Waiting for the Barbarians (31 page)

As he was nearing sixty, Fontane made the extraordinary announcement that he was ready to begin a new career—as a novelist. “I am only at the beginning,” he wrote his publisher, Wilhelm Hertz, in 1879, with a touching combination of bravado and trepidation. “There is nothing behind me, everything is ahead, which is both fortune and misfortune at the same time.” As it turned out, he had nothing to fear. For the next two decades, he and Emilie lived at 134c Potsdamer Strasse, where he produced the seventeen novels that marked him as a great writer.

It’s not surprising that Fontane’s first novel was a work of historical fiction: partly the factuality of the past, partly the twilight mystery of literary art. Some readers at the time found
Before the Storm
a disconcertingly becalmed work: the author’s languid eavesdropping
was, they found, ill suited to a subject that raised expectations of high color and excitement. (“Will they sit down at the table again? Will they go to sleep again?” one of Fontane’s many correspondents wrote of the characters in that “silly” book.) It took Fontane a while to find the proper vehicle for his talent for depicting everyday realities imbued with the poetic—ordinary people reaching for (and, as often as not, failing to attain) transcendence. That vehicle, as the literary world soon discovered, was women.

As is the case with certain male writers famous for their female characters—Euripides, Tennessee Williams—women in Fontane’s work often represent energies and emotions for which there is no room in the world created by men: the world of realpolitik and bombastic officialdom, of matrimonial hypocrisy and erotic double standards. This is why, as with those other authors, Fontane’s women are often both impressively self-aware and memorably broken. “If there is a person who has a passion for women,” Fontane confided to some friends in 1894, “and loves them almost twice as much when he encounters their weaknesses and confusions, the whole enchantment of their womanhood in full flight, that person is I.” It would be hard to think of a better way to describe the figures on whom the author’s reputation as a master of characterization and delicate plotting is based. Such weaknesses and confusions, the feminine enchantment in full flight—in both their comic and their tragic expressions—make
On Tangled Paths
and
Irretrievable
small masterworks.

On Tangled Paths
(
Irrungen, Wirrungen
in the original, a rhyme nicely finessed in an earlier translation, entitled
Delusions, Confusions
) has a typically unfussy plot. Lene Nimptsch is a pretty young seamstress (she comes complete with a much put-upon foster mother and chatty, eccentric, but loving neighbors, all painted in amusing Dickensian colors) who’s in love with Botho von Rienäcker, a dashing officer from an aristocratic family; he loves her. They spend time
together; he teases her foster mother and the neighbors; the couple make an overnight excursion on the Spree. (Readers weren’t the only ones outraged by Fontane’s unsensationalistic depiction of the casual sexual relationship when the novel was first serialized in a newspaper. “Won’t this dreadful whore’s tale soon be over?” one of the paper’s owners protested.) Eventually—and it takes some time—Botho’s mother reminds him that he must marry a suitable girl. This he does, reluctantly at first: she’s an airhead and a chatterbox. (Fontane just lets her rattle on.) Lene, for her part, ends up marrying a nice enough man. At the novel’s close, both young people have accepted their fates, though not without complex emotions: “Our hearts have room for all sorts of contradictions.” That could be Fontane’s motto.

So there aren’t many visible items of interest. The immense pleasures of the novel lie in the author’s coolheaded approach to what, in other hands, could have been a forgettable melodrama. As often in Fontane, the drama is internal, and, at first, internally generated; when the “excitement” happens—in this case, the intervention of Botho’s mother (in a letter)—it’s just an external correlative to something already present in one or more characters. The love affair in
On Tangled Paths
is shadowed from the start by the practical-minded Lene’s unblinking understanding that a romance like theirs cannot last:

It’s a remarkable speech to encounter in the mouth of a young woman in a late-nineteenth-century novel. (It’s not surprising that Fontane admired Trollope, another creator of strong-willed females who know what’s what.) Botho, as it turns out,
is
weak-willed, and bows to his mother’s demands. What saves him, and the novel—it’s an element that makes for a more stimulating richness of perspective, and makes it harder to “blame” any given character—is that he is ultimately as realistic as Lene, if rather more prone to self-justification. “Do I mean to marry Lene? No. Have I promised her I would? No. Does she expect it? No. Or will parting be any easier for us if I defer it? No, no, and no again.”

Lene suffers less than some of Fontane’s women because of her class—because her horizon of expectations is narrower than that of Effi or of Cécile, those unhappy wives of high-ranking husbands. Like them, she’s astute about the limitations that the world sets on her ambitions, but the ambitions are more realistic and the limitations more relaxed. The pleasure of
On Tangled Paths
is not the thrill of watching a female character struggle against social convention, as so many great heroines of nineteenth-century literature do, but the perhaps more complicated pleasure of recognizing a character who knows when to give in. Still, a sadness hangs in the air, owing in no small part to the innumerable touches the author employs to build up his subtle but affecting portrait of a young woman who is ignorant but not stupid, romantic but not foolish. (She’s the inverse of Emma Bovary—more interesting, too.) At one point, Lene uncomprehendingly examines the English captions on two prints in the room where she’s staying with her lover—“Washington Crossing the Delaware” and “The Last Hour at Trafalgar.” Fontane takes this casual moment and turns it, wonderfully, into a symbol of why the relationship can’t last: “But she could do no more than combine the letters into syllables, and, trivial as the matter was, it nonetheless gave her a pang by
bringing home to her the gulf that separated her from Botho.” The book is filled with comparable moments of small facts transfigured into something magical.

Irretrievable
takes the same elements—an appealing man, charming but weak; a clear-eyed, practical-minded woman, perhaps a little pessimistic; a relationship that can’t go anywhere; resignation in the face of life’s realities—and, as its stark title suggests, turns it into a tragedy. It’s one of Fontane’s most idiosyncratic achievements, and certainly one of the finest literary autopsies of a foundering relationship. (The translation reprinted in the New York Review Books edition is more fluent and natural but also more prone to infelicities than a new translation,
No Way Back
, published in 2010 by Angel Books.)

The novel’s odd, misty, rather
Pelléas et Mélisande
atmosphere has much to do with its unusual setting. It takes place not in Berlin, or even in Germany proper, but in Copenhagen and in the duchy of Schleswig-Holstein, a territory whose vexed history—it was the subject of a long series of ownership disputes between Denmark and Prussia, finally and forcibly resolved by the Danish War of 1864—serves as a metaphor for the condition of the main characters’ marriage. The Schleswig-Holstein question, the British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston once quipped, was so complicated that only three people understood it, of whom one, the Prince Consort, was dead; another, a foreign office clerk, had gone mad; and the third, Palmerston himself, had forgotten the whole thing. There’s always a background buzz of politics in Fontane’s novels—a geopolitical correlative for the emotional drama.

Unlike the couple in
On Tangled Paths
, this pair have no obvious impediments to happiness. Both are aristocratic, and they have in fact been long and happily married, with two attractive teenage
children, all living in a replica of a Greek temple on the Baltic coast. (A good setting for a tragedy.) Count Helmut Holk is charming and has many “likeable qualities,” and would, his wife can’t help thinking at the beginning of the novel, “certainly be an ideal husband—if he had any ideals at all of his own.” The countess, Christine, is beautiful, younger, and a bit too dogmatic and overprincipled, as she herself recognizes. When the author deftly alludes to Christine’s attitude toward smoking—something “which the countess did not really allow indoors, although she never forbade it”—you have all the information you need about the passive-aggressiveness that will sink the marriage. In the erosive contest between the two spouses, it’s hard not to feel the ghosts of Fontane’s quarreling parents, the
Prinzipienverächter
and the
Prinzipienreiter
.

What happens in
Irretrievable
? Not much, on the face of it. What Helmut observes of a poem that he likes is true of this novel, as it is of so many others by Fontane: “There is no real content and it is just a situation and not a poem but that doesn’t matter. It has a certain tone and just as the coloring makes a picture … in the same way the tone makes the poem.” Fontane charts the course of the Holks’ marital decline in his usual desultory way—there’s a slow accumulation of talk and events, and then that climactic fillip. The couple bicker about which schools to send the children to; Helmut, suddenly called upon to fulfill his duty as courtier, goes away to Copenhagen for some weeks, where he flirts inconclusively with his landlady’s daughter and, more conclusively, with Ebba (“Eve”), a rather spiky lady-in-waiting to the elderly princess whom they both serve. He doesn’t write often enough to Christine; there’s a fire in the castle where the princess is holding court (no one gets hurt); in a fit of midlife foolishness, Helmut tells Christine it’s all over and proposes to the lady-in-waiting, who then tells him off (“You’re always sinning against the most elementary rules of the game”); eventually, he comes home to
his wife. The moment of narrative “excitement” takes place five pages from the end of the book. As Helmut’s scheming landlady says of her daughter’s wayward life, “It’s something of a love-story but it’s not a proper love-story.”

As in
On Tangled Paths
, the pleasure of the novel lies in its subtlety—in this case, a discreet exploration of marital psychology. Here again, trouble starts within and, like a dry rot, eats its way outward. The novel begins with one of Fontane’s unemphatic epiphanies: in the course of an ordinary domestic conversation one day, Christine realizes that the terrain of her marriage has, somehow, shifted under her feet. “In spite of having the best of husbands whom she loved as much as he loved her, she yet did not possess that peace for which she longed; in spite of all their love, his easy-going temperament was no longer in harmony with her melancholy.” The symbol of the fatal disharmony is Christine’s preoccupation with restoring the crumbling family vault. (Fontane’s novels are filled with brief but meaningful references to cemeteries, graves, burials, funerals, even funeral wreaths.) From the beginning, there’s not much question about who will end up in it.

The haunted perception of imminent emotional failure—which, typically, the more sentimental male character resists at first—colors everything that follows in precisely the way the bad faith of a crumbling relationship poisons even the most innocent exchanges. This phenomenon is, indeed, one that the novel evokes in harrowing detail. “In my correspondence with Christine,” Helmut heatedly writes to her brother, who is also his close friend, “I have never been able to strike the right note. As soon as one finds oneself suspected, it is very difficult to maintain the right tone and attitude.” And, as in
On Tangled Paths
, Fontane gives us access to the kind of tortured emotional self-justification that unhappy lovers are prone to. Here is Helmut, “interpreting” the fact that he wasn’t killed in the fire:

Masculine self-delusion masquerading as duty is a favorite target of Fontane’s. (Helmut’s monologue is a grotesque inversion of Lene’s coolly self-aware speech in
On Tangled Paths
.) Here it’s precisely the reagent necessary to ignite Christine’s dangerous penchant for self-righteousness, with predictable results.