The Brooknerian

Previously hidden away in a book of 1985, Novelists in Interview , John Haffenden's interview with Anita Brookner is, I find, now available online ( here ). It is a an extraordinary exchange, brilliantly orchestrated by Haffenden, better known as the editor of T. S. Eliot's letters. Interviewer and subject fence smartly and with dazzle. Brookner's responses, aperçus astonishing in their spontaneity, are both honestly raw and elaborately postured. It is the essential interview and the inauguration of a myth.

A brief post to let Brooknerians know the moment has arrived: a biography commissioned by Chatto & Windus, to be written by Hermione Lee. Hermione Lee interviewed Brookner on television in the 80s. Brookner joins illustrious company. Lee has lifed, among others, Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton.

My Dream Dinner Party,  in which a celebrity's dream guests' recorded output is spliced together, is a concept that's been knocking about BBC Radio 4 for a few years. It just about works, but has obvious limitations. I was surprised when British actress Alison Steadman 'invited' Brookner to join Charles Aznavour, James Stewart, Beryl Reid and John Lennon. The result is arch and artificial, but also a delight, insofar as it makes available passages from Brookner's media interviews from her 1980s heyday. We hear her discoursing on writing as therapy, her parents, and her style. Several points. Steadman was apparently introduced to Brookner's work after a friend gave her Strangers (2009) in the 80s. Would Brookner really have accepted a glass of wine with such enthusiasm? And mightn't she have left the party early, certainly before Lennon got out his guitar? Brookner once called the guitar a specious instrument. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000m575 ...

Adam Scovell's piece ( here ) about Herne Hill and Brookner's birthplace is highly recommended, not least because it contains some intriguing biographical information. Anita was born, we learn, at 55 Half Moon Lane, a comfortable property Mr Scovell depicts in an appropriately wistful Polaroid; but later, following a decline in their affluence, the Bruckners/Brookners moved to a smaller place, a flat, at 25 Half Moon Lane. Is it in The Next Big Thing  (2002) that the fortunes of the protagonist's family are marked by just such a decline? One remembers Brookner's remark in 2002, in interview ( here ), when the similarities between herself and Julius Herz were put to her: 'He's me, really. You were longing to say that, weren't you?'

What a subversive joy it is to discover Muriel Spark. Of course I knew The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , but I left it at that. But this Spark centenary year I've delved further, and Loitering with Intent (1981), Spark's sixteenth novel, is easily the most pleasurable so far. On one level it's because of the story, a social comedy about a fairly ridiculous organisation called the Autobiographical Association. Why has Sir Quentin Oliver set it up? Why does he want to entice old friends to commit their scandalous secrets to paper? Has he blackmail in mind? And what are the connections between these events and those to be found in the novel the beady-eyed narrator is writing? The plot is intriguing; the atmosphere of post-war London is precisely evoked; the characters ('which resembled more and more the bombed-out buildings that still messed up the London street-scene') are funny and surprising; and the narrator, a true Spark avatar, is sharp and engaging. But it is...

I don't altogether shy from making links between an author's life and her fiction, though perhaps I ought to. Brookner's media critics, especially the hostile ones, never down the years showed any reluctance. But Family and Friends must have seemed resistant to such analysis. The four novels she'd written up till then had been of the classic Brookner 'lonely heroine' type. But here we have a family portrait, even a family saga. And yet I keep finding parallels and analogues. Brookner, like Dickens, seems not to have been able to avoid investing her work with private meanings. Take Mimi and her hospital work in chapter 8. We know from an early interview ( here ) that Brookner did voluntary work at a local hospital, even on Christmas Day. Or Alfred and his purchase of Wren House in the same chapter. Perhaps readers wouldn't, on publication of Family and Friends , yet have recognised the significance. But gradually over the course of Brookner's writing c...

Lili and Ursie come to the Dorns' as maids - 'harsh' and 'hectic', given to weeping when certain pieces of music are being played. The girls are 'foreign', but Brookner will go no further. Something similar is in the air when an impoverished woman arrives on Sofka's doorstep, selling small items, and Sofka recognises her as one Irma Beck, whom she knew 'in the past, in another country'. We're in chapter 8 by now, more than halfway through the novel, and Brookner cannot any longer step around the realities of her story. But the stories of Lili and Ursula, of Frau Beck, are told with great subtlety: restraint, Brookner suggests, is the only correct response to such horror. We know the episodes have an autobiographical origin. Here she is talking to the Independent in 1994: There was the added complication that in the 1930s the house filled up with Jewish refugees, who could come if they found a sponsor, I think, and if they went into do...

Brookner, as I've said before, doesn't always like too much detail, or not in a narrative as finely spun as Family and Friends . I'm on chapter 4, and still we don't know what the Dorns' factory manufactures. But we do now know its location: the Westminster Bridge Road. Nearly a decade later, in 1994, in interview ( here ), Brookner would reveal perhaps this detail's autobiographical origin. She was, she says, 'born into the purple of trade' in Herne Hill, a suburb near Dulwich, on 16 July 1928. Her maternal grandfather had come to England as a young man from Warsaw, and had set up as a tobacco importer, with a factory on Westminster Bridge Road. 'I didn't know him: he'd already died when I was born. My mother said that in his last illness he raised a Corona cigar to his lips, and drew on it. He supplied Edward VII with his cigarettes. There was an engraved cigarette case from the King, which vanished with one of the maids.' These ...

Reviewing with disfavour a book about fathers and daughters ( Fathers: Reflections by Daughters , ed. Ursula Owen, London Review of Books , 22 December 1983), Brookner is moved heavy-heartedly to offer her own report from the front: My father, who has been dead for some years, was a man for whom I felt none of the standard daughterly emotions, either ancient or modern. An exile, modest, diffident, as honest as a child in a world of adult considerations, he seemed to me to compare unfavourably with the capricious, handsome, successful men of my mother’s family. These uncles, as tirelessly expansive as he was reticent, could not bother with a man whose only comment on his translated life was that he missed the smell of pine forests. It seemed to me that he was completely unhappy. This unhappiness did not recommend itself to me, for his vision of the world appeared unlovely when set beside the exciting games of favour, of pleasure, of cynical appraisal, to which the men of my mother’s f...

Julian Barnes once said of Anita Brookner that it was hard to imagine a novelist less likely to write an autobiography. She was, he implied, too private, too discreet. And yet she wrote all those novels, none of which pull any punches. And though she gave few interviews, those she did allow are among the most honest and extreme writerly exchanges on record. Brookner's memoir about her early Paris experiences, 'Mme de Blazac and I',* is extraordinary, unprecedented and sadly unrepeated. It's a long essay describing the author's years in the French capital and her interactions with a number of eccentric landladies. Mme de Blazac, 'rather than formidable and omnicompetent, as I had imagined from the aristocratic name' proved 'small and tremulous', 'subdued and incompetent' and 'clearly more nervous than myself'. Brookner thus inaugurates a character portrait that wouldn't look out of place in one of her novels. Mme de Blazac i...

The Next Big Thing  presents a hero shaken by lust after a lifetime of humbly 'making things better'. Seventysomething Julius Herz, the third male protagonist in recent novels, is a self-effacing childhood émigré from Germany. Late in life, he finds release from the family ties that bound him to a solitary stoicism. Passive, obedient, too keen to please, Julius shares more than his  Mitteleuropa  background with some of his female forerunners. As I list his traits, Brookner breaks in: 'He's me, really. You were longing to say that, weren't you? And I thought I was making him up. That's what happens. That's where Freud is right.' 2002 Independent interview 'He's me, really.' The Next Big Thing - Anita Brookner's Madame Bovary 'C'est moi!' novel? It's a tempting notion. The novel is probably my favourite Brookner, though when I first read it, in 2002, I thought it a reheating of several previous works, A Private Vie...

I last saw [Anita Brookner] in the summer of 2010, when the publisher Carmen Callil brought her to lunch. She was frailer, and needed a stick. I had made potted crab, to which she said she was allergic, to my embarrassment (should I have known?). Instead she took a little cheese, some green salad and a roast tomato; she declined the beetroot. We asked about her life. She said that she went out early every morning to her Sainsbury's Local for 'a croissant, a petit pain and a loaf'. 'Every day, Anita?' 'I eat a lot of bread.' She had been rereading Stefan Zweig and applauded that most Brooknerianly-titled novel  Beware of Pity . She agreed with Carmen that the one advantage of age was that the trials of the heart were behind you. She stated that she had no religious feelings or beliefs at all. She still rented her television (no digibox or Freeview), and still smoked eight or 10 cigarettes a day. 'Do you have your first after breakfast, Anita?' 'O...

Notes on the seminar scene in chapter 11 of Brookner's Providence : Says Kitty of Adolphe 's ending: 'For the first time we are aware of the author's consciousness rather than his recital.' Later she says Adolphe is interesting for its juxtaposing of intense emotion with very dry language. And Brookner? 'There is a constant delightful tension between the austerity of her message and the voluptuousness of her medium,' wrote  Lucy Hughes-Hallett in  1998. '[I]t is characteristic of the Romantic to reason endlessly in unbearable situations, and yet to remain bound by such situations. [...] For the Romantic, the power of reason no longer operates. Or rather, it operates, but it cannot bring about change.' T he Romantic dilemma, or indeed the Brooknerian, in a nutshell. 'We are dealing with a work of fiction, and I simply want to make the point that in this period fiction, indeed all creative endeavour, becomes permeated with the author's own ...

One can easily imagine Anita Brookner meeting someone like Edith Templeton in somewhere like Bordighera. But Brookner and Catherine Cookson? They never actually met, but they might have. But we know Brookner read her - once. That alone inspires astonishment (and gives her an advantage over me). I read one of her novels, which ran to over 500 pages, and did not entirely manage to crack the code of its popularity, but then the novel was not intended for soft southerners. I found it artless, seamlessly written, and plotted only in the sense that everything came out right in the end, yet I could see that it possessed a certain transparency which would inspire trust and loyalty in her readers. Observer , 27 November 1988 Cookson's stories, Brookner goes on to say, are 'for the public library, destined to be read at home on a quiet afternoon', and indeed it was during my own library years that I came across Cookson. For those who do not now recognise the name, Catherine Co...

'About the Author' jacket pieces have always fascinated me, probably because I grew up in a time of information scarcity, i.e. before the Internet. I've listed Brookner's 'About the Author' texts  in a previous post : what I noted was the way the information grew sparser as the decades went by. In early versions we were given her academic credentials; mid-period pieces were both detailed and ludic ('She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988, when she abandoned her title of Reader in the History of Art at the University of London for the anonymity of a small flat in Chelsea and the cultivation of certain fictional characters who may one day appear in future novels.'), whereas the biographies accompanying her last novels were terse, reluctant, almost brusque. Which brings me to 'At the Hairdresser's' (2011). A new form - an e-book, a novella - and so, perhaps, a new start. This 'About the Auth...

Anita Brookner said somewhere, in one of the interviews, that she was reserving autobiographical information for her own purposes. One might have hoped for some kind of late phase of autobiography, something akin to Henry James's late-career volumes of life-writing. It was not to be. But as we have heard, writers of fiction are the folk who are really telling the truth. All those novels may be seen as one long autobiography, perhaps - or they may well not be. Good to hide, and hear 'em hunt! Better, to be found...

Anita Brookner, who is an international authority on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting, teaches at the Courtauld Institute of Art. In 1968 she was Slade Professor at Cambridge, the first woman ever to hold this position. She is the author of Watteau, the Genius of the Future ; Greuze and Jacques-Louis David . She has written five novels: A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me, Hotel du Lac , which won the Booker Prize in 1984 and Family and Friends in 1985. (1985) Anita Brookner was born in London in 1928 and, apart from three postgraduate years in Paris, has lived there all her life. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988, when she abandoned her title of Reader in the History of Art at the University of London for the anonymity of a small flat in Chelsea and the cultivation of certain fictional characters who may one day appear in future novels. (1991) Anita Brookner was born in London in 1928 and, apart from three p...