EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews The Rider on the White HorseBy Theodor Storm, translated by James Wright NYRB Classics
JUST AS MOST American school children are familiar with Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, their German counterparts know The Rider on the White Horse. It is a German literary landmark and remains one of the great ghost stories, never to be forgotten and never losing its ability to terrorise. Not because it is obviously creepy, but because its slow, subtle, nuanced telling lingers through a balanced mix of logic and the inevitable. There are many elements contributing to its atmospheric magic, not least the chill landscape, the North Sea coastline ever at the mercy of the waves.
Into this dark world enters a young man on horseback, but he is not the rider of the title. The story is initially introduced by a narrator who is attempting to remember how he first came across the tale some 50 years earlier. Storm’s formal, deliberate technique is stately, old world recalling Goethe and also pre-empting Poe, Henry James and Thomas Mann.
Storm (1817-88) allows the narrative to be taken up by another voice, the young man who against the advice of friends, leaves their warm house to ride off into the night, intent on keeping an appointment. As he rides along the dike, the filthy weather takes over: “I heard nothing but the cries of the birds, as they almost stroked me and my faithful mare with their long wings, and the raving of the wind and water.”
Regretting his haste, the man knows it is actually too late to turn back as he has already ridden so far. “But now something came toward me on the dike. I heard nothing, but ever more clearly as the light of the half-moon grew sharper, I thought I could make out a dark shape, and soon, as it came nearer, I saw it. It sat on a horse, a high boned, haggard white horse. A dark mantle fluttered across the figure’s shoulders, and as he flew past, two burning eyes stared at me out of a pale face.”
The apparition passes and then “ran past me again”. The narrator rides along behind it and then sees it disappear. He continued on until he comes to an inn. There, the locals are discussing the latest storm and how best to sustain the dikes. It is obvious that these discussions often take place. The narrator then mentions his experience and quickly wins the attention of all present. Everyone in the inn is familiar with stories of sightings concerning the ghostly rider on his white horse. It sounds old fashioned, but why not? This magnificent story, which took the ailing Storm two years to write between 1886 and 1888, completing it four months before his death, belongs to a great 19th-century tradition of story as told by an appointed teller.
Inside the warm inn, as the storm lashes the immediate world, a stranger encounters something all present are aware of, and the task of explaining it all to the newcomer, the narrator, is entrusted to the old school master who appears to have made a life’s study of the tale.
Before the schoolmaster settles into his performance, Storm provides us with an insight, by way of a whispered aside, into the character of a person who has devoted so much time to the shaping of a story. “In his youth he studied theology, and it’s only because of an unlucky betrothal that he had to remain here as schoolmaster in his home town.” It is a brilliant touch and typical of Storm’s careful, oblique, layered style.
Once the schoolmaster gets into his stride it is clear he could give the Ancient Mariner a run for his money.
“Tell the story, just tell the story, Schoolmaster,” orders a chorus of voices. The schoolmaster requires little encouragement. He regards telling the story as his function in life.
And it is some story. Storm makes it all seem as natural as breathing, that a stranger should be content to sit for however long it takes to hear the tale, which, as it happens, took place more than 100 years earlier, in the mid 18th century. The schoolmaster has researched the story and delved into the personal history of the players. It is their story and also the story of a community bound by the moods of the sea and the efficiency of an elaborate system of dikes keeping it out.
A young boy, Hauke Haien, has been selected by fate to play a dramatic role in the life of his community. When he goes to work for a dike master he meets the girl he will eventually marry. The rites and rituals of the Frisian people are played out in the background while central to the tale is the ongoing tensions and rivalries between various interested parties intent on controlling the dikes, the building of them as well as the repairs.
Alongside the technical facts is the superstition, such as the sacrificing of something living, usually an animal, to be thrust into the heart of a dike to secure its future efficiency. There are mentions of animal bones dancing in the moonlight and references to bodies who, having died at sea, return to dry land in horribly altered forms. Young Hauke has a bizarre tussle with a large cat over a dead bird. The row ends in the cat’s death; it seems the youth may be marked by his act. God’s harsh justice offers another dimension. And Storm makes effective use of doubt.
All the while the schoolmaster holds his audience through the facts while also adding his little flourishes in which romance and duty are often at odds. When the white horse makes its first appearance there’s talk of its master having been the devil himself.
Born into this marshy landscape of polders and dikes when this part of Germany belonged to Denmark, Storm was the lawyer son of a lawyer who had broken his family tradition of farming. This wonderful volume brings together The Rider and the White Horsewith seven other stories including Immensee, all dated, a valuable detail all too often neglected by editors of short fiction. NYRB Classics is an exciting series worth celebrating.
This quiet Frisian who wrote his stories while serving the law is the literary equivalent of the artist Caspar David Friedrich. Storm’s melancholy fiction exerts the haunting power of German romanticism as well as an understanding of the choices made and decisions lamented.
The Rider on the White HorseBy Theodor Storm, translated by James Wright NYRB Classics, 284pp, £8.99
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of
The Irish Times