The Snows of Yesteryear Read online

  GREGOR VON REZZORI (1914–1998) was born in Czernowitz (now Chernovtsy, Ukraine), Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He later described his childhood in a family of declining fortunes as one “spent among slightly mad and dislocated personalities in a period that also was mad and dislocated and filled with unrest.” After studying at the University of Vienna, Rezzori moved to Bucharest and enlisted in the Romanian army. During World War II, he lived in Berlin, where he worked as a radio broadcaster and published his first novel. In West Germany after the war, he wrote for both radio and film and began publishing books at a rapid rate, including the four-volume Idiot’s Guide to German Society and Ein Hermelin in Tschernopol (to be published by NYRB Classics as Ermine). From the late 1950s on, Rezzori had parts in several French and West German films, including one directed by his friend Louis Malle. In 1967, after spending years classified as a stateless person, Rezzori settled in a fifteenth-century farmhouse outside of Florence with his wife, gallery owner Beatrice Monti. There he produced some of his best-known works, among them Death of My Brother Abel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (published by NYRB Classics), and the memoir The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography.

  JOHN BANVILLE was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of many novels, including The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable, and Eclipse. Banville’s novel The Sea was awarded the 2005 Man Booker Prize. On occasion he writes under the pen name Benjamin Black.

  THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR

  Portraits for an Autobiography

  GREGOR VON REZZORI

  Translated from the German by

  H.F. BROCH DE ROTHERMANN

  Introduction by

  JOHN BANVILLE

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Introduction

  THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Cassandra

  The Mother

  The Father

  The Sister

  Bunchy

  Epilogue

  Copyright and More Information

  INTRODUCTION

  The Snows of Yesteryear is a masterpiece in that rare genre that might be classed as incidental autobiography. The story the book has to tell, of the formation of a soul and a sensibility, is slyly concealed within the interstices of a set of other stories, of other lives, other pasts. In its method, which seems not a method at all, it resembles those other two great magically dissembling memoirs of the twentieth century, Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Harold Nicolson’s Some People. Rezzori’s style is less beadily precious and certainly less prolix than Nabokov’s, and his psychological insights run deeper than Nicolson’s, but all three writers share the same poise and elegance, the same drily critical eye and, delightfully, the same faintly absurdist wit. As Rezzori writes, “to recognize what is absurd and to accept it need not dim the eye for the tragic side of existence; quite on the contrary, in the end it may perhaps help in gaining a more tolerant view of the world.’’

  Gregor von Rezzori sprang from, in Humbert Humbert’s happy phrase, a “salad of genes.” On his father’s side his origins were Sicilian—his paternal ancestors had moved north to serve the Hapsburg emperors—while from his mother he inherited Swiss, Greek, Romanian, and Irish blood. He had the dubious distinction of being born in a country which ceased to exist while he was still a young man. The Bukovina, a region on the northern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, boasts a history that in richness and complexity is entirely disproportionate to its size. The country, if that is the word, came into existence in 1775 as an annexation from Moldavia by the Hapsburgs, and remained a statelet within the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918 when it passed into Romanian control. In 1940, by the terms of the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, it was split between Russia and Romania, and in 1947 Romania formally ceded the northern half of the country to the Soviets, the former capital, Czernowitz, becoming the Ukrainian city of Chernovtsy.

  By the melting-pot standards of the Bukovina, Rezzori’s background was relatively uncomplicated. Neither of his parents was born in the region. His father, a minor aristocrat and a civil servant in the employ of the Empire, came from Austria to Czernowitz at the end of the nineteenth century to take up the post of overseer of the art and artifacts of the Romanian Orthodox monasteries in the region. His mother’s parents, Rezzori writes, “had lived there temporarily, connected with the country by an originally Greek bloodline that over the centuries had become Romanian’’—a typical example of his elegantly and blandly unenlightening narrative style. In the years between the wars, from 1919 to 1939, the family persisted “in the illusion of having a pseudo-feudal position in the world.... We considered ourselves as former Austrians in a province with a predominantly Austrian coloring, like those British colonials who remained in India after the end of the Raj.’’

  The milieu that Rezzori writes of so vividly is that quintessential Mitteleuropa which disappeared into the maelstrom of the Second World War. In his moving epilogue to the book he recounts a visit paid to his birthplace in old age. “Naturally I had to assume that the Ukrainian Chernovtsy of 1989, cleansed of its hodgepodge of Swabian Germans, Romanians, Poles, Jews, Prussians, Slovaks and Armenians, could no longer be the Czernowitz or Cernăuţi that I had last visited in 1936.” At first he is astonished to find how much the present-day city resembles the one that he knew more than half a century before. Presently, however, he comes to recognize that this clean, freshly painted, composed, and sober city is merely a simulacrum, a “cunning model of a provincial town.” The words that spring to his mind are “sterile,” “lacquered,” “antiseptic.” The city’s once demonic nature has been tamed. “Nothing could be detected now of the restlessly vivacious, cynically bold and melancholically skeptical spirit that had distinguished the children of this town ...” As Thomas Wolfe’s angel assures, you can’t go home again.

  The writer, of course, snail-like, carries his home with him. The Snows of Yesteryear is not so much an effort of Proustian remembering as an attempt to reconstitute a vanished world—in this context one thinks of Roman Vishniac’s heartbreaking photographs of the Jews of Eastern Europe in the 1930s—and in particular to conjure into life the five figures who loom most immensely and most dearly in Rezzori’s memory of his early years. He begins and ends with portraits of two family servants, as unlike each other as could be possible. The first, Cassandra, baby Gregor’s wet-nurse and later governess of sorts, is a beloved but feral creature, a descendant probably of the Dacian people who fought the Roman armies through the Carpathian wildernesses; he associates her with “the melancholy spaces of a landscape peopled with peasants and shepherds through which the silver band of a river meanders lazily, edged by hills and mountains shaded by forests.” It is Cassandra who gave the book its original, German, title, Blumen im Schnee, after the blossoms she would make for him when he was a child by printing overlapping circles in the fresh-fallen snow with the bottom of a milk can, a beautiful, simple image characteristic both of the remembered woman and the remembering author.

  The separate portraits of Rezzori’s mother and father which make up the heart of the book are tender, skeptical, penetrating, and at key moments, devastatingly candid. Rezzori, a lover of women but at heart a man’s man, cleaves naturally to the father, forgiving him his many faults, the large as well as the small, including his fierce and unrelenting anti-Semitism. Both parents harbored unfulfilled ambitions, the mother to be a pediatrician, the father a chemist, and these disappointments shadowed their lives to the end.

  Rezzori senior, tall, vigorous, handsome,
was an obsessive hunter—“I often thought,” his son writes, “that his all-consuming passion for hunting was in reality an escape and a shelter from the reminder of a truer and unrealized vocation’’—and an amateur painter, a very bad one, it seems, suffering from “a disarming mediocrity in matters of taste.” Although the author presents his father always in sunniest mode—there are marvelous vignettes of the various means he employed for thwarting his wife’s society aspirations—the overall portrait is of a tragic figure lost in time. An admirer of Nietzsche, Rezzori père saw himself, his son writes, “as a representative of the world of the Baroque who had landed in the wrong century.’’

  If the portrait of his father has a touch of the heroic, Rezzori cannot stop himself from showing up his mother’s pettiness and narrowness of mind, her essential fear of the world, above all her spurious hankering after the “grand life” of parties and fashionable balls and suave men in tailcoats bowing low over her silk-gloved hand. Yet he has a deep and loving sympathy for her plight as a woman of her time, brought up by unbending parents and trapped in a marriage from which what little love there might once have been had quickly and entirely evaporated. The unrealized dream of leading a fulfilled and useful life as a doctor had, the son writes, with a true pang of sorrow, “curdled into a bitter residue at the bottom of her soul.’’

  Of his sister, who was older than he by four years and who died at twenty-two, Rezzori writes that for all the years after her death not one went by in which she was not present to him “in an almost corporeal way.” Yet his portrait of her is amused as well as loving, as sharp as it is fond, and tinted here and there by astringent washes of resentment. In this chapter of mourning for his lost sister, Rezzori displays a wonderful control both of his material and his writing style. He is never mawkish, never strives for the grand flourish; he keeps his distance, content to achieve his effects by the lightest of brushstrokes.

  For fifty-six years—a whole life span—there has not been for me a single happy or unhappy moment, neither success nor failure, no significant or even halfway noteworthy occurrence on which she might not have commented. She is mute but she is there. My life is a wordless dialogue with her, to which she remains unmoved: I monologize in front of her. In the sequence of images in which I experience myself in life, she is included in every situation, as the watermark in the paper bearing a picture ...

  The result is a measured celebration of a life cut short, and a portrait of a clever, brave, and largehearted young woman whom the ancient Stoics would have welcomed as one of their own.

  Indeed, the stoic note is struck throughout, and nowhere more resoundingly than in the wonderful, closing portrait of Miss Lina Strauss, otherwise known as Bunchy—one of the meanings of the German word Strauss is “bunch of flowers’’—the Pomeranian tutor who first taught Rezzori’s mother and then young Rezzori himself, and who remained his friend and mentor until her death at a grand age. Bunchy had led a remarkable life. She had lived for many years in New York and Florence, and had been a good friend, and perhaps more than a good friend, of Mark Twain’s. She brought to the Rezzori household “a more civil tone,” and probably imbued young Gregor with something of her own civilized and culturally sophisticated outlook upon the world and its not always appealing inhabitants. He recalls the regular postcards she would send him in later years, usually with reproductions of paintings by the Tuscan masters, and remarks, beautifully, how “the golden background of those Annunciations lined the place in my psyche where her name was embedded.’’

  Flakes of that gold leaf adhere to every page of this wonderful, luminous memoir. The Snows of Yesteryear may deal with a lost world but in its affirmation of the necessity of clear sight, humor, warmth, and a jealously maintained sense of due proportion, it is a welcome reproof for the laxities of our time. Writing of his sister, Rezzori remarks the matter in which they felt “an identical, close affinity,” namely, “the perceptive handling of unavoidable losses. We knew the fabric that fed the poetics of our life; we knew the value of those myths into which lost realities are transformed.” By a seemingly selfless concentration upon the figures that surrounded him in his earliest years, Rezzori manages to portray vividly both a public world that has gone and a private self that endures. In a haunting passage he recalls a Joycean epiphany experienced on a long-ago “brooding Romanian summer afternoon,” when he sat by a window above an enclosed garden, raptly attentive to the music of what happens. There is an ancient vine, and summer flies that “threaded the hour,” and a sleeping cat, and soaring swallows.

  I had before me an 1873 issue of Over Land and Sea. From its yellowed pages rose a subtly musty whiff. A foxed steel engraving of a three-master with reefed sails in a small palm-fanned harbor in front of a background of steep volcanic cones—this lured my imagination into the airy remotenesses of spiced shores. But there remained a floating core of consciousness filled with nothing but a transparent void—I would have called it my “I,” had I been asked—that was neither here nor there but, instead, in an anguished and tormenting nowhere.

  —JOHN BANVILLE

  THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR

  For Beatrice

  with love and in unending gratitude

  Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?

  —François Villon

  Cassandra

  Swarms of waxwings have settled in the ripe clusters of rowanberries. It is said that they come only every seven years from high up north, from Lapland or Siberia, and only when the winter threatens to turn exceptionally severe. They’re also called plague birds, even though they appear rather pretty: plump and colorful, with a saucy crest, velvety black heads and throats, white-banded wings on scarlet pinions and tails edged in lemon yellow. Their fluffy breasts, of a rosy mother-of-pearl hue, crowd against the spiky gridwork of the cluster stems as they busily pick the red berries. A sudden detonation: someone is shooting with birdshot into the swarm, which rises like smoke above the crowns of the rowan trees. But a good dozen of the birds tumble from the fruit clusters down into the snow amidst fallen berries and drops of blood. Who can tell whether the survivors will ever return? The clusters are torn to shreds and the denuded twigs show as a rigid pattern against the pale winter sky.

  When she joined the household, it was said, she was hardly more than a beast. They had peeled her out of her peasant garb and had instantly consigned the shirt, the wrap skirt, the sleeveless sheepskin jacket and the leather buskins to the flames. But clad in city clothes, she looked so utterly absurd as to be frightening. People would say in rude jesting that if a pregnant woman encountered her, she might well miscarry. Forthwith they dressed her once more in her traditional costume, though a somewhat stylized version, devoid of the many-colored embroideries on shirt and skirt, without the vermilion sash and the saffron-colored kerchief: a nunnish garb in subdued black, white and gray shades. “They turned a goldfinch into a sparrow,” she would say of herself. It had not been anticipated that she would be even more conspicuous in this contrived costume than in her traditional clothes, notwithstanding which she wore it with great and dignified pride, as if it were a monastic vestment.

  No one ever found out how she had come by the name of Cassandra. Under no circumstances could she have been baptized under that name. The godforsaken hamlet in the Carpathian Mountains whence she had come—she still knew its name but no longer where it was located, in any case, “way back in the woods’’—consisted of a handful of clapboard hovels whose inhabitants slept with their sheep in winter, while in summer the plangent sound of their shepherd pipes mingled with the wind rushing through the pine trees of their mountain fastness. To what name she answered there she stubbornly refused to reveal, nor did she divulge who first had called her Cassandra. Probably it was someone at the monastery where my father had found her, but even that seemed doubtful: no one but the abbot himself would have been likely to bestow on her, out of the bevy of maidservants—perhaps by reason of some evil-boding prophecy?—the name of the se
eress from The Iliad. The monks in their black frocks, the stovepipes of their rimless hats on their shaggy-haired heads, shy, wildly ecstatic or half mad in self-absorption, were no less ignorant than their village brethren. Anyway, she came to us as Cassandra and took care of me from the day of my birth—as my nanny, my mother said; as my wet nurse, Cassandra claimed.

  It is typical of my mother’s misguided pride that no photographs of Cassandra have come down to me. When the northern part of the Bukovina where we used to live—formerly a crown land of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and after 1919 a province of Romania—was ceded to Russia in 1940 as a result of the pact concluded between Stalin and Hitler, or more accurately between their lackeys Molotov and Ribbentrop, the authorities in charge of Interests of Germans Abroad “repatriated” us and all other former Austrians “of German blood” to the German Reich. Each person was allowed to take fifty kilograms of belongings. My mother had a Russian colonel quartered in her town house in Czernowitz who gallantly permitted her to take with her twice as much, of which at least a third consisted of memorabilia of the family. Among the hundreds of photographs, all those showing Cassandra were eliminated. Not because of her ugliness, although she must have looked, with me in her arms, like a female gorilla costumed as a nanny kidnapping a white infant. That Cassandra had been in our service, first as nanny and later, when I was growing up and my parents had separated, as my father’s housekeeper, my mother could not help admitting. But that the “savage one,” as Cassandra openly was called in the household, had also been my wet nurse—this my mother resolutely denied. To have nursed me with her own milk was a distinction she claimed for herself alone.