The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  And how should she prepare her return—to a certain extent, a climb-down—to Todefright? She wrote a letter to her mother. It took her a long time to write.

  Dearest Mother Goose,

  I was so pleased to have your letter and hear that all is well at home. I miss the children, and Tom, and the countryside, even though it is both beautiful and exciting in the city. I am learning a lot. Germans are very different from us, and you come to understand yourself better by seeing people who are different.

  I don’t know why you thought I might not want the fairytale. I always love to see it, and know what happens next. I showed it to Herr Anselm Stern whose theatre we have been visiting. He said Mistress Higgle might be related to Hans mein Igel (originally by the Grimms) and put on his own puppet play about Hans the Igel for all of us to see. We have become great friends with Herr Stern and all his family. Frau Stern is an artist. I don’t know if you have met her. She is a very kind and welcoming woman and invites all of us—including the Tutes—to supper. Herr Stern’s sons, Wolfgang and Leon, are very good friends of all of us, now. They talk to Griselda in German, and take Charles to cabaret theatres and cafés! I know you are sad we shall not be in Todefright for the Midsummer Party, but the Sterns have invited us to celebrate it—it is called the Johannisnacht Fest—here, with them, and we will think of you all. Everyone in Munich—that is, in artistic circles in Schwabing—dresses up in fancy dress on every conceivable occasion, so we shall have to think what to go as. Herr Stern has promised to do a version of Midsummer Night’s Dream with marionettes for the occasion. Everyone here loves to go out and see the Bauerntanz—the people dancing in the streets. Herr Stern says he can make the rustics in the Dream be like the German Bauern. I am learning German but very slowly. Griselda speaks it like a swan swimming in a river. But she too will be happy to come home. We all send love, to you, and to Father, and to everyone in Todefright.

  Dorothy.

  Dorothy thought this letter was both a masterpiece of the disingenuous, and a very useful lifeline, cast to Olive, if Olive wanted to grasp it. She then sat down to think about her own fury at Olive, her wish to close her out and punish her. What exactly was she punishing her for? For a moment of passion (she supposed it was a moment of passion) with the mysterious and intriguing Anselm? For her own birth? She was glad she had been born, she was contented enough with who she was, even if that person turned out to have a different origin from what she had always supposed. For bringing her up in ignorance, as a Wellwood? What else could a woman in that situation have done? She had not lied to Humphry—possibly could not. They had both loved Dorothy, that she had to admit. What angered her was the lie. Those who are lied to feel diminished, set aside, misused. So Dorothy felt. But she was also discovering that knowing about lies that have been told is a form of power. She had power over both Humphry and Olive, because they had lied to her, and she knew. And they did not know how much she knew, and they were fearful. The letter she had written would make them more fearful, more anxious. They deserved that. But the letter also, in its naïveté and neutrality, left the door open for everyone to pretend that nothing had happened at all—for them all to know they were pretending, and tell a story together. She pressed the envelope shut, licked the stamp, and carried it to the post.

  Charles/Karl was also preoccupied with his double identity. He saw more both of the politically agitated and of the raffish and satirical sides of life in Schwabing than the young ladies did. He sat in the Café Stefa-nie, in the thick smoke and the singing, and listened to psychoanalysts and anarchists preaching ferment. He listened to slogans. “Unity is princely violence, is tyrannical rule. Discord is popular violence, is freedom” (Panizza). Intense analogies were drawn between hidden destructive parts of the soul, and the excitement of peasants and workers in mobs. It was dangerous to deny such impulses—violence, conspiracy, revolution, murder became necessary and desirable as the tyrannical state was opposed and overcome. It was a long way from the polite lucubrations of the Fabians, and even further from the horse-racing, shooting-party circles of the new King, at the edge of which Charles’s father moved—thanks to his German mother’s fortune. Charles was quite intelligent enough to see that he was able to be an anarchist because he was rich. The Munich café thinkers were aesthetically excited by peasant manifestations of energy—the charivari, the Bauerntanz, the Karneval. Karneval and misrule went together, and were glorious. Joachim Susskind mostly listened. Wolfgang said little, though, like his father, he sketched incessantly, beards wagging in passionate dissertation, women’s legs visible under their skirts as they leaned back, applauding. Leon joined in. He discussed the necessity of assassination, almost primly. Karl said he did not see that it was necessary—such detached Acts as there had been—anarchists had killed the President of France, the Prime Minister of Spain, the Empress Elizabeth and the King of Italy—had only led to more repression. There speaks an Englishman, said Leon, not unfriendly. You don’t recognise oppression as we do. You cannot be put in prison for Unzüchtigkeit—“obscenity” Joachim translated—or for lèse-majesté as our artists regularly are. We are driven to put on our serious plays in private clubs and cabarets. And then, the police come in, and the artists are imprisoned, or banished. Oskar Panizza is in Switzerland and cannot return.

  “We shall take you to the new artists’ cabaret, the Elf Scharfrichter. Eleven executioners,” said Joachim. “It’s better in German—the sharp edge of the axe is the bite of the wit.”

  Karl was already amazed by the satirical poison and violence of the periodicals, Jugend, Simplicissimus, with their drawings at once elegant, wicked, obscene and lively. Black dancing demons. Bulldogs. Women like bats and vampires with black mouths. Leon invited him—as an English anarchist—to admire Simpl’s cartoons on English matters. Leon explained to Charles/Karl that artists in Schwabing felt great sympathy for the oppressed Boers in South Africa. The cartoons preached “Shoot the English in the mouth, where they are most dangerous.” There was a graphic and horrible image of King Edward and a colonial officer stamping on Boers in a concentration camp. “The blood from these devils is befouling my crown,” said the King. “Strong, is it not?” said Leon. “English tourists have tried to get it suppressed. It mocks the Kaiser also. His endless uniforms. His journey to the Holy Land.”

  Karl was surprised—somewhat surprised—by his reaction to these images. He felt pure, chauvinistic English resentment and hurt, which he concealed from the Germans as he had concealed his anarchism from his family. Like Dorothy, he had moments of homesickness for a life more slow-paced, less intense, more ruminative. More polite. The English could not take such pleasure in giving offence. The cartoon would be funnier, less—less unpleasant.

  • • •

  They took him to see the Elf Scharfrichter perform. They took him on a night when the puppets were playing, because Wolfgang had helped in the construction of the cast, and was involved in the performance itself.

  The Scharfrichter were eleven artists—including the playwright, Frank Wedekind—who paraded in blood-red robes and hangmen’s masks, carrying executioners’ heavy swords, and performed plays, songs, puppet and shadow plays, using popular forms—which were referred to as Tingeltangel—and comparing themselves to the workers in applied arts—they meant, they said, to make songs to be sung as craftsmen made chairs to fit people’s bottoms. Angewandte Lyrik was what it was about. They had a private stage in a tavern which held eighty people, at nightclub tables. It was, when Karl went with Joachim and Wolfgang, crammed full of spectators. The black walls were decorated with lurid and elegant posters from Simplicissimus, and with pornographic Japanese woodcuts, which startled Karl, though he tried to retain a studied English calm. There was a programme, on the cover of which a gleefully naked woman was tossing out her long, blood-red gloves. Inside the entrance was a totem: a solemn head of a bewigged person, from the Age of Reason, embedded in which was an executioner’s axe.

  The executioners m
arched in, singing the song they always sang, aimed at the Catholic hierarchy.

  Ein Schattentanz, ein Puppenspott!

  Ihr Glücklichen und Glatten

  Die Puppen und die Schatten.

  Er lenkt zu Leid, er lenkt zu Glück,

  Hoch dampfen die Gebete,

  Doch just im schönsten Augenblick

  Zerschneiden wir die Drähte.

  A shadow-dance, a puppet’s joke!

  You happy, polished people—

  In heav’n on high the same old bloke

  Guides puppets from his steeple.

  For good or ill he guides their moves,

  Each doll an anthem sings,

  But then, just when it least behoves

  We cut the puppets’ strings.

  On this evening the executioners performed this song with gusto, and were followed on stage by Marya Delvard, a skeletally thin woman with a mane of flaming hair, kohl-rimmed eyes and a white skin, who sang, twisted in a long black gown, about sex and passion, suicide and murder, in a kind of low moan. She was lit by violet light. She had a vampire’s mouth. After her came the puppet play Die Feine Familie. There was a pit between the audience and the stage, which housed both musicians and puppeteers. It depicted the crowned heads of Europe as a gang of squabbling children, quarrelling over toys—the Empire in South Africa, the palace in Peking. There were the uncle and the cousins, Edward, the Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nikolas, roaring with rage like toddlers, conspiring with each other against each other. Karl sat very still and tried to follow the rapid patter. He did not approve of kings and royal persons. But, again, he became surreptitiously English. These strangers should not so easily mock England’s green and pleasant land, even in the person of a fat, amorous, red-faced, droning person in ermine and a silly crown. He had a moment of wondering what the world would be like to live in, when the desired burst of violent outrage finally happened. He had a moment of wondering whether it would really be better to be ruled by the whims of masked executioners and raucous seductresses. He applauded the end of the play, and Wolfgang winked at him.

  “You have this kind of work in London?”

  “We have music hall. It isn’t like this. It’s—sillier, and—and more sentimental.”

  “We have sentimental things, too, in abundance. Schwabing has invented a word for them, a word I like. Kitsch.”

  “Kitsch,” said Charles/Karl.

  Another new theatre, Richard Riemerschmid’s Schauspielhaus, had also opened that spring. They went there all together—the tutors, the Sterns, Karl, Griselda and Dorothy—to see Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. The theatre was Jugendstil, and delicately, exquisitely beautiful. The auditorium was a hot red cavern or womb which was also an elven wood. Fine golden tendrils and stems spilled and clambered and tumbled everywhere, irregular, linking balconies to stage, framing the actors. Wilde was dead, now. He had died shortly after Karl and Joachim had seen him in Rodin’s atelier in the Grande Exposition. Karl did not enjoy Salomé, with its rhythmic moaning and sick sensuality. He had got rather attached to the new word “kitsch.” He ventured to say to Joachim that he thought this might be kitsch, and Joachim was shocked, and said no, it was Modern Art, it was freedom of expression. Dorothy stopped looking after a time, and started to try to remember the bones of the body and their names. The actress playing Salomé seemed supple and boneless, like a snake-charmer and a snake, simultaneously. Wolfgang said to Griselda that he believed the play had never been put on in Wilde’s own country, in his own language. Toby Youlgreave, on the other side of Griselda, said it had been written in French and translated into English, but the Lord Chamberlain had stopped the performance. Ah, said Wolfgang. You too have a Lex Heinze. Toby said he thought the reason given was blasphemy, acting biblical characters, not obscenity. The text had been published with illustrations by Beardsley. Naughty illustrations. But clever. Wolfgang said he thought he had seen them, in the tone of one who has in fact no real memory of doing so. He then said Beardsley draws sex, but always coldly. Unlike our artists. The English are cold, they say. He looked quickly at Griselda, and away. Griselda looked at the rich red curtain, closed for the interval. A very faint flush rose in her white cheeks.

  Finally, it was the Solstice again, it was Midsummer. In England, Olive presided as usual over a depleted gathering on the lawn. It was a grey day. The fairy queen wore a velvet opera cloak over her floating robes. The absent Youlgreave was replaced, as Bottom, by Herbert Methley, who had finished his novel and resumed his social and amorous dealings. Florian was Cobweb instead of Dorothy. Tom was still Puck. Humphry was still handsome, but there was grey at his temple.

  In Munich it was altogether wilder. The artists and Bohemians of Schwabing dressed up whenever they could, celebrated all feasts with gusto, danced in the streets and in courtyards and gardens. Anselm Stern put on a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for marionettes. The puppets, human and stumbling, and the fair folk with trailing wings, rushed through a painted wood, whilst flutes and bagpipes squealed eerily. The Mechanicals were dressed as Bavarian workmen, and danced peasant dances. Oberon had Anselm Stern’s own thin face, Dorothy saw, and one of his characteristic looks of intent, almost dangerous, thought-fulness. Puck looked like Wolfgang, with horns pushing through the unruly hair. Hermia and Helena were Dorothy and Griselda, expressions set in wide-eyed surprise.

  After the show they roamed the streets. Midsummer in the south of Germany was warm, was leafy, was inviting. They crossed other groups, and stopped in taverns and cafés to take a beer, or a glass of Riesling. At one point Dorothy, who was dressed as a silver moth, and Griselda, who was dressed as an eighteenth-century lady, bumped into a Valkyrie, with breastplate and horned helmet, who turned out to be English. Her name, she said, was Marie Stopes. She was studying at the University. Dorothy was interested. She said she hadn’t known women were admitted. They aren’t, said Marie Stopes. In my department I am the only woman. I am a palaeobotanist. I study the sex of fossil cycads. It is very interesting. If one, then more, Dorothy thought. At this point Joachim Susskind joined them and recognised Miss Stopes, who had taken an unprecedented first-class Honours degree in Botany—in one year, moreover—at University College. Dorothy suddenly felt silly in grey silk and velvet. She should be in a classroom. But then, here was the successful Miss Stopes, dressed as an ungainly Valkyrie, and slightly drunk.

  Anselm Stern and his family had built a balefire in their courtyard—a cheerful, flickering construction, not mountainous, not a furnace. They all danced round it, and, as it subsided, jumped over the ashes. Anselm had given them all blue flowers, Rittersporn, larkspurs, to throw into the embers—“And all your cares and troubles with them,” he said.

  Dorothy had two memories from that day which never left her. The first was of dancing with her new father, with Anselm Stern, a kind of fast whirling polka, round the Spiegelgarten. She caught sight of herself in a mirror—her hair had come loose—she looked wild—and she suddenly remembered waltzing in South Kensington with her other father, her new dress, his hand on her waist, and everything that had come from it. Because of that dance, this dance. She missed a step, and Anselm supported her. He looked down at her worried face, and, for the first time, carefully kissed her on the brow.

  Dorothy’s second memory was of going indoors to find a lavatory, and having found one to be occupied, searching for another. And she came upon two people, standing closely together. They were Wolfgang and Griselda. Dorothy saw that both of them had closed their eyes. They had not seen her. She went back round the corner she had just turned. She said nothing to Griselda, and Griselda said nothing to her.

  III

  THE SILVER AGE

  32

  Backwards and forwards, both. The Edwardians knew they came after something. The sempiternal Queen was gone, in all her manifestations, from the squat and tiny widow swathed in black crape and jet beads, to the gold-encrusted, bedizened, crowned idol who was brought out at durbars and jubilees. That pursed li
ttle mouth was silent for ever. Her long-dead mate, who had most seriously cared for the lives of working-men and for the wholesome and beautiful and proliferating arts and crafts, persisted beside her in the name of the unfinished Museum, full of gold, silver, ceramics, bricks and building dust. The new King was an elderly womaniser, genial and unhealthy, interested in oiling the wheels of diplomacy with personal good sense, in racehorses, in the daily shooting of thousands upon thousands of bright birds and panting, scrambling, running things, in the woodlands and moors of Britain, in the forests and mountains of Germany, Belgium, Denmark and Russia. It was a new time, not a young time. Skittishly, it cast off the moral anguish and human responsibility of the Victorian sages Lytton Strachey was preparing to mock. The rich acquired motor cars and telephones, chauffeurs and switchboard operators. The poor were a menacing phantom, to be helped charitably, or exterminated expeditiously. The sun shone, the summers broiled and were brilliant. The land, in places, was running with honey, cream, fruit fools, beer, champagne.

  They looked back. They stared and glared backwards, in an intense, sometimes purposeful nostalgia for an imagined Golden Age. There were many things they wanted to go back to, to retrieve, to reinhabit.

  They wanted to go back to the earth, to the running rivers and full fields and cottage gardens and twining honeysuckle of Morris’s Nowhere. They wanted to live in cottages (real cottages, which meant old stone, mossy cottages) and grow their own fruit and vegetables, getting their own eggs and gooseberries. They wanted, like Edward Carpenter, to be self-sufficient on smallholdings, and also to be naked and dabble their toes in real mud, like him, having taken off real, handmade sandals, like him. They did love the earth. The chalk Downs and Romney Marsh are the ultimate heroes of Puck of Pook’s Hill, published in 1906, the year of the building of HMS Dreadnought. Ford Madox Ford, living on a smallholding in Winchelsea, wrote movingly about digging the bones of a buried Viking out of the cliff at Beachy Head. Ford’s bones in the cliff are like the human bones in Kipling’s chalk, or the bones turned up on the Downs by rabbits in Hudson’s Shepherd’s Life. They are a dream of humans as part of the natural cycle, as they no longer seem to be.