The Brooknerian

Previously hidden away in a book of 1985, Novelists in Interview , John Haffenden's interview with Anita Brookner is, I find, now available online ( here ). It is a an extraordinary exchange, brilliantly orchestrated by Haffenden, better known as the editor of T. S. Eliot's letters. Interviewer and subject fence smartly and with dazzle. Brookner's responses, aperçus astonishing in their spontaneity, are both honestly raw and elaborately postured. It is the essential interview and the inauguration of a myth.

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...

Whether the constant evasiveness and jokiness were a particularly English feature I could not decide, but I did miss the sort of overheard remark I had so relished in Paris, the willingness to discuss first principles and to invest passion in one's own arguments. The Rules of Engagement , ch. 10 This is a theme of Brookner's: the shallow jokiness of the English. Not that it works too well here: the narrator of The Rules of Engagement is, after all, English herself, however much she might feel like an exile. Brookner's protagonists can be divided into those who are (if such a thing were possible) fully English, and those whose identity is more complex. Brookner's was complex, and she was persuasive when she said (in interview with John Haffenden in the mid-1980s): I've never been at home here... People say I'm so serious and depressing, but it seems to me that the English are  never  serious - they are flippant, complacent, ineffable, but never serious ...

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...

I never felt very easy about Jane Austen: I think she made a tremendous, far-reaching decision to leave certain things out. She forfeited passion for wit, and I think that led her to collude with certain little strategems which are horrifying in real life. She wrote about getting husbands. Anita Brookner speaking to John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview , Methuen 1985 Observer : What did you read as a child? Brookner: Ah! Dickens. My father fed me Dickens. Two novels for my birthday, two novels for Christmas until I'd read the lot. And after that I think it was H.G. Wells, for some reason. I've been talked about in the same context as Jane Austen. I didn't stick that label on myself, other people did. Quite inaccurate. I've never got on very well with Jane Austen. 2001 Observer interview 'Just don't mention Jane Austen' I decided to reread Pride and Prejudice - tried to read it with an innocent eye, as if for the first time, as if I didn...

Regular visitors to this blog will know of my devotion to Anita Brookner's interviews. Five are available on the web - the Paris Review interview, the 1990s Independent interview , and three from the 2000s (the Observer , the Independent again, and the last interview in 2009 in the Telegraph ). In printed form there are the Olga Kenyon and the John Haffenden interviews, both from the 1980s. The Haffenden exchange remains to my mind the best Anita Brookner interview. You will conceive of my delight at discovering several fresh interviews on the Guardian / Observer archive website . I propose to cover these over the coming days. We start with a piece in the Guardian on 27 May 1981, 'Finding the art of fiction', published to coincide with the publication of Brookner's first novel A Start in Life . As well as giving in remarkably finished form her later familiar responses to questions about her motivations for writing ('Socially she has always had the sensation o...

'It must be a mixed motive, I think,' said Mr Wickfield, shaking his head and smiling incredulously. 'A mixed fiddlestick!' returned my aunt. 'You claim to have one plain motive in all you do yourself. You don't suppose, I hope, that you are the only plain dealer in the world?' David Copperfield , ch. 15 [Brookner:] Motives are never unmixed, are they? [Haffenden:] Your own heroines are given to be unmixed. [Brookner:] Poor little things, I feel sorry for them. They're idiots: there's no other word for them. And I don't know any more than they do. John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview , 1985

  I am apostolic about the novels of Edith Templeton, a Czech who writes in impeccable English: they are extremely restrained and tell strong stories about life in old-style central Europe, with recognisable passions and follies. Lovely, lovely novels. Anita Brookner, interviewed by John Haffenden, 1985 In the 1980s Anita Brookner wrote introductions to several of Templeton's novels, published by Hogarth. I haven't read them, so cannot comment, but I recently got hold of The Surprise of Cremona  (1954), a travel book reissued in the 2000s with an introduction by Brookner: My only meeting with Edith Templeton took place in her flat in Bordighera some time in the mid-1980s. I found an isolated and eccentric woman: I saw from the expression on her face as we were introduced that the same judgement had been passed on myself. Earlier, in the  Spectator  ( here ), Brookner had spoken of this rather delicious encounter (and in Bordighera too, a setting for Brook...

'Are you a writer?' he enquired, in a voice very slightly tinged with amusement. Brookner is to be applauded for writing so rarely about writers. I can think of only a handful of writer-protagonists: Edith, here; Frances in Look at Me ; and Jane in A Family Romance . None is quite a Brooknerian artist. Edith is a romance novelist; Frances writes Barbara Pym-style comic short stories for the New Yorker ; and Jane is a children's writer. Brookner was ambivalent as to the attractions of a writing life. It was a penance for being unlucky, she said in Look at Me (chapter 6). Later, in interview , she said writing had reprieved her from the despair of living. In Hotel du Lac Edith's work is 'obscure and unnoticeable', though her 'labours' are said to 'anaesthetise' her. The Puseys are again a focus in chapter 4, and a note of seriousness is gestured towards. Their presumed ages are getting steadily higher; and 'in a way she could not define...

I sensed that since [Jenny's] most lavish sympathies had brought her nothing in return, she had decided to withdraw them, even cancel them altogether. This had made me even more uncomfortable, as it exactly paralleled my own condition. Altered States , ch. 13 Jenny, also known as Jadwiga and Edwige, returns to the footlights in the later part of the novel. She serves as a foil for both Sarah and the stolid Englishness represented by the narrator and, to an extent, by Sarah too. Jenny reminds us that there are other, European ways of doing things. She reminds us, in a novel that might otherwise seem somewhat parochial, of the wider dimensions of Brookner's work. The passage above recalls an exchange in the John Haffenden interview. I've covered it before ( 'A Creative Power' ), but it bears repeating: [Interviewer:] What all your characters are left with is a resignation which is not even stoicism of the classical order; it's merely learning to put up w...

Brookner's repetitiveness - inevitable, perhaps, in a writer writing so copiously and at such speed - is, for some, a weakness; for the more committed reader it's a source of comfort, even of a certain perverse pleasure. Reading Altered States , chapter 12 - like chapter 10 , another tour de force - one cannot but recall Edith Hope's Swiss exile in Hotel du Lac . Alan Sherwood's exile is to a town on the Swiss/French border: The name of the small town to which [my father-in-law] had consigned me ... seemed appropriate, since my nerves were à vif , that is to say, flayed. He must, again like Edith, absent himself for decency's sake: ...somewhere, at some level, there may have been a hope that Aubrey's reasoning was sufficient, that all I needed was fresh air and exercise, and that if I absented myself I would expiate my fault ... and would go some way to being forgiven. His arrival, and indeed the subsequent details of the vacation, including observation...

Significantly, the Colonel had begun to make himself scarce: I could picture him tiptoeing like a marauder from the scene. A Friend from England , ch. 7 In the half hour or so that I spent outside I seemed to see Oscar rising continually from the bed, his face grey, his arm flung out in warning, or in remonstrance.  Ibid ., ch. 9 My last sight of him was of an untidy figure stumping off in the direction of Marble Arch. I saw his back, bent, silhouetted against the glow of a rapidly sinking sun. Ibid ., ch. 11 Brookner often presents us with such moments. The Colonel, marauding, and Oscar, his arm flung out, hail from Mannerist scenes, while that untidy figure stumping towards Marble Arch would seem perhaps to belong in a canvas by Walter Sickert. *** Would Brookner rather have been a painter than a novelist? We know the answer to that question because John Haffenden asked it in his mid-80s interview with the writer: Yes, I think you love the world more as a pa...

I can remember being admonished at uni for praising Sidney's sincerity in Astrophil and Stella . 'Sincerity is undemonstrable,' intoned my professor. One can go too far in the other direction - make authors too knowing, too self-conscious. Hilary Mantel  in her otherwise brilliant review of Strangers   fashions for us a cynical, detached Brookner, a Brookner who, with an 'authorial snigger', coolly observes the misfortunes of her characters: We hear the barely suppressed sound of the author laughing up her sleeve ... In this book as elsewhere, she subverts her characters ruthlessly and exposes them to humiliation, not only in the eyes of other characters but the eyes of her reader. Mantel speaks of Brookner's 'subtle, uncomfortable high comedy'. Comedy? That old thing again . As for sincerity, as for authorial detachment, Brookner's own ambivalent feelings towards her characters (or 'personages', as she calls them), expressed in th...

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

Quite obstinately, I prefer the stately dance of reason to any conclusion more rapidly arrived at, however persuasive the display ... And so difficult is this prejudice to shake off that I now look upon myself as one of those unfortunates who have lost their faith but are still unable to recant... TLS , 5 October 1984 Kitty Maule [in Providence ] says about Romanticism that in certain situations reason doesn't work, and that's the most desolating discovery of all. Haffenden interview, Novelists in Interview , 1985 If only he could fall in love again! Only in that climate of urgency could he make decisions ... He was left with reason, which, at his stage of life, would propel him in directions which were uncertain, and which he would have to negotiate alone. Strangers (2009), Ch. 15 Against his expectations the age of reason was proving something of a disappointment. Ibid ., Ch. 20 Reason and Romanticism: a key Brooknerian binary. That reason might have as many...

Jacques-Louis David, Portrait of Jacobus Blauw National Gallery David’s portraits of the mid-1790s – M. and Mme. Sériziat, Mlle. Tallard, M. Blauw, M. Meyer – certainly bear witness to a pause for moral reflection. Their simplicity of approach, their appreciation of the integrity of the sitter, their uncharacteristic lack of tension, possibly Mme. Sériziat’s posy of flowers, may be intimately bound up with this brief attempt by David to discover a new code of conduct. Brookner, Jacques-Louis David , Ch. 9, 'Reversal' [Haffenden:] What is your criterion for judging what is most valuable in a work of art?   [Brookner:] That's very difficult to answer. I think it would be radiance, a power beyond the image: vision. The National Gallery has just bought a portrait by David called M. Blauw , and I think I'll find it there: it's only a portrait of a man with a quill pen, but it is so articulate and has such integrity. Haffenden interview, Novelists in Int...

I've never been at home here... People say I'm so serious and depressing, but it seems to me that the English are never serious - they are flippant, complacent, ineffable, but never serious - and this is maddening. Haffenden interview, 1985 'I suppose this is home now but I find it very disconcerting ... it's a different sort of conversation one has here. Full of jokes.' Leaving Home , Ch. 9 Anita Brookner's immigrant background gave her reasons for feeling as she did. The same can be said of many of her characters. It can't as easily be said of Emma Roberts in Leaving Home . Was there ever a more determinedly English name? Precisely why Emma Roberts doesn't feel at home in England, doesn't appreciate English humour, or, as she says later, so disdains the gardens favoured by the English, isn't precisely clear, and Brookner isn't in any hurry to make it clear. It's as though she takes pleasure in making us accept things we would...

A fascinating piece of Brookneriana: Anita Brookner  being interviewed on the radio  at the 1984 Booker Prize reception. I'm rather cross with myself for not finding it earlier. Not that it reveals much. Brookner gives responses that are familiar from several of her interviews. The male interviewer's tone is typical of the era: condescending, paternalistic. But it is Brookner's tone that is of interest. She is amused, even whimsical. This is probably euphoria; she's just won a major prize. But one wonders whether, speaking to the likes of John Haffenden or Shusha Guppy, her tone wasn't similarly humorous.

The Romantic notion ... is that life is so horrible that it is the artistic duty of a man of higher sensibility to spurn its vulgar attractions, to subvert its possibilities, and in general to get it over and done with, making as few concessions to normality as possible. 'Art' (and the word is baleful in this context since it adds a spurious nobility to the process of avoiding Nature) will be the goal of the life-hater. Writing may thus be seen as a form of conversion hysteria. 'Sick Servants of the Quill' (1981), Soundings It was the sad and desperate determination of Baudelaire, Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert, Maupassant and Daudet to regard the act of writing as the justification of an otherwise unlived life. This it was. But they did not believe, as so many non-writers believe, that writing was a therapeutic exercise. Ibid. Haffenden: You make your novels sound like a sort of self-therapy. Brookner: Well, if it were therapy I wish it had worked. It doesn'...

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...