The Tongue Set Free, page 22
This taboo, which often triggers the most dangerous counter-emotions in other people’s lives, is something I am still grateful for even today. I cannot say that it has preserved any innocence in me, for in my jealousy I was nothing less than innocent. But it kept me fresh and naive for anything I wished to know. I learned in all possible ways, without ever feeling it as a restraint or burden, for there was nothing that irritated me or secretly occupied me more. Whatever happened to me took solid root in me, there was space for everything, I never had a feeling of anything being kept from me; on the contrary, it seemed as if everything were spread out before me, and I need only grab it. No sooner was it in me than it related to something else, got attached to that, kept growing, created an atmosphere, and called for something new. That was the freshness: everything taking shape and not merely adding up. The naiveté may have been that everything remained at hand, the lack of sleep.
A second good deed that Mother did for me during those years in Zurich together had even greater consequences: she exempted me from calculation. I was never told that one does something for practical reasons. Nothing was done that might be “useful.” All the things I wanted to grasp were equally valid. I moved along a hundred roads at once without having to hear that any was more comfortable, more profitable, more productive. It was the things themselves that were important, and not their usefulness. One had to be precise and thorough and know how to advocate an opinion without trickery, but this thoroughness applied to the thing itself and not to some use it might have. There was scarcely any mention of what I might do some day. The thought of a profession receded so far into the background that all professions remained open. Success didn’t mean that one advanced for oneself, success benefited everybody, or it wasn’t true success. It is a mystery to me how a woman of her background, well aware of the commercial prestige of her family, with great pride in it, never denying it, managed to achieve such freedom, breadth, and unselfishness of vista. It can only have been the shock of the war, the sympathy for all who had lost their most precious people to the war, that made her suddenly leave her limits behind and turned her into sheer magnanimity towards everyone who thought and felt and suffered, with admiration for the radiant process of thinking, which was given to everyone, at the top of the list.
I once saw her aghast; it is my mutest recollection of her and the only time that I saw her crying on the street. She was normally too self-controlled to let herself go in public. We were strolling along Limmatquai, I wanted to show her something in the window display at Rascher. All at once, a group of French officers came towards us in their conspicuous uniforms. Some of them had trouble walking, the others adjusted their pace to them, we stopped to let them slowly trudge by. “They’re badly wounded,” said Mother, “they’re in Switzerland to convalesce. They’re being exchanged for Germans.” And at that moment, a group of Germans came from the other side, several of them with crutches too, and the rest trudging slowly for their sake. I still remember how I shuddered from head to foot: What would happen now, would they charge one another? We were so disconcerted that we didn’t step aside in time and suddenly found ourselves between the two groups who were trying to pass each other, we were enclosed, right in the middle. It was under the arcades, there was certainly enough room, but now we were peering very closely into their faces as they thronged past one another. No face was twisted with hate or anger, as I had expected. They gazed calmly and amiably at one another as though there were nothing odd about the situation, a few saluted. They moved a lot slower than other people, and it took a while, it seemed like an eternity until they had gotten by each other. One of the Frenchmen turned back, raised his crutch aloft, waved it about a little, and then cried to the Germans, who were already past: “Salut!” A German who had heard it did the same, he too had a crutch, which he waved, and he returned the greeting in French: “Salut!” One might think, upon hearing this, that the crutches were brandished threateningly, but that wasn’t the case at all, they were simply showing each other, by way of farewell, what had remained for them jointly: crutches. Mother had stepped over to the curb and was standing in front of the window display with her back to me. I saw that she was trembling; I went up next to her, cautiously eyed her askance. She was weeping. We pretended to be gazing at the display, I didn’t say a word; when she pulled herself together, we went home in a hush, nor did we ever speak about that incident afterwards.
The Gottfried Keller Celebration
I formed a literary friendship with Walter Wreschner from a parallel class. He was the son of a psychology professor from Breslau. He always spoke in an “educated” way and never used the dialect with me. Our friendship emerged very naturally, we spoke about books. But there was an enormous difference between us, he was interested in the most modern stuff, which people were talking about, and at the time that was Wedekind.
Wedekind sometimes came to Zurich and performed at the Schauspielhaus in Earth Spirit. He was a subject of violent controversy, parties formed for or against him, the one against him was more powerful, the one for him was more interesting. I knew nothing about him from personal experience, and Mother, who had seen him at the Schauspielhaus gave a colorful account of him (she described in detail his appearance with the whip), but her verdict was quite shaky. She had hoped for something like Strindberg, and without totally denying the kinship between them, she felt that Wedekind had something of a preacher and also of a yellow journalist, always wanting to make a splash and be noticed, not caring how he drew attention, so long as he got it. Strindberg, however, she said, was always rigorous and superior, although he saw through everything. He had something of a doctor—but not one for healing and also not one for the body. She said I would only understand what she meant when I read him myself, later on. As for Wedekind, I got a very inadequate notion of him too, and since I didn’t wish to jump ahead and was exceedingly patient when warned by the right person, he couldn’t attract me as yet
Wreschner, on the other hand, spoke about him constantly; he had even written a play in his manner and let me read it. Everyone on stage just shot up the place, suddenly, groundlessly, I couldn’t see why. The whole thing was more alien to me than if it had taken place on the moon. At this time, I was combing all bookshops for David Copperfield, which was to be the crown of one and one half years of Dickens enthusiasm and a present for me. Wreschner came along when I went to the bookshops; David Copperfield was nowhere to be found. Totally uninterested in such an old-fashioned book, Wreschner made fun of me, saying it was a bad sign that David Copperfield, as he belittled it, wasn’t anywhere, it meant that nobody wanted to read it. “You’re the only one,” he added ironically.
At last, I found the novel, but in German, and I told Wreschner how silly I found his Wedekind (whom I only knew from his imitation).
However, this tension between us was pleasant; he listened carefully when I told him about my books, he even got to hear the plot of Copperfield, while I heard about all the utterly weird things that took place in the Wedekind dramas. It didn’t bother him that I kept saying: “That can’t be, that’s impossible!” On the contrary, he enjoyed surprising me. Today, however, I find it peculiar that I can’t remember anything he amazed me with. It slid off me as though it didn’t exist anywhere; since there was nothing in me to which it could connect, I regarded it all as stuff and nonsense.
A moment came when our mutual arrogance united in one, and we stood as a party of two against an entire crowd. In July 1919, the Gottfried Keller centennial was celebrated. Our entire school was to gather in the Preacher Church on that occasion. Wreschner and I walked down together from Rämistrasse to Predigerplatz. We had never heard anything about Gottfried Keller; we only knew that he was a Zurich writer, born one hundred years ago. We were surprised that the celebration was to take place in the Preacher Church; it was the first time that such a thing happened. At home, I had asked, to no avail, just who he was: Mother didn’t even know the title of a single one of his works. Wreschner hadn’t picked up anything about him either, and he only said: “He’s simply Swiss.” We were in a cheery mood because we felt excluded, for we were interested only in the literature of the great world, I in English and he in contemporary German. During the war, we had been enemies of sorts; I swore by Wilson’s Fourteen Points, he wanted the Germans to win. But after the collapse of the Central Powers, I turned away from the victors, I already felt an antipathy against victors, and when I saw that the Germans weren’t being treated as Wilson had promised, I switched over to their side. So we were really only separated by Wedekind, but though I understood nothing of him, I never doubted his fame for an instant.
The Preacher Church was jammed to the hilt, the mood was lugubrious. There was music, and then came a big speech. I no longer remember who gave it, it must have been a professor at our school, but no one that we had. I only know that he got more and more worked up about Gottfried Keller’s importance. Wreschner and I kept sneaking ironic glances at each other. We believed we knew what a great writer is, and if we didn’t know anything about a writer, then he just wasn’t great. But when the speaker kept making loftier and loftier claims for Keller, talking about him as I was used to hearing about Shakespeare, Goethe, Victor Hugo, about Dickens, Tolstoy, and Strindberg, I was seized with a horror such as I can scarcely describe, as though somebody had profaned the most sublime thing in the world, the glory of the great writers. I became so furious that I really wanted to heckle. I thought I could feel the devotion of the mass around me, perhaps also because the whole thing was taking place in a church, for I was well aware at the same time of how indifferent many of the students were to Keller, if for no other reason than because writers, especially those that some of them had in school, were actually a bother. The devotion consisted in the way they all took it mutely, nobody made a peep, I myself was too self-conscious or too well bred to cause any disturbance in a church, our anger went inward, turning into an oath that was no less solemn than the occasion it sprang from. No sooner were we out of the church than, deadly earnest, I said to Wreschner, who would rather have made his sarcastic remarks: “We have to swear, both of us have to swear, never to become local celebrities!” He saw I was in no mood for fun, and he swore the oath to me as I to him, but I doubt if his heart was really in it, for he regarded Dickens, whom he had no more read than I Keller, as my local celebrity.
That speech may really have been full of claptrap; I had a good sense of such things at an early age, but what struck me to the core of my naive attitude was the lofty claim for a writer whom not even Mother had read. My account stunned her, and she said: “I don’t know, I finally have to read something by him now.” The next time that I went to the Hottingen Reading Circle, I, reserved until the end, asked for a copy of Keller’s The Field People of Seldwyla. The girl at the counter smiled, a gentleman who had come for something himself corrected me like an illiterate: The People of Seldwyla. It wouldn’t have taken much for him to ask me: “Can you read already?” I was very embarrassed and, in the future, I acted even more reticent about Keller. But at the time, I couldn’t guess with what delight I would some day read Green Henry; and when I, as a student, in Vienna, again became utterly enthralled by Gogol, I felt that German literature, to the extent that I knew it then, had only one story like his stories: “The Three Just Kammachers.” Had I the luck to be alive in the year 2019 and the honor to be standing at the Keller bicentennial in the Preacher Church and to celebrate him with a speech, I would find quite different praises for him, which would compel even the ignorant arrogance of a fourteen-year-old.
Vienna in Trouble The Slave from Milan
Mother endured that life with us for two years; we had her all to ourselves. I thought she was happy because I was. I didn’t guess that it was hard for her and that she was missing something. But what had happened in Vienna, now recurred; after two years of concentrating on us, her energy began to wane. Something inside her crumbled without my noticing. The calamity returned in the form of an illness. Since it was one striking all the world, the big influenza epidemic in the winter of 1918-19, and since the three of us caught it, like everyone we knew, schoolmates, teachers, friends, we saw nothing special about her falling ill too. Perhaps she lacked proper care, perhaps she got back up too early; suddenly, complications set in, and she had a thrombosis. She had to go to the hospital, where she remained for several weeks, and when she came home she was no longer the same person. She had to lie down a lot, she had to take care of herself, the housework was too much for her, she felt confined and oppressed in the small apartment.
She no longer knelt in her chair at night, leaning her head on her fist; the high stack of books, which I prepared as before, stayed untouched. Strindberg was in disgrace. “I’m too restless,” she said, “he depresses me, I can’t read him now.” At night, when I was lying in bed in the adjacent room, she would abruptly sit down at the piano and play sad songs. She played softly to avoid waking me, as she thought; she hummed along even more softly, and then I heard her weep and talk to my father, who had been dead for six years.
The months that followed were a period of gradual dissolution. Recurrent states of feebleness convinced her and me that it couldn’t go on like that. She would have to give up the household. We conferred this way and that way what to do with the children and myself. The little brothers were both already attending school in Oberstrass, but it was still a primary school, and so they wouldn’t lose anything by transfering back to the boarding school in Lausanne, where they had already spent a few months in 1916. They would be able to improve their French, which wasn’t particularly good yet. But I was already at the Realgymnasium of the canton school, where I felt fine and liked most of my teachers. I loved one of them so much that I told Mother I would never go to any school where he wasn’t teaching. She knew the intensity of my passions, both negative and positive, and she realized this was no joking matter. And so, throughout the long period of deliberations, it was regarded as settled that I would have to stay in Zurich and board somewhere here.
She herself would do everything to restore her health, which was deeply shaken. We would spend the summer together in the Bern highlands. Then, after the three of us were settled in our various places, she would go to Vienna for a thorough examination by good specialists, who could still be found there. They would advise the proper treatments, and she would follow all their advice to the letter. Perhaps it would take a year before we could live together again, perhaps longer. The war was over, she felt drawn back to Vienna. Our furniture and books were stored in Vienna; who could tell what state they were in after three years? There were so many reasons for going to Vienna; the chief reason was Vienna itself. We kept hearing how bad things were in Vienna. Along with all the private reasons, she felt something like an obligation to see how things stood. Austria had crumbled; the land she had thought of with a kind of bitterness so long as it had waged war, now mainly consisted of Vienna for her. She had wanted defeat for the Central Powers because she was convinced that they had started the war. Now she felt responsible for, nay, almost guilty about Vienna, as though her attitude had plunged the city into disaster. One night, she told me in earnest that she had to see for herself what it was like there; she couldn’t bear the thought of Vienna going under totally. I started to realize, albeit still unclearly, that the crumbling of her health, of her clarity and solidity, of her feelings about us, were linked to the end of the war, which end she had so passionately wished for, and to the collapse of Austria.
We had resigned ourselves to the idea of the imminent separation when we traveled to Kandersteg once again, for the summer. I was accustomed to being in grand hotels with her; she had never gone to any other kind since her youth. She liked the subdued atmosphere, the cordial service, the changing guests, whom one could observe from one’s own table during the table d’hôte without seeming overly curious. She liked talking about all those people to us, speculating about them, trying to figure out their background, quietly deprecating them or pointing them out. She felt I would thereby experience something of the great world without getting too close to it, for which she thought it was too early.
The previous summer, we had been in Seelisberg, on a terrace high over Lake Urner. We often walked down through the forest with her to Rütli Meadow, at first in honor of William Tell, but very soon in order to pick the strongly fragrant cyclamens, whose scent she loved. She never noticed flowers that didn’t have a perfume, it was as if they didn’t exist, but she was all the more passionate about lilies of the valley, hyacinths, cyclamens, and roses. She loved talking about them, explaining that it was due to the roses of her childhood in her father’s garden. When I brought home natural-science booklets from school, copying the pictures assiduously—a real strain on a bad draughtsman—she pushed them away; I could never get her interested in them. “Dead!” she would say. “It’s all dead! It doesn’t smell, it only makes me sad!” But she was entranced with Rütli Meadow. “No wonder Switzerland was born here! I would have sworn any oath amid this fragrance of cyclamens. They knew what they were defending. I would be ready to give my life for this fragrance.” All at once, she confessed that something had always been missing for her in Schiller’s William Tell. Now she knew what it was: the smell. I argued that maybe there hadn’t been any forest cyclamens at that time.
