Internationally eminent as an art historian and critic, Anita Brookner is author of Watteau; The Genius of the Future; Greuze; and Jacques-Louis David. In 1968 she was the first woman ever to be Slade Professor at Cambridge. A Start in Life marked her debut as a novelist in 1981, followed the next year by Providence – both books being applauded for their sad and authentic knowledge, and for high wit and style – though Look at Me (1983) drew from some reviewers the opinion that it seemed too dreary in its exact truth-telling. Born of Polish parents, uncompromisingly honest, crisply-spoken, Dr Brookner lives in a trim modern flat in South Kensington. Insisting to herself that her stories should be ‘earthed’ in reality, she has now established a pattern of working out’ dreadful summers’ by producing a novel each year (‘I literally want to see if I can do it again’) in her office at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

This month she flourishes back on her best intriguing form: Hotel du Lac is published by Jonathan Cape, £7.95.

The heroine of your third novel, Look at Me, is striving to write a novel, and she regards it as a penitential activity. Is that your own view?

Yes, it gives me a headache. The reason why I’ve written novels is penitential and possibly useful. I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness: I felt I was drifting and obscure, and I rebelled against that. I didn’t see what I could do to change my condition. I wanted to control rather than be controlled, to ordain rather than be ordained, and to relegate rather than be relegated

Look at Me is the most serious – or perhaps the most unrelievedly sober – of your novels. I’ve wondered if it was actually the first you wrote?

No, they were published in the order they were written. Look at Me is a very depressed and debilitated novel, and it’s one I regret. When I published it, a very old friend of my mother’s summoned me and said, ‘You are getting yourself a bad reputation as a lonely woman. Stop it at once.’ She was right: it sticks.

But would it be true to say that your novels speak of your own condition?

The particulars are all invented, but they speak of states of mind which forced me to do something about those states of mind. In that sense they are very impure novels, and that gives me a lingering feeling of unpleasantness. The most recent, Hotel du Lac, is the least impure; it’s invention pure and simple.

Hotel du Lac offers a little parable about being a novelist, I think, in so far as Edith Hope seeks to investigate the lives of other people – testing her percipience – and to make sense of them.

She never does, of course. She never gets it right, and that’s why she has to fall back on her own resources of invention.

You make your novels sound like a sort of self-therapy.

Well, if it were therapy I wish it had worked. It doesn’t work that way, which is why I have to keep on doing it. I felt impelled by irritation with circumstances and life, which seemed to me so badly plotted. The morality of novels – in which judgements are meted out – very much recommends itself to me. I am always reading novelists like Trollope whose moral standards are clear within the framework of the novel: the bad are seen through, which is not the case in real life and everyday intercourse. It affects me bitterly – I despair of it – that hypocrisies can be entertained and impudent behaviour preferred, betrayals laughed off and promises broken: I can’t bear that.

In Providence, Kitty Maule wishes she had told her students that, so far as the conduct of life is concerned, being attractive and engaging works better than moral fortitude.

Yes, I see it every day. If you don’t practise to deceive, as you shouldn’t, it is particularly hard when deception is practised on you, and you write novels out of that sense of injustice … or you go under. I think this sense goes for everyone who is perhaps a little timid and never quite successful and ever hopeful.

You have been extraordinarily successful in your professional career at least.

I dispute that. Success is what other people say you are, and I don’t feel it.

Does your own background reflect that of your heroines? Do you have eccentric parents or ancestry?

Yes, they were Polish Jews. My mother was born here, my father in Poland. I loved them painfully, but they were fairly irascible and unreliable people. They should never have had children; they didn’t understand children and couldn’t be bothered. There was a fairly thriving family business, transplanted from Europe, which went under and came up again. As a matter of fact I’m trying to write a novel about that, but I very much doubt that I shall finish it – it seems so heartless at the moment. My parents are dead now, so one can’t go home again. They were mismatched, strong-willed, hot tempered, with a very great residual sadness which I’ve certainly inherited. We never had much fun. I am now alone, which takes a bit of getting used to; one has to nerve oneself every day. It really is existential living

One issue that comes up in Providence is the idea that Existentialism is perhaps a late manifestation of Romanticism

I would now say that it is anti-Romanticism: it gets rid of all the hopes and the belief that things are worth pursuing. I think my parents’ lives were blighted – and in some sense mine is too – largely by this fact of being outside the natural order, being strangers in England, not quite understanding what was happening and being done to them.

You were entirely brought up in England, with a regular schooling?

Yes, but I’ve never been at home here. I took on protective colouring at a very early age, but it didn’t stick. I went to King’s College and then to the Courtauld, and I nursed my parents until they died: it’s a dreary, Victorian story, with this added complication of not being English. People always say I’m so serious and depressing, but it seems to me that the English are never serious – they are flippant, complacent, ineffable, but never serious – and this is maddening. The English think they’re ineffable, so they are: it’s self-referential, all the time. So I don’t know what to do and I don’t know what to be: I think it may be insoluble.

Do you not identify yourself as a real person?

No, I’m absolutely passive, like blotting paper. I really feel invisible.

Have you been through psychoanalysis?

No, and I wouldn’t do it now: it would take too long.

You clearly committed yourself to an enormous emotional investment in writing Look at Me.

It didn’t pay off. I saw it through, and predictably I was ill afterwards.

It’s a very desolating story in which nothing really happens, other than Frances Hinton’s yearning to be admitted to the ranks of the glamorous and charismatic people – people who are in fact careless, like the Buchanans in The Great Gatsby.

It is indeed. I’m very envious of careless people. It’s about not being able to be like them, and how the rewards of being that sort of person are infinitely greater. Their moral status ceases to be relevant, which is the desolating aspect.

The surprising thing in your novels is that the heroines never show a trace of cynicism, despite what they discover about relationships.

I wish they could. I am constantly flattened by surprise.

And you don’t portray any outrage at the egotism of others.

No, I don’t see how you can. Basically I want to know how other people are.

In a little piece in The Author (Summer 1984) you have written, ‘since I believe that writers of fiction … are in some curious way the only people telling the truth, I would expect them to feel pretty unlucky anyway’. Is the truth always such bad news?

It’s the Cassandra complex. I learned sad truths quite early, and I never really got out of those coils – that life is a serious and ultimately saddening business. There are moments when you feel free, moments when you have energy, moments when you have hope, but you can’t rely on any of these things to see you through. Circumstances do that.

I think all your heroines act in a very deterministic way, and Kitty Maule in Providence actually announces herself as a Determinist. Do you believe that no force of decision or positive moves can change fate?

I think one’s character or predisposition determines one’s fate, I’m afraid.

At what stage did you come to that conclusion?

Within the last five years. Before that I was quite buoyant and much more energetic. It’s a very perverse energy which has gone into the novels – conversion hysteria, I would say. If I could say it I would: as I can’t say it, I have to write it. And I can’t say it because there is no one to listen: people don’t want to hear it. I wish I could cry, scream, stamp, make myself felt, but I can’t. Other people don’t want to hear: they find it embarrassing, out of bounds.

Presumably many people wouldn’t quite recognise what it is that you want to cry out against in life. You are successful on two counts: as an academic and as a novelist whose books have received a favourable press.

But the centre cannot hold. Those two activities that you’ve mentioned are outside the natural order. I only ever wanted children: six sons.

Not as extensions of yourself?

Not at all. I wanted characters quite different from myself. I wanted to get away from my own family and to be absorbed in another, more regular set-up, instead of being this grown-up orphan with what you call success. That’s the sort of rank statement which I wish I hadn’t made, but it is true. My grandfather on my mother’s side saw England as the most liberal country in the world: he adored it and adopted every English mode that he could find. But European habits of thought – melancholy, introspection – persisted, and it’s a bad mix: it was thicker than the English air.

In terms of your professional life, what particularly attracted you towards the eighteenth century?

The Enlightenment, and the fact that it might just have come out right. The Romantic movement came along and bowled it all over. I do like a rational world: rational explanations and good humour and fearlessness. I’m talking about the eighteenth century in France, painters and writers who by today’s standards were extraordinarily uninhibited … and guiltless …

I felt in reading The Genius of the Future that you were actually plotting this sorry decline of responses from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century.

Yes, I think that’s true. It’s a course I still teach, and the students automatically respond more to the later end of the period: they can more easily identify with complexes than with the guilt-free energy and enthusiasm there was at the beginning. They have no regrets for what has been lost or foregone.

When you published that book, in 1971, you wrote that art criticism today had become a ‘rigid toadying exercise’. Did you feel you’d become mired in a false profession at that time?

Yes, I saw a lot of unwise and imprudent decisions. Now there’s too much Gettyism, the idea that if a thing can be financed it must be right and desirable.

Did you ever formulate for yourself what you thought art criticism should achieve, what it should vindicate or vali-date? Was it the importance of being a philosophe, a concern with the morality of art?

Exactly that. As I teach, it seems to me that it doesn’t really matter what your subject is as long as you are teaching method The material is there for anyone to use if they care to, but getting it in the right perspective is very important. A moral and an historical perspective. What attracted me to art history is the power of images, which act differently from words. Images recur in a way that words don’t. Dreams are usually wordless, but they’re full of images, and an image can carry over in some mysterious way and generate things. Images are more powerful and primitive than words.

I think I have the impression that you would discriminate between the ‘message’ of a work of art and its style.

Probably. Subject/object is one thing, presentation is another: presentation is the artist’s own slant on what he sees, and in that sense style and moral style are compatible. The artists of the eighteenth century were obsessed with pulling order out of the surrounding chaos, whereas in the nineteenth-century it seemed more powerful and more valid to dissolve order … more true to the human condition. But order always has to be wrestled out of chaos. Nowadays we have no communal enterprise. It’s odd how even in my profession there are frequent attempts to revive the idea of the great Encyclopedia, the thing that’s going to process all the information and produce a summum, a canonical monument not only of erudition but also of meaning. The desire is there, a desire for permanence, and I see it as quite innocent. But what we lack is the philosophical momentum which values these things, and its absence is desolating, tragic.

What is your criterion for judging what is most valuable in a work of art?

That’s very difficult to answer. I think it would be radiance, a power behind the image: vision. The National Gallery has just bought a portrait by David called M. Blauw and I think I’ll find it there: it’s only a portrait of a man with a quill pen, but it is so articulate and has such integrity.

Do you see any connection between your work as an art historian and the act of writing novels? Is there any natural engagement between one and the other?

The awful thing is that I see no connection at all. It’s a sort of schizophrenic activity as far as I’m concerned. The only connection is that I do it in the same place, in my office. I need noises and interruptions and irritation: irritation and discomfort are great starters. The loneliness of doing it any other way would kill me.

What strikes me about all your heroines is that none of them are dishonest, not even with themselves. Even Kitty Maule would like to assume a posture of carelessness and gracious ease, but she is fully aware that it is not in her.

Dishonesty means betrayal of somebody or something, and you can’t do it.

You seem to set such terrifyingly high standards for yourself.

I’m not aware of this, since I don’t know what other people’s standards are.

You insist upon moral rectitude in your characters.

That comes from a grounding in nineteenth-century novels and nineteenth-century behaviour. My family was very rigorous in that respect; I’ve never unlearned these lessons, and I promise you I regret it. I would love to be extremely plausible and flattering and dishonest: there are useful dishonesties. I think it’s pleased the critics to see me as a moral success and a personal failure. Since it’s now taboo to confess to a certain form of loneliness, it has been stuck to me like a banderilla, and I’ve found it very tedious to be labelled. Even my friends have thought it an impropriety for me to put myself forward in this way, but I don’t understand the opprobrium. It’s got to the stage where I can’t even say it’s invented, because nobody would believe me, so I’m in a fix.

But anyone must find it impressive that you can be so sincere.

No, unpopular. My friends now assume that I will use them as characters, even though I don’t.

I imagine that you’ve actually used only your parents in A Start in Life and perhaps your grandparents in Providence?

No, they were nothing like; I couldn’t do that to them. You have to believe me. My parents were just as bizarre but not quite so fetching. I think it baffled and saddened them that they couldn’t take life easily. I feel I’ve cut loose and gone out into the storm, but basically I’m still one of them. I have used certain situations; not characters but situations – situations out of time, taken from twenty years ago, and nothing that could possibly have reverberations of today.

Two of your novels are critiques of other fictions. A Start in Life utilises Eugenie Grandet, and Providence a novel by Constant, Adolphe, both making the point that literature can damage life and at the same time saying that fiction does provide role models.

Yes, I believe that. I believe that it’s the virtue and value of fiction. But I think the lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just. The appreciations are more short-term in life; there isn’t the same impetus to see it through. There is in fact no selection in life – one takes opportunities and amusement where one can – it’s accumulative, if you like, piecemeal.

I think the analogies and correspondences you draw between Adolphe and Providence are particularly striking and illuminating.

It’s a little bit mechanical, I think, or forced: I wouldn’t do that again.

What is extraordinary about Adolphe is the relentless and cold logic of the hero’s career. Adolphe makes conquest of the devoted Ellénore and immediately regrets it, so that we witness every shift and turn of his efforts to be done with the relationship.

Yes, and he is quite unapologetic about the whole thing. He is serious and in fact extremely grave. It is a moral catastrophe. But he doesn’t enjoy it. Ellénore is unsuitable, and it kills her; it ruins him, but of course we don’t know for how long.

The men in your novels seem in some curious way to be opaque, perhaps partly because we see them through the prepossessing eyes of the women. They have the common denominator of being staunch Christians, they wear their hearts or hurts on their sleeves, and they are egotistical and uninvolved while apparently being disinterested.

They are conservative Establishment creations, aren’t they? And as such impervious to these dark imaginings, these brooding midnight fantasies.

Do you have a particular grouse against Christianity?

Yes, I have many grounds for complaint. I wish I could accept the whole thing – it would make one terribly cheerful, and give one a stake in the country, as it were – but I can’t. I am a lapsed Jew – if such a thing were conceivable, but it isn’t. Jewishness is a terrible religion, for its relentlessness, its bad-tempered god, its inability to learn anything at all, its self-obsessed quality …

Its sense of election as well?

That is not apparent among Jews; it’s the fear that exists in the mind of Christians or other religions. This is the hardest thing to bear: we’re supposed to be rich, exclusive and devious! How do you dispel that? I know people who have conviction in their Jewishness, and they are genial in ways that are incomprehensible to me. You can never betray the people who are dead, so you go on being a public Jew; the dead can’t answer slurs, but I’m here. I would love to think that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam but he doesn’t

The other women with whom your heroines are associated or friendly provide models of behaviour, but again they are all transparently unsuitable. I am thinking, for instance, of Caroline in Providence who is waiting for a man to materialise and pluck her off the unhappy tree.

I hope these portrayals are affectionate; they are meant to be. I have many women friends, and I’m intrigued by their ways of going on.

Do you find it easier to be friends with women than with men?

No, I prefer men, because they’re different. I know about women. I think what I say in Hotel du Lac is true, that women turn to each other in their sadness. But all of a sudden there comes that point where fortunes change, and they’ve gone over to some other side where relations are different. There is a certain inborn competitiveness among women which is a little bit murky, and it has to do with success with men: it’s an area in which friendships can become strained. A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat – there is no subtlety about it, you know exactly where you are – but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification, if you

like.

The character of Caroline is perhaps hopeless or harmless, but her passive posture – just waiting for the right man to come along – is terribly enfeebling.

All women think that, and this is why women are trying to get rid of it. But of course they never will.

Do you think you could ever postulate a heroine who takes life in her hands?

If I knew one, I would.

You say that you think your novels are unpopular, and yet a huge number of people must feel a sense of identification with your characters.

I’ve yet to have proof. I know people who have no self-doubts, and nothing succeeds like success. That’s what I mean about accumulation. Novels are about selection and just deserts; life is about accumulation and opportunities and the winner takes all.

Is the wit and humour in your books a conscious stratagem to make certain truths more palatable?

No, nothing conscious like that. It comes from a lot of reading. Here is the connection between art history – or history, if you like – and fiction: it’s the energy of the eighteenth century I admire. If you have a cause, you have to propound it with energy. My ‘cause’ is to tell a story or perhaps to cast a moral puzzle. I see these novels as extraordinary accidents, and I couldn’t account for them more than I already have done. I certainly haven’t modelled them on anybody or anything.

Do you nonetheless look to certain nineteenth-century writers for touchstones of truly great writing?

It has to be Dickens. My Polish father, who remained very Polish thought that the best thing he could do for me was to unveil the mysteries of English life which could be found in the novels of Charles Dickens: he really believed that. So I was set to read Dickens at the age of seven, and I read all the novels. I think it’s Dickens’s indignation which is so grand. For moral scruple I would look to Henry James; for decent feelings, Trollope; and for scrutiny, Stendhal and Flaubert … and Zola, where you again find the same indignation. I never felt very easy about Jane Austen: 1 think she made a tremendous, far-reaching decision to leave certain things out. She forfeited passion for wit, and I think that led her to collude with certain little stratagems which are horrifying in real life. She wrote about getting husbands.

She also seemed to fear an excess of romantic passion.

Any sentiment is satirized – such as those girls in Northanger Abbey – and it’s easy to satirize prim romanticism, but there has to be something in it. Romanticism is not just a mode, it literally enters into every life.

In Look at Me, Frances Hinton affirms the moral necessity for ‘civilized dissimulation’ …

I think if my novels are about anything positive, they’re about not playing tricks.

What all your characters are left with is a resignation which is not even Stoicism of a classical order; it’s merely learning to put up with the way life is inevitably going to turn out.

Yes, and the horror of that situation is profound.

You also seem to assert in your principal characters a correlation between highly talented intelligence and emotional or social disability.

Yes they’re stupid. They’re aware of what life should be, but not of what it is. Stendhal said, I walk along the street, marvelling at the stars, and all of a sudden I’m hit by a cab’.

You describe heroines who are emotionally ingenuous, and it might be said that you now write novels against your better understanding. You’ve had more experience than your characters, who are starting out in life or stymied by their initiations into life.

Don’t believe it: I know as little as I ever did. I may have had more experience, but l’ve learned just as little as those characters. My next encounter will have the same high hopes, the same momentary failure of nerve, and everything will go wrong from there.

To that extent your heroines – outwardly sophisticated innocents – are yourself in quite a strict sense?

I think they must be, though I’m not in a position to say it. One has to use one’s own life; one has no other material. Kitty Maule says about Romanticism that in certain situations reason doesn’t work, and that’s the most desolating discovery of all.

Do you think your writing is therefore deeply coloured by determinism?

I hadn’t thought of it, but I would think it is legitimate to think of it in those terms. I would just think of the novels as transcripts from a random passage through life, and a rather unsuccessful passage.

One of the great strengths of your books is this integrity…

I would make a present of it to you if I could. I don’t think I’m doing anybody any favours, least of all myself: I’m now doubly a victim, in life and in fiction.

I think you never go so far as to damn the plausible and attractive men in your novels. They are, after all, selfish and undiscriminating and hurtfully uninterested, but you stop short of explicitly blaming them.

Such men are very engaging, there is no doubt about it. They know how to make themselves trusted and liked: it’s their ideology, and that’s where the falseness comes in … and the opacity, because it’s unexamined. They can pretend that a relationship is simply not happening. But the relationships are mésalliances from the start, and the fault is lack of perception.

Do feminists find you half-hearted?

You’d have to be crouching in your burrow to see my novels in a feminist way. I do not believe in the all-men-are-swine programme.

Hotel du Lac nevertheless enters the lists of the contemporary feminist debate to a certain extent.

Yes, I think so, and I rather enjoyed it. But whatever the banner, you know, the competition goes on.

One of the central issues of the book is Edith’s realization that she can go along neither with the feminists nor with what she calls ‘the ultra-feminine … the complacent consumers of men’. She stands up for the principle of a straightforward domestic happiness.

Yes, that is the ideal, isn’t it? It is the natural order. She would like romance to end in domesticity.

Mr Neville, the ‘intellectual voluptuary’ she meets, is a suitable but sinister man. He proposes a self-interested arrangement.

Yes, he’s the devil’s advocate. He has a five-year plan, everything under his control.

You relate much of their intercourse in a humorous way, but it is horrible.

It is extremely humorous – it’s the only way to look at it. But one always escapes the Mr Nevilles if one has any sense. What he proposes is one of those loveless associations that become embittered and self-seeking. He’s really a very wicked man, I think; he negates so many generous and honest impulses. Edith is desperate.

She wins her freedom from him by accident, but the end – when she changes the wording of her telegram from ‘Coming home’ to ‘Returning’ – is ambiguous.

‘Coming home’ would be coming back to domestic propriety: ‘home’ implies husband, children, order, regular meals, but ‘Returning’ is her more honest view of the situation. To that extent she does break through to a clearer vision.

Is she undefeated?

I didn’t see it that way. I think people would have liked her much better if she had married Mr Neville, let’s put it that way. I think I can take on the feminists.

Did you deliberately take on the feminists in this book?

No, but I found myself involved in these questions. What women want is the clean part of the programme; how they get it is the dirty part. Of course it’s fine to want all the right things, but the real question is how you get them, what manipulations you may involve yourself in, and what sacrifices you make too.

You said to me earlier that you like the work of Fay Weldon.

Very much. The women novelists I really admire in the English tradition are Rosamond Lehmann and Elizabeth Taylor. Outside the English tradition there is a marvellous woman called Edith Templeton; a Canadian writer called Mavis Gallant; and Edith be Born: these are women of foreign extraction who write in a totally different tradition, and they interest me very much. I am apostolic about the novels of Edith Templeton, a Czech who writes in impeccable English: they are extremely restrained and tell strong stories about life in old-style Central Europe, with recognizable passions and follies. Lovely, lovely novels. Mavis Gallant, a Canadian writer living in Paris, has written some marvellous stories called From the Fifteenth District. I think she’s now working on the Dreyfus case, which interests me. Edith be Born is a Belgian story-teller. They all show great bravery in encountering horrifying obstacles: they’re much more stoical and less sentimental than English writers.

Fay Weldon is quite different from that.

Well, she’s sprightly rather than stoical, but she’s savage – she deals with it that way. Also, she cannot be fooled: I love that. You cannot pull the wool over her eyes.

Might the same remark be made about you?

I don’t want to apportion blame. I think writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence – a lot passes you by – simply because your attention is otherwise diverted. The moral examination, self-examination, pre-empts every other perception; you don’t even notice what’s going on under your nose.

Edith Hope in Hotel du Lac is portrayed as a rather mild and diminished person, and yet she does have alert and witty perceptions. It’s wonderfully funny when she expounds her theory of tortoise-and-hare readers.

That’s all too real, I’m sure, and I mean it. She has to have some perception, I think – perception that might save her – otherwise she would be defeated.

Romantic hopefulness is a constant strain in what you write, in spite of the fact that your premise is a sense of defeat.

Romance may win out, who knows? But both are true. The point is that my personages are not combatants. And you need to take on not only the men but also the women, if it’s going to come out in the end – I regret that, but I know it to be true. If we are itemising the faults of the men, women can’t just say – rather self-flatteringly – that they have been too submissive. Women may have been too devious, but that’s not the same thing.

Do you study feminist writing?

Only what gets into the popular press; I don’t read Spare Rib or anything like that. Germaine Greer is a very intelligent writer; I think she’s wrong, but she’s well worth reading. The Female Eunuch is a fine book, and it’s written with great sadness that things should be as they were – that’s what saved it – but I couldn’t swallow the selective moral blindness that’s infected the last book, Sex and Destiny. I suppose the first position has been won, but the millennium was not to be found at hand

Hotel du Lac I meant as a love story pure and simple: love triumphed over temptation. The ideal of love. Basically, I don’t like adversarial positions; I see no need for them, since life is too complicated and it’s rarely just.

Your heroines are naive, and what you relish in someone like Diderot is that sense of being naive which is actually quite different …

Zest and virtue. It’s like Candide when you can’t be fooled.

But there’s a curious element of self-appointed naiveté in what you call your ‘personages’.

It’s suspension of disbelief, as in all fiction, and I can only demonstrate the naivet of those characters by putting them against the more sophisticated ones. It’s faults in perception I’m talking about. Whether that’s innocence or stupidity I leave to others to judge. I think it’s both.

Do you regret Look at Me in particular because it’s a novel which purveys hopelessness, whereas the others allow for possible amelioration?

Perhaps, I think the fate of the other characters is probably just as sure, but they may not realise it. My characters exasperate me. I find myself deeply exasperating, and so do other people: you can’t gainsay that.

What is perhaps most striking in your novels is the combination of serious scrutiny and great wit.

The wit I owe to the eighteenth century, where the master of the put-down, of reductive wisdom, is Voltaire; but for energy plus naiveté you have to read Diderot, who is undefeated. Do you know he had twenty-three gallstones? Try writing like that with twenty-three gall stones! And three of his children died. I mean, the man is ecstatic, transcendent, in his writings! Great writers are the saints for the godless.

In Look at Me, Frances Hinton cites Dürer’s depiction of melancholy as ‘her own disease’. What you’ve said to me suggests that you feel yourself to have been permanently damaged, either by your upbringing or by your nature …

By having unrealistic goals, I think. They’ve done me a disservice.

I wouldn’t forego them for the world, but they’ve been incompatible with the conduct of life.

Did you at some time make a decision to put all your eggs in the basket of professional worthiness and attainment?

No. I thought I was not particularly viable outside a protected environment, and I liked reading and looking. Writing novels was a kind of first-aid when I found myself in a disagreeable state of will, paralyzed: it worked momentarily. I felt alone, abandoned, excluded, and it was no good moping. It was a gamble.

Is writing novels a function of maladaptation as far as you’re concerned?

No, I’m not going to let you get away with that. It’s a form of editing experience – getting it out in terms of form, because it is form that’s going to save us all, I think, and the sooner we realise it the better. I would love to possess imagination, but I have none. I can see that one thing can proceed from another. Invention implies deliberation, not flights of fancy. Everyone possesses certain powers of invention, but imagination is very rare.

Imagination, if one had it, must give one a much more glorious sense of the world. It must be more fascinating if you can imagine other lives. Diderot’s imagination made him into a scientist: he imagined the molecular structure of the universe. It was true, and he had no scientific training at all.

Would you rather be a painter than a novelist?

Yes. I think you love the world more as a painter. Painters have a healthy appetite for life. I think my personages could be reactivated, if the times were right: I hope so.

I think it’s Kitty Maule, in Providence who remarks that out of the disorder of her life she found order in her work, but then she yearned to escape that sort of order.

Yes. I love the safety of what l’m doing and I hate the safety of what l’m doing. I loved it first, and I still do – or else I wouldn’t be doing it. I didn’t hate it enough to begin with, and I probably hate it too much now.

And you’ve felt a pressing need to change your life, or at least to change your perspective on what you do?

I felt it in 1980, but I doubt that l’ve succeeded; I haven’t changed anything. I feel I’m walking about with the Mark of Cain on my forehead. I feel I could get into the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s loneliest, most miserable woman! I felt very pleased about the first novel – because I didn’t think I could do it – and people were pleased with me; but since then it’s been downhill all the way. I hope this latest novel, Hotel du Lac, will slightly redeem me in the public eye.

At one moment in Hotel du Lac, Edith Hope wants to sustain herself by reading some fiction, and she chooses a volume by Colette, Les plaisirs, qu’on nomme, à la légère, physiques. Does that book have special significance for you?

Only the title. Colette’s stories seem to be more or less undifferentiated, and they’re marvellous. But this has been overlooked: she is very, very cruel. She is fascinated by everybody’s infidelity, and she is there to chronicle it. There’s a story called ‘Le Kepi’ which is about a rather unlikely spinster who has an affair in middle life, and Colette is in the story as a much younger woman on whom her friend looks enviously while telling her this story. That is always Colette’s standpoint, I think … so there is even female one-upmanship in the writing of those stories. It works marvellously because one would rather be on Colette’s side than that of anybody else – she’s a more attractive person, a more succulent personality, more interesting – but that’s deliberate self-protection on her part. Motives are never unmixed, are they?

Your own heroines are given to be unmixed.

Poor little things, I feel sorry for them. They’re idiots: there’s no other word for them. And I don’t know any more than they