by Agnon, S. Y.
Henrietta smiled contentedly and said, “No woman is likely to forget such a night.” Manfred said, “I haven’t forgotten it either. I didn’t tell you the dream I had, nor did you urge me to tell it. If you like, I’ll tell it to you now.” A tremor passed through his flesh; a similar tremor passed through her flesh as well. Manfred took his wife’s hand, caressed it, and said to her, “There aren’t many women like you. You don’t burden me with questions, for which I am always very grateful.” Henrietta said, “Didn’t you want to tell me your dream?” Manfred caressed her again and said, “Yes, I did. I will tell it now. That night, I was being led to the gallows.” “My God, how awful,” Henrietta cried, burying her face in her hands. “Yes, it was awful; it was dreadful,” Manfred echoed. “But not for your reason, Mother. For another reason. I knew there was one person who could have saved me. But that person didn’t lift a finger on my behalf.” Henrietta asked Manfred, “Do you remember who that person was?” Manfred said, “Don’t ask, Mother. Don’t ask.” Henrietta said, “I’m not asking, and I don’t want to know.” Manfred said, “I don’t actually remember who it was. But that night, at that moment, I knew who it was.” “That’s odd.” “Even more odd is the fact that, in my dream, I was upset by the idea that if you – meaning you and our daughters – should hear this news, you would also be upset.” Henrietta looked at him in astonishment and said, “Did you doubt that – “ Manfred interrupted her and said, “That’s not what seemed odd to me. What seemed odd was that I thought I wouldn’t be upset if I were to vanish from the face of the earth, though I was aware of the pain it would cause the rest of you. Don’t be angry with me, Mother. It’s not that you taught me at all times, to be truthful with you, Mother. But your proper life and your upright opinions lead me to tell you the truth, whether I want to or not.”
Henrietta took Manfred’s hand, placed it on her heart, and said, “Life is so hard for you, Manfred.” “Hard for me?” Manfred exclaimed in surprise, as if he had been addressed by a name other than his own. Henrietta said, “What brings on these sad thoughts?” Manfred answered, laughing, “The sad thoughts bring themselves on. It’s not a paradox, Mother. That’s really how it is. You may think I am sad because I failed to finish my book. Believe me, even if I had finished two arm-lengths worth of books, nothing would change for me. Do you remember what Goethe said about writing Werther? I don’t remember the precise words, but I do remember the message. Even if I had a tenured professorship, that wouldn’t change anything. My daughters don’t need me. You, Mother, don’t need me either. I myself have no need of me. So…” “So …?” “Now, Mother, don’t worry that I’ll put a bullet through my heart. People like me don’t take their own life. They go on living, even when their strength gives out and they don’t have what it takes to live. They live on, to the point of total decay, through all sorts of situations, by any means.”
Henrietta gazed at her husband with a cold, analytical eye, with neither animosity nor empathy, and said, “Has something happened to you?” Manfred said, “Nothing happened to me.” Henrietta said, “The kind of things you’ve been saying don’t occur to a person all of a sudden.” “All of a sudden?” “Henrietta added, “And their cause isn’t simple.” “Simple?” Herbst already regretted what he had said to his wife and hoped to blur his words. He looked at his wife, searching her face for a sign of affection. Her face looked harsh and was glazed with contempt. She got up, but she didn’t clear the empty dishes, nor did she collect the remnants of the meal. Manfred got up, too, and went to his room. He paced back and forth, looked out the window, and resumed his pacing, as though there were no chair or couch in the room. After a while, he lit a cigarette and went to the window. The ashes fell on the rug, but he took no notice. When the cigarette began to burn his fingers, he started, dumped it in an ashtray, and crushed it with a book. Then he went to the bookcase, extended his arms, and, with a sweeping gesture, declared, in the style of Professor Bachlam, “I am not the author of these books. I don’t wish to be an Author of Many Books. I’m willing to disavow what I’ve already written, if you like.” He gazed at the two bookcases again and calculated: What will you be worth to my wife when I’m dead? He pictured his friends coming to her, feigning virtue to acquire valuable books at bargain prices. “Damn it!” he shouted, spitting angrily. He began to pace the room again, scanning the walls, which were lined with photographs of himself and his friends, each face expressing genius that would be everlasting and eternal, all of them learned, involved in scholarship and in the pursuit of wisdom, maintaining contact with scholars throughout the world. She’s first rate, Herbst reflected, contemplating the picture of his wife that was on his desk. If not for her, I would run away to the ends of the earth, to far-off isles, leaving you, all of you, to your own devices, to make a mess of your own – to paraphrase the words of Augustus, king of Saxony, when he was about to be deposed.
Henrietta opened the door quietly and came in. She said, “So you’re not asleep.” She placed her hand on his shoulders and said, “I see you were working.” He glanced at the bundle of notes and offprints, and said with disdain, “You’re deceiving yourself, just as I have deceived myself. If I were an honest man, I would burn this entire heap of garbage and scatter it to the winds.” “Don’t be so harsh. Not everyone has the privilege of being an outstanding scholar. Who was it you wanted to name our son after? It was Shlomo, and there was another name too.” “It doesn’t matter now.” “But it matters to me. Tell me.” “Shlomo Yehuda Rappaport.” “I thought it over, and I realize that Shlomo Yehuda is a fine name.” “How could you think it over if you didn’t even remember the second name? We must be honest rather than deceive ourselves, even in trivial matters. If one allows himself to cheat in trivial matters, he ends up deceiving himself in important matters as well.” She smoothed his hair and said, “Is that what you think of me, Manfred? You think I deceive myself?” “You’re first rate, but anything that gets dragged in the mud all the time ends up damaged. It’s good that you’ve changed your shoes. In my childhood, I never pictured a respectable woman in house slippers, certainly not in sandals. All these young women in their odd costumes – in pants, even work pants – are defacing the Jerusalem landscape. Don’t you agree?” He took her hand in his and studied her face. Then he withdrew his hand and said, “I have something awful to tell you.” Mrs. Herbst was alarmed and said, “You’ve had some news about the girls?” “Calm down, Mother. Calm down. I didn’t hear anything about the girls. There’s no reason to think anything bad has happened to them. What I want to tell you is entirely unrelated to our daughters.” “You frighten me so,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. It’s best that you know the truth. We were talking about the nurse Shira today. You ought to know that, the very night you were in the hospital, in the throes of labor, I made love to her. Why are you silent, Henrietta?” “And this fills you with the sadness of remorse, though in fact she didn’t bear your child.” “I expected you to fling your sandal in my face.” “But I’m wearing shoes.” “You’re teasing me. If you knew how much I’ve suffered and agonized over this.” She smoothed his brow and said, “Calm down, Manfred. Calm down. In our generation, men are no longer angels.” “But women are all angels. They’re all like you, right?” Manfred screamed, a terrifying scream. “I’m no angel either. If I have restricted myself to this company there are other reasons: because I don’t follow my heart.” “If I could reproach you in this matter, it would be easier for me to bear my sorrow. You don’t want to hear how it happened.” “I can imagine. You were without a woman for several months. Then a woman appeared, and you were seduced.” “That’s exactly how it was. You don’t hate her? But I hate her. My heart seethes with repressed hate for that woman, because…” “Because she was your downfall.” “Yes. But, to tell the truth, because she didn’t want to be my downfall any longer.” “So you continued to pursue her, but she didn’t respond. And, as I understand it, you still want her.” “How can you say such a thin
g, when she is dead?” “Dead? Didn’t you say she disappeared?” “Whether or not she disappeared, in any case she doesn’t exist for me.” “But you think about her?” “Is there anyone I don’t think about? If I told you all the women I think about, you would be shocked.” “Thoughts are permitted.” “In your opinion, actions are permitted too.” “This doesn’t apply to everyone, or to every situation. Let’s have some coffee.” “Actually, Henrietta, I ought to be pleased that you accepted the news without rage or anger. But, to tell the truth, it would be better if you had thrown me out, if you had called me a villain, slapped my face, spat on me.” She took his hand, slapped his fingers, and said, “You’re a glutton. That’s what we do to gluttons.” “You’re making a farce out of this.” “Would you rather I made it into a tragedy?” she said, somewhat sternly, so that Manfred began to regret having challenged her. She seemed suddenly upset, but then her face was overcome with joy, and she said, “Shlomo Yehuda is announcing himself. See, I also think it’s a boy.” “I hear someone coming. To hell with whomever is coming. I don’t want to see anyone.” “Manfred, brace yourself. Here’s the cologne. Sprinkle a few drops on your forehead, Oh, you spilled it on your papers.” “Then it will be easier to set fire to them.” “That’s how much regard you have for years of work.” She, too, grew sad, which she hadn’t been in a long time.
Never were guests as welcome to Mrs. Herbst as they were at that moment. She knew it was Herbst’s way to be angry when someone came, because of the interruption; that, as soon as he saw the guests, he would enjoy them; that he was looking for an excuse to stop working and would welcome them for relieving him of the choice.
(Describe the various guests as well as their conversations. The young man may be one of them.)*
* [The sentence in parentheses was added by Agnon in pencil at the end of the chapter. The guests, and the young man Herbst is expecting, are mentioned in another fragment, not included here. – Emuna Agnon Yaron]
Afterword by Robert Alter
Shira is S. Y. Agnon’s culminating effort to articulate through the comprehensive form of the novel his vision of the role of art in human reality. It engaged him – with long interruptions, during which he devoted himself to shorter fiction – for almost a quarter of a century. On his deathbed, in 1970, he gave his daughter instructions to publish the novel with Book Four still incomplete. Posthumously, the text of Shira remains unstable. The first Hebrew edition in 1971 ends with the fragmentary ninth chapter of Book Four, which includes Herbst’s musings on the professor of medicine who injects himself with a dangerous disease in order to find a cure (a historical figure at the Hebrew University, Shaul Adler), and breaks off with the narrator’s declaration that Shira has disappeared and cannot be found. A subsequent edition in 1974 appended the brief episode Agnon had marked in manuscript as “Final Chapter,” in which Herbst joins Shira in the leper hospital; this ending was originally intended to conclude Book Three but was set aside when Agnon went on to write a fourth book. In 1978, another substantial episode, like “Final Chapter” incorporated in the present version, was published: corresponding in fictional time to chapters 8–19 of Book Three, it prepares the way for Herbst’s discovery of Shira in the leper hospital and also explores a narrative possibility not raised elsewhere – Herbst’s confession of his infidelity to his wife.
Incomplete as it is, and even with some signs of uncertainty in its digressive and repetitive patterns, Shira is a remarkable work. The psychosexual realism – most strikingly evident in Herbst’s guiltridden, violence-prone, sadomasochistic dreams and fantasies – surpasses anything else Agnon did in this vein. What may have prevented him from finishing the book was that beyond any aim of realistic representation of psyche and social milieu, Agnon wanted to imagine in concrete novelistic detail the ultimate relation of art (or “poetry,” the meaning of Shira’s name) to truth, or, in regard to genre, to pass through the dense medium of realism to allegory, and that was a consummation that eluded him.
It may be helpful to place Shira in Agnon’s chronological development as a novelist. His earliest Hebrew fiction (there had been a few Yiddish stories before) was published in the half-dozen years after his arrival in Palestine from Galicia in 1908 at the age of nineteen, and consisted entirely of short stories and novellas. Many of these were in the subtly ventriloquistic mode of a traditional Hebrew teller of tales, and it was this identity that figured in most readers’ minds as Agnon rapidly made himself a commanding figure in Hebrew prose. Characteristically, his artfully archaizing novella set in pre-modern Galicia, And the Crooked Shall Be Straight (1912), was widely perceived in these years as his emblematic achievement. In 1913 Agnon left Palestine for Germany, ostensibly for a brief stay, but the war and a variety of personal reasons held him there till 1924. It is during the first few years of his German sojourn that he arrives at artistic maturity, rigorously revising his often effusive early stories in a precise, understated, classicizing prose that would remain his hallmark. Shortly after the war, he was working on his first novel, an autobiographical fiction he called In the Bond of Life. Though he announced in a letter written in 1920 that it would soon be in print, he must have had difficulties with it because it was still in manuscript in 1924 when it was destroyed in a fire that devastated his apartment in Bad Homburg, and Agnon never attempted to reconstruct the book. His first long integrated work, The Bridal Canopy (1931; English trans., 1937), is only marginally a novel, because it reverts to the medieval and Renaissance form of the frame-story – the peregrinations of a protagonist and his companion – into which is introduced a variegated abundance of anecdotes, fables, tall tales, and the like.
Meanwhile, Agnon continued to write realistic short fiction far removed from both the eighteenth-century setting and the formal traditionalism of The Bridal Canopy, and this involvement in social and psychological realism culminated in his first proper novel, A Simple Story (1935, English trans., 1985), a book more restricted in scope than the novels that would follow but, in the rendering of the evolution of a psychosis and its ironically qualified cure, probably the most flawlessly sustained of all his novels. From this point on, though he continued to experiment with different modes of short fiction, from anecdotal and reminiscent to surrealist and symbolic, his commitment to the capaciousness of the novel form was clear. In 1939, writing with uncharacteristic rapidity, he produced A Guest for the Night (English trans., 1968), his personal confrontation, on the eve of the Second World War, with the inward dying of European Judaism. In 1945 he brought out an even more ambitiously original novel, Only Yesterday, set in the Palestine he had encountered as a very young man, in which he combines historical realism with intricate symbolism and tragic-grotesque humor (some of the most remarkable chapters, initially composed in the early thirties, follow the canine viewpoint of a Jerusalem mongrel named Balak, who proves to be the most philosophically reflective and the most engaging character in the book).
In each of the three novels Agnon published from 1935 to 1945, he had found ways to go strikingly beyond his previous work in the fashioning of new fictional forms and in the range of themes he was able to sound. It was clearly his intention to go beyond himself once again in Shira, and he apparently set to work on the new novel not long after the appearance of Only Yesterday. Between 1949 and 1952, he published chapters of Shira in a literary yearbook issued by the newspaper Ha’aretz, material corresponding to most of Book One and Book Two of the novel as we have it. The excitement roused in Hebrew literary circles was then frustrated as Agnon confined the continuation of Shira to the privacy of his drawer, pursuing other projects in print. In 1966, after he received the Nobel Prize, he allowed two more chapters to appear, and, with failing physical powers, he was working on Shira in his last years, still hoping to forge it into what it would in any case, even incomplete, prove to be – his great last testament as a writer.