The Brooknerian

I've been listening to a couple of Brookner audiobooks. Joanna David's take on The Rules of Engagement is competent, and her middle-class tones suit the character of the novel's narrator. But there's a complacency to her reading, too cosy for a novel as dark and late as this. Diana Quick is the ideal reader of  Undue Influence . Her accent is RP, but less strident than David's. Quick's tone has a lowered, falling quality, appropriate for this sad novel. There's also a slight accent, not traceable, possibly just the effect of clipping. There are other actresses who display this: Eleanor Bron, say, or Siân Phillips. Quick's is an older woman's voice. Claire, the narrator of Undue Influence , is meant to be twenty-nine. Yet her storytelling always feels as if long in retrospect, though the novel is set in the modern day. This isn't the only example in Brookner of an unsettling freewheeling as to chronology. There's no evidence of Anita Brookner...

She rarely gives interviews... Such would be the excited refrain any time a journalist did breach the walls of the Courtauld Institute or the flat in Elm Park Gardens. Anita Brookner was interviewed in print only a handful of times, mostly in the 1980s, possibly once in the 90s, and twice in the 2000s. She featured in broadcast media hardly ever: on TV a few times around the time of the Booker win, and on radio equally infrequently. As the Countess Olenska says of the van der Luydens in The Age of Innocence , Brookner kept herself rare . Her few exchanges with journalists were stagey, dandyish affairs, expressed in language as mandarin and radical as anything to be found in her fiction. As in her novels, repetition and variation drove the performance. The Brookner academic Peta Mayer has written about repetition in Brookner's interviews. We might also recall Herz in The Next Big Thing / Making Things Better and his fantasies about being interviewed by an infinitely sympathetic, in...

This mere four-minute piece ( click here for the BBC Archive #OnThisDay feed ) should be top of the list for any Brooknerian, not least because it is, to my knowledge, the only video of the author freely available. Anita Brookner made only rare media appearances. Buried in archives are, I know, a Channel 4 interview with Hermione Lee and a programme (in the 100 Great Paintings series) Brookner made in 1980, still only an art historian, on, I think, Delacroix. We should be gladdened by this marvellous vouchsafement. There she is: stylish and a-swagger; trenchant in her commitment to the truth.

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 ...

Brookner was perhaps always a sceptic. Art doesn't love you and can't console you, she would tell her art history students; and Blanche in A Misalliance has similar doubts as to art's transcendence. What do all her visits to the National Gallery yield but 'fantasies of a high order'? (Ch. 6) Likewise with writing. For a time in the 1980s, after the Booker win, Anita Brookner was lionised. But publication of A Misalliance inaugurated a period of reassessment: Brookner was a one-trick pony; Brookner had nothing new to offer; Brookner's bloodless fiction sounded the death-knell for English literature: that kind of thing. But this was a second career, and this should never be forgotten. She wasn't starting out. She was simply trying her hand. She was playing. She could afford to do as she pleased. She made no claims for her fiction; in fact she often downplayed its significance. She probably knew her fantasies were actually of a high order. But she also kne...

I greatly enjoyed this week Rumaan Alam's appreciation of Brookner in the New York Times ( here ) and the Mookse and the Gripes' relaunched podcast, which focuses on Brookner's first four novels ( here ). Both make insightful reference to what Alam calls Brookner's life's 'remarkable second act', that period from 1981 when, in her fifties, she suddenly began writing fiction: the floodgates, as she said, were open. It gives hope to us all.

A rare mention of Brookner in a populist format. OK, semi-populist. In the 20 December edition of University Challenge ( available  on the BBC i-player for a while) there were three Brookner questions: Brookner's first published novel A Start in Life tells the story of Ruth Weiss [spelt 'Vice' on the subtitles!], an authority on which French author, best known for The Human Comedy ? In 1967 Brookner became the first woman to hold which professorship of fine art at Cambridge? It was endowed by the founder of the school of art at University College, London. Brookner won the Booker Prize in 1984 for which novel set near Lake Geneva? The contestants, celebrity alumni rather current students, got 1) and 3) correct, but answered 'Turner' to 2). There was a little grimacing when the topic was introduced, but otherwise the tone was respectful - respectful in a way that probably wouldn't have been the case some years ago.

The search for happiness, which Stendhal decided was entirely possible, has been rejected, has been replaced by the consolations of art. In the first and heroic phase of Romanticism it was possible to believe in personal fulfilment, if only in reduced circumstances. In the second and disillusioned phase the world is regarded as a vale of tears...  Romanticism and Its Discontents , Ch. 5    I always went to fiction for consolation, or indeed for company; and to be able to operate in that area seemed to me so desirable that I decided to try.  Radio interview extract, part of Radio 4 obituary programme  Last Word It is always good and surprising to hear Brookner's voice. As far as I know only the above extract and another BBC programme,  The Reunion , are available online. In the 1980s Brookner made herself more available, but recordings are hard to come by. I believe a Brookner scholar took the following stills from a TV arts show archived at ...

Fortunately, my menopause is now becoming a distant memory, but it was not too much trouble. I don't think I had any noticeable symptoms really, and it was over very quickly.  My attitude is that the menopause is a natural part of life and you don't need to worry too much about it. Just accept it and remember that it does pass. For me, it now seems a very long time ago. Daily Mail , c. 2006 This is a curious slice of Brookneriana. Brookner rarely took part in the media game. One guesses she was rung up by a Mail journalist - her words have a spoken rather than a written feel. In the piece she was presented alongside other celebrities - incongruous company - and the accompanying photograph was one of her most benign.