The World of Yesterday (20 page)

At first I did try walking. In my first week I walked all over London until I was footsore. With a student sense of duty, I saw all the sights listed in Baedeker, from Madame Tussaud’s to the Houses of Parliament. I learnt to drink ale, I smoked a pipe in the manner of the country instead of the cigarettes
of Paris; I tried to adapt in a hundred little details, but I never made any real contacts in society or literature, and those who know England only from the outside miss the essential part of it—they miss, for instance, the wealthy City companies which show you nothing on the outside but the usual well-polished brass plate. When I was introduced to a club I didn’t know what to do there; the mere sight of the deep leather armchairs, like the atmosphere in general, induced a kind of intellectual drowsiness in me because I had not earnt such relaxation, like the others there, by concentrated activity or sport. An idler, a mere observer, unless he was worth millions and knew how to raise idling to the level of a high convivial art, was rejected by this city as a foreign body, while Paris happily accepted him into its congenial activities. My mistake, as I realised too late, had been not to spend my two months in London in some kind of occupation, as a volunteer in a business or a secretary on a newspaper, and then at least I would have dipped my finger a little way into English life. As just an outside observer I learnt little, and only many years later, during the war, did I come to know something about the real Britain.

Of poets writing in English, I visited only Arthur Symons. He in turn got me an invitation to visit W B Yeats, whose poetry I loved, and whose exquisite verse drama
The Shadowy Waters
I had translated purely for the pleasure of it. I didn’t know that it was to be an evening of reading; a small and select party had been invited; we sat crowded together in a rather small room, some of us even on stools or on the floor. At last Yeats began, having first lit two thick, huge altar candles standing beside a black or black-covered lectern. All the other lights in the room were put out, so his energetic head with its black locks emerged from the candlelight like a sculpture. Yeats read slowly, in a deep and melodious voice, without ever lapsing into a declamatory tone, but giving every line its full, metallic weight. It was beautiful, and truly solemn. The only thing that disturbed my
pleasure was the stagy setting, the black cassock-like garment that gave Yeats a rather priestly look, the burning of the fat wax candles that, I think, had a slightly aromatic perfume. All this lent the literary event—which itself gave me a new kind of pleasure—more of the flavour of a celebration of poetry than a spontaneous reading. I couldn’t help comparing this occasion with my memory of Verhaeren reading his own poems in his shirtsleeves, so that his sinewy arms could keep time with the rhythm better, and without any pompous stage-setting—or with Rilke now and then reciting a couple of verses from a book, speaking simply and clearly in the quiet service of language. This was the first ‘staged’ reading I ever attended, and if despite my love for the work of Yeats I thought there was something rather suspect about the cult-like presentation, he had a grateful guest on that occasion all the same.

However, the real poetic discovery I made in London was not of a living artist but of one almost forgotten at the time—William Blake, that lonely and difficult genius, who fascinates me to this day with his mixture of awkwardness and sublime perfection. A friend had advised me to go to the print room of the British Museum, which was in the care of Lawrence Binyon at this time, and get them to show me Blake’s colourfully illustrated books
Europe
,
America
and
The Book of Job
. Today they are great rarities in second-hand bookshops, and I was captivated. Here, for the first time, I saw one of those magical natures that, without any very clear idea of their path, are borne up by visions as if on the wings of angels as they pass through every wilderness of the imagination. I spent days and weeks trying to make my way deeper into the labyrinth of Blake’s naive yet daemonic mind, and translated some of his poems into German. I became almost avidly ambitious to own a sheet of paper from his own hand, but that at first seemed impossible except in my dreams. Then one day my friend Archibald G B Russell, even then the leading expert on Blake, told me that one of the ‘visionary portraits’,
included in the Blake exhibition he was about to arrange, was for sale, in his—and my—opinion the finest of the master’s pencil drawings, his
King John
. “You’ll never get tired of it,” he assured me, and he was right. Of all my books and pictures, that single sheet of paper was my companion for thirty years, and the magically inspired face of the mad king has looked at me again and again from my wall. It is this drawing that, in my wanderings, I miss more than any other of my possessions now lost and far away. I had tried in vain to recognise the genius of England in its streets and cities; suddenly it was revealed to me in the truly astral figure of Blake. And to the many things I loved in the world, I had added another.

P
ARIS, ENGLAND, ITALY, SPAIN
, Belgium, Holland—this wandering gypsy life to satisfy my curiosity had been enjoyable in itself, and rewarding in many ways. But ultimately one needs a fixed point, a place to set out from and return to again and again. No one knows that better than I do today, when I no longer wander from country to country of my own free will. In the years since I left school I had acquired a small library as well as pictures and other mementoes; thick packages of my manuscripts were beginning to stack up, and after all, though I was attached to these things, I couldn’t keep dragging them around the world with me in trunks and suitcases. So I took a small apartment in Vienna, not meant to be a permanent residence but only a
pied-à-terre
, as the French so graphically put it. Until the Great War, in fact, my life was still governed in some odd way by the idea that everything was only temporary. Nothing that I did, I told myself, was the real thing—not in my work, which I regarded as just experimenting to discover my true bent, not the women with whom I was on friendly terms. Like this, my young self could feel that it was not yet fully committed to anything, while I still had the carefree pleasure of tasting, trying and enjoying whatever was offered. At an age when other men had been married for some years, had children, held responsible positions, and must strain every nerve to the limit, I still thought of myself as a young man, a novice, a beginner with endless time ahead of me, and I hesitated to commit myself to anything definite. Just as I regarded my writing as a prelude to the real work I would do
some day, a kind of visiting card, I meant my apartment to be little more than a temporary address. I deliberately chose a small place in the suburbs so that the expense would not curtail my freedom. I did not buy particularly good furniture, in case I felt I had to ‘spare’ it, as I had seen my parents do in their own apartment, where every single chair had a cover that was removed only when visitors came. On purpose, I set out to avoid feeling permanently settled in Vienna, and thus forming sentimental links with a particular place. For many years I thought that my deliberate training of myself to feel that everything was temporary was a flaw in me, but later on, when I was forced time and again to leave every home I made for myself and saw everything around me fall apart, that mysterious lifelong sensation of not being tied down was helpful. It was a lesson I learnt early, and it has made loss and farewells easier for me.

Not that I had many treasures to keep in that first apartment. But the drawing by Blake that I had bought in London hung on my wall, and so did the manuscript of one of Goethe’s most beautiful poems in his bold, free handwriting—at the time it was the jewel in my collection of autographs, which I had begun while I was still at school and, with the same herd instinct that had our whole literary group writing, we pursued writers, actors and singers for their signatures. Most of us gave up both writing and autograph-hunting on leaving school, but in me the passion for these earthly shades of men of genius only increased and grew deeper. I was indifferent to mere signatures, and I was not interested in the extent of a man’s international fame or what his work would fetch; I wanted the original manuscripts or drafts of written works or musical compositions because, more than anything else, I was interested in the biographical and psychological aspects of the creation of a work of art. Where else can we locate that mysterious moment of transition when
the vision and intuition of a genius brings a verse or a melody out of invisibility into the earthly realm, giving it graphic form, where can we observe it if not in the first drafts of creative artists, whether achieved with great effort or set down as if in a trance? I do not know enough about an artist if I have only his finished work before me, and I agree with Goethe who said that, to understand great works fully, we should not just look at them in their final form but trace the course of their creation. Even visually, a preliminary sketch by Beethoven with its wild, impatient strokes, its turbulent confusion of motifs begun and then rejected, the creative fury of his daemonic energy condensed into a few pencil markings, has a physically stimulating effect on me because the sight of it excites my mind so much. I can stare at a sheet full of such hieroglyphics enchanted and beguiled, as others might gaze at a perfect picture. A page of a proof corrected by Balzac, where almost every sentence is torn apart, every line ploughed up, the white margins invaded by black lines, markings and words, symbolises to me the eruption of a human Vesuvius, and when I first see a poem that I have loved for decades in its original draft, its first earthly form, I am moved by a religious sense of awe; I hardly dare to touch it. My pride in owning several such first drafts went hand in hand with the almost sporting pleasure of acquiring them, hunting them down at auctions or in catalogues. I owe to that pursuit many hours of excitement and many fortuitous events. I might be just a day too late to buy something, or then again an item I wanted badly might turn out to be a fake, but another time a miracle might happen—I found myself the owner of a small Mozart manuscript, but my joy was not unconfined because a line of the music had been cut away. And then the piece of paper containing that line of music, cut off fifty or a hundred years ago by some vandal enamoured of it, suddenly turned up at a Stockholm auction, and the whole aria could be fitted together again just as Mozart left it a hundred and fifty years before. My
literary earnings were certainly not enough for me to buy on a large scale at that time, but every collector knows how much the pleasure of owning something is increased if you have to deny yourself another pleasure in order to acquire it. I also asked for contributions to my collection from all my writer friends. Rolland gave me a volume from his
Jean-Christophe
series, Rilke his most popular work,
Die Weise von Liebe und Tod
, Claudel the
Annonce faite à Marie
, Gorky a sketch of some length, Freud a treatise; they all knew that no museum would take more loving care of their manuscripts. So many of them are now scattered to the four winds, along with other, lesser pleasures!

I discovered only later, quite by chance, that the strangest and most valuable museum piece of all, although not in my own collection, was hidden away in the same house in the suburbs of Vienna. An elderly, grey-haired spinster lady lived in the apartment above mine, both of them modest places. She was a piano teacher by profession, and one day addressed me in a friendly way on the stairs, saying that she didn’t like to think of my being the involuntary audience to the lessons she gave while I was working, and she hoped the imperfect skills of her girl pupils did not disturb me too much. As we talked, it emerged that her mother, who was half-blind and hardly left her room any more, lived with her, and that this eighty-year-old lady was no less than the daughter of Goethe’s physician Dr Vogel, and at her christening in 1830 had been held in the arms of her godmother Ottilie von Goethe, while Goethe himself had been present at the ceremony. I felt a little dizzy—to think that in 1910 there was still someone alive on whom Goethe’s sacred glance had rested! I had always felt particular reverence for every earthly manifestation of genius, and besides those manuscript pages I was making a collection of any relics I could lay hands on. Later, in what I called my second life, a whole room in my house was given up to the objects of my devotion. It contained Beethoven’s desk, and the little money box from
which he would hand small sums to his maidservant as he lay in bed, his shaking hand already touched by Death. I also had a page from his household accounts and a lock of his prematurely grey hair. I kept a quill pen that had belonged to Goethe in a glass case for years, to avoid the temptation of taking it in my own unworthy hand. But these things, after all, were lifeless, not to be compared with a living, breathing human being at whom Goethe’s dark, round eyes had looked with affection—this fragile earthly creature was a last thin thread, one that could break at any moment, linking the Olympian world of Weimar with Number Eight Kochgasse, the suburban house in Vienna where we both happened to live. I asked permission to visit Frau Demelius; the old lady was happy to meet me, spoke very kindly, and in her room I found several items from the immortal poet’s household goods that she had been given by Goethe’s granddaughter, her childhood friend—the pair of candlesticks that used to stand on Goethe’s table and other items from his house on the Frauenplan in Weimar. But the real marvel was surely the mere fact of this old lady’s existence as she sat with a neat little cap on her now thin white hair, her wrinkled mouth happily telling me about the first fifteen years of her youth, spent in the house on the Frauenplan. At that time it was not the museum that it has become today, but its contents were still preserved, untouched, after the greatest of German poets left his home and this world for ever. Like all old people, she remembered her young days vividly. I was touched by her indignation on hearing of the indiscretion committed by the Goethe Society in publishing her childhood friend Ottilie von Goethe’s love letters “so soon”—she forgot that Ottilie had been dead for half-a-century! To her, Goethe’s darling was still present and still young, and what to us had long been legends of the past were still real to her. I always felt a sense of something ghostly in her presence. I lived in this stone building, I talked on the telephone, used electric light, dictated letters to be written
on a typewriter—but twenty-two steps upstairs and I was back in another century, standing in the sacred shadow of the world where Goethe lived.

On several later occasions I met women whose heads, now white, rose into the heights of the heroic Olympian world—Cosima Wagner, Liszt’s daughter, hard and stern, yet magnificent in her emotional gestures; Elisabeth Förster, Nietzsche’s sister, small, delicate, flirtatious; Olga Monod, Alexander Herzen’s daughter, who often used to sit on Tolstoy’s knee as a child. And I have heard Georg Brandes talk, in his old age, about his meetings with Walt Whitman, Flaubert and Dickens, and Richard Strauss describing the first time he saw Richard Wagner. But nothing moved me as much as the face of that old lady, the last living soul to have been seen by Goethe with his own eyes. And perhaps, in my turn, I am the last who can say today: “I knew someone on whose head Goethe’s hand rested affectionately for a moment.”

So for the time being I had found myself a place where I could live between my travels. More important, however, was another home that I found at the same time—the publishing house that has fostered and promoted my work for thirty years. The choice of a publisher is an important decision in a writer’s life, and mine could not have turned out better. Some years before, a highly cultivated literary dilettante had decided to spend his personal fortune not on a riding stable but on some intellectual project. Alfred Walter Heymel, not himself a significant writer, decided to found a firm of his own in Germany, where, as elsewhere, publishing was run mainly on a commercial basis. His publishing house, however, even although it anticipated long-term losses, would not set its sights on material profit, instead taking the true merit of a work, rather than sales figures, as the chief criterion for the selection of works to be published. Light literature, however lucrative it might be, would not appear under its imprint; instead, the firm offered a home to subtle
and experimental books. The motto of this exclusive publishing house which, proudly proclaiming its isolation, called itself ‘Die Insel’—The Island—and later became Insel Verlag, depended entirely at first on the small public of those who genuinely appreciated literature, and set out to publish only works written in the purest form and with the purest artistic intentions. Nothing was to be printed in a standard format; every book was to have a design of its own reflecting its nature. So the frontispiece, the type area, the typeface and paper of every single book always presented choices to be made; passionate interest and care were lavished even on the catalogue and letterheads of this ambitious firm. In thirty years, for instance, I do not remember ever finding a single typographical error in one of my books, or even a corrected line in a letter from the firm; everything, down to the smallest detail, aspired to perfection.

Poetry by both Hofmannsthal and Rilke was published under the Insel Verlag imprint, and their presence on the list made the highest of standards all-important from the outset. Imagine my pride and delight in being dignified with the status of an established Insel author at the age of twenty-six! In terms of the outside world, publication by Insel meant a rise in literary rank, and for the writer himself it reinforced his own commitment. Anyone who entered this select circle must exercise self-discipline and restraint, could never allow himself any literary carelessness or indulge in journalistic haste—for thousands and later hundreds of thousands of readers, the Insel Verlag colophon on a title guaranteed both high literary quality and perfect book-production.

There could be no better luck for a rising young author than to come upon a young publishing house and grow in stature with it; there is nothing like such parallel development for creating a vital, organic link between him, his work, and the world. I was soon a close friend of the director of Insel Verlag, Professor Kippenberg, and our friendship was reinforced by our mutual
understanding of our own private passion for collecting. In the thirty years of our association, Kippenberg’s Goethe collection developed at the same time as I was adding to my own collection of autograph manuscripts, which eventually grew to the most monumental proportions ever achieved by a private collector. He gave me valuable advice and equally valuable warnings, while with my special knowledge of foreign literature I was able to offer him some useful ideas in return. And so, as a result of one of my suggestions, the Insel Bücherei series was founded. It sold millions of copies, and the imprint grew into a mighty metropolis built around the original ‘ivory tower’, making Insel the most highly regarded of German publishing houses. Thirty years made a great difference to us—at the end of them the small venture was one of the most powerful of publishing houses, while the writer whose works had initially appealed only to a small circle was now one of the most widely read authors in German-speaking countries. In fact it took a global catastrophe and the most brutal of laws to break a connection that had been natural and happy for both of us. I must admit it was easier to leave my home and my native land that not to see the familiar colophon on my books any more.