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.