Demanding novels from Vladimir Sharov and Theodor Storm - This exchange reconciled nobody.

Two novels that depend heavily on context, maybe on outside knowledge.  What novel doesn’t.  More than usual, I guess I mean.  These were difficult books, I know I mean.

Before & During by Vladimir Sharov, 1993, tr. Oliver Ready.  Ready translated the zippy recent Crime and Punishment.  He must like texts that make him work.

Sharov’s novel at first appears to be about a man who is having memory problems.  He enters a mental hospital in the first sentence.  He is writing a Memorial Book, portraits of people he has known, or has thought about a lot, given that the third memorial is for Leo Tolstoy, who is from long before his time.

The first two memorials took odd turns, but the Tolstoy portion turns out to be largely about Tolstoy’s son, who is also Tolstoy himself, let’s say for simplicity a clone, and writes counter-novels arguing against his father.  So, a fantasy novel in some way.  Fantasy stories, at least.

The conversation had come back to Tolstoy.  Clearly, this was an inexhaustible topic for them, one that, for whatever reason, had long been troubling them, to no avail.  This latest exchange, like the previous one, reconciled nobody.  (93)

The patients at the hospital are arguing about Tolstoyism.  This passage is a kind of trick.  I was about a quarter of the way into the book, ready for a series of “memorials” hooked to the hospital.  But no, there is really just one more, that lasts a couple hundred pages and is about Germaine de Staël, the Swiss writer who died in 1817, and her direct involvement in Russian history up to and past the 1917 Revolution.  She occasionally gives birth to herself, which grants her effective immortality.

She also gives birth to Joseph Stalin, and then later becomes his lover.  It is that kind of novel.

There is a section where Lenin transcribes the mystical ranting of Scriabin about how his symphony of smells has the method to overthrow the Russian government encoded within it.  Lenin then uses the symphony to overthrow the government.  This was the only section where I was thinking “Please let’s move on.”  But it is far from the only part where I thought “What exactly is going on here?”

Weird, fascinating, and beyond me.  Sharov is a major post-Soviet writer.  He died recently.  Lizok knew him and wrote him a nice obituary.

Grieshuus: The Chronicle of a Family by Theodor Storm, 1884, tr. Denis Jackson.   Storm is an intensely local writer, and Grieshuus – just “Gray House,” really – is another Frisian story, set a few miles north of his familiar Husum.  But it is also set much earlier than usual, in the late 17^th and early 18th century, amidst the so-called Northern Wars, when the Swedish Empire was dissipating its might throughout northern Europe.  The Second Northern War, the Scanian War, the Great Northern War.

I suppose it would be possible to read the book like a fantasy novel, a tragic fairy tale about the son who destroys his old noble family through a single horrible violent act, and take the shifting wars and troops and kings as background noise.  I thought the history was woven into the story pretty tightly, though.  This was a book that earned its extensive notes.

Denis Jackson has done heroic work with Storm, and is happy to annotate everything to the point of exhaustion.  I believe this is Jackson’s last Storm translation.  There is, surprisingly, an old translation, which Jackson calls “wildly inappropriate” (20).  This translation is an act of justice.

It is an exciting and sad story, with murders and wolves, so many wolves.  I was never actually baffled, as I was with Sharov.  But it felt like a text for the more devoted readers of Theodor Storm.

"But that's poetry" - A Doppelgänger, Theodor Storm as Naturalist

A Doppelgänger (1886), the novella in Denis Jackson’s recent translation that is new to English, is a shocker, not like anything else I have read by Theodor Storm.  It is about the life and sufferings of an ex-convict, John Hansen, in Husum, walking around where I have walked.  He suffers because of the prejudices of his neighbors, the economics conditions of his time, but also due to his own psychology – his guilt, his lack of impulse control, that sort of thing.  He is in some ways a sympathetic figure, but at his worst he is violent and dangerous.  The domestic abuse in the story is the most shocking part.

Storm was for many years a judge, and much of the detail of the story must have come from his courtroom.  It was no surprise to see Jackson write that A Doppelgänger is “considered even today to be the first Naturalistic literary work in Germany” (188).  Meaning Naturalism as a subject, a genre, the unsentimental literature of the poor and downtrodden as in Zola’s Germinal, not anything to do with style.  For Storm, though, the style is pretty plain.

The world was increasingly hostile towards him; whenever he needed help, or wherever he sought it, he received in response only a reproach for the crime in his past; and he was soon to hear it too where no other person could hear it.  One might have asked: ‘You with those strong arms, with your mighty fists, why do you tolerate it, why don’t you just silence them?’  He had once, when a loud-mouthed sailor had called his wife a beggar girl.  He had knocked the fellow to the ground and almost cracked his skull…  (128)

Less plain language is reserved for special occasions, and for an uncanny old well that for some reason torments John.  You know someone is going to end up in that well.  You can pretty much guess who.

The other place where the prose is less plain, where it is Storm’s ordinary poeticized prose, is in the frame story, a forest idyll, in which the Stormish narrator, in a distant land, meets a woman from his home (he recognizes her accent).  A few clues and he realizes that he of course knew her father, the notorious ex-con.  But she barely remembers him:

“I looked up at the stars, and they all shown down at me so peaceful and friendly.  ‘Father,’ I said, ‘ask Him for a small piece of bread this evening!’  I felt a warm drop fall onto my face; I thought it came from the dear Lord. – I know I was still hungry later that night in my bed; but I quietly went to sleep.”  (111)

She has escaped her early poverty, now living in a world of “yellow irises blooming at its [a pond’s] edge in a profusion I had never seen before” (112).

Strangely, the central story is not a discovered document or memory of the narrator, but a vivid fantasy.  He imagines the life of the father of the woman in the woods, tempered by his few childhood associations with the character, one of which involves the well.  In a directly anti-Naturalism move, the narrator acknowledges that he’s made it all up.  “’Hm,’ said the level-headed man [the woman’s husband], his eyes resting on me trustingly.  ‘But that’s poetry’” (157).  However far from his usual work, still Theodor Storm, in other words.

How lucky we are to have these new translations.

an irresistible feeling of compassion - the new translation of Theodor Storm's Aquis submersus

The great Theodor Storm translator Denis Jackson published his fifth volume of Storm’s novellas recently – A Doppelgänger with Aquis submersus.  The latter is also available in the old James Wright collection, The Rider on the White Horse; the former is new to English.

No offense meant to the actual translations of Wright, but the editions Jackson produces are ideal.  Jackson loves the North Frisian landscape and culture as much as he loves Storm, so his research on the villages and landscape and their connections to Storm’s fiction are worth seeing for their own sake.  I have been to Husum, Storm’s home, visited his grave and all that.  I have never been to a place more tangled with the works of an author.  Thomas Hardy’s Wessex is a useful comparison, but Wessex is much bigger, with novels set over a much larger space.  In Storm’s stories – in the two I just read – the characters keep walking past places I have been in Husum.  They keep visiting places that now have plaques telling me that this building stands on the site of the Aquis submersus house.

The hedgerows of hornbeam in our ‘Schlossgarten,’ which had earlier belonged to the ducal castle yet since time immemorial had been quite neglected, were once laid out in the old French fashion but in my youth had already grown into narrow, ghostly avenues.  (p. 31)

This is the first line of Aquis submersus (1876), and a good example of why I associate him with W. G. Sebald, who I assume knew his work well.  Although Storm is an author full of hope and joy, openly striving for beauty, his fiction has a similar sense of historical entropy.  He lived in a landscape where once in a while a North Sea hurricane destroys everything, literally smashing islands into pieces and drowning entire cities.  Storm is well aware of the natural history of destruction.

On the other hand, that garden, where I have been, is now best known for its spectacular spring crocuses.

In both of these stories, the “present” is idyllic, but the past is tragic.

Aquis submersus is historical fiction.  The narrator, as a child, was fascinated by a painting in a local church that showed

a beautiful boy of about five quietly lying in a cushion with lace decoration, holding a white water lily in his small pale hand.  The delicate face, as though beseeching help, still carried the last sweet trace of life beside the horror of death; and an irresistible feeling of compassion came over me when I stood before this painting.  (34)

The narrator actually describes the entire contents of a church, with Jackson, in his notes, telling me either where I can visit each artifact or when it was lost, but most importantly this painting, inscribed “1666” and “C. P. A. S.”, perhaps Cupla patris aqua submersus – “Through the fault of the father drowned.”  The bulk of the story is a fortuitously discovered manuscript written by the painter telling the tragic story of that painting and that inscription.

Back to the narrator:

[The painter’s] name does not belong among those who are named; hardly would he be found in any dictionary of artists; indeed, even in his own land no one knows of a painter of this name.  The chronicle of our town does in fact mention the large Lazarus painting, but the painting itself, like the rest of the art treasures dispersed following the demolition of our old church at the beginning of the present century, has disappeared.  (99)

Bookish travel notes from an unbookish vacation

New in Krimis:  Or new to me.  Animal mysteries.  Zoo mysteries.  These categories might overlap.  After the success of Glennkill: Ein Schafskrimi (2005), in which a flock of sheep solve a murder, a wave of animal detectives was inevitable, but I was not expecting a novel in which the sleuths are a pair of meerkats, a book I held in my hands in a Viennese bookstore.  If you had an idea for a mystery starring a raccoon or a flock of crows but thought, no, the whole thing is much too stupid, I say squelch your doubts and write the dang thing before someone beats you to it.  Cash in.

Similarly, we came across a Krimi in which the detective was Theodor Storm, who in fact did help solve crimes in his role as a judge in Husum, although the novel is set long before that, and before he wrote his great uncanny novellas, when Storm was a young Romantic poet.  Who investigated murders.  What a bad idea.  But now my own notion of a series of mysteries starring Marcel Proust only looks half as dumb.  The enigmatic stranger with the prosthetic leg, who may be the killer but turns out to be an ally, is Arthur Rimbaud.  Faked his death.  I’m giving that away for free.  I’m  not gonna write any Proust mysteries.  See above – the time is right for your series of Detective Whitman / Inspector Eliot / Special Agent Tzara mysteries.  Do not hesitate.  Either Eliot; both would make terrific detectives.  Tristan Tzara is the Dada Detective – good, right?  Better than Theodor Storm or a pair of meerkats.

Meine Frau read a zoo mystery, Das Schweigen des Lemming (The Silence of the Lemming, 2006) by Stefan Slupetzky, in which Lemming, a security guard at the Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna investigates the death of a penguin, which maybe sounds a little thin, but it turns out the novel is full of detail about Vienna’s art world, including, for example, the 2003 theft of the Cellini Salt Cellar, which I finally got to see with my own eyes.

At one point – this is all secondhand, since I could not read the book myself – an informant needs to meet with Lemming.  Knowing the detective is a fan of Thomas Bernhard, he suggests they meet in the Kunsthistoriches Museum – “You know where.”  He means in the Tintoretto room, in front of the painting “Man with a White Beard,” the setting of Old Masters (1985).  It had been so long since Lemming read Bernhard’s novel that he has to run to the bookstore to look up which painting is meant, but still, do you see what I am getting at here?

In Vienna, the stature of Thomas Bernhard is so high that in a mystery about the death of a penguin it is assumed that readers are comfortable with casual references to specific elements of Bernhard novels.  We stumbled upon Bernhard frequently, even in the Jewish Museum (Bernhard was not Jewish), where a clip from one of his plays was deployed ironically.  The Vienna-Bernhard phenomenon is unusual.

That Tintoretto room is magnificent.  Like the room with the Cellini, it was closed the last time I was in Vienna.

Well, that’s something.  My post-vacation resolution is to make Wuthering Expectations more breezy and shallow.  Off to a good start.  Tomorrow, I will continue with a book I have read rather than books I have seen but cannot read.

It is just a small ordinary town, my birthplace, set on a flat treeless coastal plain, and its houses are old and grey.

The town is Husum, on the North Sea coast of Schleswig-Holstein, home of Theodor Storm and inspiration for much of his fiction.  It is now, because of Storm, much less ordinary.  Also, the houses have been painted.  It is quite pretty.  I was just there.  I spent more time there than in Lübeck, Thomas Mann’s birthplace.

By a coincidence of lodging I passed by Storm’s grave several times a day.  It is in the cemetery attached to St. George’s Hospital, which is featured in Storm’s 1868 story titled, in Denis Jackson’s translation, The Swallows of St. George’s; the title quotation is from page 97, and more quotations can be read in this old post about beauty.

Never before have I been in a place so suffused in a writer’s work.  The reverse is not true – other writers have plunged into their landscape.  But they rarely have so many plaques to show for their effort.  Here is the old rifle club featured in Paul the Puppeteer; this is the house from Aquis Submersis, while the one from Carsten the Trustee is across the square.

The landscape around the town is even more – what word do I want?  More useful.  The network of sheep-covered dykes  immediately evokes The Dykemaster (or The Rider on the White Horse).  The bizarre tidal mudflats are obviously those of Storm’s poem “The City”:

By the grey shore, by the grey sea,
And set apart, lies the town;
The fog lies heavy on the roofs,
And through the stillness roars the sea,
Dully around the town.  (Denis Jackson’s translation – scroll down a bit)

The poem gives Husum its nickname, the “grey town by the sea,” although the town is no longer grey, honestly.  Those mudflats are, admittedly, extremely grey.

The tidal flats are now part of an enormous marine national park, home of seals and gulls and worms and a handful of hardy maniacs who live on the halligen, the tiny, flat, undyked islands that presented an uncanny aspect, the large farm buildings appearing to float on the sea.  The narrator of Storm’s “Journey to a Hallig” visits Süderoog Hallig, inhabited by his cousin and some sheep, much as it is today judging from the satellite view.

It is true he remained on his hallig, but they carried him out of his house; the green turf lies protectively over him.  He was bold enough to retire here in peace, well knowing that the storm could one day drive the tide to his very grave, that the tide could churn it up and carry him in his narrow resting-place out to the open sea.  (89)

It is a paradox of landscape writing, that it can be so well described as to be instantly recognizable, yet almost impossible to imagine correctly without seeing it.

The Theodor Storm House and Museum was not particularly enlightening, but only because I had already read so much about Storm in Denis Jackson’s thorough notes and introductions, and on his magnificent website devoted to Storm.

I would not recommend a trip to Husum to a party depending solely on English.  Danish might work, but not English.

And when I came back, and when I came back, there was nothing there - beautiful Theodor Storm

Meine Frau does not share my unhealthy suspicion about beauty in literature.  When I asked her who she thought of as especially beautiful, she replied with exactly the writer I was thinking about, Theodor Storm.  Two things about Storm, I think.  First, he was a lyric poet of the highest quality, and lyric poems are close to music, close to a more direct idea of beauty.  See the first one here, for example, at least pretty even in English.  Lyric poems can be quite pure, almost free of meaning, and still be effective, beautiful.  Storm often worked these poems directly into his fiction.  Immensee (1850) depends on them.

Second, Storm’s fiction is, temperamentally:  gentle, sweet, calm, pleasant, quiet, wistful, and so on.  Picturesque qualities, signifiers of “beautiful.”  Like Adalbert Stifter, he often ties his stories directly into landscape, into nature, but he’s rarely as weird as Stifter.  Stifter undercuts beauty with uncanniness.  Storm seems more likely to let the beautiful be, at least until he destroys it in a hurricane.  And Storm has a sublimely uncanny side, too.

One can see my difficulty, my groping for terminology.  Now I need two kinds of uncanniness, and distinctions of sublimity.

Storm begins The Swallows of St. George’s (1868)* with “It is just a small ordinary town, my birthplace, set on a flat treeless coastal plain, and its houses are old and grey” (97).  He does not claim that it is beautiful – he is ironically downplaying its beauty – but merely “pleasing.”  The story is one of many Storm renunciation-of-love pieces, not especially beautiful in its substance but rather in its surroundings – storks and swallows, crocuses and red hepatica.  Storm is never really interested in nature on its own, but rather man in nature, so the title’s swallows are intimately tied to a church tower.

The story ends with a flock of swallows:

The sight held me transfixed.  I could readily see they were preparing to migrate; their homeland sun was no longer warm enough for them.  The old man next to me tore the hat from his head and waved it to and fro.  “Be off with you!” he babbled. “You sinners!”  But the display up there on the gable continued a little while longer.  Then suddenly, as if blown upwards, the swallows rose as one almost vertically into the air, and at the same moment disappeared without trace into the blue sky. (131)

All of this is tangled up with a death, a lost love.  I balk at simply labeling it beautiful.  The word seems insufficient.

A gust of wind blew against the window. I seemed to hear from outside, from the highest air currents in which migrating swallows fly, the last words of their old song:

      And when I came back, and when I came back,
      There was nothing there. (132)

*  All quotations from the typically outstanding Denis Jackson translations, this time from Carsten the Trustee and Other Short Fiction (2009), Angel Books.  The Swallows of St. George’s is also available (as In St. Jürgen) in James Wright’s translation in the NYRB collection The Rider on the White Horse.  Jackson’s title novella, Carsten the Trustee (1878), is a bittersweet father-son story that ends with the same freakish storm as The Rider on the White Horse (1888).  The other two stories are lesser, but show the variety of Storm’s writing.  The little meta-fiction about ghost stories, By the Fireside, is especially clever.  Many, many readers would like this book.

A close, but not too close, reading of a page of Theodor Storm

In Theodor Storm's "A Green Leaf" (1850), a soldier is lying in the heather:

The brilliant Argus-eyed butterflies fluttered up and down, between them the rosy streaks of the sky shot down toward him, and the fragrance of the erica flower covered his eyes like a gentle cloud.

The image is more complicated than it first appears.  The sky is moving toward the viewer, between the butterflies, themselves in constant motion.  The smell of the flowers affects the soldier's eyes.  The butterflies themselves have many eyes, as many as Argus.  The spots on their wings, presumably.

A snake approaches:

The sleeping man turned his head, and, half-awake, he gazed into the eyes of the serpent that crept along beside him. He wanted to raise his hand, but he was not able to; the reptile's eye held him fast.

A woman approaches, and the soldier dreams that he is in a fairy tale.  He kisses the serpent to release the princess.

The girl had folded her hands across her knees, and she gazed out over the heath without moving. Only the mysterious rustling and swarming in the endless carpet of plants, here and there the cry of a bird from the air or, on the heath below, the sleeper's breathing, but no other sound. So a length of time passed. At last she bent over him; the long tresses fell down against his cheeks. He opened his eyes with a start; and when he saw the young face hovering over his own, he said, as though still half-dreaming, "Princess, how blue your eyes are!"

Gazed, eyes, eyes.  The soldier spends some time at the woman's home, where she lives with her grandfather.  But he is on his way to the war, and can't stay.  They fall in love; they must part.  Can he return?  "She and the forest are in the hands of the enemy" (p. 62).  That's where the story ends.  It isn't so much, is it?  But those eyes, and ways of seeing keep recurring, as do distant sounds, and the sense that the woman is intensely real yet a creature from a dream.

Every Theodor Storm story I've seen works like this.  I suspect it's possible, with too much analysis, to disfigure them.  They're delicate, these early stories.

I said, yesterday, that every Storm story I've seen has been worth reading, no matter how minor, or how repetitive the basic story.  Perhaps these passages, from a single page of "A Green Leaf," will suggest why.

All quotations, but one, from p. 52 of the NYRB edition of The Rider on the White Horse, tr. James Wright.

Almost disappointed in Theodor Storm

My enormous enthusiasm for the works of Theodor Storm has been tempered to a degree by the my most recent reading of Storm. The just republished James Wright translations, The Rider on the White Horse (1964/2009), is the culprit.

The Wright book contains Immensee and The Rider on the White Horse, both superb, unmissable. Unlike the great Denis Jackson's translations, the Wright volume has no maps or notes. On the other hand, it's about half the price of Jackson's books. A deal.

So it's not Immensee that's the problem, or the quality of the translations. It's the other stories Wright includes, all good, all delicately written, all about exactly the same thing. Specifically, thwarted love, and the sacrifices thereby required. Two lovers should marry each other, but cannot, so they heroically do what they must. Renunciation - there's some domesticated Goethe here.

Now, Immensee is also about thwarted love, sacrifices, stoicism, regrets, etc. I think it's basically perfect. Followed by another similar story, and then another, and another - six in a row, actually - a certain monotony intrudes, and what looked like necessary heroism in stiry #1 begins to seem false by story #6. Read as intended, isolated in a magazine or album, any one of these stories might have seemed like just the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. All together, the formula becomes apparent.

Tomorrow I'll forget all of this and write about the strengths of these stories. They all have their strengths. And I do want to acknowledge a clear diffference in taste. James Wright preferred these gentler, gauzier stories, characteristic of an early stage in Storm's life. To him, they represented the best of Theodor Storm. Denis Jackson prefers the more complicated, geographically specific, ambiguous later stories.

So do I. But I'm glad this book is easy to get again, am glad I read every story in it, and still plan to track down every Storm tale I can find, no matter how trivial. They have all been rewarding (some more than others).

Theodor Storm's advertisement to an honorable young gentleman

July, by Theodor Storm

Sounds in wind a lullaby
sun shines warmly from the sky,
heavy ears bend down the corn,
berries ripen on the thorn,
fields with richest blessing teems -
young woman, tell me what you dream.

tr. J. W. Thomas, in German Poetry from 1750 to 1900 (1984), Continuum Press.

Looking at the German, those berries are red, and that young woman could be a young wife. Since there is no single collection of Theodor Storm's poems in translation, I have been reading them in anthologies like The Penguin Book of German Verse and this volume of the German Library.

A lot of Storm poems sound a lot like this one. Short, sweet, a little mysterious. But what's this?

August - Advertisement

Of the honourable young gentleman who this year
May be considering the theft of apples and pears that are mine
I respectfully request that during this amusement,
As far as it is possible they will themselves confine,
Not entering the beds nearby, please,
To avoid trampling down my plants and peas.

tr. Frances Sturmer-Robb, in Anthology of German Poetry Through the 19th Century (1964), Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.

A good poem, that's what.

Puppets, witches, and sharp, white teeth - more Theodor Storm novellas

Another reason I don’t just read Important Classics is that so many not-so-important books are so good. Everyone knows this already, I know.

Case in point, the novellas of Theodor Storm. I just finished Paul the Puppeteer and Other Short Fiction, another of Denis Jackson’s lovingly translated and annotated little Storm books. Three stories here: The Village on the Moor (1872), Paul the Puppeteer (1874), and Renate (1878). They’re all set in or near Storm’s home of Husum, and two are even in the same tiny town of Schwabstedt, out on the moors. One can visit Schwabstedt and see the ruined bishopric and the big farmhouse next to it, just like in the stories.

The three stories are of a piece. All three are about thwarted love affairs, each with a quite different ending. All three are told through some sort of filter – in The Village on the Moor, for example, is basically a mystery, with a judge piecing together the story, while Renate is told through the discovery of an early 18th-century memoir. All three, inevitably, include uncanny elements – a sort of werewolf in the first story (a girl with "sharp, white teeth"), a witch in the last, and marionettes, of course, in Paul the Puppeteer.* Marionettes are inherently weird:

“As the wind blew against the house and the small draughty windows, the silent company on the wire behind me began to clatter with their wooden arms and legs. I instinctively turned round and saw their heads waggling and their stiff arms and legs swaying about in all directions in the strong draught. When the injured Kasperl suddenly tossed his head back and stared at me with his white eyes, I thought it better to move a little to one side." p. 96

There are some echoes of the marvelous puppet theater at the beginning of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. If there is any relation to Kleist's "On the Marionette Theater", essay, I don't see it, but I do not understand that piece well.

Because some of the themes and techniques of these novellen are so similar, the art of Storm's writing is highlighted. He returns to an idea because he's exploring it, not because it's a shtick. Storm wrote so many stories that their must be some poorer ones, but the consistency of those that have been translated is amazing. Lovely books. A shame they're not better known.

* To be clear: there's not actually a witch - the story is about superstition - or a werewolf. The marionettes, though, are a bit spooky.

Wilhelm Hauff - everything that he said or did was held to be excellent

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that Theodor Storm referred to a novel and writer I'd never heard of, Wilhelm Hauff. Poor Hauff, dead at the age of 25, author of Lichtenstein, the first Scott-style historical novel in German (unEnglished since 1839, apparently).

Hauff also wrote children's stories and fairy tales (he was employed as tutor for a Baron's children). That's why, when on a whim I typed Hauff's name into the library computer, I found myself directed to the Juvenile section. Honestly, I was expecting to find nothing. Instead, I found Little Long-Nose:

What's the story? A youngster is kidnapped by a witch and turned into a squirrel When the witch lets him go, she lets him be human but, unfortunately, gives him a bizarrely squat frame, big head, and long nose; fortunately, she has trained him to be a gourmet chef. Adventures ensue. A number of the illustrations are food or kitchen related:



The illustrations in this little Candlewick Press edition are by Laura Stoddart. They're fantastic. I love that overhead view of the park. There's an earlier translation called Dwarf Long-Nose with illustrations by Maurice Sendak, but I don't see how it could be better than this. Strongly recommended to Lemony Snicketers, or kids who have become obsessed with cooking shows.

What else did I find? A genuinely funny story called The Young Foreigner, in which an orangutan is trained to speak, and dance, and go to parties. He becomes very popular. The lesson is, don't act like an ape just because someone else is, because the someone else might, in fact, be an ape, and then you would feel stupid:

"He had read nothing, studied nothing, and the priest would often shake his head over the young man's extradordinary ignorance. And yet everything that he said or did was held to be excellent, for he was brazen enough always to insist that he was right, and the end of all his remarks was, 'I know better.'" (p. 79)

I found this story in a 1924 translation by Christopher Morley, accompanied by a not quite as good Alfred de Musset fable, and surrounded by this distracting "German" (note the steins) border on every page:



There was a third tale, The Adventures of Little Mouk. It was pretty good, too, a playful Arabian Nights variation. The mysterious ways that books persist; the mysterious things one finds in libraries.

Storm's Little Hobbin - he rubbed his eyes with the fur cuff of his sleeves in disbelief

I found a translation of Theodor Storm's Der kleine Häwelmann at the library. Not just any library - Bigshot Research Unversity Library. So it must be an important work, of interest to researchers:


Anthea Bell's name caught my attention. She's a big-deal translator - Freud, Stefan Zweig, Sebald's Austerlitz. This story probably took her about 20 minutes to translate, including a hot tea break. In terms of ordinary text, it might be two pages long.

Little Hobbin is a genuine bedtime story. The kid won't go to sleep; he just wants to ride around in his wheeled crib. I've forgotten how many children Storm had - seven, maybe? So it's easy enough to imagine the inspiration for this cautionary tale about the consequences of spending the night joy-riding. The story has its curious points, like the cat who wants to shine like the stars, or the trouble the moon has walking in the woods, on account of her horns.

The illustrations of Lisbeth Zwerger are very nice. I particularly like the sun, costumed as Goethe:


Think of how many books I could read if I read nothing but children's books. Like, 2,000 books a year or something.

Theodor Storm's The Dykemaster - suddenly they began to jump about weirdly like clowns

I had planned to write something about Theodor Storm's last major work, The Dykemaster aka The Rider on the White Horse (1888), written almost 40 years after Immensee. It's quite different than that quiet masterpiece - this one is all about earthworks and envy and North Sea storms and ghostly devil horses. The climax takes place on Halloween, for Pete's sake. It's long, too, or long for Storm, just over 100 pages.

But the day has slipped away and I don't have much to say. Luckily I can just refer the curious reader to the Philospher, who hits a lot of the high points, including some of the obligatory uncanny scenes,* or to Literary Lizzy, who got a response from Denis Jackson, Storm's translator and literary curator. Neat.

I'll say one thing. It turns out that I'm enjoying Storm so much that I'm reading everything by him I can find. I'll prove that tomorrow, oh yes I will. A lot of readers, including many who do not normally read dusty old books, would really enjoy Storm. If Adalbert Stifter is the herring of German literature, Theodor Storm is the cocktail shrimp. I'm just enjoying my own joke, please ignore me. My point is, where Stifter, say, is an acquired taste, Storm should have wide and immediate appeal. And it does not hurt, no it does not, that he only wrote short books.

The Denis Jackson translation of The Dykemaster, as with his Hans and Heinz Kirch and Journey to a Hallig, includes a hand-drawn map that is very, very helpful. The big drawback of Jackson's little books is that, for Americans, they are quite expensive ($24 at Powells!). NYRB will soon publish the old James Wright translation of this novel, as well as Immensee and some other stories, which will be convenient and economical. But there won't be any maps, nor Jackson's unbelievably thorough notes.

* "He walked home, but on one of the very next evenings he was out again on the dyke. In those same places the ice was now cracked, and it rose up like billowing smoke from out of the fissures, a blanket of vapour and fog spreading itself out over the entire surface of the flats and blending strangely with the evening twilight. Hauke stared long and hard at it; for within the mist dark forms were striding back and forth and they appeared to be as tall as people. He saw them far in the distance walking to and fro along the steam fissures; dignified, yet with strange frightening gestures and with long noses and necks. Suddenly they began to jump about weirdly like clowns, the tallest over the shortest and the smallest against the biggest; then they grew large and lost all form." p. 22

Hans and Heinz Kirch - a statue of Theodor Storm

Theodor Storm's novella Hans and Heniz Kirch (1882) contains a story that could be, has been, set anywhere. A father is ambitious for his son; the son has other plans; small misunderstandings create large problems. As is common with Storm, though, the actual setting, in the German Baltic port town of Heiligenhafen, is crucial.

I have become so impressed with Denis Jackson, the English translator and scholar of Storm. The extent of the notes in his little collections are absurd, and should mostly be ignored while reading, but are a sign of loving devotion (the hand-drawn maps placed before most stories, though, are an essential reference).

Jackson tells me that most of the key details used by Storm are still in Heiligenhafen. The odd church, a tower with no steeple, is still there, and it still has the special gallery once reserved for ship owners and captains. There is still a giant whale tail, inscribed with a poem, hanging over the towne hall door, although now it is wooden, while in Storm's time it was the actual preserved tail of a killer whale. One new thing in the town is a statue of Theodor Storm, erected just because of this story.

Hans and Heinz Kirch is a fine example of the art if the novella. It covers forty years of a family's history in sixty pages without feeling rushed (the opposite, really). So the story is a model of economy. This is one reason the setting is so important, whether real or invented. It's the repetition of a few details, like the ringing of the church bell at curfew, that bridge the gaps between episodes, and provide their own map to the story.

I don't pretend to have all of the imagery and themes in Hans and Heinz Kirch sorted out for myself. Well, that's why we reread. Next time.

W. G. Sebald's influence on Theodor Storm - safely locked away in the secure land of the past

The beginning of Theodor Storm's short story Journey to a Hallig (1871):

"There were once vast forests of oak along our coast, and so dense were the trees that for miles a squirrel could spring from branch to branch without touching the forest floor...

But these forests have long since disappeared; only occasionally is a petrified root still dug out of the dark earth of the moors or out of the mud of the tidal flats, which gives us descendants a sense of just how violently those crowns of leaves must have swayed in their struggle with the north-west storms." (tr. Denis Jackson and Anja Nauck)

Theodor Storm had clearly been reading W. G. Sebald. The connection to the end of Chapter IX of W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (1995), describing the destruction of southern England's trees by the 1986 hurricane, seems obvious to me:

"The forest floor, which in the spring of last year had still been carpeted with snowdrops, violets and wood anemones, ferns and cushions of moss, was now covered by a layer of barren clay. All that grew in the hard-baked earth were tufts of swamp grass, the seeds of which had lain in the depths for goodness knew how long. The rays of the sun, with nothing left to impede them, destroyed all the shade-loving plants so that it seemed as if we were living on the edge of an infertile plain. Where a short while ago the dawn chorus had at times reached such a pitch that we had to close the bedroom windows, where larks had risen on the morning air above the fields and where, in the evenings, we occasionally heard even a nightingale in the thicket, its pure and penetrating song punctuated by theatrical silences, there was now not a living sound." (p. 268)

And then, as if this were not clear enough, two pages later the characters in the Storm story sail over the sunken port of Rungholt, utterly destroyed by a storm in 1365, a passage clearly modeled after the Dunwich section of Chapter VI of The Rings of Saturn, which describes the pulverization of an English port on the opposite coast of the North Sea in 1328.

Perhaps it was Sebald who was reading Storm.* Regardless, what a marvellous story. It's a close relative of Immensee, with the narrator reflecting back on the moment he ruined a love affair. Or maybe he didn't, maybe it wouldn't have worked anyway:

"I kept my hat and my moustache until finally both became the general fashion and were absorbed in it. On the other hand, it has not been vouchsafed to me to know whether in the course of life the look of those blue eyes, besides the radiance of a precious stone, might not also have taken on something of the same hardness. The day on our Cousin's hallig, and in the middle of it Susanne's youthful figure, remain for me, like Rungholt, safely locked away in the secure land of the past." (p. 88)

Journey to a Hallig is set in, thematically as well as physically, the North Sea tidal mud flats, a strange and possibly unique landscape (a "hallig" is an island, just barely, at high tide). Meine Frau, it turns out, has not only been there, but went swimming with seals. I asked her if the terrain was like the mud flats we saw in the Ria Formosa Natural Park in Portugal. Yes, she said, except completely different. The Denis Jackson translation, linked above, includes a useful map.

Since I wrote about Immensee I have read a bit more Thedor Storm. Even though it was immediately clear to me that Immensee was a real work of art, I had sort of assumed that Storm was otherwise a minor writer. I am now sure that I was wrong about that. More Storm, and less Sebald, the rest of the week.

* I'm obliquely responding to this post at The Valve, which as usual I only half understand.

Everything's great - a George Sand idyll

Everywhere I look, in everything I read, things are going great. Or they go great for a while, but then something bad happens. Or they're going great now, except that things are a little weird, because something bad happened a long time ago. For some reason, I have been reading a lot of idylls.*

Herman Melville, Adalbert Stifter, Theodor Storm, Longfellow in Evangeline, Eliot in Adam Bede - they all build their stories around some sort of idealized rural setting, always with some sort of threat (even in Arcadia, am I, says Death) hidden somewhere. In Evangeline and Adam Bede, a tragedy disturbs the idyll, while in Stifter and Storm the sorrows lie in the past.

George Sand's The Devil's Pool (1846)** is an especially idyllic idyll. A young farmer, a widower, is going to visit a nearby village to meet an eligible widow. By chance, he is accompanied by a poor, pretty shepherdess; his adorable seven year-old son comes along as well. They all get lost in the woods. The sheperdess is really pretty. And good with children. And she secretly gathers chestnuts while they walk, and has an exta bottle of wine, all of which turns out to be kind of handy when lost in the woods. That widow does not have a prayer.

Sand begins the short novel by invoking a Holbein print, from The Dance of Death. See left. That's Death striking the horses. She describes the image only to reject it:

"So it was that I had before my eyes a picture the reverse of Holbein, although the scene was similar. Instead of a wretched old man, a young and active one; instead of a team of weary and emaciated horses, four yoke of robust and fiery oxen; instead of death, a beautiful child; instead of despair and destruction, energy and the possibility of happiness." (Ch. I)

That young man's story is the one Sand chooses to write. "I might write his story, though that story were as simple, as straightforward, and unadorned as the furrow he was tracing." Curious that she feels she has to justify it like this. I don't understand French Romanticism.

More, the best part of The Devil's Pool, tomorrow.

* Well, not anymore, now that I'm reading Cousin Bette, a vulgar and chaotic anti-idyll.

** La Mare au Diable. I've also seen it translated as The Haunted Pool, and as The Devil's Pond.

The insular Theodor Storm

Theodor Storm wrote on a small scale - novellas and short tales, and lyric poems, mostly set in and around the country where he grew up. He was a regionalist, and a miniaturist. So were most of his German-language contemporaries, or at least the ones who are still read, or at least the ones I have heard of. Gottfried Keller and Jeremias Gotthelf in Switzerland, for example, or Adalbert Stifter in Austria, or Eduard Mörike in his corner of Germany, or Annette von Droste-Hülshoff in hers. I'm leaving out one or two key figures - give me a minute.

I don't think this is a coincidence. It's some sort of reaction to the earlier generation of German Romantics. The fairy tale weirdness of E. T. A. Hoffmann and many others is being domesticated; the visonary worlds of Novalis and Hölderlin are being cut down to a human scale; the incomprehensible achievements of Goethe are being sifted by more ordinary geniuses. Reduce the scale, make it small, look carefully at what is right around you - every one of these writers picked up that message somehow.

Thinking about Storm and his peers reminded me of the recent comments of Horace Engdahl, secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, to the effect that American readers, or writers, or literature, or all three, are "too isolated, too insular," and that they don't "participate in the big dialogue of literature." I can only guess what he might have meant. But Storm, Gotthelf, Mörike - these guys were insular. They did not write the big books (Keller's Green Henry may be a bit of an exception).

I'm not sure what the "big dialogue" of literature is, exactly, or why I should attach a special value to it. Immensee is not a big book, in scope, ideas, or ambition. It is merely perfect. Gotthelf's The Black Spider is imperfect and small, but it takes a wild leap into the unknown. It's a marvel. Insular has its good side. My position is strongly pro-insular.

The two mid-century German exceptions to the rule: The contemporary fame and current reputation of Heinrich Heine dwarfs that of every other writer I have mentioned here. Heine was the great cosmopolitan, the citizen of the world, politically engaged yet a lyric poet of the highest caliber, a master of multiple genres. He would have been a sure thing for the Nobel Prize if he had only lived another fifty years, to the age of 110 or so. My other position is strongly pro-non-insular.

The second exception: Theodor Storm's first published book was a poetry anthology that he shared with two brothers, friends at the University of Kiel, Theodor and Tycho Mommsen. Theodor Mommsen did live long enough to receive, at the age of 85, the second Nobel Prize in Literature, not for his youthful poetry but for his 1854 History of Rome. Mommsen is more or less the founder of the modern study of Roman history. I don't know if that counts as insular or not. I don't think it's what Engdahl meant.

True devotion to Theodor Storm

My attempts to think about the achievement of Theodor Storm have been a failure. His art is too agile; it's slipped way from me. I am sure that many readers who wander by here would really love Immensee; others, not paying quite enough attention, or demanding something a bit more thrilling, might have trouble finding anything there at all.

His most famous novella after, or possibly before, Immensee is the 1888 The Rider on the White Horse, aka The Dykemaster. The Philosopher wrote about it recently. It has a supernatural element and for all I know is an exciting page-turner. Based on PRaymont's description, though, it also seems to have a lot of descriptions of tidal flats of Husum, which is more what I expect.

Husum? That's Storm's home town, on the North Sea, near the Danish border. The Theodor Storm Museum is there. Unfortunately it is not really on the way to anywhere, so I am unlikely to visit it soon, or ever. As an alternative, PRaymont points the curious reader to an amazing English Theodor Storm website, operated by Denis Jackson.

You want to see some love for a writer, check out that website. It has photos of dykes and farmhouses, 19th century maps and prints, and a fine bibliography of Storm-in-English that I am going to comb through. The proprietor has himself been translating Storm into English for over a decade; his fourth little collection was just published. They're all tiny books, containing no more than three stories each. I'll read them all and report back.

That's devotion to an author. I'll write about someone I like here, but I doubt I'll ever go to that length. It's shaming, just a little. Makes me feel selfish. Speaking of which, Denis Jackson, if you happen to stop by: a volume of Storm's poems, please? With facing-page German? Thanks.

Another Storm tale - A Quiet Musician - Instead of the keys, I was reaching for his ghostly hands

I guess the title of Theodor Storm's A Quiet Musician (1875) is not exactly a paradox. But a musician should not be too quiet. The center of this story is an episode of stage fright:

"My fingers felt paralyzed all of a sudden, but attempted to play a few more bars. Then a helpless sense of indifference overwhlemed me and I was at that moment transported to another time and place far in the past. All at once I felt that the piano stood in its old place in my parents' living-room, and that beside me stood my father. Instead of the keys, I was reaching for his ghostly hand." (p. 66)

The pianist finds himself ("without knowing why") seated on a rock by the stream; the stream lulls him towards sleep, but a fragment of a Schubert lieder, apparently entirely imaginary, returns him to the world. There must be some German Novellen that do not have at least one uncanny scene. This is very mild stuff compared to E. T. A. Hoffmann, but still, there it is.

Meine Frau has a couple of German collections of Storm, one quite thick, and neither contains this story. Is this minor Storm, not one of the good ones? The English translator likes it well enough, obviously, and so do I. It does seem slight relative to Immensee. But if lesser Storm is as good as A Quiet Musician, I'm going to read everything I can find by him.

Here's a funny thing. The narrator of this story becomes acquainted with the musician because they frequent the same bookstore. They share an enthusiasm for Hauff's Lichtenstein; the musician says "I find I can read it over and over again." Hauff's Lichtenstein, you don't say. It's the first historical novel in German, it turns out, published in 1826. You can visit the Lichtenstein Castle and see a bust of Hauff. There is also a collection of arms and armor, and a Fog Cave. The thing one learns.

The music of Immensee - they grow, they fall from the air

"'But who composed these lovely songs?" asked Elisabeth.

'Oh,' said Erich, 'you can hear it in the little ditties themselves - tailors, barbers, and all that kind of carefree common rabble!'

Reinhard said, 'They are not composed at all; they grow, they fall from the air, they fly over the land like gossamer, here, there, everywhere, and are sung in a thousand places at once. It is our innermost feelings and sufferings we find in these songs; it is as if we all had a hand in creating them.'" (p. 33)

Immensee is packed with poetry. The character Reinhard writes poems that sound like folk songs. So does the author, Theodor Storm. A page after this passage, Reinhard reads Elisabeth a poem, a folk song, that exactly fits the plot of Immensee and causes some trouble. The folk songs in Immensee are not really folk songs, but were written by Storm.

Writers, especially those doing unusual things, often leave clues to their readers, instructions on how to properly read their books. I'm quite sure this passage is one of them. Storm is describing his own stories, his own poems.

I would love to write about this passage more, but I feel I must stop. It contains a secret, the discovery of which is almost as pleasurable as finding the Crown Jewels in Pale Fire. I will just move on.

Reinhard, the melancholy fellow who wishes he had married Elisabeth, sees a white water lily in the titular See and decides to pluck it. His swim in the lake is the oddest thing in the book, the passage most resembling the older generation of German Romantics like Tieck and Hoffmann. Reinhard seems to have fallen into a folk song himself. Here's a bit of it:

"In the end he had come so close to the flower that he could distinguish the silvery leaves clearly in the moonlight. But in that moment he felt suddenly as if he were entangled in a net; the slippery tendrils of the plants reached up ad twined themselves around his naked limbs. The unfamiliar waters around him were so dark, and behind him he heard a fish jump. Everything was now suddenly so uncanny in this strange element; forcefully he freed himself from the mesh of the plants, and with breathless haste made for the shore. When he looked back at the lake the lily was, as before, far away and solitary out in the dark depths." (pp. 36-7)

A good way to analyze Immensee, if one wanted to do such a thing, would be to trace a series of themes through the story: plants and flowers, songs and poems, gypsies and beggars. Storm weaves these objects or motifs in and out of the story, creating resonances that an attentive reader should detect, even if it's unclear what any particular element means. I suppose one could call them symbols and say the strawberries mean this (Death, presumably) and the water lily means that (also Death), but that seems like a good way to smash poor Storm to pieces. One hardly needs any of that to hear the music of Immensee.