In a German Pension, by Katherine Mansfield, 1911

In a German Pension joins that small subset of books that the author didn’t want to see republished. It was Katherine Mansfield’s first published collection, although most of the stories had been previously published in various magazines. Because of the war and problems with the publisher (it went into liquidation) the book was quickly forgotten, and when the idea of republishing it was later floated by her then husband, John Middleton Murry, Mansfield refused. She considered the stories juvenalia and feared, I am sure rightly, that they would contribute to post-war anti-German sentiment.

Have the stories weathered the passage of the following century, or should Mansfield’s wishes have been respected? I would strongly argue the former – the tone of the collection might be uneven, and some of the portraits are caricatures, but overall this is a powerful group of stories in which the focus is not so much the German residents of the pension (a boarding house) with which the earlier stories are concerned, but the role of women in German and European society in the later stories which emerges as a more dominant theme.

The stories were written after her stay in a German spa before the first world war broke out. Mansfield was there to recuperate after a miscarriage. The collection is formed of thirteen stories, some only a few pages long, with the whole collection barely a hundred pages in total. The early stories are slightly whimsical observations of the characters in the pension, observed by a narrator who captures the chatter of the residents with the minimum of commentary. The Germans are boorish and judgmental towards the English narrator, although already the themes of maternity and women’s role in society are beginning to emerge:

“Is it true,” asked the Widow, picking her teeth with a hairpin as she spoke, “that you are a vegetarian?”

“Why, yes; I have not eaten meat for three years.”

“Im—possible! Have you any family?”

“No.”

“There now, you see, that’s what you’re coming to! Who ever heard of having children upon vegetables? It is not possible. But you never have large families in England now; I suppose you are too busy with your suffragetting. Now I have had nine children, and they are all alive, thank God. Fine, healthy babies—though after the first one was born I had to—”

“How wonderful!” I cried.

“Wonderful,” said the Widow contemptuously, replacing the hairpin in the knob which was balanced on the top of her head. “Not at all! A friend of mine had four at the same time. Her husband was so pleased he gave a supper-party and had them placed on the table. Of course she was very proud.”

This is carefully nuanced writing. What is not said is as important as what is, and the reader is able to gain a picture of the narrator’s situation without it ever being made explicit. After a few more short stories in which German attitudes to class are lightly mocked, the collection takes a more serious turn. Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding is a chilling portrait of an abusive marriage. Herr Brechenmacher is a bully who orders his wife around. She has five children under the age of nine, but is looking forward to a night off attending a wedding celebration. This is how the author closes the story:

“They walked home in silence. Herr Brechenmacher strode ahead, she stumbled after him. White and forsaken lay the road from the railway station to their house—a cold rush of wind blew her hood from her face, and suddenly she remembered how they had come home together the first night. Now they had five babies and twice as much money; but—

“Na, what is it all for?” she muttered, and not until she had reached home, and prepared a little supper of meat and bread for her man did she stop asking herself that silly question.

Herr Brechenmacher broke the bread into his plate, smeared it round with his fork and chewed greedily.

“Good?” she asked, leaning her arms on the table and pillowing her breast against them.

“But fine!”

He took a piece of the crumb, wiped it round his plate edge, and held it up to her mouth. She shook her head.

“Not hungry,” she said.

“But it is one of the best pieces, and full of the fat.”

He cleared the plate; then pulled off his boots and flung them into a corner.

“Not much of a wedding,” he said, stretching out his feet and wriggling his toes in the worsted socks.

“N—no,” she replied, taking up the discarded boots and placing them on the oven to dry.

Herr Brechenmacher yawned and stretched himself, and then looked up at her, grinning.

“Remember the night that we came home? You were an innocent one, you were.”

“Get along! Such a time ago I forget.” Well she remembered.

“Such a clout on the ear as you gave me…. But I soon taught you.”

“Oh, don’t start talking. You’ve too much beer. Come to bed.”

He tilted back in his chair, chuckling with laughter.

“That’s not what you said to me that night. God, the trouble you gave me!”

But the little Frau seized the candle and went into the next room. The children were all soundly sleeping. She stripped the mattress off the baby’s bed to see if he was still dry, then began unfastening her blouse and skirt.

“Always the same,” she said—“all over the world the same; but, God in heaven—but stupid.”

Then even the memory of the wedding faded quite. She lay down on the bed and put her arm across her face like a child who expected to be hurt as Herr Brechenmacher lurched in.”

That last line is like a punch in the face – “She lay down on the bed and put her arm across her face like a child who expected to be hurt”. The narrative is now much darker. Women are cursed with eternal pregnancies which are dangerous and potentially fatal (“my insides are all twisted up with having children too quickly” on character observes) and children are a burden not a joy. The stories are often told from the perspective of servants who are also oppressed, a situation which finds its apotheosis in The Child Who Was Tired, in which an exhausted child is expected to be the principal carer for her younger siblings, and finds the burden too much:

“I don’t believe Holy Mary could keep him quiet,” she murmured. “Did Jesus cry like this when He was little? If I was not so tired perhaps I could do it; but the baby just knows that I want to go to sleep. And there is going to be another one.”

She flung the baby on the bed, and stood looking at him with terror.

From the next room there came the jingle of glasses and the warm sound of laughter.

And she suddenly had a beautiful marvellous idea.

She laughed for the first time that day, and clapped her hands.

“Ts—ts—ts!” she said, “lie there, silly one; you will go to sleep. You’ll not cry any more or wake up in the night. Funny, little, ugly baby.”

He opened his eyes, and shrieked loudly at the sight of the Child-Who-Was-Tired. From the next room she heard the Frau call out to her.

“One moment—he is almost asleep,” she cried.

And then gently, smiling, on tiptoe, she brought the pink bolster from the Frau’s bed and covered the baby’s face with it, pressed with all her might as he struggled, “like a duck with its head off, wriggling”, she thought.

She heaved a long sigh, then fell back on to the floor, and was walking along a little white road with tall black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all—nobody at all.”

Powerful, distressing stuff. Mansfield may have wanted to forget this collection when she moved on to later work, but I am glad these stories remain in print. The anti-German sentiment has faded and we can now see these stories as a very personal and rather touching narrative.

The collection can be read online for free here.

The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood, 2000

The structure of this novel is fascinating. The principal thread holding it together is a first person narration by the novel’s central character, Iris Chase. In her old age she writes a memoir for her grand-daughter. Her narrative recalls memories of her childhood and the early years of her unhappy marriage to a Toronto businessman, Richard Griffen. She also describes her present-day life in Port Ticonderoga, her Canadian home-town, dependent on the goodwill of her friend Myra for her everyday needs. Interspersed with this narrative is the text of a novel, The Blind Assassin, apparently written by Iris’s sister Laura, and published posthumously just after the end of the second world war. The Blind Assassin itself contains a third narrative, a pulp science fantasy story – and it is this story which is the tale of the eponymous blind assassin. This might sound an overly complex structure, but it is easy to follow once you understand the conventions Atwood uses to signal which of the stories we are being told.

Intertwined narratives of this kind are not that new or innovative – A S Byatt’s 1990 Possession does something quite similar. What is so striking about this novel is the way Atwood draws together the threads of her stories and step by step reveals the truth underlying the initial presentation. It will come as no surprise to hear that Iris is an unreliable narrator and it is the contrast between her account and her sister’s novel, slowly revealed to be based on real life, which allows a truth to emerge. Again, this concept of there being a ‘true’ narrative hiding behind the lies and misrepresentations offered by the narrator is not entirely new, but it is done with considerable skill here.

Atwood uses one other device to drive the narrative. Key moments of the story are revealed through newspaper stories. We are told about the premature deaths of central characters. The novel therefore becomes a mystery story – we are less interested in what happens, but why, and how the events are related to one another.

The temptation in reviews of this kind is to take a retrospective view of the events of the novel and to flatten them out – to present them in a linear chronological fashion, whereas the presentation within the novel is complex and at times even chaotic. So if I were to tell you the story of the Chase sisters, their wealthy manufacturing family, Iris’s unhappy marriage to Toronto manufacturing tycoon Richard Griffen, etc, it would all be true, but it would give a distorted version of the novel. Sometimes such summaries are useful, when it is hard to follow the plot or where there is uncertainty about some of the detail (this is particularly true of those novels spanning generations where everyone seems to have at least three different interchangeable names!). But here I think I will pass – plot summaries are easy to find online if required, but would reduce this novel to a story, which would be reductive and misleading.

I found it interesting to compare this novel in all its complexity to Atwood’s 1972 novel Surfacing, It clearly demonstrates her growth as a novelist – while Surfacing is a convincing portrait of one woman’s mental deterioration, the contrast with The Blind Assassin makes it look superficial and incomplete.

I have disagreed with the choices of the Booker judges many times over the years, but this must have been one of the simpler choices they ever had to make.

Supplemental: A closer look at Alec D’Urberville

I wanted to take a closer look at the portrait of Alec D’Urberville in Thomas Hardy’s Tess. Alec is an archetypal rogue of fiction, one in a long line of roues that can be traced back to Robert Lovelace in Richardson’s Clarissa and beyond. These men are always attractive, but dangerous and amoral. Alec is largely a two-dimensional character. As early as Chapter 12 he tells Tess

“I suppose I am a bad fellow—a damn bad fellow. I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad, in all probability.” (77).

So one has to ask, is there anything else to him than a symbol of male oppression and sinfulness?

I’m going to look more closely at how Hardy represents Alec. When he first meets Tess he is dressed as a young country gent:

“The driver was a young man of 3 or 4 and twenty, with a cigar between his teeth; wearing a dandy cap, drab jacket, breeches of the same hue, white neckcloth, stick-up collar, and brown driving gloves” (52).

Earlier we are told he has “a well-groomed black moustache with curled points” which completes the picture – this is someone confident in his appearance and his attractiveness to the opposite sex, over-dressed for the role of driver. This establishes a template for virtually every time Alec appears – he is never recognised straightaway by Tess. Or to be more precise his identity is never immediately acknowledged by the narrator, usually because he appears in disguise.

If Tess and Angel are consistently characterised as Adam and Eve, both before and after the Fall, Alec is the tempter. In his multiple disguises he promises her riches or a better life.

“”About the children – your brothers and sisters,” he resumed. “I’ve been thinking about them”. Tess’s heart quivered – he was touching her in a weak place. Since returning home her soul had gone out to those children with an affection that was passionate.....if your mother does not recover, somebody ought to do something for them; since your father will not be able to do much I suppose”.

(Tess angrily rejects him, and in response )

“D’Urberville in anger retreated from her to the hedge, where he pulled off the long smockfrock and red neckerchief which had mainly disguised him”.

350

He disappears from the narrative for a several chapters while Tess and Angel are falling in love at the dairy, only to return in dramatic fashion. At the end of chapter 44, coming back from an unsuccessful visit to Angel’s parents, Tess meets Alec preaching to a small crowd. He is a reformed man and has found god. She hears him before she sees him, and it dawns on her that the voice, preaching “a vehement form of the views of Angel’s father” is that of Alec. (305-6). From this point he begins to haunt Tess, seeking her out time and again. He next appears (314) as “a black speck” and is “perceived to be a man in black…in a semi-clerical costume” (my emphasis). He tracks her down to her cottage, and then pesters her while she works on a threshing machine:

“Just before the dinner-hour a person had come silently into the field by the gate, and had been standing under a second rick watching the scene, and Tess in particular. He was dressed in a tweed suit of fashionable pattern, and he twirled a gay walking-cane”. (327).

We don’t have long to wait before Alec resumes his persistent attempts to persuade Tess to resume her relationship with him. She returns home to Marlott where her mother has been taken ill. One evening she is working on the family’s small-holding when she becomes aware of someone working alongside her in the twilight:

“Tess did not speak to her fellow-worker, nor did he speak to her. Nor did she think of him further than to recollect that he had not been there when it was broad daylight….by and by he dug so close to her that the fire-beams were reflected as distinctly from the steel prongs of his fork as from her own. On going up to the fire to throw a pitch of dead weeds upon it, she found that he did the same, on the other side, the fire flared up, and she beheld the face of D’Urberville. “

Alec’s demonic appearance, pitchfork and all, is re-emphasised. Once again he is in disguise – almost one might say in fancy dress:

“The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqueness of his appearance in a gathered smockfrock, such as was now worn only by the most old-fashioned of the labourers, had a ghastly comicality that chilled her as to its bearing. …

“A jester might say this is just like paradise. You are Eve, and I am the old Other One come to tempt you in the disguise of an inferior animal. I used to be quite up in that scene of Milton’s when I was theological.”

349

Their penultimate meeting is in Kingsbere church, among the tombs of the ancient D’Urbervilles. Tess is looking round the old church, home to her ancestors:

“She musingly tuned to withdraw, passing near an altar-tomb, the oldest of them all, on which was a recumbent figure. In the dusk she had not noticed it before, and would have hardly noticed it now but for an odd fancy that the effigy moved. As soon as she drew close to it she discovered all in a moment that the figure was a living person; and the shock of her sense of not having been alone was so violent that she was quite overcome, and sank down nigh to fainting, not however till she had recognised Alec D’Urberville in the form.

(363).

What are we to make of this presentation of Alec? The references to his demonic appearance aren’t that hard to decode (!) but the narrator’s persistent failure to identify him on his first appearance in each scene is more problematic. Is this just a stylistic quirk, a way of allowing the reader to guess his identity before it is confirmed, giving the false impression that the reader is slightly ahead of the narrator in their understanding of the story? Possibly, but if this was all that is going on it would be quite a tired device. When a mysterious stranger appears in the Sherlock Holmes stories (by comparison) the real surprise is when it is not Holmes in disguise. We quickly learn that it will be Alec who appears out of the gathering darkness whenever someone appears.

With regard to his disguises and costumes, I think these are a way for the author to signal Alec’s instability and unpredictability, the mercurial nature of his character and his insincerity. He presents himself to the world in the way he wants to be seen, and when that character has served its purpose it is discarded. He may even be sincere in his presentation, but it is no less shallow and superficial for all that. It is this that makes him so dangerous.

Literature has worse villains than Alec D’Urberville, but it is hard to feel sorry for him when Tess finally extracts the retribution he has coming to him.

I’d be interested what any readers of this post make of Alec – is there more to him than the stage-villain with a curled moustache and a cloak?

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, 1891

I am not sure why my feelings towards the novels of Thomas Hardy are so ambivalent. It could be the fairly turgid poetry I was force-fed at school, dating from the period of his life when he gave up writing novels (apparently because of the hostile popular reaction to Tess and 1895’s Jude the Obscure). It could also be because Hardy is so often the “go-to” writer for film and television adaptations, so I have a pretty good understanding of what happens in his novels, meaning that they can feel over-familiar.

Despite these reservations I am slowly coming round to the uncontroversial view that Hardy is a wonderful writer. I have many more of his novels to read, but thus far Tess is to my mind his most successful novel – in fact one of the best Victorian novels ever written, up there with Dickens at his finest.

Set in rural Wessex at the end of the nineteenth century, as technology slowly transforms country life, Tess is the tragic tale of a young country woman who has the misfortune to have an ancient family name, Durbeyfield. Her parents believe this to be a corruption of “d’Urberville”, the surname of a noble Norman family. This seemingly unimportant discovery is the spark for Tess’s tragedy .

We first see her at a village May Dance, a traditional ritual to welcome the spring. The dance is joined by Angel Clare, on a walking tour with his brothers – he notices Tess but doesn’t speak to her and the incident is soon forgotten. Meanwhile, Tess’s parents hatch a plan to recover their family fortunes. They send her to visit Mrs D’Urberville, a rich widow in the nearby town of Trantridge, to “claim kin”. There Tess meets Mrs D’Urberville’s son Alec, who persuades his mother to offer her a job as a poultry keeper. Alec’s interest in Tess is apparent. Her parents are well aware they are exposing the young and vulnerable Tess to risk in sending her to work at Trantridge, but they openly encourage the idea that Alec might marry her.

Late one night, walking home from town Alec offers Tess a ride home. They reach a grove in a forest where he drugs and rapes her. The attack is only implied, but there’s very little ambiguity in terms of what happens. What happens immediately after the attack is less clear. The narrator fast forwards several months to a new section of the text, entitled “Maid no More”. Tess is returning home, pregnant, angry and ashamed. This is a novel of silences and ambiguity, not least here. Was Tess living with Alec as his lover, perhaps with a promise of marriage? The text gives only hints and we are left to fill most of the gaps . Tess’s mother Joan hints she was aware all was not well: “After all the talk about you and him which has reached us here” (81) and Tess is even more ambiguous, telling Alec “I made up my mind (to leave) as soon as I saw – what I ought to have seen sooner” – presumably that Alec had no serious intention of marrying her.

Tess has a complex publication history – it first appeared in serial publication in a magazine, and the publisher required Hardy to make a number of changes to the text to make it more palatable to late-Victorian mores. This gave Hardy the opportunity to test public reaction and make changes when the text appeared in novel form a couple of years later. The chapters in which Tess is “seduced” (as it might have been seen at the time) or more rightly attacked, were fine-tuned by the author to leave sufficient ambiguity as to the precise relationship – and degree of immorality – between Tess and Alec. Hardy wants us to be on Tess’s ‘side’. He portrays her as a victim of male depravity and the judgmental social attitudes of the time. The novel’s defiant sub-title “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented” emphasises Hardy’s close identification with his heroine.

Once she has left Trantridge, Tess gives birth to a sickly infant son, who only lives a few weeks. Just before he dies she baptises him herself with the name Sorrow, and then buries him in a “shabby corner” of the churchyard reserved for unbaptised infants under a homemade cross. These are some of the most heart-breaking moments of the novel, but more is to come.

Two years pass, and a wiser, sadder Tess finds a job as a milkmaid at a dairy, far enough away from her home village so her reputation as a ‘fallen woman’ can be left behind. There she meets Angel Clare again, now an apprentice farmer learning dairy management. Angel has rejected his father’s suggestion that, like his two brothers, he becomes a clergyman, although their theological differences seem obscure. In this bucolic paradise, Angel and Tess fall in love. At one point they wander into a wild party of the farm’s garden, a nascent Eden, and the author makes the comparison explicit:

“The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left uncultivated for some years”…”This spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light, which pervaded the open mead, impressed them with a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve”.

122-130

For a while they enjoy an innocent courtship, but Angel’s proposal of marriage puts Tess in a difficult situation – would he still want to marry her if he knew of her former ‘relationship’ with Alec? Tess chooses the worst possible option – she tells him after they marry. Unable to overcome the Victorian concept that brides must be virgins (“maids”) , Angel is appalled, and rejects Tess, although seems unable to decide what to do next. In a doom-laden scene he carries Tess while sleep-walking (sleep carrying?) to a nearby church, and places her in a tomb. Foreshadowing anyone? To bring an end to the torture of indecision Tess suggests they separate, saying she will return to her parents. Rather melodramatically Angel leaves the country and goes to Brazil to seek his fortune. Things accelerate from this point. Alec reappears in Tess’s life, and further misfortune dogs her. The novel’s famous ending scene finally comes almost as a relief to the tortured Tess.

This is a rich, rewardingly complex novel. It is awash with symbolism and foreshadowing. As early as page 35 we are told that Tess’s “face was dry and pale, as though she regarded herself in the light of a murderess”. The novel is suffused with religious references, as well as a multitude of direct and indirect quotes from nineteenth century and earlier poets, and of course Shakespeare. The novel opens with an epigram from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and thereafter includes mentions from Much Ado, Lear, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, As You Like It, The Rape of Lucrece, and of course, Romeo and Juliet, to mention the few I spotted (one of which, “He suited the action to the word” (page 62), a reference to Hamlet, Act 3 scene 2, was not spotted by the otherwise exhaustively detailed footnotes provided in the Penguin Classic edition!)

While some critics have found the male leads in the novel to be two-dimensional, Tess is in many ways a modern heroine. She is strong-willed and does more than anyone could ever humanly expect to avoid her fate. If she makes mistakes it is hardly surprising given the lack of role models and support she has in her life. When there is finally no escape she takes matters into her own hands – even the pious Angel seems to accept without judgement her decision to end her relationship with Alec in the way she does.