Eline Vere

by Louis Couperus

  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 hardworking 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 Erlevoo
rt 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.

  For whatever else can it be that holds these two men together, so that they are in constant communication when apart, and are prepared to travel together for many months without significant interruptions? The one is an American ‘chevalier d’industrie’ – which may be a polite way of saying he is a successful businessmen not above a sharp piratical manoeuvre or two – the other a drifter with ideas of himself way above his actual accomplishments. St Clare thinks of Vincent as a brother, he says, yet his Vincent is not the man we ourselves have come to know. He tells Eline:

  ‘Most people have the wrong idea about Vincent. They think him lazy, capricious, egotistic, and refuse to see that he is simply ill. I can’t think of anybody else who would be capable, despite suffering from such ill health, of sharing so much of his talent and intelligence with the rest of mankind.’

  She had always had great sympathy for Vincent, but had never seen him in this light.

  ‘Yes, I believe you are right!’ she said.

  What a contrast to how Otto van Erlevoort sees Vincent!

  Vincent Vere has told St Clare so much already about his cousin (combining the complimentary with the compassionate) that already, before their actual meeting-up in Brussels, the latter has thought of her as an ‘unknown sister’. Hence his intense solicitude on her behalf, his unique ability to elicit from her truths about her deepest feelings (including her great grief for her friend Jeanne Ferelijn), his insistence, which she accepts, that she keep apart from the dubious crew with whom her uncle and aunt socialise, and his proposal of marriage, which, though moved, she refuses. What kind of marriage can St Clare be offering Eline? Primarily, we feel, one of concerned companionship such as Louis Couperus and Elisabeth Baud enjoyed, though the sincerity of not just his feelings but of his regard for her is not in doubt. Watching Eline improve in Brussels, largely because of his own caring converse with her, he has begun to feel

  a great longing to dedicate myself entirely to you, because I thought, if I can do that, she might be able to shake off her gloomy view of life and be happy again. My darling Elly, you’re still so young and you think it’s too late for things to change. Don’t think like that any more: put your trust in me, then we can set out together to discover whether life really is as dismal as you believe.

  Perhaps there is too much of the crusader, of the benevolent pedagogue and too little of the lover in this declaration, though we cannot but respect the man for making it – just as Eline does, though it also makes her weep. But she has to decline, continually tormented as she is by her memories of her failed engagement to Otto (broken off by herself, after all, for intimate, never wholly articulated reasons). Perhaps in her refusal Eline is acknowledging that, outside Ouidaesque fantasies, the whole domain of the carnal is not congenial to her, just as it apparently was not to her creator. In Couperus’s mind sexuality results in misery as much as it does in children, and even the latter (from whom he so recoiled) rarely quite vanquish the former. It is an essential but terrible part of humankind’s lot that it has not yet arrived at an ability to cope adequately and painlessly with its sexual instinct, evolution being as yet incomplete in this respect. And evolution is the key word here.

  For Couperus was of the post-Darwin generation, quite unable to accept the explanations and consolations of orthodox religion, and obsessed, as though by a fresh discovery, by the distress, the mutual destructiveness inherent in existence itself, an awareness memorably expressed in the anguished personal writings of Darwin himself occasioned by his observation of the cruelty rampant throughout the animal world. It is the duty of the honest writer, according to this view, to face up to the bleakness, the terror, to the fact that what laws one can detect operating in life take no consideration of the feelings of those they control. Everywhere there is appalling waste, and waste is represented here by the sterile careers of Vincent and St Clare, by such an un-partnered woman as Emilie de Woude van Bergh, who deals with her plight by adopting a hearty, jolly persona, and, supremely, by Eline herself. That fine novelist of the American South, ten years Couperus’s junior, Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945), had a similar weltanschauung both compounded and aided by a not dissimilar refined sensibility. In her novel Virginia (1913) Glasgow writes of a young man destined never to become the writer he dreams of being:

  But at the age of twenty-two … he was pathetically ignorant of his own place in the extravagance of Nature. With the rest of us, he would have been astounded at the suggestion that he might have been born to be wasted. Other things were wasted, he knew, since those who called Nature an economist had grossly flattered her. Types and races and revolutions were squandered with royal prodigality – but that he himself should be so was clearly unthinkable.

  Against this waste humankind has created art, and Couperus belonged to the generation who, even while seeing them as a sport of Nature, peculiarly valued artists, as able to provide invaluable bulwarks against the ultimate emptiness of existence. Much taken with, and in his turn admired by, members of the Aesthetic Movement, including Oscar Wilde himself, Couperus made his own great contribution to the art of literature, not so much through his own aestheticism – shown in his dandyism, his epicurean pleasures, his tendency to lushness of prose – as in those deeply serious novels of which Eline Vere is the first in which, with scrupulous honesty, artistry of design and intense care for minutiae he faces up to life’s complexity.

  His masterpiece, Van oude mensen de dingen die voorbijgaan (Old People and the Things That Pass, 1906) deals with two old people who, when younger and living in the East Indies as members of its colonial service, committed a horrendous crime – just how horrendous comes as a shock even to readers long anticipating its revelation, so savage, treacherous and pitiless was it. Undiscovered and therefore unpunished, for decades, the murder has nonetheless worked a long-enduring, baleful power on the intertwined ramified families of the culprits i
n The Hague (of the same milieu as the protagonists of Eline Vere). A novel of deceptions, ignorance, half-understandings, reluctant or nervous uncoverings, it imports into a restricted Dutch circle that disruptive ‘hidden force’ so ineluctably bound up with passion and with a culture not founded on reason, showing how it lurks behind even the most conventional or formal interchanges. Intricate in form though it is, with its all-important glimpses of the lurid pasts of an extremely aged man and woman, it describes a trajectory as relentless and seemingly swift of movement as some well-aimed deadly arrow. The Tolstoyan openness of Eline Vere, with its many scenes of the hustle and bustle of the unremarkable social life of mostly unremarkable individuals, must not detract from our realising that it also is closely worked and forms a devastating trajectory. Again, the book is less close to War and Peace than to Anna Karenina, from the structure of which it surely learned valuable lessons. The novel opens with an exchange between Paul and Frédérique, who, like Beatrice and Benedict, are to continue to spar throughout the novel, the girl perpetually showing up the shortcomings of the young man while revealing her deep affection for, even her belief in, him, and showing up too – with continual shrewdness, if with limited charity – the faults in Eline that will lead to her decline and demise. Paul and Frédérique’s is to be the union of those approved of by Nature and so, fittingly, it is with a window into their young married life, and with Otto and Marie determined to emulate it, that the novel concludes.