Elizabeth and Her German Garden (9781405511728) Read online

  VIRAGO

  MODERN CLASSICS

  173

  Elizabeth von Arnim

  Elizabeth von Arnim (1866-1941) was born in Sydney, Australia, and brought up in England. In 1894 she and her first husband, Count von Arnim, moved to Nassenheide, in Pomerania, which was wittily encapsulated in Elizabeth’s first and most famous novel, Elizabeth and Her German Garden(1898). The twenty-one books she then went on to write were signed ‘By the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden’, and later simply ‘By Elizabeth’.

  Elizabeth built the Chateau Soleil in Switzerland where she entertained such friends as H. G. Wells (with whom she had an affair) and Katherine Mansfield (her cousin). A greatly admired literary figure of her time, she was described by Alice Meynell as ‘one of the three finest wits of her day’.

  Also by Elizabeth von Arnim in Virago

  The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen

  Christopher and Columbus

  The Enchanted April

  Mr Skeffington

  The Pastor’s Wife

  The Solitary Summer

  Vera

  All the Dogs of My Life

  Love

  Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

  The Caravaners

  Copyright

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-1-405-51172-8

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1898, 1938 by Elizabeth von Arnim

  Introduction copyright © Elizabeth John Howard 1985

  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, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  INTRODUCTION

  In 1889 Henry Beauchamp took his youngest daughter May to Italy. He expected his wife to join them in a week or so when he would be able to abandon the exigencies of chaperoning a young girl and—leaving the women to their own devices—get down to some really serious sightseeing on his own—a practice to which he had become increasingly addicted since he had come from Australia and settled in Europe. Mary Annette—the family called her May—had acquitted herself well at school where she won a prize for History and also at the Royal College of Music where she had won a prize for organ playing. She was twenty-three, and had earlier been described by her father, who had only lately begun to appreciate her, as “bright, industrious and good”.

  Mr Beauchamp’s sightseeing itinerary—even with a young and giddy daughter addicted to cake shops—was formidable. They visited Milan, Genoa, Pisa and finally Rome, looking at everything that was to be seen and only sat down when they took Italian lessons or paid calls upon the people to whom they had introductions. May’s musical ability must have been out of the ordinary as one of the introductions was given her by Sir George Groves of the Royal College to a famous Roman musician in whose house, after calling, they spent the entire evening. “Just as we were going to bed ‘Il Conte’ appeared dressed up to the eyes on his way to a ball at the Quirinal Palace and staid over an hour.” (Mr Beauchamp’s Journal)

  “II Conte” was the German Graf Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin who was travelling to get over the death of his wife and child who had died the previous year. He was immediately attracted to May, and when, a month after their meeting he heard her playing Bach at organ recitals in the American Church in Rome, he was determined to marry her. There followed a brief, but intensely romantic courtship as von Arnim pursued the Beauchamps in Italy, in Switzerland and Germany, eventually persuading the family to take rooms in Bayreuth. Many years later Elizabeth was to write to Hugh Walpole, “my first courted me in Bayreuth and there’s not a tree within five miles that I haven’t been kissed under”.

  By the end of July their engagement was official: von Arnim did not want to wait long for the marriage, but he said that it was absolutely necessary for May to learn German, in order to manage the servants. She therefore spent three months in Dresden with her mother, having a lesson every day. The marriage took place the following February in London, and after a honeymoon in Paris, they settled to upper-class German life in Berlin, which for May (who at this point seems to have been translated into Elizabeth) was a period of stultifying dullness. She was homesick for England and her family: she somewhat mutinously bore three daughters in as many years (von Arnim was desperate for a son); she paid and received calls, went to and gave parties, received instruction in dress and etiquette—and languished.

  Then, in 1896, she accompanied her husband on one of his regular visits to his enormous Pomeranian estate, Nassenheide, ninety miles north of Berlin. The estate was centred upon a large seventeenth-century schloss that had once been a convent and had been unoccupied for the previous twenty-five years. It was surrounded by a vast, rambling and derelict garden. The moment that she saw it, Elizabeth knew that she wanted to live there. Here was freedom and peace; a natural isolation from the soul-destroying social life of Berlin—a wilderness of beauty to be ordered and enjoyed. In spite of some difficulty in persuading von Arnim (who had spent practically all his life in cities, was fifteen years older than she and a Prussian to boot), she got his partial agreement to their living there—at least for the summer months.

  Elizabeth and Her German Garden was published two years later, and opens with her account of the first blissful weeks from April to June when she was alone there, supposedly superintending the painting and papering of the house, but in fact spending every waking moment in the wild garden, with its bird cherries, lilacs, wild flowers and four great clumps of pale silvery-pink paeonies. Her meals of salad and bread and tea—with the occasional tiny pigeon to save her from starvation—were brought to her in the garden on trays, and she spent her reluctant nights alone in the old house with her door locked and a dinner bell by her as a weapon against fear.

  This first book, published anonymously, was an instant success, reprinting eleven times in the first year, and with twenty-one editions printed by May 1899. It received a good press on the whole, although one reviewer grumbled that “even the amateur gardener will be disappointed, for he will find therein no tips as to the best methods of grafting apples, or of destroying vermin…” and the Spectator, in the person of Quiller-Couch, complained that he found her “not only selfish, but quite inhumanly so and her mind … of that order which finds a smart self-satisfaction in proclaiming how thoroughly it is dominated by self.” The Derby Mercury-felt sure that the anonymous author was a gentleman, “betraying his sex by more than one sign” but on the whole The Times—in spite of its rather patronising attitude— conveys the most general contemporary response to the book.

  The anonymous author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden has written a very bright little book—genial, humorous, perhaps a little fantastic and wayward here and there, but full of bright glimpses of nature and sprightly criticisms of life. Elizabeth is the English wife of a German husband, who finds and makes for herself a delightful retreat from the banalities of life in a German provincial town by occupying and beautifying a deserted convent, the property of her husband, in one of the Baltic provinces. Her gardening experiences are somewhat primitive and unsophisticated, but this is, no doubt, only a harmless literary artifice, for the charm of the book lies not in its horticultural record, but in its personal atmosphere,
its individuality of sentiment, its healthy sympathy with nature and outdoor life,its shrewd but kindly appreciations of character and social circumstance. There is a pleasant sub-acid flavour in some of Elizabeth’s pages which show that she could do better if she chose; but she is seldom ungenerous except in the remarks about nurses and their ways which she puts into the mouth of her husband, and is never dull.

  The book—described rather loosely as a novel—is an extraordinary piece of work. It has an idyllic quality; Elizabeth’s joy and excitement about transforming a wilderness into a garden is seconded only by her desire simply to revel in the place—to become part of a great and continuing pastoral romance—of the seasons, the times of the day, of the weather, of all the amazing machinery of nature that provided such infinite variation. Her enthusiasm is matched by her self-confessed ignorance: she buys ten pounds of ipomaea seed — sows it in eleven beds and “round nearly every tree, and waited in great agitation for the promised paradise to appear. It did not, and I learned my first lesson.” It did not matter, she had the wild flowers—the old lawns that had become meadows filled with “every pretty sort of weed”. The opening of the book contains the ecstasy of a release that every woman who has experienced marriage and motherhood will recognise and many will envy: the opportunity to be alone, to have space and privacy with no demands made upon her, to eat and sleep and read when she pleased, to have silence and solitude and the time to be with herself—all things that no doubt people like Quiller-Couch would regard as infra dig, selfish, unbecoming and unnecessary for a woman. But a singular aspect of this book is the author’s determination to be something more than a good German wife and mother, and it is this quality, set against the more traditionally romantic hymn to nature that gives the work its unique flavour.

  In the midst of the first few weeks of this solitary paradise, her husband arrives to rebuke her for not having written. She says that she has been too happy to think of writing. This, unsurprisingly, does not reassure him—he thinks it extraordinary that she should be happy in his absence and the absence of the children. She shows him her beloved lilacs and he remarks that they badly need pruning, she offers him her salad and toast supper “but nothing appeased the Man of Wrath, and he said he would go straight back to the neglected family”. Henceforward, in her book, he is known as the Man of Wrath, and her relationship with him (she was in conflict with his private as well as his formal demands) adds an original dimension to the book. There seems to be no doubt but that he was devoted to her—found her fascinating and rewarding company, and was only occasionally put out by her eccentricities—her spending her pin money on artificial manure, for instance. Her portrait of the Man of Wrath is affectionately satirical—she teases him, but he comes well out of it—she feeds the liberal, eccentric aspect of his nature, but she has the rest of him to contend with, and this she does throughout with a most daring tact.*

  Her children, called throughout the April, May and June baby respectively, make welcome appearances. Here is Elizabeth about the April baby and a governess.

  … Miss Jones cast down her eyes. She is always perpetually scenting a scene, and is always ready to bring whole batteries of discretion and tact and good taste to bear on us … I would take my courage in both hands and ask her to go… but unfortunately the April baby adores her and is sure that never was anyone so beautiful before. She comes every day with fresh accounts of the splendours of her wardrobe, and feeling descriptions of her umbrellas and hats. In common with most governesses she has a little dark down on her upper lip, and the April baby appeared one day at dinner with her own decorated in faithful imitation, having achieved it after much struggling with the aid of a lead pencil and much love. Miss Jones put her in a corner for impertinence. I wonder why governesses are so unpleasant? The Man of Wrath says it is because they are not married. I would add that the strain of continually having to set an example must surely be very great. It is much easier, and often more pleasant, to be a warning than an example …

  The garden is her escape from domestic duties; indeed, with the exception of the “white and yellow library”, the house is hardly described at all. It is the garden that is her element—the place where she can breathe and live, meditate, dream, plan and above all, read. Elizabeth was a voracious reader. Books accompanied her everywhere, and it would seem that during those early years at Nassenheide she was, perhaps unconsciously, preparing herself for her subsequent career as a writer (by the end of her life she had published twenty-two books). But even her dauntless spirit was sometimes circumscribed by the rules of her society.

  I wish with all my heart I were a man, for of course the first thing I should do would be to buy a spade and go and garden, and then I should have the delight of doing everything for my flowers with my own hands, and need not waste time explaining what I want done to somebody else. It is dull work giving orders and trying to describe the bright visions of one’s brain to a person who has no visions and no brain, and who thinks a yellow bed should be calceolarias edged with blue.

  And again …

  In the first ecstasy of having a garden all my own, and in my burning impatience to make the waste places blossom like a rose, I did one warm Sunday in last year’s April during the servants’ dinner hour, double secure from the gardener by the day and the dinner, slink out with a spade and a rake and feverishly dig a little piece of ground and break it up and sow surreptitious ipomaea and run back very hot and guilty into the house and get into a chair and behind a book and look languid just in time to save my reputation. And why not? It is not graceful, and it makes one hot; but it is a blessed sort of work, and if Eve had had a spade in Paradise and known what to do with it, we should not have had all that sad business with the apple.

  When we consider all the skilled and fulfilled women gardeners who have flourished in this century, the frustration for poor Elizabeth is poignant.

  Elizabeth was ahead of her time in that she envisaged an English garden, and what she meant by that was not the vast elaborate geometry of bedding plants en parterre, but rather a merging of cultivated plants with the wild—a blending of garden to park—an apparent carelessness that was none the less artful. E. M. Forster, who stayed at Nassenheide in 1904 as tutor to her children, in complaining about the garden unconsciously describes it rather well:

  I couldn’t find it. The house appeared to be surrounded by paddock and shrubberies. Later on, some flowers—mostly pansies—came into bloom. Also rose-trees in the little whirligig of laid-out beds. But there was nothing of a show—only the lilacs effected that, and the white flowering faulbaum by which the dykes were edged. Nor did Elizabeth take any interest in flowers. The garden merged in the “park” which was sylvan in tendency and consisted of small copses … There was also a field in the park, over whose long grass, at the end of July, a canopy of butterflies kept waving.

  And Hugh Walpole, also a tutor remarked in 1907: “the garden is becoming beautiful in a wild rather uncouth kind of way, but it is a garden of trees rather than flowers”. These two may have been highly educated in some respects, but their expectations of a garden were fashionably commonplace compared to Elizabeth’s.

  She went on to write some very good novels, but Elizabeth and Her German Garden, its more rhapsodic passages nicely balanced by her acute and sometimes very funny perceptions about her family and friends, has a freshness, a freakish charm, an irrepressible energy that springs straight from the very source of her personality. It has also the seeds of an interesting and original exposition of the conflict between liberty and oppression that in her day it was taken for granted was the lot of women—a theme that was to occupy her in her writing life for many years to come.

  Elizabeth Jane Howard, London, 1984

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  VIRAGO MODERN CLASSICS 173

  ALSO BY ELIZABETH VON ARNIM IN VIRAGO

  INTRODUCTION

  ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN

  VIRAGO MODERN CLAS
SICS

  WWW.VIRAGO.CO.UK

  THE SOLITARY SUMMER

  THE ENCHANTED APRIL

  ELIZABETH AND HER

  GERMAN GARDEN

  May 7th—I love my garden. I am writing in it now in the late afternoon loveliness, much interrupted by the mosquitoes and the temptation to look at all the glories of the new green leaves washed half an hour ago in a cold shower. Two owls are perched near me, and are carrying on a long conversation that I enjoy as much as any warbling of nightingales. The gentleman owl says , and she answers from her tree a little way off, , beautifully assenting to and completing her lord’s remark, as becomes a properly constructed German she-owl. They say the same thing over and over again so emphatically that I think it must be something nasty about me; but I shall not let myself be frightened away by the sarcasm of owls.

  This is less a garden than a wilderness. No one has lived in the house, much less in the garden, for twenty-five years, and it is such a pretty old place that the people who might have lived here and did not, deliberately preferring the horrors of a flat in a town, must have belonged to that vast number of eyeless and earless persons of whom the world seems chiefly composed. Noseless too, though it does not sound pretty; but the greater part of my spring happiness is due to the scent of the wet earth and young leaves.

  I am always happy (out of doors be it understood, for indoors there are servants and furniture), but in quite different ways, and my spring happiness bears no resemblance to my summer or autumn happiness, though it is not more intense, and there were days last winter when I danced for sheer joy out in my frost-bound garden in spite of my years and children. But I did it behind a bush, having a due regard for the decencies.

  There are so many bird-cherries round me, great trees with branches sweeping the grass, and they are so wreathed just now with white blossoms and tenderest green that the garden looks like a wedding. I never saw such masses of them; they seem to fill the place. Even across a little stream that bounds the garden on the east, and right in the middle of the cornfield beyond, there is an immense one, a picture of grace and glory against the cold blue of the spring sky.