The Brooknerian

I had a James wobble not so long ago. James's last, unfinished novel,  The Ivory Tower , in a nice NYRB edition, had been sitting on my shelves for some years, and at last I gave it a try. The first couple of chapters were OK, but then James started introducing characters willy-nilly, and when I'd read a dozen or so pages thinking 'Gussy' was a man, only to find she wasn't, I decided life was too short for what Martin Amis once called the arctic labyrinth of late James. I don't elsewhere concur with Amis's views on James, but he seems to nail it when it comes to The Ivory Tower . And so? Give up? No! I chose The Spoils of Poynton , an old favourite - and it had only grown richer and more elegant and delightful. Published in 1897, it's a transitional novel, cementing the 'late style' and 'scenic method' that characterise James's last major phase. Mrs Gereth, a recent widow, must leave Poynton, her home for more than twenty years ...

Since then Anna had maintained her ambiguous poise, although she knew that it was brittle. Anita Brookner, Fraud , ch. 4 In her middle period - and Fraud sits more or less at the centre of the corpus - Brookner seems to revel in her unexpected second career. She delights in fiction, almost in what we might call storytelling. She writes about characters like Anna Durrant, who might have been invented by that born novelist Henry James. Anna's a lot like Fleda Vetch in The Spoils of Poynton - that deep little person for whom happiness is a pearl-diving plunge, that deep little person who really can only exist and survive in fiction, and Jamesian fiction at that. Henry James of course isn't content with the fairy tale, and at the end of the novel Fleda emerges into 'clearer cruder air'. Brookner too seeks to break into Anna Durrant's ambiguous poise, render it brittle. But as with James it's an affair of style. Style buoys up Anna and Fleda, creating out of ...

The best sure cure for homesickness, which can strike at any point on a foreign holiday, is a detective story. I shall unashamedly take Patricia Highsmith, whom I am re-reading, and who does not seem to date in the very least, and hope that Ripley - her amoral character - will give me the independence to sail through any uncomfortable encounter. I shall also take Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton , which is a kind of detective story, and read breathlessly until the new owner of the property is revealed. 'Holiday Reading', Observer , 4 July 1993 I've mentioned The Spoils of Poynton before. I vaguely remember Brookner saying she reread it regularly, even annually, marvelling at its technical qualities. But I've never found the reference. Perhaps this is what I remember, though I didn't take the Observer in those days. The Spoils of Poynton is one of James's transitional works, the first or one of the first of the later 1890s novels he wrote after ...

'Ah, good reading is a creative act!' declares the bumptious old professor in Deconstructing Harry . One book leads to another, one author to the next. I think I became a Jamesian because I was first a Brooknerian. I remember once reading that Anita Brookner reread The Spoils of Poynton every year. Did I imagine this? I cannot find the reference. It may have been in one of those celebrity vox pops the Spectator used to do on various topics (the piece about tisane in an earlier post is from one of those) or perhaps it's in one of the interviews - or perhaps, indeed, I dreamt it. The Spoils of Poynton is a Brooknerian reading experience, which is probably why she chose it. The opposition between the sensitive, high-strung Fleda Vetch, for whom happiness is a kind of pearl-diving plunge, and the assorted vulgarians that circle her, is pure Brookner. One thinks of dreamy Anna Durrant in Fraud , or Frances Hinton in Look at Me , at the mercy of the venal careless Frasers.