Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
In the famous introduction to his Seven Famous Novels (1934), H.G. Wells explains his early imaginative stories, differentiating them from the serious speculations of Jules Verne:
They belong to a class of writing which includes the Golden Ass of Apuleius, the True Histories of Lucian, Peter Schlemil [sic] and the story of Frankenstein. It includes too some admirable inventions by Mr. David Garnett, Lady into Fox for instance. They are all fantasies; they do not project a serious possibility....
It would be decades before Brian Aldiss famously identified Frankenstein as the foundation novel of science fiction, and I am not sure Wells ever accepted himself as one of the fathers of the field either.
But that is not, to my mind, the most interesting thing about this. You will note that in the course of citing famous classics as if they are the familiar heritage of all mankind Wells mentions what is to most people an unknown title. Peter Schlemihl (or Schlemil)? What is that? Well, I think any American knows a few words of Yiddish, and having married a lady of the Chosen People myself, I certainly have had it explained to me that, “A schlemihl [pathetic loser] spills the soup. The [even more pathetic] nebbish cleans it up.” A consultation in The New Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten and revised by Lawrence Bush reveals that the word has various spellings and that the schlemihl spills the soup down the neck of the hapless shlimazl before the nebekh [their spelling] cleans it up—which does not seem immediately germane to anything, but definition #7 of “schlemihl” is interesting:
Anyone who makes a foolish bargain or wagers a foolish bet. This usage is wide in Europe; it probably comes from Chamisso’s tale “Peter Schlemihl’s Wunderbare Geschichte,” a fable in which the protagonist sold his shadow and, like Faust, sold his soul to Satan. (344)
Here again we have the story which H.G. Wells mentions in the same breath as Apuleius, Lucian, and Frankenstein, and Leo Rosen actually thinks became part of the spoken language in Europe. So, what is “The Wonderful Story of Peter Schlemihl”? The curious reader, the adventurous reader, the reader likely to go beyond a very casual interest in fantastic literature, wants to know. I was in a book discussion of Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau recently in which I read aloud that passage from the introduction to Seven Famous Novels, and nobody there had any idea what “Peter Schlemihl” was or any interest. A couple of people asked if it was a joke.
I think not. Sometimes it is a proud and lonely thing to be an investigative reader though not a difficult one, because a quick look in any literary reference work or to Wikipedia tells us that “Peter Schlemihl” is a classic of German romanticism, a novella by Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838). Chamisso was of an aristocratic family, born in France, but after the French Revolution, his parents fled to Germany where young Adelbert got a good education and served as a page to the Queen of Prussia. He had a brief career in the Prussian army and returned to France for a visit after his parents had gone back, once Napoleon recalled the émigrés. He was in Germany again when war broke out and Prussia rose against France, and he found himself despised as an enemy alien after he had been similarly regarded by the French. Unhappy in his career and circumstances, he applied himself to the study of German literature and, interestingly enough, to science. He became a noted botanist and in 1815 was probably quite relieved to sail around the world as part of an expedition trying to find the Northwest Passage. This may not have been as scientifically momentous as Darwin’s voyage a few years later, but he made numerous observations and collected specimens. He returned to Berlin where he earned a Ph.D., received an appointment to the Botanic Gardens, and pursued natural history. But he hadn’t given up on literature and wrote poetry, various romances, memoirs, and the like.
Chamisso, incidentally, was not Jewish. Why he gave his hero a Yiddish last name is not entirely clear, but we can only guess that some Yiddish words were at least as familiar to nineteenth-century Germans as they are to twenty-first-century Americans.
“Peter Schlemihl” was apparently written in 1813 and published in 1814. Because Chamisso was an associate of Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, the author of the famous Undine, the first English translation of “Schlemihl” was mistakenly attributed to Fouque.
I had a copy of “Peter Schlemihl” all along. Mine is a very large, ornately decorated and illustrated volume called The Marvelous History of the Shadowless Man, and The Cold Heart, by A. Von Chamisso and Wilhelm Hauff, published in Boston by the Dana Estes Company. No date, but the introduction by Dr. A.S. Rappoport, who does not say he is the translator but probably is, is dated 1913. Abebooks.com listings tend to list this book as 1914. Several other editions reprint the work as The Shadowless Man or some variant thereof.
Faced with a roomful of people who just did not seem at all intrigued by what appeared to be a reference (in Wells) to a classic that nobody had ever heard of, as soon as I could afterwards I took down the book and read it.
Guess what? It’s good. This is a novella (88 pages, rather large type) which can still be read with pleasure. There is a rule here, I think, or at least something any reader should take under advisement: If something ever became a classic, even a forgotten classic, there was probably a reason.
The story opens with a strange old man who carries, interestingly enough, a botanical sample case, handing Chamisso a manuscript. This manuscript is Peter Schlemihl’s own account of how he got off a boat with an introduction to a very rich man, Mr. Thomas John (possibly intended to be an Englishman?), and proceeded to that gentleman’s house where a garden party was in progress. No one among the upper-class company pays any attention to our hero, but he notices a “tall, elderly, meagre-looking man” in “an old-fashioned coat of gray sarsnet” (a fine cloth) who has the curious ability of producing out of his pocket whatever is desired, starting with a plaster for a lady who pricked her finger on a thorn but moving on to a large telescope and quite a bit more which should not be able to fit into one man’s pocket, including a tent, a Turkish carpet, refreshments, and even two horses. The most curious thing of all is that no one else seems to be aware of where these objects came from or that they haven’t always been there.
We are clearly in the presence of the supernatural. The reader may be justified in the assumption that the man in the gray coat is the Devil, although this is not explicitly stated. The Devil’s wiles are more subtle than you might expect. He offers Peter a Faustian bargain, the possession of a bottomless purse, in exchange, not for his soul, but for his shadow. Foolish Peter, in an act that gave the word “schlemihl” its new meaning, agrees. Almost at once he sees his error because without a shadow he is uncanny. He is stoned by street children, shunned by society, and can only venture out on the darkest nights or present himself in very carefully lighted rooms. He is now, of course, inordinately rich and acquires a faithful servant (in addition to a wicked servant who later betrays him), but he would be very glad to have his shadow back. Alas, the man in the gray coat said he was going away for a year. So a year passes during which Peter travels from place to place as a man of mystery (rather like Faust), has various adventures, and loses his sweetheart. Then he meets the Devil again, who makes him a second offer: his soul for the return of his shadow. But ultimately Peter is still a friend of God and refuses. (Wikipedia, not Rosten, supplies the datum—a factoid?—that originally the name Schlemihl meant “Friend of God,” the equivalent of the Greek “Theophilus.”)
There is a genuinely unnerving moment when Peter asks if the rich man, Mr. Thomas John, has sold his soul to the Devil. But the Devil explains that he already owns such a one and pulls the wretch partway out of his pocket.
Now having thrown away the bottomless purse and still without a shadow, Peter can only wander, but luck is suddenly with him. When his boots wear out, he obtains a new pair, which prove to be the proverbial Seven League Boots so that he can range about the world in them, crossing continents in a few strides. He devotes himself to Chamisso’s other passion—botany—and is reconciled with a life in the wilderness, attuned to nature and to his own remaining goodness. (He didn’t sell his soul to the Devil after all. Rosten is wrong. He hadn’t read the story recently when he wrote or perhaps not at all.)
So what does it mean? Allegorical interpretations have been attempted. People pestered Chamisso for the rest of his life. He doesn’t seem to have had any “meaning” in mind but just wrote “Peter Schlemihl” as an amusing story, which it is. In the edition I have, the language is a little archaic, as we would expect for a translation of an early nineteenth-century fairy tale. The modern reader might object that the second part of the story involving the Seven League Boots seems to come out of nowhere but of course in Chamisso’s day “fantasy” was not a commercial genre, and there weren’t any “rules” about how such a story should be plotted.
Certainly “Peter Schlemihl” had widespread impact. Wikipedia gives us a long list of “later retellings.” Peter wandered into an E.T.A. Hoffman story and from there into Offenbach’s opera, Tales of Hoffman. Wittgenstein and Karl Marx both make allusions to Chamisso’s story. The character is referenced in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s “Venus in Furs.” There was even a television adaptation on American television in 1953 as an episode of Favorite Story with a very pre–Dr. McCoy DeForest Kelley in the title role. And so on. Or maybe und so weiter. I might also mention that for all Lord Dunsany’s 1926 novel The Charwoman’s Shadow deals with magic and the consequences of losing one’s shadow, the two works otherwise do not have much in common. Was Dunsany familiar with Chamisso? Yes, almost certainly. He, like Wells, doubtless regarded it as a standard part of the world’s classic literature.
The 1914 Estes & Co. volume is filled out with “The Cold Heart” by Wilhelm Hauff, who was another early nineteenth-century German fantasist, apparently much more prolific than Chamisso, for all he died of typhoid at age 25 in 1827. E.F. Bleiler in his The Guide to Supernatural Fiction says that Hauff’s tales are among the finest literary fairy tales in all of world literature. This one is thematically related to “Peter Schlemihl,” in that it is also about a foolish, quasi-Faustian bargain. Peter Munk, a charcoal burner of the Black Forest, is dissatisfied with his lot. He makes a deal with a forest spirit, Master Glassmanikin, for three wishes, which, of course, he spends foolishly. He then encounters a far more sinister spirit, Dutch Martin, who offers him infinite amounts of gold in exchange for his heart. When Peter agrees, Dutch Martin replaces his heart with a stone, pointing out the advantages of a stone heart, e.g., that he will never experience fear, sorrow, or remorse. But, of course, this robs him of his humanity, and eventually he has to cooperate with Glassmanikin again to regain his living heart but give up his riches. He ends up better off where he was as a humble charcoal burner. In this we see a story arc very similar to the kind of philosophical/comic romance James Branch Cabell wrote a hundred years later. Jurgen, you will recall, regained his youth and ranged throughout the Earth and cosmos but ended up where he started.
Well, now we know what that mysterious reference in Wells’s introduction to Seven Famous Novels is about, but the further question is raised: are these stories by Chamisso and Hauff genuinely forgotten ex-classics? There are such things as ex-classics. I used to argue this one with professors in graduate school. Homer and Shakespeare may be pretty secure, but otherwise, if you have spent perhaps more time in used-book stores and libraries than in classrooms, you know that there are lots of books which have fallen out of the Canon. Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth used to be ranked with Tolstoy. It isn’t anymore. Winston Churchill’s The Crisis (a novel about the American Civil War) used to be so famous that when Winston Churchill, the Briton, began to write, he had to sign his name Winston S. Churchill to distinguish himself from the other fellow, who is hardly remembered at all now, for all The Crisis along with a huge number of other ex-classics can be found listed in the catalogues of old Classics Illustrated comic books. You can also find ex-classics listed in the back of very old Modern Library books.
I am not convinced that “Peter Schlemihl” is an ex-classic. It may be more a matter of the provincialism of American fantasy readers that they haven’t heard of it. It’s still in print in both German and English. There have been many, many editions over the past two centuries. Franz Rottensteiner in his The Fantasy Book (1978) refers to it as “immortal,” as he sums up nineteenth-century German romanticism quickly in the course of a discussion of E.T.A. Hoffman, whom he ranks with Poe and Gogol as the three finest fantasists, ever. (So, have you read Hoffman? Have you read Gogol?) This is a tip-of-the-iceberg situation. Someone needs to produce an anthology of German romantic fantasy. It is clear that Germany in the early nineteenth century produced a great deal of fantasy and horror fiction (think of Poe’s remark that “horror is not of Germany, but of the soul”). We can point to Chamisso, Hauff, Ludvig Tieck, Hoffman, de la Motte Fouque, and several others. This was also the period in which the Grimm brothers were collecting and publishing folktales, so it is not surprising that the approach in most of these fantasies is folkloristic. Literary writers respond to new material as the surrounding culture absorbs it. A hundred years before this, imaginative writers were producing “oriental tales” under the influence of translations of The Arabian Nights, which were then becoming available. This spawned a genre which persisted through the eighteenth century until about the time it was memorably parodied and absorbed into the Gothic by William Beckford in Vathek (1786).
The thing to keep in mind, then, is that fantasy wasn’t invented by Tolkien or Robert E. Howard or Lord Dunsany or L. Frank Baum or even Poe. It is a norm in literature, which keeps turning up again and again throughout the centuries. It still seems to me that Apuleius’ The Golden Ass may be the oldest extant example, but there is no reason to believe it was the first.
And yes, if you keep finding references to something that many people over many decades seem to think is worthwhile, it is usually rewarding to check it out.
Darrell Schweitzer lives in Philadelphia, a classic city in danger of being forgotten.
Works Consulted
Rosten, Leo. The New Joys of Yiddish (revised by Lawrence Bush). New York: Crown Publishers, 2001.
Rottensteiner, Franz. The Fantasy Book. New York: Collier Books, 1978.
von Chamisso, Adelbert and Wilhelm Hauff. The Marvelous History of the Shadowless Man and The Cold Heart. Boston: Dana Estes & Company. circa 1914.
Wells, H.G. Seven Famous Novels. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934.
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