start? It was possibly easier then, while she was still writing. If you had never read her, and wanted to, you could read her latest. Now that she's gone, and her body of work is complete, the uninitiated can be daunted by her sheer fecundity, the sheer volume of her fiction: twenty-four novels and a novella over thirty years. Where to start? It is a difficult question. There's no obvious stand-out novel, by which I mean one that stands out in terms of, say, length or critical appreciation. The obvious answer is Hotel du Lac , which won the Booker Prize in 1984. But Brookner herself didn't think it should have won. Her surprise or shock is clear in a press picture from the Booker event. She thought  Latecomers (1988) should have got the prize - a book with a serious and indeed Booker-friendly theme: the lifelong effects of surviving the Holo...

Art doesn't love you and cannot console you , said Anita Brookner. It's a discomforting assertion. When I examine my own intake or uptake of art - by which I mean my reading, for primarily I'm literary, verbal - I realise consolation is one of the chief things I look for. My sudden blogging, my sudden and tardy engagement with the Internet, after years of silence, has somewhat changed my reading habits. I now read more, and with more purpose. I look at what others are reading and am influenced. Or else I'm reduced, made to feel subtly inferior. These other folk - how quickly and how widely they read! Much of my reading is now rereading. I read new things infrequently. I try new authors hardly at all. I favour books about certain types or classes of character and set in certain locations. I'm really very choosy, very small-minded. I've come to the end of Trollope, an almost exclusive preference of mine through my twenties and thirties. I never thought I'd e...

'"Personne ne m'aime, et je ne m'en plains pas. Je suis trop juste pour cela."'   'What?' I asked him, startled. 'One of those marvellous eighteenth-century women, I forget which one. Madame du Deffand, no doubt. She blamed no one for not loving her, said she was too - what is it? - Just? Fair? - for that.' Altered States , ch. 12 It's not a quote that's on everyone's lips. When I typed it into Google a moment ago, Altered States was the only hit. It must result from Brookner's early reading, those youthful years she spent in the old Bibliothèque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, reading her way lengthways and widthways through her cherished eighteenth century. (There's a piece in the TLS somewhere, in which Brookner writes about the library, including mention of the day she was the recipient of a large bunch of flowers. I have in my notes a mention of the article, but no longer a copy.)

Brookner's repetitiveness - inevitable, perhaps, in a writer writing so copiously and at such speed - is, for some, a weakness; for the more committed reader it's a source of comfort, even of a certain perverse pleasure. Reading Altered States , chapter 12 - like chapter 10 , another tour de force - one cannot but recall Edith Hope's Swiss exile in Hotel du Lac . Alan Sherwood's exile is to a town on the Swiss/French border: The name of the small town to which [my father-in-law] had consigned me ... seemed appropriate, since my nerves were à vif , that is to say, flayed. He must, again like Edith, absent himself for decency's sake: ...somewhere, at some level, there may have been a hope that Aubrey's reasoning was sufficient, that all I needed was fresh air and exercise, and that if I absented myself I would expiate my fault ... and would go some way to being forgiven. His arrival, and indeed the subsequent details of the vacation, including observation...

In later Brookner - and Altered States is past the mid-point - the screw turns, iron enters the soul. There are moments in many of these works that truly bring the reader up short. Or this reader, at least. Or they do now: I find myself more shocked now, on re-reading - possibly because I'm older. The end of chapter 11, for example. I read it aghast. My heart is in my mouth. One's heart is often in one's mouth when one reads later Brookner, such is the atmosphere of dread. But here the fear is realised, and in unsparing fashion.

Beyond the bridge lay the Paris I had known and loved, and perhaps should never see again with that lift of the heart that had once attended me every morning of my life. Altered States , ch. 10 Chapter 10 of Altered States is one of the most accomplished in the whole of Brookner. Significantly it is about Paris and significantly it's about a character travelling on his own. Alan goes to Paris, planning a clandestine meeting with Sarah at the George Cinq, but things go farcically awry. There's a bizarre travel-phobic man on the plane; it's raining heavily; the hotel is overbooked. From that point, Alan's attempts to meet Sarah develop from farce into Kafka-style nightmare. He reflects again on her unavailability; he's practically never had a proper conversation with her. She's rather like the love object in Mann's Magic Mountain , the woman with the Kirghiz eyes, whom Hans Castorp never so much as speaks two words to. The chapter ends in full-blown hor...

Angela, Alan's ill-fated wife in Altered States , is Lewis Percy 's Tissy reborn, though for Tissy's suburban origins we have a background even farther beyond the pale. Alan spends an 'excruciating weekend' in Angela's mother's provincial 'red-brick box of a house', the cramped amenities of which are described with maximum distaste. The garden, we're told, slopes down to a small stream. Angela has dreams of the countryside, but her fantasies are more of the fabled lives of the squirearchy. She isn't keen on Alan's mother, fears Mrs Sherwood may be condescending to her. The issue of class, as ever in Brookner, is very subtly conveyed. In chapter 9 Alan takes Angela on a holiday into the English interior - alien territory for any true Brooknerian. They spend time in the New Forest, then head for Bournemouth, mixing with Jewish matrons. This is firmer ground, recalling the Christmas hotel scene in A Family Romance . Indeed the vacation i...

[Angela] preferred to think of us in a genteel country setting, in a house called The Old Rectory, or The Old Post Office, in which she, in a flowered skirt, and one of her eternal blouses, would bake bread or entertain guests of the squirearchical class. Altered States , ch. 8 Angela, we earlier learnt, favours 'upmarket sagas of village life', a million miles from Brooknerian fare. 'Genteel', 'country', 'a flowered skirt', 'squirearchical': Brookner picks her words damningly. The stiletto of her irony is perhaps here at its sharpest but thinnest; it's possible not everyone will hear her subtle scorn. How to prove it? It's about city vs. country, outsiders vs. insiders, the wary and the excluded vs. the complacent and the established. It's about Brooknerians vs. the likes of Angela and the rest of the comfortable or comforted world.

Who writes letters now? I did, in my analogue youth. I was, I guess, playing at being grown up, because writing letters was what grown-ups did. I even had a pen-pal, Marie Delemotte, mention of whom has been previously made. (I was with her in London in 1992 on the day I met Anita Brookner - see 'A Fraudulent Encounter' .) Brookner characters write letters - long, highly emotional letters they either later regret or do not send. We get to see them in all their horror, get to witness at close quarters the collapse of the Brooknerian reserve. They're terrifying performances. No one would want to receive such letters. There's one, a comparatively short one, in chapter 7 of Altered States , and the valediction gives something of its flavour: 'I am yours devotedly, in spite of, or rather because of, everything, Alan.' With the publication of the letters of Philip Larkin and later of Kingsley Amis (both born in 1922), critics suggested the age of literary correspo...