I was surprised to find, as Anita Brookner’s novel A Private View was reaching its denouement, that it suddenly took me into the thought-world of the poet who (as readers of this diary will have noticed by now) has been most on my mind of late, Stéphane Mallarmé: “He felt,” Brookner writes of her protagonist, “as he sat undisturbed, in the light of the cruel winter sun, as if he had been shipwrecked, as if he were the only survivor of a disaster so obscure that he could never explain it, even to a friend, even to a friend who loved him.” The shipwreck, one recognizes from “À la nue accablante tu” and of course from “Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard,” among others; and that obscure disaster is none other than the one marked by “Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe.” But the man Brooker depicts is no poète maudit in whose “strange voice death wins through.” I should explain—interrupting my train of thought—that I last read a couple of Brookner’s novels about thirty years ago; I found them very good, but reviews that seemed to say she was one of those writers who write always more or less the same novel with variations (like Antonio Vivaldi composing his one concerto over and over again) made me feel I didn’t have to read another. I don’t know why, lately, I determined to read her again. I picked this one up at random. Brookner having been a historian of eighteenth and nineteenth century French art, its title (in Britain a private view is what we call an art opening) suggested to me that perhaps in this case she might deploy her professional knowledge of the art world. But not at all. The title’s implications turn out to be quite different.—Anyway, as I was saying about the book’s protagonist: Here, although switching up her usual female lead for a man, Brookner was clearly intent on facing down the criticism that her brief lives of repressed and indecisive characters could only be repetitive. She double-dares the reader to turn away by constructing her novel around a protagonist named Bland (George) and she pushes the point by making him reflect of himself that, after all, “he had better accept the fact that he was a dull character.” Reader, are you prepared to face a dull character? a man “bruised with unassuaged longings” and possessed of “passionless good taste”? One “was made of conventional material: that was all there was to it,” as he himself believes? In case all that fails to discourage you, Brookner sets up a situation that is blatantly conventional: the stodgy, aging, introverted bachelor, a sturdy Englishman, becomes obsessed with a younger, unconventional woman, whose intentions, background, and even identity are mysterious; of uncertain nationality, her cool amorality is dressed up in California-style new age lingo. One entertains visions of Emil Jannings’ descent into madness in The Blue Angel. But no. Our Mr. Bland will not end up crowing like a rooster and being stuffed into a straightjacket. He will discover feelings that he had not previously allowed himself—feelings not so much of carnal desire as of aggressiveness (“an anger that was becoming enjoyable”) and will to domination, as well as unconcern for consequences. But the result of that inward discovery will be only that it happened. There will be no consequence. Outside Bland’s memory it will be as if nothing had ever changed. Brookner’s genius lies precisely in her ability to trace, within a stasis that is social as much as psychological, the mute and transient fluctuations of thought, which she pursues with deeply analytical patience, undisdaining of these “échos esclaves / Par une trompe sans vertu,” in Mallarmé’s words—echoes enslaved / by a useless trumpet.
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Anita Brookner, A Private View, published by Random House, New York, 1994.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.