The Adventures Of Elizabeth In Rugen

Book 397: Virago Modern Classics

by Elizabeth von Arnim

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction; Action & Adventure; Classics; Humor & Satire; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

In 1901 the 'real' Elizabeth holidayed on the Baltic island of Rügen with just her maid, a coachman, a carriage piled with luggage, and a woman friend. From such unpromising beginnings Elizabeth weaves a captivating farrago around her encounters. There's the snobbish bishop's wife and her personable, handsome son, a dressmaker and, astonishingly, a long-lost cousin -- Charlotte -- who is trying to evade the pursuit of her husband, the maddeningly genial old professor. Here, with delightfully astringent humour, Elizabeth recounts the misadventures that befall her. And, as she immortalised her Pomeranian wilderness in the famous ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, she now writes enticingly of this remote and attractive island.

Release date: March 6, 2014

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 320

Sample

When I was a child there was a small oak bookcase in my mother’s bedroom in which she kept her favourite reading. I remember only The Little Flowers of St Francis, George Borrow’s Lavengro, and Elizabeth and Her German Garden. St Francis was bound in squashy leather, Lavengro in blue with gold motif, Elizabeth in a rather dreary green. Clearly my mother was one of those ‘innumerable tiresome women all over England’, sneered at by Rebecca West, ‘smirking coyly about their gardens as if they were having a remarkably satisfying affair with their delphiniums’. I didn’t care for that sort of thing and resisted reading any of them.

Elizabeth didn’t cross my path again for over half a century. Strange, since she was still a bestseller when I was a schoolgirl, but I wasn’t aware of it, being more familiar with Picturegoer than I was with literary magazines. Then sometime in the early 80s I was shuffling round a secondhand bookshop in Burford and found an identical copy of German Garden, mouldy green and faded. My mother had been dead for some years. It was curiosity as much as sentiment that made me buy it. One is always on the lookout for clues.

And damn it, I was captivated. Certainly some of the descriptions of nature were over-lyrical, but so were Wordworth’s. Certainly the April, May and June babies were winsomely named, but their dialogue and behaviour put them high on the short list of believable fictional children. Most surprising of all was the wry, almost sardonic voice behind all the raptures; and I discovered why my mother had so often referred to my father as ‘the Man of Wrath’, a title which had always seemed apt, but untypical of her vocabulary.

I went back and bought up the entire works of ‘the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden’. They were at the back of an inaccessible shelf stacked two deep with obscure novels and the transaction took some time. German Garden had been published in 1898; her last book, Mr. Skeffington, in 1940; between those two were sixteen novels and an autobiography. I read through them chronologically, sometimes impatient, occasionally losing faith, often laughing out loud, constantly pleased by the writer’s shrewd observation and catty sense of fun. (The difference between ‘catty’ and ‘bitchy’ is minimal. In her case either adjective would serve.) It did seem absurd that a writer of such calibre should still have been published under the clumsy soubriquet ‘the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden’ long after that first book had gone out of print. Who was she, anyway? Why the mystery?

Since Virago started reprinting her work, sensibly giving her the pseudonym ‘Elizabeth von Arnim’, these questions have been answered. Briefly, Mary Annette Beauchamp was born in Australia in 1866 to ‘the sort of father, frequent in those days, who is never answered back’ and ‘a happy, adorable little mother’ who spent an inordinate amount of money on ribbons. There were four elder brothers, one sister, and much later a baby cousin who would grow up to write under the name of Katherine Mansfield. When May (even then she wasn’t called by her right name) was three and a half, the family came to England. They lived in north-west London and seem to have been fairly well-to-do — May had a French governess until she was sixteen, then went to school in Acton. She also studied music under Sir Walter Parratt at the Royal College of Music. There were plans for Cambridge, for a professional musical career, but at the age of twenty-four — spinsterhood looming — she married a forty-year-old German widower, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin. He was persistent, and he indulged her: ‘The child must be fed … the child must go to Bayreuth … the child must have a dog.’ And he was not to be answered back. ‘ “All girls like love. It is very agreeable. You will like it too. You shall marry me, and see.” ’

But she didn’t like it at all. Henning had a tiresome habit of looking affectionate, ‘and when people begin to look affectionate I, for one, cease to take any further interest in them’. The inevitable consequence of affection was pregnancy, which disgusted and terrified her. She put up with it four times before her reluctance turned to stubborn rebellion. Some aspects of the Countess at this time would have come as a shock to devotees of the German Garden and throw considerable light on the undercurrent of frustration in her best novels. She laid about her with a dog whip when the children, and domesticity generally, became unendurable. A newly arrived governess, introduced to the baby of the family by his angelic little sister, was told, ‘ “If he wets his pants Mummy hits his backside with a brush. Then he screams like on a spit.” ’ No, it was not all lilies and languors in the Nassenheide garden. Henning objected to his wife being known as a professional writer, so she published her first book anonymously, disdaining the use of a pseudonym; it was the last to have an acceptably ‘happy ending’ and the only one that didn’t deal in some way with the theme of escape.

In July 1901 she set off for the Baltic island of Rügen. It wasn’t very far, and she had frequently been there before, but it was a gesture of independence and might provide something to write about. Always efficient, she had sent off for maps and guide books and commandeered a woman friend to go with her. Leaving ‘a somewhat injured and reproachful’ Henning behind, the two ladies travelled in a coach drawn by four horses, maids and luggage forming a rearguard. Ten days later they were home again. The brief holiday had provided a much-needed break from the exigencies of husband and children; Rügen had been very pretty, but nothing had actually happened. Elizabeth was canny enough by now to know that the critics were unlikely to put up with more effusions about Nature; the children and the Man of Wrath, always good for a laugh, hadn’t been there; the friend, perhaps predictably, had said nothing witty or done anything memorable. A more feeble-spirited writer might have abandoned the idea. Elizabeth dreamt up some Adventures.

The result is a triumph of comic invention — not, perhaps, as hilarious as her later The Caravaners, but far more subtle. Our well-loved heroine, idling in the Nassenheide library one summer afternoon, comes across a description of an unknown Baltic island called Rügen. She finds it irresistible. Being remarkably well stocked, the library also contains the necessary maps and guide books. Intrepid Elizabeth wants to go on foot, but none of her friends will go with her and she can’t, of course, walk alone:

The grim monster Conventionality whose iron claws are for ever on my shoulder, for ever pulling me back from the harmless and wholesome, put a stop to that even if I had not been afraid of tramps, which I am.’

(Note the clever modulation from free spirit to helpless female.) Therefore she is forced to take her carriage, two horses, a young coachman called August, and Gertrud, her long-suffering and taciturn maid. So began ‘our journey into the unknown’.

The mood is euphoric. Elizabeth picks armfuls of cow parsley (‘that most spiritual of weeds’) and a bunch of poppies for dour Gertrud. She tucks posies of chickory behind the horses’ ears and generally feels and behaves ‘as if I were fifteeen and out for my first summer holiday’. Apart from some entertaining mishaps, which she bears with fortitude, all goes well until she encounters a vaguely familiar female splashing about in the sea. ‘Perhaps she was my dressmaker … How profoundly unpleasant to meet this person in the water, to have come all the way to Rügen … for the sole purpose of bathing tête-à-tête with my dressmaker.’ However, this is her long-lost cousin Charlotte, arrived to add a touch of drama to the scene.

The Sunday Times critic found Charlotte ‘something worse even than a caricature — she is a bore’. He must have made the mistake of taking her seriously. She is a thirty-year-old blue stocking who, while up at Oxford, had become infatuated with an elderly German philosopher, Professor Nieberlein. Charlotte worshipped the Professor’s genius; the Professor’s response was that he found her ‘a nice, round little girl. A very nice, round little girl. Colossal appetilich.’ They married, and all Elizabeth heard of her cousin for the next six years were announcements of the births and deaths of six ‘potential professors’, all of whom were named, during their short lives, Bernhard. Then, after a long silence, Charlotte had suddenly emerged as a passionate feminist, racing about Europe lecturing and writing pamphlets. The family disowned her. When Elizabeth comes across her in Rügen she is fleeing from the Professor, whom she hasn’t seen for a year. He still calls her ‘little Lotte’.

A more unlikely candidate for conversion to militant feminism than Elizabeth can hardly be imagined. Her own view is that:

the paths of fate are all so narrow that two people bound together, forced to walk abreast, cannot, except they keep perfect step, but push each other against the rocks … So that it behoves the weaker and the lighter … to be very attentive, very adaptable, very deft.

She thoroughly enjoys her own agility in this respect and pities Charlotte for her lack of it. When the Professor turns up, delightedly kissing Charlotte and chucking her under her formidable chin, Elizabeth determines to put their marriage right:

Charlotte ought to be very happy with that kind old man … Her leaving him must have been owing to some trifling misunderstanding. I am sure it would be for her happiness to go back to him. She would grow quite round and mellow.

But Charlotte runs away. Elizabeth and the Professor set off in determined pursuit — or rather, Elizabeth is determined; the Professor gets easily distracted. The chase finally ends on a remote offshore island, where they find Charlotte sitting dejectedly on a cliff. Urging the Professor on — ‘ “Good luck to you both! You’ll see how happy you are both going to be!” ’ — Elizabeth hurries away, anxious not to spoil the moving reconciliation.

The denouement is a classic example of Elizabeth’s craft: she receives unprintable letters from both Charlotte and the Professor; Charlotte applies for a judicial separation. ‘When I heard it I was thunderstruck’ Elizabeth writes. One can hear the quiet chuckle, the puff of satisfaction, when she finished that final sentence.

There are some very good minor characters in this cautionary tale: Brosy Harvey-Browne, ‘a very personable young man’, and his mother, the quintessential Bishop’s wife; Gertrud, stoically knitting in the background; hoteliers and visitors and resolute sightseers bring the island of Rügen into chattering, expostulating life. The book was a great success, yet so besotted was the Daily Telegraph with Elizabeth’s personal charm that it complained about the intrusion of other people: ‘we like her alone, with her babies, her garden and her books … Will Elizabeth remember … we want her all to ourselves?’

By the time the Man of Wrath died in 1910, Elizabeth was the wealthy author of five bestsellers. The children were at boarding school in England. The German Garden, and all its associations, was a thing of the past. Elizabeth was in her mid-forties, a shrewd, witty widow with her eye on the main chance in the marriage as well as the literary market. But satisfying relationships always seemed to evade her. A turbulent affair with H.G. Wells ended when he told her that Rebecca West was pregnant with his child. She built a ‘little wooden house’ (it had sixteen bedrooms) in Switzerland, where her innumerable guests became ‘almost regrettably invigorated’ and she was inundated with young men vying with each other to read poetry to her in sheltered corners. But there is no loneliness like that of the woman or man who can’t ‘join in’, remaining always disassociated at heart. ‘The ultimate tragedy’ Elizabeth called it, and she was beginning to feel its first warning signs when Francis, Earl Russell, slipped and skidded up her front path one Christmas. ‘ “You should have your path done,” he said. And I said, motionless in my chair, hardly turning my bowed head, already sunk in acquiescence. “My path?” And he said, “Cinders. That’s what you must put down.” ’

Elizabeth became Countess Russell on 11 February 1916. On 27 September of that year she ran away for the first time. In March 1919 she left permanently, and ordered a firm of furniture removers to collect all her possessions from the marital homes. Russell issued a writ for theft. The subsequent proceedings, in which Sir Edward Marshall Hall acted for Elizabeth, were worthy of one of her novels:

Q. Now about the hammock. You bought the hammock on the 17th April 1916?

Elizabeth. Yes.

Q. Is it a suitable hammock for Lord Russell?

Elizabeth. No.

Q. Did you ever give it to him?

Elizabth. Never

Q. You have more regard for life?

Elizabeth. And for the hammock.

So ended her second and final marriage, recalled twenty years later as ‘years of acute misery’. As is often the way, it produced her finest novel Vera. Lucy, its heroine, is perhaps too naive for the modern reader, but reader, but the awful Everard Weymiss is still with us. The book exposes the sentimentality and cowardice of male chauvinism far more sharply than any of cousin Charlotte’s diatribes and the final page in which Lucy, poor fool, submits to her husband has more blood-chilling implications than any act of violence. Even murder, one feels, would have been preferable.

Elizabeth was fifty-four when she fell in love with Michael Frere, thirty years her junior. In Love, the novel she inevitably wrote about the affair, Catherine is forty-seven and Christopher Monckton twenty-five. But there are even greater discrepancies between fact and fiction. Elizabeth’s relationship with Frere, though relatively long compared with her last marriage, was predictably awkward and eventually petered out. The end of Love has no such merciful conclusion. Catherine and Christopher decide to stay together. Some writers might see this as the cue for angel voices; Elizabeth makes them laugh — ‘but it was a shaky, uncertain laughter, for they were both afraid’. She may not have been a consistently excellent writer, but she was a genius when it came to Ends.

Perhaps it was fortunate that she could not write about her own. Elizabeth ended up in America, estranged from most of her children, devoted to her dog Billy, crippled with arthritis and almost forgotten by her adoring public. The satirical twist she would have given to an account of her own death would have made unbearable reading.

Hugh Walpole wrote a long obituary in which he analysed Elizabeth’s character with some detachment and stated that The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen was one of his two favourite novels. The book belongs to the sunny, relatively innocent Nassenheide period and makes no pretensions to dramatic significance. It is fun with a refreshingly tart aftertaste. There has been gross inflation in fiction since it was written. Such moderate jewels are now invaluable.

Penelope Mortimer, Gloucestershire, 1990

EVERY one who has been to school and still remembers what he was taught there, knows that Rügen is the biggest island Germany possesses, and that it lies in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Pomerania.

Round this island I wished to walk this summer, but no one would walk with me. It is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things. It is the one way of freedom. If you go to a place on anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside. If you drive you are bound by a variety of considerations, eight of the most important being the horses’ legs. If you bicycle—but who that loves to get close to nature would bicycle? And as for motors, the object of a journey like mine was not the getting to a place but the going there.

Successively did I invite the most likely of my women friends, numbering at least a dozen, to walk with me. They one and all replied that it would make them tired and that it would be dull; and when I tried to remove the first objection by telling them how excellent it would be for the German nation, especially those portions of it that are still to come, if its women walked round Rügen more often, they stared and smiled; and when I tried to remove the second by explaining that by our own spirits are we deified, they stared and smiled more than ever.

Walking, then, was out of the question, for I could not walk alone. The grim monster Conventionality whose iron claws are for ever on my shoulder, for ever pulling me back from the harmless and the wholesome, put a stop to that even if I had not been afraid of tramps, which I was. So I drove, and it was round Rügen that I drove because one hot afternoon when I was idling in the library, not reading but fingering the books, taking out first one and then another, dipping into them, deciding which I would read next, I came across Marianne North’s Recollections of a Happy Life, and hit upon the page where she begins to talk of Rügen. Immediately interested—for is not Rügen nearer to me than any other island?—I became absorbed in her description of the bathing near a place called Putbus, of the deliciousness of it in a sandy cove where the water was always calm, and of how you floated about on its crystal surface, and beautiful jelly-fish, stars of purest colours, floated with you. I threw down the book to ransack the shelves for a guide to Rügen. On the first page of the first one I found was this remarkable paragraph:—

‘Hearest thou the name Rügen, so doth a wondrous spell come over thee. Before thine eyes it rises as a dream of far-away, beauteous fairylands. Images and figures of long ago beckon thee across to the marvellous places where in grey prehistoric times they dwelt, and on which they have left the shadow of their presence. And in thee stirs a mighty desire to wander over the glorious, legend-surrounded island. Cord up, then, thy light bundle, take to heart Shylock’s advice to put money in thy purse, and follow me without fear of the threatening sea-sickness which may overtake thee on the short crossing, for it has never yet done any one more harm than imposing on him a rapidly-passing discomfort.’

This seemed to me very irresistible. Surely a place that inspired such a mingling of the lofty and the homely in its guide-books must be well worth seeing? There was a drought just then going on at home. My eyes were hot with watching a garden parch browner day by day beneath a sky of brass. I felt that it only needed a little energy, and in a few hours I too might be floating among those jelly-fish, in the shadow of the cliffs of the legend-surrounded island. And even better than being surrounded by legends those breathless days would it be to have the sea all round me. Such a sea too! Did I not know it? Did I not know its singular limpidity? The divineness of its blue where it was deep, the clearness of its green where it was shallow, lying tideless along its amber shores? The very words made me thirsty—amber shores; lazy waves lapping them slowly; vast spaces for the eye to wander over; rocks, and seaweed, and cool, gorgeous jelly-fish. The very map at the beginning of the guide-book made me thirsty, the land was so succulently green, the sea all round so bland a blue. And what a fascinating island it is on the map—an island of twists and curves and inland seas called Bodden; of lakes, and woods, and frequent ferries; with lesser islands dotted about its coasts; with bays innumerable stretching their arms out into the water; and with one huge forest, evidently magnificent, running nearly the whole length of the east coast, following its curves, dipping down to the sea in places, and in others climbing up chalk cliffs to crown them with the peculiar splendour of beeches.

It does not take me long to make up my mind, still less to cord up my light bundle, for somebody else does that; and I think it was only two days after I first found Marianne North and the guide-book that my maid Gertrud and I got out of a suffocating train into the freshness that blows round ryefields near the sea, and began our journey into the unknown.

It was a little wayside station on the line between Berlin and Stralsund, called Miltzow, a solitary red building on the edge of a pine-wood, that witnessed the beginning of our tour. The carriage had been sent on the day before, and round it, on our arrival, stood the station authorities in an interested group. The stationmaster, everywhere in Germany an elaborate, Olympic person in white gloves, actually helped the porter to cord on my hold-all with his own hands, and they both lingered over it as if loth to let us go. Evidently the coachman had told them what I was going to do, and I suppose such an enterprising woman does not get out at Miltzow every day. They packed us in with the greatest care, with so much care that I thought they would never have done. My hold-all was the biggest piece of luggage, and they corded it on in an upright position at our feet. I had left the choosing of its contents to Gertrud, only exhorting her, be. . .