The Brooknerian

In a  recent post  I discussed Brookner, Brooknerians, and smoking. I am immensely grateful to Bookglutton (@bookglutton1) on Twitter for alerting me (@brooknerian) to the following smokers. In Brief Lives there's Vinnie, Fay's rakish mother-in-law: Her daily routine was to get up at about ten-thirty, smoke the first cigarette of the day, take a bath and dress, and then apply the heavy make-up, without which she looked like a seamed and battered twelve-year-old. (Ch. 3) And in A Misalliance , we find Sally Beamish, a true Brookner monster, a careless insider, careless as the gods of antiquity: As far as Blanche could see, Sally spent those days ... simply lying on her chaise-longue , smoking, and waiting for someone to turn up. (Ch. 5) But what of Blanche, the ostensible Brooknerian, but morally vulnerable, flirting with other lives, and a toper to boot? Yes, we find her taking a drag too. I can find one reference, in Chapter 11; there may be more.

Her exquisite manners disarm and put visitors at ease, and at the same time secure a reasonable distance. She speaks in a deep, gentle voice with fluency and deliberation in equal measure, and sometimes in 'short, military sentences,' as she once said of Stendhal. Occasionally she smokes a very slim cigarette. Shusha Guppy's introduction to the 1987 Paris Review  interview Her reasonableness is disarming: When I said that I was worried about her smoking, she replied 'So am I' and lit another one, thus acknowledging my concern while indicating that it was none of my business. Shusha Guppy, 'The Secret Sharer',  World and I , July 1998 'Oh, Katie, we must do something about that fringe,' she would say, offering me one of her untipped Woodbine cigarettes and balancing a small tin on her knee as an ashtray. Katie Law, Evening Standard: see an  earlier Brooknerian post. Lunch never took longer than 75 minutes; she usually ordered fish...