The Torch in my Ear, page 30
The same was true in a different way for the Russian writers at the table. In those days, they traveled frequently and they liked coming to Berlin; the devil-may-care turbulence suited their temperaments. They were very friendly with Herzfelde, their publisher; he was not their only publisher, but he was certainly the most effective. Any author he brought out was not overlooked; this was impossible, if only because of the jackets designed by his brother John Heartfield. Anya Arkus sat there; people said she was a new poet. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen: it sounds incredible, for she had the head of a lynx. I never heard her name again; perhaps she wrote under a different name, perhaps she died early.
I ought to speak about others who sat there, especially those who are forgotten today and whose faces I may be the only one to recall, though without their names. This is not the place to bring them up, however, because that evening was significant for a very special reason; everything else pales next to it. It was the evening when Babel appeared for the first time, a man not distinguished by anything that was typical of Schwanecke. He did not come as an actor of himself; although lured by Berlin, he was not a “Berliner” in the same sense as the others—he was a “Parisian.” The lives of celebrities did not interest him more than other lives, perhaps even less. He felt uncomfortable in the circle of the illustrious and he tried to get away from it. That was why he turned to the only person here who was unknown and did not belong. This person was I, and the sureness with which Babel recognized this at first sight speaks for his sharp eyes and the staunch clarity of his experience.
I can’t remember the first few sentences. I made room for him, he remained standing. He didn’t appear determined to stay. Yet he seemed immobile, standing there as if in front of an abysmal fissure, which he knew and was trying to block. My impression may have been caused partly by his broad shoulders, which were blocking my view of the entrance. I saw no one else who came, I saw only him. He made a dissatisfied face and tossed a few sentences to the Russians at the table. I couldn’t tell what his words meant, but they inspired confidence in me. I was certain that he had said something about Schwanecke, which he disliked no less than I; he, however, could say so. It is possible that I first became aware of my dislike of the place through him. For the poetess with the lynx face sat not too far from me, and her beauty made up for everything else. I wanted him to stay; I pinned my hopes on her. Who would not have stayed for her sake? She waved to him and signaled that she wanted to make room for him next to her. He shook his head and pointed his finger at me. This could only mean that I had already offered him a seat; his cordial gesture delighted and confused me. I would have sat next to her unhesitatingly, although greatly embarrassed. But he didn’t wish to offend me, so he turned her down. I now forced him to sit on my chair and went off in search of another. There was none to be found. I went past every table; I wandered around futilely for a while. By the time I returned empty-handed, Babel was gone. The poetess told me that he hadn’t wanted to rob me of my chair, so he had left.
This first act of his, occasioned by myself, may seem unimportant; but it was bound to have a great impact on me. Standing there in his solid, sturdy way, he had reminded me of his Red Cavalry, the wonderful and dreadful stories that he had experienced among Cossacks in the Russian-Polish War. Even his dislike of the restaurant, which I thought I had read in his face, fitted in with his stance; and the same man who had gone through those rough, harsh times had now shown such tenderness and consideration toward a very young man, whom he didn’t know and whom he now distinguished with his interest.
He was very curious: he wanted to see everything in Berlin; but for him, “everything” meant the people, and indeed all kinds of people, not those who hung out in the artists’ restaurants and the fancy pubs. His favorite place was Aschinger’s restaurant. There we stood side by side, very slowly eating a pea soup. With his globular eyes behind his very thick eyeglasses, he looked at the people around us, every single one, all of them, and he could never get his fill of them. He was annoyed when he finished the soup. He wished for an inexhaustible bowl, for all he wanted to do was keep on looking; and since the people changed rapidly, there was a great deal to see. I have never met anyone who looked with such intensity. He remained utterly calm; the expression of his eyes changed incessantly because of the play of muscles around them. He rejected nothing when seeing, for he felt equally serious about everything; the most usual as well as the most unusual things were important to him. He felt bored only among the spendthrifts at Schwanecke or Schlichter. When I was sitting there and he came in, he would look for me and then sit down nearby. But he wouldn’t stay seated for long; very soon, he said: “Let’s go to Aschinger!” And no matter what people I may have been with, I regarded it as the greatest possible honor in Berlin that he liked taking me there. So I stood up and left.
However, it was not the extravagance of these fancy restaurants that he carped at when uttering the name “Aschinger.” It was the peacock ways of the artists that repelled him. Everyone wanted attention, everyone played himself, the air was simply rigid with heartless vanities. Babel himself was generous; to reach Aschinger faster, he would take a cab, even for short distances. And when it was time to pay, he would zoom over to the driver and explain to me with exquisite politeness why he had to pay. He had just received some money, he said; he was not allowed to take it along, he had to spend it in Berlin. And though my instinct told me that none of this could be true, I forced myself to believe him, because I was enchanted with his magnanimity. He never put into words what he thought about my situation: that I was a student and probably not earning anything. I had admitted to him that I hadn’t published yet. “That doesn’t matter,” he had said. “It’ll come soon enough.” As if it were shameful to have published already. I believe he took me into his care because he empathized with my embarrassment at being among so many trumpets of glory. I said little to him, a lot less than to other people. Nor did he talk very much; he preferred looking at people. He became loquacious in my presence only when the conversation turned to French literature; he admired Stendhal and Maupassant above anything else.
I thought I would hear a great deal from him about the great Russians, but he must have taken them for granted, or maybe he found it boastful to expatiate on the literature of his own countrymen. But perhaps there was more to it; perhaps he recoiled from the inevitable shallowness of such a conversation: he himself moved in the language in which the great works of that literature were written, and I had read them at best in translations. We would not have been speaking about the same thing. He took literature so seriously that he must have hated anything vague and approximate. However, my timidity was no weaker than his; I couldn’t get myself to say anything to him about Red Cavalry or The Odessa Tales.
Yet in our conversations about the French, about Stendhal, Flaubert, and Maupassant, he must have sensed how important his stories were to me. For whenever I asked him about anything, my question secretly referred to something of his that I was focusing on. He instantly recognized the tacit reference, and his answer was simple and precise. He saw how satisfied I was; perhaps he even liked the fact that I didn’t keep on asking. He spoke about Paris, where his wife, a painter, had been living for a year. I believe he had just called for her there and was already missing Paris. He preferred Maupassant to Chekhov, but when I mentioned Gogol (whom I loved more than anything), he said, to my joyful amazement: “That’s one thing the French lack—they don’t have Gogol.” Then he reflected a bit and, to make up for what might have sounded like boasting, he added: “Do the Russians have Stendhal?”
I realize how few concrete things I have to say about Babel, and yet he meant more to me than anyone else I met in Berlin. I saw him together with everything of his that I had read—not much, but it was so concentrated that it colored every moment. And I was also present when he absorbed things in a city that was alien to him, and they were not in his language. He didn’t throw around big words and he avoided drawing attention. He could see best if he was hidden. He accepted everything from others; he didn’t reject things he didn’t care for. The things that tormented him most were the things that he allowed to exert the longest effect on him. I knew all this from his Cossack stories; everyone was enthralled by their blood-filled brilliance without being intoxicated by the blood. Here, where he was confronted with the brilliance of Berlin, I could see how indifferent he was to things in which other people bathed in blabbering vanity. He disapproved of any empty reflex; instead, his thirsty eyes lapped up countless people eating their pea soup. One sensed that nothing was easy for him, even though he never said so himself. Literature was sacrosanct to him; he never spared himself and would never have embellished anything. Cynicism was alien to him because of his strenuous conception of literature. If he found that something was good, he could never have used it like other people, who, in sniffing around, implied that they regarded themselves as the culmination of the entire past. Knowing what literature was, he never felt superior to others. He was obsessed with literature, not with its honors or with what it brought in. I do not believe that I saw Babel any differently from what he was because he spoke to me. I know that Berlin would have devoured me like lye if I hadn’t met him.
The Transformations of Ludwig Hardt
One Sunday, I happened to be at a morning performance by Ludwig Hardt: a reciter after the poets’ own hearts, recognized by all of them, especially the avant-garde. No one made a face when his name came up; not even Brecht pronounced a wooden verdict (just imagine all the things he did reject). Ludwig Hardt was said to be the only speaker of both classical and modern literature who could handle both with equal mastery. People praised his faculty for metamorphoses; they said he was really an actor, but an unusually intelligent one. His programs, they said, were cunningly arranged. Never had anyone been bored by him, which meant a great deal in Berlin, where everyone was trying his luck. In terms of my thralldom back then, there was one more thing that occupied my thoughts: Hardt had been friends with Karl Kraus, and, in earlier years, he had recited portions of The Last Days of Mankind. But they had had a fight about this and had broken with one another. Now his program lacked nothing of any importance in modern literature, except this one thing that had been forbidden him: Karl Kraus.
Hardt’s reading, which I attended with Wieland, was devoted to Tolstoy. Hardt was planning to read from the Malik edition of Tolstoy, otherwise Wieland wouldn’t have gone. Wieland never enthused about actors, and he watched them perform only if he absolutely had to. This was his way of defending himself against the glut of Berlin. He explained to me how quickly Berlin used up people. Anyone who didn’t know how to arrange things for himself was doomed. You had to husband your curiosity, saving it for things that were important to your own work. After all, you were no tourist who’d be leaving again after a couple of weeks. You had to face the fact that you’d be living here, year in, year out, and you had to grow a thick skin. He went to hear the universally admired reciter Ludwig Hardt only in honor of the Tolstoy edition, but he talked me into coming along.
I went and I did not regret it. I have never been able to forget his recital, and our subsequent meeting in the home of a maecenas led to one of those embarrassing incidents from which you learn more than from any insult. Eight years later, in Vienna, he became my friend.
He was a very short man, so short that he struck even me as unusually so. He had a narrow, dark, Southern-like head, which could change in a twinkling, so rapidly and so profoundly that you wouldn’t have recognized him. He appeared shaken by bolts of lightning, which he spoke, however—characters and poems that he knew by heart and that belonged to him as if native to him. He couldn’t stay calm for even a moment, unless he turned into a slow, easygoing character; and that was how I first saw him, as Uncle Yeroshka in Tolstoy’s Cossacks. His head became very round, his body broad and rough. He knew how to twirl a mustache until you could actually see it; I could have sworn that he had stuck one on (and when he later claimed that he hadn’t had one and certainly didn’t carry a mustache around in his pocket, I simply didn’t believe him). Of all the Tolstoy characters, this Cossack has remained the most vivid for me because Hardt portrayed him. It was miraculous to see how small, delicate Ludwig Hardt turned into a huge, heavy, massive Cossack—without leaving his chair and table, without jumping up even once or helping his transformation with suitable movements. The piece he read was rather long, but it seemed to be growing shorter and shorter; people feared he might stop. Then came a few of Tolstoy’s folktales, especially “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” And they struck me so deeply that I was convinced these folktales were the essence of Tolstoy, his best, his most intrinsic. Any work by Tolstoy that I subsequently took hold of seemed more lifeless, because I didn’t hear it in Ludwig Hardt’s voice. He spoiled Tolstoy for me in part. His Yeroshka from the Cossacks has remained an intimate of mine. Ever since that time, 1928, I have felt that I know him well, better than other people who were close friends of mine.
However, Ludwig Hardt’s interference with my relationship to Tolstoy went even further. Soon after the war, I read Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,” and it moved me as profoundly as the folktales in 1928. I felt as if I’d been transplanted somewhere else, and at first I thought it might be Ilyitch’s sickroom. But then, to my astonishment, it dawned on me that I heard the words in Ludwig Hardt’s voice. I found myself in the half-darkened auditorium where Hardt had spoken. He was no longer alive, but his repertoire had expanded, and the much longer novella, “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,” had entered the group of folk stories that he had recited back then.
This is the strongest comment I can make about that performance: the way it reached into a later time. To make this account less incredible, I would like to add that I heard many more readings of Ludwig Hardt’s in subsequent years. In Vienna, when we had become friends, he often visited our home and recited to us for hours on end, as long as we cared to listen. He had put out a book containing his programs, and little was kept back from us of the wonders he had included. I got to know his voice in all its rich possibilities, and we often spoke about metamorphosis, which preoccupied me more and more. He had given me my first conscious prompting for this interest with his transformation into old Yeroshka during the performance in Berlin. After the war, when I learned of his death, I picked up “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,” and I think it was a kind of obsequy for him when I attributed to his voice something that I had never heard from it during his lifetime.
But let me return to that first incident, which I have not yet fully reported. Ahead of me lay the satyr play, whose patient victim I ultimately became. After that morning performance, Hardt was invited to a rather large party in the home of a Berlin attorney, where the guests were lavishly regaled. They felt so good that they spent most of the afternoon there. Everything was comme il faut, not just the hospitality. The walls sported canvases by painters who were talked about, the latest books (at least those that had gotten friendly or unfriendly attention) were spread out on small tables. Nothing was lacking; no sooner was something mentioned than the host eagerly brought it over, held it under your nose, opened it—all you could do was put it in your mouth. You were spared any trouble, well-known people sat around, chewing or burping. However, notwithstanding the host’s officious efforts, intelligent or provocative conversations were going on. The most comfortable person was Ludwig Hardt himself. He was the only one more active than the host. He was even more a-bustle, leaping on low tables and reciting famous speeches, by Mirabeau or by Jean Paul Richter. He wasn’t the least bit exhausted, he could keep it up forever; strangest of all, he was interested in people he didn’t know, and during the recesses between his leaps, he got involved in conversations. He wouldn’t rest until he found out what sort of person he was dealing with. He thus found his way to me, and, infected by his expansiveness, I wasn’t ashamed to show him my enthusiasm.
He thanked me in his way by telling me interesting things about his background. He was the son of a horsebreeder in Frisia and had done a lot of riding when he was young. Small and light as he was, he looked like a jockey. I understood why he always had to jump around and I respectfully presented this insight. Any sentence that could be agreeable to him was countered with exquisite politesse. With his rich imagination and his eccentricity, he reminded you of E. T. A. Hoffmann. He was quite aware of this association, but it did not exclude other associations. It was impossible for him to recite anything without resembling the author of the words. My embarrassment (for this is what I am reporting) began with one of these leaps. He switched from Hoffmann to Heine, and his agility then increased so greatly that you instantly knew that Heine was one of his most important figures. I must have faltered upon realizing this; the process of free exchange slowed down. But he instantly grasped what had happened, and suddenly he began to come out with everything that had ever been said against Heine, and in the words of Karl Kraus, which I was all too familiar with. He spoke these words like a role, with conviction. I fell for it. I added some things with textual fidelity. I didn’t notice that he was poking fun at me. But it went on for a long time; I felt as if I were being tested on my knowledge of Die Fackel. And it was only when he suddenly broke off and went on to other things in Die Fackel, to encomiums on Claudius, on Nestroy, on Wedekind, that I suddenly saw the light. I knew that I had made a complete and utter fool of myself. I said, as though somehow apologizing: “You have a different opinion of Heine.”
