Woodcutters

  THOMAS BERNHARD

  Woodcutters

  Translated from the German by David McLintock

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  While everyone was waiting

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Woodcutters

  Being unable to make people more reasonable, I preferred to be happy away from them.

  VOLTAIRE

  While everyone was waiting for the actor, who had promised to join the dinner party in the Gentzgasse after the premiere of The Wild Duck, I observed the Auersbergers carefully from the same wing chair I had sat in nearly every day during the fifties, reflecting that it had been a grave mistake to accept their invitation. I had not seen the couple for twenty years, and then, on the very day that our mutual friend Joana had died, I had met them by chance in the Graben, and without further ado I had accepted their invitation to this artistic dinner, as they described the supper they were giving. For twenty years I had not wanted to know anything about the Auersbergers; for twenty years I had not seen the Auersbergers, and in these twenty years the very mention of the name Auersberger had brought on third-degree nausea, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. And now this couple is bringing me face to face once more with the life we led in the fifties. For twenty years I’ve avoided the Auersbergers, for twenty years I haven’t even met them, and then I have to run into them in the Graben, I thought. It had been a piece of monumental folly not only to go to the Graben in the first place, but to walk up and down the Graben several times, as I was in the habit of doing, at least since returning to Vienna from London: it was a street where I might have known I would be sure to meet the Auersbergers one day, and not only the Auersbergers, but all the other people I had been avoiding for the last twenty or thirty years, people with whom I had had close ties in the fifties, what the Auersbergers used to call close artistic ties, ties which I had severed a quarter of a century ago, when I got away from the Auersbergers and went to London, breaking, as they say, with all my Viennese acquaintances of that period, not wanting to see them again or have anything more to do with them. Going for a walk in the Graben, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, means nothing more nor less than walking straight into the social hell of Vienna and meeting the very people I have no wish to meet, people whose sudden appearance brings on all kinds of physical and mental strains. Hence in recent years, whenever I came over from London to Vienna, I had chosen different routes for my walks, avoiding not only the Graben, but also the Kohlmarkt and, of course, the Kärntnerstrasse. I had avoided the Spiegelgasse, the Stallburggasse and the Dorotheergasse too, not to mention the dreaded Wollzeile and the Operngasse, where I have so often been trapped by the very people I most detest. But in recent weeks, I reflected as I sat in the wing chair, I had suddenly felt an urgent need to go to the Graben and the Kärntnerstrasse, because the air there was healthy, and because I suddenly found it pleasant to mingle with the morning crowds, both in the Graben and in the Kärntnerstrasse, and no doubt also because I wanted to escape from the months of solitude in my Währing apartment, to get away from the isolation that had begun to deaden my brain. In recent weeks I had always found it relaxing, both mentally and physically, to walk along the Kärntnerstrasse and the Graben, then back along the Graben and the Kärntnerstrasse. Walking back and forth like this was as beneficial to my mind as it was to my body, and in recent weeks I had walked up the Kärntnerstrasse and the Graben and back every single day, as though there were nothing I needed so much as just to walk up and down the Graben and the Kärntnerstrasse. It was in the Kärntnerstrasse and the Graben that I suddenly recovered my vitality and became myself again, after months of what I can only describe as mental and physical debility; walking along the Kärntnerstrasse and the Graben and back I felt refreshed. All I need to do is to walk up and down like this, I would think to myself, though that was not all I needed. Just to walk up and down, I kept on telling myself. And in fact it did enable me to start thinking again, even to philosophize, to take an interest once more in philosophy and literature, which had for so long been suppressed, even killed, within me. It was a mistake, as I now realize, to spend the winter in Vienna and not, like previous winters, in London, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. It was this long, sickening winter that killed off everything literary and philosophical there was inside me, and now I’ve made it all come back by walking up and down the Graben and the Kärntnerstrasse. And I actually attributed my Viennese mental condition, my restored mental condition, as I now felt able to call it, to the therapy I had first prescribed for myself in the middle of January, this Graben and Kärntnerstrasse therapy. This dreadful city of Vienna, I thought, having plunged me yet again into profound despair and utter hopelessness, has suddenly become the motor that enables my mind to function again as a living mind and my body as a living body; day by day I observed the progressive revival of mind and body, of everything inside me that had been dead during the whole of the winter; having blamed Vienna throughout the winter for my mental and physical atrophy, it was to Vienna that I now owed my restored vitality. I sat in the wing chair and silently paid tribute to the Kärntnerstrasse and the Graben, ascribing my mental and physical recovery solely to my Kärntnerstrasse and Graben therapy; and I told myself that I naturally had to pay a price for this therapy, and meeting the Auersbergers in the Graben, I thought, was the price of its success. It’s a very high price, I thought, but it could have been much higher; after all I could have met much worse people in the Graben, for the Auersbergers aren’t the worst people in the world, at least not the very worst. All the same it’s bad enough to have met the Auersbergers in the Graben, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. A strong person, with strength of character to match, would have declined their invitation, I thought, but I’m not strong and I’ve no strength of character: on the contrary I’m the very weakest person, with the very weakest character, and that’s what makes me more or less everyone’s victim. And again I reflected that it had been a grave mistake to accept this couple’s invitation: having resolved to have nothing more to do with them for the rest of my life, I cross the Graben, only to be accosted by them; they ask me whether I’ve heard about Joana’s death, about her hanging herself, and then I go and accept their invitation. I momentarily gave way to the most shameful sentimentality, I thought, and the Auersbergers immediately took advantage of it; they took advantage of the suicide of our mutual friend Joana, I thought, to issue their invitation, which I at once accepted, though it would have been wiser to turn it down. But I didn’t have the time, I thought, sitting in the wing chair: they came up on me from behind and told me what I already knew—that Joana had hanged herself at Kilb, at her parents’ home—and then they invited me to dinner, to a very artistic dinner, they stressed—all our friends from the old days. They’d actually begun to walk on ahead of me when they issued their invitation, I thought, and they were already a few yards in front when I said yes, accepting their invitation and saying I’d come to their dinner party in this hideous apartment in the Gentzgasse. They were carrying a number of parcels, paper-wrapped parcels from various well-known shops in the center of the city, and they were wearing the same English overcoats they had worn thirty years before for shopping expeditions to the city center. Everything about them was what is called shabby-genteel. Actually she did all the talking in the Graben: her husband, a composer in the Webern tradition as he is described, didn’t say a word to me, wishing to offend me by not speaking to me, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. They had said that they had no idea when Joana’s funeral at Kilb would take place. I had been informed that day by a childhood friend of Joana’s, just before I left home, that Joana had hanged herself. This friend, who runs a general st
ore in Kilb, did not want to tell me over the telephone that Joana had hanged herself; she simply told me that she had died, but I told her outright that Joana had not died, but killed herself. She, as her friend, must know how she had done it, I said, but she simply would not tell me. Country people are more inhibited than townspeople about saying openly that somebody has killed himself, and they find it hardest of all to say how. I guessed at once that Joana had hanged herself; in fact I said to the woman from the general store, Joana hanged herself, didn’t she? She was taken aback and simply said Yes. People like Joana hang themselves, I said. They don’t throw themselves in the river or jump out of fourth-floor windows: they get a piece of rope, deftly tie a noose in it, attach it firmly to a beam, then let themselves drop into the noose. Ballerinas and actresses hang themselves, I told the woman from the general store. The fact that I had not heard from Joana for so long, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, had for some time struck me as suspicious, and I had often wondered lately whether Joana, a woman who had been deeply wounded, who had been cheated, deserted and scorned, might one day commit suicide. But in the Graben I had pretended to the Auersbergers that I knew nothing of Joana’s suicide, feigning utter astonishment and shock, even though by eleven o’clock in the Graben I was no longer astonished or shocked by the tragedy, having heard about it at seven o’clock that morning; after walking up and down the Graben and the Kärntnerstrasse several times I found I was able to endure Joana’s suicide, that I was able to bear it, in the bracing air of the Graben. Actually it would have been better had I not appeared utterly astonished by the Auersbergers’ announcement of Joana’s suicide; I should have told them that I had known about it for some time and that I even knew how she had killed herself. I ought to have told them the precise circumstances, I thought, and so deprived them of their triumph, which they were actually reveling in and savoring to the full, as I noted at the time while we were standing in front of Knizes’; for by pretending to know nothing whatever about Joana’s death, by acting as though I had been stunned and shattered and dumbfounded by the terrible news, I had allowed the Auersbergers the thrill of being the sudden bearers of ill tidings, which naturally had not been my intention, though this was what I managed to achieve by my ineptitude, by claiming to know nothing whatever about Joana’s suicide at the time of our meeting. All the time I was standing there with the Auersbergers I feigned ignorance, while knowing more or less everything about Joana’s suicide. I did not know how they came to know that Joana had hanged herself, but the likelihood was that they too had been told by the woman from the general store. She would certainly have told them what she told me, I thought, though not as much; otherwise the Auersbergers would have told me more than they did about Joana’s suicide. Of course they would be going to the funeral at Kilb, Auersberger’s wife said, and she said it in a way which suggested that it would not be a matter of course for me to go to Joana’s funeral; it was a kind of reproach, implying that I might possibly not go to Joana’s funeral, that I might even find it convenient to avoid going to the funeral of our mutual friend, even though, like them, I had been on terms of the most intimate friendship with her for so many years, indeed for decades. The way she said it, I thought, was actually insulting, as was the fact that, after saying she would see me at Joana’s funeral, she immediately went on to invite me to come to their so-called artistic dinner in the Gentzgasse the following Tuesday, that is, today, the day of Joana’s funeral. It was in fact through Auersberger that I had first met Joana thirty years before, at a birthday party given for her husband in the Sebastiansplatz, in the Third District, a so-called studio party attended by nearly all the well-known artists of Vienna. Joana’s husband was a so-called tapestry artist, a carpet weaver in other words, who had originally been a painter, and he had once won the first prize with one of his carpets at the Bienal in São Paulo in the mid-sixties. That Joana should commit suicide was the last thing they would have expected, the Auersbergers had said in the Graben, and before rushing off with all their parcels they told me that they had bought everything by Ludwig Wittgenstein, so that they could immerse themselves in Wittgenstein during the coming weeks. They’ve probably got Wittgenstein in the smallest parcel, I thought, the one dangling from her right arm. And again I reflected that it had been a grave error to accept the Auersbergers’ invitation, considering how I detest all such invitations, and how for so many years I had avoided invitations to artistic dinners of this kind, having attended so many of them until I was well into my forties. I was thoroughly familiar with what they were like—and I know of scarcely anything more repugnant. Actually these Auersberger invitations haven’t changed, I thought, sitting in the wing chair: they’re just the same as they were in the fifties, when they not only bored me to death, but drove me half demented. For twenty years you’ve detested the Auersbergers, I told myself, sitting in the wing chair, and then you run into them in the Graben and accept their invitation, and you actually turn up in the Gentzgasse at the appointed time. What’s more, you know all the others who’ve been invited to this dinner party, and still you turn up. And it struck me that I would have done better to spend this evening—or rather this whole night—reading Gogol or Dostoevski or Chekhov, rather than to come to this hateful dinner party in the Gentzgasse. The Auersbergers are the people who destroyed your existence, your very life, I told myself, sitting in the wing chair; they were the people who, in the early fifties, drove you into such an appalling mental and physical state, into what amounted to an existential crisis, into a state of such complete helplessness that you ended up in the Steinhof mental clinic, yet you still had to come here tonight. If you hadn’t turned your back on them at the crucial moment you’d have been annihilated. First they’d have destroyed you, then they’d have annihilated you. If I’d stayed with them only a few days longer at Maria Zaal, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, it would have been certain death. They’d have squeezed you dry, I told myself as I sat in the wing chair, and then discarded you. You run into your ghastly destroyers and murderers in the Graben, and in a momentary access of sentimentality you let yourself be invited to the Gentzgasse—and you actually turn up, I said to myself as I sat in the wing chair. And again it struck me that I would have done better to read my Pascal or my Gogol or my Montaigne, or play some Satie or Schönberg on the piano, even though my old piano is so badly out of tune. You walk to the Graben, to get some fresh air and recoup your vitality, and run straight into the arms of your former destroyers and annihilators, and you even tell them how much you’re looking forward to the evening, to their artistic dinner, which can’t be anything but dreary, like all their dinner parties, like all the evenings you can recall spending with them. Only a half-wit devoid of all character could accept an invitation like that, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. It’s now thirty years since they lured you into their trap and you let yourself be caught. It’s thirty years since these people subjected you to daily indignities and you abjectly submitted to them, I thought as I sat in the wing chair—thirty years since you more or less sold yourself to them in the most despicable fashion, thirty years since you played the fool for them, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. And it’s twenty-six years since you escaped from them—at the last possible moment. For twenty years you haven’t set eyes on them, and then, all unsuspecting, you go for a walk in the Graben and fall right into their hands; you let yourself be invited to the Gentzgasse, and, what’s more, you actually turn up, and you even tell them you’re looking forward to their artistic dinner, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Auersberger’s wife was talking incessantly about the superb actor who had reached the peak of his career in the new production of The Wild Duck. Meanwhile the guests, having arrived two hours before midnight, consoled themselves with one bottle of champagne after another; every fifteen minutes the hostess circulated among them to replenish the glasses which all these more or less distasteful people held out to her. She was wearing the yellow dress I knew so well. Possibly she’s pu
t it on specially for me, I thought, because thirty years ago I used to compliment her on this dress, which at the time I thought looked extremely good on her, though now I did not find it at all becoming—on the contrary I actually found it tasteless—and which now had a black velvet collar instead of the red one it had had thirty years ago. She kept repeating the words a superb actor and a fascinating production of The Wild Duck in that voice of hers which even thirty years ago used to grate on me, though thirty years ago I had thought it an interesting voice, even if it did grate, whereas now I found it simply vulgar and repellent. The way she said altogether the most important actor and the greatest living actor I found quite unendurable. I never could stand her voice, but now that it was old and cracked and carried a permanent undertone of hysteria—now that it was strained and worn out, as they say of singers—I found it quite insupportable. This was the voice, I reflected, that used to sing Purcell and the Songbook of Anna Magdalena Bach, and when her husband, who was my friend (and whom the experts always called a composer in the Webern tradition), accompanied her at the Steinway it used to bring tears to my eyes. I was twenty-two at the time and in love with everything that Maria Zaal and the Gentzgasse stood for; I even used to write poems. But now I was sickened at the thought of the loathsome scenes I had been quite happy to take part in thirty years earlier. I would accompany the Auersbergers as they moved back and forth between Maria Zaal and the Gentzgasse every two weeks, continually switching between their two residences, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, having drunk several glasses of champagne in a very short time. Observing the Auersbergers from my wing chair, I recalled that it was she who had spoken to me in the Graben, not her husband. And you immediately accepted her invitation! They came up from behind and spoke to you, I told myself; they’d probably been observing you from behind for some time, following you and observing you, and then suddenly, when the time was ripe, they addressed you. Sitting in the wing chair, I recalled that thirty years earlier I had once seen Auersberger—who incidentally has been drunk for the last thirty years—walking along the Rotenturmstrasse with a woman I did not know, a woman of about forty who looked thoroughly dissipated and was obviously down at heel, with long hair and worn-out leather boots. I observed everything about him and his companion fairly thoroughly, wondering all the time whether I should speak to him or not, but in the end I did not speak to him. My instinct told me, You mustn’t speak to him; if you do he’ll make some offensive remark that will demoralize you for days. And so I refrained: I controlled myself and observed him all the way down to the Schwedenplatz, where he and the woman disappeared into an old house that was due for demolition. All the time I could not take my eyes off his revolting legs, clad in coarse-knit knee-length stockings, his oddly perverted rhythmical gait, and the bald patch at the back of his head. He seemed a good match for his seedy companion, who was doubtless an artiste of some kind, a worn-out singer or a low-class unemployed actress, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. Sitting in the wing chair, I recalled how I had turned around, quivering with revulsion, and set off toward the Stephansplatz after the pair had disappeared into that dilapidated building. I was so sickened by what I had just witnessed that I turned to throw up against the wall in front of the Aida coffeehouse; but then I looked into one of the mirrors of the coffeehouse and found myself staring at my own dissipated face, and my own debauched body, and I felt more sickened by myself than I had been by Auersberger and his companion, so I turned around and walked as fast as I could in the direction of the Stephansplatz and the Graben and the Kohlmarkt. Finally, as I now recalled in the wing chair, I reached the café Eiles, where I fell upon a pile of newspapers in order to forget the sight of Auersberger and his companion and my encounter with myself. This trick of going to the café Eiles had always worked. I would go in, get myself a pile of newspapers, and recover my composure. Nor did it have to be the café Eiles: the Museum or the Bräunerhof also produced the desired effect. Just as some people run to the park or the woods in search of calm and distraction, I have always run to the coffeehouse. Thus it was as likely as not, I reflected in the wing chair, that before finally addressing me the Auersbergers had observed me for some time, just as closely as I had observed Auersberger that day in the Rotenturmstrasse, and no doubt with the same ruthlessness, the same monstrous inhumanity. We learn a great deal, I reflected in the wing chair, if we observe people from behind when they are unaware of being observed, observing them for as long we can, prolonging our ruthless and monstrous observation for as long as possible without addressing them, keeping control of ourselves and refraining from speaking to them, then being able simply to turn on our heel and walk away from them, in the truest sense of the phrase—if we have the skill and the cunning that I displayed that day at the bottom of the Rotenturmstrasse, when I turned on my heel and walked away. We should apply this observation procedure both to people we love and to people we hate, I thought, sitting in the wing chair and observing Auersberger’s wife, who kept glancing at the clock and trying to console her guests for having to wait for supper so long, that is to say until the actor made his entrance. I had once seen this actor at the Burgtheater, many years before, in one of those emetic English society farces the inanity of which is tolerable only because it is English inanity and not the German or Austrian variety, and which have been put on at the Burgtheater again and again with appalling regularity over the past quarter of a century, because during this time the Burgtheater has made a specialty of English inanity and the Viennese public has grown accustomed to it. I remembered him as a so-called matinee idol, one of the theatrical dandies who own villas in Grinzing or Hietzing and pander to the sort of Austrian theatrical imbecility that has its home in the Burgtheater, one of the mindless hams who, over the last quarter of a century, have collaborated with all the directors appointed to the Burg, as it is affectionately called, to turn it into a thoroughly brainless institution dedicated to ranting and the murder of the classics. The Burgtheater has been artistically bankrupt for so long, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, that it is impossible to say precisely when it went into liquidation, and the actors who make their nightly appearances there are the bankrupts. Nevertheless, to invite one of these barnstormers to supper, to a so-called artistic dinner, I thought, sitting in the wing chair and observing the Auersbergers and their guests, is still regarded by people like the Auersbergers who own apartments in the Gentzgasse as something out of this world. It’s a peculiarly Austrian perversion, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, and I realized just what a special occasion this must be for the Auersbergers, when supper was delayed for over an hour after it was due to be served, in other words until half past twelve, when the doorbell would finally ring and the actor would make his appearance at the Auersbergers’ apartment in the Gentzgasse, signaling his entrance with the ostentatious clearing of the throat that Burgtheater actors affect. Secretly I have always detested actors, and those who perform at the Burgtheater have always earned my special detestation—except of course for the very greatest, like Wessely and Gold, for whom I have always had the profoundest affection—and the one whom the Auersbergers had invited to the Gentzgasse that evening was unquestionably one of the most objectionable specimens I have met. Born in the Tyrol and having, in the course of three decades, acted his way into the hearts of the Viennese by his performances in Grillparzer (as I once saw it expressed), he is for me the personification of the anti-artist, I thought, sitting in the wing chair; he’s the archetypal mindless ham, who’s always been popular at the Burgtheater and in Austria generally, utterly devoid of imagination and hence of wit, one of those unspeakable emotionalists who tread the boards of the Burgtheater every evening in droves, wringing their hands in their unnatural provincial fashion, falling upon whatever work is being performed, and clubbing it to death with the sheer brute force of their histrionics. For decades, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, these people have annihilated everything with their mimic muscle-power. It’s not only the gent
le Raimund and the sensitive Kleist who get beaten to a pulp at the Burgtheater, which fancies it’s taken a perpetual lease on the theatrical art: even the great Shakespeare falls victim to the butchers of the Burgtheater. But in this country, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, the Burgtheater actor is regarded as a superior being, and to have so much as a nodding acquaintance with an actor from the Burgtheater, to say nothing of having one to supper in one’s apartment, is regarded by the Austrians, and above all by the Viennese, as an unparalleled honor. Yet to me, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, this has always made the Austrians, and above all the Viennese, appear ridiculous, whether they lay claim to a slight personal acquaintance with an actor from the Burgtheater or tell you that they have even had one to supper. These actors are petit bourgeois nonentities who know nothing whatever about the art of the theater and have long since turned the Burgtheater into a hospice for their terminal dilettantism. It was not for nothing, I thought, that back in the fifties I chose this particular wing chair, which still stands in the same place, though the Auersbergers have since had it re-covered. Sitting here, I can see and hear everything—nothing escapes me. I was wearing my so-called funeral suit, which I bought twenty-three years ago in Graz, on my way to Trieste, and which is now far too tight for me. I had worn it to Joana’s funeral at Kilb, which did not end until late in the afternoon. As I sat there I reflected that once more, contrary to my better judgment, I was making myself cheap and contemptible, having accepted the Auersbergers’ supper invitation instead of declining it. That day in the Graben I had momentarily become soft and weak and so acted contrary to my nature, and tonight I was standing not only my character, but my whole nature, on its head. Only Joana’s suicide could have prompted such an irrational reaction. Had I not been so devastated by her suicide, I would naturally have declined the invitation, I now thought, sitting in the wing chair, when the Auersbergers issued it in that abrupt, direct manner of theirs, employing their customary surprise tactics, which I’ve always found so distasteful. Almost all the supper guests were still in their funeral attire, I noted, sitting in the wing chair; only one or two had changed for the party, and so nearly everybody was dressed in black, looking just as exhausted as I was from the strain of what we had been through at Kilb, where it had actually rained heavily during the ceremony. And naturally their sole topic of conversation, of which I caught only snatches, was Joana’s funeral and the tragedy of her life, which had been brought on by her husband’s walking out on her seventeen or eighteen years earlier and going off to Mexico. One or two tapestries hung on the Auersbergers’ walls—the work of this self-same husband who, they all said, had Joana’s suicide on his conscience—and as they hung there, accusing their creator, they darkened the scene, which was in any case only dimly lit by a number of Empire-style lamps. The tapestry artist had bolted to Mexico with, of all people, his wife’s best friend, as I heard people recall more than once in the semidarkness of the Gentzgasse, leaving the unhappy Joana all alone. To Mexico of all places, and at the very moment when it was bound to be a mortal blow to her. Left alone at forty, in the studio in the Sebastiansplatz, with no financial support, with virtually nothing. More than once I heard somebody say that it was surprising Joana had not hanged herself in the studio in the Sebastiansplatz, rather than at her parents’ home in Kilb—that she had chosen to do it in the country and not in the city. Several times I heard somebody remark that it was homesickness that had driven her to Kilb, away from Vienna, away from the urban quagmire to the rural idyll. I actually heard somebody use the phrases urban quagmire and rural idyll, not without a malignant undertone; I think it was Auersberger who kept on repeating them as I sat in the wing chair observing his wife, who was constantly bursting into hysterical laughter, trying to keep everybody’s spirits up until the actor made his entrance. The apartment, on the third floor of the house, consists of seven or eight rooms filled with Josephine and Biedermeier furniture. It formerly belonged to Auersberger’s parents-in-law. His wife’s father, a rather feeble-minded physician from Graz, had his consulting room here in the Gentzgasse, though he never made a career as a doctor. Her mother, an unshapely, chubby-cheeked creature from the rural gentry of Styria, permanently lost her hair at the age of forty after being treated for influenza by her husband, and prematurely withdrew from society. She and her husband were able to live in the Gentzgasse thanks to her mother’s fortune, which derived from the family estates in Styria and then devolved upon her. She provided for everything, since her husband earned nothing as a doctor. He was a socialite, what is known as a beau, who went to all the big Viennese balls during the carnival season and throughout his life was able to conceal his stupidity behind a pleasingly slim exterior. Throughout her life Auersberger’s mother-in-law had a raw deal from her husband, but was content to accept her modest social station, not that of a member of the nobility, but one that was thoroughly petit bourgeois. Her son-in-law, as I suddenly recalled, sitting in the wing chair, made a point of hiding her wig from time to time—whenever the mood took him—both in the Gentzgasse and at Maria Zaal in Styria, so that the poor woman was unable to leave the house. It used to amuse him, after he had hidden her wig, to drive his mother-in-law up the wall, as they say. Even when he was going on forty he used to hide her wigs—by that time she had provided herself with several—which was a symptom of his sickness and infantility. I often witnessed this game of hide-and-seek at Maria Zaal and in the Gentzgasse, and I honestly have to say that I was amused by it and did not feel in the least ashamed of myself. His mother-in-law would be forced to stay at home because her son-in-law had hidden her wigs, and this was especially likely to happen on public holidays. In the end he would throw her wigs in her face. He needed his mother-in-law’s humiliation, I reflected, sitting in the wing chair and observing him in the background of the music room, just as he needed the triumph that this diabolical behavior of his brought him. I was revolted to see Auersberger practicing a simple finger exercise on the piano, raising his pale face, which was already glassy and vacant as a result of the alcohol he had consumed, and sticking the tip of his tongue out of his tiny mouth, which by now had a bluish tinge. He’s chosen Giovanni Gabrieli for this sick little scene, I thought. And I recalled that at the time when my friendship with the Auersbergers was at its most intense, I would often stand by the Steinway and sing Italian, German and English arias—grossly overrating my talent, as I now realize. I had completed my studies at the Mozarteum, the so-called academy of music and performing arts in Salzburg, though I never took advantage of my musical training; I had left the Mozarteum as a deep bass-baritone, with no prospect, and indeed no intention, of becoming a performing artist. But at Maria Zaal the afternoons were long, and in the Gentzgasse the afternoons and nights were equally long; and so virtually every day Auersberger would sit down at his grand piano, with me standing beside him, and in the course of several weeks, as I now recalled, sitting in the wing chair, we would work our way through the whole classical repertoire of arias and Lieder. Auersberger, whom I once called the Novalis of sound, had always been a first-class pianist, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, and even now, drunk though he is, he would need to sit at the Steinway for no more than two or three minutes to prove his artistry. But he’s gone to seed, I thought, sitting in the wing chair; through years of alcoholic addiction he’s allowed everything within him to degenerate, even his musical talent, which he once prized above all else. We may know for decades that someone close to us is a ridiculous person, but it’s only after a lapse of decades that we suddenly see it, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, just as I’m suddenly seeing now, with absolute clarity, that Auersberger (the so-called successor of Webern) is a ridiculous person. And just as Auersberger, who’s continually drunk, is ridiculous in his own way, and probably always has been, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, so too his wife is ridiculous and always has been. You used to be in love with these ridiculous people, I told myself as I sat in the wing chair, head over he
els in love with these ridiculous, low, vicious people, who suddenly saw you again after twenty years, in the Graben of all places, and on the very day Joana killed herself. They came up and spoke to you and invited you to attend their artistic dinner party with the famous Burgtheater actor in the Gentzgasse. What ridiculous, vicious people they are! I thought, sitting in the wing chair. And suddenly it struck me what a low, ridiculous character I myself was, having accepted their invitation and nonchalantly taken my place in their wing chair as though nothing had happened—stretching out and crossing my legs and finishing off what must by now have been my third or fourth glass of champagne. And I told myself that I was actually far more base and vicious than the Auersbergers. They caught you out with their invitation, and you promptly accepted it, I told myself. Though they were all waiting for the actor, everybody was obsessed with Joana’s suicide, and also with her funeral, which had taken place that afternoon and had clearly left its mark on them. As I sat in the wing chair, waiting like all the others until well after midnight for the actor to arrive, I could think of nothing but Joana’s appalling funeral, of the events that had led up to it, of the reasons for the utter despair that had driven her to take her life. Sitting in the wing chair, I was left undisturbed, since it stood behind the door through which the guests entered the apartment, and in the semidarkness of the anteroom I was able to devote myself to the thoughts and fantasies that occupied my mind. When guests arrived they did not recognize me until after they had walked past me, and then only if they happened to turn around after entering the apartment, which very few of them did: most of them went straight through the anteroom to the music room, the door of which was always kept open. For as far back as I can remember, the door between the anteroom and the music room has never been closed; I can remember that even when the Auersbergers had nobody but me staying with them they never closed the door to the music room, because with the door open the room had excellent acoustics, something to which Auersberger, being a composer, naturally attached the greatest importance. From my vantage point in the wing chair I could see the people in the music room without their seeing me. They all walked straight from the entrance to the music room. This was how it had always been, and on this evening the guests seemed positively to race through the anteroom and into the music room, where Auersberger’s wife was waiting to welcome them with arms outstretched, as though it was to her that condolences were due for Joana’s death, as though she was now exploiting Joana’s death for her own purposes. Since most of them had already seen one another that afternoon at Kilb, they contented themselves with a brief embrace, after which they each sat down with a glass of champagne in one of the chairs in the music room. While Auersberger’s wife went on and on about the great actor, this supremely great actor, this incomparable actor, this genius of an actor, the guests could be heard almost continually uttering the name Joana. The name had always sounded good, but it was only her professional name. In reality she was plain Elfriede Slukal from Kilb, and it never did her any good to call herself Joana; she did so in the hope of making a career for herself in Vienna, but she never made a career. Having gone from Kilb to Vienna, without the slightest idea of what to do next, she had been advised by a former dancer and choreographer, who had once choreographed a ballet at the State Opera, to take the name Joana, which had an exotic ring to it—at any rate in Vienna. Little Elfriede, as her mother used to call her, at once acted upon this advice, hoping that as Joana she could make a career for herself that would have been impossible for someone called Elfriede, let alone Elfriede Slukal. But it was a grave miscalculation, I thought, sitting in the wing chair: there was obviously no career for Elfriede Slukal, even under the name Joana, but that evening in the Gentzgasse, all the guests at the artistic dinner uttered the name Joana as though some human miracle lay concealed behind it. To judge by what I heard from my wing chair, they all spoke of Joana’s death, not of her suicide, and I did not once hear the word hanged. By now some sixteen or seventeen guests must have arrived for this artistic dinner, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. I knew most of them, and nodded to them without getting up. Five or six of them were strangers to me, and two of these appeared to be young writers. I have a gift for behaving in such a way that people leave me alone whenever I wish, and as I sat in the wing chair I showed myself to be a past master in the art of being left alone; people recognized me in the half-light of the anteroom and tried to strike up a conversation, but I at once deterred them simply by remaining seated and pretending not to understand what they said, and then, at precisely the right moment, looking down at the ground instead of into their faces. I behaved as though I were still completely taken up with Joana’s suicide, sitting in the wing chair and affecting an absentminded air whenever there was a risk that one of the guests might take it into his head to keep me company, which was something I was determined to prevent. I was willing to risk being thought unfriendly, even ill-mannered, if not downright offensive; it is quite contrary to my nature to behave badly in company, but I have to confess that on this occasion my behavior was impolite, dismissive and hostile. Some of the guests had already heard about my notorious strangeness and oddity, what somebody once called my dangerous eccentricity; I had even been told that my years in London had produced in me a quite disturbing madness. People hated me and everything I wrote, and ganged up against me in the most vicious fashion whenever they saw me. But ever since my return from London I had been on my guard against them, against all the people I had known previously, but above all against these so-called artistic figures from the fifties, and especially those who had come to this artistic dinner. As soon as they entered the apartment they more or less fell into my trap, behaving as though they were unobserved, while in fact I was observing them intently from my wing chair. They walked over to Auersberger’s wife, who was standing by the door of the music room, and let themselves be embraced. They were all without exception consummate performers who knew how to get the maximum mileage out of the Joana Case. The Auersbergers had always been, at least ostensibly, what are called good hosts; they were uniquely and uninhibitedly liberal in their mania for throwing parties and in their endless zeal for things artistic and cultural, and so they were forever hunting down celebrities. It has to be admitted that, dreadful and distasteful though they were, they had a fair measure of what is called Austrian charm. But the fact that I accepted their invitation wasn’t due to their Austrian charm, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, but to the insolent way they issued it without warning that day in the Graben; and I watched Auersberger sitting at the Steinway, leaning forward because of his shortsightedness and leafing through some music, which I eventually recognized as the Anton von Webern Album I knew so well. He was sorting out the music for a short recital to be given by his wife. Curiously enough, I’ve managed to keep my sight up to now, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, though I’ve reached an age when many people rapidly become farsighted; a lot of people begin to lose their sight in their mid-forties, suddenly finding that they have to hold the newspaper a couple of feet away from them in order to read it. I was still spared any such impairment of vision; I could now see better than ever, I thought, more sharply and ruthlessly than ever, with London eyes, it would seem. The champagne the Auersbergers are serving this evening isn’t absolutely the best in the world, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, but all the same it’s one of the three or four most expensive—no doubt what they deem appropriate to mark the visit of an actor from the Burgtheater. Naturally I had sweated a good deal at Joana’s funeral, and, not wishing to change for this artistic dinner, I had sprayed cologne on my clothes—rather too freely, it now occurred to me. I have always found it unpardonable to turn up stinking of cologne, but this evening the stench was not noticeable: to judge by the atmosphere in the Auersbergers’ apartment, they had all splashed too much scent on their clothes. Every now and then I saw the cook appear from the kitchen and stick her head around the door of the music room to find out whether she could
start serving supper, but the actor had still not arrived. Auersberger’s wife was now sitting in one of those slender Empire chairs whose backs consist simply of a lyre carved out of walnut, doing her best to keep the guests happy. Most of them were smoking and, like me, drinking champagne, while at the same time nibbling at the snacks that the hostess had disposed all around the apartment in little dishes made of fine Herend porcelain. There was one next to me, but having always had an equal dislike for Herend porcelain and pre-dinner snacks, I did not eat any. I have never been partial to savory snacks, and certainly not to the Japanese variety that it has recently become fashionable to serve at all Viennese receptions. It really is an impertinence, I said to myself, to make us all wait for the actor, to demean all the guests, including myself, by turning us into a stage set for this man from the Burgtheater. At one point Auersberger remarked that he detested the theater. Whenever he had had more to drink than his wife permitted, he would suddenly reveal his innermost self, and on this occasion he suddenly started inveighing against the actor, who had not even arrived, calling the Burgtheater a pigsty (admittedly not without justification) and the actor himself a megalomaniac cliché-monger, but his wife immediately rebuked him, rolling her eyes and telling him to go back to the piano where he belonged and keep quiet. They haven’t changed, I said to myself, sitting in the wing chair: she’s anxious to preserve the harmony of her artistic dinner, and he’s threatening to destroy it. They’re both committed to the same ends, the same social ends, I thought, but late in the evening he puts on a show of wanting to escape, remembering what he owes himself, so to speak, as an artistic personality. Essentially they’re both completely taken up with society, I thought, without which they couldn’t exist—the higher reaches of society of course, because they’ve never been able to make it to the highest—while on the other hand they’ve never abandoned their artistic pretensions, their links with Webern, Berg, Schönberg and the rest, which they’ve always felt obliged to harp on at every opportunity in their craze for social recognition. Joana wasn’t Auersberger’s best friend, as people often said, but she certainly was the one artistic friend he had, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, and it was through him, as I have said, that I first met her at the studio in the Sebastiansplatz. Joana was a country girl who had been spoiled by her mother, the wife of a railroad worker in Kilb; her parents anticipated her every wish, and if possible fulfilled it. This was certainly one of the reasons for her suicide, it now struck me—this continual pampering which goes on in the families of small country tradesmen, especially in Lower Austria. What a beautiful village Kilb is! I thought. I’ve spent many afternoons and evenings there, and sometimes even stayed the night; the Slukals, Joana’s parents, often could not put me up in their little one-story house, which, though damp, was always cozy, and so on those occasions I would stay at the local inn, which was called the Iron Hand. I would spend hours walking with Joana, discussing the art of dance and the so-called movement studio she ran in Vienna. From her very earliest childhood, when she was still at the elementary school in Kilb, Joana had wanted to become famous either as an actress or as a ballerina—she was never sure which. Finally she decided to call herself a choreographer, and arranged appearances for herself in a number of plays based on fairy tales, which were staged in various small Viennese theaters. She got extremely favorable press notices and finally succeeded in putting on a deportment class at the Burgtheater. It was utterly futile, of course, to imagine that she could teach deportment to the actors at the Burgtheater: they could no more be taught how to deport themselves than they could be taught how to speak. In the mid-fifties, however, through the good offices of a senior official in the Burgtheater management, she was engaged to coach the actors in the art of deportment. This was a failure because the actors showed absolutely no interest and because in the end she lost interest too. Yet for a whole year she got a decent fee for her efforts. Basically she could never make up her mind whether she wanted to be an actress or a ballerina; and so she had danced and acted throughout her childhood, and when she went to Vienna she actually studied drama at the Reinhardt Seminar, where she finally qualified, though no theater ever engaged her. At the height of her indecision, which she constantly referred to as her artistic crisis, she married the carpet designer, the tapestry artist as she used to call him, I recalled, sitting in the wing chair. For over ten years Joana and her tapestry artist lived in the Third District, in a patrician house in the Sebastiansplatz that had been built in 1880. Here they occupied a penthouse studio with a thousand square feet of floor space under three enormous glass domes. It was beneath these domes that he wove the tapestries that made him famous—and not just in Europe. Coming from an old Jewish family and having started out as a painter, he always averred that the art of weaving, in other words tapestry making, had been the saving of him. He ran into Joana at just the right moment, for it was her freshness and beauty that very soon turned the studio in the Sebastiansplatz into one of the artistic centers of Viennese society. He wove the tapestries and she sold them. It was Joana’s charm that made the works of her tapestry artist famous, first in Vienna, then in Europe, and finally in America, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, and at once I recalled that it was at the height of his fame (which he undoubtedly owed to Joana!) that he bolted, as they say, with his wife’s best friend and ended up in Mexico. They married in Mexico City, but he divorced his new wife only a year later to marry a Mexican (the daughter of a Mexican minister!), to whom he is still married. Joana really was an unlucky creature, from the day she was born until the day she died, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. And it was on the very day Joana killed herself that I went to the Graben and ran into the Auersbergers—I don’t believe that was pure chance, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. For ten years I didn’t bother about Joana, I thought; I completely lost sight of her for years and didn’t hear anything more of her. And today at Kilb I learned that during the last few years of her life she had had what is called a constant companion, a second companion in other words; I saw this man for the first time at the Iron Hand, I thought, a Carinthian from the Gail Valley, who made a continual effort to speak standard German, though it came across as the most pathetic variety of standard German I’ve ever heard. This man had put on an ankle-length black coat for his friend’s funeral, as well as a broad-brimmed black hat, a so-called slouch hat of the kind that has recently come back into fashion, especially among provincial actors. Of course we can’t judge people by their clothes, I thought—that’s a mistake I’ve never made—but at first everything about Joana’s companion, with whom she’s said to have lived for eight years, struck me as revolting—the way he spoke, what he said, the way he walked, and above all the way he ate his food in the Iron Hand. I was shattered to discover that Joana had in the end landed up with someone so seedy, who, after a spell as an actor at a small theater in the Josefstadt, had become a commercial traveler, hawking cheap earrings manufactured in Hong Kong; even for a commercial traveler he made a shabby impression, reminding me rather of a market trader—and the humblest kind of market trader at that. The way he pronounced the words potato salad to the waitress in the Iron Hand almost made me want to vomit, I thought, sitting in the wing chair and watching the guests in the music room. They somehow seemed like figures on a distant stage; it was rather like watching a moving photograph through the haze of cigarette smoke that had formed as a result of everyone’s smoking. The Auersbergers suddenly announced they would hold supper only for another quarter of an hour. We’ll wait till half past twelve at the latest, the hostess said to the writer Jeannie Billroth, to whom she had been talking for some time, naturally about Joana. This woman, who was now fat and gross and ugly, fancied herself as the Viennese Virginia Woolf, though everything she wrote was the most dreadful kitsch, and in her novels and short stories she never rose above a kind of loquacious, convoluted sentimentality. This woman, who had come to the Gentzgasse in a black home-knitted woolen dress, had also been a frien
d of Joana’s. She lived in the Second District, not far from the Praterhauptallee, and had for years actually imagined herself to be Austria’s greatest writer, its greatest literary artist. This evening—or rather night—in the Gentzgasse she had no compunction in telling Auersberger’s wife that in her latest novel she had gone a step further than Virginia Woolf (I was able to hear her say this because I have such acute hearing, especially at night). Her new book far surpassed The Waves, she said, whereupon she lit a cigarette and crossed her legs. She said she intended to go and see The Wild Duck again. In Ibsen there’s so much beneath the surface, she remarked to Auersberger’s wife. She had been unable to buy a copy of the play at any Viennese bookshop; not one bookshop in the city center had The Wild Duck in stock, she said—she had not even managed to find a paperback edition. But naturally she knew The Wild Duck; she loved Ibsen, especially Peer Gynt, she said, speaking through a smoke screen of her own making. She was a heavy smoker and consequently had a raucous voice, and her face was bloated from overindulgence in white wine. In the days when I had close ties with the Auersbergers I used to spend a good deal of time with Jeannie Billroth—far too much time, as I now realize—in her municipal apartment, where she lived for more than ten years with a chemist called Ernstl, who never got around to marrying her—or whom she never got around to marrying. Ernstl earned the money, and Jeannie contributed her reputation, attracting artists and pseudo-artists, scientists and pseudo-scientists, and—as Joana used to say—bringing color into their drab municipal apartment with its utterly petit bourgeois atmosphere. Jeannie herself was nothing if not petit bourgeois and had become set in her petit bourgeois ways over the years, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. After the death of my friend Josef Maria, who hanged himself just as Joana did later, and who edited Austria’s first official literary magazine, entitled Literature in Our Time, in the early fifties, Jeannie took over the editorship, with the result that the magazine became unreadable. It became a thoroughly dreary publication, utterly worthless and witless, subsidized by our dreadful, disgusting and benighted state, and carrying only the most fatuous and inane contributions, pride of place being given time and again to poems by Jeannie Billroth herself, who was convinced that she was not only the successor, even the surpasser, of Virginia Woolf, but also a direct successor and surpasser of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Germany’s greatest woman poet. She fancied she wrote the best poetry in Austria, but she actually wrote unrelievedly bad poetry, in which neither the sentiments nor the ideas had the slightest literary merit. For fifteen years she edited this pedestrian periodical, until she was finally bought out with the promise of a life pension. But this did nothing to improve its quality, I thought: on the contrary, the present editor is if anything even more stupid and inept than Jeannie. It was unfortunate, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, that I had chosen that particular day, March 14, to go to the Graben, intending to buy myself a tie in the Kohlmarkt or the Naglergasse—I’ve always bought my ties in the Kohlmarkt and the Naglergasse—only to fall into the clutches of the Auersbergers. In all probability they wouldn’t have spoken to me, I now reflected, had they not had the pretext of telling me about Joana’s death, and I’d never have accepted their supper invitation had I not been thrown off balance, as it were, by Joana’s death. Naturally I had not recognized the woman from the general store in Kilb when she telephoned; I did not recognize her voice, having last heard it twenty years before at Kilb, when I had taken her and Joana to the Iron Hand, for a meal of cold sausage and salad—for a few hours’ relaxation and amusement, in other words—as I now recalled distinctly, sitting in the wing chair. She had told me over the telephone that Joana must have hanged herself between three and four in the morning. This was the conclusion reached by the doctor, who had cut down he body with his own hands from a beam over the door of the entrance hall. Country doctors aren’t squeamish, I thought. I had seen this doctor, a childhood friend of Joana’s, at the cemetery. The funeral was a grotesque affair. I had taken the train to St. Pölten and then changed onto the Maria Zell branch, arriving at Kilb at half past ten. In order to arrive by ten thirty (the funeral was scheduled for one thirty) I had to be at the Vienna West Station by half past seven. I had turned down various offers from friends to drive me there. I attach the greatest importance to being independent, and there is hardly anything I hate more than accepting lifts from other people and so being at their mercy for good or ill. I had clear recollections of the landscape between St. Pölten and Kilb, and even on this sad occasion it did not disappoint me. During the journey through the hills of Lower Austria I naturally recalled my earlier visits to Joana, most of which I had made either with her husband, the tapestry artist, or with the Auersbergers. But I had often gone there alone too, when I happened to be over from England; I recalled these cross-country journeys to Kilb with the utmost pleasure. Wherever I travel I prefer to be alone, just as I prefer to be alone when I am out walking. Yet it had always been a great joy to know that at the end of the journey to Kilb I would find Joana in her parents’ little one-story house. I always made these journeys in the spring or the fall, never in summer and never in winter. Country girls, as soon as they are capable of making plans, set their sights on Vienna, the big city, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, and that hasn’t changed. Joana had to go to Vienna, as she wanted at all costs to make a career for herself. She just couldn’t wait for the day when she would board the Vienna train for good, so to speak. But Vienna brought her more heartache than happiness, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Young people set off for the capital and come to grief, in the truest sense of the word, in the very place where they have placed all their hopes, thanks to the appalling society they find there, as well as to their own natures, which are generally no match for this cannibalistic city. After all, Auersberger too had set his heart on making a career in Vienna, yet he’d made no more of a career there than Joana; all this time he’s been chasing after a career that has so far eluded him, I reflected in the wing chair. He made life too easy for himself, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, and so did Joana: when it comes to making a career in the big city things don’t just happen by themselves, and in Vienna they’re even less likely to happen by themselves than they are elsewhere. The mistake they both made, I now reflected in the wing chair, was to think that Vienna would come to their aid, that it would grab them under the arms, so to speak, and stop them from falling. But the city doesn’t grab anyone under the arms: on the contrary, it constantly seeks to fend off the unfortunate people who repair to it in search of a career, to destroy them and annihilate them. It destroyed and annihilated not only Joana, but Auersberger too, who once believed that in Vienna he would be able to develop into an important composer, a composer of international importance, though to tell the truth he was not only unable to develop in Vienna—he was utterly ruined by the city. The genius he brought with him from Styria, of which there were unmistakable signs some thirty years ago, I now reflected, soon wasted away in Vienna; first it suffered a body blow, and then it became stunted, like countless other geniuses before it, especially musical geniuses. In Vienna he inevitably succumbed to atrophy and dwindled into a so-called successor of Webern, and he has remained a successor of Webern ever since. And Joana dreamed all her life of making a career for herself as a ballerina at the Opera, and finally of becoming a famous actress at the Burgtheater, yet all her life she remained a dilettante both as a dancer and as an actress, a movement therapist, so to speak, giving private lessons in deportment. It’s now twenty-five years, I thought, since I used to write playlets for her, which she would then perform for me during the afternoons and evenings we spent in her high-rise in the Simmeringer Hauptstrasse, and which we would record on tape for all time, as it were—dozens of pieces for two voices, in which she would try to prove how gifted she was and I would try to show off my literary and histrionic talents. These plays have been lost; they were quite devoid of literary merit, but for years they kept Joana and me alive, I
now thought, sitting in the wing chair. For years I would set out, every two or three days, from my apartment in the Eighteenth District and catch the No. 71 tram out to the Simmeringer Hauptstrasse, call at Dittrich’s liquor store opposite Joana’s high-rise and buy three or four two-liter bottles of the cheapest white wine, then take the elevator to Joana’s apartment on the eleventh floor. As we drank we would practice the total theatrical art, which comprises both acting and play writing, more or less relying on the wine to sustain us, until we were quite exhausted. When we were no longer capable of performing, we would play back the recordings we had made and get high on them until well into the night, in fact until morning came. My relationship with Joana, I reflected in the wing chair, played an important part in my own development. It was Joana who brought me back to the theater, which I had abandoned after passing out of the Academy. I’d left the Academy with my certificate, I now recalled, thinking as I went down the staircase that I was now through with theater studies and that I wanted nothing more to do with the theater for the rest of my life. I actually shunned the theater for years, until Auersberger introduced me to Joana. Then the moment I met her she suggested the idea of writing playlets for her—short dramatic sketches, in other words. She had the perfect voice. It was not the way she looked that fascinated me, but the way she spoke. And in fact it was my acquaintance with her, which eventually developed into a friendship, that quite simply brought me back into contact with art and things artistic, after I had been averse to them for so long. For me Joana, and everything about her, represented the theater. Besides, her husband painted, and this also fascinated me, right from the beginning, I recalled in the wing chair. Under the right circumstances she could probably have become one of the greatest artists, either as a dancer or as an actress, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, had she not met her artistic husband, Fritz, the painter turned tapestry artist, and had she not given in when she came up against the first serious obstacles to her ambition. On the other hand those of her fellow students from the Reinhardt Seminar who actually went on to act at the Theater in the Josefstadt or the Burgtheater, although they are now famous, succeeded only in becoming rather ridiculous and basically futile theatrical figures, who appear in perhaps one Shakespeare play, one Nestroy play and one Grillparzer play a year and are assuredly a thousand times more stupid than Joana ever was. This evening’s gathering, though planned as an artistic dinner in honor of the actor, is in fact only a requiem for Joana, I said to myself: the smell of that afternoon’s funeral was suddenly present in the Gentzgasse, the smell of the cemetery at Kilb was here in the Auersbergers’ apartment. This so-called artistic dinner is really a funeral feast, I thought, and at once it occurred to me that to my certain knowledge the actor we were waiting for was the only supper guest who had not known Joana. The date for this artistic dinner had already been agreed, first of all with the actor from the Burgtheater, before Joana killed herself; the Auersbergers had said more than once that it was intended as a belated celebration of the premiere of The Wild Duck, which had just opened at the Burgtheater. Joana’s death had intervened in their dinner arrangements; they told the guests that it was a dinner in honor of the actor, but then intimated—though not in so many words—that it was in memory of Joana. The actor’s convinced that this artistic dinner is being given for him, and that’s enough to satisfy the Auersbergers, though of course they are giving it more for Joana, since it’s taking place on the day of her funeral, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. At that moment I recalled that on the previous day I too had intended to read The Wild Duck, in order to be able to keep up with the actor, thinking that I needed only to open my bookcase and get out the text. But I was wrong: I had no copy of The Wild Duck, though I had been convinced that I had one. I’m bound to have a copy of the play, I had thought as I opened my bookcase. I’ve read it several times during the course of my life, I had thought, and I can even remember what the editions look like. But I really did not have a copy, and so, like Jeannie Billroth, I decided to buy myself one in town, but was unable to find one. However, sitting in the wing chair, I remembered that one of the characters in the play was called Old Ekdal, and that he had a son, Young Ekdal, who was a photographer. And I remembered that the first act took place at the home of a manufacturer called Werle. Ekdal has a studio in the attic, I reminded myself; gradually it all came back, and so I no longer had to exert my memory. Can this production of The Wild Duck be any good, I wondered, sitting in the wing chair, if it’s being put on by actors from the Burgtheater? And again I thought of the Iron Hand, where I had taken the woman from the general store, who was dressed all in black, after arriving at Kilb. I entered the store only for a moment, to let her know that I had arrived. She immediately put on a black coat and accompanied me to the Iron Hand, the operations room, so to speak, for Joana’s funeral. We both ordered a small goulash and waited for Joana’s companion to arrive. He arrived at about half past eleven and joined us at our table. When people are dressed in black they appear unusually pale, and this companion of Joana’s (the woman from the general store insisted on calling her Elfriede) was so pale that he looked as though he were about to vomit at any moment. He actually did feel like vomiting when he approached our table, as he had come straight from the mortuary chapel next to the church, where he said he had been shattered by what they had shown him: without any prior warning he had had to endure the sight of Joana’s body in a plastic bag. It appeared that the mortician, who as usual was the local carpenter, had been given no precise instructions about how the deceased was to be buried and had simply put Joana’s body in a plastic bag pending the arrival of her companion that morning—this being the cheapest way of dealing with it—and left it on a trestle support in the mortuary chapel. He told us that on seeing the plastic bag he had felt sick and instructed the sexton to cover the body in a shroud and put it in a beech coffin; these instructions had been carried out with his assistance. While we all ate our goulash he told us that he simply could not describe what it had been like to pull Joana’s body out of the plastic bag and cover it with a shroud—it had all been so gruesome. Finally he had chosen the most expensive coffin the carpenter had in stock. Having eaten half his goulash he went out into the corridor to wash his hands; when he returned I could see tears in his eyes. There were no relatives left, he said; they’d all died on her long ago, as he put it, and so all the funeral arrangements fell to him. He had expected that the woman from the general store would have seen to Joana’s body and everything arising from her suicide, but at this she shook her head and said that she could not have left her shop even for an hour and had assumed that he had all the arrangements in hand. Be that as it may, Joana’s companion ate his goulash so quickly that he had already finished it when I was only halfway through mine. He accidentally splashed some of the gravy on his white starched shirt—or rather on his white starched shirtfront, for I noticed that he was not wearing a shirt, only a shirtfront over a woolen undervest, I recalled in the wing chair. This starched shirtfront spotted with gravy more or less confirms my impression that Joana’s companion was completely down and out, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. Having finished his goulash he waited impatiently for us to finish ours, but neither of us could eat any faster. In the end I left nearly half of mine, but the woman from the general store managed to force down the rest of hers. If there’s nobody around to pay the expenses, said Joana’s companion, they simply put the body in a plastic bag. And then he said that there had been a frightful stench in the mortuary chapel. Looking out of the window of the inn, I saw several cars go past with people I knew in them; they had clearly come to Kilb for the funeral and were making for the cemetery. What a good thing I’ve brought my English umbrella with me, I thought, when it began to rain. The street outside grew dark, and the inn parlor even darker. Jeannie Billroth, the writer, walked past with her retinue, all of them young people under twenty. It was actually in the high-rise that I last saw Joana, I now recalled saying to myself i
n the Iron Hand; her face was bloated and her legs swollen. She spoke in what anybody would have described as a drunken voice. Over the bed hung one of her husband’s tapestries, thick with dust, a reminder of the fact that she had once been happy with this man. The apartment was full of dirty laundry and stank abominably. The tape recorder by the bed, where I could see she spent virtually the whole day, was out of order. On the floor were dozens of empty white wine bottles, some standing, some knocked over. I wanted to hear a particular tape we had made four or five years before this surprise visit of mine, a tape of a sketch in which I had played a king and Joana a princess, but the tape was nowhere to be found. Even if we had found it there would have been no point, as the tape recorder was broken. Naturally you were a naked princess, I said to Joana as she lay in bed. And you were a naked king, she replied. She tried to laugh, but could not. There was nothing touching about this last visit of mine, nothing sentimental, I thought, sitting in the wing chair—I found it simply nauseating. There were signs of a companion about the apartment—a pack of cigarettes here, an old tie there, a dirty sock, and so on. She told me several times that I had let her down. She could hardly sit up in bed; she tried several times, but each time she fell back. You let me down, you let me down, she kept on saying. For the last few years, she said, she had lived by selling off the tapestries her husband had left behind. She had not heard from Fritz. And she had not heard from the others either—she meant the artistic crowd—she had heard nothing from any of them. She asked me to go down to Dittrich’s and get two two-liter bottles of white wine. Go on! she said, just as she always had, Go on! Go on! She ordered me down to the liquor store, and I obeyed, just as I had done twenty or twenty-five years before. When I got back I put the two bottles by the bed and took my leave. There would have been no point in having any further conversation with her, I told myself as I sat in the wing chair. At the time I thought she was finished, yet she went on living for several years, and that was what amazed me most. I can truthfully say that until I learned of her death I had assumed that she must have been dead for years. Not having seen her or heard from her for so many years, I had simply forgotten about her, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. The truth is that at times we are so close to certain people that we believe there is a lifelong bond between us, and then suddenly they vanish from our memory overnight, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. It’s the way with actors, I told myself, sitting in the Auersbergers’ wing chair, that they don’t dine much before midnight, and those who keep company with actors have to pay for this dreadful habit of theirs. If we go to a restaurant with actors the soup is never served until half past eleven at the earliest, and the coffee stage isn’t reached until about half past one. The Wild Duck is a relatively short play, I told myself, but then it takes at least half an hour to get from the Burgtheater to the Gentzgasse, and after the performance the actors have to take their curtain calls—and since The Wild Duck is such a great success, there’ll have been fairly prolonged applause—so it’ll be at least half an hour before the actors have taken off their makeup. So if the performance finished at ten thirty it’ll take the actor, who after all is the person for whom this artistic dinner is being given, at least until twelve thirty to get to the Gentzgasse. The Auersbergers invited their guests for half past ten—that’s monstrous, I told myself as I sat in the wing chair: they must have known that The Wild Duck went on till ten thirty and that consequently their Ekdal couldn’t be in the Gentzgasse before half past twelve. If I’d thought carefully about when this artistic dinner was actually going to start, I certainly wouldn’t have come, I thought. I go to the Graben to look for a tie, which naturally I don’t find, I thought, and at the most inauspicious moment I run into the Auersbergers. It’s as though time had stood still, I thought: all the guests at this artistic dinner are people who were their closest and most intimate friends thirty years ago, back in the fifties. Clearly none of these friends had ever severed their relations with the Auersbergers; throughout the twenty or thirty years in which I had had no contact with the Auersbergers, all these people had kept up with them, as they say. I suddenly felt like a deserter, a traitor. It’s as though I’d betrayed the Auersbergers and everything I associate with them, I thought, and the same thought must have occurred to the Auersbergers and their guests too. But that did not worry me—quite the contrary, for even now, sitting in their wing chair in their apartment, I found the Auersbergers utterly repugnant, and their guests equally so; indeed I hated all of them, because they were in every way the exact opposite of myself. And now, as I tried to sit it out in the Auersbergers’ apartment, anesthetized by a few glasses of champagne, I felt that my dislike of them had in fact always amounted to hatred, hatred of everything to do with them. We may be on terms of the most intimate friendship with people and believe that our friendship will last all our lives, and then one day we think we’ve been let down by these people whom we’ve always respected, admired, even loved more than all others, and consequently we hate and despise them and want nothing more to do with them, I thought as I sat in the wing chair; not wanting to spend the rest of our lives pursuing them with our hatred as we previously pursued them with our love and affection, we quite simply erase them from our memories. In fact I succeeded in evading the Auersbergers for more than two decades and avoiding any risk of meeting them, having devised a deliberate strategy for avoiding any further contact with these monsters, as I could not help calling them privately, and so the fact that I had evaded them for over twenty years was in no way fortuitous, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Joana’s suicide alone is to blame for the fact that, in spite of everything, I quite suddenly ran into them in the Graben. Their abrupt invitation to their dinner in honor of the Wild Duck artist and my equally abrupt acceptance were a classic illustration of the irrational way one reacts under stress. After all, even though I’d accepted the invitation, I didn’t have to act upon it, especially as I’ve never been punctilious about keeping my promises to visit people, I thought. In fact during the whole of the interval between being invited to this artistic dinner and the dinner itself I had kept on wondering whether I would really go to it. At one moment I thought I would, at another I thought I wouldn’t; now I told myself I’d go, now I told myself I wouldn’t go. I’ll go, I won’t go—this word game went on in my head day after day, almost driving me insane, and even this evening, shortly before I finally set off for the Gentzgasse, I still wasn’t sure whether I would go to the Gentzgasse. Only a few minutes before I finally decided to go I said to myself, Since you’ve just seen all over again, at the funeral in Kilb, that the Auersbergers are as repulsive as ever, you naturally won’t go. The Auersbergers are repulsive people; it was they who betrayed you, not you who betrayed them, I kept thinking as I tried to freshen up in the bathroom, running ice-cold water over my wrists and at one stage trying to cool my face by holding it under the tap. Over the past twenty years they’ve run you down and denigrated you wherever they could, perverting the truth about everything connected with you and taking every opportunity to assassinate your character, I thought; they’ve told stories about you that aren’t true, they’ve spread lies about you, vicious lies, more and more lies, hundreds and thousands of lies in the last twenty years, telling everybody that it was you who exploited them at Maria Zaal, not they who exploited you, that it was you who behaved outrageously, not they, that it was you who defamed them, not they who defamed you, that you were the traitor, and so on. I took into account all the reasons for not visiting them; I could find none in favor of doing so after being out of contact for twenty years, yet finally, despite my repugnance, despite the immense hatred I bore them, I made up my mind that I would visit them, and so I slipped on my coat and set out for the Gentzgasse. I’ve come to the Gentzgasse, I told myself, sitting in the wing chair, even though it’s the last thing I wanted to do. Everything was against my coming to the Gentzgasse, everything was against such a ludicrous artistic dinner, yet now I’m here. On the way to the Gent
zgasse I kept saying to myself, I’m against this visit, I’m against the Auersbergers, I’m against all the people who are going to be there, I hate them, I hate all of them. And yet I kept on walking and finally rang the bell of their apartment. Everything was against my making an appearance in the Gentzgasse and yet I’ve made it, I said to myself as I sat in the wing chair. And again it occurred to me that I would have done better to read my Gogol and my Pascal and my Montaigne, or to play Schönberg or Satie, or just to take a walk through the streets of Vienna. And in fact the Auersbergers were even more surprised at my appearing in the Gentzgasse than I was myself, I thought. I could tell this from the way Auersberger’s wife received me, and even more clearly from the way Auersberger himself received me. You shouldn’t have come to the Gentzgasse, I told myself the moment I found myself facing her. It’s an act of insanity, I told myself as I held out my hand to him. He didn’t shake it—whether this was because he was drunk or because he was being abominably rude I can’t say, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. They issued their invitation in the Graben in the belief that I wouldn’t come under any circumstances, I thought, sitting in the wing chair; perhaps they themselves didn’t really know why they invited me to their dinner, immediately referring to it as an artistic dinner—which was a fatal mistake, I thought, as it made them seem ridiculous. But the Auersbergers could have refrained from speaking to me in the Graben, I thought; they could have ignored me, as they had done for decades, just as I had ignored them for decades, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Joana’s to blame for this invitation, I thought, she’s the cause of my irrational behavior, the dead woman has this distasteful contretemps on her conscience. Yet at the same time I thought how nonsensical such an idea was, but it kept coming back—again and again I had this nonsensical notion that the dead Joana was to blame for that irrational reaction in the Graben, which finally led to my coming to the Gentzgasse, against my natural inclinations, to take part in this artistic dinner. It was because of Joana’s death that as soon as the Auersbergers saw me in the Graben they canceled the past twenty years, during which we had had absolutely no contact with one another, and issued their invitation, and for the selfsame reason I accepted it. And then of course they added that they had invited the Burgtheater actor, who was enjoying such a triumph in The Wild Duck, as Auersberger’s wife put it, and I said I would come. Never in the last ten or fifteen years have I accepted an invitation to a dinner at which an actor was to be one of the guests, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, never have I gone anywhere where an actor was going to be present, and then suddenly I’m told that an actor is coming to dinner—an actor from the Burgtheater at that, and what’s more to a dinner party at the Auersbergers’ apartment in the Gentzgasse—and I go along. There was no point now in clapping my hand to my forehead. Actually I’m doing nothing to hide the revulsion I feel for all these people, and for the Auersbergers themselves, I told myself as I sat in the wing chair; on the contrary they can all sense that I loathe and detest them. They can’t just see that I hate them—they can hear it too. Conversely I had the impression that all these people were hostile to me; from what I saw of them and in everything I heard them say, I sensed their aversion, even their hatred. The Auersbergers hated me; they realized that I was the blemish they had wished on their dinner party by being so thoughtless as to invite me; they were dreading the moment when the actor would enter the apartment and they would ask us all to take our places at table and begin the meal. They saw that I was the observer, the repulsive person who had made himself comfortable in the wing chair and was playing his disgusting observation game in the semidarkness of the anteroom, more or less taking the guests apart, as they say. They had always found it offensive that I should seize every opportunity of quite unscrupulously taking them apart, but in mitigation, I told myself as I sat in the wing chair, I could always plead that I took myself apart much more often than anybody else, never sparing myself, always dissecting myself into all my component parts, as they would say, with equal nonchalance, equal viciousness, and equal ruthlessness. In the end there was always much less left of me than there was of them, I told myself. I had one consolation: I was not the only one to curse the fact that I had come to the Gentzgasse, that I had been guilty of such imbecility and weakness of character—the Auersbergers too were cursing themselves for inviting me. But I was there, and nothing could be done about it. Thirty years ago I used to share their apartment with them, going in and out of it as though it were my own home, I thought as I sat in the wing chair observing what was happening in the music room, which was so brightly lit that nothing could escape me, while I remained in the dark all the time, occupying what was without doubt the most favorable position I could possibly occupy in this disagreeable situation. I had known all the guests at this artistic dinner, as I had known the Auersbergers themselves, virtually for decades, except for the young people; among these were two young writers, but they did not interest me: I did not know them and so had no reason whatever to concern myself with them, except to observe them. I did not feel the slightest urge to go over and talk to them, to challenge them to a conversation or an argument. I was probably too tired, for I had been completely exhausted by the strain of the funeral, by what I had gone through in Kilb for Joana’s sake, I thought, above all the dreadful scenes after the funeral, which were so incredible that I shall only gradually be able to take them in; I still did not have the necessary mental clarity to comprehend them, and I thought I would need a thorough sleep before I could even begin. Sitting in the wing chair I was already starting to think that when I got home I would go straight to bed and not get up for the whole of the following day and the following night, perhaps even the next day and the next night too—so exhausted, so worn out did I feel as I sat in the wing chair. We imagine we are twenty and act accordingly, yet in fact we are over fifty and completely exhausted, I thought; we treat ourselves like twenty-year-olds and ruin ourselves, and we treat everybody else as though we were all still twenty, even though we’re fifty and can’t stand the pace any longer; we forget that we have a medical condition, more than one in fact, a number of medical conditions, a number of so-called fatal diseases, but we ignore them for as long as we can and don’t take them seriously, though they’re there all the time and ultimately kill us. We treat ourselves as though we still had the strength we had thirty years ago, whereas in fact we don’t have a fraction of our former strength, not even a fraction, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Thirty years ago I would think nothing of staying up for two or three nights on end, drinking virtually non-stop, not caring what I drank, and performing like an entertainment machine, playing the fool for several nights—round the clock, as they say—for all sorts of people, all of them friends, without doing myself the slightest harm. For years, as it now seems, I never got home before three or four in the morning; I would go to bed with the dawn chorus, yet it didn’t do me the slightest harm. For years I would turn up at the Apostelkeller or some other dive in the city around eleven in the evening and not leave before three or four in the morning, having used up every possible drop of energy, I may say, with the utmost ruthlessness, though it was a ruthlessness which at that time was second nature to me and, as it now seems, did me no harm at all. And I spent countless nights talking and drinking with Joana, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. I had no money or possessions of any kind, yet the truth is that for years I whiled away the nights talking, drinking and dancing with Joana and her husband, with Jeannie Billroth, and above all with the Auersbergers. In those days I had all the energy a young man could possibly have, and I had no scruples about letting myself be supported by anyone better off than myself, I recalled in the wing chair. I never had a penny in my pocket, yet I could afford whatever I wanted, I thought, sitting in the wing chair and observing the guests in the music room. And for years I would go out every day to the Simmeringer Hauptstrasse in the late afternoon to spend the night with Joana, calling at Dittrich’s on the way to pick up t
he wine, and then return in the early morning, either catching the No. 71 or walking back to Währing along the Simmeringer Hauptstrasse, down the Rennweg, and across the Schwarzenbergerplatz. In those days, I recalled, horse-drawn carts could still be seen parked at night in front of the dairies, and it was still possible to walk down the middle of the Rennweg, cut across the Schwarzenbergerplatz, and walk along the deserted Ring without being afraid of being run over. I seldom met another soul, and if I did it was sure to be one of my own kind—another late-night reveler—and it was a rarity to see a car cruising through the streets at that hour. Never in my life have I sung so many Italian arias as I did in those days as I walked from the Simmeringer Hauptstrasse to the Rennweg, then across the Schwarzenbergerplatz and back to Währing, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. At that time I had the strength to walk and sing; now I’m not even strong enough to walk and talk—that’s the difference. Thirty years ago I thought nothing of a ten-mile walk home at night, I recalled in the wing chair, singing all the way in my youthful enthusiasm for Mozart and Verdi and giving vent to my intoxication. It’s thirty years, I thought, since I made operatic history in this way—thirty years. The truth is, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, that my life would have taken a different course had it not been for Joana; perhaps I’d have pursued a diametrically opposed course had I not met Auersberger. For my encounter with Auersberger meant essentially a return to things artistic, on which I had turned my back completely—and definitively, as I then believed—after leaving the Mozarteum. At that time, after passing out of the Mozarteum, I suddenly wanted nothing more to do with the supposedly artistic, having opted firmly for the opposite of what I would call the artistic, but then my meeting with Auersberger, I recalled in the wing chair, caused me once more to do a complete about-turn. And then I met Joana, I recalled, who was the quintessence of everything artistic. It was for the artistic, not for art, that I opted thirty-five years ago—only the artistic, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, though I had no idea what that was. I opted for the artistic, though I didn’t know what form it would take. I quite simply opted for Auersberger, for Auersberger as he was then, thirty-five or thirty-four years ago, and as he still was thirty-three years ago—for the artistic Auersberger. And for Joana, the quintessentially artistic Joana. And for Vienna. And for the artistic world, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. I owe it to Auersberger that I executed an about-turn and returned to the artistic world, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, and above all I owe it to Joana—to everything that was connected with Auersberger and Joana thirty-five years ago, and was still connected with them thirty-two years ago—that’s the truth, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Several times I repeated to myself the words the artistic world and the artistic life. I actually spoke them out loud, in such a way that people in the music room were bound to hear them—as indeed they did, for all their heads suddenly turned in my direction, from the music room to the anteroom—though they could not actually see me—on hearing me repeating the words the artistic life and the artistic world. I recalled what the notions artistic world and artistic life had meant to me then, and still meant to me today—more or less everything, I now thought, sitting in the wing chair, and I thought how tasteless it was for the Auersbergers to call this dinner of theirs—or rather this supper—an artistic dinner. How low they’ve sunk, I thought as I sat in the wing chair—these people who as far as I can see have been artistically, intellectually and spiritually bankrupt for decades. But to all these people in the music room, hearing me utter the words artistic world and artistic life, it was of course as though I had said artistic dinner just as the Auersbergers might have done, and apart from being so audible they struck nobody as in any way unusual—nobody realized what they meant to me. At one time, of course, all these people had actually been artists, or at least possessed artistic talents, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, but now they were just so much artistic riffraff, having about as much to do with art and the artistic as this dinner party of the Auersbergers’. All these people, who were once real artists, or at least in some way artistic, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, are now nothing but shams, husks of their former selves: I have only to listen to what they say, I have only to look at them, I have only to come into contact with their products, to feel exactly the same way about them as I feel about this supper party, this tasteless artistic dinner. To think what has happened to all these people over the past thirty years, I thought, to think what they’ve made of themselves in these thirty years! And what I’ve made of myself in these thirty years! It’s unrelievedly depressing to see what they’ve made of themselves, what I’ve made of myself. All these people have contrived to turn conditions and circumstances that were once happy into something utterly depressing, I thought, sitting in the wing chair; they’ve managed to make everything depressing, to transform all the happiness they once had into utter depression, just as I have. For there’s no doubt that thirty or even twenty years ago all these people were happy, but now they’re unutterably depressing, every bit as depressing and unhappy as I am myself, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. They’ve transformed sheer happiness into sheer misery, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, unalloyed hope into unrelieved hopelessness. For what I saw when I looked into the music room was a scene of unmitigated hopelessness, both human and artistic, I thought, sitting in the wing chair—that’s the truth. All these people had come to Vienna in the fifties, thirty years earlier, some of them forty years earlier, hoping they would go far, as they say, but the farthest they actually went in Vienna was to become tolerably successful provincial artists, and the question is whether they would have gone any farther in any other so-called big city—they probably wouldn’t have gone very far anywhere, I thought. But when I reflect that they’ve got nowhere in Vienna, nowhere at all, I thought, I also realize that they’re unaware of this, for they don’t act as though they were aware of having got nowhere: on the contrary they behave as though they’d gone far in Vienna, as though every one of them had become something worthwhile; they think that all the hopes they placed in Vienna have been fulfilled, I thought, or at least most of the time they believe they’ve gone far—most of the time they believe fervently that they’ve become something worthwhile, although from my point of view they haven’t become anything. Because they’ve made a name for themselves, won a lot of prizes, published a lot of books, and sold their pictures to a lot of museums, because they’ve had their books issued by the best publishing houses and their pictures hung in the best museums, because they’ve been awarded every possible prize that this appalling state has to offer and had every possible decoration pinned to their breasts, they believe they’ve become something, though in fact they’ve become nothing, I thought. They’re all what are termed well-known artists, celebrated artists, who sit as senators in the so-called Art Senate; they call themselves professors and have chairs at our academies; they are invited by this or that college or university to speak at this or that symposium; they travel to Brussels or Paris or Rome, to the United States and Japan and the Soviet Union and China, where sooner or later they’re invited to give lectures about themselves and open exhibitions of their pictures, and yet as I see it they haven’t become anything. They’ve all quite simply failed to achieve the highest, and as I see it only the highest can bring real satisfaction, I thought. Auersberger’s compositions don’t go unperformed, I thought, sitting in the wing chair; Auersberger, the successor of Webern, hasn’t failed to gain recognition, I thought. On the contrary, not a moment passes without something of his being sung, without one of his compositions being performed by brass, woodwind, strings or percussion (he makes sure of that!)—now in Basel, now in Zürich, now in London, now in Klagenfurt—here a duet, there a trio, here a four-minute chorus, there a twelve-minute opera, here a three-minute cantata, there a one-second opera, a one-minute song, a two-minute or four-minute aria; sometimes he engages English performers, sometimes French or Italian; sometimes his work i
s performed by a Polish or Portuguese violinist, sometimes by a Chilean or Italian lady on the clarinet. Hardly has he arrived in one town than he’s thinking about the next, our restless successor of Webern, it seems, our mincing, globe-trotting imitator of Webern and Grafen, our snobbish, musical dandy from the Styrian sticks. Just as Bruckner is unendurably monumental, so Webern is unendurably meager, yet the meagerness of Anton Webern is as nothing compared with the meagerness of Auersberger, whom I am bound to describe as the almost noteless composer, just as the mindless literary experts have dubbed Paul Celan the almost wordless poet. This Styrian imitator doesn’t go unperformed, but thirty years ago, in the mid-fifties, he was already stuck in the Webern tradition; he’s never written so much as three notes without making some composition or other out of them. What is missing in Auersberger’s compositions, it seems to me, is Auersberger himself; his aphoristic music (which was how I described his derivative compositions in the fifties!) is nothing but an unendurable copy of Webern, who was himself, as I now realize, not the genius he was taken to be, but only a sudden—if brilliant—access of debility in the history of music. In fact I feel heartily ashamed of myself as I sit in the Auersbergers’ wing chair and reflect that Auersberger was never a genius, even though back in the fifties I was utterly convinced that he was: he was simply a pathetic little bourgeois with a certain talent, who gambled away his talent in his first few weeks in Vienna. Vienna is a terrible machine for the destruction of genius, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, an appalling recycling plant for the demolition of talent. All these people whom I was now observing through their sickening cigarette smoke came to Vienna thirty or thirty-five years ago, hoping to go far, only to have whatever genius or talent they possessed annihilated and killed off by the city, which kills off all the hundreds and thousands of geniuses or talents that are born in Austria every year. They may think they’ve gone far, but in reality they haven’t gone anywhere, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, and the reason is that they were content to stay in Vienna: they didn’t leave at the decisive moment and go abroad, like all those who did achieve something; those who stayed behind in Vienna became nonentities, whereas I can say without hesitation that all those who went abroad made something of themselves. Because they were satisfied with Vienna, they ended up as nonentities, unlike those who left Vienna at the decisive moment and went abroad, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. I will not speculate about what might have become of all these people in the music room, all these people who were waiting around for the artist to make his entrance and for the artistic dinner to begin, if they had left Vienna at the crucial moment in their lives. It took no more than a minor success, a favorable press review of her first novel, to make Jeannie Billroth stay in Vienna, no more than the sale of a couple of pictures to national museums to make Rehmden the painter stay in Vienna, no more than a few fulsome notices in the Kurier or the Presse to persuade some promising actress to stay in Vienna. The music room is full of people who stayed on in Vienna, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. And at the cemetery in Kilb those who followed Joana’s coffin were almost exclusively people who had stayed on in Vienna, almost suffocating in the comfort of their petit bourgeois world. What a depressing effect the funeral at Kilb had on me, for this reason more than any other! I thought, watching these people from the wing chair. What depressed me was not so much the fact that Joana was being buried as that the only people who followed her coffin were artistic corpses, failures, Viennese failures, the living dead of the artistic world—writers, painters, dancers and hangers-on, artistic cadavers not yet quite dead, who looked utterly grotesque in the pelting rain. The sight was not so much sad as unappetizing, I thought. All through the ceremony I was obsessed by the spectacle of these repellent artistic nonentities trudging behind the coffin through the cemetery mud in their distasteful attitudes of mourning, I told myself as I sat in the wing chair. It was not so much the funeral that aroused my indignation as the demeanor of the mourners who had turned up from Vienna in their flashy cars. I became so agitated that I had to take several heart tablets, yet my agitation was brought on not by the dead Joana, but by the behavior of these arty people, these artistic shams, I thought, and it occurred to me that my own behavior at Kilb had probably been equally distasteful. The very fact that I had put on a black suit was distasteful, I now told myself; so was the way I had eaten my goulash in the Iron Hand and the way I had talked to Joana’s companion, as though I were the only person who had really been close to Joana, the only one who had any claim on her. The more I thought about the funeral, the more I became aware of the distasteful aspects of my own behavior: no matter what circumstances came to mind, they were all equally distasteful. Finding the others distasteful, I naturally could not help finding myself distasteful too, I thought, and the more I thought about everything connected with the funeral, the more reprehensible my own conduct seemed to me. It had been distasteful to go to Kilb alone, despite the fact that several people had offered to drive me there, I thought, and it had been distasteful to talk to the woman from the general store, Joana’s friend, as though I had been closest to her; it had been inconsiderate to monopolize her company, leaving her no time to attend to the other people who had come to the funeral, I thought. I had made myself the star of the funeral, I thought, and I now saw how monstrous this had been. I had downgraded Joana’s companion and all the others at the funeral and at the same time upgraded myself—and that was contemptible. On the other hand I had believed at the time that I was behaving properly. During the funeral I had been unaware of incurring any guilt: only now, sitting in the wing chair, did I develop what might be called a sense of guilt with regard to my conduct at Kilb. The fact that Joana had killed herself did not make me feel any sadder in Kilb, I thought, sitting in the wing chair: it simply aroused my indignation against her friends, though I could not explain to myself why this should be. The truth is that I was not in the least shocked to get the telephone call from the owner of the general store, informing me that Joana had committed suicide; I pretended to be shocked, I now reflected, but in fact I wasn’t—I was curious, but not shocked. I only feigned shock; I was merely curious and immediately wanted her to tell me everything about Joana’s suicide. I displayed the most outrageous curiosity, and it was only now, sitting in the wing chair, that I felt shocked by this—by the fact that I had not been sad, but merely curious, and that I had forced more information out of the woman than she was willing to impart, for during our telephone conversation she showed a decency that was entirely lacking in me. Naturally Joana had become such a stranger to me and we had been out of touch for so many years, that the call from the woman at the general store, as I have said, could not possibly have come as a shock, nor could it cause me any immediate sadness; it produced merely curiosity, and this curiosity forced her to tell me everything about Joana’s suicide there and then. I was interested not in the fact of her suicide, but in the circumstances. I was sad. I was really saddened, and it was in this mood of sadness that I walked into town—to the Graben, the Kärntnerstrasse and the Kohlmarkt, then to the Bräunerhof in the Spiegelgasse, where I glanced through the Corriere, Le Monde, the Zürcher Zeitung and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as I had been in the habit of doing for years. Then, sickened by the newspapers, I went back to the Graben to buy myself a tie, but instead of buying a tie I ran into the Auersbergers, to be told once again about Joana’s suicide. By now I knew much more about it than they did, yet I pretended to know nothing. I put on such an act of bewilderment that the couple must have felt I was shocked by Joana’s suicide, whereas in fact I was only feigning shock. I had actually felt saddened by Joana’s suicide as I walked back and forth in the city, and then, quite suddenly and quite shamelessly, I pretended to the Auersbergers that I was shocked by it. And just as my shock was feigned, so too was my acceptance of the invitation to their artistic dinner, because the whole of my conduct toward the Auersbergers during our meeting in the Graben was pure dissembling. Sittin
g in the wing chair, I reflected that I had pretended to be shocked by Joana’s suicide and pretended to accept the Auersbergers’ invitation to their artistic dinner. When I accepted it I was only pretending, I now thought, yet in spite of this I had acted upon it. The idea is nothing short of grotesque, I thought, yet at the same time it amused me. Actually I’ve always dissembled with the Auersbergers, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, and here I am again, sitting in their wing chair and dissembling once more: I’m not really here in their apartment in the Gentzgasse, I’m only pretending to be in the Gentzgasse, only pretending to be in their apartment, I said to myself. I’ve always pretended to them about everything—I’ve pretended to everybody about everything. My whole life has been a pretense, I told myself in the wing chair—the life I live isn’t real, it’s a simulated life, a simulated existence. My whole life, my whole existence has always been simulated—my life has always been pretense, never reality, I told myself. And I pursued this idea to the point at which I finally believed it. I drew a deep breath and said to myself, in such a way that the people in the music room were bound to hear it: You’ve always lived a life of pretense, not a real life—a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real. But I must put an end to this fantasizing lest I go mad, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, and so I took a large gulp of champagne. While I had been drinking champagne all the time, the people in the music room, as I could see, had been content with sherry and in the end simply with water, not wanting to get as recklessly drunk before supper, before the so-called artistic dinner, as Auersberger was already. I was not afraid of drinking too much, and so I went on drinking. But naturally I did not drink so recklessly that I became as drunk as the host. I continued to drink, but confined myself to one mouthful every ten or fifteen minutes—that is the truth. After all I was no longer twenty, but fifty-two—a fact that I never once forgot during this evening in the Gentzgasse. At Kilb all these artistic people had seemed grotesque. Their artistic preoccupations and their artistic activity made them seem somehow unnatural, at least to me: they had an artificial way of walking, an artificial way of talking; everything about them was artificial, whereas the cemetery itself seemed the most natural place in the world. When they bowed their heads they bowed them too low. When they stood up or sat down they did so too soon (or too late); when they started to sing they did so too soon (or too late). When they spoke the responses they spoke them too soon (or too late)—whereas the local people, of whom there was a good turnout, as they say, did everything naturally—they spoke naturally, sang naturally, walked naturally, stood up and sat down naturally, doing nothing too soon or too late or too quickly or too slowly. And whereas the artistic people from Vienna were grotesquely attired for the funeral, the local people were dressed with the utmost propriety, I reflected as I sat in the wing chair. The local people were in tune with the village and its cemetery, while the artistic folk from Vienna clashed with both. The metropolitan note struck by these Viennese mourners is out of keeping with this village cemetery, I had thought as I walked in the long cortege. Every one of these mourners from Vienna is a foreign body in Kilb, I had thought as I followed the coffin, walking between the woman from the general store and Joana’s unhappy companion, who coughed as though he had some lung disease all the way from the church to the cemetery (which must have been over a mile). The possibility that he might have lung disease made me anxious, and whenever he coughed I held my breath for fear of being infected, until suddenly I reflected that I too had lung disease and was probably more infectious than he was, whereupon I began to cough even more than he did, and as soon as I started coughing he stopped, as though realizing that I had lung disease and might infect him, for as soon as I began coughing he turned his face the other way and held a paper tissue to his nose as he walked. The woman from the general store wore a gray waterproof coat, the most sensible garment I saw at the funeral, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. In fact the local people were all sensibly dressed, whereas all the people from Vienna got hopelessly drenched, and those who had come in their ostentatious fur coats, expecting the weather to be cold (though in fact it was fairly warm), seemed grotesque and ludicrous; moreover the rain at once made them look messy, trickling down their fur coats like so much dirty gravy. Their umbrellas were soon blown inside out, and some were broken, by a fierce gust of wind that blew across the graves from the mountains as the cortege reached the cemetery. As always on such occasions, I recalled in the wing chair, the village priest had delivered a totally inept address at the graveside. All the same, times have changed, I remembered thinking as I stood at the graveside: he was at least delivering an address—only ten or twelve years earlier no priest would have delivered an address by a suicide’s grave anywhere in Austria. It was as primitive as all the other graveside addresses I have heard, and the voice of the priest, who seemed to have some kind of throat ailment, was so disagreeable and high-pitched that it hurt my ears to listen to it. Unfortunately, however, his address was also comprehensible and contained all the mendacity and hypocrisy the Catholic Church purveys on such occasions. Toward the end he recalled that he and Joana had both attended the village school and that he liked to remember her as the nice local girl, and referring to her years in Vienna he spoke of the morass of the big city. He had the face of a small town official, not a typical peasant face, but the kind of face we find ourselves looking at whenever we go into a country store and ask for a hammer or a hoe, a pair of rubber boots or a scouring cloth, I thought, sitting in the wing chair—a sly, distrustful face that we dare not look at for more than a few seconds. By attending this funeral, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, this whole artistic contingent from Vienna was subjecting itself to a Catholic ceremonial with which it was no longer familiar (if it ever had been) or had become unfamiliar over the years, as I had; having had no contact with this kind of Catholic ceremonial for decades, if for no other reason, I found it entirely hypocritical. The Viennese mourners pretended to know when to stand up and when not, what to sing, what prayers to say and when, yet like me they were completely at sea. Consequently they prayed and sang mezza voce in a way that nobody could understand, always sitting down and standing up a second later than the local people. This Viennese artistic contingent only mouthed their words, and so the effect they produced was merely theatrical, I thought, and so was the effect I produced—or failed to produce, as the case may be. During the funeral my mind was totally occupied with the contents of Joana’s coffin and what they must look like. Throughout the ceremony my mind was taken up by this one abominable thought. After everything that Joana’s companion had told us in the Iron Hand about his experience in the mortuary chapel, I could not expel this obscene thought from my mind during the whole of the funeral ceremony, however hard I tried, for in all truth I did not wish to think about such a thing—naturally not, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, and it occurred to me that what had prompted these speculations about the contents of the coffin was the complete lack of embarrassment shown by Joana’s companion (whom the woman from the general store always addressed as John, though I did not yet know why) as he gave us his grisly account of his visit to the mortuary chapel and the transfer of Joana’s body. John shouldn’t have returned from the mortuary chapel and told us this story while we were eating our goulash, I thought, sitting in the wing chair; on the other hand I now admired him precisely for his lack of embarrassment and his obvious truthfulness, and I reflected that it would have been impossible for me or any of these artistic folk to give such an unembarrassed account of the transfer of the body. The mention of the plastic bag had made me feel sick, and indeed John did not spare us any details of the proceedings in the mortuary chapel. Only an unartistic person like him would have been capable of giving such a grisly account without feeling embarrassed, yet at the same time without any appearance of indecency, for there seemed to be nothing indecent about what he said, whe
reas it would have seemed indecent had anyone else said it. I reflected that it would have been indecent—indeed it would have been base and contemptible—had I given a similar account of the transfer of the body. John remained silent throughout the funeral, whereas all the others whispered to one another from time to time, I thought. It had seemed strange to all who were present that he should be the first to step up to the edge of the grave, take a handful of earth from the shovel held out to him by the sexton, and throw it onto the coffin lying far below, though probably none of them could have said why it seemed strange; in fact it was entirely logical for him to do so, since Joana’s former husband, the tapestry artist, was not present and there were apparently no surviving relatives. Standing by Joana’s open grave he looked both ugly and pathetic; the people watching him were profoundly disturbed by the sight, and I myself was revolted by it, though privately (without expressing or in any way indicating how I felt) I was prepared to think of him as a good man. He’s a good man, I said to myself, seeing him standing like that beside Joana’s grave; I do not know what prompted this reaction, and it is not important. While we were still at the graveside Auersberger’s wife spoke to me and asked me whether I would like to drive back to Vienna with them, but I immediately refused with a brusqueness which never fails to give offense whenever I resort to it. I simply said No. Afterwards, in the Iron Hand, most of the people from Vienna got together at a long table; I had to sit there too, the Auersbergers having more or less forced me to do so by addressing me in characteristic fashion in front of all the others and inviting me to join them, in such a way that I was unable to refuse. I would much rather have sat at the same table as Joana’s companion, the woman from the general store, and one or two other local people who had been childhood friends of Joana’s. The Auersbergers forced me, by the manner of their invitation, to sit at their table, which was something I had been dreading throughout the funeral: I had no wish to spend even the shortest time with them in Kilb, since I was invited to their artistic dinner that same evening in the Gentzgasse. I pretended to be struck dumb by grief over Joana’s suicide and did not say a word, while the Auersbergers and the others had a goulash like the one I had had before the funeral I ordered myself a plate of sliced sausage and salad with extra onions; I also ate a couple of rolls, something I had never done before—simply out of nervousness. The Auersbergers talked incessantly about their artistic dinner, to which they had invited the actor, the Burgtheater actor, and they kept on saying how much this tragedian (as Auersberger’s wife insisted on calling him) had impressed them in The Wild Duck. Auersberger’s wife kept on wanting to tell us what role the actor had played in The Wild Duck, but she could not remember, until in the end I said Ekdal, whereupon, in a hysterical outburst, she shouted the name Ekdal across the room in a way that embarrassed everyone. She kept on shouting Ekdal, Ekdal, Ekdal, right, Ekdal, until her husband told her to calm down. Auersberger, little paunchy Auersberger, was of course drunk as usual. He had been drunk during the funeral service, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. He’s been drunk almost continuously for as long as I’ve known him—it’s a miracle that he’s still alive; twice a year he goes to Kalksburg for a drying-out cure, I thought, and that’s apparently enough to keep him alive. He had the same bloated face he had had twenty years earlier—hardly any wrinkles, the characteristic gelatinous gray complexion, the same glassy blue eyes as before, I thought. Ekdal, Ekdal, his wife kept screaming, though nobody in the room knew what she was screaming about. Finding her so repellent as she shouted out Ekdal, Ekdal, I became very rude and asked, Which Ekdal? What do you mean—which Ekdal? she asked. To which I replied, Old Ekdal or Young Ekdal? There was a pause, during which everyone stared at her; she saw that I was needling her—in the most despicable fashion, I am bound to admit—and without looking up from her goulash she said, Old Ekdal. At that point she really hated me, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. I could have slapped her face. Then her husband, who by now seemed totally drunk, suddenly pushed his goulash to the middle of the table and shouted toward the kitchen door, This food’s abominable! He shouted these words in a voice of purest upstart viciousness. I had had the same goulash before the funeral and found it quite excellent, and all the others who had ordered goulash were of my opinion, not his. For as long as I have known him Auersberger has always found fault with the food served at any inn or restaurant, even the choicest. At least it was ill-mannered to make such a scene, especially at an excellent establishment like the Iron Hand, which I know to be generally well run, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. For as long as he’s been married to his wife, who provides the financial support, Auersberger has always behaved atrociously in restaurants. Having yelled these words in the direction of the kitchen, he leaned back in his chair and stuck his tongue out at his wife. During the course of their marriage she had become so accustomed to her husband’s tasteless foolery that she was not at all surprised when he stuck his tongue out at her. She merely lowered her head and tried to finish the goulash, for which he had wanted to destroy her appetite. Her manner of eating, while hardly the acme of refinement, was not inelegant, whereas her husband’s had always been simply comic, I suddenly thought, sitting in the wing chair. This parvenu had wanted to acquire aristocratic table manners, but never progressed beyond a grotesquely comic use of his knife and fork. He was always ridiculous at table, I now thought, sitting in the wing chair, just as he was ridiculous in everything he did, and he became more ridiculous as time went on, because he constantly endeavored to do everything in an increasingly refined fashion, to make himself more refined, to apply whatever knowledge he acquired about so-called aristocratic manners in every sphere, and this in time made him seem not only increasingly comic and grotesque, but increasingly repellent, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. After he had hurled his insult in the direction of the kitchen, leaned back in his chair and stuck his tongue out at his wife, a pause intervened. Then he said suddenly, I don’t like Strindberg at all, and looked around at the assembled company. At this point I jumped up and ostentatiously went to sit with John and the woman from the general store, thinking to myself, No, I don’t want to have anything to do with this party. After joining John and the woman from the general store at their table, I heard Auersberger’s wife say, The Wild Duck is by Ibsen. From then on I simply ignored the artists’ table and ordered a glass of beer. I wanted to get more information out of John than he had already vouchsafed, not only about the transfer of the body, but about everything connected with Joana, and the woman from the general store was just as keen as I was to get him to tell us what his life with Joana had really been like. He told us that he had first met her in her apartment in the Simmeringer Hauptstrasse, which she had converted into what she called a movement studio in the mid-sixties. A girl friend of his, who had taken lessons from Joana for some time, took him along with her one day to Joana’s apartment in the Simmeringer Hauptstrasse so that he could see what a good sport Joana was, or, as John put it, what an artistic nature she had, as I recalled, sitting in the wing chair. He had paid a second and then a third visit to Joana’s with his girl friend, and then he had started going alone, without his girl friend, with whom he split up overnight because of Joana. He had not taken lessons from her, he said, but found security with her, and she had found security with him. Basically he had no time for the movement studio, as Joana called it; right from the start he had been convinced that Joana used the movement studio simply as a means to keep herself above water from a personal point of view, as he put it, since there was nothing in it for her from an intellectual or financial point of view. The only people who went there were people with virtually no means, young hopefuls in the acting profession and older theatrical people who at the age of fifty or sixty had not yet given up hope of a career, though naturally they no longer had the slightest prospect of making one. After he had slept with her several times he moved in as her lodger. His real name was Friedrich, but Joana disliked the name, and so from the b
eginning she had called him not Friedrich, but John, and ever since then he had been John to everybody. He came from Schwarzach Sankt Veit, a rail junction I knew well, in the Salzburg province. His father had been a railroad worker among other things. He had gone to school at Sankt Johann, then to a technical college in Salzburg. At the age of twenty-three he had gone to Vienna, and to make ends meet he had worked for a film company in Sievering, where he had got to know his previous girl friend, the one who introduced him to Joana, I recalled in the wing chair. At first he had pretended to Joana that he was interested in her movement lessons, though in fact he did not have the least interest in them, and to prove how great his interest was he had hopped around a few times, as he put it, with his girl friend, but then he had abandoned the pretense, giving Joana to understand at a fairly early stage that he was interested in her and not in her movement lessons. According to John she was not at all put out by this, I recalled in the wing chair. Joana earned no money, and by now more or less all her possessions had been sold. She got no support from her tapestry artist, not having heard from him since he had left her; all this time she had no idea whether or not he was still living in Mexico, or whether he was still with her friend who had gone with him to Mexico (according to John she used to speak of her friend’s being abducted). He therefore took it upon himself to provide for her. She had continued to give lessons for another two years after he moved in with her, but finally, on his orders, she gave up the movement studio, which had brought nothing but unhappiness, vexation and dissension into their lives. Wanting to wean her off drink, he had paid for her to have seven periods of treatment at the Kalksburg Clinic, but all to no avail: no sooner had she returned from Kalksburg than she started drinking again, until in the end she became a complete lush, as he put it. But he did not desert her. He said he had really loved her, I recalled, sitting in the wing chair and looking into the music room; he said he had wanted to care for this unhappy girl, as he described her in the Iron Hand. Joana was always an unhappy girl, he said, as I now recalled, sitting in the wing chair; he repeated these words several times. I did not see it that way, for the Joana I had known was a happy person—at least she was happy in the fifties, I thought, and up to the mid-sixties, at any rate until the time when she was deserted by the tapestry artist. It was only then that unhappiness and misfortune closed in on her, I thought. John, however, had known her only as an unhappy girl whom he wanted to make happy, though he had not succeeded, I thought. He said several times, I wanted to make Joana happy, but I failed. The whole helplessness of his situation was summed up in this sentence, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. He told us that she often went to Kilb, not always with him; she often went back home, only to return to Vienna disillusioned. At first he’d tried to do it by gentleness and then by firmness (these were his own words), I recalled. But finally he realized that Joana could not be saved. On the evening before she killed herself she had said good-bye to him, as she always did when she went to Kilb. It was six in the morning when the woman from the general store had called him. She had told him straight out, without beating about the bush, that Joana had hanged herself, whereas with me she had behaved quite differently, not telling me straight out, but only gradually as I began to press her for details. She told John at once that Joana had killed herself, that she had hanged herself, but she did not tell me at once. I mulled this fact over for some time in the wing chair. She’s more familiar with John than she is with me, I had thought as I sat with them in the Iron Hand, and immediately confided in him. To John she says directly what she thinks, but not to me: she speaks to me in a stilted and roundabout manner, as country people do when talking to people from the city, as so-called uneducated people do when talking to so-called educated people, as people who consider themselves inferior do when talking to their so-called betters. It had not surprised him, John suddenly said, turning to the woman from the general store, with whom he must have had fairly close contacts for some time, I reflected in the wing chair. He had put his winter overcoat on, slung his black bag over his shoulder, and come out to Kilb. What happened after that, he said, had been utterly depressing. If there was one person in Kilb today who truly mourned Joana and was genuinely shattered by her suicide, I thought, it was John, who is not at all as degenerate as I had thought all along. As I thought about this man I suddenly became aware that he had many good qualities and decided that, even though Joana had ultimately killed herself, he had been the saving of her, her refuge, somebody she could believe in, at any rate for seven or eight years, for without such a refuge she would probably have killed herself much earlier, I now reflected in the wing chair. Joana had wanted to achieve something special in Vienna, but according to John she couldn’t break loose from Kilb, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. I cannot remember how she met Fritz, the tapestry artist. When I met her she had been married to him for some years, and I always believed that they were very happily married: at least this was the impression I always had when I visited them in the Sebastiansplatz. At times I actually thought of the apartment in the Sebastiansplatz, this big studio where I could do more or less as I pleased, as my home. Fritz and his wife Joana, née Elfriede, were a focal point of Viennese artistic life, where the so-called dramatic and the so-called plastic arts had entered upon a seemingly ideal marriage, and where all art—or what I then considered to be art—could come together. At this studio in the Sebastiansplatz, in the mid-fifties, I met more or less all the significant Viennese artists and scholars who were well known at the time, though not necessarily famous—as well as all the pseudo-artists and pseudo-scholars—and it was among such people and through contact with them that I came to see myself as a writer in the making, even as a fellow artist. I had lodgings in the Nussdorferstrasse, in the Eighteenth District, where I spent my time sleeping, but it was in the Sebastiansplatz, in the Third District, that I had my temple of art, which I would enter at about five o’clock in the afternoon and not leave until about three in the morning. Fritz’s looms, worked by two or three female assistants, were set up in enormous rooms, eighteen or twenty feet high; it was on these looms that he created his tapestries, which were already much sought after, at least by experts, all over Europe. It was quite by chance, Fritz said simply, that he had become a tapestry artist, having previously been a painter working in oils. He always gave the impression of being a quiet man who did not parade his intelligence and for whom a precise program of work was the be-all and end-all of existence: all the time I knew him he could never be deflected by anything or anybody from his eight-hour working day, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. He smoked a short English pipe, which he never removed from the corner of his mouth, not even when he was talking to you, which he was always reluctant to do when weaving, but always did without losing his cool, as they say. The English pipe remained in his mouth even when it had gone out and was completely cold. His brother was a highly esteemed Viennese architect, who built what are called major residential apartments on the outskirts of the city and whom his brother always referred to as that brilliant urban vandal. Despite having grown up in a well-to-do family with a town house and a more or less princely estate in the wine-growing district of Baden, Fritz was a thoroughly modest man, or so it appeared right up to the time when, as already mentioned, he bolted to Mexico. It was not only artists who gathered in the apartment in the Sebastiansplatz, but so-called important people from every walk of life, whom Joana would seek out and invite to visit them, on the one hand to satisfy her already pathological need for company, and on the other to ensure that her husband’s tapestries became increasingly well-known and increasingly expensive. And so naturally newspaper critics and politicians were always being invited to the Sebastiansplatz; this, it now strikes me, was precisely the kind of social ambience I craved more than anything as a young man in search of wider horizons. In the Sebastiansplatz I found, as it were, an ideal cross-section of Viennese society, which was necessary, indeed indispensable, to the up-and-coming artist, and a
bove all to the up-and-coming writer I fervently believed myself to be, and I can say without hesitation that the Sebastiansplatz suddenly afforded an important foundation for my intellectual development, the course of which was charted, as they say, once and for all in the early fifties. Joana had all the attractiveness that beautiful women from Vienna and its environs can possibly have, and her taste served her purposes ideally, exercising a powerful magnetism over the artistic, intellectual and political society of Vienna. When she received her guests in the Sebastiansplatz, she would wear long dresses of her own design (though not of her own making), now in the Indian style, now in the Egyptian, now in the Spanish, now in the Roman. At all these receptions she displayed a gaiety of temperament which was enhanced by a highly individual intelligence, embodying as it were the artistic spirit of Vienna, and naturally captivated everyone who visited the Sebastiansplatz. Having attended two or three of her receptions, I suddenly became her favorite regular guest, so to speak. In those days no other address in Vienna exercised such a pull over me as the Sebastiansplatz, for I loved the studio, I loved Fritz the tapestry artist, and I loved Joana. Before I went to the Sebastiansplatz I had never seen a studio like this, such a large theater of art; I was fascinated by everything in the Sebastiansplatz, which for many years remained for me the very center of Vienna. Gradually I acquired what I may call a conception of art; I met all the artists, all the geniuses, as well as all those who were set upon becoming artists and geniuses. Observing Joana in the Sebastiansplatz, I was able to see how such a society comports itself, how it develops, how it is attracted, cultivated, nurtured and tamed, and how it can ultimately be abused and exploited. To put it in the simplest terms: in the Sebastiansplatz I studied society—and not only artistic society—and began to get a clear view of how it functioned. It was in the Sebastiansplatz that I first saw what artists were, what they were like, and what made them what they were. I also learned what they were not and never could be as long as they lived. In the Sebastiansplatz I was free to study them as I have never been able to since, with supreme intensity and hence with supreme receptivity, for at that time I was capable of the utmost intensity and receptivity. I may say that it was in the Sebastiansplatz that I first got to know human beings; I already knew them to some extent, better than many others in my position, but it was only in the Sebastiansplatz that I found out what human beings were really like, human beings of every kind, by making a conscious study of them. It was in the Sebastiansplatz that I began to evolve a method of watching and observing people which was to become my own personal art, an art which I was to practice for the rest of my life. It was in the Sebastiansplatz that I learned not only to admire human beings and human society, but also to despise them, I thought, to find them at once attractive and repellent. It was in the Sebastiansplatz that I first became clearly aware of the power and the impotence of artists, and of human beings in general; it was as though I was able at last to disperse the impenetrable fog that had hitherto blocked my view of so-called artistic society. Never before or since have I seen so many artists almost every day and every night as I did in the Sebastiansplatz, and all these artists—most of whom, it occurs to me, were probably what I would now call non-artists, and probably remained such—flitted in and out of the apartment in the Sebastiansplatz, while I stayed there nearly all the time, admiring Fritz as he sat dedicatedly working at his tapestries, and loving Joana as she dreamed of her future fame in the biggest of all Vienna’s studios. Today, if I see some so-called celebrity mentioned in the newspapers, it is almost certain to be somebody I met in the Sebastiansplatz. Joana’s fellow students who had studied and qualified with her at the Reinhardt Seminar had long since disappeared in the many theatrical cesspits that existed in Vienna in those days. Meanwhile Elfriede Slukal, in what she believed to be a moment of clairvoyance, decided to transform herself into Joana and become the wife of Fritz the tapestry artist. While her former colleagues had for years been forced into the nerve-racking business of pandering to a sick public with an insatiable appetite for entertainment, prostituting themselves to a brand of literature that can be described only as pathetic, it is possible that Joana had already given up her dreams of having her own career and was concentrating solely on furthering that of her tapestry artist. She staked her whole talent—not only an artistic talent, but her phenomenal social talent—on her devoted Fritz, and in this she was successful right from the start. For without Joana, Fritz would never have become the international tapestry artist he now is; he would certainly not have won the big prize in São Paulo for his Associative Mountain Range, and without Joana he would not be the famous professor who from time to time hits the headlines, as they say, in today’s newspapers and magazines. Joana sacrificed herself for Fritz, it seems to me, and never recovered from her sacrifice; this was probably the cause of the lifelong despair she had to endure, without ever showing it, a despair which I think probably broke her, as they say, though not until eight or nine years after the collapse of her marriage, when she tried to find consolation with John, the commercial traveler. She made of Fritz what she had wanted to make of herself—a respected, celebrated and finally world-famous artistic personality. She forced him to the top because she could not force herself to the top; of the two of them it was Fritz, not she, who was actually cut out for world fame. From the moment she realized that she was not cut out for a career, let alone for an international career and international fame, she forced Fritz into a career, into an international career, into the straitjacket of an international career, as it now strikes me, but this brought her only temporary, not permanent, satisfaction. Without Joana, it seems to me, Fritz would have remained a charming pipe-smoking painter and carpet weaver, catering to middle-class demands, an affable fellow who was content with his work, his pipe and a glass of wine before he went to bed, either alone or in company. Joana more or less jolted him out of his mediocrity, first causing the artistic sap to rise and then bringing him into full bloom. But in the long run Joana could not be satisfied by Fritz’s tapestries, which in due course hung in all the important museums and on the walls of executive suites in all the big industrial concerns, insurance companies and banks: the more well-known, the more famous his name and his art became, the more dejected she, the author of his success, was bound to be. When Fritz was at the zenith of his fame, Joana herself had naturally reached the nadir of dejection, but by now she could no longer break off her work, the building up and perfecting of her Fritz, at this high point in his career; Fritz was her one work of art, at which outwardly she continued to labor, progressively increasing its dimensions, though in her heart of hearts, as they say, she had long since come to hate it. It was, I think, this process of being perpetually forced to go on adding to the stature of her work of art and in doing so to push herself down to ever greater depths, that brought about her ruin. Joana was finally crushed, it seems to me, by the immense weight of the work that she had created and brought more or less to completion—by her beloved Fritz. What she had been unable to achieve in herself, namely the birth of a great artist, a so-called major artist, she achieved in the person of Fritz, and when the work had become reality and she saw what she had done, what she had on her conscience, it literally frightened her to death. If we cannot become what we want to become, we resort to another person—inevitably the person closest to us—and make of him what we have been unable to make of ourselves, Joana had probably thought, and so, I think, she fashioned Fritz into this colossal work of art which finally crushed and destroyed her. No one who knew Fritz would have thought it possible for him to become the world-famous artist he did become, or for his work to achieve the international acclaim it did achieve, for it was obvious to all that everything about him was quite incompatible with fame of such magnitude. Yet despite what everyone thought he did become a world-famous figure, thanks, I believe, to Joana. It was she, I believe, who transformed the honest unpretentious Fritz into the celebrated man of the world he is today, because she was able
, through her absolute dedication, to invest in him everything she was forced to deny herself, a boundless and unquenchable thirst for fame. I have no hesitation in saying that Fritz is Joana’s handiwork; I will go further and say that Fritz’s art, the works he created, all the tapestries that now hang in famous museums throughout the world, are really Joana’s, just as everything he is today derives from Joana, is Joana. But obviously nobody takes an idea like this seriously, even though of course such ideas, which are not taken seriously, are actually the only serious ideas and always will be. It is only in order to survive, it seems to me, that we have such serious ideas which are not taken seriously. What am I doing in this company, with which I have had no contact and have wanted no contact for twenty years, people who have gone their own way just as I have gone mine? I asked myself, sitting in the wing chair. What am I doing in the Gentzgasse? And I told myself that I had momentarily yielded to sentimentality in the Graben and that I should never have yielded to such disgraceful sentimentality. To think that I weakened for a moment in the Graben and made myself cheap by accepting an invitation from the Auersbergers, I said to myself, sitting in the wing chair, people whom I’ve despised and detested for so many years! For no more than a moment we become disgustingly sentimental, I told myself in the wing chair, and commit the crime of stupidity, going somewhere we ought never to go and even visiting people we despise and detest, I thought, sitting in the wing chair: I’ve actually come to the Gentzgasse, and this is without doubt not just an act of folly, but conduct of the most contemptible kind. We become weak and walk into the trap, into the social trap, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, for to me this apartment in the Gentzgasse is nothing but a social trap, and I’ve just walked into it. For there can be no doubt that the Auersbergers feel nothing but hatred for me, and so do all the other members of the party in the by now foul-smelling music room, as they await the arrival of the actor from the Burgtheater, who is enjoying such a great success in The Wild Duck, as Auersberger’s wife never tires of repeating, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. They’ve been waiting for him longer than they’d ever have waited for me, I thought. The actor’s bound to make their evening, I thought—this self-important theatrical blockhead! For the sake of this disagreeable individual they’ve let themselves be kept waiting over two hours for a supper which the hostess insists on calling an artistic dinner, probably because that’s what she’s always called her dinners, though I remember them only too clearly as revolting dinners, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Whether at Maria Zaal or in the Gentzgasse, dinners at the Auersbergers’ were always more or less revolting; they always wanted to give the grandest dinners and always convinced themselves that they succeeded, but in reality their dinners were always revolting and ridiculous, utterly ludicrous and unappetizing, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. They were always meant to be the acme of refinement, but they always turned out to be the acme of tastelessness—they were intended to be the most splendid occasions, but they unfailingly turned out to be unmitigated disasters, I recalled in the wing chair. The food was supposed to be superb, yet what was dished up was always inadequate, I thought; whenever they gave a supper party they planned to serve the choicest food, but time and again what eventually arrived on the table fell so far short of what they had planned as to be positively embarrassing. Basically their suppers never worked out: the food was never particularly good, though it was often quite good, and the wine was never particularly good, or even quite good: it was uniformly bad—of poor quality and served either too warm or too cold, and it was always either too sweet or too dry, I recalled in the wing chair. And as hosts the Auersbergers always came unstuck, as they say, right at the beginning of any supper party or dinner party they gave: after the first two or three mouthfuls they would invariably rise to each other’s dreadful provocations and drag their guests, willy-nilly, into the chaos of their personal lives. They never showed any consideration for their guests, whom they would start pelting quite shamelessly with their marital filth when they tired of merely pelting each other; in addition to the inadequate food they would dish up their own distasteful innards in front of the outraged guests, whom they finally drove away with their marital brawls, their mutual insults, and their torrents of mutual recrimination. I can remember scarcely a single supper with them, either at Maria Zaal or in the Gentzgasse, that did not culminate in some marital explosion; all their dinner parties—or rather supper parties—in the Gentzgasse would finally blow up, in the truest sense of the word, and at Maria Zaal they usually left behind a scene of conjugal carnage and a foul stench of unholiest matrimony, I thought, sitting in the wing chair and looking into the music room. The Auersbergers were perversely obsessed with their own social indigence, she because she came of a rather ridiculous family belonging to the Alpine gentry of Styria, he because his maternal grandfather had been a butcher’s assistant at Feldbach and his father a petty local government official. This was no doubt why they always felt they had to hoist themselves up the social ladder, an effort that required all the energy they could muster and was always obvious to the eye of the trained observer, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. All her life she was constantly trying to escape from her origins, just as he was from his—she from the idyll of her gentle Styrian birth, he from the paternal destiny of petty local officialdom and the maternal low-pressure zone inhabited by butchers’ assistants—all of which was bound to appear irresistibly comic to anyone around them who had eyes to see and ears to hear. She was forever trying, by every means at her command, to climb just one rung further up the ladder from her pathetic Styrian idyll into the higher echelons of rural barons and counts, though in all the years I have known the Auersbergers her endeavors were of no avail, for whenever she so much as got a grip on this higher rung of the nobility which she so fervently wished to reach, she was brutally and unceremoniously thrust down by those who occupied it, by the very people with whom she longed to be associated, and this, I know, caused her endless pain. She failed in all her attempts to reach this superior rung of the rural nobility and hold on to it—at least for a while, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, for she knew that she could not hold on forever.