The Torch in my Ear, page 23
I was destroyed, but I didn’t give in, even if I was destroyed. I asked her what had happened to Tolstoy, the count, with all his courage? Had he ever landed in prison, had he ever been put on trial? Had he ever left his manor? Had he ever been exiled?
The woman was what happened to him, she said, and he had left his “manor” and died in exile.
I also made an effort to save Gogol’s honor. He had ventured further, I said. In those works of his that counted, he had been bolder than anyone else. He hadn’t realized how bold he was; he had suddenly been confronted with his own boldness and was scared to death of himself. He had seen himself as that which he had attacked, and the zealots surrounding him after his return had threatened him with hell, the punishment of hell, for all his characters together. His terrible end proved the power and also the newness of his characters. She could mock him, but she was mocking his faith. Yet what else was it but his faith that she so greatly venerated in the old Tolstoy?
She couldn’t stand my talking about them in the same breath: the terrible zealotry of orthodox bishops, who had such an effect on Gogol, and Tolstoy’s self-acquired faith, which he subjected to incessant testing by his conscience. She said that the zealotry and Tolstoy’s faith were two utterly incommensurable things. Our bitter, drawn-out feud came to a sort of compromise, which, consistent with the literary topic, was a literary work, but one that we both equally admired: Gorky’s jottings about the old Tolstoy, which I had given her to read. It was the best thing Gorky had ever written, loose jottings that he had put aside for a long time before publishing them, without destroying them through a false, external unification. Veza was deeply moved by this picture of old Tolstoy. She called it the most beautiful present I had ever given her. When we approached these jottings, we both knew the worst was over. She could then say something that tore my heart: “That’s the thing I wish for most in the world: that you may write like this someday.”
This was no goal one could set for oneself. It was not just unattainable. (Many things are unattainable, yet one can try to sail in their direction.) However, the greatness of this memoir was due more to its subject than to its author. Was there a Tolstoy in the world today? And if there was, would people know that he was? And even if one could develop so far as to deserve it, would one encounter him? It was a preposterous wish, and perhaps she shouldn’t have articulated it. But even though I have never thought of her words without feeling the same sharp pain they caused me at that moment, I believe that it is right to utter the unattainable. After that, one can never get off easily again, and the unattainable remains unattainable.
The astonishing thing about these conversations was that we didn’t influence one another. She stuck to the things she had acquired on her own. Some of the things I offered her did impress her; but when she found them in herself, she made them her own. There were battles, but there was never a victor. The battles went on for months and, as it turned out later, for years; but there was never a capitulation. Each of us awaited the other’s position, but without bringing it up. If what had to be said had been uttered by the wrong side, it would have been nipped in the bud. Veza made an effort to avoid this very danger; she applied her secret caution, a tender concern, but not a motherly one, for we were equals. Despite the vehemence of her words, she never acted superior. Nor would she ever have yielded in submission; and she would never have forgiven herself, had she kept back her opinion for the sake of peace or out of weakness. Perhaps battle is the wrong word for our disputes. Complete knowledge of the other was involved, and not just an estimation of his strength and his quickness of mind. It was impossible for her to wound me deliberately. I would never have hurt her for anything in the world. However, we had a compulsion for intellectual truthfulness, a compulsion no smaller than the one I had known in my earlier youth.
I could not discard my legacy of intolerance, even here. However, I learned intimacy with a thinking person, which means one must not only hear every word, but try to understand it as well, and demonstrate this understanding by replying exactly and undistortedly. Respect for others begins with not ignoring their words. I would like to call this the quiet apprenticeship of this period, although this apprenticeship took place in so very many words; for the other, the utterly contrasting apprenticeship, which I began instantly, was vociferous and glaring.
I learned from Karl Kraus that one can do anything with other people’s words. Whatever he read, he operated with it in a breathtaking manner. He was a master of accusing people with their own words. Which didn’t mean that he then spared them his accusation in his express words. He supplied both accusations and crushed everyone. You enjoyed the spectacle, because you recognized the law dictating these words, but also because you were together with many other people, feeling the tremendous resonance known as a crowd, in which one no longer bruises oneself on one’s own limits. You didn’t care to miss any of these experiences; you never skipped a single one. You went to these lectures even if you were sick and running a high fever. You thus also gave in to your proclivity for intolerance, which was naturally powerful and which now intensified legitimately, as it were, and in an almost inconceivable way.
Far more important was the fact that you were simultaneously learning how to hear. Everything that was spoken, anywhere, at any time, by anyone at all, was offered to your hearing, a dimension of the world that I had never had any inkling of. And since the issue was the combination—in all variants—of language and person, this was perhaps the most important dimension, or at least the richest. This kind of hearing was impossible unless you excluded your own feelings. As soon as you had put into motion what was to be heard, you stepped back and only absorbed and could not be hindered by any judgment on your part, any indignation, any delight. The important thing was the pure, unadulterated shape: none of these acoustic masks (as I subsequently named them) could blend with the others. For a long time, you weren’t aware of how great a supply you were gathering. You only felt an eagerness for manners of speech, which you wanted cleanly and clearly delimited, which you could take hold of like an object, which occurred to you suddenly without your discerning their connection to anything else, so that you had to say them aloud to yourself; not without astonishment at their perfect polish and the sure blindness with which they excluded everything else that could be said in the world, almost everything, everything; for they had only one characteristic: they had to keep repeating themselves over and over.
It was, I believe, in Sankt Agatha, during the summer of 1926, that I first felt a need for such masks, their self-sufficiency, as it were, independent of the ones I heard in Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind, which I already knew by heart. I felt this need while watching the swallows hour after hour, listening to their swift, light motion and their simultaneous and unchanging sounds. Despite their repetition, these sounds never wore me out, any more than the wonderful movements of the swallows’ flight. Perhaps I might have forgotten them eventually; but then came the kermess with the shirt hawker under my window and his unchanging spiel:
“It makes no difference today
Whether I have cash or hay!”
I had heard barkers as a child and had wished they would remain nearby and not go on all that soon. This barker remained in the same place for two days, never budging from under my window. But when the noise drove me to the wooden table in the small garden, where I wrote, I found the swallows again. Undisturbed by the bustle of the fair, they flew in the same way, emitted the same sounds. One repetition seemed like the others; everything was repetition; the sounds—which I couldn’t get out of my mind—consisted of repetition. And even though it was a false mask that the shirt vendor donned, even though he revealed himself to be a law student in our conversation, a student who knew quite well what he wanted and what he was saying, his consistent use of this mask, together with the unchanging but natural sounds of the swallows, made such an impact on me that my later hunt in Vienna for manners of speaking led to restless nightly rounds through the streets and taverns of Leopoldstadt.
By the end of the year, this district became too confining for me. I began to wish for longer streets, longer walks, different people. Vienna was very large, but the distance from Haidgasse to Ferdinandstrasse was short; Praterstrasse, where I had lived with my brother for several months, seemed exhausted. My routes had become a routine. On Haidgasse, I expected a catastrophe night after night. Perhaps that was why I often had bad thoughts and dashed over to Veza’s window on Ferdinandstrasse, so that the light in her room could calm my nerves. If her room was dark and she was out, I was dismayed, even though she had already told me she’d be out. Something in me seemed to expect that she would always be there, no matter what obligations she had.
Gradually, I realized that the possibility of supervision, the short stroll to her home, the temptation to yield to every such emotion, increased my distrust, becoming a danger for us. A distance had to be created between us. I had to leave Haidgasse, and it would have been best if the whole of Vienna lay between us, so that every walk to her and from her would offer me the chance to get to know all streets, doors, windows, taverns of the city, hear all their voices, not take fright at any voice, surrender to them, incorporate them within me, and yet constantly remain open to new ones. I wanted to find and create a place of my own, at the other end of town, and Veza, at least occasionally, was to visit me there, free of the tyranny of the tamed evil old man, whom she always had to listen for with half an ear, for who could tell when he might not suddenly tear himself away from his fire, leave his hell, and break into the holy precinct.
The Invention of Women
During Easter vacation 1927, I went to Paris to see my mother and my brothers. They had been installed there for almost a year, and weren’t doing all that badly. My brothers managed to get along in their new schools. French, which they had learned at a much younger age, during two years in a Lausanne boarding school for boys, caused them no problems. They felt fine here, and particularly Georg, the younger one, now called Georges, who was developing in a way that I had wished for. He was a tall, dark-eyed young man, who had a way with words, and who excelled especially in his philosophy class. His proclivity for logical distinctions surprised me (it certainly wasn’t due to my influence), and it gave him, at sixteen, a certain independence that he exhibited felicitously in long letters to me and also in the conversations we had during my visit. He was subtle and resourceful; at his school, they assumed he would devote himself to philosophy. He had as much of an aptitude for French as I for German, and yet neither had been our first language. However, we spoke German with one another. He, too, was a faithful reader of Die Fackel, which I had to keep sending him from Vienna. And one of his respectable qualities was that when he had mastered a language (and there were many in the course of time), he spoke it no differently from a native, and usually better.
For all the acuity and clarity of mind, he was a tender person, who couldn’t do enough for our mother. He replaced what she had lost in me, and he avoided any conflict with her. He was aware of how deeply I had hurt her. In his emotional maturity, which went far beyond his years, he understood what had happened between us and he always kept it in the front of his mind. He listened patiently to her harsh accusations against me without contradicting her, but also without agreeing with her to such an extent as to block any path to eventual reconciliation. It was as if he had taken over my earlier love for her, enriching and refining it with his tenderness, which I lacked. It was a boon for the family that I was gone, and it was a boon for me. But to make the boon perfect, for her as for myself, I had to pull the deepest thorn out of her heart; and this thorn had a name.
Before they moved to Paris, I had understood that there was one single way of assuaging Mother’s torment and—what I wanted even more—of protecting Veza against Mother’s hatred: the invention of women. I started my inventing in letters and soon got to enjoy the everchanging stories. There had to be several women. Any woman I took too seriously, any woman who prevailed, would have frightened my mother and aroused her hatred. Mother would have feared this woman’s influence on me and turned her into a satanic figure causing her sleepless nights. And so variety was of the essence. After some experimenting, I hit upon the happiest solution: there had to be two very different women, between whom I wavered, one of them not living in Vienna and the other also not too close, so that my studies didn’t suffer under the pressure. But also so that neither woman could carry the day against the other; for this would have given her a dangerous preponderance; I would have been, as my mother wrote, at her mercy. I had no scruples about inventing these stories; I did not take them as lies in the ordinary sense of the word. Odysseus, who had always been my model, helped me over the embarrassing aspects of this situation. Something that was well invented was a story, not a lie; and the fact that the purpose of this enterprise was a good, nay, a charitable one, was soon demonstrated by its effect.
The greatest difficulty was that I had to inform Veza. Without her knowledge, without her agreement, I could neither invent these stories nor keep spinning them. And so, it was unavoidable: bit by bit, in small doses, as gently as possible, I had to tell her the truth about Mother’s deep animosity toward her. Fortunately, Veza had read enough good novels to understand what had happened. Since I had already begun my enterprise before she knew about it, she couldn’t have prevented it anyway. She feared that Mother could learn the truth from others: this would only make matters worse. I argued that gaining time would be wonderful. In later years, when Mother got used to my independent life style, when I’d have actually published a book that she could respect with conviction, then learning the true facts would hurt her less. I succeeded in persuading Veza; she also sensed—but without saying so—how deeply I feared that Mother would commit a physical act of jealousy against her.
However, there was one thing I hadn’t considered: the animating effect my not very elaborate tales would have on my mother’s imagination. By the time I arrived in Paris at Easter, there was, according to my letters, a “Maria” in Salzburg and an “Erika,” a violinist, in Rodaun, whereas I allegedly saw little of Veza and didn’t like her anymore. I was still standing in the hall of the Paris apartment—nothing had been shown me as yet, I had been greeted only casually—when Mother asked about Erika. And only when we were alone for an instant, without my brothers, did she say: “I haven’t told the boys anything; but what is Maria doing? Have you come directly from Vienna or did you stop off in Salzburg?” She didn’t feel it was right that the boys should find out about this double life; it could demoralize them. She had told them about Erika, she said. She hoped I didn’t mind; it had exorcised the bugaboo of Veza for everyone in the family, and they could think of me in Vienna without worrying too much.
So that was how things stood, and I had to satisfy my mother’s curiosity as she asked countless questions. She wanted to know everything, but her questions varied, depending on whether or not my brothers were present. She was endlessly delighted that Maria, the Salzburg girl, was a secret between the two of us. She also advised me not to tell any of our relatives; it could damage my reputation. It looked a bit licentious, whereas she had to admit she would never have expected me to show so much wisdom in a practical question of life. However, she added, it had probably just happened like that, and she shouldn’t praise me for something that was sheer chance.
A few days later, when I took my first long walk with Georg (he wanted to show me things he was sure I’d never seen despite my earlier visits to Paris), we first spoke about other, “real,” namely intellectual, matters. But then he told me that Mother was a lot better. The fact that the business with Veza was over had worked wonders for Mother. Then he looked at me earnestly and hesitated, as though not really wanting to come out with something. I plied away at him, though sensing what I was about to hear. “You don’t have to ask how I feel about it,” he said. “I hope you won’t always toy with people the way you toyed with Veza.” He hesitated again. “Do you have any idea of how she’s getting on? Aren’t you scared she could do something to herself?”
I had always liked him, but now I loved him even more. I made up my mind to tell him the truth before anyone else. Now was still too early. It was bad, I felt awful about letting him think he was more worried about a person so close to me than I was, even though he barely knew her. I hadn’t considered this facet of the stupid lie; it was good that I was now confronted with it.
Georg always thought about this matter whenever we were alone. He was convinced that a person so vilely abandoned was in danger and required special care. The insight and concern he showed Mother in Paris were feelings he had for Veza, too, in Vienna. He tried to make me feel warm about her, yet he didn’t mention her, much less give me advice. In the Louvre, which we sometimes visited together, he stopped in front of Leonardo’s St. Anne, Mary, and Jesus, took a long look at St. Anne and then at me. Her smile reminded him of Veza’s. He remembered her so clearly. He had seen her, but hadn’t exchanged two words with her. As though we were talking about painters and nothing else, he asked me whether I liked Leonardo. Some people found the smile on Leonardo’s faces saccharine, but Georg didn’t. It all depended, I said, on whether you knew people who were capable of such a smile but whose lives weren’t determined by saccharine things. He agreed with me. I sensed that he wanted to know my true opinion of Veza, whom, as he thought, I had treated so badly. But I also sensed that he wanted justice for her, since he had heard the most dreadful things about her at home, yet held his tongue, although he felt he knew better.
