The Play of the Eyes, page 22
He wouldn’t have understood, she said. They had been so young when they talked about the Burgtheater together. When they were adolescents living in Vienna, they hadn’t known each other, but they had often attended the same performances. They had discussed them later on, and then it had seemed to them that they had been there together. His idol was Sonnenthal, hers was Wolter. He was more interested in actors than she was; he imitated them, she preferred to talk about them. He hadn’t much to say about the plays, she read them all over again at home; he liked to declaim. He would have been a better actor than she. She thought too much, she preferred to be serious. She cared less for comedies than he did. It was through the plays they had both seen that they got to know each other well. He had never seen Coriolanus, he wouldn’t have liked it. He had no use for proud, heartless people. He had a hard time with her family because of their pride; her family had opposed the marriage. He would have been hurt to learn that of all Shakespeare’s characters Coriolanus was her favorite. Only when she suddenly started talking about Coriolanus in Reichenhall had it dawned on her that she had always avoided mentioning him in conversations with my father.
Had she been dissatisfied in some way? Did my father hurt her feelings in some way? I didn’t ask many questions, she needed no prodding, nothing could have diverted the flood that had been storing up inside her for so long. But this question tormented me and it was good that I asked it. No, he had never hurt her feelings, never once. She had been bitter about Manchester because it wasn’t Vienna. She hadn’t said a word when my father brought me English books to read and discussed them with me in English. That was why she had withdrawn from me at that time. My father had been enthusiastic about England. He had been right. There were distinguished, cultivated English people. If she had only known more of them. But she lived among the members of her family with their ridiculous lack of education. There was no one she could have a real conversation with. That’s what had made her ill, not the climate. That is why Reichenhall, especially her conversations with the doctor, had helped her so much. But it was a cure. It had served its purpose. She would have liked to go there once a year. My father’s jealousy had ruined everything. Had she been wrong to tell him the truth?
She meant the question seriously and wanted an answer from me. She put as much urgency into it as if all this had just happened. She retracted nothing about her meeting with the doctor. She didn’t ask whether she should have refused to listen to him. She thought it enough that she had been deaf to his entreaties. I gave her the answer she didn’t want. “You shouldn’t,” I said, “have shown how much it meant to you.” I said it hesitantly, but it sounded like blame. “You shouldn’t have bragged about it. You should have said it casually.”
“But I was glad,” she said vehemently. “I’m still glad. Do you think I’d have come to Strindberg otherwise? I’d be a different woman, you wouldn’t have written your book. You’d never have gone beyond your wretched poems. You’d never have amounted to anything. Strindberg is your father. You’re my son by Strindberg. I’ve made you into his son. If I had disowned Reichenhall, you’d never have amounted to anything. You write German because I took you away from England. You’ve become Vienna even more than I have. It’s in Vienna that you found your Karl Kraus, whom I couldn’t bear. You’ve married a Viennese woman. And now you’re even living in the midst of Viennese vineyards. You seem to like it. As soon as I’m feeling better, I’ll come and see you. Tell Veza she needn’t be afraid of me. You’ll leave her just as you left me. The stories you made up for me will come true. You have to make up stories, you’re a writer. That’s why I believed you. Whom is one to believe if not writers? Businessmen? Politicians? I only believe writers. But they have to be distrustful like Strindberg, they have to see through women. One can’t think ill enough of people. And yet I wouldn’t give up a single hour of my life. Let them be bad! It’s wonderful to be alive. It’s wonderful to see through all their villainy and yet to go on living.”
From such speeches I learned what had happened to my father. He felt she had deserted him, while she thought she had done no wrong. A confession of the usual sort might not have hit him so hard. She was not fully aware of her own state of mind; else she wouldn’t have bludgeoned him with her happiness. She wasn’t shameless, she wouldn’t have spoken so freely if she had seen any impropriety in her behavior. How could he have accepted what had happened? To him the German words they used with each other were sacred. She had profaned these words, this language. As he saw it, everything they had seen on the stage had turned into love. They had talked to each other about it innumerable times; these words had helped them to bear the narrowness of their daily lives. As a child I was consumed with envy over these foreign words, they made me feel superfluous. The moment they began talking German, no one else existed for them. My feeling of exclusion threw me into a panic; in the next room, I would desperately practice saying the German words I did not understand.
Her confession left me embittered, because she had deceived me. Over the years I had heard version after version; each time she seemed to give a different explanation for my father’s death. What she represented as consideration for my tender years was in reality a changing insight into the extent of her guilt. In the nights after my father’s death, when I had to restrain her from killing herself, her sense of guilt was so strong that she wanted to die. She took us to Vienna to be nearer the place from which her first conversations with my father had drawn their nourishment. On the way to Vienna she stopped in Lausanne and hit me over the head with the language which up until then I had not been allowed to understand. On the evenings when she read to me in Vienna, the evenings that gave me my being, she recapitulated those early conversations with him, but added Coriolanus, the mark of her guilt. In our apartment on Scheuchzerstrasse in Zurich she drowned herself every evening in the yellow Strindberg volumes I presented her with one after another. Then I would hear her singing softly at the piano, talking with my father and weeping. Did she pronounce the name of the author whom she read so avidly and whom he had not known? Now she saw me as the child of her infidelity and threw it up to me. What was my father now?
In such moments she tore everything, she was as reckless as she would have been if she had been leading her true life. She had a right to see herself in my book, to say that she herself would have written like that, that she was my book. That was why she recovered her magnanimity, why she accepted Veza and forgot that I had deceived her for so long about Veza. But she combined her magnanimity with a dire prophecy: just as I had deserted her, so I would desert Veza. She couldn’t live without thoughts of revenge. She said she would come to see us, imagining that she would then see her prophecy come true. She was quick and impetuous and took it for certain that with the publication of my book, which obsessed her, a time of triumph was sure to set in. She saw me surrounded by women, who would worship me for the “misogyny” of Auto-da-Fé and long to let me chastise them for being women. She saw a fast-moving procession of bewitching beauties at my home in Grinzing, and in the end she saw Veza banished and forgotten in a tiny apartment just like her own in Paris. The inventions by which I had taken her mind off Veza had come true; the chronology didn’t matter. I had merely predicted something, I hadn’t deceived her and she hadn’t let herself be deceived; no one could hide his wickedness from her, she had the gift of seeing through people, and she had passed it on to me. I was her son.
I left Paris thinking she had resigned herself to our marriage, that in a way she felt sorry for Veza, precisely because Veza had a dark future ahead of her. It comforted her to think she knew Veza’s inevitable fate, which Veza herself was not yet prepared to acknowledge. I thought up conversations between them and felt relieved. They may have offered me some compensation for the terrible story I had heard about my father’s end.
But things turned out differently. I was all wrong, I underestimated her emotional instability, which now surpassed all bounds. I had failed to consider how it would affect her to have told me the truth at last. Up until then she had put me off. In all the years of our early life together, when I had thought our relations so frank and open, she had diverted me with one version after another and guarded her secret. Now she had revealed it and asked me for my opinion. Sensitive as I was to words, I had found fault with her, not for what had happened, but for not having spared my father, for not realizing what she was doing to him with her boastful story. The outburst with which she reacted to my words had not troubled me, but had confirmed me in my belief that she was unchanged, indestructible, and that she had masterfully put an end to the long struggle between us, though aware of its necessity.
What I had not foreseen came a few months later. Before the year was out, her feelings against me hardened and without denigrating or accusing Veza, as she had done in the past, she wrote that she never wanted to see me again.
Alban Berg
Today I have been looking with emotion at pictures of Alban Berg. I don’t yet feel up to saying what my acquaintance with him meant to me. I shall try only to touch quite superficially on a few meetings with him.
I saw him last at the Café Museum a few weeks before his death. It was a short meeting, at night after a concert. I thanked him for a beautiful letter, he asked me if my book had been reviewed. I said it was still too soon; he disagreed and was full of concern. He didn’t quite come out with it but hinted that I should be prepared for the worst. He, who was himself in danger, wanted to protect me. I sensed the affection he had had for me since our first meeting. “What can happen,” I asked, “now that I’ve got this letter from you?” He made a disparaging gesture, though I could see he was pleased. “You make it sound like a letter from Schönberg. It’s only from me.”
He wasn’t lacking in self-esteem. He knew very well who he was. But there was one living man whom he never ceased to place high above himself: Schönberg. I loved him for being capable of such veneration. But I had many other reasons for loving him.
I didn’t know at the time that he had been suffering for months from furunculosis; I didn’t know that he had only a few weeks to live. On Christmas Day, I suddenly heard from Anna that he had died the day before. On December 28 I went to his funeral in Hietzing cemetery. At the cemetery I saw no such movement as I had expected, no group of people going in a certain direction. I asked a small misshapen gravedigger where Alban Berg was being buried. “The Berg body is up there on the left,” he croaked. Those words gave me a jolt, but I went in the direction indicated and found a group of perhaps thirty people. Among them were Ernst Krenek, Egon Wellesz and Willi Reich. All I remember of the speeches is that Willi Reich spoke of the deceased as his teacher, expressing himself in the manner of a devoted pupil. He said little, but there was humility in his feeling for his dead teacher, and his was the only address that did not grate on me at the time. To others who spoke more cleverly and coherently I did not listen; I didn’t want to hear what they said, because I was in no condition to realize where we were.
I saw him before me at a concert, reeling slightly when moved by some Debussy songs. He was a tall man and when he walked he leaned forward; when this reeling set in, he made me think of a tall blade of grass swaying in the wind. When he said “wonderful,” half the word seemed to stay in his mouth, he seemed drunk. It was babbled praise, reeling wonderment.
When I first went to see him at his home—I had been recommended to him by H.—I was struck by his serenity. Famous in the outside world, in Vienna a leper—I had expected grim defiance. I had thought of him far from his home in Hietzing and didn’t stop to ask myself why he lived here. I didn’t connect him with Vienna, except insofar as he, a great composer, was here to incur the contempt of the far-famed city of music. I thought this had to be so, that serious work could be done only in a hostile environment; I drew no distinction between composers and writers; it seemed to me that the resistance which made them was in both cases the same. This resistance, I thought, drew its strength from one and the same source, from Karl Kraus.
I knew how much Karl Kraus meant to Schönberg and his students. This may have been responsible at first for my own good opinion. But in Berg’s case there was something more: that he had chosen Wozzeck as the subject of an opera. I came to Berg with the greatest expectations, I had imagined him quite different from what he was—does one ever form a correct picture of a great man? But he is the only one I expected so much of who did not disappoint me.
I couldn’t get over his simplicity. He made no great pronouncements. He was curious because he knew nothing about me. He asked what I had done, if there was anything of mine he could read. I said there was no book; only the stage script of The Wedding. In that moment his heart went out to me. This I understood only later; what I sensed at the time was a sudden warmth, when he said: “Nobody dared. Would you let me read it in that form?” There was no particular emphasis on the question, but there was no room for doubt that he meant it, for he added encouragingly: “It was the same with me. Then there must be something in it.” He didn’t demean himself with this association, but he gave me expectation, the best thing in the world. It wasn’t H.’s organized expectation, that left one cold or depressed, it wasn’t the expectation that Scherchen quickly converted into power. It was something personal and simple; he obviously wanted nothing in return though he had made a request. I promised him the script and took his interest as seriously as it was meant.
I told him in what state of mind I had come across Wozzeck at the age of twenty-six and how I had kept reading and reading the fragment all through the night. It turned out that he had been twenty-nine when he attended the first night of Büchner’s play in Vienna. He had seen it many times and decided at once to make it into an opera. I also told him how Wozzeck had led to The Wedding, though there was no direct connection between them, and I alone knew how one had brought me to the other.
In the further course of our conversation I made some impertinent remarks about Wagner, for which he gently but firmly reproved me. His love of Tristan seemed imperturbable. “You’re not a musician,” he said, “or you wouldn’t say such things.” I was ashamed of my impertinence, but I wasn’t too unhappy about it, I felt rather like a schoolboy who had given a wrong answer. My gaffe didn’t seem to diminish his interest in me. And indeed, to help me out of my embarrassment, he repeated his request for my play.
This was not the only occasion when he sensed what was going on inside me. Unlike many musicians, he was not deaf to words; on the contrary, he was almost as receptive to them as to music. He understood people as well as he did instruments. After this first meeting I realized that he was one of the handful of musicians whose perception of people is the same as writers’. And having come to him as a total stranger, I also sensed his love of people, which was so strong that his only defense against it was his inclination to satire. His lips and eyes never lost their look of mockery, and he could easily have used his irony as a defense against his warmheartedness. He preferred to make use of the great satirists, to whom he remained devoted as long as he lived.
I would like to speak of every single meeting I had with him; they were rather frequent in the few years of our acquaintance. But his early death cast its shadow on them all; like Gustav Mahler, he was not yet fifty-one when he died. It discolored every conversation I had with him and I am afraid of letting the grief I still feel for him rub off on his serenity. I am reminded of a sentence in a letter to a student, which I learned about only later. “I have one or two months yet to live, but what then?—I can think or combine no more than this—and so I’m profoundly depressed.” This sentence did not refer to his illness but to the threat of imminent destitution. At the same time he wrote me a wonderful letter about Auto-da-Fé, which he had read in that same mood. He was in severe pain and in fear of losing his life, but he did not thrust the book aside, he let it depress him, he was determined to do the author justice. He did just that and consequently this first letter I received about the novel has remained the most precious of all to me.
His wife, Helene, survived him by more than forty years. Some people ridicule her for “keeping contact” with him all this time. Even if she was deluding herself, even if he spoke inside her and not from outside, this remains a form of survival that fills me with awe and admiration. I saw her again thirty years later, after a lecture given by Adorno in Vienna. Small and shrunken, she came out of the hall, a very old woman, so absent that it cost me an effort to speak to her. She didn’t recognize me, but when I told her my name, she said: “Ah, Herr C.! That was a long time ago. Alban still speaks of you.”
I was embarrassed and so moved that I soon took my leave. I forwent calling on her. I’d have been glad to revisit the house in Hietzing, where she was still living, but I didn’t wish to intrude on the intimacy of the conversations she was always carrying on. Everything that had ever happened between them was still in progress. Where his works were involved, she asked him for advice and he gave her the answer she expected. Does anyone suppose that others were better acquainted with his wishes? It takes a great deal of love to create a dead man who never dies, to listen to him and to speak to him, and find out his wishes, which he will always have because one has created him.
Meeting in the Liliput Bar
H. was back in Vienna that winter. We arranged to meet in town late one night. A new bar had been opened on Naglergasse, not far from Kohlmarkt. Marion Marx, a singer who was also the owner, aimed at an avant-garde clientele. She was a tall, warmhearted woman with a deep voice which filled her Liliput Bar, as the place was called, with gaiety. She made a fuss over young writers, whom she valued for the boldness of their projects, the bolder the better. They felt good in her place. The figure on the check which the waiter brought them before they left was fictitious, she didn’t want them to feel embarrassed in front of wealthy customers; actually they didn’t pay at all. It was this tact that won me to Marion. I didn’t ordinarily go to bars, but to Marion’s I went.
