The Caravaners, page 1
The Caravaners
Also published by Handheld Press
HANDHELD CLASSICS
1 What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah
2 The Runagates Club, by John Buchan
3 Desire, by Una L Silberrad
4 Vocations, by Gerald O’Donovan
5 Kingdoms of Elfin, by Sylvia Townsend Warner
6 Save Me The Waltz, by Zelda Fitzgerald
7 What Not. A Prophetic Comedy, by Rose Macaulay
8 Blitz Writing. Night Shift & It Was Different At The Time, by Inez Holden
9 Adrift in the Middle Kingdom, by J Slauerhoff, translated by David McKay
HANDHELD MODERN
1 After the Death of Ellen Keldberg, by Eddie Thomas Petersen, translated by Toby Bainton
2 So Lucky, by Nicola Griffith
HANDHELD RESEARCH
1 The Akeing Heart: Letters between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White, by Peter Haring Judd
2 The Conscientious Objector’s Wife: Letters between Frank and Lucy Sunderland, 1916–1919, edited by Kate Macdonald
The Caravaners
by Elizabeth von Arnim
with an introduction by Juliane Römhild

First published in 1909.
This edition published in 2019 by Handheld Press Ltd.
72 Warminster Road, Bath BA2 6RU, United Kingdom.
www.handheldpress.co.uk
Copyright of the Introduction © Juliane Römhild 2019
Copyright of the Notes © Kate Macdonald and Juliane Römhild 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.
ISBN 978-1-912766-12-3 Print
ISBN 978-1-912766-13-0 ePub
ISBN 978-1-912766-14-7 MOBI
Series design by Nadja Guggi.
Contents
Introduction
Further Reading
Works by Elizabeth von Arnim
The Caravaners
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
Post Scriptum
Notes
Juliane Römhild is a lecturer at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, and researches British and German interwar literature. She is particularly interested in women’s writing, middlebrow novels and representations of happiness in fiction. She is a founding member of the Elizabeth von Arnim Society. Her monograph Authorship & Femininity in the Novels of Elizabeth von Arnim (Fairleigh Dickinson UP) was published in 2014.
Introduction
BY JULIANE RÖMHILD
In July 1907, Elizabeth von Arnim wrote to her eldest daughter Evi about her holiday plans, ‘I can’t tell you yet about what we’re going to do (...) but pray for fine weather, my child, for if it is wet, heaven knows what will become of us’.1 Evi’s holiday surprise turned out to be a caravan tour through the English countryside. Evi was much excited, but von Arnim’s concerns about the British weather were well founded – the summer of 1907 turned out to be one of the wettest on record.
As her protagonists in The Enchanted April (1922) would be many years later, von Arnim had been inspired to plan this holiday by an advertisement in The Times. On the spur of the moment, she decided to hire two caravans for the month of August and tour the countryside through Kent and Sussex with a band of friends and family. After some negotiations, the travelling party included von Arnim’s teenage daughters Evi, Liebet and Trix, her niece Margery Waterlow, the children’s former governess and now family friend Teppi Backe, and several of the girls’ tutors, among them such illustrious names as Hugh Walpole, E M Forster and the classics scholar Charles Erskine Stuart, who were Cambridge students at the time. The young men had brought two dogs, who immediately started fighting, which caused Stuart, who would faint at the sight of blood, some embarrassment. Unlike the hopeful travelling party, von Arnim’s husband, Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin, saw the adventure of caravanning in a less romantic light and decided to stay at home. As it turned out, he was wise. As the party slowly moved through narrow country lanes and camped in muddy fields, it kept raining and raining. Teppi Backe later remembered that ‘[t]he foggy island gave us only three days of sun, for which we were very thankful’.2 A number of the sights on the way had to be missed simply because it was too wet. Moreover, ‘the physical difficulties of just moving along, of keeping dry and of getting fed were immense, and Elizabeth, to whom the simplicities had seemed so alluring while she was lapped in the elaborate comforts of her home, felt that she had perhaps plunged into too many of them too thoroughly’.3
In order to spare the horses, the travelling party walked beside the wagons, trudging through muddy lanes and braving the wet. Evi contracted mumps during the trip and had to be nursed in bed for a few days. Dinner largely involved throwing available ingredients in their one big cooking pot and preparing stews. Since none of the adults was particularly adept at cooking, let alone cooking over an open campfire, the food, always a critical point with camping, was not particularly enjoyable. The men were in charge of the dishwashing, the children would go shopping, and von Arnim would pay for everything. Given the circumstances, it does perhaps not come as a surprise that Teppi and her hostess stole away from the group one evening in order to have a decent meal at a nearby pub and spend the night there in a real bed. To their surprise they found the men of their party already at the pub. After a moment of embarrassment, they joined them for dinner. In summary, Backe writes, ‘I believe only the children were truthful’ in their enthusiastic accounts of their adventures ‘because they really loved this gypsy life’.4
However, not all the travellers agreed. Although he found the journey trying, E M Forster remembered the holiday as his ‘happiest spell since Greece’, which he had visited in 1903. He recalled the trip in a poem:
Ten shadows flecked the sunlit road,
Ten shadows passed, yet we remain
Still marching to the Dorian mode
Still summoning the Gods to reign.
Gods of the country! Still in Kent
The music of the pipe rings plain.
Through places where ten shadows went
The shadows passed but we remain!5
Indeed, wet and cumbersome as life on the road may have been, the trip was not without highlights. Von Arnim planned her route to include visits at various stately homes and their famous inhabitants. Lady Maud Warrender, a patron of Britain’s musical scene and an enthusiast for von Arnim’s novels, introduced them to the novelist Laurence Alma-Tadema, the eldest daughter of the nineteenth-century artist. To everyone’s great delight she was persuaded to dress up as the Queen of the Gypsies. At Aylesford, the somewhat unkempt state of the travelling party aroused the curiosity of the vicar when they attended church. In the evening, he invited them to the parsonage where the evening ended with them dancing Scottish reels to the accompaniment of the vicar’s wife at the piano. The memory of von Arnim dancing a Highland fling with the vicar stayed with E M Forster for a long time. The travelling party visited poet laureate Alfred Austin, whose book The Garden that I Love (1896) had inspired von Arnim’s first book, Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), which made ‘Elizabeth’ a household name. Although Austin had not heard of von Arnim, he kindly allowed her party to explore his garden.
They also visited Henry James, and H G Wells and his family. There seems to have been an instant rapport between von Arnim and her host, who might have become her lover after the death of her husband in 1910. During their visit, the children played croquet, the ladies discussed gardening matters, and Wells proudly showed them his great hobby: war games that he laid out across the floor, complete with ranks of toy soldiers stationed among miniature panoramic landscapes. The visit, it seems, was a success, and Wells’ wife Jane and her sons accompanied the von Arnims back to the caravan, so the boys could have a look at these exotic campers. The trip wound up in Canterbury with a visit to the cathedral and a celebratory dinner.
It is worth describing the holiday that served as inspiration for The Caravaners in such detail because the numerous references to it that von Arnim included in her novel add a layer of enjoyment for the reader. In The Caravaners a German-British travelling party sets out to travel through Sussex and Kent in gypsy style. The trip gets derailed not by the weather, but by personal politics. Von Arnim was skilful at choosing the details she could safely weave into her narrative without betraying her identity, which at the time still had to be kept a secret from the press.
Born in Sydney as Mary Annette Beauchamp in 1866, von Arnim had spent her youth in Britain as the youngest daughter of a large merchant family. On a tour through Italy, Mary Annette met the much older Henning, a member of the august von Arnim family which had close ties to the German court. They bonded over their shared love of music: von Arnim was a trained organist and Henning had been a student of Liszt. Henning presented her at cou
In 1909 her British-German identity was still a well-kept secret. However, in spite of her anonymity, von Arnim was experienced with biographically infused narratives. Her first literary alter ego, Elizabeth, was so enduringly popular that von Arnim eventually accepted the name for herself. In The Caravaners she split her own personality into a British and a German alter ego, who appear as two German sisters. The elder sister, Mrs Menzies-Legh, has married a wealthy Englishman. Forthright and witty, she shares several qualities with von Arnim herself. By contrast, her widowed younger sister, the beautiful Frau von Eckthum, lives in Germany and is an expert at holding her tongue and slinking away in unpleasant situations, much like von Arnim’s Elizabeth did before her.
An anti-German novel
Elizabeth von Arnim was one of the great satirists of her day. Virginia Woolf found that von Arnim made her ‘shout with laughter, some of her sayings are absolutely tophole: as good as Dickens’.6 Her 1921 novel Vera, whose male protagonist greatly resembles Otto von Ottringel of The Caravaners, reminded Katherine Mansfield’s husband, John Middleton Murry, of a Wuthering Heights written by Jane Austen. Indeed, von Arnim’s comedies of manners were rarely light. Her best books are darkly comical portraits of the iniquities of modern courtship and marriage. Most of her early novels also draw on the cultural differences between Germany and Britain for comic effect.
All of von Arnim’s novels are written from the perspective of a female protagonist, except The Caravaners. With this novel von Arnim ventured into new territory. It is her only novel with a male first-person narrator: the pompous, parsimonious, egotistical, misogynist and militarist Baron Otto von Ottringel. He is a Prussian officer, who upon his return from Britain sits down to write a travelogue for his small-town friends at home in Storchwerder. That, at least, is the plan. However Otto’s narrative becomes increasingly unfit for public reading. Through his increasingly self-referential account, we follow his comical tribulations in a foreign country, where he finds himself without his expected comforts, among uncongenial company and confronted with an increasingly insubordinate wife. As readers, we become Otto’s confidantes – what’s more, we become complicit. Von Arnim manages to capture her audience in spite of the extreme unlikableness of her protagonist.
Like many satirists, von Arnim works with a comedy of types: the horse-loving Englishwoman, the young parson, the stone-walling, taciturn English gentleman, the flapper, even the German officer and his wife are well-known types, drawn with a deft hand. But more specifically, she uses the comedy of embarrassment, or cringe comedy, with great skill. We laugh at Otto’s gaffes and the comical figure he cuts; we are embarrassed by his lack of tact and shudder at his selfishness and narrow-minded stupidity. But we also feel for him in his helplessness and utter lack of awareness. Outside the protective shell of the army and his provincial hometown, Otto is hopelessly out of his depth: his authority crumbles, his worldview causes polite consternation, and Edelgard, his young wife, slips from his grip. Patrick White thought the The Caravaners was ‘one of the funniest novels he had read’.7
The cultural and political clash between Otto and his British fellow travellers reflects the atmosphere of the pre-war years. The wave of Germanophilia that had swept over Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century had given way to suspicion and fear. Germany was no longer renowned only for philosophy, music and excellent beer. After the unification of its many scattered states in 1871, Germany was turning into an increasingly powerful neighbour and a new colonial power, pushing aggressively for military and economic dominance on the continent. Britain observed particularly the build-up of Germany’s navy with increasing alarm. Although Germany and Britain were closely linked through their royal families, under the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II Anglo-German relations were cooling fast.
The political and cultural rivalry between the two countries found one of its expressions in the perceived difference between the British concept of civilisation and the German notion of Kultur, which also informs The Caravaners. The distinction originated in the eighteenth century in an attempt to define more closely different ideas of culture. The concept of civilisation looks outward. A civilised person is sophisticated and cosmopolitan, follows the ideals of rational enlightenment and possesses general good manners. The idea of Kultur looks inward. A person of Kultur possesses an innate sense of beauty, strong moral feeling and shows great personal refinement. From the perspective of von Arnim’s British readers, Germany’s aggressive political stance was becoming increasingly uncivilised, whereas from a German perspective, Britain was losing its depth and could no longer fathom the profundity of German Kultur.
In the novel, these tensions are played out through the differences between Otto and his travel companions. Von Arnim offers up her own idea of a thoroughly civilised society. The travel group includes the pillars of British society: members of the clergy, Parliament, the gentry and the working classes (in the shape of the groom) work together in mutual respect. When it comes to managing the daily chores of steering the horses, cooking and cleaning, the British travellers complete their allocated tasks without rebellion or complaint. Women are respected as equals and all discuss literature and politics with enthusiasm and competence. Much like von Arnim herself, her British travellers show a spiritual appreciation of nature without making a fuss about their own comfort. These travellers are open-minded, polite, well-educated citizens with progressive political views. Jellaby, a socialist member of Parliament, personifies von Arnim’s own broadly Fabian politics. The comprehensive social reform agenda of the Fabian Society was powerfully influential at the time and popular among writers and intellectuals. H G Wells was a member, and like many artists von Arnim was a sympathiser. Even a hundred years later, von Arnim’s vision of England is still wonderfully seductive, tinged as her views may have been by homesickness. Otto is drawn in stark contrast to his civilised British companions. Through him Arnim offers a cutting portrait of Germany’s warrior caste. Under the reign of Wilhelm II, a grandson of Queen Victoria, Germany had recently established a new arms race with Britain. In spite of his lack of strategic ability, Wilhelm preferred to present himself in uniform (of which he had many). He raised the army to the position of being a state within the state. As readers, we witness these political and cultural shifts in Otto’s sense of entitlement and his constant preoccupation with personal honour, authority and class distinction.
In fact, I would argue that Otto is modelled on Kaiser Wilhelm II himself. Like Wilhelm, Otto suffers from a grossly inflated sense of self-importance. His superiority complex leads to regular social gaffes. Both share a lamentable tendency to insult people, feel easily slighted and remain completely oblivious to the alienating effects they have on others. While this is hilarious in Otto’s case, the political repercussions were long-lasting for Wilhelm’s imperial ambitions, as he persisted in meddling in foreign affairs without success. The complicated balance of powers on the continent shifted significantly when France and Britain signed the Entente Cordiale in 1904, which was extended into a triple entente with Russia in 1907. This left Germany vulnerable and without a major ally.
One very public example of Wilhelm’s disastrous vulnerability to increasing worldwide scrutiny was the ‘Daily Telegraph Affair’. In 1908 the Daily Telegraph published notes of private conversations by the Kaiser as an ‘interview’. In this, Wilhelm presented himself as a victim of incomprehensible British ill will and as Britain’s true ally, whose efforts to maintain peace remained unappreciated and misunderstood. He declared that a secret military plan of his had secured Britain’s success in the Boer War and that Germany’s navy would one day help protect Britain. He famously told the British public, ‘You English are mad, mad, mad as March hares,’ and insisted, ‘I am a friend of England, but you make things difficult for me.’8 Understandably, the interview did nothing to help German-Anglo relations. Instead, Wilhelm’s petulant stance and wild political statements provoked immediate outrage across Europe and increased doubts about his mental state. The affair rocked German politics and left Wilhelm devastated. Although Otto harbours anti-English sentiments, contrary to the declared views of his Kaiser, the shared psychology between the emperor and his subject is clear to see.
