The Brooknerian

Christopher Hampton's film of Brookner's 1984 Booker-winning novel, Hotel du Lac , was broadcast on BBC2 on Sunday 2 March 1986 at 10.05 p.m. Brookner would be watching it 'at home, with my feet up, just like anyone else'. The interview she gave the Radio Times on the occasion of the broadcast is light and airy, as befits the medium. But Brookner is Brookner, and darkness glimmers. 'People like the Puseys always win ... You can't keep them at bay. You can only repossess yourself from time to time by examining things really clearly.' 'I like writing, but it's a nerve-wracking, dangerous business.' 'Writers are like stateless persons. They can't easily be absorbed.' 'I don't aspire to anything. I'm non-aligned, I'll settle for being marginal.'

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...

1. I rarely read new things now – rarely visit new places either. But now I was in Zurich, previously only travelled through. I arrived early, and nothing was ready, and it was a Sunday and raining and the streets were empty. Thoughts of panic and flight beset me. But by noon I’d planned the coming days and booked my train ticket to Vevey and my room was cleaned. I was glad of the ideal company of Brookner ( A Family Romance ) and Dickens ( David Copperfield ), mightn’t have got through otherwise: I chose my summer reading well this year. ‘I led the same secretly unhappy life; but I led it in the same, lonely, self-reliant manner.’ 2. Still half-lost in the unfamiliar streets I at last found my way to the edge of the Zürichsee and a two-hour cruise: it seemed the Brookner thing to do, and indeed the weather was as it was for Mr Neville and Edith in fiction and on another lake: grey-blue distances, indistinct horizons. I lunched at Rapperswil and returned by train....

The Brooknerian will now be taking another short break. If all goes to plan (my itinerary is dismayingly complex) I should soon be a guest (for one night only) at the Grand Hôtel du Lac, Vevey. I could of course take my laptop with me, and blog from the scene, but I guess I'm old-fashioned. On my travels I prefer my pen, my notebook, my old analogue world. [Two views of the hotel taken on a previous visit in August, 1993:]

Followers of this blog will know I recently read, with great pleasure, Lotte in Weimar by Thomas Mann. Another largely hotel-focused story, the novel takes place in the early nineteenth century but reveals its modernist credentials towards the end, when Mann gives us Goethe's thoughts and feelings in a long stream-of-consciousness chapter. Edith Hope, in Hotel du Lac , though she may look a little like Virginia Woolf, is no modernist, and nor is her creator. Chapter 6, though reflective, introspective, and set deep in Edith's consciousness, nevertheless could have been written by Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope. Not least because Brookner gives us Edith's letters to her lover. This is a successful and fitting technique, and there will, I recall, be a smart pay-off at the end of the novel, when Edith reveals she hasn't sent any of the letters. But it is old-fashioned. But again, perhaps fittingly so. *** Some additional points: 1. Balkanization [Mrs Pu...

I'm sure the Bank Holiday long weekend is when the thoughts of many folk turn towards pilgrimage. I'll return presently to my survey of Altered States , but for the moment I've been booking a summer holiday. I've been several times to Vevey, I've had tea in the garden of the Hôtel du Lac, but I've never actually stayed there. It's been rather radically renovated in the meantime and is now known as the Grand  Hôtel du Lac, so I can really only afford one night. It'll be an excuse or an opportunity to reread the novel, which I'm not sure I've ever done. It was my first Brookner, read when I was seventeen or eighteen in 1990. I don't think of it as a great or a typical Brookner but something must have chimed. I remember reading voraciously. I hope I get a view of the Dent d'Oche. The  Hôtel  du Lac, 3 August 1993 From the hotel, August 1993 The Dent d'Oche

In January 1978, just a few years before she (stealthily) began to write novels, we find Anita Brookner at the Royal Academy, looking at pictures by Courbet ('The Last of the Old Masters', Soundings ). ...that world of pungent women, of euphoric half-drunk men ... Rumpled sleazy girls, exhibiting their cheap mittens and their white stockings to the shocked spectator ... Regis Courbet snoozing after dinner in his malodorous but convivial kitchen, trout the size of carp, yards of female hair, sniggering all-male parties, damp-fleshed nudes, an amazing tendency for everyone to fall asleep ... La Tour de Peilz, that silent pretty village where it seems to be always dusk ... That portrait of Berlioz, as watchful, as distanced as might have been his doctor father at the bedside of a dying man ... the hooked trout with agonized human eyes; a sad and lonely picture of apples with a pewter tankard; a coldly red sunset over Lake Geneva... The novelistic nature of Brookner's descri...

'...in imagination only, yet verified by the brochure, the peak of the Dent d'Oche...' [A postscript: There's a hospital in Vevey called the Providence, and a road sign - 'Providence' - just outside the hotel, not seen in these pictures.]

Well, a Fodor's, actually (1993 edn): Vevey has an air of isolation, of retirement, of Old World gentility, of nineteenth-century stuffiness ... Anita Brookner wrote and set her novel in the Du Lac (subdued relative of the Hotel Trois Couronnes) - readers may be disappointed to find it lacking the discretion and refinement but still flaunting the stuffiness she so precisely described. Though some rooms are newly done up with prim florals or chic burled wood, others retain the kelly-green carpet and mustard chenille of another era in decorating. The lakeside facilities are the hotel's greatest attraction, as there's a graceful sheltered restaurant, a garden, and a pool all just across the street from the waterfront. Rue d'Italie, CH-1800 ... 90 beds, restaurant (reservations, jackets), terrace cafe, outdoor pool, garden. Expensive / very expensive.

'The only publicity from which the hotel could not distance itself was the word of mouth recommendations of patrons of long standing.'