Is there something autumnal about the spring this year, one wonders, even as one writes the second ‘tribute’ piece in a month for these columns. After Umberto Eco last month, it is the Booker-winning British author Anita Brookner whom the literary world has lost now. And like the philosopher Eco, who claimed he wrote novels only on weekends, Brookner too was a novelist only secondarily. Her teaching and writing career as an art historian of the highest calibre was her first identity, although her novels gave her more renown and, very possibly, more money.
For, this “luminously perceptive” art critic and brilliant teacher was rather successful with her novels — 25 of them written over 30 years — despite coming out with A Start in Life (1981)at age 48. Even so, the facts that Brookner, in 1967, was the first woman to have been appointed the Slade Professor of Fine Art at University of Cambridge, and that as a teacher at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, she inspired lifelong devotion among her students, are not to be discounted as we remember the Booker winner, who, as the perception goes, wrote slim, mournful, elegant novels about middle-aged women and their romantic failures.
And that brings one to the central conundrum about Brookner’s celebrity. On the one hand, she was a popular success, despite her sad, spare, similar-looking stories — into which she loaded much reflection and little action. Add to that her Booker win and her social gravitas as a renowned professor and, later, as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). On the other hand, the media, and even a section of literary critics, loved to hate her, perceiving her as a writer of little or no genius who fashioned high-brow negative copies of Mills & Boon novels out of the stuff of her own, lonely, loveless, miserable life.
Indeed, such was the perverse persistence of this myth about Brookner — despite the obvious facts of her professional fulfilment, her quiet yet stylish way of living, and the total absence of self pity or melancholy in her comportment — that even the usually placid writer was once provoked into saying sarcastically that she felt she “could go into the Guinness Book of Records for being the world’s loneliest, most miserable woman”. Yet fellow novelist Julian Barnes — who in 1984 lost the Booker race to Brookner — had this to say about his “witty, glitteringly intelligent” friend who was “unknowable beyond [a] point”: “I can’t think of a novelist less likely to write an autobiography”.
It is to Brookner’s credit that despite being criticised for writing almost exclusively about sensitive, middle-aged female introverts, she did not move out of her chosen thematic compass. The Henry Jamesian themes of the elusiveness of contentment, the feelings of loneliness and displacement that often assault sensitive spirits, and the calm resignation that can ensue from those feelings — these were her persistent concerns. And it so happened that she delved into these themes through intelligent, perceptive women characters, often with chequered romantic histories, who grew from despair through rejuvenation to a resigned yet greater acceptance of life — an acceptance that included a clear-sighted understanding of life’s essential gloom and injustice.
Brookner’s explorations of minds experiencing love, disillusionment and alienation were as acute as they were unsentimental. The very titles of the lean, taut stories reflect this Brooknerian suavity, from Providence through Hotel du Lac, Latecomers, Brief Lives, A Private View, Undue Influence, The Next Big Thing and Strangers to At the Hairdressers, which, in 2011, was her last. A stoic by temperament, Brookner took the unfair world, where selfish coarseness wins over sensitivity and moral worth, as a given and thought it naive to expect it to change. However, her novels still do not depress: the subdued melancholy that is the keynote of her fiction leaves readers with a strange sense of relief and a creeping peace that feels almost like gladness. Brookner’s intensive focus on a well-defined thematic terrain invited comparisons with Jane Austen, although Brookner herself never concurred: with characteristic wit and poise, she once remarked to an interviewer that she “never got on very well with Jane Austen,” and it is easy to see why. What Brookner did share with Austen was a flair for subtle irony which she put to good use in producing brilliant, oblique tragi-comedies of manners en route plumbing “the suburban depths of the soul”. And her social insight, her often caustic wit was frequently directed against female foibles. Indeed, had it not been for the facade of her perfect, placid art, her vignettes of the pretentiousness, the vanity and the vapidity of common womanhood would have made her an enemy of the feminists of the world.
The overriding fact about Brookner that the British public remembers is the controversy that emerged in the wake of her Booker win in 1984. The recognition by the jury of the “elegance, restraint, (and) clarity of style” embodied by Brookner’s Hotel du Lac over J.G. Ballard’s inventiveness and flamboyance in Empire of the Sun was widely perceived as deference to tameness and traditionalism. True to character, Brookner never commented on this, even to friends like Barnes. Instead, she quietly went on to write more novels, at the brisk rate of one per year, till the turn of the century, and then, sporadically, till 2011, when she was 83.
For some time now, literary establishments in the English-speaking world have ceased to recognise the unassuming classical qualities of authenticity, acuity, stylistic perfection and restraint. In search of the inventive and the experimental, we have moved ever closer to gaudiness and gimmickry. In this milieu, Brookner’s novels continued to serve as a steady light beaconing us quietly to what, in another era, would have been hailed as ‘the real thing’.
