Brooknerâ™s longings

Anita Brookner is 46. She was 46 when, half a century ago, I first heard her lecture at the Courtauld Institute, eloquently and meticulously, on Greuze, slipping so easily into French that she convinced her students that they, too, had something of her fluency. In 1980, when mischievous gossip columnists were prompted to discuss her age, she put them down with a peremptory epistle to The Times — "I am 46," she wrote, "and have been for some years." She was quite certainly still 46 a month or two ago, lunching with equally young friends in Bibendum’s oyster bar.

Her dust jackets evade this simple fact; they tell us only that she won the Booker Prize in 1984, that her tally of novels is every number up to 22, and that she taught at the Courtauld Institute until 1988 — this last a neat trick, avoiding the terminus post quem that might give a cruel clue to the ungodly journalist.

I am content that she is 46, old enough to have such experience and authority as an art historian that I, who am now beyond three score and 10, am willing to kowtow to her, and as a novelist, young enough to communicate the emotion, passion, sentiment of ordinary life as though just felt and fresh with muted pain.

It is as an art historian that I feel more drawn to write of her, though less of her major monographs on Greuze, Watteau and David, perhaps intimidating to the general reader, than of the essays, lectures and reviews republished in Soundings, 1997, and Romanticism and its Discontents, 2000, trifles so exquisite and so profound that I bought 20 copies of the first to convince my friends of my humility.

"This," I said, "is how I wish to write, but I shall never achieve such delicacy, such precision or such point. I am a blunderbuss and she a stiletto from Damascus."

Would that I had had the wit to accuse Blake of assuming the protective colour of infantilism; would that I had dared to damn Caspar David Friedrich for his threadbare religious imagery — in three words a whole admired oeuvre undone; would that I had made the pre-eminent Leonardo and Bernini both seem faintly ridiculous through Girodet’s interpretation of their ecstasies in his wholly ridiculous and effete but classical Endymion.

Is it a coincidence that Miss Brookner, having as an historian made Romanticism her peculiar field, turned to romantic fiction? Of Romanticism she observed that "no norms can be found for this amorphous entity;" recognising in it madness, risk, terror, nostalgia, pantheism and primitivism, she concluded her list with "the conviction of a secret destiny or calling", and most to the fore, infinite longing for what can neither be identified nor found. Madness and terror I cannot recall in any of her plots — the staffage of her townscapes is too unawakened middle class for that — but in The Rules of Engagement, her 22nd of the genre, risk and nostalgia, primitivism even, play their supporting parts to infinite longing’s leading role.

Yearning, too, is on the stage, but whenever desire is about to become ardent, Miss Brookner rattles the dampers of her stove and deprives the flames of oxygen — not for her one single bodice ripped or knickers urgently discarded, not one heavy breath or drop of sweat, and certainly none of the body fluids with which artists now make art.

How can I describe the plot? "Don’t bother," said another, aspiring, novelist, "it will be the same as all the others" — which is as perverse as damning all the tales in Leberecht’s Volksmarchen, all the songs in Schubert’s Winterreise, and all the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, even if they are a little threadbare.

The setting is the never-never land between South Kensington and Chelsea, the time the distant past of post-war London when shops in the King’s Road sold simple things to eat, until perhaps the Eighties, the narrator the heroine, the tale one of an affair with a married cad in which her oldest, closest and best friend (insofar as either is capable of friendship) supplants her.

The Leitmotiv is making cups of tea. Transposing gender here and there, I recognised every moment of the novel as in some sense the tale of my own life (as I suppose it must be of Miss Brookner’s too), except that in mine coffee and Madeira took the place of tea — the same rebuffs, the same warmth accommodating itself to the same chill, the same marital exclusions, the same sex for the sake of it, perfunctory, with the excuse that some sex is better than no sex at all, the same — if I may borrow for my purposes the title of her second book of essays — romanticism and its discontents.

Indefinable but infinitely variable longing is the plot, the waters of oblivion the end.