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...

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.

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...

The second of my interview discoveries, 'Great Expectations', is from the Observer on 27 March 1983, marking the publication of Brookner's Look at Me . The interview was conducted by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, who would continue an interest in Brookner's works. Here she is on Brookner's 1998 novel Falling Slowly : She is one of a handful of living writers who can turn a sentence so graceful that to read it is a lascivious pleasure, and she can string those sentences together to make paragraphs - whole chapters even - that unfurl surely and musically until they climax, or fall away into silence with a superbly exact authority to which it is delicious to submit. There is a constant delightful tension between the austerity of her message and the voluptuousness of her medium. Brookner interviews have ritualistic tendencies, and Hughes-Hallett's certainly covers the usual ground: 'I regard myself as being completely invisible'; how the young Anita learnt false l...

The Courtauld used to be in Portman Square. [This piece of Brookneriana dates from the mid-70s. It found it inside a printed copy of a celebrated lecture Brookner gave on Jacques-Louis David. I don't know who 'Louise' is or was.] I remember visiting the Courtauld in perhaps late 1989 or early 1990. And it was gone. Visit research had been wanting. The Courtauld moved into Somerset House about that time, a year of so after Brookner retired. Brookner attended the Courtauld's 75th anniversary celebrations at Somerset House in the mid-to-late 2000s: I myself visited the Courtauld Gallery a few weeks ago, nearly thirty years after my first attempt. I wasn't sure whether I'd find much of interest. The place is famed for its Impressionists collection, and I'm not keen on them. Nor can I think of a single mention of the Courtauld in Brookner's novels. She probably didn't like to mix business with pleasure. The gallery is medium-sized an...

I often had thoughts of retiring myself, but of course that was impossible at my age. A Friend from England , ch. 5 Rachel's retirement fantasies are indeed somewhat impossible, given that she's only in her early thirties, but the subject was probably on Brookner's mind in 1986, when presumably she wrote A Friend from England (1987). She would retire from the Courtauld at the age of sixty in 1988. We might ask ourselves about the post-retirement Brookners and whether there is any distinctiveness. I would guess Brookner's writing schedule made  Brief Lives (published 1990, almost certainly written in 1989) the first she wrote in 'the anonymity of a small flat in Chelsea', as her 'About the Author' spiel put it in those years. Brief Lives, A Closed Eye, Fraud - indeed all the 1990s novels - have a new density, a new focus. There is a greater concentration on domestic, or at any rate on indoors life. There is a greater interest in ageing and on...

One could go on raking this image for ever. Its faded colours, reminiscent of family photos from the era (1987). The bank of windows outside. The author / art historian, content and not too thin. The cards on the sill. The heavy typewriter. The bottles of Tippex. The piles of paper. The calendar on the otherwise municipally unadorned walls. The hard desk chair. The ashtray.

Sue MacGregor: Anita, what did the Courtauld give you? Anita Brookner: A whole life, really. Everything that came after ... was ... very dull. SM: Even the success as a writer? AB: Oh, that was far less interesting. SM: Really? AB: Yes - yes. SM: It was your life. AB: Yes. BBC radio programme, 'The Reunion', 2011 Anita Brookner had a first career, and this is key to understanding her second. In obvious ways the first career gave her an appreciation of the fine arts that aided her as she crafted and embellished her fiction. That first career also afforded Brookner the security to regard her second as a kind of hobby: it was play; it was ludic. It made her, perhaps, careless; let her take risks. It didn't matter if she failed. 'I think if my novels are about anything positive, they're about not playing tricks,' Brookner told John Haffenden. Certainly it may seem a misreading to see such serious-minded works in games-playing terms, b...

By nature a shy and reserved figure, Brookner had a great flair for self-analysis. She also understood her students and their motivations with keen psychological insight – she encouraged the viewer to articulate his own feelings, as well as a vision based on his own character. The work of a particular artist, say, David, had to be analyzed within the larger framework of historical circumstances; yet subjectivity could not be avoided. In the case of David, she saw the revolutionary hope of creating a world of higher morality and virtue dashed as the artist anticipated the Romantic ideal by relinquishing intellectual control. Most crucially, Brookner believed that art had to be emotionally alive, and she advocated Baudelaire’s ‘impeccable naïveté,’ which she termed the ‘ability to see the world always afresh, either in its tragedy or in its hope.’   Her advice was invaluable. Nearly every sentence she uttered is engraved in my memory. My fellow student Cornelia Grassi remembers the ...

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...

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...

The fact that there was one woman there – called Anita Brookner – who you used to go up for private, individual tutorials with her and she was in the top of the building of number nineteen next door. And she was always feeding the pigeons, had an open window and feeding the pigeons, and I remember her I’d knock on the door and she said ‘Come in’ and her back was turned to me feeding the pigeons. And she said ‘You know one day Flavia I’m going to be a novelist.’ And of course she was.  Hotel du Lac  which I think is the second book but the one that first really made her name in 1984 and how many did she publish since then? Fifteen? But she did write beautifully I mean she was a very good art historian too. So in a sense I suppose she was a bit of a role model. She was very beautiful. Well she’s still alive actually, in her eighties. Very beautiful very elegant French, French dressed. And people didn’t wear scent – scent was very expensive in those days – but she always had the...

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...

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)