The Brooknerian

Clues as to Hermione Lee's approach as she begins the process of writing are to be found in the Bookseller . The proposal synopsis reads: Anita Brookner (1928–2016) is a seductive subject for a literary biography. She was a writer like no other, of stylish brilliance, wisdom, passion, sadness and irony, and she was a magnetic, witty and complex woman, at once well-known and private, candid and secretive, loved by many and close to very few. Her personal style, more French than English, was impeccably self-concealing; her attitude to life was both romantic and grimly realistic. The publisher adds: The richness of Brookner’s life, which in recent years has been occluded by a reputation of quiet and isolation, more than warrants another look. Her life was multifaceted, distinctly European, and offers tantalising mysteries.

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...

Some obvious and not so obvious ideas for a winter break... St-Sulpice, Paris Paris is classic Brookner territory, but where to go? The rue Laugier? The old Bibliothèque Nationale, where a young Brookner was once the recipient of a magnificent bunch of flowers? The Luxembourg Gardens, to sit on an iron chair? The Crillon, where, according to Julian Barnes, Brookner was given a maid's room? No, head for the Latin Quarter and the church of St-Sulpice. Once inside, look carefully around the gloomy interior for Delacroix's Jacob and the Angel . It will help if you have a copy handy of Brookner's masterpiece, The Next Big Thing . Hyde Park, London Perhaps you want to re-enact Frances Hinton's nightmarish trek across the park and down the Edgware Road towards Maida Vale in Look at Me ? Or, for brighter moments, you might wish to drive through the park, like Mrs May on that heady summer evening in Visitors ? Hyde Park has it all. Poor Claire Pitt in Undue Influence even...

The Brooknerian will be taking another break for a week or so. I'm off to Mitteleuropa once more, to Düsseldorf, Cologne, Frankfurt, Bonn. In Bonn I plan to visit the statue of Beethoven. I wonder if you can work out why.

My recent booking of a night at the Hôtel du Lac set me thinking not only about Brookner's most famous novel but also about other hotel-set works of literature. There's an early Arnold Bennett, there's Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel , there's Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont . And there's Larkin's poem 'Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel' ( High Windows , 1974). Larkin was notoriously phobic about 'abroad', but his hotel could be located as easily in Mitteleuropa as in the Midlands. The poem, ostensibly a description of an all but deserted hotel on a Friday evening, is packed with strangeness. Light 'spreads darkly downwards'; empty chairs 'face each other'; the dining-room 'declares / A larger loneliness of knives and glass'; silence is 'laid like carpet'. The vivifying of the inanimate owes much, perhaps, to Elizabeth Bowen. There are also strong Brooknerian echoes, or rather prefigurin...

In an  earlier post  we discussed the conservatism, the limitations, of Brookner's musical references. I went to the Frankfurt Opera on Wednesday, to a performance of Gluck's Ezio , around which there are (as far as I know) no Brooknerian associations. All the same the evening was richly Brooknerian. One was surrounded by dressy mittel -Europeans; Brookner wouldn't have looked out of place. Oldsters in ancient finery; youngsters in smart bright trousers; neurasthenic young girls; glamorous couples; aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, family and friends; velvets, brocades, necklaces, jewels, patent-leather shoes, fancy glasses, fancy scarves, and everywhere the decorous behaviour and measured tones of cultured leisured moneyed Germany.

[Max] had even bought a loose-leaf notebook at Ryman's, but then it occurred to him that what the world expected was a fully fledged biography, with details of the illustrious persons he had known, whereas he desired to recall sweet small incidents, family dignity, unassuming love. No publisher would be interested in such a thing; refugees' stories were all too common. The notebook was empty, although he had thought of a title: The Statue of Beethoven.  Falling Slowly , Ch. 10 My mind returns to Mitteleuropa . I have a forthcoming holiday, between Christmas and Silvester, not to Baden-Baden this time but Frankfurt and Cologne, and shall be offline for the while, reliant instead on my trusty Moleskine. Max in Falling Slowly seems at first glance a forerunner of Julius Herz, not least because he shares an identical memory. But Max Gruber is more of a showman, potent and mercurial, somewhat akin to the Ostrovski figure in the latter novel. Nevertheless the following two ex...

My grandfather on my mother's side saw England as the most liberal country in the world: he adored it and adopted every English mode that he could find. But European habits of thought - melancholy, introspection - persisted, and it's a bad mix: it was thicker than the English air.  Brookner, interviewed by John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview , 1985 I return, you see, to the Haffenden exchange, the Ur-text for Brookner's several interviews. Periodically I long for Europe, and for middle-Europe in particular. Not that my experiences of the continent aren't perhaps irredeemably  touristique .  But ah, Mitteleuropa ! The place names, the names of streets, the hotels, the modern art galleries! The cosy restaurants and cafés, the railway stations with their boards showing destinations impossibly eastern! The sedate matrons shopping in the morning, the buzz of guttural conversation, the precisely reconstructed town squares! The icy rivers, the large skies, the ...

Brooknerians dream of France - of Paris in particular. Lewis Percy always longs to return. A whole life, for Maud in Incidents in the Rue Laugier , is predicated on a youthful episode in that unremarkable Parisian street (which I visited once - and it was adamantine, very Right Bank, giving little away). But the novels that concern themselves with more mittel -European themes and places are also to be considered. Julius Herz in The Next Big Thing , for example, remembers the Thirties in Germany. The horror that prompted his childhood translation to England remains all but undefined, even unspoken, so subtle is Brookner's technique. But a whole world is lamented. Herz recalls holidays in Baden-Baden, rides in a fiacre along the Lichtenthaler Allee, coffee at the Kurhaus. I vacationed there one summer. Ah, Mitteleuropa - so solid, so gracious! Mitteleuropa - which somehow survives a century of torment! One feels, there, very far from England and its brutality, its vulgarity. Br...