Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  •

  Four years had passed between then and my latest trip from Reims to here. I drove along the same French highway, cutting straight across the land over hill and dale; the day was as bright as the day when Schwab had sat next to me in the car. I remembered adding: “Fine, I’ve sensed for a while now that I’m getting on your nerves. But I’m antsy, I can’t get along without the usual Kultur gallop. In fast motion, I promise you! I promise you I am heading straight for something that is certain not to bore you. As Uncle Ferdinand used to sing: Parlez-moi de moi, et exclusivement de moi-même, et je vous aime . . . Now where were we? With the shamans. Ever since the Cro-Magnon cave ceremonies, man has been—(à propos, back then people must have been a more likable bunch than the riffraff we saw at the rest stop yesterday)—anyway, for millennia now, man has been charmed by the same old con and the same old con men. He’s been getting his eyes rubbed by the spell of image, in which man and the world are united as one, fiction and reality in a magic equilibrium. Still the same old devices: drums, geometric figures, mutterings of conjurers, lightning-swift casting of runic staffs—our devices, dear sir: the devices of the Kultur Association for Art and Literature (a chartered and incorporated club), lyre, quill, chisel, and palette embroidered on the banners by the ladies’ auxiliary. And, if you please, we also have to sing the old ditty. The Song of God: Oh, you beauteous forest you, / Who built you so lofty, who? Well, who? The Parks Department? No. Ask Nagel, he knows. He’ll even tell you. Cryptically, to be sure, and bashfully—a Hemingway disciple in hairy-chested sentimentality—but unmistakably. And he’s right. What can we do: like it or not, we are serving God. Working on the most sublime of all fictions. Since the immemorial beginnings of language, we have been filling the names of things with our exultations and lamentations, and we have been speaking of them as if they had found a response within us. Millennia before the chanting of the pre-Homeric rhapsodists, an orderly image of the world had already been conjured up, because the rhythm of ordered words had brought that image into the world. What does a man do if he closes his eyes in a state of idiotic rapture in order to hark within himself to the responses of things to themselves? Or to rivet his eyes on them until, forgetting himself, their images rise up again within him, forcing him to render them with an added human dimension? Am I then being indiscreet if I ask again whether it is the right honorable intellectual timidity in the face of this that will ultimately prevent you from writing your book? I am being presumptuous, but after all, you did talk me into writing my book—good heavens, fifteen years ago! that’s how long it’s been!—and I want to get a little revenge. So, tell me, am I wrong in assuming that you are revolted at the thought of dealing with devices that enable all intellectual fraud? I mean, the suspect ingredients that turn a sentence into a fetish and a stanza into a revelation of the numinous, a formation of ABC’s into a Gospel—let alone a crappy best seller? But you’re not answering me, you’re leaving me in eternal uncertainty as to whether I should join the lousy game of asking, once again in my own way, the question about the meaning of existence—a question that, even if I don’t find an answer, I will nevertheless have already answered with my own way of asking, with the originality and passion of my asking . . . Come on, bestow a comforting word! Just say that creation fulfills its meaning in man, and that his existence contains a premeditated plan and an ultimate goal of salvation. Just convince me that the dreadfulness of the world is matched by so-andso many sublimities, which cancel the dreadfulness out. Persuade me that anyone who cannot recognize this in Alpine peaks, in sunsets reflected in the Mediterranean and in autumnal landscapes, will find it all the more cogently in the Gilgamesh, Beethoven’s Ninth, or the Angel of Reims . . . Tell me all these things, I need them as backup. I’m driving to Paris to pull a twenty-two-year-old American girl out of some dump she’s holed up in, because her beautiful eyes are still full of the terror of the wide-open wastes in the New World from which she comes, where an arrow can come whizzing out at any moment from behind the rock outcroppings, and Grandma wears an Indian scalp on her belt; where the pistols in thigh holsters are still as loose as in the days of Billy the Kid; where the ears of sleeping Negro children are devoured by slum rats in the huge stone wastes of the cities . . . in short, images for people for whom the pretense of GOD is an absolute necessity for enduring the thought of the world; eyes, alas, that did not try to recognize HIS revelation through European culture, certainly not in the cancerous proliferation of the Old World, in the horrible teeming of the motorized army ants, the chewing horlàs who chomp on their morsels, zealously insalivating them, washing them down with a swig of beer wine Coca-Cola apple juice milk booze mead lemonade club soda—swallowing, jerking-up of the Adam’s apple, parting of the lips, tongue-dragon rolling forward and flicking a few food-gruel remnants from the teeth, a slight burp—excuse me, it’s just my stomach—and then the next morsel is shoved in . . . and behind it lurks the big cat NATURE, ready to devour them all. Against this I have to tell my disturbed young beloved, make her believe, that this ceaseless gruesome production and destruction of living creatures is made up for by a heartful of love (isn’t that so?), and, in case of doubt, by such verses as, Springtime drops her azure ribbon, or Peace lies on all the mountaintops, or a few bars of Vivaldi, or a Cézanne landscape . . . I have to tell her this convincingly, so that she will come to her senses and allow herself to be photographed for the spring collections of Coco Chanel and Monsieur de Givenchy and Yves Saint Laurent for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and Elle and Marie Claire . . .”

  •

  That was fifteen hundred days ago. I survived them, writing and undauntedly loving: loving Dawn loving Gaia loving Nadine still loving Christa—always ready to flee from the terror of life into the gracious madness of love, or rather, from the ungracious hallucination of having to write into the not much more gracious delusion of having to love. Schwab had chastely withdrawn from this neurotherapoetic bathing cure: he was dead, was now next to me only in spirit. The little pile of earthly substance to which his large body had been reduced was probably well preserved in some urn. I still don’t know where that urn wound up—at the Ohlsdorf graveyard or in a display cabinet with his Hamburg relatives. Perhaps Schelmie got hold of it and put it on the shelf behind the bar at Lücke’s. I couldn’t quite tell whether I was sad about it. I certainly must have been in a way, for I was sorry not to see him. But on the other hand, now I had him around more comfortably, especially when traveling. I didn’t have to get fidgety with nervous expectation that he might again be overcome at any moment by some irresistible desire for whiskey or beer or a hedge to piss behind or matches for his innumerable cigarettes after burning his fingers on the last one and absentmindedly tossing the dashboard lighter out the window. True, he had always been at the mercy of my chitchat (and was a man who loved to suffer, as I well knew); but now I had him unresistingly at my disposal, and he could never again escape my convulsive monologues. It crossed my mind that a witty Frenchman (I don’t know who; anyway one of the luminaries whom Stella called “provincial”) described writing as a welcome opportunity to talk without being interrupted—

  And in the enigmatic way in which seeming trivia spark the revelation of something fundamental, it came to me with an illuminating bang: I suddenly had my book very clearly before me. It loomed before my mind’s eyes in flawless architecture: a glass cathedral, whose symbolic formula, like the axial system of a crystal, could be read from all relationships of the lines and masses. A House of God to celebrate myself—Hosannah! At last, I had the blueprint within me.

  Naturally, it had to be a book by a writer about writing. “Here we have it at last, our spiritual child!” my spirit called to Schwab’s spirit. “But it’s too bad that you’re pulling it out of me posthumously. When you were alive, it would have aroused your keenest envy: a book about the very writer of this very book. This, of course, completely involves the author.

  “And this means that everything that comes
up in it has to refer to writing. Of course, it’s necessarily an autobiography. However, for such a confession to be of interest beyond its confessional aspect, it has to tell a life story that is typical of the era. It must be proven that and why and how the life story of someone who writes is typical of the era. It must become evident that a man of this particular era has no choice but to write—and thus to write this life confession of someone who writes.

  “But if this is to deal with writing in a truly transcendental way, then every situation of the confessed life—that is, every situation that necessarily leads to writing—must simultaneously be a metaphor for a corresponding situation in writing. This can hardly be achieved with such a thoroughly banal biography as mine, dear friend, muddled as mine may be. Once again, art will have to lend life a helping hand. Instead of bare, complex, and paradoxical reality, this too will require an agreeable, plainly simple, and logically flawless as-if. We resort to the expedient of a hypothetical autobiography, dear friend. In a word: we must not be as honest as we would like to be. We shall have to cheat. In the language of art, you have to say, we must invent. Very well then! Let me worry about that. For the moment, I’m delighted. My book—or shall I rather say our book?—has finally found its form!

  “The situation of the writer in the process and experience of writing is archetypal. His intimate incorporation of the world; his absorption in things in order to suck out their articulable essence; his wholehearted devotion to what wants to express itself through him—all these things correspond to the embryo listening to its own growth. Aren’t we cozy in the warm black womb! . . .

  “The writer, in the mother liquid of his desire to write, his urge to write, is budding. What he writes has to bud. Has to develop out of itself. There mustn’t be any plot barreling ahead. The story grows statically out of itself, adding stratum after stratum by wearing out stratum after stratum.

  “This assumes the condition: I accumulate in order to have something to lose.

  “There’s nothing to add about the time and the place of the plot. All pastness of the described (and describing) existence is telescoped in the presentness of narrative. The entire story of the person who narrates himself is present in that person’s here and now. But the story refuses to be told in chronological sequence; it has to be told as the ever-present historical content of his presentness: he contains himself in all phases of his story, confronts us in any phase and is all phases at once.

  “The style too results from this accordingly. A life in the steadily changing multitude of its moods demands the totality of possible forms of expression. First of all: the half-light of the cell situation, of the budding person, his isolation from the world, flight from the world, search for the world, in the light beam of the desk lamp—these subjects require a chronicler’s diction that conjures up the atmosphere of the remote past, and this must be artificial in order to always keep alive the awareness that we’re dealing with an as-if: an allegorical story that tries to illustrate a universal truth in a chain of symbolically transparent situations. Just as I must use archetypal imagery in the story without being inhibited by fear of the occasional banality, so too my language must risk walking the line between genuine poetry and occasional kitsch, the contemporary and the antiquated. A tight-rope of language, yet a catalogue of style: from characterizing jargon to the icy neutrality of standard language, from trivial chitchat to intellectual argot, from the perfidious mendacity of a salesman’s eloquence to the poetry of a pimp—nothing can be left out. Finally my movie piglets get a word in. Finally Scherping becomes a bard. In short: a style of barbaric haut goût, like the decadent Latin texts in the centuries during and after the migrations of the peoples, a style that has something nervous and spasmodic in its incessant changes of milieux and moods.

  “What did you always say about the novel? It is in its space-time a continent unto itself. This cannot be unspooled linearly on the thread of a simple life story, not unless you section it out, cut it into little pieces, scatter it, so to speak, across the entire landscape. Especially if what is described is to be described in the very state of being described—that is, the describing is the actual subject—then nothing may, nothing can be achieved chronologically: everything has to be ready at all times to be in the present. As a writer, I do not speak about writing as about something that has taken place; I keep on writing by writing it down. I keep living my writing the way I live my life. I must tell about it the way I would tell about my life to someone who lives with me: Living on. My continent in its space-time is an island in the ocean of time. My reader is with me on this island, which for him still lies in darkness. He wants to get to know it—by all means. My story sweeps across it like the beam of a lighthouse. It sweeps along the horizon all around my island, always sweeping across the same areas; but each time the light beam hits them, they reveal something previously unknown, until eventually the entire topography is experienced.

  “I know: I will have to exercise caution—for instance, the balance of intellectual and emotional stimulations. A delicate matter, eh? But these are secondary matters, matters of execution. Generally speaking, all I have to do now is rummage through the jumble of papers in the trunk and pick out the ones that fit in with this new plan. And I’ll have my book, damn it—I’LL HAVE MY BOOK! What do you say? HE WHO HATH WILL BE GIVEN . . . Why the hell don’t you say something? It’s a bad joke on your part to have been dead for four years now.”

  Then, suddenly, everything was gray all around me, like the densest fog. I heard a brief, hard bang, and all at once, I didn’t know where I was, I got scared, I slammed on the brakes and the car almost whirled on its own axis, with crushed stone spraying up around me.

  I stood up. I opened the door. On a stretch of freshly rebuilt, still unasphalted road, I had come close—not too fast, luckily—to a truck. When I went around to pass it, he had stepped on the gas. His back tires kicked up a stone, which flew into my windshield. It was like an opaque stroke of lightning that totally blocked my view.

  I should have taken this as a warning. But people like us, heroic as we are, we do not do such things. I dug a hole in the debris on the windshield so that I could see, and then on I drove to Paris. I was absolutely determined to start work immediately.

  •

  This was—let me repeat it once again—eight days ago. I did not hesitate for an instant. I drove straight to the Épicure, unloaded my suitcases, cartons, and boxes, parked the car in the garage, bought myself a big jar of instant coffee, went up to my room (number 26 as usual; it’s always free, seems to wait for me), and got down to my papers. The first slip I took hold of said, in red letters, SCHWAB. That same moment, the horror of my dream attacked me with such power and present reality that I thought someone was actually standing behind me, catching me in the abominable act of murder.

  And while I tried to hold on to the flash of recognition that made me realize that my dream was true, that I had really murdered someone (and that I would soon also know whom and how and when and where), I was overcome with a sense of profound shame:

  the con artistry of my actions became so horrifyingly blatant to me, just as a lunatic may realize in a lucid moment that he is a lunatic—

  the incredible con artistry of a writer’s existence—a fiction inventor, a man playing his game like an unsophisticated child, in an utterly menacing world—composing his as-if like a moron who accumulates pebbles and who, babbling and drooling, watches them dribble apart as he tries all the harder to build up the same pile again . . .

  What was I doing here? What was I working on?

  Schwab—who is he?

  It is the name of a character I have sketched for a novel, for whom my (now deceased) friend S. was the model. The invented name for one of the many figures (freely drawn from life) in the untold (never fully drafted and ultimately rejected) drafts of my book.