Books
A problem like Maria
by Sarah Quigley
Something had to come out of the Great Novel Debate (“The novel is dead” v “The novel is the pre-eminent art form”). And something has: “Faction”, that curious hybrid that’s been charming the literary world all over again. Publishers and readers are delighted with the genre, though writers should be less so – it’s a difficult task to rework real life with sufficient imaginative magic to satisfy historians and dreamers alike.
Several literary heavyweights have recently taken up the challenge, most notably Colm Tóibín (on Henry James), David Lodge (James, again) and Julian Barnes (Conan Doyle). With his eighth novel, I Am Always with You, Philip Temple joins the history boys. Like them, he takes a real writer for his subject; unlike them, he chooses an unknown, the aspiring German writer Maria Scholz.
Arriving in Berlin in 1933, Maria is young and inexperienced, but determined to get published. She quickly discovers these are unpropitious times for artists. As the Nazi hold on Germany strengthens, “degenerate” art is denounced or destroyed. Publishers are driven underground, public book-burnings are held; Maria battles with depression and growing fear.
A meeting with Hermann Blumenthal, a prominent sculp-tor, leads to love and marriage. Through her husband, Maria gains entry into a community of artists quietly opposed to Hitler’s regime. Yet the group is splintered apart by Nazi persecution and the outbreak of war, Blumenthal is called up to serve at the Russian front and Maria is left alone with two sons to endure the bombing of Berlin and the equally brutal Russian invasion.
Despite its romantic title, I Am Always with You tells a prosaic and sobering story. Temple has used actual letters between Maria and Blumenthal and their acquaintances to propel the story to its tragic conclusion. Much of the correspondence is touching in its intimacy, conveying small human attempts to continue living and loving in the face of external horror. Articles from real magazines and news-papers (The Art of the Nation, The Eagle) are quoted from, and Maria’s amateurish writing. Impressively, Temple has translated most original sources and their inclusion successfully conveys the cultural climate of the 30s, though the occasional contemporary phrase (“a confused big kid”, “jumps around … something wicked”) jars.
Unfortunately, the reliance on external source material ultimately becomes its downfall. Temple’s research is commendably wide, but he seems uncomfortable fusing factual knowledge with fiction. Much of the book is plain narration of fact: “Maria left Neisse for Berlin on 8 May 1933”; “they both went weekly, on a Wednesday or Thursday, to the State Bath House in Prenzlauer Berg, only four stops on the U-Bahn from Klosterstrasse”.
As soon as Temple moves off safe historical ground, however, his writing becomes overwrought and “novelistic”. Thus Maria’s mind is “loam bared for the seeds of Noa’s advice”; her “appreciative smile flowed like water into the sand of the expressionless woman’s face”. Words “explode” over her as if she had “pulled the cork from a shaken bottle of Sekt”. The stylistic lurches feel like abrupt gear-changes, and are more than a little disorientating.
In his Afterword, Temple professes the difficulty he faced when deciding on a genre: biography, history, memoir or fiction? The difficulty for the reader is being handed, at different times, all four. Although letters are largely woven into the narrative, halfway through the book there is a lengthy section consisting only of correspondence, as if Temple became tired and needed a rest. And although 99 percent of the time the narrative point of view is Maria’s, occasionally, unaccount-ably, we jump into Blumenthal’s head (and even, once, into that of the fringe character Tucholski). In a conventional biography or history, with the luxury of narrative omniscience, this isn’t an issue; in a novel like this, it’s a noticeable error.
Thus fiction is unconvincing, while fact becomes overwhelming. Temple seems reluctant to leave anything out: Maria’s numerous trips, her dips into depression, even her menstrual irregularities. As a result the book, which adds an Epilogue to the Afterword, ends up as stretched as well-chewed gum. Two-thirds through the novel, Maria becomes uneasy, wondering when it was she began to “lose track of events, when some of the comings and goings fell out of her head, when she first sensed that everything was falling apart”. It’s not often that a character voices exactly what is in a reader’s head.
I AM ALWAYS WITH YOU, by Philip Temple (Vintage, $36.99)
