Lexa, carried away by the thrill of it all, did not know that Helmy’s triumphant shout at the door–so spontaneous and joyful as it had been–was the signal for the upheaval of the country, for the disappearance of logic, individuality, of freedom itself.
She did not know, nor did Helmy, that the simple words he cried were to announce a spring not only of buds and warm winds but of violence, bloodshed, and foolhardy actions of stupidity which were to make the rest of Europe recoil from the friendship she had felt reviving in her for German.
Germany had awoken. Hitler had spoken. And Hitler was now the rightful spokesman and leader for German.
I’m always a bit skeptical about a book touted for the beauty of its sentences: that’s not what I read novels for, or at any rate, beautiful sentences are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for me to love or admire a novel. It matters a lot to me what the sentences say, what they are for! Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross is a good reminder to me that the opposite is also true: it isn’t enough for a novel to be earnestly, even passionately, in service of something important–especially if it’s something as obvious as “Nazis bad!” which is pretty much the level of subtlety I found on offer in Crooked Cross.
I mean, yes: Nazis are bad! And it’s not that I think we should stop telling stories about this. It’s odd how the badness of Nazis makes it hard to say “this book is bad,” though. I do kind of think it is, however. It’s just so obvious. It’s true that Crooked Cross was initially published when it would not have been so obvious, its stories not so predictable. The novel first appeared in 1934: in her preface to the new Persephone edition, Laura Freeman notes that the most astonishing thing about the novel and its two sequels is “how closely they follow events.” Readers today have read (and seen) a lot of stories about this period of history, and there is something startling about the raw immediacy of Carson’s account of the events of the short period from Christmas 1932 to the summer of 1933, which transform–deform–her small cast of characters. Those who join the Nazis are, she makes clear, being destroyed from within; those who oppose them and those who are their targets and victims are first ostracized, then persecuted, then either sent to the camps or murdered.
It seems wrong to say “OK, so?”–and to be fair to Carson, she does tell her story with enough finesse that even knowing its inevitable outcome, I felt some grim dread about how exactly those inevitabilities would play out. She also does a good job bringing out what Freeman identifies as the unheimlich qualities normal life takes on in an abnormal world. Even as the two eldest sons, Erich and Helmy, become increasingly complicit in Nazi ideology and atrocities and the daughter, Lexa, sees her fiancé Moritz, a Catholic, pay a higher and higher price for his Jewish surname, the Kluger family celebrates holidays, goes to dances, enjoys favourite meals, goes swimming at the local pool, and generally carries on like any ordinary family–at least until they, or Lexa, can’t keep it up any more. Lexa’s devotion to Moritz is initially sweet, innocent, naive–but as circumstances get harder, Lexa’s courage rises to match her outraged principles as well as her love. Their attempt to escape over the mountains into Austria is suspenseful and its outcome is unequivocally tragic, and also rendered with rare restraint by Carson.
If that sounds like the stuff of good fiction, it is! Too bad Crooked Cross is not. It’s leaden, plodding, heavy-handed. Does it just seem this way because we already know? Maybe–but in that case, it is also dated, right? Its interest is perhaps more documentary than literary.
I realize that someone who loves Mary Barton should be careful criticizing writers for being heavy-handed. I believe Gaskell is just a much better (more interesting, more artful, more stylish) writer than Carson. Your mileage may vary. I will quote a few bits of Crooked Cross that I flagged as both particularly lumpish and decently representative. First, here’s a bit that follows on from the excerpt I chose as my epigraph:
Now the Nazi Party with Hitler at its head and the bulk of the nation behind it could march to triumph. The stage was set for a fresh game; the press was silenced; ears were deafened to foreign voices of protest.
Like a gigantic operation the work of rejuvenating Germany began: a blindfold surgeon began to cut at her behind closed doors, chopping away everything he thought unfit, with no thought for her future life, her future vitality, with no idea that the horrible scars on her body would be noticed by her friends–never forgotten, probably.
No matter. There was to be a boycott of Jews beginning on April 1st; there were to be new passport regulations, fresh censorship on newspapers. There were to be murders.
The bursting accumulation of fanatic energy, held in leash so long, was to be let loose. It could no longer be controlled. Patriotism must run its course. All was open and free for it.
I don’t know, maybe that’s not so bad? But I do think it is not good. Why is it so hard to be sure? I have been wondering if I would be less judgmental about Carson’s prose if it were in translation from German: there’s something (to my ear) stilted about the cadence as well as overly insistent in the tone. Here’s another bit that strikes me as, again, not quite getting it right:
As the suspense which swept through the country was heightened into excitement there were more cases of bloodshed in strife between the parties. People like Helmy and his friend, Otto Streicher, performed their tasks with a fresh, hopeful energy. In quite homes like the Klugers [sic] it began to be difficult to ignore the political situation.
Open taunts to Jews and Communists were made, and there were isolated cases of people like Moritz who began to suffer while the days of doubt, hope, indecision, bravado drew January to a close. The country was like a person tossing in a frightened sleep, half conscious yet half unconscious of the nightmare into which, on awakening, it was to be so abruptly plunged.
For me, the worst parts where those where Carson was the most ambitious, moving from her characters’ situations and reactions out towards larger moral or even philosophical insights. Again, I am aware that a Victorianist, and especially a lover of George Eliot’s fiction, could be on shaky ground criticizing a novelist for doing this–but (for me) George Eliot’s philosophical commentary is never thin and reedy, like this:
[Lexa] did not realize that the blessing which appears in times of trouble–that of being only able and forcibly made to live in the present–made the extraordinary behaviour of life possible. She did not know that that is nature’s own anaesthesia; the mind and the heart–holding too much of the past, too pregnant for the future, as external pressure of circumstance increases–gradually reach a point of satiety. Events of the past slip quickly as into a life unknown, become a part almost of a previous existence; the future no longer holds fears and doubts; it is for the moment non-existent. [It goes on like this for two more paragraphs.]
Again, I wonder: how easy is it, to make the case that this is bad writing? Maybe it is more convincing for you! Also, I think it makes a difference pulling these clips out of context. It was not any one moment, any single clunky passage, that made me conclude Crooked Cross was a badly written book. It was the whole reading experience, which left me thinking maybe it was a “lost” book for good reason. A few years back, writing about some re-published novels by Rosalind Brackenbury, I asked
what, besides nostalgia, makes a good but not great novel from a century ago more appealing than an equally middling one from this year? More generally, what qualities make the difference between a lost classic – a work that resists or subverts standard assumptions about literary value – and a period piece whose interest is primarily as an artefact of literary history?
Decently readable though it is, Crooked Cross seems to me an example of the latter, an artefact, perhaps worth recovering for the interest of seeing what could be said about the badness of Nazis and the horrors they wrought as early as 1934, but not standing out as a novel of real literary value, in spite of those currently hailing it as a recovered masterpiece. We have better books to read about its topic: novels like Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, or extraordinary works of non-fiction like Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost. Sorry, Persephone: once again I think there may be something to the concept of the “Whipple line”–even though it seems somehow rude or even faintly unethical to invoke that for a book on a subject that matters so deeply.
Novel Readings 