THE LUTE AND THE SCARS (2 page)

But then there was a shift.

And he added:
“
Call it commitment if you like: an enlargement of the circle of reality as well as an increase in the obligations resulting from it . . .
”

5

Yes, there are various ways of imagining a future world literature. And one of the most precious and wildest examples is the method of Danilo Ki
š
: this attempt to write minute encyclopaedias.

“
I believe,
”
he wrote,
“
that in its ideal, unattainable, Platonic form the novel should resemble an encyclopedia entry or, rather, a series of entries branching out in all directions yet condensed.
”
A novel, in other words, should organise the maximum content in the minimum space. And it makes me think of the strangest text in
The Lute and the Scars
: just called
“
A and B.
”
It
’
s only a description of Ki
š
’
s most magical place, followed by a description of his worst. The worst place
—
Text B
—
is a village hut, described in his manner of deep detail:

Whereas his magical place
—
Text A
—
is a place of total openness: a view of the sea from the mountains.

But then this story or memoir or fragment ends with a postscript in a single sentence:
“
Texts A and B are connected to each other by mysterious bonds.
”

And with that sketched sentence, I think, Ki
š
transforms his twin fragments into the smallest novel possible: a universal history of loss
—
described without psychology, or character, in a couple of pages.

There are various way of imagining a future world literature. And one of them, I just mean, is to realise that Danilo Ki
š
is there already.

ADAM THIRLWELL, 2012

*
Save where indicated by the text, this and other quotes in the Preface are from
Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews
. ed. Susan Sontag, (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1995).

1

“
He arrived in Paris on May 28, 1928.
”

He took a room in a hotel in the Latin Quarter, close to the Od
é
on. This particular hotel filled him with melancholy thoughts, and in the evenings, when he
’
d turn off the lamp above his nightstand, he had visions of phantoms with long hotel sheets fluttering around them like winding cloths. One of these phantom couples was familiar to him, and our man without a fatherland refreshed the image in his mind of the poet and his lover as he had seen them once in a photograph in that poet
’
s scrapbook: she, Leda, with the enormous hat shading her face as if a veil were draped over her eyes, although it was a shadow that nonetheless failed to conceal the quiver of the years, barely visible, and of a certain sensuality starting to register around the lips; he, the poet afflicted with love and illness, his eyes bulging from Graves
’
disease but still glowing with fire like the eyes of a Roma master violinist. That Leda
’
s troubadour had once lodged in this same hotel was a fact probably known only to the stateless one. Upon his arrival he asked the porter if a certain poet had stayed in the hotel around 1910 . . . and he mentioned him by name. The young man, obviously confused by the foreign-sounding name, blurted out in his mother tongue:
“
No comprendo, se
ñ
or
.
”
This proved to the stateless one yet again how irrevocably borders divide our world, and to what degree language is a person
’
s only real home. But, taking his key in his hand, he was already heading for his room on the third floor, on foot, half running up the stairs, because he had been steering clear of elevators of late.

2

“
The eyewitness accounts of the last period of his life are contradictory. Some see him beset by anxiety, avoiding elevators and automobiles with suspicion and horror, while others . . .
”

Once, more than twenty years ago, he had read in the newspaper that a young man in Pest plummeted into a basement on board an elevator; they found him smashed to pieces. This event from long ago impressed itself upon his memory and slumbered there, in hiding for years, only to pop up again one day the way a corpse resurfaces when the stone on it is dislodged. Indeed, this had happened only a few months earlier, while he was standing by the elevator door in the editorial offices of a Berlin publishing house. He pressed the button and heard the humming of the old French elevator in its cage as it descended from somewhere on high. Suddenly it stopped right in front of him, abruptly, with a slight rattle, a polished black coffin, lined with purple silk imprinted with irises like the reverse side of a lustrous piece of
cr
ê
pe de Chine
; it also had a huge Venetian mirror, polished on the edges, with green glass like the surface of a crystal lake. This upright coffin, made to order for a first-class funeral and controlled by the invisible power of a
deus ex machina
, had descended from above, docked like Charon
’
s ferry, and now sat awaiting the pale traveler standing there petrified and uncertain, the manuscript of his latest novel,
The Man Without a Country
, shoved under his arm (and through the grate he himself was observing the pale traveler in the mirror, standing there petrified and uncertain, with the manuscript of his most recent novel clenched under his arm). And the coffin was waiting to take him not into the
“
other world
”
but merely into the grim basement of the building, the crematorium and cemetery where glassy-eyed stray travelers rested in sarcophagi similar to this one.

3

When he reached his room, to which the porter had already delivered his luggage, the guest first spread his manuscripts out on the table and then began to jot down his impressions of the day. In the last few years the man without a country had been writing more and more frequently in hotel rooms at night, or by day in caf
é
s, on tables of artificial marble.

4

He captured in haste a few observations, a few
Bilder
: a newspaper vendor slurping her soup from a plate, next to her nostril a wound the size of a coin, a raw open wound; a female midget attempting to climb up into a train; a waiter totting up a bill with his pencil between his little finger and index finger because the rest of his fingers were missing; and a pimply porter with a boil on his neck. And so on.

5

He despised duels as a symbol of
Junker
arrogance, in the same way that he scorned commonplace scandal and showdowns with fists or knife, but for all that he was no less obsessed with human cruelty, which he saw simply as a depiction of the cruelty of society. Physical deformity and every kind of abnormality fascinated him as the flip side of the
“
normal.
”
Giants, dwarves, boxing champions, and circus freaks triggered in him a whole chain of metaphysical associations. Deaf from the noise of the fans, he watched their maniacal faces. Squeezed in amongst hysterical fans, he grasped, he sensed corporeally, the meaning of certain abstract concepts such as
community
,
leader
, and
idea
, as well as the connotation of that hoary adage about bread and circuses that sententiously presents us with the whole starting point of modern history.

6

Back in his homeland this poet had a monument, and streets, named after him; he had generations of admirers and his own mythos, as well as followers who praised him to the skies and stood in awe of his verse and lyrics as the pure emanation of the national spirit; and he also had sworn enemies who considered him a traitor to national ideals, a sell-out to the Germans and the Jews, the nobles and the moneyed classes, and these enemies denied that he had any originality, proclaiming him an ordinary imitator of the French Symbolists, a plagiarist of Verlaine and Baudelaire, and they wrote pamphlets about him full of accusations and every manner of slander.

7

His father, Alad
á
r von N
é
meth, began his
“
diplomatic career
”
quite modestly covering the shipping news for the
Pester Lloyd
newspaper, and his first posting was in Rijeka (Fiume). The journey to Fiume coincided with the honeymoon of this young diplomat who had just married a certain Zofia, n
é
e Dvo
ř
ak. In that city of consuls and diplomats the future
“
man without a country
”
came into the world; he would retain for the whole of his life the memory of the sea and of a palm tree in front of his window, straining beneath the hammering of a gale, as an illustration of a Spartan proverb that was near and dear to his father
’
s heart: the power of resistance is acquired through constant struggle against the elements.

8

His room was lined with carpets and the floor covered by sheepskins; in summer the blinds were let down over the windows to shield him from the sun while in winter the sitting rooms were heated by a gargantuan tile stove that looked like a Secessionist cathedral. From the time he was five years old the nursery had been unheated, as a hygienic precaution and a part of his training in the Spartan mode; sometimes the nursemaids would lie down in the child
’
s bed so that their wholesome commonplace warmth would fill the heavy feather duvet.

9

His great-grandfather on his mother
’
s side (mutton chops, stove-pipe hat clutched in his left arm, his right resting at the elbow on a high shelf; on the shelf, in a vase, paper roses; at his feet a faience figure of a tremendous mastiff) was named Feldner. He didn
’
t leave much of a paper trail around the house, with the exception of that photograph with the paper roses, and it was with a certain feeling of guilt that they referred to him as
“
the late Feldner
”
(using his last name and always with the addition of
“
late
”
). That some ancient wrongdoing had come down from him, some type of original family sin
—
this was beyond certain. Hence the sparse documentation on him; hence the sole photograph in the album.

10

And this round face, with its big black moustache and hefty sideburns, that
’
s the writer
’
s father, Dr. Alad
á
r von N
é
meth, accompanied by Lajos von Hatvany (
“
who corresponded with T. Mann and Romain Rolland
”
). And here is the writer
’
s mother (a cheerful face under a crown of blonde hair pinned up in plaits). And here we see the family in a boat, on a river.
Au verso
:
“
Belgrade, 1905.
”
The high walls with the tower that one can almost make out in the background are the walls of the Kalemegdan fortress.
—
A clearing in the woods, with guests seated around a roughly hewn wooden table. The boy is sitting in his mother
’
s lap; next to them is Dr. Alad
á
r von N
é
meth, with his hunting rifle, the stock of which he has leaned against the table like a
hajduk
would do; at the head of the table, a gentleman in a hunting hat; the women are also wearing hunting hats, and the men Hungarian tunics:
“
Dr. Alad
á
r von N
é
meth in the company of His Highness Ludwig III, King of Bavaria. Pressburg/Bratislava.
”
—
The boy on his bicycle. With one hand he
’
s propping himself up against an ivy-clad wall:
“
Budapest, R
á
k
ó
czianum, 1913.
”
—
The lad with a group of other schoolboys and professors; an arrow indicates Egon von N
é
meth:
“
M
ü
nchen. Wilhelmsgymnasium, 1914.
”
And so forth.

11

With the help of a poet he discovered at an early age the mysterious, encrypted language of love. As an eighteen-year-old, in love with a fellow student, a German girl, he discovered that in this poet
’
s works there was one poem for every phase of
amour
(for raptures, disappointment, dread, regret); and he commenced translating. And so he translated
—
“
completely
à
propos
”
—
fifty of the poems, and at the point when the love-cycle had quickened in the German language and was already in the printer
’
s hands, love evolved for him, via the process of crystallization (to put it in Stendhal-ese), to that point at which passion begins to smolder and go out. All that remained of the whole youthful adventure and amorous delirium was this anthology of translated poems, like some dog-eared photo album. And that purplish echo around the issue of love in his novels, and that lyric tension in his sentences that was to be noted by critics, and not without a certain perplexity.

12

Every sensitive young nature, above all when it is flooded by education and music as in his case, tends to regard the powerful, turbulent fascinations of body and soul, that lyrical magma of youth, as precocious signs of talent. These natures are inclined to think that the issue is more often than not simply one of the secret quiverings of their susceptibilities, the imprecise teaming up of glandular secretions and sympathetic spasms, a symbiosis of their organism
’
s tectonics and the music of the soul
—
those things that are the gift of youthfulness and intellectual precociousness and, similar to poetry in their tremblings, are easily mistaken for it. And once under the power of this magic
—
which grows over the years to be a dangerous habit, like tobacco and alcohol
—
a person will continue writing, with the skilled hand of a hack, writing sonnets and elegies, patriotic verse and occasional pieces; and it is now obviously just a matter of being a wound-up mechanism that lurched into motion in one
’
s youth and now continues to turn, by the force of habit or inertia, at each and every brush of the breeze, like an empty windmill.

13

In that epoch, when the
Bildungsroman
was in full flower in European literature and writers were basing their work on the social origins of the protagonist (the
“
narrator,
”
behind whom was concealed a slightly altered autobiography), in a kind of perpetual self-recrimination and escape from their own environment and in a belabored emphasis on their disloyalty, or, on the contrary, in that other version of
vanitas
that underscores the writer
’
s ordinary origins, emancipating him from inherited sin and any fatalistic responsibility for the evils of this world, and vouchsafing him the divine right to label things evil with no contrition
—
it was in that period, then, that Egon von N
é
meth consciously did away with the autobiographical elements in his work. He considered the question of his parents and origins to be a triviality and an accident of fate, even while intuiting with great foresight that in the theory of social origins there were signs of a new and dangerous theology of original sin, in the face of which the individual was helpless, marked for all time, with the stamp of sin on his brow as if put there by a red-hot brand.

14

“
I am a typical mixture from the Habsburg Empire of blessed memory: simultaneously Hungarian, Croat, Slovak, German, Czech, and if I were to nose around in my genealogy and have my blood analyzed
—
which these days is a very popular kind of science in the world of nationalities
—
then I would find there, as in a stream-bed, traces of Tsintsar, Armenian, and, yes, maybe even Roma and Jewish blood. But this science of the spectral analysis of blood is one that I do not recognize. It is a science by the way of very dubious value; it
’
s dangerous and inhumane, especially nowadays and in our region where this menacing theory of
Blut und Boden
engenders nothing but mistrust and hatred, and where this
‘
spectral analysis of blood and origins
’
is typically carried out in a sensationalistic and primitive manner
—
with a knife and revolver. I
’
ve been bilingual since birth, and I wrote in Hungarian and German until I was eighteen; that was when I translated that collection by the Hungarian poet and opted for the German language, because it
’
s the nearest to my heart. I am, good sirs, a German writer; the world is my homeland.
”