… floating on a sea of milk and honey

Memoirs of a good-for-nothing, by Joseph von Eichendorff

Memoirs of a good-for-nothing is one of the most charming books I’ve read in ages. Written back in 1826, it’s the story of how an amiable idiot goes out to seek his fortune but instead finds love and adventure, without ever understanding anything that’s going on around him.

The novella opens with our hero waking up to his father’s complaints that once again he’s been sleeping while others worked, that he’s a good-for-nothing and should go out and earn his own living.

“So I’m a good-for-nothing, eh?” I retorted. “All right, then. I’ll go off and seek my fortune.”
The idea was indeed very much to my liking. In autumn and winter the yellowhammer used to sing a lament outside our window: “Farmer, please hire me! Farmer, please hire me!” But a short time ago I had seen him sitting proudly on top of the tree, singing his merry springtime song: “Farmer, keep your work!” – and this had given me the idea of making for the open road.

So he heads off down that road, singing and playing his fiddle. Before too long he meets two beautiful ladies, countesses it seems, who enjoy his happy folksong and invite him to join them in their carriage bound for Vienna – or more precisely to a palatial country estate just near Vienna.

The estate’s a confusing place, for our young man is fresh from a village and knows nothing of domestic servants or the doings of the nobility, but no matter, for he has fallen in love with the younger of the two ladies he just met and besides in no small time he has a job as an assistant gardener and then as tollkeeper to the estate – a position of some responsibility, even if largely his duties involve smoking a pipe and sitting outside in a particularly lurid dressing gown. Once he’s pulled up the vegetables in the tollhouse garden and planted flowers in their place, well, if it wasn’t for the difficulty of seeing his love (their stations are very different) he’d be a happy man.

But then, he’s almost always a happy man anyway. Our hero is prone to bursting into song on seeing a pretty view, plays his fiddle at the slightest provocation (or just for the sheer enjoyment of it), he jumps for joy when he has a happy thought, and he has a lot of happy thoughts. When sadness strikes him, or anger, it’s like a summer squall of rain, soon past. He cries bitter tears more than once in his journeys, but his heart is an optimistic one and he’s never sad for long.

And that, in a nutshell, is what makes this such a likeable book. The protagonist is incredibly naive, and none too bright, but he’s good natured and well meaning and I found him impossible to dislike. There’s such an overabundance of joy in this novel, sheer joy of life, in art and music, in love and in the German and Austrian countryside and its beauties, it’s a story free of cynicism and that’s no common thing.

Of course, life as a tollkeeper is not the end of our hero’s travels. Soon, believing his love’s heart belongs to another, he leaves for Italy with two itinerant painters, spends time in a remote mountain castle staffed with people he has no common language with but who seem to be expecting him, visits Rome where he has various adventures and generally gads about the place. He’s chased by a mysterious hunchback, his companions are stolen from him, all manner of incident occurs, none of which he has the remotest clue about.

I journeyed onwards day and night without rest. I had no time to collect my thoughts, for wherever we stopped, fresh horses were waiting ready harnessed; moreover I could not speak to the people, and my gesticulations served little purpose. Sometimes, when I was in the middle of an excellent meal at an inn, the postillion would blow his horn and I had to drop my knife and fork and jump back in the coach, without having the slightest notion where I was supposed to be going at such breakneck speed, or why.

There’s an air of Shakespearean comedy to much of this work. Our hero is pursued by people, but it’s wholly unclear for most of the book why, or even if they’re after the right man, and although he finds some of them frightening in truth none of them really seem all that menacing. Our hero isn’t a man prone to questions, or reflection for that matter, and for a good chunk of the novella he can’t speak the local language anyway, so though it’s obvious something’s going on it’s not until the end it’s terribly clear what (and I don’t think he ever really works it all out).

It doesn’t matter though, because Germany and Austria are beautiful, because a wandering man with a fiddle can cause a whole village to leap up and start dancing, and because whatever’s going on our hero is guided by love and by desire for adventure and he’s basically a good person. And this is not a story in which bad things happen to good people.

Much of Memoirs is very funny. The hero has a habit of falling asleep whenever nothing much seems to be going on, leading to him missing out on quite a lot that happens. His misunderstandings lead to bizarre and comical situations, and his own emotions are so changeable that at any moment he can plunge from joy to despair and back again. There’s also some wonderful set pieces. Here he’s in Rome, and encounters a parrot in an open window above him:

Then I tried to start up a conversation with the parrot, for it gave me great pleasure to watch him clamber up and own in his gilt cage and perform all manner of contortions, in the course of which he always contrived to trip over his big toe.
Suddenly he shouted “Furfante!”* at me, and even though he was only a stupid animal, this annoyed me. So I called him an insulting name in return, and we both got angry; the more I insulted him in German, the more he shrieked away in Italian.

There’s an equally marvellous sequence where, as he enjoys a secluded mountaintop view, a group of musicians creep up behind and strike up their instruments believing him to be an English nobleman on the Grand Tour and hoping to earn some money from him. The image of young English lords being surprised by lurking bands of mountaintop musicians was one I just couldn’t resist.

More seriously, it’s a work of German romanticism (a genre I know a bit, but not well). There’s a well written introduction by the translator, Ronald Taylor, where he writes that the essence of German romanticism is a Holy Trinity of Nature, Love and Art and their connection with the soul of the German people. The novel’s a paean of love to Germany, to the German nation, and while naturally it’s hard for a modern reader to read of German “national spirit” without unfortunate connotations creeping in, that’s not really von Eichendorff’s fault.

Memoirs makes a marvellous counterpoint to The Black Spider, both are nineteenth Century pastoral novels and both I think come from a common cultural tradition, but where one is a dark tale of divine retribution the other is an idyll in which good is rewarded and nobody is really very evil. It’s also a tremendous corrective. If you’re finding yourself bogged down in a literary great which is heavy going, or depressed by a tale of unusual bleakness or cynicism, then Memoirs is as bright a contrast as you might wish for.

It’s taken me a while to warm to Oneworld Classics, with my reading this year though I’m seeing how they live up to their title. It’s marvellous to see these works being translated, German classics, Italian ones, a wealth of European literature that has tended to be obscure to English speaking readers – and like The Black Spider this is a fresh and enjoyable translation. Couple all that with good paper and print and attractive covers, and I expect to be reading more of them as the year goes on.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Memoirs is full of folksongs, Eichendorff was primarily a poet and lyricist. I’ve not quoted those songs here, for reasons of space, but one of von Eichendorff’s poems (not from this book) can be found here, with different translations of it being set side by side. Interesting stuff.

Memoirs of a good-for-nothing

*Scoundrel. The endnote is in the original.

if they had fooled the green huntsman once…

The Black Spider, by Jeremias Gotthelf

The Black Spider is a Swiss-German novella first published in 1842. Today, it’s published by Oneworld Classics and effectively translated by H.M. Waidson, who also writes a useful (and spoiler free) introduction. It was, apparently, one of Thomas Mann’s favourite works, though sadly it’s not also one of mine.

The locations in Spider are real places, ones that would be familiar to many of its original readers. The story by contrast is a mix of parable, myth and folklore. The book opens in the then present day, on the morning of a christening, a family of rich Swiss peasants preparing for celebration and feasting secure in the knowledge of their piety, good neighbourship and solid work ethic. The opening paragraphs show a scene of bucolic near-paradise:

THE SUN ROSE OVER THE HILLS, shone with clear majesty down into a friendly, narrow valley and awakened to joyful consiousness the beings who are created to enjoy the sunlight of their life. From the sun-gilt forest’s edge the thrush burst forth in her morning song, while between sparkling flowers in dew-laden grass the yearning quail could be heard joining in with its love-song; above dark pine tops eager crows were performing their nuptial dance or cawing delicate cradle songs over the thorny beds of their fledgeless young.

In the middle of the sun-drenched hillside nature had placed a fertile, sheltered, level piece of ground; here stood a fine house, stately and shining, surrounded by a splendid orchard, where a few tall apple trees were still displaying there finery of late blossom; the luxuriant grass, which was watered by the fountain near the house, was in part still standing, though some of it had already found its way to the fodder store. About the house there lay a Sunday brightness which was not of the type that can be produced on a Saturday evening in the half-light with a few sweeps of the broom, but which rather testified to a valuable heritage of traditional cleanliness which has to be cherished daily, like a family’s reputation, tarnished as this may become in one single hour by marks that remain, like bloodstains, indelible from generation to generation, making a mockery of all attempts to whitewash them.

Despite that last and ominous note regarding the possibillity of tarnish, this is a vision of temporal loveliness. God is in his heaven, and all is right with the world. From there, we go to the preparations for the christening, the good natured banter between the locals, lingering descriptions of the fine table laid out for guests, these are people who live solid, sensible and godfearing lives and they are rewarded by their god accordingly.

All this is a framing device, for the house has one curious feature, an ancient black post which sits oddly with the otherwise pristine design. A grandfather explains its provenance, with a chilling tale that forms the heart of the book.

Centuries past, when the Teutonic knights ruled the territory, an indifferent lord was working the peasantry into penury. As harvest time approached, he decided he wanted a shady grove in which to walk on the hot summer days, and so ordered the peasants to move a grove of beech trees from the valley to his mountain keep – roots and all. The task is near impossible, and even if it can be completed it can only be achieved by letting the harvest rot in the fields and so means sure starvation for the villagers.

After hearing his demands, the villagers return to their homes, but on the way sit down despairing in the road and cry out about their plight. They are heard, and a green huntsman appears and enquires as to the cause of their sorrow:

A red feather was swaying on his bold cap, a little red beard blazed in his dark face, and a mouth opened between his hooked nose and pointed chin, almost invisible like a cavern beneath overhanging rocks, and uttered the question ‘What’s the matter, good people, that you are sitting and moaning like this, as if to force the rocks out of the earth and the branches down from the trees?’ Twice he asked thus, and twice he received no answer.

Then the green huntsman’s dark face became even darker and his little red beard became even redder, so that it seemed to be crackling and sparkling like pine wood on fire; his mouth pursed itself sharply like an arrow and then opened to ask quite pleasingly and gently: ‘But good people, what use is it your sitting and moaning there? …’

The villagers ultimately ask for his aid, and ask what he requires in return.

Then the green huntsman showed a cunning face; his little beard crackled, and his eyes gleamed at them like snakes’ eyes, and a hideous laugh came from the two corners of his mouth as he opened his lips and said, ‘ as I was saying, I don’t ask for much, nothing more than an unbaptised child.’

The villagers of course refuse, but nothing goes right for them from that point. They make no progress moving and planting the trees, everything goes wrong. Only one among them, a foreign woman named Christine brought to the region by one farmer to be his wife, is willing to have any truck with the green huntsman (whose true identity they understand all too well). Finally, on a night when a storm cracks overhead with unusual force, they collectively decide to follow Christine’s advice and take the bargain, calculating that they can always renege on their side of it later. The next day:

The morning was beautiful and bright, thunder and lightning and witchcraft had vanished, the axes struck twice as sharply as before, the soil was friable and every beech tree fell straight, just as one would like it; none of the carts broke, the cattle were amenable and strong and the men protected from all accidents as if by an invisible hand.

Indeed, the only seeming downside is that the carts become peculiarly heavy when taken past the church and the men and animals filled with an inexplicable fear.

There’s a definite issue of gender politics in this book, Christine is a domineering wife, prideful and headstrong. Her husband doesn’t control her, and rather than assuming her place of wifely support she intrudes on the men’s deliberations and sways their judgement. Disaster ensues. I don’t think I’m being oversensitive in seeing in the book a suggestion that it simply isn’t a woman’s place to take decisions that men ought to be taking, and that no good can come from her rebelliion against the natural order of things.

The grove is swift erected, but when time comes to hand over a baby the villagers do not live up to their end of the bargain, instead they ensure that the child is quickly baptised and so beyond the devil’s power (and it then promptly dies, which the book informs us means god has protected it from the possibility of later sin). From there, things go wrong again, with a black spider growing literally out of Christine’s cheek and laying devastation upon them, all those it touches swelling black with poison and dying in agony. The villagers have mocked the devil, and he will not lightly be mocked.

This section is the most effective in the book. There is a chilling sense of horror as the spider grows from Christine’s face and causes her increasing pain as the villagers seek to outwit the devil. Then, the spider born and intent on their destruction, each villager begins considering whether their life is not perhaps more important than some neighbour’s next newborn. Instead of turning to god, they turn to further selfishness, and so long as they do so the spider’s reign continues uninterrupted:

Thus it was that the spider was now here, now there, now nowhere, now down in the valley, now up on the hills; it hissed through the grass, fell from the roof or sprang up from the ground. When people were sitting over the midday meal of porridge, it would appear gloating at the far end of the table, and before they had time to scatter in terror the spider had run over all their hands and was sitting on the head of the father of the family, staring over the table at the blackening hands. It would fall upon people’s faces at night, it would encounter them in the forest or descend upon them in the cattle shed. No one could avoid it, for it was nowhere and everywhere; no one could screen himself from it while he was awake, and when he was asleep there was no protection. When someone thought himself to be safest, in the open air or in a treetop, then fire would crawl up his back, and the spider’s fiery feet could be felt in his neck as it stared over his shoulder. It spared neither infant in the cradle nor the old man on his deathbed; it was a plague more deadly than any that had been known before, and it was a form of death more terrible than any that had previously been experienced, and what was still more terrible than the death agony was the nameless fear of the spider which was everywhere and nowhere and which would suddenly be fixing its death-dealing stare on someone when he fancied he was most secure.

The spider afflicts peasants in their fields and homes, knights in the castle, pallbearers taking the dead to funeral, it is a pestilence that sweeps the village bringing horrible and unpredictable death and it’s as clear a metaphor for bubonic plague as ever I’ve seen.

Eventually, a pious mother traps the spider, giving her own life in the process. A virtuous woman, she is not afraid to die so that her child might live. Again, there’s a touch of gender politics to the story. The spider lies imprisoned and time passes, but generations later the villagers again grow prideful and vain and forget their god, the spider is once more unleashed and the horror renews. This time too, the fault is a woman’s. Another foreign wife, married to a man who dare not stand up to her nor to his browbeating mother who chose the wife for him. Once again, women have stepped out from the authority of men, and plague, terror and death is the consequence.

And that’s where I struggle a bit. The contemporary framing device shows people who live in memory of god and with piety informing all their lives, but for all that they seemed a bit smug about it. They are confident of their standing with god and secure in the knowledge that they are saved, perhaps it’s the remnants of my own Catholic upbringing which make me uncomfortable with that. Frankly, they could use being a bit less sure of themselves.

For me as a modern reader, another problem is the fact that much of what happens is the fault of uppity women who don’t know their place. That’s, well, perhaps not a point of view I feel wholly able to subscribe to. And the theology of it all I find rather troubling, this Swiss god after all allows children and elderly folk who surely played no part in the decision to deal with the devil to pay for the sins of others, there’s a sense of collective judgement that I struggle to square with my own conceptions of what’s right.

The Black Spider is essentially a Christian morality tale. It’s an enjoyable read in large part, particularly (and isn’t this always true?) the parts where the devil is running rampant either in person or through his servant, the spider. But, the point of the book for me was to contrast what it means to live in the light of god, and what it means not to, and given I don’t consider myself a Christian or indeed religious at all that’s a message that’s slightly lost on me.

All that said, I would recommend The Black Spider for any prosperous nineteenth Century Swiss readers, who wish to remind themselves to be thankful for their many blessings, and though I can’t speak to this with accuracy I suspect it might make quite a good thanksgiving tale for American readers who in that season would like to read a story about the importance of being thankful for good fortune and (if they’re religious) who they owe that good fortune to.

Update 11/11/13: Since I wrote this a new translation of The Black Spider has been issued by NYRB Classics. There are reviews of it at themookseandthegripes here and at His Futile Preoccupations here. Stu of winstonsdadsblog has also recently written a review but of the same translation as the one I reviewed above. Stu’s translation is here.

This made her look so charming that even a husband could hardly remain unmoved

A slight Misunderstanding, by Prosper Mérimée

There are few things less romantic than a French novel about love. A slight Misunderstanding, a novella written in 1833 by Prosper Mérimée, is no exception.

Mérimée was, in his period, a well known and regarded writer. A slight Misunderstanding comes with a back cover recommendation from Henry James and 1958 translator Douglas Parmée in the foreword notes that “a distinguished committee of well-known French authors and critics, in choosing the twelve best novels of the nineteenth century, included in them La Double Méprise.” Parmée goes on to describe it as a masterpiece, high praise then.

For me, masterpiece goes too far, however despite that I enjoyed Misunderstanding and I can certainly see why James might have been a fan.

In Douglas Parmée’s translation, which despite being now over 50 years old was I thought clear, crisp and still fresh, Misunderstanding comes in at a brisk 115 pages. Within them, we meet Mme Julie de Chaverny, trapped in a loveless marriage with her husband of six years, Chaverny. Julie is a pretty young woman, once high spirited and imaginative, her husband though of good family is a vulgar and unappreciative man. Julie is pursued by the dashing young Major de Châteaufort, who seeks to become her lover. Matters transform, however, when her old friend M. Darcy (yes, Darcy) returns from Constantinople awakening old affections and bringing with him a new exoticism that the men of Paris struggle to compete with.

Parmée refers to the plot as banal, which is fair. There is no story so traditional in French literature as that of the bored wife, the boorish husband, the uncaring lover. The plot here is utterly predictable, sufficiently so that I would not consider it a spoiler if I were to repeat it in whole below (though I shan’t, as others may differ). The only unusual element is M. Darcy, a fourth player in the ancient love triangle, a rogue element in a story that otherwise was likely told by one French caveman to the other.

Why then, if so predictable, is it worth reading? Not the characterisation, none of the characters are deeply drawn, all are shallow, interchangeable even (though of that, more shortly), Mme. de Chaverny is not a particularly sympathetic heroine, there is little to choose between the merits of Major Châteaufort and M. Darcy, what is left then is the prose.

And the prose, generally, is excellent. Mérimée has a sharp observational eye and a dry turn of wit. For the first half or so of the novella, I could barely turn a page without a sly witticism, so softly uttered that one could blink and miss it. Descriptions are acerbic, unmerciful, yet affectionate too. Language is used with great precision, not a word wasted. Here we meet Major Châteaufort and his faithful friend Major Perrin for the first time:

Major Perrin was sitting at a little table, busily reading. His well-brushed coat, his cap, and above all, his posture, stiff as a ramrod, proclaimed him to be an old soldier. Everything in his room was spotless, but extremely simple. An inkwell and two quills already cut were on the table beside a pile of writing paper, not one sheet of which had been used for at least a year. If Major Perrin didn’t write, he at least made up for it by reading a great deal. At the moment, he was reading Montesquieu’s Persian Letters whilst smoking his meerschaum pipe and these two occupations had so engrossed him that at first he did not notice the entrance of Major de Châteaufort. He was a young officer from his own regiment, with a charming face, extremely likeable, somewhat conceited, a protogé of the Minister for War; in a word, the opposite of Major Perrin in almost every respect. Yet, quite unaccountably, they were great friends and saw each other every day.

The description of the room is light yet exact, the comment about the unused pages dry but not unkind. What will not be apparent, from the passage above alone, is that the description of Major de Châteaufort is surprisingly similar to that of Chaverny in his youth when first he won his wife.

Later, we come to a description of M. Darcy, when a younger man:

In the old days, Darcy had been a person of no consequence whatsoever in Mme. de Lussan’s set, because it was known – certainly every mother knew – that his lack of money would never permit him to think of marrying any of their daughters. And as far as the daughters were concerned, there was nothing about him to turn their pretty young heads. In other respects, he had the reputation of being a gentleman. Being something of a misanthrope as well as having rather a caustic tongue, he enjoyed making fun of the absurdities and pretensions of the other young men, whenever he found himself the only man in a group of girls. When he was seen whispering to some girl, their mamas were not alarmed, because their daughters used to laugh out loud and mothers with daughters who had nice teeth even used to say that M. Darcy was an extremely pleasant young man.

What impresses me here, apart from the vicious wit of “mothers with daughters who had good teeth” approving when Darcy made those daughters laugh out loud, is the density of social description. We have rules regarding marriage, but rules too regarding affairs for it is clear if a daughter is laughing openly that nothing untoward is occuring. Mérimée is nothing if not precise in his language.

As noted above, Major de Châteaufort is little more than a young Chaverny, Darcy too though is cut from similar cloth. He is wittier, less dashing, but armed with the power of his exoticism fresh from his return from the East he is irresistible. Chaverny wooed his wife in part with the promise of construction of a special carriage for her, Darcy seduces her in his own carriage, an irony that all Paris society (and therefore Mérimée’s original readership) would well appreciate. Indeed, for a short work, it is full of irony, from the differing accounts of Darcy’s heroic rescue of a Turkish woman during his stay in the East and his later reflection on the incident which sheds a different light on it again, to the core simliarity of every male character in Julie de Chaverny’s life. Julie de Chaverny loathes her husband, is attracted but only shallowly by Major de Châteaufort, is washed away by Darcy, but they are all really the same man – slightly differing manifestations of the same cool Aristocratic wit and disengagement. Here, the difference between a husband and a lover is not one of character, but merely of complacency. De Châteaufort and Darcy are still trying, Chaverny no longer needs to.

The curiosity of A Slight Misunderstanding, is that as I write about it, it grows in my mind. The beauty of the novella as a form is it gives space to explore an idea, but its brevity gives space too to allow it to echo beyond the page, unfolding still in the mind once finished. Misunderstanding is a work characterised by a plot that even in the early days of 1833 would have suprised noone, its criticism of French society is mild, none in it are likeable but there is none of the anger of Laclos. Still, its cool manner, clarity and pared-back style remain after the book is finished, and having read it I already find myself wanting to read it again.

I read A Slight Misunderstanding in the excellent Oneworld Classics edition, an imprint new to me but one I shall look out for again as physically the book was printed on good quality paper, with generous but not excessive use of spacing and margins which helped make it an easy read. It comes with an attractive cover image of a rumpled bed which managed to be both restrained yet apt. Oneworld Classics are I hope proud of the job they did producing it, and I’m grateful to them for bringing it to my attention.

A Slight Misunderstanding