The Play of the Eyes, page 27
When I sat there with Wotruba, I was shown what gigantic stones he would someday hew. But he didn’t bat an eyelash when a young architect who was with us begot whole cities. Wotruba even allowed himself to be bombarded with the name of Kokoschka—something that seldom ended well under other circumstances. That was the greatest name the painters and sculptors of Vienna could bandy at that time. Though he was in Prague just then and had turned his back on Vienna, everyone who was out for fame was proud of him, he seemed beyond emulation. When Wotruba’s friends wanted to squelch Wotruba’s self-assurance, they would bring up the name of Kokoschka, and although they had nothing whatever in common—Wotruba was the exact opposite of Austrian baroque—he came to regard that name as a club with which he was being hit on the head.
It struck me that he often seemed paralyzed by fear that he would never equal Kokoschka. This was quite unlike him and I tried to talk him out of overestimating Kokoschka, whose late work, as a matter of fact, he did not greatly admire. Only at the Heurigen, when he reveled in immense blocks of stone and told us how Michelangelo had longed to carve whole mountains in the region of Carrara, to make sculptures that could be seen from ships at sea instead of merely hewing blocks of stone for the Pope’s tomb in Rome; when I saw how deeply he regretted Michelangelo’s failure to realize this ambition, it sounded as if he were still trying to egg Michelangelo on, as if his own blocks of stone were suddenly mingled with Michelangelo’s, and as if he were about to take the job out of Michelangelo’s hands—only then did the name of Kokoschka, if anyone had been foolish enough to utter it, sound silly and lightweight, while Wotruba was a mighty mountain beside it.
In his case I literally saw expansion and aggrandizement; I saw his stones growing, I never heard him singing, let alone bellowing, at the most he growled, but then he was angry and that’s not what he went to the Heurigen for.
But at night when I went into the garden alone, heard the bellowing, felt ashamed of living so close to it, but stayed there until I had taken all the bellowing into myself and overcome my sense of shame, I sometimes wondered whether there might be others like him sitting down there, others who did not go in for bellowing and who from the general expansiveness drew the strength for legitimate work. I never gave myself an answer. I could not possibly have profaned my faith in my friend’s uniqueness, but the mere fact that I could ask such a question somewhat tempered my pride, and I no longer felt quite so superior to the bellowing.
From time to time—not often—I went to a Heurigen with friends and especially with visitors from abroad. It was hard to avoid doing the honors of Grinzing. And with the help of these foreign eyes I found out what they had to offer. In those Heurigen where the atmosphere was still authentically rustic, where one sat quietly in a garden with not too many people, visitors were often reminded of Netherlands painting, of Ostade or Teniers. There was something to be said for this view and it attenuated my distaste for the bellowing. With the help of this association I finally realized what really bothered me about this kind of merrymaking. I was as fond as ever of Brueghel, I loved his richness and scope, and always will. The fall from his immense general views to the small, banalized excerpts characteristic of Flemish genre painting was to me intolerable. Their attenuation and fragmentation of reality struck me as fraudulent. It was only in the event of certain scenes, such as when upper-class Indians tried to sing their love songs in one of these cafés, that the place suddenly looked real—like Brueghel—to me again.
The No. 38 Streetcar
It wasn’t a long line. The ride from terminus to terminus took less than half an hour. But as far as I was concerned it could have taken longer, it was an interesting ride, and there was nothing I liked better than to settle myself in a car on the Grinzing loop. In the early afternoon the car was almost empty. I made myself at home and opened one of the several books I had with me. The squeaking of the wheels on the tracks was my musical accompaniment. It lulled me, and yet I was alert to every stop, I watched everyone who sat down on the opposite bench. It was the right distance to watch people from. At first they were only a sprinkling and loosely distributed. At every stop the space between them diminished. Those on my side of the aisle were lost to my view. The ones farther from me were hidden by those nearest me, I could look at them only as they got on or as they stood up to get off. But there were plenty of people on the opposite bench, and as they got on only one or two at a time, I was able to take them in at my leisure.
At Kaasgraben, the first stop, Zemlinsky got on; I knew him as a conductor, not as a composer; black birdlike head, jutting triangular nose, no chin. I saw him often, he paid no attention to me, he was really deep in thought, musical thought no doubt, while I was only pretending to read. Every time I saw him I looked for his chin. When he appeared in the doorway, I gave a little start and began to search. Will he have one this time? He never did, but even without a chin he led a full life. To me he was a substitute for Schönberg, who in my time was not in Vienna. Only two years younger than Zemlinsky, Schönberg had been his pupil and had shown him the reverence which was an essential part of his nature, and which Schönberg’s own pupils Berg and Webern were to show him. Schönberg, who was poor, had led a hard life in Vienna. For years he had orchestrated operetta music; gnashing his teeth, he had contributed to the tawdry glitter of Vienna, he who was restoring Vienna’s fame as the birthplace of great music. In Berlin he obtained regular employment as a teacher of music. When discharged for being Jewish, he emigrated to America. I never saw Zemlinsky without thinking of Schönberg; his sister had been Schönberg’s wife for twenty-three years. The sight of him always intimidated me, I sensed his extreme concentration; his small, severe, almost emaciated face was marked by thought and showed no sign of the self-importance one would expect in a conductor. It may have been because of Schönberg’s enormous reputation among serious-minded young music lovers that no one ever spoke of Zemlinsky’s music; when I saw him on the streetcar, I didn’t even suspect that he had composed anything. But I did know that Alban Berg had dedicated his Lyrical Suite to him. Berg was dead and Schönberg was not in Vienna; I was always moved when his vicar Zemlinsky entered the car at Kaasgraben.
But the ride could begin very differently; sometimes Emmy Wellesz, the wife of Egon Wellesz the composer, got on at Kaasgraben. Wellesz had won world fame with his research into Byzantine music and had been awarded an honorary degree by Oxford University. He had some reputation as a composer, but not as much of one as he would have wished. The musical public seemed to take it amiss that he had distinguished himself in another field. His wife was an art historian; I had been watching her in the car for some time when I met her at someone’s home. She seemed intelligent and somewhat too meek; as though in an effort to overcome her natural aggressiveness, she had decided to be meek. But then in a long talk with her I found out where this meekness came from. She had known Hofmannsthal and was wildly enthusiastic about him. She told me how years ago she had caught sight of him while taking a walk, a supernatural vision. Her critical, intelligent features lit up, her voice cracked with emotion and she held back a tear. She spoke of that incident as if she had met Shakespeare. This struck me as absurd and from then on I did not take her seriously. It was only much later that I found out to what degree her ideas even then were in agreement with the century’s academic opinion, and when I learned that the collected works were being prepared in one hundred eighty-eight volumes, I began to be ashamed of my shortsightedness. What I would give now to help that tear take form and to bathe in her meekness.
Not far from Wertheimstein Park, where the No. 39 line branches off to Sievering, a young painter who lived on nearby Hartäckerstrasse would sometimes get on. I had once called on him in his studio when he was showing his pictures. He was the lord and master of a strikingly beautiful woman with jet-black hair. She was as seductive as an early Indian Yakshini, though there was nothing in the least Indian about her, her name was Hilde and she came of correspondingly Germanic stock. She was devoted to him after the manner of a slave girl who looks languishingly about her for a liberator but who, when liberation beckons—considering her looks, nothing could have been simpler—reverts to her master’s whip; never under any circumstances would she have let herself be liberated. She suffered from his hard rule, but she liked to suffer. I had heard about this unusual relationship and the girl’s beauty, which may be why I accepted the invitation to visit the painter’s studio, though I had never seen any of his pictures.
He was a cubist and had been influenced by Braque. The paintings were shown in a rather ritualistic way. Slowly, impersonally, at regular intervals, with no attempt to influence the viewer by charm or flattery, he placed them on an easel; I thought it appropriate to react in the same way.
A writer who lived on the upper floor of the same house had come to the showing with his mistress. He attracted my notice with his grimacing features and long arms, an imposing figure. He stationed himself at the right distance from the easel. His inconspicuous, but in her own way just as devoted, girlfriend, a rather insipid-looking blonde, sat beside him. Whenever a new picture appeared, she smiled at him, but much more discreetly than her counterpart. The sweet sympathy they emanated exasperated me with its regularity; it showed the same well-tempered joy over every picture and as much fervor as if they were viewing one Fra Angelico after another at the church of San Marco in Florence. I was so fascinated by this regularly repeated reaction that I paid more attention to the writer than to the pictures and certainly failed to do them justice. This of course was just what the writer was aiming at. His little game became the center of attraction, no mean achievement in view of the house slave, who was doing her utmost to call attention to her oppressed condition.
With consummate self-assurance, as though on horseback, the writer smiled from on high, a knight who had never doubted his powers, an old familiar of death and the Devil, both of whom called him by his first name. But he did not see the slave, who writhed in chains not far from him; indeed, I had the impression that he didn’t even see the pictures that were set before him, so prompt and unchanging was the smile with which he greeted them. When the showing was over, he thanked the artist fervently for the great pleasure. He didn’t stay one minute more, the slave girl smiled in vain, he withdrew with his paramour, and it was only later that I heard his name, which struck me as rather ridiculous, though it went with his grimaces: it was Doderer.
(I saw him again twenty years later under very different circumstances. Now famous, he came to see me in London. Once fame has set in, he said, it’s as irresistible as a dreadnought. He asked me if I had ever killed a man. When I answered in the negative, he said, grimacing with all the contempt of which he was capable: “Then you’re a virgin!”)
But it was the young painter who got on the No. 38 streetcar at that stop and greeted me in his colorlessly correct way. He was always alone. When I asked him about his girlfriend, he replied with the same reserve as he had shown in his greeting: “She’s at home. She doesn’t go out. She doesn’t know how to behave.” “And how is that writer with the long, apelike arms who lives upstairs?” He guessed what I was thinking. “He’s a gentleman. He knows how to behave. He comes only when I invite him.”
At Billrothstrasse more people got on; after that, as a rule, quiet observation was impossible. But for me this stretch had other, historic charms. After the Belt came Währingerstrasse and soon we passed the Chemical Institute, where I had spent several aimless and fruitless years. Not once did I neglect to look at the Institute, where I hadn’t set foot since 1929. Each time I sighed with relief that I had escaped it. The car went quickly past, reenacting my flight, which I could never celebrate enough. How soon it becomes possible to look back on a past; with what joy one relives one’s escape from it! With a sense of exaltation I arrived at Schottentor; it came to me every time I rode down Währingerstrasse. Broch, who visited us in Grinzing, asked me if that was why I chose to live in Grinzing. If he hadn’t looked at me with the gimlet eye of a psychoanalyst, I might have admitted as much.
PART FIVE
The Entreaty
Unexpected Reunion
Ludwig Hardt, one of whose recitations I had attended in 1928 in Berlin, was now a refugee living in Prague. He performed in Vienna now and then. I attended one of his recitations, and was overwhelmed as I had been eight years before. I went backstage to thank him, though I was sure he wouldn’t remember me, and had hardly opened my mouth when he came running up to me and startled me with a well-aimed dart: “You’ve lost your idol and you didn’t even go to his funeral.”
Karl Kraus had died recently and, true enough, I hadn’t gone to his funeral. I had been terribly disillusioned after the events of February 1934. He had come out in support of Dollfuss and had not said a word in condemnation of the civil war in the streets of Vienna. All his followers, literally all, had dropped him. He still gave small, obscure readings that no one knew about; no one wanted to know about them, let alone attend them. It was as if Karl Kraus had ceased to exist. The old issues of Die Fackel were still on my shelf, but in these last two years I hadn’t picked them up; he was obliterated from my mind and the minds of many others. It was as if he had gathered his followers together and attacked himself in one of his most eloquent and annihilating speeches. In these last two years of his life he was mentioned in conversations, but in hushed tones, as though he were dead. I heard the news of his actual death—he died in June 1936—without emotion. I didn’t even take note of the date, and I had to look it up just now. Not for a moment did I consider going to his funeral. I saw no mention of it in the papers and I didn’t feel that I was missing anything.
The first person to mention it in my presence was Ludwig Hardt. After eight years he had recognized me instantly and recalled a conversation in which I had made myself ridiculous with my blind admiration for my demigod. He knew what had happened in the meantime and felt sure that I hadn’t attended the funeral. For the first time I felt guilty about it. To make amends for the harm done by his words, he invited himself to call on us in Grinzing.
I expected a long and unpleasant argument, but I was so enchanted by Ludwig Hardt’s artistry that I wanted to straighten things out with him. I couldn’t believe that such a man merely wanted to show that he had been right. Perhaps he would condole with me and in return expect me to confess that I had been mistaken in Karl Kraus. But how was I to disavow the man to whom I owed The Last Days of Mankind and innumerable readings of Nestroy, of King Lear, Timon of Athens, The Weavers, and so on? These readings were a part of my being, and his unspeakable conduct a few years before his death defied explanation. A discussion was unthinkable; the only possible reaction was silence. In all my thirty years I had never suffered such a disappointment; it had left me with a wound that would take more than thirty years to heal. There are wounds we carry about for the rest of our lives, and all we can do is conceal them from others. There can be no point in tearing them open in public.
I was not sure what attitude I should take in my conversation with Ludwig Hardt, but of one thing I was certain: never, under any circumstances, would I deny what Karl Kraus had meant to me. I had not overestimated him, no one had overestimated him, he had changed and, I assumed, that change had been the cause of his death.
Ludwig Hardt arrived. He didn’t say one word about Karl Kraus. He didn’t so much as allude to him. The words with which he had so startled me after his reading were merely a sign of recognition. Another man would have said: “I remember you well, though we haven’t seen each other for eight years.” He had to prove it in his light-footed way. I remembered him just as well, how at parties in Berlin he would jump up on the table and declaim Heine.
I took him straight to my study. For one thing, I didn’t want to divert him with the landscape. From my study there was no view of vineyards, nor of the plain or the city; one saw only the garden gate and the short path leading to the house. I expected a confrontation, and I may have felt safer here. Also, I wanted him to see that my many books included the complete works of the man we would be arguing about. But he paid no attention to them; he talked about Prague. A small, graceful, uncommonly mobile man, he declined to sit down and didn’t keep still for a moment. While pacing back and forth, he held his right hand deep in his jacket pocket, toying with an object that seemed to be a book. At length he produced it, it was indeed a book, he held it out to me with a grand gesture, and said: “Would you care to see my most precious possession? I carry it with me wherever I go, I wouldn’t entrust it to anyone. When I go to bed I put it under my pillow.”
It was a small edition of Hebel’s Treasure Chest, dating from the past century. I opened it and read the inscription: “For Ludwig Hardt, to give Hebel pleasure, from Franz Kafka.”
It was Kafka’s own copy of The Treasure Chest, which he too had carried about with him. It seems that when he first heard Ludwig Hardt reciting Hebel, he was so moved that he inscribed his own copy and gave it to him. “Would you like to know what Kafka heard me recite?” Hardt asked. “Yes, indeed,” I said. At that he recited, by heart as usual—I had the book in my hands—in this order: “The Sleepless Night of a Noblewoman,” the two Suvarov pieces, “Misunderstanding,” “Moses Mendelssohn,” and, last, “Unexpected Reunion.”
