Archives: Persephone Forum

In November 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a formal apology on behalf of the Canadian nation for turning away a ship full of Jewish refugees, fleeing Nazi persecution in 1939; forced to return to Europe, more than 250 of the 907 passengers later died in the Holocaust. Between 1914 and 1930 the Jewish population of Canada had grown from 100,100 to 155,000, but such was the anti-Semitic sentiment in the run-up to the Second World War, that a country previously open to Jewish immigrants accepted only 5000 refugees between 1933 and 1945. ‘We let anti-Semitism take hold in our communities and become official policy’ said Trudeau.

Earth and High Heaven is set in Montreal, home to the largest Jewish community in Canada until the latter part of the twentieth century, when it ceded first place to Ontario. The novel, published in 1944 – when victory, though not survival, could be assumed – follows the course of a love affair from first meeting in June 1942 to parting three months later. The opening lines suggest that the parting is not forever. ‘One of the questions they were sometimes asked was where and how they had met, for Marc Reiser was a Jew, originally from a small town in Ontario, and from 1933 until he went overseas in September,1942, a junior partner in the law firm of Maresch and Aaronson in Montreal, and Erica Drake was a Gentile, one of the Westmount Drakes.’  ‘They’ assures us that at the time of telling the two are a couple, and that to date they have survived the war; ‘for’ implies, even before we read on, that there was a powerful reason for their not meeting in the first place; ‘originally from’ confirms that Marc is not a refugee but at least second-generation; and the name of the law firm that his employers are also Jewish. Erica, being not only a Gentile, not just a Drake, but ‘one of the Westmount Drakes’ is defined as well out of Marc’s league.

 

 

In one sentence, Graham introduces the central characters, sets the scene and gives us an idea of the outcome (the Prologue in Romeo and Juliet comes to mind), while hinting that there will be further questions, beyond the circumstances of the first meeting.  With broad brushstrokes she fills in the background: the racial-religious distinctions in Montreal between French, English and Jews, the fortunes of the Reiser family (modest) and those of the Drakes (impressive once, but hit by the depression), Marc’s step up from his social class into the legal profession, Erica’s bold move down from hers into journalism. Far away is the war (lower case ‘w’).

Graham’s prologue covers barely a page and a half before she raises the curtain, steps back, and hands over to her characters, whose dialogues and inner monologues make up by far the greater part of the novel (not surprisingly, the rights were bought by Samuel Goldwyn,  and it would have made a wonderful film). They tell their own stories, confide their aspirations and share regrets and difficulties, and silently, but eloquently reflect on their various predicaments, and on each other.  The cast is small, essentially two extended families  (‘Two households both alike in dignity’), and the scenery changes only minimally to a drawing room, a study, a bar, a hotel room, a newspaper office, until it opens out into the Laurentian mountains. Hanging over everything, though referred to only occasionally, is the cloud of war: the fighting, the deaths, the fate of Jews in Europe, Hitler and the Nazis.

The authorial voice rarely intervenes, and its absence brings us closer to the characters, as we slowly come to know them, assessing and reassessing. Marc’s first impressions of Erica tell us as much about him as they do about her: ‘Her character was in her fine, almost delicate face, in the way she talked and listened to what you had to say … You could tell at a glance that she had a good brain, that she was generous, interested and highly responsive. Her manner was neither arrogant nor self-deprecating; it was as though she had already come to terms with life and had made a good bargain, asking little on her side except that she might be herself.’ Erica recognises ‘something not only preoccupied but remote’ about Marc, ‘as though he had spent half his life learning how to withdraw unto himself and observe the world from a safe distance. He had an unusually fine body and a physical grace which reminded her of her sister Miriam; he was obviously sensitive and very intelligent, and she realized instinctively that his disconcerting remoteness and preoccupation were both a kind of defence.’ Meeting one through the eyes and emotional response of the other hugely enriches our understanding and appreciation of both. It’s love at first sight for them, and for us.

Graham does not list instances of anti-Semitism, so prevalent in Canada in the thirties and forties, but leaves it for Marc gently to enlighten Erica. She is shaken when Marc responds quite matter-of-factly to her suggestion that he look for a room in a new rooming-house, that ‘they don’t take Jews’, chastened when she is reminded of the signs she has ignored over the years ‘in newspaper advertisements, on hotels, beaches, golf-courses, apartment houses, clubs and little restaurants for skiers in the Laurentians …’. To her shame, and fury, she realises that,  ‘It made no difference what Marc was like; he could still be told by janitors that they didn’t take Jews, before the door was slammed in his face.’ And many other doors too, including that of her own home.

Her father pointedly ignores Marc on his first visit to Westmount, invited by his son’s brother-in-law, a French-Canadian, admirer of Erica’s:  Charles Drake has little more time for French-Canadians than he has for Jews and considers René de Sevigny a cowardly shirker, for failing to enlist. Graham warned her readers from the first that Montreal was riven with racial-religious distinctions. Erica’s father embodies them all. Having decided that René’s ‘shyster lawyer’ friend must, like all the young Jewish lawyers of his acquaintance,  be ‘on the make’, out to do himself ‘a bit of good socially’, he is determined that Marc Reiser’s first visit will be his last. ‘I’ve no objection to Jews, some of the ones I know downtown are very decent fellows, but that doesn’t mean I want them in my house any more than they want me in theirs …’

 

Charles is unapologetic about favouring Erica over his other two children, and she has loved and admired her tall, dark-eyed father, charming and magnetic. She has understood the complexity of his character, and, to date, been forgiving of his more outrageous bursts of intolerance and prejudice. He is closer to her than he is to his wife. He senses straight away the nature and force of Erica’s feelings for Marc, which her mother, a woman for whom the sexual element did not exist ‘except in a derogatory sense’, dismisses as mere infatuation. The ingredients of a successful marriage were in Margaret Drake’s opinion  ‘community of tastes, interests and a similarity of viewpoint and background.’ In his (forlorn) attempts to bring an end to the relationship between Erica and Marc, Charles is forced to fall back on his wife’s arguments, which he expresses more fiercely: ‘I don’t want a son-in-law who’ll be an embarrassment to our friends, a son-in-law who can’t be put up at my club and who can’t go with us to places we’ve gone all our lives. I don’t want a son-in-law whom I’ll have to apologise for …’ He is concerned for himself, and for Erica, worried that she might have to ‘go through life neither flesh, fowl nor good red herring, living in a kind of no man’s land where half the people you know will never accept him and half the people he knows will never accept you.’

Charles’ case against their marriage will find an echo five hundred miles away in Manchester, Ontario, where Leopold Reiser warns his son, ‘You’ll be neither one thing nor the other, and that goes for your wife and children too, particularly your children … It’s like mixing oil and water.’ Both men fear for their grandchildren, Charles that they will be brought up Jewish, Leopold that they won’t.

 

 

Erica has already heard these arguments, from Marc: ‘I’d probably go on being the only Jew in the room so far as your family and most of your family’s friends are concerned, which isn’t awfully pleasant for either them or me.’ Marc, who at first meeting had admired Erica’s self-belief, struggles to find the same quality in himself: ‘Erica was born on top. She’s been on top all her life … she can go anywhere and do anything on the basis of complete equality with anyone … If she marries me she’ll lose all that overnight.’

But Graham has convinced us that her heroine has strength enough for both of them. Born in 1914, ‘she had come to full consciousness when political security had begun to go and economic security had already gone. … The more you could learn to do without the safer you were.’ She is twenty-eight and over the years has turned down suitors, exchanged the security of a parental allowance and social position to earn her own living on a newspaper (in this essentially serious novel there are incidentally some wonderful scenes of office life), she has defied her father, and she has joined the Army.

 

 

The year 1942 was a low point in the War, not least for the Canadians: 1000 Canadian soldiers lost their lives in the Dieppe raid on 19 August, 2500 were killed and 2000 taken prisoner. Attitudes towards Jews were unexpectedly hardening in Canada. But Erica is brave, a risk-taker capable of embracing change. We have to hope that Charles Drake is wrong to think that married to a Jewish lawyer life would be no easier for his daughter in 1945 than in 1910.

I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t know anti-Semitism was once so widespread and so deep-rooted in Canada  –  and it’s only fair to add that the policy was greatly liberalised after the war. Earth and High Heaven is an eye-opener, a wonderful novel with one of the best of Persephone heroines.

Theodor Fontane was born two hundred years ago. The bicentary celebrations started in Berlin in April and will end on December 30th, the date of his birth. Fontane is hardly known in the UK but is a major figure in German literature. There will be at least two exhibitions, an installation, two bus tours, a boat trip, several guided walks, a bicycle ride, readings, lectures, a dinner based on meals in his novels, and theatrical productions including at least two of Effi Briest. The first will stick closely to the novel, the second Effi in the Underworld,in which a group of adolescents will consider how they behave when they reach the ‘limits of standards’ (the website has been Google translated!) featuring a character called Steffi Beast, a contemporary character ‘who actively deals with borders, and rubs against them constructively.’ I think we can work out what that means, although it is not at all clear that poor Effi manages to rub against the borders constructively.

 

 

Having delivered her first, and only, child, Effi von Instetten’s doctor squeezes her hand, and says ‘Today is the anniversary of the battle of Königgrätz; a pity it’s a girl,’ pithily and with casual, probably inadvertent, cruelty, summing up the values of the Prussian aristocracy of the nineteenth century: an essentially military caste, in which a woman’s position would be dependent first on her father and then on her husband.

Effi (née) Briest is seventeen years old, her husband, the Baron, is thirty-seven. Many years earlier as a nineteen-year-old lancer he had courted her mother. The attraction was mutual, but the match was deemed unsuitable – the couple were too young, and, though noble, he was not sufficiently rich –  and Louise had married von Briest, a prosperous landowner and local dignitary, twenty years her senior: a comfortable marriage, but, we deduce from their conversations, a far from passionate one. Instetten had resigned his commission (there had been talk of a suicide attempt), briefly rejoining the army during the Franco-Prussian war, in a different, and by implication less prestigious, regiment. Fontane’s reader would grasp that no  political career in Prussia, however successful, could make up for an abandoned military career.

Effi Briest opens on the day of Instetten’s first visit to the Briests’ ancestral home, which triggers one of many questions. Fontane engages us not with facts, but with tantalising details, often conveyed in dialogue, inviting us, as in life, to draw our own conclusions about characters and events. The ‘whole picture’ is for the reader to paint. Interestingly, in the wonderful 1974 Fassbinder film of Effi Briest, many significant scenes are viewed in mirrors, or through nets, often showing characters from the back, or at an unexpected angle, an indirectness that precisely mimics Fontane’s.

 

 

Why is Instetten visiting after seventeen years? Has he been waiting for the daughter of the woman he once loved to reach marriageable age? He asks for her hand after one brief meeting, so brief that Effi needs to be reminded of it. What are his motives? Is there an element of revenge? Is he looking for a re-incarnation of the wife he was forced to forego?  Is Effi’s mother, Louise von Briest, somehow colluding in this? She deliberately offers up a child-bride, presenting her in her play-clothes, a smock with a sailor collar: ‘you look completely ravishing like this – completely natural and unprepared, and this is very important under the circumstances[my italics].’ What circumstances? Does she believe that the Baron will see in her daughter her own young self?  Does she want him to be reminded of their youthful affair?

With considerable insight and rare frankness, her husband says that Louise ‘would have been much more at home with Instetten than Effi’; she assures him that ‘the past is the past  … and there is no point in constantly harping on youthful aberrations’. Briest replies that he was only trying to raise her spirits: a curious exchange, which suggests that the subject has been discussed before. Effi’s father is a kind man, why does he not object more strongly to the match?

Effi is pretty, aristocratic, and young, the only daughter of a rich man: there would be no shortage of suitors.  Why does she so readily agree to marry a man twenty years older, whom she barely knows?  Asked by her friend if he is ‘the right one’, she answers dismissively, ‘You don’t understand these things, Hertha. Anyone is the right one so long as he has a title, a good position and good looks.’ Her father has taught her that love and tenderness, though desirable, are ‘nonsense’, but she confidently looks forward to wealth and a splendid house. Her mother has assured her that she will ‘at the age of twenty have a position which other women hardly achieve before they are forty. You will go further than your mama.’ Status, it seems, is everything, and status depends on being married to the right man.

Louise knows that Effi’s material ambition will be satisfied, but fears that her thirst for play and adventure will not: ‘He won’t provide much entertainment for her. And the worst of it is: it won’t even occur to him that he ought to. That will be all right for a while and no great harm will be done, but in the end she will become aware of it and it will hurt her …’ She knows from experience the sacrifice involved in marrying for status rather than love. Why is she so eager for her daughter to share her fate?

The difference in age between the von Briests is exactly the same as between the Baron and Effi, a point which Fontane does not labour, but rather leaves us to notice, or possibly overlook: throughout the novel we are scarcely aware of the authorial voice. Fontane is rarely judgmental. If so many questions hang in the air, it is not because of any lack of plotting or sketchy characterisation, but rather because Fontane is sensitive to the multiple and often contradictory impulses driving people, some but not all disclosed in their conversations with others, or in moments of  self-examination. For all her impetuosity Effi does not reveal much to her mother, who remarks that ‘a complete surrender of her thoughts is not in her nature.’

Effi’s father loves her spontaneity, while her mother worries that she is impetuous, soft and compliant, with ‘something ruthless in her make-up’ that will make her take risks. Nineteenth-century Prussian society did not value spontaneity, particularly in women. A man might have ‘a gambler’s instinct’ and escape censure, but a woman must tread warily, and cultivate discretion (her mother’s warning), and eschew the unconventional, which, in the words of the local apothecary, Effi’s one true friend, is invariably ‘paid for with happiness.’

The residents of Kessin, a small Baltic port where the Instettens start their married life, consider Effi to be too much a product of Berlin, an atheist, ‘infected with rationalism, and, perhaps worst of all, they disapprove of her clothes, which are ‘not sober enough’, insufficiently conventional. The Baron is concerned that she might not adapt to Kessin, not settle down, but his concern is largely for himself: ‘Will you become popular, and secure me a majority if I stand for Parliament?’ Instetten is deeply selfish. He makes no apology for the Prefect’s Residence, a sinister timbered house, cruelly fanning Effi’s fears that it might be haunted, while refusing to move: ‘I can’t have the townspeople saying that Prefect Instetten is selling his house because his wife has been haunted by the picture if a Chinaman stuck to the back of a chair. It would finish me, Effi. I would never be able to live it down.’

Instetten’s reputation means everything to him. That his first love should have forsaken him for an older, more prosperous, man, did more than break his heart. It inflicted a deep wound on his honour, and as he perceived it, reduced him in the eyes of others. In marrying Effi he has exacted revenge on von Briest (and on Louise), and redeemed his reputation. This is no love match. As a husband, he is cold, ‘frosty as a snowman’, says Effi, there is ‘something remote about him even in his caresses’ which she describes as ‘perfunctory’.  She admits to her mother that there have been times when she feared him, but she gets used to it, ‘… he’s got me where he wants me … if a man is too amorous it only makes people laugh, especially in view of the difference in our ages.’

 

The Baron is often absent and inattentive when he is at home. Of Effi’s two servants, only one is reliably loyal to her: Roswitha, engaged to care for their child, a simple woman, raped as a girl, disgraced by the birth of a bastard baby. Joanna, her maid, chosen by Instetten, is devoted, but to the Baron and not to her mistress. Effi, who had dreamt of entertaining princes, is lonely, bored, and frightened, but stoically resigned to her lot.

 

 

Although social approval does not concern her, Effi pushes beyond ‘the limits of standards’, and she must, eventually, pay the price. She has freely admitted to not having principles, she cannot escape the opprobrium of those closest to her who do have them, who cannot relax them whatever the consequences. The social code of the Prussian aristocracy, which would destroy his enchanting heroine, was a code still so strong that neither her husband nor her parents could challenge it, even if they might have wished to.