life would ever be made precious to me

M. said that he wondered if he was losing his old passions, and I began to talk about J.A. Baker and The Peregrine, a book that I picked up almost by chance at a library book sale where the people in charge suspected that I was buying the books to resell them. My copy is not the recent New York Review of Books reissue but a secondhand 1970 Penguin, white, black, orange, thin, and plain. The book was first published in 1967. Baker himself was born in 1926 and is assumed to have died at some point during the 1980s. He spent years exploring a piece of Essex fenland, watching for peregrines, following them, stationing himself in trees, and imagining how the world must look, to them, from the air.

I found myself crouching over the kill like a mantling hawk. My eyes turned quickly about, alert for the walking heads of men. Unconsciously I was imitating the movements of a hawk, as in some primitive ritual; the hunter becoming the thing he hunts. I looked into the wood. In a lair of shadow the peregrine was crouching, watching me, gripping the neck of a dead branch. We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life.

The birds were Baker's passion. He opens the book with a sketch of his intentions and goes on to describe the peregrine in a methodical way, telling the reader that the female bird is "between 17 and 20 inches long: roughly the length of a man's arm from elbow to fingertip" while males "are 3 to 4 inches shorter." "Weights also vary." The rest of the book is written in the form of journal entries. In most of the entries a peregrine appears, hunts, makes a kill, or misses, and leaves. In the next entry it appears again and hunts again. But there are these variations: the bird appears in a different place, it kills a different species, the weather is rainy one day, sunny another, it is a "frosty day, fading from brightness slowly, hour by hour," or there is "hot sun and cooling breeze, the North Sea flat and shining." December 22nd is "The shortest day: dull, cold, with a sudden flare of sunlight before dusk." In winter the ground is covered with snow, and the birds are dying. I remembered the dead birds in Gormenghast: "In the wide, white fields that surrounded the castle, the birds lay dead or leaned sideways stiffening for death. Here and there was the movement of a bird limping, or the last frantic fluttering of a small ice-gummed wing." In the Peregrine, too, birds freeze: "Near the brook a heron lay in frozen stubble. Its wings were stuck to the ground by frost, and the mandibles of its bill were frozen together." So it wasn't an exaggeration of Peake's after all.

Reading through these days of routinely appearing and vanishing peregrines I thought about the kind of repetition that can make aboriginal Australian song-poetry seem aimless or enigmatic when it's translated into English. There's this Baby Cockatoos, recorded and translated by RMW Dixon, spoken by a Jirru man named Pompey Clumppoint:

Waiting hopefully in the end of a hollow log
They swallow noisily, their voices beg

Waiting hopefully in the end of a hollow log
They swallow noisily, their voices beg
For the food their mother brings

Waiting hopefully in the end of a hollow log
They swallow noisily, their voices beg
For the food their mother brings

In life, off the page, there must have been movements and inflections to go with this, an atmosphere that disappears when you remove it into a book. Baker, the Englishman, coming from a cultural background of books, a book-nation, does the song-dance in prose, and the inflections that would give me his character and his purpose are contained in his language: he is dumb for me, he is invisible (and dead now too: dead as the partridge on page 112, dead as the beak-lanced curlew on page 80), yet he speaks, he describes --

A cock blackbird, yellow-billed, stared with bulging crocus eye, like a small, mad puritan ...

What was left [of a newly dead gull] smelt fresh and sweet, like a mash of raw beef and pineapple.

Trees by the brook were grey with a lichen of woodpigeons.

There are different ways of making sense.

The crow-catchers of Königsberg kill their prey in the same way [as the peregrine]. Having decoyed the crows into their nets, they kill them by biting them in the neck, severing the spinal cord with their teeth.

Writing for readers who are invisible to him, who might be sitting distantly in a city, at home, indoors, or overseas, he can't, like Pompey Clumppoint, assume that the audience is so familiar with his birds that they can fill in the details for themselves, so Baker has to explain, and the explaining fills the book.

When a wader would not move, they [red-legged partridges] tried to walk over it. For a bird there are only two sorts of bird: their own sort, and those that are dangerous. No others exist. The rest are just harmless objects, like stones, or trees, or men when they are dead.

His language is rapt and steady, as if all this is fate, but what if he hadn't discovered this passion for peregrines, I wonder: did he think of that, and did he fear it, the thought of ending up like Dorothea in Middlemarch, or derailed like Lydgate, a fear that George Eliot expresses more than once in her journals: the fear that she will do nothing worthwhile, that her life will be gone and the vital thing will not be done or found.

This is the last entry I mean to make in my old book in which I wrote for the first time at Geneva, in 1849. What moments of despair I passed through after that -- despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was the sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity: and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated.

a jungle of butter dishes

Whispering Gums, when asked to recommend an underread book on Reading Matters, said that people should read Thea Astley's Drylands, but, not having Drylands, I read A Kindness Cup instead. I look forward to hearing what you have to say, she wrote. All righty then.

So --

-- (and for the benefit of anyone who is planning to read the book, I'll warn you that I am about to give away the ending) --

A Kindness Cup is written with a prose accent that might owe something to Patrick White. It shares his habit of picking words quite precisely so that individual sentences are left frieghted with meaning. This precision, along with constant overtones and undertones of judgment and watchfulness, gives the prose a prissiness; the authors like to use prinking words like frightful and dreadful, even though the horrors that occur in the story seem to deserve meatier language. It's this refusal to reward us with the meatier language that gives the prose its strange charge. White used his own prissiness to describe shit and dog balls, setting the substance of a sentence against the manner in which it was being described -- exactness fighting against mess. Astley has her own version of this tension. She places her precise language in the setting of a Queensland country town: sloppy, drab, drooping, shabby, hot, and inhabited by thugs and yobs.

She chooses unexpected words, and she measures things against a point of perfect balance that is never reached, the language of an idealist who sees that the world is less than it should be.

The council ripples petered out. The moment became a blemish.

or

Grief keeps pecking at her for the vanished past, when even her voice had seemed purer.

Sometimes she moves into mock-heroic language.

Man among men, he projected his strength into each watching face, even that of the town printer who had proclaimed his unworthiness.

Occasionally she will zero in on some very slight thing, weighing it.

The angle of his vowel, that first vowel, lecherously over-toned plus the quiet refinement of the soured mouth and face made for frightful antithesis.

When her verbs carry emotion then the emotion is often a derogatory one, making the nouns a little ridiculous -- grief pecks and voices quack, and a man "fumbles his way along a row towards a group of empty chairs." Astley regards events bitterly, pessimistically: a handshake between two men is "the most counterfeit of gestures," and when a girl becomes an accomplished professional singer her progress is not an artistic one; it is a process of crass acquisition:

She suspected it was only a voice even though it was the best in those parts; and not until she had begun to soar her way through a jungle of butter dishes and cut-glass trophies was her assurance bolstered.

The habit of gauging and judging gets into the characters too.

He pauses, having gauged the response to a nicety, as the applause breaks out.

We are never encouraged to like the characters, or enjoy them, but we are invited to think about them critically as the author tweaks them around in her Cubist apparatus, searching for the least flattering angle.* The part of our brain that might have empathised with the singing girl when she weeps, "soggy with tears," is left to search for other things to do, like think about the structure of the story, and the author's intentions, and where we might fit into her universe. This is Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt taken from the stage and put into a book. A Kindness Cup is an angry, strident story -- Brecht was angry and strident too.

Astley's country town is called Taws. A taws, or tawse, is a whip, an instrument of punishment, and the townsmen here punish the local aboriginal people with impunity, shooting them, harassing them, and chasing them away. Taws is the whip that our lead character uses on himself. Twenty years ago, when he was teaching in the local high school, a group of men from the town chased a family of aborigines towards the brink of a cliff. The townsmen were armed; they committed massacre. One of the women threw herself over the cliff and the brutality of this suicide brought the violence to a halt. The schoolteacher and two friends arrived, intending to stop the attack, but it was already over; and the woman's brains were splattered across the rocks. "Lucretia," said the schoolteacher, who had been teaching Latin to his students.

Raped and blackmailed by the king's son, the Lucretia of Roman legend begged her father to bring the rapist to justice, stabbing herself in the breast with a dagger to prove her unhappiness. Rome's citizens, outraged by the impunity of verminous royalty, toppled the monarchy. In A Kindness Cup the disruptive aftermath of the woman's suicide peters out; the police chief who was in charge of the "hunting party" is tried and acquitted and goes on with his life. The social structure of the town remains intact, nothing is toppled or changed. Twenty years later, returning to Taws, the schoolteacher tries to force people to acknowledge the murder. Now he is a "fanatic;" he is still trying to give the legend its correct ending.

This teacher's name is Tom Dorahy, and his creator refers to him as Dorahy rather than Tom. My mind kept pronouncing Dorahy as Dorothy, which made me wonder -- because Astley doesn't let things happen by mistake, and if she names a character X you know there's a reason for them being called X -- if he was supposed to represent an Everyperson, a man-woman, Tom-Dorothy; or if he was Dorothy Gale, making his way through Oz. Perhaps the incomplete sound of the word dorahy seemed to suit his character. (It asks for something hard in the middle.) The author prefers to call all of her male characters by their surnames, and this might be a deliberate part of the distancing effect. (It's also a cultural thing, as in the army, or in an old schoolroom, or some other hierarchical situation but that doesn't mean she had to extend it into her prose, unless she wanted to, for a reason, but what was the reason?) Charlie Lunt is Lunt, Fred Buckmaster is Buckmaster, and Snoggers Boyd is Boyd. The same rule does not extend to the women, who have a tiny amount of page-time compared to the men: our female lead Gracie Tilburn is always either Gracie or Gracie Tilburn, but never Tilburn. Lucy Boyd is Lucy. Gracie is a false grace, an ineffectual grace, a woman who wants men to like her, flirting with them in front of their wives at dinner parties; the character will sleep with murderous Buckmaster but she'll help Dorahy too; she enters the book in a state of physical and moral virginity, and with respect to the latter she more or less stays that way, deliberately, it seems.

She was claiming seclusion as well, an untouched-by-the-world virginity she thought might appeal.

Gracie's "doric neck" ties her back to the ancient world whose legends have failed Dorahy; the purity, the balance, of these old stories is a ruin, they don't work here, they are lies. All of the characters, no matter what they do or how they behave, or how they try to get away, are doomed to bounce back to the whip and suffer punishment. Dorahy's friend Jenner sings tirra lirra like Lancelot in Tennyson, but his knightly qualities fizzle out. The boys Dorahy is trying to teach remain fundamentally uneducated. Legend fails, justice fails, brutality wins, a pacifist character is pushed, falls, hits his head, and dies, but this sacrificial lamb is not enough, and the violence goes on. The town printer plans to insert a story about the massacre into the local paper but his assistant betrays him (and even this betrayal is useless, a result of "devious compulsions," masturbatory-sounding, that make the Judas "tremble with the excitement of disloyalty that has never bought him anything"), the workshop is burnt down by a mob -- the mob is never punished. Astley keeps setting up stories that ought to end in forgiveness or retribution or cleansing, and then she squashes them. On the last page a pack of townsmen bashes the schoolteacher and the printer bloody. The pack achieves a temporary catharsis; the reader does not.









* Which is more or less why this post sounds so clinical. A Kindness Cup, with its allusions and its suggestive names, was closer to a problem than a story: it wanted to be solved. The book is a gift to the Australian high school curriculum. You could write a ream of essay questions.

1. Most of the active characters in this book are men. What part do the women play? Why do you think Astley wrote like this? Discuss.

2. Do you think the author spends enough time with the aboriginal characters? Why or why not?

3. "Fred dangled a lost pawn. It was an insolent gesture over-interpreted by the father who saw himself thus." What does this tell us about Buckmaster? How do you think it affects his behaviour in other parts of the novel?

4. Is Charlie Lunt active or passive? Is his behaviour in the novel good or bad? Discuss.

5. What if Kowaha had survived? How would that change the story? Discuss.

And so on.

that in the middle

Last week someone asked a few of us to read a poem she'd written, so we did. It went -- well I don't have any kind of permission to copy it out here, but the ideas went like this:

A thing has happened: it is terrible
A thing has happened: it is terrible
A thing has happened: it is terrible
Did you think this wasn't going to affect you?
It will. The terrible thing must be dealt with
The terrible thing must be dealt with
The terrible thing must be dealt with
Or else everything will get worse.

She had variety in there, you understand: she didn't write, "A thing has happened" three times: that was me. But it was the part in the middle I picked up on, the direct address. It wasn't something I'd noticed before. I've never studied poetry, or not since high school, and for all I know they might point this out in the first tertiary-level poetry lesson right after they ask you what your name is, and the name of your favourite colour, and your cat, but for the first time it occurred to me that a line like this in the middle of a poem could act like a clip to the reader's face, saying, "You thought you knew where this was going, didn't you -- you were starting to feel complacent. But now we're about to expand this idea further, so focus your attention."

The next night I was reading Czesław Miłosz's essay "Against Incomprehensible Poetry" when I came across this paragraph,

Nothing, perhaps, is simpler and more obvious than what supplied the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummon de Andrade with the theme for his poem [In the Middle of the Road]. When a thing is truly seen, seen intensely, it remains with us forever and astonishes us, even though it would appear that there is nothing astonishing about it.

followed by this translation of the poem by Elizabeth Bishop:

In the middle of the road there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
there was a stone
in the middle of the road there was a stone.

Never should I forget this event
in the life of my fatigued retinas.
Never should I forget that in the middle of the road
there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
in the middle of the road there was a stone.

"It's the same thing again," I thought. "That belt around the middle of the poem, giving it a wasp-waist …" then I amended myself "… but of course you don't read a poem in a single glance, the way that you see the silhouette of wasp-waist, from a distance, no, you travel through it over time, and the fastening at the centre arrives like a surprise, catching hold of your brain and giving it a flick, or sharpening it for a moment: long enough to reach the end of the poem. I wonder if the conversation between Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, the one in which he lets her know that, "My feelings will not be repressed," and she advises him to begin the repressing process immediately because she has no intention of marrying him -- I wonder if that works in the same way?" It was a long time since I'd read the book, and I wasn't sure, but in my mind I saw Pride and Prejudice rearranged like this -- in an instant, reshaped -- like an hourglass, with that scene pinching in the middle, drawing your attention to a point there, a pivot.

the translator is riding another beast

Starting a translated book last night I found myself reading an introduction by the Eeyore of all translators. "It is not recorded that Job worked on a translation, but I wouldn't doubt it," Robert Hullot-Kentor writes glumly-whimsically, thanking the friends who prevented him throwing the manuscript away or dropping it behind a bookshelf. Visited by earthquakes, unemployment, illness, and "lesser scourges," he finished years later than he meant to.

What is hard about translation is not -- as those who have never tried it imagine -- finding the right word. The right word is always there, it just can't be used: inevitably it starts with the same letter as the three words on either side of it and, in a translation, pulling four oranges says fake, not jackpot. Line by line, the wrong word is always, unbeatably, coming to the rescue. The sureness with which translation taps fate puts the I-Ching to shame: the word needed at any one point has somehow always just been used in the previous clause to cover for some other right word that would not fit. If translation were just pinning the tail on the donkey it would be easy, but the donkey is running and the translator is riding another beast, going in some other direction: each language, and each and every word, has its own momentary vector. So, for instance, even when the original wants to dictate the right word -- e.g. Programm -- directly into English, with only a slight shift of spelling, it turns out that the English equivalent now instinctually summons up computers -- not the self-understood political sense of the original -- with barely containable contextural implications …

mauve luminescence that pervades the earth

I'd heard John Marsden speak before, once, when I was at high school. Editing, he told us. It's important. Cut. Trim. Limit your adjectives. Get rid of excess words. Look at this sentence.

The balloon rose up into the air.

He said: we don't need 'into the air.' If a balloon is going up then of course it's going into the air. It can't rise into the ground.

The balloon rose up.

If it rises then of course it's going up. We don't need up.

The balloon rose.

Better!

On Sunday he went after the same idea, but now he was describing a businessman at his desk telling someone they could come into his room.

"Come in," he shouted angrily.

If he's shouting we can assume that he's angry. Adverbs weaken a sentence, get rid of them.

"Come in," he shouted.

You don't need 'he shouted.'

"Come in!"

So he recommends, with the devout good plainness of a man whose vocation is teaching, cutting and trimming, and as I listened to him I thought of Elmore Leonard and his Ten Rules, which have become so well known that they were used, earlier this year, as the jumping-off point for a two-part Guardian article. Leonard would have us all using said said every time any character opened its mouth: nothing but said. No adverbs. Christina Stead, that Rodin of twentieth century literature, satirised Rules like this three decades ago in Miss Herbert (the Suburban Wife).

The story, she was confident, conformed, as she had written it, to the set of rules she had extracted from various books on writing and from Mrs Beresford Banes's writing course. A well-typed* list of these rules hung above her table and read as follows:

Short sentences
Short paragraphs
…
'Ware adjectives!
Pare your prose to the bone
…

She had already rewritten her story "In the Morning" twenty-three times, arranging it differently for each "market" and repolishing it according to her rules. It grew simpler, clearer, more barren each time. She was unable to understand why she had no success with it, but she plodded sturdily on.

Stead was so impatient with the carefully-trimmed often-revised approach that she committed all kinds of sins -- she once lost a character. He was introduced then never mentioned again. She forgot he was there, and he wasn't. In The People With the Dogs she uses things three times in four sentences.

… a soft middle-aged dark man … was packing Vera's things into an immense brassbound steamer trunk. He brought out a few handfuls of delicate things in black, rose, white, and a few ribbons. They took up not more than six square inches of space. Vera still had a few things but, "No, no, there's no more, Simon," said she.

"Oh writing teacher," you ask, "should I use the same very ordinary vague word three times in a row? Things is just useful." "No, oh God, no, hideous, hideous," says the writing teacher, throwing a pen at you. "Never do that. Very amateurish. Think of a new word. If you write things things things the reader will notice and feel bored." But it was years before I noticed Stead's things. And she smacks aside other of Leonard's Rules too, she writes long descriptions, and she doesn't bother sticking to said. Skimming a single page of my Penguin Man Who Loved Children I see characters declaring, crying (twice), sighing (three times), and saying things "after a pause" and "impatiently." On the next page they speak "violently," "indignantly," and, twice, "suddenly." "Never use the words 'suddenly' or 'all hell broke loose'," say the Rules, and, "There are exceptions," writes Leonard, meaning that each Rule can be broken if the writer knows how to do it. Of all the sentences he's written there, this is the only true one. There are exceptions!

I want instead a writer who follows Ruskin:

No limit: it is one of the affectations of architects to speak of overcharged ornament. Ornament cannot be overcharged if it be good, and it is always overcharged when it is bad.

For "ornament", think of descriptive prose, adverbs, adjectives -- and run-on sentences! How many people have I seen online complaining about run-on sentences, happily, smugly, as if they've caught the writer kissing behind a shed -- that yowling tone of aha!** All of those posters seem to be American, judging from their references and spelling. Is there a writing textbook somewhere in the American school system that tuts at run-on sentences? Burn it. Burn the ones that tell you to throw away your adverbs. Burn everything that wants us to be small, stripped, tiny, juiceless, and confined to said. Write new books, write textbooks that show you how everything might be used well. Not no ornament but good ornament. Bring out Johnson and his majestick adjectives.

The compleat explanation of an authour not systematick and consequential, but desultory and vagrant, abounding in casual allusions and light hints, is not to be expected from any single scholiast. All personal reflections, when names are suppressed, must be in a few years irrecoverably obliterated; and customs, too minute to attract the notice of law, such as mode of dress, formalities of conversation, rules of visits, disposition of furniture, and practices of ceremony, which naturally find places in familiar dialogue, are so fugitive and unsubstantial that they are not easily retained or recovered.

Bring out Robert Hughes.

One cannot see the purple underlights in plowed furrows against the sunset without thinking of the strange, dull, mauve luminescence that pervades the earth in The Sower and helps suggest that this dark creature fecundating the soil under the citron disc of the declining sun is some kind of local deity, an agrestic harvest god.

Beautiful extravagance! Let things be said suddenly, if they need it. Say to students, "Now that we have practiced our trimming and cutting, I want you to write a long sentence and make it interesting. Use the trimming and cutting there." Show them how a long sentence can roam, roam, shuttling back and forth across the page, this physical thing, like the moment in a ballet when the ballerina launches into a series of pirouettes, going on and on until the audience, thrilled at the sight of another human being facing an obstacle and overturning it, starts clapping.*** Show them those Proust sentences that hook back on themselves at the close, finishing with a kind of sigh or shrug. I wish someone had done this for me. Annie Dillard told us that humans were alarmed by the fecundity of nature:

I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.

But how impressed we are when some an author brings that fecundity into existence then exerts control over it! The tension there, between the life-force and the person moulding. Each long sentence is a bit of life born, controlled, and killed. There is the appearance of danger. The ballerina appears to be on the verge of falling over, the extravagant writer appears to be about to lose control of the sentence, their own words either running them over or eating them up. Each artwork claims some portion of the world for its creator, how good it is, how filling, when the creator lets it sprout prolifically, daring it to slip the leash and charge off . (Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling has the fecundity but not so much the control, and the book, in spite of its length, feels incomplete.)










* Stead was a terrible typist.

** There's an example of that aha! in the comments after this Metafilter post: "On the other hand, writers who are any good are students of language, and professional writers usually work run-on sentences out of their system by middle school."

*** I've used this comparison before. Thanks to wood s lot for drawing my attention to the Dillard excerpt. (Pilgrim at Tinkers Creek is a great piece of naturalist mysticism.) The Hughes quote comes from Vincent Van Gogh, Part 1, in Nothing if not Critical. The Ruskin is borrowed from Seven Lamps of Architecture. Johnson is writing about Shakespeare. The missing Christina Stead character is a boy in The Rightangled Creek.

My copy of Man is the one with the Alton Pickens painting of two distorted people torturing a doll on the cover. Turn to page 203 to see the characters crying and sighing.

(M. has just handed me a US high school textbook that describes a run-on sentence as a sentence needing punctuation between two ideas, eg, "It is easy to run the machine just turn the dial and press the button." He understood -- and I, from the online comments I've seen, was also understanding -- that the description, "run-on sentence," included sentences that were merely long. Not according to James F. Howell and Dean Memering of Central Michigan University, it doesn't.)

the situation

I've been told that some comments to this blog are being blocked by Google for ... well, whatever reasons Google has for doing things: but the salient point is, they are. Sorry about that. In place of the ability to comment I will give you the secret of life, as I heard it from John Marsden yesterday. Marsden is the man who wrote So Much to Tell You, the Ellie chronicles, and other teenage books.

The secret of life is to change your status according to the situation.

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.