Vera : A Virago Modern Classic (9780349005218) Read online

  VIRAGO MODERN CLASSICS

  102

  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’.

  Copyright

  Published by Virago

  ISBN: 9780 34900 521 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 © 1921 Elizabeth von Arnim

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  © The Estate of Elizabeth, Countess Russell 1941

  Introduction Copyright © Xandra Hardie 1983

  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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  Contents

  Virago Modern Classics 102

  Copyright

  Introduction

  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

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  INTRODUCTION

  Vera, published anonymously in 1921, was Elizabeth von Arnim’s eleventh book, and in her own judgement, her best.

  I know I’ll never write anything so good again—I daresay more popular among the masses, but not so really good. It was extracted from me by torment … People do say lovely things to me about the book, but only the intelligentsia—all the others shudder and say it is too depressing and there never was such a man, etc.

  Vera roused a furore among those in England who knew the true identity of the author, and recognised the figure to whom she had been married, upon whose personality she based Everard Wemyss.

  Rebecca West assessed Vera as one of the most successful attempts at the macabre in English.

  The author has produced a remarkable novel because she has had the courage to override a tiresome literary convention. She has insisted that there is no real reason why a book should not be just as tragic as it is comic. By the unsentimental justice of its values, by its refusal to make Wemyss less of a comedian because he is murderous or less of a murderer because he is comic, Vera achieves a peculiar, poignant effect.

  For a writer whose métier was strongly founded in the romantic idyll, Vera is an extraordinarily skilful exploration into the arena of sex, violence and death. Whether contemporary influences of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, or of Edvard Munch’s paintings, where women are both an innocent child and a blood-sucking vampire, had an affect on the book is hard to say. If it was written entirely out of Elizabeth von Arnim’s own perception of what subconscious longings create a character like Wemyss, then it is all the more remarkable.

  “Elizabeth” was the nom de plume she used to guard her real identity. She was born Mary Annette Beauchamp in Sydney, Australia, in 1866, where her father, Henry Beauchamp, set up a successful trade and shipping business. Katherine Mansfield was the daughter of Henry’s brother, Sir Harold Beauchamp, who became a New Zealand banker. Henry Beauchamp married Louey Lassiter after a whirlwind courtship. The marriage, “which from the slight acquaintance you have of each other, I could scarcely have thought possible”, Louey’s brother Fred wrote, led to fifty-two years of unconventional but loving partnership. At the age of three Elizabeth came to England with her three brothers, one sister and an adopted cousin.

  The family lived in London, and for a time in Lausanne from where Henry’s new passions for music and travel could be indulged. Louey, when her husband was away became independent and tremendously gay which set the pattern for Elizabeth’s inescapable belief, always apparent in her novels, that feminine talents for enjoyment were more than likely to be suppressed by the egotism of men.

  At Miss Summerhayes’ school in Ealing, Elizabeth won a history prize “against all Ealing schools”, and a prize for organ-playing at the Royal College of Music. In 1889, when she was twenty-three, she set out for Europe with her father and there began the life which shaped her writing. In a musician’s house in Rome, Elizabeth met the widowed Count Henning August von Arnim, “dressed up to the eyes on his way to a ball at the Quirinal Palace”. Count von Arnim tracked the Beauchamps to Florence, Lake Como, Lucerne, Baden-Baden and Bayreuth. Many years later Elizabeth wrote 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.”

  Married in London, they moved into the formal, placid life of Berlin Junker society. Three daughters were born, amid scenes of rebellion from Elizabeth who did not wish for numerous children and found life among the laden tea tables of Berlin unspeakably dull.

  Then Henning took her ninety miles north of Berlin to Nassenheide, his 8000 acre Pomeranian estate she had never seen. Here was freedom. The enormous seventeenth-century Schloss had been empty for twenty-five years. Elizabeth abandoned husband and children to camp there. Builders and decorators began work but she viewed the scene as “the oasis of bird-cherries and greenery where I spend my happy days, and in the middle of the oasis is the greystone house of many gables where I spend my reluctant nights”.

  In 1898 an anonymous novel called Elizabeth and her German Garden was published in England. Instantly it became extremely popular, reprinting eleven times in the first year and with twenty-one editions in print by May 1899. Her books, with one exception, were always published anonymously but they carried a note on the cover or flyleaf, “By the author of ‘Elizabeth and Her German Garden’”.

  As a pastoral idyll, Elizabeth’s first book is a euphoric hymn to nature in the romantic tradition. Its originality and peculiar talent rest on a character called “The Man of Wrath”, a benevolent caricature of Elizabeth’s husband. It is a novel of passionate rebellion against established demands, formal and private, made on a married woman even by a devoted husband.

  In her garden Elizabeth is free and it is a tribute
to her imaginative skill that E. M. Forster, after four months as tutor living in the place she described as inordinately full of flowers and all the beauties of nature, reported, “I couldn’t find the famous garden, the house appeared to be surrounded solely by paddocks and shrubberies.”

  Part of Elizabeth’s freedom is to do with reading. Every path she walks, every tree she sits under, and every four-hour drive in horse and cart through snow and ice or picnic on the shores of the Baltic is accompanied by Thoreau Keats, Spenser, Whitman or, in general, some inspired and ecstatic author.

  Indoors her spirit was diminished, she lost the grace with which she viewed nature and was only saved, in her writing by a sense of comedy. In her second book, The Solitary Summer, written in 1899, on a dark evening,

  In the gloom of the big room I must have looked rather lonely, and smaller than usual buried in the capacious chair When the Man of Wrath finally discovered me his face widened into an inappropriately cheerful smile.

  “Well, my dear,” he said genially, “how very cold it is.”

  “Did you come in to say that?” I asked.

  “This tempest is very unusual in the summer,” he proceeded; to which I made no reply of any sort.

  “I did not see you at first amongst all these chairs and cushions. At least, I saw you, but it is so dark I thought you were a cushion.”

  Now no woman likes to be taken for a cushion, so I rose and began to make tea with an icy dignity of demeanour.

  Hugh Walpole tutored Elizabeth’s children at Nassenheide. Her temperament, he said, swung between tremendous energy, talk and wildly rumbustious games to a fiercely critical silence during the almost unendurably long and formal lunches where tutors and governesses were not expected to initiate conversation. Elizabeth was a capricious woman and she teased the tutors with the same caustic wit that appears in her writing. Walpole naively showed her his diary, which she returned with annotations (printed in italics):

  June 4 Gautier’s “Balzac” in the Portraits a moddle of what such a thing should be. Wish I were sure how to spell that. Rather fancy it should be on the lines of noddle and toddle. Shall write to the “Academy” and ask. They like letters about things like that in their correspondence columns. It IS a splendid paper!

  June 6 Spent a pleasant but idle evening over The Serious Wooing—“the tipsy cake of literature” someone says—very daintily done—but Oh! this novel-reading! Must really give it up. My brain is mere whipped cream and jam.

  June 20 Played tennis and won two sets. See no point in mentioning the number of sets I didn’t win.

  She did not have an intellectual or analytical mind and she well knew it but her reactions are naturally sharp. “If, for instance, I cannot read Thoreau in a drawing-room, how much less would I ever dream of reading Boswell in the grass by a pond!” And she was impatiently sceptical of adroitly crafted writing, “Read two novels of So. Maugham, one of his first and his quite last. Clever as paint; and just about as unnourishing.” The most intelligent, and complimentary description of Elizabeth’s writing is in Rebecca West’s review of Vera.

  The author has so little heart that when she writes of sentiment she often writes like a humbug, but she has a clear and brilliant head that enables her to write a particular kind of witty and well-constructed fiction, a sort of sparkling Euclid, which nobody else can touch.

  In 1899 Count von Arnim was rather mysteriously committed to prison, an event Elizabeth remembered all her life with horror, and on which she based The Benefactress. He was released but in 1910 he died, and Elizabeth built the Chalet Soleil in Switzerland. By 1911 she had published seven novels, and her play “The Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight”, was a runaway success at the Haymarket. She was a romantic figure. H. G. Wells wrote to his long-suffering wife, Jane,

  work and the gravity of life much alleviated yesterday by the sudden eruption of the bright little Countess von Arnim at one with a cheerful proposal to lunch with me & go for a walk … She talks very well, she knows The New Machiavelli by heart, & I think she’s a nice little friend to have … her conversation is free but her morals are strict (sad experience has taught her that if she much as thinks of anything she has a baby).

  Elizabeth’s erratic and emotionally violent liason with H. G. Wells lasted for two years, in competition with a frenetic social life, the attentions of a Nassenheide tutor called E. C. Stuart, and her five children for whom she left little time.

  In the First World War, Elizabeth needed more than a nom de plume to protect her family. Her son, with the surname of a famous German military family, was at school at Eton while Trix, her second daughter, was working in a German army hospital. The most tragic was Felicitas. Elizabeth’s musically talented youngest daughter who she had packed off hurriedly in disgrace, to a strict German college as a punishment for her expulsion from a school in Lausanne. Felicitas fell ill and died in Germany, aged sixteen, cut off from Elizabeth by the war. Liebet, the eldest daughter, who married in America in 1917, wrote a pseudonymous biography of her mother* which, by its omissions, makes clear how fiercely the family were split over national loyalties.

  Bertrand Russell’s diary for May 1915 records: “Elizabeth expressed regret at the fact that her five German nephews in the war are all still alive. She is a true patriot. The Americans would like her.” But in 1920 In the Mountains was published, a soul-searching novel written around the question of forgiveness toward an Englishwoman who does not dare admit her earlier engagement to a German officer. Elizabeth’s friendship with Bertrand Russell was closest during the period of his pacifist trials, and it seems from In The Mountains that his views altered her feelings. Before the war, the tone she uses when writing about Germany and German characters is mordantly and maliciously cruel. In The Caravaners, which evolved from a damp, plodding holiday in Kent with E. M. Forster and other friends, Baron von Ottringel is a comically self-important husband who is treated with merciless ridicule. Elizabeth is mutinously critical of German ways and habits in The Solitary Summer, written at Nassenheide, and in Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther the provincial background to Fräulein Schmidt’s life is crammed full of heavy food and social ambition, though the essence of the book is a brilliant and witty exposé of an arrogant and quasi-intellectual Englishman through the letters of Fräulein Schmidt.

  The Pastor’s Wife, written in 1912, is a sharply realistic and funny portrait of an Englishwoman to whose German husband the improvement of the soil of East Prussia signifies more than anything. Ingeborg runs off with an artist and here, as usual, Elizabeth writes from her own experience: this time a final romantic jaunt with H. G. Wells.

  When The Pastor’s Wife was written, Elizabeth invited a stream of visitors to Chalet Soleil. One morning, just after Christmas 1913, “climbing slowly up the ice-covered path to my front door, and slipping back a step in every two, wasn’t so much another guest as Doom.” It was the Earl Russell, who announced: “You should have your path done.”

  Years afterward, Elizabeth recalled the day of his arrival:

  And I said, motionless in my chair, hardly turning my bowed head, already sunk in acquiescence, “My path?”

  And he said, “Cinders. That’s what you must put down.”

  Such were his first words. Looking back I recognise them as characteristic.

  After reading Vera, it is impossible not to feel that Elizabeth should have perceived Francis Russell’s true personality before marrying him, if only from the turmoil of his earlier life.

  At the age of eight, Francis Russell caught diptheria which he passed on to his mother and sister who died of it within five days of each other. His father died eighteen months later having, Russell believed, been kept alive only by the wish to finish his book, The Analysis of Religious Belief. Up until these tragedies, which in his memoirs, My Life and Adventures, he describes in a chapter subtitled “How the Serpent came—And how Death came to us —And how I was turned out of Eden”, his childhood had been exceptionally liberal: “I
have been told that I had a very naughty and passionate temper when I was a small boy, but I don’t remember this. I had some kind of brain illness as a result of which the doctor gave orders that I was not to be overworked, and not to be contradicted.” The orphaned Francis inherited an earldom and, with his young brother Bertie, went to live with their Russell grandparents, “in an atmosphere of insincerities, conventions, fears and bated breath, which was like a nightmare to me”, and from which he twice ran away. After Winchester, he was rusticated from Balliol College, Oxford and in a rage swore he would not return. From then on his life was a series of public scandals to do with women. He was sued for cruelty by his first wife, spent three months in prison after an illegal remarriage and, when his marriage to Elizabeth had broken up, he took her furniture removal firm to Court for allegedly stealing his possessions under her direction. It was a ridiculous case:

  Mr Mould (representing Lord Russell). Now with regard to the hammock. Do you say you did not give that to Lord Russell?

  Lady Russell. Certainly not, it was entirely for me. It would not have held him.

  George Santayana, in My Host The World, wrote about the advice he sent to Francis Russell in response to news of yet another divorce and remarriage.

  Like Henry VIII he desired to marry all his lady-loves; but that only made him wish later to cut their heads off, that each might make room for the next. Goethe, less bigoted morally and calmer, had finally married only one, the humblest of his women, who has been his mistress and housekeeper for years. Russell found himself married in the same sensible way as Goethe … That he loved Elizabeth, Grafin von Arnim, I could well believe … but why marry?

  In Vera, Everard Wemyss has killed his first wife. She has thrown herself from the window of her study at the top of their house. The effect of this tragedy, and what it says about Wemyss, is simply not considered by Lucy until she becomes his second wife. She loves Wemyss because he is protective, and for his schoolboy sense of fun which diminishes the thirty years difference between them, and because like Henry VIII, he is immutably there. And his tyrannies are so small and ludicrously domestic. Servants race, timed by his watch, from door to door. The gong must be beaten for a full two-and-a-half minutes even if he and Lucy are kissing beside the din, a few steps away from the dining-room door. Vera’s wedding present piano has a specially upholstered cover with buttons along the length of the keyboard, and up each leg “like Alpine sports gaiters”. But Wemyss remembers how Vera, in spite of his instructions, never buttoned all its buttons.