The Play of the Eyes, page 10
From the first I took Wotruba seriously; he was usually serious. Words always had meaning for him; he spoke when he wanted something, then his words demanded. And when he spoke to me of something that weighed on him, he meant what he said—how few people there are whose words count. It was probably my hatred of business that led me to look for such words. The way people dither with words, trot them out only to take them back, the way their contours are blurred, the way they are made to merge and melt though still present, to refract like prisms, to take on opalescent colors, to come forward before they themselves want to; the cowardice, the slavishness that is imposed on them—how sick I was of seeing words thus debased, for I took them so seriously that I even disliked distorting them for playful purposes, I wanted them intact, and I wanted them to carry their full force. I recognized that everyone uses them in his own way, distorts them in a way that does not clash with his better knowledge, that is not playful, that corresponds to the speaker’s innermost being—such a distortion I respected and left it untouched, I would not have dared lay hands on it, to explain it would have repelled me most of all. I had been captivated by the terrible seriousness of words; it prevailed in every language, and through it every language became inviolable.
Wotruba had this terrible seriousness of words. I met him after suffering the opposite for a year and a half in F., another friend. For him words had no inviolable meaning; their purpose was seduction and they could be twisted this way and that. A word could mean one thing, it could mean another, it could change its meaning in a matter of hours, even though it referred to such apparently stubborn realities as convictions. I saw F. take in my statements, I saw my words become his, so much so that I myself might not have recognized where they came from. At times he could use my words in arguing against me or, what was even more striking, against himself. He would smile ecstatically while surprising me with a sentence he had heard from me the day before; he would expect applause and he may even have thought he was being original. But as he was careless, something was always different, with the result that in the new formulation my own idea repelled me. Then I would argue against it and he seemed to think we were debating, that opinion was fighting opinion, while in reality an opinion was fighting its distortion, and he had distinguished himself only by the ease with which he had distorted it.
Wotruba, on the other hand, knew what he had said and did not forget it. Nor did he forget what others had said. Our conversation was a sort of wrestling match. Both bodies were always present, they didn’t slip away; they remained impermeable. It may sound incredible when I say it was my passionate conversations with him that first taught me what stone is. In him I did not expect to find pity for others. Kindness in him would have seemed absurd. He was interested in two things and in them alone: the power of stone and the power of words, in both cases power, but in so unusual a combination of its elements that one took it as a force of nature, no more open to criticism than a storm.
The “Black Statue”
In the first months of our friendship I had never seen Marian without Fritz Wotruba. Together they came plunging toward me, together they stopped close to me. Since there was always some undertaking to talk about, something that had to be done, a stubborn enemy who stood in the way of a commission, a creature of the official Vienna art world, against whom it would be necessary to pit another more favorably inclined, since Marian was the battering ram that resolutely assaulted every wall, and since it was her nature to report on every detail of her battle, Wotruba let her do the talking, merely punctuating the flow now and then with a grunt of confirmation. But even the little he said on such occasions sounded Viennese to the last syllable, whereas Marian’s rushing torrent, which nothing and no one could interrupt, rolled on in High German with a barely noticeable Rhenish tinge. She was from Düsseldorf, but to judge by her manner of speaking she could have been from anywhere in Germany—except the south. She spoke urgently and monotonously, without rise or fall, without punctuation or articulation, above all without pauses. Once she got started, she chattered on mercilessly, not a chance of getting away before she had said it all, and her reports were always interminable, she was never heard to deliver a short one. There was no escape. Everyone turned to stone in her presence. You couldn’t just pretend to listen. She spoke with such emphasis that you were doomed to take in every sentence; it was—as I realize only now—a hammering to which one could only submit. Yet she was never trying to force my hand, I was merely a friend to whom she was reporting. How the actual victims of her assaults must have felt I hardly dare imagine. For them there was only one way to get rid of her: to grant what she wanted for Fritz. If she was interrupted, either because an office closed at a certain hour or because her victim was called to the phone or summoned by a superior, she would come again and again. No wonder she won out in the end.
She came to Vienna as a young girl and studied under Anton Hanak; it was in Hanak’s studio that she met Fritz Wotruba. She had lived in Vienna ever since, but had acquired no trace of a Viennese accent, though for many years exposed day after day to Wotruba’s thick Viennese. He remained fanatically true to the language he had absorbed as a child on the streets of Vienna. He never learned a foreign tongue. When in later years he attempted a few words of English or French, he sounded ridiculous—like a stammering petitioner or a crippled beggar. Like all Viennese, he could produce some sort of bureaucratic High German when necessary, and then, as he was intelligent and wrote good German, he did not sound ridiculous. But he did this so unwillingly, it made him feel so cramped, that one suffered with him and sighed with relief when he reverted to himself and his native intonations. Of these, Marian, who lived entirely for him and his interests, who had long ago given up her own sculpture for his sake, who never had a child, who spoke incessantly and spoke his thoughts, never acquired the slightest trace. What she heard from him was immediately converted into action. When she sallied forth on her expeditions, she heard nothing and thought of nothing but what she wanted to get for Fritz. She talked and talked, nothing else could get to her. When he was present, her talk didn’t bother him—not then at least. When I was alone with him, he told me, I believe, everything that passed through his head or that weighed on him. But not once did he complain about Marian’s chatter. Occasionally he would disappear for a few days; Marian was wild with worry, she went looking for him everywhere, and sometimes I went with her. But I don’t think it was her flow of words he ran away from, it was his early fame, the art business in which he felt caught; or perhaps it was something deeper, the stone he wrestled with may have been a kind of prison to him, and he feared nothing so much as imprisonment. I never saw him so moved to pity as by caged lions and tigers.
* * *
They invited me to lunch at 31 Florianigasse, where he had always lived. He was the youngest of eight children. Now only he and Marian lived there with his mother and his youngest sister. His mother would cook, that way the three of us would be able to sit quietly and eat. They had told his mother about me. She was full of curiosity and choleric by nature. If you vexed her, she would throw a dish at your head, and you’d better duck quickly. You had to pass through the kitchen to reach the living room. But the room, he assured me, was beautiful because Marian had decorated it to her own taste, it was a good place to sit and talk. He would call for me, because if I had to go through the kitchen by myself, I might get a dish thrown at me. I asked him if his mother objected to my visit. Not at all, she was looking forward to it, she herself was making the schnitzels, she was a good cook. Then why should she throw a dish at me? You never can tell, he said, sometimes for no reason at all; she likes to get mad. When he was late for meals, for instance. When he was working, out under the Stadtbahn tracks, he’d forget everything else and be two hours late for dinner. Then the dishes would fly, but none had ever hit him. He was used to it; she was temperamental, a Hungarian from the country, she had walked all the way to Vienna as a young girl and found employment in good households. Then she had to hold her temperament down, she had saved it up for her eight children. They had given her a rough time, she had let it out on them. “If we’re late she’ll give us hell, she doesn’t always throw dishes.”
The appointment was made. He insisted on escorting me. The subject made him more talkative than usual. Ordinarily so carefree and self-assured, he seemed worried and nervous. He respected his mother, he admired her for the very things that he warned me about. He seemed to be giving her a buildup for my benefit. She looked emaciated, but that was deceptive, she was tough and wiry and no one could get the better of her. When she gave you a clout, you didn’t forget it. She always wore a headscarf, the same as in her Hungarian village. She had never changed, after all these years in Vienna she was still her same old self. Wasn’t she proud of him? I asked. You could never be sure, she never showed it, but maybe to a visitor. Writers impressed her. She liked to read books, but you had to watch your step.
He was almost an hour late in picking me up. I was nervous after all he had told me. He seemed to be looking forward to a clash with his mother. “Today you’ll see something,” he said when he finally arrived. “We’d better hurry.” He never apologized for being late, though this time he might have offered an explanation. I was on edge, I could feel a dish hitting me in the face long before we turned into Florianigasse. As we entered the kitchen, he raised his forefinger in warning. His mother was standing at the stove, I first saw her headscarf, then the small, slightly bent form. She didn’t say a word, she didn’t even turn around. Her son shook his head in alarm and whispered to me: “Oh-oh! Take care.” We had to cross the whole kitchen. He ducked and pulled me down with him. We had just reached the open doorway of the living room when the dish came, well aimed but too high. Then she wiped her hands on her apron and came over to us. “I ain’t talking to him,” she said to me in a high-pitched Hungarian singsong, and gave me a hearty welcome. “He does it on purpose,” she said. “He likes his friends to see his mother angry.” She’d known he’d be late so as to make her do her number. So she had waited before starting her schnitzels. “That way they won’t be dry and I hope you like them.”
In the living room the glass tabletop and the steel-pipe chairs gleamed, an extreme modernism, which fitted in with Marian’s intentions if not with her personality. On the white walls hung pictures by Merkel and Dobrowsky, gifts from the painters to the young sculptor, who embodied the avant-garde of the Sezession, its most controversial member. The absence of any superfluous object in the room made the pictures especially striking. I was attracted most by Merkel’s Arcadian landscapes, with which I was already familiar. There was no door between kitchen and living room, only the open doorway. My friend’s mother did not come into the living room, but she heard every word and, at least with her ears, participated intensely in the conversation. The dishes were handed in through a serving hatch. Marian took them from there and put them on the glass table. There lay the giant schnitzels; they were the meal. Wotruba assured me there would be no gristle in them, I’d better not pick at them as I had done at Anna’s, his mother would be offended. Then he bent over his meat and ate it without a word, in big square chunks. Not once did he take his eyes off his meat and as long as there was anything on the plate he didn’t join in the conversation with so much as a syllable or a gesture.
Marian monopolized the conversation. First she went on about my sin at Anna’s studio, when I had cut the gristle out of my meat and left half of it standing; my plate had been strewn with spurned bits and pieces, in all his life Fritz had never seen anything like it. “There was a nervous character at Anna Mahler’s,” he had said the moment he got home, and he’d given her a demonstration of what I’d done to my meat, he’d brought it up every day at table; that had aroused her curiosity, they’d come to the conclusion that I was an enemy not only of gristle but of meat in general, and now we’d see if that was the case. She soon saw that in their house it was not, and when I had finished, a second, equally gigantic schnitzel appeared on my plate without my being consulted. Marian apologized, they didn’t eat much else, there was never any dessert, Fritz hated cheese, from childhood on he’d never touched it, or compote for that matter, he couldn’t bear to see fruit cut into little pieces. On hearing such statements I turned to him with a questioning look, and he grunted confirmation; he was incapable of saying a word as long as he had meat on his plate. I took an interest in everything concerning him, especially in practical matters, otherwise I’d have run away; as it was, I listened as raptly as if she had been talking about his sculptures. His mother called in from the kitchen: “Is he eating it, or is he messing it up again?” So she too had been told of our first meeting. Marian carried out my empty plate, to prove that I had left nothing. Whereupon I was offered a third schnitzel, which I declined amid words of praise for the first two.
When Fritz had finished eating, he found his tongue again and I heard some interesting things. I asked him if he had started right in with his stones, for his hands didn’t look as if he had always worked in stone. I have already said how very sensitive they were; when we shook hands, I was never indifferent to their touch, in all the many years of our friendship I never ceased to feel it, but at first they awakened in me the memory of two different hands that were close together in a picture, each so vivid that neither was dominant. I thought of God’s finger in The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I can’t explain it, for life passes into Adam’s hand from a single finger and here I was shaking a whole hand, but evidently I felt the life-giving force that passed from God’s finger into the future man. And I also thought of Adam himself, of his whole hand.
Stones, he said, had come early, but he hadn’t begun with stone. When still a small boy, no more than five years old, he had scratched the putty out of the windows to model with it. The panes came loose, one fell out and smashed. He was found out and beaten. He did it again, he had to model and he had nothing else to do it with. Bread was harder to get, there were eight children, and putty was easier to handle; he was beaten again, but by his mother, which was nothing compared to what his father dished out.
His father beat his elder brothers so hard that they became criminals. But I didn’t hear that until later; he seldom spoke of his father, whom all the children hated, never within earshot of his mother. He was a Czech tailor and had long been dead. Fritz’s eldest brother had been sent to jail for murder and armed robbery, he had died miserably in Stein on the Danube. This Fritz confided to me only after we had become twins. The stigma of violence weighed heavily on him, and when I heard the story of this brother, I began to understand his strange way of fighting stone. The police had always kept an eye on the Wotruba brothers. Fritz, the youngest, much younger than his recalcitrant brothers, couldn’t show himself on Florianigasse without being stopped by a policeman. Still a small boy, he had seen his father whipping his brothers with a leather belt and heard their desperate screams. His father’s cruelty repelled him more than his brothers’ crimes. He felt sure that those beatings had made criminals of his brothers. But when he thought of his father’s brutality, it also occurred to him that the sons may have inherited these qualities.
Fear of this heredity had never left him; his dread of imprisonment entered into his daily battle with stone. Stone of the hardest, densest kind held him captive; he dug into it, he dug deeper and deeper. For hours each day he battled with it, stone became so important to him that he could not live without it, as important, not as bread, but as meat. It is hard to believe, but his work owes its existence to the conflict between his father and his brothers, and to the fate of his brothers. No sign of this is noticeable in the finished work; the connection is so deep that it entered into the stone itself. One must know his history, his recurrent escapes, his passionate love for caged animals—he felt more sympathy for a captive tiger than he could for any human—his fear of having children, because the killing instinct might be hereditary. Instead of a son he kept a tomcat. One had to know all this (and a lot more) to understand why he had to get so far away from the flesh quality of stone, which is present in such early works as the famous torso.
When I saw him in this room, furnished along Bauhaus lines, but with Arcadian pictures by Georg Merkel and elegant Dobrowskys on the walls, while the rest of the apartment, especially the kitchen, remained as it had been in the days of the battering father, in whose place the mother now ruled—but what were a few hurled and smashed dishes compared with the father’s never-ending hard blows?—when her choleric campaign against unpunctuality and his dish-dodging act were staged for my benefit, how could I have suspected that all this added up to an achievement, to a step on the road to civilization? For the father was gone, the brother was in jail or already dead—and in their stead this foolery with his mother, the privileged position of this woman who had survived so much and now, thanks to her youngest son, had come to a new life, a life worthy of her, but relinquishing no part of the old locale—the apartment, the kitchen, the cobblestones of Florianigasse.
* * *
On my first visit to the studio under the Stadtbahn tracks, I saw a large black basalt figure of a standing man. No work by a living sculptor had ever moved me so. I stood facing it, I heard the rumbling of the Stadtbahn trains overhead. I stood there so long that I heard several trains. In my memory I can’t separate the figure from the sound. A difficult work, it had taken him a long time and had come into being amid this noise. There were other figures to look at, though not too many. The studio didn’t seem overcrowded; it consisted of two big vaults supporting the Stadtbahn trestle; in one stood figures that would have got in his way while he was working in the other. When the weather wasn’t too bad, he liked best to work in the open. At first I was put off by the plainness of the studio and the noise of the trains, but since nothing here was superfluous, since everything appealed to me and had a function, I soon got used to the place and sensed that it was right and couldn’t have been more appropriate.
