Once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And, in a way, that bends time, so long as it is remembered, it will indicate the future. It is wiser, in every circumstance, to forget, to cultivate the art of forgetting. To remember is to face the enemy. The truth lies in remembering.
I decided to read Anita Brookner’s Look At Me after hearing Trevor read an excerpt from it on the Mookse and Gripes episode about favorite passages. This is what he read:
And I did not write for many evenings that followed. In my new security I began to see it all in a different light. I began to hate that inner chemical excitement that made me run the words through in my head while getting ready to set them down on the page; I felt a revulsion against the long isolation that writing imposes, the claustration, the sense of exclusion; I felt a thrill of distaste for the alternative life that writing is supposed to represent. It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world’s tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present, and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state ‘I hurt’ or ‘I hate’ or ‘I want.’ Or, indeed, ‘Look at me.’ And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory.
Who could hear or read that and not be devastated by it? It’s an absolutely ruthless declaration of bitterness, alienation, and loneliness. Maybe it’s perverse that I wanted to go to this place, to meet this person for myself, to find out how her story surrounds this moment, to understand what kind of life encompasses it. Probably I would not have been tempted down this sad path by any other novelist, but Brookner is a maestro of misery—not the screaming or wailing kinds but the stealthily accumulating, erosive kinds—and in other novels she brings to her exploration of this grim territory a faint redemptive sympathy for her sad characters.
Does she do this for Frances, the wary, lonely narrator of Look At Me? Do we—should we—find compassion in our hearts for her? There’s definitely something pathetic about her, as we follow her through her unexpected and initially life-affirming friendship with Nick and Alix Fraser, who are so much brighter and more beautiful and more exciting than she is:
I slipped into the routine of dining with the Frasers, scarcely believing my good fortune. I registered with amazement the fact that Alix seemed to have taken to me, and that Nick accepted my presence in their flat without comment . . . I don’t think I was forcing my company on them, although I was avid for theirs.
What do they see in her? It is difficult (rightly so, it eventually proves) to take their interest in her at face value, as genuine friendship: she’s an audience, a useful hanger-on, a pet, a project, an object of quizzical condescension. Perhaps there is kindness there, but the Frasers (and Alix especially) are so self-centered that Fanny’s groveling readiness to accept any terms they offer becomes increasingly depressing.
And yet Fanny’s motives and character also seem uncomfortable: she is manipulative, jealous, reticent to a fault. I’m not sure she’s meant to be an unreliable narrator, strictly speaking, but she’s certainly not a trustworthy one. She reminds me very much of Lucy Snowe in Villette, cast in the role of a spectator to life, showing strength and resilience but also stubbornness, bitterness, and even malice as she endures her marginalization and denies her own desires, even to herself. Just as Lucy watches Dr. John fall in love with Ginevra, insisting all the while that her own heart is untouched, so Fanny refuses to admit her love for James Anstey, only eventually to realize that if he did ever have romantic feelings for her (which I’m not sure of, really), the moment for claiming them has irrevocably passed. Lucy and Fanny also both endure an absolutely nightmarish walk through their city, so overcome with their own emotions that it makes them physically ill. Here’s Fanny, making her way home across London late at night after seeing James in love (or lust, anyway), with another woman:
I was not very fast now, and my feet stumbled from time to time. I went past the sex shop, and the television rental company, past the ethnic hairdresser, whose fluorescent tube in the window blinked weakly, lessening my feelings of total desertion. I greeted the wax nurse in her spectral uniform like an old friend. I passed the banks and the supermarkets and the mysterious shops which seemed to have an air of dereliction about them and whose normal purposes I could now no longer remember. The rain had stopped but my coat was damp and it impeded me. I felt intimations of nightmare; I seemed to be making no headway. It was as if I were trying to wade through some viscous substance wearing an old-fashioned diving suit. There was no one in sight. There was no sound, apart from a distant rumble, which I could not identify. I was breathing harshly now and I could feel a pain in my chest; my hair stuck to my damp face in wisps, and I was very thirsty.
At the end of the walk she is home again, but there is no sense of comfort or reassurance: her flat is the life she doesn’t want, with its stasis and isolation and memories of illness and death. She tries to sleep, and waking up brings new pain as she forgets for a moment how bad everything is (“as if I were on holiday, being cared for, with a day full of surprises and treats ahead”) and then remembers again: “I think this is one of the cruelest tricks we play on ourselves,” she reflects, “this inability to banish early expectation.”
Writing, for Fanny, is no balm, no refuge, only a retreat—though I think we are meant to take Look At Me as a sign that it can also be revenge. I find myself wondering (not knowing much at all about Brookner herself) how she talked about her own writing. The passage Trevor read is such a crushing statement about writing as the last resort of the outcast. I’m reminded of a passage from Hotel du Lac that I often think about, spoken by Edith, the “romantic fiction” writer who is the protagonist of the novel:
In my books it is the mouse-like unassuming girl who gets the hero, while the scornful temptress with whom he has had a stormy affair retreats baffled from the fray, never to return. The tortoise wins every time. This is a lie, of course . . . In real life, of course, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Axiomatically . . . hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game. The propaganda goes all the other way, but only because it is the tortoise who is in need of consolation.
Look At Me offers no such consolation, especially if you recognize anything of yourself in “Little Orphan Fanny.” Fanny is a tortoise to the end, but her only victory is having the last word.
Novel Readings 