The Knife Thrower

by Steven Millhauser

  For it is indeed of him that I wish to speak, this troubled spirit who has risen up in our midst with his perilous and disturbing gift; and if I have seemed to hesitate, to linger over other matters, it is because the very nature of his art throws all into question, and requires one to approach him obliquely, almost warily.

  Like many masters, Heinrich Graum was the son of a watchmaker; like most, he displayed his gift early. At the age of five he was sent to the workshop of Rudolf Eisenmann, from which so many apprentices emerge as young masters. There he proved a talented but not precocious pupil. At the age of seven he constructed a one-inch nightingale capable of sixty-four motions, including thirty-six separate motions of the head, and exhibiting such perfect craftsmanship that it was used in the orchard scene of Eisenmann’s Der Reisende Kavalier. This was followed almost a year later by a charming high-wire artist who climbed to the top of his post, walked with the aid of a balancing pole across the wire toward the opposite post, lost and regained his balance three times, fell and clung to the wire with one hand, climbed laboriously back up, and continued safely to the opposite post, where he turned and bowed. In all this there was nothing to distinguish young Heinrich from any talented apprentice; he was never a child prodigy, as has since mistakenly been claimed. A far greater degree of precocity is very frequent among the child apprentices, and is looked upon by the masters with a certain distrust. For in an art that more than any other demands a thorough mastery of mechanical details, a too-early success often leads the young apprentice to a false sense of ripeness. All too often the prodigy of seven is the mediocrity of fifteen, fit only for service in the Children’s Theater. For it is not too much to say that the highest form of the automatist’s art is entirely spiritual, though attained, as I have said, by mechanical means. The child prodigies display a remarkable technical virtuosity that is certainly impressive but that does not in itself give promise of future greatness, and that more often than not distracts them and other apprentices from their proper path of development. Young Heinrich was spared the affliction of precocity.

  But he was highly talented; and a master always watches his talented apprentices for any sign of that indefinable quality which marks a pupil as doomed to mastery. In the case of young Heinrich it was his early interest in the human form and above all in the hands and face. At precisely the time when talented apprentices of ten and twelve are turning their attention to the dragons and mermaids of the Children’s Theater, and reveling in the display of their considerable technical skills, Heinrich began to study the inner structure of Eisenmann’s famous magician, capable of making a silver coin disappear, producing a bluebird from his hat, and shuffling and holding outspread in his hands a deck of fifty-two miniature cards. It was the mechanical problem that appears to have engaged young Heinrich’s interest; it was the first problem he could not solve rapidly. For eight months during his twelfth year he dissected and reassembled the hands of the anatomical models that flourish in every workshop; the intricate clockwork structure of the thumb appears to have obsessed him. And in this too he distinguished himself from the child wonders, who move rapidly and a little breathlessly from one accomplishment to the next. At the end of eight months he was able to construct the precise duplicate of Eisenmann’s magician—a feat that earned him the master’s first serious attention. But what is more remarkable is that young Heinrich was still dissatisfied. He continued to study the structure of the hand (his series of sixty-three hands from this period is considered by some to be his first mature work) and shortly before his fourteenth birthday produced an Eisenmann magician capable of three new tricks never attempted before in automaton art. One of these tricks achieved a certain notoriety when it was discovered that no human magician was capable of duplicating it. Young Heinrich confessed to having improved the musculature of the hand beyond a merely human capacity; for this he was lightly rebuked.

  The magician was followed quickly by his first original creation, the astonishing pianist capable of playing the entire first movement of the Moonlight Sonata on a beautifully constructed seven-inch grand piano. Heinrich had only a slight musical training, and the execution of the movement left much to be desired, but all agreed that the hands of the pianist displayed the mark of a future master.

  Heinrich at fourteen was a large, slumped, serious boy, whose thick-fingered hands looked clumsy in comparison with the delicate clockwork hands of his creatures. Aside from his taciturnity, which even then was notable, he was in no way sullen or eccentric, as so many talented apprentices prove to be, and among his peers he had an unusual reputation for kindness. He seems to have slid awkwardly but without a struggle into young manhood, wearing his large and powerful body with an air of surprise.

  It was immediately after the completion of the pianist that he began the study of the human face which was to have such profound consequences for his art and to make of him an acknowledged master by the age of twenty. For six long years he analyzed and dissected the automaton face, studying the works of the masters and trying to penetrate the deepest secrets of expressivity. During this entire period he completed not a single figure, but instead accumulated a gallery of some six hundred heads, many of them in grotesque states of incompletion. Eisenmann recognized the signs of maturing mastership, and allowed the stooped, grave youth to have his way. At the end of the six-year period Heinrich created in two feverish months the first figure since his pianist: the young woman whom he called Fräulein Elise.

  Eisenmann himself pronounced it a masterpiece, and even now we may admire it as a classic instance of automaton art. This charming figure, who measures scarcely five inches in height, moves with a grace and naturalness that are the surest signs of mastership. Her famous walk, so indolently sensual, would alone have ensured the young master a place in the histories. She seems the very essence of girlhood passing into womanhood. But even in this early figure one is struck above all by the startling expressivity of the face. During her twelve minutes of clockwork life, Fräulein Elise appears to be undergoing a spiritual struggle, every shadow of which is displayed in her intelligent features. She paces her room now restlessly, now indolently, throwing herself onto her bed, gazing out the window, sitting up abruptly, falling into a muse. We seem to be drawn into the very soul of this girl, troubled as she is with the vague yearnings and dark intuitions of innocence on the threshold of knowledge. Every perfectly rendered gesture seems designed only to draw us more deeply inward; we feel an uncanny intimacy with this restless creature, whose mysterious life we seem to know more deeply than our own. The long, languorous, slowly unfolding, darkly yearning yawn that concludes the performance, as Elise appears to open like a heavy blossom, and draw us into the depths of her being, is a masterpiece of spiritual penetration, all the more remarkable in that Heinrich is not known to have been in love at this time. One fellow apprentice, a thin youth of eighteen, was so stirred by Elise that he was observed to study her twelve-minute life again and again. As the weeks passed his cheeks grew pale, a dark blueness appeared below his eyes; and it was said that he had fallen in love with the little Fräulein Elise.

  The young master now entered upon a period of powerful creativity, which in four years’ time led to his first public performance. The success of the Zaubertheater was immediate and decisive. His figures were compared to the greatest masterpieces of clockwork art; all commentators remarked upon their supple expressivity, their uncanny intensity. Here was an artist who at the age of twenty-four had not only mastered the subtlest intricacies of clockwork motion but, in an art where innovation was often disastrous, and always dangerous, had added something genuinely new. No one could ignore the haunting “inwardness” of his admirable creatures; it was as if Heinrich Graum had learned to shadow forth emotions never seen before. Even those who disdained all innovation as inherently destructive were compelled to offer their grudging admiration, for when all was said and done the young master had simply carried the art one step further in the honorable direction of sc
rupulous imitation. His difference was noted, and admired by those of most exacting taste; and he was pronounced to be in the classic tradition of the great masters, though with a distinctive modern flavor peculiarly and compellingly his own. Thus did it come about that he was admired equally by the older generation and the new.

  It is one thing for a young master to earn his reputation; it is another for him to sustain it. Heinrich Graum was not one to ignore a challenge. In the course of the next twelve years the grave young master seemed to surpass himself with every new composition, each one of which was awaited with an eagerness bordering on fever. Audiences responded in kind to the peculiar intensity of his creatures; young women especially were susceptible to the strange power that glowed in those clockwork eyes. Well known is the case of Ilse Länger, who fell so desperately in love with his dark-eyed Pierrot that the mere sight of him would cause her to burst into fits of violent sobbing. One rainy Sunday, after a tormented night, the suffering girl left her house before dawn, walked along the gloomy avenue of elms north of the Schlosspark, and threw herself into the Bree, leaving behind a pitiful love-note and the fragment of a poem. Poor Ilse Länger was only an extreme and unfortunate instance of a widespread phenomenon. The tears of women were not uncommon at the Zaubertheater; young men wrote fiery poems to his Klara. Even sober critics were not above responses of the extreme kind, which sometimes troubled them, and which served as the basis of an occasional attack. It was noted that Graum’s figures seemed more and more to be pushing at the limits of the human, as if he wished to express in his creatures not only the deepest secrets of the human soul but emotions that lay beyond the knowledge of men; and this sense of excess, which was at the very heart of his greatness, was itself seen to pose a danger, for it was said that his figures walked a narrow line dividing them from the grotesque. But such attacks, inevitable in an art of high and ancient tradition, were little more than a murmur in the thunder of serious applause; and the performances at the Zaubertheater were soon being called the triumph of the age, the final and richest flowering of the automatist’s art.

  It was perhaps the very extremity of these well-deserved claims that should have given us pause, for if an art has indeed been carried to its richest expression, then we may wonder whether the urge that impelled it in the direction of its fulfillment may not impel it beyond its proper limit. In this sense we may ask whether the highest form of an art contains within it the elements of its own destruction—whether decadence, in short, so far from being the sickly opposite of art’s deepest health, is perhaps nothing but the result of an urge identical to both.

  However that may be, the young master continued to move from triumph to triumph, shocking us with the revelation of ever-new spiritual depths, and making us yearn for darker and deeper beauties. It was as if his creatures strained at the very limits of the human, without leaving the human altogether; and the intensity of his late figures seemed to promise some final vision, which we awaited with longing, and a little dread.

  It was at the age of thirty-six, after twelve years of uninterrupted triumph, that Heinrich Graum suddenly fell silent.

  Now the silence of masters is not unusual, and is in itself no cause for alarm. It is well known that the masters undergo great and continual strain, for when we speak of mastering the sublime art of the automaton we do not mean a mastery that leads to relaxation of effort. It may indeed with more truth be said that the achievement of mastery is only the necessary preparation for future rigors. How else are we to explain the grave, melancholy countenances of our masters? The high art of the automaton demands a relentless and unremitting precision, an unwavering power of concentration, and a ceaseless faculty for invention, so that mastery itself must always struggle merely to maintain its own level. In addition there is the never acknowledged but always felt presence of the other masters. For there is a secret rivalry among them. Each feels the presence of the others, against whom he measures himself mercilessly; and although it may be that such rivalry is harmful to the health of the masters, yet without it there is every likelihood that the art would suffer, for a faint and scarcely conscious relaxation would inevitably set in. In addition to this rivalry, each master is a rival of the great masters of the past; and each is also a rival of himself, continually striving to surpass his own most superb achievements. Such pressures are more than sufficient to engrave deep lines on the faces of our masters, but there are in addition the continual threat of poverty, the burden of having to live in two worlds at once, and the common lot of suffering that no mortal can escape, and that often seems to the master, stretched as he always is to the highest pitch of a strained and exacting creativity, too much to bear. Thus it comes about that a master will sometimes fall into silence, from which he will emerge in six months or a year or two years as if born anew, while in his absence the theater is run by his leading apprentices. The striking feature of Heinrich Graum’s case is therefore not the silence itself, nor even the suddenness of the silence, but rather its thoroughness and duration. For Graum remained silent for ten long years; and unlike all other masters who temporarily retire, he closed his theater and withdrew all his creatures from public performance.

  The debate over the ten-year silence of Heinrich Graum will in all probability never cease. It has been compared in some quarters to Schiller’s twelve-year silence between Don Carlos and Wallenstein, but perhaps I may be permitted to point out that Schiller began to compose poetry (if not drama) eight years after the completion of Don Carlos, that he worked steadily on Wallenstein from 1797 to 1799, and that in any case he was far from silent, since he published two full-length histories as well as numerous philosophical and esthetic essays during the very years of his dramatic silence. Graum’s silence was complete. Moreover he released his apprentices. We have therefore no witnesses of his activity during this decisive period. He had married quietly during the triumphant years, and there is no cause whatever for connecting his silence in any way with his domestic life. During his silent years he is known to have made several trips in the company of his wife to various bathing resorts on the Nordsee; he was twice seen in a chair on the beach at Scheveningen, a stooped giant of a man in brown bathing trunks, staring out gloomily at the water. But most of the time he appears to have remained shut up in his workshop on the Lindenallee. It is commonly assumed that there he tirelessly took apart and recomposed clockwork creatures in the manner of his obsessive youth. Nothing can be proved to the contrary, for he has remained silent about this as about all other matters, but against the general assumption two objections may briefly be raised. First, no trace of any automaton from this period has ever been found. Second, the nature of the new automaton theater renders the theory of ceaseless experiment unlikely. It may be argued that he destroyed all his experiments; yet it should be remembered that he carefully preserved the sixty-three hands and more than six hundred heads of his apprenticeship. My own suggestion, which I offer after long and serious reflection, is that for ten years Heinrich Graum did nothing. Or to be more precise: he did nothing, while thinking ceaselessly about the nature of his art. Had he been a man of letters, a Schiller, he might have offered to the world the fruits of his meditations; his genius being of the wordless kind, his thoughts were reflected only in the strange creatures that suddenly burst from him toward the end of this period, changing the nature of our automaton theater forever.

  When the Zaubertheater first closed, we were disappointed and expectant. As the silence continued, our expectation diminished, while our disappointment grew. In time even our disappointment faded, returning only in stray eruptions of sadness or, on lavender summer evenings when the yellow streetlamps came on, a vague uneasiness, a restlessness, as if we were searching for something that had departed forever.

  Meanwhile we threw ourselves into the automaton theater. It was a time of ripeness in the art; and it was said that never before had the skill of so many masters reached such a pitch of expressive brilliance, haunted as they all were by
the memory of the old Zaubertheater.

  The rumor of the great master’s return was at first greeted with a certain reserve. He had vanished so completely that his possible reappearance among us was somehow disturbing. It was as if a beloved son, ten years dead, should suddenly return, long after one had made one’s thousand little accommodations. An entire generation of apprentices had entered the workshops without having seen a single work of the legendary master; some were openly skeptical. Even we who had mourned his silence were secretly uncertain, for we had grown accustomed to things as they were, we had lost the habit of genius. In our timid hearts, did we not pray that he would stay away? Yet as the day drew near we became tense with expectancy; and in our pulses we could feel, like an eruption of fever at the onset of an unknown disease, a slow, secret excitement.