Fiction: Child of All Nations By Irmgard Keun, translated by Michael Hofmann Penguin, 195pp. £14.99A nine-year-old girl gives her version of life on the road with her parents. Her father is a writer, continually looking for loans, while making promises and setting deadlines he appears incapable of keeping and always drinking, drinking, drinking.
The child's mother is more openly defeated; bewildered and desperate for even the slightest trace of normality, Annie can only watch as her husband plots and plans and disappears.
It all seems very chaotic, yet Kully, the little girl and narrator of a tale that is as chilly for its subtext as it is delightfully engaging in its telling, is impressively buoyant. Here is a child wise beyond her years and well aware of the relevance of visas and borders, who has somehow, for all her worldliness, retained her innocence. As her father, a German writer, races across Europe, from city to city, leaving a trail of hotel bills, not to mention his hapless wife and child, behind him, Kully reports on the speed with which the friendliness of the hotel staff is replaced with disdain. "We can't leave, because we can't pay the hotel bill. We can't enter any other country, but we can't stay here either. Perhaps we'll be thrown into prison, and then we'll be fed."
Originally published in Berlin in 1938, Child of All Nations, is one of several novels written by Irmgard Keun (1905-1982). After a short-lived and indifferent acting career, Keun began writing and met with rather more success. By the time she published this book, she was already well established and sufficiently significant to be black-listed by the Nazis. As an émigré writer, she moved in an exalted circle and could question with some exasperation the material chosen by her peers. In the insightful afterword accompanying his characteristically astute and lively translation, Michael Hofmann quotes Keun at her sharpest: "What are the other émigrés writing?" she asks. "Kesten has a novel about Philip II, Roth has one about the Dual Monarchy of Austria, Zweig is writing on Erasmus of Rotterdam, Thomas Mann on Lotte in Weimar, Henrich Mann on Henri IV, Feuchtwanger on Nero . . . Who is writing the great book about now?"
THAT 'NOW' WAS the now of upheaval as Europe, and eventually the world, slid towards war. Child of All Nations evokes the reality of that "now"; of the reality of people on the run, tensely waiting for the real trouble to begin. In fairness to Kully, she is more concerned with having no food, slinking through hotel lobbies, and the memory of having her coat pawned, than with the politics, yet even she, caught up in the bickering exchanges between her parents, is aware of something going on. She is a precocious child, making the best of her mother's despair and her father's empty promises. She may only be nine years of age, but she can calmly report her father's publisher, Mr Krabbe, announcing, "If there's a war now, we'll all be locked up and shot".
Kully does not go to school yet speaks many languages, or at least phrases picked up from hotel staff. She is still young enough to not fully understand death. Having been knocked over by a crowd stampeding to stare at the Duke of Windsor, Kully screams at her father: "I've been trampled to death." When he assures her that she is still alive, she disagrees: "No. I told you: I'm dead. They trampled me to death.", later adding in her half pragmatist, half dream fantasist way, "I was dead, but my father wouldn't believe me."
FOR ALL THE narrative energy and black humour - and Keun daringly pitches the narrative at a level of candour that is both blunt and childlike: "My mother spends more time waiting than I do, because she doesn't play much and has no little friends" - this is also a terrifying book. The characterisation of the father alone makes this a work to ponder. Here is a ruthless alcoholic who "never cries", lies his way around Europe and whose child appears to see him only in the context of his latest deal, his most recent promise. She knows he has told her mother to tell his publisher that she is about to deliver the manuscript of a novel that has not yet been written. Elaborate, often ingenious deception is part of the daily business of Kully's father.
There is also the fear that he will abandon his wife, who is aware of his relations with other women, while Kully has no expectations of him. In this alone, Keun has created a child who belongs to the real world. Still, although Kully is not cynical and is lonely, she is tough. Keun ensures that the reader never forgets exactly how tough this dreamer of a child happens to be. When she meets up with some Dutch children, she is delighted and shares her doll's house with them. However, the play turns nasty, her new playmates trample the doll's house, so Kully threatens to stab the children.
Her nomadic life has set her apart from other children who "don't believe me when I say I've been on a sleigh in the Carpathians with my father and a Polish hunter, and have lain on a fur in a hut and eaten bear steaks . . . ". In Kully, Keun has created a child who is truly the daughter of a writer. The little girl recalls a time she was sitting in a seaside cafe with her parents. "Women pushed carts of prawns and smooth flat fish that smelled nasty and dripped pale blood. The fish were hung up next to us, like items of laundry out to dry. Fishermen walked over the beach. They wore reddish-yellow jackets - the house of my grandmother in Cologne is that sort of colour."
It is a tightrope, maintaining a credible balance between the perceptions of a child, albeit one who has lived almost exclusively in an adult world, and those of an adult writer observing Europe through an exile's heightened sensibility. Yet Keun sustains the belief, although this is stretched when father and daughter board a liner for New York. Mother, Annie, has been left sleeping in the hotel; the plan is that she will wake in time for the journey. Of course she does not, and then there is the problem with her passport - Kully's father has it with him. The American sequence sits awkwardly on the tale.
Whatever about the plot, though, the theme of displacement is what really matters. Irmgard Keun shared a few years of her exile's life with the marvellous if enigmatic novelist and journalist Joseph Roth (1894-1939), upon whom, Hofmann suggests, the character of Kully's father may well be based. Perhaps Peter is Roth, or part of him, who knows? This first English translation of Child of All Nations is an exciting discovery and introduces yet another gifted and intuitive European writer of witness to a wider audience.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times