And Heinrich Graum returned; again the old Zaubertheater opened its doors. That long-awaited performance was like a knife flashed in the face of our art. Of those who remained during the full thirty-six minutes, some were openly enraged, others sickened and ashamed; a few were seized by the roots of the soul, though in a manner they could not understand and later refused to discuss. One critic stated that the master had lost his mind; others, more kindly though no more accurately, spoke of parody and the grotesque. Even now one still hears such charges and descriptions; the Neues Zaubertheater remains at the center of a passionate controversy. Those who do not share our love of the automaton theater may find our passions difficult to understand; but for us it was as if everything had suddenly been thrown into question. Even we who have been won over are disturbed by these performances, which trouble us like forbidden pleasures, like secret crimes.
I have spoken of the long and noble history of our art, and of its tendency toward an ever-increasing mimetic brilliance. Young Heinrich had inherited this tradition, and in the opinion of many had become its outstanding master. In one stroke his Neues Zaubertheater stood history on its head. The new automatons can only be described as clumsy. By this I mean that the smoothness of motion so characteristic of our classic figures has been replaced by the jerky abrupt motions of amateur automatons. As a result the new automatons cannot imitate the motions of human beings, except in the most elementary way. They lack grace; by every rule of classic automaton art they are inept and ugly. They do not strike us as human. Indeed it must be said that the new automatons strike us first of all as automatons. This is the essence of what has come to be called The New Automaton Theater.
I have called the new automatons clumsy, and this is true enough if we judge them from the standpoint of the masterpieces of the older school. But it is not entirely true, judged even from that standpoint. In the first place, the clumsiness itself is extremely artful, as imitators have learned to their cost. It is not a matter of simply reducing the number of motions, but of reducing them in a particular way, so that a particular rhythm of motions is produced. In the second place, the acknowledged master of expressivity cannot be said to have turned against the expressive itself. The new automatons are profoundly expressive in their own disturbing way. Indeed it has been noticed that the new automatons are capable of motions never seen before in the automatist’s art, although it is a matter of dispute whether these motions may properly be called human.
In the classic automaton theater we are asked to share the emotions of human beings, whom in reality we know to be miniature automatons. In the new automaton theater we are asked to share the emotions of automatons themselves. The clockwork artifice, far from being disguised, is thrust upon our attention. If this were all, it would be startling, but it would not be much. Such a theater could not last. But Graum’s new automatons suffer and struggle; no less than the old automatons do they appear to have souls. But they do not have the souls of human beings; they have the souls of clockwork creatures, grown conscious of themselves. The classic automatists present us with miniature people; Heinrich Graum has invented a new race. They are the race of automatons, the clan of clockwork; they are new beings, inserted into the universe by the mind of Graum the creator. They live lives that are parallel to ours but are not to be confused with ours. Their struggles are clockwork struggles, their suffering is the suffering of automatons.
It has become fashionable of late to claim that Graum abandoned the adult theater and returned to the Children’s Theater as to his spiritual home. To my mind this is a gross misunderstanding. The creatures of the Children’s Theater are imitations of imaginary beings; Graum’s creatures are not imitations of anything. They are only themselves. Dragons do not exist; automatons do.
In this sense Graum’s revolution may be seen to be a radical continuation of our history rather than a reversal or rejection of it. I have said that our art is realistic, and that all advances in the technical realm have been in the service of the real. Graum’s new automatons offer no less homage to Nature. For him, human beings are one thing and clockwork creatures another; to confuse the two is to propagate the unreal.
Art, a master once observed, is never theoretical. My laborious remarks obscure the delicate art they seek to elucidate. Nothing short of attendance at the Neues Zaubertheater can convey the startling, disturbing quality of the new automatons. We seem drawn into the souls of these creatures, who assert their unreal nature at every jerk of a limb; we suffer their clumsiness, we are pierced by inhuman longings. We are moved in ways we can scarcely comprehend. We yearn to mingle with these strange newcomers, to pass into their clockwork lives; at times we feel a dark understanding, a criminal complicity. Is it that in their presence we are able to shed the merely human, which seems a limitation, and to release ourselves into a larger, darker, more dangerous realm? We know only that we are stirred in places untouched before. A dark, disturbing beauty, like a black sunrise, has come into our lives. Dying of a thirst we did not know we had, we drink from the necessary and tormenting waters of fictive fountains.
And the new automatons begin to obsess us. They penetrate our minds, they multiply within us, they inhabit our dreams. They waken in us new, forbidden passions we cannot name. Once again it is adolescent girls who have proved to be peculiarly susceptible to Graum’s dark wizardry. In any audience one can see three or four of them, with their parted lips, their hungry eyes, their tense, hysterical attention. The tears that flow are not the tears of love, but quite different tears, deep, scalding tears torn up from unspeakable depths, tears that give no relief, tears wrung from nerves tormented by the crystalline harmonies of unearthly violins. Even our stern young men emerge from these dangerous performances with haunted eyes. Incidents of a pathological kind have been reported; the demonic pact between Wolfgang Kohler and Eva Holst must be passed over in silence. More troubling because more common are the taut, drained faces one sees after certain performances, especially after the terrifying dissolution scene in Die Neue Elise. The new art is not a gentle art; its beauties are of an almost unbearable intensity.
These are perhaps superficial signs; more profound is the new restlessness one feels in our city, an impatience with older forms, a secret hunger.
They are no longer the same, the old automatons. Gratefully we seek out the old theaters, but once we have felt the troubling touch of the new automatons we find ourselves growing impatient with the smooth and perfect motions of the old masters, whose brilliant imitations seem to us nothing but clockwork confections. So, rather guiltily, we return to the Neues Zaubertheater, where the new automatons draw us into their inhuman joys and sufferings, and fill us with uneasy rapture. The old art flourishes, and its presence comforts us, but something new and strange has come into the world. We may try to explain it, but what draws us is the mystery. For our dreams have changed. Whether our art has fallen into an unholy decadence, as many have charged, or whether it has achieved its deepest and darkest flowering, who among us can say? We know only that nothing can ever be the same.
CLAIR DE LUNE
THE SUMMER I turned fifteen, I could no longer fall asleep. I would lie motionless on my back, in a perfect imitation of sleep, and imagine myself lying fast asleep with my head turned to one side and a tendon pushed up along the skin of my neck, but even as I watched myself lying there dead to the world I could hear the faint burr of my electric clock, a sharp creak in the attic—like a single footstep—a low rumbling hum that I knew was the sound of trucks rolling along the distant thruway. I could feel the collar of my pajama top touching my jaw. Through my trembling eyelids I sensed that the darkness of the night was not dark enough, and suddenly opening my eyes, as if to catch someone in my room, I’d see the moonlight streaming past the edges of the closed Venetian blinds.
I could make out the lampshade and bent neck of the standing lamp, like a great drooping black sunflower. On the floor by a bookcase the white king and part of a black bishop glowed
on the moon-striped chessboard. My room was filling up with moonlight. The darkness I longed for, the darkness that had once sheltered me, had been pushed into corners, where it lay in thick, furry lumps. I felt a heaviness in my chest, an oppression—I wanted to hide in the dark. Desperately I closed my eyes, imagining the blackness of a winter night: snow covered the silent streets, on the front porch the ice chopper stood leaning next to the black mailbox glinting with icicles, lines of snow lay along the crosspieces of telephone poles and the tops of metal street signs: and always through my eyelids I could feel the summer moonlight pushing back the dark.
One night I sat up in bed harshly and threw the covers off. My eyes burned from sleeplessness. I could no longer stand this nightly violation of the dark. I dressed quietly, tensely, since my parents’ room stood on the other side of my two bookcases, then made my way along the hall and out into the living room. A stripe of moonlight lay across a couch cushion. On the music rack I could see a pattern of black notes on the moon-streaked pages of Debussy’s “Second Arabesque,” which my mother had left off practicing that evening. In a deep ashtray shaped like a shell the bowl of my father’s pipe gleamed like a piece of obsidian.
At the front door I hesitated a moment, then stepped out into the warm summer night.
The sky surprised me. It was deep blue, the blue of a sorcerer’s hat, of night skies in old Technicolor movies, of deep mountain lakes in Swiss countrysides pictured on old puzzle boxes. I remembered my father removing from a leather pouch in his camera bag a circle of silver and handing it to me, and when I held it up I saw through the dark blue glass a dark blue world the color of this night. Suddenly I stepped out of the shadow of the house into the whiteness of the moon. The moon was so bright I could not look at it, as if it were a night sun. The fierce whiteness seemed hot, but for some reason I thought of the glittering thick frost on the inside of the ice-cream freezer in a barely remembered store: the popsicles and ice-cream cups crusted in ice crystals, the cold air like steam.
I could smell low tide in the air and thought of heading for the beach, but I found myself walking the other way. For already I knew where I was going, knew and did not know where I was going, in the sorcerer-blue night where all things were changed, and as I passed the neighboring ranch houses I took in the chimney-shadows black and sharp across the roofs, the television antennas standing clean and hard against the blue night sky.
Soon the ranch houses gave way to small two-story houses, the smell of the tide was gone. The shadows of telephone wires showed clearly on the moonwashed streets. The wire-shadows looked like curved musical staves. On a brilliant white garage door the slanting, intricate shadow of a basketball net reminded me of the rigging on the wooden ship model I had built with my father, one childhood summer. I could not understand why no one was out on a night like this. Was I the only one who’d been drawn out of hiding and heaviness by the summer moon? In an open, empty garage I saw cans of moonlit paint on a shelf, an aluminum ladder hanging on hooks, folded lawn chairs. Under the big-leafed maples moonlight rippled across my hands.
Oh, I knew where I was going, didn’t want to know where I was going, in the warm blue air with little flutters of coolness in it, little bursts of grass-smell and leaf-smell, of lilac and fresh tar.
At the center of town I cut through the back of the parking lot behind the bank, crossed Main Street, and continued on my way.
When the thruway underpass came into view, I saw the top halves of trucks rolling high up against the dark blue sky, and below them, framed by concrete walls and the slab of upper road, a darker and greener world: a beckoning world of winding roads and shuttered houses, a green blackness glimmering with yellow spots of streetlamps, white spots of moonlight.
As I passed under the high, trembling roadbed on my way to the older part of town, the dark walls, spattered with chalked letters, made me think of hulking creatures risen from the underworld, bearing on their shoulders the lanes of a celestial bowling alley.
On the other side of the underpass I glanced up at the nearly full moon. It was a little blurred on one side, but so hard and sharp on the other that it looked as if I could cut my finger on it.
When I next looked up, the moon was partly blocked by black-green oak leaves. I was walking under high trees beside neck-high hedges. A mailbox on a post looked like a loaf of bread. Shafts of moonlight slanted down like boards.
I turned onto a darker street, and after a while I stopped in front of a large house set back from the road.
And my idea, bred by the bold moon and the blue summer night, was suddenly clear to me: I would make my way around the house into the back yard, like a criminal. Maybe there would be a rope swing. Maybe she’d see me from an upper window. I had never visited her before, never walked home with her. What I felt was too hidden for that, too lost in dark, twisting tunnels. We were school friends, but our friendship had never stretched beyond the edges of school. Maybe I could leave some sign for her, something to show her that I’d come through the summer night, into her back yard.
I passed under one of the big tulip trees in the front yard and began walking along the side of the house. In a black windowpane I saw my sudden face. Somewhere I seemed to hear voices, and when I stepped around the back of the house into the full radiance of the moon, I saw four girls playing ball.
They were playing Wiffle ball in the brilliant moonlight, as though it were a summer’s day. Sonja was batting. I knew the three other girls, all of them in my classes: Marcia, pitching; Jeanie, taking a lead off first; Bernice, in the outfield, a few steps away from me. In the moonlight they were wearing clothes I’d never seen before, dungarees and shorts and sweatshirts and boys’ shirts, as if they were dressed up in a play about boys. Bernice had on a baseball cap and wore a jacket tied around her waist. In school they wore knee-length skirts and neatly ironed blouses, light summer dresses with leather belts. The girl-boys excited and disturbed me, as if I’d stumbled into some secret rite. Sonja, seeing me, burst out laughing. “Well look who’s here,” she said, in the slightly mocking tone that kept me wary and always joking. “Who is that tall stranger?” She stood holding the yellow Wiffle-ball bat on her shoulder, refusing to be surprised. “Come on, don’t just stand there, you can catch.” She was wearing dungarees rolled halfway up her calves, a floppy sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up above the elbows, low white sneakers without socks. Her hair startled me: it was pulled back to show her ears. I remembered the hair falling brown-blond along one side of her face.
They all turned to me now, smiled and waved me toward them, and with a sharp little laugh I sauntered in, pushing back my hair with my fingers, thrusting my hands deep into my dungaree pockets.
Then I was standing behind home plate, catching, calling balls and strikes. The girls took their game seriously, Sonja and Jeanie against Marcia and Bernice. Marcia had a sharp-breaking curveball that kept catching the corner of the upside-down pie tin. “Strike?” yelled Sonja. “My foot. It missed by a mile. Kill the umpire!” The flattened-back tops of her ears irritated me. Jeanie stood glaring at me, fists on hips. She wore an oversized boy’s shirt longer than her shorts, so that she looked naked, as if she’d thrown a shirt over a pair of underpants—her tan legs gleamed in the moonlight, her blond ponytail bounced furiously with her slightest motion, and in the folds of her loose shirt her jumpy breasts, appearing and disappearing, made me think of balls of yarn. The girls swung hard, slid into paper-plate bases, threw like boys. They shouted “Hey hey!” and “Way to go!” After a while they let me play, each taking a turn at being umpire. As we played, it seemed to me that the girls were becoming unraveled: Marcia’s lumberjack shirt was only partly tucked into her faded dungarees, wriggles of hair fell down along Jeanie’s damp cheeks, Bernice, her braces glinting, flung off the jacket tied around her waist, one of Sonja’s cuffs kept falling down. Marcia scooped up a grounder, whirled, and threw to me at second, Sonja was racing from first, suddenly she slid—and sitting there on
the grass below me, leaning back on her elbows, her legs stretched out on both sides of my feet, a copper rivet gleaming on the pocket of her dungarees, a bit of zipper showing, a hank of hair hanging over one eyebrow, she glared up at me, cried “Safe by a mile!” and broke into wild laughter. Then Jeanie began to laugh, Marcia and Bernice burst out laughing, I felt something give way in my chest and I erupted in loud, releasing laughter, the laughter of childhood, until my ribs hurt and tears burned in my eyes—and again whoops and bursts of laughter, under the blue sky of the summer night.
Sonja stood up, pushed a fallen sleeve of her sweatshirt above her elbow, and said, “How about a Coke? I’ve about had it.” She wiped her tan forearm across her damp forehead. We all followed her up the back steps into the moonlit kitchen. “Keep it down, guys,” she whispered, raising her eyes to the ceiling, as she filled glasses with ice cubes, poured hissing, clinking sodas. The other girls went back outside with their glasses, where I could hear them talking through the open kitchen window. Sonja pushed herself up onto the counter next to the dishrack and I stood across from her, leaning back against the refrigerator.
I wanted to ask her whether they always played ball at night, or whether it was something that had happened only on this night, this dream-blue night, night of adventures and revelations—night of the impossible visit she hadn’t asked me about. I wanted to hear her say that the blue night was the color of old puzzle boxes, that the world was a blue mystery, that lying awake in bed she’d imagined me coming through the night to her back yard, but she only sat on the counter, swinging her legs, drinking her soda, saying nothing.
The Knife Thrower Page 10