Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood

by Peter Stephan Jungk

  Bouts of fever, great difficulty in breathing, and fear of suffocation now marked Werfel’s days and nights, while the weakness of his heart caused his lungs to congest. Anguished, he asked the friendly priests at the Old Mission of Santa Barbara to say daily prayers for him. He was confined to bed in his bright room on Bedford Drive, attended by his wife and Friedrich Torberg. An oxygen tank had been installed beside his bed, and he sometimes used it for hours to assist his breathing. He told Alma that he was in “the birth pangs of death” and sat up in bed one day in mid-December to write a poem, “Dance of Death” (“Totentanz”).[713] “Death swung me around in a dance. / At first, I did not miss a step. / In the dance of death, I did step out/ Until he speeded up the tempo. /... But suddenly he dropped his prey / And in the alphabet of the First Silence / He spoke only two words: Not today!”

  Bedford Drive house

  A few days after Christmas, Hollywood witnessed the festive and vastly successful world premiere of The Song of Bernadette — America’s first great Catholic movie. Werfel was unable to attend the gala event, but he listened to a live radio broadcast reporting the arrival of illustrious guests at the Cathay Circle Theater. A million copies[714] of the novel had been sold by now; the U.S. government purchased fifty thousand for the army. The San Francisco Herald Examiner was running the novel as a daily comic strip. A manufacturer in Alabama had come up with a soap statuette of Bernadette Soubirous that was marketed all over the country. There was a hit song on the radio, “The Song of Bernadette,” and the famous illustrator Norman Rockwell produced a large, endlessly reproduced portrait of Jennifer Jones as Bernadette.

  In the meantime, S. N. Behrman, the original co-initiator of the idea to turn the flight from Marseilles to Marseilles into a play, had written yet another version of Jacobowsky and the Colonel. His version, never approved by Werfel, was based on the version by Clifford Odets that Werfel despised. At the beginning of 1944, a young director, Elia Kazan, was already rehearsing the play — this, too, without Werfel’s consent. Werfel now spent hours on the telephone to Lawrence Langner of the Theatre Guild, trying desperately to avert the worst. He protested against the melodramatic watering-down and sentimentalization of his play, and the daily excitement put an additional strain on his extremely unstable condition. Numerous, often page-long telegrams[715] attest to his worries and rage. He told Langner that if he weren’t so ill, he would have no trouble convincing everybody that he was right. He was particularly distressed that Behrman decided to cut his favorite scene, in which the refugees meet Francis of Assisi and the Wandering Jew riding a tandem bicycle. “I implore you,” Werfel cabled Behrman in his less than idiomatic English, “not to reject every thing for what I am fighting with perhaps the last heartpower I have.” And a few days later, in a telegram: “I beg you on my knees to restitute the end of scene IV.”

  While the first previews of the comedy were presented in New Haven, Boston, and Philadelphia, Werfel kept on protesting, still without success. “I am depressed to death because I feel helpless,” he cabled Lawrence Langner, who replied laconically that Werfel’s contract with the Theatre Guild clearly assigned the latter the right of final decisions.

  Werfel clung to one last hope: to see his own original version of the play, in Gustave Arlt’s translation, in the bookshops as soon as possible, so that every member of the theater audience could form his or her own opinion about it.

  The Broadway premiere of Jacobowsky and the Colonel took place in mid-March 1944 at the Martin Beck Theater.[716] The “comedy of a tragedy” now had the misleading tag “Original play by Franz Werfel, American play based on same by S. N. Behrman.” The New York critics reacted mostly with praise, some even with enthusiasm; they wrote that Werfel’s own contribution to the play remained unclear, although some reviewers did assume that at least the two main characters, the Jew and the anti-Semitic officer — both of whom were generally regarded as theatrically effective and original — owed their existence to Franz Werfel. The production relied heavily on the Viennese-born actor Oscar Karlweis in the part of Jacobowsky, and the critics hailed him as an exciting talent, perfectly cast. None of this consoled Werfel, who remained more hurt and angry than ever before in his life. He even considered a lawsuit against the Theatre Guild, but a few days after the first night it became apparent that the play would indeed be a hit, and Werfel gave up the idea. All the excitement about the ill-starred enterprise threatened to deprive him of his last reserves of strength.

  In the spring of 1944, while he was still convalescing and mostly confined to his bed, he slowly recovered from his disappointment over the Jacobowsky affair. He read a great deal, including the works of Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway and, above all, Thomas Wolfe, his favorite American author. The “travel story” begun the previous year gradually started preoccupying him again; while Alma played Bach sonatas on the newly purchased Steinway or the radio blared musical programs sponsored by the California Gas Company, which often included fine recordings of Verdi arias, Werfel called up the spirits of memory. He searched for images of childhood and youth, moments of his days as a soldier, editor, and bohemian, in order to weave them into the narrative when he took up work on the Utopian novel again. His thoughts circled most often around Willy Haas, who had found refuge in a Himalayan village in northern India; he reviewed their walks along the hillsides around Prague, their arguments in the coffeehouses, their first erotic adventures. He asked himself which moment of his life had been the most important, concluding that it was midsummer 1918, when Alma hemorrhaged and their son was born prematurely, after which he had to endure weeks of anxiety over the survival of mother and child. It was his intention to include this crucial event in his novel.

  The gigantic work soon took shape in his mind. He told a reporter[717] that this “travel story” — provided he managed to complete it — would be his very best and most important book. The journalist noticed that Werfel kept toying with an unlit cigar: since the doctors had strictly forbidden smoking, he wanted at least to touch and play with the beloved object.

  Gulliver’s Restaurant in Marina del Rey is close to the yacht harbor of Los Angeles. The walls of the entirely windowless restaurant have been decorated with famous episodes from Jonathan Swift’s “travel story,” and the waiters and waitresses, most of them out-of-work actors and actresses, wear costumes of the early eighteenth century. The furnishings are imitations of the same period. Hidden in a booth is Gustave O. Arlt, eighty-eight years old. This is the favorite haunt of the former chairman of the Department of German Literature of the University of California at Los Angeles. “My acquaintance and later friendship with the Werfels really started right after they came to the West Coast,” says the sturdy old man. “We became particularly close in those last years before his death. While Werfel was writing his ‘travel story’ in Santa Barbara, I was translating the manuscript into English and often collaborated with him. I think it is his most important book — and he was very enthusiastic about it himself. Did you know that the title of the novel, Star of the Unborn, was my idea? Werfel had chosen a quotation from Diodorus, another travel writer, for an epigraph: it says that it is the poet’s task to seek out and describe the creatures of myth and fable, even the unborn on their star. That’s how we hit upon the idea to call the book Star of the Unborn. Next to Class Reunion and The Pure in Heart, Star is the most reliable source of information on Werfel’s childhood. There’s a lot of autobiographical material in it, more or less disguised. I never asked Werfel any indiscreet questions, but sometimes he seemed ready to divulge personal things — and then often spoke of Willy Haas, in the most loving way, insisting that Haas had been the dearest friend he’d ever had.

  “In those final years, Werfel always wore very expensive suits. He had them tailored in Beverly Hills at the London Shop on Rodeo Drive; the store is still there, by the way. But never mind how expensive the pinstripe may have been, it always looked as if it didn’t belong to its owner: both the coats and
the pants always looked baggy and wrinkled, immediately. And he was always covered with food stains and cigar ashes. ‘He smudges so easily,’ they used to say about Werfel. And he smoked incessantly: cigars, cigarettes, pipes, sometimes all three at once, placed in different parts of his study. (He used the same method with his glasses: he had countless pairs that he left here or there, so that he’d always have some at hand without having to look for them.) After the severe heart attack in September 1943, he had to stop smoking, of course; he was lying in bed and asked August, their butler, to light a cigar and sit down next to him and blow the smoke at him. He was like a mischievous schoolboy all his life. August Hess was a failed opera tenor from Germany, around forty, homosexual, and a jack-of-all-trades in the Werfel household: cook, chauffeur, servant. And extremely loyal. He hated animals. For instance, the turtle that the Werfels had brought back from an excursion to the Mojave Desert and that they took with them everywhere, for years, even to the St. Moritz in New York and to the Biltmore in Santa Barbara: it was allowed to do anything it wanted, including flooding the back seat of the Oldsmobile with its urine — Alma just loved such little contretemps. But one day the turtle disappeared. And August was the strongest suspect. A high-pedigree Irish setter and a Siamese cat didn’t fare much better in the Werfel household; August saw to it that they left after a very short time.

  “Here’s a totally different image I just remembered: the day Werfel and Alma passed their exams for U.S. citizenship — it must have been in 1944. I went with them to the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. They were both sweating blood, they were so nervous. They were questioned separately about American history and government. ‘What is the name of the current president of the United States?’ was one of the questions. Or: ‘Who are the senators for California?’ Of course they didn’t have any trouble at all.

  “Or our automobile trip at the height of the summer of 1941 — Werfel had just heard that his father had died. The four of us drove to Yosemite Park and stayed at the Ahwanee Hotel. Werfel mostly sat on the big veranda and wrote and wrote, hot as it was. Alma left one of her countless bottles of Benedictine liqueur — she consumed one a day — sitting in the sun, and it heated up until it exploded and covered everything with its sweet, sticky contents, including Werfel’s notes.

  “In the middle of meals, when we went to restaurants — Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills was one of Werfel’s favorite places — he would suddenly jump up and run out into the street, looking for a newsboy to get the latest edition of the paper. ‘I have to see the evening papers!’ he’d shout. He was that eager to have the latest news about his beloved Europe; he was deeply attached to it, he had to read the latest dispatches from the fronts. August had to run out for the papers several times a day.

  “When Werfel and Alma quarreled, it was really only about politics. And how Werfel could yell! He was the choleric-sanguine type. But sometimes he yelled at Alma just because she was really hard of hearing. And he found that very irritating. Especially since she did nothing to correct it; she was much too vain to get a hearing aid.

  “But they were unanimous about the question of how Werfel should be buried. They talked about that quite often, especially after that serious heart attack. I often heard him say to Alma, ‘Now, you won’t have them bury me as a Jew, will you?!’ And he was really serious about it. You know, he lived in this curious mix of Judaism and Christianity — he was absolutely convinced of the ‘permanence’ of the Jewish people, as he discusses it in Star of the Unborn. But at the same time he felt deeply attached to the Catholic fathers, such as the sophisticated Jesuit Georg Moenius, who published an anti-Nazi journal and was one of his best friends during his years in California. Moenius was more a politician than a man of the cloth. And the Franciscan monk Cyrill Fischer, who lived in Santa Barbara, a mild and lovable man who never mastered the English language — discussions with him were particularly important to Werfel while he wrote his ‘travel novel.’ You’ll find them reproduced in Star, in the conversations between F.W. and the Grand Bishop. Fischer died in May 1944 of cancer of the liver — another severe blow to Werfel. I accompanied him many times to the Old Mission in Santa Barbara, where he spent most of his time in the beautiful library or visiting the fathers he knew there. I remember one Saturday when we went there and practically all the Franciscan monks were sitting in front of a television set watching a football game — I’ve never forgotten that.”

  A waitress in a red Gulliver outfit brings Professor Arlt a huge half-bloody T-bone steak. “Did you know,” Arlt continues without breaking stride, “that Alma published Star of the Unborn after Werfel’s death in an arbitrarily cut version? Well, she even published Mahler’s symphonies, after his death, in abbreviated versions — she believed that Mahler’s ‘long-windedness’ was detrimental to his popularity! (It’s true that Werfel often admitted to being a bit too verbose, like Victor Hugo, Balzac, or Dostoyevsky.) You do look surprised about Alma’s editorial interventions in Werfel’s work. You have to understand one more thing: after Werfel’s death, Alma talked much more often about Mahler and Kokoschka than about her ‘man-child’ Franzl. I always felt that she never loved the man Werfel as much as his fame and genius. If Werfel hadn’t been a genius, Alma certainly wouldn’t have been interested in him.”

  “The Book Must Be Finished”

  Marlene Dietrich, a good friend of the Werfels, commissioned Carroll Righter, then America’s best-known astrologer, to cast Franz Werfel’s horoscope[718] in the spring of 1944. The only information she gave Righter was that the person in question had been born in Prague during the night of September 10-11, 1890. Righter’s prognostications extended up to August 1946 and stressed, above all, the unknown subject’s extremely precarious state of health: particular caution was to be exercised until November 1944 — until then, upsets of any kind would have to be avoided. Unfortunately, it seemed that this Virgo had a tendency to get upset by mere trivialities. The fall of 1944, Righter prophesied, initiated a period of powerful inspiration of, as it were, a visionary nature — never before, the popular stargazer noted, had he seen a chart like this: the man to whom it applied had to be an extremely idealistic and at the same time magnanimous person, and what was more, there was no doubt that he was a genius.

  Werfel remained in bed during the spring of 1944. Nevertheless, urged by his American publisher Ben Huebsch, he decided to publish a collection of thoughts and ideas on ethical and religious questions, under the title “Theologumena.”[719] He gathered sketches and fragments from his desk drawers and old notebooks, some of them dating back to 1914, when Werfel first considered an essay to be called “On the Subject of Theodicy” (“Zum Thema Theodizee”).[720] He also wanted to incorporate a large number of aphorisms and epigrams he had jotted down during his months of illness. He began to dictate[721] these short texts, which spanned a period of thirty years, to Albrecht Joseph in the latter part of March. Modeled on Pascal’s Pensées and Novalis’s Fragments, they failed to match either, not even reaching Werfel’s own customary level. “What would Israel be without the Church? And what would the Church be without Israel?” Next to this typical credo, Werfel also tried to express his own rather abstruse sense of Jewishness, which ascribed the guilt of persecution to its victims: “It is one of Israel’s strangest transgressions that by means of its nature and form of being, it calls forth... from Christians,... the sin of anti-Semitism, which leads to its own destruction.” He also did not hesitate to defame the expressionist ideals of his youth: there had never been, he now claimed, “a more devastating, insolent, sarcastic, satanic arrogance” than that of the “avant-garde artists and radical intellectuals” among whom he had to count himself. He concluded, “While amusing and shocking a few Philistines, we, otherwise unnoticed, stoked the fires of the hell in which mankind is roasting now.”

  Sitting up in bed dictating “Theologumena,” Werfel (along with his doctors) believed that he had gotten over the worst. However, he suffered another coronary
occlusion[722] in mid-May and had to spend further weeks and months in bed. Not until the height of summer was he gradually able to lead a more normal life, nine months after the first major attack in September 1943. He went on his first, still very cautious walks and spent hours sitting in the garden. However, he wanted to pick up his work on Star of the Unborn as soon as possible, and to that end he moved back to Santa Barbara in July.[723] Even then, Alma did not go with him, but he was accompanied by his private physician, Dr. Spinak[724], who lived with him from that time on. Dr. Spinak, a native Austrian, outwardly resembled Franz Schubert and hence bore the nickname “Schwammerl” (Little Mushroom), borrowed from R. H. Bartsch’s famous fictional biography of Schubert. A few days after the two had moved into a bungalow on the grounds of Werfel’s favorite hotel, the Biltmore, it was taken over by the American military.[725] Werfel and Spinak had to move into Santa Barbara itself, where they rented a cottage on the spacious grounds of Hotel El Mirasol.[726]

  Despite his mortal illness, Werfel returned to his task with familiar intensity, working on the creation of a world that was taking on increasingly bizarre and fairy-tale forms. It was populated by Foreignfeelers and Geoarchons, Starrovers and Chronosophers, Marvelers and Animators. The year before, he had simply told Gottfried Bermann Fischer that he was trying “something quite unexpected”; now he wrote[727] that he was working on a novel set “in the most remote future,” which was “a kind of fantastic travel book, but also the story of souls, hearts, and love.” “Pretty strange...”