Month: May 2011

Under Gemini, by Isabel Bolton

Our twin sons will be heading off to college in a few months, and it occurred to me recently to look into the subject of neglected books about twins. Despite the fact that twins are not, statistically, all that uncommon, there are relatively few books on the topic, aside from parenting guides. Probably the best known these days in Wally Lamb’s 1998 novel and Oprah’s Book Club selection, I Know This Much Is True, about an identical twin’s coming to grips with his highly disfunctional family and his place in the world.

At the other end of the commercial success spectrum from Lamb’s best-seller are two diametrically different books about twins. Donald Newlove’s Sweet Adversity his 1978 integration of two earlier novels, Leo & Theodore (1973) and The Drunks (1974), a 600-plus page whirlwind about siamese twins, their rough-and-tumble childhood, and their descent into alcoholism. Newlove’s prose is robust, full of great riffs, swinging between euphoria and nihilism. It’s a fantastic book that at times will reach into your chest, rip out your heart, and leave it in tatters. I first read it twenty-some years ago, and I kick myself for having utterly forgotten it until I went on this search.Cover of first US edition of 'Under Gemini'

It would be tough to find a book less like Sweet Adversity than Under Gemini Isabel Bolton’s slender, elegaic 1966 memoir of her early life with her identical twin sister, Grace. It’s short, poetically succinct, and restrained. Yet it has an emotional power greater even than that of Newlove’s tour de force.

Two tragedies punctual the decade or so spanned by story in Under Gemini. In 1887, just two weeks after the girls’ fourth birthday, their mother and father died of pneumonia on the same day. Then, ten summers later, as she watched, helplessly, Bolton’s sister drowned when their rowboat was carried away from them in the currents of Long Island Sound.

In between, the two girls–Mary (Bolton’s real name was Mary Britton Miller) and Grace–and their two older brothers and older sister were looked after in a fairly haphazard way. Their aging grandmother showed the greatest concern for them, offering as much comfort and protection as her diminishing strength could muster:

The double weight of sensibility, the impact of living moments–the smell of bread rising from the kitchen, of gingerbread just taken from the oven, the sound of squirrels surrying on the veranda roof, shadows of leaves on the bedroom wall, flames in the open fireplaces, the all-pervading smell of burning logs, the sense of unseen presences–all combined to make use feel so safe, so sheltered in this comfortable home our grandmother had given us.

Sadly, though, she died less than a year after the parents. Their custody was left to their Uncle James (James A. Rumrill, a railroad executive) and Aunt Anna, who saw to their material needs in a begrudging manner, hiring a spinster in her sixties to run their home and raise them.

Mary and Grace Miller, age 3, around 1886As Bolton portrays her, Miss Rogers had the best of intentions and cared deeply for the children, but she was utterly unequipped to take charge of herself, let alone five willful children, each dealing less rather than more ably with the loss of their parents and grandmother. Philip, one of the boys, threw a glass of water in her face. She brought in a hired man to help with the house and yard. He clearly adored Miss Rogers, but he also clearly spent much of his time half drunk or half asleep. Each Sunday Aunt Anna and Uncle James came to inspect the situation and each week they left unsatisfied. Eventually, Miss Rogers is let go and arrangements are made for the children to be farmed out to boarding schools for much of the year. Grace drowns not long before she and Mary are to be packed off. “My darling Mary, how I love you” are her last words to her twin sister.

Isabel Bolton, 1966Although she published a number of books of poetry under her own name, Miller came to the novel very late, publishing In the Days of Thy Youth in 1943, at the age of sixty, and then, as Isabel Bolton, the three novels for which she has achieved lasting critical recognition: Do I Wake or Sleep (1946); The Christmas Tree (1949); and Many Mansions (1952). These were reissued in 1997 as one volume, New York Mosaic, with an introduction by Doris Grumbach. At the time of their first publications, the books received the highest possible acclaim. Edmund Wilson judged her style “exquisitely perfect in accent.” Diana Trilling called her “The most important new novelist in the English language to appear in years.” Wilson is reputed to have fallen in love with his vision of Bolton as a bright and beautiful young thing, only to have find she was actually an elderly woman of upper class manners and discretion.

She came even later to dealing with her own experience. One reviewer wrote that Under Gemini reflected enormous strength of character in the moderation and perspective with which Bolton describes what must have been a near-over-whelming experience. “That business in which we are all perpetually engaged–the making of an individual soul–is an enterprise of memory,” she writes at the end of the book. “In our case it was a joint and not a single venture.”

What most distinguishes Under Gemini is how effectively Bolton conveys the unique sensation of encountering the world as two:

When I evoke those hours of childhood to live in them once more, it is not myself I see before me–it is she, the living image of myself, and there I stand revealed in all the sharp intensity of what the moment brought of pain or joy or curiosity or wonder or decision. I see my own face, my own dark eyes and hair, I hear my voice, my intonations and tricks of speech. The words that issue from her tongue are mine. Her expressions mantle, as I remember it, my countenance. Attuned to the same vibrations, with nerves that responded to the same dissonances and harmonies, we were one in body and in soul. What happened to one of use happened at the same instant to the other and both of us recognized exactly how each experience had registered in the other’s heart and mind.

It was never I but always we. It was never you or I but both of us. Never mine or yours but always ours. We were seldom referred to by those we lived among as Mary or as Grace but as the twins–I was Mary, she was Grace. This may be so.

Bolton was 83 when she published Under Gemini. Though she had abundant family connections with New York society, she lived most of her life in Greenwich Village, volunteering as a social worker and writing an occasional book of light poetry. She never married and lived on her own for nearly eight decades after losing Grace. That she was able to achieve at least critical success as a novelist so late in life is remarkable, but I suspect that what’s more telling is the fact that, at the age of 83, she could still summon so easily the sense of life as part of a larger being that was the two sisters together–and perhaps that she was never able to find another to replace the void left by Grace’s death.

Under Gemini was reissued by the Steerforth Press in 1999, but it’s no longer backlisted by them and is once again out of print.

Under Gemini: A Memoir, by Isabel Bolton (Mary Britton Miller)
New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966

Theodor Fontane

One of the more noteworthy recent reissues in the wonderful New York Review Books Classics series is Theodor Fontane’s 1891 novel, Irretrievable. Fontane is considered by many of those familiar with his work as “clearly the greatest German novelist before Thomas Mann,” in the words of Gordon A. Craig, yet there are few of the truly major European writers of the nineteenth century–aside perhaps of Benito Pérez Galdós–who have suffered greater neglect among English-reading audiences.

Theodor FontaneIn part he suffers a common fate with other German novelists. His works, as much as those of his contemporaries such as Adalbert Stifter and Theodor Storm, have a tendency to pop up in English translations, usually from academic presses, and then vanish out of print just as quickly.

The loss is ours. German writers get a bum rap, a reputation for ponderousness than is only partly deserved–and wholly undeserved in Fontane’s case. “There is also in Fontane,” writes Phillip Lopate in his Afterword to Irretrievable (Unwiederbringlich), “a Montaigne-like equipoise, a sunny melancholy, an investment in domestic family life that steadfastly avoids the demonic and apocalyptic….” Perhaps this is due to the fact that Fontane came to fiction very late: his first novel was published when he was sixty years old. Throughout his work, you find a sense of perspective, humor, and tolerance very few writers possess before middle age.

The other thing most English readers encountering Fontane’s work for the first time note is how modern his themes are. The problems of marriage–particularly from the wife’s perspective–are one of his most frequent topics, as are its most common responses: divorce, adultery, and simple unhappiness. Take, for example, Lopate’s setting on the story in Irretrievable:

Irretrievable is the story of a marriage that has worn thin. The partners have been together for some twenty-three years, are raising two teenage children, and for the most part have enjoyed a happy marriage. Still, they have reached a point where they no longer are
charmed but are irritated by the limitations each sees in the other.

His women are fully-drawn individuals capable of living outside their husbands’ shadows, and his men–like most of us still–are more often well-intentioned but clueless than autocratic and evil. In fact, Lopate suggests the lack of a radical sense of evil might be one of the reasons Fontane’s work has had a hard time winning popular and critical readers in English.

Fortunately, though, there’s never been a better time to discover Fontane in English. In large part this is thanks to Antony Wood, whose small press, Angel Classics has reissued four of his novels–including an alternate translation of Unwiederbringlich, No Way Back, translated by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers.

In addition to No Way Back/Irretrievable, Fontane books currently available in English translation include On Tangled Paths, translated by by Peter James Bowman. The tale of a romance between a cavalry officer and a seamstress. The officer intends for the relationship to be something of a place-holder until a wealthier and more socially acceptable wife can be found, but then the situation gets more complicated when they end up falling in love.

This novel is also available in not one but two alternate translations: Trials and Tribulations, translated by Katharine Royce, from Mondial Books, and in a volume from Continuum’s fine “The German Library” series, Delusions, Confusions, paired with another novella, “The Poggenpuhl Family.” Finally, there is Cecile, translated by Stanley Radcliffe, also from Angel Classics–also a story of adultery–in this case, initiated by the woman.

However, at least as many other English translations of Fontane’s works have disappeared within a few years of appearing in print:

• Effi Briest

This is easily Fontane’s best-known work, often compared to Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary for its depiction of adultery. Thomas Mann once wrote that if one had to reduce one’s library to six novels, Effi Briest would have to be one of them. Although Angel Classics’ website shows their edition, also translated by Rorrison and Chambers, as being in print, Amazon shows that both theirs (issued as a Penguin Classic in the US in 2001) and the 1976 Douglas Parmee translation (also a Penguin Classic) as out of print.

• Before the Storm, translated by R. J. Hollingdale

This was Fontane’s first major work, about the impact of the Napoleonic Wars on the Prussian gentry and peasants. It was issued as an Oxford World Classic in paperback in 1985, but used copies now go for $25 and up. It’s compared by some to War and Peace, but aside from sharing a historical period, the two books have little in common. Although both novels portray wars from the viewpoints of the people they crash over like tsunamis, there is very little drama and quite a lot of conversation in Fontane’s book. It does cause one to wonder, though, what Fontane might have produced if he’d tackled this subject when he was twenty or thirty years younger.

• Under the Pear Tree

Although a minor work, Under the Pear Tree is the closest Fontane ever came to a novel of incident (if not action). Hradschek, a village innkeeper, murders a man who comes to collect a gambling debt … only to wind up dead himself soon after.

• The Stechlin, translated by William Zwiebel

“At the end an old man dies and two young people get married—that is just about all that happens in 500 pages” was Fontane’s own summation of this book. The Stechlin was Fontane’s last major work. It’s been called, “probably the finest chronicle of the life style of the German upper classes in the late nineteenth century.” Camden House published William L. Zwiebel’s first-ever translation into English in 1995.

Douglas Parmée’s introductory essay to Irretrievable is now available on the NYRB webpage for the book, along with Lopate’s Afterword. The New Yorker also published a long essay, “Heroine Addict,” by Daniel Mendelsohn, in its 7 March 2011 issue.