The Play of the Eyes, page 13
Georg Merkel, a painter whose works had attracted me at exhibitions, was a man of about Broch’s age. I had seen him at the Café Museum, though less frequently than some other painters. He had attracted my notice by the deep hole in his forehead, just above the left eye. I had admired some of his pictures in Wotruba’s living room; they had a French quality, they had clearly been influenced by the neoclassical movement and their palette was unusual for Vienna. I had asked about him at the time. Later at the Café Museum, Wotruba had introduced me to him as to most of the leading painters of the day. The elegance of his German had delighted me from the start. He spoke slowly, with a Polish intonation; every sentence carried deep conviction, his diction had a lofty, biblical ring, as though he were courting Rachel. Actually he spoke of things that had nothing to do with the Bible, but in such a way that he seemed to be paying homage to his interlocutor, who invariably felt honored and respected when Merkel addressed him. At the same time it was clear that, though not overbearing, he took himself very seriously. Once he pronounced a name, it rang in one’s ears just as he had spoken it; one sometimes felt tempted to say it in his way, but that would have been ridiculous, for what in anyone else sounded theatrical made an impression of natural dignity coming from him. His opinions were charged with emotion, no one would have dreamed of getting into an argument with him. To question anything he said would have been to call the whole man into question. He was incapable of a vulgar action or word. In the case of so vehement, so passionate a man this seems unbelievable. One had to see the force and firmness with which he countered an insult without ever demeaning himself, looking around to make sure everyone had heard him. At such times the deep wound in his forehead would look like a third, cyclopean eye. I was sometimes tempted to make him angry, because what he said in anger sounded so magnificent, but I loved him and respected him enough to resist the temptation.
Georg Merkel seemed a striking example of the proud Slav one met with so frequently in the Vienna of those days. He had studied in Cracow, under Wyspianski, which may have accounted for the persistence of his Polish accent. It remained with him after decades in Vienna and in France. He lived to a ripe old age, and neither his French nor his German ever lost its Polish tinge. There were certain vowels that he never mastered. He never managed in my presence to say a proper “ö” and he never learned to pronounce two of the most important words in his life: “schön” and “Österreich.” He said “Esterreich” and when carried away by a woman’s beauty, he would say: “Ist sie nicht schén? Schén ist sie.” Veza was treated to that, enunciated with captivating vehemence. Never, regardless of whether he came to see us or we went to see him, or whether we met at the Café Museum, could he refrain at the sight of Veza from saying: “Schén ist sie!”—which was all the more striking because everything else he said was couched in choice and elegant German.
I had met Georg Merkel only a short while before the previously mentioned conversation with Broch, and his name came up quite naturally in the course of our search for a “good” man. He had much in his favor, but we did not vote for him, because he saw himself too exclusively as a painter. This set him apart, so to speak, from the section of mankind that took no interest in art and made him somewhat less of a “good” man as we defined one.
Merkel had gone to Paris as a young man, some years before the First World War, and had never lost the imprint of those Paris years. It seems likely that such a wide variety of talented painters had never before, or since, been concentrated in one place. They came from everywhere and were buoyed by great hopes. They did not try to make things easy for themselves, to achieve fame and recognition by trickery. Painting meant so much to them that they did nothing else. With so many painters at work there was no lack of inspiration, Oriental and African influences made themselves felt, but the treasures of medieval and classical art served as a counterweight. It took fortitude to live in poverty, but another kind of strength may have been even more important: the strength of character needed to steer a course amid all the many possible influences and stimuli, to take only what one needed and disregard the rest. In the Paris of those years a new nation came into being: the nation of painters. When we pass in review the names with which those years will no doubt be identified for all time, we are amazed at the diversity of their origins. It was as though the young people of every imaginable country had been summoned to Paris for painting duty. But they had not been summoned, they had come of their own free will. For the privations they took upon themselves without hesitation, they were rewarded by the companionship of fellow painters, who were having just as hard a time but like themselves were confident of winning fame in this world capital of painting.
The outbreak of the First World War caught Merkel in Paris, living happily with his wife, Luise, who was also a painter. It would have been hard to find an atmosphere more congenial to him; he returned to Paris time and again; all in all, he must have spent a good third of his life there. Yet at the end of July 1914 he had only one thought, to get back to Austria with his wife and join the army. In those days a kind of Austrian patriotism was common among educated Galician Jews. They never lost sight of the Russian pogroms and they thought of the Emperor Francis Joseph as a protector. So strong was Merkel’s Austrian feeling that he would not have been satisfied to sit in a government press office whipping up martial spirit in others. Surmounting all difficulties, he made his way from Paris to Vienna, where he lost no time in enlisting.
The price he paid for his Austrian patriotism was a severe head wound. A shell fragment struck him just above the eyes and blinded him. For several months he lived in total darkness, a painter deprived of his eyesight. That was the worst time in his life. He never mentioned it to me or, as far as I know, to anyone else. The deep scar remained, I couldn’t look at it without being reminded of his blindness. He recovered his eyesight, a miracle which influenced all his painting from then on. His eyesight was his paradise that he had lost and regained. One cannot find fault with him for painting “beauty”—his pictures became a hymn of thanks for the light of his eyes.
Soon after that half-playful, half-serious conversation with Broch, I was invited for the first time to visit Georg Merkel in Penzing, where he lived. He had his studio there too, and sometimes on Sunday afternoons he would invite friends and show his pictures. I didn’t know him very well at the time, but I had heard his story, especially the story of his wound and the terrible dent in his forehead. I liked his lilting speech, and though those of his paintings I had seen, despite the charm of his palette, were a far cry from what ordinarily fascinated me in modern art, I was curious to see more of his work. I had always delighted in watching painters show their work. They do it in a manner compounded of pride, lavish generosity and diffidence, in proportions varying with the individual.
I was a little late, the guests were still drinking tea. With some I was personally acquainted, others were known to me by name or through their works. Off to one side, half in darkness, sat a man whose face I had known for a year and a half. He sat in the Café Museum every afternoon, hidden behind a newspaper. As I’ve already related, he looked like Karl Kraus. I knew he couldn’t be Karl Kraus, but I was so keen on seeing a silent Karl Kraus who wasn’t accusing or crushing anyone that I tried to imagine it was Karl Kraus. I used my silent daily meetings with this face to free myself from the overwhelming power of that face when it was speaking.
And now the face was here; I was struck with amazement. Merkel saw that something had happened. He took me gently by the arm, led me to the face and said: “This is my dear friend Dr. Sonne.” There was feeling in his way of introducing people, he had no interest in cold acquaintance; when he brought two people together it was for life. He had no way of knowing that I had been scrutinizing this man’s movements for a year and a half. Or that just a week ago Broch had mentioned Dr. Sonne to me for the first time. Our game of “find a good man,” which we had played so doggedly and taken quite seriously, had become reality, and it was significant that the name and the face, which had existed separately in my mind, should have become one in the house of this painter with the lilting voice.
Sonne
What was it about Sonne that made me want to see him every day, that made me look for him every day, that inspired an addiction such as I had not experienced for any other intellectual?
For one thing, he was so utterly impersonal. He never talked about himself. He never made use of the first person. And he seldom addressed me directly. By speaking in the third person, he distanced himself from his surroundings. You have to imagine this city with its coffeehouses and their floods of I-talk, protestation, confession and self-assertion. All these people were bursting with self-pity and self-importance. They all lamented, bellowed and trumpeted. But all banded together in small groups, because they needed and tolerated each other for their talk. Everything was discussed, the newspapers provided the main topic of conversation. This was a time when a great deal was happening and when people sensed that much more was in the offing. They were unhappy about events in Austria, but well aware that the events in neighboring Germany weighed far more heavily in the balance. Catastrophe was in the air. Contrary to the general expectation, it was delayed from year to year. In Austria itself things were going badly, how badly could be seen from the unemployment figures. When snow fell, people said: “The unemployed will be glad.” The municipal government hired unemployed to shovel snow; they made a little money. You saw them shoveling and hoped for more snow for their sake.
It was only seeing Dr. Sonne that made this period bearable for me. He was an authority to which I had daily access. We discovered innumerable things that were happening on all sides and more that were threatening to happen. I would have been ashamed to speak of them in personal terms. No one had a right to regard himself as singled out by the events that were threatening. This was no private menace, it confronted everyone without exception. Perceiving it and talking about it were not enough; what mattered was insight and nothing else, but that was so hard to come by. I never decided in advance what I was going to ask Dr. Sonne. I made no plans. Topics came up as spontaneously as his explanations. Everything he said had the freshness of new thought. It never struck me as falsified by emotion, yet it was never cold and unfeeling. Nor was it ever biased. I never had the feeling that he was talking in support of one party or another. Even then the world was saturated with slogans, it was hard to find a place that was free of them, where the air was fit to breathe. The best thing about his talk was that it was concise without being schematic. He said what was to be said clearly and sharply, but omitted nothing. He was thorough, and if what he said had not been so fascinating, one might have called his statements expert opinions. But they were much more than that, for, though he never said so, they contained the seeds of rich new developments.
We talked about everything imaginable. I mentioned something that had struck me; sometimes he wanted to know more about it, but his requests for information never sounded like questions, for he always seemed to address them to the subject matter, rather than to the person questioned. One could get the impression that the person he was sitting with was in no way involved, only the question under discussion. But this was not the case, for when a third party was present, he spoke in a different way. Evidently he drew distinctions, but they were imperceptible to the person concerned; it was inconceivable that anyone in his presence should feel belittled. Stupidity made him very unhappy, and he avoided stupid people, but if through circumstances beyond Dr. Sonne’s control, he found himself in the company of a stupid person, no one could possibly notice how stupid that person was.
After a few preluding chords, the moment always came when he took up a topic and began to speak of it exhaustively and aptly. It would never have occurred to me to interrupt him, not even with questions, as I often did with others. I cast off all outward reaction like an ill-fitting carnival costume and listened with the closest attention. I have never listened to anyone else so intently. I forgot that the speaker was a human being, disregarded his peculiarities of speech, never regarded him as a character; he was the opposite of a character. If anyone had asked me to imitate him, I would have refused, and not only out of respect, I would have been quite incapable of playing him, the very thought strikes me even today not only as sacrilege but as an utter impossibility.
What he had to say on a subject was always thorough and exhaustive; one also knew that he had never said it before. It was always new, it had just come into being. It was not an opinion concerning realities; it was their law. The amazing part of it, though, was that he would not be speaking of some specialty in which he was well versed. He was not a specialist, or rather, he was not a specialist in any particular subject, he was a specialist in all the matters I ever heard him talk about. From him I learned that it is possible to concern oneself with a wide range of subjects without becoming a windbag. This is a bold statement, and it will not seem more credible when I add that for that very reason I cannot reproduce any of his observations, for each one was a serious, yet animated, dissertation, so complete that I can remember none of them in full. And to cite fragments of his discourse would be a grave falsification. He was not an aphorist; in connection with him, the word, which I otherwise hold in high regard, seems almost frivolous. He was too thorough to be an aphorist, he lacked the onesidedness and the desire to startle. When he had made a complete statement, one felt enlightened and satisfied; something had been settled and nothing more would be said about it; what more was there to say?
But though I would not presume to reproduce his statements, there is a literary creation to which I believe he can be likened. In those years I read Musil. I could not get enough of The Man without Qualities, the first two volumes of which, some thousand pages, had been published. It seemed to me that there was nothing comparable in all literature. And yet, wherever I chanced to open these books, the text seemed surprisingly familiar. This was a language I knew, a rhythm of thought that I had met with, and yet I knew for sure that there were no similar books in existence. It was some time before I saw the connection. Dr. Sonne spoke as Musil wrote. But it should not be supposed that Dr. Sonne sat at home writing things which for some reason he did not wish to publish and subsequently drew on them in his conversations. He did not sit at home and write; what he said came into being while he was speaking. But it was said with the perfect clarity that Musil achieved in writing. Day after day I was privileged to hear chapters from a second Man without Qualities that no one else ever heard of. For what he said to others—and he did speak to others, though not every day—was a different chapter.
For amorphous eclecticism, the tendency to reach out in all directions, to drop what one has barely touched on, for this sort of curiosity, which is undoubtedly more than curiosity since it has no purpose and ends nowhere, for such thrashing about in all directions there is only one remedy: to associate with someone who has the gift of exploring a subject, of not dropping it before the whole ground has been covered and not analyzing it to pieces. Sonne never reduced a subject, never disposed of it. His talking about it made it more interesting than before, articulated and illuminated it. He founded whole countries in the mind of his listener, where previously there had only been question marks. He could describe an important public figure as accurately as a field of knowledge. He had no use for anything that could turn conversation into gossip, and avoided speaking of persons known to both of us. But with that reservation he had the same methods in dealing with persons and things. It may have been this that most reminded me of Musil—his conception of individuals as distinct fields of knowledge. The sterile notion that any single theory might be applicable to all people was utterly alien to him. Each individual was distinct and different. He detested every instrumentality directed by men against men; never has anyone been farther from barbarism. Even when he had to name the things he hated, there was no hatred in his tone; he was merely laying bare an absurdity, nothing more.
It seems almost unbelievable how strictly he avoided all personal observations. You could spend two hours with him and learn an incredible lot, so much that you always left with a sense of wonderment. How, in view of this unquestionable superiority, could I look down on others? Humility was certainly not a word he would have used; yet I left him in a state of mind that no other word can describe; but it was a vigilant humility, not the humility of a sheep.
I was in the habit of listening to people, total strangers with whom I had never exchanged a word. I listened with genuine fury to people who did not concern me in any way, and I was best able to capture a person’s tone of voice once it seemed certain that I would never see him again. I had no compunction about encouraging such a person to speak by asking questions or by playing a role. I had never asked myself whether I had a right to store up everything a person would tell me about himself. Today I find the naïveté with which I claimed this right almost beyond belief. Undoubtedly there are basic qualities that cannot be analyzed, and any attempt to explain them ought to fail. My passion for people is just such a basic quality. It can be described, it can be characterized, but its origin must remain forever obscure. Fortunately, I can say that thanks to my four-year apprenticeship with Dr. Sonne I became aware of its dubious character.
