The Brooknerian

Brookner was a reviewer and an essayist long before she picked up her pen to write fiction. As an established academic, she was a go-to for editors in search of a piece on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, French painting in particular. From the 1980s onwards, by then a novelist, Brookner's focus was more on fiction and literary biography. She appeared in the Observer , the Telegraph , the LRB , the TLS , prolifically in the Spectator . In the latter, for example, she wrote a yearly column called 'Prize-winning Novels from France'. She was often to be found contributing to 'Books of the Year' and 'Summer Books'. Her tastes were both predictable and surprising. She revered James, Wharton, Proust, Stendhal. She also valued the middlebrow women's authors of her youth, Margaret Kennedy, Barbara Pym. She was a significant fan of Updike and Roth. There are many essays I've never read or found. No one, as far as I know, has made a list of her outp...

Will anyone ever get round to writing Anita Brookner's biography? It is less likely than it might have been once. The golden age of literary biography was in the last century. Simply, the economics of publishing probably wouldn't support a latter-day Bevis Hillier or Norman Sherry, whose multi-volume John Betjeman and Graham Greene lives respectively were the fruit of decades of work (Sherry was said to have visited every place Greene ever set foot in). Then there are the lesser 'hack' biographies that often appear more quickly after an author's death. These are culled largely from material already in the public domain. Such a biographer might find so private and retiring figure as Anita Brookner a recalcitrant subject for such a job. She was a public figure, but only up to a point, and only really from her fifties onwards. Any more comprehensive life would entail a lot of research and a lot of interviews. She herself gave few interviews and rarely appeared on the r...

An undoubted Establishment figure - Keeper of the Queen's Pictures no less - Sir Anthony Blunt was exposed as a spy in the 1960s (an episode of The Crown deals with the affair), though the information wasn't publicised until Mrs Thatcher came to power in 1979. Anita Brookner, who worked with and for Blunt at the Courtauld, was unaware of his secret past. (She would later discover, on publication of Peter Wright's Spycatcher , that she had herself been unwittingly used to gather information possibly useful to the Soviets.) Max Hastings, writing in the Spectator in August 1980, laid into those he saw as forgiving or making light of Blunt's misdemeanours: all those former students, colleagues and hangers-on who continued to be seduced by his charisma and didn't demonstrate the sort of kneejerk condemnation Hastings (and the Leaderene, no doubt) would have seen as confirmation of the right stuff. Brookner's letter to the Spectator of a few weeks later was nua...

Anita Brookner's hack work output was prodigious. Here's a selection from three decades of her  Spectator reviews and articles. Many more are freely available on the Spectator archive and main sites. (Click on the titles below to link to the original articles.) 'A Stooge of the Spycatcher', July 1987 The painful astonishment of a deceived soul: that line from Adolphe , via Brookner's Providence , might well be applicable here. Her dismay at being mentioned in Peter Wright's notorious  Spycatcher is palpable even at this distance. But the dignity with which she sets out her 'great and steady anger' in this Spectator reply awards Brookner the undoubted moral victory. 'Repose is taboo'd by anxiety', October 1993 This piece on Oliver Sacks's Migraine is magisterial. An essay both restrained and candid. 'Even less fiction than Stranger ', May 1994 Brookner, Kafka, Camus, Existentialism: who could ask for more? The ...

I have been reading John Banville's The Untouchable , which was inspired by the life of Anthony Blunt. I was hopeful of finding in its pages a character based on Brookner. None is detectable. She herself  reviewed the novel , maintaining as ever an obliquity, not to say an opaqueness, in her references to her former boss. I have heard it said she was the only one of his colleagues who didn't realise he was gay. This was advanced as proof of her maidenly unworldliness. It was surely anything but - for was there ever more of a worldling than Anita Brookner? It was evidence, rather, either of an admirable discretion or of a respectful incuriosity. One would hope for more of her kind in this intrusive, over-sharing age.

Kenyon: Why is it that you didn't begin writing till middle age, like Edith Wharton? Had you been writing in secret? Brookner: No, there were no secret notebooks, not a scrap, not a sentence. Olga Kenyon,  Women Writers Talk , 1989 What, then, is one to make of the following startling piece, published along with the obituaries last year? Piles of exercise books? In bed? In French? Anthony Blunt liked to invent new ‘special subjects’ for third-year undergraduates. One of them was ‘19th-century art criticism in England and France’. Anita Brookner taught our students about Baudelaire while I was deputed to introduce them to Ruskin and Pater. This was in 1966.  Thus we formed an unlikely friendship. Anita would never enter a pub, but we sometimes had a drink in a little cafe opposite the Archives Nationales in Paris, and she liked lunching in the restaurant at Fenwick’s in Bond Street. A quarter of a trout would fill her.  She was smartly dressed, but in tho...

Anita Brookner was as likely to criticise my hairstyle as she was my essays on Baudelaire and French Romanticism. As my tutor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, she would hold her classes in a cramped attic study at the top of the building, in those days housed at 20 Portman Square.  'Oh, Katie, we must do something about that fringe,' she would say, offering me one of her untipped Woodbine cigarettes and balancing a small tin on her knee as an ashtray. She wasn’t joking: her own hair was always perfectly coiffed, making her head seem disproportionately large above her tiny, slender frame. She would sometimes be spotted in the grotty student basement canteen at lunchtime, nibbling on sliced-up apple or breaking a Kit Kat into tiny pieces.  Elegantly dressed in camel Burberry sweaters and skirts long before Kate Moss made them cool, Brookner was a formidable teacher who made her students question everything at those intimate, informal lessons. She would throw in perso...

In dealing with an author as private and even as secretive as Anita Brookner, one has to make much out of not a lot of material. For years I would listen to things like Desert Island Discs , but never once did Sue Lawley say, ‘My castaway this week is a novelist and art historian…’ But sometimes one made wonderful discoveries. In the days before the Internet I would pay visits to London libraries to examine files of back-issues of the Times Literary Supplement and the Spectator . I remember a marvellous afternoon one autumn in Senate House. I was leafing through old copies of the Spectator when I discovered a strange essay: ‘A Stooge of the Spycatcher: Anita Brookner explains how she was used by Blunt and Wright’. ( Link ) I had of course heard about Spycatcher , which the Thatcher government had sought to ban. I knew also about Anthony Blunt, and his unmasking. So I read with interest. Phoebe Pool, possibly a model for Delia Halloran in Look at Me , was dying. It was the 196...

I come now to a treat for Brooknerians. I have a copy of a pamphlet, Brookner's 'Jacques-Louis David: A Personal Interpretation' (London, 1974): it is the text of a lecture given by Dr Brookner. 'Lecture on Aspects of Art, Henriette Hertz Trust, of the British Academy', reads the title page. I bought it some years ago at a Gerrards Cross book fair for £25. The lecture was read on 30 January 1974: it seems to be a condensation of Brookner's study of the painter – whom I also rate highly, and whenever I’m in Brussels I always like to look at the Davids. And one thinks of was-it- Providence ? – that make-or-break lecture Kitty Maule must make before an august assembly. Was this that lecture? Probably not. The date’s too late. By 1974 Brookner was an established art historian. The pamphlet is dedicated to Anthony Blunt, not yet unmasked, and is part of a lecture series that includes 'Some Uses and Misuses of the Terms Baroque and Rococo as applied to Archit...

Brookner's voice - rich, alto - can be heard via the link below. The closing moments of the broadcast, in which Brookner wistfully remembers her old life, contrasting it with her later career as a novelist, are especially treasurable. Link to 'The Reunion' (BBC, 2011)