The Brooknerian

I grew impatient with those who wasted [David Copperfield's] time: I saw nothing amusing in Mr Micawber ... I realised why I was so impatient with Mr Micawber. And Dolly was not only Mr Micawber, she was Mrs Micawber as well, hinting that she had come down in the world... A Family Romance , ch. 6 Nothing amusing in Mr Micawber?! When a stranger came on the scene in chapter 11 of David Copperfield , with a 'certain condescending roll in his voice, and a certain indescribable air of doing something genteel', I found myself newly fascinated. I had forgotten how Micawber was introduced, and how early, but I welcomed him as an old friend, and looked forward to his every return. I don't often disagree with Brookner, but on the subject of Mr Micawber I must make an exception.

I reread Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) as part of my 'Hotels in Literature' series (see previous post ). But I was resistant to the 2005 film, largely because I knew it wasn't set in the early Seventies. The producers had made the decision to update the story to the present, and I felt this might be an issue. Within the first ten minutes we get references to Mrs Thatcher and Sex and the City , which sound incongruous. And there is of course a central problem with the set-up: old people simply don't live as residents in hotels any longer. The bigger bugbear is with the film's tone. The supporting players plainly think it's a comedy and are hamming it up. We have the porter Summers, whose face is vaguely familiar from a hundred minor character roles, and Mrs Post is played by Marcia Warren, whom I remember from a forgettable Eighties sitcom called No Place Like Home . Then - God help us - there's Anna Massey (Edith Hope hersel...

1. I rarely read new things now – rarely visit new places either. But now I was in Zurich, previously only travelled through. I arrived early, and nothing was ready, and it was a Sunday and raining and the streets were empty. Thoughts of panic and flight beset me. But by noon I’d planned the coming days and booked my train ticket to Vevey and my room was cleaned. I was glad of the ideal company of Brookner ( A Family Romance ) and Dickens ( David Copperfield ), mightn’t have got through otherwise: I chose my summer reading well this year. ‘I led the same secretly unhappy life; but I led it in the same, lonely, self-reliant manner.’ 2. Still half-lost in the unfamiliar streets I at last found my way to the edge of the Zürichsee and a two-hour cruise: it seemed the Brookner thing to do, and indeed the weather was as it was for Mr Neville and Edith in fiction and on another lake: grey-blue distances, indistinct horizons. I lunched at Rapperswil and returned by train....

The Brooknerian will now be taking another short break. If all goes to plan (my itinerary is dismayingly complex) I should soon be a guest (for one night only) at the Grand Hôtel du Lac, Vevey. I could of course take my laptop with me, and blog from the scene, but I guess I'm old-fashioned. On my travels I prefer my pen, my notebook, my old analogue world. [Two views of the hotel taken on a previous visit in August, 1993:]

...but when he looked up from his soup, which he had been drinking rather greedily, and smiled at her, as he had smiled at her when he was a young boy, her heart smote her and she made a pretext of tiredness after the journey in order to weep a few tears in the privacy of their spare room. She spent a sleepless night watching a square of moonlight reflected in the tall mirror hanging on the dark blue patterned wall to the left of her bed and imagining that she was a girl in Vienna once again, sleeping in a similar bedroom, with a similar polished wood floor, and the same smell of beeswax fustiness that now came back to her with hallucinatory reality. A Family Romance , ch. 3 There's something of an hallucinatory quality to A Family Romance  as a whole. It has to do with the density of the prose and the expansiveness of the chapters. It has also to do with events such as those above not having been experienced by the narrating consciousness but instead imagined and presented w...

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...

My father thought that Dickens would uncover the mysteries of English life. Instead, I grew up thinking that everyone had a funny name. Life was really rather a relief after this panorama of social injustice. 1994 Independent interview The ghost or the shadow of Dickens, hovering over A Family Romance from the beginning, steps into the footlights in chapter 2: Having effectively divorced themselves from home and family, [my parents] felt free to invent their lives, as if they were characters in Dickens. (Brooknerians often feel the need or have the leave to invent their own lives . It's a favourite locution of Brookner's. Incidents in the Rue Laugier , I think, also employs the phrase.) Then there's Brookner's use of Dickensian phrasing. Compare these: ...family ties which [my parents] had long ago sought to sever, so as to be all in all to each other... A Family Romance , ch. 1 ...my mother and I and Peggotty were all in all to one another... Da...