The Tongue Set Free, page 34
I have never been back to this valley; it must have changed a great deal in half a century, especially this last half. I made sure never to touch the image I have preserved of it. I owe it, in consequence of its very strangeness, the feeling of intimacy with antiquated living conditions. I can’t say how many people lived in the valley at that time, there may have been five hundred. I saw them only as individuals, not more than two or three at a time. Their hard life was obvious. I didn’t consider that some of them sought their livelihood on the outside, they seemed never to have dreamt of leaving their valley for even a while. Had I found out more from them, the image would have dissolved, and they would have become, they too, people of our time for me, people such as I knew everywhere. Luckily, there are experiences that draw their power from their unicity and isolation. Later on, when I read about tiny tribes and nations that lived in seclusion from all others, the memory of Lötschen Valley arose in me, and no matter how bizarre the things I read, I regarded them as possible and accepted them.
However, my admiration for mono- or rather quadrisyllabics, as I experienced them in that valley, was something rare at that time. It was around the same period that I succumbed to Gotthelf’s eloquence. I read “The Black Spider,” and I felt haunted by it, as though it had dug into my own face. Up in my garret, I tolerated no mirror, but now I shamefacedly asked Trudi for one, retreated upstairs with it, locked the door behind me, which wasn’t customary in the house, and combed both my cheeks for traces of the black spider. I found none, how could I have, the devil hadn’t kissed me, but I nevertheless felt a swarming as though from the spider’s feet, and I washed frequently during the day to make sure it hadn’t attached itself to me. I saw it where it was least expected, it once shone for me in lieu of the rising sun up on the footbridge. I plunged into the train, it had settled down opposite me, next to an old lady, who didn’t notice it. “She’s blind, I have to warn her,” but I let it go at that; when I stood up in Stadelhofen to get off the train, the spider had decamped, and the old lady sat alone; it was a good thing I hadn’t warned her, she would have died of fright.
The spider could vanish for days, it avoided some places, it never appeared in school, nor were the girls bothered by it in the hall. As for the Herder ladies—in their simple innocence, they weren’t even worthy of the spider. It stuck to me, although I was not aware of having done any bad deed, and it stuck to my trail when I was alone.
I had resolved not to say anything to Mother about the black spider; I was worried about the effect it might have on her, as though it were especially dangerous for sick people, and some things might have turned out differently had I had the strength to keep my resolution. For at her very next visit I blurted the entire story out in detail, blow by dreadful blow. I omitted the pleasant baptism of the baby and all the comforting moral elements with which Gotthelf tries to soften the effect. She listened, not once interrupting me, I had never succeeded in fascinating her so totally. As though our roles were reversed, she asked about Gotthelf as soon as I was finished: just who he was and how come she had never before heard anything of such a fantastic story. I had narrated myself into terror and attempted to conceal it by going off into an old dispute between us about the worth or unworth of dialects. He was actually a Bern writer, I said, his language was that of Emmental, you couldn’t understand some of it, without the dialect Gotthelf would be unthinkable, he drew all his strength from it. I hinted that “The Black Spider” would have escaped me, that I would never have gained access to it if I hadn’t always been open to the dialect.
We were both in a state of excitement generated by the thing itself, even the hostility we felt towards each other had something to do with the story, but anything we articulated moved in the sphere of superficial obstinacy. She didn’t want to hear about Emmental at all, she claimed the story was biblical and came straight from the Bible. The black spider was an eleventh Egyptian plague, and it was the fault of the dialect that the story was so unknown. It would be good to translate it into a literary German so that it would be accessible to everybody.
As soon as she was back in the sanatorium, she asked her acquaintances about Gotthelf, most of them came from northern Germany and they told her he had written nothing but unpalatable, long-winded novels about peasants, consisting mainly of sermons. “The Black Spider” was the only exception, they said, but it too was awkwardly written, full of long, superfluous passages; nobody with any understanding took Gotthelf seriously today. In her letter telling me all this, she added a derisive question: What did I want to become now, a preacher or a peasant, why not both at once, I really ought to make up my mind.
But I clung to my opinion, and at her next visit, I attacked the aesthetic ladies and gentlemen whom she allowed to influence her. “Aesthete” had always been a term of abuse in her mouth, the worst thing on God’s earth were “Viennese aesthetes.” The word hit her severely, I had picked it carefully, she defended herself, revealing a concern for the lives of her friends, and so earnestly that I felt as if it came right out of “The Black Spider.” People threatened by death, she said, could not be called aesthetes. They didn’t know how much longer they had to live. Did I believe that people in such a condition didn’t think very carefully about what they read? There were stories that ran off you like water, she went on, and stories that you remembered better with every passing day. That said something about our condition and nothing about the writer. She was positive, she said, that despite “The Black Spider,” she would never read a line of Gotthelf. She was determined to be right and win out against this dialect sinner, and she cited authorities. She spoke of Theodore Däubler, who had given a reading in the forest sanatorium, a number of writers gave readings there, she had become a bit friendly with Däubler on that occasion, even though he had recited poetry, which wasn’t her thing, and she claimed he had a low opinion of Gotthelf. “That’s not possible!” I said, I was so indignant that I doubted the truth of her words. She became unsure of herself and toned down her statement: in any event, others had made such comments in his presence, and he hadn’t contradicted them, so he must have agreed. Our dialogue degenerated into a squabble, with each one insisting he or she was right and insisting, almost venomously, on his or her viewpoint. I sensed she was beginning to view my passion for everything that was Swiss as dangerous. “You’re getting narrow-minded,” she said, “no wonder, we see too little of each other. You’re becoming too conceited. You live among old maids and young girls. You let them worship you. Narrow-minded and conceited, that’s not what I sacrificed my life for.”
Michelangelo
In September 1920, one and half years after we lost Eugen Müller as our history teacher, he announced a series of lectures on Florentine art. They were given in an auditorium at the university, I missed none of them. The very loftiness of the place—I was a long way from being a student—spelled a certain distancing of the lecturer. I did, of course, sit in the front, and he noticed me, but there were a lot more listeners than in school; people of all ages, even adults, sat among us, and I took that as a mark of popularity for the man who had meant more to me than any other teacher. There was the same enthusiastic roaring and quaffing that I had done without for so long—interrupted only by the slides he pointed at. His respect for works of art was so great that he would go mute at such times. The instant a slide was flashed, he uttered only two or three more sentences, which were as modest as could be, and then he fell silent to avoid disturbing the absorption he expected from us. I didn’t care for that at all, I regretted every moment in which the roaring stopped, and whatever went into me and whatever I liked depended solely on his words.
In the very first lecture, he showed us the doors of the Battisterio; and the fact that Ghiberti had worked on them for twenty-one and twenty-eight years moved me more deeply than what I saw on the doors. Now I realized that one can devote a whole lifetime to one or two works, and patience, which I had always admired, acquired something monumental for me. Less than five years later, I found the work to which I wanted to devote my life. The ability to articulate it, not only to myself, and to tell other people about it later on, without embarrassment, people whose respect I cared about—that ability is something I owe to Eugen Müller’s information about Ghiberti.
In the third lecture, we came to the Medici Chapel; the entire hour was spent on it. The melancholy of the reclining female figures seized hold of me, the dark slumber of one, the painful struggle of barely awakening in the other. Beauty that was nothing but beauty seemed empty to me, Raphael meant little to me; but beauty that had something to carry, that was burdened by passion, misfortune, and dark forebodings fascinated me. It was as though it weren’t abstract, for itself, independent of the whims of time, but as though, on the contrary, it had to prove itself in misfortune, as though it had to be exposed to great pressure, and it was only by not being consumed in this struggle, by remaining strong and restrained, that it had the right to be called beautiful.
But it wasn’t only those two female figures that excited me, it was also what Eugen Müller said about Michelangelo personally. He must have been reading the biographies by Condivi and Vasari shortly before his lecture; he mentioned several concrete features, which I came upon and recognized in these books a few years later. They lived in his memory with such freshness and immediacy that one might think he had only just learned those details by word of mouth. Nothing seemed diminished by the time that had passed since then, much less by cold historical research. Even the nose, smashed in Michelangelo’s youth, appealed to me, as though he had been thus made a sculptor. Then his love for Savonarola, whose sermons he still read as an old man, even though the preacher had so violently attacked the idolatry of art, even though he was an enemy of Lorenzo Medici. Lorenzo had discovered the boy Michelangelo, he had brought him up in his home and at his table, his death had shaken the almost twenty-year-old. But that didn’t mean that he didn’t recognize the vileness of his successor; and his friend’s dream, prompting him to leave Florence, was the first in a long series of reported dreams that I collected and thought about. I made a note of it during the lecture, rereading it frequently, and I recall the moment ten years later, while writing Auto-da-Fé, when I stumbled upon this same dream in Condivi.
I loved Michelangelo’s pride, the struggle he dared to wage against Julius II, when he, an offended man, fled from Rome. A true republican, he also defended himself against the pope, there were moments when he faced him as though they were equals. I have never forgotten the eight lonely months near Carrara, when he had blocks hewn out for the pope’s tomb, and the sudden temptation that came over him there to carve huge sculptures right in the landscape, visible to distant ships at sea. Then the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, with which his enemies, who refused to consider him a painter, wanted to destroy him: he worked on it for four years, and what a work came forth! The impatient pope’s threat to have him flung off the scaffold, his refusal to decorate the frescoes with gold. Here too, I was impressed by the years, but this time the work itself also went into me, and never has anything been so determining for me as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It taught me how creative a defiance can be if it is tied to patience. The labor on The Last Judgment took eight years, and even though I didn’t understand the greatness of this opus till later, I was burnt by the shame that the artist experienced at eighty, when the figures were painted over because of their nakedness.
Thus arose in me the legend of the man who endures torment and overcomes it for the greatest thing that he invents. Prometheus, whom I loved, was transferred for me into the world of human beings. What the demigod had done, he had done without fear; only when it was over did he become the master of the torment. Michelangelo, however, had labored in fear, the figures of the Medici Chapel were created when he was regarded as a foe by the Medici who ruled Florence. His fear of him was well founded, bad things could have happened to the artist, the pressure weighing down upon the figures was his own. But it would not be correct to say that this feeling was crucial for the impression of those other creations that began to accompany me for years: the figures of the Sistine Chapel.
It was not only the image of Michelangelo that was set up in me at that time. I admired him as I had admired no one since the explorers. He was the first to give me a sense of pain that is not exhausted in itself, that becomes something, that then exists for others, and lasts. It is a special kind of pain, not the bodily pain which all men profess. When he fell off the scaffold while working on The Last Judgment and was seriously injured, he locked himself in his house, not admitting any attendant or any physician, and lay there alone. He would not acknowledge the pain, he excluded everybody from it, and would have perished because of it. A friend who was a doctor found the arduous way up back stairs to the artist’s room, where he lay in misery, and the friend stayed with him day and night until the danger was past. It was a totally different kind of torment that entered his work and determined the tremendousness of his figures. His sensitivity to humiliation drove him to undertake the most difficult things. He could not be a model for me, because he was more: the god of pride.
It was he who led me to the prophets: Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Isaiah. Since I strove for everything that wasn’t close to me, the only book that I never read in those days, that I avoided, was the Bible. Grandfather’s prayers, bound to their periodic times, filled me with repugnance. He reeled them off in a language that I didn’t understand, I didn’t care to know that they meant. What could they mean anyhow if he broke off to make comical gestures at stamps that he had brought along for me. I encountered the prophets not as a Jew, not in their words. They came to me in Michelangelo’s figures. A few months after the lectures that I have told about, I received the present I most desired: a folder of huge reproductions of the Sistine paintings, they happened to be the prophets and sibyls.
I lived on an intimate footing with them for ten years, one knows how long these young years are. I got to know the pictures better than people. I soon hung them up, I always had them before me, but it was not habituation that attached me to them; I stood spellbound in front of Isaiah’s half-open mouth, puzzling over the bitter words he spoke to God, and I felt the reproach of his raised finger. I tried to think his words before knowing them; his new creator prepared me for them.
Perhaps it was arrogant of me to think such words, they sprang from his gesture, I did not feel the need to experience them in their precise form, I did not seek the correct wording where it could easily have been learned: the image, the gesture contained the words so powerfully that I had to keep turning to them yet again, that was the compulsion, the true value, the inexhaustibility of the Sistine Chapel. Jeremiah’s grief, Ezekiel’s vehemence and fieriness also attracted me; I never gazed at Isaiah without seeing them. It was the old prophets who would not let me go; even though Isaiah was not really depicted as old, I nevertheless included him among them. The young prophets meant as little to me as the sibyls. I had heard of the bold foreshortenings admired in some of these figures, I had heard about the beauty of the sibyls, the Delphic, the Libyan Sybil, but I merely took in that admiration like things I read, I knew it through the words in which it was described for me, but they remained paintings, they did not stand before me like exaggerated human beings, I didn’t think I heard them like the old prophets, the latter had a life for me such as I had never experienced, I can only—very inadequately—call it a life of obsession, next to which nothing else existed. It is important to observe that they did not become gods for me. I did not perceive them as a power established over me; when they spoke to me or I even tried speaking to them, when I faced them, I did not fear them, I admired them, I dared to ask them questions. Perhaps I was prepared for them by my early habituation to the dramatic characters in the Vienna period. What I had felt back then as a raging torrent, in which I swam in a kind of confused daze, amid so many things that I did not know how to distinguish, was now articulated for me in sharply differentiated, overwhelming, but lucid figures.
Paradise Rejected
In May 1921, my mother came to visit me. I led her through the garden and showed her all the blossoming. I sensed that she was in a dark mood, and I tried to soothe her with fragrances. But she did not inhale them, she maintained a stubborn silence, it was bizarre to see how quiet her nostrils remained. At the end of the tennis court, where no one could hear us, she said “Sit down!” and she sat down herself. “This is over!” she said abruptly, and I knew the time had come. “You have to leave here. Your mind’s deteriorating!”
“I don’t want to leave Zurich. Let’s stay here, here I know why I’m in the world.”
“Why you’re in the world! Masaccio and Michelangelo! Do you believe this is the world? Little flowers to paint, Fräulein Mina’s sparrow’s nest. These young girls, the way they fuss over you. Each more respectful and more devoted than the next. Your notebooks chockfull of the phylogeny of spinach. The Pestalozzi Calendar, that’s your world! The famous men you leaf through. Did you ever ask yourself whether you had any right to it? You know the pleasant part, their fame; did you ever ask yourself how they lived? Do you believe they sat in a garden, like you now, among flowers and trees? Do you believe their life was a fragrance? The books you read! Your Conrad Ferdinand Meyer! These historical tales! What relation do they have to the way things are today? You believe that if you read something about St. Bartholomew’s Night or the Thirty Years’ War, then you know it! You know nothing! Nothing! Everything is different. It’s awful!”
