I am seeking a Europe that might still be European.
Actually, you ought to sympathize with this, Mr. Jacob G. Brodny. First, as a nostalgic Jew. Like every good American province, Europe today is fairly judenrein. But things were different once, weren’t they? If not a promised land, Europe was at least a long-familiar and beloved land, a land in which you Jews saw fulfilled many of your boldest promises but, above all, found your most ruthless murderers. That makes for an unusually strong tie, doesn’t it? . . .
But aside from that: as an ex-European—Eastern European, to be sure—you too presumably had half of your life sliced off. You may have no reason to mourn it, but be that as it may, you’ve gone with the times. Whether sadly or eagerly, you jettisoned anything about yourself that was a vestige and echo of a past form of life and vigorously settled into a new one: you became an American. In the great collective of the United States of our Western World, your halved self was transubstantiated into a new, bursting fullness. The American in you practically leaps out for all to see.
I for my half part have allowed myself to be guilty of the unfortunately widespread offence of being behind the times, and thus dragging the past into presence. I could not wholly renounce something that was somehow still alive within me, albeit in an abstract, ghostly way, like Nagel’s shot-off arm.
Thus nothing newly whole, nothing newly full of life has become of me in the new (American) era. And of course I most certainly have not remained what I was. So kindly understand what I find so fascinating about the French. Not only have they remained what they were, they have even become more intensely what they had been. Schwab was filled with excited sympathy for this phenomenon.
Cast to and fro by the capricious fate that attends a filmmaker (I’m a screenwriter, as you know), I hang around the various mini-metropolises of Europe: Vienna, Madrid, Rome, Munich, Copenhagen, Milan, West Berlin. A Europe that is woefully shriveled, likewise mutilated by one half, ridiculously provincial, suburban, desolate. But for several years now (ever since a crazy romance with an American fashion model named Dawn, at least since Schwab’s death), it’s been safest to contact me here in Paris. No household of my own, of course. After my dismal experiences in an abortive marriage in Hamburg (with Christa), I tried to settle down here (with Gaia—chocolate-brown giantess, half-Afro-American, half-Romanian blood, Princess Jahovary—sounds like a freak show and looked like one, too). My attempt at domesticity failed, but you’ll hear about that later.
Now, what so utterly frustrated me here is the unbelievable, downright incredible hard surface of the French. Cartesians clear as crystal, these fellows, and coalesced into a geode. It makes for a world that’s not so easy to get into. At any rate, I haven’t managed, even though I sense—good Lord! even though I know that it’s my world. Yes sir, it is my world in almost every way, and I (or at least the I of the lost half of my life) am contained in it integrally (as you’d say in electricians’ parlance, that of my Uncle Helmuth’s former clan).
Here, nearly everything of the lost half of my life has been preserved: forms, colors, tones, fragrances galore, an entire language-world (which did a great deal to determine the style of that era), no end of art nouveau and art deco. And yet here I lose not only my sense of having once belonged to a world like this but any solid foothold in time, above all in the present.
The world is an event in which I do not participate, have never participated, and will never participate. The world is a French event, and I am not French. I am not even a boche, like Schwab—a potential killer of Frenchmen (I repeat: an intimate kinship, almost a kind of identification). Nor am I American, which would be a different form of killer of the French mode of being. I am nothing. Not only stateless in terms of citizenship but rootless by blood, déraciné par excellence: truly without a fatherland or a father, a man who doesn’t know who spawned him, and whose mother deserted and betrayed her kin, her people; a man who belongs neither here nor there, unbaptized, with no religion, suspiciously polyglot, devoid of any tie to any tribe, to any flag . . . But of course in search of all those things.
The exceedingly lovely, the wondrously beautiful city of Paris, la ville lumière, gives me not the least bit of help in my search. On the contrary. The devastating presentness of its history excludes me as much as its historical presence does. In the uninterrupted continuity from Charlemagne to Charles de Gaulle there is not the tiniest gap for me to squeeze into. And yet the half of the life that I and my kind lost in that March of 1938 belongs far more here than anywhere else. I mean to say: The European Europe from which that half was born, in which it grew up, and whose colors, forms, sounds, fragrances, moods constituted its pattern, is far more present here than anywhere else. Where else might I seek it, if not here? Here, I am incessantly on its trail, on the trail of my self—but only ever on its trail, and sometimes, for auspicious, breathtaking micro-moments, I am even on my heels. But I will never reach my self completely. And this is all the more agonizing, as everywhere I go I am always on the verge of some kind of identification . . .
How can I make this clear to you, my esteemed Jaykob Gee? As a man who has traveled the world over, you must, of course, know Sneek, the Dutch Venice? There, you can punt along in a heavy boat, infinitely slowly, through leaden canals. To the left and the right, the banks drag by with such sluggish drowsiness that one expects the houses to topple forward like the heads of exhausted people, their eyelids shutting.
Well, in a movie script I once wrote, which like so many others will remain an unrealized pipe dream (none of my producer-piglets will ever want to actually film it), I set a chase scene in Sneek. A man has to catch up with another man at any cost, and the other is several boats ahead of him and flees . . . very slowly flees . . . infinitely slowly and always just beyond reach . . . and that other man is, of course, himself.
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I assume that you too, sir, are not unfamiliar with such existential conditions, slipping off into the dream dimension of slow motion (with a resulting schizoid personality split). After all, this is a phenomenon of the times; I mean to say, a special perception or awareness of time that is inherent in our era (and also, by the way, the first step hashish eaters, opium smokers, et al., make into their psychedelic wonderlands).
I would not be amazed to experience this in Vienna. That is where I lost the first half of my life, and for consistency’s sake I ought to look for it there—and never find it again. You will, I hope, understand me when I say that I lost it precisely because that half is present there. Like Vienna as a whole, it is there as part of a museum existence, and thus is thoroughly timeless, a dead thing in a dead city. On March 12 of the year 1938 Vienna died before my eyes and, with it, my then living and lived self. The two now belong together for all time—but no longer to me.
What I am seeking in the lost half of my life is not my then self but rather that within it that might connect in some way to my present self. Connect in such a way as to make me believe that it really was I and not just a legend, a literary invention, a fiction within me.
I am seeking myself in the European cities where I am cast away by my flimsy profession, as if they were not the cities and sites of my past but the cities and sites of my present. I seek my self in the airports, the highways, gas stations, Hilton hotels, supermarkets, movie studios, office high-rises of Madrid, Rome, Munich, Copenhagen, Milan, West Berlin, Paris. In seeking my self I seek a European continuity. This European continuity is to be found neither in the museum existence of these cities nor in my present self. Except, as I said, in an occasional split second of recognition which makes my search the more intense, and the more futile.
But in the airports, highways, gas stations, Hilton hotels, supermarkets, film sets, and office towers of the American province that Europe has become, I am nowhere to be found. I am nowhere whole, not in yesterday and not in this today, which is, however, an anticipated, fictitious tomorrow.
This has its consequences, of course. Split in two and e
qually far away from both past and future, I also have no true present. I am searching, my esteemed Mr. Brodny, for my identity, as you would call it. A typically American, a so to speak banally American phenomenon. However, as a hopeless European, I have cause to doubt my reality.
I am capable of illustrating this condition with several documents. Permit me to present you with two of them. Together, they should make the situation clear. The first is a sheet of paper, and unfortunately I can no longer say for sure whether it was part of a draft of a letter, in which I tried a while back (it was five, six years ago) to tease gently my late friend Schwab from afar, or whether it was one of the endless monologues that I delivered to him for the same reason when he came from Hamburg to visit me here in Paris, soliloquies intended to provoke a reaction from his dulled and yet at times doubly fine alcoholic’s mind. But ultimately it makes no difference whether it’s the one or the other. Let me give you the excerpt:
•
. . . You remember that passage in Nietzsche where he announces a coming artistic age? Well, that age has arrived. Today, everyone must realize his potential—to wit, by producing art. Be creative! Produce! Give shape! Form! If you lack any distinct talent, make literature! One has the impression that for people like us, puberty drags on until the climacteric—and indeed beyond it. It is obvious that teenagers live with a sense of unreality and are looking for the meaning of life. But middle-aged bank directors collapse before me in sobs and confess, with their heads in my lap, that they would give all their wealth for my gift of literary self-expression. Every jackass feels the urge to realize his potential artistically. Statesmen like Winston Churchill and Amintore Fanfani find their true selves in painting. In Parisian society (which in my uncle Ferdinand’s day was not afflicted by self-doubt, no, sir; it was a homogeneous conglomerate of Guermantes, Verdurins, and Rastaquères) every beautiful lady at least does interior decorating if she doesn’t have her hands full being an archaeologist or running a gallery. You’d be amazed at what you can get into a film (and then into a bed) with a nod and a bit of celluloid. And if you expect a nineteen-year-old today not to find everything there is in life in throwing pottery (as I, incautiously, dared to expect with my son), you’ve got another thing coming.
Certainly, this is an encouraging sign of a general ennoblement of mankind. An upward development toward the spiritual realm, which one ought to welcome. As my uncle Helmuth, an electrical engineer and spiritualist, might have understood it, we are already living in a different vibrational state, dematerialized and spiritualized. We have ascended one level closer to God. But I don’t feel quite right about it. I fear that we have once again failed to reckon with God’s less spiritual other half—namely, with Mother Nature.
This powerful lady is always on the lookout to catch the flies that have all too ardently swarmed onto the honey of the mind because they are under the delusion that this is the true reality. She will grab anybody by the scruff of the neck if he finds her rules too brutal, too monotonous, too idiotic and would rather ignore them. Anyone who prefers to follow laws other than those of the everlasting stupid cycle of procreation and annihilation is already playing on his own, and at his own risk. He should not be surprised if she raps him on the knuckles.
Yes, indeed, I too bow respectfully to the beautiful courage of the human race, which keeps creating new fictions in order that it may confront the perpetual threat of cruelly productive-and-destructive nature and claim undaunted that existence must have some other purpose than merely eating and being eaten. I admire the insanely courageous way mankind lingers in the as-if, its insistence that we could have other aims than to breed and to kill. But not everyone is up to staying awake during such sleepwalking. Art is opium for today’s people. Only a select few still consider it a vice, the hard lot of the damned.
Ask Nagel, he writes so nicely about it: “If any of the acrobats under the Big Top knows there is no net under him, he can still dare to try his stunt. But woe, woe unto him if he realizes it only when he is already on the tightrope . . .”
Here, I once again agree completely with our friend Nagel. A dangerously large number of dilettantes step out on the high wire nowadays. More and more of them, bolder and bolder. Everyone wants to get up there. This cannot end well. Certain experiences in Vienna make me feel that in the long run Mother Nature will not be content to watch this collective somnambulism and do nothing. I would not like to be called to account with the others when she intercedes to set things right.
My friend! I admire your courageous “Nevertheless!” I take my hat off to Nagel whenever another of his books appears on the market (as a best seller). I bow respectfully to you, Schwab, for still clinging to your intention, despite heartrending, soul-churning doubts, to write your book—even if you won’t admit to it at any cost. But I, for my modest little part, no longer indulge in the lovely illusion that I might thereby succeed in pulling myself (like Münchhausen by his own pigtail) out of the knowledge of the total absurdity of existence.
No, no. I shall not step out on the tightrope. I shall remain pious. (Please tell this to dear Scherping, too) I shall remain an obedient servant of Mother Nature. Living against one’s time—such has always been the attitude of the dandy. In this age of artists and self-realizers, I take the liberty of being a dandy in the purely biological form of existence. I run no risk. I perform my biological duties, nothing more. I realize my potential not in artistic creations like everyone else but rather in acts of destruction. Murder, though, is something I can do only in dreams. But for example I systematically lay waste to everything I have written over the past few years. Plus, incidentally, a lot of expensive food—come and join in! You can still eat well here in Paris—and you know how serious, yes downright fundamental my approach is to this activity. And of course in between I set my sights on even the tiniest possibility of a quick, pleasant act of copulation. On the off chance of procreating if my partner hasn’t taken the right precautions.
•
So much for the first document. The second might be dated a few months later. I found it among the papers for my book where it had slipped in, by goodness knows what accident. A similar accident played it into my hands a few days ago. Le voilà:
Paris in the blossoming of May. Printemps posters behind brightly greening plane trees. The first summer dresses. All the airy kitsch of Dufy.
Schwab has arrived unexpectedly. During the day, we sit outdoors in front of the Flore, the Deux Magots, feast at Lapérouse or Chez Anne, shuffle through museums. At night we play Russian roulette.
It doesn’t take much psychological flair (as in Professor Hertzog’s school) to guess why he sticks to my heels like that. My imperturbability is uncanny to him. He simply doesn’t believe me. He thinks I’m dazed, in a kind of trance (like one of the mediums in my late uncle Helmuth’s spiritist circle in Vienna: outside myself and somewhere in space, only loosely attached to my body by an astral umbilical cord, while the emptied shell of my body is open to any spirit that wishes to sojourn within it—in my case, needless to say, the demon of despair).
He regards me as a character in a novel. Hence I have to act like one. A man who, after the end of a love affair in which he has carried on like a lunatic for three years, smiles and acts like nothing had happened—as if he had not personally experienced all the magic of insanity and happiness and misery and anxiety and senseless hope and foolish perseverance but had read about it in some pulp paperback, which he has only just put aside, or seen it in a movie. Such a character is convincing only if, behind his feigned imperturbability, he nurtures the intention of killing himself. And that is what S. expects me to do.
After all, he ardently envied me for it. His rhetorical question: “Who is still capable of such a thing!”
(I see his face before me as he exclaimed it. It was raised heavenward, as during a hymn. Cousin Wolfgang up in the church choir: “Queeheeheeheen of heaheaheaheaven, rejoice, Maa-haa-haa-rie-ha!. . .”)
Who is
still capable of such a thing at the age of forty-five? In 1964, the second half of the twentieth century, if you please—who can still fall in love like a schoolboy? At best, a department-store executive having a midlife crisis. But in people like us—inhabitants of a crater landscape, an emotional world that has been analyzed to atoms—if anything is still stirring then it’s allergies . . .
So if someone like us kicks up such a splendid fuss, then there must be something exquisite behind it, don’t you think? The intention to transvaluate that experience artistically into something exemplary. If you don’t do that, you’re cheating and you’ll have to pay for it. You can’t just escape it by producing psychosomatic sugar in your urine. Nowadays, neuroses are children’s ailments. Anyone with any self-respect has to kill himself. Ni plus, ni moins.
Actually, S. has come to Paris because he has reached the end of his rope. Scherping finally went through with it and fired him. Fired him as well as his secretary, Fräulein Schmidschelm, which S. considers particularly insidious. But of course he has to admit that Schelmie is quite happy about it: now she’s free of the burdensome job of alternately rescuing the publisher from the claws of Gisela or lovely Heli in the whorehouse or tracking the editor down during a boozing tour with his terrific tante. Schelmie has settled down on her regular stool at Lücke’s Bar, clearing off only when the place is closed (all together six hours out of twenty-four).
He, meanwhile, has panicked. Not because he’s worried about his further material existence (although in such cases, a thoroughbred bourgeois probably can’t stop the involuntary tightening of his sphincter).
Of course, Scherping gave him—had to give him—a handsome amount of severance pay. Obviously he was forced to do so by a murderous contract (probably still fuming at the thought, grinding his teeth in woe and weal).
Abel and Cain Page 4