boarding-school life, she might have become a good doctor after all. One thing is certain—had such frivolous books come within her reach, even if only as potential reading, she would have been more likely to become a reader of Proust than of Joyce; as it was, she did at least read Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, and copiously in that Catholic illustrated weekly which has by now acquired antiquarian value and
in those days
was the most ultramodern of the ultramodern in its category, the 1914–1920 counterpart to the
Publik
of the 1970’s, and when it is also known that on her sixteenth birthday her parents gave her a subscription to
Hochland
, we can see that she was equipped with not only progressive but the most progressive reading matter. It was probably through her reading of
Hochland
that she was so well informed on the past and present of Ireland, names such as Pearse, Connolly, even such names as Larkin and Chesterton, were not unfamiliar to her; and there is evidence, by way of her sister Irene Schweigert, née Barkel, who is still alive and at the age of seventy-five is living in a ladies’ rest home in the company of fondly warbling budgerigars, “calmly waiting for death” (her own words), that as a young girl Leni’s mother was “among the first, if not the very first, feminine readers of the German translations of William Butler Yeats, and certainly—as I personally know because I gave it to her—of Yeats’s prose that appeared in 1912, and of course Chesterton.”
Now there can be no question of using a person’s literary background or lack of it either for or against him, its only useis to throw light on a scene that around 1927 was already casting tragic shadows. Of one thing there is no doubt when one studies the honeymoon picture taken in 1919: whatever else of her and in her may have been frustrated—Leni’s mother was most certainly not a frustrated courtesan. She appears to be not very sensual and far from bursting with hormones, whereas he obviously is bursting with hormones. It is quite possible that both of them—whose mutual love we have no right to doubt—were, erotically speaking, totally inexperienced when they embarked on the adventure of marriage, and it may very well be that during the first few nights Gruyten proceeded, if not exactly roughly, perhaps a little impatiently.
As far as
his
acquaintance with books is concerned, the Au. is far from inclined to rely on the opinion of a surviving business competitor who, described as a “giant in the construction field,” expressed himself in these words: “That fellow and books—his ledger maybe, that might have been a book that interested him.” Indeed, we have reason to believe that Hubert Gruyten did in fact read very few books: the technical literature he was obliged to read during his engineering studies, and otherwise, as can be verified, a popular biography of Napoleon, and apart from that, according to the identical testimonies of Marja and Hoyser, “all he wanted was the newspaper and later on the radio.”
After old Mrs. Schweigert had finally been tracked down, an explanation presented itself for a phrase of Marja’s that had thus far been unexplainable and unexplained, a phrase that had remained so long in the Au.’s notebook without being checked off that it very nearly fell victim to impatience: for Marja accused Mrs. Gruyten of having been “just crazy about her Finns.” Since not a single one of the available statementscould be found to contain even the remotest reference to Finland, this expression must have been meant to denote the “Fenians,” Mrs. Gruyten’s partiality for Ireland having subsequently taken a romantic and to some degree even sentimental turn. In any event, Yeats had always been her favorite poet.
There being a complete absence of any exchange of correspondence between Gruyten and his wife, and nothing beyond the statements of Miss van Doorn (which in this case
in those days
was the most ultramodern of the ultramodern in its category, the 1914–1920 counterpart to the
Publik
of the 1970’s, and when it is also known that on her sixteenth birthday her parents gave her a subscription to
Hochland
, we can see that she was equipped with not only progressive but the most progressive reading matter. It was probably through her reading of
Hochland
that she was so well informed on the past and present of Ireland, names such as Pearse, Connolly, even such names as Larkin and Chesterton, were not unfamiliar to her; and there is evidence, by way of her sister Irene Schweigert, née Barkel, who is still alive and at the age of seventy-five is living in a ladies’ rest home in the company of fondly warbling budgerigars, “calmly waiting for death” (her own words), that as a young girl Leni’s mother was “among the first, if not the very first, feminine readers of the German translations of William Butler Yeats, and certainly—as I personally know because I gave it to her—of Yeats’s prose that appeared in 1912, and of course Chesterton.”
Now there can be no question of using a person’s literary background or lack of it either for or against him, its only useis to throw light on a scene that around 1927 was already casting tragic shadows. Of one thing there is no doubt when one studies the honeymoon picture taken in 1919: whatever else of her and in her may have been frustrated—Leni’s mother was most certainly not a frustrated courtesan. She appears to be not very sensual and far from bursting with hormones, whereas he obviously is bursting with hormones. It is quite possible that both of them—whose mutual love we have no right to doubt—were, erotically speaking, totally inexperienced when they embarked on the adventure of marriage, and it may very well be that during the first few nights Gruyten proceeded, if not exactly roughly, perhaps a little impatiently.
As far as
his
acquaintance with books is concerned, the Au. is far from inclined to rely on the opinion of a surviving business competitor who, described as a “giant in the construction field,” expressed himself in these words: “That fellow and books—his ledger maybe, that might have been a book that interested him.” Indeed, we have reason to believe that Hubert Gruyten did in fact read very few books: the technical literature he was obliged to read during his engineering studies, and otherwise, as can be verified, a popular biography of Napoleon, and apart from that, according to the identical testimonies of Marja and Hoyser, “all he wanted was the newspaper and later on the radio.”
After old Mrs. Schweigert had finally been tracked down, an explanation presented itself for a phrase of Marja’s that had thus far been unexplainable and unexplained, a phrase that had remained so long in the Au.’s notebook without being checked off that it very nearly fell victim to impatience: for Marja accused Mrs. Gruyten of having been “just crazy about her Finns.” Since not a single one of the available statementscould be found to contain even the remotest reference to Finland, this expression must have been meant to denote the “Fenians,” Mrs. Gruyten’s partiality for Ireland having subsequently taken a romantic and to some degree even sentimental turn. In any event, Yeats had always been her favorite poet.
There being a complete absence of any exchange of correspondence between Gruyten and his wife, and nothing beyond the statements of Miss van Doorn (which in this case
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