A Personal Tribute to Anita Brookner

The following personal tribute to Anita Brookner was written by blogger A Super Dilettante. Reposted with permission.

"Anita Brookner: of all the younger generation known to me, the rarest in quality both as friend and writer." Rosamond Lehmann
(Image credit: Rosamond Lehmann's Album, Chatto & Windus, 1987)

When I heard the news that the writer, Anita Brookner has died, on the wireless this morning, I felt as though I had lost the greatest teacher in my life. Although the majority of people in the literary world know her as a writer, Anita Brookner first came into my life as an art historian. The first book I read by her is a book of her art historical essays and reviews called Soundings published in 1997. This book had the profoundest effect on me when I was studying art history.

Her marvellous style, penetrating vision and her intelligent interpretation of the French paintings by Corot and Courbet made me realise that a well-written essay can be every bit as beautiful as the poetry or fiction. It was Anita Brookner, an exceptional scholar from London's Courtauld Institute, whom I greatly admired as an exemplar and a role model during my student days. She lived in France for a number of years. During that time, she wrote very insightful short essays and reviews of the exhibitions that made a regular appearance in the prestigious art magazine called The Burlington Magazine.

She later admitted in her rare radio interview, which must be her last interview, The Reunion: The Courtauld Institute, with Sue MacGregor (available to listen online) that the most meaningful period of her life was at the Courtauld Institute where she was trained and later appointed as a teaching fellow by then-Director, Anthony Blunt. One of her students at Courtauld (the artist, John McLean) later wrote about her: "She gave very elegant lectures. I had never seen anyone so metropolitan and poised."

It was her essays and reviews along with the writings of Benedict Nicolson, the elder son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West that inspired me to become an art historian. I would devour every word they wrote for The Burlington Magazine at the university's library.

Anita Brookner came into my life as a novelist was much later, during the darkest days, after I left the university when I felt my entire life was drifting in the sea of desolation. It was her novels that spoke to me and comforted (they still do) me. Through her writings, I found my mentor because I looked up to her as a survival from a vanished civilisation. Her extraordinary ability to write the most elegant prose makes most contemporary writing seem crude and sloppy. She was most perspective and insightful as a writer. Here is how she described an incompatible relationship in her book, The Misalliance: "Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes. Like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography." No one else would have written like that. Her subjects are about narratives of failures (after all, isn't literature all about failure?), lonely characters and exiles leading what she called "the unlived life". She wrote in her 1984 Booker Prize winning novel, Hotel du Lac:

"In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game."

Some literary critics were rather harsh and unfair in their judgment when they assess her works and complain that she repeatedly wrote the same kind of story. But then, they seem to forget the words of Tolstoy, one of the greatest writers of all time, when he said: "All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger come to town." You will find that Anita Brookner engaged in both aspects brilliantly and passionately in her novels.

Every sentence she wrote is a sheer beauty, made in the elegiac tone, full of subtle evocations of vanished ways of life. All these things made a powerful impression on me. But what makes me so sad is that her death was not even mentioned in the national 6 o’clock news. There were no headlines. Apart from the online social media and the tributes paid by her contemporaries and famous writers, there is very little statement about her death in today's press cover and news bulletin.

I thought that being an infinitely reticent woman, she would probably have preferred this quiet and dignified way of leaving this world. This evening, I read one of the most beautiful paragraphs from her novel, Look At Me. My voice slightly choked with emotion but I read it out loud as a mark of respect to her while I sat on my favourite reading chair and who knows she may even be listening….

I shall leave you with her words:

 "It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world's tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state "I hurt" or "I hate" or "I want". Or indeed, "Look at me". And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, or thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory."