Kommer had received the Jacobowsky play with enthusiasm, and Werfel told him that he had basically “dashed it off for fun” in only ten days but that he believed that the characters had “a certain charm.” He considered the antithetical relationship between Jacobowsky and the Colonel “symbolic” and hoped “that the comic horror in the background of all the scenes — a Raimund fairy tale of the greatest collapse in world history” — would be effective in a successful production. The New York Theatre Guild had meanwhile read the play but insisted on making an American adaptation before even considering a Broadway production. Humiliating as this was to Werfel, he accepted: a theatrical success seemed worth any price, even that of agreeing to an American coauthor. “But — but — here comes the big worry!” he wrote to Kommer. “Just as with Eternal Road, the whole thing is vitiated by a lack of clarity from the start... And now the conflicts begin to bloom... The Reinhardts, father and son, are treating me in an entirely incomprehensible manner. They don’t recognize this opportunity.” He realized that his play needed “an American adaptation,” but not “some patchwork at the hands of strangers who are ignorant of this material and could destroy its charm.”
At the end of September 1942 the Werfels moved[687] from the Hollywood hills to far more prestigious Beverly Hills. With the money made by Bernadette they purchased a roomy bungalow with a large and beautiful garden on Santa Monica Boulevard and North Bedford Drive, diagonally across from the Church of the Good Shepherd. Even in Venice and Sanary, Werfel’s domiciles had been situated close to Catholic houses of worship — the Basilica dei Frari or Notre-Dame-de-Pitié.
The house at 610 Bedford Drive, Beverly Hills, California, into which the Werfels moved in the fall of 1942
This move brought the Werfels closer to their friends and acquaintances. Their immediate neighbor was the conductor Bruno Walter; Ernst and Anuschka Deutsch and Bruno Frank and his wife lived nearby. Erich Maria Remarque was a frequent visitor, as were the Slezaks, Schoenbergs, Korngolds, Friedrich Torberg, and Lion Feuchtwanger. Alma’s closest friends in Los Angeles were Gustave O. Arlt and his wife, Gusti. Arlt was a professor of German literature at the University of California; some claimed that Alma loved those two particularly because of their “Aryan” background and the fact that this American couple was not entirely opposed to National Socialism.
Thomas Mann was also a frequent visitor to the house on Bedford Drive.[688] He would sometimes read from the latest chapters of the final volume in his tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers. Werfel would act out scenes from Jacobowsky and the Colonel, playing all the parts.
The Werfels spent the turn of the year 1942-43 in New York. Franz wanted to see his mother, who was now living at the Langdon, an apartment house, and feeling lonely and friendless in the foreign metropolis. She saw hardly anyone except her daughter Mizzi and a female companion. Alma, on the other hand, held her obligatory salon at the St. Moritz, receiving her numerous friends who lived in the East.
Meanwhile, Archbishop Rummel of New Orleans had released to the press certain passages from Werfel’s letter, which were quoted out of context and thus highly ambiguous. Time magazine printed these quotations and created the impression that the author of The Song of Bernadette was a wholehearted believer in Catholicism. This in turn triggered a flood of letters to the editor[689], asking Werfel ever new variations of the same question: Why was he taking a public stand for the Catholic Church, with all its anti-Semitism, but none against the persecution of the Jews that was raging in Europe?
In November 1942 Russian forces surrounded some 250,000 German troops of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Shortly before that, Allied forces had landed in North Africa, and the war took its first decisive turn against Hitler’s Germany. Werfel had seen it coming six months earlier, writing to his mother[690] that he could see “the beginning of a new time” and that he was certain “that our scale is rising higher in the balance from day to day... We will soon see a requital whose like has rarely been seen by mankind.” Werfel, however, was heard to make a strange remark at a dinner party[691] in New York — the Sixth Army had already surrendered — to a circle of friends: “Children, let’s not go overboard. This peace will be so far ‘left’ that you won’t believe your eyes and ears!” Thomas Mann, who was present, was outraged by his friend’s statement and even noted in his diary that he had considered it improper to have such things uttered in his presence.
At the beginning of 1943 Werfel worked on the American adaptation of Jacobowsky and the Colonel with Clifford Odets[692], who had been recommended to him as a coauthor by the Theatre Guild. After some weeks of collaboration, Werfel was at the end of his tether and wrote to his agent George Marton that he kept trying to “convey the European misery of France to an American deaf-mute by means of sign language” but seriously doubted whether anything would come of the project. On top of it all, Werfel was being harassed by S. L. Jacobowicz, the banker from Stuttgart, who was now also living in American exile and had heard about the comedy. Jacobowicz warned Werfel that if he did not receive adequate compensation for his indirect assistance in the creation of the play, he would be compelled to take Werfel to court. In the meantime Gottfried Reinhardt and S. N. Behrman had followed up on their threat and sued Werfel. Alma Mahler wrote to her friend Friedrich Torberg in California that her husband was surrounded by “vultures” in New York.[693] In the spring of 1943, after his return to Los Angeles, Werfel received Clifford Odets’s final version of the Jacobowsky adaptation and rejected it as a silly, sentimental distortion of his original. One of the typical changes made by Odets had Jacobowsky flee through France with a portable gramophone on which he played Mozart records while the Gestapo was stalking him in the bushes. The Theatre Guild now suggested another adapter, the actor and producer Jed Harris, who had presented plays by Ibsen and Strindberg in New York. However, when Werfel reacted to this suggestion without enthusiasm, things came to a halt and the adaptation of the “comedy of a tragedy” stalled for months. At this point the ill-fated project had caused Werfel more trouble and strain than any other in his writing life.
“I am not really one who believes in dreams.”[694] That is the first sentence of a text Franz Werfel began in May 1943. The night before Palm Sunday he had a dream that “overwhelmed” him with its “inexplicable vividness” and seemed quite distinct from all his previous dreams. The dream continued all night like “installments” of a “novel serialized in a newspaper.” Werfel felt “disembodied in the most uncanny way,” a phenomenon that gave him a “sense of well-being” he had never experienced before. Even two weeks later, the memory of that feeling of happiness was so vivid that Werfel was compelled to “get over my reluctance to work and pick up the pen.”
That “reluctance to work”[695] must have been one of the reasons why he had, in the meantime, abandoned the project of a big Jewish novel, The One Who Stayed, at precisely the time when a few rebels began their desperate fight in the Warsaw Ghetto, actively resisting deportation and certain death — not unlike Gabriel Bagradian and his five thousand Armenian countrymen.
In only six days[696], the hotel bungalow of the Biltmore in Santa Barbara witnessed the creation of more than five chapters of the new work, simply titled A Short Visit to the Distant Future (Kurzer Besuch in ferner Zukunft). Werfel himself did not yet know what would become of it. To friends he referred to it as a “travel novel,” but also noted Behind Time’s Back (Hinterm Rücken der Zeit) as a possible title. He let himself become ever more deeply enveloped by the very curious atmosphere of the book, which was unlike anything he had ever written before, by a chain of events that took place in the year 101943, in the Eleventh Cosmic Capital Year of Virgo, on an entirely leveled globe that had been ravaged by numerous wars and was now overgrown by gray grass, most of its inhabitants living underground.
“F.W.,” the novel’s hero, is summoned by spiritualist means to a wedding in the city of “California,” as a kind of amusement for the newlyweds. Disembodied at fi
rst, F.W. is met by his former schoolmate B.H., who is to serve as his guide (Vergil to his Dante) through the “Astromental world.” B.H. — the initials barely conceal the identity of Willy Haas, Werfel’s closest friend since childhood — has lived through several reincarnations while F.W. has lain buried in California without being born again. B.H. can therefore tell the newcomer all about the most important events of the past one hundred millennia, including a solar catastrophe that destroyed all birds and increased the distance between Earth and the sun. Most of mankind now lives below the surface, eating pastel-colored essences. People live for two hundred years or longer, and locomotion is achieved by means of a “travel-puzzle.” “‘When we travel,’“ B.H. explains, “‘we do not move toward our objective, but we move our objective toward us.’“ Only two ideas have remained unchanged in the course of the small eternity F.W. has missed: the Catholic Church and Orthodox Judaism. “Two antitheses,” as Werfel wrote, “that had to fight to a finish because they were in reality two identities.”
After F.W.’s astral body has changed back into the stocky male figure that once bore the name Franz Werfel, wearing the tailcoat[697] in which he had been carried to his grave in California, B.H. presents the visitor to the newlyweds’ kindly and amused host family. The lady of the house immediately asks him if he was a cowboy or a goldhunter in the California of a hundred thousand years ago. F.W. replies, “No, Madame... Neither as a cowboy nor as a goldhunter; not even in the movies, but simply as a refugee.”
The very first chapters of the “travel story” indicated the course the novel would take. Werfel fused the abstruse reality of the year 101943 with detailed reminiscences of the turn of the century, of his childhood and youth in Prague, of experiences in both world wars and in exile in Europe and California. A kind of summary of Werfel’s life and work was the most important theme threading through the novel, giving it the aspect of a half-disguised autobiography.
The novel also made numerous allusions to works of literature that Werfel had valued in the course of his life. In addition to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Pliny’s fantastic tale Another World, illustrated by the gifted French graphic artist Grandville, and Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift were particularly inspiring. Thus, Gulliver’s experiences with the inhabitants of Laputa, their strange foodstuffs, and their love of astronomy are clear precursors of Werfel’s Astromental society in the Eleventh Cosmic Capital Year of Virgo. Even stylistically Werfel followed Swift closely, addressing the reader directly and combining autobiographical disclosures with the various adventures of his hero.
Werfel was aware that he was writing a completely nonpolitical novel. His narrator comments: “I confess and acknowledge: my time is short and I am wasting it unscrupulously. I have not forgotten that I, too, am persecuted. Nor have I become too deaf to hear the roar of the bombers,... the death rattle of the mortally wounded... The monstrous reality... constrict[s] my throat by day and night... Of course I am neglecting my duty. But this reality does not leave me even enough breath for an echoing groan to the cry of torment.” While it had been his initial plan to dedicate a book to “the ravished, the tortured, the massacred” — by which Werfel undoubtedly meant the abandoned novel about the simple Jewish silk manufacturer — he had been sent, one night when he was searching for a perfect pen, on a “voyage of exploration” which he now wanted to write down instead.
“In only a few days,”[698] Werfel told G. B. Fischer at the end of May 1943, he had produced “one-fifth to one-fourth” of a new novel. “Superstition” prevented him from revealing the content of the work, but he was willing to say that it was “something entirely unexpected.”
At this time, science fiction was not yet truly established as a popular genre with a wide readership. Apart from H. G. Wells’s Utopian novels and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932, fictional visions of the future were rarely published anywhere outside the American magazine Amazing Stories or, on a far lower level, in the comics. Werfel’s “travel novel” has to be regarded as one of the pioneering works in the field.
In Beverly Hills, Werfel had to set his “travel novel” aside to complete yet another version of the Jacobowsky adaptation, this time in collaboration with Jed Harris, the Theatre Guild’s candidate. Though it was as difficult for him to accept Harris’s suggestions as those made months earlier by Clifford Odets, his ambition to have a Broadway hit made him fight on, with a certain amount of bitterness and determination. He returned to the Biltmore and, during a heat wave, rewrote Jacobowsky and the Colonel for the third time, according to Harris’s specifications. “I have squeezed out everything to the last drop,”[699] he wrote to Albrecht Joseph, asking him to pass this on to Jed Harris, “but I have not put in anything that isn’t there. This is all I can do, as the author of this comedy.” Exhausted and dissatisfied, he mailed the manuscript back to the Theatre Guild, but all his efforts seemed to have been in vain: the Guild did not even acknowledge receipt.
During these weeks, Werfel corresponded with Max Brod[700], who had been living in Palestine since 1939 and had informed Werfel of the death of his wife. “It moved me greatly to see your handwriting after so many years of separation,” Werfel wrote to his friend. He told him about Jacobowsky and sadly noted, “Now that the worst seems to be over and one hopes to see the end of the war, my feelings of loss and grief are growing stronger by the minute... Will we ever find each other again?”
News of the successful Allied landing on Sicily brought him some comfort. Throughout Italy, popular opinion suddenly turned against Mussolini, who was deposed at the end of July 1943. Radio Rome proclaimed the end of Fascism.
Werfel tried to take his mind off the disappointing Jacobowsky affair by frequently visiting the set[701] of The Song of Bernadette on the 20th Century-Fox lot. If he had, as a young man (quite unlike Franz Kafka), been inclined to look down on the cinema, he now became a movie enthusiast[702], frequently attended glamorous gala premieres, and knew many stars personally, among them his particular favorite, Edward G. Robinson. They made him feel as shy and reverential as he had felt about the famous actors and singers who came to the May Festival at the Neue Deutsche Theater. Jennifer Jones[703], still an unknown, played the title role. The screenplay was by George Seaton. It had been rewritten several times[704]; Werfel had found the first version too mawkish and rejected it. The producer was William Perlberg; the director, Henry King, one of the most esteemed movie directors of his day.
At the end of August 1943, back in his hotel bungalow in Santa Barbara, Werfel wrote his first poems in a long time, free-verse works he intended to collect and publish under the title Word of Life on Earth (Kunde vom irdischen Leben).[705] “Lyric poetry (a term I detest) is a jealous goddess,” he had written a year earlier to the writer Rudolf Voigt.[706] “She does not tolerate novels, novellas, and plays by her side.” As in the “travel novel,” memories of the Prague years[707] resurfaced in these new poems, as in the “Ballad of the Winter Frost” (“Ballade vom Winterfrost”), which resurrected Gunner Werfel’s year of volunteer service. The actress Maria Immisch, a guest at the Prague festival, whom he had once adored, suddenly arose from his memory: “In the year five, when I was fifteen / They were celebrating the great Schiller year. / I saw her as the heroine of famous plays. / Even today my heart is full of gratitude. / The city park was in full leaf.”[708]
On the eve of Werfel’s fifty-third birthday, the University of California at Los Angeles conferred an honorary doctorate on him.[709] Gustave Arlt and other prominent academics had taken the initiative to obtain the honor, which was quite unusual for an émigré. Two years after his death, Rudolf Werfel’s dream had come true: his unruly heir had received his doctorate. Hanna Fuchs-Robetin wrote that their father would have been at least as pleased by this honor as by the German defeats in Stalingrad and North Africa.
Two days after Werfel’s birthday[710], Friedrich Torberg paid his customary afternoon visit to the house on Bedford Drive. The friends
chatted amicably while Werfel smoked one of his strong Havanas. Soon after Torberg left, in the early hours of September 13, 1943 — on the second anniversary of his crossing of the Pyrénées — Werfel had a severe heart attack, far more dangerous than the one in 1938. He complained of fear of death and intense pain. The doctors prescribed digitalis. For weeks, life-threatening lung embolisms kept recurring, a series of near-death events that gave the patient the feeling that he and the “F.W.” in Star of the Unborn who had been buried in California A.D. 1943 were one and the same.
In what seemed a premonition of things to come, Werfel had written on the back of a Biltmore Hotel menu[711], two weeks before the heart attack: “In reality, the curse of illness reveals a double intention. It invites us to hell or to heaven. It either delivers the human being soulless into the hands of matter, or it frees his sanctity by offering up his ego as a sacrifice and letting it become ever more transparent until the moment of death.”
Max Reinhardt’s sudden death[712] at the end of October 1943 was yet another severe blow: one of the homeless, like himself, had become a victim of exile. The most important man in the German-language theater of the twentieth century had never been able to gain a real foothold in the United States, especially not after the Eternal Road debacle in 1936-37.
Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood Page 30