Love : A Virago Modern Classic (9780349005188) Read online

  VIRAGO

  MODERN CLASSICS

  297

  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 Château 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

  Elizabeth and Her German Garden

  Mr Skeffington

  The Pastor’s Wife

  The Solitary Summer

  Vera

  All the Dogs of My Life

  Copyright

  Published by Virago

  ISBN: 9780349005188

  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 © 1925 Elizabeth von Arnim

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Introduction copyright © 1988 Terence de Vere White

  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.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

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  Little, Brown Book Group

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  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Elizabeth von Arnim in Virago

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Part I

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Part II

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  INTRODUCTION

  When Michael Frere came to see Elizabeth about her autobiography All the Dogs of My Life she found him ‘such a boring little man. But it is because we are all growing old, and the bones of our inadequate minds come through the flesh that hid them.’ She hadn’t always found him boring, and Love, one of her best novels, is largely based on their romance. In the novel Catherine is forty-seven and Christopher twenty-five. In life, when Elizabeth first met Frere in May 1920, she was fifty-four and he was twenty-four. This is important because Love is really a book about age. Frere’s early promise was showing itself in the publishing field. He was with Heinemann, and would become managing director. The only link with Elizabeth now was her books, and she was godmother to one of his children. Their liaison had been formally dead for four years, and had been ailing since long before that.

  Elizabeth heard about Frere in the first place from his mother, and was intrigued by her account of having had a child by a sporting gentleman called Colonel Reeves. Mary Frere put the baby in an orphanage and forgot about him until rumour reached her that he had fought gallantly in the Royal Flying Corps in the still recent war and was now an undergraduate at Cambridge. Did Elizabeth smell the plot for a novel? She asked Arnold Bennett to fix a meeting over lunch. He obliged, and Elizabeth and Frere became at once ‘tremendous friends’. Elizabeth invited him to come to her Swiss chalet in August and settle her library. He accepted delightedly if, nearer the time, he felt nervous at the thought of the distinguished guests. But he endeared himself to all at once by appointing himself major-domo. Lieber Gott Elizabeth called him. She never allowed guests to interfere with her working hours, but she always took a walk before lunch, and Lieber Gott was frequently her companion. He fell head over heels in love with her.

  He had come at a time when she was in need of tenderness. Her marriage to Francis Earl Russell had finally collapsed, and he was busy blackguarding her to anyone who would listen. There had always been some man in her life, and as well as the few who played significant parts, there were usually young men about whose company she enjoyed as well as pale followers who lingered on, enjoying a meagre diet of attention.

  After he went back to England, Frere deluged Elizabeth with adoring letters. She was flattered and fascinated, but she had obtained freedom from the domination of men at last, and so far from needing constant companionship, she was happier, and felt far more vital alone. Or so she often said, and it was true up to a point. In London she danced with Frere and enjoyed the company of his young friends, to whom he was proud to introduce her. For her part, she discreetly pushed his career. In high spirits she began Vera, her final stiletto-thrust in the long battle with her husband. Frere could be a sympathetic companion, but his glooms in private made him difficult. He was never as good in reality as on paper; quite early on there were rows. Frere, who had never known mother love, wanted above everything to be emotionally dependent on Elizabeth. She used to tease him, and sometimes enjoyed putting young women in his way. The novelistic possibilities of the situation did not escape her.

  Michael Frere, when he met Elizabeth, like Christopher in Love ‘didn’t know much about women. Up to this he had had only highly unsatisfactory, rough and tumble, relations with them.’ He wrote to her like a boy for the first time in love. ‘I find myself pinned down by dreams, dreams of the unattainable.’ Those close to her remarked how young and well Elizabeth was looking. Getting rid of Francis Russell was not enough to account for it. Michael and she became lovers, in fact, in 1921 on his second visit to the chalet. In Love Catherine, though worldly wise, is strictly proper. But in life, by this time, Elizabeth allowed herself some latitude. Even when her marriage to Russell was breaking up she was dining in London regularly with his brother Bertrand. True to form, she was also trying to persuade him to collaborate with her in an epistolary novel. But what else went on? Whatever it was, Bertrand Russell advised her not to be indiscreet when writing to Francis. Given Russell’s reputation, Frere suspected the worst, and may not have been wholly satisfied by her reassurance that the laughing philosopher ‘smelt like a bear garden’. However tiresome his moods, Elizabeth did not want to lose Frere; whenever she told him to go, she inevitably whistled him back.

  1922 was a bad year for Elizabeth. She was disappointed by some of the reviews of The Enchanted April although it was to prove the most popular — excepting the first — of all her novels. She suffered from depressions that she couldn’t throw off. Her doctor diagnosed menopausal symptoms. If Frere wanted her to marry him she couldn’t because she was still married to Russell and took precautions against his discovering any evidence that might incite him to sue her for adultery. When, for example, friends let her use their house on the Isle of Wight that Christmas, Elizabeth invited Michael to join her, but found him separate lodgings. An incident during the holiday humiliated her. A casual friendship struck up with a father and daughter in a pub led to remarks, made in all innocence by the newcomers on the assumption that Elizabeth was Frere’s aunt. She put this episode into Love. It may well have been what sparked off this novel. There were probably other incidents of a similar nature. ‘But wouldn’t that bore your mother dreadfully?’ a pretty girl at a party says in Love when Christopher counters an invitation to him with: ‘No. You come to us.’

  Love is a knowing novel even though the facts of life are laid on in water colour. It was a happy idea to begin the story at The Immortal Hour, the musical drama which was drawing a small but enraptured audience to the Regent Theatre in the Spring of 1923. Celtic themes were in fashion just then, and Elizabeth went again and again. She made a stage door call on the leading actor, and he came to tea on a few occasions. It was all very much in keeping with the beginning of Love, to which, no doubt, Elizabeth and Frere went often together.

  She was at pains in the description of Christopher in the novel to make him as unlike Frere as possible. We are never told much
more about his background than that he has expectations from an uncle with whom he plays golf, that he shares rooms with a misogynistic friend, and works in an ‘office’. If his background is bare, his physical appearance is detailed: great height and flame-coloured hair. Frere was dark and only a few inches taller than Elizabeth’s five foot. In contrast, Elizabeth emphasises Catherine’s resemblance to herself. Christopher thought that he had never heard ‘such a funny little coo of a voice’. Elizabeth had lent that voice to other heroines. Jane Wells said she could make even German sound pretty. Swinnerton, the novelist, compared her voice to ‘a choir-boy with a sore throat’. Her smallness is stressed. Santayana, the philosopher, on first meeting Elizabeth, the mother of grown-up children, was astonished to find that she looked like a child. Her acquaintances must have recognised her before they came to the end of Love’s second page. Wells had advised her that when the younger lover started to cool it was the time for the older to make the break. Had that point been reached in this affair when Love was being written? (I Never Should Have Done It was considered as a subtitle.) Two years after it was published Frere confessed that he was living with a young woman who was forcing him into marrying her. This took Elizabeth by surprise, and she was miserable about it. A year later the marriage took place. Elizabeth told Frere that she never wanted to see him again even though he said that he had been frog-marched to the ceremony. But very soon they were corresponding again. Going through drawers when she was leaving Switzerland in 1929 for a villa on the French Riviera, Elizabeth came across Frere’s letters (‘Some of them very sweet. That had been a funny business. And a sweet one.’) But it was still unfinished. In 1931 Francis Russell died, leaving Elizabeth free to marry again. Frere recalled her at this time, her face scarred by lifting, extremely thin, stockings wound round her legs, her face powdered white, wearing enormous hats. ‘Nevertheless she was still beautiful.’ He was full, as usual, of his own troubles, and thought he was going to die. ‘If he dies the light of my life goes out, and I start dying myself’, she wrote in her diary. But their romance plummeted when Frere’s wife turned up at a Heinemann party and made a scene in Elizabeth’s presence. Elizabeth returned to France the next day and changed her will. Frere was no longer her literary executor. (His unsuitable wife ran away with a taxi driver eventually and he was expecting his divorce decree when Elizabeth met him out walking with a blonde to whom he introduced her as the girl he was about to marry. She was a daughter of Edgar Wallace, the crime writer. When Elizabeth got home she wrote in her diary: ‘I am so glad it is she and not I. What perfect grammar.’) Her last diary entry that year was: ‘So ends 1932. In it, in March, I shed L.G. after nearly twelve years of him. It was high time.’ That was seven years after the publication of Love.

  Love gave Elizabeth more trouble than most of her novels. For every page she wrote, she tore up six, and she was never satisfied with the inconclusive ending. She spelled out Catherine’s position at the beginning of Part Two. Catherine thinks she has been ostracised by her family — really only by her preposterous son-in-law, the Reverend Stephen Colquhoun, who discovers that Catherine and Christopher took all night to return to London after a visit to his rectory. They were on Christopher’s motor-bike. The bike had itself become a cause of scandal before it became a supposititious occasion of sin. Stephen found it excruciating to see his mother-in-law in the sidecar, dashing round his parish, scattering his flock. But he is even more concerned to anticipate scandal and expiate sin by the speedy marriage of the errant couple. Not that the idea of a wife so much older than her husband causes him anything but disgust. His hurt is almost lethal when he hears from the pure lips of his adored child-wife (from whom he kept as much of the story as possible) that she sees no difference between her own marriage and theirs.

  ‘Do you not see it is terrible to marry someone young enough to be your son?’ he had asked sternly — he couldn’t have believed he would ever have to be stern with his own love in such a place, at such an hour.

  And she had answered: ‘But is it any more terrible than marrying someone young enough to be your daughter?’

  Virginia had answered that. His Virginia. In bed. In his very arms.

  For so much of the novel, Stephen is the character who dictates the action and his moral collapse is an extraordinary development of the plot. Elizabeth’s authorial difficulties may well have arisen from finding that she had taken aboard a heavier cargo than her delicate vessel was constructed to carry. Catherine says as much: ‘The stuff one filled life with! And at the faintest stirring of Death’s wings, the smallest movement forward of that great figure from the dark furthermost corner of the little room called life, how instantly one’s eyes were smitten open.’

  Agonising about wrinkles round the eyes has no place in the death chamber, but until then Catherine’s predicament had agonised the reader. Part Two spells it out. Catherine enjoyed an enchanted time when bus conductors and taxi drivers called her Miss. She loved Christopher, but she was not in love with him — a very different thing. ‘Her vanity was fed to the point of beatitude.’ Her image in the glass was ‘radiant with the cool happiness of not being in love’. But when at last she agrees to marry Christopher that Indian summer is brought to an end. She falls in love with ‘hopeless completeness’. In doing so, she loses her beauty. Christopher ‘burnt up what had still been left of her youth.’ As Mrs Micham, Catherine’s housekeeper said to herself: ‘It’s them honeymoons.’

  It might seem that Catherine’s dramatically sudden ageing is allowed to get out of hand to match the graver development of the plot. She is pictured as if she were one of Macbeth’s witches when Christopher opens the nursery door and sees three ‘grizzled’ women standing round a cot. The account of the face treatment that Catherine had undergone at the hands of a quack was taken from a description given to Elizabeth by Katherine Mansfield, her New Zealand cousin, of her own experience in Paris when she was searching for a cure for consumption. This may have been too tragic a source. If Elizabeth needed copy she had, if Frere is to be believed, her own experience to draw on.

  These are questions of tone values. Elizabeth was a tragi-comedienne, and happiest when describing the human situation. It was not only with Frere she discovered that ‘Marriage being mainly repetition, and Christopher now being a husband, he presently began to make fewer rapturous speeches. It was quite unconscious, but as the weeks passed it became natural to love with fewer preliminary cooings — to bill, as it were, without remembering first to coo.’

  Terence de Vere White, London 1987

  Elizabeth Irene (Liebet) wrote a life of her mother, Elizabeth of the German Garden, under the psuedonym Leslie de Charmes, which was published by Heinemann in 1958. A fuller biography, ‘Elizabeth’ by Karen Usborne, was published by The Bodley Head in 1986.

  PART I

  I

  THE first time they met, though they didn’t know it, for they were unconscious of each other, was at The Immortal Hour, then playing to almost empty houses away at King’s Cross; but they both went so often, and the audience at that time was so conspicuous because there was so little of it and so much room to put it in, that quite soon people who went frequently got to know each other by sight, and felt friendly and inclined to nod and smile, and this happened too to Christopher and Catherine.

  She first became aware of him on the evening of her fifth visit, when she heard two people talking just behind her before the curtain went up, and one said, sounding proud, ‘This is my eleventh time’; and the other answered carelessly, ‘This is my thirty-secondth ’—upon which the first one exclaimed, ‘Oh, I say!’ with much the sound of a pricked balloon wailing itself flat, and she couldn’t resist turning her face, lit up with interest and amusement, to look. Thus she saw Christopher consciously for the first time, and he saw her.

  After that they noticed each other’s presence for three more performances, and then, when it was her ninth and his thirty-sixth—for the enthusiasts of The Immortal Hour kept jealous count of their visits—and they found themselves sitting in the same row with only twelve empty seats between them, he moved up six nearer to her when the curtain went down between the two scenes of the first act, and when it went down at the end of the first act, after that love scene which invariably roused the small band of the faithful to a kind of mystic frenzy of delight, he moved up the other six and sat down boldly beside her.