The Play of the Eyes, page 11
But much as I wished to show respect for the artist, I didn’t look closely enough at most of the things, because the “Black Statue,” as we called it from then on, held me fast. It was as though I had come for its sake. I tried to tear myself away from it, I felt called upon to say something, but it struck me dumb. Wherever I stood, whatever I tried to look at, it was always to the “Black Statue” that my eyes returned. I viewed it from every possible angle and showed it the greatest honor by the silence it instilled in me.
This figure has disappeared. According to Wotruba, it was buried during the war and never found again. It had been much criticized and he may have wanted to disown it. When events parted us—he took refuge in Switzerland, I in England—he may have been put off by my passion for this figure, and since in our havens we had gone entirely different ways he may not, on returning to Vienna, have wished to be associated with work he had done at the age of twenty-five. It is true that my constant talk about this figure barred his way to new things. I was as persistent as he was and my persistence got on his nerves. When he first visited me in London after the war, I measured everything he had done since by the “Black Statue” and made no secret of my disappointment. His really new period, with which, as I alone perceived, he continued and greatly surpassed the work of his early days, began only in 1950. Thus the work that formed a link between us disappeared; it dominated my view of him from autumn 1933 when I first saw it up to the day in 1954, twenty-one years later, when I wrote an essay about him, no word of which I ever want to change.
Today I am well aware of the weaknesses that can be found in the “Black Statue.” Accordingly, I shall confine my remarks to what the figure meant to me that first day.
Black and larger than life, it held one hand, the left, hidden behind its back. The upper arm protruded strikingly from the body and formed a right angle with the forearm. Thus the elbow stood out aggressively, as though preparing to repulse anyone who came too close. The empty triangle, bounded by the chest and the two parts of the arm, the only empty space in the figure, had a menacing quality; this was related to the missing hand, which could not be seen and which I felt the need of locating. It seemed to be hidden, not cut off. I didn’t dare look for it, the spell I was under forbade me to change my position. Before embarking on the inevitable search, I satisfied myself that the other hand was visible. The right side of the figure was at rest. The right arm lay extended along the body, the open hand reaching almost to the knee; it seemed quiet, charged with no hostile intent. It was so still that I gave it no thought, because the other hand was so conspicuously hidden.
The egg-shaped head sat on a powerful neck that tapered slightly at the top; it would otherwise have been wider than the head. The narrow face, flattened toward the front, stern and silent, despite its simplification more face than mask; the slitlike mouth firmly and painfully closed to any confession. Chest and belly divided circumscribed areas, as flat as the face, overshadowed by strong cylindrical shoulders, the knees stylized and almost semi-spherical, the big feet pointing clearly forward, side by side, enlarged, indispensable for the weight of the basalt; the sexual parts not hidden and not obtrusive, less explicitly formed than the rest.
But the moment came when I tore myself loose in search of the withdrawn hand. And unexpectedly I found it, enormous, stretched across the lower part of the back; palm outward, larger than life even measured by the rest of the figure. I was stunned at the power of this hand. It betrayed no evil intent, but it was capable of anything. To this day I am convinced that the figure was created for the sake of this hand, and that the man who hewed it from basalt had to hide it, because it was too powerful, that this was the secret the mouth which refused to speak was keeping, and that the elbow thrust menacingly outward was barring access to it.
I went to that studio innumerable times. My passion for that figure became the heart of our friendship. For hours I watched Wotruba’s hands at work and wearied no more than he did. But excited as I might be by whatever new piece he was working on, I never turned to it without first paying homage to the “Black Statue.” Sometimes I found it in the open; expecting my visit, Fritz had rolled it out for me. Sometimes he put it behind the open door of one of the vaults; there I could see it all by itself and no other figure got in the way. I never spoke of the hand; we talked about innumerable things, but he was much too perceptive to fail to see that I had fathomed something that he could only say in basalt, because he was much too proud to say it in words. One of his brothers was Cain, who had killed, and all his life he was tormented by fear that he would have to kill. He owed it to stone that he never did, and in the “Black Statue” he divulged, to me at least, the threat that he lived with.
This figure may have embodied his most immutable essence. His language also partook of it. His words were charged with the strength that enabled him to hold them back. He was not a silent man and he expressed opinions on many matters. But he knew what he was saying, I have never heard idle chatter from his lips. Even when he was not talking about his main interest, his words always had direction. When he was trying to win someone over, he could say things that sounded like crass calculation. But then he would trot out some gross exaggeration in an attempt to pass it off as a joke, though he never wavered in his purpose. Or he could also set all purpose aside and speak so clearly and forcefully that his interlocutor was moved to speak clearly and forcefully in his turn. At such times, he never borrowed an alien language, he always expressed himself in the idiom of the Viennese district with whose cobblestones he had played as a child, and one was amazed to find that everything, literally everything, could be said in that language. It was not the language of Nestroy, which had shown me long ago that there was a Viennese idiom full of startling possibilities, an idiom that fostered delightful bursts of inspiration, an idiom both comical and profound, inexhaustible, varied, sublime in its acuteness, which no man of this hapless century can completely master. Perhaps Wotruba’s language had only one thing in common with Nestroy’s: its hardness, the exact opposite of the sweetness for which Vienna is famed and ill-famed throughout the world.
I speak of him as he was then, at the age of twenty-six, when I first met him, obsessed by stone and by purposes inseparable from stone, unrecognized, full of an ambition in which he did not doubt for one moment, as sure of his plans as I was of mine, so that we immediately, without diffidence, without hesitation, shame or presumption, felt ourselves to be brothers. To each other we could say things that no one else would have understood, because in talking to each other we found it quite natural to reveal things that had to be guarded against others. His cruelty put me off and my “morality” put him off. But magnanimously each found excuses for the other. I explained his cruelty by the hardness of his work processes. He interpreted my “morality” as my need to safeguard the purity of my artistic purpose, and put it on a plane with his own exalted ambition. When he proclaimed his hatred of kitsch, I was with him heart and soul. As I heard it, he was talking about corruption. To me kitsch was what you did for money alone, to him it was something soft and easy to model. In childhood I had felt threatened by money, he by his brother’s imprisonment.
I gave him the manuscript of Kant Catches Fire to read. He was no less overwhelmed by it than I by the “Black Statue.” He fell in love with Fischerle. He knew the surroundings in which Fischerle lived, and he knew the obsessiveness of such ambition. He thought the unscrupulousness of the chess dwarf perfectly plausible; he himself would have stopped at nothing to lay hands on a block of stone. He did not find Therese “overdone,” he had seen harder people. He liked the sharp delineation of the characters; naturally Benedikt Pfaff, the pensioned policeman, struck him as right, and so—to my great surprise—did the sexless sinologist; it was only the sinologist’s psychiatrist brother that he couldn’t stomach. Hadn’t I, he asked me, gone wrong out of love for my youngest brother, whom I had told him about? No one, he insisted, could have so many skins; I had constructed an ideal character; what a writer does in his books Georges Kien did in his life. He liked the “gorilla,” and by comparison hated the doctor. Essentially he saw the “gorilla” as Georges Kien himself saw him, but he found fault with Georges for submitting to conversion; Wotruba distrusted conversions at the time and told me that he even preferred Jean the blacksmith, that narrow-minded old man, to the successful psychiatrist. He gave me credit for making him come to grief at the end of the book and having him bring about the sinologist’s fiery death by an ill-advised speech. Georges’s abysmal failure, Wotruba once told me, had reconciled him to the character.
Silence at the Café Museum
At the Café Museum, where I went every day after moving back to town, there was a man whom I noticed because he was always sitting alone and never spoke to anyone. That in itself was not so unusual, lots of people went to cafés to be alone among many. What struck me about this man was that he was invariably hiding behind his newspaper and that on the rare occasions when he did show his face it was the well-known face of Karl Kraus. I knew he couldn’t be Karl Kraus, he wouldn’t have had a moment’s peace in the midst of all those artists, writers and musicians. But even without being Karl Kraus, he seemed determined to hide. His face was grave and unlike Karl Kraus’s impassive mien. Sometimes I thought I detected a vaguely sorrowful look, which I attributed to his constant newspaper reading. I caught myself waiting for the rare moments when his face became visible. Often I put my own newspaper aside to make sure that he was still immersed in his. Every time I entered the Café Museum, I looked around for him. Since his face was not to be seen, I recognized him by the rigidity of the arm that held his newspaper—a dangerous object that he clung to, that he would have liked to put aside but went on reading with rapt attention. I tried to choose a seat from which I could keep my eye on him, if possible obliquely across from him. I began to attach great importance to his silence; it intimidated me, and I would never have sat down at an empty table in his immediate vicinity. I too was usually alone, I knew few of the habitués of the Museum, and I had no more desire than he did to be disturbed. I would sit across from him for an hour or more, waiting for the moments when he might show his face. I kept my distance; without knowing who he was I had great respect for him. I felt his concentration as if he had been Karl Kraus, but a silent Karl Kraus such as I had never encountered.
He was there every day; usually he was there when I arrived, I couldn’t have dared suppose that he was waiting for me. But when he chanced not to be there, I was impatient, as though I had been waiting for him. I only pretended to steep myself in my paper, I kept looking toward the entrance and I couldn’t have said what I was reading. In the end he always turned up, a tall, thin figure with the stiff, dismissive, almost arrogant gait of a man who didn’t wish to be importuned and was wary of windbags. I remember my surprise when I first saw him walking; he seemed to be riding toward me, and he could not have held himself more erect if he had been in a saddle. I had expected a smaller man with a bent back. It was the head which showed that amazing resemblance. As soon as he was seated, he was Karl Kraus again, hidden behind the newspapers he was gunning for.
For a year and a half I saw him in this way, he became a silent element in my life. I mentioned him to no one and made no inquiries. If he had stopped coming, I would probably have ended by asking the waiter about him.
At that time I sensed that a change was taking place in my attitude toward Karl Kraus. I was none too eager to see him and I did not attend all his readings. But I did not impugn him in my thoughts and I doubt if I would have dared to contradict him. I could not bear to hear him utter an inconsistency, and even when it was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, I wanted him to stop talking. Thus his likeness at the Café Museum, which I saw day after day, became a necessity for me. It was a likeness and not a double, for when he was standing or walking he had nothing in common with Karl Kraus; but when he sat reading the paper, the resemblance was unmistakable. He never wrote anything down, he took no notes. He just read and hid. He was never reading a book, and though I had a feeling that he must be a big reader, he read only newspapers.
I myself was in the habit of jotting down one thing and another at the café and I did not like to think of his watching me. To write in his presence struck me as insulting. When he peered out for a moment, I quietly lowered my pencil. I was always on the qui vive, eager for a look at his face, which would quickly vanish. The air of innocence I put on at such times must have fooled him. I don’t think he ever caught me writing. I was sure, though, that he saw not only me but everything around him, that he disapproved of what he saw, and that that was why he went back into concealment so quickly. I felt sure he was a genius at seeing through people, possibly because I knew Karl Kraus to be one. It didn’t take him long, he didn’t persist, and perhaps, or so I hoped, it didn’t greatly matter to him because he was concerned with important things; obviously the newspapers sickened him. Printer’s errors had become a matter of indifference to him. He sang no Offenbach, he didn’t sing at all, he had realized that his voice was not for singing. He read foreign newspapers, not just Viennese or German. An English paper lay at the top of the pile the waiter brought him.
I was glad he had no name. For once I knew his name, he wouldn’t be Karl Kraus anymore, and the great man would cease to undergo the transformation that I so fervently desired. Only later did I realize that this silent relationship brought about a cleavage. Little by little, my veneration detached itself from Karl Kraus and turned to his silent likeness. My psychological economy, in which veneration has always played a prominent part, was undergoing a profound change, all the more profound because it took place in silence.
Comedy in Hietzing
Three months after my return from Strasbourg and Paris, I finished my Comedy of Vanity. The sureness with which I wrote the second and third parts gave me great satisfaction. This work was not born in pain. It was not written against myself; it was not a judgment on myself; it was not written in self-mockery. On the surface I was writing about vanity, taking a candid view of the world, about which I had misgivings. In my handling of the basic idea, the interdiction of mirrors and images, I had submitted in the second part to the influence of the man whom I regarded and still regard as the richest and most stimulating writer of comedies, Aristophanes, and my frank admission of this, despite the enormous distance between him and me or anyone else, may have helped me to write more freely than usual. For it is not enough to admire a predecessor and to recognize that he cannot be equaled. One must venture a leap in his direction and run the risk that it will fail and bury one in ridicule. One must take care not to use the unattainable as though it were just right for one’s own purposes, but to let oneself be stimulated and inspired by it.
It may have been because of my confidence in this model that I hoped my Comedy could be an immediate success. I felt a keen sense of urgency, things were moving faster and faster in Germany, but I did not yet regard the situation as irreversible. What had been set in motion by words could be stopped by words. Once my Comedy was finished, I thought it an appropriate answer to the burning of the books. I wanted it to be played immediately, everywhere. But I had no connections in the theatrical world. Still inhibited by Karl Kraus’s condemnation of the modern theater, I had despised and neglected it. True, in 1932 I had sent The Wedding to the S. Fischer Verlag in Berlin, which accepted it for its theatrical agency, but it was already too late in the day and a production was out of the question. The reader responsible for accepting The Wedding had left Berlin and was now head of the drama department at the Zsolnay Verlag in Vienna.
To appreciate the Comedy, one had to hear it; it was based on what I have called acoustic masks; each character was clearly demarcated from all the others by choice of words, intonation and rhythm, and there was no way of showing this in writing. My intentions could be made clear only by a complete reading. At this point Anna suggested that I should read the play at the Zsolnays’ to a small audience of persons with theatrical taste and experience. It would of course be attended by the reader who knew The Wedding and who in Berlin had spontaneously, knowing nothing about me, come out for it. The suggestion appealed to me, my only misgiving was the length of the play.
“It takes four hours,” I said. “I refuse to omit a single scene. Or a single sentence. Who can stand that?”
“You can do it in two two-hour sessions,” Anna suggested. “If possible on two successive days.”
She hadn’t read the play, but after reading my novel, which she praised wherever she went, she was sure that the play I had told her so much about would go over. True, she had little enthusiasm for the theater, in fact she seemed to have an innate distaste for it. I had aroused an interest in this play by telling her about it, and my storytelling was the one thing about me she liked.
Paul Zsolnay’s mother, whom Anna called “Aunt Andy,” was the dominant figure in the family; she had great influence on her son. She had been largely instrumental in founding the publishing house as a “home” for Werfel. A number of then reputed authors and a few of undoubted excellence, such as Heinrich Mann, had been recruited. Anna had given her mother-in-law the manuscript of Kant Catches Fire to read, and she, who was not unacquainted with women’s capacity for evil, had been taken with it. The house on Maxingstrasse was hers and she was the actual hostess, though the invitations to the reading were sent out by Anna. I had expressed the urgent wish that her mother, Alma, should not be present. Anna assured me there was no danger, I was much too unknown, her mother wouldn’t dream of coming. But Werfel would come in her stead; he was curious; formerly, when working with Kurt Wolff, he had spent much of his time discovering new writers. “I doubt if he is interested in such discoveries these days,” I said, with no suspicion of how greatly I was understating the truth. I looked forward with curiosity to his coming and wasn’t the least bit afraid of him, though I didn’t care for his books and had disliked him when we met at the concert.
