The Exiles Return - Elisabeth De Waal

When I read 'The Hare With Amber Eyes' Elisabeth De Waal was one of the characters I wanted to know The Hare With Amber Eyes' she must have been a remarkable character and certainly deserves some attention. Amongst everything else Elisabeth was also a writer, leaving behind five unpublished novels including this one, all in manuscript, and inherited by her grandson housed in an old carrier bag.

more about. Edmund De Waal's grandmother lived through interesting times. She fought for the chance of an education - successfully, she studied law, set off into Europe where she married outside of her own super rich Jewish circle, finally settled in England, extracted her father from Nazi Vienna, and in 1945 went back to see what could be salvaged - that much I remember from '

It seems that Elisabeth De Waal tried and failed to get her books published in her lifetime but kept on writing anyway. Edmund quotes Elisabeth on this:

 'Why am I making such a great effort and taxing my own endurance and energy to write this book that no one will read? Why do I have to write? Because I have always written, all my life, and have always striven to do so, and have always faltered on the way and hardly ever succeeded in getting published...What is lacking? I have a feeling for language...But I think I write in a rarified atmosphere, I lack the common touch, it is all too finely distilled. I deal in essences, the taste of which is too subtle to register on the tongue. It is the quintessence of experiences, not the experiences themselves...I distill too much.' 

I'm not convinced that this is a particularly well chosen quote for this book. I suspect the problem with it may have been the fairly sensationalist plot which includes homosexuality, suicide, adultery, many titled folk, and a young girl who is seduced and then abandoned by a princely but unprincipled lover. If Elisabeth wasn't such a good writer in other respects the last part of this book would be something of a mess as the plot, which I do not feel entirely hangs together - enjoyable as it is - takes over from her perceptive exploration of exile. 

Exile must have meant a lot of things to Elisabeth personally and she explores many of them here. There's exile from home, from class, from family, from church, and from status, nor does she forget to look at the children of those who make the choice to leave - the legacy, even of self imposed exile, is passed down the generations. The first exile we meet is Professor Adler, a Jewish scientist on his way back to Vienna after 15 years in America. His wife and daughters have done well in the U.S. and have no desire to return to Austria, but the professor has never felt at home there - shocked by the casual anti-Semitism he's met with in New York, uncomfortable with his wife's success, and simply missing home, he takes his chance at repatriation returning to a country that has promised reparation but neither knows what to do with, or particularly wants, this ageing man who has experience but no capital. 

This is the point when the occupying forces of the four powers are about to move out of Austria, Vienna is recovering and rebuilding, and after 15 years there is a post war generation taking possession of it's future without perhaps being over anxious to examine it's immediate past, it's also interesting that there are so many upwardly mobile young people in this book. Adler's return is a difficult transition, the few old acquaintances he has left have lived through there own difficult years which leave them slightly embittered towards those who got away - who had an easy war safe in a country of plenty. Initially Adler is paranoid and hard to like, but homecoming suits him, and in the end he gets his moment of catharsis in conversation with someone who admits to having been a Nazi.  

If Adler is our hero Resi is the heroine. Resi has been sent to her Austrian family from America - they have adjusted to life there, it suits them, but to Resi something is missing and she doesn't quite fit into the country that's been home almost all her life. In the Austrian countryside with her aristocratic though no longer wealthy family she finds peace and purpose and in Vienna her connections open doors to her. Elisabeth chose her own route, arguably the war, for all the loss and heartbreak it bought, also created opportunities for people like her who wanted to escape the constraints of the rarefied society they were born into - there is little of the sense of loss in this book that characterises 'The Hare With Amber Eyes' - instead it feels like someone making sense of a changed world. Resi however is a problem. She has neither the confidence, born of knowing precisely who you are and where you're from, or the ambition of her parents who fought to go their own way, to back her up so she's a little bit adrift in the world. 

Persephone have a talent for finding thought provoking books and this one is no exception, I'd even go as far as to say that it's almost the quintessential 'Persephone'. The success of 'The Hare With Amber Eyes' should guarantee a certain amount of publicity for 'The Exiles Return' (it's already been discussed on Radio 4's Front Row) which it deserves. Elisabeth has basically successfully distilled her experience to create a really interesting discussion about the experience of exile, and about Austria's past, present, and future as it was in 1955, and better late than never we can now all read it and engage with her. 

Enthusiasms – Mark Girouard

I have long been enthusiastic about Mark Girouard – his ‘Life in the English Country House’ was probably the best read of my degree so it’s a pleasure to get to know the man behind the books a little better. After reading ‘Enthusiasms’ I googled Girouard, surprisingly because he’s well respected and connected, I didn’t find much about him beyond his age (80).

This is an odd little book, easy to read, hard to write about (I’ve been trying for 3 days). The first half chronicle various projects and thoughts – mostly about writers, the second half is a series of potted family biographies. Girouard has some fascinating ancestors (his would be the best ‘Who do you think you are?’ ever). Overall (and this is why I think his age was important enough to mention, although I feel slightly bad mannered for doing so) it feels like a collection of things he wants to share before the moment has gone but also a throwing down of the gauntlet. This isn’t just about sharing memories or holding forth on a pet theory it’s an invitation, explicitly made in many instances, to pick up the baton.

I’m strongly reminded of two other books; ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes’ for the family stories – Girouard also has his collection of objects (they are variously books, portraits, medals, letters and diaries. There have been more but over the years they have been lost – a collection of crystals which he thinks the cleaning lady had, or been given away - pen used to sign an important treaty went to a fellow historian) and a Jewish ancestry. The difference is that he doesn’t fetishise his things in the same way – or at least not openly and that he chooses to concentrate on the very remarkable achievements of the Solomon clan who turn out to be well worth celebrating especially Saul Solomon who was a dwarf but also a moving force in South Africa in the middle of the nineteenth century. He fought all legislation which sought to bring distinctions against class, colour, or creed, was the parliamentary kingmaker and altogether a serious proposition – it’s a very inspiring story.

The other book that came to mind was Susan Hill’s ‘Howards End is on the Landing’. The similarity is in the format and the sharing of enthusiasms and prejudices (as well as some pretty impressive name dropping) but I prefer Girouard. I feel he has more of a metaphorical twinkle in his eye and never more so than when talking about Walter the Victorian Casanova/pornographer and Lionel Sackville-West (a reference to his delicious tart made my mother think this was a cookbook, she soon realise her mistake.) I had half forgotten the historian’s predilection for throwing in the odd risqué anecdote - I assume as a test to see if the student is listening – it’s an effective method. I had never heard of Walter but am intrigued by him now, the important thing about him being that nobody has ever cracked his identity. Girouard was distracted by an attempt to do so for a while but everything leads to dead ends and he finally gives up – which makes the process no less fascinating.

The academic process is better applied to an early Jane Austen fragment where there is a convincing argument to have it re-dated (I’m no expert on this but the theory is persuasive) and Oscar Wilde gets a drubbing when his down and out in Paris income is added up. There is also a dowager Duchess of Devonshire in the mix (not the present one) and a really good debunking of a Tennyson myth. It’s an odd little book in its mix of topics but it’s thought full and thought provoking – definitely worth picking up.

The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance - Edmund De Waal

This book turned up on my amazon recommends list a few days after my sister and I came into possession of a handful of okimono and netsuke that have made a journey through both sides of our family. De Waal’s book is about a huge collection – some 264 netsuke originally collected by Charles Ephrussi in Paris during the 1870’s when Japonisme is the cutting edge of fashion. Charles is fabulously wealthy, freed from taking a direct part in the family banking business, a patron of the arts, a scholar, and Jewish.

From Paris the netsuke journey to Vienna as a wedding present, at the same time moving from the salon to the boudoir and the heart of family life – and then comes the war and it seems likely that they will be lost altogether, but miraculously the collection is saved and hidden until it’s reunited with the authors grandmother. She takes them back to Tunbridge Wells before giving them to her brother who takes them to Tokyo. He leaves them first to his lover and then his great nephew – and now their story is continuing in another family home, this time in London with an artist rather than a patron as their owner.

Our pieces were collected by a great uncle who I’m pretty sure bought them as souvenirs from a trip to Japan in the 1880’s though when I examine my assumptions about our family history I’m not sure what’s fact and what’s myth. I do know he had quite a mixed bag of Japanese things, that he lost out in the depression, and that he died in 1936 leaving what he had left to his sister’s daughter. She was my father’s godmother and he got amongst other things this small collection of ivories. I remember seeing them when I was about 6 or 7 and being fascinated, as well as forbidden to go near them. An instruction I totally ignored – I also remember climbing on a chair to get to a desk to stand on tip toe to reach a top shelf and have another look... I think I got smacked for my troubles but it was worth it. Dad sold them to my maternal grandfather on the condition that they came back to my sister and I – something that looked unlikely to be remembered, but perhaps because most of them are damaged and none valuable nobody seemed bothered and we got them – they still hold their fascination for me.

Most the things I’ve collected through my life are important to me, but when I’m gone they won’t have much significance and I actively want my books which are by far the majority of my possessions to be spread far and wide. But the small accumulation of family things I have – all of which originated from the same great uncle - are mine on the understanding they stay in the family. There is an irony in all of this, but it’s a condition I’m prepared to accept and honour because the personal history they’ve accrued means something to me and will hopefully mean something to whoever gets them next.

‘The Hare With Amber Eyes’ is an intensely personal sort of memoir, just as personal as a treasured object handed on from one person to the next; it demanded and got an intensely personal response from me as a reader. There is a little bit of philosophy, a lot of memory, a painstaking reconstruction of the lives of long departed antecedents, and a good deal of sadness and anger in this account by a vicar’s son of his Jewish ancestors, and what they went through and lost. I feel like there are flaws in this book but no dishonesty and it totally got under my skin – there are places where I would like to argue with De Waal but he’s also given me far more than I imagined likely to think about as well as a hitherto unknown desire to read Proust.

Proust because Charles Ephrussi is one of the models for Charles Swann; De Waal makes him come alive as a charming man who collects netsuke with his mistress, a generous benefactor of the impressionists (who later turn on him over a love of symbolist painting and the Dreyfus affair), and in short someone who’s company I want to spend more time in.

The Vienna portion of the story is more fraught. I’m shamefully ignorant of what it meant to be Jewish in Austria at the turn of the century and found myself surprised that such a rich and well connected family managed to so misjudge the political situation – that in their world of international banking they had no inkling of what’s to come. My blood ran as cold as it was meant to when the Anschluss is described. When De Waal writes “‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’ and ‘Heil Hitler, Sieg Heil’” it echoes round my imagination as dark as you like, but I’m equally chilled by the admission that Anna – the servant who saves the netsuke for the children has almost vanished from history. She was always there but far enough beneath attention that her surname has vanished. What the family lose and how it’s lost is terrible, but I feel the general anger and sense of betrayal obscures how great a risk this woman took to save something for the children she must have loved.

But this is De Waal’s family and his story to tell as he chooses, so the narrative is richer for the very personal bias and pre occupations, and if sometimes it feels like a point is a little laboured or a supposition unsound I wouldn’t want it any other way.

I also think this is the most tremendous book about things and the allure they can exercise. The netsuke will undoubtedly be charming, amusing, desirable objects in themselves but I think De Waal holds them dear for the sake of his beloved great uncle, who would have loved them for the memories of playing with them in his mother’s dressing room. Anna must have had her memories of better times and past glories to sustain her through the indignities and hardships of war as she slept with them in her mattress. Emmy Ephrussi would surely have cherished them for their part in her family life long after her children grew out of playing with such toys, and Charles Ephrussi would have had recollections of Parisian afternoons in the back of discreet shops with his beautiful mistress every time he picked one up, which is perhaps why they had to go. How can you not be engaged by history like this?