The Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  HERMANN BROCH

  THE

  DEATH

  OF

  VIRGIL

  Translated by

  JEAN STARR UNTERMEYER

  VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL

  VINTAGE BOOKS

  A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC.

  NEW YORK

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JANUARY 1995

  Copyright © 1945 by Pantheon Books Inc. Copyright renewed 1972 by Random House, Inc.

  All

  Broch, Hermann, 1886-1951.

  (Tod des Vergil, English)

  The death of Virgil / Hermann Broch ; translated by Jean Starr

  Untermeyer. — 1st Vintage International ed.

  IN MEMORIAM STEPHEN HUDSON

  . . . fato profugus . . . VERGIL, Aeneis, I, 2

  '. . . Da jungere dextram,

  da, genitor, teque amplexu ne subtrahe nostro.'

  Sic memorans, largo fletu simul ora rigabat.

  Ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum,

  ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago,

  par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno.

  VERGIL, Aeneis, VI, 697-702

  Lo duca ed io per quel cammino ascoso

  Entrammo a ritornar nel chiaro mondo;

  E, senza cura aver d'alcun riposo,

  Salimmo su, ei primo ed io secondo,

  Tanto ch'io vidi delle cose belle

  Che porta il ciel, per un pertugio tondo;

  E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

  DANTE, Divina Commedia Inferno, XXXIV, 133-139

  CONTENTS

  WATER — THE ARRIVAL

  FIRE —THE DESCENT

  EARTH—THE EXPECTATION

  AIR —THE HOMECOMING

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

  SOURCES

  WATER — THE ARRIVAL

  STEEL-BLUE AND LIGHT, RUFFLED BY A SOFT, SCARCELY perceptible cross-wind, the waves of the Adriatic streamed against the imperial squadron as it steered toward the harbor of Brundisium, the flat hills of the Calabrian coast coming gradually nearer on the left. And here, as the sunny yet deathly loneliness of the sea changed with the peaceful stir of friendly human activity where the channel, softly enhanced by the proximity of human life and human living, was populated by all sorts of craft—by some that were also approaching the harbor, by others heading out to sea and by the ubiquitous brown-sailed fishing boats already setting out for the evening catch from the little breakwaters which protected the many villages and settlements along the white-sprayed coast—here the water had become mirror-smooth; mother-of-pearl spread over the open shell of heaven, evening came on, and the pungence of wood fires was carried from the hearths whenever a sound of life, a hammering or a summons, was blown over from the shore.

  Of the seven high-built vessels that followed one another, keels in line, only the first and last, both slender rams-prowed pentaremes, belonged to the war-fleet; the remaining five, heavier and more imposing, deccareme and duodeccareme, were of an ornate structure in keeping with the Augustan imperial rank, and the middle one, the most sumptuous, its bronze-mounted bow gilded, gilded the ring-bearing lion's head under the railing, the rigging wound with colors, bore under purple sails, festive and grand, the tent of the Caesar. Yet on the ship that immediately followed was the poet of the Aeneid and death's signet was graved upon his brow.

  A prey to seasickness, held taut by the constant threat of its outbreak, he had not dared move the whole day long. Now, however, although bound to the cot which had been set up for him amidships, he became conscious of himself, or rather of his body and the life of his body, which for many years past he had scarcely been able to call his own, as an after-tasting, after-touching memory of the relief which had flowed through him suddenly when the calmer region of the coast had been reached; and this floating, quieted-quieting fatigue might have become an almost perfect boon had not the plaguing cough, unaffected by the strong healing sea air, begun again, accompanied by the usual evening fever and the usual evening anxiety. So he lay there, he the poet of the Aeneid, he Publius Vergilius Maro, he lay there with ebbing consciousness, almost ashamed of his helplessness, at odds with such a fate, and he stared into the pearly roundness of the heavenly bowl: why then had he yielded to the importunity of Augustus? why then had he forsaken Athens? Fled now the hope that the hallowed and serene sky of Homer would favor the completion of the Aeneid, fled every single hope for the boundless new life which was to have begun, the hope for a life free alike of art and poetry, a life dedicated to meditation and study in the city of Plato, fled the hope ever to be allowed to enter the Ionian land, oh, fled the hope for the miracle of knowledge and the healing through knowledge. Why had he renounced it? Willingly? No! It had been like a command of the irrefutable life-forces, those irrefutable forces of fate which never vanished completely, which though they might dive at times into the subterranean, the invisible, the inaudible, were nonetheless omnipresent as the inscrutable threat of powers which man could never avoid, to which he must always submit; it was fate. He had allowed himself to be driven by fate and now fate drove on to the end. Had this not always been the form of his life, had he ever lived otherwise? had the pearly bowl, had the halcyon sea, had the song of the mountains and that which sang painfully in his own breast, had the flute-tone of the god ever meant anything else to him than a circumstance which, like a receptacle of the spheres, was soon to draw him into itself, to bear him into immensity? He had been a peasant from birth, a man who loved the peace of earthly life, one whom a simple secure life in a village community would have fitted, one for whom because of his birth it would have been seemly to be allowed, even to be forced to abide there, but who in conformity with a higher destiny was not allowed to be free from nor free to stay at home; this destiny had pushed him out from the community into the nakedest, direst, most savage loneliness of the human crowd, it had hunted him from the simplicity of his origins, hunted him abroad into the open, to ever-increasing multiplicity, and if thereby something had become greater and broader, it was only the distance from real life, verily it was this distance alone which had grown. Only at the edge of his fields had he walked, only at the edge of his life had he lived. He had become a rover, fleeing death, seeking death, seeking work, fleeing work, a lover and yet at the same time a harassed one, an errant through the passions of the inner life and the passions of the world, a lodger in his own life. And now, almost at the end of his strength, at the end of his search, self-purged and ready to leave, purged to readiness and ready to take upon himself the last loneliness, ready to start on the inner journey back to loneliness, now destiny with all its forces had seized him again, had forbidden him all the simplicity of his beginnings and of the inner life, had deflected his backward journey once more, had turned him back to the evil which had overshadowed all his days, as if it had reserved for him just this sole simplicity—, the simplicity of dying. Above him the yards cracked in the ropes and betweenwhiles there was a soft booming in the sailcloth, he heard the slithering foam of the wake and the silver pour that sprayed out each time the oars were lifted, their heavy creak in the oar-locks, and the clapping cut of the water when they dipped in again, he felt the soft even thrust of the ship keeping time to the hundredfold stroke of the oarsmen, he saw the white-surfed coastline slip by and he thought of the chained dumb slave-bodies in the damp-draughty, noisome, roaring hull of the ship. The same dull rumbling silver-sprayed down-beat resounded from the two neighboring ships, from the next in line and the one following, like an echo which repeated itself over all the seas and was answered from all the seas, for so they plied everywhere, laden with people, laden with arms, laden with corn and wheat, laden with marble, with oil, with wines, with spices, with
silks, laden with slaves, everywhere this navigation for bartering and bargaining, one of the worst among the many depravities of the world. In these ships, however, the cargo was not so much goods as gluttons, the members of the court: the rear half of the ship up to the stern's end was given over to feeding them, from early morning it reverberated with the sounds of eating and there was always a crowd of guzzlers in the dining-hall, impatient for a triclinium to be vacated, waiting, after a tussle with rivals, to tumble themselves onto it, finally to lie down and do their part by beginning a meal or maybe by starting one all over again. The waiters, light-footed, smart, flashy fellows, not a few pleasure-boys among them, but now sweaty and harried, scarcely had time to catch their breaths, and their forever-smiling head-steward, with the cold look in the corner of his eyes and the politely tip-opened hand, drove them hither and thither, himself rushing up-deck and down-deck because, apart from the progress of the meal, it was necessary at the same time to take care of those who—wonderful to relate—seemed to be already sated and now were taking their pleasure in other ways, some promenading with hands clasped upon their bellies or over their behinds, some, on the contrary, discoursing with expansive gestures, some dozing on their cots or snoring, their faces covered with their togas, some sitting at the gaming boards, all of whom had to be served and appeased incessantly with tidbits which were passed around the decks on large silver platters and offered to them, keeping in mind a hunger which might assert itself at any moment, keeping in mind a gluttony which was limned in the expression of all of them, ineradicably and unmistakably, as much in the faces of the well-nourished as in those of the haggard, in those of the slack as well as the swift, of the restless and the indolent, in the faces of the sleepers and wakers, sometimes chiselled in, sometimes kneaded in, clearly or cloudily, cruelly or kindly, wolfish, foxish, cattish, parrottish, horsish, sharkish, but always dedicated to a horrible, somehow self-imprisoned lust, insatiably desirous of having, desirous of bargaining for goods, money, place and honors, desirous of the bustling idleness of possession. Everywhere there was someone putting something into his mouth, everywhere smouldered avarice and lust, rootless but ready to devour, all-devouring, their fumes wavered over the deck, carried along on the beat of the oars, inescapable, unavoidable; the whole ship was lapped in a wave of greed. Oh, they deserved to be shown up once for what they were! A song of avarice should be dedicated to them! But what would that accomplish? Nothing availed the poet, he could right no wrongs; he is heeded only if he extols the world, never if he portrays it as it is. Only falsehood wins renown, not understanding! And could one assume that the Aeneid would be vouchsafed another or better influence? Oh yes, people would praise it because as yet everything he had written had been praised, because only the agreeable things would be abstracted from it, and because there was neither danger nor hope that the exhortations would be heeded; ah, he was forbidden either to delude himself or to permit himself to be deluded, only too well he knew the public to which the grave, the knowledge-burdening and actual work of the poet was as negligible as that of the bitterly oppressed and bitterness-filled slave rowers, the public which held the value of one to be equal with that of the other, as tribute due to the usufructuary, to be received and enjoyed as a right! However those who lolled about and gorged themselves were by no means all parasites, even though Augustus was obliged to tolerate so many of this sort in his following, no, quite a few of them had already achieved much that was worthy and useful, but during the idleness of the voyage they had stripped off, with almost luxuriating self-exposure, most of what they customarily were, and the only thing which they had kept intact was their blind arrogance and their unceasing and befogged greed. Below, magnificent, savage, brutal, sub-human, but not less befogged, the tamed rowing-mass worked together, stroke after stroke. Down there they did not understand him and paid no attention to him, these up here maintained that they revered him, yes, they even believed it; but, be that as it may, whether they presumed to cherish his work by falsely pretending to be connoisseurs, or whether, no less falsely, they paid homage to him as Caesar's friend, it was of no moment, he Publius Vergilius Maro had nothing in common with them although fate had driven him into their midst, they nauseated him and if the land-breeze, in an advance-salute to the sunset, had not started to blow the stench of the meal and the kitchen away from the ship, seasickness would have befallen him again. He assured himself that the chest with the manuscript of the Aeneid stood undisturbed near him, and, blinking into the deeply-sinking western day-star, he pulled his robe up to his chin; he was cold.

  From time to time there arose in him a desire to turn round to the noisy gang at his back, almost curious to see what they were up to now; but he did not do it and it was better not to, since more and more he was convinced that such looking back was in some way forbidden him.

  So he lay quietly. The first twilight spread lucidly over the heavens, gently over the world, as they arrived at the narrow river-like approach to Brundisium; it had become cooler yet milder, the salt breath merging with the heavier air of the land into whose entrance the ships now intruded, one after the other slowing down its speed. Iron-gray, leaden-hued became Poseidon's element, no longer rippled by a wave. On the ramparts of the fortifications to the left and right of the canal, troops of the garrison were on parade in honor of Caesar, perhaps also as a first birthday greeting to him, for it was to his cradle-feast that Octavianus Augustus had come home; in two days, in fact the day after tomorrow, it was to be celebrated in Rome, and Octavian, who rode there in the preceding ship, would be forty-three years old. The cheering of the soldiers arose hoarsely from the banks, the flag-bearers at both flanks of the manipels, precise and practised, thrust the red vexillum aloft, timed to the cheers, afterwards lowering it aslant before the emperor, its tip pointed to the ground; in short what took place was the hearty unimpassioned performance of the salute as stipulated by the army manual, regimentally right in its military ruggedness, and in spite of that it was curiously mild, curiously soothing; it could almost be described as dreamy, so very, so exceedingly puny the cheering that floated off into the grandeur of the sunset, so very, so exceedingly autumnal the fading of the red flag overshone by the firmament glimmering into gray. Greater than the earth is light, greater than man is the earth, and man's existence avails him nothing until he breathes his native air, returning to the earth, through earth returning to the light, an earthly being receiving the light on earth, received in turn by the light only through earth, earth changing to light. And never was the earth nearer the heart of light, nor light closer to the earth than in the approaching dusk at the two boundaries of night. Night still slumbered in the depths of the waters, but with tiny dark noiseless waves it began to filter upward, everywhere in the mirror of heaven, in the mirror of the sea, above indistinguishable from below, the velvet-muffled waves dove up from the wake of night, the waves of a second immensity, of the fecund outspreading utter-immensity, and downily they began to overcast the radiance with the breath of silence. The light came no longer from above, it hung in itself and, hanging so, it was luminous but it no longer illumined anything, so that even the landscape over which it hung seemed confined in its own light. The chirping of crickets, myriadfold yet issuing as one continuous monotone, piercing yet lulling in its evenness, neither rising nor falling, vibrated throughout the twilit land; endless. Under the fortifications the slopes were overgrown with sparse grass down to the stony beach, and, meagre though it was, that growth was peace, was nocturnal quiet, was rudimental darkness, the darkness of earth spread out under the departing light. Then the patches became more connected, richer in plant life, deeper in color, and very soon were interspersed with shrubbery, while on the hill-tops between the stone-fenced quadrangles of the peasants, the first olive trees revealed themselves, gray as the breath-thin fog-spray of the deepening twilight. Oh, unbridled became the desire to stretch the hand toward those still so distant shores, to reach into the darkness of the shrubbery, to feel
the earth-born leaf between his fingers, to hold it tightly there forevermore—, the wish quivered in his hands, quivered in his fingers with uncontrollable desire toward the leafy branches, toward the flexible leaf-stems, toward the sharp-soft leaf edges, toward the firm living leaf-flesh, yearningly he felt it when he closed his eyes, and it was almost a sensual desire, sensually simple and grasping like his masculine, raw-boned peasant's fist, sensually savoring and sensitive like the slender-wristed nervousness of this same hand: Oh grass, oh leaf, bark-smoothness, bark-roughness, vitality of burgeoning, in this branching out and embodiment ye are earth's darkness made manifest! oh hand, tingling, touching, fondling, embracing, oh finger and finger-tip, rough and gentle and soft, living flesh, the outermost surface of the soul's darkness opened up in the lifted hands! He had always been aware of this strange almost volcanic pulsation in his hands, always the intimation of the strange separate life of his hands had accompanied him, an intimation that once and for all had been forbidden to overstep the threshold into actual knowledge, as if an obscure danger lurked in such knowledge, and when now, as was his habit, he turned the seal ring, the one finely-wrought and even a little unmasculine in its delicate workmanship, which he wore on a finger of his right hand, it was as if by so doing he could avert that obscure danger, as if he could appease the hands' longing, as if by this act he could bring them to a certain self-control, abating their fear, the longing fear of peasant hands that never again might grasp the plough or scatter the seed and therefore had learned to grasp the intangible, the foreboding fear of hands to whose will-to-form, robbed of the earth, nothing remained but a life of their own in the incomprehensible universe, threatened and threatening, reaching so deeply into nothingness and so gripped by its perils that the dread foreboding, lifted to a certain extent above itself, was transmuted into a mighty endeavor, an endeavor to hold fast to the unity of human existence, to preserve the integrity of human desire in a way that would protect it from disintegrating into manifold existences, full of small desires and small in desire; for insufficient was the desire of hands, insufficient the desire of eyes, insufficient the desire of hearing, sufficient alone was the desire of heart and mind communing together, the yearning completion of the infinity within and without, beholding, hearkening, comprehending, breathing in the unity of the doubled breath, the unity of the universe; for by unity alone might one overcome the lowering hopeless blindness of fearful isolation, in unity alone occurred the twofold development from the roots of understanding, and this he divined, this he had always divined—, oh the yearning of one who was and always must be only a lodger, oh yearning of man—, this had been his prescient-listening, his prescient-breathing, his prescient-thinking, drawn by reciprocal listening, breathing, thinking, into the flowing light of the universe, into the never-ending approach to the endlessness of the universe, unattainable the pearly shimmer of its abysmal depths, unattainable even its outermost edge, so that the longing desirous hand dares not even touch it. Still there was an approach and there was his thought, breathing and waiting, listening into the twofold abysses where Poseidon and Vulcan reigned, both realms united by the heavenly arch of Jove. Opened and flowing now the light, the breath too was flowing, as flowing as the current into which the keels plunged, flood-bath of the innermost and outermost, flood-bath of the soul, the breath flowing from this life into the beyond, from the beyond back into this life, the unveiled portal of knowledge, never knowledge itself, but still a presentiment of knowledge, a presentiment of the entrance, a presentiment of the path, a dim presentiment of the twilight journey. Forward on the bow a young slave, one of the musicians, was singing; possibly those assembled there, whose hubbub had been hushed in the quiet of the evening, had summoned the boy, even they aware of homecoming, and after a short interval for tuning the lyre followed by a suitable pause, there rang out, wafted back to him, the nameless song of a nameless boy; mildly flowing the song, floating insubstantially, like rainbow tints in the nocturnal heavens, mildly flowing the strings, soft-hued as ivory, human accomplishments, both the song and the strings, but removed beyond their human source, delivered from mankind, delivered from suffering; this was the music of the spheres singing itself. It became darker, faces became dimmer, the shores faded out, the boat seemed to vanish, only the voice remained, becoming clearer and more dominant as if it wished to direct the ship and the timing of the oars, forgotten the source of the voice, the nonetheless-guiding voice of a slave boy; guidance the song, secure in itself and for that reason guidance, just for that reason exposed to eternity, for only the serene may, guide, only the singular, wrested, nay rescued, from the flow of things, lays itself open to immensity, only that which is held fast— ah, had he ever succeeded in getting such an actual, guiding grasp?—only the truly comprehended, even though it be only for a moment in the ocean of millenniums, only the firmly-retained becomes timeless, becomes permanent, becomes a guiding song, becomes guidance; oh, for a single life-moment enlarged to eternity, enlarged to the limits of understanding, susceptible of immensity: high above the shining song, high above the shining sunset breathed the heaven, whose sharp-clear autumnal sweetness had repeated itself unchanged for millenniums past and would repeat itself unchanged for millenniums to come, nevertheless unique in its manifestation here and now as the silky bright shimmer of its dome was overcast by the silent breath of the oncoming night.