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...

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 ...

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...

Alan Sherwood in Altered States is, we learn, 'in thrall' to Sarah Miller. He gives her lilies. He blushes. Sarah, for her part, is ever distracted. She's enchanting. Their coming together is 'almost magical'. The novel begins and ends with an autumn-set frame narrative. Brookner's invocations of English poets are rare, and indeed Keats's 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' isn't directly referenced here. But of all Brookner's novels Altered States is the one that, uncharacteristically for its Europhile author, aspires towards a more English version of Romanticism. *** 'A Pre-Raphaelite air of brooding intensity...' ( Altered States , ch. 6)

We had  the recent post * about the after-dinner cigar, and one from a short while back  on the connections between or among Brookner, Sebald and Stendhal, and yesterday I enormously enjoyed reading a text** by Jack Robinson (Charles Boyle) from CB Editions , An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H. B. ,*** which I discovered by chance in the  Guardian Review . The text is powered by its footnotes - and what pleasure there is in finding on pp. 4-5 a quotation from Brookner's 1980 TLS review of a Stendhal biography, collected in Soundings : 'Anita Brookner', says Robinson, '...approves [Beyle's] furious attempts "to measure up to the rules of the game, even when [my [i.e. Robinson's] italics] there was no game being played ".'**** Though Brookner isn't directly referenced again, the italicised line is mentioned twice more, on p. 81 and p. 128. The other echoes are numerous. Beyle, while watching a mosquito bite on his ankle, reme...

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...

Brookner's writing is powered by binary oppositions. In her literary and art criticism the battle is not often between eighteenth-century good sense and the effects of the succeeding Romantic debacle. To confine sick writers to the symptoms of their disease may be fascinating, but it is not quite decent. There may be a terrible justice in Flaubert, high priest in the temple of Art, being downgraded to the subject of a learned article about the difference between hysterical and epileptic convulsions. But none of this quite explains Madame Bovary . 'Sick Servants of the Quill', Soundings 'Not quite decent'? Or not quite Romantic? Does Brookner, as elsewhere in the essay, favour rational medical interpretations, or does she endorse Romanticism's belief in the sanctity of the artwork, the specialness of the artist? As ever it is the potency of Brookner's divided loyalties that makes her writings in a range of genres so interesting and so provoking.