The Brooknerian

Further to earlier posts ( here and here ) on Brookner's writing style, I note a review from 2009 of Strangers in the Oxford Mail (see here ): Since the perfection of her grammar and use of language is a subject often commented on by reviewers ('Brookner’s writing is meticulous, impeccable and full of simple grace,'  Sunday Times ) I cannot resist pointing out that on the evidence of Strangers she does not know the meaning of either ‘dilemma’ (page 25) or ‘fulsome’ (pages 37 and 44). I would also suggest there is an otiose comma in her brief author’s note: 'All the characters in this novel are imaginary. But I do not doubt that somewhere, out there, they, or others like them, exist.' Dilemma There are five examples of the word in Strangers (none of them on p. 25 of the British edition). The reviewer's complaint appears to centre on Brookner's use of the word to mean 'difficult situation or problem' rather than 'a situation in which a choice must...

Further to my post of last week :

Chapter 5 finds us at last in the rue Laugier and again on familiar Brookner ground: Paris. Characters free but anxious and disenchanted in Paris abound: Sturgis in Strangers , Herz in The Next Big Thing . Paris is here, as there, bigger and more dangerous than in the characters' dreams and memories. I recognise in myself such feelings. I haven't been to Paris in more than a decade, but I used to be a regular. I think on my last visit, in something like 2009, I was, like Edward in Incidents , debilitated by the unexpected largeness of the place, its monumentalism. In dreams one traverses great spaces with ease, and there is little traffic. John Bayley said of George Bland in Brookner's 1994 novel, A Private View , as he endures a crisis of nerves in Nice, that one might contemplate his situation indefinitely. But the plot must go on. And so it must here too.

He had nothing to do, his occupation was gone, and it seemed to him that he should never find it again. Henry James, The American , 1879 edn. He had nothing to do, his occupation was gone, had simply strayed and lost itself in the great desert of life. The American , 1907 edn. The days before him were empty, and the emptiness was as much of a burden as it had always been. Brookner, Strangers , 2009 The curiously downbeat ending to The American takes the reader by surprise. Newman has lost his great love, but surely he'll be reunited with her by the end? This is a nineteenth-century novel! But time passes, and he wanders listlessly around Europe and America, his malaise not so much tragic in a Shakespearean way ('his occupation was gone' echoing a line in Othello ) as proto-Existentialist. Brookner's Sturgis suffers a similar dying fall as he gathers up what remains to him at the end of the author's last novel Strangers . Like Newman, Sturgis wa...

My thing with Brookner goes back exactly 25 years ago when Hotel du Lac won the Booker prize. To an aspiring literary critic, this frail, thin book about a frail, thin heroine coming to terms with loveless solitude at a Swiss hotel seemed the epitome of the bloodless, sexless, plotless English novel that had led us to study American literature at college.  Subsequently, one of the subjects for my debut appearance on the Radio 3 chatshow Critics' Forum turned out to be the latest Brookner, in which another west London spinster didn't quite get it together with a semi-comatose widower. What passed for a plot twist was the heroine experiencing a severe migraine. I have a memory of a moment when the central character was forced to return early from a stroll because the weight of the spectacle frames on her nose had become unbearable. Mark Lawson, Guardian , 2009 Mark Lawson's review of Brookner's 2009 novel Strangers isn't the only example of a critic recanti...

The character of Nigel, dignified and likeable at first, but given to psychobabble, gradually falls victim to a sort of novelistic passive aggression. The existence somewhere in his background of an analyst* is inferred by the narrator, indeed imagined in some detail, though never confirmed. For her part she's 'too proud, or too ashamed (they are the same thing) ever to have confided, to have confessed in any company' (ch. 14). Brookner herself was asked by at least one interviewer whether she'd undergone analysis. She hadn't. And she wasn't about to start. It would take too long. And she might doubt the intelligence of the interrogator. It's a breathtaking answer. But she was a devotee of Freud. Her novel Strangers has an epigraph by Freud, a rare honour in Brookner. One thinks of Herz too, in The Next Big Thing , talking to an uncomprehending GP of Freud's experience on the Acropolis, of having 'gone beyond the father' (ch. 7). Or one ...

The word is used three times in The Rules of Engagement . It might pass without notice were it not for the following, from some years later. In The Rules of Engagement 'blithe' describes the innocent, romantic Betsy. Here, in Brookner's  2009  Telegraph  interview  the word takes on more equivocal associations: In  Strangers  it is the tentative, introspective Sturgis who is confronted with the impulsive, carefree and monstrously self-obsessed Vicky Gardner, whose only interest in him is in what he can provide for her.  The person who thinks seriously about life, Brookner's books suggest, who proceeds cautiously and conscientiously, will be punished for their virtue, end up alone and dissatisfied, while the person who takes a wholly unreflecting and rather selfish view of life pays no price for it.  'But haven't you noticed that?'  She gives an amused smile. 'Think of Tony Blair. Unrealistic. Selfish. Happy as a clam!'  Didn't Pla...

Once more, rereading Brookner, one comes across intriguing repetitions. Take Mrs Marsh's 'night thoughts' in Fraud (ch. 7). Lying in bed, with (like George Bland in A Private View ) the World Service playing in the background, she entertains memories of shopkeepers she remembers from her earliest youth. Sturgis recalls such stores in Strangers , and Mrs May in Visitors similarly conjures the neighbourhood of her childhood. Then, in Fraud , but briefly, there's 'Dolly', Mrs Marsh's mother's glamorous friend. So there are three characters with that name in Anita Brookner. There's the legendary aunt in A Family Romance / Dolly of course, but there's also a woman named Dolly Edwards who appears in a dream at the beginning of Leaving Home . As I say, intriguing. Are there other Dollys?

Mrs Marsh was intrigued in spite of herself. Anna, she reflected, was not without power, even if that power were confined to the mystery which she both contained and partly concealed. Anita Brookner, Fraud , ch. 3 This reminds me of both Visitors and Strangers (see an earlier post  here ). It's postmodern metafiction à la Brookner. For at this stage of the novel this is precisely how the reader sees Anna Durrant. Henry James has already been evoked, and it's a strongly Jamesian tale. Anna's mystery - not least the mystery of her disappearance - is a mystery to be solved, but it is also what makes her potent, a mystery to be appreciated and delighted in and perhaps maintained.

Mrs Marsh. Let's think for a moment about that name. To refer to a character so formally, and a character to whose inner life the reader is given full access, is surely unusual and even subversive. It's determinedly old-fashioned. Its male equivalent is the simple surname, as in the cases of Bland in A Private View or Sturgis in Strangers . Mrs Marsh   has more than a little in common with Mrs May in Visitors : similar names, both widows, both fond of the painter Turner. Mrs May is the central consciousness in that later novel, and at the time critics reacted with some consternation to a character whom they were invited to know so well and yet whose authorial denomination seemed so antique, so distancing. But none of this is about propriety but about how such characters think of themselves: some people think of themselves in one way, others in another - a point Brookner makes about Miriam at the start of Falling Slowly: On her way to the London Library, Mrs Eldon, who stil...

Undue Influence , which starts out so breezily, so lightly, with its short chapters and rapid character brushstrokes, gradually reveals darker undertones. It's very much a transitional novel. Coming at the end of the 1990s, it says goodbye to the greater substantiality of Brookner's novels during those years. We're heading now into more perilous uncertain territory. Claire Pitt, with her 'black heart' and her secret liaisons in French cathedral cities, never fully revealed or even clearly indicated, is a forerunner of Zoe in The Bay of Angels and far more disaffected and dysfunctional than any of her forebears, Rachel in A Friend from England , for example, or Frances in Look at Me . There's a growing opacity in the writing. Claire, that 'merry adventurer' (ch. 8), brings back from her mysterious holidays postcards and photos for her mother: rood screens, tympanums, choirstalls, misericords, clerestories, elevations: Brookner takes a perverse pleasure...

The Courtauld used to be in Portman Square. [This piece of Brookneriana dates from the mid-70s. It found it inside a printed copy of a celebrated lecture Brookner gave on Jacques-Louis David. I don't know who 'Louise' is or was.] I remember visiting the Courtauld in perhaps late 1989 or early 1990. And it was gone. Visit research had been wanting. The Courtauld moved into Somerset House about that time, a year of so after Brookner retired. Brookner attended the Courtauld's 75th anniversary celebrations at Somerset House in the mid-to-late 2000s: I myself visited the Courtauld Gallery a few weeks ago, nearly thirty years after my first attempt. I wasn't sure whether I'd find much of interest. The place is famed for its Impressionists collection, and I'm not keen on them. Nor can I think of a single mention of the Courtauld in Brookner's novels. She probably didn't like to mix business with pleasure. The gallery is medium-sized an...

New to Anita Brookner? Let me suggest a route into and through what a critic (unfavourably but memorably) once called the long dark corridor of her fiction . Start with a late-period novel. Brookner's fiction divides roughly but usefully into three phases: the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s. The early work is inconsistent but often brilliant; the middle period is more settled, more even. In Brookner's last works we see a return to the unpredictability she started with, now allied to a greater assuredness of form and style. Start with The Next Big Thing ( Making Things Better ) (2002). Also try The Bay of Angels (2001) and The Rules of Engagement (2003). Scarier than the scariest horror story. Next try the essential early Brookner: Look at Me (1983). A remarkable and quite extreme laying out of the Brookner manifesto. The final chapters contain some of the bleakest and most unsettling passages in the whole of English literature. Temper this with the novel of the followi...

Anita Brookner acquired a forbidding reputation during her writing career. Critical reception was strongly divided. So - where to start? It was possibly easier then, while she was still writing. If you had never read her, and wanted to, you could read her latest. Now that she's gone, and her body of work is complete, the uninitiated can be daunted by her sheer fecundity, the sheer volume of her fiction: twenty-four novels and a novella over thirty years. Where to start? It is a difficult question. There's no obvious stand-out novel, by which I mean one that stands out in terms of, say, length or critical appreciation. The obvious answer is Hotel du Lac , which won the Booker Prize in 1984. But Brookner herself didn't think it should have won. Her surprise or shock is clear in a press picture from the Booker event. She thought  Latecomers (1988) should have got the prize - a book with a serious and indeed Booker-friendly theme: the lifelong effects of surviving the Holo...

People seemed to behave more reasonably in those remote days. The companionship engendered by the late War had not entirely fragmented. Nobody jogged. Nobody went to the gym. Brookner, 'Benedict Nicolson',  Independent Magazine , 10 September 1994 Not long ago  we said a few words about booze, a most unBrooknerian topic. Continuing this series, let's look at sport and exercise. Sport first: no one in Brookner watches it, plays it, thinks about it. There are no visits to football fixtures; the Brooknerian year is not punctuated by even the most genteel of sports. Compare the way the aristos in Trollope live their lives in tune with the sporting rituals of the Season. There are still people today whose years are structured in this way. But they're not to be found in Brookner. But there are always joggers. Anna Durrant, in chapter 8 of Fraud , enduring the loneliest Christmas day on record, nevertheless spots a few determined joggers. But they represent otherness r...

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...

I had no doubt that in the ballrooms of his youth the Colonel had been noted for his charm and his way with women. It was a style which he had carefully taught his son, who had never, as far as I could remember, uttered a serious word. Badinage was obviously the favoured means of exchange in the Sandberg establishment. A Friend from England , ch. 5 This is a serious condemnation. Brookner hates the Sandbergs, with their plausibility, their polished manners, their uncertain income, their slippery identity, their sibilant speech: most of all she hates them for their jokiness. One thinks of Paul Sturgis in Strangers , longing for the sort of proper conversation he loved in the books of his youth: Werther , Adolphe ( Strangers , ch. 7), but having to make do with 'opacity', 'social niceness'. Rachel in A Friend from England is a different proposition: she long ago decided to live her life on the surface ( A Friend from England , ch. 5). But discussion of the 'inn...

regret > verb ( regretted , regretting ) [ with obj. ] feel sad, repentant, or disappointed over (something that has happened or been done, especially a loss or missed opportunity): she immediately regretted her words ¦  [ with clause ] I always regretted that I never trained.   [...]  archaic : feel sorrow for the loss or absence of (something pleasant): my home, when shall I cease to regret you! The New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1998 I've now and then noticed this about Brookner: her odd use of the verb to regret . I find it in Chapter 1 of A Friend from England (1987): ...Oscar sometimes regretted his little office and his box files... or this similar line from Chapter 3 of Strangers (2009): He regretted ... the structure of the working day. As you might imagine, I'm all in favour of  Brooknerese , but this is perhaps a step too far, especially as Brookner often and more frequently uses the more common meaning of regret . There are twenty-...

For W. G. Sebald, in Vertigo * (English translation, 1999), the life of Stendhal offers insights into 'the various difficulties entailed in the act of recollection'. Visiting the scene of the Battle of Marengo, Stendhal, or Beyle as Sebald correctly but playfully insists on calling him throughout, experiences a 'vertiginous sense of confusion' as he acknowledges the gulf between his fantasy and the stark reality before him. Thus Stendhal is put to work for Sebald; Stendhal becomes a Sebaldian. Stendhal has other functions for Anita Brookner. In Soundings (1997), in a review of a Stendhal biography, Brookner emphasises his contributions to Romanticism, his commitment to the 'supreme emotional adventure'. In Strangers (2009)   he is invoked several times. Stendhal, Sturgis's one-time favourite author, collapsed in the street and was taken to a cousin's house, where he died. 'That was the way to go, the relative, whether liked or disliked, put in char...

Brookner often takes us to Paris, but not so often to the Louvre. In late, late Brookner, in Strangers (2009), Sturgis gives the Louvre a miss, putting it 'definitively behind him', preferring an 'improvised existence' for which no one will take him to task (Ch. 25). In gentler, more expansive mid-period Brookner, in Fraud (1992), Anna Durrant dutifully puts in time at the museum. But it is not the 'great discordant machines of the Romantics' that claim her attention but the portraits of Ingres, 'calm, replete, satisfied with their immensely enviable situation in this world, and careless of the world to come' (Ch. 12). Anna remembers Baudelaire's remark that he found it hard to breathe when faced with an Ingres portrait: he felt as though the oxygen had been sucked out of the atmosphere. This is evidently a favoured description, which Brookner returns to in her essays on Ingres in Soundings (1997) and Romanticism and Its Discontents (2000). Ingr...