My First Wife

by Jakob Wassermann

  JAKOB WASSERMANN

  My First Wife

  Translated by MICHAEL HOFMANN

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  MY FIRST WIFE

  Mirror of Youth

  The Age of Certainties

  The Age of Dissolution

  Afterword

  Bibliography and Acknowledgements

  Mirror of Youth

  SIX SISTERS

  She had five sisters – four older, one younger. The six Mevis girls were known all over the city. Whenever they appeared together, they were like a sealed phalanx, from the classically beautiful Lydia to the graceful Traude. Their father and commander-in-chief, Professor Gottfried Mevis, shining beacon of the law faculty, a striking-looking man, was their Barbarossa. Six daughters and no sons – that was some freak of nature. Ribald commentators predicted a whole tribe of grandchildren. Frau Mevis, given name Alice, née Lottelott – one of the Düsseldorf Lottelotts, of Lottelott & Grünert, Consolidated Steel – had inherited a large fortune. The family, respected and envied, lived comfortably in a spacious villa.

  DUCKLING

  No question: where physical attributes were concerned, Ganna lagged some way behind her sisters. She had become aware of the fact very early, to her chagrin. Mirrors proclaimed it, the expressions and reactions of others confirmed it; she was the ugly duckling among five swans. Therefore it was her task to clear a path for herself through the five arrogant swans. Nor was that enough; Ganna wanted to outdo them. She was endlessly ambitious. She dreamed of a glorious future. Hers weren’t the usual banal girlish dreams, they were scenarios and imaginings of an unusual definition. She felt chosen, even though she couldn’t have said in what way.

  Even as a child, she had been hard to manage. I have heard tell that she was repeatedly the subject of scenes and commotions. In her tenth year, Professor Mevis took to giving her twice-weekly prophylactic beatings, to get her out of the habit of lying. A barbarous measure, which failed to achieve its purpose, and only caused Ganna unnecessary suffering. Because surely these childish lies of hers were only self-protective fantasies. Beatings only made her more wilful, and drove the badness further into her. When she was beaten, she would scream like a banshee. Sometimes she would throw herself to the ground and thrash about with her arms and legs. That would only provoke the Professor further. Once, her mother sent for the doctor, because Ganna wouldn’t calm down. Irmgard, her next-older sister, shrugged her shoulders and said it was play-acting, Ganna was putting on an ‘epileptic fit’; she had seen another girl at school have one a few days before.

  So I was told. Also that on another occasion the Professor had lost his temper with her, and in his rage – which, like all tyrants, he enjoyed – shouted the words in her face: ‘You’re the nail in my coffin!’ Whereupon Ganna is said to have fallen to her knees and raised her arms to him imploringly. A number of the sisters were listening at the door, with gleeful expressions. Ever since, when they were among themselves, they referred to Ganna as the coffin nail. All of which goes to show that a duckling has no easy time of it among swans. Swans are cruel and snobbish birds.

  She thinks she’s better than us, said the sisters, and from time to time they would rise up and make common cause against her. Ganna refuses to do any chores, so she’s responsible for all domestic mishaps. She is so highly strung that she often breaks things, therefore she gets the blame for anything and everything that breaks in the house. A carton of expensive laid paper goes missing; the bathtub overflows; a china vase is found in pieces on the carpet; little stick-figures have been scratched in the cream gloss on a door: who is the culprit? Ganna. Look at her standing there, said the sisters, refusing to defend herself, eyes lowered like a good girl, every inch a martyr; it’s no good, Ganna, we’ve seen through you!

  THEY WANT YOU TO LIE

  Punctuality was enjoined in the Mevis household. The paternal rule decreed that lunch was on the dot of one. Time and again, there they all were sitting at table: Lydia, Berta, Justine, Irmgard, Traude, the Professor, Frau Mevis, their old nurse, Frau Kümmelmann – only Ganna’s chair was unoccupied. Ganna’s deeply ingrained objection to time-keeping was another of the family traditions. Professor Mevis pretends not to notice Ganna’s absence, but his brow is twitching ominously. Frau Mevis keeps looking anxiously at the door; she’s suffering agonies. Finally a creature bursts into the room in a mad rush, her face puce, her eyes wide with dread, her hair a tangled mess; and while the wrathful father, strangling his red beard in his fist, glowers at her, the sisters, five models of virtue, titter quietly to themselves, because there can be no doubt that Ganna is about to tell one of her famous stories that don’t have a shred of truth in them, however masterfully she tells them. Poor Ganna. Don’t you feel sorry for her. She stutters, she stumbles over her words, poor mite, she’s so moving in her plight one should take her and pet her a bit; eight pairs of eyes are levelled at her, not one of them kind, not one of them encouraging, and there is nothing masterly about the story either – quite the contrary, her excuse gets snarled up in itself, and in the end she falls silent and starts eating her soup. Having witnessed similar scenes myself later, I can be fairly sure that they will have passed off in this way.

  At any rate, Ganna comes to see that it is necessary to lie in order to save one’s skin. It’s what they expect. Really, they made her do it. Lying becomes an indispensable weapon for Ganna, like the black liquid into which the cuttlefish disappears. The plain truth doesn’t work on them, you don’t get your peace that way, you have to make things up. Experience becomes a sort of semi-scandalous adventure, and by and by her spirit is no longer content in a rather colourless reality.

  SEVERAL OF THE SWANS LEAVE THEIR HOME POND

  Round about 1895, when Ganna was seventeen, her older sisters started marrying. One after the other, as though by some contagion, they fell in love, became engaged, married, started a home, and from that time forth were only ever seen at the side of their swains, with whom they behaved with unseemly displays of intimacy. The experience of three weddings in next to no time was decidedly difficult for Ganna. It was the combination of love and settling down, of dowry and secret and blatant necking that offended her idealistic sense. At least that’s what I assume to have been the case. She did not trouble to hide her contempt: the noble swans had soiled their plumage. I remember reading a passage in one of the diaries she kept as a girl. There she protested: I could never give myself to a man who wasn’t my intellectual equal. Once, when Lydia’s consort, who was a professional seducer, attempted a tender advance on Ganna, she bit him on the thumb so hard that he had to wear a rubber fingerstall for days afterwards. ‘Satanic little minx,’ he would say furiously, when her name came up later.

  The three most stainless of the swans had cleared the field, but there were still two left, who were more irksome, being closer to her in age. Also, the married ones continued to show off their exemplary lives and characters in the face of Ganna’s loneliness, in which enterprise they had the support of their contented, beaming husbands, who had every reason to be proud of so much honour, intelligence and domestic virtue.

  GANNA LIVES IN A WORLD OF HER OWN

  She did not know the meaning of obedience. Whatever she wasn’t allowed to have, she would purloin for herself secretly. She was full of cunning. If asking isn’t enough, and a person is driven to plead for something, it will tend to make them devious. She even used her absent-mindedness as a way of securing small advantages for herself. If you can make people laugh, they will be more lenient in their judgement of you. I know fools who are so diligent in their folly that they can quite comfortably live by it. The confusion that Ganna wrought kept
her family and friends continually amused. Misplaced letters, garbled names, forgotten appointments, muddled dates and places, forsaken umbrellas, lost gloves, attempts to leave by the wrong door, inappropriate replies, pointless errands: it was one continual comedy of errors. ‘Have you heard the latest about Ganna Mevis?’ was a standing question in her circle. And some story would follow about how she had gone out into the woods one summer morning with her hairbrush wedged under her arm, firmly convinced she had Beyond Good and Evil with her. Priceless, people said, and they laughed till they cried. It was all very innocent, very adorable. And the most delightful thing of all was that Ganna herself could laugh at her innumerable slips, with a winning laugh that even made up for the coarse indiscretions she was often guilty of in her absent-mindedness. She lived in a world of her own that seemed to have been designed especially for her.

  HER FATHER’S DAUGHTER

  Professor Mevis didn’t lose too much sleep over matters of upbringing. If shouting didn’t work, there was always violence. Ganna annoyed him. The spirit of rebellion with which she was imbued turned him against her. ‘If only we were rid of her,’ he said to his wife, ‘if only she were safely married off.’ Whereupon Frau Mevis would shake her head in a worried way. It was her view that with Ganna’s rather indifferent attractions, there was little chance of him finding a suitable man to do him such a service. She told me so once, much later, laughing.

  Nevertheless, the Professor sometimes was of the view that she was more flesh of his flesh and spirit of his spirit than the other girls, who were more réussies. The well-set figure, the stubborn brow, the bold expression; that in addition to her insistence on entitlement, actual or notional; her wilfulness and hot-headedness: it was as though Nature had had half a mind to make a son of her and only decided otherwise at the very last moment. None of the others could match her for toughness and strength. All that spoke for her. And there was something else too. Often, when he thought he was about to burst with rage and impatience, she would strike him as so irresistibly droll that he had to run to the nearest room to keep her from noticing his hilarity, and his own authority from being impaired.

  WHAT HER FATHER MEANS TO HER

  She for her part feared him. He was the black curse and cloud overhanging her youth. Fear was allied to profound respect. Basically, his iron hand felt like happiness to her. In childhood she was more aware of this than in subsequent years. Perhaps it was an instance of that mysterious instinct that shields the kernel of the spirit till it is eventually subsumed by will and necessity. But even as a growing girl she would sometimes feel the dark threats emanating from her own character; she required this master, this powerful fist, to keep everything within her from collapsing in unruliness. She had a dream once of a flaming whip rushing down from the heavens. The mortal fear with which she tried to evade the lash helped her across an abyss she would otherwise certainly have fallen into. Regardless of the continual uprisings against his authority, the many trivial deceptions she regularly practised on him, she acknowledged his power unconditionally, and with her whole body. However much the physical chastisements outraged and upset her – she underwent them into her eighteenth year – a mysterious little pleasure did quiver in her when he beat her. He alone had the licence to do that. In all the world, he alone was in the right against her. When his great voice boomed through the house so that everyone flinched, then, underlying her own fear, there was a strange feeling in her of satisfaction, something that hailed the master, how good that the master is there. His fits of rage seemed to her to be splendid elemental events, as impressive as a spouting geyser or a forest fire. Can qualities be used up? Is there only so much submissiveness in one’s heart that it might trickle away or evaporate if not resupplied? Never again, I think I am right in claiming, in no other association or relationship, did Ganna encounter a being whose presence and influence compelled her to the feeling: how good that the master is here, my master. And that was the ruin of her.

  FOOLISHNESS OF LITERATURE

  I come now to a delicate subject. At that time, the educated classes were pleased to take an interest in writing and in literature. It was a part of the bon ton to discuss the ‘modern movement’, to have read Germinal or The Kreutzer Sonata, and to have witnessed the latest theatrical scandal/sensation, although it was mauvais to overdo it and to take an excessive interest in such things. It was good to know the names of certain works and their authors, you had to be able to keep up your end of a conversation; though beyond that it had no more significance than knowing the names of the dishes on a menu. Young people liked to talk about ‘life’ without actually confronting it; while they feigned an enthusiasm for art, their real effort was to secure some vain ascendancy by parroting views they picked up in the papers, or had heard from some impeccable authority. A man who worked in one of the professions was only expected to show a limited interest in literature, otherwise people would stop taking him seriously. That left the field open for women. And, since they were the ones who determined taste and set fashions, they made their contribution to a fairly comprehensive debasement, because, just like the men, they gravitated quite naturally to the second- and third-rate; first-class things they ignored. It was the age of paste diamonds and shallow minds.

  But with Ganna, things were slightly different.

  SHE WRITES HER OWN WORLD

  She was convinced she was marching at the head of the true cognoscenti, right in the van, where the new world would heave into sight, where the youngest, tenderest reputations were just beginning to sprout, before they could be ferried into immortality by doting hands. And it’s true, there was something smitten about her. She was capable of being enthused by a work of literature. She roughly understood the categories. She despised mediocrity. Once a fortnight she gathered faithful young male and female friends about her who were of the same persuasion, and then she would rapturously share her finds with them, but also read excitedly and blushingly what she herself had penned. Her otherwise clear and piercing voice would sound dark and hoarse, as if she had powdered her throat with flour. When it got about that a critic for a major newspaper had said of her philosophical essays that they bore the stamp of an unmistakable if undisciplined genius, her acolytes cheered, though she herself with modesty and agitation tried to mute the acclaim. These literary sessions took place in the small drawing room at the Mevises’. They had something of an occult character. None of her sisters was allowed to enter the room; Ganna, like a priestess protecting the godhead from profane disturbances, took steps. If an outsider had violated the presence, she would have pierced him with a look. Everyone in the house knew it, and they let her get on with it.

  It wasn’t a pastime, not something frivolous or pretentious. It wasn’t possible to say at the time how far and how deep it went. For Ganna it was the ‘higher reality’, an expression of ridicule in the circles in which she moved. But was this ‘higher reality’ real? Was it a force for purity and nobility? Hard to say. Normally it’s the case – and this casts an odd light on human nature – that a love of literature disguises a vacant inner space, so that where you might expect to find principles or high-mindedness, often you only meet with gush. If the enthusiasm is real, then a pact is made with it, and the ethical implications are quietly avoided. Whether this was the case with Ganna was, as I say, not yet ascertainable at the time. One day she was bound to reach the parting of the ways. In those early years she was still unsteady, still groping, looking for her law, looking above all for a mirror. People couldn’t be a mirror for her, nor could the real world; it was only in books that she encountered a being like herself – so she thought – a trusting being full of earnestness and passion. She was delighted by the likeness, yes, that was her own poem, her own creation, she fell in love with it, and in her eyes it made her truthful and good.

  It is therefore almost inevitable that a writer, a certifiable writer, would come to hold the meaning of the universe for Ganna, to save her from the repellent superficial
ity of the Mevis empire, the tarn with the five exemplary swans. She dreamed of the role and the mission of an Aspasia. But to be an Aspasia, you needed a Pericles and an Athens. Even to be a Rahel Varnhagen, you still needed a Goethe. But where was there a Pericles, or a Goethe, in the humdrum world of 1898? Well, that’s what dreams are there for, for changing phantasms into reality.

  YOURS TRULY

  In May of that self-same year, it so happened that I left Munich for Vienna. I had just published a novel called The Treasure Seekers and the book had not gone entirely unnoticed. Some experts were even pleased to praise it at over its worth, and call its author a shining new beacon of light on the horizon, a rather tawdry form of words that was much in vogue at the time. Perhaps they were impressed by the darkness of the material and the seemingly inspired chaos of the narrative; today I can only say I am surprised by the many friendly voices and respectful opinions this unripe product of a twenty-five-year-old tyro managed to garner.

  It remained a so-called succès d’estime. My grim financial situation was unaffected. I left Munich in a hurry, firstly to get away from creditors, secondly because a love affair had stirred up so much gossip and odium towards me that my closest friends deserted me and respectable citizens crossed themselves on the pavement when I was pointed out to them. I knew hardly anyone in Vienna, half a dozen admirers, that was all, and admirers are only useful to you so long as you don’t need their help. I had no idea what I was going to live on, since I had only random earnings, and arrogantly rejected the idea of employment. Luckily, I met rich people here and there, who not only had some sympathy for me, but who also had a degree of snobbishness about them; they allowed me from time to time to borrow money from them.