CHRISTOPHER AND COLUMBUS, PART 2

I flubbed Elizabeth von Arnim Month by only managing to read one book. Luckily, I adored Christopher and Columbus, a 1919 comic-romantic novel about 17-year-old twins, Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas von Twinkler, raised in Germany by a German father (now dead) and an English mother. They escape the outbreak of World War I by moving with their mother to England, but she dies soon afterward, leaving them at the mercy of unsympathetic relatives who pack them off to America, which at that point was still neutral in the war. On the sea voyage, they meet a friend and protector, the adorable Mr. Twist, and they all end up in California, where they attempt to open a tea room, struggle against close-mindedness (everyone they encounter assumes the worst of them, disapproving of a man traveling alone with two young women) and anti-German sentiment, and of course find true love. The plot is quite screwball, with the naïve, perky, and eccentric twins getting Mr. Twist into one scrape after another, but the wartime setting and the deep prejudices the Twinklers encounter everywhere they go lend a realistic, poignant aspect to the story. Mostly, though, this book is witty, frothy fun.

All I want to do in times of duress is read quaint books like this one, so apologies to the late and great Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, but his month is being summarily canceled so that I can spend the rest of the year (a) further exploring the works of von Arnim, once I get myself to the downtown L.A. library, which I've just discovered has nearly all of her long-out-of-print books; and (b) tackling the entire Jeeves-and-Bertie oeuvre of P.G. Wodehouse, 11 books in all. Early-twentieth-century British comedies of manners are the sand in which I shall bury my head for the rest of 2008!

I shared the masterful first sentence of Christopher and Columbus last time; let me leave you with a few more of my favorite passages:

• “Anna-Rose, having given her the desired promise not to talk or let Anna-Felicitas talk to strange men, and desiring to collect any available information for her guidance in her new responsible position had asked, ‘But when are men not strange?”
  ‘When you’ve married them,’ said Aunt Alice. ‘After that, of course, you love them.’”

• “The twins having eaten, among other things, a great many meringues, grew weary of sitting with those they hadn’t eaten lying on the dish in front of them reminding them of those they had. They wanted, having done with meringues, to get away from them and forget them. They wanted to go into another room now, where there weren’t any. Anna-Felicitas felt, and told Anna-Rose who was staring listlessly at the leftover meringues, that it was like having committed murder, and being obliged to go on looking at the body long after you were thoroughly tired of it. Anna-Rose agreed, and said that she wished now she hadn’t committed meringues—anyhow so many of them.”

• “Edith…was born to be a mother—one of the satisfactory sort that keeps you warm and doesn’t argue with you. Germans or no Germans the Twinklers were the cutest little things, thought Edith; and she kissed them with the same hunger with which, being now thirty-eight, she was beginning to kiss puppies.”

• “The first thing this cat had done had been to eat the canary, which gave the twins much unacknowledged relief. It was, they thought secretly, quite a good plan to have one’s pets inside each other—it kept them so quiet.”

• “He stooped down as though to examine the cat’s ear. The cat, who didn’t like her ears touched but was prepared to humor him, got out of it by lying down on her back and showing him her beautiful white stomach. She was a black cat, with a particularly beautiful white stomach, and she had discovered that nobody could see it without wanting to stroke it. Whenever she found herself in a situation that threatened to become disagreeable she just lay down and showed her stomach. Human beings in similar predicaments can only show their tact.”

CHRISTOPHER AND COLUMBUS, PART 1

Now, hallelujah, it’s Elizabeth von Arnim Month. I’m such a sucker for gentle, charming, quirky, comic/romantic early-twentieth-century British novels (Nancy Mitford, P.G. Wodehouse, Dodie Smith, Lucky Jim, Cold Comfort Farm) that when I first read The Enchanted April at my father’s recommendation a few years ago, I immediately realized that von Arnim was right up my alley. I quickly read a second von Arnim book, Mr. Skeffington, which I also liked, though it was a little darker. I’ve been meaning to read more von Arnim ever since, and here’s my chance. The problem with her books is that they’re hard to find—most are out of print, so I’m stuck with whatever old tomes my library happens to have. This means no Elizabeth and Her German Garden, perhaps von Arnim’s most famous book before The Enchanted April became a movie in the 1990s, but I do have a shot at its sequel, The Solitary Summer. I’m also contemplating a reread of The Enchanted April. First, however, I picked out Christopher and Columbus, and I’m loving it so far (except for the fact that the summary on the back of my Virago edition begins, “As the Second World War looms…” even though the book was written in 1919 and clearly takes place during WWI!). I think the extraordinary first sentence—a masterpiece of both exposition and punctuation—gives a good sampling of von Arnim’s style:

Their names were really Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas; but they decided, as they sat huddled together in a corner of the second-class deck of the American liner St. Luke, and watched the dirty water of the Mersey slipping past and the Liverpool landing-stage disappearing into mist, and felt that it was comfortless and cold, and knew they hadn’t got a father or a mother, and remembered that they were aliens, and realized that in front of them lay a great deal of gray, uneasy, dreadfully wet sea, endless stretches of it, days and days of it, with waves on top of it to make them sick and submarines beneath it to kill them if they could, and knew that they hadn’t the remotest idea, not the very remotest, what was before them when and if they did get across to the other side, and knew that they were refugees, castaways, derelicts, two wretched little Germans who were neither Germans nor really English because they so unfortunately, so complicatedly were both—they decided, looking very calm and determined and sitting very close together beneath the rug their English aunt had given them to put round their miserable alien legs, that what they really were, were Christopher and Columbus, because they were setting out to discover a New World.

RIPLEY UNDER WATER/HUCK FINN

While on vacation, even though it was technically August, I continued Patricia Highsmith Month by reading the final Ripley book, Ripley Under Water, in which Ripley contends with a Who’s-Afraid-of-Virginia-Woolfish American couple who move to his French village and begin harassing him with hints that they know about his past crimes. It was fascinating, even though I wish it spent a bit more time on the psycho couple and a bit less time on Ripley’s gardening. With so many references to the earlier books (especially the first one), it brought things full circle and provided a fitting end to the series.

August was meant to be Mark Twain month, but I’m afraid it got truncated by my lazy, vacationing ways, so all I ended up tackling was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My dad had read the book to me when I was a kid (along with just about every other Twain work in existence—I remember really liking Twain), and I read it myself at least once during my childhood, but unlike every other American student (including my 17-year-old cousin, who was crankily trudging through it for assigned summer reading at the family reunion—the same edition I had brought, even!), I somehow never had to read it for school, and thus remembered little about the book except the vague outlines of the plot. It was a bit too picaresque for me, and (as every literary critic ever has noted), the ending (where Tom Sawyer randomly shows up to save the day with painfully ridiculous comic shenanigans) is a travesty (in the edition I read, one of the sections of the very-well-written foreword was titled “The Ending, Oh God, the Ending”), but overall the book is great, especially the narrative tone; I fell in love with Huck’s voice. I now think it would be really interesting to read Finn, John Clinch’s novel told from the point of view of Huck’s father. Another one for the TBR list! More and more, I’m thinking that just whittling that down is going to have to be its own Reading Project for next year.