The Play of the Eyes, page 9
After the reading I saw satisfaction on some faces, consternation on others. All went back to their places and sat quietly down. Conversation, there was none. No one asked a returning neighbor: “What did he say?” The atmosphere had changed perceptibly. There was no more joking. Those with long lives to look forward to kept the good news to themselves. And no word of protest or lamentation was heard from those who had come off badly. H., who appeared to be deep in the study of hands, kept close track of who reported and who didn’t. Most of his clients were people who meant little to him, and he dealt with them only for form’s sake. Others he was obviously awaiting with eagerness. I held back for quite some time, and I could feel him glowering at me. Sitting across the table from him, I showed no sign of standing up and taking my place in line. Several times, between hands, he shot me quick glances. Finally, he looked me straight in the eye and said so loudly that the whole table could hear: “What’s the matter, C., are you afraid?” I couldn’t have it thought that I was afraid of his palmistry. I stood up and went to the end of the line. “No, no,” he said. “Step right up. I don’t want you running away on me.” Reluctantly I moved up and, making an exception for me, he took me out of turn. He grabbed my hand and, before he’d even looked at it, decreed: “You won’t live to be thirty.” For once, he added an explanation: “This is where the life line breaks off.” Dropping my hand like something he no longer had any use for, he beamed at me and hissed: “I’ll live to be eighty-four. Only half my life is behind me. I’m just forty-two.” “And I’m twenty-eight.” “You won’t live to be thirty.” He said it again and shrugged his shoulders. “And you can’t do one thing about it. Call that a life? What can you do with a life like that?” Even the two years allowed me were worthless. What can you do in two years?
I stepped aside. He thought he had crushed me, but the game wasn’t over yet. All had to take their turns, he had to pronounce sentence on each one. With most his tone was one of bored routine, they might just as well have been flies. Others he really had it in for. I didn’t always know why. My place on the other side of the table was not far away, I sat down again and listened. A few evaded his clutches, pretending to be drunk and ignoring his orders. Most came and were treated to varying fates. For those who had never thwarted him his mood was benign and they came off with a promise of middle age. None got to be eighty-four. A few harmless, compliant souls made it to their sixties. But these were not his favored targets, at whom he took closer aim. He was obviously determined to dispose of everybody. There were several women and he treated them no better than the men. All would die younger than their husbands. He wasn’t interested in widows. Women who didn’t have to be taken from anyone depressed his libido. I alone was doomed to die before my thirtieth birthday.
PART TWO
Dr. Sonne
A Twin Is Bestowed on Me
My Comedy of Vanity was written in 1933 under the impact of the events in Germany. Hitler had come to power at the end of January. Everything that happened from then on seemed sinister and of evil omen. Everything affected me deeply, I felt involved in everything, it was as though I were present at every incident I heard about. Nothing had been foreseen; measured against the reality, all explanations and calculations, even the most daring prophecies, were empty words. What had happened was in every way unexpected and new, out of all proportion to the paltry ideas that had sparked it off. These events defied understanding, yet one thing I knew: they could culminate only in war, not a shamefaced, hesitant war, but one that would come forward with the proud and gluttonous appetite of a biblical Assyrian war.
I knew this, yet cherished the hope that war could be prevented. But how could it be prevented unless the process was understood?
Since 1925 I had been trying to determine the nature of crowds, since 1931 to discover how power springs from crowds, from the masses. In all those years there was seldom a day when my thoughts did not turn to the phenomenon of crowds. I made no attempt to simplify, to make things easy for myself; I saw no point in singling out one or two aspects and neglecting all the rest. Thus it is not to be wondered at that I had not got very far. I was on the track of certain phenomena such as the connection between crowds and fire or the tendency of crowds to expand—a characteristic they share with fire—but the more I worked, the clearer it became to me that I had taken on a task which would demand the better part of my life.
I was prepared to have patience, but events were not so patient. In 1933, the year of the great speedup which was to carry everything with it, I had as yet no theoretical answer to it and felt a strong inner need to describe something I did not understand.
A year or two before, and not at first in connection with current events, it had occurred to me that mirrors should be prohibited. When I sat in the barber chair having my hair cut, it got on my nerves to have always the same image in front of me, it seemed to hem me in. My eyes would stray to the right and left; the men to the right and left of me were fascinated by what they saw. They studied themselves, they scrutinized themselves, they made faces to broaden their knowledge of their features, they never wearied, they never seemed to get enough of themselves, and what surprised me most was that in their exclusive self-immersion they didn’t seem to notice that I was watching them. These men were young and old, dignified and less dignified, totally different from one another and yet alike in one thing: all were sunk in self-worship, in adoration of their own image.
Once, while observing two especially grotesque specimens, I asked myself: What would happen if men were forbidden this most precious of moments? Could any law be stringent enough to divert men from their image and likeness? And what detours would vanity take if such a barrier were placed in its path? Imagining the consequences was an amusing game, without serious implications. But when the books were burned in Germany, when I saw what interdictions could be promulgated and enforced and how readily, taking on an imperturbable will of their own, they lent themselves to the formation of enthusiastic crowds, I was thunderstruck and came to regard my playful prohibition of mirrors as something more than a game.
I forgot everything I had read about crowds, I forgot what little insight I had gained, I cast all that behind me and started from scratch, as though confronted for the first time with so universal a phenomenon. It was then that I wrote the first part of my Comedy of Vanity, the great temptation. Some thirty characters, speaking in very different ways but all Viennese to the last syllable, live in a place that suggests the Prater amusement park. But it’s a very special sort of Prater; its main attraction is a fire stoked by the characers, which gets bigger from scene to scene. Sound effects are provided by the crashing of mirrors that are hit by balls in galleries set up for that very purpose. The characters bring their own mirrors and pictures, the former to smash, the latter to burn. A barker accompanies this plebeian entertainment with his spiel, in which the word heard most frequently is “We!” The scenes are arranged in a kind of spiral, first long ones, in which characters and events explain one another, then shorter and shorter ones. More and more, everything relates to the fire; at first it is far away, then it comes closer and closer, until in the end one of the characters becomes fire by throwing himself into it.
I can still feel the passion of those weeks in my bones. There was a heat in me, as though I myself were the character who becomes fire. But despite the rage that drove me on, I had to avoid every imprecise word and I champed at the bit. The crowd formed before my eyes, in my ears, but in my thinking I was far from having mastered it. Like the old porter Franzl Nada, I collapsed under the weight of mirrors. Like Franzi, his sister, I was arrested and imprisoned because of my lost brother. Like Wondrak the barker, I lashed the masses on; like Emilie Fant, I screamed heartlessly, hypocritically, for my heartless child. I myself became the most monstrous characters and sought my justification in the downtrodden whom I loved.
I have forgotten none of these characters. Every one of them is more alive for me than the people I knew at that time. Every fire that had made an impression on me since my childhood went into the fire in which those pictures were burned.
The heat in which I wrote those scenes was still with me when I went to Strasbourg. I was still in the middle of the first part when I started out and, strange to say, my hectic weeks in that city did not blur my vision of the Comedy. It was more firmly performed in my mind than anything else I have written. I spent the September after the festival in Paris, and there I took up just where I had left off in Vienna. When I finished the first part, I was intoxicated with it. I had done something new, I thought, presented the story of a crowd in dramatic form, shown how it formed, increased in density and released its charge. A good deal of the second part was also written in Paris. I knew how it would continue; even the third part was clear in my mind.
I did not feel defeated on my return to Vienna. Anna’s cold rebuff had hit me hard, but it did not destroy me as it might have at another time. Under the protection of my Comedy, I felt so safe that I called Anna as if nothing had happened, and arranged to see her at her studio. On the phone I made myself sound as cool and indifferent as she actually was, and that pleased her. She was relieved that I made no reference to what there had been between us; she detested scenes, reproaches, bitterness, lamentation. She was pleased with herself for having acted on her strongest impulse, which was to preserve her freedom, yet when I spoke of my Comedy, which I had mentioned before leaving, she expressed interest, though she cared little for plays. I hadn’t expected real sympathy.
Ever since she had known me, she had wanted me to meet Fritz Wotruba, her young teacher; before I went to Strasbourg he had been away from Vienna; now he was back. She said she would ask him to come on the day of my visit and we could have lunch together in her studio. This was a good idea on her part. It would be our first meeting since the break. Crossing the garden; the crunching of the gravel, which seemed much louder than I remembered; the greenhouse that served her as a studio; Anna in the same blue smock, but a little to one side of the figure that was standing in the center of the studio; her fingers not in the clay; her arms at her sides; her eyes resting on a young man who, kneeling beside the figure, was working on the lower part of it with his fingers. He had his back turned to me and didn’t stand up when I came in. He didn’t remove his fingers from the clay but kept kneading it. Still kneeling, he turned his head toward me and said in a deep, full voice: “Do you kneel at your work too?” It was a joke, a kind of excuse for not getting up and giving me his hand. But with him even a joke had weight and meaning. With the word “too” he bade me welcome, put his work and mine on the same level; with “kneel” he expressed the hope that I took my work as seriously as he took his.
It was a good beginning. Of this first conversation I remember only the sentence with which it began. But I see him clearly before me as soon afterward he sat across the table from me, busy with his schnitzel. Anna had had lunch served for us, she herself did not sit with us. She stood there, took a few steps around the studio from time to time, then came back to the table and listened. She participated only in part. Food meant nothing to her. She could work for days without bothering to eat. But this time it was out of kindness that she did not sit down; she wanted to do something for me, but she was thinking also of Wotruba, whom she respected for his work in hard stone and his unswerving determination. That was why she tried to help him and had become his first pupil. She felt she was doing a good deed in bringing us together and left us to our first conversation without taking part or attracting attention to herself. She showed great tact on that occasion, for if she had left the room entirely we should have felt like domestics, having their meals served in some far corner. She busied herself around the studio but kept coming back to us, stood listening to our conversation as though standing there to wait on us, but didn’t stay long for fear that her presence would distract us. A few months before, she wouldn’t have let a single word of such a conversation escape her. She had decided then that she cared for me and acted accordingly. Now that she had decided the opposite, she was able to be tactful and leave us to our conversation.
But eating interfered with our talk. My attention was held by Wotruba’s hands, long, sinewy, powerful, but wonderfully sensitive hands that seemed to be creatures in their own right with a language of their own. I began to look at them instead of listening to his words, they were the most beautiful hands I had ever seen. His voice, which had appealed to me with that one sentence, left me for the moment, it meant nothing to me compared with my first impression of those hands. That may be why I’ve forgotten our conversation. He cut meat, almost perfectly square chunks of meat, which he raised with quick decision to his mouth. The impression was more of determination than of greed, the cutting appeared to be more important than the swallowing, but it seemed unthinkable that the fork would stop halfway, that he would ask a question or fail to open his mouth because his companion had said something. The morsel vanished inexorably, followed in quick time by the next.
The schnitzels were shot through with gristle, which I did my best to remove from mine before eating. I found more and more of it, I kept cutting it out, and what I removed remained on my plate. All this twisting and turning and doubting, this poking and excising, this obvious reluctance to eat what had been set before me, contrasted so strongly with his way of eating that for all his concentration on his plate he noticed it. His movements slowed down a little, he looked at the battlefield on my plate, it was as though we had been served two entirely different dishes or belonged to two different species. Our conversation, which had been interrupted by the earnestness of his eating process, took on a different character: he expressed amazement.
He was amazed at this creature across the table from him, who treated meat so disrespectfully. At length he asked me if I was going to leave all that. I said something about the gristle; gristle meant nothing to him, he ate every speck of his square chunks. You couldn’t fuss over so perfect a shape. Poking around in meat repelled him. This first meeting left him with an impression of fuzziness, and as I later found out, he passed his impression on to his wife when he got home.
* * *
In those days, while Fritz Wotruba was becoming my close friend—we soon regarded each other as twin brothers—my self-confidence as a writer attained a high point. To the aggressiveness I had known and admired in Karl Kraus was now added that of the sculptor, whose work consisted of daily blows on hardest stone. Wotruba was the most uncompromising man I have ever known; whatever we discussed or did together had a dramatic character. He felt infinite contempt for people who made things easy for themselves, accepted compromises or perhaps didn’t even know what they wanted. Like two superior beings, we rushed through the streets of Vienna. Wotruba always rushed; suddenly, forcefully he arrived, demanded or took what he wanted and rushed away before one could even tell if he was pleased with it. I liked this kind of motion, which was known to all and feared by some.
I felt closest to Wotruba in his studio. Two vaulted enclosures under the Stadtbahn tracks had been assigned to him by the city. In one—or outside it in good weather—he hacked away at his stone. When I went to see him there for the first time, he was busy with a recumbent female figure. He struck powerful blows and I could see how much the hardness of the stone meant to him. Suddenly he would jump from one part of the figure to another and apply his chisel with renewed fury. It was clear that his hands were all-important to him, that he was utterly dependent on them; and yet he seemed to be biting into the stone. He was a black panther, a panther that fed on stone, that clawed at it and bit into it. You never knew at what point he would attack it next. It was these leaps that reminded me most of the great cats, but they didn’t start from a distance, he leapt from one point on the figure to another. He attacked each point with concentrated energy, with the force of a leap from some distance.
During my first visit—he was working on a funerary statue of the singer Selma Kurz—the leaps came from above; that may be why I couldn’t help thinking of a panther, leaping on its victim from a tree. He seemed to be tearing his victim to pieces. But how can one tear granite to pieces? Despite his somber concentration I didn’t forget for a moment what he was contending with. I watched him a long time. Not once did he smile. He knew I was watching him, but there was nothing amiable about his look. This was deadly serious work with granite. I realized he was showing himself as he really was. He was so strong by nature that he had sought out the most difficult of occupations. To him hardness and difficulty were one. When he suddenly leapt away, it was as though he expected the stone to strike back, and was dodging in anticipation. He was enacting a murder. It took me a long time to realize that to him murder was a necessity. This was no hidden murder that left only obscure traces; he kept at it until a monument remained behind. Usually he committed his murder alone; sometimes, however, he felt the need to commit it in the presence of others, though without changing in any way, entirely himself, not as an actor but as a murderer. He needed someone who understood how very serious he was about it. It has been said that art is play; his was not. He might have populated the city and the whole world with his deeds. I had gone there with the prevailing opinion that what mattered to the sculptor was the permanence of the stone, which secured his work against decay. When I saw him at work, engaged in his inexplicable action, I realized that what mattered to him in the stone was its hardness and nothing else. He had to do battle with it. He needed stone as others need bread. But it had to be the hardest stone and he enacted its hardness.
