My Marriage

by Jakob Wassermann

  A look at the deed

  While all this was going on Bettina was sitting in Ebenweiler and waiting. So as not to be completely alone, she had invited Lotte Waldbauer to keep her company. At twelve noon Hornschuch phoned through news of the divorce. When she returned to Lotte in the blue salon, Lotte leaped up because her friend was staggering so. Bettina was indeed on the point of collapse. ‘It’s too much,’ she stammered, ‘too dear,’ and she lost consciousness. It wasn’t money and price that she was referring to with her ‘too dear’, because she only got to hear of the financial conditions I had been forced to accept the following day, when Hornschuch brought her the divorce agreement.

  She read it with her typical attentiveness. Then she remained silent for a while, with head down. Then she softly said: ‘But that’s awful.’ Hornschuch made a disappointed face. He thought he deserved thanks. Feebly Bettina held out her hand to him. ‘Don’t think I don’t appreciate your effort and goodwill,’ she said, ‘but look at what that man is taking upon himself! How could he set his name to it! A man who lives off his intellect and imagination!’ Hornschuch didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t able, not then and not for a long time afterwards, to question the excellence of his legal edifice. Most men are a little like that. It’s the gambler and the player in them all, and in their professions. The gifted and honest ones are dazzled by their idea, the mean and brutish ones by success and profit. So between them they rule the world. That’s how Bettina saw them. Besides, from the very beginning she was under no illusion about the situation. She knew with prophetic certainty that the garrotting agreement, as she called it, hadn’t shooed the ghost out of our house. And she said: ‘I’d sooner love in a hut than share a palace with a ghost.’

  However embarrassing and chilling it is, I must still, as briefly as I can, talk about the conditions imposed upon me in that notorious deed. There was, first of all, the payment of Ganna’s debts run up over many years. Then, I was accountable for all the legal bills; these, including the demands of Dr Stanger-Goldenthal and the cost of drawing up the deed itself, came to 48,000 schillings. Ganna’s monthly allowance comfortably exceeded the salary of a government minister. In addition there was a considerable sum that I had to raise within the next three years, which was described as Ganna’s emergency fund. That I was also responsible for the upkeep of the children was only to be expected and need not have appeared in the deed as a further compulsory obligation. But Ganna wanted it there and so, from the look of things, I was also in hock to my children. A further condition was clearing the house my friends had given me fourteen years ago of all mortgage debt and making it over to Ganna unencumbered. Very well; one might very well come to terms with such clauses. It was a huge material burden; an investor, a bank director, a captain of industry presumably wouldn’t have sought to oppose it, still greater sums wouldn’t have cost them their sleep; after all, freedom costs money, bourgeois society makes a business transaction out of divorce and a person’s freedom into an object of trade. Very well. The last two clauses were different: that Ganna was to inherit one-third of all sums realized from my writings and my possessions after my death; and further, that, as a guarantee for her allowance, a lien on the Buchegger estate to the tune of 100,000 schillings was to be conceded to her. The first clause was tantamount to disinheriting Bettina, since there were four children plus Ganna who had to share the estate; the second devalued the house in Ebenweiler by loading it with debt, which would help make it unsellable.

  The gift of the one house, the lien on the other and the claim on a third of my worldly goods all derived from the marriage contract that, if you’ll remember, I had signed rather skittishly twenty-five years before. Now at last I learned what the so-called ‘revocability’ was all about: namely that, in the event of the marriage ending in divorce, I would not only have to return the dowry of 80,000 schillings, but pay it back twice over. And this doubled capital, with inflation, now came to some 200,000 schillings. You will concede that the kraal knew their business. They had succeeded in taking the naif, who with culpable innocence had run into their toils, and wringing him out. Honour and respect the kraal. A little curtsey to the age of security. And so Ganna took no harm from her sortie into the terrain of literature and the ‘higher life’, while Bettina and Caspar Hauser, beggars both of them for the foreseeable future, will have to look out for themselves. Ganna will sleep peacefully on her securities, as on a pillow of rose petals. Or am I wrong? I know it defies credulity; but all those ‘securities’ only served to shred their lives and mine with them.

  Money

  At first money was a whip, driving me on, without opening any deep visible wounds. My capacity for work multiplied. The experiences of the last few years had ravaged me to such a degree that they seemed to have renewed me intellectually and spiritually, and transformed my picture of the world. All you need is to understand the suffering of a single being, through and through, for him to be the source and focus of everything there is to know about humans. The thing that eats us up inside becomes our fuel, if we are strong enough to keep going. Almost every sickness refines the organism. I no longer allowed myself to be guided by the sweet whims of a spirit loitering in remote imaginings; I heard the call of the now which pierced me more deeply in my solitude than if I’d been in the world’s hubbub. Also, fortune had given me the gift of shutting myself away in working hours against worries and pressures, admittedly only—once the bolts were undrawn and I was a human being again among other human beings—for me to succumb to my fears, my existential panic, my gloomy forebodings, all of them exacerbated by my periods of solitude.

  The seeming tranquillity that Bettina and I enjoyed early on in our marriage glossed over the oppressive obligations with which it had been bought. In order to meet them, to finance our own lives and the payments to the Dutchman and to my friend who had helped me to acquire the Buchegger estate, not to mention taxes, I had to earn a vast sum every year; and although, by some freak of fortune and a delirium of creative work, I even managed to top that for the first couple of years, it wasn’t long before I saw myself under pressure and was forced to take out a considerable loan at extortionate rates of interest.

  Since my income at the beginning seemed able to keep step with our outgoings, I got into something of the mood of a gambler, trusting to luck, risking ever higher stakes; or of a man who is so deeply indebted, and has given out so many promissory notes that in his life he will have nothing to do with economy of any kind, remains oblivious to rising consumption and greets each inner prompting to prudence with anger and contempt. So I expanded my lifestyle, I ran a household, added to my library, bought a car and took Bettina abroad. The all-too-evident result was that Ganna, who of course remained minutely informed of all of this, was confirmed in the belief that I was in possession of vast means, that she had been crudely deceived and practically criminally deprived of the possibility of securing her fair share by the divorce agreement.

  My relationship to money at the time could perhaps best be described by the paradox ‘selfish indifference’. Like anyone who has climbed out of poverty, I was devoted to the pleasures and advantages conferred by money; but not only did I not love money itself, I despised it. Which is to say, I despised it when I had it and couldn’t imagine what it must be like not to have it. I had never been avaricious, but neither had I been carefree. Without my being by nature a lover of luxury, a certain dull sensuality in things I had become accustomed to made it exceedingly difficult for me to do without.

  With Bettina it was different. She neither loved nor despised money. To her balanced sense, it was a means to satisfy a few basic needs. Sometimes, admittedly, for luxuries as well, inasmuch as they were presented to her in terms of aesthetic value—that classical simplicity that causes more heart-searching and trouble than any pomp. In the years in which I didn’t allow her to see into my finances and she—partly so as not to burden me, partly awed by my creative furor—declined to question me or rein me in, she
gave herself up with a secret reservation, just as I did, to the illusion of an overflowing horn of plenty. She decorated herself, she decorated our home, decorated the garden and was happy that she could surround herself with beautiful things, which she chose with discernment, because she has the most incorruptible eyes of anyone in the world. To have visitors made her very happy, and for the most part it was old friends whom we had to stay; she was loyal and devoted to them. Never was she immodest, much less rapacious in her wishes. She didn’t care about having possessions. To know that the beautiful thing was there, to be communed with and to make her richer inside, not to plume herself with it—that was her style of ownership; and in any case the two things that remained dearest to her were music and our little Caspar Hauser.

  Till one day these brilliant dreams of beauty, peace and art burst, and a baleful reality eyed us like a hyena that had crept out from under the bed.

  Ganna in preparation

  And Ganna? The severing of the formal bonds between us failed to persuade her that privately, in our hearts, we were now separated as well. The mood in which she returned to her now barren life was glum. It was as though the lights had gone out and all the visitors suddenly disappeared. A hush descended. Suddenly it was dark. She was all alone. Yes, there were the children. But apart from Doris, they were grown up and didn’t need their mother, not in the sense Ganna understood: as provider, comforter, protector. They lived in the baffling world of people. They had opinions, experiences, friends and who knew what attachments.

  And, like someone clearing out an old flat before moving into a new one, she ransacked wardrobes, boxes and chests of drawers and pulled out all the memories and souvenirs she had of me, old photographs, gifts from the early years of our marriage. She couldn’t get enough of these things. She used them to remind herself how happy she had been then, when she received them. In her imagination it was a happiness beyond computation—such as she had never really felt. She leafed through her girlhood diaries and refused to accept that things had turned out so differently from the way she had dreamed they would. She made the upsetting discovery that dreams lie. Admittedly, this only happened in brief little intervals of consciousness, as when a persistent beam of light forces its way through a shuttered window. She hurried to seal it up again.

  Her chief resource was the letters I had written to her in those first ten years. Greedily she supped full of them. She put them in chronological order and numbered them. So as to make them even more strongly present to her imagination than by merely reading them, she copied them out by hand, one after the other. When she was finally finished, weeks later, she took the copies to a stenotypist and had the whole collection typed up in several copies. One of which, nicely bound, went to me. I didn’t see what I was supposed to do with it. The hidden purpose of the exercise was presumably to tell posterity the truth about the relationship between Ganna and Alexander Herzog. Posterity was a sort of fire insurance firm for her.

  Every day was like a holey curtain. Through each hole, a piece of the past peeped through. What could she do, to fill up the dreary days? There were no files, no documents, no nail-biting negotiations any more. Sometimes she took down the books of her favourite poets and philosophers. It was a hollow gesture. A real counter-factual as-if. There is pleasure to be had in as-if. To its devotees it allows a rush of seeming existence after periods of feeling dead. Over the summer she read everything I had written, in sequence; and when we met at the end of that time claimed, half with feigned regret, half with unconstrained satisfaction, that the books I had written while I was living with her were incomparably better than those I wrote since falling in with Bettina. She was on the point of saying: I always knew God would punish you and He has. The old formula. The conversation took place one fine evening in the garden of her house. She was wrapped in numerous blankets when I arrived, had made herself comfortable on her chaise-longue and looked up into the sky where, one by one, the stars popped out. I asked myself: what is she looking for up there? She was capable of lying there for hours on end, looking up at the sky, almost like a person of faith, all the while foolish and resentful notions crowded her mind. What does she look to the stars for? What was she wanting, craving, overarched by the eternal canopy?

  There was one thing she couldn’t be reconciled to, and she gnawed at it like a poisonous wound. I had promised her my friendship, had sworn to cherish her, if only she would agree to a divorce. Well, now she was waiting to be cherished. But since I gave no appearance of being ready to do so, an anxious disappointment came up in her. Whatever time I devoted to her, it wasn’t enough. I talked about all kinds of things, in her view, only not about friendship. When I got up to go, she asked me with a troubled expression why I didn’t spend the whole day with her. When I had spent the whole day with her, she wanted me to keep tomorrow for her as well. Sometimes I had the car parked outside the house. She smiled and passed remarks that were intended to show how free from jealousy she was, but that on the contrary betrayed the fact that she was consumed with regret. She regretted that she had agreed to the divorce, regretted it with every thought she had, day and night; bitterly she gave me to understand that she felt she had been outwitted and ambushed, by Hornschuch and by Bettina. The notion that I was gadding around the world with Bettina, while she sat there in her own four walls, mocked and betrayed to her scorn, almost drove her mad.

  I asked her in what form the promised friendship was to be realized, if not in tentative efforts at renewal, as I was honestly attempting, the gradual forgetting and removal of her unhappy past. Forgetting? Unhappy past? She was beside herself. ‘How can you say such a thing, Alexander! How really mean of you!’ Absurd, the idea that I was going to her to find out how to convince her of my friendship. Nothing easier: going to the theatre together, to a concert, just to demonstrate to the world that a divorce between two fine characters like her and me didn’t mean anything and didn’t change anything; we could go on little spring or autumn jaunts together; I could come and stay with her when I had to be in the city; she will give teas and soirées at which I can meet her new friends. That was what she insisted and insisted on; that was the wonderful thing, the only thing that could compensate her for her monstrous sacrifice. Instead of which she was being fobbed off with charity; it was a disgrace, a disgrace . . .

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. That was it, the ambitious wishing on the stars as they opened. What did she care about the stars? She was carrying on the great process against the wrong that had been done her. Many years before, I once summed her up like this in one of my notebooks: ‘A being with a blind heart, a salamander.’ It was just a scribbled jotting. In her blindness of heart she never was aware of what tied her, of what was seemly, of what was right. In her salamandrine nature, she slipped out of time and space and every form of law and instruction. She was like a figure outside of any mathematical order—what the mathematicians call an unreal number. Something unthinkable. But in matters of morality and ethics one can come across the unthinkable readily enough, because to a human being nothing is impossible.

  In the preceding pages I have consistently been at pains to write a chaotic sort of love into her that broke all bounds and turned destructively in the end against herself. A psychological aberration, in short. Don’t we handle the term love as though it were some jemmy or crowbar that could open any lock? Don’t talk to me about love/hate, or the chase or such things, it wasn’t that. Amor demens’ would be closer to it. But delusion is a mysterious, underexplored element; no mirror has ever caught its reflection, no pen has described it utterly, because it reaches down into the lowest depths of humanity.

  Everything that now happened was preformed, prefigured in Ganna. There was no scheme, no fierce unspeakable determination, but it was resolved in her, just as it is resolved that when heat is applied to a boiler steam will seek to escape through the vents. Since she couldn’t have me physically, she had to have me every other way. How, you may ask. Meet me. In ever
y sense of the word. Meet me where I was most vulnerable: she felt herself chosen by destiny for that purpose. If she couldn’t be by me and with me, then within me—if not for my good, to which she firmly believed she was contributing, then to my ill, to which she really did contribute. Madness can do anything.

  Psyche bleeds

  I must take care not to fluff the connections. There is a mixture of triviality and breathtaking audacity informing the events which makes it difficult to set them out in hindsight. The sober truth of things runs smack into the pandemonium they created when the brain that bore them followed them through to the end with fanatical logic.

  It began one fine day when she told me that she and a journalist friend of hers had adapted my Treasure Seekers of Worms for the cinema. When telling me this, she reminded me of the written permission I had given her to do this eight years before. In the meantime, however, I had sold the book to an American firm. I thought I had told her about this, either verbally or in writing; she claimed I hadn’t. I suppose it was just possible that with everything going on I did forget to mention it to her. In alarm, I warned her against trying to place it anywhere; one couldn’t sell the same thing twice. She claimed she had a right to make the film sale. The fact that I had neglected to tell her about it (the possibility that I might have suppressed the news had the status of a fully fledged fact for her), was to her proof that I was always out to deceive her about my income. I replied that it was only by such windfalls that I had been able to provide for her and the children during the years of the Inflation. She wasn’t interested. She totted up my supposed wealth; the fact that she had benefited from all of it, if not taken the lion’s share, was not thought to be worth mentioning. She refused to withdraw the screenplay. She said her co-author, with whom she had a contract, insisted on his share and was even threatening to sue. I remarked in surprise: how can you sign a contract relating to something that doesn’t belong to you? She replied that her lawyer saw matters differently. Hence I found out that she once more had a lawyer engaged for her, one Dr Mattern. I was left with no alternative but to assign the conduct of the unwanted case to my own lawyer. Hornschuch was back in business. During the final stages of the dispute, I was abroad with Bettina. I was sent newspaper articles in which the quarrel about the screenplay was vulgarly sensationalized with nasty jabs at myself. At the same time, Ganna was again bombarding me with long telegrams in which she swore blind that she was not to blame for the press attacks, which were the work of people who wanted to damage her in my eyes. ‘How does she always know where we are?’ asked Bettina, shaking her head. I had to confess I had told her where we were going. After that, Bettina said nothing.