The Tongue Set Free, page 25
The opus that I eyed with true envy, a “luxury edition,” was entitled The Miracles of Nature, in three volumes, and looked so costly that I couldn’t hope ever to own it myself. Nor did I dare ask if I could take it to the hall; the girls weren’t interested in it, and it would have been a sacrilege. So I only perused it in the parlor of the ladies. I would sometimes sit there for an hour, silently gazing at pictures of radiolarians, chameleons, and sea anemones. Since the ladies were on their own time, I didn’t trouble them with questions, I showed them nothing; when I discovered something particularly exciting, I kept it to myself and was amazed by myself, which wasn’t so easy, I would at least have liked to emit an exclamation, and it would have been fun determining that they didn’t know about something they had had in their bookcase for many years.
I was not supposed to sit there for too long, however, for it might have led the girls out in the hall to believe I was enjoying special privileges. Well, actually I was, but they didn’t resent it so long as it was limited to affection and attention. There was only one point in which there would have been bad blood, and that was the food. For the meals weren’t especially good or copious. The ladies ate a piece of bread with their beer in the evening, and nobody was to think that I got anything extra from them, which indeed was never the case, for I would have been ashamed of such favors.
There would be a lot to tell about the girls, but I do not now intend to describe all of them. Trudi Gladosch, the Brazilian, has already been introduced. She was the most important, for she was always there, and had been there long before I or others came. Thus, she was not really typical or characteristic of the others, and no one else came from as far away as she. There were girls from Holland, Sweden, England, France, Italy, Germany, and from the French, Italian, and German parts of Switzerland. There was a student from Vienna, she was here to be “fattened” (it was the period of starvation after World War I), and there were always individual children from Vienna. These boarders weren’t all there at the same time, however, the tenants changed throughout the two years, only Trudi never changed, and since her father, as I have already said, owed for her room and board, the situation was quite embarrassing for her.
Everyone worked together at the large table in the hall, here they did their homework and wrote their letters. If I had to be undisturbed, I was permitted to use a small schoolroom in the back of the house.
Shortly after moving into the Yalta, I heard the name “Wedekind” from the ladies; but here, the name was preceded by a “Doctor,” which confused me slightly. They seemed to know him well, he often came by; after everything I had heard about him, from Wreschner, from Mother, and what not—his name was in the air—I couldn’t quite understand what he was doing here. He had died recently, but he was spoken of as though alive. The name was borne by confidence; it sounded like the name of a man whom one relied on, they said with great respect that he had uttered this or that at his last visit, and the next time he came, they would have to consult him about something important. I was struck blind, dazzled by the name, which, in my eyes, belonged to only one man; I didn’t dare ask for any details, though I normally had a ready tongue, and I explained it for myself by assuming that this must be a case of a double life. The ladies obviously didn’t know what he had written, I myself knew it only from hearsay; so he wasn’t really dead, he was still practicing, known only to his patients, in that section of our street, Seefeldstrasse, that lay closer to town.
Then one of the girls fell ill and Dr. Wedekind was summoned. Curious, I waited for him in the hall. He came, he looked stern and ordinary, like one of the few teachers whom I didn’t like. He went upstairs to the patient, soon came back down, and resolutely informed Fräulein Rosy, waiting below, about the girl’s sickness. He sat down at the long table in the hall, wrote out a prescription, got to his feet, and, while standing, became involved in a conversation with Fräulein Rosy. He spoke Swiss German like a Swiss, the deception of the double role was perfect; even though I didn’t care for him at all, I began to admire him slightly for this theatrical achievement. I then heard him say very decisively (I don’t know how the subject came up) that his brother had always been the black sheep of the family, people simply couldn’t imagine how that brother had hurt him professionally. Some patients had been so frightened because of his brother that they had never returned to his office. Others, he said, had asked him: It just wasn’t possible that such a man could be his brother? He had always, he said, given one and the same answer: Hadn’t anyone ever heard that someone in a family can go the wrong way? There were impostors, check forgers, confidence men, crooks, and similar riffraff, and such people, as he could confirm from his medical practice, often came from the most decent families. Why, that was what prisons were for, he said, and he was in favor of those criminals being punished with utmost severity and with no consideration of their background. Now the brother was dead, he went on, he could say a few things about that brother which would not make his image any better in the eyes of decent people. But he preferred to hold his peace and think to himself: It’s good that he’s gone. It would have been better had he never lived. He stood there, solid and positive, and spoke with such wrath that I strode over to him, forgetting myself in my anger, planted myself in front of him, and said: “But he was a writer!”
“That’s just it!” he snapped at me. “People like him give wrong ideals. Mark my words, my boy, there are good writers and there are bad writers. My brother was one of the worst. It is better not to become a writer in the first place and to learn something useful!—What’s wrong with our boy here?” he turned to Fräulein Rosy: “Is he already coming out with such stuff too?”
She defended me; he turned away, he did not shake my hand when leaving. Thus, long before I read Wedekind, the doctor succeeded in filling me with affection and respect for him, and during my two years in the Yalta, I never got sick once, so as not be treated by that narrow-minded brother.
Phylogeny of Spinach Junius Brutus
Mother spent a good part of those two years in Arosa, at the Waldsanatorium. I saw her—as I wrote to her—hovering at a great altitude above Zurich, and whenever I thought of her, I automatically gazed aloft. My brothers were at Lake Geneva, in Lausanne; so after the small, crowded apartment on Scheuchzerstrasse, the family had moved quite far apart, forming a triangle: Arosa-Zurich-Lausanne. Letters did pass back and forth every week, discussing everything (at least mine did). But most of the time I was independent of the family, and thus they gave way to new things. For the daily rule of life, my mother was replaced by the committee—one may phrase it thus—of the four ladies. I would never have dreamt of putting them in her stead, but in point of fact it was they I turned to when I wanted permission to go out or whatever. I was a lot freer than before; they knew what sort of wishes I had and denied me nothing. It was only when it got to be too much, when I attended lectures three days in a row, that Fräulein Mina grew skeptical and almost timidly said no. But that seldom came up, there weren’t all that many lectures accessible to me, and mostly I myself preferred to have free time at home, for after every lecture, no matter what the topic, there was plenty to be read. Whatever was touched sent off waves of new things, spreading out on all sides.
I felt every new experience physically, as a sense of bodily expansion. Part of it was already knowing something else to which the new thing had no connection whatsoever. Something separate from everything else came to roost where previously there was nothing. A door suddenly flew open where one had not suspected anything to be, and one found oneself in a landscape with its own light, where everything bore a new name, stretching further and further, to infinity. One moved about, astonished, here, there, wherever one felt like, and it was as if one had never been anywhere else. “Scientific” became a magic word for me at that time. It did not signify, as later on, restricting oneself, gaining a right to something by forgoing everything else; on the contrary, it meant expansion, liberation from limits and boundaries, truly new landscapes that were populated differently, and they weren’t imaginary as in stories or fairy tales, if you spoke their names they were not to be refuted. I had my difficulties with the much older stories, which I clutched as though life hinged on them. They were smiled at; I couldn’t, for instance, come out with them in front of my schoolmates. Some of them had already lost all stories; being grown-up meant making scornful comments about them. I kept all the stories by spinning them further and using them as starting points to invent new ones for myself; but I was no less enticed by the areas of knowledge. I imagined new subjects at school in addition to the old ones, I devised names for some, names so odd that I never dared say them aloud, guarding them as a secret later too. But something about them remained unsatisfying, they were valid only for myself, they signified nothing to anyone, and I certainly also felt, as I spun them out, that I couldn’t put anything into them that I didn’t already know. The yearning for the new was not really stilled by them, the new had to be gotten where it existed independently of me, and that was the function, then, of the “sciences.”
Furthermore, my altered circumstances had released forces that had long been bound. I no longer watched over Mother as in Vienna and in Scheuchzerstrasse. Perhaps that had been a cause of her periodic illnesses. Whether or not we cared to admit it, so long as we lived together we were accountable to each other. Each of us not only knew what the other did, but also sensed the other’s thoughts, and what made up the happiness and denseness of this rapport was also its tyranny. Now, this watchfulness was reduced to letters, in which one could easily hide with some cleverness. She, in any case, by no means wrote me everything about herself: there were only reports on her illness, which I believed and went into. As for some of the people she met, she told me about them on her visits, her letters themselves contained quite little about them. She did the right thing, for if I found out anything about a figure in her sanatorium, I pounced on him with concentrated strength and tore him to bits. She lived among many new people, several of whom meant something to her intellectually; they were mature and diseased people, mostly older than she, but articulate and fascinating precisely because of their special kind of leisure. By socializing with them she thought of herself as really ill, and allowed herself the special sort of precise self-observation that she had once renounced for our sake. Thus, she too was free of us as I of her and my brothers, and our energy individually developed in an independent way.
However, I didn’t want to keep any of my newly gained wonders from her. Any lecture that I went to and was inspired by I would tell her about, in factual detail. She got to hear things that had never interested her: e.g., about the Bushmen in the Kalahari, about the fauna of East Africa, about the island of Jamaica; but also about the architectural history of Zurich or the problem of free will. The art of the Renaissance in Italy—that was still acceptable, she was planning a trip to Florence that spring and received my precise instructions on what she absolutely had to see. She was embarrassed about her inexperience in the area of fine art and was not unwilling to be instructed occasionally. But she scoffed at my reports on primitive peoples, not to mention natural history. Since she herself prudently concealed so much from me, she assumed I was doing the same. She was firmly convinced that these many pages of reports on topics that bored her to tears were meant to camouflage personal things I was dealing with. She kept asking for real news of my life instead of the “Phylogeny of Spinach,” as she scornfully called anything smacking of science. My regarding myself as a writer was something she accepted not unwillingly, and she never balked at ideas for plays and poems that I laid before her, or even at a completed drama that I dedicated to her and sent her. Her doubts as to the value of this concoction were never stated; perhaps too, her judgment was uncertain since I was the author. But she ruthlessly rejected anything smacking of “science,” she refused to hear anything about it in letters, saying it had absolutely nothing to do with me and was an attempt at misleading her.
That period produced the first seeds of the later estrangement between us. When my curiosity, which she had fostered in every way, struck off in a direction alien to her, she began doubting my truthfulness and my character and was frightened of my possibly taking after Grandfather, whom she regarded as a wily actor: her most irreconcilable enemy.
Nevertheless, it was a slow process, it had to take time; I had to attend enough lectures to let my accounts of them and their effect on her accumulate. At Christmas 1919, three months after my entrance into Yalta, she was still under the impact of the drama I had dedicated to her: Junius Brutus. Since early October, I had been working on it evening after evening; in the schoolroom in back, which had been given over to me for studying, I remained every evening after supper until nine o’clock or later. I had long since finished my homework, and if I was deceiving anyone, it was the “Fräuleins Herder.” They had no idea that I was working on a drama for Mother two hours daily. It was a secret, no one must find out about it.
Junius Brutus, who had overthrown the Tarquinii, was the first consul of the Roman Republic. He took its laws so seriously that he condemned his own sons to death and had them executed for participating in a conspiracy against the Roman Republic. I got the story from Livy, and it made an indelible impact on me, because I was certain that my father would have pardoned his sons had he been in Brutus’ place. And yet his own father had been capable of cursing him for disobedience. In the ensuing years, I had seen how Grandfather had been unable to get over that curse, which Mother bitterly threw up to him. Livy didn’t have much on this topic, a brief section. I invented a wife for Brutus, who fights with him over the lives of their sons. She gets nowhere with him, their sons are executed, in her despair she hurls herself from a cliff into the Tiber. The drama ends in an apotheosis of the mother. The last words (they are put in Brutus’ mouth, he has just learned of her death) are: “The father’s curs’d who murders his own sons!”
It was a double tribute to Mother; I was aware of one tribute, which had such great control of me during the months of writing, that I thought she would be so overjoyed as to recover. For her illness was mysterious, the doctors couldn’t quite tell what was wrong; no wonder that I tried to aid her with such devices. As for the hidden second tribute, I was unaware of its existence: The final line of my play was a condemnation of Grandfather, who, as some of the family and particularly my mother were convinced, had killed his son with his curse. Thus, in the struggle between Grandfather and Mother, which I had witnessed in Vienna, I resolutely sided with her. Perhaps she also received this hidden message; we never discussed it, and I therefore cannot say for sure.
There may have been young writers revealing talent at the age of fourteen. I was definitely not one of them. The play was wretched, it was written in iambs that mock all description, awkward, bumpy, and bloated, not so much influenced by Schiller as determined in every detail, but in such a way that everything was ludicrous, dripping with ethics and nobility, garrulous and shallow, as though having passed through six pairs of hands, each less gifted than the earlier pair and thus making the origin unrecognizable. It is not advisable for a child to solemnly march about in the garments of an adult, and I would never had mentioned this wretched concoction if it hadn’t revealed something with a genuine core: the early horror at the death penalty and at the order to carry it out. The connection between an order and a death penalty, albeit of a different nature than I could know at that time, occupied me later for many decades and has not released me even today.
Among Great Men
I finished the drama on time and wrote out the clean copy during the weeks before Christmas. Carrying through such a long work, which I began on October 8 and finished on December 23, filled me with a new kind of rapture. In the past, I had spun yarns for weeks on end, telling them to my brothers in installments; but as I never wrote them down, I didn’t see them before me. Junius Brutus, a tragedy in five acts, filling a lovely, light-gray notebook, stretched out for over one hundred twenty-one pages and ran to 2,298 blank verses. This labor was my most important activity for ten weeks, and its significance was heightened by my keeping it a secret from the ladies and girls in the Yalta, even Trudi, who was my confidante. While so many other new things moved in on me, things I was passionately caught up in, the true meaning of my life seemed to be contained in the two daily hours of glorifying my mother. My weekly letters to her, reporting on all sorts of things, climaxed in the proudly ornate signature, with the following words underneath: “In spe poeta clarus.” She had never learned Latin at any school, but her knowledge of Romance languages helped her guess pretty much of it. Still, being worried that she might misunderstand “clarus” as “clear,” I put the German translation below the Latin.
