The Dedalus Book of German Decadence

by Ray Furness

  And then he took the road into the town.

  […]

  As they were seeking their places in the darkened auditorium the last bars of the overture signalled the raising of the curtain. A muted melody rose from the orchestra, and the finely-cut features of Richard Strauss could be seen against the background of the players.

  Dressed in white, a crowd of lamenting ephebes, maidens and elders swarmed around a marble altar in a dark funereal grove, with torches and wreaths in their hands; everyday faces, singing songs of night, threnodies in an archaistic minuet, passions forced into a lace jabot a la Louis Quinze … and suddenly the isolated cry ‘Euridice!’ from a man with a woman’s hips and a high voice, the whole impression muted, mannered and mild, like an Ionic column with a Baroque capital. ‘Orpheus is written for an alto voice,’ Meinewelt whispered, ‘Isn’t that a wonderful piece of alienation? We hear a woman representing a man who is lamenting the beloved.’

  The chorus now separated to perform sombre, stately measures: a youth mounted the steps to the altar and extinguished his torch at the top. All were silent, and laid their wreaths at the base of the sacred, memorial flame, disappearing silently into the undergrowth; gradually the orchestra died into silence. Orpheus alone remained. He gazed around him, then up at the architraves, at the painted trees and the dead torch before the white altar whose flame – a real one – flared and twisted. Abstractedly he seized his lyre and plucked the strings which gave forth a quiet, humming sound, he raised his brow and the footlights cast light and darkness across his delicate features. He was singing a recitative, quiet, sustained and dignified, misted over darkly by the irretrievable loss of the lamented one.

  ‘I hope you like it?’ Meinewelt asked quietly. ‘By the way, I’ve just seen her, she’s here!’

  ‘Who? Euridice?’

  ‘Her, Désirée, the woman I told you about in the foyer. How she sits there, God, how she sits there!’

  Sebastian gazed steadfastly at Orpheus who had thrown away his lyre and broken out into sobs of desperation. How strange it all is, mused Sebastian … Where is the stage? Where am I? I have been brought into a theatre before I have really seen what reality is: and am I to trust his, Meinewelt’s guidance? At home I didn’t recognize any division between dream and reality, between myself as poet and man, my twin brother. And now all this new confusion! Am I Orpheus, or is he me? I am sitting here motionless between all these people, my senses alert to what is happening, and through me are flooding the feelings of centuries! […] My God, why do I feel like this? I cannot shake it off, why don’t the trees bow before him and the wild animals creep from the bushes when they hear such laments? But of course, it’s only a stage in a theatre … And in real life? But I’m forgetting, it’s only a legend. And yet, he – or she – has tears in her eyes and she weeps for a woman, and it affects me so deeply. What’s Hecuba to her? And she knows that she’ll win Euridice, and then lose her, because she’s learned her lines. The spectators sit in silence and listen, entranced.

  […]

  Désirée Wilmoth was sitting in a box in the stalls: she was wearing her cameo which was gleaming on her heart against the deep-violet background of her plain brocade dress, cut low in the Florentine manner; the cameo shone in a milky iridescence. Her throat was visible, as was a narrow strip of her splendid bosom. Meinewelt saw and heard nothing of the opera, and only had eyes for the gleaming spot on her heart: his imagination seized hold of it, and he soon saw her gleaming white body, hard, with classical outlines: one unique jewel […] ‘Let’s go,’ he whispered, before the final scene. ‘There’s the final apotheosis, I know, but let’s get out … Come.’ They left the theatre on tiptoe. And in the street Sebastian stood still. ‘Meinewelt, who is she?’ The editor looked at him. A radiance had spread over this young countenance, and candles were flickering in his eyes as though the joy of life had set them in the windows when the Queen was passing. Meinewelt slipped his arm through Sebastian’s and pulled him forwards. ‘Come, let’s go and see her. She said I should, after the performance. We’ll go there now …’ They set off, and as they walked Sebastian asked about Sulzwasser, whom Meinewelt had pointed out before the opera began, and who had exchanged a few words. ‘Well, what did he say to you, Sebastian?’

  ‘He didn’t look me in the face. He looked down at me, and his gaze had a biting quality, I felt it on my skin … and then he gazed at the lady in the box. It offended me that he kept staring at the box as though he had no interest at all in what he was saying to me. It was the same old stuff, young man, young poet, and in a mixture of pity and irony. But who is she, Meinewelt? I beg you, tell me, and who is this man?’

  ‘Oh, someone who plays the stock exchange, some millionaire, I don’t know. Certainly he has a name, and is talented; he invented something once … He’s one of those youthful acquaintances that stick to you for ever afterwards like a burr which you can’t shake off.’

  ‘He was talking about Parsifal, I couldn’t quite make out the context, Parsifal and Kundry, Orpheus and the Maenads … I couldn’t understand a word, yet there seemed to be some sort of intelligence at work. But, my God, why did he seem to be so repulsive? He also claimed that Orpheus was the first decadent and that you had done well to take me to this opera above all, there was no other work which made the listener feel so close to the hero …’

  […]

  He strode forward impetuously, and Meinewelt had difficulty in keeping in step with him … The smooth facade of the Imperial Library reared up before them with the pointed twin towers of the Ludwigskirche in the background. During the ride to the theatre, and also that morning, Sebastian had been struck by a sudden vision of Venice, and had recalled an old print that his father had had in an album at home and which he had often looked at – Venice, a section of the Doge’s Palace with the thin needle of the Campanile behind; and this had sufficed to still the yearning of a youthful soul, the flight towards beauty, the past, the sun – and this gentle reminiscence made him tremble with ecstasy. To glide along the canals in a black gondola, past the Lido, out into the rocking plain of the lagoons, half sitting, half reclining, his cheek resting against a warm hand, a round knee, and on the lids of his eyes, eyes turned inwards, towards happiness, to feel mild blessing rain, to hold back the verses which would break forth under an unspeakable pressure, to restrain them so that the holy, silent hour should not be tainted; to know nothing of the presence of the world than the music of the waves and the cries of the gondolier, melancholy and melodious, and to glide through the year-long evening hours, with no wishes, no desires, endless …

  ‘Look!’

  Meinewelt had seized his arm. An English coupé was driving past them, drawn by two greyish yellow horses, and the figure within the carriage became visible as it passed beneath a street lamp. Startled, Sebastian doffed his cap and gazed after the carriage, which drew all his dreams with it and was soon swallowed up by the darkness.

  ‘Meinewelt, don’t torment me!’

  ‘It was Désirée Wilmoth.’

  ‘You’ve already mentioned that name.’

  ‘And the name is enough. I’m not a poet, and can’t drag all sorts of adjectives from my brain; besides, she’s not the sort of woman who needs any. Do we not say Astarte? Semiramis? Sarah Bernhardt? I simply say, Désirée Wilmoth. That should suffice. That is nothing more, and nothing less, than everything.’

  ‘But does she write? Is she a poetess?’

  The editor laughed aloud at the recumbent statues of philosophers which decorated the driveway to the library which they were just passing. ‘No, God knows, she isn’t that, she is a poem, rather […] And how old are you? Twenty-three? Very well, let me tell you this. He who keeps her after he’s twenty-five will remain a wretched cripple for the rest of his life, but woe to him who’s never possessed her!’

  […]

  A small table with sandwiches, tea and fruit was standing in the round room with the tapestries, the overhead lighting and the gle
aming parquet floor. The groom ushered in the visitors, told them to help themselves, waited in the doorway, then carried the table out. The two men were alone, and waited for the mistress of the house.

  There was another table in the room, more of a large, oval ebony plate standing upon a dainty taboret base; on this table there were something in the region of twenty porcelain figures, milk-white and exceptionally dainty. There were gentlemen with elegant swords and elegant lace falling over their wrists, and ladies in enormous crinolines who were curtseying to each other or standing engrossed in porcelain conversations; others, young aristocrats by their appearance, were dancing a minuet in the corner to the strains of a small orchestra (one could hear the fine, glazed harmonies of fiddle, viola d’amore and flute); an aged roué, with tricorne under his arm, was looking through a lorgnette raised in a most affected manner at the young ladies before him who graciously bowed their heads with their enormous castles of hair and rested their thin arms on their crinolines; finally another beau with a wrinkled face and a jet black beauty-spot beneath the right-hand corner of his mouth, the only splash of colour in this milk-white world.

  ‘You wished to say something?’

  ‘No – no … Oh please, don’t say anything to me at this moment.’

  Sebastian had stepped to the side and was standing against the Gobelins which portrayed the fountain of youth: he was standing next to the group of senile decrepits who were staggering with heads bowed down the steps. Strange … very strange … Had he not experienced all this before? The hours of this day had passed like a procession of veiled memories; now all was still, and he could look the last in the eye. And silently he grasped its insubstantial form. This name, Désirée; this room; no light and yet such lightness, no life and yet this long procession of elongated figures, moving in a circle, and then the tiny dance of white figurines, comical and serious, moving in a delicate dance, and he in the middle, with that name upon his lips, silent, slumbering, yet weaving a glittering, gossamer thread around it all, a web from which the soul called forth names, colours, movements, dimly at first, yet firmer in its plenitude, a rich cornucopia of dream-like seas, which the soul could drink, long, long, longer than from any other earthly pabulum … In a trance he compared the room in which he was now unquestionably standing with a room miles from here which he had glimpsed in a dream one July night, and piece by piece he recognised it all again and within this implausible reality there was that word Desiderata, a word he had seen the day before in a Latin textbook and from which, like a calyx in a dream, this whole miraculous world had blossomed. […] This is what it was! Sebastian had found it. He gently repeated the word: Desiderata … that which, after it had passed through the refining power of nocturnal dreams had lodged in the imagination of the sixteen-year-old as the expression and the essence of all that time might have in store for him, and all that, unclear at first, would crystallize as yearnings within him. For weeks he had wandered through the forests surrounding the castle, with this word as his only companion: it hovered high and erect beside him, a slender figure of supernatural solemnity, with earnest eyes, eyes which he could well imagine gazing from Lady Wilmoth’s countenance.

  But he had seen, one night towards the end of August, a splendid rain of meteors through the tree tops, and as he watched the dying, falling stars (stars which he had woven as a diadem in the phantom’s hair) he remembered the Latin word ‘sidera’, and was darkly aware of the ambiguity of the name ‘Desiderata’ – the one who is desired, but also far! Very well, yes, a pun, a subtle word play of a young student, the febrile juggling with concepts of a boy in puberty, but a melancholy logic formed a bridge between synonyms and conclusion: that desire removes everything that it touches. This insight for a long time drove Sebastian to the point of despair. Now, indeed, he had to laugh at such childish notions, but it was poignant to feel their roots deep within his heart […]

  He suddenly blushed to the roots of his hair, for it was only now that he noticed Désirée, who had entered some minutes before.

  ‘Dreamer!’ laughed Meinewelt, and Désirée was also smiling. But only for a second; she invited both to sit and took her place on a high armchair which was standing next to the table with the Nymphenburg figurines and across the back of which a length of purple cloth fell in folds to the floor. She had kept on her violet gown but was not wearing her cameo on her heart. She sat there, her chin resting in her left hand, her hand resting on the arm of the chair whilst her slim right hand, white, and concealed by the narrow sleeve to the base of her thumb, rested upon her lap.

  […]

  They were riding, driving in a small, warm square of cosiness through the small windows of which, to left and right, they could look out at the alien, frosty world outside; they drove through streets and alleys, across a square, beneath an archway through all the changing images of the city, lulled by the gentle feeling of enclosure and remoteness and the drumming of the horse’s hooves upon the snow. It had begun to grow dark outside and the darkness in the coupé gathered even more tangibly between the two people. It stopped before the Imperial Library and the Ludwigskirche, that ‘piece of old Venice’. The groom jumped from the carriage to light the lanterns, and in the light Désirée could see a troubled expression on Sebastian’s face. It was at this spot that he had caught the first glimpse of her, in this same carriage, silently gliding away from him …

  […]

  The carriage turned into a side street and before them lay the English Garden with its gleaming masses of snow, white despite the darkness, and the glittering starkness of its ancient trees which, like half-frozen giants, were pulling the night from the skies to cover themselves. The horse’s hooves were muffled by the snow and, rocked in silence, they galloped along the paths of the English Garden. Melancholy overcame them both, and, taking her hand, Sebastian slid on to his knees and buried his face in her lap.

  ‘I am suffering, Désirée, I don’t know where to turn. The world does not treat me kindly, and an alien poison creeps through my veins, ceaselessly. There are so many good deeds that I could do, but fear to do them, as I might seem abject to myself. My heart is wounded and I can no longer create as once I could. I must … share you with other people, yes, I must, Désirée, and my breath is tainted with envy and bitterness.’

  ‘But, my little one, with whom must you share my heart?’

  ‘I used to write as I breathed – naturally, freely – but now I am oppressed. The verses that I once wrote were like a crystal edifice in which I saw myself as the centre: now all is dim, and I can no longer see myself in my work.’

  ‘My little one, with whom must you share my heart?’

  ‘I don’t know … with him, Sulzwasser, with everyone …’

  ‘What foolishness! My little one, what do these people mean to me? Can you not see how limited they are in their expressions? And are there any boundaries between us?’ She let go of his hand and pressed her cheek to his head, speaking gently.

  ‘I love you. Why worry about the rest? If your poetry cannot satisfy you, then think of a more faithful beloved.’

  ‘No, no, you mustn’t ask me to do that, how base do you think I am, Désirée?’

  ‘I want you for myself, do you understand? You must belong to me and nobody else, for with me alone can you find what eludes you. You must deny everything that does not have my name on it … You must think of nothing but me, as long as I wish it. This is the secret!’

  This last sentence she spoke loudly, solemnly, over his head, as though it were an incantation and then she added, gently, as though she were speaking to an invalid: ‘All your doubts will disappear when you surrender yourself to me.’

  Her hands were gently stroking the top of his head; beneath the warmth of her fingers which had lightly dishevelled his hair Sebastian had the feeling that his thoughts, feelings and energies were spun together into one thread which gradually, and without his being able to say how it happened, enfolded the nerves of this woman like the st
rings of an instrument, so that they sounded fuller, stronger as he himself was sinking, limp and broken. She was still talking with her even, quiet voice whose comments were never overheard. Sebastian was overwhelmed by the yielding softness of resignation: he no longer sought to understand the sense of the words whose gentle music, fused into one, was passing over him. […]

  He noticed a place in Désirée’s fur jacket where the fine hairs of the cloth opened and closed as her breast rose and fell. With wide-open nostrils he breathed the perfume with which her underclothes were always sprinkled and which swam in the warm atmosphere of the carriage like a damp cloud. The bevelled panes of the windows were also haunting with their frames which were of a reddish-brown colour, whilst outside the coupé was painted a dark green. You could see the snowy lawns outside the carriage refracted into rainbow colours through the bevelled glass edges, a delightful play of colours, a melting landscape, something to which he would love to sink, in oleaginous softness, expire, die …

  He dimly felt that he was starting to lose his reason beneath the caresses of these warm fingers which were paralysing him, sucking him dry, destroying him: a slackness had suffused him, making his joints liquid, his sinews limp … ‘Give me all that you have withheld from me, give me the last thing of all, I shall belong to you for ever’ … the voice was singing, and when she had finished he felt her hands lifted from his head and, awoke.

  […]

  With the first mild days of Spring the greyhound, Only, began to creep around the house in a sick, miserable manner, and he became so ill that the doctor had to put the faithful animal out of its misery in the garden in front of the villa. Désirée watched the execution from the window. Next day she sent the French maid to an animal dealer in Bogenhausen and she returned with a large, splendid cat with long black fur and a pink fleck between its eyes: Désirée gave it the name Pandora.