An ideal companion
Richard Shone
SOUNDINGS by Anita Brookner Harvill, £16.99, pp. 214 Those of us of a certain age who remember Anita Brookner as an art histo- rian before she became the premier Miss Lonelyhearts of contemporary fiction will welcome Soundings. The major part of it brings together several lectures and reviews on French art of the 18th and 19th centuries, the subject which chiefly engaged her in an earlier incarnation as Reader in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute. But to her lectures on Gericault, Ingres and Delacroix and book reviews concerning painters and writers of the period are added three miscellaneous pieces on Doris Lessing, The Book of Job and Diana Trilling's account of Mrs Harris, the murderer of Dr Tarnower, inventor of the Scarsdale Diet. This strikes my tidy mind as peculiar. Brookner wrote widely on French art and there are pieces by her — in the Burlington Magazine, for example — which merit disinterment. Surely the reviews on topics other than art should have been kept for another volume. Adding to the tentative feel of this collec- tion is its paucity of illustrations — three black-and-whites only. Not everyone can quickly lay their hands on a reproduction of Ingres' Mme Moitessier' or Gericaules `Cavalry Officer Charging' to test Brook- ner's descriptive and analytic powers. This parsimony was an editorial mistake.
I like to think of the young Anita Brookner, alone, I presume, in Paris, mak- ing her way round the galleries and sending her reviews to the encouraging Benedict Nicolson at the Burlington. She became one of his most reliable and valued contribu- tors, fusing, through elegant prose, scholar- ly judgment with an inner eye. Later, her Genius of the Future examined the influen- tial contribution to French art criticism of Stendhal, Baudelaire, the Goncourts, Zola and others. In Britain such ambidextrous figures have hardly existed, partly, it must be supposed, because its art was, with a couple of exceptions, greatly inferior to France's in the 19th century. Today, there is a fashion for novelists and poets to write about art. They are often absurd and eccentric in opinion, frequently adopt a biographical mode and avoid any knotty problems of theory and history. Brookner has never confused criticism and fiction, although I am sure there is a good thesis to be written on the subject of the visual arts in her novels. Who will forget, for example, the perfectly timed introduction of the Royal Academy's Sickert exhibition into her novel A Private View? But she may not thank us, perhaps, for spying those Brooknerish touches in her writing on art, notably the characteristic opening to her piece on the animal painter Rosa Bonheur: `Abroad, in provincial cities, indolent and homesick, one turns, as ever, to the muse- um.' Again, she savours human character, its foibles and disappointments above all, and one comes away with a handful of con- vincing profiles — of Corot and Moreau (with his `unlived life'), of Judith Gautier and Louise Colet. But never does she lose sight of the canvas or book before her, nor the backbone of theory that strengthens each review.
There is a highly sympathetic moment when Brookner monitors the turn of schol- arly attention from the landmark figures of the 19th century — Manet, Cezanne, Gau- guin — to the unvisited byways of the Salon, the preposterous pompiers and ephemeral provincial masters with their `terrible colour, glistening craquelure, instant respectability, infinite tedium'. In 1981 when she wrote this, she could not have foretold the subsequent avalanche of exhumed corpses that has provided sub- jects for exhibitions, theses, monographs and catalogues raisonnes. While admitting the necessity of seeing enduring artists within the context of their time, of saluting the genuine contributions of good minor painters, she is refreshingly defiant in her worship of great men. If Cogniet, Scheffer, Couture, Bonheur are 'wonder- ful', 'exhilarating', 'masters of their art', what words are left for the achievements of David and Ingres, Manet and Cezanne?
It is therefore a relief to find that Brookner's most pungent and synthetic commentaries in Soundings take as their subjects three great figures of the earlier 19th century — Gericault, Ingres and Delacroix. Although her narrative of Geri- caules short life is paced with gusto, Brookner seems less at home with the pathology of his self-torturing personality. She is better on the profound complexities of Ingres, 'the most massive French genius of his time' who transformed Mme Moitessier, a banker's adipose wife wearing a 'stupendous flowered creation', into the `Delphic oracle' we know from the Nation- al Gallery. Delacroix, 'perhaps the most glamorous artistic personality since Rubens', excites her sympathy and deepens the shadows of her thought. She sees him as the reluctant conduit of High Romanti- cism whose character embodied classical virtues, as a man who was both innovatory and reactionary, gregarious and aloof, a master at disguising his own acute self- knowledge.
In her reviews, as opposed to the lec- tures, Brookner is obviously tied to the given text. Even so, she quickly floats free, leaving the book behind after a punctilious phrase or two. Exceptionally, her review of Michael Fried's Absorption and Theatricali- ty closely attends to his text and Brookner's initial doubts turn into general demolition — a process delicious to follow when the book is so famous and so ridiculous.
The majority of the pieces here were written 15 or more years ago when Brook- ner was still attached to the Courtauld. She did not have to take on board the 'New Art History' which burgeoned in the early 1980s and Soundings is free of abstruse hypothesising and jargon. Nevertheless, a visible hem of feminism and a sharp atten- tion to the social and political context of the production of works of art give a timely edge to her investigations. The intellectual furniture may be familiar, even safe, but she rearranges the room, retaining comfort but providing unexpected vistas. These days, Brookner is rarely persuaded to write about art — the biennial novel keeps her busy. I, for one, regret the loss of her mea- sured, inquisitive voice in the current Babel of art historians.
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