As odd as these little postcards may seem today, they were but part of a larger tradition of viewing Central and Eastern Europe as exotic and unusual. Books like Dracula, music like Brahms' Hungarian Dances or Smetana’s Ma Vlast, countries and individuals with names lacking the normal complement of vowels – all were immensely popular at the turn of the last century. Safely on the major rail lines, yet peopled by colorful locals in unfamiliar costumes, the principalities, duchies, and petty empires to the East of Berlin and Vienna were close enough for the average English-speaker to contemplate an enjoyable visit, yet far enough away to hint at the possibility of swashbuckling romance.
Tonight I bring you two books that seem to promise such grand and glorious fun. One, the sequel to an adventure classic, is a melancholy and ultimately tragic inversion of its predecessor. The other, first in a series of increasingly pedestrian chronicles of a land that never was, is an uneasy combination of exoticism, unlovely names, and nods to modern geopolitics:
Rupert of Hentzau, by Anthony Hope - Anthony Hope, the pen name of Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, wrote one of the greatest, most influential adventure novels in English. The Prisoner of Zenda, dashed off in 1893, truly had it all: a dashing, honorable English nobleman, Rudolf Rassendyll; his distant cousin, the King of Ruritania, a vaguely Germanic monarchy set somewhere near the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the King’s fiancee, the beautiful, strong-willed Princess Flavia; the evil Prince Michael, and his scorned mistress; and Michael’s henchman Rupert of Hentzau, crafty, sly, and seemingly invincible. Rudolf, who looks enough like the King to be his twin, finds himself forced to impersonate the King to foil a kidnapping plot and attempted coup by Prince Michael. Along the way he falls in love with Princess Flavia, battles the evil Rupert, and is faced with the temptation of assuming the Ruritanian throne and marrying his beloved in place of the feckless, alcoholic King.
The book, which ends with Rudolf nobly returning to England in hopes that his cousin will mature enough to be a good husband and ruler, was immensely popular. Briskly written and surprisingly entertaining, it was filmed repeatedly (most notably with Ronald Colman, Madeline, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in the 1930s, then remade using the same script with Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr, and James Mason in the 1950s), became a TV movie with Christopher Plummer and Inger Stevens in 1961, was adapted for Bollywood the same year, and has never been out of print. Its theme – a double recruited to serve in the place of a rightful if unworthy ruler – has reappeared in works as disparate as Robert Heinlein’s novel Double Star and Richard Dreyfus’ film Moon Over Parador. It’s a minor classic, and every bit as enjoyable now as it as a century ago.
If that weren’t enough, The Prisoner of Zenda soon was more than a book, or even a trope. It was so popular that it launched an entire school of adventure fiction, the so-called “Ruritanian romance.” These tales, which promised adventure, derring-do, romance, and Byzantine political machinations in cleverly disguised versions of the Balkans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were immensely popular, and The Prisoner of Zenda was quickly followed by a rash of novels, plays, operettas, etc., that promised similar delights. George Bernard Shaw satirized the genre in Arms and the Man, Dorothy Sayers had a murder victim believe he was the lost heir to a Ruritanian country in Have His Carcase, and Belgian cartoonist Herge sent his boy journalist Tintin to the suspiciously Zenda-esque lands of Sylvania and Borduria.
Even today, there are echoes of Ruritanian romance in novels (The Mouse That Roared, set in the Duchy of Grand Fenwick), films (much of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang takes place in Vulgaria, ruled by the feckless Baron Bomburst), and comic books (Marvel Comics’ Latveria, ruled by pompous villain Doctor Doom). As recently as last year, The Grand Budapest Hotel was a film version of a Ruritanian romance, with some of the fun and froth of the turn of the century original
The same cannot be said for the inevitable sequel to The Prisoner of Zenda, the deservedly forgotten Rupert of Hentzau.
Narrated by Ruritanian courtier Fritz von Tarlenheim, Rupert of Hentzau not only lacks even an iota of The Prisoner of Zenda’s panache, romance, and joie de vivre, but achieves the rare feat of undoing almost everything that had been resolved at the end of the first book. The King has relapsed into bad habits, Flavia is miserable as wife and queen, and the political unrest that had only been hinted at the first book has Ruritania on the verge of full-blown revolution. The King is assassinated, Rupert of Hentzau is finally dispatched after wreaking even more mayhem upon country and crown, and Rudolf, who eventually agrees to serve as King for the good of his beloved adopted country, is himself murdered almost as soon as he dares to reach above his proper station. The book ends with poor Flavia, who’s been widowed both legally (by the death of the King) and emotionally (by the death of her one true love), reigning in lonely despair while Rudolf is buried in place of the rightful King in Strelsau Cathedral.
It’s a curiously flat, unsatisfying way to end what could have been a delightful series, and it’s little wonder that Rupert of Hentzau failed to approach the popularity or lasting impact of the original. It’s not clear why Hope wrote it at all – he certainly didn’t need the money – let alone why he chose to kill off his hero seemingly at random. It may be that he was tired of demands for a sequel, but as much as killing off Rudolf would seemingly ensure that he got his wish, the grim tone and tragic ending came perilously close to ensuring that the original book also disappeared into obscurity.
Either way, it’s a huge disappointment, especially since The Prisoner of Zenda is so much fun. One has to wonder if Rupert of Hentzau, evil to the end, was behind it all.
Graustark: The Story of the Love Behind a Throne, by George Barr McCutcheon - one of the earliest Ruritanian knock-offs was this “story of a love behind a throne.” Written in 1901 by American novelist George Barr McCutcheon, Graustark tells the story of an American lawyer, the less than euphoniously named Grenfell Lorry, and his romance with a beautiful European girl saddled with the even less euphonious moniker “Sophia Guggenslocker.” They meet rather cutely thanks to a missed train connection in, of all places, West Virginia, then are reunited in Europe when Grenfell and his buddy Harry Anguish (yes, that’s really his name) go in search of Sophia after our hero can’t forget the lovely young lady.
To his shock, Grenfell learns that Sophia isn’t named Sophia, or even Guggenslocker. Her real name is, I swear on my father’s grave, “Yetive,” and she’s actually the Princess of Graustark, a mountainous country located somewhere between Transylvania and Cloud Cuckooland. Alas for love, Yetive is engaged to the duplicitous but comparatively normally named Prince Lorenz of Axphain (a country, not a giftable man’s fragrance), who will pay off the millions of gavvos in war reparations Graustark owes to its odious neighbor, Dawsbergen, thanks to Yetive’s father Ganlook (????) falling in battle several years earlier. Complicating matters even further, Prince Gabriel of Dawsbergen wants to marry Yetive himself, which would cancel the war debt and spare Graustark the agony of being ruled by someone with a name like “Ganlook” or “Yetive.”
These plains come to naught when Lorenz is inconveniently assassinated during a kidnapping attempt against Yetive. Grenfell, who had helped thwart the kidnapping, is immediately suspected of eliminating the rival, and nearly loses his head (literally) when Lorenz’s father offers to pay off the reparations anyway if someone will rid of him of this meddlesome American. Eventually it comes out that Gabriel killed Lorenz, Yetive marries Grenfell, and they all live happily ever after…
At least until the inevitable sequel, Beverly of Graustark, came out three years later. This book, which includes yet more ridiculous names (“Prince Dantan of Dawsbergen,” which sounds like a brand of sugar-free chewing gum but is still better than “Baldos,” an alleged goatherd who of course turns out to be More Than He Appears), is chockfull of the mistaken identities, then-common racial stereotypes, true love, cardboard characters, and safely familiar exoticism so beloved of Ruritanian readers. It, too, ends happily, with lovely American Beverly Calhoun marrying Prince Dantan and peace between Dawsbergen and Graustark…
At least until the next book, Truxton King: A Story of Graustark, whose eponymous character is yet another American and not a weirdly named Balkan ruler. This story, which begins by killing off Grenfell and Yetive in a train accident in Belgium, involves an assassination attempt on their son, the (thank God) normally named Robin, by minions of the evil Count Marlanx (a human being, not a type of Eastern European longhaired cat). Truxton King foils the plot, Marlanx dies unheroically, and all is well until…
Robin, now an adult, needs to take a wife in The Prince of Graustark to settle yet more financial difficulties. A rich, vulgar, unheroic (for once!) American named William Blithers, emboldened by Graustark’s history of Yankee Doodle consorts, offers to pay off all the debts if Robin will marry his less than refined daughter. This less than exciting plot ends when Robin marries his true love, Bevra (not a soft drink), daughter of Dantan the Non-Dental and Beverly Calhoun. They seem all set for a happy ending…
Except that Russia now owns Graustark’s war debt and is able to force Graustark to ally itself with Russia during the Great War in exchange for finally canceling the reparations incurred by Ganlook all those years ago. Once Russia is out of the war, Graustark negotiates a separate peace. All finally, finally, finally seems well…
If it weren’t for a Communist revolution in Axphain that exiled its heir, the dweebishly named Prince Hubert. Hubert wants to marry Princess Virginia of Dawsbergen, but she’s already married to an American journalist named Pendennis Yorke (what in hell was McCutcheon smoking when he named these people?????), and after about five million complications Hubert is dead, his illegitimate half-brother Gregory is the ruler of Axphain, and the Communists are heading off to infiltrate yet another country.*
Phew
As ridiculous as this all sounds, the Graustark books were surprisingly popular in their day. Ludicrous names and all, there was actually a short period when Graustark and its characters looked fair to be the Ruritanian (or Graustarkian) romances that would survive, not Anthony Hope’s masterpiece — a woman wrote to McCutcheon asking for genealogical information on Beverly Calhoun because she suspected they were related, and the first two novels were turned into successful films (one starring Marion Davies, the future mistress of William Randolph Hearst, as Beverly Calhoun). As late as the 1960s, a champion racehorse named Graustark was a favorite for the Kentucky Derby until he was injured (possibly by terrorists from Axphain, I’m not sure), and if he had, there’s every chance the entire series would have come back into print.
Fortunately for people who like their characters with relatively normal names, Graustark and its denizens are all but forgotten today except by Thoroughbred breeders and racing fans. Most of the books are available on Project Gutenberg in case you want to get a taste of them, but be warned: you may not recover from the laughter induced by names like “Ganlook,” “Axphain,” “Yetive,” or “John Glottal Stop Smith” (not actually a character, but he certainly should be).
*Note: there are at least two sequels but I couldn’t find them online. This is probably a good thing, but I’m sure they are somewhere in the High Library of the Heights in Badbookistan, waiting to be found at an estate sale and read by someone who is not me.
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Have any of you read a Graustark book? Bet on Graustark the horse? Read Rupert of Hentzau? Crushed on Stewart Granger and/or Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and/or Ronald Colman? It's a lovely spring night in New England, so gather 'round the fire and share....
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