Eline Vere (72 page)

Such thinking is present also in
Eline Vere
. Paul van Raat is as silly and selfish as young men often are, indeed maybe more so than many because of the wealth and lofty social position into which he was born, the very thought of which makes him proud and a touch reckless. But he is also warm-hearted and observant of others, and through the love he feels for Frédérique and the marriage with her that he will sustain, he can not only repay his debts to society but make it a better place (this being fittingly emblemised in his becoming Mayor of a comparatively small provincial community). But Eline will make no contribution of this kind whatsoever. In common with Tolstoy's Anna, what she will bequeath to the society that has produced and nurtured her is a death that at once distresses and disconcerts it. Why? What went wrong?

Eline's flaw is
not
, like the Russian tragic heroine's, related to intensity of sexual reaction. If anything Eline strikes us as deficient in normal erotic feelings. The baritone Fabrice, Otto for the greater part (she has to be cajoled into accepting him as fiancé), Vincent, the mysterious figure of Lawrence St Clare – there is no evidence that she is sexually aroused by any of them. Nor is there much evidence that men generally, while admiring her beauty and her social grace, respond to her physically, as – to take examples from literature – men, including her own husband, do to Flaubert's Emma Bovary, or those in Christiania's élite do to Hedda Gabler in Ibsen's virtually contemporaneous play (1890). What attractions Eline feels for the men in her life, what emotions they have brought out in her very quickly dissolve into day-dream. Fabrice – whose picture she will buy for her albums, like any starstruck shop-girl – scarcely has any reality for her off the boards of the stage on which he sings Gounod. Vincent's secretive disposition, compounded by his insecurities of money and health, she soon distorts into a novelette invalid's yearning for love, which she could somehow in a fantasy-world encounter.
Even Otto, for whom she does know something not unlike love, becomes for her chiefly an embodiment of masculine good sense on which she will be able eternally to depend.

Unlike Emma Bovary or Hedda Gabler, however, Eline is not unintelligent or even notably unintellectual, nor – as Ibsen, in his preparatory notes on his play, says of Hedda – conventional. Couperus is insistent that Eline's English is positively good, and her French is clearly proficient also: she reads as well as speaks both languages. She is interested in the arts, even if she does have an inordinate admiration for Ouida (!), is cognisant of cultures outside the Netherlands, and, if anything, is rather too much at ease among the bohemian, heterodox folk whom her uncle Daniel and his younger wife, Eliza, take up with. Her discussions with Vincent might not impress a professional philosopher any more than they please her irascible sister, Betsy, but they show her to have, for all her languor, a certain liveliness of mind, a wish to explore further than the bounds of the immediately perceptible. It is hard to imagine the other young members of her circle engaging in them. Furthermore she has the ability – often, admittedly, coming to the fore too late or with insufficient force – to stand back from her fantasies and even her behaviour. (Think of her sad, bemused awareness of how badly she can behave to kind old Madame van Raat.) Likewise, she has the ability to discern the sham even when it is she herself who, through her heightened theatrical tendencies, is doing the shamming. When, in her despair, she turns to church-going, she can see through her own religiosity – so akin to the swooning over opera which led her to idolise the sorry, shabby Fabrice – and also through the hypocrisies of her fellow worshippers.

No, Eline's tragedy – for it is nothing less – is not the consequence of her having too much erotic passion in her or too little sharpened an intellect. It is that she has too abundant and fertile an imagination in a society which gravely undervalues this quality, indeed scarcely even pays lip-service to it. Imagination is not an attribute one could ascribe to any other character in the book – with the possible exception of Eline's shadow-self, Vincent, and perhaps Frédérique, in her own frustrated way. Her milieu is one of fundamentally practical, pragmatic persons, sensible once they have put
youthful idleness behind them, incurious, rarely looking beyond their own set, dabbling in the arts (as Paul van Raat does) while unaware that these have profounder purposes than amusement, worried about money in a household-expenditure kind of way, but never seriously discomposed by current affairs – and accordingly disinclined ever to challenge the status quo.

Eline surely emanates from that part of Couperus's own experience which made him, in a vital respect, an outsider in the social world in which he was so accepted. The Couperus family had a long connection with the Dutch East Indies. Louis Couperus's own father, John Ricus Couperus, was born there in 1816. In 1872, when Louis was only nine years old, Couperus senior took his family away from The Hague back to the Indies, where they had property, and they did not return to Holland until 1878, when the boy was fifteen. Couperus was therefore something of a stranger in those circles which were so open to him, and in which he was expected to have a role. And his kinship here with spoilt, orphaned Eline becomes the clearer when we realise what a pampered, luxurious life he knew as a child in Batavia (Java's capital) as a child of its ruling class. What he also was aware of in the Javanese life all round him was its rich vein of inherited lore, its reliance on instinct rather than rational precepts, its attention to natural phenomena which the folk-mind read as emanations of mysterious powers, often dark, hostile and running contrary to humankind's conscious intentions or will. Such knowledge he could not have gained remaining in The Hague.

In one of Couperus's greatest subsequent novels
De Stille Kracht
(
The Hidden Force
, 1900) Couperus depicts Van Oudijck, a Dutchman who holds the eminent position of Resident of a Javanese province: kindly, conscientious, ready to be a paterfamilias with all the responsibilities and demonstrations of affection that entails, even prepared to face up to his own sensuality. But he is lacking in imagination, and vigorously suppresses any signs of that quality which tentatively surface. His failure here – demonstrated in his dealings with the mother of the Javanese Regent, or chief nobleman – has dire consequences for many, but before these have become fully apparent, he and those close to him experience hideous, terrifying manifestations of hostile occult spirits, whom the superstitious
local folk can name but whom the educated Dutch refuse even to acknowledge until far too late. These are emanations from the shadow-land, the vast region of the collective unconscious which the colonialists have chosen first to despise and then to deliberately ignore.

Eline Vere is thus of the East Indies without being aware of this. The ‘ghost' she sees behind her picture of life with Otto, the fantasies she embroiders round the decadent figure of Vincent, the terrifying cavalcade of images that haunt her on her last day of life – these relate intimately to what torments Van Oudijck and his wife in
The Hidden Force
.

The importance of the East Indies to Louis Couperus is evidenced in his marrying his cousin Elisabeth Baud, whose family had distinguished itself in Indies service, and in the couple's living there from March 1899 to February 1900, returning again for four months during their long travels of October 1921–October 1922. Of the generous cast in
Eline Vere
the irrepressible Etienne van Erlevoort is tempted to join the colonial administration but in the end prefers to stay at home. But there is one very important character in the novel connected with Java – the ill and indigent Jeanne Ferelijn, whose husband is on poorly paid furlough and who pines in what she sees as the drabness of Holland for the richness of her Indies, whither she returns and where she dies. Significantly when Eline, in her hysterical passion, flees the Van Raats' house at night, it is to Jeanne she goes, Jeanne with whom she was warmly friendly when they were both schoolgirls, and who now in her illness will console and sustain her. And when later Eline learns of Jeanne's death, she is dreadfully upset; indeed we can see her reception of this news as the most authentic moment of her life. This then is Eline's tragedy: to have been born with too large a supply of imagination in a society too focused on the cash nexus and on living comfortably. Her neighbours and kinsfolk in The Hague represent only too well the dominant culture of their times extending from Gilded Age America to Queen Victoria's Jubilee in Britain to France on the eve of the Dreyfus affair.

. . .

Tolstoy was not the only influence on the keen, probing mind of the young Couperus. And of Tolstoyanism itself, with its emphasis on the word of the Gospels and on the quietist faith of ordinary folk, I can see only mild manifestations. Mesdames van Erlevoort and van Raat are undogmatically pious, the lives of both women being dominated by a warm, compassionate, maternal feeling commendably inclusive of others outside their immediate family, and therefore exemplary. (See the treatment of Eline by both women.) Couperus tenderly evokes simple country church-going for us, indeed his whole portrayal of Gelderland life as more conducive to ethical health and spiritual contentment than the sophisticated urban round of The Hague could loosely be described as Tolstoyan. Similarly his preference for the good-hearted in all circumstances – whether represented by indolent Henk or hard-working Jeanne Ferelijn – relates to Tolstoy's admiration for certain of
his
characters, Count Nicholas Rostov and Princess Mary in
War and Peace
for example. But all these can, and probably should, be seen mainly as expressions of temperamental priorities and preoccupations, as well as of the contemporary fear that the age, in its obsession with productivity and wealth, had brought about rather too radical a severance from the natural life. As discernible as that to Tolstoy is Couperus's debt – one is tempted to call it ideological – to Émile Zola (1842–1902). By the time of
Eline Vere
's appearance fifteen novels in Zola's great twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart sequence had appeared, its ambition to show, through two interconnected families, both the laws of human heredity and the development (illustrating these laws) of France up to the fall of the Second Empire. Among these books were such influential and powerful works as
L'Assommoir
(1877),
Germinal
(1885) and
La Terre
(1887) – while a sixteenth came out the same year as Couperus's first novel,
Le Rêve
(1888).

Heredity is most evidently a preoccupation of
Eline Vere
. Great emphasis is placed on the two sisters' inheritance from their parents. Madame Vere was, we are told, an intimidating, unlovable woman, and from her come Betsy's blunted sensibility and her bossiness. Eline, as she herself believes, inherits from her father, a refined, dreamy, weak-willed, indecisive person. So far so convincing, but,
graduate of the school of Zola as he felt himself, Couperus wishes us to go further. Both Eline and nephew Vincent exhibit the late Mr Vere's fatal lack of robustness, which appears also, modified, in his younger brother, Daniel, with his fondness for luxurious surroundings and for the company of bohemian riffraff, flâneurs and useless expatriates. Eline's readiness to fall in with her uncle and aunt's way of living is a manifestation of her own share of this regrettable, determining trait, clearly associated in Couperus's mind – as in Zola's and, later, Thomas Mann's – with the make-up of the artist. Only a family, and by extension a society, in decline devotes itself to art, would seem the inference.

Take by way of contrast the case of Paul van Raat, a virile young man and lively, despite those bouts of laziness and dissipation ascribable to the phase of life he is passing through. Paul, at two important points in the novel, is much taken with being an artist. It isn't, we realise, so much the case of his not having enough talent to become one (though that statement is true enough), as his having rather too healthy a physical inheritance. The Van Erlevoort clan into which he befittingly marries is clearly an excellent genetic pool; descriptions of the youngest generation abound in tributes to their vitality and physical attractiveness. This can be darkly counterpointed by the case of Paul's own nephew. His brother Henk has a child, Ben, by a Vere, and neither Henk's rude health nor Betsy's maternally received energy can prevent the likeable, indeed the imaginative little boy from being a backward child – a predicament poignantly rendered. Is this then another reason why Eline feels she cannot, must not marry Otto? She could not give that splendid specimen of normality a satisfactory child who would one day himself continue a strong line.

For me this aspect of
Eline Vere
is its least convincing, perhaps because it is not sufficiently thought out. Moreover – very unlike any production of Zola's – the novel does not allocate to the figures in the foreground any convincing background connecting them to society in the wider sense of the term. The occupations of Paul and Otto, who do indeed become responsible public servants, are perfunctorily rendered; they interest us because they fit into the overall formal pattern, rather than because they have much validity
in their own right. With regard to the specific instances in the novel of biological inheritance, Couperus has nothing like Zola's command of detail, his intensity of interest in, and insight into, specific cases. Ben van Raat's backwardness, like Eline's concluding helpless capitulation to psychic and physical illness, smacks of literature – if aided by sincere human sympathy – rather than life studied scientifically by the author himself. But there is surely another factor at work here.

Though Couperus found in his wife Elisabeth a veritable model of companionship and unsparing support, their union is generally assumed to have been a
marriage blanc
. The very idea of procreation horrified Couperus whose erotic inclinations – and practise – were, by general agreement now among experts on the writer, homosexual. Thus Eline's increasing non-progenitive detachment from her society can be seen as a correlative for Couperus's homosexual position. And homosexuality must stand behind the novel's most baffling couple, Vincent Vere and Lawrence St Clare.