by Jay Parini
Now he and his sister made their way through darkened streets to the station, their heads down, hurrying. Like most people in their situation, they simply abandoned their worldly goods, hoping that after the war they might retrieve them. Tonight, it was enough to carry a few small bags—and Benjamin’s manuscript, although Dora couldn’t see why he had to bring it. “Give it to Monnier, let her look after it. Or somebody else! It’s safer here than on the road!”
“You don’t understand,” he said.
“It’s a bag of bricks. It is slowing us down!”
As they pulled away from the dimly lit station, which smelled of oil and dust, the Eiffel Tower shone above the city in garish moonlight: the world’s most preposterous radio transmitter, and Benjamin imagined it calling invisible cries of desperation across the dark Atlantic to anyone who might be listening. It is often like this with technologies, he thought. Function follows form.
The tower itself, he recalled, had been erected whimsically, a monument to the sheer magniloquence of steel. Three hundred skyjacks had sunk two and a half million rivets to create what seemed, at first, like a three-hundred-meter flagpole. It had been a mere fancy, a piece of artifice, an unnatural wonder of the world that tourists might gawk at for generations; then came radio, and in 1916 the edifice suddenly acquired a meaning. Benjamin took a notebook from his briefcase and wrote: “Meaning as after-echo. The point of apparently pointless events, too, becomes clear long after. This is the end of history: the post hoc accumulation of significance for random, inarticulate events, beautiful or cruel.”
“What are you writing, Walter?” asked Dora, sitting beside him. “You’re not listening to a word I’m saying.”
“Nothing,” he said.
“What does that mean? Nothing! Talk to me.”
“I have nothing to say, that’s what I mean,” he said, a trifle angry. He did not want his thoughts interrupted.
“You seem so sad,” she said.
“I am not sad,” he insisted.
“You are.”
He yawned. It was exhausting to deal with Dora.
“Ever since you were a little boy, I could tell when you were sad,” she continued.
Benjamin closed his notebooks and wanly said, “You are quite wrong, Dora. The truth is I may even be a little happy.”
* * *
—
They traveled through the night, sleeping fitfully in the crowded railway car. He watched Dora as she dozed, her head sloping to her chest and a double chin forming. It reminded him, again, of his mother, who had grown pudgy in middle age. And himself, for that. A family replicated the production of the world, the organic historical growth of objects in time: He and Dora were still connected in the most literal sense to his parents, Émile and Pauline. He withdrew from his wallet a yellowed photograph of his family, an instant locked in the glacier of memory that preserves such images. There he sits, bald, in a long white gown with ruffled collar, on his mother’s lap, his right hand raised slightly, a look of concentrated attention on his face; he is perhaps five months old. Georg holds his left hand, protective, loving. Already a lostness narrows his gaze, a bewilderment born of credulousness. His black hair is ruffled, and his dark eyes burn holes in the picture. Pauline sits primly, the billowing sleeves of her dress a sign of affluence and ease. There is a firm aura of control in her expression, in the way her right hand balances her child so effortlessly. But there is fear on her face as well. Her confidence has been shaken, and she does not know if she will find herself capable of summoning Motherhood on such a scale. This self-doubting is visible in the arch of her back, the way she leans forward ever so slightly, as if afraid she might slump and then crumble. Only Émile shows total confidence; he stands a full foot above everyone, or more; he is centered in the photograph: paterfamilias, provider, benevolent source of life. His vast, meticulously sculpted mustache is much in contrast to Benjamin’s, which is stubby and thick, unkempt.
Dora began to snore heavily, embarrassing him. He wished he could simply get off at the next station and leave his sister forever. He wanted to separate from the Benjamins of Berlin, from his inherited place in the continuum of pain and responsibility. He wanted the experience of total freedom, that free fall beyond time and place. But he knew better, and he stood and wrapped a blanket around Dora’s shoulder and was relieved when she did not waken.
From the inside pocket of his coat he took a weary letter from Grete Steffin, Brecht’s lover. He and Grete shared an affection for Brecht that was unbroken despite the fact that he had treated them both with contempt. Brecht treated everyone horribly—everyone except those who promised to get him something: money, sex, fame. He was a disturbing man. A little boy, really. All he wanted was adulation, gratification. He pretended to be a Communist and attended every world conference on literature sponsored by Stalin, feigning a profound social conscience, but Benjamin felt that Brecht was in some ways a fake, a brilliant fake. It was the underside of his genius.
They had met in Capri that fateful summer of 1924, the same time he met Asja Lacis, who had simultaneously ruined his life and given him the one important thing he had ever had: the experience of deep, erotic love. But this particular love had brought desire, and desire had consumed him. He had never been free again. Sometimes he could think about nothing but Asja’s green eyes, the faint, alluring smell of her breath, the way her hair fell lankily across her forehead. Often, in the sixteen years since he met her, he lay in bed all night thinking of her, unable to waste himself, to drain himself, to exhaust this terrible need.
He was dreaming of Asja when the train pulled into the station at Lourdes in the bluish pink of dawn. He and Dora found a room in the boardinghouse where Emma Cohn was staying on the rue de la Cité; it was a modest room, but it overlooked a garden full of lemon trees and hibiscus. They each had a bed, and there was a bathroom down the hall shared by a dozen or so others, mostly refugees from Belgium. It pleased Benjamin that Dora had a friend here, as he did not relish spending too much time with her.
When, in mid-July, the opportunity arose for Dora to accompany Emma to a town in the south of France where refugees were apparently making their way into Spain quite easily, he encouraged her to go.
“It’s your chance,” he said. “You must take it, Dora. We can meet in New York, in a few months.”
“I’m afraid, Walter.”
“If you stay, there is no hope. Horkheimer and Adorno are sending me a visa. Not two visas, but one. And passage on a ship to New York. I am expecting this.”
“You should come with me.”
“Why are you always like this, Dora?”
“Like what?”
“Insisting, resisting…”
“You treat me like a child, Walter.”
“This is a ridiculous conversation.”
“Emma says there is room. You could join us. What if they don’t send you a visa or get you a berth?”
“I will take my chances.”
“You are being stubborn. Look where it’s got you.”
He was getting angry now. “What are you talking about?”
“You expect everyone to take care of you. You expect miracles.”
“I don’t have to listen to this.”
“You are worse than Georg.”
“Please, enough of Georg. Enough of this chatter.”
“I will go alone, with Emma.”
“Good.”
“You are a disappointment to me,” she added. “Mother was always right about you.”
Benjamin chose not to answer. His sister made him furious. She was perpetually opening old wounds. She could not let any dog lie buried.
“I will never see you again,” she said, and began to cry.
He drew her near. “Dora, you exaggerate everything. You worry all the time. Mama used to say, ‘Dora, you fre
t too much.’ Remember?” He took a handkerchief to her eyes. “She was right about you.”
“I will go to New York,” she said.
“That’s good,” he said. “You always wanted to go to America, didn’t you?”
“No,” she said, “that was you.”
“Ah,” he said. “I will give you Teddy Adorno’s address. You must write to Teddy. He will know my whereabouts.”
“Come with me, Walter.”
“No,” he said. “I will go to Marseilles, then to Cuba.”
“You will hate Cuba.”
“Or Buenos Aires.”
“That is worse.”
“Or Antarctica.”
They both started laughing. It was a relief to have this conversation behind them. Later that day, he took her and Emma to the train station, and he gave Dora enough money to last three months: exactly half of the money Adrienne Monnier had given him. “And remember what I told you,” he said. “I will see you soon, believe me. A few months, no more.”
“I believe you, Walter,” she said, her expression betraying her actual words. She did not believe him. Indeed, disbelief flooded her last looks, dampening the tiny fans of wrinkles that widened from the corners of her eyes. Benjamin watched the train pull out, with its breath of ashes. He understood perfectly that he would never see Dora again.
* * *
—
The heat of July nearly exhausted him, and he lay in bed most of the day, reading and writing letters: to Grete Steffin, to Adorno, to his ex-wife, Dora. Near the end of July he wrote to his cousin, Hannah Arendt, explaining his situation: “Hideous and stifling weather reinforces my need to maintain the life of both body and spirit in a state of suspension. I cloak myself in reading: I’ve just finished the last volume of the Thibaults and The Red and the Black. My extreme anguish at the thought of what is going to happen to my manuscripts is now doubly painful.” He sent the letter to the last address he had for Hannah, in Paris, although he could not imagine it would find her. The mail was so fickle now. You dropped a letter into a mailbox without the slightest sense that it was going anywhere, although some letters, amazingly, seemed to get through. Since many of his correspondents were in flux, or flight, there was no telling where they might be. Letters occasionally came back marked undeliverable at this address. Most of them dropped, like feathers, into the well of history.
Alone in the boardinghouse in Lourdes, he felt unbelievably lazy, but he did not mind. A sentence from La Rochefoucauld returned to give comfort: “His laziness supported him in glory for many years in the obscurity of an errant and hidden life.” He considered himself a deeply lazy man, and his life had certainly been obscure. Many of the people he knew, especially the writers, loathed any form of sloth, but he did not. He had tried for many years to cultivate leisure, to let happen what happened, to allow his imagination room to graze, always searching for that distant valley where larks rise on strings of sound all day and the sun is steady in the sky.
He believed in chance, in lazy luck, and the benefits of serendipity. It had never let him down, and he had stumbled upon so many treasures in nearly five decades of living; these formed his secret hoard. The fact that he had never written a whole book, a “real” book, apart from the Habilitation on German tragic drama, bothered him, but only a little. If the war ended soon, he would publish the arcades book, and that would be his magnum opus. The work on Baudelaire would follow, a brilliant adornment. And a neat, pocket-size selection of his best essays and aphorisms would be lovely, and perhaps a posthumous book would appear. He had, after all, scattered countless fugitive pieces in odd publications in different countries. Surely one could assemble miscellaneous collections from these, and they would make for good reading. (Indeed, he had once published a collection of random jottings called One-Way Street, and it had found its way into many appreciative hands.)
An aphorism stuck in his head: Scripta manent, verba volent: Writing stays, but talk flies away. Was that Martial or Juvenal? Either way, he knew it was true. But he loved conversation as much, even more, than written words. He had loved the long hours with Gerhard Scholem, the late-night talks with Brecht, the prolonged, even timeless café mornings in Paris with Bataille and Klossowski. In the few times when he and Asja Lacis had been alone, they had often talked through the night instead of making love. Now he had nobody to talk to, so he was dependent on letters: writing even more than receiving them. He found himself in his letters, pulling from peculiar depths an energy that was then shaped by the expectations of a particular, well-imagined reader.
My selves are many, he thought. One by one they emerge in my letters. They are all true, even when contradictory. I embrace them all.
If he regretted anything in his life it was the way he allowed himself to disappear in the presence of strong personalities, like Scholem or Brecht. Scholem was somewhat easier to deal with: The man was a scholar to his fingertips, and he understood the vulnerabilities of a scholar, the dependence on the text, the material at hand; he was acquainted with the need to lose oneself in digging, in rooting for truth; he also knew that one must invent the truth over and over, never forgetting that life is a process of continual revision in the interest of greater understanding. But Brecht…My God, what a difficult man! What an impossible friend!
Brecht abused his friends and used his enemies. He was ruthless with women, lying to them constantly about his affections, pretending to be faithful when no man was ever less faithful. He had nearly ruined Elisabeth Hauptmann, who wrote portions of The Threepenny Opera in exchange for affection. And he had worn out poor, dear Grete Steffin: She was a bag of skin now, her lungs as fragile as flypaper; she coughed up blood each day and was light-headed, weak. But she loved Brecht. She would do anything for him, swallow any lie, do any cruel deed for a smile from him, a wink, a gesture of acknowledgment.
The sad letters poured in from Grete: Not even the war could stop them. Sad news travels well, it seems. Benjamin wanted to take her by the hand and lead her to freedom, but he was not free himself when it came to Brecht. He considered Brecht—for all his reliance on the women in his life as editors, even cowriters—a genius. It was unmistakable. The fact that others contributed to his works did not matter; he gathered their language into his own groundswell; he transmogrified everything.
That last summer in Denmark with Brecht had been equally exhausting and exhilarating. Brecht was ailing, and he lay in bed most of the time, demanding constant attention. Night after night, Benjamin sat beside him and listened. Occasionally he would offer a response, or an objection, and Brecht would flare into anger: “How can you say such a thing, Walter?” or “You are too intellectual, Walter. You do not understand the real world.” He was, like Gramsci, a pessimistic Marxist. Fascism had definitely taken over the world, or would soon rule everything and everyone. But the future, said Brecht, is always a place of hope. One must never give up hope.
Brecht had taught Benjamin what he liked to refer to as plumpes Denken, or “crude thinking.” All useful thought must be simple, crystalline, and fresh. The elaborate metaphysical turns that had become second nature to him through long years of philosophical study must be sacrificed now. He was going to write the most straightforward sentences he could imagine. To make himself crude, peasantlike, and useful. His essays would become tools, picks and shovels, and he would put them into the hands of ordinary people. Here was the hope he kept alive in his heart: a dream of future writing.
Almost in defiance of the historical moment, he maintained a small flame of hope as he boarded the train for Marseilles. He decided that the only plausible way out of this beleaguered country, for him, was by ship. One heard fantastic stories of eccentric captains taking shiploads of refugees to strange (and mythical) islands. Benjamin discounted most of these tales, but he felt sure that plenty of ships left Marseilles every day: merchant marine ships, cargo ships, passenger liners of o
ne kind or another. He had been told it was quite easy to get false papers, and that Cuba was wide open. It would make a fine temporary layover. And when the war ended, he would go straight to New York to found the firm of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin, Ltd. It sounded like a company of haberdashers, but he and his friends would sell ideas to the world instead of clothes. “It is astonishing how a few men with the right ideas can shift the world,” Adorno had written to him only the year before. “We must become these men.”
It was maddeningly hot and humid in the train, and Benjamin was forced to stand in a vestibule beside the toilet all the way to Marseilles. He spent three agonizing days in search of a place to stay, sleeping at night in parks with his head on his briefcase. (He checked his bag at the station, aware that he was too weak to cart it around; the briefcase was another matter, since it contained his manuscript. One could not risk leaving it unaccompanied.) His chest pains, which had eased somewhat in the healing air of Lourdes, returned with a vengeance in Marseilles, and he frequently had to stand still for twenty minutes, frozen in place by pain that radiated, like filaments, down his arms to the tips of his fingers.
Life would have been difficult had he actually found a place to sleep, but it seemed impossible in these conditions; exposed to the elements, trudging from one makeshift bed to another, he wondered if he might die in Marseilles, a city that felt like the eye of a storm: strangely lit, awkwardly peaceful, with occasional swirls of wind reminding him that war was everywhere but here. One could see any number of uniformed men in the streets: fragments of the scattered French army, delinquent members of the Foreign Legion, military policemen on loud, brawny motorcycles. Whole convoys of troops occasionally moved through the city streets, as if randomly searching for the war. Lumpish cargo planes flew overhead, as did bi-winged trainers. But the war never actually erupted on this particular spot.
On Benjamin’s third night in Marseilles, as black rain fell, he was forced to take shelter beneath a sandstone bridge with an old and toothless woman. Zigzag lightning ripped the nearby grass, and thunder boomed. The woman suddenly began to sob.