by Colin Wilson
I guessed that there wouldn’t be much to drink, so I went out and got two bottles of wine before I joined them; I discovered later that I couldn’t have hit on a better way of making him talk. When I went in, he seemed embarrassed, and asked me if I’d excuse him while he finished working. He was scribbling away on music paper (I gathered later that he was making a piano arrangement of some light opera by Reynaldo Hahn). His wife laid the table and hardly spoke a word. The place was fantastically untidy, and I began to wonder if I hadn’t made a mistake in coming down. Then it turned out that she was going to produce fish, which didn’t go with the red wine, and it really seemed that some fate was out to make the evening a fiasco.
For the first ten minutes of the meal, he hardly said a word, and she asked me polite questions about my writing. I began to wonder why they had invited me. However, we opened the wine—I needed it; Diana’s cooking is excellent and I was hungry. Then we started to talk about Schoenberg, whom Kirsten had known in Germany in 1930; he drank a quantity of the wine, and suddenly became very lively. I find it difficult to describe Kirsten. A curiously weak, eager-looking man—at least, that is the first impression. When he gets carried away by talk, the weakness disappears. He has fine eyes, like his wife, very deep, and almost round, with huge eyelids. A tremendous forehead, a small, thin mouth with a sensuous lower lip that would give an expression of cruelty to most men, and a yellowish complexion.
As soon as his wife saw that I was listening to him with attention, and didn’t seem disposed to smile at some of his absurdities, she became far more friendly. I can see that she is certain that he’s a genius; nevertheless, she finds it hard work being married to him.
The trouble with him is that he seems more completely ‘other worldly’ than anyone I’ve ever known. When I said I liked Beethoven’s last piano sonata, he sat down and played it right through from memory, interrupting himself to make comments like: ‘Here he leaves the world entirely behind and soars into the clouds,’ or ‘I am convinced he wrote this variation with Plato’s Philosopher-King in mind’ (I asked him why; he thumped his heart and said: ‘I feel it’). At the end of it, he explained, with a curious, ecstatic expression: ‘This sonata presages the end of commerce and all forms of human selfishness. On the day when men turn into gods, they will play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as a hymn of triumph. But then they will look back on man’s long struggle, on the painful road, on the indomitable spirit that drove us on. Then they will play opus 111 in a mood of reminiscence.’ All this greatly excited me; I found myself looking at him with a new feeling; it suddenly seemed clear to me that in spite of the inflated language he was a great man, a prophet. I asked him about his early life, and he gave me some details. He was born in Vienna in 1910, the son of a Jewish father and an Austrian mother. The whole family was musical. His uncle was a cantor in the synagogue; his father had known Brahms and Hugo Wolf. As a child he saw a great deal of Bruno Walter, and Kokoshka the painter. His mother was a Catholic, and he was brought up as a Catholic. He started to learn the organ when he was about eight. When he was twelve he played, at short notice, the organ part in one of Bruckner’s masses. He and several friends formed a music society, on the model of Schumann’s Davidsbundler. (He has a vast admiration for Schumann; he told me that, when he could afford it, he liked to work on champagne, because Schumann worked on champagne, and that when he drank the first glass out of a new bottle, he always said: ‘To the memory of a divine man.’) He said: ‘We ate and drank and breathed music; we thought of nothing but music.’ In the late twenties, his father got worried about Hitler, and they moved to Prague, and the family fell on hard times. He had studied music in Vienna, but now had to take an office job. One of his sisters died—his favourite, he said—and his father began to drink too much. He said: ‘I was in despair. I was tempted to kill myself. And it was in this mood that I first realized that I would devote my life to music. One evening, the family were all out; I thought that if I intended to gas myself, now was the time to do it. First of all, I sat down at the piano, and played myself some Mahler—my own transcription of the adagio of the tenth. Then all at once, I went into a condition of ecstasy. I had a vision. I thought that the ceiling of the room dissolved, and I was looking up into the heavens. I cannot explain my feeling, but suddenly I understood why the world has to suffer. I felt as if God leaned down to me and said: “Don’t worry. There will be an end to suffering. And when the end comes, all those who committed suicide, or died of discouragement, will want to die with shame. And the men who fought and refused to be defeated will know that they have saved the human race.” Then I started to laugh, and I played one of Beethoven’s bagatelles—the third of opus 126—and vowed that I would live as a pure artist, without compromise.’ At this point, to my surprise, his wife broke in: ‘Is it possible to live without compromise?’ He said: ‘I think so, my dear. I have somehow managed to do it.’ I felt like saying: ‘But your wife has to compromise.’ I suspect this is what she may have been thinking. However, he was in fine form by this time, finished the bottle of wine, and began telling me about Brahms. He said that Brahms once said to his father, ‘The world will be saved by music.’ Then he played me some of Brahms’s Handel variations with tremendous power and expression, although he struck the wrong key every other note. He explained that modern musicians had lost the great faith, and that they all, without exception, wrote a corrupt music of the nerves, compromising with the worst elements in modern culture. Berg’s Wozzeck seems to be his peculiar detestation, although he gets nearly as irritable about Stravinsky, whom he calls ‘a musical whore’ because, he claims, he changes his style to suit the changing taste. I asked him if there was no living composer whom he admired, and he said that the only one he cared about was Pfitzner, whose Palestrina is the greatest and most sublime opera of the twentieth century.
By this time, he had got me a little bewildered. I had begun by thinking him a crank, then swung to the opposite opinion, and decided that I’d found a genius; now every word he said propelled me back to my first opinion. I asked him why he had listened so carefully to the Martinu this afternoon; he said that it was music of tragedy, but that it was riddled with neurosis.
He then offered to play me some of his songs—a cycle of short poems by one of his old Viennese friends. He sang a couple of these to me, and I liked them—they were rather Wolfian, and sounded well in German. But he then proceeded to praise this friend extravagantly—a man called Schindler—and proposed to read me his own translations of some of Schindler’s poems. At this point, the whole thing turned into absurdity. He produced a great ledger, and proceeded to read me the most awful drivel since the great McGonagall. He was particularly enthusiastic about a long poem in praise of man, full of clichés like: ‘Thy spirit reacheth out towards the stars.’ Half-way through this thing (obviously inspired by Schiller’s Ode to Joy), he placed the ledger on the floor, leaned back in his chair, and proceeded to recite from memory, staring at the ceiling, and sounding like some old ham from Drury Lane entertaining a theatre queue. I glanced at his wife; she kept her eyes on her knitting, but she looked very pink. I could now understand why she hangs around with a bookmaker type even though she thinks her husband a man of genius.
Finally, he told me at length about an opera he is working on, to be called ‘The Spirit of Man’, and based loosely on Imre Madàch’s Tragedy of Man, which, he tells me, is the greatest Hungarian play. He even played me his overture to the opera, but apart from a few lively passages, it didn’t strike me as in any way interesting. His wife fell asleep in her chair as he went on playing (the poor thing has to be at work at 7.30 in the morning), but he didn’t seem to notice. He suggested that I should write him a libretto for a one-act opera. By this time, I was half asleep, so I agreed. He said he wanted something about witchcraft. Finally, his wife woke up, and staggered off to bed, after muttering good night. He proposed he should come up to my room and listen to some Beeth
oven; I was half asleep, so said that I didn’t want to wake the people above me. This view obviously struck him as completely eccentric, but he shrugged, and offered to make some coffee; I said I was tired, and came off to bed. He went on playing the Handel variations, and I lay in bed thinking about his wife. She is certainly one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen, even though I would find it impossible to explain the reason. Her colouring is extraordinarily delicate, so that when she blushes she looks like one of those blossoms painted by Hokusai, and she moves with the grace of a dancer. Unfortunately, this life of overwork she leads makes her look pale and strained. Obviously, she appeals to me because, in some indefinable way, she is my ‘type’. I could go deeper than this, but it would take me pages; besides, it would involve being immodest. . . . Yet I believe she knows how deeply I’m attracted to her, and accepts my admiration as she might accept a box of sweets. I’m not sure how far she responds to it.
Later: After writing the above, I suddenly felt an intense desire to see Diana again. As it was around midday, I walked along to Sidney Street. She had told me the name of the place she worked in, so I hung around until half past twelve, when the girls came out. Diana wasn’t among them; I waited another ten minutes, then approached another girl who came out and asked about Mrs Kirsten. She said that Mrs Kirsten was inside, eating her lunch, so I asked her if she’d bring her out. A few minutes later, Diana came out, looking bewildered, and rather disappointed when she saw me (I wonder if she expected her bookmaker type?). I said I’d hoped I could buy her some lunch in return for the supper last night. She actually looked scared, and said she always ate sandwiches for lunch. I asked her if she’d eaten them yet, and she admitted she hadn’t, so I grabbed her arm and told her that today was going to be the exception. She protested—said it would make her sleepy to eat a full lunch—but I insisted, so she finally came with me to a place in the Mile End Road, where we got decent lamb chops. She wouldn’t talk much—I noticed that her eyes are red today; I don’t know whether she’s been crying, or if it’s just fatigue. At first I thought that she might be feeling guilty, eating lunch with a strange man, so I asked her if she thought her husband would mind me taking her to lunch. She looked startled, and said: ‘Oh no, of course not,’ and actually managed to smile, as if I’d at last said something really funny.
I even managed to persuade her to come into the pub next door, although she’d only drink fruit juice. I asked her point-blank about money, and she admitted that they often live on four pounds a week. This is the real reason why she eats sandwiches instead of a full lunch. (She wouldn’t admit this—claimed that it was to do with her figure; but the poor thing wouldn’t be fat even if she expanded to twice her present size.) Her husband makes a little money by orchestrating various operettas and musical shows, and making piano versions of Oscar Strauss, Messager, etc. But apparently he spends most of this on his ‘invention’, a sort of organ, which he keeps in a shop in Hanbury Street, and on which he has now worked for five years.
I asked her how she’d met Kirsten. At first, she was unwilling to talk, but when I’d prised a few sentences out of her, she went on of her own accord. I found it an interesting story. Diana’s father apparently made a lot of money in manufacturing some domestic appliance. But being a domineering and reactionary sort of man, the other members of the firm got sick of him and somehow forced him out. He then wasted most of his money in lawsuits against the firm. Diana, who is the only daughter (there are two brothers, but the father hates them) was at a finishing school in Switzerland at the time all this was going on. Her mother died; she came back to England to look after her father, who took out all his domineering instincts on her. As he wasted money in lawsuits, they were finally forced to live in a Liverpool boarding house. Her father went to terrific lengths to scare away young men who were attracted by Diana; he was completely possessive, and would hardly allow her out of the house without making her explain where she’d been. Finally, Kirsten moved into the house, in the cheapest room. The father apparently took rather a liking to him, although he made no secret of thinking him a poor fish. Also, no doubt, he thought Diana was safe enough from Kirsten, since Kirsten was so much her senior, and not particularly attractive. However, Diana found herself much attracted by Kirsten’s cranky idealism—it made a pleasant change from her father’s unending preoccupation with money—and also felt a certain pity for him because he seemed so helpless, and would allow any shopkeeper to swindle him. This went on for about six months—neither of them ever speaking a word about being attracted to one another, but just talking for hours when the old man was asleep or out. Then one day, her father caught them talking on the stairs outside Kirsten’s room. He flew into a rage, accused Kirsten of seducing his daughter, and demanded that the landlord should throw Kirsten out. He must have had a lot of influence with the landlord, for Kirsten was given notice. Diana knew he had no money. She had a little money of her own—left by her mother—but not much. She tried to give this to Kirsten, and when he said he wouldn’t take it, told him that in that case, she would go with him. The same evening, she eloped with him, and they were married two days later. Kirsten, apparently, would never have dreamed of making any advances himself! He didn’t even tell her he loved her until after they were married.
She didn’t say much about her married life, but I think I can read between the lines. She then discovers that, from having a tyrannical father, she lands herself with a husband who is a mixture of a father and a helpless and very selfish child. Apart from her finishing school, the poor girl never seems to have got any fun out of life.
She admitted to being born in 1932. That makes her twenty-four now; a year younger than I am, and twenty-two years younger than her husband.
I walked back to work with her, and watched her go into the miserable dump with a crowd of healthy-looking cockney girls, all yawping to one another about rock ’n’ roll and Elvis Presley, and I realized that I feel very protective about her. I suppose that’s half-way to being in love.
Later: Kirsten came and interrupted me as I was writing, and asked me if I’d like to hear him play the organ. I thought he meant his curious invention; so, being anxious to get a look at it, I went with him. However, we only went as far as the church. He seems to have some kind of arrangement with the vicar, who allows him to play the organ on certain afternoons. He is, as far as I can judge, an excellent player. After playing me some Franck and Buxtehude, he finally did the Bach Toccata and Fugue, and made it sound tremendous and quite inevitable. He went on and on, for over two hours, while I sat with him up in the organ loft (and consequently unable to escape). There was no stopping him—Widor, Liszt, even Brahms. His approach is rather fierce and square, but he is so obviously absorbed by the music that you fail to notice the imperfections.
We walked back here at six (he remembered that his wife hadn’t a key, and that she’d probably be waiting). However, she wasn’t there, so I went in with him. More reminiscences of the Davidsbundler in Vienna, and of Max Brod in Prague. He also repeated that he wanted me to do him a libretto about witchcraft, so I said I’d go and see what they had in the local library. I did this, and got out a couple of interesting books by Montague Summers. I took these into the local pub, feeling certain that he’d invade my room as soon as he heard me come in! He seems to have taken a great liking to me, but uses me as a kind of tape recorder, to be talked at. He insists that I call him Robert. And when I mentioned that I’d taken Diana out for lunch, all he said was, ‘I hope she didn’t allow you to pay for her,’ as if the poor girl was in the habit of cadging lunches from his friends.
When I finally got home, I found Gertrude waiting for me (I’d left my door open). She was in a rather gloomy mood, and began asking me about Caroline, saying that Caroline’s mother was sure I was still seeing her, and that she was afraid Caroline might get herself pregnant. I told her that I’d met Caroline a few days ago, and that she told me s
he was getting married to an actor. This seemed to reassure her. Someone knocked on my door, and Diana opened it. When she saw Gertrude, she looked disappointed, and said it didn’t matter. I suspect she wanted to talk to me about something, and feel sorry I wasn’t alone.
Gertrude immediately looked suspicious about her, so I had to tell her about Kirsten and his wife at length, and my project of the opera libretto. I saw the gleam of predatory interest in her eye when I talked about Kirsten. (There are times when I believe that Gertrude would like to collect a houseful of geniuses and devote her life to darning their socks.) As I don’t particularly want to provide Gertrude with further reasons for coming here, I overcame the temptation to introduce her to Kirsten. Gertrude then proposed that we go back to Hampstead to supper. So we drove back—it was a pleasant evening, with a clear sky—and had supper at Gertrude’s. There was a constraint between us most of the time, and it didn’t improve when Brother Robbins dropped in about ten o’clock. He glared at me, and Gertrude seemed to be apologetic. I wanted to go home, but she took me aside and asked me to wait until he’d gone. But he showed no sign of going, and when it was time for my last bus home, I decided to leave. Gertrude looked unhappy, but I went.