The Brooknerian

Anita Brookner was never one for easy hyperbole, only for that which was earned and justified by time. One wonders what she would have made of 2020. No doubt she would have reserved judgement. Her essays and reviews are often at their most piquant when considering something from which she withholds praise. I've been reading 'Descent into the Untestable', a review in Soundings of a book of 1980 on regression in the arts from the eighteenth into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Analysis of large movements, notions such as the Enlightenment and Romanticism, will be familiar to readers of Brookner. In Providence (1982), Kitty Maule and her students mount lofty seductive arguments: Existentialism as a late manifestation of Romanticism - and the like. But Dr Brookner herself would caution her own pupils: Art doesn't love you and cannot console you. Here she argues for the limitations of art. 'Artistic traditions are self-generating and at best reflexive. One cannot...

She soon had a clientele among the girls, cheerful, stoical, good-natured creatures who petted the baby and took to spending their off-duty moments in the workroom with Fanny. There was nothing downtrodden about these girls; they regarded ordinary married women with scorn and pity. A Family Romance , ch. 3 Brookner's determined blithe tolerance of what would now be called sex work is of some interest. It may be that she's cocking a snook at the political correctness that was coming into its own at the time of A Family Romance 's publication (1993). Or at feminism - of which Brookner wasn't a noted follower. But it probably has its roots in her affection for the modes and mores of the eighteenth century. The girls, during the Occupation, became, we learn, mistresses: they were, as Brookner puts it, 'elevated to the status of regular mistress'. The conservative imagination, far from being outraged by such goings on, instead is almost reassured by a sense o...

...this country, by all measures one of the wealthiest in the world, appears to be so dilapidated, destitute, shorn of hope ... The UK is rich; there is wealth inequality, but that alone doesn't explain why the country is so mean . Robinson , ch. 3 Just over a year ago the UK voted to leave the EU. There are still some who celebrate this decision. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719. Many people still think of it as a charming and harmless tale, even a book for children. Jack Robinson's Robinson , with quiet subtlety and in detail, links and dismantles both these conceptions. 'Jack Robinson' is Charles Boyle of CB Editions  and this is the companion volume to An Overcoat , earlier appreciated on this blog . It is as good and as brilliant as An Overcoat . Each is the A-side of the other. Novel? Memoir? Literary criticism? Diatribe?  Robinson politely requires that we abandon such labels. But what is the book about? It's certainly a...

Interviewer: Despite their subtlety and variations, all your books so far have been basically about love. Do you think you will go on writing about love? Brookner: What else is there? All the rest is mere literature! 1987 Paris Review interview Interviewer: Where do you see yourself in the tradition of English literature? Brookner: I don't know anything like that. I'm a middle-class, middle-brow novelist. And that's it. It amuses me.  2001 Observer interview 'You write about love,' says Mr Neville. 'And you will never write anything different, I suspect, until you begin to take a harder look at yourself.' Anita Brookner, in interview, purported to be on Edith's side, even to the extent of pretending she herself was Edith's kind of novelist. Yet in none of Edith Hope's novels would we find the sort of exchange that takes up much of chapter 7 of Hotel du Lac . The conversation is a deconstruction of the terms that underpin E...

'"Personne ne m'aime, et je ne m'en plains pas. Je suis trop juste pour cela."'   'What?' I asked him, startled. 'One of those marvellous eighteenth-century women, I forget which one. Madame du Deffand, no doubt. She blamed no one for not loving her, said she was too - what is it? - Just? Fair? - for that.' Altered States , ch. 12 It's not a quote that's on everyone's lips. When I typed it into Google a moment ago, Altered States was the only hit. It must result from Brookner's early reading, those youthful years she spent in the old Bibliothèque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, reading her way lengthways and widthways through her cherished eighteenth century. (There's a piece in the TLS somewhere, in which Brookner writes about the library, including mention of the day she was the recipient of a large bunch of flowers. I have in my notes a mention of the article, but no longer a copy.)

In terms of your professional life, what particularly attracted you towards the eighteenth century?   The Enlightenment, and the fact that it might just have come out right. The Romantic movement came along and bowled it all over. I do like a rational world, rational explanations and good humour and fearlessness [...] Kitty Maule says about Romanticism that in certain situations reason doesn't work, and that's the most desolating discovery of all. Haffenden, Novelists in Interview , 1985 During her three postgraduate years in Paris in the Fifties, sitting daily in the old Bibliothèque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, Brookner read her way across and through the eighteenth century. (Her days in the library were powerfully described in an article in the Times Literary Supplement I no longer have a reference for; she was once, I remember, the recipient of a bunch of flowers from a gentleman admirer.) In my own way, though I've gained more pleasure from the Victori...