The Brooknerian

We have a fairly clear idea what Henry James thought about his own novels. He revised many and wrote illuminating Prefaces for the summative New York Edition, released near the end of his life. And he left several out*. One to be excommunicated was Confidence of 1879 - an early work, but not that early. Either side of it sit The Europeans and Washington Square , both favourites and always in print. But Confidence is forgotten. I'd never read it - and I'm at the stage where I'm reduced to mere rereading. I decided this summer to give Confidence a try. Who was it who first described Confidence as a light and awkward comedy ? It's something that comes up often in relation to the novel. My money's on Leon Edel. Otherwise there's almost nothing anywhere. And yet it's a short to medium-sized work, written when James was close to entering his middle phase and the decade of The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians.  How could Confidence have been all but l...

Where was Anita Brookner during the Paris événements of May 1968? Evidently not in Paris, to judge from her review of Mavis Gallant's Paris Notebooks ( Observer , 10 January 1988). (Brookner was probably in Cambridge, working out her year as Slade Professor.) Brookner knew about revolutions - the French kind in particular - and was in no doubt that this was one. But was it, in Wordsworth's words, 'very heaven'? Probably not, but it makes for 'excellent reading'. And so too does the Brookner account, even if not firsthand, of that strange Parisian moment from fifty years ago: Certain scenes were so surreal that they seem to have been enacted from 'A Tale of Two Cities', such as the incident in Les Halles when truckdrivers, wading through crates of overturned cherries, fought with manifestants , then gave up and pressed the fruit to their mouths, chins running with juice, to be joined by the whores of the district: Dickens shading into Zola. Most ...

That world no longer existed, or if it did would have undergone a change... Anita Brookner, The Next Big Thing , ch. 6 With almost Nabokovian ardour Brookner conjures Herz's past, that ride down the Lichtenthalerallee in Baden-Baden, coffee in the Kurhaus gardens. A remarkably similar scene occurs in Falling Slowly , suggesting perhaps an autobiographical origin. Baden-Baden is indeed different now: a resort for the super-rich, no longer for the merely bourgeois. The bourgeois past, Herz finds, is to be found only in his reading: in Thomas Mann's short stories or in  Buddenbrooks . Elsewhere in The Next Big Thing the modern world intrudes. Mobile phones, email. Globalisation. People trafficking? The seamstresses who work in a neighbouring flat at the start of the novel appear to be illegal immigrants. Their employer, Mrs Beddington, admits as much to Herz. He notices the girls' absence during the summer: perhaps they've gone home ('to homes he had difficult...

Some obvious and not so obvious ideas for a winter break... St-Sulpice, Paris Paris is classic Brookner territory, but where to go? The rue Laugier? The old Bibliothèque Nationale, where a young Brookner was once the recipient of a magnificent bunch of flowers? The Luxembourg Gardens, to sit on an iron chair? The Crillon, where, according to Julian Barnes, Brookner was given a maid's room? No, head for the Latin Quarter and the church of St-Sulpice. Once inside, look carefully around the gloomy interior for Delacroix's Jacob and the Angel . It will help if you have a copy handy of Brookner's masterpiece, The Next Big Thing . Hyde Park, London Perhaps you want to re-enact Frances Hinton's nightmarish trek across the park and down the Edgware Road towards Maida Vale in Look at Me ? Or, for brighter moments, you might wish to drive through the park, like Mrs May on that heady summer evening in Visitors ? Hyde Park has it all. Poor Claire Pitt in Undue Influence even...

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...

...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 ...

[Max] had even bought a loose-leaf notebook at Ryman's, but then it occurred to him that what the world expected was a fully fledged biography, with details of the illustrious persons he had known, whereas he desired to recall sweet small incidents, family dignity, unassuming love. No publisher would be interested in such a thing; refugees' stories were all too common. The notebook was empty, although he had thought of a title: The Statue of Beethoven.  Falling Slowly , Ch. 10 My mind returns to Mitteleuropa . I have a forthcoming holiday, between Christmas and Silvester, not to Baden-Baden this time but Frankfurt and Cologne, and shall be offline for the while, reliant instead on my trusty Moleskine. Max in Falling Slowly seems at first glance a forerunner of Julius Herz, not least because he shares an identical memory. But Max Gruber is more of a showman, potent and mercurial, somewhat akin to the Ostrovski figure in the latter novel. Nevertheless the following two ex...

Baden-Baden, the summer capital of Europe, is a destination of choice for many a Victorian literary personage. Lady Glencora and Plantagenet Palliser honeymoon there in Can You Forgive Her?  Baden-Baden features in Confidence , a minor James novel, which I haven't read. It is renamed but identifiable in the opening pages of Daniel Deronda . Today, more than a century afterwards, one imagines those long ago days as not so very distant. In fact all has changed, much separates then and now, and what remains is a mere simulacrum (great Brooknerian word).

Brooknerians dream of France - of Paris in particular. Lewis Percy always longs to return. A whole life, for Maud in Incidents in the Rue Laugier , is predicated on a youthful episode in that unremarkable Parisian street (which I visited once - and it was adamantine, very Right Bank, giving little away). But the novels that concern themselves with more mittel -European themes and places are also to be considered. Julius Herz in The Next Big Thing , for example, remembers the Thirties in Germany. The horror that prompted his childhood translation to England remains all but undefined, even unspoken, so subtle is Brookner's technique. But a whole world is lamented. Herz recalls holidays in Baden-Baden, rides in a fiacre along the Lichtenthaler Allee, coffee at the Kurhaus. I vacationed there one summer. Ah, Mitteleuropa - so solid, so gracious! Mitteleuropa - which somehow survives a century of torment! One feels, there, very far from England and its brutality, its vulgarity. Br...