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.

A.S. Byatt, “The Children’s Book”

What an ambitious book this is! And a puzzling one as well. There’s sometimes something quite dull about Byatt’s writing — I think it has to do with the distance she maintains from her characters. And yet it’s also completely absorbing. I found myself thinking a great deal about it and wanting to get back to it when I wasn’t reading it.

The premise is wonderful: Byatt opens with three boys in their teens at the South Kensington Museum, in 1895. Two of the boys are educated, upper-middle class children, and the third is a runaway from the Potteries in central England, camping out in the museum and drawing what he sees. The book is going to be the tale of these children and their families. Byatt points out that in the large families of the era, “relations shifted subtly as new people were born — or indeed, died — and in which a child also had a group identity as ‘one of the older ones’ or ‘one of the younger ones.’” The central clan here is the Wellwood family, the seven surviving children of Humphry and Olive Wellwood, earnest, liberal, and more complicated than they appear.

The novel, 675 pages in hardcover, spans twenty-four years. Do the math: it takes us to 1919. This may be the weakness of the structure. The book is paced with considerable leisure at first (echoing a child’s perception of time?) but speeds up toward the end, when World War I breaks out and the characters who were children in England and Germany at the turn of the century necessarily get caught up in World War I. Most of the men die in the usual places (Ypres, the Somme, Passchendaele) and the women serve as VADs or doctors. This material felt unfortunately familiar after the magic of the earlier sections — maybe it was supposed to? Maybe adulthood is just like that? Lord, I hope not.

And perhaps the end suffers mostly in contrast with the earlier sections. I’m not kidding about “magic.” It’s everywhere — in Olive’s tales, in Byatt’s appreciation of the English countryside. Some of the characters are German theater people and puppeteers, providing opportunities for us to experience stage magic. Only a writer as good as Byatt could hope to approximate that art form in words. Yet she is equally insistent about historical context and “real life,” with substantial sections of narrative that set the background for the characters’ actions but read like a textbook. I have to assume this is intentional; possibly we readers are to feel the shift between fiction and fact, in the way her characters toggle between real life and fantasy? There’s certainly a lot of structural doubling going on  – Olive Wellwood grew up in a mining town in the north, many of her tales feature tunnels and underground life, and what were the trenches but another version of muddy claustrophobic horror? The runaway boy in the first scene turns out to be a genius potter, and nearly meets his death buried in the clay of Flanders.

Maybe this is what’s going on: Olive writes a tale for each of her children: each has his or her own book, specially written and bound to suit his or her character. Each has his story. Who writes the story? Who chooses it? Who tells it? How much of it gets told, and to whom? Maybe Byatt’s book is the meta-version, the fiction of all of the children.

Gregor von Rezzori, “The Snows of Yesteryear”

More mid-European, mid-20th century nostalgia. But, gosh, nobody deserves it more than these guys like Sebald and Rezzori. Their predicaments make any American longing for his past into a total amateur. You can’t go home again? You sure can’t — it doesn’t exist. For Rezzori, this is a literal statement: he grew up in Czernowitz, which was then part of Romania, after having been an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At least, Czernowitz is the place he identifies as home, though his parents’ rocky marriage and World War I made him something of an unwanted parcel, sent now to Trieste, now to Vienna, now to a gloomy Lutheran vicarage in a small German town dominated by an edifice known as the Black Church. 

Strangely, it’s the places that make an impression on me — or is it that he freights the places with emotion, while nominally focusing on the people? The book is presented as five portraits of the characters most important to his youth: his parents, his sister (dead at twenty-two), his wet nurse Cassandra and his nanny “Bunchy.” Cassandra he describes as almost feral, a pure emanation of what he calls “brood-warmth” who spoke a strange patois of Romanian, German, and snippets of the other Eastern European languages that washed through Czernowitz. Bunchy represented Occidental civilization. His mother was a neurotic, disappointed would-be belle, who felt thwarted by life; his father was concerned only by hunting. (Sounds like a cliche but Rezzori invests this quirk with considerable glamor.) The sister, born four years before the narrator, never ceased resenting him. 

How seriously are readers to take this? “I am a writer and as such I have not only the right but also the duty to raise the level of reality, as I see it, to the very point where it threatens to tip over into the unbelievable.” Grains of salt seem indicated. Yet surely the overall dreamlike melancholia is reliable. There’s a haunting epilogue when he goes back to Czernowitz in 1989 and finds it physically restored but culturally homogenized, utterly lacking in magic. I don’t have a lot of patience with this — or with nostalgia in general. Not sure why I’ve been on this reading jag, then. Am I merely examining someone else’s pain? 

Translation quirk: the German title is Blumen im Schnee, “Flowers in the Snow.”  The English translation provides as an epigram a line from the Francois Villon poem Ballade des dames du temps jadis (“ballad of the women of former times,” literally). The poem was written in the mid-15th century and each stanza ends with the line, “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” (Which gives us 15th century nostalgia; who knew?) Dante Gabriel Rossetti translated this as “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” It makes for a lovely title, but adds a sort of pushy gloss on Rezzori’s original title.

Dorothy Sayers, “Whose Body?”

I went to Columbia to watch the Inauguration.  They had a Jumbotron below the steps of Low Library and as we all stood there in the brilliant snowy cold listening to Obama’s speech, the bells at Riverside Church began to peal. It was amazingly moving.

It also got me thinking about campanology, a word no one would know without Sayers’ The Nine Tailors. I haven’t read it in a long time though it was the first Sayers I made my way through. I got a hankering to revisit it, but when I went to the shelf yesterday my pedantry got the better of me and I decided instead to start from the beginning, i.e. Whose Body, in which Lord Peter Wimsey makes his appearance.

Goodness: more shell shock. Between Siegfried Sassoon and Pat Barker you’d think I’d had enough of this. Mercifully Sayers confines herself to a mere flashback episode (clearly Lord Peter suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome) but in a page and a half she redeems him from being an insufferable twit. In my eyes, anyway. But then, he’s my first love and as such beyond any substantive criticism.

It’s been many years since I read this one. It’s thin; more a matter of clever clockwork than interests me normally. Characters mere adumbrations of what they’ll become in later books. But very clever in places. At one point a walk-on character (Sayers at this point is writing in second person, a feat you rarely see in early twentieth-century detective fiction) feels that Wimsey’s “clothes were a kind of rebuke to the world at large.” Nifty.

The anti-Semitism is cringe-making. I’d forgotten that. But interestingly the villain, who feels that most emotions are merely physical quirks in the brain, seems scientifically prescient. When this was written (1923) that was probably a fringe point of view. But his explanation of Lord Peter’s trench-horror flashbacks seems to resemble some current thinking on neural pathways, while his anti-Freud stance seems to chime with the latest on brain chemistry.  Funny how even mental-health attitudes go in and out of fashion.

Siegfried Sassoon, “Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man”

This book has been on my radar for decades, ever since my teenage horsey phase. I vaguely remember trying to read it, but grasping that it wasn’t really about horses. Then of course when I read Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth and embarked on a little WWI obsession, Sassoon came back in his role as a poet. Finally, he’s one of the models for Pat Barker’s Regeneration.

Then this lovely edition (with beautiful William Nicholson illustrations and, oh joy! uncut pages!) entered the household at Christmas. I began to read. Lovely stuff but a bit puzzling. Disingenuous, it seemed. More literary than I’d expected. Amid the jolly old England and frosty mornings on horseback, there were haunting touches about mirrors gone blind with age and casual remarks from the narrator about his own thinly-constructed identity.  As “a fox-hunting man,” of course. Wikipedia told me the book had been written in 1928, long after Sassoon’s horrendous war service and searing poetry and spell in a mental hospital. Yet where was the rage?

Oh, it’s so well done. It is lovely, lyrical, gently humorous, as the thinly disguised “George Sherston” advances from his first pony to his first race over fences. Very little foreshadowing but of course in retrospect you see how the structures and implements of fox-hunting prefigure those of battle. Even the final chapter, with a Nicholson sketch of a gun heading the page, moves gently into the now-familiar territory of mud and explosions. The one jarring factor is his invention of “Dick Tiltwood” (if the reminiscence of the knightly joust weren’t enough, he refers to him later as a Galahad figure) who stands for all that is beautiful, straightforward and lovely about British manhood.  Naturally Tiltwood takes a bullet near the end. For the rest, Sassoon’s savagery is compressed by his control until the final pages which bring together a memory of rural England with the reality of Belgian trenches in the spring of 1917. Incredibly effective.

Pat Barker, “Life Class”

I’m glad I don’t live in Pat Barker’s head.  If we accept that what a writer puts on the page is  tiny fraction of his or her mental furniture, Barker’s thoughts are full of the gruesome sights and sounds and smells of a Belgian Red Cross tent in the winter of 1914: gangrenous limbs and eyeballs dangling on shattered cheekbones, cold and wet and boredom and irritability and the endless stench of putrefaction.

The “life class” of the title is, literally, the class in drawing from a live model at London’s Slade School of Fine Art. (Metaphorically?  Up to you.) The central character, Peter Tarrant, is a student at the Slade along with Elinor Brooke. The novel begins in the summer of 1914 but Barker does without the portentous foreshadowing of, say, Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party.  Not for several chapters does discussion of the Balkan crisis pin us down in time.  Not until Peter has been an orderly in a Belgian hospital tent for weeks do we learn that the nearby town is called Ypres. The horrible significance of it all creeps up on both reader and characters.

Peter thinks he is in love with Elinor, who remains in England painting, and their correspondence demonstrates the strain placed on them by their different circumstances.  Peter can think of nothing but the war while Elinor, painting English landscapes at home, finds his preoccupation selfish and morose.  Is art important?  More important than death? How does our experience affect our creativity?  Interestingly, though Barker’s characters are preoccupied with what and how they see, she insists on every facet of their sensory experience, without ever slipping into overheated prose.

The overall effect is similar to what I took away from Geraldine Brooks’ March: a fine-grained visceral description of what war does to everyone caught up in it.  March won the Pulitzer prize, Life Class the Booker, so this is apparently a moment when we’re receptive to that reading experience.