The Brooknerian

Henry James rated highly the work of John Singer Sargent, and towards the end of his life was depicted by him in the famous, appropriately magisterial painting (above) that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Some decades previously in an 1887 essay, republished in 1893 in the collection Picture and Text , James had written a substantial appreciation of the artist. Words such as 'splendid', 'brilliant' and 'masterpiece' abound. Of the 'superb'  Dr Pozzi at Home (below), for example, James writes: This gentleman stands up in his brilliant red dressing-gown with the prestance of a princely Vandyck. Brian Sewell once complained of how a reference of Anita Brookner's to the 'threadbare' religious imagery of Caspar David Friedrich had forever ruined for him the work of the painter. Likewise we might look differently at Dr Pozzi after reading John Updike's assessment of the painting, quoted by Brookner in her review...

...Henry had cultivated a middle-aged persona as early in his life as he plausibly could. David Lodge, Author, Author *, Part 2, Ch. 1 Anita Brookner is 46. She was 46 when, half a century ago, I first heard her lecture at the Courtauld Institute, eloquently and meticulously, on Greuze, slipping so easily into French that she convinced her students that they, too, had something of her fluency. In 1980, when mischievous gossip columnists were prompted to discuss her age, she put them down with a peremptory epistle to The Times — ‘I am 46,’ she wrote, ‘and have been for some years.’ She was quite certainly still 46 a month or two ago, lunching with equally young friends in Bibendum’s oyster bar.  Her dust jackets evade this simple fact; they tell us only that she won the Booker Prize in 1984, that her tally of novels is every number up to 22, and that she taught at the Courtauld Institute until 1988 — this last a neat trick, avoiding the terminus post quem that might ...

Brookner makes reference now and again to Goethe. Family and Friends begins with an epigraph from Werther . At least one later Brookner novel ( Altered States ?) namechecks Elective Affinities . The Frankfurt Goethehaus looks at first like a genuine eighteenth-century house but like many old-looking buildings in Germany it is in large part a postwar reconstruction. In another part of the building there's a small art gallery: Tischbein, Fuessli, Hackert, minor Caspar David Friedrich. Brookner's comment somewhere about Friedrich's threadbare religious imagery apparently spoilt for ever  Brian Sewell's  appreciation of the painter.

Brookner, as we have seen, was rarely reviewed in ways that weren't extreme. Often, especially in the middle period, the tone was vitriolic. At the other extreme one found pieces lauding her to the heavens, and these often ended up on the covers of her books. The following review, of The Rules of Engagement , is noteworthy not only because it is written by a Courtauld colleague, Brian Sewell, but also because of the level of personal identification admitted to. We aren't, Brooknerians, reading her as some dry academic exercise; we are reading her because she tells the story of our own lives. (Not that Brian Sewell could ever really be called anything other than a Sewellian.) Transposing gender here and there, I recognised every moment of the novel as in some sense the tale of my own life (as I suppose it must be of Miss Brookner’s too), except that in mine coffee and Madeira took the place of tea — the same rebuffs, the same warmth accommodating itself to the same chill, the...