by Les Weil
As a consolation, he invited us to an excellent dinner. I was too depressed and resigned even to quarrel with him. During dinner he explained the plan for the new sex book. I said I would think it over.
Then Theodore left for Budapest, with the apologetic smile of the locust who has just destroyed the farmer's crop and shattered his hopes.
It was a restless year.
A few months after getting officially married, Dorothy and I agreed to separate as we realised that we were not much fitted for married life, or that I, at any rate, was not. The reasons for this unfitness I have explained in a chapter of the previous volume, called `Portrait ofthe Author at Twenty-five'; unfortunately they were still in evidence at thirty, and even at forty. We parted without quarrel or bitterness, and have remained friends to this day. I may add, as a mitigating circumstance, that this is also true of my earlier and later companions.
After Theodore's catastrophic visit I had to return to hack-work, which occupied me through the whole year, left me little time and energy for continuing The Gladiators, and even less for the indispensable research that it involved. I have probably never written more in the course of a single year, and to less purpose--if to live from one day to the next can be called a purpose at all. I continued to write articles and book reviews for Das Neue Tagebuch, which at least gave me some professional satisfaction; but as a refugee paper, the Tagebuch could only pay very small fees. I also wrote a chapter on Paris for an English Continental guidebook (published by Freddie's now extinct firm in London). I wrote the second sex book, Sexual Anomalies and Perversions, comprising six hundred and thirty pages, or over a quarter-million words. I translated S. Fowler-Wright's novel Prelude in Prague into German for Muenzenberg's publishing firm. I re-wrote one of my plays as a short story for a literary competition--without success. I wrote two film treatments, which I was unable to sell. I wrote a synopsis for an other projected Freddie-book, The Encyclopaedia of Psychic Research, but the circulars did not bring in the required one and a half per cent of orders, so the book was never written.
Finally, I also wrote about half of a satirical novel, called The Good Soldier Schweik Goes to War Again. It was to be a continuation of Jaroslav Hasek's classic about Schweik, the Central-European Sancho Panza. About a hundred pages of the manuscript survive and are in parts quite funny, in a coarsely farcical manner. It had been commissioned by Willy Muenzenberg, who always liked unorthodox ideas, to serve the Party's anti-war campaign, but was vetoed by the Party on the grounds of the book's `pacifist errors'.
Altogether I must have turned out during that year around half a million words. This would represent a good average for any pulp writer, and it may give the impression that I belong to the enviable category of people who write with ease and facility. In fact the opposite is true. I write as a stammerer talks. I sweat out every word in longhand, slowly and painfully, cutting and re-writing all the time; the typescript that goes to the printer is usually the third or fourth version, and then I start again on the galleys. This, of course, refers only to `serious' work, but it includes newspaper and magazine articles. The finished product of this grind inevitably acquires a certain smoothness, which is often mistaken for glibness or natural ease. Over a number of years my average daily output has remained two pages for fiction, three for non-fiction, counting four hundred words to a page. Incidentally, most writers whom I have asked seem to average about the same amount, but with a considerably smaller number of daily working hours.
It would, of course, have been impossible to write the sex books, or the chapter in the guide-book, at this slow rate. I had to set myself a target of ten to fifteen pages a day, and keep to it. This hectic pace deprived me of any professional satisfaction, and made me feel a cheap hack. Even so, I only earned with each of these books about a month's living over and above the time spent in actually writing it.
I felt no missionary purpose in writing my second sex book such as I had felt about the Encyclopaedia. `Sexual anomalies and perversions' are an uninspiring subject. The artificial over-excitation of the senses by vast industries living on commercialised sex appeal is certainly harmful; and particularly so in a civilisation that encourages the stimuli, and inhibits the response. But the sober case histories of sexual aberrations with their clinical and compressed style have a singularly chilling effect. The description of the case of `Mr. X., aged fifty, employee of an insurance firm, living in a respectable suburb; arrested for exhibitionistic practices,' does not set you dreaming any more than an anatomical chart; whereas the entirely virtuous heroine on the magazine-cover does.
This paradox was ironically driven home to me while I was engaged in writing the book. Because of the speed with which it had to be written, I dictated it straight on to the typewriter. The typist whom Theodore had found for me happened to be a pretty young woman, married to a psychiatrist. We worked in my hotel bedroom, shut up together every day for eight hours, myself pacing the carpet, Mrs. F. sitting at the desk, her pretty head bent over the typewriter, demurely hammering out the most hairraising things that a man might do to a woman, or vice versa. Mrs. F. never turned a hair--hair of the colour of ripe chestnuts, smooth and glossy, and known to me, after a week, down to every individual strand and curl. From time to time she would ask me to spell out for her a terrible Latin word--which I did, my face turning crimson. She knew, of course, the meaning of all the Latin words, being married to a psychiatrist; and if she didn't, she was sure to ask her husband over lunch. For pretty Mrs. F. invariably lunched with her husband, and adamantly refused to go out with me even as far as the restaurant around the corner. She knew that as soon as we went out together, the clinical atmosphere would vanish and I would start making advances across the luncheon table; whereas while we were working in lny room, she was protected by the ghosts of Jack the Ripper, the Marquis de Sade, and all the balding insurance agents with a passion for committing so sodomy with fishes. How can you stroke a girl's smooth hair when you have just heard a chapter on the hair-fetishists who loiter in tubestations with scissors in their pockets; or squeeze her hand while she thinks of all the dismembered bodies left in suitcases in the cloakroom of Paddington Station; or hear amorous words having just called a spade a spade, and in Latin to boot? The effect was paralysing. It was obvious that any attempt at a transition from the abstract to the personal, any impulsive gesture, would produce either a piercing scream or the giggles.
The setting of this edifying story was Budapest. When I had given in and agreed to write the book, Freddie and Theodore, who were spending the summer in that town, had insisted that I write it there, so that they could supervise its progress.
It was my last stay in my native country; after Spain I could return there no longer. It was also the last time that I saw Attila Jozsef. In the two years since my previous visit he had written some of his most moving poems, but his nervous condition had already begun to deteriorate. Among other peculiarities, he had developed an obsession about matches. Before going to sleep, he felt compelled to count and re-count the number of matches left in the box on the bedside table. That could be explained as a common and relatively harmless symptom in a compulsion-neurosis. But he had also fallen into the habit of burning one match after another while we were talking across a cafe table, until there were none left in the box. He would pull out the first match, light it and, before it burnt out, light the second from it, and so on, gazing absent-mindedly into the small yellow flame. On the first occasion when he did this, I innocently asked him to stop that silly game but he only reacted with an absent, blank stare which chilled me. After that I pretended not to notice what he was doing, and his friends acted in the same way. Though there were still hours and days when our relations were as warm as before, I never again felt entirely at ease in his company. Yet I had no premonition that the end was so near, nor of the terrible form it would take.
As for Nemeth and Juci, our friendship was resumed with the same intimacy as before. They had in the meantime married. This had infu
riated Zsuzsa, Nemeth's aristocratic mistress, and she bad avenged herself by publishing a magazine short story whose hero was a plainly rccognisable, malicious portrait of Nemeth. The story was called `The Angel', and it dwelt lovingly on a certain aspect of Nemeth's character which I have described as that of a`saintly sponger or a sponging saint'. Nemeth took the whole thing in a truly saintly manner, and Juci would read aloud passages of the story, interrupting herself with appreciative giggles. The publication of 'The Angel was the main scandal and delight of the literary world of Budapest at about the time when Mussolini marched into Abyssinia.
We again spent all our evenings together, but `the firm' as a literary enterprise was not resurrected. During my absence, Nemeth had published a beautifully written pot-boiler--a romanced biography of the Empress Marie Therese--but he had done next to no serious work. When I tried to admonish him about it, he brushed me off with the remark that Cervantes wrote Don Quixote when he was past sixty, and that no writer should be allowed to publish anything before he was fifty. He was serenely determined to fritter away his life and gifts as the last of the bohemians. He did it with so much grace and detachment, and he was so delighted with the absurdity of the existence he led, that preaching to him seemed pedantic and futile. Again I felt that, with all his sloth and indolence, he lived closer than I to the things that really mattered, and that, in some devious way, his passive acceptance made more sense than my strugglings and kickings in the net.
XXVII. The House on the Lake
THE only relief from this pointless existence was a period of three or four weeks spent in a house on the Lago di Lugano. It belonged to a strange personality who had invited me to stay with her so that I could work undisturbed on my novel.
The house stood in the village of Caslano, on a wooded slope, overlooking the Lake. It belonged to a rich, middle-aged woman, the widow of the famous German film-actor, Eugen Kloepfer. Maria Kloepferl was a benefactress of impecunious Communist writers whom she invited to her house, one at a time, for a month or two. Among those who had enjoyed her hospitality were Johannes R. Becher, Ludwig Renn, and my brother-in-law, Peter. She also contributed generously to the various committees and front organisations of the Party.
On our first evening in her house, she explained to me that she was attracted by Communism as a new way of social life, but equally by Buddhism and Theosophy as ways of spiritual life, and that she regarded psychoanalysis as a bridge between the two. This might have sounded like the gushings of a frustrated society woman who feels the change of life approaching, but Maria was not that type. She was just the opposite.
I remember her best in her white bathing suit. She was tall, with a lean, sinewy body, with small breasts and long limbs, her skin the colour of baked clay from constant swimming and sunbathing. Stretched out in the grass, she looked like a stranded, ageing mermaid, waiting for the flood to call her back. The only discordant feature was her teeth, held together by conspicuous metal braces.
Maria lived alone in her house with an elderly maid and an ageing mongrel dog called Ricky. On the second evening, she asked me whether I believed in ghosts. I answered with a joke, and Maria dropped the subject. A little later she said casually, in her well-bred manner, that if at night I heard knocking on the walls I should not worry; she had all her life been plagued by poltergeists, but they were harmless.
I never heard the poltergeists, but I had some experiences with Maria which, though less dramatic, were of a sadder and more harrowing nature. But I can better explain these by anticipating the end of the story. Maria Kloepfer died, a few months after I had left her house, in a mental home. Strangely enough, neither Becher nor Peter--in whose joint company I had first met her a few months earlier--had any intimation of her condition, otherwise they would have warned me.
It was a small house of two floors, and I had the whole upper floor to myself. In the morning we usually went for a swim, then I worked most of the day, but occasionally I accompanied Maria on a walk. About seven in the evening we would have some grappa, either in the garden or in the local trattoria which consisted of a few wooden benches in front of a cave in the rock. Then we would dine on the terrace of her house, watching the sun set over the lake, with a fiasco of red wine in front of each of us. After dinner, we would continue to drink wine until midnight; most of the time we talked, but sometimes Maria played the piano. It sounds like an ideal existence.
The first tension arose in connexion with our occasional visits to the trattoria, and had a rather squalid cause. I had arrived in Caslano again literally without a penny--I think I was waiting for some money due to me from Freddie and Theodore, which did not arrive. Thus, whenever we went to the trattoria, Maria had to pay for our grappas, of which she sometimes ordered several rounds. This I found embarrassing, as the local people in the trattoria must obviously take me for a gigolo. So one day I summoned my courage and told Maria that if she insisted on going to the trattoria, it would be preferable to bow to the prejudices of the world by her lending me the necessary coins beforehand--which I would repay as soon as my money arrived.
Maria got quietly angry, explained to me that as a Communist I should be above such prejudices, and insisted on continuing to visit the trattoria and paying for me. These visits then became rather a torture; I thought everybody's eyes were on us.
The situation was made more sordid by the fact that whenever I needed postage stamps or a tube of toothpaste, I was obliged to borrow the money from Maria. It would have been easier if she had lent me ten francs in one sum, but she never made the suggestion. I resented this, and I resented even more resenting it. She was a generous host, and I felt not only a sponger but an ungrateful one too.
In a tangled human relationship, all the apparently silly surface tensions have their interior roots. The visits to the trattoria grated on my sense of inferiority, and to ask for small sums of money was like a regression to the scenes of childhood. Perhaps Maria unconsciously desired that. I was reminded of an incident which Peter had related to me. One day, in Paris, he had met Maria in a cafe. She had noticed that Peter's only suit was getting threadbare, had packed him into a taxi and bought him the most gorgeous suit he had ever possessed.
Peter, who was a genuine Communist, and Nemeth, who was a true bohemian, felt no embarrassment about scenes like that, and would have been perfectly happy while Maria bought the grappas in the trattoria. They had a complete disregard for money, and accepted it, when offered by richer friends, with good grace as a matter of course. But I, bundle of loosely tied complexes that I was, did not possess that grace. I could lend money, but I could not borrow it; I sometimes went to great trouble to render a service to a friend, but if the reverse happened, I felt ashamed and guilty, and broke into abjectly profuse thanks. For a long time I believed that these were signs of an unselfish and noble character. Until one day Maria remarked drily across the breakfast table: `You have the vanity to give, but you lack the generosity to take.' She often threw off casual remarks like that which flew like darts into the bull's-eye, while sitting primly upright in her sleeveless white linen suit. It set off her brown arms and chest, which had remained pathetically young.
On another occasion she remarked, also at breakfast on the sun-flooded white terrace: `You have been kicked about so much that your whole inner surface is raw and sore, and when something touches you, you wince. But the real kick is still in store for you. It is coming soon though, I can feel it.'
During the second week of my stay with Maria, we went for a walk in the woods. Ricky, the old mongrel, was ambling a few yards ahead of us. Suddenly Ricky stopped, rooted to the mossy ground, and gave out a growl which then changed into a plaintive, long-drawn howl. Maria also stopped and grabbed my arm--that alone gave me a start, for she normally avoided, and shrank away from, any physical touch or contact. Her face had changed colour in the undefinably painful manner of a person growing pale under a sunburnt skin, and the braces on her teeth became very visible. The wailing dog's hai
r was actually bristling, and the whole scene was so eerie that I felt suspended between horror and the giggles. Maria turned on her heel and hurried back along the narrow forest path towards the house, striding so fast on her long legs that I could hardly keep up behind her; yet I could see that she needed all her grim determination not to break into a run. The dog now kept running at her side, now and then licking her hand as if to comfort her. When we got home, Maria said curtly: `Don't leave me alone, please.' I followed her to a balcony which she rarely used, and which opened on the back of the house, overlooking the woods from which we had come. Mary, the maid, brought up a carafe with grappa, giving her mistress a suspicious look, but left us again without saying a word. Maria drank a couple of small glasses, and I asked stupidly: `What happened? She was not yet quite herself and said unguardedly with a shrug: `Ricky saw the uncle approaching us. He sometimes sees him first, and warns me.' On that afternoon, I learnt part of Maria's story.
From time to time, Maria had a hallucination. She saw an uncle, who had died of dementia praecox when she was three, advancing on her simultaneously from three directions, from the right, left and front. The frontal image was slightly over life-size, the two lateral images were smaller. Before he could reach her, she was usually seized by a fit. `Don't get frightened,' she said, `if you see me rolling on the floor and grinding my teeth just leave me and call Mary. I don't like people to see it.' When the hallucination started, Ricky always behaved as he had today. But sometimes the dog sensed the approach of the uncle before she saw him, and warned her. He had not turned up for the last few weeks, and she had already hoped that she had got rid of him for good. Now she was no longer sure. Anyway, something was bound to happen during the next few days-- -a sign. --What sort of sign? --Oh, nothing frightening. Just a sign. I would see.
After dinner I learnt more of the story. Maria had suffered one or two nervous breakdowns earlier in her life. She had been for a long period under psychoanalytical treatment. The analyst was a well-known orthodox Freudian whose name was at the time familiar to me, but I have mercifully forgotten it since. He had brought back to her the memory of a previously repressed and forgotten, early traumatic shock. As an infant between the age of two and three, she had been left alone for a few minutes with the deranged uncle, who had committed a sexual assault on her. But the revival of this memory did not cure Maria. On the contrary: it was after the conjuring up of the uncle's ghost that the hallucinations started. Before that she had not even known that the uncle had ever existed, for he had never been mentioned by her parents. She had then broken off the treatment, against the analyst's warning, for fear that if she continued with it she would go insane. About the same time she divorced her husband, who seems to have treated her abominably. The analyst was the last link with her former world. When that link snapped she had retired to the house on the lake. She wanted no more gravediggers to work in her brain. She knew everything that lay interred there, even the symbolic meaning of the trinity in her hallucination: the two pockct-editions of the uncle on either side, the large erect one in the centre; advancing upon her. But the knowledge did not help, and she wanted to know no more. She wanted to swim in the lake and get cleaned and tanned by the sun through skin and flesh down to the bones--an ageing, psychic mermaid, stranded upon `the tedious shore of Lethe'.