The Brooknerian

Brookner died on 10 March 2016, ‘peacefully in her sleep’, according to the death notice in The Times . One thinks of Mrs March in Fraud , daily scanning the columns. The piece continues less conventionally. At Anita’s request, we learn, there would be no funeral. Donations should be addressed to Médecins sans Frontières. (It is disappointing to find ‘Médecins’ spelt ‘Medicins’.) No funeral? This was subject to some comment at the time. It was becoming fashionable – a green alternative to the expense and waste of a traditional ceremony. One senses in Brookner other motives. Feelings of dread and shame. The thought of all those gushing tributes, perhaps from people who were little more than strangers. The absence or near absence of family. The shame? Peacefully in her sleep? But we know Anita Brookner’s death was far from benign, that her flat was on fire, and she had had to be dragged from it, that she survived for a time afterwards in hospital, but that adequate reha...

The Next Big Thing  presents a hero shaken by lust after a lifetime of humbly 'making things better'. Seventysomething Julius Herz, the third male protagonist in recent novels, is a self-effacing childhood émigré from Germany. Late in life, he finds release from the family ties that bound him to a solitary stoicism. Passive, obedient, too keen to please, Julius shares more than his  Mitteleuropa  background with some of his female forerunners. As I list his traits, Brookner breaks in: 'He's me, really. You were longing to say that, weren't you? And I thought I was making him up. That's what happens. That's where Freud is right.' 2002 Independent interview 'He's me, really.' The Next Big Thing - Anita Brookner's Madame Bovary 'C'est moi!' novel? It's a tempting notion. The novel is probably my favourite Brookner, though when I first read it, in 2002, I thought it a reheating of several previous works, A Private Vie...

Rachel, an 'extremely emancipated young woman', as Brookner told the  Paris Review  - and a young woman 'whom they will not be able to think is me!' - seems at first glance an experiment with a new, unfamiliar and possibly unsympathetic character. She's emotionally cold, sexually liberated, ruthless in her 'sensible arrangements', and is spoken of as a feminist. At the time many critics saw Rachel as unBrooknerian, at any rate 'an extreme case in the Brookner hospital', according to Hermione Lee . But knowing the complete oeuvre, we may think differently now. Rachel is atypical only if you don't know your Brookner, if you credit too far Brookner's often disingenuous, stagy pronouncements in the various interviews, and if you think Brookner's some kind of super-sophisticated Barbara Pym. In fact there's nothing unusual about the narrator of A Friend from England . She's Zoe, she's Emma, she's George Bland. In chapter 5, f...

Who does not enjoy a set piece, by which I guess I mean an extended scene depicting a social occasion? Brookner goes in for them infrequently, but usually memorably. Disastrous meals are a feature: one thinks of Look at Me 's climactic meal, or the dinner party in Fraud . Such scenes, with their food, their clothes, their vulgar demotic dialogue, can unbalance a novel as finely woven as an Anita Brookner. In A Friend from England , for example in the engagement party and wedding scenes in chapter 3, Brookner seeks a middle way: dense paragraphs, indirect speech, a painterly attention to detail and manner and impression. This is in keeping with the estranged, disillusioned mood of the narrator. Rachel has things in common with Anthony Powell's almost disembodied narrator in his Music of Time sequence. Powell also has a fondness for a set piece, but his are on an epic scale. I remember a scene in one of the early novels, A Buyer's Market or The Acceptance World,  that goe...

The Heat of the Day Elizabeth Bowen, title of 1949 novel The sun rose on a landscape still pale with the heat of the day before. Bowen, A World of Love (1955), Ch. 1 Leaving Home Anita Brookner, title of 2005 novel ...fantasies about the life he would lead when old enough to seek his freedom. Or indeed to leave home, though, strangely enough, home it had remained. Brookner, Strangers (2009), Ch. 1 There is a trend among Brookner scholars to view her oeuvre as one giant text, each installment a version of the others, every iteration in conversation or conflict with the rest. Themes concatenate across novels, especially in novels that are contiguous. We see it also at the level of the sentence, as above, and not only in Brookner. In some ways such moments are nods to the fans, small secret rewards. There's a sense of private knowledge, a sense of participating in a dialogue others aren't attuned to.

Among the nymphs, with their fixed gaze and dowdily coiffed hair, can be seen the last avatar of Mme. Récamier… Brookner, Jacques-Louis David , Ch. 13, 'Exile' David, Mars disarmed by Venus Brussels So in her novels, Brookner would present us with later versions of earlier characters. Emma Roberts is Claire Pitt; Paul Sturgis is George Bland. And Julius Herz? 'He's me, really. You were longing to say that, weren't you? And I thought I was making him up.' ( 2002 interview ) See also  The Brookner Room .

David, View from the Luxembourg Louvre There are direct physical resemblances to [Géricault’s] style: the grey sky, the dull sunshine of an early autumn afternoon, a predominance of grey and beige and cream, with only a red poppy in the green grass to give the positive accents. All these elements, although faithfully recorded, are used as vectors of heavy-heartedness. There is also a psychological resemblance to Géricault, for despite its rational pattern the picture conveys emptiness and wistfulness, and therefore approximates to Géricault’s ability to convey states of mind which can be experienced through the painted image. It is the only unpopulated picture David ever executed: a group of winnowers in the middle distance is almost scratched out. A tiny figure is outlined against the beautiful shaky fence. In the path on the left a woman glides past with a water pot on her head. It has the calm and the unreason of certain dreams. Anita Brookner, Jacques-Louis David , Ch. 9, ...

Traditional or progressive? Brookner is commonly described as the former. A study of Brookner's endings can be instructive in this regard. A number of her novels begin in a notional present and then move into the past. By the end the narrative has returned to the beginning. The ending isn't perhaps in a lot of doubt, though there may be shocks and surprises along the way. Falling Slowly is an example of this kind of novel. Others - A Private View , for example - are presented more chronologically. George Bland has his adventure, and at the end at least a version of the status quo is restored. At the sentence level, several of the novels attempt a moment of epiphany (e.g. Fraud ), often delivering a not always persuasive, or earned, sense of hope ( Leaving Home  ends like this). What we don't find, except possibly in Incidents in the Rue Laugier , is ( Middlemarch -style) a rundown of the Nachgeschichte , details of the various characters' ultimate fates. Aspe...

This sudden feeling of displacement was radical; my life was circumscribed because I accepted that it should be. Occasional visits from a part-time lover were perhaps all that I could tolerate. Even those distant Sunday excursions with Michael were cherished because they came within safe limits, and those gardens I so faithfully studied were valued because they existed in a finite space and a time that could not be replicated. Leaving Home , Ch. 17 Emma Roberts's feelings are radical indeed. There is, in late Brookner, from time to time a powerful and strange obscurity. What precisely is this feeling of displacement? And why so sudden? Why is Emma's life so limited, and why is she so accepting? Why can't she tolerate more? One thinks almost of late Henry James: it's the same gesturing at information - information that remains, even for the writer, just a little out of reach.

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...

Friendship sometimes demands less than full disclosure, and it may be more comfortable to abstain from an accountability which may leave one open to criticism. Leaving Home , Ch. 18 Olga Kenyon: ...Which qualities do you value most in a friend? Brookner: I think accountability, that's to say explaining actions with full knowledge of emotions and procedures. You get it in Russian novels: the complete confession. Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy, and it is the  Grail . Women Writers Talk  (Lennard, 1989) If such characters persist through my novels that's because I don't know much about them, not because I know them too well. I write to find out what makes them tick. 1994  Independent  interview It's an easy mistake to make, especially with the novels written in the first person. But really Brookner must be given at least a little credit when she says her novels aren't about herself. Of course those first-perso...

I was feeling mildly alienated, as if the whole affair had taken place in a time warp, or in a fête galante by Watteau or Fragonard. It was quite easy to transpose those guests into one of those colloquies in which nothing is explicit but in which ritual exchanges take place. In many of those images there is an outsider, a figure in harlequin costume: a hand is laid on a breast; one assumes that love, or something more savage, is in the air. Leaving Home , Ch. 15 Watteau, 'Harlequin and Columbine (Voulez-vous triompher des belles?)', 1716? Wallace Collection See also  Watteau: Der Zeichner  and  Earliest Brookner .

'He intends to join Médecins sans Frontiéres. As I should have done at his age. Live all you can, as Henry James said.' So says Dr Philip Hudson, over salmon, in Chapter 10 of Leaving Home . He is speaking of his son, whose sleeping form had such a powerful effect on Emma earlier in the novel. I do not know the significance of any of this, and, gathering inscrutable congruences, I feel a little sub-Sebaldian, but here's Brookner's death notice in The Times from a year ago, in my mind at this anniversary time:

After dinner we watched television, the same American serial that all England had been watching. 'Pouah!' she uttered. 'Ils sont mal élevés, ces gens.' Leaving Home, Ch. 8 Brookner plays her little games with the reader. She has moments of vulgar excess, but she can't quite bring herself to name names. ( Leaving Home is, elsewhere, an exception in this regard, when it names Coronation Street , a favourite of Emma and her mother. They watch it 'gravely', hoping to glean 'pointers to modern life'.) But the American serial: what is it? There's a similar reference, I think, in Lewis Percy . It seems almost inconceivable that Brookner ever sat down to watch Dallas or Dynasty , but of course, as she said, she lived in the world. And with a disparaging comment in untranslated French, she can always undermine the moment, and feel superior and be more civilised.

' Un jour nous partons, le coeur plein de flamme ,' says the poet, and goes on to describe the bitter disillusionment we confront at the end of the journey. Leaving Home, Ch. 4 The actual quote is below. One remembers a story Larkin used to tell. He met Mrs Thatcher for the first time and she misquoted one of his early poems. It was the fact of her misquotation, he felt, that gave the moment its authenticity. Un matin nous partons, le cerveau plein de flamme, Le coeur gros de rancune et de désirs amers… Baudelaire, ‘Le voyage’, Fleurs du mal

Leaving Home, published without fanfare in 2005,   is in danger of being forgotten. It's very short and, for Brookner, hardly revolutionary in its subject matter. It hasn't, for example, the novelty of being about a man. A Private View, The Next Big Thing and Strangers , all tales of Brooknerian guys, and therefore not the stereotypical 'Anita Brookner novels about lonely women', were heralded with major press interviews. Not so Leaving Home . So - minor Brookner? Brookner-lite? It tells the story of Emma Roberts - 'cautious Emma Roberts', insists the blurb - and her contrasting relationships in England and France. Brooknerian binaries are at once in operation: London / Paris; caution / expansiveness; order / chaos. Other themes - home, leaving home, the provisional nature of home - are typically Brooknerian, recalling earlier works, including the first. But Brookner's preoccupations lose nothing in the repetition, are instead re-energised. Her fictio...

Interviewer: So far all your novels have been the same length, around two hundred pages, with the same group of characters and more or less the same circumstances producing the same results. (Although  Family and Friends  has a bigger cast of characters.) Are you not afraid of being accused of writing to a formula, even though of your own creation? Brookner: I have been so accused! But the latest book,  The Misalliance , is much longer and has a broader canvas. It is quite different from the others... Paris Review  interview, 1987 We have spoken of Richardson's Clarissa , which comes in at around a million words. We have mentioned Dickens and Trollope, some of whose novels are more than three hundred thousand words long. Such vastness suits them. Shorter novels such as Great Expectations can seem too pacy, even rather rushed. A teacher from my university years,  Alison Light , in her studies of Interwar fiction, has talked of shell-shocked readers a...

Observer : Where do you think your ideas come from? Anita Brookner: I wish I knew. I'd tap into them straight away. I think it's mostly dreams and memories, isn't it, as with all novelists? […] Obs : Where will the next idea come from? AB: I don't know, that's the point. I have no control. I'm a great believer in unconscious processes. They usually work. Observer interview, 2001 ( Link ) Dreams are potent if mysterious motors in the novels, especially the later fiction. The Next Big Thing , Leaving Home and 'At the Hairdresser's' all begin with dreams. Information is received, considered, and not always found to be of use. Visitors ends with a dream, but it is a vouchsafement earlier in the novel - of a field of folk - that stays in the memory, lambent, puzzling. Brookner invokes not so much Piers Plowman as a Forties and Fifties heaven, a lost England, old decent values, kindness... Martin Amis, though not a Brooknerian, s...