The Tongue Set Free, page 32
That made him truly popular in the class. Even those who had no rapport with his literary intoxications, even those who despised him for his lack of discipline and his refusal to inflict punishments, were captivated by the prospect of a creature of the female gender, a real cousin. The class had been talking more and more about girls, relations had developed with a private school for girls, but consisted mainly of wishes and boastful announcements. Some classmates were already vehemently in action, there were big and physically mature boys among them who scarcely talked about anything else. Yet they couldn’t do it without giggles and risqué comments. It was hard not to get drawn into such conversations. In all these things, I was truly retarded, my Mother’s balcony taboo in Vienna still operated in me, and long after suffering the passion of jealousy in full force and even emerging as “victor”—from the struggles I had gotten involved in, I still had no concept of what really went on between a man and a woman. In Fenner’s natural-history class, I learned a good deal about animals, I drew their sexual organs in my notebook with my own hand, but it never occurred to me to relate any of that to human beings. Human love took place at altitudes that could only be expressed in blank-verse scenes, all events of love were a matter for iambs. I understood nothing in my schoolmates’ off-color talk, they couldn’t get anything out of me, no matter how encouragingly they grinned; I always stayed earnest amid titters and bragging and boasting, and so what was chiefly lack of understanding may have seemed like disapproval.
At bottom, it was a grotesque situation, for while others would have given their souls for a few words with a real, live girl, I went home daily to the Yalta, to a dozen girls, all older than I and secretly occupied with the same problem as my classmates, some of these girls more beautiful than any of the ones adored at the fancy girls’ school. Two Swedish girls, Hettie and Gulli, whom I would find irresistible today, endlessly giggled and laughed with each other in Swedish, and even I could guess that they were carrying on about young men. There were some like Angèle, who came from Nyon on Lake Geneva, as lovely as she was timid, perhaps in the same frame of mind as I, but two years older. There was Nita, from Geneva, mentally the most mature of all, a trained dancer, who had studied with Dalcroze and who performed for us on some evenings in the Yalta. There was Pia, from Lugano, a dark, voluptuous beauty, bursting with something that I recognize as sensuality only in memory. And all these creatures, even the less attractive among them, nevertheless young girls, always with me in the hall, for hours on end, or playing with me in the tennis court, where we frolicked about heftily, and also got physically close during violent scuffles; all of them competing for my ear and my interest, for there was always something to ask about in their homework, and I could answer, since it mostly involved rules of German grammar; some of them, by no means all, conferring with me about private things too, such as reproaches in letters from parents. I, however, at the peak of this all-round delight, spoiled by these creatures like no boy of my age, anxious to prevent my comrades from finding out anything about this domestic life, for I was convinced they would have to despise me for such an exclusively feminine atmosphere, whereas they would actually have envied me for it. I used all my cunning to keep them away from the Yalta; I don’t believe I ever permitted a single one of them to visit me here. Hans Wehrli, who lived in Tiefenbrunnen himself, must have been the only schoolmate of mine with any notion of the way I lived, but he was also the only one never to talk about girls in all our discussions, he always remained serious and maintained his dignity in this point too: perhaps—I cannot say positively—he was under a taboo similar to mine, perhaps he did not yet suffer from the compelling need of the others.
And now Witz made his violinist cousin a topic of discussion in class; from that moment on, she was a much more frequent topic than Witz himself; he was asked about her, he answered patiently. However, the fruit-wine ramble was put off from week to week, that must have been because of the cousin that Witz was trying to get, perhaps he wished to encourage her as a violinist and put an audience instead of flowers at her feet, a public that would welcome her in triumph. First she was busy, then she got sick, the expectations of the class reached a fever pitch. “Irene of Greece” became less interesting, I was infected by the general mood, we had no violinist at the Yalta and the violin, as my father’s instrument, was transfigured for me—like the others, I stormed Witz with questions and sensed him growing more and more reticent and finally embarrassed. He was no longer positive that the cousin would come, she was about to take examinations, and when we finally met for the ramble, he appeared without her, she had begged off and sent us her regrets. With an incomprehensible instinct for these things, which I knew absolutely nothing about, I felt that something had gone awry for Witz. He seemed disappointed, he was dejected, he didn’t act as cheerful and chatty as during his classes. But then, perhaps recalling his loss, he started talking about music. His cousin had dared to tackle Beethoven’s violin concerto, I was glad that he intoxicated himself with a composer instead of a poet this time, and when the obligatory adjective for Beethoven cropped up, “tremendous,” and was repeated several times, I was happy.
I wondered what it would have been like if the cousin had shown up. I had never doubted her virtuosity. But she would have had to play very well and always the right pieces to get the ardent interest of the class under control. Perhaps she wouldn’t have dared to put the instrument down again and would have led us back to town through the forest, playing all the while. Witz would have been silent and followed at her heels, as a kind of forefront-admirer, to make room for her. But ultimately, our enthusiasm would have raised her to our shoulders, from where, still playing, she would have made her royal entrance into the city.
Actually, it did prove disappointing without her. The disappointment was made up for by the excursion to Kyburg Castle; Witz no longer spoke about her, instead he talked about history, which he made us familiar with in his lively and colorful way, by showing us the well-preserved castle. The high point was the train ride home; I was in the same compartment as Witz, directly opposite him and reading a guidebook I had bought in the castle. He lightly nudged my arm with his finger and said: “Now that’s a young historian.” His noticing something I was doing, his addressing me personally, was the thing I had most deeply wished for; but now that it happened, it contained the bitter injury of his seeing a future historian in me and not a writer. How could he have known, since I had never breathed a word about it, and his conjecturing a historian in me, something he couldn’t have thought much about then, was the just punishment for my know-it-all attitude, which I exhibited in his classes too. I was quite taken aback, and to get him off history, I asked him about a writer who was being talked about and whom I hadn’t yet read: Franz Werfel.
He spoke about his poetry, which was nourished by love for humanity. He said there was no one with whom he couldn’t feel empathy. No serving-girl was too lowly for him, no child, and indeed no animal; he was a sort of St. Francis, as though that name had shown him the way. He was no preacher, said Witz, but a man who had the ability to turn into any living creature so that his example might teach us love for that creature.
I credulously accepted this like everything that came from him (forming my own and very different opinion in this matter only later). But that was not the crucial event of the train ride. Touched by my timid, uncertain, and venerating questions, he began talking about himself, and he spoke so veraciously, so unheeding of any shield against other people’s opinions, that, not without confusion, I got the picture of a man who was still in the process of forming, completely uncertain about his path, still truly open, without contempt or condemnations, such as I was so familiar with at home. His words, which I may not have even properly understood, have remained with me as the proclamation of an enigmatic religion: He said he was full of zest for action and then again in utter despair. He was always looking and never finding. He didn’t know what to do, how to live. This man, who sat before me, who inspired me with such love, whom I would blindly have followed anywhere, didn’t even know where he was going and kept turning now to one thing, now to another; all that was certain about him was that he wanted to be uncertain, and much as it attracted me, for it came in his words, from his lips, it was wonderfully confusing—where in the world was I to follow him?
History and Melancholy
“Freedom” had become an important word around this time. What the Greeks had sown came up; since I had lost the teacher who had given us the Greeks, the peculiar structure emerging from Greece and Switzerland inside me had solidified. The mountains played a special role here. I never thought of the Greeks without seeing mountains before me, and, strangest of all, they were the same mountains that were in front of my eyes every day. They looked closer or further away depending on the atmosphere, one was delighted when they weren’t covered up, one spoke and sang about them, they were the object of a cult. It was nicest to view them over a sea of fog from Mount Ütli near by; at such times, the mountains changed into islands, glistening, almost palpable, presented for veneration in all peaks. They had names and were named, some of them sounded lapidary and signified nothing but themselves, like the Tödi; others, like the Jungfrau (Virgin) or the Mönch (Monk), signified too much; I would have preferred a new and unique word for each mountain, a word employed for nothing else. No two were equally high. Their rock was hard, it was inconceivable that they ever changed. I had a powerful notion of this changelessness, I thought of them as untouchable; if anyone spoke of their conquest, I felt a malaise, and if I planned to climb them myself, I had a sense of something forbidden.
All the more life took place right by the lakes, the most exciting things had happened there, I wanted these lakes to be like the Greek ocean, and they all flowed into one when I lived close to Lake Zurich. It was not so much that anything changed its form, every place had its meaning and retained its individuality: bays, slopes, trees, houses. But in my dream, everything was “the lake,” anything happening to one of them belonged to the others as well, the Helvetic Confederation created by an oath was a confederation of lakes for me. When I heard about the pile dwellings that had been discovered here and there, I was preoccupied with the thought that the inhabitants hadn’t known about one another. At that distance from their own kind, without communication, it made no difference where they lived, they only needed a tiny patch of water, it could be anywhere; no one would ever know who they were; no matter how many shards of theirs were found, how many arrowheads, how many bones—they were not Swiss.
Now that was history for me: the alliance of the lakes, there was no previous history whatsoever, and even history itself came up to me only because I had found out about its true pre-history, the Greeks. In between, little counted; I distrusted the Romans, I was bored by Walter Scott’s knights, who struck me as their descendants, jointed dolls made of armor; they got interesting only when they were beaten by peasants.
In this time of my enchantment by lakes, Hutten’s Last Days fell into my hands, and I am not surprised that this earliest work of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s so infallibly struck me. To be sure, Hutten was a knight, but he was also a poet, and he was depicted as a man who had fought against the false powers. He was ill and ostracized, abandoned by all, he lived alone in Ufenau by Zwingli’s grace. The deeds he had performed in his rebelliousness arose in his memory, and as ardently as one felt their fire, one never forgot his present condition in Ufenau. The author saw to it that Hutten was always shown in the struggle against a superior power; and thus the thing that was so irritating about knights was omitted: the fact that even the bravest of them felt stronger because of their armor.
I was swept away by Loyola’s visit to the island, this was a Loyola that no one, not even Hutten, knew: a pilgrim whom he puts up in his small dwelling during a storm, whom he covers with his own blanket, his own cloak to sleep in. In the night, Hutten is aroused by a thunderstroke, and in the brightness of the lightning he sees the pilgrim scourging his back bloody, and he also catches the words of his prayer, in which he dedicates himself to the service of the Virgin. In the morning, the pilgrim’s place is empty, and Hutten realizes that now, when his day is squandered, his worst enemy has shown up. This confrontation with the opponent at the end of his life, this unawareness of unknown eavesdroppers, the insight into the futility of his own struggle, for the true foe has appeared only now, the subsequent response when it is too late—”Had I but killed the Spaniard!”—how could I help but feel that I was close to “reality” precisely here, in the midst of poetic fiction?
The lake on which Ufenau lay reached all the way down to me; Meyer had lived in Kilchberg, on the opposite bank. I felt enclosed in this long narrative poem, the landscape was illuminated by the poet, two lines most simply designated the extent to which I had by then become capable of insight into human matters: “I’m not an artful piece of fiction,/I’m human with human contradiction.” The contrast between fiction and man, between what is made with prior knowledge and what is given by nature, between the graspability of a book and the incomprehensibility of man had started tormenting me. I had experienced enmity where I had not expected any, hostility forced from the outside, which did not spring from personal stirrings, whose roots I did not understand, and which I thought about a great deal. Since I had no solution, I accepted the temporary solution of viewing man as a contradiction. I seized that solution greedily and quoted Meyer’s lines over and over again, until Mother demolished them in an annihilatory attack.
But beforehand, I had a year’s time in which she left me alone. I followed Meyer to St. Bartholomew’s Night and the Thirty Years’ War. Through him, I met Dante in person, and the poet’s image, as he spoke from his exile, was stamped in my mind. I had already gotten to know the Grisons mountains during hikes; two summers in a row, my first in Switzerland, I had been on Mount Heinzen in Domleschg, “the most beautiful mountain in Europe,” as Duke Rohan called it. Nearby, at Rietberg Castle, I had gazed at a blood stain associated with Jürg Jenatsch, it hadn’t impressed me very much. But now, reading about him, I felt like an expert tracking him down. I met Pescara’s wife, Vittoria Colonna, sanctified by Michelangelo; I came to Ferrara, how dreadful, how sinister this Italy was, a land which I had heard nothing but idyllic things about. There were always exciting events, standing out in their “significance” against my daily surroundings. I didn’t see the costume, I saw the variety of times and places. I noticed nothing about the varnish created by the costuming; since the ending was always gloomy, I accepted it as the truth.
In the unswerving, in the furious thirst for knowledge during those years, I was of the opinion that this varied animation of history was what captivated me in Meyer. I seriously thought I was learning something from him. No doubts assailed me, I willingly yielded to his presentation, I didn’t sense what lay behind it, everything was in the open, so much was happening—what could there be behind it that, measured by this wealth, was not irrelevant and unworthy of mention?
Today, when I can no longer endure shaped history, when I only seek the sources themselves, naive accounts or hard thoughts about them, I believe it was something else in Meyer that had a deeper impact on me: a sense of harvest and fruit-laden trees, “enough is not enough,” and the melancholy of his lake poems. One of them began with the lines:
Drearily wanes the sultry summer’s day,
Dull and sad, my oars now plod their way.
. . . . . . . . . .. . ..
Far the heavens, and the depths so near—
Stars, you stars, why do you not appear?
Now, a cherished voice is calling me
From the watery grave so steadily.
I didn’t know whose voice it was, but I felt it was a dead person, someone he had been close to, and the calls from the water moved me as though it had been my father who was calling. In those last Zurich years, I didn’t think of him often, but his return from this poem was all the more unexpected, all the more mysterious. It was as if he had hidden in the lake because I loved it so dearly.
At that point, I hadn’t yet found out anything about Meyer’s life, about his mother’s suicide by drowning in the lake. Never—had I known it—would it have occurred to me that I could hear my father’s voice while rowing on the lake at twilight. I seldom rowed alone, and it was only then that I recited the lines, breaking off and listening: for the sake of the lines, I wished to be alone on the lake; no one learned of this poem and how much it meant to me. Its melancholy seized hold of me, it was a new feeling for me, tied to the lake, I felt the melancholy even if the time wasn’t sultry and dreary, the melancholy dripped from the words. I sensed that it was drawing the poet into the lake, and although my melancholy was merely taken over from someone else, I felt the lure and waited impatiently for the first stars. I greeted them, in accordance with my age, not with relief but with jubilation. The urge to relate to the stars, which were unreachable and untouchable, began then, I believe, and increased into an astral religion during the next few years. I held them too high to grant them any effect on my life, I turned to them purely for the sight of them, I was fearful when they withdrew from me, and I felt strong when they reappeared where I could hope for them. I awaited nothing from them but the regularity of their return, the same place and the consistent relationship to their fellow stars, with which they formed constellations, that had wondrous names.
The Collection
Of the town, I knew the parts facing the lake, as well as the road to school and back. I had been to few public buildings, the music hall, the art house, the theater, and very rarely at the university for lectures. The anthropological lectures took place in one of the guild houses on the Limmat. Otherwise, the old part of town consisted, for me, of bookshops, where I browsed through the “scholarly and scientific” books that were next on the program. Then, near the railroad station, there were the hotels, where relatives stayed when visiting Zurich. Scheuchzerstrasse in Oberstrass, where we had lived for three years, almost passed into oblivion; it had too little to offer, it was fairly remote from the lake, and if ever I did think of it, it was as if I had lived in some other town.
