Caravaners (9781405511735) Read online

  ELIZABETH VON ARNIM

  (1866-1941) was born Mary Annette Beauchamp in Sydney, Australia, and brought up in England. Travelling in Italy with her father in 1889, she met her first husband, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin. They were married in London the following year and lived in Berlin. After five years of marriage the von Arnims moved to their family estate, Nassenheide, in Pomerania: Elizabeth’s experience and deep love of Nassenheide were to be wittily encapsulated in her first and most famous novel, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, published anonymously in 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 von Arnim gave birth to four daughters and a son, whose tutors at Nassenheide included E.M. Forster and Hugh Walpole. Her idyllic Prussian days were, however, to be abruptly ended when, in 1908, debt forced the von Arnims to sell the estate. They moved to England, and in 1910 Count von Arnim died. Buying a site in Switzerland Elizabeth built the Chateau Soleil where she worked on her book and entertained such friends as H.G. Wells (with whom she had an affair), Katherine Mansfield (her cousin), John Middleton Murry and Frank Swinnerton. On the outbreak of war she managed to escape to England, but she was unable to rescue her daughter Felicitas, who died in Germany. In 1916 Elizabeth von Arnim married Francis, second Earl Russell, brother of Bertrand Russell, whom she had met three years previously. This proved to be a disastrous union: in the first year of marriage Elizabeth ran away to America and in 1919 the couple finally separated.

  A greatly admired literary figure of her time, described by Alice Meynell as “one of the three finest wits of her day”, Elizabeth spent her later years in Switzerland, London, and the French Riviera where she wrote her autobiography, All the Dogs of My Life (1936). On the outbreak of the Second World War she moved to America, where she died two years later at the age of seventy-five.

  Of her novels Virago publishes Vera, Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, The Enchanted April, The Pastor’s Wife, and The Caravaners.

  VIRAGO

  MODERN

  CLASSIC

  NUMBER

  314

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 9781405511735

  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 © 1930 by The Estate of Elizabeth von Arnim

  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

  “One of the cleverest and most amusing stories of the year,” declared Punch, when The Caravaners was published in 1909. Elizabeth von Arnim’s witty account of an ill-assorted group of upper-class people grappling with the hardships of the open road was an immediate success—it even spawned a new literary genre known as “Wayside Wisdom”. The narrator of the story is one Baron Otto Von Ottringe, a pompous, humourless and stingy scion of Prussian gentry. He joins a caravan tour of Kent and Sussex, attracted by its cheapness, and is disgusted by the laxity of English manners. Comic tension is provided by the Baron’s increasing unpopularity among his fellow-travellers, and his own failure to notice it.

  Elizabeth excelled at creating horribly hilarious male characters, and the bone-headed Baron is one of her very best. “Why are the men in your books always disagreeable?” the writer George Moore once asked her. “Is the disagreeable man an integral part of your style, just as the fat woman was a part of Rubens’s?” In fact, the disagreeable man was an integral part of Elizabeth’s life. As a child, she had seen her mother blossom during the absences of her temperamental father, and she was always to assume that women could only enjoy themselves fully when their menfolk were elsewhere. Her books are full of women oppressed and constricted by the yokes of daughterhood and marriage, and she was keenly aware of the powerlessness of an intelligent woman in a male-dominated world. She used her pen as an instrument of revenge, and the men in her life are often skewered in the pages of her fiction. Francis, Earl Russell, her pathologically disturbed second husband, is so brilliantly and mercilessly immortalised in Vera that his brother, Bertrand Russell, later advised his children never to marry a novelist.

  Baron Otto epitomises the kind of German man Elizabeth scorned and in The Caravaners she gleefully subjects him to all kinds of humiliations. It is probably the most purely funny novel she ever wrote, but there is more than a hint of savagery beneath the humour. It is easy to see why Hugh Walpole pronounced it “so cruel that you blush for her a little”.

  Elizabeth was a dainty, ethereal woman of legendary personal charm. She had a voracious desire to be loved, and always managed to surround herself with worshippers, but she never could resist teasing, and few of these infatuated people escaped the lash of her wicked tongue. Teppi Backe, a young German governess, was amazed on her first day in the von Arnim nursery when her employer suddenly erupted into the room, screaming like a fury, and whacked the baby with a hairbrush. That same evening, however, she saw the sunny side of Elizabeth, and was enslaved. “A cream coloured gown wrapped her small body,” Teppi gushed in her memoirs, “and a pearl necklace hung round her beautiful neck and was woven through the high piled brown hair. Beneath the flowing gown could be seen shoes which would probably fit Cinderella.”

  Hugh Walpole, writing after Elizabeth’s death in 1941, paid handsome tribute to her warmth and kindness, but did not gloss over the harsher aspects of her character. “I had a horrible summer,” he said, recalling his period as tutor to the von Arnim children.

  When she was cruel, she was very cruel, and I was so miserable, so stupid and so homesick that I used to snivel in the cold dark passages of the Schloss and ache for home. I doubt whether any experience in my life did me more good, but dear me, did I suffer!

  He was, admittedly, rather silly to show Elizabeth the pretentious diary he was keeping—which she never let him forget—but the whole episode illustrates Elizabeth’s penchant for attacking people who were not equipped to answer back. This is very evident in the most acidly satirical parts of The Caravaners.

  The ménage Walpole joined at Nassenheide, out in the wilds of Pomerania, was a curious one. Elizabeth had been born in New Zealand and brought up in England, and she was already a famous writer. To her stolid, countrified German neighbours, she must have seemed dangerously exotic. Her husband, Count Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin, was a Prussian aristocrat, struggling to farm the dry soil of his ancestral acres and pay off his father’s debts. Henning was familiar to readers of his wife’s best-loved novel, Elizabeth and Her German Garden as “The Man of Wrath”, the affectionate but damping voice of authority.

  Elizabeth met Henning in Rome in 1889, when she was 23-year-old Mary Annette Beauchamp, travelling with her parents. Henning was a widower of forty, on the look-out for a suitable wife. Young Mary certainly did not conform to prevailing Teutonic standards of “suitability”, but he was captivated. At the summit of the Duomo in Florence, he proposed to Elizabeth, in words which have more than a suspicion of Baron Otto about them: “All girls like love. It is very agreeable. You will like it too. You shall marry me and see.”

  After they were married, however, Elizabeth felt stifled in Berlin society, where a woman was expected to know her place and provide en
dless children. Her first three daughters were born within three years, and she later complained that she got pregnant if Henning so much as blew his nose in the same room. They were to have a total of five children—four girls and one boy—in what Elizabeth referred to as her “wild career of unbridled motherhood”. In 1890, Henning moved his family to Nassenheide, and Elizabeth revelled in the outdoor life. This was to be the “German Garden” of her first novel. “What a happy woman I am,” she exclaimed, “with books, babies, birds and flowers and plenty of leisure to enjoy them!”

  Elizabeth loved Nassenheide, but she became increasingly exasperated by Germany and the Germans. Above all, The Caravaners is a virulently anti-German book—the Baron regards England with the eyes of a potential invader, and declares that he never wants to see it again unless he is marching at the head of his regiment. By 1907, Elizabeth knew that war between her two countries was possible, and she was looking for ways to return to England with her children. There was also increasing tension in her relationship with Henning, aggravated by financial worries. Longing for a respite, Elizabeth seized on the idea of a caravan holiday in the Home Counties.

  An advertisement for vans and horses in The Times fired her imagination. At that time, it was almost unheard of for a lady to rough it like a tinker, but she was not one to care about the more pointless conventions of her era. “I can’t tell you yet what we’re going to do,” she wrote to her daughter Evi, “But pray for fine weather, my child, for if it’s wet heaven knows what will become of us.” In the event, it was the wettest August on record, and the caravaners spent most of their time shivering over a cauldron of rain-splashed porridge. “Elizabeth, to whom the simplicities had seemed so alluring while she was lapped in the elaborate comforts of home, felt that she had perhaps plunged into too many of them, too thoroughly,” her daughter Liebet remembered afterwards.

  On the few fine days, however, Elizabeth was in tearing spirits, falling in love with every thatched cottage she saw, and soaking up the blessed English atmosphere. They were a motley crew—Elizabeth, her daughters and two women friends lived in the vans, and the young men, (who included E.M. Forster, another ex-tutor at Nassenheide) slept in tents. The attention they attracted along the way was not always complimentary. When necessary, Elizabeth pulled out her title and reputation to obtain decent campsites. Forster cherished the memory of her dancing a highland fling with a hospitable vicar.

  All this was simmering in Elizabeth’s mind when she came to write The Caravaners. First, she had to find a plausible reason for her self-indulgent Baron to submit himself to such discomfort. The reason is, quite simply, sex appeal. The von Ottringe’s neighbour, Frau von Eckthum, is an appealing little widow, who keeps the Baron in a constant ferment of attraction and disapproval. Most of Elizabeth’s novels contain a tiny, enchanting and rather anarchic heroine. This was how she saw herself, thin silk stockings, cooing voice and all. How can the Baron resist, when she paints such an alluring picture of nights under the stars?

  Frau von Eckthum’s less appealing sister, Mrs Menzies-Legh, unpatriotically married to an Englishman, is the brains behind this holiday. She has assembled an eccentric group of wayfarers, and the Baron begins to have regrets as soon as he sets eyes on the two young men of the party. They are, of course, an outrage to Prussian sensibilities, with their baggy clothes, mild manners and progressive ideas. In particular, Elizabeth has great fun pitching the Baron against Mr Jellaby, who is a socialist MP.

  The first half of the book is broad farce. Away from his starchy home surroundings, the Baron is a ludicrous figure. The smoked ox-tongue he has instructed his wife to hide away in their caravan for private consumption falls into the mud. He discovers he is expected to lead his horse in all weathers, and go for more than two hours at a stretch without food. “This was not a holiday,” he declares, “It was privation combined with exposure.”

  The notion of upper-class people fending for themselves was a novelty for Edwardian readers, and they were fascinated by the detailed descriptions of cooking and cleaning in such amusingly primitive conditions. Nowadays, the most interesting element in the novel is its underlying debate about women’s rights. Eighty years on, the points Elizabeth makes are still relevant—she goes right to the root of the problem. To say that Baron Otto is a male chauvinist pig is to put it mildly. “The perfect woman does not talk at all,” he says. “Who wants to hear her?” His stout, submissive wife Edelgard is only audible when she agrees with him. He is a monster of selfishness, even blaming his first wife for being knocked down by a carriage and inconsiderately dying. When Mrs Menzies-Legh rejoices in “freedom from the ministrations of menials”, Otto assumes she means that the women in the party will do all the work. After all, what is a woman for, if not to provide meals and babies when wanted? Elizabeth captures his absurd sense of injury with deadly accuracy—he simply cannot believe that the females are not expected to sacrifice themselves for his comfort.

  “A reasonable man,” maintains the Baron, “will take care to consider the suggestions made by his wife from every point of view before consenting to follow them, or allowing her to follow them.” Elizabeth must have heard statements like this issuing from beneath many a Prussian moustache, and her comedy is tinged with the bitterness of experience: “Every time Edelgard is neglectful or forgetful she recedes about a year in my esteem. It takes her a year of attentiveness and diligence to regain that point in my affection on which she previously stood.” The withdrawal of love is an ancient male weapon. Poor Edelgard is not the first woman to be emotionally blackmailed in this way, nor will she be the last.

  Red Mr Jellaby, with his unfailing consideration for the ladies, serves as an excellent foil for the Baron’s grotesque sexism. One of the most significant exchanges in the book takes place when Jellaby is cooking sausages over the camp fire, and the Baron is holding an umbrella over the frying pan. The task is so unpleasant, he suggests they tell Edelgard to do it. Jellaby is outraged. “Monstrous,” he says.

  “Why should she cook for us? Why should she come out in the wet to cook for us? Why should any woman cook for fourteen years without interruption?”

  “She did it joyfully, Jellaby, for the comfort and sustenance of her husband, as every virtuous woman should.”

  “I think,” said he, “It would choke me.”

  “What would choke you?”

  “Food produced by the unceasing labour of my wife. Why should she be treated as a servant, when she gets neither wages nor the privilege of giving notice and going away?”

  Such dangerous notions are dismissed as nonsense by the Baron, but to his consternation, they begin to work on his wife. Edelgard shortens her skirts and loosens her hair, copying the pagan appearances of Frau von Eckthum and Mrs Menzies-Legh. She becomes boyish and fleet of foot, and begins to lose weight. This is a little exaggerated, since it is all supposed to happen in one week, but the transformation is deeply symbolic from Elizabeth’s point of view. Like herself, Edelgard is shedding her German qualities and embracing the freedom of England. Elizabeth equated fat with stupidity and weakness, and despised fat people. When her daughters showed signs of chubbiness as small children, she made them run round the garden until they were breathless. Edelgard cannot be properly liberated until her clothes have begun to hang on her.

  And the loss of her admirable German embonpoint is only the tip of the iceberg, as the Baron discovers.

  “I gently began ‘Dear wife – ’ and was going on when she interrupted me.

  ‘Dear husband’ she said, actually imitating me, ‘I know what you are going to say. I always know what you are going to say. I know all the things you ever can or ever do say.’

  She paused a moment, and then added in a firm voice, looking me straight in the eyes, ‘By heart.’”

  To sustain a novel with such a preposterous character at its centre is quite a task. At first, the Baron is tolerable, and even strangely likeable, because he is the begetter of such delightful comedy. Ho
wever, Elizabeth is not content to leave it at that. Towards the end, the tone sharpens, and the “cruelty” noticed by Hugh Walpole comes into play. Although it is richly deserved, the ostracism of the Baron is painful to witness. “It was very odd,” he muses, as he recalls innocently chasing his fellow travellers round a dance floor, “It was almost like an optical illusion. When I went up, they went down; when I went down, they went up.” For a few lines, he has an almost tragic stature. Frau von Eckthum is overheard explaining why her sister tries to be nice to him: “She says … that his loneliness, whether he knows it or not, makes her ache.” Elizabeth could not allow her readers to ache for someone so unworthy, and the tone is quickly forced back into hilarity.

  The Caravaners was begun at Nassenheide early in 1908. Financial pressure was mounting, and the estate was put up for sale. Henning wanted to move to his mother’s house, Schlagenthin—a “mausoleum” according to Elizabeth. Eventually, she left her husband to negotiate the sale, and set up house at Broadclyst, in Devon. Here, she continued to work on her novel. Despite the upheaval, the anxieties over money and the loss of the “German Garden” which had made her famous, she was in sparkling form when she wrote The Caravaners. The vital ingredient in all her work is fun, and here she is at her most sprightly and irreverent. Occasionally, the acid bite of her humour makes one wince instead of smile, but the overall effect is as exhilarating as a stiff sea breeze. In his generous obituary, the devoted Hugh Walpole placed her alongside Jane Austen as a writer of comedy, and added: “English literature is not so crammed with wits that it can spare Elizabeth.”

  Kate Saunders, London,1998

  Contents

  Elizabeth Von Arnim

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter I

  Chapter II