The Brooknerian

Anita Brookner was never one for easy hyperbole, only for that which was earned and justified by time. One wonders what she would have made of 2020. No doubt she would have reserved judgement. Her essays and reviews are often at their most piquant when considering something from which she withholds praise. I've been reading 'Descent into the Untestable', a review in Soundings of a book of 1980 on regression in the arts from the eighteenth into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Analysis of large movements, notions such as the Enlightenment and Romanticism, will be familiar to readers of Brookner. In Providence (1982), Kitty Maule and her students mount lofty seductive arguments: Existentialism as a late manifestation of Romanticism - and the like. But Dr Brookner herself would caution her own pupils: Art doesn't love you and cannot console you. Here she argues for the limitations of art. 'Artistic traditions are self-generating and at best reflexive. One cannot...

He had nothing to do, his occupation was gone, and it seemed to him that he should never find it again. Henry James, The American , 1879 edn. He had nothing to do, his occupation was gone, had simply strayed and lost itself in the great desert of life. The American , 1907 edn. The days before him were empty, and the emptiness was as much of a burden as it had always been. Brookner, Strangers , 2009 The curiously downbeat ending to The American takes the reader by surprise. Newman has lost his great love, but surely he'll be reunited with her by the end? This is a nineteenth-century novel! But time passes, and he wanders listlessly around Europe and America, his malaise not so much tragic in a Shakespearean way ('his occupation was gone' echoing a line in Othello ) as proto-Existentialist. Brookner's Sturgis suffers a similar dying fall as he gathers up what remains to him at the end of the author's last novel Strangers . Like Newman, Sturgis wa...

Some notes on the seminar scene in chapter 4 of Brookner's Providence : Kitty's '[A] novel is not simply a confession, you know. It is about the author's choice of words' reminds me of Evelyn Waugh's line, 'I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in language, and with this I am obsessed.' When the Paris Review asked Brookner about Kitty's comment, she replied, 'I am not conscious of having a style. I write quite easily, without thinking about the words much but rather about what they want to say. I do think that respect for form is absolutely necessary in any art form - painting, writing, anything. I try to write as lucidly as possible. You might say lucidity is a conscious preoccupation.' The key quote from the Preface to the Third Edition of Constant's Adolphe , ' ce douloureux étonnement d'une âme trompée ' is given in the Penguin translation as 'the pain and bewilderment of a soul d...

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 am now alone, which takes a bit of getting used to; one has to nerve oneself every day. It really is existential living. Haffenden interview, Methuen 1985 Once the morning had been got through my failure of nerve would be without witnesses... 'At the Hairdresser's' (2011), Ch. 5

Was Anita Brookner an Existentialist? As a young woman in Paris in the 1950s she must often have seen the principle actors. In her fiction she takes Existentialist positions, more than once adapting for her own purposes a famous proto-Existentialist line from the nineteenth century: 'Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.' 'And my own recovery? That, I feared, would have to be postponed indefinitely. It would be safer, and wiser, to assume an endless vigilance,' says Zoe in The Bay of Angels at one of her lowest points. Providence is the novel that explores Existentialism most blatantly. Brookner discusses the novel and the movement at length in the  Paris Review interview : INTERVIEWER All your heroines follow 'an inexorable progress toward further loneliness,' as you say of Kitty Maule in  Providence . It seems to me very deterministic. Is there nothing we can do to alter our fate? BROOKNER I think one’s character and predisposition determine one’s f...