The World of Yesterday (16 page)

After lunch and that first delightful surprise came a second. Van der Stappen, who had long been meaning to fulfil an old wish of his own and Verhaeren’s, had been working for days on a bust of the poet, and today was to be the last sitting. My presence, said van der Stappen, was a very lucky chance, because he positively needed someone to talk to Verhaeren—who was only too inclined to fidget—while he sat for the sculptor so that his face would be animated as he talked and listened. And so I looked deeply into his face for two hours, that unforgettable face with its high forehead, ploughed deeply by the wrinkled furrows of his bad years, his brown, rust-coloured hair falling over it, the hard, stern structure of his features surrounded by brownish weather-beaten skin, his chin jutting like a rock and above the narrow lips, large and lavish, his drooping moustache in the Vercingetorix style. All his nervousness was in his hands—those lean, firm, fine and yet strong hands where the veins throbbed strongly under the thin skin. The whole weight of his will was expressed in his broad, rustic shoulders; the intelligent, bony
head almost seemed too small for them. Only when he was moving did you see his strength. If I look at the bust of him now—and van der Stappen never did anything better than the work of that day—I know how true to life it is, and how fully it catches the essence of the man. It is documentary evidence of literary stature, a monument to unchanging power.

In those three hours I learnt to love the man as I have loved him all the rest of my life. There was a confidence in him that did not for a moment seem self-satisfied. He did not mind about money; he would rather live in the country than write a line meant only for the day and the hour. He did not mind about success either, did not try to increase it by granting concessions or doing favours or showing cameraderie—his friends of the same cast of mind were enough for him. He was even independent of the temptation so dangerous to a famous man when fame at last came to him at the zenith of his life. He remained open in every sense, hampered by no inhibitions, confused by no vanity, a free and happy man, easily giving vent to every enthusiasm. When you were with him, you felt inspired in your own will to live.

So there he was in the flesh before me, young as I then was—a poet such as I had hoped to find him, exactly as I had dreamt of him. And even in that first hour of our personal acquaintance my decision was taken; I would put myself at the service of this man and his work. It was a bold decision, for this hymnodist of Europe was little known at the time in Europe itself, and I knew in advance that translating his monumental body of poetry and his three-verse dramas would keep me from writing my own work for two or three years. But as I determined to devote all my power, time and passion to someone else’s work, I was giving myself the best thing imaginable—a moral mission. My vague seeking, my own attempts, now had a point. And if I am asked today to advise a young writer who has not yet made up his mind
what way to go, I would try to persuade him to devote himself first to the work of someone greater, interpreting or translating him. If you are a beginner there is more security in such self-sacrifice than in your own creativity, and nothing that you ever do with all your heart is done in vain.

In the two years that I spent almost exclusively in translating the poetry of Verhaeren and preparing to write a biography of him, I travelled a good deal at various times, sometimes to give public lectures. And I had already received unexpected thanks for my apparently thankless devotion to Verhaeren’s work; his friends abroad noticed me, and soon became my friends too. One day, for instance, the delightful Swede Ellen Key came to see me—a woman who, with extraordinary courage in those still blind and backward times, was fighting for the emancipation of women, and in her book
The Century of the Child
pointed a warning finger, long before Freud, at the mental vulnerability of young people. Through her, I was introduced to the poetic circle in Italy of Giovanni Cena, and made an important friend in the Norwegian Johan Bojer. Georg Brandes, international master of the history of literature, took an interest in me, and thanks to my promotion of it the name of Verhaeren began to be better known in Germany than in his native land. Kainz, that great actor, and Moissi gave public recitations of his poems in my translation. Max Reinhardt produced Verhaeren’s
Les Moines
—The Monks—on the German stage. I had good reason to feel pleased.

But now it was time to think of myself and remember that I had taken on other duties as well as those to Verhaeren. I had to bring my university career to a successful conclusion and take my doctorate in philosophy home. Now it was a matter of catching up within a few months with the entire scholastic material on which more conscientious students had been labouring for almost four years. With Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, a literary friend of my youth who may not be too happily remembered
today because he was one of the acknowledged public writers and academics of Hitler’s Germany, I crammed by night. But the examination was not made difficult for me. In a private preliminary conversation the kindly professor, who knew too much about me from my public literary activities to trouble me with details, said with a smile, “I expect you’d rather not be tested in the field of exact logic,” and then gently led me into spheres where he knew I was sure of myself. It was the first time that I had to take an examination, and I hope the last, and I passed with distinction. Now I was outwardly free, and all the years from then until the present day have been given to my struggle to remain equally free in my mind—a struggle that, in our times, is becoming ever harder.

I
HAD PROMISED MYSELF
a present for the first year of my newly gained freedom—I would go to Paris. Two earlier visits had given me only a superficial knowledge of that city of inexhaustible delights, but I could tell that any young man who had spent a year there would be left with incomparably happy memories for the rest of his life. Nowhere but in Paris did you feel so strongly, with all your senses aroused, that your own youth was as one with the atmosphere around you. The city offers itself to everyone, although no one can fathom it entirely.

Of course I know that the wonderfully lively and invigorating Paris of my youth no longer exists; perhaps the city will never entirely recover that wonderful natural ease, now that it has felt the iron brand forcibly imprinted on it by the hardest hand on earth. Just as I began writing these lines, German armies and German tanks were rolling in, like a swarm of grey termites, to destroy utterly the divinely colourful, blessedly light-hearted lustre and unfading flowering of its harmonious structure. And now they are there—the swastika is hoisted on the Eiffel Tower, black-clad storm troopers march challengingly down Napoleon’s Champs-Elysées, and even from far away I feel how hearts must be sinking in the buildings of Paris, how its downtrodden citizens, once so good-humoured, must be watching the conquerors tramp through its pleasant bistros and cafés in their jackboots. Few of my own misfortunes have dismayed me and filled me with despair as much as the humiliation of Paris, a city that was blessed like no other with the ability to make anyone who came
there happy. Will it ever again be able to set future generations the wonderful example it set us—wise instruction in how to be both free and creative, open to everyone and made ever richer by such delightful extravagance?

I know, I know, Paris is not alone in its suffering today. It will be decades before that other Europe can return to what it was before the First World War. A certain gloom has never entirely lifted from the once-bright horizon of the continent since then, and from country to country, from one person to another, bitterness and distrust have lurked in the mutilated body of Europe corroding it like poison. However much progress in society and technology has been made during the quarter of a century between the two world wars, look closely and there is not a single nation in our small Western world that is not immeasurably worse off by comparison with its old natural
joie de vivre.
You could spend days describing the trustful, childlike cheerfulness of the Italians in the old days, even when they were in the direst poverty—how they laughed and sang in their trattorias, joking about their terrible
governo
, while now they have to march in sombre ranks, chins jutting, hearts heavy. Can anyone imagine an Austrian today as free and easy, as good-natured as he would once have been, devoutly trusting in his imperial ruler and in God, who used to make his life so pleasant? The Russians, the Germans, the Spanish, none of them know how much freedom and joy that heartless, voracious ogre the State has sucked from the marrow of their souls. The people of all nations feel only that an alien shadow, broad and heavy, looms over their lives. But we who knew the world of individual liberties in our time can bear witness that a carefree Europe once rejoiced in a kaleidoscopic play of variegated colours. We tremble to see how clouded, darkened, enslaved and imprisoned the world has now become in its suicidal rage.

And nowhere could you ever have experienced the artless yet wonderfully wise lightness of life more happily than in Paris,
where it was gloriously affirmed in the city’s beauty of form, mild climate, wealth and traditions. All of us young people absorbed a part of that lightness, and added our own mite to it. Chinese and Scandinavians, Spaniards and Greeks, Brazilians and Canadians, we all felt at home on the banks of the Seine. We were under no compulsion, we could speak, think, laugh and criticise as we liked, we lived as we pleased, with others or by ourselves, extravagantly or thriftily, luxuriously or in the bohemian style—there was room for every preference and all tastes were catered for. There were sublime restaurants where culinary magic was worked, wines at two hundred or three hundred francs, wickedly expensive cognacs from the days of Marengo and Waterloo; but you could eat and drink almost as well at any
marchand de vin
around the corner. In the crowded student restaurants of the Latin Quarter, a few sous would buy you the most delicious little
amuse-gueules
before and after your juicy steak, with red or white wine and a long stick of delicious white bread. You could dress as you liked; students promenaded along the boulevard Saint-Michel in their chic berets, while the
rapins
, the painters, sported broad-brimmed hats like giant mushrooms and romantic, black-velvet jackets. Meanwhile workers cheerfully went about on the smartest of boulevards in their blue blouses or their shirtsleeves, along with nursemaids in elaborately pleated Breton caps and vintners in blue aprons. A young couple might start dancing in the street any time, not just on the fourteenth of July, with a policeman smiling at them—the street was common property! No one felt shy with anyone; the prettiest girls didn’t shrink from going into the nearest
petit hôtel
with a black man—who in Paris minded about such ridiculous bugbears as race, class and origin became later? You walked, talked, and slept with whoever you liked, regardless of what anyone else thought. To love Paris properly, you ought really to have known Berlin first, experiencing the natural servility of Germany with its rigid class differences, painfully clearly delineated, in which the
officer’s wife did not talk to the teacher’s wife, who in turn did not speak to the merchant’s lady, who herself did not mix with the labourer’s wife. In Paris, however, the inheritance of the Revolution was still alive and coursing through the people’s veins; the proletarian worker felt himself as much of a free citizen as his employer, a man with equal rights; the café waiter shook hands in a comradely manner with the general in his gold-laced uniform; the industrious, respectable, neat and clean wives of the lower middle classes did not look down their noses at prostitutes who happened to live on the same floor in their building, but passed the time of day with them on the stairs, and their children gave the girls flowers. Once I saw a party of prosperous Norman farmers coming into a smart restaurant—Larue, near the Madeleine—after a christening service; they wore the traditional costume of their village, their heavy shoes tramped over the paving stones like horses’ hooves; their hair was so thickly pomaded that you could have smelt it in the kitchen. They were talking at the top of their voices, which grew louder and louder the more they drank, uninhibitedly nudging their stout wives in the ribs. As working farmers they were not at all diffident about sitting among the well-groomed gentry in frock coats and grand dresses, and even the smooth-shaven waiter did not look down his nose at such rustic guests, as he would have done in Germany or Britain, but served them as politely and punctiliously as he waited on the ministers and excellencies, and the
maître d’hôtel
even seemed to take particular pleasure in giving a warm welcome to his rather boisterous customers. Paris accommodated everyone side by side; there was no above and below, no visible dividing line between de luxe streets and grubby alleys; life and cheerfulness reigned everywhere. Street musicians played in suburban yards, from the windows you heard midinettes singing at their work; there was always laughter in the air somewhere, or the sound of someone calling out in friendly tones. If a couple of cabbies got into an argument, they would shake hands afterwards, and drink a glass
of wine together to wash down a few of the oysters that you could get really cheap. Nothing was stiffly formal. It was easy to meet women and easy to part with them again; there was someone for everyone; every young man had a cheerful girlfriend with no prudishness about her. What a carefree life that was! You could live well in Paris, especially when you were young! Even strolling about the city was a pleasure, and also instructive, because everything was open to everyone—you could go into a bookshop and spend a quarter-of-an-hour leafing through the volumes there without any morose muttering from the bookseller. You could visit the little galleries and enjoy looking around the bric-a-brac shops at your leisure, you could go to auction sales at the Hôtel Drouot just to watch, and talk to governesses out in the parks. Once you had really begun to stroll it wasn’t easy to stop, for the street irresistibly led you on with it, always showing you something new, like the patterns of a kaleidoscope. If you felt tired, you could sit outside one of the ten thousand cafés and write letters on the free notepaper provided, while you listened to the street traders talking up the useless junk they had for sale. The only difficulty was in staying at home or going home, particularly when spring came, silvery light shone softly over the Seine, the trees in the boulevards began to put out green leaves, and every young girl wore a bunch of violets that had cost a mere sou. However, it didn’t have to be spring in Paris for you to feel cheerful there.

At the time when I first knew the city it had not merged so completely into a single entity as it has today, thanks to the underground railway and motor cars. Most of the traffic in the streets still consisted of omnibuses drawn by heavy horses with steam rising from them. And there was no more comfortable way of discovering Paris than from the
impériale
, the top deck of those wide omnibuses, or from one of the open cabs which also ambled along at a leisurely pace. At that time it was still quite a journey to go from Montmartre to Montparnasse, and
considering the thrifty habits of the
petit bourgeoisie
of Paris I thought it quite credible that, as legend had it, there were still Parisians on the Right Bank who had never set foot on the Left Bank, and children who played only in the Jardin du Luxembourg and had never been to the Tuileries or Parc Monceau. The Parisian resident or concierge preferred to stay at home in his own part of the city, making his own little Paris inside the great metropolis, and every arrondissement had its own distinct and even provincial character. So it was quite an important decision for a stranger to choose a place to stay. The Latin Quarter no longer enticed me. On an earlier brief visit, when I was twenty, I had gone straight there from the railway station, and on my very first evening I had sat in the Café Vachette, getting them to show me, with all due reverence, the place where Verlaine used to sit and the marble-topped table on which, when he was tipsy, he used to bang angrily with his heavy stick to get a respectful hearing. I was a novice drinker, unused to alcohol, but I ordered a glass of absinthe in his honour, not because I liked the taste of the greenish brew at all, but out of a sense that, as a young admirer of the great lyric poet of France, I ought to observe his own ritual in the Latin Quarter. At that time my idea of the right thing to do made me want to live in a fifth-floor attic near the Sorbonne, to give me a more faithful idea of the ‘real’ atmosphere of the Latin Quarter, which I knew from books. At twenty-five, however, I was no longer so naively romantic. The student quarter seemed to me too international, too un-Parisian. Above all, I no longer wanted to choose my permanent place of residence for reasons of literary reminiscence, but in order to work there as well as possible myself. I started looking around at once. The elegant Paris of the Champs-Elysées was not at all suitable, still less the quarter around the Café de la Paix, where all the rich visitors from the Balkans congregated and no one spoke French but the waiters. I was more attracted by the quiet district of Saint Sulpice, surrounded by churches and
monasteries, where Rilke and Suarès also liked to stay. Most of all I would have liked to take lodgings on the Île St-Louis, so that I could feel I was linked to both sides of Paris, the Right Bank and the Left Bank. But in my exploration of the city I managed to find something even better in my very first week. Wandering around the Galeries du Palais-Royal, I discovered that among the eighteenth-century buildings constructed on the same pattern in that huge square by the duc d’Orléans, nicknamed Philippe Égalité, a single once grand
palais
had come down in the world, and was now a small and rather primitive hotel. I asked to be shown one of the rooms, and was charmed to find that its window had a view of the garden of the Palais-Royal, which was closed to the public after dark. All you could hear then was the faint roar of the city, an indistinct and rhythmic sound like waves breaking on a distant shore, you saw statues gleaming in the moonlight, and sometimes in the early hours of the morning the wind carried an aromatic scent of vegetables that way from the nearby food market of Les Halles. The writers and statesmen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used to live in this historic quarter of the Palais-Royal. Opposite stood the building where Balzac and Victor Hugo had so often climbed the hundred steps up to the attic storey where the poet I loved so much, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,
1
had lived. There stood the marble memorial at the place where Camille Desmoulins had called on the people to storm the Bastille, there was the covered walkway where the indigent young Lieutenant Bonaparte had looked for a patroness among the not very virtuous ladies promenading along. The history of France spoke from every stone here, and what was more, the Bibliothèque Nationale, where I spent my mornings, was only a street away. Also close were the Musée du Louvre with its pictures and the boulevards with crowds pouring along them. At last I was where I had wanted to be, in a place where the warm heart of France had been beating steadily for centuries, right in the centre of the
city. I remember how André Gide once visited me and, amazed by such silence here in the heart of Paris, commented, “We have to ask foreigners to show us the most beautiful places in our own city.” And sure enough, I couldn’t have found anything more Parisian and at the same time more secluded than my romantic studio room in the very middle of the magic circle of the liveliest city in the world.