My Marriage

by Jakob Wassermann

  And yet it had a frightening, even an alarming aspect too. Bettina was tied to me in a different way from the Ganna world. In the spirit of the anti-Ganna, I could say. She was the absolutely sane human being. The person destiny gave me so that I could share in truth and reality, instead of perishing in lies and illusion. That was the purpose of everything we’d gone through, if an existence like mine could ever be crowned by anything like a purpose. And now—was it a trick of fate, was it a higher testing, whose outcome still hung in the balance—now the anti-Ganna was being drawn into Ganna’s orbit, was being asked—against her inner nature—to fight with Ganna’s weapons, to confront her, to shadow her in her darknesses and thickets. Could that all be to the good? Was it good of itself? ‘My Diana, tenderly rapt,’ I had once written about Bettina; but would I not end up becoming the murderer of my tender goddess? True, Diana is the huntress, but her hunting-ground is not populated by phantoms, she doesn’t hunt nightmares, she doesn’t suffer her course to be set by Ganna ghosts—if she did, she would herself become the quarry.

  And then, as if events were only waiting to confirm these endlessly frightened thoughts, I started to see Bettina’s slow physical collapse. She became sensitive, irritable, prone to sudden fevers; she lost weight; sometimes she gave the impression some unknown toxin had been administered to her. Her mainspring was broken. In my service. Through my fault. In a certain sense, through my fault. So Ganna was the stronger after all. The nightmare had bewitched my Diana on her campaign and made her lame. From the dreadful moment I first saw it, just three weeks ago now, I had only one concern, which was how to lead Bettina back out of the poisoned land. But when I talked to her about it, she laughed at me. The courage that inspirited her was like a glass bell, melodious, uncontaminated, ringing pure.

  Yesterday, 26 June, I received for the fourth time a summons to give the oath of disclosure which Ganna was trying to extort from me. I content myself with recording what happened. It was all to do with the alleged hidden fortune I am supposed to have tucked away somewhere. On previous occasions, I had objected to swearing such an oath. Once, taking Bettina’s advice, I had gone away; another time I brought a doctor’s letter. I have never sworn an oath in my life. It struck me as monstrous, a violation of honour, of sense, of all human feeling, that I was to use the name of God to assure Ganna that I did not own the treasures that she, in really the most literal way, wanted to squeeze out of me. I admit I was foolish enough to be afraid of it, as of an attempt on my life. Bettina shook her head over me. She said: ‘What’s the matter, what’s so frightful about it? You don’t have anything to hide. It’s just an empty formality.’ I answered that it was much more than a formality; it was an act of duress, in which the spoken word became fact; and by swearing it you gave yourself utterly into the hands of someone like Ganna. She would never drop her suspicion; every single day, every time I spent a banknote, she and her associates would sniff it; she would nail me to the sworn oath every bit as much as to my signature on the marriage contract thirty years before. Bettina said: ‘Perhaps you’re right. Then the only other possibility is that you go away somewhere. Go away.’

  But where was I to go? Back up into the mountains? [. . .] If such a way doesn’t lead to death or to an utterly changed life, then it is a farce. After the conversation with Bettina I wandered around the house and garden all afternoon, I was unable to read, to work, to think, I couldn’t even properly see. Basically it isn’t that endlessly foolish oath that frightens me, it’s all the futility, all that endlessly foolish futility that is destroying my life. [. . .]

  But in the end it’s just words on paper, which can be turned and twisted and perhaps challenged by a higher instance. There remains a residue of division and human frailty. The other day I said to Bettina this whole enterprise feels as though I have a hammer that will not do what I want, which is to drive one nail into another, smashing the head of one, the point of the other.

  So what do I need? A hand to help me past an obstacle whose nature I cannot ascertain. A human breath to imbue me with the spirit of understanding. Understanding would surely illumine me like a flash of lightning ripping apart the sheet of darkness. And then the devil riding over the wreckage of my life would disappear with a howl into the gulch of his hell. A slightly overdone image. But then I’ve lost all sense of measure. [. . .]

  AFTERWORD

  My Marriage first saw print in Amsterdam in the autumn of 1934, with the firm of Querido. Its blacklisted German Jewish author, sick for some time with heart and kidney trouble, diabetes and general exhaustion, had managed to complete it and secure its publication with this newly founded firm of exile publishers—having been at the last turned down by the somewhat pusillanimous and anxious Bermann Fischer, the son-in-law and heir to the German Jewish publishing firm of S. Fischer, which had successfully published twenty-eight of Wassermann’s books in an association lasting thirty-two years (the retired founder, Samuel Fischer, increasingly deaf and increasingly terrorized, was himself to die on 15 October of that year)—but did not live to see it, or to write his intended preface to it, having died punctually on New Year’s Day 1934 at the age of an even sixty. The project he was revolving in his mind at the time of his death—because his circumstances were such that he had to go from one book to the next, without the least break, even while contemplating an old age of fear, penury, homelessness, dishonour and exclusion from the literature of his native language—was, ironically, the story of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew.

  At that stage, though, My Marriage was not yet a book. It was a book within a much longer book (ostensibly, a little like Italo Svevo’s La Coscienza di Zeno, it was ‘written’ by one character, the writer Alexander Herzog, at the insistence of another, the doctor Joseph Kerkhoven), which was in turn the third volume of a rather wandering and unfocused (and thereby all the more accommodating) trilogy. There was Der Fall Maurizius of 1928 (The Maurizius Case), Etzel Andergast (confusingly titled Doctor Kerkhoven in English) of 1931 and Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz (Joseph Kerkhoven’s Third Existence) of 1934. The last-named is qualified by the German literary historian Peter de Mendelssohn as ‘not a complete success; no one would claim that it was’; as for the trilogy, that was nothing but a ‘superficial bundling-together’ of works that were never ‘intended to go together, formally or thematically’, and were ‘only loosely, even fortuitously, connected by continuities of personnel’, and even then ‘with the characters taking up completely different functions’. Henry Miller, a great admirer of The Maurizius Case, found the author ‘baffled’—it’s a strange idea—by his own ‘sequels’.

  It all sounds, in short, like too many other works by Wassermann, who all his life wrote too much, too quickly, too chaotically and abundantly (the tiny handwriting which he liked to claim saved him thousands of miles of script was actually rather a mixed blessing). Rotted brocade, historical melodrama, brilliance of details but paucity of overall design was a diagnosis he got all his life, from friends and critics alike (his long-serving, long-suffering editor, Moritz Heimann, even suggested he take a break from writing novels). In these last years, moreover, for reasons some of which will have become apparent, he was even more a driven man than ever. The saving difference is that, into his very last book, Wassermann smuggled the manuscript of—call it what you will, his novel, account, protocol, confession, masterpiece—Ganna oder die Wahnwelt, to give it its original title, ‘Ganna, or the Mad World’. If the trilogy had offered some coherence, then surely Bermann Fischer would have shown more interest in keeping the three volumes of it together (even with Nazi blacklists and book-burnings); conversely, if Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz had been all about Kerkhoven, Wassermann would hardly have knocked himself out as he did (he suffered a major heart attack after the last of his meetings with Bermann Fischer in Vienna in November 1933) to get it published. The 2,000-odd pages of the trilogy aren’t the point; the 200-odd pages of My Marriage are.

  What seems overwhelmingly like
ly to have been the case is that Wassermann, knowing he was dying and wanting to put out what was quite obviously the major story of his adult life, but—for reasons of pride, because he was something of a public figure, to protect the feelings of some of the survivors, perhaps not knowing how else to do such a thing—in such a way that it remained at least deniable, or half-hidden, ‘gave’ it to the character of Alexander Herzog. He built, if you like, a haystack for his needle. Because, as anyone reading it then or now can tell instantly, Ganna or (now) My Marriage is the true account of Jakob Wassermann’s marriage to Julie Speyer of Vienna, with almost nothing omitted or changed. It is, de Mendelssohn says, ‘exactest, most scrupulous autobiography’, ‘authentic to the last detail’, ‘the true confession of the death-marked author, Jakob Wassermann’. Readers who knew the couple smirked or shuddered, according to taste. They confirmed (it’s easy to imagine): this is her all right—and him all right. When ‘Sami’ Fischer’s wife, the meddlesome and generally wrong-headed Hedwig, read Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz, her suggestion to Wassermann—which speaks both to its self-sufficiency and its shock value—was that he leave out the Ganna section! (Still, even that response confirms me in doing the opposite: omitting the trilogy.) But there it is. Wassermann’s last baggy novel didn’t mind; his shapeless trilogy had nothing to say. It was not, finally so much a framing device as a pair of shutters, or a lid. The pity of it is how well Wassermann’s stratagem worked. Until I blundered upon Ganna, and was promptly electrified, I had no idea such a thing existed; I had never heard of it. (Has anyone ever written so rivetingly about marriage?) Relative to its quality, urgency and interest, the 2008 German edition of Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz I worked from has no readers. It has the status of an obscure also-ran among a once-fashionable and successful oeuvre that has almost in its entirety failed to survive. Effectively, what Wassermann did was to keep his best and most anguished work hidden from view for the best part of eighty years. It is time it were seen.

  Both the writing and the—however misguided—publishing bespeak a once-in-a-lifetime, if not actually a mortal, exertion. The circumstances of the only book that I think can stand comparison with My Marriage, Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, are not dissimilar. Both books come wreathed in fiction: with Hughes it is the claim that these poems were ‘birthday letters’ written on Sylvia Plath’s anniversary over many years; with Wassermann it is the wholly uninteresting, wholly forgettable framing narrative. ‘In wartime,’ as Churchill said—and both books belong, so to speak, to military history, as well as embracing wars, the First in the case of Wassermann, the Second with Hughes—‘truth must be protected by a bodyguard of lies.’ Both books were fought off by their authors for as long as humanly possible. Both books would not have been published without the prospect of imminent death. Both books have an unmistakable and inimitable burn.

  In progressive, ‘zooming-in’ order, it seems to me that My Marriage has three distinct claims on our attention. It is, first and widest, a story of a rare intensity and drama. It is, second, a story set at a pivotal juncture in the long struggle between men and women—at the very moment of sorpasso, I would say. And, third, it is the story of a man of some eminence and gifts, trying to be unimpassioned and truthful about what he did and what was done to him. Let me go through these three layers, these three distances, in reverse order.

  My Marriage is almost wholly true. Nothing of significance has been omitted. There was such a family as the Mevises in turn-of-the-century Vienna, descended from a wealthy German industrialist, with six daughters and a dominant professor father; they were the Speyers, and they were indeed known ‘all over town’; Julie Speyer was Ganna Mevis. In 1898, the then twenty-five-year-old Wassermann arrived in Vienna from Munich, following the publication of his first novel. He met Julie in circumstances like those related in the book (the agency of the well-meaning Frau von Brandeis), and the relationship developed, with Julie making the running, and Wassermann, as he relates, a mixture of awestruck, obliging, stoic and venal. The interview between Wassermann and his father-in-law passed off just as related. The wedding took place in January 1901. Honeymoon in Italy, pregnancy, return, shuttling around the Viennese suburbs—all as related. For three children, read four children (two boys and two girls—they were born in 1901 and 1903, 1906 and 1915). For meadow, read meadow. Ditto school foundation. For the extraordinary gift of a house on the edge of the city, read the extraordinary gift of a house on the edge of the city—and then, later, another one in the mountains, in Ebenweiler/Altaussee (for the generous Dutch businessman who couldn’t settle in the area, read Salomon Deventer). For sister-in-law Irmgard, read sister-in-law Agnes (though there seems little sense in disbelieving that there was an affair. Infidelities on Wassermann’s side were numerous, and—pace Herzog—not all that discreet).

  Herzog’s confusion in face of the war was Wassermann’s. It was in 1915 that Wassermann first met Marta Karlweis (Bettina Merck); by 1918 they were living together; in 1919 Wassermann finally asked for a divorce. Ganna writes an article about her husband; Julie a whole book: Jakob Wassermann und sein Werk (for his fiftieth birthday—1923). She collects and publishes his letters; she collects and publishes his letters. The agonizingly slow separation, following a few summers in which Ganna and Bettina ‘shared’ Alexander in the country, was real. The seasonally/economically conditioned hopping from place to place in Ebenweiler/Altaussee was real. Wassermann and Marta moved into the newly offered villa in 1923; ‘little Caspar Hauser’—his actual name was Carl Ulrich—was born in 1924. Protracted legal manoeuvrings found their—provisional—end in a—for Wassermann—staggering, ruinous divorce agreement as late as 1926. Nor was Julie done. In her maniacal possessiveness, she launched wave upon wave of proceedings (even at the time of Wassermann’s death, there were still cases pending). She wrote a roman a clef—Psyche Bleeds in the book, in actuality Das lebendige Herz: Roman einer Ehe (The Living Heart: Novel of a Marriage)—that came out in 1928. The blurb went like this:

  With this work of fiction, the hitherto little known Viennese authoress quietly, nobly and authoritatively takes her place at the side of her former husband, Jakob Wassermann, his equal not least in her valiant endeavour to truthfully plumb the deeply tangled relations between two human beings. The Living Heart is a novel about the end of a writer’s marriage, of how—by ill luck, external circumstances and intrigues on the part of another woman—it was possible for a great man to become sundered from his family. In the midst of emotional storms, the character of the first wife attains an unforgettable scale.

  Astonishingly, Julie thought the book would win him back. Lawyers—‘thirty or forty lawyers’—clustered in several countries, in several jurisdictions. The only satisfaction for the dying Wassermann was naming them for predatory or carnivorous birds: pelican, stork, crane and so forth.

  I offered my sense that My Marriage is set at a pivotal moment in the relations between men and women. By this I mean not only that it is set in Vienna at the time of Freud, and that it plays in the decades either side of the First World War—the decades, if you will, of Women’s Suffrage—but also that it ends a certain kind of late-nineteenth-century male fantasy about women and society and money and art, namely that it was possible by adroit use of the last of these to make an impression on the first three. Originally, the idea—French, as all these things originally are—had been that there was an opposition, an enmity even, between the artist and his tasteless, foolish, moneyed public; the painter, the poet, the musician loathed and despised the bourgeois, and in return was maudit, ‘cursed’ for it. There was no niche for the artist in society and, if there was, he shouldn’t take it. His superiority, his aristocracy even, resided in his nerve endings. He was an outsider. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, and the children of the bourgeoisie became cultivated and even a little neurasthenic themselves, there was finally some accommodation between the two. Each had something to offer the other, something to tempt h
im with. The bourgeois felt scandalous stirrings of a latent creativity, and the artist, tired of outlawry, a hankering for comfort and possessions.

  Individual authors—like Dickens or Byron—may have come to money before, but Wassermann belonged to the first commercially successful generation; they made writing look like a reasonable career option: Lion Feuchtwanger (1884-1958), Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), Thomas Mann (1875-1955), Franz Werfel (1890-1945), Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), even Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), though his great success came later. The successful authors bought themselves imposing villas and cars (often more than one of each), kept secretaries and domestic staffs, holidayed exhaustively in the mountains or by the seaside, travelled the length and breadth of Europe and beyond, and thought of themselves as deserving members of the grande bourgeoisie. That is, they continued to lay claim to the inheritance of the French bohemiens, but in practical terms they expected a lifestyle of mahogany and silver and libraries. They demanded personal freedoms and the kudos of rebellion or unconventionality for themselves, but they also wanted presentable families (Thomas Mann’s pretty mob in sailor suits) and beetling castles or plush architect-designed homes (or, as was the case with Wassermann, both). The days of dying in garrets or taking one’s lobster for a walk were over. No, these writers were a startlingly worldly bunch. Stefan Zweig (who admittedly was born into a wealthy manufacturing family) owned Beethoven’s desk and Goethe’s pen and Leonardo and Mozart manuscripts, and lived, when he cared to, in a fourteenth-century bishop’s palace above Salzburg that his lovely and capable aristocratic wife had found for him; Thomas Mann was immortally described by Hermann Kesten as ‘hartnäckiger Villenbesitzer’ (an obstinate or determined or serial owner of villas); while, sounding rather petulant in his almost fetishistic litany of aspirations, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (himself the son of a banker) wailed: ‘I finally want a house with Empire furniture, a smell of lavender, Old Vienna porcelain and music being played, where people can drop in, listen in silence, and maybe chat quietly, or not as the case may be.’