A Painterly Eye

I first discovered Theodor Storm about eight years ago when someone sent me a copy of The Dykemaster in an excellent translation by Denis Jackson. I say excellent, not because of its truth to the original German, of which I’m not competent to judge, but because of its strong and consistently evocative English; like all good translations, it brings its own flavour to the story.

And what a story! Storm wrote it in 1871 and the setting is the coast of North Friesland a century earlier, with the heroic dykemaster’s plan to strengthen the sea defences being impeded by the ignorance and prejudice of the locals, as if the forces of man as well as of nature were against him. The historical background is less important, though, than the threatening climate of that storm-tossed coast and the immediate circumstances of its inhabitants’ daily existence, intimately described. You’re reminded a little of Thomas Hardy, in whose novels the tribulations of Tess or Jude are somehow given an extra-keen edge by our knowledge of the landscapes in which they move. Since then the same publisher and translator have produced a collection of three of Storm’s novellas under the title Paul the Puppeteer, which is the English title of the most substantial of the three. This is a much gentler tale than The Dykemaster, and much less widely known, though in its own way equally compelling. It’s set mostly in the same part of the world that Storm knew and understood so well, Friesland, this time in the town of Husum a few miles inland. Its narrator, Paul, is an old craftsman telling the author the story of his life: how a travelling puppet master brings his show to the town, how the boy Paul falls for the puppet master’s daughter and how, many years later, in the distant German town of Heiligenstadt, he is able to rescue the innocent father from undeserved imprisonment. The ending is happy and the whole thing rich in sentiment. Does the child Lisei have beautiful black eyelashes and do they lie modestly on a perfectly formed cheek? They most certainly do, but haven’t we seen plenty of such creatures elsewhere? Why, then, does the reader (or this one at any rate) find himself falling as heavily for her as does the infatuated Paul? Why does one bite one’s lip with anxiety when Paul breaks the puppet master’s best puppet, or when the local yobbos start to wreck the show? And why, when our now grown-up heroine, half-starving, sees Paul’s face and cries out his name in the icy town square of Heiligenstadt, does one find one’s heart swelling for a moment with relief and joy? It’s Theodor Storm’s painterly eye, of course, that does the trick. He takes us to the places where it happens and we see them plain; we are there. One can almost smell the drains. The genre was labelled ‘poetic realism’ (Storm himself was a poet first and a fiction-writer only second) and it’s this deliberate and carefully cultivated realism that gives his narrative its credibility. It becomes even more important when he is dealing with the supernatural, as he does in Renate, another story in this collection. Paul the Puppeteer was first seen as a children’s story, but Renate is grown-up business from the start. He puts it in the form of a recently discovered pastor’s journal written in the early eighteenth century, at a time when large numbers of sensible people, including most of the clergy of course, believed in the corporeal existence of the Devil and the power of witchcraft; and indeed its heroine, another beauty, is clearly and alarmingly in thrall to the forces of evil. I can’t say I turned the lights up higher as I read it, but the realist technique helped keep disbelief at bay. Storm was a radical and an anticlerical humanist, but his rationalism did not extend to the matter of ghosts. There’s an impressive one in The Dykemaster that rides on a spectral grey horse and gives you a sinister shudder. I see that the translator’s introduction to Paul the Puppeteer also compares Storm’s work with Hardy’s, for similar reasons. And although Hardy doesn’t have much truck with ghosts, he and Theodor Storm do share that knack of conveying a sense not so much of gloom as of unease, a half-formulated knowledge that sooner or later something unnerving is going to happen. The first story in the collection is called The Village on the Moor and is perhaps more Hardyesque (if you’ll forgive the word) than the others, being concerned with a rich farmer’s self-destructive obsession with a local femme fatale. Denis Jackson has more than once been all over the terrain covered in Storm’s work, and the new volume has about thirty pages of explanatory notes which, though I suppose not essential to the reader’s enjoyment, certainly added to mine.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 6 © Nicholas Bagnall 2005