one who gave appearance

For Moreau was treasured above all by men of letters. To them he was one who gave appearance to their convictions and a recognisable décor to their world, a world dominated by anxiety, mistrust, and premonition.

(Anita Brookner, Incantations to Inertia, from Soundings, 1997. "Moreau" is the painter.)



I love the figure of the emperor in Hans Christian Anderson's The Emperor's New Clothes. I am convinced that he knew he was naked and he just wanted to stun the population.

(Terayama Shuji, Anderusun no 'hadaka no osama' wa sugoi nikutaibi data, quoted in the introduction to his short story collection, The Crimson Thread of Abandon, tr. Elizabeth L. Armstrong)

we love him, with a little dash of irony

Christina Stead didn't like Proust. "Dull Proust," she called him in a letter to her lover Bill Blake, who had written to her about some authors that he liked and didn't like, mentioning Joyce, Stendhal, Proust, and Balzac. "Everyone is mad about that dull Proust. Why? Old Balzac I suppose is one of my masters, I think more or less like him (at times -- though in César Birotteau there are some pages so exactly like yourself, when you are not too serious and a bit careless and this is when Balzac is rushing along -- that I open my eyes in amazement, have to laugh. Just exactly like, word for word.)"

"To love Balzac!" wrote Proust, forty years earlier (translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner). "Sainte-Beauve, who was so fond of defining what it meant to love someone, would have had his work cut out for him here. For with the other novelists, one loves them in submitting oneself to them; one receives the truth from a Tolstoi as from someone of greater scope and stature to oneself. With Balzac, we know all his vulgarities, and at first were often repelled by them; then we began to love him, then we smiled at all those sillinesses which are so typical of him; we love him, with a little dash of irony mixed in our affection; we know his aberrations, his shabby little tricks, and because they are so like him we love them."

A character in Anita Brookner's A Start in Life: "Most women are too young for Balzac."

being many flavoured and subtle

Reaching the end of Incidents in the Rue Laugier after A Friend From England I thought, "I have read two Brookners in a row. Every other time I've read two Brookners in a row I have felt too enervated to read a third. Now I will want to read something else." So I made myself read Chinese Poems, a collection of translations by Arthur Waley, who tells us that he chose this group of poems above others not because they were "a balanced and representative anthology of Chinese poetry through the ages," but because he liked them, and because they "happen to work out well in translation." Waley died in 1966. Transparent plastic on the book's cover is curling off with age, and the publisher's blurb starts like this,

A taste for Chinese poetry is not hard to acquire. It is as easy to enjoy as chop suey, and has in fact something of the same quality, being many flavoured and subtle, yet full of honest nourishment

but I was uneasy throughout, and afterwards rushed on to another Brookner, finally discovering that she was the author I had wanted all along. I had misread myself, I had tried to stop the flow of my attention, which had not been enervated after all; I had betrayed myself as a reader. If to dedicate time to reading is to make a blind way through a jungle (how to identify the destination, how to reach it once identified?) then I had misinterpreted the cry of some bird, the broken branch, the crushed leaf, the weather. I had substituted science for intuition.

The Brookner I chose was her 1988 Latecomers -- why? -- because I liked the first couple of words: "Hartmann, a voluptuary ..."

Hartmann, a voluptuary, lowered a spoonful of brown sugar crystals into his coffee cup, then placed a square of bitter chocolate on his tongue, and, while it was dissolving, lit his first cigarette.

I did not like the cover, which was black. It seemed wrong for the author, who previously I'd only read in coloured volumes, a blue streetscape, a reproduction of a girl's portrait, but inside everything was as it should be, ordered and dense, deep, close, observant, although, unusually for her, there were four principal characters. At the end of Latecomers I read the first page again and came to the conclusion that Hartmann had changed over the course of the book. He was not the person he had promised to be. I remembered that she writes her books (she's said) from beginning to end, in a single draft, longhand, and that's it, as did Iris Murdoch, who sat with a stack of clean paper on one side and the written-on pages on the other, moving one pile, page by page, onto the table in front of her so that it could be transferred to the top of the second pile. So I've heard ("a new Murdoch manuscript ... many thousands of pages of illegible handwriting carried in a blue laundrette plastic bag," wrote her publisher).

INTERVIEWER
Do you ever rewrite what you have written?

BROOKNER
Never. It is always the first draft. I may alter the last chapter; I may lengthen it. Only because I get very tired at the end of a book and tend to rush and go too quickly, so when I have finished it I go over the last chapter.

INTERVIEWER
Do you know exactly how a novel would develop and end when you start, or do you let its organic growth take over?

BROOKNER
The latter. I have an idea, but I don’t know exactly what will happen.

I wondered if Hartmann had managed to mutate by degrees, over the course of her writing him, into a less doomed man than he'd seemed in chapter one. By pages two and three I had decided that he was going to get some sort of comeuppance (like the retired actor in Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea, and from a similar direction: his self-pleasure was going to be assaulted) but no, he never did. The funny thing was this: I had been reading about him in Chinese Poems. Not him by name, but people like him, the kind of man who, in Brookner's words,

considered his life's work to lie in the perfecting of simple pleasures, mainly of a physical or domestic nature, far from the strife and pain of more ambitious purposes ... a mundane task supremely devised and carried out, however small -- the buying of cheese, for example -- filled him with a sense of completion

Men like this recur throughout Chinese Poems. They live in the countryside, admiring the flowers, or the irregular shapes of pine trees, or the sight of a river moving over stones, or a mist that "hovers / Then scatters."

My friend is lodging high in the Eastern Range,
Dearly loving the beauty of the valleys and hills

says Li Po

A pine-tree wind dusts his sleeves and coat;
A pebbly stream cleans his heart and ears.

Rapture is contained and coiled in these small things, about to be released, the larger matters realisable but not yet -- or not ever -- they are too profound, says this delicate treatment (Proust's narrator, stepping on the loose stone: these poems are the moments of step). Old Po Chu-I, remembering a day in his youth when he went with a beloved friend and a pair of horses into the mountains, sharpens the memory down to the tinkling of a jade bridle-strap. The last poem in the collection sabotages itself by adding "and their tears fell like rain" to a scenario that has already been drawn sad. "They tap at the door, but no one comes; they look in but the kitchen is empty," writes Ch'en Tzu-lung, "They stand hesitating in the lonely road and their tears fall like rain." Up to those last few words they might have been showing their sadness in a multitude of complicated ways; after "rain" their reaction has been blanded down to a single generic act: they weep.

These Chinese poets are voluptuaries too, and in Latecomers their pines trees and stream-noises become Hartmann's "grilled fish with a vegetable" and "the blue tracery of smoke above the white linen tablecloth, the spray of yellow carnations in the silver vase" which "pleased him profoundly." But the tone in Chinese Poems is congratulatory, assuring the reader that this way of regarding life, this attention to beautiful aesthetic moments, is the best, the natural, way to live, while the tone in Latecomers is detached and critical. It doesn't involve itself in this simplicity movement as Waley's poets do. Instead it shows us Hartmann comparing himself to the businessmen at a nearby table, "benevolently," condescendingly, because they do not have his poise.

My dears you do not look well, thought Hartmann: your complexions are not clear, your haircuts unbecoming. You give your time and attention to business and save too little for yourselves. There is not a lot of point in talking about a zero-growth scenario ... if you are going to dispatch a lobster cocktail followed by steak and kidney pie: mineral water will not save you.

His restraint becomes a lens through which to focus his self-admiration. Hartmann's equivalent exists in Chinese Poems but Brookner's does not. Her place is outside the book, looking in on the poets as they venerate themselves, and speculating on the biographical history being masked or adjusted with that love of streams.*

Lodging with the Old Man of the Stream [excerpt]

Men's hearts love gold and jade;
Men's mouths covet wine and flesh.
Not so the old man of the stream;
He drinks from his gourd and asks nothing more.
South of the stream he cuts firewood and grass;
North of the stream he has built wall and roof.
Yearly he sows a single acre of land;
On spring he drives two yellow calves.
In these things he finds his great repose;
Beyond this he has no wish or care.

by Po Chu-I

* The day after I made this post an analogue hit me: myself, last year, reading first ER Eddison, then Pierre Louÿs' Aphrodite, both authors scornfully in love with the idea of a strong, pure, ancient Greek aesthetic -- then Jacob's Room, in which Woolf's protagonist has the same enthusiasm, but Woolf shows it to us from the outside, where Edddison and Louÿs are men on the inside. They're so far deep within this ancient-Greek fandom that from their vantage point it becomes the whole world of the novel. But Woolf murmurs, "It is a popular trend among educated men. It is not a superior, separate existence. It is of this world." What's more: "The people who espouse it are not as seamless as they would like you to think, or as they think. There are passions concealed behind that passion ..." After Jacob, Aphrodite seemed changed.

Jacob knew no more Greek than served him to stumble through a play. Of ancient history he knew nothing. However, as he tramped into London it seemed to him that they were making the flagstones ring on the road to the Acropolis, and that if Socrates saw them coming he would bestir himself and say, "my fine fellows," for the whole sentiment of Athens was entirely after his heart; free, venturesome, high-spirited

insistent yet curiously uneasy

So City Basement Books has closed. They had a row of Anita Brookners and I bought one of each title. There is a particular atmosphere that comes out of her books, smothering, bleak, enervating and honest -- relentlessly, calmly honest; each book is a single large unforgiving muscle of honesty that closes around you like an anaconda -- as if you're being drained by a vampire, a quiet and unobtrusive vampire that latches softly onto the back of your neck and gives you no trouble while it sucks; in fact it does not like you but its manners are very nice, and when it draws its head away and addresses you by name you notice that it has the French literary habit of speaking in aphorisms, near-aphorisms, and bits of jaded, graceful neatness.

Ruth avoided sentiment, for she had seen how easy it was to come by.

or

She did not realize that most men accept invitations to dinner simply in order to know where the next meal is coming from.

One of the books I bought was her first, A Start in Life. It seems typical of her contrariness that she would begin a fiction-writing career by telling you that you can be cursed by reading.

Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.

And the character's life goes on to be so bleak and modest that although the first line might not be strictly true -- it wasn't only literature, but literature didn't help; there was also a terrible, passive trust -- you can't shake it off as a joke. She writes numerous funny lines but they are grim, not jokes. None of her funny lines are jokes.

She does not hobnob with the reader, does not condescend, does not write in an easy startling way, and if she writes about a woman, as she often does, and as she does in Life, then the woman will be quiet, humble, good, and plain. She will not be a role model, not a bold person, not a success. She will be unloved, wretched, miserable, self-contained. She will be brave, but her bravery will be neither recognised nor rewarded. She will not remove her glasses, untie her plait, and come to a happy ending. Quietness and modesty will be her undoing, they will leave her stranded. Confident, happy, brash people will take advantage of her. She will acknowledge that this is her own fault.

For moral fortitude, as Dr Weiss knew, but never told her students, was quite irrelevant in the conduct of one's life; it was better, or in any event, easier, to be engaging.

Nearly thirty years after Life was published in 1981 an interviewer would ask Brookner about Plato, and her answer would be the opinion of Dr Weiss.

Didn't Plato say the unexamined life is not worth living?

She gives the faintest smile. 'Plato could be wrong too. I think the unexamined life is much better. Much more comfortable.'

So you wish you had been…

'Blithe…' It rolls off her tongue, wrapped in longing. A lovely word, I say.

'It's an old-fashioned word. You don't hear it much.'

So you envy the blithe?

'Oh yes.'

The journalist might have felt prompted by this, from 1986's A Misalliance

Bathed and dressed, Blanche took down from her shelves the Philebus of Plato and read that the life of pleasure must be mixed with reason and that the life of reason must be mixed with pleasure but that a third quality, to which both reason and pleasure look forward, must be the final ingredient of a good life. Realizing, with a slightly sinking heart, that given the choice she might have settled for a life of pleasure, she laid the book aside.

With Life the note is struck, the string is plucked, the reverberations will go on for decades, in book after book. A Start in Life is all plucked strings. Ah! you say when Anthea shows up. I recognise her! That's the Attractive and Confident Friend! The Ruthless Modern who buys the shop in Undue Influence appears for the first time, in embryo, under the name of Roddy. And oh, it's the Cruelly Truncated Escape to Paris that damages the young lead character of Leaving Home! The shrouded, stifling home life! The woman looking after her parents! And the timid female habit of giving the floor over to a forceful young man!

Richard draped the cat round his shoulders. Ruth and Miss Howe watched in fascination as he unleashed the full glory of his smile.

"He'll be all right, won't you old chap?" he said, bringing Tiger down like a scarf until he could rub his cheek on the cat's neck. Tiger was his slave. Miss Howe waited patiently until he rewarded her with a friendly pat on the shoulder.

This is humiliating to read -- this old woman waiting for a caress from a young man simply because he is handsome -- and it will be even more painful in later books when the young man is a careless nephew whose elderly relative is greedy for him and accepts his condescension as the price of his visits. Here in Life is the Brookner tone, fully formed already, immaculate, here is the Brookner language, her quality of being unowned, remote as a cat; here is her cool Proustian way of evaluating friendships.

Her insistent yet curiously uneasy physical presence inspired conflicting feelings in Ruth, who was not used to the idea that friends do not always please.

French writers play a role in this book but Proust is not mentioned. Ruth Weiss studies Balzac. Her life is stymied, worn down, sacrificed. Later the author will suggest that persisting with this kind of modest half-erased existence is a kind of unrecognized nobility. Your personality has betrayed you yet you are true to it, your interior knight bending the knee to your interior belle dame sans mercie.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

All of the Brookner novels I've read could be prefaced with this Keats, and it would seem apt. Not always perfect, but apt.