FICTION: Carsten the Trustee By Theodore Storm, translated by Denis Jackson, Angel Classics, 239pp, 11.95 LET NO DREAM LIST of the supreme masters of short fiction overlook 19th-century German storyteller Theodor Storm (1817-88), whose admirers during his lifetime included Turgenev and whose influence would shape Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann as well as subsequent generations of German-language writers.
This wonderful volume, dominated by the title novella, comes just five months after the publication of Storm's The Rider on the White Horse and Selected Storiesin the New York Review Books Classics series, and it is equally welcome and just as important.
Storm was born in the small seaport of Husun in Schleswig, then part of Denmark. In 1864, when Storm was 47, the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein were occupied and subsequently, following the Austro-Prussian War in 1866 and the Treaty of Vienna, became part of Prussia. This left Storm without a fatherland, and he never forgot the loss.
Storm was German-speaking. His father, the lawyer son of farmers, was German, while his mother came from a rich Frisian merchant family involved in dyke-building, a vital occupation in a place always threatened by invasive seas. The bleak landscape provides a dramatic backdrop to Storm’s stories, which often contain a supernatural element.
His work, in its formal, deliberate, nuanced telling, looks to Goethe, yet it also pre-empts Edgar Allan Poe and the Henry James of The Turn of the Screw.
What makes Storm so compelling? His inspired balancing of that harsh, marshy, coastal world with his quiet tone, along with careful observation of his characters, who respond to fate as if it were so many blows dealt by an invisible hand.
As his father had done before him, Storm became a lawyer. He is the literary manifestation of the artist, Caspar David Friedrich, and in Storm we see German Romanticism juxtaposed with the theme of living with one's decisions. Carsten the Trusteewas written in 1878, just 10 years before Storm's dramatic final (and most famous) work, The Rider on the White Horse, completed four months before his death, guaranteed his artistic legacy. In Carsten, Storm has created a moving study of a good man – dull, earnest, kindly, but good beyond dispute. In this goodness lies his downfall.
Carsten, whose “name was actually Carsten Carstens, the son of a small merchant in the town, from whom he had inherited a house built by his grandfather”, shares with “most North Frisians” a fondness for learning, writes Storm. The story presents a man at home with books, and it is this love of reading which has convinced the townspeople that Carsten is suited to offering advice on serious matters. He soon acquires a local reputation for giving sound, unselfish assistance to anyone in trouble.
One such person in difficulties is the beautiful Juliane. Carsten’s first sight of her is when she is weeping at the open coffin of her dead father, a bankrupt businessman who has hanged himself.
Carsten’s initial reluctance to become involved with this situation – “I will have nothing to do with such people” – becomes ironic, and ultimately tragic. Aged 40 and out of his depth, he marries the girl, who is obviously wild and not to be trusted.
Together they attend dances and events at which she dances with other men, leaving Carsten to play “an unnoticed and awkward role”. He and his elder sister are reduced to bewildered onlookers, but it doesn’t last – the young wife dies “at the birth of her first child”. Carsten returns to his quiet life with his spinster sister, except for the presence of his son, who, in time, becomes a copy of his mother.
Storm skilfully leaves an element of ambivalence hanging over Heinrich, the young son, and adds a further complication to Carsten’s life with the inclusion of a girl, Anna, orphaned by the death of a relative. She is only a year younger than Heinrich, but is of a loving nature. Acting as a brilliant foil to Anna and Carsten is the character of Carsten’s sister, Brigitte. In one of the most beautiful scenes in a story rich in pathos, though devoid of sentimentality, the elderly sister and brother stand together looking at a painting of their childhood selves, in which they are depicted with their long dead father, grandmother and younger brother, who had been painted astride his toy hobby horse. “Soon after the completion of the picture the merry little rider had been snatched away by smallpox . . . of the five evening walkers only the two older siblings were still alive.”
Young Heinrich is an unreliable schemer, yet this does not prevent Anna from trying to help. Carsten watches his son’s career with mounting horror. Various shifts and twists dictate the action, and translator Denis Jackson ensures that nothing of Storm’s subtle narrative flair is lost.
Also included in this valuable volume from Angel Classics – which has published Theodor Fontane's Cécileand Andrey Bely's The Silver Dove, as well as Garshin's From the Reminiscences of Private Ivanov and Other Stories– is By the Fireside(1862), with its sequence of ghost stories building to the wonderful observation, "before going to bed, one peers under every bed and chest of drawers with a candle".
Most German schoolchildren are familiar with Storm's eerily convincing The Rider on the White Horse; now, thankfully, his work is becoming more widely available, and Carsten the Trusteewill linger in the memory long after the final poignant image.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
