PENGUIN DECADES
Latecomers
Anita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her twenty-fifth, Strangers, in 2009. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism.
Latecomers was Anita Brookner’s eighth novel, published in 1988, four years after she won the Booker Prize with Hotel du Lac. Reviewing the book when it first appeared, Ruth Rendell wrote that ‘She has never written a better novel… There are only inadequate words (except her own) in which to convey how searchingly gentle it is, how almost unbearably moving.’
Helen Dunmore is a poet, novelist and short-story writer. Among other awards her work has received the Orange Prize for Fiction, the McKitterick Prize, the Signal Poetry Award and the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Award. Her latest novel is The Betrayal. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Latecomers
ANITA BROOKNER
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1988
Published with a new introduction in Penguin Books 2010
Copyright © Anita Brookner, 1998
Introduction copyright © Helen Dunmore, 2010
The moral right of the author and of the introducer has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
ISBN: 978-0-14-195955-9
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Introduction
Archive photographs of the Kindertransport show dozens of Jewish children being marshalled along German railway platforms, or streaming off a ship newly arrived in Harwich from the Hook of Holland. In one image, a single child in a knitted woollen helmet clutches a soft toy while an identifying number hangs around her neck. These children left parents, home, language, culture and all familiarity for a new life in Britain, and in many cases never saw their parents again after the last goodbyes at a railway station. When the war was over, the long silence from home crystallized into the knowledge that their families had been murdered. The world of German Judaism into which many of the children had been born had all but disappeared.
Photography may appear to have frozen the Kindertransport children in time, solemn, bewildered and dressed in their best, facing a cameraman who is as unknown to them as the destination to which they are travelling. But unlike so many of their contemporaries, who might have been caught on film for a fleeting second, leaving a ghetto with their hands above their heads, the Kindertransport children lived to adulthood. Their cargo of memory was as heavy as it was incomplete.
Latecomers centres on the lives of two boys who were seven and twelve when they were brought to England. Hartmann, the elder, remembers both his parents and the life he led as a child in Munich, in scenes ‘that might have been devised by Proust’. These memories are lit with splendour. In a luxurious emporium, his father points out a pineapple or a box of peaches, and has them taken out to the car. At Nymphenburg, the summer residence of the rulers of Bavaria, the young Hartmann plays with his childhood sweetheart. But he does not remember – because he has not witnessed it, and also because he is determined to shut his mind to it – the moment when his parents were ‘driven off, never to be seen again’.
Hartmann meets his younger friend Fibich when they are both sent away to school in England. These two, united against the miseries of the school, become each other’s family and remain so for the rest of their lives. The growing-up of Fibich and Hartmann, their establishment of a successful business and their conduct of courtship, marriage and fatherhood resemble the slow, careful construction of bulwarks against the past. Brookner creates brilliant portraits of each man individually, and of the tender, stringent, humorous and profound relationship between them. Neither Hartmann nor Fibich can imagine life without the other, although their approaches to life are radically different.
Hartmann has decided to resist time and memory by becoming ‘deliberately euphoric’. He will live in the present, nurturing and sustaining the small pleasures of each day. Hartmann is a great frequenter of restaurants, with a keen sense of what is due to every relationship, no matter how slight. His enquiries after the family of the head waiter are genuine; he respects and is respected. He weaves the minor delights of an excellent cup of coffee or a wander in the sun into the larger design of a family life which he values all the more because he never entirely trusts to its permanence. Brookner creates a marvellously subtle, knowledgeable and worldly character in Hartmann; few novelists could suggest his depths so convincingly while delighting so thoroughly in the gloss of his surfaces.
But while Hartmann has set out to defeat the past, Fibich fears that he will never lose his habitual anguish unless he discovers more about its sources. In order to regain these lost years he embarks on therapy. His analyst, Mrs Gebhardt, possesses a ‘transfixing but fallacious maternal aura’, and does her best to force Fibich towards her own rigid goals of memory release and emotional fluency. The outcome of this is ‘the odd fragment, the odd image, extracted under kindly coercion from a mass of fear which was very slow to abate’. There is a good deal of comedy in this essentially tragic novel, and Brookner handles Mrs Gebhardt and her practice with glinting humour.
The Hartmann and Fibich families live in the greatest possible intimacy, on two floors of the same comfortable building near Westminster Cathedral. Children are born, one to each family, and the children’s beauty – as well as their sheer existence – seems almost incredible to their parents. Toto and Marianne are the future which should never have come to be, if the Fibich and Hartmann families had been wiped out as planned. They, too, protected and even spoiled as they are, must deal with their inheritance.
The Fibich/Hartmann family li
fe is described with considerable irony as well as warmth. Hartmann chooses a wife in his secretary Yvette, who possesses an almost fabulous self-regard, a wonderful body and a childlike lack of sexual response. Fibich’s wife, Christine, is a more immediately fragile figure, marked by early losses and oblivious of her own beauty. And yet both marriages not only survive but thrive. Brookner’s view of marriage is searching: people may not find in it what they think they are going to get, but if they allow the marriage to work – as yeast works – they will discover just how powerful and necessary it can become. Something similar happens in the relationship between the parents and children, who, in the long fall from the grace of their infant perfections, become only more fiercely lovable.
The brilliance of Latecomers lies in the way every cherished domestic detail is set against an immense dark canvas. This canvas is not static; it billows and ripples, threatening to come forward and wrap itself around the light, extinguishing it. Once you have seen your mother faint in anguish at the separation from your seven-year-old self in a Berlin station, and known that she fainted because you would die if you remained, and she would die without you, then how do you put aside such knowledge sufficiently to live a life? Fibich cannot answer this question; Hartmann begs him not to ask it, but just to keep on living. Fibich’s solitary journey to Berlin, which is the dramatic climax of the novel, although not its emotional one, is a frightening experience for any reader to share. And yet, as Fibich discovers, ‘although he was face to face with the terror and the alienation and the longing, he was nevertheless somehow still on his feet. He had not died of it.’
Fibich’s journey does not offer resolution, any more than Latecomers offers it. Brookner has no interest in pastiche renderings of what the past might be supposed to feel. Her subject here is the continuing action of the past within the present. Fibich is a handsome man in his late middle-age, and cadaverous in spite of his greed. He eats even when he is not hungry, but without the sensuous pleasure which Hartmann takes in all his appetites. Even when sitting comfortably at home in his own chair, reading or listening to music, Fibich can be struck through ‘with a pang, as if home were somewhere else’. He is haunted by the ghost of ‘a very small, very plump boy, engulfed in a large wing chair which he knew to be called the Voltaire, feeling lazy, replete, and secure in the dying light of a winter afternoon’. The child whom Fibich once was did not evolve into the adult Fibich, but was traumatically erased by the terrors of separation and refugee life. The man must try to survive this erasure.
Anita Brookner is the most European of British novelists. Without generalization, rhetoric or flourish, she lays bare the aftermath of the disaster which overwhelmed the Jews of Europe. Latecomers is arguably the most moving of her novels, and also one of the most rich in comedy. Like Jane Austen, Brookner focusses on a small group of characters in a defined locality, who are richly real in their inner life, customs and social behaviour. Like Austen, Brookner knows that while we laugh at the absurd, we also laugh, in some sense, when we feel love. Hartmann, in his careful and joyous buying of cheese, is filled ‘with a sense of completion for which many more metaphysically inclined men might envy him’. The fact that Hartmann lives and buys cheese becomes almost frighteningly vital, in the context of so much death and loss. The reader of Latecomers, loving Hartmann too, laughs with him and shares his sense of completion.
Helen Dunmore
1
Hartmann, a voluptuary, lowered a spoonful of brown sugar crystals into his coffee cup, then placed a square of bitter chocolate on his tongue, and, while it was dissolving, lit his first cigarette. The ensuing mélange of tastes and aromas pleased him profoundly, as did the blue tracery of smoke above the white linen tablecloth, the spray of yellow carnations in the silver vase, and his manicured hand on which the wedding ring fitted loosely, without those deep indentations that afflict the man who has gained weight or age, a man to whom in any case his wedding might be presumed to be an affair of the irrelevant past. Hartmann gazed around the hotel dining-room, coming to rest benevolently on the youngish men with briefcases at the adjoining tables – middle management, he believed they were called – for whom lunch was inextricably bound up with discussions of a business nature. My dears, you do not look well, thought Hartmann: your complexions are not clear, your haircuts unbecoming. You give your time and attention to business and save too little for yourselves. There is not a lot of point in talking about a zero-growth scenario, as you are apparently prepared to do, if you are going to dispatch a lobster cocktail followed by steak and kidney pie: mineral water will not save you. He himself ate sparingly, grilled fish with a vegetable, followed by coffee. He had long ago learned the pleasures of sobriety, of extracting the essence from the example, of attaining and completing rather than striving and collapsing. He would not even allow himself a second cigarette. That would come much later, after his frugal dinner. Since his wife had started going to evening classes, he preferred to prepare something for himself. Before going back to the office he would select and buy cheese: another treat, another exercise in worth.
Hartmann aspired to the sublime. If, as Hegel says, in the true sublime a sharp consciousness of inadequacy is required, Hartmann resided somewhere in the more comfortable territory of the false sublime, for inadequacy rarely troubled him. He considered his life’s work to lie in the perfecting of simple pleasures, mainly of a physical or domestic nature, far from the strife and pain of more ambitious purposes. The idea of God, for example, he rejected as derogating from his own serene existence. To the proposition, ‘I am that I am’, Hartmann, if he ever thought about it, would have replied, ‘Et moi?’, not meaning any disrespect, but rather acknowledging a simple division of activities in which paths would never cross. On the other hand, a mundane task supremely devised and carried out, however small – the buying of cheese, for example – filled him with a sense of completion for which many more metaphysically inclined men might envy him. Hartmann’s joy was apparent in his beautifully cut hair, his expensive suit, his manicured hands, the faint aura of cologne that heralded his approach; in his mild and habitually smiling face, too, his expressive walk, in which the body, leaning slightly forward, seemed to indicate amiability, a desire to please. He was now middle-aged, in the closing stages of middle age, even old, he daringly thought. He had an impressionistic attitude towards his age, as he did towards his daughter’s marriage, sometimes resigned to it, sometimes deciding to ignore it entirely. Thus it occasionally pleased him to take up the benign posture of an elderly man while safe in the secret knowledge that he had plenty of time in hand. Now in his sixties, he felt himself to be unchanged from his earlier self, but noticeably improved on the miserable boy whom he tried not to remember. There were in fact certain memories that Hartmann had consigned to the dust, or to that repository that can only be approached in dreams. For this reason Hartmann took a sedative every night and ensured untroubled sleep. He defended this practice, as he defended all his habits, as sensible: his own glossy head was his best justification. ‘I eat well. I sleep well,’ he was in the habit of saying, when asked how he did. ‘What else is there?’ He knew there was more, but thought that wisdom consisted in reducing the purchase of such nebulous matters or indeed of any imponderables that might darken his own impeccable consciousness.
However, no man is free of his own history. Hartmann was no exception. But in the interests of damage limitation he had struck a bargain with the fates: he would, in so far as he could, employ the maximum good will at his disposal in an effort to screen out the undesirable, the inadvertent, those shocks against which the mere mortal is powerless. He would, he had long ago decided, be deliberately euphoric. It was a technique which he could practise and perfect, although sometimes it nearly eluded him. Thus, from his earliest days, he remembered scenes that might have been devised by Proust. He remembered his father, in a magnificently odorous and gleaming emporium, pointing with his cane to a pineapple, a box of peaches, and asking for them to
be taken out to the car. Or himself, when tiny, walking with his nurse in the Englische Garten. Or first love, at the age of ten, and a game of hide-and-seek with the beloved at Nymphenburg, beside the long paths rustling with fallen leaves and the commotion of birds. He did not remember, because he had never witnessed the event, his elegant parents, dressed for some fête-champêtre, being hoisted, slightly puzzled, on to farm carts, but behaving with good grace, thinking this part of the entertainment. They were driven off, never to be seen again, but how could he know that? How could one remember absence? Was it not one’s duty to fill the void, when there were so many agreeable ways of doing so? He had a sense of his own life progressing to its conclusion and was therefore ruthless in dispensing with the past, since every minute of the present must be valued. And, after all, he had survived: that was all that mattered in any life. And he was here, in this hotel dining-room, waiting for his bill, replete, contented, even lively. What mattered was to intensify the pleasure, to ensure that it might be repeated. On such satisfactions Hartmann constructed his happiness.
He cast a long lingering glance at the middle management, now flushed and talkative, and reflected how even his business life managed to avoid such infelicities. It may have pleased his gloomy partner, Fibich, to behave like a harassed salesman, to eat a sandwich at his desk or to stir his tea furiously with an HB pencil, but that was not his way. Fibich felt guilty about having made so much money so easily: that was his way. Hartmann mentally shrugged his shoulders at the folly of such a reaction. He had never been ambitious, driven, ruthless, as so many men seemed to be. Even Fibich thought such behaviour ridiculous. There was even, to Hartmann, something reassuring about the absurdity of their trade: greetings cards, of a cruel and tasteless nature, which had paid their way very nicely for about twenty years, until Hartmann, who did little work but was valued for his Fingerspitzengefühl, his flair, his sixth sense, suggested that the market in this commodity was self-limiting, and that there were fortunes to be made in photocopying machines. They had both been printers by trade in the years that Hartmann had forgotten about, and it was easy for them to diversify from their original specialization. Of course the work was anathema to them both, but the money was charming, delightful. Fibich, clutching his neuralgic head, might groan at every suggestion that Hartmann put to him, but it was understood between them that they would agree on everything, as they did, and always had done, the ebullient Hartmann literally dragging Fibich along with him, into sheds, warehouses, shops, wherever their greetings cards had led them. And now they sat in splendour in Spanish Place, in an office got up to look like a flat, for domesticity was important to them both. Each had a room or salon, in which decisions were taken; coffee was served morning and afternoon. Their accountant, Roger Myers, and their company secretary, John Goodman, shared the apartment, though slightly less expansively; their typists were encouraged to take time off for shopping. Thus a family atmosphere was maintained, for which neither Hartmann nor Fibich thought to take any particular credit. It was simply that they preferred to feel themselves at home, for the idea of home was central to their lives.
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