The Brooknerian

Val Hennessey's interview with Anita Brookner in  You Magazine,  9 August 1987, marks the publication of Brookner's seventh novel  A Friend from England . The piece, 'Babbling with Brookner', anticipates Julian Barnes's warning to a later interviewer: 'You will find yourself babbling'. Hennessey is a fan, Brookner her 'literary heroine'. She once bumped into Brookner outside Waitrose and said embarrassing fannish things. Brookner 'stood shifting uneasily from foot to foot, wide-eyed and fearful, like a trapped hare'. Later they met by chance on a number 14 bus. Both Brookner and Hennessey were shopping for outfits, Brookner for 'something tweedy and dull': she gets off and is seen heading into The Scotch House, a purveyor of quality Scottish clothing. Hennessey phones Brookner to arrange an interview. Brookner expresses alarm and consternation: she finds interviews 'an ordeal'. On arrival Hennessey compliments Brookner on her ...

1983's Look at Me finishes with a night walk through London. The walk, which extends over a whole chapter, as if in real time, is harrowing: it's one of the most abject episodes in Brookner. A nocturnal traipse of a different kind occurs towards the end of George Meredith's 1859 novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel . The hero, as emotionally turbulent as Brookner's protagonist, though for different reasons, moves through a forest in Germany, experiencing everything from dusk to dawn, with a tempest in between. The chapter is satirised in Forster's Howards End (1910). Leonard Bast, visiting the Schlegel sisters, expresses his admiration for Meredith's novel and describes his own emulation of Richard Feverel's night walk. The Schlegels are less enamoured. They know the novel, but find it laughable. They mock, for example, the glimmeringly drooping forest. Such different reactions to a nineteenth-century masterpiece place the characters socially. The sisters, ...

'[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...

When, a few years ago, an early-modern manuscript translation of Tacitus was discovered in Lambeth Palace, the writer's identity was at first a mystery (see here ). The piece was in the neat hand of a scribe, but scribbled marginal corrections gave clues as to the translator: Queen Elizabeth I herself, whose late penmanship was notoriously appalling. Chirographic disregard for the reader was a marker of status in the period, and Elizabeth's ministers would provide fair-copy transcriptions of her correspondence. Brookner's handwriting, though more even and consistent than Elizabeth's, or indeed late Henry James's, is also difficult to read. It's the kind of script you have to take a run at, letting the likely sense carry you forward. On AbeBooks at present, an autograph letter to a reader: These things show up from time to time. I own two myself (see here  and here ). Brookner corresponded willingly but guardedly with her fans. The present letter, to a Mrs Chappe...

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.

Is Brookner our contemporary? It might be a strange question to ask of a writer active so recently, whose last work of fiction was published in 2011. But even then there was less labelling, less ready codification of social and emotional malaise. In 2011 we heard talk of mental health less often, though not quite as infrequently as in 1981, when Brookner's first novel came out. Hermione Lee, Brookner's later biographer, offers an insightful, psychoanalytical review ( here ) of A Friend from England , one of Brookner's 1980s novels, inexplicably now out of print. Though the protagonist, Rachel, hasn't read Freud, 'Freud,' says Lee, 'would have wanted to read her': [S]he is an extreme case in the Brookner hospital, off in her own isolation ward. Time and again Brookner's characters worry the reader. Nominatively determined Herz, in The Next Big Thing , endures cardiac discomfort, but his visit to his GP baffles the harassed young doctor, with talk of F...

In a recent post ( here ), I pointed to Anita Brookner's prolific, largely uncurated journalistic output. Serendipity presents me today with a piece on Géricault from September, 1983 ( here ). The date, as will become clear at the end of this post, is significant. Like many of Brookner's art-history reviews, this New Criterion essay is less a review of the book under consideration than a wider discussion of the artist, his work and his life. Géricault is familiar ground for Brookner: her essay collection,  Soundings (1997), begins with the text of an excellent lecture Brookner gave on the artist at the Courtauld. But anything of Brookner's, however repetitious, is of value. Indeed it may be argued that in her repetitions, and the variations they allow, Brookner is most truly herself. Only Brookner could make this arresting, novelistic observation of a sketch ( Retour de Russie ) by Géricault in the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC: Here are two veterans of the Na...

Continuing a series on the 2026 rebrand: Two further cover images have been added to booksellers' websites. I was expecting something similar to the new Strangers ( here ). These, however, reuse the black-and-white photos of ten years ago. In this significant year for Brookner, I hoped for the sort of uniform branding enjoyed by Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and others. Brookner's prolificity will always be a problem for publishers. Several of the novels, A Misalliance  (see here ) in particular, may be lost for ever. But even Henry James, or Hardy, otherwise fairly completely in print, have their lost children. James's Confidence , anyone? (For which see here , if of interest.) 

Announced this week, an event in September at Topping and Company, Bath: Hermione Lee discusses her upcoming biography of Anita Brookner. https://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/events/bath/hermione-lee/

As noted in a recent post ( here ), I'm fond of Professor Emma Smith's lecture series on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Highbrow but accessible, these talks contribute to our continued appreciation of early-modern drama. Professor Smith builds on the curatorial work of commentators over the years, not least in the eighteenth century, when Johnson, Pope and the Shakespeare Ladies Club argued for the preeminence and rehabilitation of the 'Bard'. Professor Smith extends her mission through popular media, appearing regularly on literary podcasts. In one such, on being asked why she loves Shakespeare, Professor Smith responds, Do I? Do I really love Shakespeare? She goes on: Shakespeare is a thing to think with. I adore the conversations it makes possible. A thing to think with . It's a thought-provoking remark, relevant to fandoms of all kinds. It helps me understand my own 'love' of Brookner. I don't read her all the time. I have many other interests. ...

An interior hermetically sealed, a tilted head, a clock just edging beyond a quarter past one, a whole afternoon to be got through... The National Portrait Gallery in London houses five photographs of Anita Brookner ( here ), each of which repays close attention. Anita Brookner by Lucy Anne Dickens The most extreme of Brookner portraits. It is one of a series of photos of art establishment figures from the early 2000s. Each is formal and carefully staged; none is as austere. Lucy Dickens said of the project, 'I am immensely grateful to those who agreed to sit for me, despite the pressures on their time, and in some cases, old age or infirmity. I was met unfailingly with courtesy (and often fish pie).' The only references to Brookner's former career are the pictures on the walls, somewhat artlessly placed. We know Brookner owned an etching by Manet of Baudelaire, and a few watercolours by Edward Lear. The picture on the left has the air of a Watteau. Brookner has a pile of ...

I can't recommend highly enough Professor Emma Smith's podcast lecture series on Shakespeare ( here ). Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford. She is an active and generous academic whose insights can be enjoyed further on YouTube and on radio programmes like In Our Time . Throughout her lectures Professor Smith poses questions about critical response, genre, style, and intertextuality, all topics of wider relevance. She encourages her students to use their enthusiasms in their work, licensing them to seek comparisons and contrasts between early-modern drama and apparently unrelated cultural phenomena. In her lecture on The Tempest , she says: One association of cultural or aesthetic lateness is as a decline from earlier achievement or prowess . W e might think : Thomas Hardy, Ben Jonson, Alfred Hitchcock, Lady Gaga, Kenneth Branagh, artists who go off rather than on . It sets me thinking. What of Brookner? The first thing to note is that Bro...

Anita Brookner used epigraphs sparingly - in Family and Friends (Goethe), A Closed Eye (James) and Strangers (Freud). The epigraph of her 1991 novel A Closed Eye is a quote from an early Henry James tale called Madame de Mauves (1874).* I have two questions: Which text did Brookner use, and where did she find it? With James, there is often a question of texts. James (unlike Brookner) was an inveterate reviser. He would make minor changes to works between magazine and book publication. And years later, for the New York Edition (1907-9), he reread and substantially revised most of his oeuvre, making significant alterations at the level of the word and sentence to early works like Madame de Mauves . Brookner quotes from the original 1874 version: She strikes me as a person who is begging off from full knowledge, - who has struck a truce with painful truth, and is trying awhile the experiment of living with closed eyes. The New York Edition version (Volume 13) reads: She strikes me as a...

This may, by now, come as a surprise, but Brookner was once disregarded, downgraded and even mocked by her peers. For illustration, consider the comments of Jeanette Winterson ( here ) and Anthony Burgess ( here ). Why the hostility? Coming to fiction after a successful career elsewhere, was Brookner seen as an interloper, a hobbyist, straying from her lane? Something has changed. Time has passed. A major biography is in the offing. Mentions of Brookner in the press nowadays are not only more frequent but more admiring. Writing last year in the Guardian ( here ), in their 'Books of my life' column, the writer Geoff Dyer - lauded by, among others, Zadie Smith - spoke of Brookner in respectful and, one feels, revisionary terms: ... the first 12 novels by Anita Brookner, a subtle and quietly pathological writer. When someone writes essentially the same book over and over you’re in receipt of an enacted philosophical consciousness. Having said that, Brookner’s persistent and gradua...

In an earlier post I asked: In which novel by Anita Brookner is there a reference to the Victorian novelist George Meredith? Answer: Look at Me (1983): I had already got Olivia's Christmas present, a first edition of  The Ordeal of Richard Feveral  [ sic* ], her favourite novel, and I also saw the smile that would break up her little face when I gave it to her. (Ch. 5) The antagonist Alix pooh-poohs this ('Well, I think we can do better than that'). A preference for worthy Victorian fiction represents for Alix all that is wrong in Olivia. Brookner presents Olivia as Alix's passive foil; the reader is invited to take Olivia's part. Olivia, disabled, from a socialist family, is the embodiment of virtue, not least in her liking for George Meredith. Brookner's favouring of Olivia verges on the sentimental, even on the infantilising: 'her little face'. I said the question called for deep-cut knowledge - and I mean not just of Brookner but of literature. Mere...

In yesterday's  Telegraph features magazine, Mick Brown was one of the contributors to a piece called 'The celebrities who are actually nice ... and those who aren't' (available here ). Mick Brown interviewed Anita Brookner in 2009 in what was to be her last interview. It is an often-cited exchange and very fine (available behind the Telegraph 's paywall). In Brown's recollection, Brookner was 'one of the most fascinating people I've ever met': '80, pin-neat figure, fragile and watchful'. Her flat, he recalls, was as if preserved in aspic at some point in the 1960s. A few weeks later he glimpsed her from a bus: 'walking along King's Road, head down into the wind'. He wanted to get off and give her a hug. As if inevitably, and probably blessedly, when the bus did stop, Brookner had vanished.

Previously hidden away in a book of 1985, Novelists in Interview , John Haffenden's interview with Anita Brookner is, I find, now available online ( here ). It is a an extraordinary exchange, brilliantly orchestrated by Haffenden, better known as the editor of T. S. Eliot's letters. Interviewer and subject fence smartly and with dazzle. Brookner's responses, aperçus astonishing in their spontaneity, are both honestly raw and elaborately postured. It is the essential interview and the inauguration of a myth.

In a much earlier post I lamented the unavailability of Anita Brookner's contribution to the 100 Great Paintings series (BBC, 1981). During the time I was away from the blog, the BBC reshowed the episode, and it has now found its way to YouTube:

The critic Andrew Graham-Dixon (see here ) remembers: When I first studied the history of art, at the Courtauld Institute in London, one of my tutors was the formidable Anita Brookner. Her special subject was French painting of the Romantic period, but it was her approach to art in general that I found enlightening, and eye-opening. I remember one of her instructions in particular: 'Always remember, when you're looking at a painting, that every last detail is important: nothing is there by accident.' She said this so often, that I came to think of it as her motto. I recently saw Graham-Dixon lecture on his latest subject, a fresh interpretation of Vermeer. Andrew Graham-Dixon at the event I attended Afterword : Her finest art-critical motto was surely 'Art doesn't love you and cannot console you' (see earlier post here ). I have often considered it as an alternative motto for this blog.

Further to earlier posts ( here and here ) on Brookner's writing style, I note a review from 2009 of Strangers in the Oxford Mail (see here ): Since the perfection of her grammar and use of language is a subject often commented on by reviewers ('Brookner’s writing is meticulous, impeccable and full of simple grace,'  Sunday Times ) I cannot resist pointing out that on the evidence of Strangers she does not know the meaning of either ‘dilemma’ (page 25) or ‘fulsome’ (pages 37 and 44). I would also suggest there is an otiose comma in her brief author’s note: 'All the characters in this novel are imaginary. But I do not doubt that somewhere, out there, they, or others like them, exist.' Dilemma There are five examples of the word in Strangers (none of them on p. 25 of the British edition). The reviewer's complaint appears to centre on Brookner's use of the word to mean 'difficult situation or problem' rather than 'a situation in which a choice must...