The Brooknerian

To Hamburg, L ü beck and Travem ü nde I came to the conclusion some time ago, after years of puzzlement, that I don't really like any weather. My favourite sort of day is a dry day, a little chilly, in spring or autumn. I was once in Dallas, and the temperature was more than 40⁰C. My day at the Southfork Ranch was a trial. We had a miserable English winter this year, then a heatwave from June. I suffered. In Germany it was worse - even in the north, supposedly subject to sea breezes. In Hamburg I hunkered close to the Kunsthalle, discovered Cranachs, appreciated an exhibition about disasters. Lübeck and Travemünde: no Brookner connection, other than Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks in particular, which plays its role in The Next Big Thing . I've been to the Buddenbrookhaus before. It is, like many such buildings in Germany, largely a reconstruction. Then to Travemünde, where the Buddenbrooks took their holidays, now a sizable port serving destinations as far away as Helsinki. I...

There was always something facile, even hysterical, about these [early] reviews (I should know; I wrote one). The annual Brookner offered a cheap shot to young critics, eager to savage a scandalous bearer of bad tidings about ageing and loneliness. Yet now she agrees with those snapping puppies. 'I hate those early novels. I think they're crap. Maybe I needed to write them. I far prefer what I'm doing now.' Yes, she does use the Ratner* word. It's like hearing a duchess cuss. Why are they crap? 'They're morbid, they're introspective and they lead to no revelations.' Has she a favourite among her works? 'I don't like any of them very much.' Boyd Tonkin, Independent interview, 2002 Elsewhere Brookner said she wrote only a first draft. There were no revisions. There just wasn't time . There just wasn't time. This is significant. She came late to fiction. She was fifty-three when A Start in Life was published. Had she sta...

...but when he looked up from his soup, which he had been drinking rather greedily, and smiled at her, as he had smiled at her when he was a young boy, her heart smote her and she made a pretext of tiredness after the journey in order to weep a few tears in the privacy of their spare room. She spent a sleepless night watching a square of moonlight reflected in the tall mirror hanging on the dark blue patterned wall to the left of her bed and imagining that she was a girl in Vienna once again, sleeping in a similar bedroom, with a similar polished wood floor, and the same smell of beeswax fustiness that now came back to her with hallucinatory reality. A Family Romance , ch. 3 There's something of an hallucinatory quality to A Family Romance  as a whole. It has to do with the density of the prose and the expansiveness of the chapters. It has also to do with events such as those above not having been experienced by the narrating consciousness but instead imagined and presented w...

Jacques-Louis David, Three Ladies of Ghent , Louvre ...this wordless domestic drama of will and submission, of determined age and fading youth, is so potent in its implications that one feels almost uneasy in its presence. The three figures occupy all their space, both physically and metaphorically; there is no room for them to move. The daughters are riven for ever to their mother's side. The primitive format is strikingly appropriate to the block-like permanence with which these ladies confront the spectator. It is a marvellous and marvellously disturbing portrait, the justification, and indeed the vindication, of the Brussels style. Anita Brookner, Jacques-Louis David , Ch. 13, 'Exile' David spent his old age in Belgium. It was a kind of afterlife. His work during those ten years was, Brookner tells us, 'prolific but obsessional'. He did new things; he also played to his strengths. The Three Ladies of Ghent 'must do duty for David's final maste...

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along... Auden, 'Musee des Beaux Arts' One always gets a frisson, in Brussels, standing before Bruegel's Fall of Icarus . Standing before it yesterday I had some memory of Brookner too. A long search brought me at last to Chapter 20 of A Start in Life: 'About suffering, they were never wrong, the Old Masters,' said Auden. But they were. Frequently. Death was usually heroic, old age serene and wise. And of course, the element of time, that was what was missing. Duration.

Dolly, in A Family Romance (or Dolly , if you prefer), hails from the rue de la Loi, Brussels. As I've noted before , I haven't much knowledge of that part of the city - an omission I rectified this (very cold) morning, in a feat of what felt like extreme Brookner tourism. We start with the menacing arches of the Cinquantenaire, which, for the child Jane, seem to mark the limits of the known world: In the next picture the arches are seen again, at the end of the rue de la Loi: And here are some buildings Dolly might have lived in:

I still call it, in deference to Auden, the Musée des Beaux-Arts, though it goes under several other names now (including Bozar , regrettably). David, Mars Disarmed by Venus , 1824 (In foreground) Godecharle, Charity , after 1795 David, Portrait of a Young Boy David, Death of Marat , 1793 Ingres, Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Augustus Navez, La Famille de Hemptinne, 1816 (One of my favourite paintings, this. Such an image of fidelity! How noble they look! How good-hearted!)

L’univers brooknérien : I picked up this phrase in my Francophile youth, deciphering the blurbs of Anita Brookner translations in the bookshops of Paris, those rambling Left Bank warehouse-like stores with their tattered yellow frontages. Nowadays my Brooknerian universe is more specialised. I'm going to Brussels tomorrow, to see several Jacques-Louis David paintings, and I may also pay a visit to Ghent, where I hope to take soundings from the distressed gentleman below.

I have been reading Villette , which puts me in mind of A Family Romance . Dolly, the aunt - squat, European - lives in Brussels at the start: Jane Manning remembers a discordant childhood visit to the rue de la Loi. She remembers the menacing arch of the Cinquantenaire, which seemed to mark the edge of the known universe. She remembers thinking there was not another child in the whole of the city. I have stayed in Brussels many times, and one sees Brooknerians there, or their European versions. But I have never seen the Cinquantenaire. I once gave A Family Romance to a girlfriend. It was an ill-judged gift. It is one of the intensest, most Brooknerian Brookners, depicting a clash of cultures between English Jane and European Dolly. (And as ever, whose side is Brookner on?) This novel was, as I say, unappreciated by my girlfriend, who preferred John Grisham. But thereby perhaps I found out what I needed to know. She was not a Brooknerian.