The Brooknerian

Brookner's second novel, Providence , published in 1982, has several extended scenes set in Kitty Maule's tutorial room. For Kitty Maule read Anita Brookner, a lazy but inevitable parallel. The tutorials focus on a nineteenth-century French novel, Adolphe by Benjamin Constant, about a young man's affair with an older woman. Now in 2022 we add to the mix a third slim volume, Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes. Elizabeth Finch is a tutor, not in French literature (like Kitty Maule) or art history (Brookner) but in 'Culture and Civilisation'. The viewpoint in the tutorial room isn't Elizabeth/Kitty/Anita's, but rather a Julian Barnes substitute, a student named Neil who soon becomes fascinated by his inspirational teacher. Finch shares many of Brookner's peculiarities: her appearance, her clothes, her big eyes, her hair, her smoking, her voice, her diction, her handwriting, her high seriousness, her lunch habits (seventy-five minutes max.). Or rather she sha...

(I'm not over-fond of these 1980s British paperbacks, though their rather curious cover paintings strike me as worthy of study.) The rest of the novel is taken up with preparations for Kitty's make-or-break lecture, which, we are told, she once envisaged as a 'sort of open exchange' but now becomes 'yet another solo performance of high strain' (ch. 13). Everything seems to depend on the outcome of this event: she fantasises about weddings, and about married life as an accepted Englishwoman in Gloucestershire. But by this stage the novel is tense with foreboding. None of this can end well. '[L]ater that night she burned in fires.' There's a misstep at the start of chapter 13. Several pages are spent with two minor characters, while Kitty is elsewhere. This gives Brookner the chance to show us at length what other people think of her protagonist, but for me the scene's artistic infelicity cancels out any gain. Chapter 14 opens meanderingl...

As she turned to give them a last wave, as she always did, she saw their two faces at the window, white masks that dwindled as she walked backwards down the hill, still waving. Anita Brookner, Providence , end of ch. 12 Scenes of waving in Brookner: a topic for a minor study. There will be a leave-taking, the protagonist will depart, and he or she will look back at some significant other or others, often parents. A chapter usually ends here, or, in the case of A Family Romance, a whole book ('waving to me ardently, as if I were her best beloved.'*). There are examples in A Closed Eye and Altered States , and probably elsewhere. Waving? Drowning? *Lovely deployment of the were -subjunctive there. (I once wrote a dissertation on the use of the were -subjunctive in British English. Brookner made an appearance.)

Notes on the seminar scene in chapter 11 of Brookner's Providence : Says Kitty of Adolphe 's ending: 'For the first time we are aware of the author's consciousness rather than his recital.' Later she says Adolphe is interesting for its juxtaposing of intense emotion with very dry language. And Brookner? 'There is a constant delightful tension between the austerity of her message and the voluptuousness of her medium,' wrote  Lucy Hughes-Hallett in  1998. '[I]t is characteristic of the Romantic to reason endlessly in unbearable situations, and yet to remain bound by such situations. [...] For the Romantic, the power of reason no longer operates. Or rather, it operates, but it cannot bring about change.' T he Romantic dilemma, or indeed the Brooknerian, in a nutshell. 'We are dealing with a work of fiction, and I simply want to make the point that in this period fiction, indeed all creative endeavour, becomes permeated with the author's own ...

It doesn't yet feel like mature Brookner, but in Providence you do get the sense of an author finding her feet. The middle stretches are of interest: Brookner seems to proceed through indirection, sending Kitty Maule to a clairvoyant; to a colleague's cottage in Gloucestershire; on an outing with her grandparents; and to Paris. But the focus on the heroine and on the main plot is tighter than in A Start in Life , and this is an advance. The tone, accordingly, is more consistent. There is still humour - the schoolgirls and their teacher in Paris, for example - but it's better integrated and less distracting. The pace is, however, slack. It works in Trollope, this lessening of the tempo in the middle, but readers often need a breather in the course of a long Victorian tome. In a novel as short and slight as  Providence the reader may feel uncertain as to where the story is going, may even suspect the writer of not really having a story to tell. But the Paris scenes (' R...

In chapter 6 of Brookner's Providence we find ourselves in uncertain and unfamiliar territory. Kitty, persuaded by her neighbour Caroline, visits a clairvoyant. Kitty is appropriately sceptical - '[s]he was intellectually, as well as morally, uneasy' - but she goes through the experience all the same. The visit is fully described and dramatised; there's even a crystal ball. And Madame Eva's vouchsafements? They're stunningly close to the truth. What are we to make of all this? I've really no idea. It puzzles me. It's a strange intrusion into the normal rationality of the Brookner world. It seems obvious to me that Caroline, before the visit, fed Madame Eva with details of Kitty's life. But Brookner doesn't acknowledge such a possibility, and the episode is allowed to pass away. Why?

Always an interesting topic, this. I live in hope of picking up some old volume and finding fascinating annotations within, clues to the past, remnants of old lives. I've got a number of very old books - eighteenth-century editions of Tristram Shandy , the Rambler , and the original Spectator - but their previous owners seem to have been careful, reticent folk. Looking back at one's own jottings is another matter. I think I last read Brookner's Providence in the 1990s, and I'm using the same copy for my reread. I find disappointingly few marks, and no notes. But the few marks intrigue me. I responded, back then, to passages that leave me cold now. I don't wish to go into too much detail here, but in general I seemed to 'identify' (hateful word, but unavoidable) more with Maurice than with Kitty. Now the opposite is true. As I say, interesting - but probably only to myself, so we'll leave it there.

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...

The scene had, for her, a strange exoticism: the hideous room, the north light, the dull atmosphere, compounded by the smells of cigarette smoke and sheets of photocopied paper, the muted and rumpled appearance of everyone except Maurice and herself, the enormous amount of luggage they managed to bring in - bags, briefcases, mackintoshes - the ceremonial plate of chocolate biscuits handed round by Jennifer's assistant, all this seemed to her stranger and more desirable than the home life of her grandparents with their variants on normal dress and erratic impromptu meals. Anita Brookner, Providence , ch. 3 Anyone who has ever, in a British educational setting, sat through a staff meeting or committee meeting will recognise and enjoy the description above. But it isn't just the precision of the detail, and the period detail at that - the pungent photostats, the smoke. It is also the exoticism of the scene that gives it its savour and makes us see it afresh. Brookner's ...

Some day, unless a miracle took place, she would spend all her time in this kitchen and it would become her permanent and only home, instead of the temporary staging post she had always thought it might be. But this was too dangerous to contemplate... Anita Brookner, Providence , ch. 2 Providence , in its opening stages, seems light and witty: any jeopardy is manageable, within bounds, or wistfully past. But we get these little shafts of steel. This is, after all, even so early in the oeuvre, fully and absolutely Brookner.

Chapter 2 of Providence focuses on Kitty's university life. Both she and her lover Maurice have flats in London, from where they commute to their 'provincial' university; we are told the financial supporters of the institution, the Friends, hail from the 'surrounding countryside'. I suspect Brookner means Reading. She was a visiting lecturer at the University of Reading from 1959 to 1964. It gives Providence a particular, perhaps rather charming non-Londoncentric air. Campus life, the provinces: this could be David Lodge.

What a strange, assured, idiosyncratic beginning. No action, practically no dialogue, all retrospect and introspection. We find ourselves in the Parisian world of Kitty Maule's grandparents. There's a hint, too, as ever, of something 'further east'. Providence (1982) was Anita Brookner's second novel, published a year after her first. Reading it now - now that we have the entire corpus - we recognise many things from later works. But  Providence is an urtext. Take the grandmother's dressmaking workroom in the rue Saint-Denis, with its seamstresses and its 'young and outrageous girls'. What does this recall? And of course, yes, the rue Saint-Denis appears a decade or so later, and similarly, in A Family Romance . See an earlier post  here .

I'm planning a reread of Providence , which makes use of Adolphe , but let me consider Constant's 1816 novel from another angle: ...he thought he might have done better, even prospered, in another era, or even another place, where the natives, the citizens, were more helpful, more curious, and indeed more candid. He longed to have lived in one of those confessional novels he had read as a young man -  The Sorrows of Young   Werther, Adolphe  - in which whole lives were vouchsafed to the reader, with all their shame, yet as if there were no shame in the telling. Here, now, one was consciously checked by a sort of willed opacity, a social niceness that stalled one's attempts to make real contact. Brookner, Strangers , Ch. 7 As Brookner said in interview, Adolphe is the story of a moral catastrophe; it's about what you do when you're the cause of a disaster. Adolphe is a bored, ennui-laden young man: he decides the time has come for him to fall in love. He...