* * *
—
ALTHOUGH THEIR EPISTOLARY friendship was firmly platonic, Anna May felt a small pinch reading this letter. Not because she was jealous that Walter admired this woman, but because the woman, “also an actress,” sounded so much more sophisticated than she. Compared with this woman, she felt crude and unlettered, but was it really necessary to marry one’s politics with one’s art, and wouldn’t it be for very wrong reasons if at the end of the day what Anna May wanted was not to change the world, but to garner for herself some measure of savoir faire?
She wrote Walter that she, too, seemed to fall for individuals who were already married, and that in her personal experience, none of those affairs had ended well, but then again, it could be because she was an Asian American woman and none of her white partners had taken her seriously. As a German Jewish cultural theorist wooing a Latvian Bolshevik theater actress, he would have more of a chance than she, she sincerely thought, and this might sound witless and ditzy, but she did truly believe that in life we all deserve to be happy and must muster up some measure of fool’s courage to pursue that end, even in less than ideal circumstances.
Their correspondence tailed off after several years, when some of Anna May’s letters to Walter were returned unopened. He must have moved to a different lodging, forgetting to update her with his new address. Often he wrote her from disparate locales—Ibiza, Svendborg, Nice, Paris—and she envied his mobility. As a freelance writer, he must have been able to work from anywhere he pleased, did not have to be tied down to an industry and a place, the way she was with Hollywood and L.A. It was too bad to lose touch. There had been something liberating about having no friends in common, no social pressure to meet in the flesh. She’d enjoyed their exchanges. Perhaps it was easier for them both to speak quite freely because they were each remote enough from the other in so many ways.
All her letters to him she had signed in this manner, arch and unvarying:
Orientally yours
七
DIE LITERARISCHE WELT
6 July 1928
Conversation with Anna May Wong
A CHINOISERIE FROM THE OLD WEST
Walter Benjamin
May Wong—the name sounds vibrantly edged, robust and light like tiny chopsticks that unfurl into moon-filled scentless blossoms in a cup of tea. My questions were the tepid bath into which the destinies it encloses are supposed to surrender a little of themselves.
In this hospitable Berlin house, we formed a small community that had gathered around the low table to follow the proceedings. But as it is said in the Ju-Kia-Li: “Pointless chatter about people’s affairs frustrates important conversation.”
At first nothing came of it for a long while and we had time to create an image of each other: the influential and worldly inhabitant of this room, who wished to offer us the final hours before her departure (“You encounter a person, he asks you for a favour; if he is pleased with you, then you become his friend”), the novelist, who later asks May Wong whether she rehearsed her roles before a mirror; the artist whom May Wong indicated on the left, the American journalist whom she indicated on the right, and Anna’s sister who was accompanying her in Europe. The two of them came here from America all by themselves, and when they stood at the Hamburg train station, there was nothing left for them to do but to listen attentively and follow the group where they heard the word Berlin fall.
May Wong, as we know, is in the middle of the big film now being made under the direction of Eichberg. Of course, we learn very little about this film. “But the role is perfect,” she said, “it belongs to me as no role before.” Vollmoeller had written it just for her. And for this reason, there is sure to be much suffering and misfortune, for she loves tragic scenes. Her weeping is famous among her peers.
A full countenance like the spring breeze,
Plump and mild tempered
as it said in the fifth chapter of the Dschung-Kuei. That is why she loves to play her sad scenes in mature, weighty roles. “I don’t like to always play flapper girls. I like mothers, most of all. I played a mother once, at the age of fifteen. Why not? There are so many young mothers.”
She will, I told myself, come to speak about what we wish to know of her, of her own accord and for that reason all the more precious, the more skillfully I know how to distract her. “Do many aristocratic Germans”—as they say so beautifully in “Götz,” when they want to make conversation—“now study in Bologna?” Or “Do the Chinese love film? Are there Chinese directors? Do they make movies in China?” Certainly they make movies. Of course they love it. Are there any people on earth who can escape film, either in love or fear?
Only, they began too late in China, at least if one trusts the impression of what was recently screened in Paris as “the first Chinese film.” “The Rose of Pushui” is a work in which the most unscrupulous American method of direction underplays the infinitely subtle material, which the Mongoloid facial expressions portray for the film. Only a dilettante could dare to encapsulate in a few catchphrases the distinctiveness of these facial expressions and this approach to film acting. After all—be it due to the reticence, the speed, the quickness to smile, the abrupt shift into horror—in Europe, the emergence of the Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa has not been forgotten to this day, even after ten years. His acting created a school. All the more strange how long it took in America for Chinese to be allowed or appointed to act in movies.
May Wong cannot imagine her existence without movies, and when I asked: “What medium would you reach for, if film was not at your disposal?” her sole response was “touch wood,” and the entire group playfully hammered on our small table. May Wong makes a swing out of questions and answers: she leans back, reappears, sinks away, emerges again, and I feel as though I am giving her a little push from time to time. She laughs, that is all.
Her dress would not at all be inappropriate for such a garden game: a dark blue lady’s suit, light blue blouse, embellished by a gold cravat—one would like to know a Chinese poem for it. She has always worn such clothing, for she was not born in China but in the Chinatown of Los Angeles. When her roles call for it, however, she dons the old costumes with pleasure. Her imagination works more freely when she wears them. Her favorite dress, which she wears at home from time to time, was tailored out of her father’s wedding coat. With that we were back from “Bologna” and in Hollywood once more.
When it was first suggested to her to be filmed she found it strange, she wouldn’t believe it. Of course, what fell to her was just a minor role. But we imagined the feverish excitement with which she sought her first appearance on the silver screen, and her boundless disappointment that it came to nothing. She had put such effort into it. For she had been interested in films from early on. She still remembers today the first time she stepped into a cinema. School was out that day due to some epidemic. With her pocket money she bought a ticket. As soon as she got home, she reenacted before a mirror all that she had seen. For, as it is said in the story of two cousins, in the chapter about the departure of the crane and the return of the swallow: “One’s career in life is a matter to which one must turn one’s thoughts early on.”
She has long since had no use for mirrors—neither a glass mirror nor a distorting paper mirror that replies to her as public opinion. Friendly and hostile criticism matter little to her. “Because,” this Chinese saying comes from her directly, “one hears the bitter truth only from enemies. I want to hear the bitter truth also from friends.” “Do you have role models? Teachers?” “No. There are actresses whom I admire, but the only time I picked up another’s gesture, it was from—according to the general conviction of Hollywood—the most stupid, most untalented actress around.”
We had already wandered into another room. May Wong quickly found her reclining position again. She seemed to feel comfortable here, letting loose her l
ong hair, arranging it to resemble “a dragon frolicking in water,” stroking it at her brow. Right in the middle, it cuts in at a deeper angle, creating the most heart-shaped of all faces.
Everything that is heart seems to be reflected in her eyes.
I know I shall see her again, in a film that may be similar to the fabric of our dialogue, of which I say, along with the author of the Ju-Kia-Li:
The fabric was divinely worn,
But the face was finer still.
八
The morning he finally decided to leave Marseilles, Walter took his time finishing up the last of the ersatz coffee, roasted from acorns. The nutty taste he’d found nauseating in the beginning had grown on him. He studied his emergency U.S. entry visa as he waited for the water to heat up. Even the umlaut in his full name was accurately reflected: Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin.
The kettle whistled a gentle boil.
Staidly he observed that he was far less anxious when there had been no visa. With no practicable way out then, he was quite free to go about his daily business. Now, alas, he was faced with a dancing bear’s obligation to perform the grandiose escape he’d been putting off for years. When the visa first reached him in Paris months ago, painstakingly procured and securely forwarded to him by Adorno and Horkheimer in L.A., Walter had chucked the whole envelope casually on a pile of old newsprint in a corner of his rented pension. Such travel documents were in very short supply. Most countries had officially closed their borders off to German Jewish refugees; no one wanted a mass influx of someone else’s problem on their hands. War had been declared, and Walter was an enemy alien in Paris, but he’d wanted to start on a new book—about Baudelaire. Instead of ratifying the visa at a consulate and making his way to America as soon as possible, Walter went to the Bibliothèque Nationale to renew his library membership card, so he could carry out his research uninterrupted. It was only when word came that the Wehrmacht was pushing into Paris that Walter entrusted his Arcades Project manuscript to Bataille, returned all the Baudelaire books to the library, and fled, first to Lourdes, then Marseilles.
The kettle was screaming now, but Walter’s inertia had expatiated beyond the room. If he did not have the energy to turn it off and make his morning coffee, how would he be able to climb a mountain and cross a sea? It had been impertinent and irresponsible to set larger wheels in motion when he had no real certainty as to whether he could bring himself to follow an arc till its end. By the time Walter got to Marseilles, it was no longer so easy to set sail from this busy port with its indelicate miasma of oil, urine, printer’s ink. Article XIX of the Franco-German armistice had been signed, requiring the French government to surrender on demand anyone the NSDAP wanted extradited to Germany.
Walter was most certainly on that list.
The Gestapo had put in a repatriation order with the German Embassy in Paris fairly early on after getting wind of the “Paris Letter,” in which Walter had written unequivocally: “culture under the swastika is nothing but the playground of unqualified minds” and “fascist art is one of propaganda.” He did not have a death wish, but surely, in writing, one strives to tell the truth as clearly as one can, or why write at all? Paris had not spat him back out to Berlin then, but circumstances were different now. Vichy France was already borrowing from the populist nationalism of Germany’s swastika. Leery of that scuzzy mix they now termed the Anti-France—namely Protestants, Jews, Freemasons, foreigners, Communists, homosexuals, and Romani—they were setting up their own special commissions to take care of these aforementioned public enemies. Together with the left-wing government that had been in power, these rotted apples must surely be responsible for their country’s effete standing. Once they were rid of these undesirable persons, they could make France magnifique again. Better to have a strong authoritarian government that cared for and cultivated its real sons than a namby-pamby republic: high-minded promises for rootless cosmopolitans full of hot air.
Without washing out yesterday’s dregs, Walter prepared his coffee.
Waiting for it to brew, he ran a free hand along the spines of the last few books he carried with him, enjoying the amicable sound this made. What he missed most in exile was his personal library, and the beloved rare books he’d saved up for on errant paychecks. Walter had accumulated twenty-eight changes of address in assorted cities for seven years prior, parting with more and more of his collection with each move. Also, he’d lost touch with most friends and acquaintances: it was no longer safe for him to give out his address, even under a false name. Between looking over his shoulder and settling down in yet another makeshift place, Walter fleshed out concurrent manuscripts. When there was no more paper, he resorted to using both sides of the page, a breach in etiquette he found distasteful, and when even that had been exhausted, he wrote his notes between the lines of his own handwriting. Given that he was always on the run, with fresh paper in short supply, he realized that the precariousness of his daily life was forcing him to think and write, more and more, in elliptical paragraphs. It was all he could manage of late, in flight. If any of these provisional drafts were ever published, what a lark it would be if readers considered their fragmented form a pure element of style.
Nursing his acorn coffee, he watched a black ant cross the threshold of the rickety table, sizable morsel hoisted over its exoskeleton. How he admired the ability of the common ant to bear loads hundreds of times in excess of its own body weight! He flicked it off the table. Then he tried to look for it on the floor, but it was nowhere to be found. Later in the day, after trimming his moustache very short and patting on cedarwood aftershave in the spots he’d knicked, Walter packed a black leather suitcase crammed full of his papers, one change of undergarments, and the visa. There was no space for his books, and so he left them behind.
* * *
—
FROM MARSEILLES, WALTER caught a train to Port-Vendres, meeting up with a socialist-democrat photographer and her son who were hoping to make the same passage. Like Walter, the two possessed an entry visa into America, but not the relevant exit visa out of Vichy France. For this reason, they had all been counseled that the best way to attempt their exit would be to cross overland from Port-Vendres, the southernmost tip of Vichy France, where it met the northern cusp of its neutral Spanish neighbor, Portbou, between mountain and sea. After entering Portbou, they would head on to Lisbon and sail for America. Fresh lace doilies brightened the worn headrests in the communal train carriage. The photographer had a small stash of bogus food stamps, with which she’d obtained some bread and tomatoes. She shared them with Walter on the commute. Upon reaching Port-Vendres, the trio made a discreet survey of the track they would take, cutting across a stretch of the Pyrenees mountains on foot to reach Portbou.
Circumspection and his infirm heart led Walter to propose his spending the night up on the mountain after the recon so he would not have to exert himself on the same route the very next day, when they embarked on the track proper.
They tried to dissuade him, but he was firm.
You must understand, he said, I do not wish to retrace a single step.
And so Walter spent the night alone with his suitcase in a small stand of parasol pines, the scent of fermenting grapes reaching him on the nighttime wind. Regrouping the next morning, they were ready to walk from one topography of fascism into another—it had been nary a year since the Spanish democrats fell to Franco’s nationalists in the Guerra Civil—one that, for now, better suited their logistical predicament.
They tried to make themselves look inconspicuous among the vine workers, but with his spectacles and the black leather briefcase, Walter was sure they stood out. He wanted the photographer and her son to go ahead of him, but they said it was better to walk together. Calmly, he explained his reason. They would have none of it. Also, he confessed, he feared his stamina was giving out. It had been several hours of hiking upward, fording unpaved di
rt roads, climbing over limestone boulders that littered overgrown slopes. They were not family, he counseled, and had only just made the other’s acquaintance by pure chance, so there was please no need to feel constrained.
Still they refused to leave him on his own.
Every ten minutes, Walter stopped to rest for one minute, and they waited with him. Silently grateful for their comradeship and wary of slowing them down, he counted every second on his wristwatch, forcing himself up at forty-five or thirty. When Walter well and truly could walk no farther, the photographer relieved him of his hand luggage, and her son propped him up to cross the last, steep vineyard. Seeing the middle-aged woman struggle with his heavy briefcase when she herself was traveling without trappings, Walter was beset by guilt, but still he could not bring himself to discard his life’s work. Ma’am, he said. You should not be bearing my burden. I can only hope you will believe me when I say that these contents are more important to me than my life itself.
I believe you, she said simply, without irony.
Delayed Rays of a Star Page 10