The World of Yesterday

  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 st
able 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.

  Now my path lay open before me. I had begun to publish my work at an almost indecently early age, but privately I was convinced that at the age of twenty-six I had not yet written any real works of literature. Mingling with the best creative artists of the time as a friend had been the great achievement of my youth, but curiously enough that stood in the way of my own creativity. I had learnt to understand genuine values too well; it made me hesitant. Thanks to this timidity, all I had published so far, apart from translations, was confined, with cautious economy, to small-scale works such as novellas and poems. It was a long time before I found the courage to begin a novel (another thirty years, in fact). My initial venture into a genre on a larger scale was with drama, and after my very first attempt many good omens tempted me to pursue it. I had written a play in the summer of 1905 or 1906—in the style of the time it was, of course, a verse drama in the classical manner. It was called Thersites, and the fact that—as with almost everything I wrote before I was thirty-three—I have never had it reprinted renders it superfluous for me to give my present opinion of this play. Only its form was any good. All the same, the play did indicate a certain personal tendency of mine never to take the side of the supposed ‘heroes’ of my works, seeing the tragedy of the losers instead. I am always most attracted to the character who is struck down by fate in my novellas, and in my biographies it is those who are morally right but never achieve success who appeal to me—Erasmus and not Luther, Mary Stuart and not Elizabeth, Castellio1 and not Calvin. Even in that early place I took not Achilles as my heroic character but the most insignificant of his opponents, Thersites—the man who suffers, not the man whose strength and sure aim inflict suffering. I did not show the play to any actors when I had finished it, not even those who were friends of mine; I knew the world well enough to be aware that dramas in blank verse and performed in ancient Greek costume, even if written by Sophocles or Shakespeare, are not calculated to be a big box-office success. For form’s sake I sent a few copies to the large theatres, and then forgot the whole thing entirely.

  Imagine my surprise, then, when a letter arrived for me some three months later, in an envelope bearing the imprint ‘Royal Berlin Theatre’. Why on earth, I thought, was the Prussian state theatre writing to me? Again to my surprise, the director Ludwig Barnay, formerly one of our greatest actors, wrote to say that my play had made a great impression on him, and it was particularly welcome because in Achilles he had found the right part for Adalbert Matkowsky, something he had long been searching for. He would be glad, he said, if I would let the Royal Theatre in Berlin put on the first production.

  I was delighted, but almost frightened. The German-speaking countries had two great actors at the time, Adalbert Matkowsky and Josef Kainz. The former, a North German, was unsurpassed in the elemental force of his nature, projecting passion that enraptured audiences—the latter, our own Josef Kainz in Vienna, delighted them with his fine intellect, his perfect diction, his mastery of both soaring eloquence and a harsher, more metallic tone. And now Matkowsky was going to bring my character to life, speak my verse, the most highly regarded theatre in the capital of the German Reich was to stand sponsor to my play—a wonderful career as a dramatist seemed to open up before me, although I had never thought of such a thing before.

  Since then, however, I have learnt never to look forward expectantly to a performance until the curtain actually rises. The rehearsals did indeed begin, one following another, and friends assured me that Matkowsky had never been better or more virile than when he spoke my verse at these rehearsals. I had already booked a train ticket in a sleeping car to Berlin when, at the last moment, a telegram arrived—the premiere was postponed because Matkowsky had fallen ill. I thought it was just an excuse, which is usually the case in the theatre when an engagement or a promise cannot be met. But a week later the papers published the news of Matkowsky’s death. My verses had been the last to pass his wonderfully eloquent lips.

  So that’s that, I said to myself. All over. It was true that now two other court theatres of distinction, in Dresden and Kassel, wanted the play, but my own interest had waned. I couldn’t imagine anyone but Matkowsky playing Achilles. Then, however, an even more astonishing piece of news arrived; a friend woke me one morning saying that he was there on behalf of Josef Kainz, who happened to have come upon the play and saw a part for himself in it—not Achilles, the role that Matkowsky had been going
to take, but the tragic role of his adversary Thersites. Kainz was going to get in touch with the Burgtheater at once, he said. Schlenther, the director of the theatre, had come there from Berlin as a pioneer of contemporary realism, and to the considerable annoyance of the Viennese was managing the theatre on those lines. He wrote to me at once, saying that he could see the interest of my drama, but unfortunately there was no likelihood of lasting success after the premiere.

  That’s that, I said to myself again, doubtful as I had always been of myself and my literary work. Kainz, however, felt bitter about it. He invited me to visit him at once, and for the first time I saw before me the idol of my youth. We schoolboys would happily have kissed his hands and feet. His figure was lithe, his intellectual face still animated by fine dark eyes in his fiftieth year. It was a pleasure to hear him speak. Even in private conversation, he articulated every word clearly, every consonant was sharply pronounced, every vowel full and clear; there are many poems that, if I ever heard him recite them, I cannot read now without recalling the incantatory power of his voice, its perfect rhythm, its heroic and sweeping range. I have never again taken such pleasure in the sound of the German language. And lo and behold, this man, whom I revered like a god, was actually apologising to me, young as I was, because he had not managed to persuade the theatre to put on my play. However, he assured me, we would not lose sight of each other now. In fact he had a favour to ask me—I almost smiled to think of Kainz asking me a favour!—and this was it: he was giving a great many guest performances these days, he said, and had two one-act plays for the purpose. He could do with a third, and what he had in mind was a small piece, preferably in verse, and if possible with one of those lyrical cascades of words that he—alone in the world of the German theatre—thanks to his magnificent elocution and breath control, could deliver like a crystalline waterfall of sound falling on a large audience that held its own breath as it listened. Could I write him a one-acter like that, he asked.