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- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
It is the summer of 1851 and Charlotte Morrison is on holiday in Germany with her brother and his wife. Charlotte may be a spinster aunt with a seemingly sparse life, but beneath that quiet respectability lie unsuspected depths. Boating down the Rhine one day, Charlotte sights a fellow traveller, who releases the hissing floodwaters of her subconscious. Dark and dangerous, they sweep Charlotte towards the watershed of her life, stretching her imagination to its limit. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1981, Ann Schlee's heady novel creates a tension that is as compelling as it is mysterious, forcing her characters to confront each other as well as themselves over one hot summer abroad.
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Seitenzahl: 254
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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‘The quality of the writing is so extraordinarily high that I could hardly believe it was a first novel.’ Margaret Forster
‘A journey down the Rhine in the company of Ann Schlee is the purest, simplest pleasure.’ Sunday Telegraph
‘I raced through Rhine Journey. Mrs Schlee’s simple and direct style makes for very easy reading. This is a first novel of considerable promise.’ Olivia Manning
‘A work of art.’ New Yorker
iii
RHINE JOURNEY
Ann Schlee
with a foreword by LAUREN GROFF
DAUNT BOOKS
v
To my companions on the Rhine in the summer of 1977
vi
Contents
A GERMAN SUMMER is a quick, shimmering, lively thing. The winter is often so long and grey that, by April, one begins to despair, to believe that the gloom may in fact be permanent, that the sun might never find the energy to rouse itself for more than a few grim hours before it falls back weakly below the horizon once more. But when spring does at last arrive, it’s with a thunderclap, operatically large and wild and loud, the Gesamtkunstwerk of the great eternal genius of nature. The landscape that had been so leaden and dour goes green nearly overnight, the sun gathers its courage and shines down, and viiiin human hearts the heaviness of those long, cold months begins to lift and lighten.
In Ann Schlee’s first novel for adults, Rhine Journey, Charlotte Morrison’s story is that of a German awakening. As befits our meek, unmarried middle-aged English protagonist in the year 1851, Charlotte’s revolution is less external than it is internal; not a physical blooming into flower, but a subtle and total derangement of understanding. Charlotte is accompanying her brother, the stern and pious Reverend Charles Morrison; his poisonously passive-aggressive, beautiful, and sickly wife Marion; and their teenaged daughter Ellie on a voyage down the Rhine. Charlotte has just recently come into some money: for twenty years she was the housekeeper to one Mr Ransome at Ditchbourne, and he left her a small fortune in his will. Now she is financially independent for the first time in her life, though still without an occupation or a place to live when she returns home to England. In Germany, she finds herself expected to act as something a little less than a family member and a little more than a servant, the minder of her brother’s baggage in public, Ellie’s companion and governess, and Marion’s lady’s maid. If Charlotte ixdoes not baulk at this humbling expectation, it’s because she is so out of practice in seeing herself as anyone’s equal that she welcomes service as her due.
The book opens as the family arrives in Coblenz. At the moment the boat docks, Charlotte sees a man whose face sends a terrible jolt of pain to her heart. She has mistaken him for someone she loved when she was very young; a miller named Desmond Fermer, whom her family felt was too far below her to agree to their marriage. She knows this stranger is not her former love – he is close to her own age, and Fermer would by now be in his sixties – but when, to her dismay, this man, Edward Newman, and his family begin to show up at the same hotels and restaurants as the Morrisons, and they strike up an acquaintance, Charlotte can’t help from seeing him dually, both as himself and as the love she lost. The echo of Charlotte’s ill-fated love affair gives rise to an onslaught of memories. The sensitive nerves of girlhood reawaken, and she feels an ache she can’t soothe away. She remembers most vividly a moment when, in the terrifying, exhilarating first transport of her love long ago, in lieu of Fermer, she kissed the large soft face of a blooming peony: x
A full moon had enchanted all colour from the garden. Freed from its bright distractions she had felt intensely all around her the life of plants, which seemed a cold moist persistent thing, gripping and sucking its survival, far more akin, after all, to the moon and the sun. She had felt drawn in among them, had stooped to smell the peony and, feeling its cool vigorous flesh brush her cheek, had pressed lips among the petals and kissed them repeatedly.
This passage is so true to the experience of the deep wild emotion of adolescence that I felt, upon encountering it, a jolt of nostalgia. Who among us, once so very young and trembling with new love, hasn’t kissed something soft and beautiful and safe, instead of the far more terrifying and longed-for lips of the beloved?
The writing in Rhine Journey is always taut and wonderful like this, never showy, gesturing clearly to Charlotte’s emotional pitch even when she can’t quite understand it herself. When, late in the book, in a great boil of dismay and anger, she leaves her family and the Newmans at a beer garden in the evening and walks fast to get away from them, Schlee’s language takes on the urgency of Charlotte’s internal state: xi
Now her back was to the warm contrived light of the lanterns. The moon had risen. Coming out from the canopy of trees, she entered its sphere. The tight bitter panic ceased. Moonlight transforms; it deadens; it makes more tolerable. A great shoal of light thrashed on the surface of the river. Everything that stood motionless beside it was rendered in the deepest black. She must not stop. It must be apparent if she walked alone at night that she was impelled by some purpose: that she wanted nothing of anyone. Still it took the breath away: the cathedral fretted at its edges by light. The roof shone like a sheet of silver, each tile distinct like the indentation of a hammer. Below the great mass was an illusion. Finally it excluded her, but it was her only landmark; towards it she hurried, first to the bridge and then towards the cathedral.
The barges supporting the bridge were as still as piers. Between them molten light streamed and boiled. The crimson pier lights were cast down into it and shattered their red shafts sliced by the water light, the fragments drawn down sideways, struggling to rejoin, never permitted.
Rhine Journey is graceful, economical, and emotionally acute, but, to me, the most astonishing aspect of this novel is the precision with which Schlee xiireplicates the customs, language, and atmosphere of 1851, hewing so closely to the feeling that a book written in the early Victorian era stirs in the reader that, upon learning that Rhine Journey was only first published in 1980, I did a double take. This cannot be true; this book cannot possibly be by a contemporary writer!, I insisted, even while discovering that Schlee herself was not even born until 1934, and that the novel was in fact a finalist for the 1981 Booker Prize. She followed it, two years later, with another atmospheric feat of careful historical ventriloquy in The Proprietor, the story of the idealistic owner of a small group of islands off the south coast of England in 1836, beset and broken by his own idealism and his romantic longings.
Historical fiction is always a complicated negotiation between the present from which the writer is writing and the past that is being imagined on the page. Writers bridge the divide by either implicitly or explicitly acknowledging the present – whether through a winking, postmodern pastiche, or a more earnest animation of a distant era that informs or reflects the present (or vice versa) – or by ignoring it completely. Schlee boldly chooses to ignore the xiiipresent, staying so faithful to the mindset and vocabularies of the people of the mid-nineteenth century that she entirely erases the idea of the modern world from the experience of the book. She effects this with incredible subtlety, not only through the many small choices she makes – the flowing Victorian grammar; the more decorum-bound emotional landscapes of her characters; the small, slightly alien details of clothing or transportation – but also in what she chooses to leave out. The things, that is, that her characters don’t notice, but that a century or more later we certainly would, because they would be so very alien to our experience. This lack of explication forms small vacuums of consciousness, uncannily replicating the same small vacuums of consciousness that appear in texts that were written during eras that the long passage of time has since made strange.
For instance, the year in which Rhine Journey takes place, 1851, is extremely important to the story, deepening the narrative stakes, but Schlee traces it so gently that the reader might not be initially aware of the resultant underlying tensions. Three years before the book is set, in 1848, there had been a great social uprising in Paris called the February xivRevolution, leading to the abdication of King Louis-Philippe of France; the republican fervour spread across Europe and into the many fragmented German states of the time, including Prussia. There, King Frederick Wilhelm IV, under pressure of civil unrest, agreed to reorganise his government and push to add his kingdom to the larger German state. His army, however, fearing riots, clashed with protestors on 13 March in Berlin, and the resulting day-long fight left hundreds dead. In the aftermath, the King’s verbal agreement to expand the people’s liberties was retracted, and many freedoms were curtailed, particularly those of Communist and Workers’ Party members who had been the most vocal; this included Karl Marx, who had to flee from Cologne and later settle in London. By 1851, Frederick Wilhelm IV had intensified the attack on the Workers’ Party members, fearing their subversive actions, and the ports and train stations were being closely surveilled. The Morrisons arrive, blithe English tourists, into a tense and paranoid Prussia; though perhaps not quite fully comprehended by Charlotte, this sense of simmering unrest under the surface of things seeps into her consciousness. xv
Another echo buried in the text is Siegfried’s Rhine Journey in Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the fourth part of The Ring Cycle, which the composer was writing by 1851. In it, Brünnhilde escorts the hero through the quiet, lightly brassy dawn with her shield and horse, down to the opening strings of the river, where there is a final blooming outward into Siegfried’s ‘Hero’ motif. Charlotte’s quiet internal revolution over the course of the book exactly echoes this passage of music. It begins with the long slow soft movement of her life on the narrow path that her family has allowed her; moves through this trip in Germany where there is a breaking of her own assumptions about herself in a quiet earthquake of awakened passion, regret, and mistaken assumptions; before ending with her taking possession of herself as a whole person, finally acknowledging the harm that her family had done to her by denying her love. In the end, instead of envisioning a future with her brother and his family in their parsonage, where she’d be made to pay for every bite of bread and breath of air, she can at last picture ‘whitened cottage rooms where she might quietly extend herself, and moving room to room, meet and recognise herself xviin forms unaltered by the pressures of others upon her’. It is a small victory, but how hard-won those whitened cottage rooms feel, bittersweet, full of regret but also hope. What a spiritual expansion we sense she will experience when given her days to do with what she wishes; how revolutionary this quiet, private assertion of Charlotte’s autonomy feels, how urgent and new.
Lauren Groff
New Hampshire, 2023
Historical Note
VISITORS TO Rhenish Prussia, in the summer of 1851, found much to charm them. They also found much to condemn. The British particularly, always so mindful of their own national liberties, railed against the power of the Prussian police, the censorship of the press, the restrictions placed on the Lutheran Church.
Many citizens of the Rhineland would have agreed with them and felt bitterly that the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions had seen the curtailment of those freedoms they had hoped to extend. Some of the more outspoken critics of Frederick Wilhelm IV’s regime found themselves under threat of arrest. xviii
Karl Marx had fled from Cologne in 1848 and settled in London the following year. When a fellow member of the Communist League escaped from prison in 1850, Frederick Wilhelm urged his Prime Minister to intensify the government’s attack on the workers’ movement. Rumours were spread of an international revolutionary plot centred on the Great Exhibition. Ports and railway stations were carefully watched for subversive workers seeking to escape to England. By June the majority of the League was under arrest and was brought to trial in Cologne in October of 1852.
It is unlikely that the Morrison family was concerned or even aware of these events. They had come for Marion’s sake, to take the waters at Baden Baden and to experience on their return a romantic Rhine composed mostly of the fruits of judicious reading and the play of their own imaginations. But it is against the background of these events that their summer excursion is set.
One
The Landing Stage at Coblenz
‘THE LUGGAGE has simply been left on the deck,’ said the Reverend Charles Morrison. ‘I had thought, Charlotte, that you were with it.’
Charlotte, his sister for whose summer excursion (the fact suffused her at this moment) he had generously paid, said, ‘Surely you didn’t ask me.’
‘Was it necessary to ask? I assumed that when you went off by yourself onto the deck it was to check on the luggage, knowing as you did that I was otherwise occupied.’
For he had been distributing tracts for the edification of their fellow passengers. She could not 2restrain a glance at the black velvet bag slung across his shoulder, nor repress her sensation of relief that it was empty. She said of the luggage, ‘I’m sure it is quite safe.’
‘On the contrary, you have no occasion to be sure of any such thing. We have been warned often enough of thieving on the Rhine and have observed the extreme negligence of the shipowners. I have impressed upon you before, Charlotte, the possibility that the captain may actually be in league with the thieves. It is our duty to be vigilant at all times over the property of others as well as our own.’
She loved him, had always loved him, but knew him to be habitually thus, like a lantern swung deliberately on a pole, searching in this part, then in that, going over the matter a second time. Had it not been the luggage it would have been something else. Soon he would mention the Almighty. She looked swiftly away from his face to the approaching town of Coblenz. Thick yellow walls glowing in the late sun seemed to skim towards them propped precariously on their unsteady yellow reflections. But she dared not look away long.
‘The Almighty after all asks us to help ourselves in 3the first instance. Then when we have measured our ineptitude to the hilt, He intervenes with His grace.’
‘But what,’ she asked carefully, ‘would you like me to do about the luggage now?’
Nothing could quicken the pace of Mr Morrison’s arguments. The deck listed with the weight of passengers straining against the shoreward rail. Some of them, she noticed, waved towards the approaching shore with their tracts. Others used them as fans, for the evening was sultry. Though many, she told herself, would have been carefully folded and placed in reticule or coattail pocket for later earnest perusal. Devoutly she hoped that he had not seen the one or two that had fluttered past them on the deck. But he had not.
He stood alone with his back to the town. Strands of grey hair blew from under the brim of his hat. His strong plain face was as deeply weathered as any of the farm labourers’ to whom he ministered. His blue eyes were set fixedly on some place where no one, to Charlotte’s knowledge, was ever permitted to land. He continued to expound the grace of God until it occurred to her that he was frightened at the thought of yet another new place and needed consolation.4
She laid her hand on his arm and said, ‘I shall go and check that it is safe, if you will find Marion and Ellie and say that we have arrived.’
Confronted with a duty, immediately he went and she was left on a deck too congested with the wide dark skirts of the lady passengers for her to press on to the pile of luggage forward of the mast. But, optimistic by nature, trained in the belief that people left in charge of things were infallible, she had no fears at all that the strong young men surrounding the luggage with ropes would fail to lower it over the side, where subsequently they would find it.
A space occurred near her at the rail. She fitted herself into it, placed her gloved hands side by side on the polished wood of the rail, and stared down at the scene below.
It was at that moment – when the throb and vibration of the engine ceased, the brass bell jangled their arrival, and the steamer made its shuddering contact with the land – that Charlotte felt a sudden intense pain in what she had been taught to believe was her heart.
The crowd on the shore stared upwards at the passengers. At one moment their faces were no more 5than pale shapes among the white scarves of the peasant women and a cluster of spiked brass helmets flashing in the last of that day’s sun; at the next, eyes, mouths became distinct, upturned, searching. Then pain brought tears to the eyes so that the whole scene wavered and started on a course of disintegration, as if invisible fumes off some rising conflagration had drifted between herself and the shore. All this because near the space cleared for the gangplank, she had seen, for the first time in twenty years, the face of a man called Desmond Fermer.
She gripped the rail in an astonishment of pain. In recent years, reaching in moments of self-pity for her broken heart, she had felt little or no sensation, and now without warning the long bandaging years were cruelly stripped away at the sight of a black coat, a tall hat, a heavy handsome face staring up, it appeared, at her.
Of course it was not he. She had known this at once. This man was her own age, forty-five at the most. Desmond Fermer would be by now sixty, ageing, stout, grey, perhaps dead after all. Knowing that it was not he, she knew that he was not looking at her. That now, raising his hat, smiling, shouting sounds which 6were lost among the shouts of the men securing the gangplank, with his eyes fixed seemingly onto hers, that it could not be she that he saw.
Instantly by her shoulder, a woman’s voice called in English, ‘Here, Edward, here,’ and turning she saw a stout, comely lady backed by two tall sons waving in reply. Her husband. Other people. No matter.
Legs moved on command. They remembered the raised sill into the cabin; ‘I do beg your pardon,’ to the Frenchwoman she brushed against. In the crowded cabin a row of ladies leant towards the long pier glass that encircled the wall. Their skirts tilted up behind them and although they talked to one another their faces were intent. Their reflected hands moved briskly about imperceptible adjustments. Charlotte moved in among them and there appeared in front of her what she had learned to accept was her face. She stared at it dispassionately, wondering if it yet showed any sign of the disintegration she had felt inside herself. Apparently not. Apparently she flashed the same signal to the world as she had on all previous days – dark eyes, smooth hair, straight nose, neat bonnet, saying in effect, ‘Respect me, but let me pass.’ 7
When suddenly her sister-in-law’s face appeared beside hers in the glass it seemed more familiar than her own, more closely watched over the years.
‘There you are,’ said Marion’s voice and Charlotte, alive at once to its minutest emphasis, said without turning, ‘Yes, I was watching us land.’
She watched Marion stare at herself, open-eyed, her chin folded softly in, as she performed those automatic pointless actions (they were being repeated all around the cabin) with which one prepares to meet new places; a tug at each side of the collar, the hair smoothed out under the bonnet’s brim, the rapid pulling of each glove finger’s end, and all the time her little mouth worked in her soft round face.
The hotel frontage looked quite respectable. But might it not be noisy by the river? Still, if it were clean on the outside might it not be clean on the inside? So long as there was no repetition of Heidelberg. She did not think, tucking in the folded chin, turning the head, pursing the lips, that Charles’s nerves would stand another such ordeal. Charlotte felt strengthened by these certainties. She thought, I have been absurd, and said softly, ‘And you, dear, how are you feeling? I have found no chance to ask you today.’8
‘Tired, of course,’ said Marion with her sweet resignation. The reflected eyes fastened onto Charlotte’s and the little mouth gave a tight quick smile. ‘But then there are so many things of more moment than how I feel.’
To this of course, there is no answer, only the need to make a move. Everything when one is travelling must be gone over bead by bead. Gloves, shawl, reticule, Marion’s checked travelling rug, her red guidebook to be collected off the red plush seat. She followed Marion across the cabin. ‘Remember the sill,’ she said, reaching out to touch her lightly on the shoulder.
Already the passengers were making their slow way down the gangplank. Luggage swung on ropes. It is impossible not to hope at the prospect of such newness, not to crane to see the hotel with its bold lettering between the rows of windows, not to look down again at the crowd on the quay, shifted now like the pattern in a kaleidoscope, and freed of ghosts.
Ahead of her Marion raised herself on tiptoe to look first over one shoulder of the gentleman in front of her, then over the other. Her gloved hand darted over her head.
‘Have you seen them?’9
‘I thought I had. Yes, there they are.’ She called out to her husband and daughter, in a little voice they could not hear, ‘Charles, Ellie.’ But they were caught in different streams slowly converging on the top of the gangplank. ‘What the hurry is,’ said Marion, ‘I shall never know,’ but she stood on tiptoe again and darted up her hand as if she might force her way past the solid black back that blocked her.
Now Charlotte could see them too; her brother with his hair blowing in the wind and his mouth clamped shut on inconceivable thoughts, and straining from his side Ellie, her niece – but in her heart her child – with her bright hair escaping from under the edge of her bonnet, alive, alight, sucking in life from everyone around her, crying out as they were borne slowly towards one another, ‘Oh, Charlotte, look at the bridge.’ So that when they met at the head of the gangplank Charlotte found herself being drawn back by Ellie’s strong warm hand to the bows of the steamer.
‘Charlotte,’ she said warmly in her aunt’s ear, ‘I feel so strange.’
‘Why is that?’
‘It’s this place.’
‘But we have only just arrived.’10
‘I know. Don’t you feel it?’
‘No,’ said Charlotte. ‘Places begin to seem alike.’
‘Aren’t you happy? Aren’t you enjoying it?’ She was stricken.
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘Well then, can’t you feel something?’
‘Only that this is a new place.’
‘I have the strangest feeling that something will happen to me here. I shouldn’t say so even to you, because nothing ever really happens and you will be sure to laugh at me when we go away again, but it came to me all of a sudden when the boat came into the side and everyone was looking up at us, that they’d come especially to meet me and that I was looking for a face that would make sense of it.’ At that she was overcome with her own foolishness and hid her face between her aunt’s neck and shoulder.
But Charlotte was disposed to be serious. ‘Did you see such a face?’
‘No, of course not.’ But then she insisted, ‘Tell me, do you ever think of this one moment? Now. This is me now. This is happening to me.’
‘Not any more.’
‘Oh, you make yourself out so old.’11
But Charlotte could remember just that, standing at the centre of the universe on the very apex of time. Now it seemed that she stood a little to the side of centre and that her awareness was not confined to any particular moment. Lights were going on in the town, giving it depth, a suggestion of back streets and lives suddenly illuminated in the moment before the curtains are drawn. Once tiny filaments would have connected her to all those windows, to all those lives. But now she knew those streets to be composed of a dense element, non-conductive of spirit, which she would penetrate and emerge from gratefully without influencing or being influenced. But Ellie must still believe that the town reacted and attracted, wanted to take from her and to give.
They were standing now in the very bows of the steamer. A cold, wild river smell surrounded them. To the left lay a cluster of small boats, by the landing stage. Behind them the bland white façades of the hotels rose above the yellow city walls. Directly ahead was what Ellie had brought her to see. A line of flat barges with the roadway laid over it, crowded at this evening hour with peasants returning from market. They could see the white scarves of the women, the 12empty knapsacks sagging on the backs of the men as they moved towards the farther shore, whilst working its way against them was an eddy of blue uniforms, the bright helmets of the officers and men coming down from the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein to pass the evening in the town.
‘Oh, I wish we had been going the other way,’ said Ellie. ‘Then they would have had to open for us.’ And because the world that summer seemed to conspire to give her exactly what she wanted, a gun sounded from the bank, causing them both to start and clasp their hands more closely together.
‘Oh, look, look,’ cried Ellie, for the barriers were down and the stream of people halted congested behind them. The central boats separated. The strong brown river was triumphant between them, and working up against the current they saw a little steamer like their own, coming perhaps from Cologne, where a week from now they would reach the climax of their tour.
They stood watching until the steamer passed and the bridge closed. Then, still hand in hand, they retraced their steps and walked down the gangplank into the waiting town.
Two
The Table d’Hôte
Noneedtoaskmyname.Noneedtomakediscreetenquiriesaftermycircumstances;towonderwhereIlive,whatclassofcompanyIkeep,orallthoseessentialsthattheworldmustknowbeforeitcanmakeupitsmindtolikeordislike.No,IamsimplythewomanoppositetoyouinthediligencetoBasle;threeplacesawayatthetabled’hôteatHeidelberg.YoumustlikeordislikeonimpulsefortomorrowIamgone.Soquicklyenjoymyfinegreyeyeswhichpeoplestilladmire;myquietself-effacingnaturewhichwillnotpermitmetoraisemyvoice,nor 14demand the window be opened,nor press upon you my opinion of the view.
InreturnIwouldaskyounottospeculateon whether my handsome brown silk were a giftfrommysister-in-law,cutdowninhastetofitmylessampleform,norifthehandinmyneatgloveberingedorunringed.Believemeifyouwillacomfortablewidow,andthebrightfaceatmyside–whichdoes,theysay,alittleresemblemine–mydaughterperhaps.Donotquestionandletmepass.
So Charlotte Morrison: to her journal at an early halt in their tour, when all the freshness of the journey was still upon her and the cares and duties of her former life still sufficiently real in memory for her to be delightfully aware of their absence. She woke each morning with a sense of their weight which had settled again perhaps in dreams, only to feel it lift and vanish so that she lay afloat with very lightness above the surface of the bed, her mind unable to imagine the sights they would visit during that day.15
Only on that first night in Coblenz, seeing herself haunt the corner of a glass given over to charms of Ellie’s brushing out her hair, did she suddenly long for the safe confines of home, the hard edges of her old identity.
