HER FATHER’S DAUGHTER
Professor Mevis didn’t lose too much sleep over matters of upbringing. If shouting didn’t work, there was always violence. Ganna annoyed him. The spirit of rebellion with which she was imbued turned him against her. ‘If only we were rid of her,’ he said to his wife, ‘if only she were safely married off.’ Whereupon Frau Mevis would shake her head in a worried way. It was her view that with Ganna’s rather indifferent attractions, there was little chance of him finding a suitable man to do him such a service. She told me so once, much later, laughing.
Nevertheless, the Professor sometimes was of the view that she was more flesh of his flesh and spirit of his spirit than the other girls, who were more réussies. The well-set figure, the stubborn brow, the bold expression; that in addition to her insistence on entitlement, actual or notional; her wilfulness and hot-headedness: it was as though Nature had had half a mind to make a son of her and only decided otherwise at the very last moment. None of the others could match her for toughness and strength. All that spoke for her. And there was something else too. Often, when he thought he was about to burst with rage and impatience, she would strike him as so irresistibly droll that he had to run to the nearest room to keep her from noticing his hilarity, and his own authority from being impaired.
WHAT HER FATHER MEANS TO HER
She for her part feared him. He was the black curse and cloud overhanging her youth. Fear was allied to profound respect. Basically, his iron hand felt like happiness to her. In childhood she was more aware of this than in subsequent years. Perhaps it was an instance of that mysterious instinct that shields the kernel of the spirit till it is eventually subsumed by will and necessity. But even as a growing girl she would sometimes feel the dark threats emanating from her own character; she required this master, this powerful fist, to keep everything within her from collapsing in unruliness. She had a dream once of a flaming whip rushing down from the heavens. The mortal fear with which she tried to evade the lash helped her across an abyss she would otherwise certainly have fallen into. Regardless of the continual uprisings against his authority, the many trivial deceptions she regularly practised on him, she acknowledged his power unconditionally, and with her whole body. However much the physical chastisements outraged and upset her — she underwent them into her eighteenth year — a mysterious little pleasure did quiver in her when he beat her. He alone had the licence to do that. In all the world, he alone was in the right against her. When his great voice boomed through the house so that everyone flinched, then, underlying her own fear, there was a strange feeling in her of satisfaction, something that hailed the master, how good that the master is there. His fits of rage seemed to her to be splendid elemental events, as impressive as a spouting geyser or a forest fire. Can qualities be used up? Is there only so much submissiveness in one’s heart that it might trickle away or evaporate if not resupplied? Never again, I think I am right in claiming, in no other association or relationship, did Ganna encounter a being whose presence and influence compelled her to the feeling: how good that the master is here, my master. And that was the ruin of her.
FOOLISHNESS OF LITERATURE
I come now to a delicate subject. At that time, the educated classes were pleased to take an interest in writing and in literature. It was a part of the bon ton to discuss the ‘modern movement’, to have read Germinal or The Kreutzer Sonata, and to have witnessed the latest theatrical scandal/sensation, although it was mauvais to overdo it and to take an excessive interest in such things. It was good to know the names of certain works and their authors, you had to be able to keep up your end of a conversation; though beyond that it had no more significance than knowing the names of the dishes on a menu. Young people liked to talk about ‘life’ without actually confronting it; while they feigned an enthusiasm for art, their real effort was to secure some vain ascendancy by parroting views they picked up in the papers, or had heard from some impeccable authority. A man who worked in one of the professions was only expected to show a limited interest in literature, otherwise people would stop taking him seriously. That left the field open for women. And, since they were the ones who determined taste and set fashions, they made their contribution to a fairly comprehensive debasement, because, just like the men, they gravitated quite naturally to the second- and third-rate; first-class things they ignored. It was the age of paste diamonds and shallow minds.
But with Ganna, things were slightly different.
SHE WRITES HER OWN WORLD
She was convinced she was marching at the head of the true cognoscenti, right in the van, where the new world would heave into sight, where the youngest, tenderest reputations were just beginning to sprout, before they could be ferried into immortality by doting hands. And it’s true, there was something smitten about her. She was capable of being enthused by a work of literature. She roughly understood the categories. She despised mediocrity. Once a fortnight she gathered faithful young male and female friends about her who were of the same persuasion, and then she would rapturously share her finds with them, but also read excitedly and blushingly what she herself had penned. Her otherwise clear and piercing voice would sound dark and hoarse, as if she had powdered her throat with flour. When it got about that a critic for a major newspaper had said of her philosophical essays that they bore the stamp of an unmistakable if undisciplined genius, her acolytes cheered, though she herself with modesty and agitation tried to mute the acclaim. These literary sessions took place in the small drawing room at the Mevises’. They had something of an occult character. None of her sisters was allowed to enter the room; Ganna, like a priestess protecting the godhead from profane disturbances, took steps. If an outsider had violated the presence, she would have pierced him with a look. Everyone in the house knew it, and they let her get on with it.
It wasn’t a pastime, not something frivolous or pretentious. It wasn’t possible to say at the time how far and how deep it went. For Ganna it was the ‘higher reality’, an expression of ridicule in the circles in which she moved. But was this ‘higher reality’ real? Was it a force for purity and nobility? Hard to say. Normally it’s the case — and this casts an odd light on human nature — that a love of literature disguises a vacant inner space, so that where you might expect to find principles or high-mindedness, often you only meet with gush. If the enthusiasm is real, then a pact is made with it, and the ethical implications are quietly avoided. Whether this was the case with Ganna was, as I say, not yet ascertainable at the time. One day she was bound to reach the parting of the ways. In those early years she was still unsteady, still groping, looking for her law, looking above all for a mirror. People couldn’t be a mirror for her, nor could the real world; it was only in books that she encountered a being like herself — so she thought — a trusting being full of earnestness and passion. She was delighted by the likeness, yes, that was her own poem, her own creation, she fell in love with it, and in her eyes it made her truthful and good.