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Love's Labors Lost and Transcribed
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19681 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
2,598 Words |
| Author
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Linda Simon
Linda Simon is professor of literature at Skidmore College
and a frequent contributor to The World & I. |
BRIEF LIVES
Anita Brookner
New York: Random House, 1991
260 pp., $19.00
Anita Brookner was born in London in 1928, the only child of Polish Jews who, she said later, never should have had children. Her parents created an environment that made her feel like an outsider, both to her family and to British culture. She found solace in books, favoring expansive nineteenth-century novels by James, Flaubert, Zola, and especially Dickens. Like many females at the time, she was raised to marry young, have children, and devote herself to home and family. Instead, she attended the University of London and then the prestigious Courtauld Institute, taking a Ph.D. in art history. In 1964, she joined the faculty of the Courtauld as a noted authority on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art.
In the 1960s and '70s she published several scholarly volumes on art history, gilding a distinguished reputation. Her attraction to the eighteenth century was not arbitrary: "I do like a rational world," she explained to an interviewer once, "rational explanations and good humour and fearlessness." She admired, she said, "the energy of the eighteenth century. ... If you have a cause, you have to propound it with energy."
Her "cause" shifted suddenly from art history to fiction in 1980, when she began to work on her first novel. The motivation for the shift remains mysterious. "I had a long summer vacation in which nothing seemed to be happening," she said, "and I could have got very sorry for myself and miserable, but it seemed such a waste of time to do that, and I'd always got a lot of nourishment from fiction. I wondered--it just occurred to me to see whether I could do it. I didn't think I could. I just wrote a page, the first page, and nobody seemed to think it was wrong. ... So I wrote another page, and another, and at the end of the summer, I had a story. That's all I wanted to do--tell a story."
That story was published in the United States in 1981 as A Start in Life (its British title was The Debut) and served as a prototype for Brookner's subsequent fiction. A Start in Life focuses on Ruth Weiss, a forty-year-old literary scholar who specializes in Balzac's fiction. Ruth's life is circumscribed by her work and her responsibility to her aging parents. She is a kind, good woman with no social life, few friends, and no outlet for her repressed passions. Finally, in a daring moment, she decides
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