Theodor Fontane, “Irretrievable”

Isn’t that a terrific title for a novel about a marriage going bad? Especially, I think, for a novel published in 1891, when I would have expected something wordier. The German is Unwiederbringlich which, if you break down the German phonemes, is literally “un-back-bring-able.” What a great language!

Sadly for me my German isn’t good enough to read Theodor Fontane’s novels in the original so the publication of this NYRB edition of Irretrievable is a big thrill. As was the article about Fontane in the March 7 issue of The New Yorker (you may not be able to see it without being a subscriber to the magazine).

Frederiksborg Castle, an important setting for "Irretrievable"

Of course, this being a Fontane novel, the “thrill” is muted. This writer is all about the finer shades of behavior and psychology. As Daniel Mendelson pointed out in that New Yorker piece, much of the story is simply told in dialogue. It does feel somewhat  stiff, I have to say. The novel is set in 1859, among German aristocrats, and some of it takes place at the Danish court, which may explain a certain ponderousness. And a lot of 19th century fiction is talky. If Trollope, for instance, moves too slowly for you, Fontane will not do the trick. On the other hand if you relish Trollope’s comprehensive sympathy with human frailty, Irretrievable will wring your heart.

The story opens in a castle by the sea. Count Helmut Holk, not content to live in his family’s medieval castle, has built a classical temple on the sand dunes. Fontane tells us squarely that the beautiful countess Christine has never liked the new castle or been happy there. But when Holk quotes a poem about such a castle, she replies, “Where did you unearth that quotation, Helmut?” Then she tells him where it comes from, who wrote it, and that it has a sad ending.

Not a good way to begin. Don’t we all know couples like this, who can’t resist chipping away at each other? Christine is smarter than Helmut, and motivated by a strict piety. Helmut is easy-going, not perhaps terribly bright, handsome, appealing. They are fond of each other, and Christine has the grace, early in the book, to apologize to Helmut for her earnestness: “‘You’ve been unlucky in your choice, you need a wife who is better able to laugh. I try now and then… but I’m never quite successful.’” How can you not feel for a woman whose self-knowledge is so unsparing?

Once Fontane has established the tension in the relationship he sends Helmut to Copenhagen where he is a courtier to a Danish princess. Helmut is intrigued by three different women: his landlady, her beautiful daughter, and the dashing lady-in-waiting Ebba von Rosenberg, who toys with him like a bored child with a large dim dog. Letters home to Christine are curt, then dwindle in frequency and finally Helmut comes to think of his wife’s virtue as oppressive.  The title tells us where the novel is going but its inevitability is leavened by a special poignancy at the end.

Thomas Mann, “Death in Venice”

There’s a great deal to be said for discovering classics at a mature age. Many of my university classmates (among them my husband) read Death in Venice for a seminar on European literature freshman year, and some of them will, without any coaxing, imitate the eccentric professor’s caressing way of enunciating the name “Tadzio.” That imitation, and the poster for the 1971 film directed by Luchino Visconti, were all I knew in advance. Perhaps this ignorance made my appreciation for the novella keener.

I’m perfectly certain that Iain Pears had Death in Venice in mind when he wrote Stone’s Fall, by the way. The Venetian section, which includes overheated sex on the Lido, works very nicely as a kind of prequel/hommage to Mann’s novella — which is about, among other subjects, not having heated sex on the Lido.

The novella was originally published in 1911, and Mann is supposed to have based the principal character, Gustave Aschenbach, in part on Gustav Mahler. Aschenbach is a fifty-year old writer who has achieved both literary eminence and popular acclaim, in part through a life of endless discipline. On a whim, he breaks out of his temperate habits and travels to Venice, taking up residence at the Hotel des Bains on the Lido. Here he becomes enamored — and then obsessed — by a beautiful prepubescent boy named Tadzio, whom he, well, stalks. (No other word for it.) As it happens, there is cholera in Venice, and Aschenbach ignores the dictates of good sense, opting to risk illness rather than leaving Tadzio. In the end, he… well, I won’t give it away. Check the title.

Bjorn Andresen as Tadzio and Dirke Bogarde as Aschenbach in the film of "Death in Venice"

Obviously the novella leans toward an allegory of the famous Nietzschean divide between the Apollonian and Dionysian approaches to life, with Aschenbach arriving at a late fervent embrace of Dionysos. Not only does he have an orgiastic dream toward the end of the novel: he is sent out of his original routine by a “hallucination” prompted on a mid-day walk outside of Munich. “Desire projected itself visually: his fancy… imaged the marvels and terrors of the manifold earth:… Hairy palm-trunks rose near and far … out of bottoms of crass vegetation, fat, swollen, thick with incredible bloom.” And this is just the beginning of the things that Aschenbach sees. I was delighted to note that the final image shared with the reader includes a camera on a tripod “at the edge of the water, apparently abandoned; its black cloth snapped in the freshening wind.”

In fact, Mann turns Aschenbach — and us — into a camera. I haven’t seen the film but the novella reads like a screenplay for an immensely long tracking shot. Every item Mann records is significant, from the graveyard on page 4 to Tadzio’s gesture on page 73. The black of the gondolas; the deep red of the pomegranate juice Aschenbach drinks; the red trim on Tadzio’s sailor suit.

I read, by the way, the 1931 translation by Helen Tracey Lowe-Porter. There’s a new 2005 translation that may be less florid, but this was really enjoyable.

Joseph Roth, “The Radetzky March”

In a scene about three-quarters of the way through The Radetzky March , Joseph Roth shows us the old Emperor Franz Joseph reviewing troops in an eastern portion of the empire. The Emperor loves his troops, loves the noise, the pageantry, the horses, the polished brass — he regrets that on this day the men are all wearing “field gray uniforms,” an innovation that does not please him. Indeed, Roth has spent much of the novel until now lovingly describing the multi-colored gaiety created by the armed forces of the Austro-Hungarian empire. (Do listen to this: you actually know Strauss’s famous “Radetzky March” and having it in your head will make the novel all the more poignant.) He uses the showy external glory as a marker for social rank, as early as page 5. Young Joseph Trotta, having saved the life of the Emperor at the Battle of Solferino, has been elevated to the rank of Captain and the civil rank of Baron. As a new aristocrat he visits his father, a groundskeeper. The young man “stood… wearing a gleaming officer’s scarf, a lacquered helmet emanating virtually its own black sunshine, smooth fiery waxed riding boots with glittering spurs, two rows of lustrous, almost blazing buttons on his coat, and the blessing of the ethereal power of the Order of Maria Theresa.”

der Kaiser Franz Josef

Over and over in The Radetzky March, clothes make the man. But Roth makes the baubles work hard, too; they not only rank and place each character but they actually hold them together, carapace-like. And when, toward the end of the novel, the third-generation Baron von Trotta leaves the army, the shedding of the uniform becomes a ceremony of its own.

But I’ve gotten beyond myself. The first Trotta is the Hero of Solferino, a career military man. His son becomes an imperial administrator, the district captain of a town in Silesia. The third Trotta, Carl Joseph, a young man of very moderate gifts, follows his grandfather’s example and joins the cavalry. The relationships between the generations of men (wives & mothers conveniently dead: women are nothing but trouble in this book) are governed by formality and shyness. Roth moves smoothly from the point of view of one character to another, even-handedly exposing the aching tenderness, the yearning, the nascent affection. Even the Emperor functions paternally, with a perpetual beneficence toward the Trotta family.

Only, of course, it’s the early twentieth century. Roth seeds the tale with clues: telephones, labor unrest, ethnic and national impulses. Poor Carl Joseph, the main protagonist, loses first his mistress then his only friend to early deaths. He’s not going to outrun that shadow. (And Roth makes it, literally, a shadow: watch for the way he uses color throughout the book.) The set-piece in which the news of Sarajevo reaches Trotta is magnificently cinematic, with a thunderstorm, darkening skies, blasts of lightning prefiguring you-know-what.

“The Radetzky March is the great poem of elegy to Habsburg Austria,” said J. M. Coetzee in a wonderful New York Review of Books article back in 2002. I’m not going to argue.