If people have heard of Brookner today, Hermione Lee says, they imagine a lonely, cardiganed woman yearning for an absent lover. Of 24 novels written across 30 years, only the first four – A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me and Hotel du Lac – are about a single woman pining for love. There is certainly a “Brooknerian” style, characterised by elegance, restraint and melancholia, but her fiction engaged with our emotional lives broadly, examining family, exile, home, trauma, ageing and much more.
Born in 1928 and raised in south London by a fearsome Polish-Jewish grandmother and absurdly ineffectual parents (a tobacco salesman and a failed singer), Brookner was a highly academic only child. After a degree at King’s College London, she briefly tasted freedom as a student in Paris, but was soon dragged back to care for her extraordinarily needy mother. Yoked to home for the next decade, she managed, nevertheless, to become a brilliant art critic and a charismatic lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, where she stayed until retirement.
In the introduction, Lee describes hearing the author’s voice saying, repeatedly, “Go away”, and Brookner’s 20s and 30s were the “most hidden, the least witnessed” of all. Brookner did her utmost to erase her life, and Lee is forced, therefore, to mine any detail she can find. As well as Brookner’s academic work and extensive reading habits, we get her poor handwriting, fear of trains, love of perfumes and at one particularly desperate point, salary increases over two decades.
A couple of love affairs in her 30s fizzled out, but if there was ever a record of her feelings, Brookner expunged it. The first 200 pages, then, can be hard going. She was, says Lee, through gritted teeth, “an object of mystery and puzzlement”.
But Lee persists – always rake thin, Brookner kept slimming biscuits in her handbag; she loved babies; she doled out tranquillisers to nervous PhD candidates – and just as this enterprise starts to feel doomed, something miraculous happens. The tireless details begin to cohere and Brookner steps out of the shadows, intriguing, contradictory – the super brain who shaved 10 years off her age in her own Who’s Who entry; the self-proclaimed “loneliest woman in London” who had loads of friends. The older she gets, the more interesting this book becomes.
In 1979, her beloved Courtauld mentor, friend and boss, Anthony Blunt, was exposed as a Soviet spy. Shaken, Brookner remained loyal until she discovered he’d used her to extract information from a hospitalised colleague. Reeling and depressed, facing another lonely summer, she found herself writing fiction.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
