I was reading about last week’s London Book Fair, and how it is all now so openly about money and book-to-film etc, and from there I found my circuitous way to thinking about the old-style Booker Prize, and how much people used to care, quite passionately, about who and what won it, regardless of whether or not the book had screen prospects. It now seems amazing to me, but I once really minded that Martin Amis was clearly never going to win. Before that, people wanted his father to win (which he did, quite rightly, for The Old Devils). And then, the controversies… Saul Bellow knocking out the chances of Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont with his ‘I seem to hear the tinkle of teacups’ (what I hear from that terrifying book is a death rattle, but each to his own). Rebecca West dissing Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall (according to fellow judge Antonia Fraser, she thought it made too much of a fuss about doing the washing-up). The real spite and nastiness when Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore won. Of course controversy is the breath of life to prizes; look at the Oscars. Why Brando wasn’t nominated for Streetcar. How Crash got best film. #Oscarssowhite. Ryan Gosling paying the social media price for being recognized as the best thing in Barbie. Not a great controversy, that last one, and RG’s charm was more than a match for it, but it kept people going for a while. Which is more, I’m sure, than anything to do with the Booker would now manage. In today’s dislocated literary world, it is impossible to imagine even a minor ruckus of the kind that occurred in 1984, when Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac won a Booker that ‘ought’ to have gone to J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun.
John Fuller, a Booker judge, would later express the thought ‘that the Brookner was, in its economy and elegance, a small triumph of moral insight worthy of the tradition of James and Forster to which it belonged.’ I don’t actually see the book in terms of that tradition, but it is a serious compliment all the same.
Of course Hotel du Lac is far more limited in obvious scope than Ballard’s novel. No World War Two, no majestic clash of cultures. Instead, the story of a lonely woman’s brief sojourn, out of season, in a Swiss hotel. It can easily be damned with faint praise, described as clear-eyed, elegant, exquisitely-wrought: all the slightly dull literary virtues that make one long for Philip Roth. Nevertheless I would contend that it is one of the few Booker winners that will endure.
And - as tends to happen to the best novels; even those that weren’t conceived with book-to-screen in mind - it was adapted for TV. A very beautiful adaptation, which is on YouTube at the moment. Anna Massey, Denholm Elliott, Patricia Hodge, Barry Foster, Googie Withers, the quite astoundingly great Irene Handl in a heart-piercing cameo… it sounds good, does it not…. and a marvellous atmosphere of a near-empty hotel, the dense luxurious boredom, the slightly irksome meals that are nonetheless the highlights of the days, the decorous silences cut through with piano music, that odd air of faint disapproval with which guests are treated by nonetheless exemplary staff…
As with the BBC’s The Old Devils, it is an adaptation worthy of the original (not quite as rare a phenomenon as received wisdom would have it). And the original, to my mind, is wonderful indeed, although my very favourite Brookners are the three that precede it - her first, A Start in Life; her third, Look at Me; and best of all her second, Providence, whose ending - a shock, despite the fact that the clues have been planted with a crime novelist’s care - I long to be different every time I read it. To mitigate any sense that there was a falling-off after Hotel du Lac, which there was not, I also particularly love Brief Lives and A Closed Eye.
I have no idea how much she is read today. Possibly not that much. To be honest, I have no idea how easy she would find it to get published today. But Anita Brookner, who died in 2016 aged eighty-seven, is to my mind the last great novelist of the twentieth century (and, technically, the first of this century; her twenty-fifth book, At the Hairdresser’s - a title that teeters upon self-parody - appeared in 2011). A Start in Life was published when she was 53. Then she became astonishingly prolific. I remember her saying in an interview that she would finish one novel and start another the following day, which I found incomprehensible but fascinating; she also said that she wrote because she had no children, which I found irritating but possibly a bit of a wry tease. Essentially I thought she was magnificent. I loved her European elegance - her parents were Polish Jews, her father’s original name Bruckner - and the fact that when she won the Booker she knocked ten years off her age (a former colleague gave her away - what a petty thing to do). She had the quality I adore in female writers - the understanding of the facade - which in Brookner is peculiarly intense. That is what is going on in the Hotel du Lac, women putting up a show to each other. A marvellous, sophisticated book. Full of the English novelist’s virtues, but not quite English.
In so far as she belonged to a literary tradition, it is to one that seems almost to have vanished… in which the authorial voice is not a dominating and insistent presence, but is subservient to the cause of examining the human condition. She had a style, of course, rigorous and sometimes droll and almost repressively civilized. Yet the point is not the style itself, excellent though it is. The point is what she is using it to say: the terrible truths that she is telling, about love, loss, ageing, life itself. Depressing, she has been called, in the same kind of reflex reaction that says Jean Rhys is self-pitying and Elizabeth Taylor is about tinkling tea-cups. But then truth, as opposed to openness, is also out of fashion.
I first read Brookner when I was too young to know just how terribly truthful she was. Being forty, like Ruth Weiss in A Start in Life, seemed an almost hilarious concept. Nevertheless I was captivated. I sensed the power beneath the politesse. Quite often I would defend her to a friend, who would ask how could I be so passionate (old-style Booker-style) about somebody whose novels repeatedly revisited the same territory, and were almost always about the same woman in a cardigan? (The word ‘cardigan’, in this context, had a punchline quality). Actually Brookner herself said that ‘one keeps on writing the same book over and over again’. But this was simply a product of her integrity. Like Jane Austen, she recognized that her artistic destiny was to polish the two inches of ivory to the highest possible finish. Anyway criticism, as she once shrugged, cigarette no doubt in hand, is ‘mostly ill-founded, with a sneer behind it. Take it or leave it.’
The ‘same book’ criticism, which couldn’t bother me less, also derived from the fact that Brookner - like Jean Rhys, whom she resembles, not overtly but in a profound sense - is an essentially autobiographical writer. Her protagonists are usually female, they are disconcertingly clever, and their controlled, watchful behaviour masks poignant, romantic yearnings. Indeed Edith Hope in Hotel du Lac is a romantic novelist (I was always struck by the fact that she delivered her typescripts ahead of deadline). Set against these women - the ones whose superior intellects exclude the more basic life skills - are their natural antagonists, who both impress and repel them: women like the refulgent Mrs Pusey at the hotel, who stake out their territory and defend it instinctively, who achieve conventional fulfilment, who ‘raise altars to themselves’, who are tricky and ruthless in the pursuit of what they want. The ones who would still be admired for their alpha-dom, even though Brookner’s frames of reference - for instance the equation of marriage with success - would be officially deemed passé. As I hope the forthcoming Bridget Jones IV will prove to us all.
In fact, and even though she can write very well from a male point of view, women are Brookner’s subject. She is almost frighteningly honest about her own sex - only Jean Rhys seems to me as fearless. Brookner’s calm style helps to conceal her transgressions against the sisterhood, but what she says is not always very pretty. Nor is it very modern, which does not make it untrue.
As to her central subject… The author herself was a distinguished art historian, invited to teach at the Courtauld by its then director, Anthony Blunt (yes him), where she remained until her retirement in 1989; by which time her second career was in full bloom. As a young woman she had studied in Paris – ‘I’ve never been so happy’ - but her defection, as it was perceived, enraged her parents, who cut her off for a time. She was an only child, an unmarried one, and her duty lay at home in south London. Eventually, after the death of her father, she put her own life aside for several years to care for her mother.
Thus Ruth Weiss, in A Start in Life, is an academic whose ‘life had been ruined by literature’ (her subject, Balzac, is her chief support but an inadequate guide to reality). She has a brief flowering in Paris before being dragged back to England, unbearably to the reader, by the demands of her capricious parents - rendered quite brilliantly, with an eye both ice-cool and compassionate - who regard her quiet choices as entirely subsidiary to their own. Thereafter, all that is left to her are the spaces of her restless, learned mind.
Also running through A Start in Life – and subsequent novels – is the sense of displacement deriving from Ruth’s European background. The Weiss flat in Holland Park - so often Brookner gives us these mansion flats, dim-lit and evoking a near-lost London - is filled with pieces of alien dark furniture, whose woods ‘looked as though they had absorbed the blood of horses’. Meanwhile Kitty Maule, in Providence, is half-French, half-English, again an academic, an attractive young woman with hopes for which the reader fears. She is figuratively torn between the world of her Parisian grandparents - who ran a maison de couture and believe in tailoring, grooming, formalities and rituals - and the casual, Cotswolds-born confidence exemplified by her lover.
This hinterland gives to Brookner her singular voice. Although her careful, ironic rendering of female despair might seem closer to Barbara Pym than to the demi-mondaine Jean Rhys, there is nothing provincial about her; it is impossible to imagine her at a vicarage. She is innately worldly, more so than is usual in the literary sphere. One is always aware of an undertow of sophistication. ‘My dear girl, that man had a price on his head the minute he walked into the hotel’, says one of the women in Hotel du Lac, sharpening Edith’s eyes to the possibilities of her unsought, not wholly unwelcome friendship with the rich, enigmatic Mr Neville.
It is Mr Neville, a devil in impeccable suits, who sets out with cruel clarity the Brookner theory of life: that good behaviour gets one precisely nowhere. ‘People feel at home with low moral standards’, he says. (My God, how true that is). Marry me, he tells Edith, and you will not have to suffer the consequences of your outmoded integrity, which can only lead to solitude and despair. The urgency with which Brookner invests Edith’s struggle, between the life that will bring social salvation and the one in which she believes, is so profound, so intensely moving, that it becomes impossible to regard Hotel du Lac as anything other than a great novel. Its formal beauty brings the consolation of art, although its truth holds little comfort.
And therein lies the scope that won her the Booker. The quality of her truths, etched deep on that legendary bit of ivory.
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This is a simply wonderful tribute to Brookner. I've never had any interest in literary prizes (or the Oscars), but this account of Brookner's writing and career is truly gripping.
I liked the phrase, "Full of the English novelist’s virtues, but not quite English." It reminds me a little of something said about Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier, that it was the best French novel in the English language.
I loved reading this. It made me want to take my Brookners from the shelf again. Like you, Laura, I read them too young, and yet I took something from them, a something that was lived out in my mother's life and adapted by my older sister (whose copies the books originally were); that life can be lived on your own terms, including apparent conformity, including navigating loneliness in the midst of social busyness.
Lewis Percy is one of my personal favourites.