Back to the Classics #5

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Classic by a Woman. I detest gardening. Hot, sweaty, dirty. Stings, scratches and cuts. Sprains and strains. Literally back-breaking, toting and heaving and digging and weeding. And for what? Flowers are pretty for about a minute before I want to look at something else. Pride? Sense of accomplishment? Good for my soul? Please. In Western New York summer after summer disappointment is caused by fickle combinations of drought or deluge, bugs and blight, vandal squirrels and thieving birds, voracious rabbits and pissing skunks. Though my experience with shovel and hoe has been taxing and bitter, I have read one gardening book, a collection of essays by Katherine White, Onward and Upward in the Garden, which gave me a sense of the kind of book the author below is parodying.   

Elizabeth and Her German Garden - Elizabeth von Arnim

Narrator Elizabeth sits in her garden she has planned and talks about this and that: her life, her husband, her three tot daughters, her neighbors and guests, and, above all, her garden. Living 15 miles from the shores of the Baltic in Pomerania (sandy soil, pine and heath), she loves nature as a Taoist does, which is the best thing about her. She endears herself to us condescending veterans by readily admitting she’s still green enough to make plenty of horticultural mistakes.

Elizabeth has a mind of her own, a quirky sense of humor, and she’s never boring. The reader can bask in the narrator’s primary concern, the joy she finds in her untidy garden and the company of her books in the utter seclusion of her remote country surroundings, where she is completely self-sufficient and any visitor is viewed as an intruder. 

Author von Arnim, however, invites other readers to see Narrator Elizabeth in a satirical light. A reader can reckon Elizabeth as a spoiled, arrogant and empty-headed dimbulb who has nothing else to do all day long than indulge her passion for gardening. After all, the narrator did marry a thoroughly dislikable man – opposites attract but they don’t marry each other - and she cheerfully teams up with her “friend” Irais to bully young foreign student Minora over Christmas.

Narrator Elizabeth lets us know that she’s unsocial and reclusive. She says,

The passion for being for ever with one's fellows, and the fear of being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible. I can entertain myself quite well for weeks together, hardly aware, except for the pervading peace, that I have been alone at all.

Even the most introverted among us avid readers want to advise her to try living through a pandemic to test the benefits and risks of wanting to live a totally private life, willingly not seeing other people, and find out such a life is not fully to be human. Our narrator likes solitary stillness too much, I fear, to be healthy.

Narrator Elizabeth points unintentionally to the dark side of the Great Lady of the Estate role that she admits she’s not really up to when she admiringly writes of a neighbor:

She is up at daylight superintending the feeding of the stock, the butter-making, the sending off of the milk for sale; a thousand things get done while most people are fast asleep, and before lazy folk are well at breakfast she is off in her pony-carriage to the other farms on the place, to rate the “mamsells,” as the head women are called, to poke into every corner, lift the lids off the saucepans, count the new-laid eggs, and box, if necessary, any careless dairymaid’s ears. We are allowed by law to administer “slight corporal punishment” to our servants, it being left entirely to individual taste to decide what “slight” shall be, and my neighbour really seems to enjoy using this privilege, judging from the way she talks about it. I would give much to be able to peep through a keyhole and see the dauntless little lady, terrible in her wrath and dignity, standing on tiptoe to box the ears of some great strapping girl big enough to eat her.

That accidently sums up the pitfalls of the prerogatives of power, I think. Later Elizabeth’s husband opines that women in the laboring class accept beatings from their husbands “with a simplicity worthy of all praise, and far from considering themselves insulted, admire the strength and energy of the man who can administer such eloquent rebukes.”

Narrator Elizabeth also makes inadvertent admissions in her views of marital and domestic bliss. “I don't think a husband is at all a good thing for a girl to have,” Elizabeth observes knowingly, as she refers to her husband never by name but always by the epithet Man of Wrath. Above we got a sense of his outrageously stupid opinions. 

And as for a mother’s duties to teach her children well, in fact, the religious education of moppets will pose challenges:

I began about Adam and Eve, with an eye to future parsonic probings. The April baby’s eyes opened wider and wider, and her face grew redder and redder. I was surprised at the breathless interest she took in the story—the other two were tearing up tufts of grass and hardly listening. I had scarcely got to the angels with the flaming swords and announced that that was all, when she burst out, “Now I’ll tell about it. Once upon a time there was Adam and Eva, and they had plenty of clothes, and there was no snake, and lieber Gott wasn’t angry with them, and they could eat as many apples as they liked, and was happy for ever and ever—there now!”

She began to jump up and down defiantly on my knee.

“But that’s not the story,” I said rather helplessly.

“Yes, yes! It’s a much nicelier one! Now another.”

“But these stories are true,” I said severely; “and it’s no use my telling them if you make them up your own way afterwards.”

“Another! another!” she shrieked, jumping up and down with redoubled energy, all her silvery curls flying.

Finally, Elizabeth also unwittingly tells us that she’s autocratic, narrow-minded, and unimaginative. On the Russian farm laborers brought in to the work the fields:

They herd together like animals and do the work of animals; but in spite of the armed overseer, the dirt and the rags, the meals of potatoes washed down by weak vinegar and water, I am beginning to believe that they would strongly object to soap, I am sure they would not wear new clothes, and I hear them coming home from their work at dusk singing. They are like little children or animals in their utter inability to grasp the idea of a future; and after all, if you work all day in God’s sunshine, when evening comes you are pleasantly tired and ready for rest and not much inclined to find fault with your lot.

We’ve all heard intelligent charming people blandly express stupid opinions like this. In regard to some Disliked Feared Other, lots of people, rich poor and middling, are apt to express stupid views. I know my feeling annoyed does no good but I still feel this stupidity is outrageous. Putting aside whether people who say these things really believe them, marvel at the stubborn reluctance ever to imagine what other people are experiencing.

I conclude that Author von Arnim is a writer to be reckoned with. I seem to remember in one of his books of literary criticism Somerset Maugham (The Vagrant Mood? Points of View?) telling a story about Elizabeth von Arnim. It went that von Arnim read aloud a story that featured a shattering depiction of her husband, who was lying sick in bed. He was so mortified that he turned his face to the wall and died. “He was very sick,” she later said, “and was going to die anyway.” 

If you think this anecdote as funny as I do, you’ll like this book. Or, not. Readers can feel free to take this unique wonderful book  as light literary fare that inspires bent but never broken gardeners to dig into the seed catalogs.