Anita Brookner obituary

Anita Brookner, who has died aged 87, observed of Emile Zola, “One marvels at his ability to start another book almost as soon as one was finished.” Much the same could be said of Brookner herself, since from 1981, when she turned to fiction with A Start in Life, she published at the rate of a novel a year, easing up only at the end of the century.

Her feelings about being so prolific were mixed: “I don’t like writing fiction much; it’s like being on the end of a bad telephone line – but it’s addictive.” All the same, and although she wrote much else, it was for her fiction that Brookner was best known.

One of her earliest novels, and still the bestselling one, is Hotel du Lac (1984), which won the Booker prize from under the nose of JG Ballard, whose Empire of the Sun had been tipped as the winner. A television version came in 1986.

Its central character is an author of romantic women’s fiction, Edith Hope, who turns down an offer of marriage in the Swiss hotel to which she has escaped from a disastrous affair. Brookner’s narrative device of events punctuated by letters home from Edith is not new; indeed, it is as old as the Greek chorus, but Brookner deploys it with pointed originality. Like the Greek chorus it comments on the action; like an on-stage telephone conversation in a Noël Coward comedy it pushes the action unpredictably forward. However, the outcome is neither tragedy nor romantic resolution, but quiet resignation.

Until the novels started, Brookner had practised purely as an art historian. She was the first woman to hold the Slade chair of fine art at Cambridge University (1967-68), and was based principally at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

Like Kitty Maule, the central character of her second novel, Providence (1982), who sets off for adventures in France, she pitched her tent among the romantics, in her own case moving effortlessly between the writers Stendhal, Baudelaire and the Goncourt brothers, and the painters Delacroix, Ingres and Antoine-Jean Gros. She had started her career as an expert on French 18th-century art, but having heard Isaiah Berlin say that romanticism was at the root of all our problems, she decided to broaden her expertise.

She thought of her talent as a novelist as middle-class and middlebrow. Middlebrow is a harsh judgment: her stories of disillusion, personal betrayal, minor failure, and loneliness declining into death are too uncomfortable to have had a wide readership, but though their scope is narrow, beneath an immaculate mirror surface there are great depths.

Middle-class she certainly was. She did not at first appear to be cut out either for an academic career or to be a novelist. Anita was born in London, the only child of an unhappy Polish couple who had arrived with the name of Bruckner, tweaked into Englishness to escape the ignominy of bearing a Germanic name during the first world war. Her mother, Maude (nee Schiska), had been a professional singer; her father, Newson Brookner, was a gently failing businessman who at one point owned a lending library. They lived with her grandmother, and were surrounded by uncles, aunts and cousins.

As Brookner said in an interview with the Paris Review, “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.” Still, Newson provided her with a diet of Dickens and HG Wells.

She was educated at James Allen’s girls’ school in Dulwich, south-east London, before going on to King’s College London, which she disliked as much as she disliked her general degree course in French, history, and a third subject which she was so unenthusiastic about that she later professed to have forgotten what it was. Whatever it was, she would always neglect it in favour of a stroll down the Strand to listen to a public lecture at the National Gallery.

She knew nothing about art but she knew that she liked it. One of the lunchtime lecturers noticed her interest and suggested that she should switch to reading art history as her third option. She followed his advice and took a first in finals.

Anthony Blunt was professor of art history at London University as well as director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, and appears to have been rather better at talent-spotting aspiring art historians than he was at recruiting for the KGB. He persuaded Brookner to move on to an MA in art history at the Courtauld, and she did so well under his genial and sympathetic tuition that her thesis on the French genre artist Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) was upgraded to a doctorate.

Her teaching career, beginning in 1959 as a visiting lecturer at Reading University, where she remained until gaining a lectureship at the Courtauld in 1964, was distinguished by the lucidity and command of ideas that marked her writing as well. Nicholas Serota, the Tate director and another late convert to the study of art, did his MA at the Courtauld under her tutelage and remembered her as “an incredible teacher, really brilliant”.

By 1977 she was reader in art history, which she remained until she retired in 1988. A couple of years later she was appointed CBE.

Her first book, in 1968, was a slender monograph on the great and most mysterious of rococo artists, Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), a brilliant coup in which the first couple of hundred words encapsulate Watteau’s elusive style and subject matter better than most writers could do in a volume.

In 1972 came Greuze: The Rise and Fall of an 18th-Century Phenomenon. He was, she said in an off the cuff verdict, “extremely bad, sentimental and melodramatic, but a marvellous draughtsman with a gift for unexpectedly good portraits”. It was based on her thesis: she chose him because, she argued in the book, he was the bridge between the age of Louis XIV’s Versailles court culture and the severity of Jacques-Louis David’s stripped-down neoclassicism during the revolution and Napoleon’s days of imperial glory.

On David (1748-1825), Brookner wrote her magnum opus, Jacques-Louis David (1980), slogging through what sports writers call the hard yards, the kind of grafting research of primary documentation aimed at placing the subject in the canon and, of course, winning the professional regard of other historians that is often only grudgingly handed out to beautiful-phrase makers and wide-ranging themes.

Valuable though the David monograph remains, Brookner’s outstanding gift was for swift and penetrating synthesis – still with beautiful phrase-making. Her two books on the romantic movement in France, The Genius of the Future (1971), which was based on her Slade lectures at Cambridge, and Romanticism and Its Discontents (2000), will both continue to be read by a wider public, many of them precisely the kind of readers who enjoy her fiction.

Curiously enough, though Brookner’s art histories bubble with the delight of discovery and joyful exposition, her novels tend to describe a grey milieu of enervated, stranded and tentatively hopeless women. Her typical fictional character would be prone to headaches, especially after imbibing a glass or two of champagne, or, like the narrator’s mother in The Bay of Angels (2001), have retained her composure and dignity “by dint of suppressing almost every healthy impulse”. Even the optimism of that novel’s ending is strictly qualified by its guarded last words: “I realise, with a lifting of the heart, that it is not yet time to close the book.”

Not surprisingly, though Brookner kept a special place in her heart for Dickens, her favourite novel was Ivan Goncharov’s masterpiece Oblomov, a story, as she put it, “about a man who fails at everything”.

On the face of it we must accept Brookner’s assertion that there was no connection between her fiction and her non-fiction, but it is not that simple. In her art history she sometimes tosses a pebble into the pond and watches the ripples quietly spread: of Delacroix, for instance, she writes, “none of the struggle to achieve [the painting] need be effaced: the picture would be an event, a manifestation of the artist’s engagement with his art”.

This is to deploy the critical vocabulary developed to describe the work of Jackson Pollock: firstly the stress on the artist’s actions and the marks it leaves on the surface of the canvas rather than the subject; secondly the use of the word “event” to describe a canvas - a nodal point in 20th-century criticism after the American critic Harold Rosenberg used it to signify so-called action painting. Brookner feels it too much of an historical solecism to make the explicit link between the way Delacroix handles paint and the way Pollock drips it, so she merely implies it – which is the method of fiction, not of art history, and the better for it.

Her frequent witticisms, too, are barbs aimed across the centuries. Diderot, she writes, “is beginning to succumb to the art critic’s syndrome: a need to dismiss paint and canvas as vanity of vanities and a corresponding hunger for something great and unchanging”. And certain pupils of David, she remarks with feeling, “criticised their master’s works and went on to emulate the lilies of the field by producing practically nothing of their own: recognisable student behaviour, but unusual in that place at that time”.

Brookner guarded her privacy, if necessary laying down a smoke screen to do so. She did not marry but insisted that her books were not her children.

After her retirement, she would reiterate that, so far as visiting art galleries was concerned, she was now just another member of the public. Anyone who swallowed this would have been taken aback by the publication a dozen years later of Romanticism and Its Discontents (though she had kept in touch with articles in specialist journals).

True, she recycled large parts of it from The Genius of the Future, the title of which was lifted from a messianic phrase of Zola’s. The book itself, incidentally, contained a judgment on Zola which could apply almost in its entirety to her own practice: “He performed an immense service to the public which, if it cared to, could read an article on controversial contemporary painting which dispensed with the jargon of criticism.”

The Genius of the Future was an examination of the influence on their times of, apart from Zola, the critics Diderot, Stendhal, Baudelaire, the brothers Goncourt, and Joris-Karl Huysmans; the theme had been anticipated by Oscar Wilde in his brilliantly paradoxical essay The Critic As Artist. Romanticism and Its Discontents reintroduced that theme, but intermeshed with the work of the Romantic artists who had meant so much to the critics.

The flow of fiction came to an end with Leaving Home (2005), Strangers (2009) and an ebook novella, At the Hairdresser’s (2011). Her later, sparer novels were summed up by one reviewer as Beckett crossed with Mills and Boon. Mostly they were consummately crafted, though the occasional critic would complain about improbabilities. Brookner’s male characters tend to be charming cold-hearted cynics on the make; her women, gloomy though their lot is, are studies in depth, emotions flowing deep underground, and self-control; the shock of her drama, although domestic, nevertheless registers high on the Richter scale.