Anne Frank (16 page)
Authors: Francine Prose
W
HAT
we have of Anne’s revisions—that is, the “b” version—ends in March 1944. The entries dated after that exist only in one draft, so one cannot know how much she intended to rewrite or retain of the sections that describe the intensification of her involvement with Peter. But every reference to Peter that she
did
revise (presumably, after her infatuation had cooled) is toned down so that the romantic becomes platonic, and the strong emotions seem, by contrast, neutral, the sorts of things a girl might say about any close neighborhood friend.
Early in 1944, Anne describes the thrill of gazing into Peter’s eyes. “I couldn’t refrain from meeting those dark eyes again and again, and with my whole heart I almost beseeched him, oh, tell me, what is going on inside you, oh, can’t you look beyond this ridiculous chatter?” The revision is notably less heated: “It gave me a queer feeling when I looked into his deep blue eyes and saw how embarrassed this unexpected visit had made him.
“I would have liked to ask him: Won’t you tell me something about yourself, won’t you look beyond this ridiculous chatter?…When I lay in bed and thought over the whole situation I found it far from encouraging and the idea that I should beg for Peter’s patronage was simply repellent.”
The February and March 1944 entries in the “a” version are cut to eliminate impassioned references to Peter and speculations about whether Anne’s feelings are returned. In the “a” version, Anne tells Kitty that “From early in the morning till late at night, I really do hardly anything else but think of Peter. I sleep with his image before my eyes, dream about him and he is still looking at me when I awake.” Missing from the revisions, this passage reappears in Otto’s edit of
The Diary of a Young Girl.
In the first draft, and the published diary, Anne writes that she lives from one meeting with Peter to the next, but that obses
sion no longer haunts the writer editing
Het Achterhuis
for publication.
On March 7, there is a revealing alteration. The original reads: “At the beginning of the New Year the second great change, my dream…and with it I discovered Peter…discovered my longing for a boy; not for a girl friend but for a boy friend. I also discovered my inward happiness and my defensive armor of superficiality and gaiety. Now I live only for Peter, for on him will depend very much what will happen to me from now on!”
Anne’s rewritten dream of her future is nobler, more abstract—and no longer dependent on Peter:
“At the beginning of the New Year the second great change, my dream…and with it I discovered my boundless desire for all that is beautiful and good.” Nowhere in the revisions do we find passages like the following, which exists only in the first draft: “Peter has touched my emotions more deeply than anyone has ever done before—except in my dreams. Peter has taken possession of me and turned me inside out.” Nor did Anne choose to include the discussions about sex that the “a” version records—conversations in which Peter explained how contraceptives function and Anne informed him about the mysteries of female anatomy.
Even small fixes are telling. In the March 12, 1944, entry, Anne enumerates the crises that make her long to fall asleep and wish she could confide in her sister; her worries include the fact that she never receives a “friendly glance from Peter.” In the second draft, Anne admits that she loves talking to Peter, though she fears being a nuisance. “But still, I won’t drive myself mad over it, I see quite a lot of him and there is no need to bore you with it too, Kitty, because I’m miserable. On Saturday afternoon I felt in such a whirl after hearing a whole lot of sad news that I went and lay on my divan for a sleep. I only
wanted to sleep to stop thinking.” Again, there is no hint that Peter’s coolness is one of the subjects about which Anne longs to stop thinking.
Laureen Nussbaum observes, “When revising her black notebook during the late spring and early summer of 1944, only a few months after she had filled it with her outpourings, Anne had become very critical of her infatuation with Peter van Pels…in the
b
manuscript she eliminates most of her effusive entries of that emotional period…Otto Frank reinstated the bulk of those eliminations.” Otto “selected time and again the more emotional passages of Anne’s
a
version, some of which Anne had dispensed with, while she had reworked others into fictional stories. By the time she was rewriting her entries of the beginning of 1944, Anne had gone through a great deal of inner development. Father Frank ignored all of that evidence of growth. Or did he want to preserve a stormy stage in the development of his beloved little Anne rather than allow her to present herself as the more objective and self-contained young writer she had become at such a precocious age? One can only speculate.”
What is there to speculate about? Otto’s restitution of these cuts created a more compelling drama. Had Otto expunged Anne’s romance with Peter, Broadway and Hollywood would likely have wanted to reinstate or invent it. And it wasn’t as if Otto
created
the sections in which his daughter tells Kitty about her nascent love affair in the way that an adolescent girl would confide, in her best friend, the details of her first serious crush. But after the onset of her disappointment in Peter, Anne did not imagine the heroine of
Het Achterhuis
as a lovesick teen, agonizing over every smile she got from the boy upstairs.
T
WO
passages from the same entry that describes Minister Bolkestein’s radio speech typify the differences between successive
drafts. In both, Anne’s focus shifts from inside the attic, where the scared “ladies” wait out the air raids, to the wider world outside, so that future generations can see, as the minister suggested, how the Dutch people suffered.
In the first version, Anne reports what she has heard and read about the deterioration of civil society. More than four years into the Nazi occupation, the Dutch are now enduring the additional hardship of Allied bombings:
…how the houses shake from the bombs, how many epidemics there are, such as diphtheria, scarlet fever etc. What the people eat, how they line up for vegetables, and all kinds of other things, it is almost indescribable.
The doctors here are under incredible pressure, if they turn their backs on their cars for a moment they are stolen from the street, in the Hospitals there is no room for the many infectious cases, medicines are prescribed over the telephone.
Above all the countless burglaries and thefts are beyond belief. You may wonder whether the Dutch have suddenly turned into a nation of thieves. Little children of 8 and 11 years break the windows of people’s homes and steal whatever they can lay their hands on, you can’t leave your home unoccupied, for in the five minutes you are away your things are gone too.
Here is the same account, from the draft Anne revised:
…how the houses trembled like a wisp of grass in the wind, and who knows how many epidemics now rage…People have to line up for vegetables and all kinds of other things; doctors are unable to visit the sick, because if they turn their back on their cars for a moment they are stolen; burglaries and thefts abound, so much so that you wonder
what has taken over the Dutch for them suddenly to have become such thieves. Little children of eight and eleven years break the windows of people’s homes and steal whatever they can lay their hands on. No one dares to leave his house unoccupied for five minutes, because if you go, your things go too.
Admittedly, there’s an added bit of
writing.
Explosions may have shaken Holland, but did the houses really tremble like wisps in the wind? But every other large and small change is for the better. To say that epidemics rage is stronger than simply enumerating them. Words and phrases that writers are sensibly advised to avoid—“indescribable,” “incredible,” and “beyond belief”—have been eliminated or replaced by more descriptive adjectives.
The detail of lining up for food has been selected from more vague ones, and the doctors’ problems have been distilled to the inability to make house calls without their cars being stolen. Minor alterations increase a sentence’s effect on the reader. Compare “You can’t leave your home unoccupied for in the five minutes you are away your things are gone too” with “if you go, your things go too.”
Considering that Anne began her revisions in the spring of 1944 and that by August the family had been arrested, the above passage had to have been rewritten within a short time. Only a few weeks, months, or hours separated Anne’s two drafts.
The differences between the drafts are naturally more pronounced when more time has elapsed between them. Some revisions are sobering corrections based on a less optimistic awareness of how things would turn out. On September 21, 1942, when Anne contemplates her first winter in hiding, she writes that all her warm sweaters have been left with friends, but that Miep may ask if she can store them for Anne, who will then get the sweaters back. By the time she is rewriting, this
seems not to have happened: “We have some clothes deposited with friends, but unfortunately we shall not see them until after the war, that is if they are still there then.”
Passages of remembered dialogue are altered and clarified. Near the diary’s beginning, several members of the household are speaking, observed by the others. Anne Frank finesses the scene, and then (in the second draft) improves it further.
It is late September, almost three months after the two families have gone into hiding, long enough for them to have begun getting on each other’s nerves. Hermann van Pels tells Anne that it’s self-sabotaging to be overly modest. In part, he’s reacting to Otto Frank’s having just been praised for his modesty, but he’s also giving advice the way adults often do to children: reflexively, without bothering to notice who the child is, or to consider what advice she could actually use. The briefest acquaintance with Anne should have alerted Mr. Van Pels to the fact that modesty was not her problem.
The first version of the scene does a perfectly adequate job of re-creating a conversation in which more is unspoken than expressed, and in which at least two of the speakers enjoy a foray into passive aggression:
One Sunday morning we were sitting at breakfast, and we were talking about how modest Daddy is and then Mrs. v.P. said:
“I too have an unassuming nature, more so than my husband!”
Mr. v.P.: “I don’t wish to be modest,” and to me: “Take my advice, Anne, don’t be too unassuming, it will never get you anywhere!” with which Mummy agreed.
Mrs. v.P.: “What a stupid thing to say to Anne, that outlook on life is just too silly!”
Mummy: “I myself also think that you don’t get much
further with it. Just look, my husband and Margot and Peter are exceptionally modest while Anne, your husband, and I are not modest at all. We are not immodest, but we are not modest either.”
Mrs. v.P.: “Oh, no, on the contrary, I am very modest, how can you say that I am immodest?”
Mummy: “I haven’t said that you are immodest, but you aren’t all that modest either.”
But it’s in the second attempt that Anne succeeds in giving the moment its full complexity, animation, and humor:
Somehow or other, we got on to the subject of Pim’s extreme modesty. Even the most stupid people have to admit this about Daddy. Suddenly Mrs. v.P. says, “I, too, have an unassuming nature, more so than my husband.”
Did you ever! This sentence itself shows quite clearly how thoroughly forward and pushing she is! Mr. v.P. thought he ought to give an explanation regarding the reference to himself. “I don’t wish to be modest—in my experience it does not pay.” Then to me: “Take my advice, Anne, don’t be too unassuming, it doesn’t get you anywhere” Mummy agreed with this too. But Mrs. van Pels had to add, as always, her ideas on the subject. Her next remark was addressed to Mummy and Daddy. “You have a strange outlook on life. Fancy saying such a thing to Anne; it was very different when I was young. And I feel sure that it must still be so, except in your modern home.” This was a direct hit at the way Mummy brings up her daughters.
Mrs. v.P. was scarlet by this time. Mummy calm and cool as a cucumber. People who blush get so hot and excited, it is quite a handicap in such a situation. Mummy, still entirely unruffled, but anxious to close the conversation as soon as
possible, thought for a second and then said: “I find, too, Mrs. v.P., that one gets on better in life if one is not overmodest. My husband, now, and Margot, and Peter are exceptionally modest, whereas your husband, Anne, you, and I, though not exactly the opposite, don’t allow ourselves to be completely pushed to one side.” Mrs. v.P.: “But, Mrs. Frank, I don’t understand you; I’m so very modest and retiring, how can you think of calling me anything else?” Mummy: “I did not say you were exactly forward, but no one could say you had a retiring disposition.”
T
HE REVISION
not only displays a greater facility, but a sharper sense of who her relatives and roommates are and of how they see themselves and each other. Anne’s ear is more attuned to the way they speak, and, more important, to what they mean. Two years after the event, she hears their voices more clearly, even as the redrawn portrait of Mrs. Van Pels shows the wear and tear of her neighbor’s perpetual insistence on having the last word.
In the second version, Anne provides cues for her actors—the coolness, the blushing—and makes sure we notice Mrs. Van Pels’s vulgarity. Nor, this time, can we miss the fact that Mrs. Van Pels’s apparently offhand remark about modernity is a dig at Mrs. Frank’s child-rearing practices, a veiled insult that doesn’t quite show through, when, in the earlier draft, she merely comments on the silliness of “that outlook on life.” Mrs. Frank’s reply is not only more elegant, but funnier, slyer, and more pointed. Cleverly, she groups herself with the “immodest,” so that no one could accuse her of singling out Hermann and Auguste van Pels for special criticism. Unlike Hermann, Edith knows there is no point in even pretending that Anne is modest; indeed, Anne’s confident self-regard seems to have been one of the differences that generated friction with her
mother.