Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  “Needless to say, he’s honest enough to admit that he too has no message to convey. Even the best-selling author Nagel does not give us beautiful images, lofty thoughts, or soul-expanding emotions anymore; he only hands us problems. Like everyone nowadays, he is nothing but a pile of completely unanswered questions. Like every upright writer, he too stammers on about himself. But he stammers only the stammerings of everyman. He stammers of the questions that every moment of existence holds under his nose, everyday problems. He circumspectly chooses those that haunt everyman. Thus he can honestly go halves with the reader. He truthfully admits that the questions concern primarily him, the writer Nagel. In exchange, the reader accepts his disguise as a character in a novel. Naturally, it must not be too exotic. For example, Nagel puts his own writerly head on Bookkeeper Müller’s shoulders. The reader accepts this, especially when Bookkeeper Müller admits that he spends part of his leisure aspiring to higher things by writing short stories. That’s a good deal. The reader gladly identifies with Müller because he too doesn’t want to spend twenty-four hours a day trudging through his daily round and would love to write short stories himself. That’s why he reads books, after all. What makes him a reader is the escape from and beyond his shitty workaday life. Thus, with Nagel’s book, in which he identifies with Müller, he can tackle the problems of existence arm in arm with the writer Nagel and, together with him, fail to solve them. But I ask you: Does our friend Nagel realize how clownish that is? When the whole fiction of Bookkeeper Müller, without Nagel added in, is an imposition one can’t expect the shrewd reader to accept, then half of it is actually ironic. Do you believe Nagel gives this any thought? . . .”

  •

  I was driving with Schwab back then on a day like this. A day in autumn 1964. Panic-stricken, I had set out from Hamburg, for Dawn had vanished once again in Paris. Untraceable, no matter how much I telephoned after her. So I had to go back to haul her, in a state of total bewilderment, out of some Épicure-like dump and calm her down until she had pulled herself together enough to endure a few more weeks of existence. Schwab had insisted on coming along. At the time, I was busy with one of the movie piglets’ usual big projects, so I wanted to get to Paris as fast as I could but have the car handy because I knew it soothed Dawn when I chauffeured her around, with her precious hair in the wind. And so I didn’t hop a plane; I didn’t go by way of Holland, where my son probably spent a whole melancholy-heavy Sunday waiting for me in vain; instead I took the Autobahn to Baden-Baden, and, with my then still alive German friend Schwab, slipped into France via Strasbourg. Because I hadn’t managed to leave Hamburg until late, we spent the night in Reims, going on to Paris the next morning.

  •

  “There’s something else that good old Nagel doesn’t seem to see,” I blathered on during the drive, “namely, that with his silly bookkeeper who writes short stories, he throws away the very thing he would like to write himself: a novel. If he wrote about himself, the writer Nagel, who writes not only short stories but whole books, and indeed so incessantly and uninterruptedly as to make you think that he can’t live without writing, then he would have a novel! A writer who writes about writing will reveal the world in a new way. A lost possibility will open up to him: the very possibility of showing a human being in a world with which he has a living relationship. Hence, a world in which one lives and not just exists in isolation. We are told on all sides that the novel is dead, and that’s because its last great theme is exhausted—the incompatibility of man’s inner world with his outer world, the individual’s forlornness in society, the unreality of the world man has created. But these are simply the problems of novel characters, not novel writers. These are the troubles of Bookkeeper Müller, whom Nagel has disguised himself as. They concern the writer Nagel only because he falls for his own trick and identifies with Müller the bookkeeper, not with Müller the short-story writer. Okay, through Müller he identifies with the reader—but by way of Müller’s intention to write short stories. The reader is totally uninterested in Müller in his workaday existence. He’s enough of a bookkeeper himself and has enough everyday problems of his own; he doesn’t need Nagel for that. In order to escape, he reads books and wants to write short stories. So why doesn’t Nagel go all the way and let the reader identify fully with him, the writer Nagel? With a writer not only of short stories but also of books, day in day out, year in year out. Someone who lives from and for writing books. For whom writing is life. Who can experience the world only by writing. That way he’d pull off the trick of a symbolic existence. A writer interiorizes the outer world. The more incompatible he finds the existence of man as an individual in a world that cares not a rotten fig for him, the more the world becomes an immediate, burning, living issue for him, and he for it. And the more subjectively he makes an issue of it, the more objectively he grasps it and the more objectively he renders it. The world becomes an object again. One not only swims in it, as among fish in an aquarium, but confronts it, simply by writing, by describing it. Admittedly, the writer who sees the world only from his special vantage point circumvents the problem of society. Il s’en fout totalement. He has an easy time of it, after all. He is in the enviable position of getting along marvelously without society. The more isolated he is, the better he works. Cervantes, as you as a top student must surely know, wrote Don Quixote in a prison cell. Fine: In the prison cell of your existence, you, as a writer, will find your great theme today: yourself. The self as reality—in German, Wirklichkeit, from wirken, to work, act, operate . . . working: writing. Acting by writing. Become real by writing. By describing, writing about, how you want to describe the world and in doing so experiencing defeat, you draw out the world as reality. You become a defeated Don Quixote, who, being entangled in his inner world and thwarted by it, achieves experience of the outer world. In this way, the reader Müller, staring bewildered into nothingness, is shown the road to the interior and then out of it into the exterior. You present the world to him. For the writer who writes about himself writing, the world becomes once again a means of experiencing the world—and thus, for the reader, once again a means of experiencing himself. Heed these golden words, dearest friend, for they may contain salvation for you too. No more roguish acts of lightning-swift exposure. No more brief liftings of the costume so that the reader can see the naked author underneath—the flasher author, the bashful exhibitionist. Rather a grand act of submission. Hara-kiri. Offer yourself freshly butchered on a platter to your fellow man, Bookkeeper Reader Müller. No more machinations, no more going halves. You need not borrow Bookkeeper Müller’s costume from Reader Müller in order to hide your nakedness. You don’t have to wink at him from that costume: ‘Look at me; I know that you know that I, naked underneath, am the author; but a very tiny little thing that wishes to write short stories is dangling between your legs too.’

  “Show Müller what you really think of him. Smash all your innards, smoking, into his face. Show him what you think of his fifty-fifty partners; for instance, Nagel. But no! Nagel is an upright fellow: a Sancho Panza, who, for sheer love of being a lackey, continues Don Quixote’s heroic struggle. This is not for you, no, no: Show Reader Müller what you think of the great writer Thomas Mann sitting at his desk and giggling into his fist because he, who has just Wagnered Faustus out of that selfsame fist, is now masquerading as Felix Krull, Confidence Man, and cutting capers for us. Pull down those borrowed pants! The Mardi Gras is over. Today, even a child knows that existence can be endured only if existence describes itself. Ask any modern-day child the old, idiotic question, What does he want to be when he grows up? Not a fireman or train engineer, as in our day. No, he wants to become an artist. A circus performer if he is especially talented and in the best of health. But if his gifts are average, then a sculptor, actor, painter, moviemaker. In delicate cases, the brat is already writing. He’s had the outline for his novel lying in his little desk since long before puberty, since the age of six or seven. And his enraptured parents a
re encouraging him. Just imagine how proud I am of my son’s ceramics . . .”

  I waited for his reaction, a sign of agreement or rejection, or else simply amusement or boredom; but Schwab, at my side, remained wordless and gazed unswervingly forward into the road flying toward us. It was a straight-as-an-arrow road through land that surged toward us in a vast breath; intoxicatingly set between the round tops of apple trees, the road dipped steeply into the depressions, like a roller coaster in an amusement park, and then up the other side, straight as an arrow, and the apple trees, dense green spheres, continued to accompany it. La douce France flew past Schwab’s profile, which was strangely delicate for such a massive Martin Luther head (a silverpoint drawing, I thought to myself); every acre of soil had been fertilized with French and German blood. I knew his father had died in action here, just before the end of Doubleyou Doubleyou One, in 1918. Schwab had never known his father, but he piously nurtured his memory: German Professor Anselm Schwab (no relation to Gustav).

  In those days, one of my delights was to let the landscapes of Europe fly past Dawn’s profile. She loved an open car and was very beautiful when she closed her eyes and held her face with its blowing hair into the headwind. I thought of the cruel game I had played with Christa: “If there were two people you loved equally, and you had to sacrifice one of them so that you and the other could survive, which would it be?” I loved Dawn. But I never doubted for an instant which of the two I would sacrifice if I were forced to choose between her and Schwab. I sensed I was becoming irritable, and I stepped harder on the gas pedal. I had been driving rather fast anyhow. Now things began to get interesting.

  “You may have goodness knows how high an opinion of Nagel,” I said (and knew I was hitting a raw nerve, for Schwab held Nagel in very high esteem and regularly despaired when Nagel failed once again to achieve what Scherping ingeniously called the “breakthrough to himself”). “But so long as Nagel does not realize that he is always deceiving himself, that most honest of all men, he will never become a first-class writer. And that’s very much your concern, honored friend. You and no one else are called on to tell him that. After all, Scherping pays you to administer pastoral care to his authors. Not that there aren’t purely ethical motives as well. When a man like you is too prim and proper to contribute a work to literature, then he at least has the damned duty to make sure the general level of culture is raised by the works of other people. A self-abnegatory task, I’ll admit, but as we all know, it is always the best who fall in war, likewise the best who perish in the culture business. The survivors write, there’s nothing we can do about it. They write to survive, and they survive because they write. But they shouldn’t make it too easy on themselves, right? I know you’ll have Scherping to deal with if you convince Best-selling Author Nagel that what he writes is shit. But after a dozen best sellers, even his publisher ought to allow him an excursion into literature. Naturally, that sort of thing might mess up the Complete Works. The Oeuvre. Without failed attempts, it will be more homogeneous, of course. Twelve gentle street ballads by Bookkeeper Müller, who wants to write short stories. Twelve illustrated broadsheet tales, striding like valiant hikers toward their noble goal of assuring us that, despite all the murky confusion, the world is ultimately an orderly structure. It may not be obvious why this is true, but it is comforting to believe it. It could be an orderly structure at least. It should be in any case. Per aspera ad astra even for the potential short-story writer Müller. After all, it’s always the same story with the same character, and the same destiny, simple and obvious as a child’s mechanical toy. The coil-spring tension of some tiny man-in-the-street problem, some common, current conflict—for instance, in the potential short-story-writing Bookkeeper Müller, the bad conscience caused by belonging to an elite—transferred to the gear transmission of our theoretically humanitarian and in fact misanthropic social conditions; and the thing is already purring along its path, joining with others of its kind, creating a tiny world, a tiny as-if, which, minute and simplified, is nevertheless a fair image of the big, bad world, as though it were our dear, bad, workaday life itself. Meant merely to be wound up, reduced to the simplest term, deciphered with a pocket multiplication table. A tiny fiction, sharply true to life but so remote in its own reality that if you look at it, your gaze is lost in dreams as in the glass-encapsulated oceanic vastness surrounding a meticulously rigged ship inside a bottle. Happily, you add it to other bric-a-brac in your home, in the culture cupboard, where next to the dictionary you use for your short-story writing stand a dozen contemporary novels like peas in a pod. In terms of its skill, this belongs with the little Calderesque mobile whirling overhead. But imagine Nagel understanding that his Bookkeeper Müller, who wants to write short stories, is not material for a novel, no matter how tragicomically he has Müller struggle through to the light or be doomed with all the powers of earth and heaven. Still, it’s an excellent topic for an essay: ‘Imagination as a Gamble.’ For once, a sober posing of the question whether the courage for this should not be reserved for an elite of more or less violent lunatics. Can it be consistent with order if the gamble of imagination is also granted to Bookkeeper Müller? And what damage is thereby done to his soul? You see, if this is accorded to just anyone, then it would leave the door open for such questions as well . . . Oh, come on, you don’t have to snort so indignantly, I’m quite serious. One is confronted with the question of a sound relationship between fiction and reality. We realized long ago that this relationship is out of kilter among people like us. The psychologist piglets didn’t have to demonstrate the close connection between writing and masturbation. That has always been a source of our arrogance. The onanist is a sovereign. He has the biggest harem on earth, and no woman can resist him. Above all, however, he eludes Mother Nature’s dirty game. Who wants reality anyway? Don’t we do everything we can to flee it? For instance, by reading books. And certainly by writing books! Even Short-Story Writer Müller knows that. It is simply human. What gives us a special place in zoology is the fact that we cannot endure reality and incessantly oppose it with fictions. Mother Nature’s monotonous game made us sick to our stomachs long ago. We refuse to admit that only one single reality can dominate: the sheer, brutal, infinitely unimaginative reality of being born in order to create life-devouring life, and to be devoured for the procreation of other life. We push this reality into the background and cover it up with a camouflage backdrop of fiction. All well and good. But the problem is the mixture: too much fiction blinds us to Nature, while a man is devoured before he knows what hit him; too little fiction renders Mama Nature’s unendurable cruelty too evident. Here too we lunatics with too much imagination are nicely left out of the game. We know we’ll be devoured; in the meantime, we send up the balloons of our fictions, create a reality within reality, valid for us alone, a world within the world, in which we can be happy-go-lucky, a Middle Kingdom in which we are sovereign. If everyone thought and acted along those lines, obviously things would become chaotic. The man in the street must be allowed to go halves with reality and veil it agreeably, and he must be permitted enough consciousness that it not catch him at unawares.”

  Schwab continued not to show any interest, and I laughed.

  “Perhaps there is a possibility here to save you too,” I said. “I mean: the essay. If I were you, I would write an essay that would be a consequence and heightening of the essay on ‘Imagination as a Gamble’ and also a genuine German contribution: namely, ‘On Causality and Necessity.’ The German contribution would come directly from the German genius: its language. No other language more blatantly expresses the predicament of having to stave off necessity: Notwendigkeit: having to die Not wenden: see the translation of Not: need, want, privation, indigence; care, sorrow, misery, affliction; trouble, difficulty, plight, predicament, emergency, extremity; danger, peril, distress; necessity, exigency, urgency . . . and all this wants to be gewendet: turned away from us, take a turn for the better, turn out for the best . . . I
ncidentally, a theological theme. I can sniff the LORD Zebaoth. Our most reliable camouflage backdrop. No, no, I’ve been talking nonsense again: Nagel knows what he’s doing. When he feels like philosophical profundity, he merely sticks a steel helmet on his Bookkeeper Müller: not only does this make Müller totally universal and humanly akin to everyone, even without the urge to write short stories, but also thrusts him into the midst of the realest events, and Mother Nature laughs at the human beings dancing to her pipe in the name of the most astonishing fictions. Yet for Nagel, going halves with Reader Müller, all that has its own necessity. Whenever Nagel opens the little treasure chest of his wartime experiences (for which I envy him more and more hungrily), something else emerges in the glow of the German Cross in Gold, the Iron Cross First Class and Iron Cross Second Class, the Close Combat Clasp, and medals for being wounded: that something else is the Lord God. From out of the gunfire, HIS eye gives us an encouraging wink, indicating that the whole hullaballoo has been put on in order to help Private First Class Müller find his identity. On a literary level, a hail of steel is just sufficient to forge a young man into a self whose inner wealth (of doubt, of course, but now also self-confidence, thank goodness) will supply an entire generation with a basis for seeing its own portrait in that self. The fact that the riflemen Neumann, Lehrmann, Meier, and Kunze, all the same age as he, are shot to bits is significant only in that it displays the harshness of this test of destiny. It is part of the drama’s background dynamics. Chiaroscuro flatters. Nitpickers are referred to the irrational fraction that remains when we try to divide life by reason. But for the Bros. Nagelmüller, what results is necessity—Notwendigkeit—and with it, subsequently, alleged causality. This is then known as: history. Bravo! A final European attempt to insert an orderly structure into the absurdity of existence, to make it into a meaningful structure. Does Nagel know this—Nagel, whose intellectual lodestar is Mr. Hemingway? Does he know how much he, in his Europeanized Hemingway imitations, is still rebelling involuntarily against America’s message that life is, more than anything else, irrational and subject to violence? For wasn’t that what the New World pioneers brought home to us from the harshness of their wide-open spaces? Dealing the coup de grâce to millennia of frail efforts to put Nature in order? Just what is our culture, our civilization? The tradition that our origin and ultimate bliss are in a garden. That unordered Nature can have an order and thereby a meaning and purpose. This is the message of Western Civilization from the Bible to Nagel. True, Mother Nature is not overlooked, especially in certain gory and decay-green depictions of man as the Son of God nailed to a cross. It’s odd, though, that despite their spectacular evocation of anxiety, these often sincere, even unsparing likenesses of everyday human life have something comforting and morally edifying about them, don’t you think? This depicted world is no less dreadful, monstrous, devastating than the real world at our fingertips. However, the artist’s depicting hand has also gotten himself, man, into the picture, has brushed and stylused him in. This makes it a human world, a world with the dimension of its echo in the human soul. It keeps it in suspense, as it were, hanging from the conceptual balloon like the Saviour on the cross. The image of horror contains horror, spellbinds it. The image of terror includes terror, canceling it somewhat, offering only its outline and not its weight, only the reflection of its harshness and not the harshness itself. Disorder, so represented, has been sifted by him who has ordered its elements in his representation. Meaninglessness fills up with the intent, the meaning, of the person who recognized it as meaningless . . . Yes, we know this: The image of reality is a magic formula that casts a spell on reality itself, in a dialectical equilibrium that gives it a logic in itself, the analogic of representation. And that’s what we’re charmed by. We’ve been charmed by this since our very first primer picture and nursery story—what am I saying: since the Cro-Magnon cave drawings . . .”