Irretrievable (35 page)

The novels
of Theodor Fontane (1819–1898) are so sparkling, polished, tender, sympathetic, delicately ironic, and psychologically astute that it is a wonder they are not better known by American readers. Considered the most important German novelist between Goethe and Mann, or even, as Gordon A. Craig, who wrote a fine book about him, claimed, “clearly the greatest German novelist before Thomas Mann,”
[1]
Fontane can be made to fit snugly into the school of nineteenth-century European realism that includes Stendhal, Balzac, Turgenev, Austen, Flaubert, Zola. But he came after most of them, in part because he was such a late bloomer (his first novel was published as he turned sixty) and in part because of Germany's own delay in becoming a nation-state. Having been unified by Bismarck only in 1871, Germany may have needed more time for its social scene to thicken and acquire sufficient texture to generate a novelist of Fontane's sensibility. Fontane has been called the first European German novelist: he did turn German fiction away from its folkloric, mythological, timeless elements and toward the novel of society, with its manners, traditions, hierarchies, and historic tensions. None of this would matter except to German literature scholars, were it not that he is an uncommonly interesting writer, whose novels continue to be so pleasurable to read.

What makes them delightful, for one, is their worldly, tolerant understanding of human frailty: the author's refusal to condemn, preach morality, or be shocked by his characters' errors, side by side with his rigorous honesty about their self-deceptions and his ability to see both sides of every question. Thomas Mann's penetrating essay “The Old Fontane” seizes on precisely this mature perspective, liberated by advanced age, to explain his predecessor's appeal:

The author of
Buddenbrooks
, himself an oldish young man when he wrote this essay in 1910, would seem to be identifying with Fontane, and defending his own aesthetic, when he goes on to say:

That Fontane's work is so little known in this country may partly be explained by the American public's incuriosity about much world literature beyond the biggest names. In a sense, he belongs more with those wonderful, lesser-known ironists of the late nineteenth century, such as Eça de Queiroz, Pérez Galdós, Machado de Assis, Bolesław Prus, who championed the provincial novel of manners, with a skeptical perspective that came from knowing one is not in the center of the universe. There is also in Fontane a Montaigne-like equipoise, a sunny melancholy, an investment in domestic family life that steadfastly avoids the demonic and apocalyptic—in a word, he may seem too bourgeois, too sanguine, to readers brought up on modernist discordances. The wisdom of experience he embodies in every sentence is perhaps not so highly valued anymore; and the very fact that he speaks to us from an elderly perch may turn off some younger readers. One is reminded of Lionel Trilling's essay on William Dean Howells, whose intelligent books Trilling thought no longer spoke as much to our times because they lacked a radical sense of evil. Fontane may not have anticipated the destructive forces unleashed in the twentieth century or our own, but he was certainly conversant with war, tragedy, and erotic discontent. Violent and sexual acts do occur in his books, though usually offstage. He is the kind of artist who rejoices in working small, away from melodrama, and whose full worth you grasp much better the more you steep yourself in his works. Searching for a comparable artistry, I think of Eric Rohmer, who kept creating exquisitely wry filmic investigations of vanity, folly, temptation, and moral quandary.

Theodor Fontane was born in 1819 in Neuruppin, near Berlin. His easygoing pharmacist father liked to gamble and failed at business (perhaps the two were related), and his sterner mother, losing patience, divorced her husband. The family barely scraped by; Fontane, unable to afford university, followed his father into the apothecary trade. He also joined a literary circle, called the Tunnel over the Spree, where he gained a reputation as a skillful writer of poetic ballads. At thirty he made the decision to give up pharmacy and commit himself to living by his pen, one way or another. At the same time he married his fiancée, Emilie Rouanet-Kummer, after a prolonged engagement. For the next few decades Fontane supported himself and his growing family, sometimes just barely, with a succession of journalistic and government press-officer jobs.

Fontane had had the good fortune to be asked by a friend to accompany him on a trip to England, and the two-week trip sparked in him a lifelong enthusiasm for the English. He was to live and work in England for a number of years (1855–1859) and to travel in Scotland, experiences which led to his writing several travel books. There is no doubt that his experiences abroad gave him a more expansive and cosmopolitan viewpoint. He also traveled in the less frequented parts of Germany and wrote the multivolume
Journeys Through the Mark of Brandenburg
, which is still highly regarded. Despite his affection for Germany, he was well aware of the typical Prussian's smug provinciality. In one of his novels, he has a character say acerbically: “I was abroad for a long time, and one learns about oneself when abroad. Anyone who comes back is surprised by nothing as much as by the naive belief, which he finds here on every side, that in the land of Prussia everything is the best. The big, the small, the whole and the single. The best, I say, and, above all, the most honorable.”
[4]
Fontane became increasingly attached to Berlin (where many of his novels take place), but saw it for what it was, a garrison town at the time, not yet a world metropolis.

The German characters in his novels are always a bit insecure and defensive about their cultural level—always looking to foreigners to provide excitement and sophistication. The Poles, the French, the Jews, the English, the Danes are each pressed into service to administer the necessary
savoir vivre
to these uptight Teutons. (Fontane himself would sometimes play up his Gascon roots, saying “The older I get, the more the Frenchman in me comes out.”
[5]
Several generations back, his Huguenot ancestors had fled persecution in France and emigrated to Prussia, though he spoke French poorly and was not nearly as conversant with French literature as he was with English.)

If travel gave him one enlarging corrective, history provided another. Before embarking on fiction, Fontane wrote a series of military histories:
The War Against France, The Schleswig-Holstein War, The German War of 1866
. He had a passion for history, and according to Craig, his scholarship and historiographic approaches stand up well. In both the nonfiction books and the novels, Fontane can be seen as writing, unofficially and accumulatively, the history of Germany as an emerging state. It is still possible to find more “things,” more sheer detail about German nineteenth-century life in his books than anywhere else.

Having participated marginally in the uprising of 1848 on the side of the progressives, he drifted into a moderate liberalism. Essentially apolitical, he was doubtful of reformism, saying, “Among my small virtues I count the fact that I do not wish to change the human race.” It is odd that, given his own humble beginnings and precarious financial struggles to support his family, he would come to write so often about aristocrats. When his own wife called him on that, he lamely justified the practice by saying that poets naturally hung around aristocratic milieus. The truth is that he found much to admire in the old Junker virtues of honor and rectitude, and he was repelled by the bourgeoisie's sanctimonious greed. But he could also be highly critical, documenting in his novels the decline of the aristocratic values. Like Chekhov in
The Cherry Orchard
, he portrayed the aristocracy on its last legs from the sympathetic but detached viewpoint of a new-minted bourgeois.

In 1871, he was appointed drama critic of the newspaper
Vossische Zeitung
, which gave him a secure living and ample writing time for the first time in his life. It is no coincidence that his career as a novelist took off at about the same time he settled into his drama-critic berth. In his reviews, Fontane championed the innovative realism of Ibsen and Hauptmann. The post must have also refined his feeling for dialogue, which would play such a major role in all of his fiction. Fontane has been characterized as a novelist of
causerie
, or social chatter: he believed character and conflict could best be demonstrated by the way people spoke. Talk can be a means of both self-concealment and self-exposure. In Fontane, conversation establishes the distance between the social being and the inner being. Sometimes it also has the function of revealing the way mediocre people waste their lives in petty blather. It is extraordinary how flowing, various, witty, literate (or the opposite, satirically inane) the talk in Fontane's books can be. The trick is that people appear to be speaking insignificant small talk, and suddenly out of this twaddle comes a startling insight, shrewd analysis, or confrontation. In
Irretrievable
, an old courtier tells the protagonist that his main responsibility as a gentleman-in-waiting is “to talk as much as possible. Talking a great deal is an excellent thing and in some cases it is by far the best diplomacy, because if you talk a great deal, then the details can never be properly ascertained, or better still, one detail cancels out another.” There usually comes a point, however, when talk can no longer obfuscate and the gloves come off, revealing the feelings underneath.

Fontane's fiction career began with a couple of history novels. His first,
Before the Storm
(1878), showed the impact of the Napoleonic Wars on the gentry and ordinary folk. It is a long, patient, slow-moving work in which Fontane was still feeling his way, some characters treated sentimentally while others already display psychological complexity. What is clear from the first is that Fontane was following his quirky instincts and writing to suit himself, rather than genre formulas. Already one could detect a shying away from heavy plotting and a preference for story to crystallize from conversation and details of everyday life. He once defined his stylistic ambition: “It was my proud intention to describe the seemingly most insignificant things with the most detailed precision and thus to raise them to a certain artistic level, indeed to make them
interesting
by means of the kind of simplicity and transparency that appears to be easy but is most difficult to achieve.”
[6]
His final novel, published in 1898, the year he died, the exquisitely nuanced if becalmed
The Stechlin
, a tender portrait of an old aristocrat who embodied the admirable, live-and-let-live nobility, the last of a dying breed, had so pared-down a plot that, by his own admission, “At the end an old man dies and two young people get married—that is just about all that happens in 500 pages.”
[7]

Curiously, only his first and last novels were lengthy; the others had a bracing brevity. Fontane was a master constructor of novellas and short novels. Given his inclination to work with as little plot as possible, and his avoidance of what he called the “Jack the Ripper” sensationalism of some naturalist novelists, the shorter fiction forms allowed him scope to develop one situation at leisure, and to bring it to a point of crisis. Focusing on the domestic and familial, he will introduce matters that seem at first casually digressive; only in a second reading does one grasp how economically each new topic anticipates a major theme while moving the story along.

Nowhere is this foreshadowing construction tighter than in
Unwiederbringlich
, alternatively called
Irretrievable
or
Beyond Recall
in English. (The latter title was used by Douglas Parmée, whose superbly fluent translation, first made in 1963, is being reprinted in this edition.) “Among the novellas his artistically most accomplished work is
Irretrievable
,” wrote Erich Heller.
[8]
It is certainly as good a place as any to start reading Fontane. Published initially between January and June of 1891 in the
Deutsche Rundschau
and in book form that same year, when Fontane was seventy-eight, it fell in the midst of his string of marvelous social novels that included
The Woman Taken in Adultery, Delusions, Confusions, Frau Jenny Treibel, The Poggenpuhl Family,
and the exquisite
Effi Briest
, usually regarded as his masterpiece. Though
Effi Briest
is perfectly composed, I admit a slight personal preference for
Irretrievable
because it is so sprightly and replete with amusing cameos and side streets. Fontane made good use of all his previous occupations—the balladeer, the travel writer, the historian, the drama critic—in this novel.

Irretrievable
is the story of a marriage that has worn thin. The partners have been together for some twenty-three years, are raising two teenage children, and for the most part have enjoyed a happy marriage. Still, they have reached a point where they no longer are charmed but are irritated by the limitations each sees in the other. A familiar enough situation in everyday life: less a question of anyone's fault than of the erosion of romantic idealization in a long-term union. The wife, Countess Christine, regards her easygoing husband, Count Helmut Holk, as a weak, indecisive man without much character, who has no interest in deeper spiritual or existential challenges; he, in turn, finds her a moralistic, dour, self-righteous scold. Various secondary characters discuss the merits of the case, weighing in on the couple's flaws. Fontane preferred to advance the character analyses by putting insights into the mouths of bystanders. Since he was always open to various sides of each question, he would distribute points along the spectrum to different speakers. Though he liked to think his style was “objective” and didn't impose his own judgments, at key moments he let his narrator swiftly adjudicate the conflicting claims. For instance: “Holk, though a kind and excellent husband, was none the less a man of rather ordinary gifts and in any case markedly inferior to his wife, who was a far more talented woman.”