Nevertheless Couperus’ wide and continuing appeal to readers is easy to understand: his great gift for narrative, characterisation and dialogue is allied to a compelling fatalistic vision.
The outbreak of World War I brought four years of enforced confinement within the neutral borders of his native Netherlands, and put a brake on Couperus’ growing reputation in the English-speaking world, where since the 1890s he had enjoyed critical and popular success with a string of translations. As early as 1891 Footsteps of Fate (Noodlot, 1890) had appealed to Oscar Wilde and his circle, Old People and the Things that Pass (Van oude mensen de dingen die voorbijgaan, 1906) was praised, albeit faintly, by D H Lawrence, and the ambitious four-novel cycle The Books of the Small Souls (De boeken der kleine zielen, 1901–1903) won the endorsement of Katherine Mansfield.
Once hostilities ceased the priority was his reintroduction to an international audience. Deciding which of his books was best suited to inaugurate such a relaunch was no easy task: both the brilliant and perceptive colonial novel De stille kracht (The Hidden Force, 1901) and the explicit homosexuality of De berg van licht (The Mountain of Light, 1905–1906), centring on the downfall of the androgynous boy-emperor Heliogabalus, were too controversial for the contemporary moral and political climate in the target countries. Though The Hidden Force eventually appeared with some success in a slightly censored version in the UK in 1922 and in 1924 in the US, where the film rights were also sold, the latter novel, in some ways the fictional counterpart of the languid classical tableaux of the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912) and cited in Mario Praz’s classic study The Romantic Agony as an exemplary decadent novel, remains untranslated.
The final choice was the 1900 novel Langs lijnen van geleidelijkheid, which was published first in America as Inevitable in 1920, in the version by Couperus’ regular translator Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, and the following year in the UK under the (even more) portentous title The Law Inevitable. This study of a young upper-class divorcee’s attempt to build a new, emancipated and culturally fulfilling life in Italy and her eventual return to her ex-husband received rapturous reviews in the US, where the author’s skill, power and versatility and his creation of a “beautiful and passionate” protagonist were widely admired. In Britain, however, the reception was more mixed. There were two main reservations: firstly, the novel’s erotic explicitness and specifically the concluding bedroom scene (which was discreetly bowdlerised in the UK edition); secondly, the title’s suggestion that Cornélie’s story is exemplary and universal. The latter stricture stems from a misapprehension caused by the English title, particularly in its expanded form. In fact Couperus’ Dutch title means something more like ‘slowly but surely’ or ‘little by little’, highlighting the specific, slow-acting chemistry between the heroine and her (ex-)husband.
On a literary level, Inevitable represents an interesting variation on some of Couperus’ major themes, including the complex underlying factors determining human character and action, and the contrast between Northern and Southern Europe—the former representing grey gloom, repression and convention, the latter sunshine, warmth and self-fulfilment. Present-day readers may detect echoes of Henry James (especially the story Daisy Miller of 1878) in both setting and tone, and be reminded of E M Forster’s evocations of Italian boarding-house life in A Room with a View (1908). Aspects of the ending suggest a comparison with D H Lawrence. The vagaries of a woman’s attempt at self-liberation recall a novel like H G Wells’ Ann Veronica (1909), though the optimism of the latter book is lacking.
Contemporary Dutch readers will have inevitably recognised the novel’s allusions to real life in the shape of the aristocratic women’s rights activist and writer Cecile Goekoop-de Jong van Beek en Donk (1866–1944), one of the principal organisers of the epoch-making Dutch National Exhibition of Women’s Labour held in The Hague in 1898. The heroine of her militantly feminist novel Hilda van Suylenburg (1897) combines a happy marriage with a successful career as a lawyer. The author’s own life fell somewhat short of this emancipated ideal: having left her rich husband in 1898 and fled to Italy, she was briefly reconciled with him after he followed her abroad, but was divorced in 1899, later remarrying and converting to Catholicism.
This biographical and literary link with contemporary feminism raises the question whether Couperus’ book is to be read as a fictional counterblast to Hilda van Suylenburg and its message that women “can have it all”. A commentator like Marianne Braun, for example, in her study of the first wave of feminism in the Netherlands, sees Couperus’s novel as an “antipode” to the earlier book. This, though, would seem a rather crude reading of a generally empathetic and balanced work. Certainly it would be simplistic to view Cornélie’s final submission to Brox as a pre-Lawrentian recipe for “sexual bliss ever after”; there is a heavy price to pay for Couperus’ character: her independence, her political engagement, and the cultural and intellectual affinity as well as the love she had shared in Rome with Duco. The Dutch critic Herman Verhaar has pointed to Couperus’s debt to Madeleine Férat (1868), an early novel by his revered model Zola, while stressing the Dutch writer’s commitment to individual psychology over the deterministic theories of “first impregnation” that loom large in Zola’s vision. Ton Anbeek stresses the fact that Couperus’ fatalism is never crudely physical or psychological, but has from the outset a mystical dimension, for most of his career classical in flavour, though in his last period coloured increasingly by oriental beliefs. Anbeek quotes a passage early in the novel (Chapter II), which seems to present Cornélie one-dimensionally as a product of her social class:
This woman was a child of her time but particularly of her environment, which was why she was so immature: conflict against conflict, a balance of contradiction, which might be either her downfall or her salvation, but was certainly her fate.
Certainly, the socio-economic consequences of an upbringing that has left her unfit for “menial” shop work in Rome are clearly spelt out (for example in Chapter XLII). It is no accident that Mrs Holt, the English feminist who urges Cornélie, as the author of an influential pamphlet, to rejoin the struggle, should be wealthy (Chapter XLVI). But realistic elements can be contrasted with a less tangible expression of her quandary when she is forced to leave Duco (Chapter XLIII):
There was absolutely no reason to leave him. He did not want her to either, he would never want it. And they held each other tight, as if they could feel something that might separate them, an inexorable necessity, as if hands were floating around them, pushing, guiding, restraining and defending, a battle of hands, like a cloud around the two of them; hands trying to sunder violently their glistening lifeline, their merged lifeline, though too narrow for both their feet, and the hands would wrest them apart, making the single great line spiral split apart into two.
Couperus is too great an artist to content himself with a purely programmatic treatment of his heroine’s predicament, though such charged passages, of which there are many in the novel, may seem to border on mystification. Today’s reader may wish to supply his or her own question mark to the English title (which, it must be stressed, was not the author’s choice).
PAUL VINCENT
Also Available from Pushkin Press
PUSHKIN PRESS
Pushkin Press was founded in 1997. Having first rediscovered European classics of the twentieth century, Pushkin now publishes novels, essays, memoirs, children’s books, and everything from timeless classics to the urgent and contemporary. Pushkin Press books, like this one, represent exciting, high-quality writing from around the world. Pushkin publishes widely acclaimed, brilliant authors such as Stefan Zweig, Marcel Aymé, Antal Szerb, Paul Morand and Hermann Hesse, as well as some of the most exciting contemporary and often prize-winning writers, including Andrés Neuman, Ellen Ullman, Eduardo Halfon and Ryu Murakami.
Pushkin Press publishes the world’s best stories, to be read and read again.
For more amazing stories, go to www
.pushkinpress.com.
Copyright
English translation © Paul Vincent and Pushkin Press 2005
First published in Dutch as
Langs Lijnen van geleidelijkheid in 1900
This edition first published in 2005 by
Pushkin Press
71-75 Shelton Street
London WC2H 9JQ
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 908968 56 2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press
Cover: Girl in White c 1889 by William de Zwart (1862–1931)
Haags Gemeentemuseum The Hague Netherlands The Bridgeman Art Library
The translation of this book is funded by the Foundation for the
Production and Translation of Dutch Literature
www.pushkinpress.com
Inevitable Page 26