 |
 |
   |
|
|
|
|
Slightly Foxed No 15, Autumn 2007Editions
ReviewThis issue contains an article by Johnny about Gregor von Rezzori. Here is an extract: ……Born in 1914 in the province of Bukovina, Gregor von Rezzori began life as a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As the Russians advanced on his birthplace of Czernowitz, the family moved to a house near Trieste and then to Vienna. After the First World War and the fragmentation of Emperor Franz Joseph’s fragile empire, von Rezzori was brought up as a Romanian. His education, conducted precariously at home and at school in Brasov, was enlivened by periodic hunting expeditions in the Carpathians with his father, a monomaniac who supervised hunting in Bukovina under both regimes. As a young man von Rezzori was in Vienna where, between chasing women (successfully – he was extraordinarily handsome), he started a career as a draughtsman in an advertising office; then in Bucharest, where he continued chasing women, duelled a bit, and developed a passion for horses. The Anschluss put a stop to this carefree life: as a German-speaking Romanian citizen he was ‘repatriated’ to Germany, where he spent the war. Afterwards he worked in radio in Hamburg, got divorced, knocked around Europe a bit and then married Beatrice Monti, a distinguished Italian art dealer. He died in 1998 and she continues to run their house in Tuscany, Santa Maddalena, as a writers’ retreat. It would be possible to see von Rezzori as a dinosaur from an age and a place that have vanished. Czernowitz, Bucharest, Brasov, Trieste and Vienna once belonged to a coherent world. When it shattered, its parts went in different directions – respectively, to Ukraine, Romania, Transylvania, Italy and Austria. Those of its citizens who rejoiced at the resurgence of German culture had their lives broken all over again (if they survived) in the Third Reich. Von Rezzori observed history and his place within it with an unflinching eye: he was acutely aware that he embodied some of the deepest fissures of twentieth-century Europe, but his mordant irony and lack of sentimentality make the anomaly of his survival emerge in his work in a very modern way…… His best-known work in the English-speaking world is Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. Consisting of five stories (two of which he wrote in English), it presents modest provincial scenarios in which attitudes that made the Holocaust possible might have taken root. The first, ‘Skushno’, concerns a boy from a family whose loyalties were with the Dual Monarchy. He has been sent to stay with his uncle and aunt in a village where he encounters situations that narrow and develop his insecurities. The theme of anti-Semitism is introduced after a few pages in a remark that is all the more shocking for being throwaway: ‘On weekdays, the place was almost lifeless, if we disregard the straggling gangs of lice-ridden Jewish children who romped among the sparrows in the dusty roads.’ Memoirs of an Anti-Semite invites its readers to speculate about its author in a most disconcerting way. Just how far did he share his characters’ views? Von Rezzori’s late memoir Anecdotage contains the unequivocal recognition: ‘I myself – pampered by my Jewish friends – was a steadfast anti-Semite.’ There are enough reflections from his autobiographical work to show that he was intimately acquainted with his fictional world, and to feel that the power of his fiction is closely related to his ruthless honesty about himself. If Memoirs of an Anti-Semite does not seem dated, it is not because there is anything inherently more ‘modern’ about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust than about the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. It is because of the unnerving position of the narrator, the timeless implied injunction, ‘Look into yourself, reader,’ and the honesty with which the author explores the harrowing context…… The Snows of Yesteryear (1988) is a work of a particular kind of literary genius that may be grouped with Nabokov’s own memoir Speak, Memory Von Rezzori was brought up among women and was plainly fascinated by them. Shrewd, uncompromising in his assessments, unafraid of contradictions, he writes about women with a perspicacity and love that are rare in any context but unique, so far as I know, for someone of his time and place. But his portrait of his father too is superb. While clearly recognizing him as an anti-Semite, a vehement supporter of the Sturm und Drang revivalist Germany, he nevertheless writes of accompanying him on a hunting expedition: ‘Nothing will ever place me so intimately in the world again. Nothing will have this sense of presence.’ And I cannot believe that literature contains a better description of a man shaving than there is in this portrait. The historical and cultural remoteness of the world von Rezzori describes is emphasized by the gap between what may actually have been lost and what he remembers. He feels that he is defined by his loss but he can no longer be quite certain whether it is Czernowitz or the ‘Czernopol’ of his fiction which is more deeply embedded in his own identity; a solid, independent reality or a world recreated as myth according to his own nature and neuroses. Hence the disturbing nature of his return to Czernowitz in 1987, described at the end of Snows of Yesteryear: ‘It began to sound as if I had invented Czernowitz, and with it myself.’ This tension between what has actually been lost and what is remembered as loss underpins his work and gives it a much broader significance than its immediate setting might suggest. For while his own loss must be particular, the sense of having suffered loss is, in our fast-changing world, common to all. As von Rezzori also knew, it is the basis of psychoanalysis. He says in The Snows of Yesteryear, ‘the nonsexual tensions between our parents and their uninhibited explosions in front of us triggered a fairly complete anthology of neuroses. My efforts to deal with these on my own, without professional rummagings in my unconscious, greatly enriched my life.’ Whether von Rezzori’s portraits allure or shock, the vividness with which he draws them dramatizes for us the process of interpreting loss; and interesting though his particular losses certainly are, the enduring value of his work is to be found, in the end, in the constantly shifting reflections of his mind. - review by Johnny de Falbe |
|
John Sandoe [Books] Ltd |
Fax:
020 7581 2084