European Reading Challenge #1

I read this strange book for the European Reading Challenge 2024.

The Desirable Alien at Home in Germany - Violet Hunt

Violet Hunt (1862 - 1942) was an English feminist, activist, ghost story writer, and novelist. For about three years, the unconventional Hunt lived with Ford Madox Ford, a writer who is remembered now for the fascinating novel The Good Soldier and the masterpiece of a tetralogy Parade's End.

Ford’s wife Elsie felt adamant about not granting him a divorce. Ford hatched a fantastical plan to obtain German citizenship (his father was a native-born German) for himself and Hunt and then obtain a German divorce for Ford. So to explore the possibilities of obtaining German citizenship and marrying there legitimately, from 1910 to 1912, Ford and Hunt took multiple journeys to Germany.

We can enjoy today the only tangible result of these trips, this eccentric book, released in 1913. It is a literary experiment, a fictionalized travel book. The fiction is that the narrator is the wife of Joseph Leopold. They have domestic tiffs, debate where to eat, and argue about religion - he is RC, she is Prot. As for the travel journal, the narrator regales us with her responses to sightseeing and her explanations of national characteristics of the English, French, and Germans. An artist and socialist, Hunt sighs and rolls her eyes at the complacent German middle-class. Punctuality. Tidiness. Vacant good temper. Painted plates in the walls. Copious eating and drinking. Tameness under the boot of overbearing authority that no true Englishman would stick. 

What is odd and funny is that Ford provides footnotes to respond to the author’s asseverations. “I do not know what may be our author's authority for making this statement, nor do I fancy that she knows herself.” “This and the whole subsequent passage ... represent, without doubt, an impressionistic frame of mind on the part of an author, but the conversation with myself is the purest nonsense, as well as being the sheerest invention.” Seems really modernist, undermining the narrator's credibility. Seems hardly supportive of a romantic partner, holding her learning and high-mindedness up for ridicule, though.

She doesn’t even speak the language fluently so we have little reason to take her ethnography seriously. Still, we enjoy her “impressionistic frame of mind” and her experience of Germany just before that terrible war which started in 1914. Her subjective descriptions of scenes and people persuade us readers think that we are dealing with a keenly observant personality. The avid reader, often an introverted and quiet person easily tired by the irrepressible, gets a glimmer of understanding as to how this opinionated restless person is experiencing Germany.

The book also has autobiographical elements with evocative descriptions of her growing up in Durham with her artist father Alfred William Hunt and novelist mother Margaret Raine Hunt. Hunt’s style is copious and impressionistic in the modernist mode of Ford Madox Ford. She "makes us see," as Conrad said. She awakens our interest. She surprises us. She gets dull, clumsy, banal. Then she surprises us again. It’s fun, something for long winter Sunday afternoons, for hardcore readers who like musty books that nobody else reads.

Links: Librivox and Internet Archive