Hunger art: the novels of Anita Brookner

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1995 by Ann Fisher-Wirth

I feel only relief when Edith finally refuses to negate her desire and enter a marriage of convenience with Mr. Neville. Brookner, however, has seemed to disagree. "She balks at the last minute," Brookner remarks of Edith in her Paris Review interview. "As I wrote it I felt very sorry for her and at the same time very angry; she should have married ... and at least gain some worldly success, some social respectability. I have a good mind to let her do it in some other novel and see how she will cope! " (154). The appalling results of such coping are the subject of A Closed Eye. Harriet Lytton, the protagonist, makes a self-damning marriage such as Edith Hope refuses, not for her own comfort -- for she is perfectly happy living with her parents and working in a bookstore -- but for the sake of her mother, Merle, whose pleasure-loving habits are cramped by a child. Resolutely she embraces numbness, death-in-life, with her kind but boring, much older husband, to whom she is little more than "a restful presence and a compliant body" (48), but her calm domestic silences mask an inner tumult which cathects in longing for her best friend's husband, Jack. For decades she does not act upon these longings, and when she does, it is not only to act -- that is, she presents herself to Jack, kisses him twice, but goes no further. What is fascinating about Harriet is the extent to which she chooses to live "a life not of her choosing" (102). She feels "dread" (62) for her life, which is "an age without a name" (87);(1) she lives with a "cowering feeling of dismay" (102); yet she refuses to speak, to change, so consciously, so intensely, that she reveals herself as starving for starvation. She can only live as hunger, in a state of what Rilke calls "unlived life, of which one can die" (Letters 64, qtd. in Levertov 90). Yet hers is no common reticence; she has no moral scruples that might keep her from adultery. Hunger feeds her, as life would not. The question, then, is why.

If I digress, I may suggest an answer. When Brookner published Latecomers in 1988, it seemed to indicate a radically new direction in her fiction. Widely hailed as a breakthrough, Latecomers departs from Brookner's earlier desolate, retiring heroines to focus on the friendship of Hartmann and Fibich, two aging European jews who meet when they arrive as little boys in England, having been sent from Berlin by parents who then vanish in the Holocaust. Only Fibich's wife, Christine, an important but secondary character, continues in the line of Brookner's earlier protagonists. Mostly, the novel is an aching hymn of thanksgiving for the resiliency of the human spirit and for the friendship that has enabled Hartmann and Fibich to survive their childhood losses; the novel's refrain, "Look, we have come through," comes from the title of a book of poems by D. H. Lawrence. When I read Latecomers several years ago, I thought that Brookner, too, had "come through," that she had reached the true source of her sorrow and would begin more openly to explore her place in history as the child of Polish Jews brought up in exile in a tragic century. Certainly Latecomers has a range the other novels lack, in its moving exploration of the human results of political devastation. And yet, rereading it in the light of A Closed Eye, I see, not how different Latecomers is from the other novels, but how similar -- and in fact, how quintessential -- for Latecomers most dramatically expresses the originary moment, the constitutive loss, that informs all of Brookner's fiction and that, for instance, lies buried beneath the more obvious desolations of Hotel du Lac, A Friend from England, and A Closed Eye.