The Brooknerian

Clowns do not make one laugh. Undersized, deliberately grotesque, on the verge of tears, they induce discomfort. Their function is to be humiliated, by powerful men and pretty girls, aided and abetted by the audience, and the process by which this is accomplished is a diabolical set-piece of collusion... We are supposed to identify with clowns because they appeal to the undersized innocents we all know ourselves to be. I suspect this process to be abominable. Brookner, Soundings , 'The Willing Victim' ( TLS review) Witness, there, in 1979, before a single novel was written, perhaps as neat an insight into the Brookner world as one is ever likely to find: think of Frances in Look at Me , trampled underfoot by the careless and effortless Frasers. Yet Frances is clear-eyed, though her knowledge is of little use. In an early interview Brookner said she felt sorry for her characters, poor things, and yet knew as little as they. '[T]he guileless unfortunate from whom nothing is r...

They conferred on him the function of master of the revels. As each golden day succeeded the last they imagined that they saw in him the spirit of summer incarnate. Everything in Brookner comes back to Watteau, the subject of her first important study in art criticism. In chapter 6 of Incidents the 'very sexy' atmosphere she spoke of takes, as it were, centre stage, in the enchanted atmosphere of a French summer. Everyone assumes roles, the old, the young, and Tyler is the undoubted star. Brookner depicts the scene with sureness, as though it were a painting, and Tyler one of the gods. The following are the Watteau in the Staedel in Frankfurt and a few lines from Brookner's 1967 monograph. The women he paints have a sparkling miniature solidity, the men an engaging quirkiness, a sharpness of knee, an intense turn of head which prompt admiration for Watteau's realism; yet these sharp little characters who, even in repose, seem always to be pouting, to be urging, to be in...

'I plan to become dangerous and subversive,' says Blanche in chapter 5 of A Misalliance , before (as she puts it) 'raving on about Henry James'. 'A silly girl,' says Blanche of Milly* Theale in  The Wings of the Dove . 'She should have bought that rotter outright. What else is money for?' And so Blanche continues to purchase the company of her own new acquaintances, Sally and her daughter. Quantities of ten-pound notes are placed under the lid of a chipped teapot in Sally's ruinous kitchen. It is not the only time in Brookner that protagonists buy the time of others. One thinks of Elizabeth in 'At the Hairdresser's' or George Bland in A Private View . Each time the donation of funds is effected in clandestine ways, bringing analogous transactions into the mind of Brookner's knowing and fallen ideal reader. Not that Blanche's wealth is really quite in the same ballpark as Milly Theale's. But Sally's former mythic ex...

Regular visitors to this blog will know of my devotion to Anita Brookner's interviews. Five are available on the web - the Paris Review interview, the 1990s Independent interview , and three from the 2000s (the Observer , the Independent again, and the last interview in 2009 in the Telegraph ). In printed form there are the Olga Kenyon and the John Haffenden interviews, both from the 1980s. The Haffenden exchange remains to my mind the best Anita Brookner interview. You will conceive of my delight at discovering several fresh interviews on the Guardian / Observer archive website . I propose to cover these over the coming days. We start with a piece in the Guardian on 27 May 1981, 'Finding the art of fiction', published to coincide with the publication of Brookner's first novel A Start in Life . As well as giving in remarkably finished form her later familiar responses to questions about her motivations for writing ('Socially she has always had the sensation o...

I chose out of the way places, out of season: almost any town in France or Germany, however devoid of scenic interest, provided the sort of ruminative space which I seemed to require. Anita Brookner,  A Family Romance , ch. 8 1. To Düsseldorf: out of the way, though in season. To the Kunstpalast, in rain, under a heavy sky. Some Cranachs, older and younger, some Rubens, one or two Caspar David Friedrichs, some very engaging nineteenth-century history paintings, some Kirchners. But altogether the collection seemed slightly at a low ebb. Unprepossessing building: red-brick, monumental, 1930s: 'degenerate art' was exhibited here once, for purposes of ridicule. 2. Chapter 40 of  David Copperfield . Mr Peggotty - a wanderer in search of Little Em'ly - speaks of his journey through France and into Italy. He returns via Switzerland, responding to a tip-off. As with other pre-aviation era narratives, one is aware here of the great distances involved, the sense of the Alps...

I was feeling mildly alienated, as if the whole affair had taken place in a time warp, or in a fête galante by Watteau or Fragonard. It was quite easy to transpose those guests into one of those colloquies in which nothing is explicit but in which ritual exchanges take place. In many of those images there is an outsider, a figure in harlequin costume: a hand is laid on a breast; one assumes that love, or something more savage, is in the air. Leaving Home , Ch. 15 Watteau, 'Harlequin and Columbine (Voulez-vous triompher des belles?)', 1716? Wallace Collection See also  Watteau: Der Zeichner  and  Earliest Brookner .

At the Staedel, a Brooknerian moment: a substantial exhibition of Watteau's drawings. How many of the more than fifty pieces did Brookner know? In the bibliography to the accompanying book, one was sorry not to see her name. The exhibition was set out over several rooms and all but unvisited. At first the figures in the drawings withheld their message, but gradually one grew to appreciate their poised, pointed watchfulness, their effortful staginess. For more on Watteau, see an  earlier post.

The women he paints have a sparkling miniature solidity, the men an engaging quirkiness, a sharpness of knee, an intense turn of head which prompt admiration for Watteau's realism; yet these sharp little characters who, even in repose, seem always to be pouting, to be urging, to be inclining their tiny thoughtful heads, exist in a vacuum of apparent purposelessness. Their clothes, of satin slick as the oil into which Watteau translates them, are beautiful, flimsy, and bizarre; the context in which their languid activities take place is grandiose and vague, like a stage set. They look, in fact, like a group of professional actors, either warming up half-heartedly for a performance or enjoying a break in rehearsal, falling into a day-dream while a musician improvises softly on his guitar. Anita Brookner, Watteau , 1967 (It isn't actually the earliest Brookner. That honour goes to the extraordinarily titled An Iconography of Cecil Rhodes , from the mid-50s, which I can on...