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.”