Issue 104, Fall 1987
Anita Brookner works in an office at the Courtauld Institute filled with books and pictures of French paintings, a desk strewn with papers, and an old typewriter. She also works in her Chelsea home, where this interview took place. She lives in a small but sunny and quiet apartment, furnished in light colors and overlooking a large, pleasant communal garden. When asked how it felt to work in the male-dominated atmosphere of Cambridge University in the sixties, she answered, “Nobody looked all that male and I didn’t look all that female.” In fact, though, she does look very feminine: petite, slim, and casually but most elegantly dressed. Reddish well-cut hair frames her pale, striking face, which is dominated by large beautiful blue eyes. Her exquisite manners disarm and put visitors at ease, and at the same time secure a reasonable distance. She speaks in a deep, gentle voice, with fluency and deliberation in equal measure, and sometimes in “short, military sentences,” as she once said of Stendhal. Occasionally she smokes a very slim cigarette.
INTERVIEWER
Let us start at the beginning. Did anything in your background lead you to believe that one day you would become a scholar and a novelist?
BROOKNER
Oh no! Anything but! I was brought up to look after my parents. My family were Polish Jews and we lived with my grandmother, with uncles and aunts and cousins all around, and I thought everybody lived like that. They were transplanted and fragile people, an unhappy brood, and I felt that I had to protect them. Indeed that is what they expected. As a result I became an adult too soon and paradoxically never grew up. My mother had been a concert singer but had given up to marry. She was inclined to melancholy and when she sang at home my father used to get angry, with good reason—it was only in her singing that she showed passion. I would start to cry and be taken out of the room by the nanny. She, not I, should have been the liberated woman. My father, who didn’t really understand the English, loved Dickens; he thought Dickens gave a true picture of England, where right always triumphed. I still read a Dickens novel every year and I am still looking for a Nicholas Nickleby!
INTERVIEWER
Is that why all your heroines have a “displaced person” quality, and the family backgrounds are very Jewish, even though not explicitly? Were you brought up Jewish?
BROOKNER
Yes, very much so. I never learnt Hebrew because my health was fragile and it was thought that learning Hebrew would be an added burden. I regret it, because I would like to be able to join in fully. Not that I am a believer, but I would like to be. As for the “displaced person” aspect, perhaps it is because although I was born and raised here I have never been at home, completely. People say that I am always serious and depressing, but it seems to me that the English are never serious—they are flippant, complacent, ineffable, but never serious, which is sometimes maddening.
INTERVIEWER
The foreignness of your heroines is emphasized by the contrast between them and the very solidly English, Protestant men they are attracted to.
BROOKNER
I think the contrast is more between damaged people and those who are undamaged.
INTERVIEWER
Your first books were on artists and art history. What made you decide to try your hand at the novel?
BROOKNER
It was literally trying my hand, as you put it. I wondered how it was done and the only way to find out seemed to be to try and do it.
INTERVIEWER
You took the title, A Start in Life, from an obscure novel by Balzac, Un Début dans la vie. Was it autobiographical?
BROOKNER
It was. I wrote it in a moment of sadness and desperation. My life seemed to be drifting in predictable channels and I wanted to know how I deserved such a fate. I thought if I could write about it I would be able to impose some structure on my experience. It gave me a feeling of being at least in control. It was an exercise in self-analysis, and I tried to make it as objective as possible—no self-pity and no self-justification. But what is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere—it is an art form in itself.
INTERVIEWER
In your two subsequent novels you give different reasons for wanting to write. In Look At Me you say that writing is your penance for not being lucky.
BROOKNER
I meant that writing is a very lonely activity. You go for days without seeing or talking to anyone. And all the time out there people are living happy, fulfilled lives—or you think they are. If I were happy, married with six children, I wouldn’t be writing. And I doubt if I should want to. But since I wrote that sentence I have changed. Now I write because I enjoy it. Writing has freed me from the despair of living. I feel well when I am writing; I even put on a little weight!
INTERVIEWER
You also said that you write to be hard, to remind people that you are there.
BROOKNER
I have changed my mind about that too. Far from making me hard, writing has made me softer, more understanding, more observant, and perhaps more passive in the sense that other people and their opinion of me seems to matter less.
INTERVIEWER
It seems that writers wish to find a reason for their activity: Paul Eluard called it “le dur désir de durer.” And lately E. M. Cioran said, “L’écriture est la revanche de l’homme contre une Creation baclée.” And you say, in Providence, that you write to tell the truth, what you call the Cassandra complex.
BROOKNER
I agree with Cioran, in so far as we all try to put some order into chaos. The truth I’m trying to convey is not a startling one, it is simply a peeling away of affectation. I use whatever gift I have to get behind the facade. But I hope I am not an aggressive writer, and that I see through people with compassion and humor. My own life was disappointing—I was mal partie, started on the wrong footing; so I am trying to edit the whole thing. It was the need for order in my own life that made me start. And once the floodgates are open, you must go all the way.
INTERVIEWER
Your first three novels seem to be variations on the same theme. The basic argument is that we are deceived by literature into believing that virtue is rewarded, that good will win in the end, and that Cinderella will always get the Prince. Whereas, in reality, honest, disciplined, and principled people lose to the beautiful and the selfish.
BROOKNER
Not selfish—plausible. My new novel goes further: I now feel that all good fortune is a gift of the gods, and that you don’t win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.
INTERVIEWER
Sometimes the beautiful and the bold lose to lesser people because they don’t use the right stratagems. For example, Anna Karenina: Tolstoy very cleverly shows that all around her people are having love affairs that everyone knows about and condones because it is all a game and does not threaten the accepted order. Anna, too honest, wants to go all the way and rock the boat: divorce her husband and marry her lover; she creates a scandal and so she is condemned.
BROOKNER
Anna loses because, for all her boldness, she can’t commit herself morally to her actions. She feels guilty about her son and misjudges her Vronsky. She can’t accept that men can’t keep up the same pitch of passion as women can—that they cool off. With men passion is all at the beginning and with women it is all along.