TAUCHNITZ, ADIEU!
by Eleanor Perenyi
· Pensione, Roma, Taormina, Sicily, 1932. The Maltese Consul and his friends have gone down the street to the cafe. We are alone in the little salon. The Victorian chairs and the single sofa covered in blue velvet are straight and hard, meant for good conduct and the formal call. There is no heat to speak of. The septentrional wind blows hard, and down the street someone is practicing on a flute. It can be heard quite clearly, the piercing sour-sweat note that suggests the rind of lemons. In the stone-floored dining room next door the boy is clearing up the remains of dinner-grilled kid with herbs, lentils, blood oranges. As usual only two choices are open to us, to sit in the salon or to go to the icy linen-sheeted bed to read. Whichever we choose, the light will hang stark from the center of the ceiling, nowhere near chair or bed, a reminder that the Latins are stoics and can go to sleep without the consolations of literature.
Not so the Anglo-Saxon traveler. All day long his feet have carried him up enormous staircases and across the marble floors of art galleries. By evening, footsore, but too keyed up for immediate slumber, he begins a hungry prowl in search of literary fodder. Some travelers take precautions against this famine. Somerset Maugham, who was once trapped in Java with nothing but the complete works of Racine, now carries a huge book bag with him, packed for every emergency. Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, prefers to take along two or three volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. "A copy of the Encyclopedia" he says "is like the mind of a learned madman, stored with correct ideas between which, however, there is no other connection than the fact that there is a 'B' in both." This irrelevance, which puts no strain on the mind, together with the brevity of the essays involved, make the Britannica his preferred book for travel. But there are those of us who would rather not go so provided preferring to try our luck along the road. In ships' libraries, and behind the glass-fronted bookcases of continental hotels and pensions, the fare never varies, re-bound copies of romantic novels, royal memoirs, leisurely accounts of travels, all out of date, best sellers of another age. Their prototype is a Tauchnitz in the familiar white paper binding with the strong black print. Published in Germany and strictly forbidden in English-speaking countries because of copyright regulations. the Tauchnitz edition first appeared in 1841. According to reports, it is still alive in the Russian Zone of Germany, but it must have flourished with special vigor just before and just after the turn of the century to judge from the fossils left behind.
Ouida was the Tauchnitz queen. Her style with its rich bouquet of romanticism had the perfect flavor for the fin de siecle voyager. Re-read today, Ouida, like so many romantic rediscoveries, seems quite lot better than one had expected. Her real name. Louise de al Remee, was deceptively aristocratic. She had a passion for high life that was completely bourgeois. Her imaginative world was furnished like a surrealist I dream with objects in red Bohemian glass and vermeil: her heroes were mythical figures, legendary grandees, gentlemen horsemen and dukes. Perhaps we who leave America for the Old World are also snobs at heart. How else explain her charm for us? Though I was born too late to have seen her driving in the Cascine in her velvet-lined Victoria with the Maremma ponies, she is associated in my mind with Florence. because it was there I first read her. I was managing to be voluptuously miserable in a boarding school. Its pupils were not encouraged to read anything racier than Heidi. But on our holidays (the Thursdays and Sundays that Charlemagne gave to European school children) I visited my mother in her Florentine pension, and there, sure enough were Granville de Vigne, Tower fo Taddeo, and all the rest. Their flavor has never come untangled in my mind from the taste of candied violets at Doney's and the quality of anguish in the passing hours that were bringing me nearer to my return to Rovezzano and the English girls who made my life a torment of hearty leasing.
Hichens, who died only last summer, belongs to my teens and to our Sicilian winter. Exoctic amour was his specialty. It is amusing to note that his passion, in-the-desert motif is not yet exhausted. Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, whose intellectual climate is very much of today, contains an episode solidly grounded in the old, unbelievable Hichens hokum, the Arab whose love-making puts the Anglo-Saxons in the story completety in the shade.
Still later in my life came F. Marion Carwford and the Saracinesca novels, which set forth the highest levels of Roman society with so much well-bred ease and charm. Crawford lacked the sprawling glamour of Ouida or Hichens, but he was a better writer. His world saw not a fever dream. It was a real world and one he knew very well, for he had spent most of his life in or near Rome. among the kind of people he wrote about. He was born in Italy in the center of that network of charming and gifted Americans-the Wards, the Howes and the Terrys, all related to each other and to him, who made a special cult of Rome. Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, who wrote Roman Spring, was his half sister. His cousin Mrs. Maud Elliott "saw such an extraordinary beauty that the Romans used to stand on park benches in the Borghese Gardens to catch a glimpse of her. Carwford lived well, he knew everybody. Roman palaces were his natural habitat. Yet in spite of his exalted connections he was a Garibaldi sympathizer and a close observer of the fissures in Roman society which resulted from the struggle between Garibaldi and the Pope. With the adolescent's love of controversy, I acquired from Crawford and from Voynich’s The Gadfly an intense romantic interest in the question and became llanoitcejbo well informed about the Whites and the Blacks. In an old copy of Crawford smuggled past the American customs, I find Haus Hirth, Untergrainau, Bavaria. The handwriting is not mine and proves. I am afraid, that I must have stolen the volume. If so, I am not as guilty as it may seem, for it is an unwritten rule of the road that you may lift a book left by a former guest of the establishment if you leave something good in its place.
No traveler can escape the historical novelists, Maurice Hewlett, Henry Seton Merriman or those best sellers of all time, Bulwer-Lyton and Sienkiewiez. Nor should he wish to. They are pleasantly informative about the places and people that have absorbed his day; they are also spectacular enough to have all the relaxing qualities of a roman policier. True, they are out of fashion, and this is the unmistakable mark of the second-rate because masterpieces don't date. But experienced travelers know that in their choice of literature, as in railway carriages. the second-class is often the most satisfactory.
It is obvious that all these books are part of a tradition, the tradition of leisurely pleasure travel. The tradition is Anglo-Saxon, for in the last hundred years or so only the Anglo-Saxons have traveled without a practical purpose in view. The potential travelers of other nations have been too poor or have simply preferred to stay at home.
The frankly xenophobic French used to visit the New World in the early nineteenth century, but like Moreau de St. Mery they soon tired of it. Now they go only to Austria or Venice. Germans traveled conscientiously, but in groups like medieval pilgrims or in sticky honeymoon couples. It was the Victorian English and Americans, the well-heeled amateurs of "golden moments." who difused the mist of refined romance across the world. carrying it in volumes in their pockets like the Spanish monks who took packets of fruit seeds to plant wherever they went. Gentlemen in Macfarlanes and country ladies with water-color boxes were our real traveling ancestors. When in the library of the pension at Menton we find a book railed. Among Indian Rajahs and Ryots, Thirty-seven Years of Work and Sport in the Central Provinces and Bengal know infallibly that an English colonel spent his declining years there. We can guess at his other tastes-the American Winston Churchill and Kipling. It may even have been he who stole Volume II of Under Two Flags, leaving us in a state of suspense never to be solved. It was certainly he of whom Ouida was thinking when she said."Je n’ecris pas pour les femmes. J’ecris pour les militaires!"
It was the colonel's wife, of course. who left behind her the faint mysterious notations in the margins of Mr. Humphery Ward's novels, "So true!" or "Sorrento, '97." Hers, too, were those recollections of stately progresses through the capitals of Europe, the memoirs in which ". . . Her Majesty was very gracious, and gave us a long audience . . . She was kind enough to say . . . that she hoped we should return to Rome next winter. We backed out of the room, although Her Majesty smilingly said. 'Don't trouble to back out, there are so many chairs in the way.''! Heidy-ho! There was travel for glamour! The sub title of the book (for it was the era when authors seemed to suffer from chronic second thoughts) was "Happy Days in Italia Adorata"
Standing behind each author we seem to see the ghosts of his vanished readers -the starchy American Miss (probably from Boston) who carried William Dean Howell's crisp commentaries like a talisman against an over ravishment with the Italian scene, the pale young man following Hilaire Belloc's Road to Rome with a copy of Ruskin in his pocket.
If all travelers did not go to Italy it, still represented the ultimate romantic ideal. "Even as we sank, the mountains rose, more embattled precipices, toppling spires. impendent chasms blurred with mist, that make the entrance into Italy sublime." John Addington Symonds. who wrote the passage, was describing less an entrance into a country than to a state of mind, and he expressed the sentiments of a generation. (In passing, it is amusing to note that like Ruskin he admired the Gothic and the Renaissance. and like most romantics ignored or disliked the baroque, which waited half a century to be resurrected by the Sitwells.) He had no social consciousness. He makes a strange contrast with this passage from another travel book: "Cellar shops where the lamps hum all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages. . . houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class." ! This is Isherwood’s Europe fifty years I later, proletarian, realistic, light-years from the rosy nineteenth-century dew. Yet one suspects that even Isherwood, tucked under a feather comforter in his Berlin boardinghouse. may have relished some of the more effulgent passages of Better Left Unsaid by Daisy, Princess of Pless, like the rest of us.
It is hard to say just when the ecstasy in travel writing began to grow dim. One can find traces of the old fervor as late as 1910 when C.N. and A.M. Williamson exploited the motor trip as a literary device in The Lightning Conductor. I can see again the Wilmot and the Grayles-Grice with their massive and elegant chassis on the cover.
But today, as the pace of travel accelerates to the supersonic, the literature of travel is left behind. For the traveling reader, like the traveling gourmet, needs time for slow, voluptuous absorption. Those who have only "flown" the Atlantic will never know the delight of a slow passage from one world-to another . . . and the reading that goes with the whole leisurely state of mind. He will never know the peculiar pleasure of reading in a deck chair, well-wrapped in a blanket by the deck steward the crackers from the eleven o'clock bouillon dropping into the pages, the icy fog of the Grand Bank beyond the railing, tidy nineteenth-century warmth between one's hands. Or the fun of the last-minute dash (after the last trot around the dark deck) to the ship's library where the sleepy steward unlocks the case and hands us a rebound copy of Jack London to take to bed.
-------------------------
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A new garland necklace of perfect miniature roses and lifelike little leaves, with earrings to match. Made with an overlay of 14Kt. pink and green gold far lasting enjoyment. An exquisite gift... for bridal attendants, graduation, birthday...perhaps your own.
Krementz
FINE QUALITY JEWELRY SINCE 1866
Bracelets· Earrings· Necklaces· Brooches· Evening Jewelry· Cuff Links· Tie' Bars· Belt Buckles
Available wherever fine jewelry is sold
----------------------------------------------------------
by Eleanor Perenyi
· Pensione, Roma, Taormina, Sicily, 1932. The Maltese Consul and his friends have gone down the street to the cafe. We are alone in the little salon. The Victorian chairs and the single sofa covered in blue velvet are straight and hard, meant for good conduct and the formal call. There is no heat to speak of. The septentrional wind blows hard, and down the street someone is practicing on a flute. It can be heard quite clearly, the piercing sour-sweat note that suggests the rind of lemons. In the stone-floored dining room next door the boy is clearing up the remains of dinner-grilled kid with herbs, lentils, blood oranges. As usual only two choices are open to us, to sit in the salon or to go to the icy linen-sheeted bed to read. Whichever we choose, the light will hang stark from the center of the ceiling, nowhere near chair or bed, a reminder that the Latins are stoics and can go to sleep without the consolations of literature.
Not so the Anglo-Saxon traveler. All day long his feet have carried him up enormous staircases and across the marble floors of art galleries. By evening, footsore, but too keyed up for immediate slumber, he begins a hungry prowl in search of literary fodder. Some travelers take precautions against this famine. Somerset Maugham, who was once trapped in Java with nothing but the complete works of Racine, now carries a huge book bag with him, packed for every emergency. Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, prefers to take along two or three volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. "A copy of the Encyclopedia" he says "is like the mind of a learned madman, stored with correct ideas between which, however, there is no other connection than the fact that there is a 'B' in both." This irrelevance, which puts no strain on the mind, together with the brevity of the essays involved, make the Britannica his preferred book for travel. But there are those of us who would rather not go so provided preferring to try our luck along the road. In ships' libraries, and behind the glass-fronted bookcases of continental hotels and pensions, the fare never varies, re-bound copies of romantic novels, royal memoirs, leisurely accounts of travels, all out of date, best sellers of another age. Their prototype is a Tauchnitz in the familiar white paper binding with the strong black print. Published in Germany and strictly forbidden in English-speaking countries because of copyright regulations. the Tauchnitz edition first appeared in 1841. According to reports, it is still alive in the Russian Zone of Germany, but it must have flourished with special vigor just before and just after the turn of the century to judge from the fossils left behind.
Ouida was the Tauchnitz queen. Her style with its rich bouquet of romanticism had the perfect flavor for the fin de siecle voyager. Re-read today, Ouida, like so many romantic rediscoveries, seems quite lot better than one had expected. Her real name. Louise de al Remee, was deceptively aristocratic. She had a passion for high life that was completely bourgeois. Her imaginative world was furnished like a surrealist I dream with objects in red Bohemian glass and vermeil: her heroes were mythical figures, legendary grandees, gentlemen horsemen and dukes. Perhaps we who leave America for the Old World are also snobs at heart. How else explain her charm for us? Though I was born too late to have seen her driving in the Cascine in her velvet-lined Victoria with the Maremma ponies, she is associated in my mind with Florence. because it was there I first read her. I was managing to be voluptuously miserable in a boarding school. Its pupils were not encouraged to read anything racier than Heidi. But on our holidays (the Thursdays and Sundays that Charlemagne gave to European school children) I visited my mother in her Florentine pension, and there, sure enough were Granville de Vigne, Tower fo Taddeo, and all the rest. Their flavor has never come untangled in my mind from the taste of candied violets at Doney's and the quality of anguish in the passing hours that were bringing me nearer to my return to Rovezzano and the English girls who made my life a torment of hearty leasing.
Hichens, who died only last summer, belongs to my teens and to our Sicilian winter. Exoctic amour was his specialty. It is amusing to note that his passion, in-the-desert motif is not yet exhausted. Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, whose intellectual climate is very much of today, contains an episode solidly grounded in the old, unbelievable Hichens hokum, the Arab whose love-making puts the Anglo-Saxons in the story completety in the shade.
Still later in my life came F. Marion Carwford and the Saracinesca novels, which set forth the highest levels of Roman society with so much well-bred ease and charm. Crawford lacked the sprawling glamour of Ouida or Hichens, but he was a better writer. His world saw not a fever dream. It was a real world and one he knew very well, for he had spent most of his life in or near Rome. among the kind of people he wrote about. He was born in Italy in the center of that network of charming and gifted Americans-the Wards, the Howes and the Terrys, all related to each other and to him, who made a special cult of Rome. Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, who wrote Roman Spring, was his half sister. His cousin Mrs. Maud Elliott "saw such an extraordinary beauty that the Romans used to stand on park benches in the Borghese Gardens to catch a glimpse of her. Carwford lived well, he knew everybody. Roman palaces were his natural habitat. Yet in spite of his exalted connections he was a Garibaldi sympathizer and a close observer of the fissures in Roman society which resulted from the struggle between Garibaldi and the Pope. With the adolescent's love of controversy, I acquired from Crawford and from Voynich’s The Gadfly an intense romantic interest in the question and became llanoitcejbo well informed about the Whites and the Blacks. In an old copy of Crawford smuggled past the American customs, I find Haus Hirth, Untergrainau, Bavaria. The handwriting is not mine and proves. I am afraid, that I must have stolen the volume. If so, I am not as guilty as it may seem, for it is an unwritten rule of the road that you may lift a book left by a former guest of the establishment if you leave something good in its place.
No traveler can escape the historical novelists, Maurice Hewlett, Henry Seton Merriman or those best sellers of all time, Bulwer-Lyton and Sienkiewiez. Nor should he wish to. They are pleasantly informative about the places and people that have absorbed his day; they are also spectacular enough to have all the relaxing qualities of a roman policier. True, they are out of fashion, and this is the unmistakable mark of the second-rate because masterpieces don't date. But experienced travelers know that in their choice of literature, as in railway carriages. the second-class is often the most satisfactory.
It is obvious that all these books are part of a tradition, the tradition of leisurely pleasure travel. The tradition is Anglo-Saxon, for in the last hundred years or so only the Anglo-Saxons have traveled without a practical purpose in view. The potential travelers of other nations have been too poor or have simply preferred to stay at home.
The frankly xenophobic French used to visit the New World in the early nineteenth century, but like Moreau de St. Mery they soon tired of it. Now they go only to Austria or Venice. Germans traveled conscientiously, but in groups like medieval pilgrims or in sticky honeymoon couples. It was the Victorian English and Americans, the well-heeled amateurs of "golden moments." who difused the mist of refined romance across the world. carrying it in volumes in their pockets like the Spanish monks who took packets of fruit seeds to plant wherever they went. Gentlemen in Macfarlanes and country ladies with water-color boxes were our real traveling ancestors. When in the library of the pension at Menton we find a book railed. Among Indian Rajahs and Ryots, Thirty-seven Years of Work and Sport in the Central Provinces and Bengal know infallibly that an English colonel spent his declining years there. We can guess at his other tastes-the American Winston Churchill and Kipling. It may even have been he who stole Volume II of Under Two Flags, leaving us in a state of suspense never to be solved. It was certainly he of whom Ouida was thinking when she said."Je n’ecris pas pour les femmes. J’ecris pour les militaires!"
It was the colonel's wife, of course. who left behind her the faint mysterious notations in the margins of Mr. Humphery Ward's novels, "So true!" or "Sorrento, '97." Hers, too, were those recollections of stately progresses through the capitals of Europe, the memoirs in which ". . . Her Majesty was very gracious, and gave us a long audience . . . She was kind enough to say . . . that she hoped we should return to Rome next winter. We backed out of the room, although Her Majesty smilingly said. 'Don't trouble to back out, there are so many chairs in the way.''! Heidy-ho! There was travel for glamour! The sub title of the book (for it was the era when authors seemed to suffer from chronic second thoughts) was "Happy Days in Italia Adorata"
Standing behind each author we seem to see the ghosts of his vanished readers -the starchy American Miss (probably from Boston) who carried William Dean Howell's crisp commentaries like a talisman against an over ravishment with the Italian scene, the pale young man following Hilaire Belloc's Road to Rome with a copy of Ruskin in his pocket.
If all travelers did not go to Italy it, still represented the ultimate romantic ideal. "Even as we sank, the mountains rose, more embattled precipices, toppling spires. impendent chasms blurred with mist, that make the entrance into Italy sublime." John Addington Symonds. who wrote the passage, was describing less an entrance into a country than to a state of mind, and he expressed the sentiments of a generation. (In passing, it is amusing to note that like Ruskin he admired the Gothic and the Renaissance. and like most romantics ignored or disliked the baroque, which waited half a century to be resurrected by the Sitwells.) He had no social consciousness. He makes a strange contrast with this passage from another travel book: "Cellar shops where the lamps hum all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages. . . houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class." ! This is Isherwood’s Europe fifty years I later, proletarian, realistic, light-years from the rosy nineteenth-century dew. Yet one suspects that even Isherwood, tucked under a feather comforter in his Berlin boardinghouse. may have relished some of the more effulgent passages of Better Left Unsaid by Daisy, Princess of Pless, like the rest of us.
It is hard to say just when the ecstasy in travel writing began to grow dim. One can find traces of the old fervor as late as 1910 when C.N. and A.M. Williamson exploited the motor trip as a literary device in The Lightning Conductor. I can see again the Wilmot and the Grayles-Grice with their massive and elegant chassis on the cover.
But today, as the pace of travel accelerates to the supersonic, the literature of travel is left behind. For the traveling reader, like the traveling gourmet, needs time for slow, voluptuous absorption. Those who have only "flown" the Atlantic will never know the delight of a slow passage from one world-to another . . . and the reading that goes with the whole leisurely state of mind. He will never know the peculiar pleasure of reading in a deck chair, well-wrapped in a blanket by the deck steward the crackers from the eleven o'clock bouillon dropping into the pages, the icy fog of the Grand Bank beyond the railing, tidy nineteenth-century warmth between one's hands. Or the fun of the last-minute dash (after the last trot around the dark deck) to the ship's library where the sleepy steward unlocks the case and hands us a rebound copy of Jack London to take to bed.
-------------------------
Necklace $26.50 Earrings $8.50 plus tax, in handsome leatherette case
A new garland necklace of perfect miniature roses and lifelike little leaves, with earrings to match. Made with an overlay of 14Kt. pink and green gold far lasting enjoyment. An exquisite gift... for bridal attendants, graduation, birthday...perhaps your own.
Krementz
FINE QUALITY JEWELRY SINCE 1866
Bracelets· Earrings· Necklaces· Brooches· Evening Jewelry· Cuff Links· Tie' Bars· Belt Buckles
Available wherever fine jewelry is sold
----------------------------------------------------------
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with hand detail!
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At I. Magnin & Co., Pacific Coast
Neiman-Marcus Co., Dallas, Texas
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Woolf Bros., Kansas City, Mo.
For name of store nearest you, please write:
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----------------------------
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