The Brooknerian

In a much earlier post I lamented the unavailability of Anita Brookner's contribution to the 100 Great Paintings series (BBC, 1981). During the time I was away from the blog, the BBC reshowed the episode, and it has now found its way to YouTube:

Christopher Hampton's film of Brookner's 1984 Booker-winning novel, Hotel du Lac , was broadcast on BBC2 on Sunday 2 March 1986 at 10.05 p.m. Brookner would be watching it 'at home, with my feet up, just like anyone else'. The interview she gave the Radio Times on the occasion of the broadcast is light and airy, as befits the medium. But Brookner is Brookner, and darkness glimmers. 'People like the Puseys always win ... You can't keep them at bay. You can only repossess yourself from time to time by examining things really clearly.' 'I like writing, but it's a nerve-wracking, dangerous business.' 'Writers are like stateless persons. They can't easily be absorbed.' 'I don't aspire to anything. I'm non-aligned, I'll settle for being marginal.'

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 copy of the UK hardback The claustral atmosphere intensifies. Once inside his block of flats, Bland feels he has 'definitively left the outside world'. Bland 'cautiously' watches soap operas, seeking knowledge of other lives, suburban lives like those of his forebears. For more on Brookner and television, click on the label below. Bland's porter is called Hipwood, which I always thought of as a made-up name - the sort you might find in Dickens. But it is a genuine name. I'm rereading  A Private View alongside a piece of more recent literary fiction, which is lots of fun but reads like a children's book. (The title and author shall remain unsaid.) Brookner absolutely is an author for grown-ups. The closeness of Brookner's observation is remarkable. She misses nothing. She's fully one of those on whom nothing is lost. Take Bland's sudden access of tears at the end of the chapter. Also to be remarked is the extreme fineness of the lang...

After dinner we watched television, the same American serial that all England had been watching. 'Pouah!' she uttered. 'Ils sont mal élevés, ces gens.' Leaving Home, Ch. 8 Brookner plays her little games with the reader. She has moments of vulgar excess, but she can't quite bring herself to name names. ( Leaving Home is, elsewhere, an exception in this regard, when it names Coronation Street , a favourite of Emma and her mother. They watch it 'gravely', hoping to glean 'pointers to modern life'.) But the American serial: what is it? There's a similar reference, I think, in Lewis Percy . It seems almost inconceivable that Brookner ever sat down to watch Dallas or Dynasty , but of course, as she said, she lived in the world. And with a disparaging comment in untranslated French, she can always undermine the moment, and feel superior and be more civilised.