Waiting for the Barbarians

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  So there aren’t many visible items of interest. The immense pleasures of the novel lie in the author’s coolheaded approach to what, in other hands, could have been a forgettable melodrama. As often in Fontane, the drama is internal, and, at first, internally generated; when the “excitement” happens—in this case, the intervention of Botho’s mother (in a letter)—it’s just an external correlative to something already present in one or more characters. The love affair in On Tangled Paths is shadowed from the start by the practical-minded Lene’s unblinking understanding that a romance like theirs cannot last:

  One day I’ll find you’ve flown away.… Don’t shake your head; it’s true, what I say. You love me and you’re true to me—at least my love makes me childish and vain enough to imagine it. But fly away you will, I can see that very clearly.… You love me but you’re weak-willed. We can’t change that. All handsome men are weak-willed, and ruled by a stronger force.… What is it? Well, either it’s your mother or people’s talk or circumstances. Or maybe all three.

  It’s a remarkable speech to encounter in the mouth of a young woman in a late-nineteenth-century novel. (It’s not surprising that Fontane admired Trollope, another creator of strong-willed females who know what’s what.) Botho, as it turns out, is weak-willed, and bows to his mother’s demands. What saves him, and the novel—it’s an element that makes for a more stimulating richness of perspective, and makes it harder to “blame” any given character—is that he is ultimately as realistic as Lene, if rather more prone to self-justification. “Do I mean to marry Lene? No. Have I promised her I would? No. Does she expect it? No. Or will parting be any easier for us if I defer it? No, no, and no again.”

  Lene suffers less than some of Fontane’s women because of her class—because her horizon of expectations is narrower than that of Effi or of Cécile, those unhappy wives of high-ranking husbands. Like them, she’s astute about the limitations that the world sets on her ambitions, but the ambitions are more realistic and the limitations more relaxed. The pleasure of On Tangled Paths is not the thrill of watching a female character struggle against social convention, as so many great heroines of nineteenth-century literature do, but the perhaps more complicated pleasure of recognizing a character who knows when to give in. Still, a sadness hangs in the air, owing in no small part to the innumerable touches the author employs to build up his subtle but affecting portrait of a young woman who is ignorant but not stupid, romantic but not foolish. (She’s the inverse of Emma Bovary—more interesting, too.) At one point, Lene uncomprehendingly examines the English captions on two prints in the room where she’s staying with her lover—“Washington Crossing the Delaware” and “The Last Hour at Trafalgar.” Fontane takes this casual moment and turns it, wonderfully, into a symbol of why the relationship can’t last: “But she could do no more than combine the letters into syllables, and, trivial as the matter was, it nonetheless gave her a pang by bringing home to her the gulf that separated her from Botho.” The book is filled with comparable moments of small facts transfigured into something magical.

  Irretrievable takes the same elements—an appealing man, charming but weak; a clear-eyed, practical-minded woman, perhaps a little pessimistic; a relationship that can’t go anywhere; resignation in the face of life’s realities—and, as its stark title suggests, turns it into a tragedy. It’s one of Fontane’s most idiosyncratic achievements, and certainly one of the finest literary autopsies of a foundering relationship. (The translation reprinted in the New York Review Books edition is more fluent and natural but also more prone to infelicities than a new translation, No Way Back, published in 2010 by Angel Books.)

  The novel’s odd, misty, rather Pelléas et Mélisande atmosphere has much to do with its unusual setting. It takes place not in Berlin, or even in Germany proper, but in Copenhagen and in the duchy of Schleswig-Holstein, a territory whose vexed history—it was the subject of a long series of ownership disputes between Denmark and Prussia, finally and forcibly resolved by the Danish War of 1864—serves as a metaphor for the condition of the main characters’ marriage. The Schleswig-Holstein question, the British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston once quipped, was so complicated that only three people understood it, of whom one, the Prince Consort, was dead; another, a foreign office clerk, had gone mad; and the third, Palmerston himself, had forgotten the whole thing. There’s always a background buzz of politics in Fontane’s novels—a geopolitical correlative for the emotional drama.

  Unlike the couple in On Tangled Paths, this pair have no obvious impediments to happiness. Both are aristocratic, and they have in fact been long and happily married, with two attractive teenage children, all living in a replica of a Greek temple on the Baltic coast. (A good setting for a tragedy.) Count Helmut Holk is charming and has many “likeable qualities,” and would, his wife can’t help thinking at the beginning of the novel, “certainly be an ideal husband—if he had any ideals at all of his own.” The countess, Christine, is beautiful, younger, and a bit too dogmatic and overprincipled, as she herself recognizes. When the author deftly alludes to Christine’s attitude toward smoking—something “which the countess did not really allow indoors, although she never forbade it”—you have all the information you need about the passive-aggressiveness that will sink the marriage. In the erosive contest between the two spouses, it’s hard not to feel the ghosts of Fontane’s quarreling parents, the Prinzipienverächter and the Prinzipienreiter.

  What happens in Irretrievable? Not much, on the face of it. What Helmut observes of a poem that he likes is true of this novel, as it is of so many others by Fontane: “There is no real content and it is just a situation and not a poem but that doesn’t matter. It has a certain tone and just as the coloring makes a picture … in the same way the tone makes the poem.” Fontane charts the course of the Holks’ marital decline in his usual desultory way—there’s a slow accumulation of talk and events, and then that climactic fillip. The couple bicker about which schools to send the children to; Helmut, suddenly called upon to fulfill his duty as courtier, goes away to Copenhagen for some weeks, where he flirts inconclusively with his landlady’s daughter and, more conclusively, with Ebba (“Eve”), a rather spiky lady-in-waiting to the elderly princess whom they both serve. He doesn’t write often enough to Christine; there’s a fire in the castle where the princess is holding court (no one gets hurt); in a fit of midlife foolishness, Helmut tells Christine it’s all over and proposes to the lady-in-waiting, who then tells him off (“You’re always sinning against the most elementary rules of the game”); eventually, he comes home to his wife. The moment of narrative “excitement” takes place five pages from the end of the book. As Helmut’s scheming landlady says of her daughter’s wayward life, “It’s something of a love-story but it’s not a proper love-story.”

  As in On Tangled Paths, the pleasure of the novel lies in its subtlety—in this case, a discreet exploration of marital psychology. Here again, trouble starts within and, like a dry rot, eats its way outward. The novel begins with one of Fontane’s unemphatic epiphanies: in the course of an ordinary domestic conversation one day, Christine realizes that the terrain of her marriage has, somehow, shifted under her feet. “In spite of having the best of husbands whom she loved as much as he loved her, she yet did not possess that peace for which she longed; in spite of all their love, his easy-going temperament was no longer in harmony with her melancholy.” The symbol of the fatal disharmony is Christine’s preoccupation with restoring the crumbling family vault. (Fontane’s novels are filled with brief but meaningful references to cemeteries, graves, burials, funerals, even funeral wreaths.) From the beginning, there’s not much question about who will end up in it.

  The haunted perception of imminent emotional failure—which, typically, the more sentimental male character resists at first—colors everything that follows in precisely the way the bad faith of a crumbling relationship poisons even the most innocent exchanges. This phenomenon is, indeed, one that the novel evokes
in harrowing detail. “In my correspondence with Christine,” Helmut heatedly writes to her brother, who is also his close friend, “I have never been able to strike the right note. As soon as one finds oneself suspected, it is very difficult to maintain the right tone and attitude.” And, as in On Tangled Paths, Fontane gives us access to the kind of tortured emotional self-justification that unhappy lovers are prone to. Here is Helmut, “interpreting” the fact that he wasn’t killed in the fire:

  If all my feelings had been wrong all this time, punishment would have overtaken us and Ebba and I would have fallen unconscious and been suffocated and never found our way to safety. And if I understood Christine’s last letter properly, she also feels that this will be the best thing for us to do. All those happy days we spent together mustn’t be forgotten, of course not … but part we must and I think it is our duty to do so.

  Masculine self-delusion masquerading as duty is a favorite target of Fontane’s. (Helmut’s monologue is a grotesque inversion of Lene’s coolly self-aware speech in On Tangled Paths.) Here it’s precisely the reagent necessary to ignite Christine’s dangerous penchant for self-righteousness, with predictable results.

  Well, not quite predictable: Irretrievable lingers in an unexpected cul-de-sac before it realizes the promise of its title. But even after the couple ostensibly reconcile, there’s really nothing left; by the end of this mild yet anguished work, all that remains of the marriage is a lifeless residue of thwarted yearning—“nothing but the willingness to be happy.” As so often in the fiction of Theodor Fontane, that’s not enough to save the characters, but it’s a marvelous subject for a novel.

  —The New Yorker, March 7, 2011

  REBEL REBEL

  ONE WINTER’S DAY in 1883, aboard a steamer that was returning him from Marseilles to the Arabian port city of Aden, a French coffee trader named Alfred Bardey struck up what he no doubt thought would be a casual conversation with a countryman he’d met on board, a young journalist named Paul Bourde. As Bardey chatted about his trading operation, which was based in Aden, he happened to mention the name of one of his employees—a “tall, pleasant young man who speaks little,” as he later described him. To his surprise, Bourde reacted to the name with amazement. This wasn’t so much because, by a bizarre coincidence, he had gone to school with Bardey’s employee; rather, it was that, like many Frenchmen who kept up with contemporary literature, he had assumed that the young man was dead. To an astonished Bardey, Bourde explained that, twelve years earlier, the tall and taciturn young man had made a “stupefying and precocious” literary début in Paris, only to disappear soon after. Until that moment, for all Bardey or anyone else in his circle knew, this man was simply a clever trader who kept neat books. Today, many think of him as a founder of modern European poetry. His name was Arthur Rimbaud.

  What Bardey learned about Rimbaud that day is still what most people know about him. There was, on the one hand, the dazzling, remarkably short-lived career: all of Rimbaud’s significant works were most likely composed between 1870, when he was not quite sixteen, and 1874, when he turned twenty. On the other hand, there was the abrupt abandonment of literature in favor of a vagabond life that eventually took him to Aden and then to East Africa, where he remained until just before his death, trading coffee, feathers, and, finally, guns, and making a tidy bundle in the process. The great mystery that continues to haunt and dismay Rimbaud lovers is this “act of renunciation,” as Henry Miller put it in his rather loopy 1946 study of Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins—which, Miller asserted, “one is tempted to compare … with the release of the atomic bomb.” The over-the-top comparison might well have pleased Rimbaud, who clearly wanted to vaporize his poetic past. When Bardey got back to Aden, bursting with his discovery, he found to his dismay that the former wunderkind refused to talk about his work, dismissing it as “absurd, ridiculous, disgusting.”

  That Rimbaud’s repudiation of poetry was as furious as the outpouring of his talent had once been was typical of a man whose life and work were characterized by violent contradictions. He was a docile, prizewinning schoolboy who wrote “Shit on God” on walls in his hometown; a teenage rebel who mocked small-town conventionality, only to run back to his mother’s farm after each emotional crisis; a would-be anarchist who in one poem called for the downfall of “Emperors / Regiments, colonizers, peoples!” and yet spent his adult life as an energetic capitalist operating out of colonial Africa; a poet who liberated French lyric verse from the late nineteenth century’s starched themes and corseted forms—and, more importantly, from “the language of common sense,” as Paul Valéry put it—and yet who, in his most revolutionary work, admitted to a love of “maudlin pictures,… fairytales, children’s storybooks, old operas, inane refrains and artless rhythms.”

  These paradoxes, and the extraordinarily conflicted feelings of admiration and dismay that Rimbaud’s story can evoke, are at the center of a powerful mystique that has seduced readers from Marcel Proust to Patti Smith. It had already begun to fascinate people by the time the poet died, in 1891. (He succumbed, at thirty-seven, to a cancer of the leg, after returning to his mama’s house one last time.) To judge from the steady stream of Rimbaldiana that has appeared over the past decade—which includes, most recently, a new translation of Illuminations, by the distinguished American poet John Ashbery, and Bruce Duffy’s Disaster Was My God, a substantial novel that wrestles with the great question of why Rimbaud stopped writing—the allure shows no sign of fading.

  Depending on your view of human nature, either everything or nothing about Rimbaud’s drab origins explains what came later. He was born in October 1854, in the town of Charleville, near the Belgian border. His father, Frédéric, was an army captain who had fought in Algeria, and his mother, Vitalie Cuif, was a straitlaced daughter of solid farmers; it was later said that nobody could recall ever having seen her smile. To describe the marriage as an unhappy one would probably be to exaggerate, if for no other reason than that Captain Rimbaud was rarely in Charleville; each of the couple’s five children was born nine months after one of his brief leaves. When Arthur was five, his father went off to join his regiment and never came back. The memory of the abandonment haunts Rimbaud’s work, which often evokes lost childhood happiness, and occasionally seems to refer directly to his family’s crisis. (“She, / all black and cold, hurries after the man’s departure!”) Vitalie, devoutly Catholic, took to calling herself “Widow Rimbaud,” and applied herself with grim determination to her children’s education.

  At school, Rimbaud was a star, regularly acing the daunting prize examinations. (One exam required students to produce a metrically correct Latin poem on the theme “Sancho Panza Addresses His Donkey.”) Not long after his fifteenth birthday, he composed “The Orphans’ New Year’s Gifts,” the first poem he published. It’s a bit of treacle—two children awaken on New Year’s to discover that their mother has died—but it is notable for its thematic preoccupation, the absence of maternal love, and its precocious technical expertise. It is likely that Rimbaud inherited his verbal gifts and intellectual ambition from his father, who, while serving in North Africa, had produced an annotated translation of the Koran and a collection of Arab jokes. Rimbaud, who seems to have retained a romantic view of his father, sent for these texts when he moved to Africa; a formidable linguist, he became fluent in Arabic as well as a number of local dialects and even gave lessons on the Koran to local boys. His mother’s glumly concrete practicality (“actions are all that count”) stood in stark contrast to these cerebral enthusiasms. It’s tempting to see, in the wild divergence between his parents’ natures, the origins of Rimbaud’s eccentric seesawing between literature and commerce.

  Certainly the teen-rebel phase that began when he was around fifteen looks like a reaction to life with Vitalie. This was the period during which he remarked, in a letter to his schoolmate Ernest Delahaye, whose memoirs furnish important information about the poet’s early years, that orphans or “wild children” wer
e luckier than he and Delahaye were: “Brand-new, clean, without any principles, and notions—since everything they teach us is false!—and free, free of everything!” The frenetic pursuit of what, in another letter, he called “free freedom” runs like a leitmotif through Rimbaud’s life: few poets have walked, run, ridden, or sailed as frequently or as far as he did. Indeed, late in the summer of 1870, a couple of months before his sixteenth birthday, he ran away from Vitalie’s dour home and took a train to Paris: the first of many escapes. Since he didn’t have enough money for the full fare, he was arrested and jailed on his arrival and, after writing a plaintive letter to a beloved teacher back in Charleville, Georges Izambard—and not, as far as we know, one to his mother—he was bailed out and then slunk back home. The pattern of flight and return would recur up until his final return, a few months before his death.

  Two days after the iconoclast’s arrival in the capital, France was defeated by Prussia and the Second Empire fell; soon after he got back home, the Paris Commune was established. Stuck in Charleville while great things were happening in the world (“I’m dying, decomposing under the weight of platitude”), the once-model schoolboy let his hair grow long, sat around mocking the passing bourgeoisie, and smoked his clay pipe a lot. The yearning to break away now made itself felt in the poems he was writing. Some of these, as Izambard once put it, could have “the cheek to be charming.” (The charm is certainly there in the widely beloved “Bohemian” poems written in the autumn of 1870, when Rimbaud strolled across to Belgium: “Off I would go, with fists into torn pockets pressed.… Eh, what fine dreams I had, each one an amorous gest!”) But the desire to break out could express itself as well in a kind of literary vandalism. He’d already mocked the poetic conventions of the times (one early poem gives the goddess Venus an ulcer on her anus); to the period of frustrated ennui following his first escape, we owe such poems as “Accroupissements” (“Squattings”), which in elegantly metrical verse describes the effortful bowel movements of a priest, or “Les Assis” (“The Sitters”), which pokes vicious fun at the habitués of the town library where Rimbaud himself spent hours. Occasionally, he stole books.