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Edith de Born

Edith de Born and the Sense of Foreignness

Edith de Born, 1960

“Have you heard of the lady who writes under the name Edith de Born — an Austrian-Hungarian-Jewess I suspect – married to a French banker called Bisch?” Evelyn Waugh asked his friend Nancy Mitford in 1953, adding “She writes in English quite beautifully.” Waugh had spent several days as a guest of the Bisches in their elegant apartments opposite the Parc Royal in Brussels. Jacques Bisch was then a director of the Belgian office Société Générale, one of the leading French banks. Waugh confided that he had mistaken Jacques Bisch for a Belgian for most of the visit and had “dropped brick after brick” in his typically less-than-circumspect comments about the French.

Waugh’s suspicions about Mme. Bisch, however, were right on the mark. He probably had no idea, though, why she had chosen to write novels in English. It was a decision that came about, more than anything, through the disruptive effects of history.

Born on her family’s estate outside Vienna in 1901, Edith Ausch Kemengi was raised in the privilege of the most prominent members of the Austo-Hungarian court. Like the narrator of her semi-autobiographical novel Felding Castle, hers was “a world so different from that of my grandchildren that it might have been several hundred years ago.” Her father came from noble families in Hungary (Kemengi, more often spelled Kemenyi) and Austria (Ausch) and was a counselor and lawyer to the royal household of Emperor Franz Joseph. Sixty years after the fact, she remembered watching her father marching in one of the annual court parades from the window of their house in Vienna. Her mother was Jewish, but from a family of sufficient wealth and distance from the Orthodox faith to be considered acceptable in court society.

After the end of World War One and the collapse of the Hapsburg dynasty, however, Count Kemengi found himself land rich and cash poor and put most of his estate up for auction. Société Générale, like other French banks, saw the opportunity to swoop up some choice real estate for almost nothing and sent a young agent, Jacques Bisch, to bid on them. He took away with him not only the title to thousands of acres of Austrian land but also the Count’s daughter. By then, Edith had begun working as a writer, publishing theater reviews and short stories in Vienna and Berlin under the name of Edith Ausch.

She put her writing career on hold for the next twenty years, however, concentrating on assimilating into Parisian society and performing the role of wife and hostess in support of her husband’s career. Jacques Bisch rose quickly in the bank. The couple spent the early 1930s in London, where they were leading members of the colony of French expats. When King George V attended the memorial service for French president Raymond Poincaré at Westminster Cathedal in 1934, the Bisches were in attendance.

Their comfortable life in Paris was discrupted when the Germans invaded in 1940. Despite Edith’s Jewish ancestry, however, they remained. Edith put her language skills in service of the Resistance, having become fluent in French and English in addition to German. She translated communiques to and from the Special Operations Executive, an experience she later said gave her confidence in handling the nuances of English prose.

Her first novel, Gaëtan, or The Stock-Taking, was published in 1950 and demonstrated her ease in navigating the ways of European society. Most of the book consists of a conversation between Irina, the Russian-born widow of Gaëtan, a Frenchman of some high social standing, and Marie, his Swiss cousin. Marie has invited Irina to her villa above Lake Geneva out of courtesy, but really to probe Irina’s intent regarding what she considers an estate belonging to Gaëtan’s family as a whole. Soon, however, the topic shifts from property to love. Marie, it turns out, was in love with her cousin and crushed by his decision to marry a Frenchwoman (Irina is his second wife).

I thought Gaëtan quite a fine short novel when I wrote about it back in 2019, but it received only mildly positive reviews. Her next novel, The Bidou Inheritance (1951), her first published in the U.S. as well as England, made a bigger splash. The story of a small town French shopkeeper and the intrigues regarding his estate won glowing praise from Harper’s chief reviewer, Katherine Gauss:

Miss de Born, an Austrian married to a Frenchman, writes in almost flawless English with quiet distinction, and there is a classic sense of tragedy in the way in which she shows, through two generations, how the child against its own will apes what it most hates in the parent. She is a most perceptive and able new novelist

The Saturday Review put the book to a severe test by assigning it to Henri Peyre, then professor of French at Yale. Peyre noted that the subject of family members keeping a protective eye on a potential inheritance had been “a favorite of French fiction since the Revolution.” His assessment of de Born’s strengths and weakenesses may be the most succinct and accurate from all the reviews her subsequent sixteen novels received:

If she cannot be called a great writer, or at least not yet, she is undoubtedly a skilful one who, with great simplicity and artistic restraint, without any of the “modern” features of philosophy, any delving into the subconscious, morbid eroticism, fiashy juggling with time and logic, has composed a wellmade, a convincing, and an honest work of fiction.

While wellmade, convincing, and honest are admirable qualities, they tend not to be those that assure a writer’s place in literary history.

De Born’s skill in writing fiction in English was often, at least in the first decade of her career, considered the most notable feature of her work. The novelist Francis King, who became a close friend of de Born, recalled his own reaction to the book:

When the author presented me with a copy of the book (The Bidou Inheritance) some twenty years ago, my first astonished thought after devouring a single page was “How beautifully this woman writes!” Why astonished? The answer to that is that Born was an Austrian, who married a Frenchman (Jacques Bisch) and lived much of her life in Belgium, but like Conrad, Nabokov and Julian Green, she miraculously wrote better in her adopted language than most people in the language to which they were born. My second, much later thought was that she dealt with the cupidity of the French bourgeoisie with all the vividness of a Francois Mauriac or a Julian Green….

King later learned that Edith relied on help from a friend in England, the wife of a Norfolk vicar, to clean up and copy-edit her prose, so that unlike Conrad and Nabokov, her English was not a solo production. However, she shared with them what King called a sense of “foreignness”:

… though it is impossible to point to any one passage and declare: ‘No one English could have written that.’ This foreignness is not a matter of vocabulary or syntax — each of these writers has a far more varied vocabulary and far firmer command of syntax than many a native-born novelist — but of rhythm. In the case of Edith de Born, this rhythm seems to be one, not of her native German, but of the French which (so I am told) she speaks with such precision and fluency.

Still, de Born’s prose was good enough to impress Waugh, whose own is considered some of the best of his time. Waugh reviewed her third novel, Daughter of the House (1953) — before staying as her guest — and found it her most mature novel so far:

Madame de Born has already attracted the admiration of the fastidious by her two previous works; brief, severly elegant, classical contes. In Daughter of the House she has spread her wings full span. It is a haunting, highly original story; an authentic work of art, classical in form and . Without once transgressing her self-imposed limits, the author produces an effect of breadth and intensity quite unusual in a modern novel, and worthy of comparison with the masters of her craft. It is a complete book, from which nothing could be taken and to which nothing could be added, without loss.

Over the next twenty-five years, Edith de Born published at a steady rate. Seven novels in the 1950s, seven in the 1960s, and four more in the 1970s. Two of her novels — Felding Castle (1959) and The House in Vienna (1959) — came closest to her own experience. In the first, a young girl named Milli has her first romances in the days just before the outbreak of World War One. The second takes Milli forward a decade, to a Vienna where noble families are now scraping by. Those who have some property left are selling it off, like de Born’s father did. Those still young enough to hope are leaving for Berlin or Paris or America. And many, desperate and bankrupt, are forced, like Fraulein Hertha von Branner, to write begging letters in hopes of finding work:

I have heard that you seek a gouvernesse for your children and so allow myself herewith to offer you my services. I write you in Englisch because it is a langwitsch which I have always spoken and written with great plaisure. My dear Father was two years at Eton, the famous Englisch school…. I mention him only as a guaranty for my standing, he was a Sektionschef in our Ministry for the Inside. Naturally I am ready to furnish you with every otherwise desired reference.

Although Felding Castle and The House in Vienna were advertised as the first two books of a trilogy, the next book she published, The Flat in Paris has no connection with their stories. Indeed, The Flat in Paris is one of her stodgiest books, perhaps because she forgot that she wrote at her best when the themes of love and property were intertwined. When she wrote of love alone, the result reads somewhat like the experience of driving a car with underinflated tires. One can reach the destination all the same, but it’s a tedious and inefficient journey.

Francis King once observed that like Edith Wharton, de Born “belongs to the world that she describes and yet has been distanced from it by an exceptional sensibility,” adding that,

Edith de Born’s books have almost invariably been concerned with civilised, if not intellectual, people, who have no difficulty in expressing themselves richly and succinctly. To write about such people — tended by devoted by dwindling bands of servants in large houses often full of objets d’art in the taste of a bygone age — is something that few novelists can now do with any conviction.

And the kind of adjectives reviewers used to describe de Born’s work lead one to think that she belongs in the school of followers/imitators of Henry James: “mature, authoritative, and genuinely sensitive”; “sensitive and delightful”; “lightly and subtly done”; “curiously tantalizing”; “elegant fable.” Peter Ackroyd wrote that one of her later novels, Mutual Observation, was “written with great intelligence and charm,” then closed, cuttingly, “and one can recommend it to one’s grandmother.” Anita Brookner, who often mentioned de Born as a writer she admired, also watered down her praise with such remarks as “These novels are long out of print and perhaps need not be revived” and that de Born “writes like a lady.”

But though de Born certainly knew exactly which fork to use in any dinner service, as well as which wine to serve with any dish, she was willing to delve into subjects that would not have been considered proper for conversations at her table. The Penalty of Exile (1964) is about a 14-year-old child prostitute whose mother — also a prostitute — is found murdered in her dingy flat near Brussels’ Gare du Midi. State of Possession (note the reference to property and ownership in the title) is about a woman attempting to prove herself the mother of her illegitimate child.

In The Imperfect Marriage, Roger Warnier, heir of a wealthy family in the industrial north of France, returns from years as a prisoner of war in Germany and informs his wife that he is now in a relationship with one of his fellow prisoners and intends to remain so. Already unhappy with the grey life in their factory town, after growing up in the vineyards of the sunny south, she considers leaving but decides in the end to live in a form of coexistence that maintains a fine veneer of propriety — as well as her status in society. It was not surprising, Christopher Wordsworth once observed, that William Trevor sang praises for de Born’s work, “since both are considerable specialists on what survives and seethes under the surface of apparently extinct lives.”

Cover of Scars by Edith de Born

De Born did return to her unfinished autobiographical trilogy, if indirectly, in her 1968 novel Scars. Although the lead character is now Mitzi, not Milli, the two women share similar histories. Mitzi is now an older woman, living in London, cut off by the First World War from the Austria she knew as a child, cut off from many of her Jewish relatives by the Second. As was de Born herself in Brussels, Mitzi’s may be a comfortable exile, but it is an exile nonetheless, an exile in both time and space.

In the book, a visit by an old Viennese friend forces Mitzi to reflect on the life she had left behind when she fled Austria following the Anschluss. But she also finds that she and Egon, the friend, share more than a past. They share the experience of being refugees:

They had crossed psychological as well as geographical frontiers and experienced the fact that national achievements could not be carried from one land to another. Famous men in German-speaking countries were asked elsewhere to spell their names; others, normally in a position to grant favors, were reduced to begging for the smallest privilege. People who had refused all forms of compromise were forced to accept the most uncongenial surroundings and humiliating conditions in order to subsist.

De Born understands, however, that losing one thing in life often means gaining something else. Having survived the tragedy of disrupted lives,

… they had become aware of new realities. Obliged to revise their standards of thought and value, both of them had developed from exiles into explorers of new moral fields. They had become pioneers of a world in which the nation was an anachronism. Gradually the frontiers they had crossed were replaced by unforeseen invisible boundaries, which could reveal wide chasms between people who still persisted in thinking in terms of the past and others who belonged to the future.

Although Edith de Born wrote and spoke English fluently, hosted the likes of Evelyn Waugh, and became a close friend of the historian Alethea Hayter, she never lost her sense of foreignness in the eyes of the English literary establishment. A critic as esteemed as V. S. Pritchett might say that her novel The Engagement was “An uncommonly good novel,” but the general assessment was that she was, at best, a minor novelist of manners. Someone to read between doing the shopping and mending socks, as a character in Jane Gillespie’s Envy does, and not, as in Anita Brookner’s dismissive judgment, someone whose novels need to be revived.

Indeed, it’s ironic to see Brookner making this judgment, given the significant role that the experience of exile plays in several of her novels. It’s hard to think that Brookner failed to see that it was precisely this experience, which was purely second-hand to her, that gave Edith de Born the power to see what “seethes under the surface of apparently extinct lives.”

Edith de Born published her last novel, The Negligent Daughter in 1978. She and her husband moved from rue Royale to a grand townhouse in the rue Marteau decorated with priceless paintings by Picasso, Miro, and Paul Delvaux and run by superior Flemish housekeeper. She died in 1987.

English as a Second Language: Following in Conrad’s Footsteps

First page of Burt's Polish-English Dictionary

Reviews of Selina Hasting’s new biography of Sybille Bedford, who was born Sybille Aleid Elsa von Schoenebeck in Charlottenburg, Germany and forced to live as an exile starting in the late 1930s due to her support of anti-Nazi causes reminded me of a number of other neglected writers who found themselves exiled not only from their own lands but also from their own languages.

The story of German intellectuals who sought refuge in the United States, particularly those who gathered in Santa Monica around the towering figure of Thomas Mann, is well known. But less remembered today are those who headed to England instead, a number of whom not only chose to settle for good outside their own countries but who adopted English as the language in which they wrote from then on. In an article in the Times Literary Supplement that appeared in 1962, Norman Shrapnel wrote of such writers: “Some have used the language as a honeymoon hotel, some as a gymnasium, some as a concert platform for virtuoso performances, some as an ideas factory. It has accommodated them nearly all, and their tendency has been to amplify, rather than alter, what might by now, if left to itself, have turned into something as stylized as a Pall Mall club or an Indian dance.”

Arthur Koestler, of course, is still recognized and his Darkness at Noon has a solid place in the canon. Here, however, are five others who chose to follow in Joseph Conrad’s footsteps.

Robert Neumann

• Robert Neumann

Robert Neumann was, like the better-known Stefan Zweig, a Viennese Jew who decided to leave Austria well ahead of the Anschluss. He settled in a village in Kent that he then took as the setting for his novel written in English, Scene in Passing (1942). The novelist J. D. Bereford considered it more successful as prose than fiction: “Dr. Neumann seems more at home with the English language than with the manner of life in an English village.” Neumann went on to write ten more books in English before he moved to Switzerland in 1958.

Cover of The Inquest by Robert Neumann

The Inquest (1944), an inquiry into the last years of a woman of the international set before the war, was his most commercially successful book. Though he never returned to live in Vienna, the city was close to his heart, and his first postwar novel, Children of Vienna (1946) decried the living conditions, particularly of the large number of orphan children, in the ruins left after the initial Soviet takeover of the city, “There are indignation, pity, savage humour, obscenity, irony on irony in this ferocious novel,” wrote one reviewer.

Neumann helped establish Hutchinson International Authors, an imprint of the major publisher, for which he contracted translations of numerous German and Austrian writers in exile, including Arnold Zweig (no relation to Stefan) and Heinrich Mann (Thomas’s older brother). His last work in English, The Plague House Papers (1959), was an unusual and light-hearted autobiography. “He has seemed to have decided to make the book worth his while as a novelist, and has arranged a nice patter of interacting themes,” Muriel Spark wrote in her review for the Spectator.

Neumann’s books are out of print in English, but Flood (1930), Children of Vienna (1946), and Insurrection in Poshansk (1952) are available on the Internet Archive.

Peter de Polnay with his dog Dodo

• Peter de Polnay

Born in Hungary, the son of a leader of the Jewish community in Budapest, de Polnay spent most of his life distancing himself from his home and his family. According to the version of the story he tells in The Crack of Dawn: A Childhood Fantasy (1958) and My Road: An Autobiography (1978), his mother was ill, his father an absent and abusive brute, and his primary caregivers were the servants who looked after him and his brother and sisters as they grew up in Switzerland, Italy, and England.

After spending time in Argentina and an unsuccessful attempt at establishing himself as a gambler on the Riviera, de Polnay found himself broke and in Paris and turned to writing to make cash. Though fluent in at least three languages, he opted for English based on its larger market share, and began pumping out novels at the rate of at least one a year beginning in the late 1930s.

Cover of The Germans Came to Paris by Peter de Polnay

In May 1940, however, the German invasion disrupted his comfortable life. Along with the government and many of the upper bourgeosie of Paris, he fled to Bordeaux, but soon returned. It was easier to survive on the cheap in Paris. He lasted for about a year, until he was able to make his way to England via Spain and Gibraltar.

He quickly took himself an English wife and enlisted in the Royal Pioneer Corps. After the war, he took a lease on Boulge Hall, the former home of poet and Rubaiyat translator Edward Fitzgerald. Though he aspired to the life of a country gentleman, he soon found the cost beyond his means, and after his wife died, he spent years as an itinerant, living in France, Spain, and Portugal while tapping out novel after novel that fell somewhere between Balzac’s Comedie Humaine and Simenon’s romans dur.

He remarried, this time to a Spanish woman, and converted to Catholicism. The couple lived for a number of years in seaside towns in Kent but decided they preferred the food and sun of France. By the time he died in 1984, he had written nearly 90 books in English.

Edith de Born

• Edith de Born

Edith de Born took perhaps the oddest route to writing in English. Born Edith Ausch, like de Polnay, she came from a Jewish family ennobled in the Austro-Hungarian court. When her father lost his title and most of his fortune after the end of World War One, she married Jacques Bisch, a French financier who’d come to Vienna to liquidate what remained of her family’s estate, and moved to Paris.

Having been taught French and English as a child, she quickly became fluent after stays in Paris and London before the war. Trapped in Paris by the German invasion, the couple became involved in the Resistance. She later said that the work of translating cables to and from London trained her to write in English with nuance and subtlety. When Jacques Bisch became president of the Société Générale Bank in Brussels, they took a palatial apartment on the rue Royale and hosted such English writers as Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford.

Cover of The Flat in Paris by Edith de Born

Though de Born wrote in English, English characters were exceptionally rare in her books. Instead, she wrote of people she knew: Belgians, Dutch, French, and, in her trilogy of Schloss Felding (1959), The House in Vienna (1959), and The Flat in Paris (1961), Austrians and Austrian expats like herself. Many reviewers praised her elegant, pseudo-Jamesian prose, but novelist Francis King wrote somewhat more precisely that it was “in English that all her seventeen novels have been composed”:

I use the word ‘composed’, rather than ‘written’, advisedly, since, as with Conrad and Nabokov, one receives an impression of infinitely meticulous care in the shaping of every paragraph and even of every sentence. As with them too, one senses a ‘foreigness’, though it is impossible to point to any one passage and declare: ‘No one English could have written that.’ This foreigness is not a matter of vocabulary or syntax — each of these writers has a far more varied vocabulary and far firmer command of syntax than many a native-born novelist — but of rhythm. In the case of Edith de Born, this rhythm seems to be one, not of her native German, but of the French which (so I am told) she speaks with such precision and fluency.

King was dissembling in writing this. As he later disclosed in his autobiography, de Born sent all her manuscripts to the wife of an Anglican vicar in Norfolk, who returned them with meticulous line-by-line copy edits, before she submitted the corrected versions to her English publishers.

Jerzy Peterkiewicz

• Jerzy Peterkiewicz

When Jerzy Peterkiewicz arrived in England from France in 1940, he knew no English. Yet he enrolled in the University of St Andrews and went on to earn a doctorate in English literature at King’s College London. Soon after, he married Christine Brooke-Rose. Though they later divorced, both explored abstract and experimental themes and styles in their fiction. Peterkiewicz, however, grew somewhat more conventional in the course of his career, with one of his later books, The Third Adam, being a largely nonfictional account of the Mariavites, a Catholic cult based in the Polish town of P?ock whose leader considered himself to be the third Adam — the first two being the original man of Genesis and Jesus.

Cover of The Quick and the Dead by Jezry Peterkiewicz

His first few novels, written in the 1950s, were full of Joycean wordsplices and almost embarrassing onomatopeia. He liked writing, as he wrote of one of his characters, “at his cosmopolitan best, daring every vocabulary to twist his eloquent tongue.” The Quick and the Dead (1961) might better have been titled The Dead and the Slow as it’s the story of a man who only figures out he’s dead halfway through the book. Its subject and style left the Telegraph’s reviewer unsure of what he was dealing with:

If only one knew what Jerzy Peterkiewicz was up to. Or, alternatively, if only one could be sure that what he was up to was elaborately pretentious nonsense. But if it is hard to find the viewpoint that would enable one to read some meaning into his oblique and arbitrary fancies, it is equally hard to belieave that a writer, more a writer working in an adopted language (like another Polish novelist, Mr. Peterkiewicz knew no English until he was grown up), who clothes those fancies in such precise and fastidious words means nothing at all.”

Anthony Burgess, on the other hand, loved it: “Mr. Peterkiewcz is on of our most intelligent and original novelists. There are some excellent things in The Quick and the Dead. Whatever you’re going to call this uncategorisable book, it’s an altogether brilliant performance.”

Peterkiewicz’s life and work are now commemorated by the Jerzy Peterkiewicz Educational Foundation. The Third Adam (1975) and Green Flows the Bile (1968), Peterkiewicz’s last novel, are available on the Internet Archive.

Stefan and Franciszka Themerson

• Stefan Themerson

Stefan Themerson and his wife Franciszka — both artists and experimental film makers — were happy and productive members of the Left Bank avant garde, having settled in Paris after traveling there to meet the Hungarian artist and photographer László Moholy-Nagy. “I just knew I had to be in Paris,” he later said. When the war broke out, he joined a regiment of Poles that fell apart soon after the Blitzkrieg began, and he ended up spending two years in a Red Cross hostel in Vichy France. There, he began writing his first novel Professor Mmaa’s Lecture, an elaborate pastiche of a scientific lecture on the subject of the superiority of insects to human beings. After being smuggled out of France and reunited with his wife in England, Themerson decided to rewrite the book in English.

Cover of first edition of Professor Mmaa's Lecture by Stefan Themerson

To say that Stefan Themerson wrote in English, however, is to accept that any one language could contain the energy of his imagination. Here, for example, is just an excerpt of the entry for Chapter Six in the Table of Contents of Professor Mmaa’s Lecture:

Wherein Professor Mmaa’s Lecture May Be Likened to a “Chariot Sailng over a Volcano ”

BATSMAN HITS A GOOSE & LADIES AND GENTLEMENT!
IMAGINING THE IMAGINATION
PROFESSOR MMAA’Ss ATTEMPT TO ADAPT A VERTICAL POSITION
HOW WILL MY OLD MAMMA COME TO BELIEVE IN THE SHALLOWEST BEING, & HOW WILL PROFESSOR SOUL COME TO BELIEVE IN CORPUSCLES?
LES MORTELS SONT EGAUX, AND THE TOLERANCE OF FANATICISM
LES MORTELS SONT DIFFERANTS, AND THE FANATICISM OF TOLERANCE
HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN STOPS LAYING EGGS
NONOBODY ON SCIENCE, LANGUAGE, AND POLITICS
PANCAKERS & FARCEMEATERS

After the war, the Themersons became cornerstones of the English avant garde — which might be a bit of an non-sequitur, as they never looked for imitators or others to imitate. In 1948, they formed the Gaberbocchus Press, under whose imprint a fair share of their books were published over the course of the next 30 years. Franciszka worked steadily as an illustrator of children’s book, including such collaborations with Stefan as Peddy Bottom (1950), Mr. Rouse Builds His House (1951), and The Table that Ran Away Into the Woods (1963). Franciszka also provided the illustrations for Barbara Wright’s remarkable English translation of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises de Style

Queneau’s fiction is perhaps the closest equivalent to Themerson’s. Both men drafted genres and put them to work for slyly anarchic purposes. In one of Themerson’s last works, The Mystery of the Sardine (1986), he took the international conspiracy thriller a la The Da Vinci Code and turned it into a playful epistemological fantasy. Not everyone appreciated the results. Kirkus Reviews “a stringy mass” of heavy-handed social comedy and compared it to “sour-tasting fudge.” Neville Shack, reviewing it for the TLS, recognized that Themerson was more of a puppetmaster than a master of characterization:

Many of them, weird and wacky, seem to have a flair for bemusement in action and speech. They are figures in a constantly shifting scenario, neither nautralistic nor typical ofmuch beyond themselves. These people who come and go, often in search of clues, serve only the fickle ends of the narrative. They are mannequins, walking constructs in the mode of Peter Greenaway’s cinematic inventions; the tableaux are highly synthetic, despite real settings and occasionally believable situations.

There’s a certain satisfying irony in the fact that more of Themerson’s work is in print now in Polish than in English. Several of his books, including Professor Mmaa’s Lecture, are available on the Internet Archive.

The Penalty of Exile, by Edith de Born (1964)

Cover of The Penalty of Exile by Edith de Born

The Penalty of Exile demonstrates that although Edith de Born had a reputation for writing books that, in Peter Ackroyd’s words, “one can recommend to one’s grandmother,” she didn’t always stick to grandmotherly topics. Within the first 30 pages of the book, we find that its focus is a 14-year-old child prostitute whose mother — also a prostitute — has been stabbed to death. In an interview she gave about a year after publishing The Penalty of Exile, de Born expressed tremendous admiration for Nabokov’s Lolita, calling it one of the finest novels of the century and also characterising it as a love story. Knowing this, I found it hard not to read de Born’s novel as her own attempt to deal with the taboo subject of pedophilia.

Unfortunately, her sensibilities led her to take an indirect approach, telling the story of young Helga Vankammen primarily as seen by the two adults who become personally involved in her case after her mother’s murder. The first is Edgar Kermans, a wealthy Belgian businessman who encounters Helga on the streets around the Gare du Midi in Brussels. Helga is crouched on the sidewalk, gently caring for a ragged mutt of a dog. Struck by Helga’s beauty, despite her tattered clothes and dirty face, Kermans ends up buying the dog and getting some food for the girl.

He leaves her his business card, which is how he’s then contacted by the police after Helga’s mother is murdered. Kermans’ motivations are never quite clear. They seem to be part Good Samaritan, part infatuation, and part a belief that money can solve all problems. De Born sums up an entire slice of bourgeois society in her characterization of Kermans and his kind: “The distinctive trait they possessed in common was the firm belief that the only sure and efficient method of protection for themselves and their families against all potential risks and dangers was the acquisition and preservation of wealth.” (For more, viz. Capital by Thomas Piketty).

The other is Wilhelmina van Hemmen, a Dutch sociologist from a noble family, who takes Helga to live at her kasteel in the Netherlands and undertakes her rehabilitation. An erect, elegant, and iron-willed woman, Madame van Hemmen provides a safe and sheltered environment in which she begins to teach Helga about manners, culture, and trust. A bit like de Born herself, her attempts to work with Helga are awkward and unfamiliar. But de Born is at least capable of recognizing the limitations inherent in this kind of situation. Helga says to Wilhelmina at one point,

“You don’t really know whatmy life was. There’s no chance at all of my ever being happy like you say — through love.”

The last word was pronounced with an effort.

“You’re wrong, dear. I do know what your life was like and I know, and you do, that now it lies behind you. It is definitely past and over.”

Helga shook her head.

“You’ve never been in the middle of it. You’ve only seen it from above.”

Wilhelmina was at a loss to reply. It was a shaming truth that she had seen only from “above” the poverty, stupidity, vice and crime, protected as she was by money and her name; she was totally unaware of her innocence and goodness, an even greater protection than her position.

De Born’s story of Helga’s rescue and redemption is never fully convincing. Like Kermans and Madame van Hemmen, she recognizes the pain and violence that lies at the core of Helga’s experience but is at a loss for how to deal with it except through politeness and a diffident kind of empathy. The ingenue Helga grows up into a stunning beauty who becomes a top model in Paris, but she never sees that success as anything more than a matter of economics: “Once I was treated as a thing, and I’m still a thing, though a different kind put to a different use. Now I am a point of intersection for all sorts of commercial interests: textiles, dress-making, cosmetics, jewelry. I often represent a huge fortune; I never represent myself.”

To give de Born and Helga’s rescuers credit, kindness, comfort, and empathy can go a long way as substitutes for understanding. If The Penalty of Exile never descends into the belly of its beast, de Born once again proves a keen observer, particularly of the better sort of European — even if she does allow herself a very Belgian dig at the Netherlands, whose “insipid, badly-cooked food bore little resemblance to the cuisine on the other side of the border.”

The Penalty of Exile, by Edith de Born
London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1964

State of Possession, by Edith de Born (1963)

Cover of first UK edition of State of Possession

State of Possession represents Edith de Born at mid-career. Her first novel, Gaëtan, was published in 1950; her last (of 18), The Negligent Daughter, in 1978. And yet, having read all three books, I have to say that de Born seems to have reached a high level of maturity with her very first book and maintained it with remarkable consistency throughout. One of her strongest advocates, the novelist and critic Francis King, once called Edith de Born “a literary sport.” But if she is a sport, it would be more appropriate to compare her with Roger Federer or Cal Ripken: she never played to the point of burn-out, always held something back for the next contest. If you’re looking for flash and high drama, keep looking: you won’t find them here.

The story in State of Possession is really the least important aspect of the book. Elisabeth Vandernoot, a Flemish nurse, is contacted by a lawyer. Another Belgian woman, now married to an Englishman and living in London, believes that Lionel, Elisabeth’s son, is actually the child she lost in the chaos of the evacuation from the German invasion of May 1940. Elisabeth is compelled to prove that she did, in fact, give birth to Lionel.

One might think this is a simple matter of producing a birth certificate. But birth certificates are comparatively recent innovations. In many countries and for many years, there were no birth certificates; instead, the parents reported the birth to local town hall or mairie, where it was recorded in a register, often days later. That’s not really the issue in this case, however. Here, neither party can produce definitive evidence — and in Elisabeth’s case, it’s for reasons that are best left to be discovered by reading the book.

A single mother and never married, Elisabeth works as a masseuse. She prefers to call herself an aesthetician because of the seamy connotations of the word masseuse. De Born illustrates the problems Elisabeth faced when she first set up practice:

One man had strutted in and looked her up and down, his face clearly proclaiming that she was not to his taste. “Are you the only woman working here?” he had inquired. “Yes, Monsieur.” For a moment he had hesitated; then, with a shrug, pushing back the hat he had not removed, “O.K. A massage,” unbuttoning his greatcoat. As he began to fumble with more buttons, she had quickly asked, “Have you a doctor’s recommendation” “A what — ?”

Now she attends patiently exclusively in their homes. They are all several cuts above her own station: a retired ambassador; a Vicomtesse. They respect her professionalism and discretion — but they also see her as a non-entity, “describing their ailments at the greatest possible length as though the fact of lying naked before her compelled them to go further and turn themselves inside out.” On the other hand seeing them intimately, in their lavish houses and apartments, she in turn is provided with “a glimpse of worlds beyond her reach, with the result that she felt suspended in mid-air, with no solid ground left under her feet.”

Elisabeth has aspirations for her son Lionel. Having lost its colony, Belgium no longer has the Congo to serve as “a springboard for the lower classes.” The only options for Lionel hinge upon his exam results: with honors, he might get a lifelong government job; otherwise, he will have to go elsewhere — to South America or Africa — and work his way up through some multinational firm. Yet without property of her own — aside from Lionel himself — Elisabeth is also looked down upon by the Peeters, the brusque Flemish family she rents her flat from. One of the pleasures of this book is de Born’s deft and subtle depiction of the intricate dances of social positioning that go on in a small and crowded country like Belgium.

State of Possession is set in Brussels, where de Born and her husband lived for over forty years after the end of World War Two. De Born was a perfect example of the kind of meta-European one finds in Brussels, where the European Commission, NATO, SWIFT, EUROCONTROL and other international organizations bring together people with strongly cosmopolitan sensibilities. Born in Vienna, which she left after the Anschluss, de Born moved to Paris, where she married Jacques Bisch, a French banker and worked with him in the Resistance during the war.

One of her jobs in the Resistance was translating messages to and from British intelligence services, and she credited that experience with teaching her how to write clearly and precisely in English while still managing to preserve essential nuances that didn’t have simple equivalents in the vocabulary and syntax of the other language. She learned well, as many critics like King noted that, “as with Conrad and Nabokov, one receives an impression of infinitely meticulous care in the shaping of every paragraph and even of every sentence.” King wrote,”It is in English that all her seventeen novels have been composed. I use the word ‘composed,’ rather than ‘written,’ advisedly, since, as with Conrad and Nabokov, one receives an impression of infinitely meticulous care in the shaping of every paragraph and even of every sentence.”

Many of the Brussels-based institutions operate on the basis of consensus, where different positions and interests have to be balanced and integrated through a careful, time-consuming and often frustrating process of negotiation. This fosters environments where extremes are actively discouraged and moderation is considered an essential quality for both success and survival. What matters most is not the outcome of any one deal but preserving the ability to make another deal tomorrow. The same spirit can be found in de Born’s work. Her books never find easy answers to the questions they raise. They also display an acute sense of history. As Francis King wrote of another de Born novel, State of Possession “gives the impression of the pasts of its characters receding in a long perspective.”

Despite the comparisons to Conrad and Nabokov, however, Edith de Born’s closest equivalent is probably a native English writer: Anita Brookner. Like Brookner, de Born wrote slight novels that seem to have the substance of tissue paper yet managed to cut like razors. Brookner herself tended to ward of the association. In 2007, she told The Spectator she had been rereading de Born, whom she considered “a completely forgotten precursor, both in style and subject matter” not of herself but of Sybille Bedford. “Of cosmopolitan background — her books are set in Austria, France and Belgium — she demonstrates an intriguing combination of rootlessness and good manners.” Brookner added dismissively, “These novels are long out of print and perhaps need not be revived.” In her 1987 Paris Review interview, however, Brookner said she very much enjoyed de Born, finding her “much more stoical and less sentimental than English writers.”

All of Edith de Born’s novels have been out of print for over forty years, but many of them can be purchased from used book shops for under $15. I note, though, that prices on Amazon are creeping into the stratosphere, so try searching on AddAll.com instead.

State of Possession, by Edith de Born
London: Chapman & Hall Ltd., 1963

Gaëtan, or The Stock-Taking, by Edith de Born (1950)

“Gaëtan consists of a 100-page discussion between the wife and the mistress of a Frenchman who has been killed in a car accident,” wrote Julian Symons in his terse review of Edith de Born’s first novel. It’s an accurate description, but also a spoiler, for through much of the book, we only know we are eavesdropping on a conversation between Irina, Gaëtan’s Russian-born second wife, and Marie, his Swiss cousin. Gaëtan, a Frenchman of some high social standing — a brave officer in the First World War, a successful manufacturer, a covert agent of the Resistance in the Second — is gone now just a few months, and Irina has come to Marie’s villa outside Geneva to recuperate. From the very beginning, we know that there will be little relaxation during this visit, the two women’s first meeting.

As Irina takes her seat across from Marie by the fireplace, she takes in — and condemns — the decor. “The worst were the pictures. Boring landscapes, mountains and mountain lakes, displayed a depressing lack of personalisty and meagre craftsmanship in pretentious gilt frames.” She feels herself “caught in an unnatural and translucid atmosphere through which no sound could pierce.” But neither woman is on safe ground: “They took each other’s measure, appraised their mutual impressions, and both were disappointed.”

And indeed, what follows is a pause in limbo before the final judgments are passed. Over the course of the evening, their polite dialogue provides a poor disguise for what is really an interrogation. Mostly it is Marie doing the questioning. She is clearly offended that her fine well-born cousin married this short, plump Russian émigré, even if her family stood in the nobility before the Revolution. Marie notes that Irina still speaks with an accent, and “She doesn’t look youn either.” But Irina slips in a few pointed inquiries of her own, and she makes no apologies for being willing to humble herself to survive as an otherwise penniless refugee in Paris.

Irina has spent decades toiling in the backrooms of some of the most exclusive couturiers, and she has learned to appreciate both the skill involved in creating high fashion and the sweat:

I longed to be able to get away from the atmosphere of women dressing and undressing. At times the smell of their skin, their sweat, their scent, seemed to cling to me; I couldn’t get rid of it, I was nauseated by it, it stayed in my nostrils. Day in day out I watched them pitifully cheating their own selves. I heard them deliberately deny their most obvious imperfections. I saw them go through agonies of hidden pain in their desperate fight against ugliness or age. I listened to them, endeavouring to believe in the miracle expected from the new frock. That daily routine, perpetually repeated, had begun to get me down. Oh, that monstrous procession of wretched women!

Marie, on the other hand, has spent the same decades living in peace and comfort in her solid, dull villa on the slopes above Lake Geneva. She has servants to clean, feed, and care for her and money to pay for their service. Yet, as the stock-taking continues into the night, she begins to reveal the pain she has long kept hidden under the smooth surface of her own life. “Don’t try to tell me how happy, full, rich, and so on, the life of a single, independent woman can be. It is a tune I know by heart. I used to sing it to myself at first. Later I only sang it to other people.”

Part of a Chapman and Hall advertisement in the Times Literary Supplement from 1950
One contemporary reviewer wrote that Gaëtan is, “Good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.” I have to disagree. I think Gaëtan goes as far as it needs — and stops. In the end, it becomes clear that neither woman finds the need to pass judgment on the other. The real stock-taking is of the places into which men have put women. “All women form one chain-gang,” Marie tells Irina. “You cannot be in the company of a man, even though only on rare occasions, without incurring obligations.”

Edith de Born was the pen-name of Edith Bisch, who by the time that Gaëtan was published was living with her husband, Jacques Bisch, a French banker, in Brussels. Born Edith Ausch in Vienna in 1901, she had grown up in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, an experience she wrote about in a number of her novels, including a trilogy that traced her own journey: Schloss Felding (titled Felding Castle in the US) (1959); The House in Vienna (1959); and The Flat in Paris (1960). She is recorded as having played some role in the French Resistance during the Second World War, and she and her husband hosted Evelyn Waugh in their flat just around the corner from the royal palace in Brussels. I haven’t yet been able to learn why she chose to write in English or even why she began writing fiction after the war, but she went on to publish at least fifteen novels — all sadly now out of print — before her death in 1987.

Gaëtan, or The Stock-Taking, by Edith de Born
London: Chapman & Hall, 1950