Woodcutters Read online

  Her outfits did her no good, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, nor did her husband’s do him any good. His attempts at upward mobility into the aristocracy came to grief even more pitifully and calamitously than hers. It was, as I know, his life’s ambition to be an aristocrat, nothing less: the sad truth is that he would rather have been a witless aristocrat than a respectable composer. As long as I have known him he has always dressed like a Styrian count, and of course he would never be seen without the ostentatious signet ring on his left hand. He has always cut a ludicrous figure; though not lacking in wit, as people always remarked, he was a hopeless figure of fun. Auersberger isn’t stupid—anything but, I thought, sitting in the wing chair—but in this one respect, his desire to be an aristocrat, a count at the very least, he was always the most idiotic of social climbers, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. At Kilb he made himself look vulgar and ridiculous by screaming This food’s abominable, in the same way, it now occurred to me, as he’s made himself look vulgar and ridiculous hundreds and thousands of times in my presence. Whenever he straightened his neck and pursed his little lips to pass sentence of death on food or drink or some other trifling matter, what came out was not witty, but pathetic—merely foolish and distasteful. And the most distasteful thing of all about him is that, although officially he is called Auersberger—which is naturally what I have always called him—he once decided, in an access of folie de grandeur, to call himself Auersberg: on first meeting his future wife, the daughter of the country gentry, in the Gentzgasse (where, as I happen to know, she started off as his landlady), he decided to chop off his tail—in other words the last syllable of his surname—and proceeded to call himself Auersberg, in order to give the impression that he belonged to the ancient princely family of that name. Were revolting not the proper term to describe this perverse castration of his own name, one would have to ignore all the rules of the game and call it simply pathetic, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Auersberger’s conduct at Kilb was no different from what I was accustomed to when we knew each other in the fifties. He hasn’t changed in the least, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. In the Iron Hand, after two or three glasses of wine, he began to play the clown for the benefit of all the people at his table, I thought, putting on his infantile circus act as he once more became conscious of his central role, and upstaging everyone else, as they say. And when he said, This food’s abominable, I went to sit with John and the woman from the general store, because I found both the Auersbergers, in their different ways, quite insufferable. Hardly had I set eyes on them in their tasteless clothes—her in her blue print Styrian dirndl and him in his Styrian linen jacket—than I felt sick, realizing at once that neither had changed since we had last known one another—that the last twenty years, which had wrought such enormous changes in the world, had passed these people by without leaving so much as a trace. How pathetic and repellent the Auersbergers were, sitting at their table in the Iron Hand, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, yet they were still surrounded by all their friends from the old days, as though they were the center of some magic circle. No matter how ridiculous and how worthless this couple may be, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, they still have the same hangers-on as they had in the fifties, twenty or thirty years ago. It was as though nothing had changed in the last twenty years: the Auersbergers were once more surrounded by the same artistic coterie that had surrounded them thirty years ago. What can the reason be? I wondered, sitting in the wing chair. But I could find no answer. I was suddenly intrigued by the question of how this couple, neither of whom earned any money, could still continue to exist, and it struck me how inexhaustible their wealth must originally have been, for after thirty-five years of marriage it still not only protected them and kept them alive, but enabled them to lead a life of self-indulgence. Auersberger himself had nothing but his original genius, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, a quite remarkable musical gift, as well as an immense verbal talent, and a quite extraordinary intelligence bordering on insanity, yet he hadn’t a penny to his name, except for the pittance he had earned for years as a teacher at the Vienna Conservatory before his marriage. His wife, by contrast, whose maiden name was von Reyer, came from a family I had always assumed to be fairly affluent, but now know to have been really rich. One of the sources of her wealth was a number of plots of land around Maria Zaal which her father had bought for a song between the wars, among them the so-called manor house, a five-hundred-year-old building that had once belonged to the provincial government of Salzburg. It was here that the couple spent the whole of the summer when the Gentzgasse became too stifling and oppressive; like all affluent Viennese, they would escape to the country for the summer, though unlike most they did not wait until late July, but left the capital at the end of May. Their property is all situated around Maria Zaal, which used to be one of the most beautiful villages in Styria, famous especially for its large church, formerly a place of pilgrimage, an architectural jewel, part Romanesque, part Gothic, which the local people respectfully call the minster. The Auersbergers have been living off their property for almost thirty-five years by gradually selling it off, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. An uncle of hers, a well-known Styrian lawyer, has been parceling it off and disposing of it for them by degrees. It’s heartbreaking to see what’s become of Maria Zaal through the sale of the Auersbergers’ property, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Where twenty years ago there were the most beautiful fields and meadows there are now dozens of detached houses, each as ugly as the next and mostly prefabricated, which purchasers can order direct from various warehouses in the vicinity, horrid little concrete cubes with roofs made of cheap corrugated asbestos concrete and nailed to the main structure by incompetent local contractors. Where there was once a copse or a thicket, where a garden once blossomed in spring and its glorious colors faded in the fall, there is now a rank growth of the concrete tumors beloved of our modern age, which no longer has any thought for landscape or nature, but is consumed by politically motivated greed and by the base proletarian mania for concrete, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Every year one or more of the Auersbergers’ properties are sold off to people who are gradually ruining Maria Zaal. In fact it is ruined already, as I saw for myself when I passed through two or three years ago—incognito as it were—on my way back from Italy to Vienna. I could hardly believe my eyes, I recalled in the wing chair, when I saw the extent to which Maria Zaal had been destroyed simply through the sale of the Auersbergers’ land. Each time a plot of land is sold by the Auersbergers—who do not earn any money, doubtless because they think they have no need to—a bit of the natural landscape around Maria Zaal is destroyed. Maria Zaal is actually destroyed already, for the truth is that, having been one of the most beautiful villages in Styria twenty years ago, it is now one of the ugliest, thanks to the gross irresponsibility of the Auersbergers, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. They have this Styrian jewel on their consciences, I thought, and it suddenly occurred to me that the blame for the spoliation of the countryside around Maria Zaal lay not with the little people of the region, whom our revolting age has infected with building hysteria, but with the Auersbergers—not with the people who are usually blamed, whose repulsive houses have wreaked havoc throughout almost the whole area around this once unique village, who have simply shat out their houses into the landscape—not just here, but throughout Austria—because they have never been told how to build properly: the blame lay with the Auersbergers lurking in the background, who every year persuade their obliging uncle to sell off one or two of the remaining plots so that they can go on leading their more or less futile social life without having to lift a finger, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. Perfidious society masturbators—what an apt description! I thought, sitting in the wing chair and recalling how Fritz the tapestry artist had once used it to their faces. Auersberger wanted to be a composer, yet this successor of Webern has become nothing but a degenerate society ape who’s grown stupid
on the proceeds of his wife’s fortune. Seldom have I been so enraged by the Auersbergers as I was that evening. People like Joana kill themselves, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, while parasites and society apes like the Auersbergers live on and on and on, getting older and older and older, boring themselves out of their minds all their lives and remaining utterly futile. People like Joana end up with self-tied nooses around their necks and are stuffed into plastic bags and dumped in the ground as cheaply as possible, while people like the Auersbergers don’t know how many dinner parties to give for how many Burgtheater actors in order to survive their sickening boredom and their mindless world-weariness, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. People like Joana have to be content for years with the bare necessities of life and finally kill themselves, while people like the Auersbergers have everything in abundance and reach a ripe old age to no purpose, I thought. A person like Joana is finally abandoned by all these people, because they can no longer be bothered with her, yet they continue to flock around people like the Auersbergers just as they did twenty years ago. These dinners given by the Auersbergers are just part of a perverse routine, I told myself, sitting in the wing chair. This couple has a house in the country and throws it open to all this artistic riffraff from the capital who are eager for a breath of country air, not out of philanthropy—naturally not—but out of sickening boredom and crass self-interest. They use all these people, who continue to turn up under the guise of old friendship, for their own purposes, offending, abusing and demoralizing them, just as for years they offended, abused and demoralized me, and all this Viennese artistic riffraff, as I chose to call the people who were standing or sitting around in the music room, actually come to the Gentzgasse to show their gratitude. Like me, all these people standing or sitting around in the music room were guests of the Auersbergers at Maria Zaal for years, letting themselves be used by their hosts, helping them cope with their rural boredom, and joining in their rural extravagances for days, weeks, months and years, without realizing that they were being violated, exploited and abused by the Auersbergers. They were invited in order to be abused, they weren’t invited out of friendship or affection or whatever other absurd motive the Auersbergers alleged, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. The Auersbergers invited me to Maria Zaal to paper over the cracks of their ramshackle marriage, not, as they pretended, to give me a holiday. They thought I would be able to disentangle the knots in their marriage—though of course they didn’t say anything about this. They made out that they wanted to spoil me for a few weeks or months, even for a whole year or for two years, but this was by no means all they wanted. The first time they invited me to Maria Zaal I may have seemed run down, neglected and half starved, but they did not invite me there to nurse me back to health: they quite unscrupulously lured me into their trap at Maria Zaal to make their matrimonial hell endurable—not because I was an undernourished youth in need of care and affection, but because they saw me as a means to an end, a Salzburg clown they had discovered who would rescue them from the hell of their marriage. And I was too naive to recognize the trap they set for me, and so I groped my way into it and at once started playing the Salzburg fool for them in their frightful Styrian retreat—and I went on playing the fool more and more, I now reflected as I sat in the wing chair. I remember how, when I left the Mozarteum, I screwed up my diploma into a sticky ball with both hands and stuffed it in my trouser pocket, and then at Fritz’s birthday party in the Sebastiansplatz they invited me to Maria Zaal, I recalled in the wing chair, and I accepted their invitation because I did not know I was being invited to their matrimonial hell. They pounced unscrupulously on the naive youth from Salzburg and invited him to their residence at Maria Zaal. And I accepted their invitation, only later realizing that it had been madness to do so. People like the Auersbergers tell us that they have money and a beautiful big estate, an enormous estate with a beautiful big house on it, an enormous house, and as we ourselves have none of these things, we walk into their trap, I thought. We let ourselves be impressed by their wealth and walk into their trap. Seeing only the facade and taking all they say at its face value, we walk into their trap, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. They tell us about a big, old house with fine vaulting, about long walks in grounds that all belong to them, about delicious meals in their garden and daily car trips from one castle to another, and, being impressed, we walk into their trap. They describe a rustic life of absolute luxury, and, being impressed, we walk into their luxurious rustic trap, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Again and again they talk about the things they own, about their endless wealth, though not in so many words, and we let ourselves be impressed and walk into their trap. They talk about their well-furnished kitchens and their well-stocked cellars and the thousands of volumes in their libraries, and, letting ourselves be impressed, we walk into their trap. They tell us about their stock ponds and their water mills and their sawmills, but not about their beds, and we are impressed by them and fall into their trap—and into their beds, I thought. And if we have more or less come to the end of the road, as I had in the early fifties, and don’t know where to go next, we allow ourselves to be profoundly impressed by them and are only too glad to walk into their trap. I had been at a loss to know what to do when I left the Mozarteum, and so I went to Vienna, but Vienna offered me no escape—only cold, brutal hopelessness—and so naturally I walked into the Auersbergers’ trap, and it proved almost fatal, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Their instinct was unerring, I thought, in the early fifties: I was the best possible bet for the Auersbergers, whom I first met at that time, though suddenly I don’t know how or where I met them. I know I met Joana in the Sebastiansplatz through Jeannie Billroth, I now recalled, but I no longer know where I met the Auersbergers. I suddenly asked myself, Where did I meet them? But I no longer knew—I had forgotten. I kept trying to remember, but it was no good. I’ve often had such momentary spells of debility recently, spells of mental debility, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, and it was hardly surprising in view of all my illnesses, all my nervous illnesses—and after what I had been through that day, I thought. And I told myself that this year alone, which was not a very long time, I had attended the funerals of five of my friends. They’re all dying off one after the other, I thought, most of them by taking their own lives. They rush out of a coffeehouse in a state of sudden agitation, and are run over in the street, or else they hang themselves, or suffer a fatal stroke. When we’re over fifty we’re constantly going to funerals, I thought. I’ll soon have more friends in the cemetery than in the rest of the city, I thought. People who were born in the country go back to the country to kill themselves, I thought. They choose to commit suicide in their parents’ home, I thought. All of them, without exception, are basically sick. If they don’t kill themselves they die of some illness that they’ve brought on through their own negligence. I repeated the word negligence to myself several times; I kept on repeating the word—it was as if the word gave me pleasure as I sat in the wing chair—until the people in the music room noticed, and when I saw them all looking in my direction I stopped repeating it. They were all friends of mine thirty years ago, I thought, and I could no longer understand why. For a time we go in the same direction as other people, then one day we wake up and turn our backs on them. I turned my back on these people—they didn’t turn their backs on me, I thought. We attach ourselves to certain people, then suddenly we hate them and let go. We run after them for years, begging for their affection, I thought, and when once we have their affection we no longer want it. We flee from them and they catch up with us and seize hold of us, and we submit to them and all their dictates, I thought, surrendering to them until we either die or break loose. We flee from them and they catch up with us and crush us to death. We run after them and implore them to accept us, and they accept us and do us to death. Or else we avoid them from the beginning and succeed in avoiding them all our lives, I thought. Or we walk into their trap and suffocate. Or we escape fr
om them and start running them down, slandering them and spreading lies about them, I thought, in order to save ourselves, slandering them wherever we can in order to save ourselves, running away from them for dear life and accusing them everywhere of having us on their consciences. Or they escape from us and slander and accuse us, spreading every possible lie about us in order to save themselves, I thought. We think our lives are finished, and then we chance to meet them and they rescue us, but we are not grateful to them for rescuing us: on the contrary we curse them and hate them for rescuing us, and we pursue them all our lives with the hatred we feel toward them for having rescued us. Or else we try to curry favor with them and they push us away, and so we avenge ourselves by slandering them, running them down wherever we can and pursuing them to their graves with our hatred. Or they help us back on our feet at the crucial moment and we hate them for it, just as they hate us when we help them back on their feet, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. We do them a favor and then think we are entitled to their eternal gratitude, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. For years we are on terms of friendship with them, then suddenly we no longer are, and we don’t know why. We love them so fervently that we become positively lovesick, and they reject us and hate us for our love, I thought. We’re nothing, and they make something of us, and we hate them for it. We come from nowhere, as people say, and they perhaps make a genius out of us, and we never forgive them for it, just as if they’d made a dangerous criminal out of us, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. We take everything they have to give us, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, and we punish them with a life sentence of contempt and hatred. We owe everything to them and never forgive them for the fact that we owe everything to them, I thought. We think we have rights when we have no rights of any kind, I thought. No one has any rights, I thought. There’s nothing but injustice in the world, I thought. Human beings are unjust, and injustice prevails everywhere—that’s the truth, I thought. Injustice is all we have to hand, I thought. These people have never done anything but pretend to be something, while in reality they’ve never been anything: they pretend to be educated, but they’re not; they pretend to be artistic (as they call it), but they’re not; and they pretend to be humane, but they’re not, I thought. And their supposed kindness was only pretense, for they were never kind. And above all they pretended to be natural, and they were never natural: everything about them was artificial, and when they claimed—in other words, pretended—to be philosophical, they were nothing but eccentric, and it struck me again how repellent they had seemed to me in the Graben when they told me they now had bought everything by Wittgenstein, just as twenty-five years earlier they had said they had bought everything by Ferdinand Ebner, with just the same tasteless pretense to a knowledge of philosophy—or at least to an interest in philosophy—because they thought they had to for my benefit, since they believed then—and probably still do—that I have a philosophical bent, that I am a philosophizer—which I am not, for to this day I really have no idea what the words philosopher and philosophize mean. At various times they pretended to know about French or Spanish or German literature. And it is of course true that I got to know the works of many Spanish and French writers, as well as most German writers, while I was staying with them, especially at Maria Zaal, where they have an enormous library, much bigger than the one in the Gentzgasse, though this too is fairly substantial—what one might call a representative library, even a scholar’s library, founded by the great-grandfather of Auersberger’s wife, also for show. The Auersbergers, who inherited this library, have probably taken out no more than twenty or thirty volumes in the past thirty years, whereas I positively fell upon these collections in the Gentzgasse and Maria Zaal with all the passion of the ignoramus, as I have to admit. And perhaps what tied me to the Gentzgasse and Maria Zaal was not so much the Auersbergers themselves as the extensive libraries which their forebears had founded merely for show, a show of scholarship, culture and comprehensive knowledge—the kind of wide-ranging knowledge that is deemed to go with metropolitan life—things that have always been in fashion. There has never, I think, been a time when it was not fashionable to pretend to comprehensive knowledge, and even if it has become somewhat less fashionable in the last two decades, it is now all the rage again. They’ve always gone in for show, I thought, because they lack any capacity for reality. Everything about them has always been show: their social relations amount to nothing but show, and the same is true of their relations with each other, their marital relations: they’ve always put on a show of marriage because they’ve never been capable of sustaining a real one, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. And it’s not only the Auersbergers who’ve always lived a life of pretense: all these people in the music room have only ever made a pretense of living—they’ve never really lived, they’ve never for one moment led a real life, a life that had any link with reality. They’ve never had the courage or the strength or the love of truth that is required for real living. They’ve always lived in accordance with fashion, I thought, cloaking themselves in fashion and becoming slaves to fashion for the sake of show, I thought. When it was fashionable in Vienna to read Ferdinand Ebner they read Ferdinand Ebner, just as today, when it’s fashionable to read Wittgenstein, they read Wittgenstein, but of course they didn’t really read Ferdinand Ebner then, and they don’t really read Wittgenstein today. Thirty years ago they went out and bought Ebner’s works, just as today they go out and buy Wittgenstein’s; they talk about them but don’t read them, and they continue to talk about them, without reading them, until suddenly what they’ve been talking about continually—sometimes for years—goes out of fashion, and all at once they stop talking about it. Wittgenstein is now talked about in Vienna as much as Ferdinand Ebner once was, yet it seems to me that Wittgenstein was more a philosopher than a teacher and Ferdinand Ebner more a teacher than a philosopher, and that Wittgenstein will survive and go down in history as a philosopher, unlike Ferdinand Ebner, who has already gone down in history simply as a teacher. The Auersbergers always made a show of being grand, just as they made a show of being artistic, and of course above all they always made a show of being humane, indeed hyper-humane, I thought, though beneath all this show they were never capable of being anything but pathetic: they could never be what they really wanted to be—first-class citizens, aristocrats—and members of the highest ranks of the aristocracy at that. What was so grotesque about them was that they remained constantly wedded to this comic but distasteful view of the world and let themselves be worn down by it day and night. They also made a show of patronizing the arts, however, and whenever they invited anyone, no matter whom, from outside the ranks of the aristocracy, they felt this to be an act of patronage, I thought. In the end I dubbed them rural patrons of the arts—a kind of ironic carnival title, but they took this bitter jest of mine at face value. Instead of traveling extensively, instead of broadening their minds by extensive travel, as they could so easily have afforded to do with all their money, they wasted all their time—whole decades of their lives—aping the upper crust and endeavoring to be aristocrats. These sedulous apes exhausted themselves in this aristocratic mania of theirs, of which they could not be cured and had no wish to be cured, I thought. They made a show of being artistic, yet remained essentially petit bourgeois, too feeble to behave like members of the true bourgeoisie, let alone its upper reaches, which they feebly affected to despise, I thought. And so they exploited to the utmost anyone who walked into their trap, I thought. But the people they exploited had no one to blame but themselves, I thought, for they were fully aware that they were being exploited and derived the greatest benefit from it. The victims of the Auersbergers’ exploitation did indeed benefit from it, just as I did for years. It would be true to say that this exploitation eventually had the same effect as a health cure: the Auersbergers’ exploitation cure finally brought me back to health, I thought. Having been thoroughly sick in both mind and body when I first met them thirty years ago, I regained m
y health, though not my happiness, through submitting to the Auersbergers’ exploitation cure, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. They rescued me thirty years ago, I thought, but I also rescued them—that’s the truth. Now they’re pretending that they’re giving their artistic dinner for the artists they’ve invited, whereas in reality they’re giving it for their own miserable selves. Ostensibly they’re giving it for the actor, who, being an actor from the Burgtheater, allows himself to be fêted everywhere, just as all Burgtheater actors allow themselves to be fêted everywhere and all the time in every corner of the city—ostensibly they’re giving this party for the highly successful and highly acclaimed star of The Wild Duck, for Ekdal, but really they’re giving it simply for themselves—ostensibly the dinner is being given for the guests, but as always it’s being given for the hosts, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. They’ve bought masses of food, all to be cooked and dished up for their artistic guests, yet it’s actually been bought and cooked for themselves, and then they’ll call this artistic dinner of theirs a contribution to the patronage of the arts. For weeks on end they’ll tell everybody in Vienna that they gave a dinner for the actor who played Ekdal in The Wild Duck, but what they won’t tell them is that he accepted their invitation only after they’d begged him for weeks, and that in order to get hold of him they’d almost torn themselves apart, as they say in Vienna. They’ll tell people that they gave a dinner, an artistic dinner, for the Burgtheater actor, as well as for a host of other artists who are not quite as distinguished as the actor, but nonetheless great artists, people who are also artists, artistic also-rans, one might say. They say they’re giving a dinner for this actor, yet in all probability he agreed to come only under duress, for there’s an element of blackmail in all their invitations, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. They owe their entire social life to blackmail, I thought: whatever social show they put on, it’s always contrived by blackmail. Even if people go to their dinner parties more or less of their own free will, I thought, the Auersbergers still put them under a certain degree of duress. They’d much rather be entertaining aristocrats at their dinner table in the Gentzgasse, or at least people they take to be aristocrats, instead of the people who are here this evening, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. They’d rather be entertaining some seedy prince or degenerate count and his hangers-on than these artistic folk, of whom they’ve always had a horror; for they’ve never really been keen on anything artistic: they’ve only ever put on a show of being artistic, I thought, just as they’re putting on this supper party as an artistic dinner, as a kind of show in other words. They’re probably thinking that even if they don’t have a prince or a count at their dinner table, they do at least have an actor from the Burgtheater, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, at the very moment when the actor arrived. People always refer to this man as a Burgtheater actor, because he has been playing at the Burgtheater for the last thirty or forty years. At dinner I was placed opposite Jeannie Billroth, the person I had found so revolting that afternoon at Kilb. They had all taken their places in the dining room before I was asked to the table—I was summoned so late, in fact, that I could only assume that they had forgotten about me, as they probably had. I had actually dozed off for a few moments in the wing chair, out of exhaustion, and woke up only when I was called to the dining room, that exquisite Empire monstrosity of theirs. Auersberger’s wife came into the anteroom to summon me to dinner. She must have spent some time trying to rouse me, for when I first heard her call my name I was at once aware that she must have called it several times already. She was about to shake my shoulder to wake me, but I forestalled her and pushed her hand away, perhaps a little roughly. In the semidarkness of the anteroom I could not see the expression on her face, but I think I must have offended her by my somewhat abrupt reaction. However, I immediately got up and followed her into the dining room, where, as I have said, they had all taken their places, with the Burgtheater actor in the place of honor. I now realized that I had slept through his entrance. I had not heard him come in, and since he would have had to walk right in front of me to reach the dining room and I had not heard him, I realized that I must have been asleep, presumably for several minutes, possibly even for half an hour or longer. When I took my place at the table I was still somewhat dazed. I watched the cook bring in the soup—an absurd procedure at a quarter to one in the morning, I thought. They all ate hurriedly, listening to what the actor had to say as he spooned up his soup. It had not been a good night, he said: Not my best night, as he put it. Several times the audience at the Burgtheater had shouted Speak up, speak up, no doubt because he was speaking his lines too softly. He did not know why—it sometimes happened that an actor became so completely absorbed in his art while performing on stage that he entirely forgot about the audience, whereas the audience wanted not only to see him, but to hear him and understand what he said. He eats his soup as clumsily as he acts, I thought, though my eyes were not on the actor, but on Jeannie Billroth. She, on the other hand, was watching him and apparently taking in everything he said as he hurriedly spooned up his soup, as though what he had to say were something quite extraordinary, something unique. I found myself sitting opposite the Virginia Woolf of Vienna, this creator of tasteless poetry and prose who has never done anything throughout her life, it seems to me, but wallow in her petit bourgeois kitsch. And someone like this dares to say that she has surpassed Virginia Woolf, whom I consider the greatest of all women writers and have admired for as long as I have been competent to form a literary judgment—somebody like this has the temerity to assert that in her own novels she has surpassed The Waves, Orlando and To the Lighthouse. Jeannie showed herself once more in her true petit bourgeois colors when we were at Kilb, I now reflected, sitting opposite her and cursing this grotesque and distasteful artistic dinner, which was now, thanks to the Burgtheater actor, a late-night artistic supper. To serve potato soup at a quarter to one in the morning and announce that a boiled pike is to follow is a perversion of which only the Auersbergers are capable, I said to myself, sitting opposite Jeannie, who had always had her own special way of eating soup, with the little finger of her right hand sticking up about half an inch above the others. Imagine serving a pike at a quarter to one in the morning in honor of an actor from the Burgtheater! The actor had already spooned up half his potato soup with great rapidity, as though he were famished, with such rapidity that some of it was now lodged in his beard. Ekdal, he said, spooning up his soup, has been my dream role for decades. And then he went on, interrupting himself after every other word to spoon up more soup, Ekdal—pause for a spoonful—has always—another spoonful—been my—another spoonful—favorite part, adding, after two more spoonfuls, for decades. And the phrase dream role he actually pronounced as though it denoted some culinary delicacy. Ekdal is my favorite role, he said several times, and I immediately wondered whether he would have said that Ekdal was his favorite role had he had no success in it. When an actor is successful in a certain role he says it’s his favorite: when he isn’t, he doesn’t, I thought. The actor went on spooning up his soup and repeating that Ekdal was his favorite role. For a long time none of the other guests said anything, but merely ate their soup and stared at the actor, as though he were the only one entitled to speak. When he ate fast, they ate fast; when he slowed down, they slowed down; and by the time he had finished the last spoonful, so had they. Long after they had finished their soup I still had half a plateful left. I did not like the taste, and so I did not eat it. He had always wanted to play in The Wild Duck, and now at last he had the chance, the actor said with some pathos. If the other members of the cast had been better, if he had had ideal fellow actors in other words, he said—for they were not the best, they were not ideal; apart from himself the casting had been a makeshift affair—the production of The Wild Duck would have been an enormous success as a whole and not just where he was concerned. As it was, everybody had concentrated on his performance; the newspapers had written exclusively a
bout him. It was not The Wild Duck, not the production as such, that had been the great theatrical event, but his performance as Ekdal. Where would The Wild Duck be, where would Ibsen be, were it not for him?—that was more or less what all the papers had asked if one read between the lines. He himself had a high regard for Ibsen, just as he had for Strindberg, indeed for all the so-called Nordic dramatists, but where would these dramatists be without actors like himself? He asked this in all modesty, he said, but at the same time quite openly. But of course in his opinion there was more to these dramatists than the papers made out, he said: quite irrespective of whether the acting was superb or not, Ibsen was a great writer, and so was Strindberg—they were both towering geniuses, towering figures in literary history, but where would they be without superb actors? He must have had at least two or three glasses of champagne on arrival, I thought when I heard him say, Drama comes to life only when a good actor brings it to life. Whereupon he placed his hands on the table, raised his histrionic head, and said to Auersberger, I greatly enjoyed your new com position, my dear friend. At this Auersberger lowered his head; the successor of Webern lowered his head at the same moment as the actor raised his and paid his compliment. The whole company now fell silent, thinking that the pike was about to be brought in, but they were wrong: all that happened was that the cook entered the room empty-handed to ask whether the pike could now be served. The hosts indicated that it could. We actors are accustomed to dining late, the guest of honor remarked. We don’t usually dine until after midnight. It’s a typical feature of our profession that we don’t dine until after midnight. It’s an unhealthy life, the life of the theater, he added, breaking a pretzel stick in two. But an actor gets used to eating after midnight, he said. The role of Ekdal, more than any other, was his dream role, he said. You have to have great writing if you’re to give a consummate performance. He had studied the role for a whole six months, the actor went on, and in order to carry out this study of Ekdal he had withdrawn to a remote alpine chalet in the Tyrol, for it was only in such genuine solitude that he was able to understand the role properly. Actors tended to approach a part either too early or too late, he said, and a part like Ekdal had to be approached at just the right moment. Great drama and great dramatic roles must always be approached at just the right moment. Ekdal was always my dream role, he said, but I’d never understood it properly. It was only when I was in the mountain chalet, concentrating solely on Ekdal, that I discovered the true nature of the character—and of The Wild Duck as a whole. The true nature of The Wild Duck! he exclaimed. It was in the mountain chalet, he said, that he had suddenly understood Ekdal. It was there, in the mountain chalet, that I saw the light, he said. Whereupon he leaned back and remarked that he had always been partial to pike—preferably from Lake Balaton, the genuine Balaton pike. Auersberger’s wife now interrupted his disquisition on Ekdal to say that naturally she would never serve any pike other than a Balaton pike—what other pike was there? One has to approach Ekdal with great sensitivity, the actor said. We rush around in the city for months on end, racking our brains, yet failing to understand Ekdal or relate to the character in any way, despite the fact that in the whole of world literature we’ve always felt him to be the figure who most appeals to us, and we finally give up in despair, he said. And then we go up the mountain and live in the alpine chalet, and we see the light. I had the same experience with Prospero, the actor went on. If I ever play Lear, he said, I shall go back to the chalet, and I won’t spend months beforehand waiting around for enlightenment in this dreadful city. It was the Tyrolean atmosphere, the actor said, that had revealed the secret of Ekdal to him—living in a chalet, five and a half thousand feet above sea level, far from civilization. No electric light, no gas, no consumer society! he exclaimed as a warm plate was placed before him and he was invited to help himself to the pike. We must all scale the mountain heights if we are to get a proper view of the world, he said, helping himself to a second portion of pike. Incidentally, he said, he had never played Ibsen before—Strindberg yes, Edgar in The Dance of Death, but never Ibsen. He had not even played Peer Gynt when he was a young man, though that would have been an obvious part for him to play. We come up against so many producers, he said, and they never give us the parts we really want to play. Or the dramatists who are close to our hearts. We want to act in a Spanish play and we’re landed with a French one, he said. We want to play Goethe and we’re condemned to play Schiller. We want to appear in comedy, and we’re pushed into tragedy. Even being famous doesn’t ensure that you always get the parts you want to play, the actor went on. And how often is one promised a part, one of one’s favorite parts, he said, only to learn later that it’s been given to somebody else! Theaters don’t plan properly; nothing in the theater ever turns out according to plan. What’s finally presented to the public is always a compromise, a sloppy compromise. By his age, he said, actors like himself had long since learned to live with all this. Even at the Burgtheater, Europe’s premier theater, as he put it, all we get is compromises. But what compromises! he said, implying that the compromises reached at the Burgtheater still constituted great theater. Any accidents that happened there were after all Burgtheater accidents, he said, implying that when all was said and done the Burgtheater was a great theater, despite repeated disasters. What he said was quite ludicrous. I was so tired that I could hardly keep my eyes open, but the actor was obviously not at all tired. The rest of us were exhausted after attending Joana’s funeral and then spending more than two hours waiting for the actor to make his appearance. To think that you have to devote a whole six months to a part like Ekdal, he said, and that during these six months you have to give up everything else! A role like Ekdal completely takes you over, robbing you of all creature comforts while you’re studying it (this was the word he used), for after all it’s not much fun locking oneself away for weeks in a chalet in the Tyrol for the sake of Ekdal, living on virtually nothing but bread and water and pea soup, sleeping in an uncomfortable bed and hardly ever washing—the audience has no idea about all this and gives one no credit for it. And even if they applaud and the role is a great success, as Ekdal was this time, he said, the price one pays for such devotion—I might even say for such sacrifice—is too high. But then an actor’s life was a life of sacrifice, he said, trying to insert a note of irony into the remark but not succeeding, since it was clear to all that it was meant seriously. Such a role, he said, required an actor to give his all. First getting inside the work, he said, but how? Then arriving at a proper understanding of the writer, then of the part, and then the long period of rehearsals, which in this case had taken up the whole of the fall and the winter. We begin rehearsing at the end of August, and when rehearsals are completed we’re not aware that spring has come around again. With Shakespeare it’s quite different, he said, without telling us what it was that made Shakespeare different from Ibsen. Or Strindberg. During the rehearsal period, unless he happened to be acting in another play and had to appear on stage, he went to bed at ten and got up at six. He memorized his lines, incidentally, in front of the open window, pacing up and down in his bedroom. Being unmarried has always been an advantage, he said suddenly. I walk to and fro in my bedroom more or less from seven o’clock to eleven and memorize the text. I arrive at the first rehearsal having learned the whole text, he said. Producers are always amazed at this. Most actors turn up for rehearsals without knowing their lines, he said. I always have all my lines in my head when rehearsals begin. It’s sickening when one’s colleagues don’t know their lines. Sickening, he repeated as he helped himself to more of the pike, which was served with a sauce containing far too many capers. If I hadn’t built myself a house in Grinzing in 1954, he said, I might have gone on the German stage—who knows? I had numerous offers. I could have gone to Berlin, to Cologne, to Zurich. But what are all these cities compared with Vienna? he said. We hate Vienna, and yet we love it like no other city. Just as we hate the Burgtheater, though we love it like no other th
eater. This success I’ve had with Ekdal was quite unpredictable, he said, and as he said this I was watching Jeannie Billroth, who had become somewhat agitated, feeling that this evening she had been pushed into the background; she could not make herself the focus of attention that she always wanted to be, since the Burgtheater actor had so far not allowed her to get a word in, despite her repeated attempts to intervene. Again and again she had tried to take him up on some remark or other, but he had not given her the chance. But now, having heard him say that Ekdal was the most difficult part he had ever studied or played, she managed to remark that in her opinion the role of Edgar in Strindberg was much more difficult. But Edgar is a much more difficult part than Ekdal, she said. At any rate that had always been her impression from reading the play. She had never thought of Ekdal as a difficult part—except of course that all parts are difficult if they are to be well played and if they actually are well played. She had always felt, when reading the plays, that Edgar was more difficult than Ekdal. No! cried the Burgtheater actor, Ekdal is the more difficult of the two—that’s obvious. There she could not agree with him, said Jeannie Billroth, pointing out that she had once studied drama, incidentally under the famous Professor Kindermann. This evening too, as on all such occasions, she managed to mention the fact that she was once a pupil of Kindermann. Perhaps an actor was bound to think that Ekdal was the more difficult part, she said, whereas in fact Edgar was the more difficult. No, you must understand, the actor said to Jeannie Billroth, that when one has been an actor for decades, as I have—and an actor at the Burgtheater moreover—and when one has played nothing but leading roles for as long as one cares to think back, one knows what one is talking about. As a student of drama, of course, one has quite different views about the theater, he went on, but there’s no doubt that Ekdal is the more difficult role and Edgar the easier—easier when it comes to playing it, don’t forget. Jeannie Billroth was not satisfied with what the actor had said, and replied that it had surely been a proven fact for as long as the two roles had existed that Ekdal, not Edgar, was the easier role to play. Kindermann, her teacher, had demonstrated this quite clearly in an article entitled Edgar and Ekdal: A Comparison. Had he not read the article? Jeannie Billroth asked, to which he replied that he was not familiar with Kindermann’s article. That was regrettable, said Jeannie Billroth, for if he had read Kindermann’s discussion of Edgar (a Strindberg character) and Ekdal (an Ibsen character) before beginning rehearsals he could have spared himself many of the unpleasant aspects of his study of The Wild Duck, whereupon Auersberger, who had been on the lookout for an opportunity to say something himself, suddenly interjected, And all those weeks in the chalet! By now the actor himself wanted to change the subject and announced that he had lost one of his gloves on the way to the Gentzgasse. Had he not been late setting out he would have gone back to look for it, but he could not retrace his steps as he did not want to keep the Auersbergers on the rack any longer. People did not know what they were letting themselves in for when they invited him to dinner. It’s easy enough to invite me, he said, but the hosts don’t realize what’s involved until they notice that it’s half past twelve and the guest still hasn’t arrived. Yes‚ acting is quite a profession, he said, as though this were one of the remarks he habitually made when he was at a loss for anything else to say. The hostess, who had had a second serving of pike brought to the table, remarked that it really was a pity he had lost one of his gloves on the way to the Gentzgasse. Losing one glove was just as bad as losing two, she said, as there was nothing one could do with one glove. And all the people at the table said that they had once lost a single glove and had the same feeling. But possibly whoever had found the glove would have handed it in, the hostess suggested. Where would he have handed it in? Auersberger asked his wife, with a burst of laughter which prompted everybody else to laugh. Who might have handed the glove in or might still do so, and where? he asked. Whereupon everyone sitting around the table recounted his own glove story. It transpired that they had all lost one glove on some occasion and felt the loss of one as keenly as the loss of a pair. And none of them had found the lost glove—none of the gloves had been handed in. Oh, if only it had been a pair! Auersberger’s wife said, and proceeded to tell her own glove story. About twenty years ago she had gone to the ladies’ room at the Josefstadt Theater and left her black evening gloves there. Both of them, she said, looking around at the assembled company. The play was Der Zerrissene, one of Nestroy’s best, she added. She had left her gloves in the ladies’ room during the interval, and immediately after the performance she had gone back to get them, assuming that they would still be on the table where she had left them. In the Josefstadt I naturally took it for granted, she said, that my gloves would still be there. But they’d gone. The attendant knew nothing about them, she said. But just imagine: two weeks after the performance of Der Zerrissene my evening gloves were returned to me. Anonymously, she added, leaning back in her chair for a moment—anonymously, and accompanied by a little card with the words Best wishes written on it. To this day I don’t know who it was who returned my evening gloves, she said. Shortly after this the actor turned to her and said: An excellent pike, a genuine Balaton pike, and the others indicated that they too had the same impression—that the pike they were eating was indeed a genuine Balaton pike. But you know, said the actor, who every now and then used his napkin, which he had stuck in his shirt collar, to wipe his mouth and surrounding beard, acting is quite a profession. Once, ages ago, when I was playing in Munich—at short notice, as they say—in the role of Heinrich (though that’s beside the point), I met a colleague in the Kaufingerstrasse whom I’d known some time earlier, before the war, and whom I’d shared digs with in the Lerchenfelderstrasse. No heating, as you may imagine, rats all over the place, nothing to eat—you know what it was like at the time: the Americans hadn’t arrived and the Russians were already there. Anyhow, I asked this colleague why he’d left Vienna. I’ll tell you why, he said: I’m utterly sick of Vienna. And what about Munich? I asked him, the Burgtheater actor went on, wiping his bearded chin. And he said, I’m utterly sick of Munich as well! So you might just as well have stayed in Vienna, I said, if you’re sick of Munich too. Incidentally this colleague was engaged at the time to play the kind of roles I played, the actor went on. Possibly his voice was too high-pitched for the roles he was called upon to play. It was a Strindberg voice, not an Ibsen voice. Fine for Goethe, but not for Shakespeare—and no good at all for Ibsen. All right for Molière, but not for Nestroy, certainly not for Nestroy, he said. Perhaps he was too fat—an undisciplined life-style, said the actor from the Burgtheater. Born at Vöcklabruck, basically a provincial, but a nice enough fellow—voice too high-pitched, married young, one child, divorced, long engagement at the Volkstheater. So you might just as well have stayed in Vienna, I said to him. He had a curious facial twitch, the actor recalled—a man with a great sense of humor, but he always got through all his money—an easygoing type, very easygoing. I told him I was rehearsing the role of Edgar. Oh, Edgar, he said—I’m not interested. Not interested? I said. Not interested? It was so cold, and I hadn’t any gloves—I was freezing the whole time. I’m rehearsing the role of Edgar, I repeated, but he wasn’t listening. I’m rehearsing Edgar! I shouted at him, the actor recalled. Then I turned on my heel and left him. A sweet man, the actor said, helping himself to a spoonful of caper sauce. Next day I read in the evening paper that he’d killed himself. In the Kaufingerstrasse, where he was living, though I didn’t know he was living there. Hanged himself! the Burgtheater actor said, drawing out the syllables. Actors are predestined to kill themselves, to hang themselves, said the actor from the Burgtheater. I’m not the suicidal type—not at all—but when I think of how many people in my line of business have killed themselves! Thoroughly talented people, the actor said, all of them potentially great actors, and they go and kill themselves. I was the last person to speak to him. We’d known each other since we were young. All the best peopl
e kill themselves, he said, taking a gulp of wine. The weather has a great deal to do with suicide, he said. The Burgtheater actor, having become somewhat melancholy through telling the story about the actor who had committed suicide in Munich, now recalled that Joana, whom he had not known personally, but whom the rest of us had known, had killed herself a few days earlier and been buried only that afternoon at Kilb. I assume that he had learned this from Auersberger. I once saw your friend Joana when she gave a talk at the Burgtheater about the art of movement, as she called it. I remember her very clearly, he said, suddenly affecting an attitude of grief and modulating his voice into a mourning key. A gifted person, he said, but quite out of place at the Burgtheater. The course she gave was an unfortunate mistake, he said. He then went on to say that during the past year he had attended the funerals of several fellow actors—there had been an unprecedented number of deaths among actors, he said, adding, and among cabaret artists. Ah yes, he said, addressing Jeannie Billroth, I know what it means to lose a lifelong friend. But when we reach a certain age we lose all the people who mean anything to us, all the people we love. He took a gulp of wine, and the hostess filled up his glass. So long as it’s a quick death, he said. Nothing is more dreadful than a protracted illness. It’s a blessing when somebody just collapses and dies, he said. But I’m not the suicidal type, he said again. There were more women who killed themselves than men, he said. Whereupon Jeannie Billroth pointed out that this was not true: statistics showed that the number of male suicides was double the number of female suicides. Suicide is a male problem, she said. She had read a study of the incidence of suicide in Austria, which showed that, as a percentage of the total population, as she put it, more people killed themselves in Austria than in any other country in Europe. Hungary had the second highest suicide rate and Sweden the third highest. And in Austria, interestingly enough, the people most likely to commit suicide were those who lived in the Salzburg region, in other words the most beautiful part of Austria. The Styrians are rather prone to suicide, said Auersberger, who by this stage was just about totally drunk and had become highly agitated. He told the actor that he was surprised that so few Burgtheater actors killed themselves, since they had such good reason to do so. Saying this he burst out laughing at his own remark, though the others merely found it embarrassing and glared at him. I myself momentarily joined in his laughter, thinking that despite his generally repugnant behavior Auersberger had a certain clownish wit that occasionally made even me laugh, averse though I generally am to jokes. What do you mean? the actor asked. I mean something quite simple, Auersberger replied: if the actors at the Burgtheater realized how pathetic their acting was, they’d all have to kill themselves. Present company excepted, Auersberger added, draining his glass. All right, the Burgtheater actor replied, if that’s what you think of the Burgtheater, why do you still go? Auersberger replied that he had not been to the Burgtheater for ten years. His wife at once corrected him, saying that only two weeks ago they had seen the performance of Der Verschwender. Oh yes, Der Verschwender, Auersberger retorted, and the performance was so bad that it turned my stomach, and I immediately forgot all about it. At first the actor did not know how to react to Auersberger’s remarks. The Burgtheater has always had its detractors, he said, which is what happens to any institution that is superlatively good. The Burgtheater has always been attacked, especially by those who have been eager to join it and been rejected. All the actors who haven’t had an engagement with the Burgtheater, he said, inveigh against it until they land one. It’s always been like that. Anything out of the ordinary attracts hostility, he said. Hating the Burgtheater is an old Viennese tradition, just like hating the State Opera. Even the theater managers hate the Burgtheater, constantly ridiculing it until they succeed, by their unscrupulous endeavors, in becoming Burgtheater managers themselves. But look, the actor continued: where else would you see a performance of The Wild Duck like the one we’re doing at the Burgtheater? Nowhere! You can go wherever you like, but nowhere will you find a comparable performance of The Wild Duck. Nowhere, Auersberger replied, since you’ve just said yourself that this production of The Wild Duck at the Burgtheater is a failure, and that according to the critics the only successful aspect of the production is your own performance in the role of Ekdal. Your performance as Ekdal is superb, but apart from that the production’s no good. You can’t put it like that, the actor said, you can’t say that this production of The Wild Duck is no good, even though it may have its shortcomings. Even this partial failure is much preferable to all the other Wild Ducks I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen all the Wild Ducks that have been put on in recent years. I once saw The Wild Duck in Berlin, the first postwar Wild Duck, the Burgtheater actor said, at the Freie Volksbühne; I also saw The Wild Duck at the Schillertheater. Both of them disastrous productions—and the same was true in Munich and Stuttgart. The German theater is praised only by total incompetents who haven’t the first notion of what theater is all about. It’s all fashionable journalism written by half-baked critics, said the actor. No, no, this Wild Duck at the Burgtheater is the best Wild Duck I’ve ever seen, and I’m not speaking from prejudice, even though I’m playing Ekdal in it. It’s far and away the best Wild Duck. I once saw the play in Stockholm—in Swedish the title is Vildanden. I didn’t like it at all. I felt I had to go to Stockholm to see the best Wild Duck there was to be seen, but it was a total disappointment. It’s not true that Scandinavian theaters put on the best performances of Scandinavian plays. I once saw a performance of The Wild Duck in Augsburg and found it far superior to anything I’d seen in Scandinavia. Naturally everything depends on Ekdal. If Ekdal’s no good the whole play’s no good. Don’t imagine for one moment that you hear the best Mozart performances in Salzburg or Vienna. People always make the mistake of thinking that a play gets its best productions in its country of origin. But they’re quite wrong. I once saw a Molière play performed in Hamburg in a way you’d never see it performed in Paris. And a Shakespeare production in Cologne that put all English Shakespeare productions in the shade. Of course it’s only in Vienna that you can see a good Nestroy production, the actor added. But not at the Burgtheater, Auersberger interjected. You’re probably right there, replied the actor. I have to admit that you’ve got a point. There’s never been a successful Nestroy production at the Burgtheater. But then where has there ever been a successful Nestroy production? Surely not at the Volkstheater, where by rights he belongs? Of course not at the Volkstheater, Auersberger replied—at the Karltheater, but that was pulled down nearly thirty years ago. Yes, said the actor, it’s a great pity the Karltheater was demolished. In a way, he observed not unwittily, when they demolished the Karltheater they also demolished Nestroy. By they he meant the Viennese authorities, who have most of the city’s demolished theaters on their conscience. After the war more than half the theaters in Vienna were torn down, said Auersberger. Alas, how right you are! said the actor. In Vienna it’s always the best that gets demolished, Auersberger continued; the Viennese always demolish the best, but at the time they don’t realize that it’s the best—that dawns on them only after the event. The Viennese as a whole are expert demolishers and destroyers, demolition and destruction specialists. How right you are! said the actor, who had by now finished eating and had his glass replenished by the hostess. If a building in Vienna is especially beautiful, he went on, it’s sure to be demolished sooner or later—no matter whether it’s a particularly beautiful building or a particularly successful institution, the Viennese don’t rest content until it’s been demolished. And they treat people in just the same way, the actor went on: being incapable of recognizing a person’s goodness or worth, they proceed to tear him down, just as they would tear down a monument, having suddenly forgotten that it was they who put it up in the first place. My interpretation of Ekdal is in a certain sense philosophical, said the actor, but when you read what’s been written about Ibsen you’re none the wiser—on the contrary, you find that it only deranges the m
ind. And you can’t approach an exacting role like Ekdal with your mind deranged, said the actor. Young Werle, Gregers—that would have been the part for me thirty years ago, perhaps even twenty years ago. I’d have liked to play it, but whenever I got anywhere near playing it, The Wild Duck was taken off the repertory. Gregers would have been an even more appropriate part for me to play, he said, looking around at the others. I had the impression that none of them knew what he was talking about, except for Jeannie Billroth, who had just admitted to having recently read and seen The Wild Duck for the first time. Gregers would really have been the part for me, rather than Ekdal, said the actor, and it was now clear that nobody at the table knew what he meant. I used to dream of playing Gregers, he said. I was once invited to play the part in Düsseldorf, but I turned the invitation down because I didn’t want to leave Vienna. If I’d gone to Düsseldorf to play Gregers—who knows?—I might have lost my contract with the Burgtheater. I was naturally thankful to be engaged by the Burgtheater, he said, but all my life it’s pained me to have forfeited the chance to play Gregers. Only once was I offered the part. I always thought I’d play it one day, but I never did. If we pass up a chance like that, he said, it never comes around again. Psychological theater, said the actor, leaning back in his chair after accepting a cigar from Auersberger’s wife. She made to light it for him, but he forestalled her and lit it himself. We always want the highest, he said, but we don’t attain the highest just by wanting it, he said, uttering this sentence as though it were a quotation, possibly from some play or other. While he was having such a success as Ekdal, he said, he was already preparing for his next role. In an English play, he said. An English director was coming over from London, and rehearsals were due to start the following week. An English conversation piece, but not Oscar Wilde, he said. Oh no! And naturally not Shaw. Something contemporary! he exclaimed, something contemporary! Amusing, but profound! Set in a theatrical milieu incidentally. He played the part of a writer who had married into the aristocracy. Not necessarily first class, he said, but entertaining and not unintelligent, far from unintelligent in fact—a very English play, good entertainment value and not excessively demanding intellectually. A rather sloppy translation, he said, but I’m tidying up the text. If only we had one good writer! he suddenly exclaimed, but we haven’t any. In the whole of Germany there isn’t a single good writer, let alone in Austria—to say nothing of Switzerland. And as a result only foreign plays are put on—plays by English, French or Polish playwrights. It’s a calamity, he lamented. Not a single readable play in twenty years. Dramatic talent has died out in German-speaking Europe, he said, leaning back and blowing his cigar smoke at Auersberger, who promptly began to cough. Probably the age we live in isn’t an age for playwrights, said the actor. When a talent does emerge it soon turns out to be a non-talent. How much garbage gets rave notices in the press! he said. It’s incredible what passes for talent these days, what is regarded as dramatic art. I found myself sickened by what he was saying. You know, he went on, you’ve no idea what it’s like having to rehearse with untalented people, having to grind away with them for weeks, sometimes for months. Young people in the theater today are all so spoiled, he said; the papers are always saying that they’re so gifted, that they’re geniuses, while in reality they’ve no gift whatever, not the least talent. And their most notable characteristic is their indolence. Like the rest of today’s youth they’re thoroughly spoiled, having been brought up in the most stupid fashion, said the actor. While I was working on The Wild Duck I saw what was wrong with these young people: they will not tolerate discipline. But the actor who plays Gregers is quite outstanding, Jeannie Billroth objected at this point. To which the Burgtheater actor replied, Everybody says Gregers is good, but I don’t understand what they see in him: I find his performance just average, no more than average—a piece of positive miscasting. Jeannie Billroth was the only other guest who had actually seen the production at the Burgtheater, and the others, having started off without even knowing what The Wild Duck was and only gradually learning that it was a play, were condemned to silence. Every now and then they nodded, either looking straight at the actor or gazing down at the tablecloth, or else staring in bewilderment at the person sitting opposite; they had no chance whatever of participating in the actor’s performance, with which he was regaling them so uninhibitedly, knowing that none of them could inhibit him. Auersberger’s wife, far from inhibiting him, repeatedly urged him to go on, and it was natural that the actor, having just come from performing in The Wild Duck at the Burgtheater, should continue to expatiate on the performance and related matters. It was a wonder, he said, that The Wild Duck had been put on at all in Vienna—put on was a phrase he used repeatedly—since putting it on in Vienna was a risk. After all The Wild Duck was a modern play. He actually used the term modern to describe a play that was just a hundred years old and was still as great, after a hundred years, as it was when it was written: to call such a play modern was patent nonsense. To present The Wild Duck to the Viennese public was not just a risk, said the actor, but a considerable gamble. The Viennese simply did not respond to modern drama, as he put it—they never had responded to modern drama. They preferred to go and see classical plays, and The Wild Duck was not a classical play—it was a modern play, which might admittedly one day become a classic. Ibsen might one day join the classics, and so might Strindberg, said the actor. He had often felt that Strindberg was a greater dramatist than Ibsen. Yet at other times, he said, I’ve felt the opposite to be true—that Ibsen is superior to Strindberg and has a better prospect of becoming a classic. Sometimes I think Miss Julie will one day become a classic, and at other times I think it’ll be a play like The Wild Duck. But if we attach too much importance to Strindberg we do Ibsen an injustice, he said, just as we do Strindberg an injustice if we attach too much importance to Ibsen. Personally, he said, he loved the Nordic way of writing, the Nordic way of writing for the theater. He had always loved Edvard Munch too. I’ve always loved The Cry, he said—which of course you are all familiar with. What an extraordinary work of art! I once went to Oslo just to see The Cry, when it was still in Oslo. That doesn’t mean that I have a preference for the Scandinavian countries, he said. Whenever I was in Scandinavia I had a nostalgia for the south, or at least for Germany, he said. Stockholm—what a dreary city! To say nothing of Oslo—so enervating, so soul-destroying. And Copenhagen—enough said! Young actors are always clamoring to get to the Burgtheater, he said, and even if they have no talent they get engagements there through personal connections—through having an uncle who’s on the board of management of the Volksoper or an official of the Federal Theater Trust. If somebody has an aunt in the Ministry of Education, he’s taken on at the Burgtheater as soon as he’s qualified at the Reinhardt Seminar, said the actor, though he may not have the slightest talent. These twenty-year-olds then sit around in the rehearsal rooms, blocking the way for other people and simply making a nuisance of themselves. Semi-talents at best, said the actor, which simply atrophy in our leading theater, keeping out the genuine talents. The only advice I would give to a young person with genuine talent would be not to go to the Burgtheater, since that would be a sure path to total destruction at the very beginning of his development, said the actor, helping himself to the dessert, a rum-flavored chocolate cake covered in whipped cream, of which I ate only one mouthful, reflecting that a dessert like that was far too rich for such a late supper. But all the others ate theirs, and so did the actor from the Burgtheater, who, having eaten half of his dessert, returned to the subject of The Wild Duck. Actually I should have played in Wallenstein, and originally I was to have played in the new Calderón production, but nothing came of either, I’m now thankful to say. I myself never dreamed of such a success, such a resounding success, said the actor. To think that The Wild Duck was produced at the Burgtheater—and was a success! He had been completely bowled over, he said. In April I’m going on my annual journey to Spain, he said—Andalusia, Sevil
le, Granada, Ronda, he said, finishing his dessert. My Spanish nostalgia, he said, his mouth still full of chocolate cake. It was almost impossible to follow what he was saying with his mouth full of chocolate cake, even when, alarmed at his own table manners, he said, I do beg your pardon! and gulped down the last mouthful. In recent years I’ve taken to visiting Spain, turning my back on Italy so to speak. Spain is still an unspoiled country—at least large parts of it are unspoiled—so sparse, he said, using his napkin to wipe not only his mouth and mustache, but the whole of his beard and his forehead. Charles V, the Prado, he said, looking around the table. Of course I’m no connoisseur of art, he said, just an art lover—that’s the difference. But when I think of Italy I feel sick, he said, whereas the thought of Spain really excites me. In Italy more or less everything screams to high heaven, but in Spain you still have this historical sparseness, this historical tranquillity, if you see what I mean. It’s no bad thing for an actor to make a longish journey once a year. It doesn’t have to be to Africa or the Caribbean. In my case it’s Spain, especially La Mancha—I find it regenerating. And believe it or not, I have a passion for bullfighting. An affinity with Hemingway, he said, a real affinity with Hemingway. But I’m not such a romantic as Hemingway was—more a man of reason, said the Burgtheater actor. I don’t have the romantic American view of bullfighting—I have a more scientific approach. Whatever is profound is naturally unromantic, he said. Nothing profound is romantic. Indeed, he said suddenly, suicide is a fashionable contemporary sickness. Now I am not the suicidal type. Joana—a Spanish name, he said. Twice he said Joana—a Spanish name, then leaned back and asked Auersberger whether his latest cantata had been published. All your cantatas are in print, aren’t they? he asked. Auersberger said, Yes, my latest cantata is in print. And is it going to be performed in Vienna? asked the actor. I doubt it, replied the successor of Webern. It would be impossible, he explained, to find first-class performers for his complicated cantata in Vienna. At either the Konzerthaus or the Musikverein, said Webern’s successor, raising his head to its full height. There’s not one flautist in the whole of Austria who could play it, said Auersberger. But I hear the London performance was very good, said the actor. Yes, replied Auersberger, the successor of Webern, London was the only place where his cantata could be performed as he envisaged it, where it could be performed ideally. His wife at once joined in, echoing the word ideally, after which they both repeated the word several times, so that it seemed as though everybody was saying ideally—everybody except Jeannie Billroth, who had sat watching me, consumed with hatred, all the time the actor was talking. It was now impossible to imagine that thirty years ago, even twenty-five years ago, I had read poems by Eluard to her while sitting on her sofa and stroking the soles of her feet, that I had played short scenes from Molière for her in her bedroom while she sat virtually naked on the bed, repeatedly demanding that I play these scenes from Molière after I had obviously bored her with my readings from Joyce and Valéry. It was inconceivable now that I had once read her the letters that her friend Ernstl wrote to her from the Salzkammergut. She wanted no one but me to read her these letters, which she described as the most intimate letters imaginable—which indeed they were, as I now recalled—while she devoured me with her gaze, as they say. That I used to spend hours reading the text of one of her novels to her, thus affording her hours of supreme gratification while I myself became more and more depressed, and that I was the one who thought up a title for this novel, The Wilderness of Youth, under which title it subsequently appeared—regrettably, I thought. That I used to walk for hours with her in the Prater, once even going up on the Giant Wheel with her, talking to her all the while about Pavese, Ungaretti and Pirandello, that I had been to Kagran and Kaisermühlen with her on a number of occasions, because when I was with her I always felt an urge to cross over the Reichsbrücke to the north bank of the Danube, I thought. That she was the first artistic person I met in Vienna after completing my studies in Salzburg, I thought. That she was the first person in Vienna who heard me read my poems and did not immediately reject them as worthless—which was what had always happened back home—and hence the first person, as I now recalled, who can be said to have given me literary courage, for whatever reason. To think that I once loved this woman Jeannie Billroth, whom I have hated for the last twenty years, and who, also, hates me. People come together and form a friendship, and for years they not only endure this friendship, but allow it to become more and more intense until it finally snaps, and from then on they hate each other for decades, sometimes for the rest of their lives. For years I used to go and visit Jeannie Billroth, I thought. At this point the actor suddenly started recounting anecdotes, the kind of theatrical anecdotes that always go down well in Vienna and provide life support for many a Viennese party that would otherwise be in danger of dying of paralysis. Most Viennese parties are able to survive for a few evening hours only because these theatrical anecdotes are continually dished up, and this party in the Gentzgasse, which has been officially designated an artistic dinner party, is no exception, I thought. It was through Jeannie Billroth that I met the Auersbergers, and finally Joana, I thought. I met Jeannie through a philosopher friend of my grandfather’s whom I visited in the Maxinggasse in Hietzing thirty years ago at a time when I was extremely hard up and on the verge of starvation. It was my visit to the Maxinggasse in Hietzing that saved my life, I told myself—to the so-called Johann Strauss House, which was occupied by my grandfather’s philosopher friend, whose brother played the bassoon and the horn in the Vienna Philharmonic. I now recalled how, having arrived in Vienna without a penny and being close to starvation, even to suicide, I had summoned up what little strength I still had and made my way to the Maxinggasse, to an address that my grandfather had given me, hoping that I would somehow be saved. And the Maxinggasse did save me. First I was given a drink of milk, then something to eat, and finally a recommendation to a woman writer who lived on the west bank of the river Wien, by the chain bridge. She got me to clear out her cellar, and for this she paid me enough money to keep me above water for three days. I read a few of her poems at the time, and these made a considerable impact on me. It was through this writer, who died young, that I met Jeannie Billroth. I now recalled how Jeannie and I used to visit Joana at Kilb, and how we would often go to the Iron Hand with her and Fritz to eat and drink and play cards. It was after all Jeannie who introduced me to nearly all the great writers of the twentieth century by lending me copies of their works. That was the Jeannie of those days, I thought, not the Jeannie who was now sitting opposite me, filled with hatred because I escaped from her one day rather than let myself be devoured by her. Had I not escaped from her, at the high point in our relationship so to speak, I would inevitably have been devoured and annihilated. So I suddenly stopped visiting her. She waited in vain for me to appear. While Ernstl was working at his Chemical Institute, I had spent hundreds of afternoons with her behind drawn curtains, as I now recalled, either reading the great works of the major twentieth-century writers to her, or listening to her as she read them to me. And then, when Ernstl came home, we would all have a cold supper, or a goulash that had been warmed up a second time and so tasted outstandingly good. And when Ernstl was tired and had gone to bed, she would make me read Joyce or Saint-John Perse or Virginia Woolf to her again until I was quite exhausted, I now recalled. I never left Jeannie’s until about two o’clock in the morning, when I would set off home to Währing, walking down the Radetzkystrasse and along by the Danube Canal, my mind brimming with world literature. We stick to someone for years, I thought, looking straight at Jeannie; we are fascinated by them and in the end become utterly dependent on them, not only head over heels in love, as they say, but utterly in thrall, and when we leave them we believe we are finished, as I did at the time, yet one day we stop going to see them, without giving any reason. Not only do we stop visiting them—we shun them, we start to despise and hate them, and no longer want to see them. And then we d
o see them, and we fall prey to a terrible agitation that we can’t control. All the other people I met at the funeral in Kilb meant virtually nothing to me, I now thought, even the Auersbergers, but meeting Jeannie instantly plunged me into mental turmoil. I had thought of them all on the way to Kilb, all except Jeannie, and naturally I had not considered the dreadful possibility of meeting her again. But there she was. She even shook hands with me at the cemetery—she even managed to smile at me, I recalled, but it was an almost annihilating smile. Yet perhaps I returned it with an equally annihilating smile. I hated her as she stood by the open grave, acting the part of the lifelong friend, I now thought, going closer to the grave than anyone else, taking a handful of earth from the sexton’s shovel and throwing it into the grave with a dexterous movement of the hand. I must stop going to her apartment before she kills me, I had thought almost thirty years ago, and I had simply made good my escape, one might say. My behavior was not as despicable as might be thought: I acted in self-defense, fearful for my own survival, I now told myself, providing myself with an excuse that I could not expect anyone else to provide and did not demand from anyone. We meet someone at the right moment, I thought, we take everything we need from them, and then we leave them, again at the right moment. I met Jeannie Billroth at just the right moment and left her at the right moment—just as I’ve always left everybody at the right moment, it now occurred to me. We adapt ourselves to the mentality and temperament of a person like Jeannie, and for a time we take in only what this person’s mentality and temperament have to offer us, and when we think we’ve taken in enough—when we’ve had enough—we simply sever the connection, just as I severed my connection with Jeannie. We spend years sucking all we can out of someone, and then, having almost sucked them dry, we suddenly say that we ourselves are being sucked dry. And for the rest of our lives we have to live with the knowledge of our own baseness, I now reflected. And having parted from Jeannie, I changed sides and went over to the Auersbergers with colors flying, as it were—and to Joana. I had broken with Jeannie, to whom I owed almost everything at that time—simply deserting her for the Auersbergers and Joana, attaching myself for two or three years first to the Auersbergers, by whom I was immediately fascinated, and then to Joana. For the fact is that the moment I deserted the Auersbergers, the moment I escaped from them, one might say, I flung myself at Joana; having given up the Gentzgasse and Maria Zaal, at first inwardly and then outwardly, I opted for the Sebastiansplatz. After Jeannie had initiated me into the literature of the twentieth century and the Auersbergers had enabled me to widen my knowledge to an unbelievable extent—when suddenly the art of literature, especially twentieth-century literature, was no longer a mystery to me, thanks to Jeannie and the Auersbergers, I fell upon the so-called plastic arts; from now on all my interest was directed to these and to acting—and of course to the art of movement, to dance, and to choreography, since it was only here that Joana was truly in her element. Looking back, I now thought as I sat facing Jeannie, I chose what was for me an ideal course of development. I chose this development, I thought—I did not think: I underwent this development, which proved to be absolutely ideal—I thought: I chose this ideal development for myself, I chose what was for me the ideal artistic development. This idea gave me pleasure—above all, I think, because all at once the notion of artistic development seemed self-evident. There could have been no more ideal, no more logical development for me, I now thought—encountering first Jeannie Billroth the writer, then the Auersbergers, and finally Joana—and through Jeannie her chemical friend Ernstl, and through Joana her tapestry artist Fritz; I could not have made a happier choice. Yet now I hated Jeannie, who was sitting opposite me, and she hated me. This hatred would of course be susceptible of precise analysis, but I have no wish to analyze it, though possibly Jeannie made her own analysis long ago. And a person like this ends up writing worthless sentimental prose, and poems that are equally worthless and sentimental, and finally falls into the universal cesspit of petit bourgeois mediocrity, I thought. We respect somebody—we may respect them for years—and then suddenly come to hate them, without at first knowing why. And we find it quite intolerable that this person, whom for so long we respected and perhaps even loved, who as it were opened our eyes and ears to everything, who revealed the whole world to us, and above all the world of art—that a person like this, who for so many years preached the highest standards, supreme standards, who guided and educated us to these supreme standards, should have ended up producing such miserable art and cultivating such appalling dilettantism. We simply cannot understand how such a person can eventually have produced something worthless and repellent, I now thought, and we can’t forgive them because, by merely pretending to subscribe to these supreme standards, they have cheated and deceived us. Jeannie cheated and deceived you with her own dilettantism, I told myself as I watched her sitting there, filled with hatred and revulsion and having to endure the actor’s endless anecdotes. Like all the others, he was leaning back in his chair, no doubt expecting that the Auersbergers would shortly ask the by-now stiff and lifeless company around the dinner table to get up and repair to the music room. I find nothing more distasteful than listening to the Viennese recounting their anecdotes, and I have to endure this Viennese perversion too, I thought. The Auersbergers’ dining room suddenly reminded me of a chapel of rest, largely no doubt because they had meanwhile switched off all the electric lights, so that the room was now lit only by the candles in the Empire lamps on the dining table. One could now see only the contours of the furniture in the dining room; one could no longer see the perverse beauty of the room—which I used to think altogether too beautiful—but only its somber theatricality. This atmosphere was in tune with the present company, who were waiting for a signal from the hosts that they might leave the dining room and move to the greater comfort of the music room. They seemed to have been plunged into a mood of despondency, above all by Joana’s death, but also by the lateness of the hour, I thought, and not even the actor was disposed to go on talking. He loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt, murmuring something about fresh air, whereupon the hostess jumped up to open a window. She opened the window overlooking the courtyard, rather than the one that gave onto the street, expecting the air to be fresher from that quarter. After this she went out into the music room, then returned to the dining room and sat down again at the table. She could have believed anything of Joana, she said, resuming her place at the table, but not that she would kill herself. The actor again brought up the case of his colleague who went to Munich, whom he described as an unhappy man right from the start. All these suicides, he said, were unhappy people right from the start, sometimes more so, sometimes less, but always essentially unhappy. It never comes as a surprise when they end up killing themselves, he said. When Joana was engaged by the Burgtheater management to teach the actors how to walk he had found the whole idea crazy. The managers of the Burgtheater were forever coming up with crazy ideas, he said. They wanted to help people like Joana, but this meant that they were bound to come up with some crazy idea. The actors at the Burgtheater are quite capable of walking, he said, and of standing and sitting and lying. He could clearly remember the observations of one Viennese criticaster, as he put it, which were published in the Presse, to the effect that the actors at the Burgtheater could neither walk nor speak, or at least that they could not do both at once. Whenever a critic writes this kind of nonsense, said the actor, it’s immediately taken up by the theater management. In this case they engaged a speech instructor, so that the actors could learn to speak. Absurd! said the actor. But if it helped our dear departed friend, he said, then there was some point in it. While he was speaking I recalled how distastefully Jeannie had behaved at Kilb. After the funeral she had gone to the woman from the general store and pressed a hundred-schilling note into her hand to cover the cost of the telephone call she had made from Kilb to inform her of Joana’s death. Less than a hundred yards from the grave she had
pressed this hundred-schilling note into the woman’s hand, I thought, in such a tasteless manner that the woman could not help feeling insulted. In fact she really was insulted by Jeannie’s behavior, for it would never occur to a person like her to expect to be reimbursed for making a telephone call to report her friend’s death to another friend. But Jeannie always went in for that kind of tasteless behavior, I thought: she hasn’t changed. But not content with this, she turned up at the Iron Hand, where I had gone with the woman from the general store to continue our conversation about Joana, and had the impertinence to go around among the funeral guests begging for money for poor John, who was now all alone, she said, and had to pay for all the funeral arrangements—who did not have a single penny, but had to meet all the expenses connected with Joana’s funeral. She would make the first donation, as she put it, by contributing five hundred schillings. Jeannie has always played the Good Samaritan, I now reflected, and I’ve always found it repugnant, since she’s never been motivated by genuine charity: it’s always been an act intended to demonstrate her social concern. All her life she’s had an unstable and unsavory character and has never been above using any available means to put others in the wrong, as she did at Kilb after Joana’s funeral. She had the audacity to pick up an empty cigar box and place her own five-hundred-schilling note in it, then go from one mourner to another canvassing contributions, with an expression on her face that made one want to slap it rather than give her any money for John, poor though he may have been—holding out the cigar box and carefully noting the amounts her victims were prepared to contribute and actually did contribute. Everyone found this performance of hers quite tasteless, and curiously enough it was Auersberger who voiced their feelings by suddenly saying to her face, How tasteless you are, how tasteless, how tasteless! Twice he repeated the words how tasteless—in other words he uttered them three times altogether—and then threw a thousand-schilling note into the cigar box. Finally there was a sum of several thousand schillings in the box, together with a hundred and twenty pounds which I had put in. Jeannie walked over to the table at which John was sitting with the woman from the store and myself and tipped out the contents of the cigar box on the table in front of him, behaving as though it were her money, all her own work, as it were. And indeed it was all her own tasteless work, but by no means her own money—her own tastelessness, but not her own money, I had said to myself at the time, though I refrained from telling her that I thought she was disgusting. That was the proper word for her, and it was on the tip of my tongue. The Virginia Woolf of Vienna, I thought at the time, who has used John as a means of once more parading her social concern, thereby facing him with one of the most embarrassing situations of his life! He would have liked to crawl under the table. People like Jeannie Billroth, who have a great understanding of art (or used to have), lack any instinct for real life, for dealing with real people, I thought. And this, it now occurred to me, has more than a little to do with the fact that, having perhaps once been a truly gifted artist, an artist of considerable talent, Jeannie has in the course of the last two decades developed into an unscrupulous, petit bourgeois hypocrite of the most dreadful kind. But she always made this hypocritical pretense to social concern, I thought, though thirty years ago, even twenty years ago, this repellent side of her character did not strike me with such depressing force as it does today, I thought. In fact in those days I was unaware of her weaknesses and the generally disagreeable traits in her personality. For a long time we see only one side of a person’s personality, because for reasons of self-preservation we do not wish to see any other, I thought, then suddenly we see all sides of their personality and are disgusted by them, I thought. I sat in the Iron Hand for over two hours, and finally took my leave shortly after Jeannie had left for Vienna with the Auersbergers. Once more I could see her ostentatious fir wreath adorned with a bright silvery bow imprinted with the words From Jeannie, which the sexton had contrived to place on top of the pile of flowers by the graveside in such a way that everybody saw only the one name Jeannie. Not that I suspect Jeannie of having prevailed upon the sexton to give her wreath such prominence, but all the same it was her wreath with the words From Jeannie that had pride of place, and this seemed to sum up the whole of her performance at Kilb. She was also the only one who had prayed aloud with the local people; this I found almost insufferable, considering that Jeannie is not a Catholic and has always disparaged Christianity, at least when speaking to me. She put on a show of being pious, and this was the most repulsive aspect of the ceremony; no one else, I thought, had made this distasteful pretense of piety. At Kilb she behaved altogether as though she were Joana’s best friend, though I know that in reality she had let Joana down, abandoning her at the very moment when she was deserted by Fritz, the fashionable artist of the Sebastiansplatz—the moment the lights went out in the Sebastiansplatz, as it were, when there were no more parties and no longer anything to be gained by going there. She pretended to be her closest friend, whereas she had been a deserter from Joana’s cause for years. And then she had arranged for her wreath to have this dreadful bow with the words From Jeannie attached to it, in the belief that this would somehow cancel out years of disloyalty, I thought. And I thought to myself: she hates me because, contrary to her wishes, I finally became a writer, no matter what kind of a writer—a writer all the same, in other words a competitor, and not an actor or a producer or a theater manager, as she would have liked me to become. This, after all, was the reason why one day she introduced me to Joana, I thought. At all costs she wanted to prevent my becoming a writer, I thought, but now that I had become one she hated me for it. In her eyes I had committed a capital offense by becoming a writer in spite of everything—in spite of everything, I am bound to repeat, in spite of all her efforts to prevent me. And I thought of all the venom with which she had pursued me during the last twenty years in the pages of her journal Literature in Our Time, of the way she had put down everything I had published—or tried to put it down. And when she was not trying to put down my writings herself by publishing vicious articles and defamatory essays about them in her Literature in Our Time, she did not recoil from exploiting others in pursuit of her vendetta, penniless writers who were forced to rely on her, I now thought. But it was ridiculous to get so worked up: by getting myself worked up over something so nonsensical I was making myself ridiculous in my own eyes, and I told myself several times, though in such a way that only I could hear it: You’re making yourself ridiculous, you’re making yourself ridiculous in your own eyes—you’ve made yourself ridiculous in your own eyes. What a disgusting character you are! The words were addressed only to myself—no one else could hear them—and I went on addressing myself, working myself into a state of growing agitation. You betrayed Jeannie—she didn’t betray you, I told myself more than once, and I went on repeating it to myself until I was utterly exhausted. It was already half past two in the morning, and we were still sitting in the dining room. The actor was still talking and the others listening: throughout this artistic dinner he was virtually the only person who said anything, because nearly everyone else was much too tired to talk. The only others who made any contribution to the conversation were Jeannie Billroth—who every now and then said something that seemed to me invariably inept or ineffectual, though at times vicious and rude—and the Auersbergers themselves. None of the other guests said a single word—and there were seven or eight of them at this artistic dinner, or perhaps ten or twelve. For a long time I was not sure how many guests there were or whether I knew them all. I did know them all, of course, but I paid no attention to most of them—they were simply part of the scenery, I thought. One actually finds most people uninteresting, I thought, all the time—almost all the people we meet are uninteresting, having nothing to offer us but their collective mediocrity and their collective imbecility, with which they bore us on every occasion, and so naturally we have no time for them. If we look back, I thought, we see that they have quite automatically made
themselves ludicrous and uninteresting in their thousands, their tens of thousands, their millions. How tiresome and insignificant celebrities like this Burgtheater actor can be! I now thought as I suddenly saw him yawn, after which the hostess yawned, and then Auersberger yawned. At this point they probably all yawned. Jeannie and I were the only two who did not, and by now we were staring fixedly at each other. The Virginia Woolf of Vienna, who remained simply the wife of Ernstl the chemist, was already as old at sixty as some people become only when they reach seventy or eighty, I thought. I recalled The Wilderness of Youth and all the nonsense she had put into it, in the belief that it was world-class literature, whereas it was only petit bourgeois kitsch. She hates you, I told myself, and you despise her—that’s the truth of it. But she hates you not just because you left her more than twenty years ago—twenty-five years ago in fact—and because you’re a writer, but because you’re ten years her junior. Such women never forgive you for the fact that they are ten years older than you, I thought. She hates me because I left her to go on living with her Ernstl in their apartment in the Second District and went over to Joana, exchanging the writer who was ten years older than myself for the movement artist who was only six years older, and who had a Fritz instead of an Ernstl. All the same Jeannie still has her Ernstl, whereas for the last eighteen years of her life Joana didn’t have her Fritz, I thought. She now hates me with a far greater hatred than twenty-five or twenty years ago, I thought. She hates you with a fundamental hatred, I told myself. No no, if the Auersbergers had said that they were inviting Jeannie to their artistic dinner, I wouldn’t have come to the Gentzgasse, I thought. I always make the mistake of not asking the hosts who else is being invited, I thought. Had they said, We’ve invited Jeannie Billroth too, I would never have come to the Gentzgasse. And so at once I fell into the Gentzgasse trap on two counts, on three or four counts, on a thousand counts, it seemed to me. I ought to have known that Jeannie would obviously be coming to an artistic dinner like this in the Gentzgasse, especially as it was taking place on the day of Joana’s funeral; and it was equally obvious that she would be coming without Ernstl, whom she has never taken to visit her artistic friends, I thought, and who never had any interest in artists or anything to do with artists, who never showed the slightest interest in anything that interested Jeannie, I have to say. Nothing that interested Jeannie was ever of the slightest interest to her Ernstl: he was interested only in chemistry and Jeannie herself, nothing else—only in his chemistry and the conjugal bed. And this was the one day, I thought, when I ought not to have laid myself open to Jeannie’s malice, for the effect she had on me was not only destructive, but annihilating; what is more, she at once realized this and gave me no quarter. There was no longer any way of escaping her: I might have got up and left, but I was already too weak to do this; on the other hand I thought I would be able to survive this night in the Gentzgasse, as I had survived hundreds of equally intolerable late-night parties there—after all I’ve survived all of them up to now, I thought. The actor from the Burgtheater had settled himself in one of the chairs in the music room. He was naturally the first to take his place; only after he had sat down did the others find themselves places in various parts of the room. Once again I was the last, and as I dragged myself into the music room I thought, Ah yes, no doubt Auersberger’s wife is now going to sing us one or two arias. Auersberger had the Purcell Music Book open in readiness, but as it was now three o’clock I hoped that she would refrain from treating us to a sample of her art. And in fact I was spared having to listen to her singing, though I am bound to say that she always sang with great charm; indeed she had a particularly beautiful voice, I might even say an extremely fine voice, I thought as I took my place in the music room. This too was furnished in the Empire style and full of treasures which no one could afford today, as it had been thirty years ago. Some were heirlooms which Auersberger’s father-in-law had brought to Vienna from Styria, from the family residence in Maria Zaal; others he had acquired in Vienna on highly favorable terms, having been well acquainted, as I happen to know, with an antique dealer in the Third District, who for various reasons preferred to call himself a secondhand dealer, although essentially he dealt only in valuable items. This so-called secondhand dealer had for years done business, on a quid pro quo basis, with Auersberger’s father-in-law, who treated him for his various illnesses and was in return supplied with all kinds of Josephine and Empire furniture, as well as some exquisite Biedermeier pieces, without having to pay a penny for them. Thirty years ago, I thought, I used to love this music room, which I always described as the most beautiful Josephine room I had ever seen. But later I realized that it was simply too beautiful, too perfectly furnished, and hence unbearable. Looking around the room now, I found it merely repugnant, probably because in the intervening years I had ceased to place such a high value on rooms like this which were furnished solely with antiques; my early enthusiasm for old furniture had diminished and turned almost to dislike. People furnish their apartments in an antique style, surrounding themselves with furniture that is centuries old, furniture from an age that does not concern them, and this makes them guilty of a certain kind of mendacity, I thought. Being too feeble to cope with their own age, one might say, they find it necessary, in order to keep themselves above water, to surround themselves with furniture from a bygone age, an age that is dead and gone, I thought. It really is a sign of appalling feebleness, I thought, if people fill their apartments with furniture belonging to past ages rather than their own, the harshness and brutality of which they are unable to endure. What they do, it seems to me, is surround themselves with the softness of the dead past that cannot answer back. The Auersbergers, who have always been credited with what is called taste, have never had any real taste, but only a secondhand surrogate, just as they have no life, no existence of their own, but only a secondhand surrogate. It was not they who were the focal point of their parties, I thought, but their furniture, their objets d’art and their money. They don’t speak for themselves: they let their furniture and their money speak for them, just as they’ve done tonight, I thought. As this thought struck me, their true indigence was borne in upon me. The Auersbergers believe themselves to be objects of admiration, yet the truth is that those who visit them really admire only their furniture, their objets d’art, and the skill with which these are disposed about their residences. They think people admire them, I thought, while in fact people admire only their polished cabinets and sideboards, their tables and chairs, the many oil paintings on their walls, and their money. It is by no means farfetched to think that what people admire about them, what draws people to them and inspires admiration, is their wealth, and the more or less shameless life-style it enables them to sustain. It’s not only the emperor’s clothes that make the emperor, but the emperor’s furniture and art treasures, I thought. But in the dimly lit music room it’s quite impossible to see any of these art treasures, I thought—not that I had any wish to see them, for I would undoubtedly have been sickened by the sight. How sickened I was by this whole apartment in the Gentzgasse, which once more struck me as perversely ostentatious! Such perfection, which hits you in the eye and crowds in upon you from all sides, is simply repellent, I thought, just as all apartments are repellent in which everything is just so, as they say, in which nothing is ever out of place or ever permitted to be out of place. We find such apartments repellent and would never feel at home in them, I thought, unless we were to some extent absentminded, as I was thirty years ago when I first set foot in this apartment. Being the last to take my place, I found myself sitting between the actor and Auersberger. The former now looked like a retired infantry general, and I noticed that even his loquacity had been dampened by the large intake of food: he had suddenly become silent, and as he sat with his legs stretched out in front of him there was something military about his whole demeanor, I thought. Such knife-edge creases are seen only in officers’ trousers, I thought—generals’ trousers, field marshals
’ trousers. The hostess was circulating among the guests with a decanter of white wine, but by now everybody was tired and showed scarcely any interest in the wine or any other drink. Only Auersberger continued to drink nonstop. He was probably due for another drying-out cure at Kalksburg, I thought, looking at him from the side—at the sunken temples and the fat spongy cheeks that hung from them. Had the sight not been so repulsive I would have thought it merely grotesque, but I was devastated to see him in this condition. This is somebody you were once more or less in love with, I thought to myself as I viewed him from the side; there was a time when it might have been said that you’d fallen in love with this man. And now he was sitting next to me, I thought, puffy and bloated, able to draw attention to himself only by mumbling something from time to time in a drink-sodden voice. He’s wearing those grotesque knitted socks again, I thought, and that utterly tasteless peasant jacket, and that linen shirt with the colorful embroidery and stiff collar, which looks even more ridiculous on him than it would on anyone else. His wife obviously suffered under her husband’s perversely demented condition, which she could do nothing about. An hour earlier she had tried, without success, to persuade him to leave the party and go to bed; now she made a second attempt to get her husband, who had meanwhile drunk himself into a thoroughly infantile condition, out of his chair, out of the music room, and into his bed, but Auersberger pushed her away with a full glass of wine in his hand; in doing so he hurt her eye and spilled the wine on the floor, at the same time calling her a silly goose‚ as he had done throughout the evening. He had behaved no differently thirty years earlier. I was used to these scenes at the Auersbergers’—I know them well. The present one was relatively innocuous. Such evenings usually ended with Auersberger flinging his wine glass against the wall and smashing up one of the priceless Empire chairs. Their chairs were constantly having to be repaired by a restorer in the city center who made a good deal of money out of the Auersbergers’ mania for destruction. Every now and then Auersberger succeeded in saying something, even in getting whole sentences out. One of these was The human race ought to be abolished, a pronouncement with which he more than once attracted the attention of the company in the music room, delivering it with a rhythmic precision that came from his musical training. He delivered himself of other pronouncements, such as: Society ought to be abolished and We should all kill one another. I was too familiar with such pronouncements to find them original, but on this occasion I was not embarrassed by them, as the others no doubt were, not having heard them before, among them the actor from the Burgtheater, who had clearly not heard them before this evening and found them embarrassing, as I could see. But my dear Auersberger, he said, what’s the matter with you? Why are you getting so worked up? The world’s a beautiful place and the people in it are good people. Why do you get so worked up and run everything down when everything is essentially so agreeable and well ordered? Having said this, he added, Why do you have to drink yourself almost into a stupor? He shook his head and drew on his cigar, which the hostess had lighted for him. Jeannie Billroth, sitting opposite me, remained silent, observing the scene between Auersberger, with whom she had been even more infatuated than I had been twenty-five years earlier, and the Burgtheater actor, with whom she had hoped to have what she always termed an intellectual conversation, though no such conversation had materialized: the actor had not been willing to respond to any of her questions or enter into any discussion with her, and thus had given her no chance to strike up an intellectual conversation, choosing rather to confine his attention to the genuine Balaton pike and the recounting of his own anecdotes. Jeannie always wanted to have intellectual conversations and took every opportunity to stress that this was all that mattered to her in her social dealings, that this was her sole motive for attending parties; but most of the time she had no precise notion—or even a rough notion—of what constituted an intellectual conversation. She doubtless thought that an actor from the Burgtheater would be just the right partner for an intellectual conversation, but she was wrong. An intellectual conversation was the last thing the actor wanted that evening: he had not even been willing to talk about ordinary topics of supposedly intellectual interest or even to discuss matters that might be thought germane to his profession. Jeannie had repeatedly tried to lure him out of his reserve, as it were; she did not know that he had no reserve—nor could he have, I reflected, since he was after all an actor from the Burgtheater, one of the many half-wits engaged to perform there, who remain within their narrow intellectual confines, their generally mindless confines, and reach a venerable old age on the national stage. Even this actor’s face betrays no sign of anything that might be called remotely intellectual, I told myself, but Jeannie failed to see this. Even so, there was a certain tactlessness in inviting an actor to talk about the theater or the acting profession, in other words about his livelihood: nobody likes doing this, nobody finds it acceptable or tolerable to have to give his views on what he is obliged to live with, namely his profession—what some might call his vocation. She herself has always refused to talk about writing, and so have I, for naturally, as a writer I hate nothing so much as having to discuss writing. I’ve always refused to do so, and in this way I’ve offended a great many people, though their tactlessness has always merited whatever offense I’ve given, I thought. I find nothing so repugnant as talking about writing, and I find it supremely repugnant to talk about my own. Yet Jeannie imagined that she could talk to the actor about acting at the Burgtheater, I thought. Sitting next to her was Anna Schreker, a high school teacher whom I have also known as long as I have known the Auersbergers and whom I have always seen in their company, though only in the Gentzgasse, never at Maria Zaal, and always with her male companion, who is also a writer. She still has the same revolting sibilant pronunciation she had thirty years ago, I thought. People have always maintained that Anna Schreker the high school teacher is the Austrian Gertrude Stein or the Austrian Marianne Moore, whereas she has only ever been the Austrian Schreker, a local Viennese writer of megalomaniac pretensions. I now recalled that she too had started writing in the fifties, following more or less the same path as Jeannie Billroth, the path that leads from youthful promise to state patronage—starting off as a derivative literary virgin and ending up as a derivative literary matron—the path of mediocrity, it seems to me, not of genius. Just as Jeannie progressed from her Virginia Woolf fixation to her Virginia Woolf posture, so Schreker progressed from her Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein fixation to her Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein posture. At an early stage both Jeannie and Schreker, together with Schreker’s companion, made a radical break with their early intentions, their early literary visions and passions, and applied themselves instead to the loathsome art of exploiting literature as a means of ingratiating themselves with the state; all three applied themselves with the same abhorrent zeal to the cultivation of various city councillors, ministers, and other officials concerned with cultural affairs, so that as far as I was concerned they suddenly died overnight in the early sixties of their innate feebleness of character and became precisely the kind of sickening, revolting figures they had always accused others of being and spoken of with such supreme contempt. It seems to me that in endeavoring to ingratiate themselves with the state, Schreker and Jeannie betrayed not only themselves, but literature as a whole. This is what I thought at the time, when I suddenly became aware of their ambitions, and what I still think today; I shall never forgive them for what they did, and I am not sure which of the two is the more contemptible. Suddenly, in the early sixties, both Jeannie Billroth and Anna Schreker, in their appallingly opportunistic fashion, positively crawled into the very filth they had always found so loathsome and been so loud in condemning in the fifties. In the fifties, when I was twenty, they had described the state to me in terms which still hold good today, namely as an institution that brings unmitigated disaster on our benighted nation, yet in the early sixties they seem to have had no compunction in capitulating t
o this selfsame state and making common cause with it. As I see it, Schreker and Billroth sold out unreservedly to this egregious state in the early sixties, and so from then on I wanted nothing more to do with them, and especially with Jeannie. Schreker I had always regarded as a peripheral phenomenon, though she and Jeannie always struck me as being moral and spiritual siblings. While Jeannie always had her Virginia Woolf madness and hence suffered from a kind of Viennese Virginia Woolf disease, Schreker always had the Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein madness and suffered from the Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein disease. At the beginning of the sixties both of them quite suddenly turned their literary madnesses and their literary diseases, which in the fifties had no doubt been quite genuine madnesses and quite genuine diseases, into a pose, a purpose-built literary pose, a multipurpose literary pose, in order to make themselves attractive to openhanded politicians, thus unscrupulously killing off whatever literature they had inside them for the sake of a venal existence as recipients of state patronage. For I can only describe this pair as devious beneficiaries of state handouts, who in recent years have never missed an opportunity of showing themselves compliant to the perversely openhanded state they once despised, and who in the last fifteen years have been seen wherever something was up for grabs, as they say, never failing to take their places at official state functions or civic festivities. Wherever the politicians who run the nation’s cultural affairs with such outrageous insolence turn up with their well-filled money bags, these two may be seen dancing attendance. Thus over recent years Jeannie Billroth and Anna Schreker, the two literary, artistic and cultural ladies of my youth, on whom I had for years been prepared to bet my bottom dollar, as they say, have come to earn my detestation—Jeannie naturally more so than Schreker, since I never had such close contacts (or conflicts!) with her as I did with Jeannie. It became clear to me at the beginning of the sixties that these two writers, whom I had looked up to in the fifties as the two great female authors of my youth, were merely a couple of petit bourgeois women intent upon dressing up their mendacious inanities in literary guise. And there they were sitting opposite me, the two female monsters of Austrian literature side by side, each as repellent as the other in her inflated literary pretensions. There sit the Marianne Moore, the Gertrude Stein and the Virginia Woolf of Vienna, I thought, and yet they are nothing but devious, ambitious little state protégées, who have betrayed literature—and art in general—for the sake of a few ludicrous prizes and a guaranteed pension, kowtowing to the state and its cultural riffraff, churning out their derivative kitsch for the vilest of motives and spending their time going up and down the stairs of the ministries that dole out subventions. How Schreker used to inveigh—indeed vituperate—against the so-called Art Senate! Yet a year ago she let this same Art Senate single her out for the award of the Great Austrian State Prize for Literature. It’s nauseating, I thought, to have to watch Schreker and Billroth suddenly falling upon the neck of the former President of the so-called Art Senate, now its Honorary President, the very person they execrated for decades and pronounced so dreadful and dangerous, simply because they covet the Great Austrian State Prize—to see them suddenly and quite unashamedly fawning upon this man and his acolytes, who have this prize—and the money that goes with it—in their gift. For decades these two women regarded this President of the Art Senate as an object of opprobrium, but now. Schreker embraces him in the so-called audience chamber of the Ministry of Culture, check in hand, and makes a fulsome speech of thanks. This Honorary President and former President of the Austrian Art Senate is now ninety years old, yet the decision as to who should be awarded the highest distinction the country has to offer and who should not still rests solely with this stupid, vulgar, arch-Catholic exploiter of the arts, who for decades, it seems to me, has been the greatest polluter of the country’s cultural environment, yet Schreker, with the prize at last in her hands, now even kisses him on the cheek—the thought of it still nauseates me. And it will not be long before Billroth and then Schreker’s companion march into the audience chamber at the Ministry of Culture to receive the Great Austrian State Prize from the hands of this revolting man, and nothing will stop them kissing his cheek and delivering a fulsome speech of thanks. But Billroth and Schreker (and her companion) are not the only people who make a point of cultivating the people who administer state moneys and state honors in this country: almost all Austrian artists go the same way when once they have reached years of discretion, as they say, recanting everything they professed and propagated with the utmost vehemence before the age of twenty-five or thirty as the minimal morality required of the artist, in order to ally themselves with those who dispense state moneys, state orders, and state pensions. All Austrian artists end up letting themselves be bought out by the state for its nefarious purposes, selling themselves to this vile, unprincipled, execrable state, and most of them start off that way. Their art consists solely in working hand in glove with the state—that is the truth. Schreker and her companion and Jeannie Billroth are just three examples of the so-called artistic world of Austria. To be an artist in Austria means for most people being compliant to the state, whatever its political complexion, and letting oneself be supported by it for the term of one’s natural life. Artistic life in Austria is a road built by state opportunism out of people’s baseness and mendacity, paved with scholarships and prizes, lined with decorations and distinctions, and leading to an honored grave in the Central Cemetery. Schreker, who is incapable of developing a simple idea and has for decades written nothing but drivel, passes for an intellectual writer in the same way as Billroth, who in my opinion is even stupider, I thought. This fact is characteristic not only of the degenerate intellectual life of Austria, but of intellectual life generally. But in Austria this catastrophic state of affairs seems even more catastrophic if, having just come from England, we observe it from a bird’s-eye view. The repellent has always been more repellent here, the tasteless always more tasteless, the ludicrous always more ludicrous. But what and where would we be, I wonder, if things were different? Schreker, her companion, and Jeannie, who for twenty years have been simulating rebelliousness, revolution, and advanced attitudes for the benefit of the young, while in reality expending all their energy running up and down the back stairs of the ministries that hand out the money, have always been intellectual birds of a feather; I have always been repelled by the skill they display in hoodwinking the young and blackmailing the benighted ministries. Anna Schreker is now sitting next to Jeannie Billroth, I thought, and I observed the two of them, these degenerate spiritual siblings. Schreker and Billroth and Schreker’s companion are today the embodiment of the kind of derivative pseudo-intellectual literary garbage that I’ve always detested, though it’s lapped up by fashion-crazed whiz-kid copy readers who’ve never outgrown their literary puberty, and eagerly subsidized by senile officials of the Ministry of Culture in the Minoritenplatz. This evening, for this artistic dinner, I thought, Schreker has come dressed all in black, as always. Now she was suddenly sitting in the background next to the one-armed painter Rehmden, a member of the so-called Second Viennese Surrealist School and naturally a professor at the art academy in the Schillerplatz, the nature engraver with the fine line. Auersberger, whom I once in all seriousness called a Novalis of sound, as I now recall to my horror, had long since become unaccountable for his actions and did no more than mumble the occasional incomprehensible remark. Earlier, no doubt in a final effort to attract everyone’s attention, he had suddenly removed his lower dental plate and held it in front of the actor’s face, remarking that life was short, man a frail creature, and death not far away. This had prompted the actor to utter the word tasteless several times, while Auersberger replaced the dental plate in his mouth. His wife naturally jumped up once more, intending to get him out of the music room and into the bedroom. Again she did not succeed; Auersberger threatened several times to kill her and pushed her away, so that she stumbled against the actor, who caught her in his arms,
whereupon Auersberger exclaimed Oh how tasteless! several times, then dozed off in his peasant jacket. Also present at this artistic dinner were two young men who spoke with a Styrian dialect; these hefty country louts were probably related to Auersberger, I thought, and had been dragged along, in the true sense of the phrase, to beef up the artistic dinner, as they say. For as long as I observed them they spoke to nobody but each other, just as I conversed with nobody but myself; having come to this artistic dinner, I remained more or less silent throughout the whole proceedings, it now occurs to me. In other words I behaved in much the same way as the two young men, who were said to be trainee engineers, except that they for some reason kept on standing up and sitting down again, whereas I remained seated nearly all the time, first in the anteroom and then at the dining table. Only on two occasions did I speak to anyone. On the first occasion it was to ask the actor whether, after four or five decades, he was not sick to the teeth, as they say, of constantly playing classical roles at the Burgtheater—Goethe or Shakespeare and Grillparzer, Goethe or Shakespeare twice a year and Grillparzer once every two or three years, but a role like Ekdal in The Wild Duck only every five or six years, or alternatively playing in some silly English society comedy like the one the Burgtheater was now rehearsing, but he did not answer me. The other occasion was when I told Auersberger, quite superfluously, that he had made a mess of his life and dragged his genius in the dirt for the sake of a rich wife and high living, that he had destroyed himself in the process and made drinking the be-all and end-all of his life, that he had exchanged one misfortune, that of his youth, for a second misfortune, that of old age, that he had sacrificed his musical genius for his revolting socializing, and intellectual freedom for the bondage of wealth. I also told him several times that I found his peasant-style woolen jacket distasteful, and his peasant-style linen shirt equally so—that in fact I found everything about him distasteful. I attended this artistic dinner but, like the two Styrian louts, I took no part in it; I observed the proceedings without involving myself in them. There were one or two other people in the background whom I had been unable to identify even in the dining room, which was much more brightly lit than the music room, and then there were the two young writers, who made their presence felt by repeatedly bursting into peals of laughter, though the reason for their laughter escaped me. It had begun to get on my nerves even before the Burgtheater actor arrived on the scene: it was a completely hollow and mindless laughter, such as we often hear nowadays when we are with young people—hollow, inane and mindless. The two young writers had virtually nothing to say for themselves, I thought; they drank incessantly and ate everything that was set before them, and although they had been invited to this artistic dinner, probably by Auersberger, to represent artistic intellectual youth at the dinner table—as a counterpoise to the two technological youths from Styria—they took no active part in it. But what, after all, can young writers have to say? I thought. They imagine they know everything, yet can only find everything ridiculous, without being able to say why it’s ridiculous. This is something they don’t discover until much later, I thought. At first they find everything ridiculous, without knowing why, then later they know why, but don’t tell anybody, because they’ve no reason to do so. This is the stupid, hollow, mindless laughter that’s typical of today’s youth, the youth of our own age, the perverse, mindless, dangerous eighties, I thought. They burst into peals of laughter and find everything ridiculous and haven’t published a single book, I thought—just like you thirty years ago. They’ve got nothing but their laughter, nothing, and they’re content with it. All they have is their laughter: the catastrophe of life still lies ahead of them, I thought. They have only their laughter, and no way of justifying it. And I recalled how I, as just such a young writer, had sat at parties like this and spent all my time laughing, finding everything laughable, but never giving a reason, and taking no part in the proceedings apart from drinking and eating and laughing. I found the two young men so uninteresting—just as uninteresting as I had been—that I made no approach to them, just as no one had made any approach to me when I was their age, I told myself. We don’t learn anything of interest by talking to the youth of the eighties: we talk and talk and talk, without understanding what we’re talking about, and they talk and talk and talk, and we don’t understand a word of what they say, nor do we want to understand, I told myself. Talking to young people gets us nowhere, I thought, and anyone who asserts the contrary is a hypocrite, for young people have nothing to say to their elders, to old people—that’s the truth. What the young have to say to the old is of absolutely no interest, none whatever, I thought, and to assert the contrary is gross hypocrisy. It’s always been fashionable to say that the old should talk to the young because they’ve so much to learn from them, but the opposite is the truth: the young have nothing whatever to say to the old. Of course the old would have something to say to the young, but the young don’t understand what the old have to say to them, and, being unable to understand, they’ve no wish to understand. Auersberger always had young writers in his entourage and in his bed, I now recalled; I was one of the first to be invited to Maria Zaal—one of the first to walk into his trap, one of the first to play the fool for him. Someone to paper over the marital cracks, I said to myself, the marital cracks on both walls, I added, looking at the two young writers and the two trainee engineers. Auersberger was not content to take just any young men to bed with him, I thought—they had to be young writers. He never invited a young painter or a young sculptor to go to Maria Zaal and share his bed: only a young writer would do. He would invite him to go to Maria Zaal and then invite him to share his bed, intending to devour him, I now thought. He would pay his fare to Maria Zaal, no matter where from, pick him up from the station, and show him to the room that had been prepared for him, and on the very first day he would try to devour him. This thought had sickened and tormented me for years, indeed for decades, but all at once it no longer did. Auersberger, the lecherous literary Moloch, I thought, and had I not been so tired I could have laughed out loud at this formulation of mine. Auersberger and the young writers, I thought—I could write a short essay on the subject, or even a long essay—an essay and a half, as they say. I’ll certainly play Ekdal another fifty times or so, the actor said suddenly. He was now leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed. If only I’d had someone better to play Gregers! I ought to have played Gregers myself, but that’s an absurd idea—playing both Ekdal and Gregers simultaneously! That’s absurd! Quite absurd! said the actor. Meanwhile Auersberger’s wife had put on a record of Ravel’s Bolero, which had been Joana’s favorite piece. She’s chosen the Bolero on purpose to remind us of Joana, I said to myself. And no sooner had I heard the opening bars than I began to think of Joana again, and above all of her funeral. At first I thought it tasteless to play a record of the Bolero, but perhaps it was not. Possibly it was a good idea, however contrived, to turn this more or less frightful supper, this artistic dinner, into an act of remembrance for Joana. Before she put the record on I had already made up my mind to get up and leave, but now I was quite happy to go on sitting there, suddenly feeling pleasantly indifferent to everything, letting the images of the funeral float through my mind. I had a clear vision of the scenes in the Iron Hand, the face of the woman from the general store, and John’s face, and Kilb, the beautiful, restful little market town in Lower Austria. The agitation I had felt throughout this dreadful evening and night in the Gentzgasse suddenly gave way to a sense of calm. I have always enjoyed listening to the Bolero, which Joana always played in her movement studio when she was working with her more gifted pupils. Actually the whole of her art of movement and the whole of her teaching was oriented to the Bolero, I thought, as I listened to the music with my eyes closed. How good it feels to be sentimental now and then, I thought. I could now see Joana quite clearly, the movement artist who had had every chance of happiness but whose life had ended in utter misery. I could hear her voice and take de
light in the things she used to say, in her laugh, in her responsiveness to everything beautiful. For Joana had the gift of always seeing the beauty which exists beside the terrible, unending ugliness that destroys and annihilates—a gift which very few possess, but which she possessed to a higher degree than anyone I have known in my whole life. But even this gift did her no good, I thought. She came to Vienna and let Vienna devour her; then she fled from Vienna and went back home, only to hang herself, I thought. And I recalled how Joana’s neighbor, who always looked after the house for her when she was away, had found her just before six o’clock in the morning, hanging from a rope that she had tied in a noose and attached to a roof beam with her own hands. The woman from the general store had broken down in the Iron Hand. She told me that the neighbor had at first seen only Joana’s feet swinging above the stairs in the entrance hall; going closer she had seen the legs, and finally the whole heavy body, completely bloated from years of drinking, hanging in the noose and set in motion by the opening of the door. It had been a grotesque sight, and at the same time horrible, said the woman from the general store. The neighbor had not screamed, she said, but stayed quite calm and come straight over to her to tell her of her discovery, knowing her to be Joana’s best friend. It was not yet light at the time. At seven o’clock Joana’s friend had called me in Vienna; I was not the first person she called, but she informed me only an hour after the body was discovered. The Bolero gradually brought back all the different stations in Joana’s life. I saw her alternately in the Sebastiansplatz, in Kilb, and in Maria Zaal, where she had often been a guest. She loved wearing clothes of her own design, I thought, and ancient Egyptian bracelets and Persian earrings; she had a very keen and very feminine interest in ancient African and Asiatic cultures, about which she read every book and article she could find. She would wrap herself in Indian silks and wear Afghan, Chinese and Turkish necklaces. No one else talked more about her dreams, which she tried to explore and trace back to their origins. I used to spend whole nights with her exploring her dreams. She was interested in other people’s dreams too; she made a study of them, one might say, and hence the exploration of dreams became her second art, I thought. She often described herself as a dreamwalker, leading a dreamwalking existence. I remembered how she liked to surround herself with young people—preferably very young people who can still dreamwalk, she would say, who’ve not yet been spoiled and corrupted by culture and education. Naturally she had a fantastic feeling for fairy stories, which were her favorite reading, and she liked reading them aloud, sometimes publicly. Dreams and fairy stories were the real stuff of her life, I thought. That was why she killed herself, because a person whose life is built on dreams and fairy stories can’t survive in this world—has no right to survive, I thought. She was a fairy-tale figure herself, and no doubt all her life she believed herself to be a figure in a fairy story—Elfriede Slukal, who in the fairy story was called Joana, I thought. I must say the Bolero was always her piece, the center of her existence. We shouldn’t be afraid of letting sentimentality take over from time to time, I thought, and I now let the Bolero take over; I let myself go, surrendering myself to the music and my feelings for Joana, until the moment when Jeannie Billroth asked the actor, who was sitting next to me but opposite Jeannie, what he thought of the fact that a new director was about to enter the house on the Ring, that the Burgtheater was going to be exposed to a new wind—a fresh wind, some thought, that would sweep out everything in the Burgtheater that was stale and dead and horrible, everything that had become revolting and disgusting and appalling over the years. What did he think of the fact that one of the best theater people was about to move into the Burgtheater, a German genius, a German theatrical genius of the first rank, the very first rank, a first-class theater fanatic, as Jeannie put it, or rather as it had been put by others, for she was only quoting what she had heard or read in the newspapers, she said—she was not expressing her own opinion about the new man from Germany, whom she did not know, who still had to convince her, who was still an unknown quantity as far as she was concerned. A theatrical tornado, the papers had said, an elemental man of the theater such as the Burgtheater had not seen for a hundred years was about to move into the Burgtheater, if she might venture to quote what the papers had said. The Burgtheater actor, who had dozed off briefly, was startled by this sudden question. So, what do you think of this new man who’s coming to your theater? Jeannie persisted, as though she had at last found a quarry for the malice that had been lying in wait all evening and suddenly saw how to bring her quarry to bay and dispatch it. But surely you have an opinion about the new man? she said several times. At this the actor became indignant; he sat up in his chair, drew in his legs, raised his head high, and said, Good, fine, so a new man’s taking over. But that was of no interest to him, he said, it could no longer be of any interest to him. He had seen so many directors take up the post only to lose it again that this new man was of no interest to him. They come and they go, he said, they’re received with open arms and then ignominiously sent packing. It had always been like that, he said, and the new man would be no exception. All right, he said, the new man may be a genius, as you say. To this Jeannie replied that she had not said he was a genius—that was what the newspapers had said. It was not she who had said it, but the papers. Every day one read something in the papers about this genius from Germany, she went on—it was not she who had said it. The Burgtheater actor replied, Whether the papers say it or whether you say it, my dear, it’s a matter of complete indifference to me who the new man is who’s taking over. It had always been a matter of indifference to him, he said. He had outlived ten or eleven Burgtheater directors who had all vanished without trace—nobody could remember their names any longer. They’re appointed by the minister, who has no idea about the theater and is guided only by his political instinct. They work for a year and then they’re shed, said the actor, suddenly becoming heated again. The minister appoints the man he thinks will be most useful to him, naturally always for political reasons, never for artistic reasons, and no sooner has the new man signed the contract than he encounters hostility, and every effort is made to get him out as quickly as possible. Two or three productions get good notices, and then the critics start attacking and destroying the man they’ve just praised for a whole year before he signed the contract. If the newspapers say he’s a genius before he’s signed the contract and taken up his post, they’ll call him an idiot afterwards. No matter what productions he puts on, they’ll attract less and less praise, and in two or three years he’ll be no good at all, said the actor. If he stages classical plays it’ll be stupid, and if he stages modern plays it’ll be equally stupid. If he favors Austrian playwrights it’ll be wrong, and if he goes for foreign playwrights it’ll be equally wrong. If, before coming to the Burgtheater, he’s been told that his Shakespeare productions are overwhelming, altogether the best Shakespeare productions the critics have ever seen, he’ll be told they’re a disaster as soon as he’s in his post at the Burgtheater. The kingmakers of the Burgtheater turn into regicides the moment they’ve achieved their aim and the new king is on the throne, he said. Ah, you know, he said to Jeannie Billroth, if you’re a good actor you don’t care who the theater director is. A new director loses his attraction in no time. Hardly has he been seen in the Kärntnerstrasse a few times or dined once or twice at the Sacher or the Imperial, than he’s finished. There have always been favorite actors at the Burgtheater, my dear, but there’s never been a favorite director. If you really want to know, it’s a matter of complete indifference to me who’s going to succeed our present director, he said. Suddenly everyone was listening with the greatest interest, and the actor was now not only smoking a cigar, but drinking white wine. The actors at the Burgtheater put down roots in Vienna, he said. They buy properties in Grinzing and Hietzing and Sievering and Neustift, and they live out their boring lives in their boring villas until they reach their boring old age, but the directors of the Burgtheater hav
en’t the slightest chance of putting down roots in this beautiful city. Woe betide any director who buys himself a house here: before he’s even moved into it he’ll be frozen out or kicked out. The story of the directors of the Burgtheater is not just a scandalous story, said the actor, it’s possibly the saddest of all Viennese stories. Vienna is an art mill, the biggest art mill in the world, in which the arts and artists are ground down and pulverized year in, year out; whatever the art or whatever the artists, the Viennese art mill grinds them all to powder. It grinds everything to powder—everything, said the actor, quite ineluctably. And the curious thing is that all these people jump into this art mill entirely of their own volition, only to be totally ground down by it. Even the Burgtheater directors jump into it of their own free will, having in some cases spent their whole lives frantically seeking an opportunity to do so, falling over themselves to jump into this art mill in which they’ll be totally ground down. Totally ground down, totally pulverized, exclaimed the actor. But the sensations and scandals surrounding an outgoing or an incoming director of the Burgtheater have never affected me. You see, my dear, he said, still addressing Jeannie Billroth, I’d have played Ekdal under any director, believe me. And in any case, he said, as though wishing to close the subject, I’ll have retired before the new director takes office. I shan’t be around when he takes over. He now turned to Auersberger, who had been dozing all the time and heard nothing of the actor’s reply to Jeannie Billroth’s question. You know, he said, when I’ve retired I’ll be quite content to give two or three readings a year at the Konzerthaus, from the works of Rilke or the late Goethe. I’m not really interested in the theater of today. If I had my way I’d be retired already, because nowadays everything to do with the theater is intolerable. Once upon a time it was a pleasure to be an actor—it was one’s mission in life—but I no longer get anything out of it. Nobody is more surprised than myself that I’m playing Ekdal and having such a success in the role, he said. But the truth is, the theater no longer has my interest. You see, he said, turning to Jeannie, I’ve had so many happy years on the stage, and I don’t regret a single day I’ve spent in the theater—I don’t regret a single hour of the happy time I’ve spent at the Burgtheater. But I no longer get anything out of it, said the actor. To this Jeannie replied that in her opinion the reason why he had got nothing out of the theater for so long was that he had been unable to tear himself away from the Burgtheater. You’ve got nothing out of the theater for such a long time, she said, because you’ve bought a property in Grinzing—because you’ve dined at the Sacher every day and gone to the Café Mozart for coffee every day. If you’d left the Burgtheater, or, better still, if you’d left Vienna altogether, you wouldn’t now be saying that you’d got nothing out of the theater for such a long time. Possibly it was because you bought a property in Grinzing that you lost your enjoyment of the theater and theatrical affairs generally, Jeannie insisted. Possibly you’re right, my dear, the actor replied, but I suspect you’re probably not. There’s been a general decline in the theater. No matter whether you’re in Vienna or elsewhere, you no longer find good theater. The theater has lost its fascination. I don’t believe that, said Auersberger, whom everyone had long assumed to be asleep. He gave it as his opinion that the theater was as alive as it had ever been. It was only in Vienna that it had gone stale—not just moribund, but actually dead, actually dead, actually dead, he exclaimed, after which he repeated these words several times, but now in a drunken mumble. Because his mumbling sounded so comic the two young writers began to laugh. Having been to all intents and purposes absent throughout the evening, they now laughed out loud at Auersberger’s intervention. My God! the actor exclaimed suddenly. A theatrical genius—what’s that supposed to mean? A director and a genius? What an absurdity! You know, he said to Jeannie Billroth, the newspapers use the most monstrous language, and everything they print is monstrous. Whatever paper you pick up, you’re confronted with something monstrous. Of course we may choose to say that we don’t mind what the newspapers print, but all the same we can’t help being mortally wounded by it. But the worst papers in the world are the Austrian papers, in which viciousness reaches its apogee, he said. There are no other papers in which you find such viciousness. Austrian history, indeed world history, has always suffered from the awfulness of these papers, said the actor. Although I’ve always been praised by them, I still think they’re the most awful papers in the world, with the most monstrous and stupid contents. Yet we never fail to read them every day, greedily gulping down everything they print, he said—that’s the truth. Ever since I was a child I’ve been gulping down this Austrian journalistic filth, but I’m still alive. The Austrian stomach is pretty strong. The Austrians in general have strong stomachs, considering what an awful tasteless history they’ve had to gulp down over the years. Austrian newspapers, if one can call them newspapers, are the world’s worst, said the actor, but for precisely that reason they’re probably the world’s best. Auersberger now responded by mumbling, You’re right there, you’re right there. How right you are! And the two young writers again laughed uproariously. We live in the midst of perpetual absurdity, the actor said suddenly, unadulterated absurdity. I beg you to consider the fact that everything is absurd. Absurd ideas are the only true ideas, said the actor. Consider the fact that this absurd world we live in is the only true world. Everything that exists is absurd, said the actor with sudden pathos, and leaned back in his chair. Absurd and perverse, he added. Thereupon he immediately turned to Auersberger’s wife and said, I was so looking forward to hearing a sample of your art. But never mind—perhaps next time. What were you going to sing for us? Purcell, she replied. Ah, Purcell, said the actor. Purcell is all the rage. Like older music generally. People listen to older music all the time, am I not right? Whereupon Auersberger mumbled, You’re right, you’re right, you’re right. Purcell wrote superb songs and arias, said the actor, and looking straight at me he said, It’s a rare delight to hear one of them beautifully sung. The Bolero—good heavens! he said suddenly, do you know, it always used to get on my nerves? And now I love it. It’s the kind of music that gets on our nerves for years, then all at once we love it. You’ve observed that too, haven’t you? he asked Jeannie. Without answering the actor’s question, she said, quite unconnectedly, that a new era was about to dawn at the Burgtheater—she actually used the word dawn—a new era that would wipe out the old. It’ll wipe it out, she said malevolently. New names will appear and quite different plays will be staged. Yes, that’s a good thing, Auersberger mumbled, new names appearing and new plays being staged. Good-bye to the old favorites, he mumbled, good-bye to the remaindered goods, the remaindered goods. He uttered this last phrase three times, presumably because he liked the sound of it. His wife was probably embarrassed by this remark made by her drunken husband, whose head had by now slumped down into his peasant jacket, for she made yet another fruitless attempt to lift him out of his chair. Auersberger still had enough strength to remind her, by means of a kick in the calf, who was the master in this household in the Gentzgasse. I’ve just read a book about Palladio, said the actor suddenly, and rediscovered my admiration for the Brenta villas. Forgotten for centuries, he said, then suddenly in vogue again, at the center of world interest, so to speak. I’ll go to Spain when I’ve retired, he said. Not just a short trip as in recent years, but a prolonged stay, months on end. When one’s served the theater as long as I have, he said. Actor, mimic, servant of the drama. My greatest good fortune is never to have married; the best thing for an actor is never to embark upon marriage—best to remain alone with one’s art, with one’s acting. I’ve always known how to get my way, he said, and curiously enough I’ve never been ill, not once, apart from minor indispositions, and so I’ve never had to cancel an appearance, not a single one, whereas my colleagues were forever canceling appearances and in due course developed a kind of cancellation hysteria. I was never what they call a temperamental actor, he said, pedantic perhaps, but neve
r temperamental, and I never went in for artistic indispositions. An eagerness for knowledge—perhaps that’s what it was. Studied every role scientifically, though of course I was the only one who felt the need to do so. I’m not a man for luxury—no, quite the opposite. But not a simple man either—I’ve always detested simplicity. But in all truth, he went on, here in Vienna the greatest demands are made of the arts, especially of music and acting, greater demands than anywhere else in the whole of Europe. The people who go to the concert halls and the theaters here, and above all the Burgtheater, are utterly spoiled, more exacting and more critical than any other audiences in Europe, I might even say in the whole world. There are no better musicians and actors than the ones you find in Vienna—that’s the truth. Go wherever you like, he said, to La Scala in Milan or the Metropolitan in New York, or the National Theatre in London or the Comédie Française—they’re all nothing compared with Vienna: ultimately they’re all dilettante and amateurish—that’s the truth. The Viennese public is the most spoiled in the world, but it’s also the most tasteful with regard to both music and theater, while at the same time it’s the most infamous and the most ruthless. What ludicrous offerings the German stage presents us with! How inane the English or the French theater is by comparison! But woe betide you if you say this in Vienna, even though it’s true. If you dare to say such a thing, you’re finished. The acting at the Burgtheater may be as poor as you like, but it’s still much better than anything you see on any German stage. No no, said the actor from the Burgtheater, German theater is dilettante and insipid, the kind of brainless theater that has always gone down well with the Germans. German theater has always been amateurish and inept—that’s the truth of the matter. Simply modish and mindless—that’s the truth. No wit. No imagination. No trace of genius. The actors we see on the German stage perform like schoolteachers, like junior high school teachers. Even the humblest Viennese cabaret artist is superior to the most distinguished German actor, and that’s the truth. But tell this truth in Vienna and you’ll be stoned. Any Monday night performance at the Burgtheater or the Opera is superior to anything you’ll find in the rest of the world. But don’t say this in Vienna. It’s gratifying to play the part of Ekdal and to have so much success in the part, he went on—to bow out on a note of success. For I don’t regard the English role I’m working on as part of my development as an actor: it’s something peripheral, not to be taken seriously—not like playing Lear, he said. Just a long-drawn-out paradox, he added. In a way age and indifference go together, he said. In any case I wouldn’t want to be young again: it’s terrible to be young, but it’s not terrible to be old. In fact I wouldn’t want to relive a single day of my life, and I’m glad it’s not possible. Believe me, said the actor, turning first to the hostess and then to Jeannie, when you’re old you become enamored of retirement. People talk about absolutely everything, laugh about absolutely everything, and get themselves worked up about absolutely everything, but none of this affects me any longer. In a certain way, after a life filled with so much art on the stage and so on, one’s greatest enjoyment probably comes from learning the art of being old. The Bolero having come to an end, the hostess got up and went through the dining room to the kitchen to fetch coffee. Jeannie, taking advantage of her absence to grab the limelight once more, asked the actor, who had been gazing at the floor for some time, lost in thought and suddenly completely exhausted, whether he could say, now that he had more or less reached the end of his life, that he had so to speak found fulfillment in his art. These were the very words with which she confronted this old man, whom I had found anything but likable during the course of the evening and night, but who was by now very tired and deserved to be treated with some consideration after having played the role of Ekdal at the Burgtheater only a few hours earlier. Do you think that at the end of your life you’ve found fulfillment in your art? she asked a second time, as though he might not have heard her the first time, although he unquestionably had: naturally neither her question nor her insolence and inconsiderateness had escaped him. She asked him a third time, Can you say that at the end of your life you’re fulfilled by your art? Her insolence did not escape him this time either, as I saw at once, but he clearly thought that Jeannie would eventually leave him in peace, since he had only the most superficial acquaintance with her and she ought never to have presumed to speak to him in this impudent manner. He was mistaken: Jeannie gave him no quarter, but put her question several times more. Could he say, at the end of his life, that his art had brought him fulfillment? She persisted in her shameless fashion, relentlessly repeating her question, until the actor was finally forced to reply, and it was strange to see this man, whom I had hitherto found thoroughly objectionable and regarded with the greatest distaste, suddenly give her the answer she deserved. It was outrageous, he said, to ask him such a stupid question. Your question is quite simply stupid, he said. She could surely not expect an intelligent answer to such a stupid and insolent question. I think you’ve struck the wrong note, he said, making to get up from his chair, as though he wanted to leave the Auersbergers’ Gentzgasse apartment at once and without further ado, having had enough of this insolent questioning. However, seeing the hostess return with the coffee, he sat down again in his armchair, saying as he did so that he did not have to answer stupid questions like that. Such a tasteless question, he told the astonished Jeannie, would naturally get no answer from him. What impertinent nonsense about my coming to the end of my life! said the actor from the Burgtheater. What impudent presumption! How rude to confront me with your stupidity! Jeannie accepted a cup of coffee from Auersberger’s wife and suddenly fell silent. She was not in the least indignant, as I had expected her to be. On similar occasions, when her crass stupidity has been shown up, she’s always leaped up and left the scene, I recalled. But this time, though bright red in the face under her heavy makeup, she sat motionless for several minutes, while the actor from the Burgtheater, having suddenly recovered his strength, launched into a speech which I found quite astonishing and would never have expected to hear from him. It was distasteful, he said, to mix with people who simply interrogated you and then proceeded to put you down, who were there only to take you apart, as he put it, to dissect you into all your component parts; and what was more, to do so after midnight was an additional piece of rudeness. He uttered the word rudeness without any apparent compunction, and to my great surprise his hand was not trembling as he held his coffee cup and took an occasional sip from it. We enter a house, thinking it’s a friendly house, he said. Because the actor had recently been so incensed, even Auersberger was now wide awake, listening to what he said. Anna Schreker, the two young writers, and all the other guests were now listening attentively, for the actor had again forced everybody’s attention on himself by the strong language he used. Words like vicious, rude, insolent, hypocritical, infamous, megalomaniac, stupid rained down on the company in the Gentzgasse, and in particular on Jeannie. He kept on repeating that it was not just ill-mannered, but positively vicious to confront him with such stupid questions, as this person had done. This person, he said, referring to Jeannie, was all I needed, this person whom I instantly loathed, because she’s absolutely stupid. If I’d known that this person was going to be present, I’d never have taken up your invitation, the actor told the Auers-bergers with some feeling. I hate people like this who are out to destroy everything, who talk incessantly about art and have no notion of art, people who blabber away on evenings like this with a mindlessness that reeks to high heaven, said the actor indignantly. When I saw this person sitting here I thought of turning around and leaving, but decency forbade me. He repeated the word decency several times, then leaned back—in relief, I thought, but I was mistaken. He immediately sat up again, and in a sudden access of breathlessness he said to Jeannie, You’re one of those people who know nothing and are worth nothing and consequently hate everybody. It’s as simple as that. You hate everybody because you hate yourself and your own pitiful inade
quacy. You talk incessantly about art, without having the faintest notion of what art is. He wanted to shout these words at Jeannie, but he was prevented by his sudden breathlessness and had to speak them in a monotone. You’re a stupid and destructive person, and you’re not even ashamed of it, he said, and then fell silent. I have to own that the actor’s attack on Jeannie gave me great delight, for I had seldom seen anybody say such things to her face or requite her with such asperity for one of her impertinences. Although I still found the Burgtheater actor repugnant, he had momentarily earned my esteem. Never before has Jeannie Billroth been told how lacking in decency she really is, I thought. Nobody’s ever told her that for a long time she’s been utterly incompetent in discussing ideas, I thought. Nobody’s ever told Jeannie to her face that she’s rude, even vulgar, as the actor just has. We feel a great delight when we believe that somebody is getting his just deserts, so to speak, by being reproached with his own rudeness and shamelessness, his own stupidity and incompetence, I thought, especially when we’ve waited years to see it happen. Jeannie’s never before been told that she’s basically a common little woman and a low character, but the actor from the Burgtheater has just spelled it out. I had the impression that everyone who witnessed the actor’s outburst felt not only a certain momentary pleasure, but a satisfaction that would last rather longer than that. Naturally they did not express what they felt: they had no occasion to do so, nor could they have afforded to. The actor could afford to, however, just as I could afford, if only by my silence, to endorse everything he had said about Jeannie. For years, perhaps for decades, we may have wanted to tell someone the truth to his face, the truth that he has never heard because no one has dared to tell it to him to his face, and then at last someone does it for us. And I reflected that by telling Jeannie the truth to her face, whatever that truth may or may not have been, the actor had made it worthwhile for me to have accepted the invitation to the artistic dinner after all. You’re a thoroughly dishonest person, the actor had told her. For hours you lie in wait for an opportunity to degrade someone. People like you are dangerous. One is well advised to give people like you a wide berth. Were the actor’s words not still ringing in my ears I would not now believe them possible, but they are recorded here exactly as he uttered them that evening. It’s quite likely, I thought, that Jeannie had launched her insolent attack on the actor before I left the dining room and entered the music room, that she had for some time been playing the part of the repulsive Jeannie Billroth I know all too well from the time when I was still having an affair with her. She has not changed. If she is not the focus of attention at any gathering, she makes every effort to put this right by mounting what one might call a frontal attack and insulting the person who is meant to be the focus of attention, as the actor from the Burgtheater was at this artistic dinner. And she must have started provoking him even before I entered the dining room, for otherwise his angry explosion would have been inexplicable. I now knew the reason for the curious outbursts which I had heard from the music room while I was still sitting in the anteroom and which I did not understand at the time, loud exclamations such as Ekdal? Rubbish! or Gregers? Rubbish! or The Wild Duck? Rubbish! They had clearly been directed at Jeannie when she began her attack. Yes, said the actor, getting up to leave and handing his empty coffee cup to Auersberger’s wife, who had also risen from her chair, how I hate gatherings like this, which seek to destroy everything that means anything to me, to drag everything I’ve always held dear in the dirt, where people exploit my name and the fact that I’m an actor at the Burgtheater! How I long, not so much for peace, as to be left in peace! If only I’d been born a different person, I’ve always thought, if only I’d become a completely different person from the one I have become, a person who was left in peace! But then I’d have had to be born of different parents and have grown up in quite different circumstances, surrounded by nature, a nature that was free and unconfined, instead of being surrounded by artificiality. For we’ve all grown up amid artificiality—not only I, who have always suffered under it, but everyone here. And turning to Jeannie he added, Even you, my dear, who pursue me with your hatred and contempt. He now turned to me, but did not address me. Finally he turned to Auersberger, who was once more asleep in his chair, completely drunk, and remarked that it was a misfortune to have been born at all, but the greatest misfortune of all was to have been born a person like Herr Auersberg. To enter into nature, to breathe natural air, to be utterly at home in nature—that, he felt, must be the greatest happiness. To go into the forest, deep into the forest, said the actor, to yield oneself up to the forest, that had always been his ideal—to become part of nature oneself. The forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter—that has always been my ideal, he said with sudden excitement, as he made to leave. Although everyone had drunk a good deal, the only person who was totally drunk as the party broke up was Auersberger; this was how it had been thirty, twenty-five and twenty years earlier. Slumped in his chair, he was unaware that all the guests were now standing up and about to take their leave. As I stood up myself, I recalled hearing the actor utter the words the forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter earlier in the evening, once during dinner, as he was eating his pike, and again in the music room, though at the time I had not known what he meant. Much of the time my attention had naturally been concentrated not on him, but on Jeannie Billroth; all through supper I had hardly taken my eyes off her, paying no attention to what the actor was saying most of the time, catching only the odd half sentence, never a full sentence. During the meal I had not been in the least interested in what he had to say; it was only much later, in the music room, after he had drunk more than was really good for him, that he began to interest me, because he had meanwhile become a different person, as it now strikes me. Everything he had said in the dining room was drivel, the kind of vacuous small talk we are accustomed to hearing from aging or aged actors, whom I always try to avoid because I cannot endure their conversation, and because the so-called wisdom of old age they purvey, which is in fact merely the crass imbecility of old age, grates on my nerves. I have repeatedly been struck by this and have accordingly always taken care to avoid such people’s company. But after a few glasses of wine a change had come over this actor from the Burgtheater: all at once he had become an interesting person, with a philosophical cast of mind that suddenly revealed itself when he uttered the words the forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter. I have since learned that these are catchwords used by many others like him, by millions of others. At the end of this artistic dinner I suddenly became aware of what the actor meant by using these catchwords, what he was trying to say to himself and others, what he was trying to tell all of us, and I began to listen to him attentively. It seems to me that this man, who started off by being merely tiresome and uninteresting, was transformed for a brief spell into an interesting person, a person who—if only for this brief spell—was able to capture my attention. Suddenly I was no longer interested in anything Jeannie Billroth or Anna Schreker had to say, but only in what the actor from the Burgtheater was saying. And so I turned my attention away from them and the other people present at this artistic dinner, whom I had found uninteresting right from the beginning. I haven’t listened to the others at all, I thought, I haven’t even heard what little they’ve had to say. This man, who had at first seemed merely a portentous driveler, seeking to create an effect with his feeble jokes and stale anecdotes, had in the course of this artistic dinner turned into a fascinating figure, even a philosophical figure, I thought. This is not, I think, a phenomenon that we observe in many people, though it may now and then be observed in the old: at first they appear as portentous drivelers, distasteful purveyors of jokes and anecdotes, putting on the act of the typical Viennese with artistic or intellectual pretensions, but then they undergo a truly philosophical metamorphosis in the course of an evening, in the course of a dinner like this artistic dinner given by the Auersbergers in the Gentzgasse: at fir
st they strike us as ludicrously inflated and inane, but then, when they have had a few drinks—usually more than is good for them—they are suddenly able to convert our initial aversion into genuine liking by bringing a certain spiritual or even philosophical element into play. It seems to me that when the actor first made his appearance he was playing his accustomed role as the actor from the Burgtheater, and it was as the actor from the Burgtheater—a figure that I found quite repellent—that he later addressed himself to the genuine pike, continuing his Burgtheater performance throughout the pike-eating ceremony. But then, having finished with the pike and had two or three cigars and a few glasses of white wine, he suddenly became a thinking human being, even a philosopher of sorts, transforming himself from a gargoyle into a philosophical human being, from a repellent stage character into a real person. This is the converse of the normal process: usually people begin by behaving like human beings, but eventually, after a certain amount of eating and drinking, they turn into gargoyles, being unable to do otherwise. This is what we observe every day: we meet people at parties who become progressively more repulsive until they finally turn into gargoyles, and, as the evening wears on and increasing quantities of food and drink are consumed, the whole company becomes increasingly repellent. That night, however, the Burgtheater actor went through the reverse process, transforming himself from a gargoyle into a philosophically minded human being, if not from a driveler into a philosopher. In the end I found myself enthralled, as they say, by this man, whom I had for so long found quite distasteful and whose demeanor had aroused in me not merely indignation, but anger; I was now no longer angry and indignant, but enthralled, unlike Jeannie Billroth, who I think was enthralled by him at first, but gradually became infuriated during the pike-eating ceremony, and in the end detested him. I ended up by being enthralled by the actor from the Burgtheater, Jeannie Billroth by detesting him, I think, and that says it all. The way he said the forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter was not, I think, symptomatic of senile sentimentality, but of mental clarity. And the way he countered Jeannie’s attack appears to me as anything but senile, anything but a resort to the opportunism of old age. We sit through an interminable supper party with one of these artistic nonentities that pullulate in Vienna, one of these atrocious pseudo-artists of whom we know hundreds—these unappetizing painters and sculptors and writers and musicians and actors, these horrendous provincial artists who converge on Vienna in droves—and as if this were not enough, we find that the person sitting opposite us during this appalling, interminable supper at the Auersbergers’, which we would have done well to miss, is an actor from the Burgtheater, the very prototype, it seems to me, of the Viennese pseudo-artist. Then suddenly we observe that this man, who began by making the most distasteful exhibition of himself and filling us with the utmost revulsion, has been transformed into someone with a philosophical turn of mind who actually interests us, into what might be called a momentary philosopher, who is able to arouse our interest. It is clearly not true that all old people are philosophers, and I know of nothing so foolish as the proposition that this is so, but old people do have a philosophical propensity: they all have the potential to become philosophers, or at any rate to philosophize, if only for a few moments, just as the actor from the Burgtheater, during the course of this artistic dinner, was prompted, by whatever motives, to philosophize for a few moments, to become a momentary philosopher. Next morning, with the return of sobriety, the momentary philosopher no doubt reverts to being the insufferable stage character with whom we first became acquainted. It was precisely a party like this one in the Gentzgasse that produced this effect on him, I thought, transforming him for a few brief moments into a philosopher, though naturally it had no such effect on the others, for nothing could ever have a philosophical impact on them. Not on the Auersbergers, not on Anna Schreker, and certainly not on the other guests—especially not on the two young writers, whose age alone precludes them from what we may call the philosophical condition. I believe that to qualify for this condition one needs to have an experience of life that goes some way back into history and is constantly informed by history; this qualification was possessed by the actor from the Burgtheater, as it is by all old people, and above all by the very old. During the course of my life I think I have become more interested in the old and the very old than in the young; more and more I have sought out the company of the old and the very old and spent more and more of my time with them, rather than with the young. After all, I knew about youth when I myself was young, but not about old age: hence it was old age that interested me, not youth. Get all you can out of the old, I always told myself, and indeed I always derived the greatest benefit from following this precept; I have no hesitation in saying that I derived immense profit from it. Old age always attracted my curiosity, I think, whereas youth never did, because I knew it at first hand. The Burgtheater actor, I believe, is a person who constantly suppresses his propensity to philosophy, which has evolved during the course of his life—which means during the course of his own history, our history, everyone’s history. Hence most of the time we have dealings with people who suppress their philosophical propensity until it atrophies and dies. Only occasionally do we have an opportunity to discern this propensity in them, as I discerned it in the actor at this supper party, though I suspect he did not discern it in himself and was probably quite unaware of it. All at once I was fascinated by the way he uttered the words the forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter, and then repeated them several times. But this does not mean that I should take to him now, were I to meet him again. He remains for me the unattractive and essentially superficial stage character he was from the start. I was revolted by the way he took his leave, kissing the hostess’s hand in his Viennese Burgtheater manner. And when he paid Jeannie Billroth a compliment—a foolish and entirely unnecessary compliment, an insolent compliment in fact—by telling her, as he kissed her hand too, that he liked her intellectual audacity—he actually said, I like your intellectual audacity—he had once more reverted to type and become the distasteful stage character that he had been at the outset. I too had drunk more than was good for me, I think, but not as much as the actor, to say nothing of Auersberger, who did not wake up until the guests had all left. The two young writers, who had talked about nothing but how rebellious they were, though without being able to say what they were rebelling against, were also completely drunk and had difficulty getting to their feet. In the end the Burgtheater actor was the only one who still had the strength and the poise to make a decent exit from the Gentzgasse—and, I may add, with the utmost politeness—for none of the others was in a fit condition to do so. What an excellent pike that was! he finally said to Auersberger’s wife, after which he was the first to leave, walking alone down the stairs in the entrance hall. He’s not even unsure on his feet, I thought, watching him from the door of the apartment as he descended the stairs. It is one of my principles that I like to leave a party alone, and so I waited with Auersberger’s wife at the door of the apartment until all the others had gone down the stairs. Yes, it’s been a sad day, hasn’t it? I said to her after they had all left, referring once more to Joana. Perhaps it was best that she killed herself, I said, it was probably the best time for her to go. I was aware of how embarrassing and distasteful this remark was, a remark that is frequently made when somebody has committed suicide. We want to say something appropriate, I thought at that moment, and then we say something entirely inappropriate, something distasteful and stupid. What would she have had to look forward to? I said, adding yet another embarrassing and distasteful remark to the first. Everyone should act as they think fit, I went on, which again was embarrassing and distasteful. So it was best to say no more. I ran down the stairs as if I were twenty years younger, suddenly taking two, three, or even four steps at a time. In the entrance hall below I told myself that it had been ridiculous to kiss her forehead as I left. Like thirty years ago, I thought, just as ridiculous as it w
as thirty years ago. I had kissed her on the forehead as I used to do in the fifties, and this fact annoyed me all the way from the Gentzgasse to the city. I haven’t seen her for twenty years, and I have to admit that fundamentally I hate her, yet when I leave I have to go and kiss her forehead! But it was only her forehead you kissed, at least it was only her forehead, I kept on telling myself as I walked through the city, which was still dark, feeling angry with myself. If only I’d left with the others I’d have been spared this embarrassment, I thought, but I didn’t want to leave with the others, above all because I wanted to avoid an encounter with Jeannie, especially in the street, and especially now, for I’d have been sure to have a terrible row with her, I’d have been bound to say too much, to make too many reproaches, to cause her too much offense, I thought. And she’d have done the same, and so it was as well to stay behind and let the others go on ahead. Being alone with Auersberger’s wife was certainly more tolerable than being alone with Jeannie, I thought; to be alone in the street with Jeannie would have been disastrous, I thought, whereas to be alone with Auersberger’s wife at the door of their apartment was at least endurable. But I now reproached myself for having given her a kiss on the forehead, after twenty years, perhaps even twenty-two or twenty-three years, during which I had positively hated her, with the same hatred that I had felt for her husband; and I reproached myself too for having lied to her, saying that her artistic dinner had given me great pleasure, when in fact I had found it nothing short of revolting. To get ourselves out of a tight spot, it seems to me, we are ourselves just as mendacious as those we are always accusing of mendacity, those whom we despise and drag in the dirt for their mendacity; we are not one jot better than the people we constantly find objectionable and insufferable, those repellent people with whom we want to have as few dealings as possible, though; if we are honest, we do have dealings with them and are no different from them. We reproach them with all kinds of objectionable and insufferable behavior and are no less insufferable and objectionable ourselves—perhaps we are even more insufferable and objectionable, it occurs to me. I told her I was glad to have renewed my ties with her and her husband, to have visited them again in the Gentzgasse after twenty years, and as I said this I thought what a vile hypocrite I was, recoiling from nothing, not even the basest lie. Standing at the door of the apartment, I told her that I had liked the actor from the Burgtheater, that I had liked Anna Schreker, even that I had liked the two young writers; I said all this as I watched the others going down the stairs, all the time thinking how revolting they were, yet at the same time telling her how much I had liked them all. To think that I am capable of such base hypocrisy, I thought as I was speaking to her—to think that I am capable of quite openly lying to her face, that I am capable of telling her to her face the precise opposite of what I feel, because it makes things momentarily more endurable! I also told her that I was sorry not to have heard her sing one of the Purcell arias that she used to sing so beautifully, so superbly, so incomparably, and that I was sorry above all that I had been out of touch with her and her husband for twenty years—which was another piece of mendacity, one of my basest and most contemptible lies. I even said that I particularly regretted that Joana could not have been present that evening, and that she would probably have wished us—that is, the Auersbergers and myself—to renew our contacts, now that I was back from London for some time, though not for good. We would keep up our contacts from now on, I said untruthfully, hearing the others leave the building as I still stood at the top of the stairs. Joana had to die, she had to kill herself, so that we could get together again, I told her, after which I briefly embraced her and kissed her on the forehead, then ran down the stairs and out into the street. In every street I walked along I was tormented by the thought that everything I had said to her was a lie, that I had been consciously lying with every word I had spoken. For the truth is that after this artistic dinner I still hated her as much as ever, her and her husband, the Novalis of sound, the successor of Webern who had got stuck in the fifties. Perhaps I hated them now with an even more intense hatred than before—with the Auersberger hatred that I have borne them for twenty years, it now occurs to me—because twenty years ago they went behind my back and slandered me so viciously, seizing every opportunity to denigrate me and run me down to all and sundry after I had left them—simply to save myself from being devoured by them. They always asserted, and still assert, that I turned my back on them, not they on me, just as for twenty years they have asserted that I took advantage of them, that they supported me, that they kept me alive, when the truth is that I kept them alive, that I saved them, that it was I who supported them—not with money, of course, but with all my talents. I ran through the streets as though I were running away from a nightmare, running faster and faster toward the Inner City, not knowing why I was running in that direction, since to get home I would have had to go in the opposite direction, but perhaps I did not want to go home. If only I’d spent this winter in London! I said to myself. It was four in the morning, and I was running in the direction of the Inner City when I should have been going home. I should have stayed in London at all costs, I told myself, and I kept on running in the direction of the Inner City, without knowing why, and I told myself that London had always brought me happiness and Vienna unhappiness, and I went on running, running, running, as though now, in the eighties, I was once more running away from the fifties, running into the eighties, the dangerous, benighted, mindless eighties, and again it struck me that instead of going to this tasteless artistic dinner I ought to have read my Gogol or my Pascal or my Montaigne, and as I ran it seemed to me that I was running away from the Auersberger nightmare, and with ever greater energy I ran away from the Auersberger nightmare and toward the Inner City, and as I ran I reflected that the city through which I was running, dreadful though I had always felt it to be and still felt it to be, was still the best city there was, that Vienna, which I found detestable and had always found detestable, was suddenly once again the best city in the world, my own city, my beloved Vienna, and that these people, whom I had always hated and still hated and would go on hating, were still the best people in the world: I hated them, yet found them somehow touching—I hated Vienna, yet found it somehow touching—I cursed these people, yet could not help loving them—I hated Vienna yet could not help loving it. And now, as I ran through the streets of the Inner City, I thought: This is my city and always will be my city, these are my people and always will be my people, and as I went on running, I thought: I’ve survived this dreadful artistic dinner, just as I’ve survived all the other horrors. I’ll write about this artistic dinner in the Gentzgasse, I thought, without knowing what I would write—simply that I would write something about it. And as I went on running I thought: I’ll write something at once, no matter what—I’ll write about this artistic dinner in the Gentzgasse at once, now. Now, I thought—at once, I told myself over and over again as I ran through the Inner City—at once, I told myself, now—at once, at once, before it’s too late.