Book review - Rosshalde

Hermann Hesse’s short novel Rosshalde (1914) is told from an omniscient point of view. The painter Johann Veraguth bought the property and land Rosshalde and built a studio where he could avoid his wife, Adele. His older son was sent off to boarding school and his young son Pierre, aged seven, rarely crossed the studio’s threshold. Hesse was a painter and this book possesses autobiographic elements: his marriage began to disintegrate, partly due to his wife Maria’s mental issues. However, it’s quite possible his obsession with writing might have been a factor. Certainly, his character Veraguth only seemed content when painting.  ‘… he recaptured the industrious tension which tolerates no digressions and concentrates all our energies on the work in hand.’ (p11) He was incapable of perceiving his poverty of existence: he strove to perfect his works of art, yet ‘bungled his attempts at love and life’ (p73)

Gradually we learn that he made difficult demands on his wife, nothing specific, but it harmed their relationship deeply. ‘… though she had ceased to love her husband she still regarded the loss of his affection as a sadly incomprehensible and undeserved misfortune.’ (p13)  He admits, ‘I kept demanding the thing that Adele was unable to give…’ (p47)

Hesse illuminates scenes with a painter’s eye: ‘The little lake lay almost black in the total silence, the feeble light lay on the water like an infinitely thin membrane or a layer of fine dust.’ (p3) He was also a student of nature: ‘… the declining sun shone horizontally through the tree trunks and golden flames were kindled on the glassy wings of the dragonflies.’ (p27) And, in the drizzle, ‘the wet smooth trunks of the beech trees glistened black like cast iron.’ (p65)

A catalyst for change is the arrival of his friend Otto, who lives in India. He brings with him many captivating photographs of the exotic land.

[An aside: Strange coincidences abound in my selection of reading, it seems. I read March the Ninth by R.C. Hutchinson which concerned partisans in wartime Yugoslavia; next I read Alastair MacLean’s Partisans, about the same subject; yet random choice, entirely unplanned. Then I read Legacy by James Steel, where one of the protagonists is called Otto, and here in this book we have Otto!]

A friend has observed that the phrase ‘eyes narrowed’ is overused and perhaps not quite accurate. Here, Hesse avoids falling into that common trap: ‘Pierre froze. He closed his eyes except for a small slit and glared through his long lashes.’ The son’s relationship with the manservant Robert is at times amusing. Another writerly bugbear is ‘the movement of eyes, as if levitating entities in themselves – when it should be described as a gaze. Even Hesse (or his translator) succumbs: ‘(she) let her eyes roam idly over the flowers, the table, the room…’

Hesse deplored the strident nationalism leading up to the First World War; in protest against German militarism he exiled himself to Switzerland in 1919. While on a vacation at home, the eldest son Albert says he hates his father. His mother retorts: ‘Hate! Don’t use such words, they distort everything.’ As true today, as it was then.

It is quite possible that Hesse had seen or read J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904). He has Pierre say: ‘… when old people get older and older, they die in the end. I’d rather stay the way I am, and sometimes I’d like to be able to fly, and fly around the trees way up high, and in between the clouds. Then I’d laugh at everybody!’ (p39)

Illness in the home affects the family. Adele’s ‘balance had been shaken, she felt as though she were sitting on a limb that was being sawed off.’ (103)  This is a turning point for the painter. ‘It was as though his life had become once more a limpid stream or river, driving resolutely in the direction assigned to it, whereas hitherto it had stagnated in the swampy lake of indecision.’

How he makes his decision, and what it is, is annoyingly hinted at in the blurb; an unforgiveable spoiler. Indeed, it reflects Hesse’s own actions of 1911. Whatever loss Veraguth experienced, he had his art.

Hesse wrote his last book in 1943, The Glass Bead Game; he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946; he died in 1962, aged 85.

Make a Date – 9, 14 and 26 October

Some time ago I published a regular monthly column linking a set selection of dates in history. The series was popular. I'm busy coordinating the articles into book form. As today is 9 October, here are a number of linked events for that date plus two other October dates. To avoid repetition, I've simply indicated the relevant date in brackets. The three dates for this article are:

9, 14 and 26 October

This month (26) saw the British military occupation of Iraq end – in 1946. Obviously, governments don’t refer to history these days! Peace in the Middle East has been an elusive dream for a long time, and seems to be further away than ever. As far as this month goes, because he had made peace with Israel (and gained a Nobel Prize for his efforts), the President of Egypt was assassinated by members of the Islamic Jihad in 1981 and one week later President Hosni Mubarak was elected (14) President.

On the same day in 1994 Palestine leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (14). Twelve days later, Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty (26).

A year later to the day, Israeli secret service agents from Mossad assassinated the Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shikaki in his hotel in Malta (26).

And still people die in the Middle East – and elsewhere in the world – because of the politics and religion affecting that region’s instability.

Politicians tinkered with the House of Lords and in 1999 the Lords voted to end the right of hereditary peers to vote in the upper chamber of Parliament, bringing to a close hundreds of years of tradition (26).

Lord Home of Hirsel (Sir Alec Douglas-Home), the ex-Prime Minister, died (9) in 1995. He was a keen cricketer and played against Argentina for three of his first-class games for the MCC during their South American tour in the 1920s. On retiring as PM, he became the president of the MCC in 1966.

Cricketer Charlie Parker was born (14) in 1882 and is the third highest wicket taker in the history of first class cricket, behind only Wilfred Rhodes and Tich Freeman. During his career with England he took 3,278 wickets and scored 7,951 runs.

Running of a different type is the 1,500 metres race – which was first run under 3 minutes 30 seconds by Steve Cram, who was born (14) in 1960. At one time he seemed unbeatable, gaining world records for the 1,500, 2,000 metre races and the mile, all within nineteen days in 1985. His record for the mile stood for eight years.

Sportsman Matthew le Tissier, who played soccer for Southampton and England, was born (14) in Guernsey in 1968. A little over a hundred years earlier, in 1863, the Football Association was formed (26).

 
An association of a different kind was cemented by the marriage (9) of Louis XII of France and Mary Tudor, the daughter of our own Henry VII in 1514, striving to get a male heir. They were not successful and he died the following year. The Salic Law did not permit either of his two daughters by an earlier marriage to succeed to his throne so his cousin succeeded him instead to become King of France.
 
The Royal Charter, a steam clipper, was wrecked (26) by a severe hurricane off Anglesey in 1859. Over 450 souls died.

Sixty years earlier, HMS Lutine was transporting over a million pounds of bullion to the Hamburg banks when she encountered heavy gales and off the Dutch coast she became a total loss, with all but one of over 240 passengers and crew dying.

Lutine bell, Lloyd's - Wikipedia commons

 

Several attempts were made in succeeding years to recover the gold but most of it remains unsalved to this day. The ship’s bell was found almost sixty years later and was placed in the Underwriting Room at Lloyd’s. Traditionally, the bell was struck once when a ship was lost and twice when an overdue ship returned. A crack has developed so the bell is only rung to commemorate disasters, such as the atrocities of 11 September 2001, the Asian Tsunami, the London terrorist bombings and annually at the end of the Armistice Day silence.
 
HMS Royal Oak was sunk (14) by German U-boat U-47 in 1939, six years to the day after Germany withdrew from The League of Nations (14).

German businessman Oskar Schindler has been immortalised in the 1982 book Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally, filmed by Steven Spielberg as Schindler’s List. He saved over 1100 Jews from the concentration camps and died (9) in 1974.

 
Jewish-born Hannah Arendt fled her home in Germany in 1933 and lived in France until she had to elude the Nazis again in 1940, this time with her husband and mother. She was helped by American diplomat Hiram Bingham IV, who illegally issued US visas to her and about 2,500 other Jewish refugees. She was born (14) in 1906 and brought her considerable intellect to bear on the philosophical conundrums posed by the twentieth century and attended several US universities.

The Commission of National Education was the first recorded ministry of education and was formed (14) in Poland in 1773.

Education and intelligence could be the death of you in Pol Pot’s regime in the 1970s; ‘intellectuals’ – if you could write, you fell into that category! - were massacred in their thousands. The Khmer Republic was proclaimed (9) in Cambodia in 1970 and civil war was waged until 1975 when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were victorious, renaming the country Democratic Kampuchea. His guerilla fighters and later his government were responsible for the deaths of over two million Cambodians in the Killing Fields.

 
Guerilla fighter Che Guevara was captured in 1967 in Bolivia and the day afterwards he was executed without trial (9). Guevara is variously a socialist revolutionary icon or a terrorist and butcher. He was in at the beginning with Castro and founded Cuba’s labour camps and state-endorsed executions and mismanaged the Cuban economy, overseeing the near-collapse of sugar production, the failure of industrialization, and the introduction of rationing—all this in what had been one of Latin America’s four most economically successful countries. Many Cuban exiles have said that their country could not afford another Che Guevara. The Left still idolise him, however.
 
Cuban musician Chucho Valdés was born (9) in 1941 and in 1967 co-founded Orquesta de Música Moderna with his compatriots guitarist Carlos Emilio Morales, reedsman Paquito D’Rivera, trumpeter Arturo Sandoval and singer-percussionist Oscar Valdés. In 1973 eight members of that orchestra formed Irakere, which in 1978 became the first Castro-era Cuban ensemble to obtain a contract with an American-based record label. Irakere's debut on Columbia was a Grammy winner.
 
The Cuban Missile crisis began in 1962 when a U-2 flight (14) over Cuba took photographs of Soviet nuclear weapons being installed on the island. These definitely were Weapons of Mass Destruction, no doubt about it, and the world teetered on the brink of war.

U2 plane on USS America - Wikipedia commons

Another momentous flight was that of the Bell X-1 which Chuck Yeager flew faster than the speed of sound (14), the first man to do so in level flight in 1947.

Eleven years later, in 1958, Pan Am made the first commercial flight of the Boeing 707 from New York to Paris (26). [The Pan Am airline collapsed in 1991.]

In 2001 internal US Delta Flight 458 was an early symptom of terrorist paranoia which we’re still seeing today, some years later. The aircraft was diverted (14) and passengers were taken off while officials investigated a report that two ‘Middle Eastern men’ were making threats in a foreign language. The two were actually Orthodox Jews praying... Not a suicide bomber in sight.

In 1984 there was one strange suicide when John D McCollum shot himself after spending a day listening to Ozzy Osbourne records (26); a law-suit was later filed by his parents over the song ‘Suicide Solution’ but the case was thrown out.

 
Osbourne’s wife Sharon was born (9) in 1952, the same year as the poet Andrew Motion (26).

American poet e.e. cummings was born (14) in 1894. Fellow American writer Harold Robbins, author of The Carpetbaggers (1961) and A Stone for Danny Fisher (1952), seemed to invent the modern blockbuster with its sex and violence; he died (14) in 1997. In complete contrast was the author A.A. Milne’s book Winnie-the-Pooh, which was first published (14) in 1926. An Italian author who wrote political works as well as stories for children, Carlo Collodi died (26) at the age of sixty-four in 1890. Collodi created Pinocchio, the puppet without any strings.

 
Someone who has had a string of popular hit singles is Cliff Richard, who was born (14) in 1940, the same day and year (14) as actor Christopher Timothy, the actor best known for his portrayal of the vet, James Herriot.
 
Also born (9) in the same year was John Lennon, musician and songwriter. The term ‘Beatlemania’ was coined (14) in 1963 to describe the scenes at the previous night’s performance of The Beatles on the TV show Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium. In early 1964 The Beatles appeared at the Palladium with Alma Cogan, the singer who had ‘a laugh in her voice’. Tragically, cancer killed her (26) in 1966 at the age of thirty-four; she was also known for wearing amazing dresses.

Alma Cogan

American fashion designer Ralph Lauren was born (14) in 1939. One wonders what he would have thought of the sumptuary law passed (14) in 1651 in Massachusetts forbidding poor people from adopting excessive styles of dress - the law-makers were filled with ‘utter detestation’ concerning those people of ‘mean condition’ who disported themselves as ladies and gentlemen by ‘wearing gold or silver lace and silk or tiffany hoods’. What a silly law!
 
What would PM David Cameron make of that law? He was born (9) in 1966, fifty years after Francois Mitterrand, President of France, who was born (26) in 1916 (he died in January 1996). Full circle again, we started with politics so we might as well end on that subject!

[PS - yes, I know, 14 October was included in the 1, 14 and 31 October item too! Well, a lot happened on that day in history!]

Make a date - 1 December etc

Some time ago I published a regular monthly column linking a set selection of dates in history. The series was popular. I'm busy coordinating the articles into book form. As today is 1 December, here are a number of linked events for that date plus two other December dates. To avoid repetition, I've simply indicated the relevant date in brackets. The three dates for this article are:

1, 10 and 24 December

The sale of dates greatly increases over the Christmas period and this month you could easily get a surfeit of dates. Still, they’re good for you. Unlike lampreys, apparently.

Henry I died (1) from food poisoning in 1135, having had a surfeit of lampreys in Normandy.

It begs the question, though, why would anyone want to eat even one lamprey?

A lamprey resembles an eel in outward appearance but is actually a jawless fish that has no scales and has cartilage instead of bones and is sort of in between a vertebrate and an invertebrate; it’s a parasite and sucks the blood of other fish.

When Britain actually had a fishing fleet, we fought three cod wars against Iceland - 1958, 1972 and 1975 - all over fishing rights and the limits of territorial water; my ship HMS Mermaid was holed by an Icelandic vessel packed with concrete; the damage control ratings and chippy (carpenter) did a fantastic job of shoring up the big gash in our side. Iceland (1) became a self-governing kingdom in 1918, though it remained part of Denmark.

On the same day in 1835, one of Denmark’s most famous citizens, Hans Christian Andersen, published (1) his first book of fairy tales. Twelve years later in 1847 Andersen visited England for the first time and was a great success in society. Charles Dickens invited him to stay for a fortnight but Andersen ignored the writer’s hints to leave and stayed a further four weeks! Shortly afterwards, Dickens published David Copperfield in which Uriah Heep is supposed to be modelled on Andersen.

 

That same year, one of Dickens’s contemporary writers published Vanity Fair, set at the time of the Napoleonic wars. William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel was an immediate success. Thackeray died (24) in 1863, leaving the world forever with one of literature’s most fascinating immoral female characters, Becky Sharp.

A particularly sharp operator was Howard Hughes, who was born (24) in 1905. One of Hughes’ lovers was film star Ava Gardner; she was born (24) on the same day as Hughes, but in 1922. At one time Howard Hughes was the richest man in the world. He was a film writer and director, pilot, designer of the half-cup bra for his Hollywood discovery Jane Russell and in later life a hypochondriac recluse. An excellent film about him is The Aviator.

In essence, flight defies gravity. Which Isaac Newton would be familiar with, considering that in 1684 he began to propound (10) his theories about the motion of celestial bodies culminating in his Principia, published in 1687, considered by many to be the greatest scientific book ever written.

Newton led to the law of universal gravitation which explained a wide range of previously unrelated phenomena: the eccentric orbits of comets, the tides and their variations, the precession of the Earth’s axis, and motion of the Moon as perturbed by the gravity of the Sun.

Czech astronomer and physician Tadéas Hájek was born (1) in 1525. He published his studies of a supernova in the constellation Cassiopeia in 1572 and counted among his contacts such luminaries as Tycho Brahe, Kepler and John Dee. Many regarded him as the greatest astronomer of his time.

And, like Dee, he was also fascinated with astrology, which wasn't unusual for scientists of the period. A crater of the moon and an asteroid have been named after Hájek.

A fascinating aspect of scientific research in our past is that these men - and women - were able to span several sciences at once, as well as philosophy. Today, where science is now ‘pure’, any moral sense - perhaps supplied by philosophy - sometimes seems missing.

 
The thoroughly amoral Lord Byron was the father of Ada Lovelace, one of the earliest computer programmers. She was born (10) in 1815 and a few weeks later the poet abandoned her mother and child. Byron went abroad and when Ada was eight he died in Greece while fighting for freedom from the Turks. Her mother brought up Ada to be a mathematician, what she thought was the antithesis of a poet.
 
In her teens, Ada met Charles Babbage and helped him with his Analytical Engine and her writings on the subject became the premier text on what became known as computer programming.

Ada’s prescient comments included predictions that such a calculating machine might be used to compose complex music, to produce graphics, and would be used for both practical and scientific use. Cancer claimed her in 1852, at exactly the same age as her father had died - thirty-six. At her request she was buried next to her father. Poetic, that.

The poet Emily Dickinson was born (10) in 1830 and lived twenty years longer than Ada. While Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends. She is now almost universally considered to be one of the most important American poets.

 
American-born expat Lady Astor, was the first female MP, taking her seat (1) in 1919.
 
In the same year the League of Nations was formed but ultimately collapsed due to the depredations of the fascist powers in the 1930s; it was replaced by the United Nations in October 1945.

Three years later, the UN adopted (10) the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It seemed like a good idea until lawyers got hold of it.

Certain inalienable rights were not being granted in the Land of the Free. In 1865 several Confederate veterans formed (24) the Ku Klux Klan to enforce white supremacy by terrorising and killing Negroes.

You probably recall reading about the seamstress Rosa Parks refusing (1) to give up her bus seat to a white man and was arrested for violating Montgomery, Alabama’s racial segregation laws. She was charged and fined in 1955. Five days later the Montgomery Improvement Association was formed, with a young Baptist minister as its leader - Martin Luther King Jr.

Another Martin Luther was a monk and theologian who in 1517 nailed to his church door 95 theses, criticising the avarice of the Church of Rome, notably in selling indulgences which instilled fear into the people so they would pay for escape from eternal damnation. The new printing presses widely distributed Luther’s theses, heralding the beginning of the Reformation. Rome responded in 1520 with the papal bull Exsurge Domine, which warned Luther of excommunication unless he recanted. Luther’s response was to burn this papal bull (10) outside the Elster Gate of Wittenberg.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: a black bull blocked (24) the Cross Harbour Tunnel in Hong Kong for three hours in 1985. On the same day (24) in 1941 Hong Kong fell to the Japanese Imperial Army.

Fourteen days earlier in the same year (10), Japanese forces landed in the Philippines and captured Guam and sank HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, which sent shock waves through Britain.

The Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune appeared in almost 170 films, including The Seven Samurai and a strange western called Red Sun starring Charles Bronson and Ursula Andress. Mifune died (24) in 1997, aged seventy-seven.

 

Born (24) in the same year as Mifune, Evgeniya Rudneva, a Hero of the Soviet Union, flew 645 night combat missions during the Second World War, perishing on her last sortie. She’d promised her first bomb against the Nazis after they’d bombed her old university’s buildings for the faculty of mechanics and mathematics.
 
Another brave Russian was Andrei Sakharov who spoke out for civil liberties and reform in the Soviet Union. He was awarded (10) the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, which was collected by his wife Yelena Bonner since he wasn’t allowed out of his own country.

Yet another spouse who received (10) the Peace Prize (for 1983) was Danuta, on behalf of her husband Lech Walesa, the face and voice behind the Polish Solidarity movement.

Other Peace Prize winners (10) include Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, Dr Albert Schweitzer in 1953, Menachim Begin and Anwar Sadat in 1978 and Desmund Tutu in 1984.

As you’ve probably gathered by now, the Swedish Nobel Prize Ceremony official flag day is on December 10 in remembrance of the Swedish founder, Alfred Nobel, who died (10) in Italy in 1896. He invented dynamite to facilitate the building and construction industries. During his lifetime Nobel took out over 350 patents - dynamite was patented in 1867 - and all he ever wanted was to be of service to mankind. Indeed, many great engineering works would not have been possible without his invention - not least, the Suez and Panama canals.

A year after his death, it was revealed that he left the bulk of his considerable estate to a fund, the interest on which was to be awarded annually to those people whose work had been of the greatest benefit to mankind. The Nobel Foundation began on 29 June 1900 and the first Nobel Prizes were awarded (10) in 1901.

Nobel's high ideals are the reverse of those exhibited by his countrymen in 1715 when Swedish troops occupied Norway (24).

This wasn’t the only Christmas Eve invasion, of course. The Soviet invaded Afghanistan on the same day in 1979, ostensibly to support the Marxist government. It wasn’t all gloom and doom on Christmas Eve during war. In 1914 the ‘Christmas Truce’ began (24) during the First World War. In successive years it never caught on with the Top Brass as they thought the ordinary soldiers from both sides were fraternising. That would never do - bad for morale and all that.

On the same day (24) in 2003 cowardly terrorists were thwarted in their evil designs in Spain. ETA’s attempt to detonate 50kg of explosives inside Madrid’s busy Chamartin Station was defused by Spanish police. You can’t help wondering if this incident suggested (admittedly wrongly) to the authorities that the 11 March, 2004 bomb perpetrators were also ETA rather than al Queda. On such questions do political parties fall.

Independence from Spain isn’t new, naturally. In 1640 Portugal regained its independence (1) from Spain and Joao IV of Portugal became that country’s king.

And on the same day (1) seven years earlier the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia of Spain died. She and her husband Albert were patrons of such artists as Rubens and Brueghel and after her husband’s death she joined the Order of the Sisters of St Clare and became the governor of the Netherlands until her death.

 
Isabella of England was the daughter of King John. She married Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor in 1235 and he kept her hidden away. When her brother Richard passed through Sicily on his return from the Crusades he had to beg Frederick to see Isabella just to speak for a few moments. Isabella gave birth to four children, dying in childbirth with her fifth (1). Apparently, Frederick buried her beside one of his Saracen mistresses.

We started with royalty and so we’ll end with them too - with what is probably yet another surfeit of dates - calendar dates.