The Play of the Eyes, page 15
Not seeing him was almost unbearable, for I knew he was sitting there at that hour, possibly looking at the revolving door to see if I was coming in. Each day I felt more keenly that I couldn’t survive without him. I would just have to summon up the courage to appear before him and not to speak of what I now knew, to take up where we had last left off and dispense with knowing what he thought of me until the book, which I wanted to submit to his judgment and to his judgment alone, should be available.
* * *
I knew the intensity of obsessions, the incisiveness of constant repetition; it was to this that Karl Kraus owed his power over his audience. And here I was sitting with a man who wore his face, who though no less rigorous was serene, for there was no fanaticism in him and he wasn’t interested in taking people by storm. His was a mind that despised nothing, that addressed itself with the same concentrated power to every branch of knowledge. He saw a world divided into good and evil; there could never be any doubt as to what things were good and what things were evil, but the decision is up to every individual. He neither attenuated nor embellished, but painted a picture of stunning clarity which I was almost ashamed to accept as a gift in return for which nothing was asked of me but an open ear.
He accused no one. That was spared me. The reader must bear in mind the profound effect Karl Kraus’s perpetual accusations had had on me. They took possession of one and never let one go (to this day I detect wounds they left me with, not all of which have healed), they had the full force of commands. Since I accepted them in advance and never tried to evade them, I might have been better off if they had had the stringency of commands; then it would have been possible to carry them out and they would not have become thorns in my flesh. But as it was, Karl Kraus’s periods, as solidly built as fortresses, lay heavy and unwieldy on my chest, a crippling burden that I carried around with me, and though I had thrown off a good part of it while slaving over my novel and later while my play was erupting, there was still a danger that my rebellion would fail and end in serious psychic enslavement.
My liberation came from the face that so much resembled the oppressor’s, but that said everything differently, in a richer, more complex, more highly ramified way. Instead of Shakespeare and Nestroy, it gave me the Bible, not as the gospel, but as one among many. And always he knew the exact wording. When the conversation turned to it apropos of something or other, he would recite a passage of some length, which I did not understand, followed quickly, sentence after sentence, by the luminous but thoroughly sound translation of a poet, a privilege for which anybody would have envied me. I alone received it, I received it without asking, just as it flowed from his mouth. Of course I received other quotations as well, but many of these were known to me, and they did not give me the feeling that they represented the authentic essence of the speaker’s childhood wisdom. Then for the first time I began to appreciate the language of the Prophets, whom I had encountered fifteen years before in the paintings of Michelangelo, which had made so powerful an impression on me that they had kept me away from the written words. Now I heard these words from the mouth of a unique man, it was as though he were all the Prophets in one. He resembled them, and yet he did not; he resembled them, not as a zealot, but as one who was filled with the torment of things to come, about which he spoke to me without apparent emotion. In any case, he lacked the one most terrible passion of the Prophets, who insisted on being right even when they proclaimed the worst. Sonne would have given his last breath not to be right. He saw the war he detested coming, he saw the course it would take. He saw how it could have been prevented, and he would have given anything to invalidate his dire prophecy. When we parted after a friendship of four years, I going to England, he to Jerusalem, neither of us wrote any letters. Step by step, in every detail, everything he had predicted came to pass. The events affected me doubly, for I was to live through what I had already heard from him. All those years I carried them within me and then, mercilessly, they came true.
* * *
Long after Sonne’s death I learned the reason for his rather stiff gait. As a young man, in Jerusalem I believe, he had hurt his spine in a fall from a horse. How well it mended, whether he had to wear a brace, I do not know. But this was the reason for what some friends, in poetic exaggeration, called his “royal bearing.”
When he translated the Psalms or Proverbs to me, I saw him as the royal poet. Yet this same man, prophet and poet in one, could disappear completely; hidden behind his newspaper, he was quite invisible, while he himself was aware of everything around him. This absence of color, as it were, and his lack of ambition—these were what truly amazed me about him.
I have singled out just one of the subjects touched on in our conversations at the Café Museum, the Bible. My not naming the others might arouse the impression that Sonne was one of those who make a display of their Jewishness. The exact opposite is true. Neither in reference to himself nor to me did he ever use the word “Jew.” It was a word he didn’t use. As a point of pride or as the target of vicious mobs, it was unworthy of him. He was imbued with the tradition but did not pride himself on it. He took no credit for the glories that were so well known to him. I had the impression that he was not a believer. The esteem in which he held all men forbade him to exclude any, even the basest, from the full claim to humanity.
In many ways he was a model. Once I had known him no one else could become a model for me. He was a model in the only way that can make a model effective. Then, fifty years ago, he seemed unequalable, and unequalable he has remained for me.
Operngasse
Anna received many visitors in her ground-floor studio at Operngasse 4. It was in the center of the city. The true center of Vienna was, after all, the Opera, and it seemed right that Gustav Mahler’s daughter, after definitively casting off the fetters of marriage, should live where her father, the superior emperor, the music emperor of Vienna, had wielded his power. Those who knew her mother and were received in the villa on Hohe Warte without wanting anything for themselves, those who were famous enough to need a rest from their careers, were glad to call on Anna when their occupations left them time.
But there was something else that attracted them, the heads she sculptured of her guests. The lions whom Alma liked to attach to her person, one or another of whom she occasionally singled out for pleasure or for marriage, were reduced, or I should say ennobled by Anna, to a portrait gallery. Anyone who was sufficiently famous was asked for his head, and few were those who were not glad to give it. Consequently, I often found people engaged in lively conversation while Anna was working on a head. My visit on such occasions was not unwelcome, because I drew her visitors into conversations that helped Anna in her work. She seemed to listen while modeling. Some people thought her real talent lay in this direction.
I should like to name a few of the people who called on her and build up a kind of gallery of my own. Some I had already met either on Maxingstrasse or on Hohe Warte. One of these was Zuckmayer, whose head she did. He had just come back from France and was talking about his impressions. He was a great storyteller, dramatic, bubbling with enthusiasm. It seems that wherever you went in France you ran into Monsieur Laval. He was the universal face. You went into a restaurant, you were still in the doorway: who stepped up to welcome you? Monsieur Laval. In a café that was full to bursting, you were looking for a place to sit down: who stood up to go, leaving you his seat? Monsieur Laval. At the hotel, one desk clerk after another: all were Monsieur Laval. You took your wife shopping on the rue de la Paix: who waited on you? Monsieur Laval. He was the public figure, the image and likeness of the average Frenchman. This sounds ominous in light of the subsequent events; at the time it was just funny. What held your attention was not the theatrical aspect, but the narrator’s hearty crudeness. The spice was in the repetition; you kept bumping into the same man in a hundred forms; all were him and he was all, but you never felt that this was a real Monsieur Laval, it was always Zuckmayer, a stage Zuckmayer disguised as Monsieur Laval. He did all the talking, he didn’t care who was listening. Apart from Anna, no one was there but me, I felt as if I were many listeners; just as Zuckmayer played the part of many Lavals, I played the part of many listeners. I was the lot of them, and all were amazed at the incredible innocence he emanated, a carnival atmosphere in which nothing really evil happened; all evil was metamorphosed by comedy. When today I call to mind that Laval episode, what strikes me most is how Zuckmayer made situation comedy out of this sinister character.
There were those who captivated me with their beauty, in some a beauty of the purest sort, such as I saw in death masks. De Sabata, the conductor, was one of these. He was conducting at the Opera and dropped in on Anna between rehearsals. It was only a few steps along Operngasse, Anna’s studio was virtually an annex of the opera house. That was how he must have felt, he had just come from Mahler’s music desk. A few steps took him to Mahler’s daughter, and it not only made sense, I thought, but was the high point in his life that she should immortalize his countenance. I was sometimes there when he appeared, tall, with quick, self-assured movements. Despite his haste there was something somnambulistic about him; his face was very pale, with the beauty of a corpse, but of a corpse that resembled no one, though the features were regular; he seemed to walk with his eyes closed, and yet they saw, and there was happiness in them when they rested on Anna. It was no accident, I thought, that de Sabata’s was one of her best heads.
She also did Werfel’s head at that time. He undoubtedly found it pleasant to be having his portrait done so near the house of music. He enjoyed sitting here: it was a very simple studio, a far cry from the sumptuous villa on Hohe Warte or from his publisher’s palace on Maxingstrasse. I stayed away when I knew he would be there. But one day, as I often came unannounced, I saw Werfel sitting in the little glassed-in courtyard. He responded to my greeting as if nothing had happened and showed no sign of resentment for the way he had treated me. He even carried charity so far as to ask me how I was getting along. Then he brought the conversation around to Veza, whose beauty he admired. Once at a soirée on Hohe Warte he had knelt at her feet and, the whole time on one knee, had sung a love aria. He had sung it to the end and stood up only when he felt certain of his success. He had a good voice and sang as well as a professional tenor. He likened Veza to Rowena, the famous actress of the Habima, who had played the lead in The Dybbuk in Vienna to great acclaim. Nothing could have pleased Veza more, she was sick of Andalusian metaphors. He meant it when he said it, it wasn’t flattery, it seems likely that he always meant what he said, which may be one reason for the distrust he aroused in critical minds. Those who tried to defend him despite the repugnance he inspired called him “a wonderful instrument.”
It was interesting to see Werfel just sitting and not doing anything in particular. One was accustomed to hear him holding forth or singing, the one readily merging with the other. He always perorated standing. He had plenty of ideas but spoiled them with verbiage. One might have liked to stop and think, one hoped for a pause, for a moment, no more, of silence, but the verbal torrent rolled on, washing everything away. He attached importance to everything that issued from his mouth, the stupidest remarks were made in the same tone of urgency as unaccustomed, surprising aperçus. Not only his nature but his deepest conviction as well made him incapable of saying anything without putting feeling into it. His propensity for singing distinguished him from a preacher, but like a preacher he was most himself when standing. He wrote his books standing at a lectern. He thought his hymns of praise had their source in love of mankind. He abominated both knowledge and reflection. To avoid reflecting, he would blurt out everything at once. Since he took any number of important ideas from others, he often held forth as if he were a font of infinite wisdom. He overflowed with sentiment, his fat belly gurgled with love and feeling, one expected to find little puddles on the floor around him and was almost disappointed to find it dry. Sitting did not come easy to him except when he was listening to music, which he did avidly, for that was when he charged his batteries with feeling. I often wondered what would have become of him if for three whole years there had been no opera available anywhere on earth. I think he would have wasted away, singing dirges to the bitter end. Others feed on knowledge after wearing themselves out getting it; he fed on music, which he absorbed with feeling.
Anna did something splendid with his ugly head. She, who execrated the grotesque unless it was cloaked in fairytale colors, exaggerated the size of his head, which consisted largely of fat, and making it larger than life gave it a force it did not have. Among the great men’s heads lying about in her studio his didn’t even cut a bad figure. It couldn’t hope to resemble de Sabata’s—which was as beautiful as Baudelaire’s death mask. But it could hold its own with Zuckmayer’s.
Some of Anna’s visitors were quite surprising. One day—I had already sat down and was talking to Anna—Frank Thiess drifted in with his wife, a well-dressed couple in fluffy woolen coats, with variously shaped parcels suspended from every finger, nothing heavy, nothing large, samples, as it were, of precious commodities. When they gave you their hands, they seemed to be offering you your choice of a present. They didn’t put their parcels down because, as they explained apologetically, they could only stay a moment. Thiess spoke very rapidly—a northern-sounding German in a rather high voice; though dreadfully short of time, they couldn’t think of passing without rushing in and saying hello to Anna. They would look at her work another time. And then, in spite of their hurry, a flood of chitchat about the Kärntnerstrasse shops, in none of which I had ever set foot. It sounded like a report on an exotic expedition, delivered in breathless haste, standing, because there wasn’t time enough to put down their coats and presents. Now and then he would start one of his parcels swinging, to show he was talking about the shop where it came from. Soon all the parcels were bobbing up and down on his fingers like marionettes. They were all perfumed; in a few minutes the room was filled with the finest scents, which emanated not from the parcels but from the shopping report. He talked of nothing else; only Anna’s mother—in a passing word of homage—was briefly mentioned. When they had gone—in leaving they had cautiously refrained from holding out their parcels—I asked myself: Has someone been here? Anna, who wasn’t in the habit of making disparaging remarks, went over to her figure and gave it a slap. The shopping world that had just drifted in and out of her studio was not as strange to her as it was to me, she knew it through her mother, whom she had often accompanied to Kärntnerstrasse and the Graben, but it was a world she hated, and in leaving the husband her mother had forced on her for reasons of family politics, she had left it too.
She was no longer under obligation to give receptions on Maxingstrasse. She no longer had to worry about giving offense to any social faction. She no longer had to waste her time, for she was no longer under her mother’s control. If something infuriated her, she picked up her chisel. She was determined to make her work as hard as possible for herself. What she had learned from Wotruba, with whom she had no deep friendship, was to strive for the monumental, because it demanded the hardest work. In the determination that showed itself in the lower half of her face, she resembled her father.
Thiess’s call was purely a matter of form. He may not even have known that he had nothing to say to her. He could have served up his quick chatter to anyone. But Paul Zsolnay, Anna’s last husband, was his publisher. Forsaking the delights of Kärntnerstrasse for this rather fleeting homage to Anna was a friendly gesture, a declaration of neutrality, as it were. He was satisfied just to show his face; perhaps he knew that everything she had lost by her flight from Zsolnay was dangling from his fingers.
Only really “free” writers, who were well known and widely read enough not to be dependent on the publishing house (because any other publisher would have taken them on), could afford to honor Anna with a visit. People came and went at her place, and it would get around that one had been there. Writers who were felt to be lackeys of the publishing house would have been ill advised to come. Some who had previously flattered Anna, who would have given their eyeteeth to be invited to her receptions, avoided her and kept away from Operngasse. There were some who suddenly began to speak ill of her. Her mother, who had a great influence on the musical life of the city, was spared, though calculation and power politics oozed from her every pore.
Anna stood up to the world’s gossip, she was a brave woman. In her little studio on Operngasse she built up a kind of museum of famous heads. It was her own achievement insofar as her heads were successful, which was often enough the case. She did not suspect to what extent her museum was a reflection of her mother’s life.
Her mother was out for power in every form, for fame, for money and for the power that confers pleasure. Anna’s driving force was something weightier, her father’s enormous ambition. She wanted to work and to make work as hard as possible for herself. Wotruba, her teacher, gave her just the long, hard work she needed. She made no excuses for herself as a woman, she was determined to work as hard as the powerful young man who was her teacher. It would never have occurred to her that his kind of work called for a different kind of life. She made no class distinctions, whereas her mother pronounced the word “proletarian” with the contempt she felt for slaves, as if it denoted a being with no claim to humanity, an indispensable commodity which could be bought, which at the most, in the case of an unusually beautiful specimen, might be used for love. While her mother liked to raise up people who had already been raised, Anna drew no such distinctions; class and social status meant nothing to her, she was interested only in people themselves. But it turned out that this noble sentiment was not enough: to estimate people at their proper worth, experience is not enough, one must also register and remember one’s experience.
