They planned to meet. ‘Let it not be a short hour, but a real moment of time,’ he writes, but they were unable to meet each other in Vienna, and then Elisabeth got the time wrong for their meeting in Paris and had to leave before he arrived. I find their telegrams. Rilke at the Hôtel Lorius in Montreux, 11H 15 to Mademoiselle Elisabeth Ephrussi, 3 rue Rabelais Paris (Réponse payée), and her response forty minutes later and his the next morning.
Then he was ill and couldn’t travel, and there is a hiatus while Rilke is in the sanatorium where they are trying to treat him; then a final letter a fortnight before his death. And later a package from Rilke’s widow in Switzerland returning Elisabeth’s letters to him, reuniting the correspondence into one envelope, carefully marked and carefully put away in one drawer and then another over Elisabeth’s long life.
As a present ‘for my dear niece Elisabeth’, uncle Pips had ‘Michelangelo’ written and illuminated by a scribe in Berlin on vellum, like a medieval missal, and bound in green buckram. It is a gentle echo of an early volume of Rilke’s The Book of Hours, where each stanza is initialled in carmine. This is one of the books my father remembered having, and looked out and brought down to my studio. I have it on my desk now. I open it up and there is the epigraph from Rilke and then her poem. It is quite good, I think, this poem about a sculptor making things. It is properly Rilkean.
When she was eighty, and I was fourteen or so, I started sending her my schoolboy poetry and would get in return careful critiques and suggestions of what to read. I read poetry all the time. I had a passionate, silent longing for the girl in the bookshop where on Saturday afternoons I would spend my pocket money on slim volumes of Faber poets. I carried poetry in my pocket at all times.
Elisabeth’s criticism was direct. She hated sentimentality, ‘emotional inexactitude’. She thought there was no point in having formal poetic structures if they didn’t scan. No points for my sonnet sequence on the dark-haired girl in the bookshop then. But her greatest scorn was for the indefinite, a blurring of the real in rushes of emotion.
When she died I inherited many of her books of poetry. Her personal numbering system means that Rilke’s Das Stunden-Buch is no. 26, his book on Rodin no. 28, Stefan George is EE no. 36 and her grandmother’s books of poems are nos 63 and 64. I send my father off to a university library that has some of her books to check when she read them, and I have to stop as I find myself late at night looking through Elisabeth’s copies of French poetry, the twelve volumes of Proust, early editions of Rilke, for comments in the margins, scraps of forgotten lyric, a lost letter. I remember Saul Bellow’s Herzog spending his nights shaking out banknotes that he had left in volumes as bookmarks.
When I do find things, I wish I hadn’t. I find a transcription by her of a poem by Rilke written on the back of a page from a desk diary from Sonntag Juli 6 (Sunday, 6th July), black and red like a missal. There is a translucent gentian marking a page in Rilke’s Ephemeriden; the address of a Herr Pannwitz in Vienna tucked into Valéry’s Charmes; a photograph of the sitting-room at Kövecses in Du côté de chez Swann. And I feel like a bookseller judging the sunning of the cover of a book, marking the annotations, assessing its possible interest. It is not only a trespass on her reading, which feels strange and inappropriate, but close to a cliché. I am turning real encounters into dried flowers.
I remember that Elisabeth didn’t really have much feel for the world of objects, netsuke and porcelain, just as she disliked the fuss and bother around which clothes you put on in the morning. In her last flat she had a great wall of books, and only a narrow white shelf on which were balanced a small Chinese terracotta of a dog and three lidded jars. She was supportive of my making pots – and wrote me a handsome cheque once when I was trying to build my first kiln – but was mildly amused by the idea of me making things for a living. But what she loved was poetry, the world of things, hard and defined and alive, made lyrical. She would have hated my fetishising of her books.
In Vienna in the Palais Ephrussi there are three rooms in a row. On one side is Elisabeth’s room, a sort of library, where she sits and writes poetry and essays and letters to her poetic grandmother Evelina, to Fanny and to Rilke. On the other is Viktor’s library. In the centre is Emmy’s dressing-room with its great mirror and dressing-table with its posy of flowers from Kövecses and the vitrine of netsuke. It is opened less often.
These are hard years for Emmy. She is in her early forties, with children who need her attention but who turn away. They all worry her in different ways, and they no longer come to sit and talk and confide about their days as she dresses. There is the little boy in the nursery to complicate things. She takes them to the Opera as it is neutral territory: Tannhäuser with Iggie on 28th May 1922, Tosca with Gisela on 21st September 1923, and the whole family to Die Fledermaus in December.
In these hard years there are not quite so many excuses for dressing up in Vienna. Anna is no less busy here – a lady’s maid is always kept busy – but the room is no longer the centre of the life of the house. It is quiet.
I think of this room and remember Rilke writing of ‘a vibrating stillness like that in a vitrine’.
23. ELDORADO 5–0050
The three older children leave the city.
Elisabeth, poet, is the first to go. She receives a doctorate in law in 1924, the first given to a woman from the University of Vienna. And then a Rockefeller Scholarship to travel to America – she is off. She is redoubtable, my grandmother, clever and focused, and she writes about American architecture and idealism for a German journal, how the ardour and fervour of skyscrapers fit with contemporary philosophy. When she returns she moves to Paris to study political science. She is in love with a Dutchman she met in Vienna, recently divorced from a cousin of hers, with a little boy from the marriage.
The beautiful Gisela is next. She marries well, a lovely Spanish banker called Alfredo Bauer, from a rich Jewish family. The couple are married in the synagogue in Vienna, which causes confusion for the secular Ephrussi, who are unsure of what to do, where to sit or stand. There is a party for the young couple and the great floor of the Palais is opened up for a proper reception in the gilt ballroom under Ignace’s triumphant ceilings. Gisela is effortlessly stylish in a long cardigan and a silver belt low over a print skirt, a dark black-and-white dress with a string of dark beads for going away in. She has an open smile and Alfredo is handsome and bearded. The couple move to Madrid in 1925.
Then Elisabeth sends the young Dutchman, Hendrik de Waal, a note to say that she has heard he is coming through Paris on Friday week and might they meet? Her phone number is Gobelius 12–85, if he could ring. Henk was tall with slightly thinning hair and wore very good suits – grey with the slightest of charcoal stripes – and a monocle and he smoked Russian cigarettes. He had grown up in Amsterdam on the Prinzengracht, the only son of a merchant family that imported coffee and cocoa. He was well travelled and played the violin and was charming and very funny. And he also wrote poetry. I’m not sure if my grandmother, who at twenty-seven was wearing her hair drawn back in a severe bun and had round black spectacles worthy of a Baronin Doktor Ephrussi, had ever before been wooed by such a man. She adored him.
I find their wedding notice in the archives of the Adler Society in Vienna. It is rather elegantly printed. We are gemeinde (compelled to/led to/unable not to) announce, it reads, that Elisabeth von Ephrussi has already married Hendrik de Waal. And then Viktor and Emmy’s names in one corner and the de Waal parents in the other. My grandparents – one Dutch Reformed Church, the other Jewish – were married in the Anglican church in Paris.
The genealogists are amused by this notice and this use of this word gemeinde, with its undercurrents of familial complexity.
Elisabeth and Henk bought an apartment in Paris in the rue Spontini in the 16th arrondissement and furnished it in the newest art deco taste, with armchairs and carpets by Ruhlmann and rather excitingly moderne metal lamps and glassware of impossible lightness from
the Wiener Werkstätte. They hung large reproductions of paintings by Van Gogh and, briefly, housed a Schiele landscape in the drawing-room that they bought in Vienna from Fanny’s gallery. I have a couple of photographs of this apartment, and you can sense the complete delight this couple took in creating it, the pleasures of buying new things, rather than inheriting stuff. No gilt, no Junge Frauen, no Dutch chests. And no family portraits at all.
When things were going well, they lived in this apartment with Henk’s son Robert and their two little boys, born soon after their marriage, my father Victor – known, like his grandfather Viktor, by his Russian nickname Tascha – and my uncle Constant Hendrik. They played every day in the Bois de Boulogne. When things were going well there was a governess and a cook and a maid, and even a chauffeur, and Elisabeth wrote poetry and articles for Le Figaro and improved her Dutch.
Sometimes, when it was wet, she would take the boys to the gallery of the Jeu de Paume on the edge of the Tuileries gardens. Here in the long, bright rooms they would look at the Manets and Degas and Monets coll. C. Ephrussi, left to the museum in memory of her uncle Charles by Fanny and her husband Théodore Reinach, the clever scholar who had married into the family. There are cousins in Paris, but Charles’s generation has gone, trailing benefactions to the country it adopted. The Reinachs have left the Villa Kerylos, a fabulous re-creation of a Greek temple, to France, and great-aunt Béatrice Ephrussi-Rothschild has bequeathed the rose-pink villa in Cap Ferrat to the Académie française. The Camondos have given their collections, and the Cahen d’Anvers have given their chateau outside Paris, too. It is seventy years since all these first Jewish families built their houses on the golden rue de Monceau and they are giving something back to this generous country.
In terms of religious faith it is an interesting marriage. Henk had grown up in a severe family – they look doomed in their black suits and dresses – but had converted to become Mennonite. Elisabeth, who felt completely confident of her Jewishness, was reading the Christian mystics and talking about conversion. Not expedient conversion for marriage, or to fit in with the neighbours, or to Catholicism – I’m not sure if any Jewish girl brought up in Vienna opposite the Votivkirche would choose to do that – but to the Church of England. They go to the Anglican church in Paris.
When things did not go well with the Anglo-Batavian Trading Company, Henk lost a lot of his own money, and other people’s too. He lost, inter alia, a fortune belonging to Piz, the wild cousin and childhood friend, who had become an up-and-coming Expression-ist painter and was living a bohemian life in Frankfurt. Losing this amount of money was a nightmare, and the maid and the chauffeur were let go and the furniture was put into storage in Paris and there were discussions of labyrinthine complexity.
Henk’s incompetence with money was different from his father-in-law Viktor’s. Henk could make numbers dance. My father talks of how he could scan three columns, take away another column and conjure a (correct) total with a smile. It was just that he believed he could do the same sleight of hand with money. He believed that it was all going to come right, that the markets would move, the ships would come into port and that fortunes would click back together like his slim shagreen cigarette case. He was, simply, deluded in his abilities.
And I understand that Viktor never believed he had any control over the columns of figures at all. I wonder, very belatedly, what it was like for Elisabeth to realise that she had married a man almost as poor with money as her father.
Iggie graduated from the Schottengymnasium and was the third to leave. I have his graduation photograph and can’t find him at first, until I suddenly recognise a rather portly young man in the back row in a double-breasted suit. He looks like a stockbroker. Bow-tie and handkerchief, a young man practising how to stand properly, how to look convincing. Do you, for instance, stand with one hand in your pocket? Or are two hands in pockets better? Or even, this is most endearing, one hand inside the waistcoat, a clubman pose.
To celebrate the end of his schooling, he went for a motoring tour with his childhood friends the Gutmanns, from Vienna to Paris the long way round through northern Italy and the Riviera in a Hispano-Suiza, an elephantine car of fabled luxury. In some cold, bright pass somewhere, three young things sit in the back with the hood down, swaddled in their motoring coats with goggles up over their motoring caps. Their luggage is piled in front of them. A chauffeur hovers. The bonnet of the car disappears to the left of the photograph and the boot of the car disappears to the right. It feels balanced on the faintest breath of a fulcrum, hovering between deep descents.
It would have been difficult to have Elisabeth as an older sister if you were academic: Iggie was not bookish. The family finances are not so rocky in these days – Emmy, an elegant forty-five, is buying clothes again – but Iggie does need to concentrate and not just spend his time watching endless looping afternoons of films in the cinemas. Viktor and Emmy are clear about his future. Iggie should join the bank, turn left and left again each morning with his father, sit at a desk under the shield with the little boat ploughing its way onwards, Quod honestum, through the generations from Joachim to Ignace and Léon, and then to Viktor and Jules, and now to Iggie. Iggie was, after all, the only young man in the whole of the extended Ephrussi family, Rudolf being a rather gorgeous child of seven.
The fact that Iggie was not particularly good with his figures was swept aside. Plans were made for him to continue his studies in finance at the university in Cologne. This had the advantage of allowing Pips – now on his second marriage, this time to a glamorous film actress – to keep an avuncular eye on him. Iggie was given a tiny car as a gesture towards independent living, and he looks good in it. He survived this ordeal – three whole years of German lectures – and started work in a Frankfurt bank, which ‘gave me the opportunity to acquaint myself with all phases of the banking business’ as he drily put it in a letter years later.
He would not talk of these years, except to say to me that being a Jewish banker in Germany in the Depression was unwise. These were the years of the Nazi ascendancy when the votes for Hitler spiralled higher, when the paramilitary SA doubled its membership to 400,000, and when street battles became part of the life of cities. Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30th January 1933 and a month later, after the Reichstag fire, thousands were taken into ‘preventive detention’. The largest of these new detention camps was on the edge of Bavaria in Dachau.
In July 1933 Iggie was expected back in Vienna to start at the bank.
It was not wise to stay in Germany, but it was not a propitious time to return to Austria. Vienna was turbulent. The Austrian Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, had suspended the constitution in the face of increasing Nazi pressure. There were violent confrontations between police and demonstrators, and some days Viktor did not even go to the bank, but waited impatiently all day for the evening papers to be brought to him in the library.
Iggie did not turn up. He ran away. The list of reasons for running away started with the bank – the smirk that the doorman always gave him – but tangled into Vienna. And then tangled further into family: Papa, the old cook Clara and her welcoming veal pie with potato salad, Anna fussing over his shirts, his room with its Biedermeier bed waiting for him along the familiar long corridor, past the dressing-room, the counterpane turned down at six.
Iggie ran to Paris. He began work in a ‘third-rung fashion house’ learning how to sketch tea-gowns. He spent nights learning how to cut in an atelier, starting to sense how the scissors slip across a billowing field of green shot-silk. Four hours’ sleep on the floor of a friend’s apartment and then coffee and back to drawing. Fifteen minutes for lunch, coffee, and back again.
He is poor: he learns the tricks to keeping clothes clean and smart, how to take in and hem cuffs. He has a small allowance from Vienna that continues, without comment, from his parents. And though it must be mortifying for Viktor to explain to his friends that Iggie is not joining the firm – and perhaps he mumbles w
hen asked what Iggie is actually doing in Paris – I wonder if he has sympathy for his son. Viktor must know about running away and not running away, just as Emmy must know about staying.
Iggie is twenty-eight. As with Emmy, clothes are a vocation. All those nightly hours in the dressing-room with the netsuke and Anna and his mother, smoothing down a dress, comparing lace details at cuff or neck. All those dressing-up games with Gisela, the trunk of old gowns kept in the box-room at the far corner. The old copies of Wiener Mode, pored over on the parquetry floor of the salon. Iggie could tell you how the trousers of one imperial regiment differed in cut from another and how you could wear crêpe de Chine on the bias. And now, finally, he finds that he is not as good as he had hoped, but he has started.
And then, after nine hard months, he runs away again, to New York, to boys and to fashion. This was a trinity so wonderful in its cadence that in very old age he couldn’t help smilingly describing the voyage to New York as a sort of baptismal crossing from one life to another, a voyage in some way into himself.
I know a little about this from his wry attempts to make me dress better when I first stayed with him in Tokyo. It was during that hot, humid June in Iggie’s apartment, earnest and gushing and rather grubby from my travels, that I first understood not that clothes mattered, but how they mattered. Iggie and Jiro, his friend in the interlocking apartment, took me to Mitsukoshi, the grand department store in the centre of the Ginza, to buy some proper clothes, some linen jackets for the summer and some shirts with collars. My jeans and collarless shirts were taken away by their housekeeper Mrs Nakano and returned rehemmed, folded with little pins across the cuffs and all my buttons restored to full array. Some things did not re-emerge.
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss Page 20
