by Allan Massie
“I meant to throw this into the grave. I bought it in Berlin before the war. No, I didn’t. That’s stupid, Eli gave it to me. But I meant to leave it with Franz. You can guess why.”
She screwed her body round so that she could look out of the back window into the cemetery, but she must have known it was too late. We had already seen them place boards over the coffin, and it wouldn’t have been the same thing to place her memento on top of the boards.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, “it was sentimental, and if it wasn’t, maybe he knows anyway.”
The pub had that sickly aroma that English saloon bars have in the first half-hour of morning opening time: of furniture polish and cleaning stuff fighting against the beer and tobacco fumes. The food wasn’t ready, and we sat, Nell with a brandy and ginger and me with a large Scotch, waiting until they brought the shepherd’s pie to the counter.
“I wish Becky hadn’t given up,” she said. “I’ve always thought of you, all three, as my children. Do you give her money?”
“Ted left her a bit,” I said. “But I help out now and then. She’ll get something from Franz,” and I wondered if he had really forgotten Nell in his will, or if he had forgotten to tell me. Maybe he had expected her to be dead before him.
“Don’t think I’m blaming you,” she said. “Blame doesn’t enter into it. If I blame anyone, I blame myself. I should have stopped Eli. I suggested she should come to live with me when Ted died, but she refused. I was so glad really.”
The food arrived.
“I’ve always liked shepherd’s pie. Comes of being a schoolmaster’s daughter. If you’re brought up to eat school dinners, I’ve always said, you’ll never starve through being finicky. You’re a bit the same with your writing, aren’t you?”
“If you mean I’m a hack, yes.”
“No,” she said, “I think you’ve done awfully well. I liked the one about the abbess. I don’t know how you think these things up. They’re …” she paused as if searching for a word, against her habit, “ingenious.”
It was not true. The detective novels by which I make my living now are well made and competent and don’t insult the reader’s intelligence, but they are not ingenious. I have no gift for ingenuity, just as I have a dull imagination.
“You ought to write about Franz,” she said. “I would really like you to do that. Tell the whole story. After today, there’s nobody to be hurt.”
“Becky?”
“It can’t hurt her more. It might even heal her.”
We left that dangling. There is no remedy for cancer of the spirit.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“I wish you would.”
She leaned over and kissed me.
“Poor Franz,” she said. “You know when I first saw him, I thought, if only he was English.”
The bar filled and emptied, and Nell drank more brandy as she talked about Franz, and Argentina, and the Germany of old newsreels and her first loves. The years fell away, and I could see her as she had been then, and the type of that now all but extinct Englishness she would have wished on Franz. Then, despite the brandy, she said of course she could drive home – “I drive better when I’ve had a few. I do most things better, so why not driving?” – and I watched the Volkswagen swing wide round the corner and out of sight.
I turned towards the station. Leaves were falling from the plane-trees, and the mist settled in sparkling droplets on my overcoat. Well, I thought, why not? It couldn’t be biography, because you couldn’t write Franz’s life without supposition. If I was going to have to suppose, then I would use what I distrusted – my imagination – and present it as fiction, at least till my own acquaintance with him began. Fiction, I said to myself, might deliver truths of a type denied biography. There would be Franz’s papers to draw on: that store of sad confessional and horror I had not yet seen. Why else, I thought, had he left them to me, if it wasn’t to ask me somehow to employ these materials to rebut the assertion of a character in his favourite Conrad, that “life doesn’t stand much looking into”?
But hadn’t a reviewer called the novel in which that line appears “too sordid to be tragic and too repulsive to be pathetic”?
Nevertheless, I thought, I’ll do it, and stood a long time on the open suburban platform waiting for the train.
There is that scene in The Secret Agent, in which the poor half-wit, Stevie, falls into great distress when a cabman whips his miserable old horse. “Don’t,” he sobs, “don’t…”
Did Conrad know – he must have known – that Nietzsche’s permanent mental collapse began in Turin when he behaved like poor Stevie, throwing his arms round the wretched mare, and then sliding to his knees in the gutter?
When I told Becky that evening what I was going to do, she said, “Let the poor bloody fool be.”
“No,” I said, “we owe him more than that. More than oblivion. He came through, in a way. You could say he died trying to save others.”
“Others?” she said. “What about himself?”
“Don’t ask the impossible.”
She put down the receiver. In the dead buzzing in my ear, her question took on different forms: what about me? what about us? what about humanity?
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Allan Massie’s Klaus and Other Stories
About the book
Allan Massie, the prolific novelist and non-fiction writer, is here revealed as a consummate master of the short story. This should not surprise, given his dense and highly effective style. Some of the short stories come from his early career, and some are the product of a recent return to the genre.
Klaus, the novella that opens and, to some extent, dominates this collection, tells the story of Klaus Mann, son of Thomas, and in spite of the long shadow of so famous a father, an important novelist and political activist in his own right. His struggle against Nazism gave him a focus, but its demise and what he perceived as Germany’s inability to change led to depression and an early death.
Massie succeeds in evoking that period of courage and hypocrisy, intellectual fidelity and clever changeability, sacrifice and impunity, personified by the tragic Klaus and the mercurial and indestructible Gustaf Gründgens, his former brother-in-law and ex-lover. Between these two lie not only those broken relationships but also a novel – Klaus’s novel Mephisto, a thinly disguised attack on Gründgens that for many years could not be published in West Germany. Massie’s subtle prose merely suggests some intriguing aspects of this network of relationships and the self-destructive nature of literary inspiration.
Comments
“Allan Massie is a master storyteller, with a particular gift for evoking the vanishing world of the European man of letters. His poignant novella about Klaus Mann bears comparison with his subject’s best work.”
Daniel Johnson, editor of Standpoint
“The tale of Klaus Mann’s final days is, however, tremendously interesting, a warning and an example. Aspiring authors should read it. They’d do worse than study Massie’s craftsmanship.”
Colin Waters, Scottish Review of Books
Price: £10.00 ISBN: 978-0-9560560-6-1 pp. 208
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Allan Massie’s Surviving
About the book
Surviving is set in contemporary Rome. The main characters, Belinda, Kate (an author who specialises in studies of the criminal mind), and Tom Durward (a scriptwriter), attend an English-speaking group of Alcoholics Anonymous. All have pasts to cause embarrassment or shame. Tom sees no future for himself and still gets nervous “come Martini time”. Belinda embarks on a love-affair that cannot last. Kate ventures onto more dangerous ground by inviting her latest case-study, a young Londoner acquitted of a racist murder, to stay with her.
Allan Massie dissects this group of ex-pats in order to say something about our inability to know, still less to understand, the actions of our fellow human beings, even when relationships are so intense. It is also, ther
efore, impossible or at least difficult to make informed moral judgements of others. This is an intelligent book that examines human nature with a deft and light touch.
Comments
“Massie is one of the best Scottish writers of his generation. Surviving – sympathetic, unsentimental, atmospheric – is an overdue reminder of how good he is.”
Alan Taylor, The Herald
“… an impressive novel which poses moral and philosophical questions but works equally well as a compelling thriller.”
Joe Farrell, TLS
“… an excellent little novel.”
Ben Jeffery, The Guardian
“The dark brilliance of Massie’s style … Surviving may be an instant classic in the alcoholic literary canon.”
Patrick Skene Catling, The Spectator
“This is Scotland’s Stendhal at his best: clipped but sympathetic to his fragile characters in their haunted wood.”
Christopher Harvie, The Sunday Herald
Price: £10.00 ISBN: 978-0-9560560-2-3 pp. 224
Copyright
© Allan Massie 1991
This edition was published in February 2012 by
Vagabond Voices Publishing Ltd.,
Glasgow,
Scotland
ISBN 978-1-908251-05-3
First published by Hutchinson in 1992
The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.
Cover design by Mark Mechan
The publisher acknowledges subsidy towards this publication from Creative Scotland
For further information on Vagabond Voices, see the website,
www.vagabondvoices.co.uk