Peter Camenzind (6 page)

Richard often took me along when he went to meet other people our age—students, musicians, painters, writers, and foreigners of all sorts. All the interesting, art-loving, unusual persons in town eventually made his acquaintance. Among them there were very serious, deeply committed people—philosophers, aestheticians, socialists—and I was able to learn something from all of them. Bits of knowledge from a wide variety of fields came my way and I tried to supplement them by much reading on the side. I gradually gained a fairly clear notion of what fascinated and tormented the liveliest spirits of the day and, moreover, gained stimulating insights into the wishes, premonitions, achievements, and ideals of the intellectuals. These attracted me and I understood them, but I myself lacked any strong urge to take sides on any of the issues, either pro or con. I discovered that in most cases the intellectual fervor was directed at analyzing the conditions and the structure of society and the state, at the sciences, the arts, and at teaching methods. Yet only a small minority seemed aware of the need to develop their own selves and to clarify their personal relationship to time and eternity. And in my case, the awareness of this need was not very great at that time.

I made no further friends because of my exclusive and jealous affection for Richard. This was so exclusive that I even tried to draw him away from the many women he knew. When we arranged to meet, I was always scrupulously punctual, however unimportant the event, and I was very touchy if he kept me waiting. Once he asked me to call for him at a certain hour to go rowing. I did not find him home and waited three hours. The next day I reproached him bitterly.

“Why didn't you go rowing by yourself?” he laughed. ‘I'd completely forgotten about it. That isn't a catastrophe, is it?”

“I'm accustomed to keeping promises to the letter,” I replied heatedly and pompously. “But of course by now I'm used to its not mattering to you at all that you keep me waiting—not if one has as many friends as you…”

He looked at me with immense astonishment. “Do you take trifles like that seriously?”

“My friendship is more than a trifle to me.”

“This saying made such deep impress

That he swiftly swore redress…”

Richard quoted solemnly. He seized my hand and rubbed his nose affectionately against mine in Eskimo fashion, until I freed myself from him with an angry laugh. But the friendship had been repaired.

Modern philosophers, poets, critics—in borrowed, often expensive editions—literary reviews from Germany and France, new plays, Parisian
feuilletons,
and the works of the fashionable Viennese aestheticians were all piled up in my attic. I read them quickly but reserved most of my attention for my old Italian novelists and my historical studies. I wanted to have done with philology as soon as possible and devote myself exclusively to history. Besides works on general history and historical methodology, I read sources and monographs about the late Middle Ages in Italy and France, and in this reading I made my first acquaintance with my favorite among men, the most godly and most blessed of saints, Francis of Assisi.

That dream of mine which had shown me the splendor of life and intellect came true each day and warmed my heart with ambition, joy, and youthful vanity. In the lecture halls I had to pay attention to serious, rather dry, and occasionally somewhat tedious scholarship. At home I returned to the intimate and devout or gruesome tales of the Middle Ages, or to the more leisurely old storytellers whose beautiful and well-appointed world harbored me as if I were in a shadowy enchanted corner. Or I felt the wild wave of modern ideals and passions sweep over me. In between I would listen to music, laugh with Richard, be with him and his friends, meet Frenchmen, Germans, and Russians, listen to strange modern books being read aloud, visit painters' studios or attend soirees at which crowds of excited and muddled intellectuals surrounded me as if at some fantastic carnival.

One Sunday when Richard and I were visiting a small exhibition of new paintings, my friend stopped short before a picture of a mountain with a few goats on its slope. It was carefully and nicely executed, but it was a little old-fashioned and lacked artistry. You can find pretty, relatively trivial paintings like this in every salon, but still this painting pleased me because it was a fairly accurate rendering of the meadows where I grew up. I asked Richard what had attracted him to the picture.

“This,” he said, pointing to the signature in the corner. I could not decipher the reddish-brown letters. “The painting,” Richard continued, “is no great achievement—any number like it are more beautiful—but there is no painter more beautiful than the woman who painted it. Her name is Erminia Aglietti, and if you like we can call on her tomorrow and tell her she's a great painter.”

“Then you know her?”

“Yes. If her paintings were as beautiful as she is, she would be wealthy and would not be painting any more. For she does not enjoy it and paints only because she happens not to have learned any other way to make a living.”

Richard forgot all about it and did not mention her again until a few weeks later. “I ran into the Aglietti girl yesterday. We were going to visit her a couple of weeks back, you remember. Come on. Your collar is clean, isn't it? She's a bit finicky about that.”

My shirt was clean and we went off to see the Aglietti girl, I not without misgivings, for the rather rough and ready relationship of Richard and his friends with women painters and students had never appealed to me. The men were quite ruthless—sometimes coarse, sometimes sarcastic; the girls, on the other hand, were practical, clever, and shrewd—and devoid of the ethereal haze in which I preferred to see and venerate women.

I entered the studio feeling somewhat apprehensive. I was used to the atmosphere of painters' workshops, but this was my first time in a woman's studio. It made a simple, well-ordered impression. Three or four finished paintings hung in their frames; another, on which she had just begun, stood on the easel. The other walls were covered with neat, attractive pencil sketches. There was also a half-filled bookcase. The painter coolly accepted our greeting. She laid down her brush and leaned against the bookcase in her smock, looking as though she did not want to waste much time on us.

Richard showered her with extravagant praise of the picture we had seen at the exhibition. She laughed and cut him short.

“But I might want to buy the painting. Besides, the cows in it are so true to life…”

“But they're goats,” she said quietly.

“Goats? Of course, goats. Observed with an accuracy that is absolutely breathtaking. They are about to leap off the canvas, completely goatlike. Just ask my friend Camenzind, a son of the mountains himself. He'll back me up.”

I felt the painter's eye sweep over me critically, while I listened with a mixture of embarrassment and amusement to the banter. She looked at me for some time, quite uninhibitedly.

“You are from the mountains?”

“Yes.”

“It's obvious. Well, how do you feel about my goats?”

“Oh, they're excellent. I certainly never thought they were cows as Richard did.”

“Very nice of you to say so. Are you a musician?”

“No, a student.”

She said nothing further to me and now I had a chance to observe her. Her long painter's smock hid and distorted her figure, and her face did not strike me as beautiful. The features were sharp and sparse; the eyes a little hard; the hair full, black, and soft. What bothered me—almost repelled me—was her complexion: it made me think at once of Gorgonzola; I would not have been surprised to find greenish veins in it. I had not seen this Italian paleness before, and now, in the unfavorable morning light of the studio, her skin looked startlingly like stone—not marble, but like some weathered, highly bleached stone. And I was not in the habit of testing a woman's face by its shape but was accustomed—still in my somewhat boyish fashion—to look for softness, hue, and loveliness of complexion.

The visit had put Richard in a bad mood too, so I was astonished, actually frightened, when he said sometime afterwards that the Aglietti girl would like to do a drawing of me. It would only be a sketch; she was not interested in my face but in my “typical” broad massive figure.

Before we had a chance to discuss this at greater length, something occurred which transformed my life and set my future course for many years. Suddenly, when I awoke one morning, I was a writer.

At Richard's urging I had occasionally written brief sketches and portraits of types in our circle and also a few essays on literary and historical subjects—all of them as accurate as possible, but purely stylistic exercises.

One morning, when I was still in bed, Richard came in and placed thirty-five francs on my blanket. “They are yours,” he said in a businesslike voice. Finally, after I had exhausted all possible explanations, he drew a page of a newspaper out of his pocket and showed me one of my essays printed there. He had copied a number of my manuscripts and taken them to an editor friend and sold them quietly behind my back. I now held the first piece the editor had bought, as well as the fee.

I had never felt as strange as I did then. Although I was furious that Richard should have assumed such a providential role, the first sweet pride in being a writer and having earned the money, and the thought of a certain, though small, literary fame, overcame my irritation.

Richard had me meet the editor in a café. The editor asked if he might keep the other pieces Richard had shown him and asked me to send more. He said my pieces had a distinctive tone, particularly those on historical subjects, and he would be glad to have more in the same vein and would pay a good fee. Only then did I fully grasp what had happened. Not only would I be able to eat regularly and settle my small debts, but I could abandon the course of studies I'd been compelled to follow and might even be able to afford working solely in my chosen field.

Meanwhile, the editor had a batch of new books sent to my place for review. I worked my way through these and was kept busy for several weeks. Since payments were due at the end of the quarter and I had exceeded my usual standard of living in anticipation of this income, one day I found myself without a centime to my name and was forced to go hungry again. For a few days I held out in my attic on a diet of bread and coffee, then hunger pangs drove me out to a restaurant. I took three books along to leave as security in lieu of payment, having already made a vain attempt to sell them at a secondhand bookshop. The meal was first-rate. Only after I drank my cup of black coffee did I begin to feel uneasy.

With some trepidation, I confessed to the waitress that I was broke. Couldn't I leave the books instead? She picked one of them up from the table—a volume of poetry—leafed through it with evident curiosity, and asked whether she could read it. She liked reading, she said, but somehow never had the chance to get hold of good books. Then I knew I was saved. I suggested that she take all three books as payment for my meal. She accepted and over a period of time took seventeen francs' worth of books off my hands. For a slim volume of poetry, I demanded a cheese sandwich; for a novel, the same plus a glass of wine; a single novella was worth a cup of coffee and a serving of bread.

As I remember, these were all quite insignificant books written in a painfully cramped, fashionable style, so the goodhearted girl probably received a strange impression of modern German literature. With real delight I can recollect mornings on which I would race through a book, scribble a few lines of comment so I would be done with it by noon, and take it to trade in for lunch. But I took pains to hide my financial difficulties from Richard, for I felt unnecessarily ashamed and disliked accepting his help except in the most dire circumstances.

I did not think of myself as a poet. What I wrote on occasion was
feuilleton
stuff, not poetry. Yet I cherished the hope that one day I would succeed in creating a work of literature, a great, proud song of longing and of life.

The clear, lighthearted mirror of my soul was overcast at times by a kind of melancholy. Yet it was not seriously ruffled at first. These shadows appeared for a day or a night in the form of dreamy, forlorn sadness, then disappeared again without a trace, only to return suddenly after weeks or months. I got used to this sadness as to a mistress. I did not feel tortured but experienced an uneasy weariness that had a certain sweetness all its own. If this melancholy enveloped me at night, I would lie for hours by the window gazing down upon the black lake and up at the mountains silhouetted against the wan sky, with stars suspended above. Then a fearfully sweet, overpowering emotion would take hold of me—as though all the nighttime beauty looked at me accusingly, stars and mountain and lake longing for someone who understood the beauty and agony of their mute existence, who could express it for them, as though I were the one meant to do this and as though my true calling were to give expression to inarticulate nature in poems.

I never gave any thought to how I would go about doing this; I only sensed the beautiful grave night mutely longing for me. And I never wrote a poem when I was in such a mood, though I felt responsible for these dark voices and usually would set out on an extended solitary walk after one of these nights. I felt that in this fashion I requited a little the earth's love which offered itself up to me in silent supplication, an idea I could only laugh at afterward. These walks, however, became one of the bases of my later life, large parts of which I have spent as a wanderer, hiking for weeks and months from country to country. I grew used to tramping on, with only a little money and a crust of bread in my pockets, to being by myself for days on end and spending nights out in the open.

I had forgotten the Aglietti girl now that I was becoming a writer. Then she sent a note: “I'm giving a tea on Thursday at my place. Why don't you come and bring your friend?”