The Play of the Eyes, page 8
She asked me to write to her and gave me a mailing address. I was to put my letter in a carefully sealed envelope, which I was to insert in another envelope addressed to Fräulein Hedy Lehner, Porzellangasse. Fräulein Lehner, a young model who came to Anna’s studio every day, was a beautiful redhead with a face like a fox; I’d get a glimpse of her when I came to the studio, an almost imperceptible smile would cross her face, then she would disappear without a word. Sometimes when I got there, she had just brought a letter from me, which Anna had not yet opened, let alone read. Anna was careful, because someone could come into the studio any minute. She owned that she found it hard to talk to me before reading my letter, and that at such moments she would rather I hadn’t come. True, I told her lots of stories, and she loved stories, but she was still fonder of the letters in which I glorified her.
“Drums and Trumpets” was her name for what I wrote her. Transposing my sentences into her own medium. She had never before received such letters; many came, sometimes three in one day, Fräulein Hedy Lehner couldn’t always bring each one separately; it would have attracted attention if she had come several times a day, and Anna was under strict supervision (to which she had consented). Permission to have a model was a special privilege, which she had no desire to forfeit. Anna always replied to my high-flown eloquence by means of telegrams (which Hedy would take to the post office on her way home from the studio). Words did not come easy to her, but she was determined to thank me for the inventive glorification of my letters, and telegrams were just the thing.
* * *
Anna had many secrets, which made her mysterious to me; I did not realize how much she had to keep secret and how vitally important it was for her to keep it secret. Luckily for her, she forgot easily, but others were capable of reminding her of the past. Most secret of all was her sculpture, on which she worked hard. She regarded hard work as honorable; she had inherited that from her father, but she was also influenced in that direction by her young teacher, Fritz Wotruba, who worked in hard stone. She also modeled, chiefly heads; that was not hard work but played an entirely different role, it was her only access to people that was not blocked by her mother’s loving, domineering ways.
She did not expend herself in letters, but tried to react, and as long as her letters served that purpose, she was content. But when she did not want to react—in times of disillusionment that were frequent because she was blind to people she did not happen to be modeling and especially to those she had taken it into her head to love—in such times of disillusionment, she gave herself wholly to music. She played a number of instruments, but in the end she had gone back to the piano. I rarely heard her play, I avoided opportunities to do so, so I never found out what those solitary sessions meant to her. I distrusted music that left room for sculpture.
The aura of fame surrounding Anna was so great that I could think no harm of her. Someone could have shown me a confession, written in her hand, of the most hideous thoughts and deeds, I wouldn’t have believed him or the testimony of her handwriting. What made it all the easier to preserve an untainted image of her was that I soon had a very different image of her mother to contrast it with. On one side I saw a silent light feeding on sculpture and glorification, on the other an insatiable, tipsy old woman. I was not deceived by their close family ties, I saw the daughter as a victim, and if it is true that one is the victim of what one has seen around one from early childhood, I saw correctly.
H. would not have employed me as a messenger if he had thought me very dangerous. He took himself too dead seriously to doubt that a handwritten letter from him would divert all possible attention from a mere messenger. Besides, he may have felt that the author of The Wedding was bound to be harmless, since only an unfeeling monster could have written so glacial a play. He may even have thought it clever to entrust a love letter to such a creature. But he never got an answer, not even a rebuff. Soon after arriving in Strasbourg I saw him briefly between rehearsals. He squeezed out three sentences, one of which was “Did you give ‘Anni’ my letter?” “Of course,” I replied, and added in a tone of astonishment: “Hasn’t she answered you?” From this he inferred that I had seen her more than once and that we might have become intimate. For the present a mere suspicion; as a dictator he was always inclined to suspicion. “Hasn’t she answered you?” suggested to him that I knew her well enough to know that she habitually answered letters. Reasonable enough. But at the same time, his contempt for an unimportant young man was so great that he felt the need of dispelling his suspicion. So he did his best to find out that there was nothing to find out.
During the first days of the festival he tried to provoke me with contemptuous remarks about Anna. Her yellow hair was dyed, it had formerly been mouse gray; he put the emphasis on “formerly,” implying that when H. had first met her as a young woman of twenty, married to Ernst Krenek, she had had gray hair. Hadn’t I noticed her walk? No real woman would walk like that. Every one of his remarks infuriated me. I defended her with such passion and rage that he soon knew the whole truth. “You really are in love,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought you capable of it.” I admitted nothing, less out of discretion than because I hated him for his remarks. But I spoke of her in such glowing terms that only a simpleton would have failed to conclude that I loved her. Thus he forced me to step forward as her paladin. A strange irony, for soon after my arrival in Strasbourg I received a letter and a telegram from her, giving me my walking papers. In two months, no more, she had got over what was to haunt me for years. She offered no explanation, not a word of reproach. Her letter began with the words “I don’t believe, M., that I love you.” This Irish name (M.) she had given me was as unreal as the letters in which she had protested her love. And now H. collided unsuspecting with this misfortune which had laid me low and which—so I thought—he had been the cause of, for I assumed that she had been disillusioned by my going to Strasbourg. And here he was trying to demolish my image of her and taking obvious pleasure in this beastly pursuit. Every time he opened his mouth he said something horrible about her.
We saw each other briefly, between his rehearsals and concerts, while he was stuffing himself on toast and caviar at the Broglie, or longer late at night in his hotel, when the inner circle met to exchange catty observations. But he preferred to tell me unpleasant things about her when we were alone. It wasn’t long before he issued his strange warning: “Steer clear of her. You’re too inexperienced, too naïve.” Every word was an insult to me, but I was hurt a lot more by what he said about her. He soon caught on to this, and once he had worked himself up to a certain pitch, he would come out with something so unspeakable that I still can’t bring myself to write it down. I stared at him in horror, while at the same time wondering if I hadn’t heard wrong. And then with visible relish he would repeat his words. “But why, why are you saying this?” I cried out, too horror-stricken to hit him. His accusations were so monstrous that they reflected on him more than on her. He saw he had gone too far. “But don’t let it get you down. There are more things in heaven and earth than you let yourself dream of.”
I didn’t ask how he had discovered these horrors. I knew he was lying, and I also knew why. I remembered how Anna had put his letter aside, saying: “It’s not important.” He meant nothing to her. She had always thrust him aside like his letter. He didn’t interest her, not even as a musician, let alone as a man. There were conductors who interested her, with whom she associated, and as her father’s daughter she had every right to decide whom she regarded as a good conductor. She looked upon H. as a kind of military band leader; in that respect, his looks and his manner were no help to him. To this innovator, who took the trouble to discover new and difficult music, she preferred men who wouldn’t so much as look at a modern, unfamiliar work. Her rejection came as a hard blow to him. He was trying to get a foothold in Vienna. He had got nowhere with Anna’s mother, who had great influence, and that made it all the more important for him to get somewhere with Mahler’s daughter. Since she would have nothing to do with him, his only recourse was to slander her.
Suddenly I found myself in an intolerable situation, and if I had not been so taken up with Strasbourg itself, its literary history and the many outstanding musicians I soon met there, I doubt if I would have had the strength to stay. I had been exalted to high heaven and now I was flung down. A woman whom I greatly admired, whom I thought beautiful and regarded as the living creation of a great man, had received me into her world, read my novel and found me worthy of her love. The novel had not yet been published and few people knew of its existence. And few knew of the play I had read to the conductor and because of which he had invited me to a conclave of modern musicians. I owed this invitation to The Wedding and I owed Anna’s love to Kant Catches Fire. Immediately after my arrival in Strasbourg I climbed to the platform where Goethe had waited for Lenz. There I stood, face to face with the tablet on which they had inscribed their names. I was made welcome into one of the beautiful houses at the foot of the Cathedral, and lodged in a room where Herder was believed to have lain sick and received Goethe’s visit. The strange coincidence between my happiness and my veneration for the men who had lived here might have produced a dangerous hubris. In my illustrious bedchamber I might have given myself over to wishful fantasies, “temple dreams,” as it were, and abandoned the arduous and essential tasks I had set myself. But as my luck would have it, misfortune struck me at that very time. I had been there only three days when a letter and a telegram from Anna were handed me in the office of the Conservatory. In the midst of that musical pandemonium, under a hundred eyes, I tore them open and read their ice-cold message. Not a word of reproach, she simply let me know that her feeling for me was gone. She made no attempt to spare my feelings but told me quite plainly that it was my letters and not me she had loved. She added that she was seeing no one, that she had shut herself up with her piano and played for herself alone. Yet, in this cold letter, devoid of overtones, I sensed a faint sorrow over her disappointment. She hoped, she said, for more letters from me, but held out no prospect of answers. I had ceased to be of interest, I had been sent back to earth, but I was free to penetrate her atmosphere with letters, only with letters. There was something almost sublime in the way she had treated me, as if she had a natural right to exalt and depose without explanation or forbearance, as though the victim should be grateful for the hardest of blows, because it came from her.
The sense of annihilation that invaded me was held in check by the battle my sense of chivalry obliged me to fight for her. Every time he spoke to me, H. tried to drag her lower, and the worst of it was that his slanders were shot through with a strange sort of lubricity, calculated to arouse my jealousy. He himself was motivated by jealousy, thinking me in possession of the happiness I had lost. I threw every one of his ignominies back in his teeth, I was as obstinate as he was, though I was far from being as sure of my poison as he was of his. At first I exercised some restraint for fear of exposing her and myself—as though we were still a couple—to his attacks. But then, as his insults grew worse and worse, I threw caution to the winds and spoke of Anna as I had in the letters I had written her and could write her no longer. In my battle against H.’s vileness, everything that had supposedly existed between her and me remained intact. I couldn’t lament, I couldn’t tell him the new truth. Instead, I proclaimed the old truth with such force of conviction that he was dumbstruck at my unswerving faith.
Since H. tended to say everything in public, his large entourage must have found it strange that he sometimes asked explicitly to be alone with me. “I must speak to C.,” he would say in a tone suggesting that there was something of importance to be discussed. But these few minutes wrested from the furious activity of his day were devoted entirely to our battles over Anna. He savored my violent counterattacks, because I never attacked him personally, but only defended Anna. They contrasted so sharply with his obscene denunciations that he needed them. He couldn’t do without them, he needed both, and maybe I too—though I certainly didn’t think so at the time—needed both to get me over the pain and humiliation inflicted on me by Anna.
To the others, though, to those who had no idea what these conversations were about, it looked as if H. were asking my advice, as though I were his trusted collaborator during those difficult weeks.
Gustel, who kept watch over him in her way, thought so too. Because he needed her, he had called her back; to show her how much he needed her and allay her misgivings, he had promised to tell her the truth about everything and enjoined her to guard him against new entanglements. His collapse after the flight of Carola Neher, who had abandoned him so shamefully, was not yet far behind him. Never before had a love affair, or more accurately a rebuff at the hands of a woman, impaired his capacity for work. In mortal fear, this otherwise dauntless man had run for protection to Gustel, his first wife and love. He was not deceiving her when he begged her to watch over him and make sure that no other woman ensnared him.
Thus Gustel had good reason to try to find out about those confidential discussions of ours. Though ordinarily rather crisp and tight-lipped, she approached me and talked to me of herself in an attempt to win my friendship and possibly my help as well. She suffered cruelly from all his associations with women, and there were numerous female musicians at the festival: several singers, including one who was exceedingly seductive, exuberant and ready for everything, as well as a magnificent violinist, whom he had known in Vienna, a childlike, delightfully original creature, combining perfect naturalness with rigorous intelligence. She came of a highly musical family and one of her Christian names had been given to her in honor of Mozart. It suited her, she was musical in every fiber of her being, what a man like H. had acquired by superhuman industry was hers by nature. The rhythms she had to play were to her a form of obedience. To her, scores were in the strictest sense of the word instructions. Conductor and score were one and the same thing, and whatever a conductor ordered was a prolongation, an extension of the score. She would have given her life for the sake of a score and, it goes without saying, for the author of a score. Amadea, to call her by the middle name given her after Mozart—actually it was used only in an abbreviated form—made no distinction between the reigning sovereigns of music. When it came to compositions, however, her tastes were most decided, not to say capricious. Her abilities were not merely technical—she had a thorough knowledge of Bach, who was perhaps the foremost among her gods, and of Mozart, but she also understood new compositions, which the general musical public of Vienna shunned like the Devil. She was one of the first to play the works of Alban Berg and Anton von Webern and was even called to London to perform them. But she was a slave to the instructions of the true beneficiaries of all musical compositions, the conductors, not to their persons, for about them she knew nothing, but to their tyrannical orders. In Strasbourg, H., who had already worked with her in Vienna, would summon her to rehearsals at six in the morning, and since she was by nature ingenuous and outgoing, she was unable to conceal his mastery over her. She was the principal object of Gustel’s jealousy.
* * *
I didn’t know much about music. I had never studied musical theory. I was an enthusiastic listener but would never have set myself up as a judge. My taste was catholic, ranging from Satie to Stravinsky, from Bartók to Alban Berg. I enjoyed them all in an uninformed way that I would have scorned in literary matters.
My attention was therefore concentrated on the people at the festival and the complex relationships among them. My impressions of these people were indelible; I never saw most of them again, yet now, fifty years later, I can call them clearly to mind, and there’s nothing I would enjoy more than telling each of them the impression he then made on me. The main object of my scrutiny was the man who had organized the festival, its working heart. I studied him closely and mercilessly just as he was; not a word, not a silence, not a movement of his escaped me; at last I had before my eyes a perfect specimen of something I was determined to understand and portray: a dictator.
A banquet was held in Schirmeck, a small town in the Vosges mountains, to celebrate the end of the festival. Some of the participants would have preferred to leave sooner, but feeling that they owed H. a debt of thanks for the enormous amount of work he had done, most of them stayed on.
There we sat at long tables in the garden of an inn. A good many speeches were made. H. asked me to say a few words about my impressions of the festival. Precisely because I was a writer and not a musician, he felt it was important. I found myself in a difficult situation. How was I to tell the truth without touching on the darker aspects of H., which moreover I had not yet clearly formulated in my own mind? As it was, I praised him for his gift of bringing people together and getting them to work together. My speech may have struck him as lukewarm, he probably wanted a paean of praise, such as he got from most of the orators. Late that evening, with the official proceedings disposed of, he took his revenge.
He had been praised as a master conductor, and indeed he had done wonders with his musicians in those few weeks. He had been drinking heavily and now he wanted to relax in his own way. Apart from conducting, he had another talent that none of those present suspected: palm reading. All of a sudden he shouted that he wanted to read our palms. “Not one of you, not a few, the whole lot of you.” One look at a person’s hands, he said, and he knew that person’s fate. “But don’t shove, you’ll all get your turns. Just form a line.” And so we did, hesitantly at first, but once he had started on his first palm half the company rose from the long tables and formed a line. The people who had been sitting near him were taken first. He was quick, as in everything he did; he never kept a hand for long, a brief glance was enough; and his verdicts were delivered with his usual assurance. He was interested only in one thing—longevity; he had no time for character, adventures or anything else. He simply told each victim how long he would live without explaining how he arrived at his figure. He spoke no louder than usual; only those closest to him could hear what he said.
