And then others came down from the stage as well: the Roman girl; the rough form of a peasant woman from olden days; a lanky albino chap with watery eyes; Anja, a little girl bundled up in a sheepskin, the clown in the troupe, now coughing and rapidly drawing on a cigarette in her soft mouth. They all clustered around Friedrich, welcomed him, and asked him for news of home, as they called the country he had just left, although to them, Russian émigrés from the wave of 1917, it could hardly have been home. Fedor took charge, he spoke for Friedrich, gave answers on his behalf to questions [to which Friedrich had not collected himself] and finally said "Du" to him, taking his arm with a generous, fraternal gesture: "What do you want to drink, let's have a bite to eat, come and join us at the buffet."
A long table had been set up, at which members of the troupe but also other persons were sitting. People who weren't directly involved with the cabaret but were somehow friends or hangers-on, who got a meal ticket from one or other member. Friedrich saw faces that looked tense, hungry, and unsure. "They are refugees," he said to himself, and then he thought: But the czar's no longer alive, so why are they sitting here in the basement chewing their bread like anarchists on the eve of the great day when they will take the bomb they've hidden in their coat, and throw it at the feet of the horses drawing the Imperial carriage? There was a measure of repugnance and disapproval in Friedrich. He felt bourgeois, which he hadn't really before, a man who acted by the lights of reason and sense. "Perhaps I'm in a bad mood," he said to himself. "Something is predisposing me against these people." He was not a loudmouth. He wasn't happy to have to talk to strangers, with a lot of people he didn't know, of whom he knew only what he thought he saw, and whose society he had not sought. Principally, however, had he come here to sit so far away from Sibylle, who was only one of the voices in the general conversation? He was sitting next to her, he had at least managed that, but could he do more than look at her from the side? Questions, questions. She smells of something. Maybe it's old greasepaint grown rancid. She looks excited. How did she fall in with these people in the first place? She's no Russian, she's from the west, I'm more of an Easterner than she is.
"Can we go?" he said.
And she: "Where to, everything here closes at midnight."
He hung his head. Do I still desire her? I can't even say whether I find her attractive. Her face doesn't have the power it once had, to fling me to the ground. I have an actress next to me, a member of a troupe of savages, who seem intent on conferring the gamy taste of darkness to everything they do. Now Anja over there, the soft round face above the shaggy white sheepskin, and the tired expression of a child still awake at the end of the party, I could feel some tenderness for. Whereas Sibylle, why? All right then, then it'll be over, I'll go home to my hotel, and tomorrow I'll travel on, have a wonderful time, see the south and the sun and the sea.
"Where are you staying?"
The question was from Fedor, and he was thrown into a panic. He said: "The Grand Hotel," and he said it quietly, and he saw, before anyone was able to say anything, that it was something to be ashamed of. He explained: "It was the only hotel I knew by name, and I wanted to be right on the lake."
Sibylle asked: "How long are you staying for?"
He said: "Only till tomorrow."
"But we've got so much to talk about, and I wanted to go out with you somewhere!"
Her face was turned toward him now, and he saw it plainly, and he scraped away layers of what might be the bad air in this smoky room till she was the way he remembered her. Her mouth was without lipstick, and he thought: She used to take more care of herself. But then he thought that that was probably inevitable, because whom did she have to look after her? He felt like taking her hands between his and warming them, as if they had been those of a child that has fallen into the water and is lying on the stones of the quayside, trembling and pale, while the heroic policeman has left home, left wife and child and mother [and left the group photographs on his walls], and gone out in a boat after her, pulled her out with a boat hook, getting himself thoroughly wet in the process, and gives the alarm.
There was dismay. The group piped up. "But then you'll miss the performance?"
Friedrich admitted he would, and felt thoroughly rude. To these people, the performance meant everything. And Friedrich wanted to see Sibylle after all, had to see Sibylle. "All right. No, I can stay another day."
A doorman came and said he wanted to close. The fat bartender counted the takings. "We'll buy a bottle of schnapps," said Fedor, "and you can come with us; this is a miserable town, everything closes down at midnight."
And there it was again, his heart was once more in someone else's hand, sometimes they squeezed it shut, sometimes they allowed it to breathe, it wasn't to die on them, a little bird in a cage that had to sing. His chest collapsed, he was close to shaking. "With you?" Of course, when Fedor had fetched him from the buffet and led him into the theater to Sibylle, even then he had known it. And now there were the naked facts. You know there's a pillar in the dark corridor, and still you cry out in shock and pain when you walk into it. Fedor? He said: "No, no, I can't bear it, it's too much."
The three of them piled into a cab. Friedrich sat next to Sibylle, Fedor squatted on the foldaway seat opposite them. Once again, it was Friedrich's wish that the drive might go on forever. They zigzagged through shadows. Into a suburb, a long way from the lake. "Here we are, we'd better give the porter a tip"; the cab stopped; a brass sign winked: ST PETER'S HOSTEL. "Are you staying here, Sibylle?"
"Of course, you know I am."
"What about Fedor?"
"He is too."
"I'm tired," Friedrich said. "You know, the long journey and everything, I don't want any more to drink, I'll just go home, good night."
Fedor seemed not to understand. He was disappointed. "Hang on, just a minute, I thought we were going to have some fun, celebrate your arrival, Sibylle's so pleased to see you!"
Well, that was nice of Fedor, and Friedrich felt he was much, much older than Fedor, who was certainly no younger than himself, and he said: "Well tomorrow, maybe tomorrow." Then he shook hands with Sibylle and kissed her on the cheek.
"Will you come and get me, ten o'clock, I'm in room fourteen."
"Sure, I'll pick you up, ten o'clock, St. Peter's, room fourteen." He climbed back into the taxi, and drove off. "The Grand Hotel," he managed to say, feeling it might just well have been the lake.
When he awoke, it was seven o'clock and still dark. The passage outside was being swept. A broom scratched at the doormats, shoes were returned from being polished. There was a rumbling of pipes in the walls, the heating came on and still it felt cold. What was he supposed to do? He was pale, and his eyes were wide open, staring up at the ceiling of his cave, and on into infinity.
When I was still living in the Akademiestrasse, I was able to shout and roar like a trapped animal, Friedrich could remember. And that, after just six months, had been what he was reduced to.
THERE IS, obviously, a lot of literature about love, but a whole novel, and about one desperate, all-consuming, and unconsummated relationship, and little else besides?! One might come up with Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, Wedekinds Lulu plays, Heinrich Mann's The Blue Angel; there are a few similarities as well to Proust—Swann expending so much feeling on Odette, a woman who wasn't even his type, "mon genre"—and to Thomas Mann—Ingeborg Holm puts her hand, "not even a particularly slender or shapely little girls hand," to the back of her head, and Tonio Kröger falls in love for a lifetime—but it remains true to say that the obsessive intensity of A Sad Affair is more like that of lyric poetry, painting, ballet, or song: Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci," Dowson's exquisite "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae," the pictures of Munch or Klimt or Schiele, Swan Lake, and any number of art songs and pop songs.
This is the more unexpected from an author who, in his masterly trilogy of novels from the 1950s—Pigeons on the Grass (1951), The Hothouse (1953), and
Death in Rome (1954)—showed himself such an adept at the bigger picture: politics, history, society, culture. The world in those books, not unnaturally, is a fallen, a defeated, a recrudescent, and, in its bones, an unreformed world. It's as though the later Koeppen has turned on its head Pascal's nostrum about the cause of human misery being our inability to remain in our rooms; how, he argues, can there be anything as frail and contingent as human happiness, as long as the macro-scene is so full of iniquity? Surely everything—including our rooms and our selves— is warped, if not crushed, by the weight of these bigger tensions and untruths. Love is perhaps the most degraded thing of all: a feeling produced from cynicism, opportunism, or vacancy, a transaction somewhere on the scale between seduction and rape. In a world of rubble, where is one going to find a rose garden?
Koeppen said of himself—whereupon, helpfully, others said it of him—that he never wrote his books at the right time. Just as the books of the 1950s were published to howls of protest and indignation and hurt amour-propre, so this book he wrote in 1934—his debut, a young man's book—has nothing of Weimar or fascism or Germany. Its first action is to take its hero out of the country— never even named—and across a border. It barely deigns to use any place-names, and certainly no German ones: not until the action reaches Italy are streets and towns thought to be worth naming. Surely this already, this turning his back on the place just as it was so full of itself, so full of history and catastrophe, and on the cusp of much more history and catastrophe, is a gesture of tacit contempt. Nothing here for Left or Right, it seems to say: A curse on both your houses! Not that it has gone abroad to seek its political quarry either (as Koeppen did in Death in Rome, twenty years later); there is almost nothing of the feeling of gathering clouds, a restoration of national pride, and the sinister bombast of Mussolini (of the kind that Thomas Mann got into his wonderful short story from 1930, "Mario and the Magician"), no political curiosity at all. As we see from the later books, it wasn't that this type of thinking and writing was beyond Koeppen, even then, or ever. No, he wants to write the wrong book at the wrong time—even if it's his first.
It's hard to think of another writer as rebellious and ornery and uncompromising as Wolfgang Koeppen; I am reminded a little of Elizabeth Bishop, who said, "I have always written poetry more by not writing it." It was really not a time to make your debut with a love story, from a Jewish publisher. In a fine specimen of Nazi literary criticism—understood as an annex to the penal code, or, less formally, as an incitement to murder—one reviewer, Herbert Göpfert, fulminated:
I at any rate read nothing in these pages relating to love, only those surrogates that certain scribblers once offered in its place. The young persons in this squalid cabaret- and bordello-milieu, talking incessantly across each other of their repressed feelings, are such puny beings that one is forced to put the question quite directly: Are there really still such creatures among us, and if there are, do these striplings and tomboys have to be put in books? If it had been an old émigré writing like this, one might have understood—but a young poet, in our time? Theres only one prescription I have to offer: labor camp!"
Koeppen, in Holland, managed to laugh. (A Sad Affair was duly put on the list of condemned books in 1936.)
What happened was this: Koeppen was a young journalist writing for the Berliner Börsen-Courier. A piece of his was seen and admired by Max Tau, an editor working for the prestigious Jewish publishing house of Bruno Cassirer. They met; Tau was very taken with Koeppen; offered him an advance to write a novel; Koeppen took the advance (took it to Italy), spent it, and came back without the novel. Max Tau—who does seem to have understood his man— realized that the carrot alone would not work, and offered a mild version of the stick to supplement it. They tried locking Koeppen up in empty apartments with a typewriter and plenty of paper. Eventually, one such arrangement worked, and Koeppen wrote his book—as I think he wrote all his books—very quickly. He had a resistance to writing, and in particular to writing what he thought someone else wanted or expected him to write, and this, in conjunction with his journalist's bad habit of leaving everything to the very last minute, must have made him an exasperating author. He wrote little in the course of a long career—five completed novels in sixty years—but when he did, the results were unexpected and worth having. The long periods of truancy surrounding short patches of zeal and productivity are a sort of guarantee. You don't get the oases without the desert. He was lucky in that he found three patient and supportive publishers, Cassirer, Henry Goverts, and latterly Suhrkamp. Tau said: "As an author, he was one of the compulsives, and encouragement and admonition weren't really much use. He would generally take off."
A Sad Affair (Eine unglückliche Liebe, but neither term translates well, and this is the only form of the pairing that I found satisfactory in English) is—it's no very great surprise—almost entirely true. (This also makes it an oddity in Koeppens published fiction: elsewhere, he's not a straightforwardly autobiographical writer.) Friedrich seems utterly real: poor, vague, with secret, remote ambitions, educated, unworldly, intense, gauche, not perhaps very good at being young. The idea of him running everywhere is wonderful— a young man with a full heart and a full head, the sort of literary youth that probably went out of production in the 1980s. A little more surprising is the fact that Sibylle, the ideal and object—subject would be a better word—of Friedrich's passion is also about as real as a character in a book can be. She is based on Sibylle (sic!) Schloss, a young, half-Jewish (Koeppen doesn't say so) actress. When her career in the legitimate or serious theater was blocked as a result, she fell in with Erika Mann's anti-Fascist Pfeffermühle cabaret in Zurich (the unnamed foreign city of the novel), where the renowned German actress Therese Giehse also worked; Giehse, incidentally, is the somewhat Brechtian "peasant woman from olden days," and Mann herself is described as having "a Roman head." Koeppen (he doesn't say this either) wrote one or two chansons for his inamorata to perform. He persuaded her to visit Venice with him. Schloss was in her early twenties, heart-stoppingly beautiful, unconventional in her morality, and an interesting person with an interesting background (somewhat persiflaged by Koeppen). When it was published, Sibylle read and admired Eine unglückliche Liebe, and later on, when she worked in Brentano's bookshop on Fifth Avenue, she recommended the German edition to customers looking for "true-life romance." My source is a fascinating and very well-researched book called Wolfgang Koeppen, 1933-1948, published in 2001, by Jörg Döring, who tracked down and interviewed Sibylle Schloss on the Upper East Side, where she still lives. Other characters, like the wonderfully named Bosporus, Walter the critic, Fedor, and others, are also drawn from life. In fact, the only part of the book that is substantially made up is the adventure with Anja.
Tyranny has been described as the mother of metaphor, in which case, love—a state of emergency, a politics of two (a formulation that bridges the gap to Koeppen's later work)—perhaps might qualify as a form of tyranny. Certainly, it is a wonderfully generative—one might call it an aerobic—condition, fully exercising the image-making and likeness-building faculties of the imagination. Friedrich questions, rants, performs, devotes, hymns. He goes through all his gears, gets put through all his paces. And while he says "Yes," Sibylle as indefatigably and insistently says "No," perhaps the two great human freedoms. In her character, it seems to me, Koeppen investigates the pressure put upon beauty, a rather underexplored subject in fiction. Sibylle is a compassionately viewed victim, at least as much as she is a femme fatale, a Salome or a Jael or a Medusa. The beautiful are different, and not just because, as Hemingway would have had to have said, "They are better-looking." The accumulation of private expectation becomes almost a public pressure. The issue for beauty is how to be—or how not to be—publicly owned.
Still, A Sad Affair is mostly Friedrich's show, and the book is endearingly full of his instability, his zigs and zags, as he seeks forever to "travel," only to encounter the "frontiers" or the "glass wall" of a
nother's being. (This is the principal metaphorical opposition in the book.) There are memorable descriptions of Friedrich and Sibylle as tunneling toward one another, of Friedrich as "the lover running amok," of Friedrich "in a desert in front of the cloud of a constant mirage." There are gorgeous poetic tributes to Sibylle, from the intimate but virginal "need to loiter in her breath and her bloodstream, to be a child in her womb" to the exalted yet delightfully playful "She was radiant, a contented snail in an invisible house of joy; a young kitten rolled into a ball, feeling the pleasure of being itself, and purring songs of praise to the Almighty," to the desperately sad and utterly authentic-sounding fallback, "She is my contemporary!" There is a lot of what I would call the "impossibilism" of the English Metaphysical love poets, Donne and Marvell, in Friedrich:
My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by Despair Upon Impossibility.
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'er have flown
A Sad Affair Page 2