The Exiles Return
Authors: Elisabeth de Waal
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Literary, #World Literature, #Jewish, #Literary Fiction
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Contents
Foreword
by Edmund de Waal
I have read and re-read this novel by my grandmother Elisabeth. The yellowing typescript with some tippexed corrections was handed over to me by my father, along with a clutch of Elisabeth’s school-reports from the Schottengymansium in Vienna, and a manila envelope stuffed with essays on economics from her studies at the University. There were a few lambent pages of autobiography describing her childhood at the turn of the century in the Palais Ephrussi on the Ringstrasse – the carriage-horses, the interminable teas with great-aunts – and a clutch of letters between her and a favourite uncle. But there was very little else. My father had joked in the liminal moment as the files were passed across that I was now the keeper of the archive. In the many, many months that followed in archives and libraries, tramping streets in Vienna, Paris and Odessa, in search of the family story that had become so compulsive for me, I realised that this archival penury made complete sense. My grandmother had spent her life in transit between countries: she kept only the things that mattered to her. And these pages did.
This untitled novel, now called
The Exiles Return
, was not published in her lifetime. In conversation with her about why writing matters, she never revealed what this fact meant to her, and it was only recently that I found this single and extraordinary page:
Why am I making such a great effort and taxing my own endurance and energy to write this book that no one will read? Why do I have to write? Because I have always written, all my life, and have always striven to do so, and have always faltered on the way and hardly ever succeeded in getting published … What is lacking? I have a feeling for language.… But I think I write in a rarified atmosphere, I lack the common touch, it is all too finely distilled. I deal in essences, the taste of which is too subtle to register on the tongue. It is the quintessence of experiences, not the experiences themselves … I distill too much.
This is Elisabeth’s voice, tough and self-examining, incapable of self-pity; but there is also a sense of her deeply-felt need to write, something she kept close to her throughout the succession of disappointments as the manuscripts of her novels (five altogether, three in English and two in German) were rejected. What she wanted was to create novels of ideas: in her writing she tried to bring into balance a heady combination of intellectual and emotional influences, the adamantine rigour of her academic life and the lyric imperative of her life as a writer of poetry and fiction. In
The Exiles Return
the two principal protagonists, Resi, the young and beautiful girl, and Professor Adler, the exiled academic, dramatise both these parts of her life. And it was a life of great drama.
Elisabeth de Waal was Viennese and this is a novel about being Viennese. As such, it is a novel about exile and about return, about the push and pull of love, anger and despair, about a place which is part of your identity, but which has also rejected you.
The Exiles Return
is alive to this complexity and it stands, in part, as a kind of autobiography in its mapping of these emotions.
She was born Elisabeth von Ephrussi in 1899, into a dynastic Jewish family that had adopted Vienna as its home thirty years before. It was an extraordinary moment in an extraordinary place. Her home was the Palais Ephrussi, a vast slab of neo-classicism adorned with caryatids, on the newly constructed Ringstrasse, the arc of civic buildings and Imperial monuments erected to reflect glory on the Habsburg Empire. The house, marble and gilded, was a calling-card built by a rich and aspirational family of financiers, one of many on the street known derisively in the city as Zionstrasse: the street of Jews. Elisabeth’s mother, a beautiful and appropriately-titled Jewish baroness, had been born in the Palais Schey a few hundred yards away. Cousins lived next door. It was a comfortable – if complex – world in which to be born.
This fissile combination of money and status, the question of where you come from and where you belong, was part of the make-up of Vienna. As the capital city of the Empire, the streets were full of every nation and every ethnic group. From her bedroom window, looking through the branches of the lime trees across to the University, Elisabeth could see and hear the marching bands of Imperial regiments from across a swathe of Europe. As one of the protagonists of her novel, Professor Adler, reflects, in the sleepless hours before his return, ‘… from all directions of the compass they had come, seeking their fortune – Czech and Pole and Croat, Magyar and Italian, and Jew of course, to mix and feed and enrich this German city, which through them became unique and truly imperial.’ Elisabeth’s memories were of a polyglot upbringing in a polyglot city. And her writing was born from an unselfconscious ease with different languages. She could choose which language to write in, as much as to read in:
I was born and lived in Vienna, so German was the language which surrounded me, the Austrian kind of German with its soft and sometimes raucous vowels and muted consonants, a speech that could be coarse but never cutting, but the literate language nevertheless. It was for me, as I grew up, the language of Goethe and Schiller, later of Rilke and Thomas Mann, of Kant and Schopenhauer and the language in which Reinhardt’s plays were produced. But it was not the language of my small, immediate and intimate world as a child. That was English.
Elisabeth’s childhood in this exceptionally privileged household, surrounded by servants, was also one of fearsome social conventionality. Her parents – a scholarly father with a wonderful library, and socialite mother with an unparalleled dressing-room – disagreed passionately about her education. Elisabeth prevailed and was allowed to study with teachers from the Schottengymnasium, the well-regarded boys’ school across the street from the family house. At the end of the First World War, just as the Empire was crumbling in unrest and desertions, Elisabeth graduated. Her certificate reads as a long list of
sehr gut.
This allowed her to enter the University to study philosophy, law and economics. It was, in one sense, a very Jewish choice: all three disciplines had strong Jewish presences in the faculty. But it was also a deeply personal decision. She loved the way in which ideas work, and through this rigorous academic training she felt completely at home within philosophical discourse. This can be seen in her lifetime correspondence with the formidable Viennese economist and political scientist, Ludwig von Mises and with the political philosopher, Eric Voegelin.
But Elisabeth also had another writing life. She was a poet. Like many of her generation she was captivated by the lyric poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, the great and radical poet of the day. In his poetry Rilke combined directness of expression with intense sensuousness. His poems are full of epiphanies, moments when things come alive. Elisabeth was introduced to Rilke by an uncle and started a correspondence of great significance to her, sending poems to be critiqued and receiving long and thoughtful replies, often accompanied by copies of the poems he was writing. When you look at the collected letters of Rilke, you realise that many of his correspondents were young, poetic and titled: Elisabeth was one of many. But the cache of letters, taken with her on all her lifetime of travels from Vienna to Paris to Switzerland, and then into her new life in England, was intensely symbolic for her. It was a benediction for her as a writer from a writer.
Elisabeth’s languages gave her an expansiveness across literature that was breathtaking. After she met and married my grandfather, Hendrik de Waal, she learnt Dutch and they wrote poetry for each other in that language. When living in Paris in the 1930s, she wrote for
Le Figaro.
She wrote reviews of French novels for
The Times Literary Supplement
in the 1950s. Her first two novels were written in German, and her last three in English. No wonder I found her bookshelves so bewildering. When I was visiting her, as a student of English literature, conversation would swerve across genres and countries – a haphazard reference to Goethe would invoke the final scene from
Faust
, learnt eighty years before. We talked of Rilke and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. And then of Joyce – and she produced her edition of
Ulysses
, bought from Shakespeare and Co, with its shimmering azure paper covers. I find it is uncut from page 563. And Proust. She re-read Proust constantly. When I found her single page describing her ‘quintessence of experiences’, I felt this could be someone describing Proust.
The Exiles Return
is profoundly autobiographical. In the figure of Resi, the beautiful girl lost in the social milieu, there is the glimmer of projection. And in Professor Adler, the academic whose need to return to Vienna is at the heart of the book, and who has to evaluate where he belongs amongst those who stayed, I think there is a strong sense of an alternative life being lived out. There are compelling moments of Elisabeth’s experiences too in the encounter between the character of Kanakis and an estate agent he consults about a property purchase. You can hear the memory of her encounters with Austrian lawyers, when she tried to find and restitute the looted family art collections and property, seized at the Anschluss in 1938. And you can feel it in the estate agent’s tremor of anxiety when he’s asked about two recently acquired paintings hanging on his office wall:
‘I just thought they furnished the room, gave it a certain cachet, within the limits of what I could afford. Yet they did in fact belong to a gentleman who must have been an acquaintance of your family, Baron E—. You might possibly have seen them at his house. Baron E— died abroad unfortunately, in England, I believe. After they had recovered what could be traced of his property, his heirs had it all sold at auction; I suppose they had no use for this old-fashioned stuff in their modern homes. I acquired the pictures in the auction rooms, as well as most of the things you see here: all quite openly, publicly and legally, you understand…’
But above all the book is about the heartbreak of returning:
Finally there he was, on the Ring: the massive pile of the Natural History Museum on his right, the ramp of the Parliament building on his left, beyond it the spire of the Town Hall, and in front of him the railings of the Volksgarten and the Burgplatz. There he was, and there it all was; though the once tree-bordered footpaths across the roadway were stripped, treeless, only a few naked trunks still standing. Otherwise it was all there. And suddenly the dislocation of time which had been dizzying him with illusions and delusions snapped into focus, and he was real, everything was real, incontrovertible fact. He was
there.
Only the trees were not there, and this comparatively trivial sign of destruction, for which he had not been prepared, caused him incommensurate grief. Hurriedly he crossed the road, entered the park gates, sat down on a bench in a deserted avenue, and wept.
The Exiles Return
is a novel of great vividness and great tenderness, which at its heart depicts what it might mean to return from exile. Within its pages it reflects a truly ambitious writer and a woman of considerable courage. Elisabeth returned to Vienna weeks after the Anschluss in 1938 in order to save her parents in their moment of greatest need. She managed to get her father to England in 1939. And she returned immediately after the war to find out what had happened to her family. She fought for a decade to get justice for the wrongs that had been done, battling the intransigence, hostility and derision of the authorities in Vienna. Yet she did this without losing her ability to live fully in the present and not be held hostage by the experience of being a refugee.