The Brooknerian

The photograph, taken by Peter Campbell in 1982, featured on a cover of the London Review of Books in 1982. See an earlier Brooknerian post here . Peter Campbell's son tells the story of the photo's rediscovery here . The image, not previously in wide circulation online, shows Brookner in her mid-fifties in the early days of her second life as a novelist. She has published A Start in Life and Providence . Her hand-to-head pose, a go-to for portrait photographers, will become a signature. For Brookner it likely refers to Ingres's painting of Mme Moitessier in the National Gallery ( here ). Hermione Lee's biography of Anita Brookner will be published in September.

As ever, Brookner scholar Dr Peta Mayer offers insightful comment (see Liverpool University Press blog here ). Her reading (misreading?) of a photograph of a smoking Brookner in a Wildean pose is particularly tangy. I myself have spied in Brookner's images wily references and analogues. Were the photographers in on such jokes, one wonders? The National Portrait Gallery holds another Lucy Anne Dickens ( here ), possibly taken at the same sitting as the Wilde shot. (The chair is the same, though not the sweater.) The chair to the side, the body in profile, the sidelong glance... the lamp... What bells ring in the subversive Brooknerian mind? Step forward, Madame Récamier...

The available photographs of Anita Brookner date almost exclusively from her fifties onwards. We have a school photo, but nothing from her later youth or early middle age. Most available photos are staged publicity shots. They follow conventions. Brookner no doubt gave as much thought to the tenor of such images as she evidently did to the character of the information she was willing to disclose in the few interviews she allowed. She doesn't often smile. A set of 'new' photos is available to view on Ebay at the moment (type 'Anita Brookner photo'). They comprise a collection of images turned out of an old newspaper archive. We see Brookner reading Spycatcher on her familiar striped sofa. We see her in a flowered dress smiling (this is from 1989, at a Lewis Percy signing). We see her clutching  Hotel du Lac at the 1984 Booker Prize dinner. And we see a rare impromptu shot of a startled Brookner in what looks like a hotel lobby. I suspect this was taken on one of he...

Accounts of meetings with Anita Brookner are often treasurable. Julian Barnes (follow the 'Julian Barnes' label at the foot of this post) was a friend; Roy Strong enjoyed several chance encounters (ditto 'Roy Strong'); James Lees-Milne commented acidly on her hair ( here ); and even I once met her, not quite by chance, in a London street ( here ). The artist Zsuzsi Roboz sketched a portrait of her, the experience of which Roboz wrote about in 2011: In the case of my meeting with Anita Brookner, I felt this was an occasion for mutual observation; she didn't miss a thing and seemed to be storing up every detail of my character and appearance as much as I was hers. The 'face to face' project was, in a sense, a series of duels between myself and the sitter, and also an occasion to witness the observer observed. The resulting picture, with its clairvoyant stare, complements the many memorable photographs of the author, and can be seen here .

Brookner, 1982   The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in. I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the night lies on these white walls... Sylvia Plath, 'Tulips'

Yesterday's spell of Brookner tourism also took in a visit to the Passport Photo Service in North Row, the other side of Oxford Street from the Wallace Collection. A piece in the Guardian by Andrew Male had alerted me. It's a small, unremarkable photo studio, but its walls are decorated with photos of celebrities. Including Anita Brookner. You can see her in the Guardian picture. Dressed in a crisp white blouse with rather wide collars, she slouches forward slightly. Her expression is composed but lugubrious; her bottom lip is more protuberant than in other pictures. She looks newly coiffed. The photo has a faded, almost sepia look, though it's probably from no earlier than the Eighties. She keeps company with other old-time half-recognised figures.

We had some fun a little while back with Mme Récamier - reclining on her couch, turning to the viewer, and with that lamp. Now let us reconsider Mme Moitessier 's equally famous pose:

One could go on raking this image for ever. Its faded colours, reminiscent of family photos from the era (1987). The bank of windows outside. The author / art historian, content and not too thin. The cards on the sill. The heavy typewriter. The bottles of Tippex. The piles of paper. The calendar on the otherwise municipally unadorned walls. The hard desk chair. The ashtray.

The child-bride, incredibly alone, does not charm; secure in her beauty, she is as bewildered by her isolation as we are. The accessories of the cruelly revealing studio are pared down to a lamp, painted by David’s newest pupil, Ingres, and the famous studio bed made by Jacob. Brookner, Jacques-Louis David , Ch. 10, 'Recovery' Consideration of this famous David painting, its pose, its colours, its lamp, perhaps sheds a little playful much-needed light on the oddest and most mysterious of Brookner photographs (part of a series of portraits not of novelists but of art historians). Or perhaps not.

I've only ever been moderately interested in first editions and signed copies. I've got a signed copy of Altered States , and followers of this blog will recall the  autographed note  I once purchased at a book fair. In Cecil Court yesterday there were first editions of A Start in Life (£75) and Look at Me (£40), plus a copy of Jacques-Louis David with an inscription by Brookner ('With best wishes') for £60. I bought the Look at Me , mainly for the author's photograph on the jacket. I reckon this picture was taken at the same time as another early photo:

Brookner, in her essay on Oliver Sacks's book on migraine (see post called 'An Invasion of Unpalatable Memory'), mentions the pain she gets above her left eye. I don't know if there's any connection between this and the raised left eyebrow she had all her life. It is what makes her identifiable in the school photograph recently published by James Allen's Girls' School:

I bought this early American copy of Providence from George Whitman at Shakespeare and Co:

Until the late Nineties, when photos stopped appearing on her British book jackets, Anita Brookner was represented by the following four images: Elegant (1980s) Compassionate (later 1980s) Magisterial (1990s) Ethereal (later 1990s)