Vol. 4, Number 2	Summer 2001 issue

 

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There is a particular fascination with writers who launch their literary careers after working for most of their lives at some other occupation. Anthony Trollope toiled for decades at the Post Office; Joseph Conrad was a sea captain; Iris Murdoch taught ancient philosophy. Each wrote novels that to varying degrees show the impression made by, and are enriched by the perspective gained through, these "day jobs."

In this tradition we have Anita Brookner, a distinguished art historian who wrote her first novel, appropriately titled The Debut, when she was in her fifties. In the twenty years since that initial exercise, allegedly undertaken to ward off boredom during an empty London summer break, she has without apparent strain maintained an even summer-to-novel ratio. Her novels, particularly the Booker Prize-winning Hôtel du Lac, have won her an international reputation as our most sensitive chronicler of loneliness.

These books are numerous enough and characterized by such striking thematic unity that it is possible to summarize a "typical" Brookner novel: a highly educated London professional, usually a woman - resigned to a solitary life but plagued by a recurring desire to be stronger, less inhibited, more interesting - becomes entangled in a romantic, or, less often, a platonic connection with just the sort of vivacious, attention-getting individual she knows she can never become. Our protagonist ("heroine" would be inadvisable in light of the relentlessly anti-heroic temper of Brookner’s novels) embarks on a series of progressively more futile and desperate attempts to make the association durable, but her lover or friend in due course cheerfully abandons her for someone more lively. A pair of emotionally inaccessible and unreasonably demanding parents is usually lurking in the background, and the chief character often feels she is somehow congenitally marked for unhappiness.

What saves Brookner’s books from the unrelieved dreariness this synopsis might suggest is her understated humor and, even more crucially, the insight she gives us into a certain frame of mind, the refined, extraordinarily perceptive, self-contained sensibility of her protagonists. An ersatz-Brooknerian running commentary courses through one’s head for hours after putting down one of her novels. Hers is a way of looking at life that acknowledges the underlying unity of the tragic and comic.

It is this psychological acuity and unsentimental view of human experience that Brookner brings to bear on some of the major artistic figures of nineteenth-century France in Romanticism and Its Discontents. The subject allows her full scope to display both her academic expertise as a scholar of French painting and the unique perspective on literature that her vantage point as a practicing novelist affords her. Perhaps because we are so clearly on Brookner’s home turf, she assumes a dizzyingly high level of familiarity with the history of French literature and art; a number of her casually dropped last-name-only references sailed right by this reviewer.

Working in miniature as usual, Brookner structures her book as a collection of essays on French painters and writers from Antoine-Jean Gros to J.K. Huysmans. The Romantic movement, as Brookner makes clear, was a complex and pluralistic phenomenon, characterized by rebellion against what was perceived as the arid rationalism of the eighteenth century and by an attempt to forge a new mode of existence in the wake of the decline of the established institutions that rationalism had undermined. In this vacuum of authority, a new emphasis on the interior life of the individual and on the nuances of the relation between the individual and society exalted the creative alienation of the poète maudit as an end in itself. Brookner characterizes the movement as an acknowledgement of, if not always a genuine response to, Mme. du Deffand’s question to the eighteenth-century philosophe Voltaire: "Mais, M. de Voltaire, vous combattez et détruisez toutes les erreurs, mais que mettez-vous à leur place?" ("M. de Voltaire, you combat and destroy all the errors, but what do you put in their place?"). This effort to extract meaning from an existence shorn of illusions took a startling variety of forms, from the antinomianism of the poet William Blake, a strain of Romantic thought that culminated in the Europe-wide revolutionary ferment of 1848, to the conservative medieval nostalgia of Sir Walter Scott, the seminal figure in the development of the modern historical novel.

Brookner’s study, however, does not reflect this diversity: despite its sweeping title, the book is not a survey of Romanticism as a whole but rather a highly personal glance at the makers of a particular national Romantic tradition. This narrowness of scope perhaps accounts for the oddness of some of the book’s judgments, which are characterized by a Gallocentrism that borders on parochialism. Charles Baudelaire, for instance, assumes a towering centrality he would perhaps not be granted in a study that took account of developments outside the Parisian bohemian demi-monde.

Additionally, Brookner’s exploration of Romanticism shares the chief defect of her fiction: an unhealthy lack of attention to larger social and economic realities. Her novels are populated almost exclusively by members of the upper-middle class, and many of her protagonists are equipped with trust funds that insulate them from financial concerns: it is as if Brookner has consciously sought to avoid discussion of the economic dimensions of her characters’ lives. Similarly, in Romanticism and Its Discontents, Brookner discusses the convulsive changes in French artistic sensibility in the opening decades of the nineteenth century without reference to the rapid industrialization and urbanization that characterized the period. This unwillingness to situate art and artists in their social and political context lends her book a weightlessness that at times verges on the bizarre: the twenty-page essay on Emile Zola, for instance, devotes precisely one paragraph to his celebrated defense of French Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus from trumped-up and anti-Semitically motivated spying charges. While Brookner probably regrets that Zola is more familiar to twenty-first century readers for embroiling himself in an espionage case than for his reviews of the 1896 Salon, she cannot possibly believe that his bold stand against prejudice is as incidental to an understanding of his work as her glancing mention would lead one to think.

That Brookner presents us with such an anemic and apolitical Romanticism is partly attributable to her exclusive focus on France: how could a book that excludes Blake and the German revolutionary poet Heinrich Heine hope to address the political currents in Romantic art and writing? The international Romantic spirit translated itself into political action in a variety of unpredictable and contradictory ways that had repercussions through the twentieth century; rather than explore the relationship between the artistic and the political, Brookner occupies herself with such questions as what Eugène Delacroix really thought of Baudelaire.

It could be said of this book, however, that, like Brookner’s novels, it does very well what is within its scope of intent, a scope that is in this case maddeningly limited. Brookner locates the roots of French Romanticism in the First Empire; after Napoleon’s rise and fall, she explains, the enfants du siècle were saddled with "unlimited free will without the backing of established order or social support." It was this moral crisis, the dilemma faced by a post-Napoleonic generation of "resentful young men cheated of their chance at glory," that prompted Baudelaire to proclaim "the heroism of modern life." With characteristic subtlety, Brookner points out in each of her subjects a deep-seated ambivalence towards the dominant ideas of the immediate pre-Romantic era— "heroism," "classicism," and the like. She expertly exposes the shallowness of the clichéd conception of mid-nineteenth-century French painting as a Manichean struggle between Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, hidebound classicist, and Delacroix, wild-eyed Romantic; Brookner points out the Romantic richness of emotion latent in Ingres’s work and Delacroix’s insistence on viewing his own work as within the neoclassical tradition of Jacques-Louis David. Each essay weaves together biography and criticism to reveal the nuances of its subject’s relation to the abstraction "Romanticism." Unusually for Brookner, Romanticism and Its Discontents suffers from occasional sloppy writing: we are told twice in the space of three pages, for instance, that Ingres’s paintings made Baudelaire "physically ill," and the same anecdote about Delacroix’s fondness for Mozart and hearty country walks is recounted twice in the same essay.

As always, though, Brookner is capable of quiet but decisive unorthodoxy: an unexpected attempt is made, for example, to resuscitate the literary reputation of the Goncourt brothers, whose collaboratively written and meticulously documented novels were highly regarded by their contemporaries but whose names are now chiefly known through the literary prize they endowed. Her dry wit is less in evidence than in her best novels, but there is the occasional gem; she comments on one of Huysmans’s last novels: "the whole tenor of the story, with its simple confrontations of black and white and its grave acceptance of phenomena like incubi and succubi, demands a credulity which the author evidently possessed in greater quantity than most of his readers." It is sentences like these that remind us why Brookner is always worth reading; she knows how to laugh and how to live in a world without heroes.