Read Lauren Groff's Foreword to Ann Schlee's 'Rhine Journey'

Lauren Groff on Ann Schlee’s “graceful, economical, and emotionally acute” historical novel, Rhine Journey

By Lauren Groff

Excerpted from Rhine Journey, by Ann Schlee

A German summer is a quick, shimmering, lively thing. The winter is often so long and gray that, by April, one begins to despair, to believe that the gloom may in fact be permanent, that the sun might never find the energy to rouse itself for more than a few grim hours before it falls back weakly below the horizon once more. But when spring does at last arrive, it’s with a thunderclap, operatically large and wild and loud, the Gesamtkunstwerk of the great eternal genius of nature. The landscape that had been so leaden and dour goes green nearly overnight, the sun gathers its courage and shines down, and in human hearts the heaviness of those long, cold months begins to lift and lighten.

In Ann Schlee’s first novel for adults, Rhine Journey, Charlotte Morrison’s story is that of a German awakening. As befits our meek, unmarried middle-aged English protagonist in the year 1851, Charlotte’s revolution is less external than it is internal; not a physical blooming into flower, but a subtle and total derangement of understanding. Charlotte is accompanying her brother, the stern and pious Reverend Charles Morrison; his poisonously passive-aggressive, beautiful, and sickly wife Marion; and their teenaged daughter Ellie on a voyage down the Rhine. Charlotte has just recently come into some money: for twenty years she was the housekeeper to one Mr. Ransome at Ditchbourne, and he left her a small fortune in his will. Now she is financially independent for the first time in her life, though still without an occupation or a place to live when she returns home to England. In Germany, she finds herself expected to act as something a little less than a family member and a little more than a servant, the minder of her brother’s baggage in public, Ellie’s companion and governess, and Marion’s lady’s maid. If Charlotte does not baulk at this humbling expectation, it’s because she is so out of practice in seeing herself as anyone’s equal that she welcomes service as her due.

The book opens as the family arrives in Coblenz. At the moment the boat docks, Charlotte sees a man whose face sends a terrible jolt of pain to her heart. She has mistaken him for someone she loved when she was very young; a miller named Desmond Fermer, whom her family felt was too far below her to agree to their marriage. She knows this stranger is not her former love—he is close to her own age, and Fermer would by now be in his sixties—but when, to her dismay, this man, Edward Newman, and his family begin to show up at the same hotels and restaurants as the Morrisons, and they strike up an acquaintance, Charlotte can’t help from seeing him dually, both as himself and as the love she lost. The echo of Charlotte’s ill-fated love affair gives rise to an onslaught of memories. The sensitive nerves of girlhood reawaken, and she feels an ache she can’t soothe away. She remembers most vividly a moment when, in the terrifying, exhilarating first transport of her love long ago, in lieu of Fermer, she kissed the large soft face of a blooming peony: 

A full moon had enchanted all colour from the garden. Freed from its bright distractions she had felt intensely all around her the life of plants, which seemed a cold moist persistent thing, gripping and sucking its survival, far more akin, after all, to the moon and the sun. She had felt drawn in among them, had stooped to smell the peony and, feeling its cool vigorous flesh brush her cheek, had pressed lips among the petals and kissed them repeatedly.

This passage is so true to the experience of the deep wild emotion of adolescence that I felt, upon encountering it, a jolt of nostalgia. Who among us, once so very young and trembling with new love, hasn’t kissed something soft and beautiful and safe, instead of the far more terrifying and longed-for lips of the beloved?

The writing in Rhine Journey is always taut and wonderful like this, never showy, gesturing clearly to Charlotte’s emotional pitch even when she can’t quite understand it herself. When, late in the book, in a great boil of dismay and anger, she leaves her family and the Newmans at a beer garden in the evening and walks fast to get away from them, Schlee’s language takes on the urgency of Charlotte’s internal state:

Now her back was to the warm contrived light of the lanterns. The moon had risen. Coming out from the canopy of trees, she entered its sphere. The tight bitter panic ceased. Moonlight transforms; it deadens; it makes more tolerable. A great shoal of light thrashed on the surface of the river. Everything that stood motionless beside it was rendered in the deepest black. She must not stop. It must be apparent if she walked alone at night that she was impelled by some purpose: that she wanted nothing of anyone. Still it took the breath away: the cathedral fretted at its edges by light. The roof shone like a sheet of silver, each tile distinct like the indentation of a hammer. Below the great mass was an illusion. Finally it excluded her, but it was her only landmark; towards it she hurried, first to the bridge and then towards the cathedral.

The barges supporting the bridge were as still as piers. Between them molten light streamed and boiled. The crimson pier lights were cast down into it and shattered their red shafts sliced by the water light, the fragments drawn down sideways, struggling to rejoin, never permitted.

Rhine Journey is graceful, economical, and emotionally acute, but, to me, the most astonishing aspect of this novel is the precision with which Schlee replicates the customs, language, and atmosphere of 1851, hewing so closely to the feeling that a book written in the early Victorian era stirs in the reader that, upon learning that Rhine Journey was only first published in 1980, I did a double take. This cannot be true; this book cannot possibly be by a contemporary writer!, I insisted, even while discovering that Schlee herself was not even born until 1934, and that the novel was in fact a finalist for the 1981 Booker Prize. She followed it, two years later, with another atmospheric feat of careful historical ventriloquy in The Proprietor, the story of the idealistic owner of a small group of islands off the south coast of England in 1836, beset and broken by his own idealism and his romantic longings.

Historical fiction is always a complicated negotiation between the present from which the writer is writing and the past that is being imagined on the page. Writers bridge the divide by either implicitly or explicitly acknowledging the present—whether through a winking, postmodern pastiche, or a more earnest animation of a distant era that informs or reflects the present (or vice versa)— or by ignoring it completely. Schlee boldly chooses to ignore the present, staying so faithful to the mindset and vocabularies of the people of the mid-nineteenth century that she entirely erases the idea of the modern world from the experience of the book. She effects this with incredible subtlety, not only through the many small choices she makes—the flowing Victorian grammar; the more decorum-bound emotional landscapes of her characters; the small, slightly alien details of clothing or transportation—but also in what she chooses to leave out. The things, that is, that her characters don’t notice, but that a century or more later we certainly would, because they would be so very alien to our experience. This lack of explication forms small vacuums of consciousness, uncannily replicating the same small vacuums of consciousness that appear in texts that were written during eras that the long passage of time has since made strange.

For instance, the year in which Rhine Journey takes place, 1851, is extremely important to the story, deepening the narrative stakes, but Schlee traces it so gently that the reader might not be initially aware of the resultant underlying tensions. Three years before the book is set, in 1848, there had been a great social uprising in Paris called the February Revolution, leading to the abdication of King Louis-Philippe of France; the republican fervor spread across Europe and into the many fragmented German states of the time, including Prussia. There, King Frederick Wilhelm IV, under pressure of civil unrest, agreed to reorganize his government and push to add his kingdom to the larger German state. His army, however, fearing riots, clashed with protestors on the 13th of March in Berlin, and the resulting day-long fight left hundreds dead. In the aftermath, the King’s verbal agreement to expand the people’s liberties was retracted, and many freedoms were curtailed, particularly those of Communist and Workers’ Party members who had been the most vocal; this included Karl Marx, who had to flee from Cologne and later settle in London. By 1851, Frederick Wilhelm IV had intensified the attack on the Workers’ Party members, fearing their subversive actions, and the ports and train stations were being closely surveilled. The Morrisons arrive, blithe English tourists, into a tense and paranoid Prussia; though perhaps not quite fully comprehended by Charlotte, this sense of simmering unrest under the surface of things seeps into her consciousness.

Another echo buried in the text is Siegfried’s Rhine Journey in Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the fourth part of the Ring Cycle, which the composer was writing by 1851. In it, Brünnhilde escorts the hero through the quiet, lightly brassy dawn with her shield and horse, down to the opening strings of the river, where there is a final blooming outward into Siegfried’s “Hero” motif. Charlotte’s quiet internal revolution over the course of the book exactly echoes this passage of music. It begins with the long slow soft movement of her life on the narrow path that her family has allowed her; moves through this trip in Germany where there is a breaking of her own assumptions about herself in a quiet earthquake of awakened passion, regret, and mistaken assumptions; before ending with her taking possession of herself as a whole person, finally acknowledging the harm that her family had done to her by denying her love. In the end, instead of envisioning a future with her brother and his family in their parsonage, where she’d be made to pay for every bite of bread and breath of air, she can at last picture “whitened cottage rooms where she might quietly extend herself, and moving room to room, meet and recognise herself in forms unaltered by the pressures of others upon her.” It is a small victory, but how hard-won those whitened cottage rooms feel, bittersweet, full of regret but also hope. What a spiritual expansion we sense she will experience when given her days to do with what she wishes; how revolutionary this quiet, private assertion of Charlotte’s autonomy feels, how urgent and new. 

Lauren Groff

New Hampshire, 2023

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