High infidelity
JANE O’GRADY Effi Briest By Theodor Fontane, translated by Walter Wallich, with an afterword by Charlie Lee-potter Persephone Books £12.00 Thank goodness for Persephone Books, which has had the good sense to bring out a handsome new edition of the late 19th century novel Effi Briest. Although we have numerous translations of French and Russian novels among our classics, we tend to neglect German literature. Since the Huguenot-german writer Theodor Fontane is not a familiar name, it is Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, rather than poor Effi, who spring to mind as the pre-eminent heroines of the novel of adultery.
First published in 1895, Effi Briest is set in southern Germany at a period when upper-class parents are still uncontentiously arranging their daughters’ marriages; duelling is the honourable response to being cuckolded; convention suffocates spontaneity – all this more than a century after Rousseau and the cult of primitivism.
Literary critics uniformly insist that Fontane is criticising the social, sexual and military mores of his society, but he often seems exasperatingly distanced and ambivalent. Effi (17 when the novel begins) is, for all her wild exuberance, perfectly docile in accepting marriage to a man of 39. In the last chapter she recants what she has said about her husband being cold and cruel, instead declaring him quite justified in bringing up their child to disown her. She once rode high on her swing ‘with the feeling, “any moment now I shall fall”, giving her a prickly sensation and delicious shudder of danger’, but her adultery happens off-stage, and is so discreet that it is only seven years later that we can be certain it happened at all. There is no blood flowing like warm milk, no shivering leaves and flickering brightness, as in Emma’s seduction by Rodolphe.
There is no equivalent to Anna’s lustful voluptuousness or to her tormented secret visit to her son, Seryozha. When that scene was performed on the radio, I knew that women all over England were, like me, holding on to their sinks and crying – but tears are miles away when reading Effi Briest.
Yet, in a way, it is all the more telling that Effi’s infidelity is so bloodless, that she is never strongly, ineluctably drawn to her lover, and that the reunion with her daughter is so disappointingly flat and unemotional. Like Emma, she is unfaithful out of boredom; but, unlike Emma, she is sufficiently honest and self-reflective to recognise that, and to feel guilty about her lack of guilt.
Both Fontane’s ambiguity and his detachment are part of his harsh realism. Effi denounces herself for her lack of principles and, if her husband is stultified by his, he is also shown to be as kind as the limits of his character, intelligence and conformity will allow.
Like Anna, Effi has her panting train – one that she watches from the station but that leaves her dazed, homesick and ‘brimming with tears’. The real tragedy of this skilfully nuanced novel is that a young woman’s vitality, cleverness and incipient passion are not so much suppressed as never allowed to emerge. My only cavil with Persephone is that they have used an abridged translation.