The Tongue Set Free, page 35
Now it all came out. Her dislike of science: I had waxed enthusiastic about the structure of the world as revealed in plants and animals; and in letters to her, I had said it was good to detect a purpose behind it, and I was of the still unshaken opinion that this purpose was a good one.
But she didn’t believe the structure of the world was good. She had never been religious and never resigned herself to the way things were. She never got over her shock at the war. It passed into the experiences of her sanatorium period, she knew people there who were virtually dying before her eyes. She never discussed that with me, it was a part of her experience that remained concealed from me, but it did exist within her and exerted its effect.
She cared even less for my sympathy with animals. Her dislike was so great that she indulged in the cruelest jokes with me. In Kandersteg, on the street in front of our hotel, I saw a very young calf being yanked along. It resisted every step; the slaughterer, whom I knew by sight, was having no end of trouble with it; I didn’t understand what was happening; she stood next to this scene and explained quite coolly that it was being dragged off to slaughter. Right after that, it was time for the table d’hôte, we sat down to dine, I refused to have any meat. I stuck to my resolve for several days. She was annoyed; I put mustard on my vegetables, she smiled and said: “Do you know how they make mustard? They use chicken blood.” That confused me, I didn’t see through her derision; by the time I understood, she had broken my resistance, and she said: “That’s the way it is. You’re like the calf, it has to give in too in the end.” She wasn’t picky about her methods. But she was also convinced that humane feelings are meant for human beings alone; if they were related to all forms of life, they would have to lose their strength and become vague and ineffective.
Her distrust of poetry was a different matter. The only interest she had ever shown in poetry was in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal; that came from the special constellation of her relationship to Herr Professor. She was bothered by the smallness of the form in poems, they ended too quickly for her. She sometimes said that poems lulled you them shakento sleep, basically they were lullabies. Adults ought to watch out for lullabies, it was despicable remaining devoted to them. I believe that the measure of passion in verses was too low for her. She set great store by passion, she found it plausible only in drama. For her, Shakespeare was the expression of the true nature of man, nothing here was diminished or alleviated.
I must recall that the shock of death had struck her with the same force as myself. She was twenty-seven when Father suddenly died. This event haunted her for the rest of her life, twenty-five more years, in many forms, whose root was always the same, however. Without my realizing it, she was an emotional model for me in that. War was the multiplication of that death, absurdity intensified to massiveness.
More recently, she had also begun fearing the overwhelmingly feminine influences in my life. How was I to become a man through mere knowledge, which kept attracting me more and more intensely? She despised her sex. Her hero was not some woman, it was Coriolanus.
“It was a mistake leaving Vienna,” she said. “I’ve made life too easy for you. I saw Vienna after the war, I know how it looked then.”
This was one of those scenes in which she tried to demolish everything she had built up in me through years of patient efforts. In her own way, she was a revolutionary. She believed in sudden changes, breaking in and ruthlessly altering all constellations, even in individual men.
Her special anger focused on my account of the two seaplanes that had crashed into Lake Zurich very close to us. The crashes had occurred a week apart, in autumn of 1920, and I had written about them, shaken and terrified. The connection with the lake, which meant so much to me, infuriated her. She said those deaths had been something lyrical for me. She scornfully asked whether I had also written poems about them. “I would have shown them to you, if I had,” I said; the reproach was unfair, I talked to her about everything.
“I thought,” she then said, “that your Mörike inspired you.” And she reminded me of his poem “Reflect, Oh Soul!” which I had read to her. “You’re trapped in the idyll of Lake Zurich. I want to take you away from here. You like everything so much. You’re as soft and sentimental as your old maids. You probably want to end up as a flower painter?”
“No, I only like Michelangelo’s prophets.”
“Isaiah, I know. You told me. What do you think he was like, this Isaiah?”
“He strove against God,” I said.
“And do you know what that means? Do you have any idea what that’s all about?”
No, I didn’t know. I held my tongue. I was suddenly mortified.
“You think it consists of holding the mouth half-open and glowering. That’s the danger of pictures. They become frozen poses for something that occurs incessantly, constantly, on and on.”
“And is Jeremiah also a pose?”
“No, neither is a pose, not Isaiah and not Jeremiah. But they turn into poses for you. You’re satisfied if you can look at them. That saves you the trouble of having your own experiences. That’s the danger of art. Tolstoy knew it. You’re nothing as yet and you think you’re everything you know from books or pictures. I should never have led you to books. Now, paintings have come to you through the Yalta. That’s all you needed. You’ve become a bookworm and everything is equally important to you. The phylogeny of spinach and Michelangelo. You haven’t earned a single day of your livelihood yourself. You’ve got a word for everything connected with that: business. You despise money. You despise the work it’s earned with. Do you realize that you’re the parasite and not the people you despise?”
Perhaps that dreadful conversation was the start of our falling-out. At the time, I didn’t perceive it as that. I only had one thought, to justify myself to her. I didn’t want to leave Zurich. I sensed that during this conversation she had made up her mind to take me away from Zurich and put me in a “harder” environment, which she had some control over as well.
“You’ll see I’m no parasite. I’m too proud for that. I want to be a human being.”
“I’m human with human contradiction! You really chose that carefully. You should hear yourself quoting it. As though you had discovered America. As though you had done God knows what and had to repent it now. You’ve done nothing. You haven’t earned a single night in your garret yourself. The books you read there were written by others for you. You select what you find pleasant and you despise everything else. Do you really think you’re a human being? A human being is someone who’s struggled through life. Have you ever been in any danger? Has anyone ever threatened you? No one’s ever smashed your nose. You hear something you like and you simply take it, but you have no right to it. I’m human with human contradiction! You’re not a human being yet. You’re nothing. A chatterbox is no human being.”
“I’m not a chatterbox. I mean what I say.”
“How can you mean anything? You don’t know anything. You’ve just read it all. Business, you say, and you don’t even know what that is. You think business consists of raking in money. But before a man gets that far, he has to have some ideas. He has to have ideas that you haven’t the foggiest notion about. He has to know what people are like and convince them of something. No one gives you anything for nothing. Do you think it’s enough just putting on some sham for people? You wouldn’t get very far like that!”
“You never told me you admire that.”
“Maybe I don’t admire it, maybe there are things I admire more. But I’m talking about you now. You have absolutely no right to despise or admire anything. You first have to know what’s really going on in the world. You have to experience it personally. You have to be buffeted around and prove you can defend yourself.”
“I am doing that. I’m doing it with you.”
“Well, then you’ve got an easy time of it. I’m a woman. Things are different among men. They won’t let you off so easily.”
“What about the teachers? Aren’t they men?”
“Yes, yes, but that’s an artificial situation. In school, you’re protected. They don’t take you seriously. They see you as a boy that has to be helped. School doesn’t count.”
“I defended myself against my uncle. He couldn’t win me over.”
“That was a short conversation. How long did you see him? You’d have to be with him, in his business, day after day, hour after hour, then you’d see whether you can hold your own. You drank his chocolate in Sprüngli and ran away from him: That was your entire achievement.”
“He’d be the stronger one in his business. He could order me around and push me around. I’d have his vileness in front of my eyes all the time. He certainly wouldn’t win me over. That much I can tell you.”
“Maybe. But that’s just talk now. You haven’t proven anything.”
“I can’t help it that I haven’t proven anything yet. What could I have proven at sixteen?”
“Not much, that’s true. But other boys are put to work at your age. If things were right, you’d have been an apprentice for two years by now. I saved you from that. I don’t notice your being grateful to me. You’re just arrogant and you’re getting more arrogant from month to month. I’ve got to tell you the truth; your arrogance irritates me. Your arrogance gets on my nerves.”
“You always wanted me to take everything seriously. Is that arrogance?”
“Yes, for you look down on others who don’t think as you do. You’re cunning too and you make things comfortable for yourself in your easy life. Your only real concern is that there are enough books left to read!”
“That was the way it used to be, when we lived on Scheuchzerstrasse. I don’t even think of that anymore. Now I want to learn everything.”
“Learn everything! Learn everything! No one could do that. One has to stop learning and do something. That’s why you have to get away from here.”
“But what can I do before I finish school?”
“You’ll never do anything! You’ll finish school, then you’ll want to go to the university. Do you know why you want to go? Just so that you can keep on learning. That way, you’ll turn into a monster and not a human being. Learning isn’t an end in itself. One learns in order to prove oneself among other people.”
“I want to keep on learning all the time. Whether or not I prove myself, I want to keep on learning. I want to learn.”
“But how? But how? Who’ll give you the money?”
“I’ll earn it.”
“And what will you do with what you learn? You’ll choke on it. There’s nothing more awful than dead knowledge.”
“My knowledge won’t be dead. It’s not dead now either.”
“Because you haven’t got it yet. It becomes something dead only when you get it.”
“But I’m going to do something with it, not for myself.”
“Yes, yes, I know. You’re going to give it away because you haven’t got anything yet. So long as you’ve got nothing, it’s easy to say that. Once you really have something, then we’ll see whether you give anything away. Everything else is claptrap. Would you give your books away now?”
“No. I need them. I didn’t say ‘give away,’ I said I’d do something, not for myself.”
“But you don’t know what yet. That’s all airs, empty talk, and you indulge in it because it sounds noble. But all that counts is what a person really does, nothing else matters. There’ll hardly be anything left that you could do, you’re so contented with everything around you. A contented person does nothing, a contented person is lazy, a contented person has retired before he has begun doing anything. A contented person keeps on doing the same thing over and over again, like a bureaucrat. You’re so contented that you’d rather stay in Switzerland forever. You know nothing of the world and you’d like to retire here at the age of sixteen. That’s why you’ve got to get out of here.”
I felt that something must have embittered her particularly strongly. Was it still “The Black Spider”? She was thrusting away so violently at me that I didn’t dare bring it up right away. I had told her about the generosity of the Italian workers when I was collecting money with the girl, she had liked that. “They have to work hard,” she had said, “and yet they’re still not hardened.”
“Why don’t we go to Italy?” I wasn’t serious, it was an attempt to change the subject.
“No, you’d like to amble around museums and read old histories on every town. There’s no hurry. You can do that later. I’m not talking about pleasure junkets. You have to go to a place which won’t be pleasurable for you. I want to take you to Germany. The people are badly off there now. You ought to see what happens when people lose a war.”
“But you wanted them to lose the war. You said they started the war. If people start a war, they ought to lose it, I learned that from you.”
“You’ve learned nothing! Otherwise you’d know one doesn’t think of that any more when the people have met with disaster. I saw it in Vienna, and I can’t forget it, I can see it all the time.”
“Why do you want me to see it? I can imagine it, after all.”
“Like in a book, isn’t that so! You think it’s enough to read about something in order to know what it’s like. But it’s not enough. Reality is something else. Reality is everything. Anybody who tries to avoid reality doesn’t deserve to live.”
“I’m not trying to avoid it. I told you about ‘The Black Spider.’”
“That’s the worst example you could pick. That’s when my eyes opened about you. The story absorbed you because it belongs to Emmentwl. All you think about is valleys. Ever since you visited Lötschen Valley, your mind’s been degenerating. You heard two words, and what were those words? ‘Come, little boy,’ or however they pronounce it there. Those people can’t speak to save themselves, they never talk. What can they say, cut off from the world and ignorant of everything. They’ll never talk there; but you made up for it by talking all the more about them. They would have been flabbergasted if they’d heard you! You came back from your excursion and spoke about Old High German for days on end. Old High German! Today! They may not even have enough to eat, but why should you care! You hear two words, you think they’re Old High German because they remind you of something you read. That gets you more excited that what you see with your own eyes. The old woman knew perfectly well why she was suspicious, she’s had her experiences with people like yourselves. But you people chattered away as you hiked through the valley, happy and elevated by their poverty, you left them there, they have to struggle on with their lives, and you people show up at the hotel as conquerors. There’s dancing in the evening, but you’re not interested, you’ve brought something better along, you learned something. And what? Two words of Old High German, allegedly, you’re not even sure if that’s right. And I’m supposed to watch you creep away into nothing! I’m going to take you to the inflation in Germany, then you’ll forget all about the Old High German little boy.”
Nothing I had ever told her was forgotten. Everything was brought up. She twisted every single one of my words around, I couldn’t find any new word to make her waver. She had never struck away at me like that. It was a matter of life and death, and yet I greatly admired her; if she had known how seriously I took it, she would have stopped; each of her words lashed me like a whip, I sensed that she was being unjust to me and I sensed how right she was.
She kept coming back to “The Black Spider,” she had taken it altogether differently from me, our earlier conversations about it had been untrue, she hadn’t wanted to deny it, she wanted to get me away from it. What she had said about Gotthelf had been a skirmish, he didn’t interest her at all. She wanted to deny in him what she perceived as her own truth, it was her story, not his, the setting of the spider was not Emmental, it was the Waldsanatorium. Of the people with whom she had discussed it, two had died in the meantime. She had previously spared me the deaths, which were not infrequent there, and she didn’t even let me guess what had happened when we saw each other again. I knew what it meant when she didn’t bring up a name anymore, but I took care not to ask. Her dislike of “valleys” was only seemingly due to the confinement. What she reproached me for—the propensity for idylls, the innocence and self-complacence—was nourished by her fear: the danger from which she wanted to save me was a greater one, it was the danger with which our lives had always been marked, and the word “inflation,” which she used in connection with Germany, a word I had never heard her use, sounded like a penitence. I wouldn’t have been able to state it so clearly, but she had never spoken so much about poverty, that made a big impression on me; and even though I had to muster all my strength in order to save my skin, I liked the fact that she rationalized her attack by pointing out how badly off other people were.
But that was only part of it, and the threat to take me away from Zurich struck me more deeply. There had been peace in school for over a year. I had started understanding the other pupils and I thought about them. I felt I belonged with them and many of the teachers. I now realized that my position in Tiefenbrunnen was a usurped position. My reigning there as the sole male was a bit ridiculous, but it was pleasant to feel safe and not always be challenged. Besides, the process of learning had become more and more lavish under these circumstances, not a day passed on which nothing was added, it looked as if it would never end, I imagined it would go on like that for the rest of my life, and no attack in the world could have gotten me away from that. It was a time without fear; this was due to the expansion, I was expanding everywhere, but I wasn’t conscious of any injustice, the same experiences were accessible to anyone, after all; and now she confounded and confused me by trying to put me in the wrong because of my enthusiasm for Lötschen Valley and trying to make me seem unjust towards its inhabitants.
