Death in Venice and Other Tales

  It was the beginning of May and after weeks of damp and cold, a false summer had set in. Though the leaves were hardly out, the Englischer Garten had nonetheless felt late-summer sultry, and its city end had been teeming with carriages and strollers. In front of the Aumeister, where paths of increasing solitude had led him, Aschenbach had paused a short while to survey the crowded restaurant garden, which had a few idle brougham cabs and equipages at its edge. Then, with the sun beginning to set, he had started home via the open field outside the park, stopping, on account of fatigue and storm clouds over Föhring, by the north cemetery to await the tram that would take him via the direct route back to the city.

  As it happened, the tram stop and surrounding area were deserted. Neither on the paved Ungererstraße, with its train tracks stretching solitary and gleaming toward Schwabing, nor on the old Föhringer Chaussee was a single vehicle to be seen. Nothing stirred behind the fences of those stonemasons’ yards where the crosses, headstones and other monuments on display make up a second, unoccupied graveyard. Across the way, the funeral chapel with its Byzantine architecture stood silently in the reflected light of the dying sun. To the fore, said chapel, which is decorated with Greek crosses and brightly colored hieratic ornamentation, bears symmetrically arranged inscriptions in gold lettering, selected biblical sayings concerning life in the afterworld, things like “They shall enter the house of God” or “May the Eternal Light suffuse them.” For some time the waiting Aschenbach had been deriving solemn pleasure in reading those formulae and allowing his mind’s eye to wander about in their shimmering mysticism, when, awakened from his dreamy musings, he noticed a man in the portico, above the pair of apocalyptic beasts that guard the outside stairs, a man whose not entirely everyday appearance turned his thoughts in a completely new direction.

  It was unclear whether he had just emerged from inside the chapel through the bronze door or whether suddenly, out of nowhere, he had climbed up there from the outside. Without being especially absorbed by the question, Aschenbach was inclined toward the former. Of moderate height, skinny, unwhiskered and possessing a remarkably snub nose, the man was one of those redheads with milky-white, freckled skin. To judge from external details, he was not of Old Bavarian stock: the wide, straight-brimmed raffia hat on his head, at least, made his appearance seem alien and faraway. Nonetheless, he was wearing the indigenous rucksack around his shoulders and a yellowish belted suit of what seemed to be loden, with a gray overcoat slung over his left forearm, which he held tightly pressed just below the ribs, and a metal-tipped cane in his right hand, against whose handle he leaned, feet crossed, with his hip. Head held high, so that his Adam’s apple emerged stark and bare from the wiry neck protruding from his loose tennis shirt, he peered with sharp, colorless eyes under red lashes out into the distance. Between them, there were two vigorous, perpendicular furrows that matched oddly with his short, upturned nose. Standing there like that—perhaps being elevated contributed to this impression—he had the imperious bearing of someone gazing down from on high, bold or even savage. Whether because he had to squint against the blinding effects of the setting sun or because his features were permanently distended, his lips seemed not to reach far enough down. Indeed they were so completely retracted from his teeth that the latter, bared to the gums, flashed out long and white.

  It could have been that, in taking stock of this alien figure in his half-distracted, half-inquisitive way, Aschenbach had overstepped the bounds of polite restraint. He suddenly became aware of the man staring back at him, so militantly, so directly and so obviously intent upon escalating the matter and forcing the opponent to avert his eyes, that he turned away, smarting, and began to walk along the fences, resolving as he did to take no further notice of the fellow. A minute later he had forgotten him. Nonetheless, be it that the traveler-like aspects of the alien figure’s appearance had worked upon his imagination, or that some other physical or mental influence was at play, he suddenly became conscious, to his surprise, of a strange expansion within him, a kind of roving unease, a youthful thirst for distance. This was so vital and new—or at least so long ago outgrown and forgotten—that he stopped in his tracks with his head down and his hands behind his back to ponder what this sensation was and where it was heading.

  It was the desire to get away, nothing more, though it veritably attacked him in the form of a visual longing, a near hallucination. Craving had gained the power of sight, and his imagination, which had still not calmed down after his hours of hard work, was creating for itself a single emblematic scene, laboring to picture all the wonders and terrors of the multifarious world at one and the same time. He saw . . . saw a landscape, a tropical swamp under a sky thick with vapor, damp, lush and monstrous, a kind of primeval wilderness of islands, bogs and sediment-carrying channels . . . saw hairy trunks of palm trees pushing up near and far from fecund tangles of fern and beds of oily, swollen, outlandishly blooming flora . . . saw bizarrely deformed trees with roots growing down through the air into the earth, into the green shadows reflected in sluggish floodwaters where, between floating, milky-white flowers the size of plates, birds of some alien species stood in the shadows with hunched shoulders and clumsily shaped beaks and stared immovably off to one side . . . saw through the knotted shoots of a bamboo thicket the glint from the eyes of a crouching tiger . . . and felt his heart pound with horror and inexplicable longing. Then the tiger vision dissolved, and, shaking his head, Aschenbach resumed his deliberate walking along the stonemasons’ fences.

  He had, at least since gaining the means to enjoy the advantages of global travel whenever he wanted, always considered vacationing to be nothing other than a health measure, which had to be taken now and again, contrary to his own sensibilities and inclinations. Too occupied by the tasks set for him by his own ego and the European soul, too burdened with a sense of duty toward his output, too contemptuous of distraction to ever qualify as much of an enthusiast for the colorful world around him, he had been entirely content to have viewed that much of the earth’s surface which anyone can experience without departing the immediate circle around his homeland. He had never even been tempted to leave Europe. Now that his life had begun its slow ebb, his artist’s fear of not finishing everything—this special anxiety that the clock might run out before he’d completed his appointed part and given his all—had become impossible to dismiss as a mere humbug. Thus Aschenbach had restricted his existence almost exclusively to the lovely city that had become his home and to the country house that he had built for himself in the rugged mountains, where he spent the rainy summer.

  Whatever it was that had come over him so suddenly at this late stage, it too was quickly moderated and corrected by reason and by the self-discipline that he had practiced from youth on. He had intended to reach a certain point in the work for which he currently lived before resettling to the country, and the thought of tramping halfway around the world seemed all too carefree and disruptive of his plans. It would take him away from his work for months and was therefore beyond serious consideration. Still, he knew only too well why this temptation had arisen so suddenly out of nowhere—he had to be honest with himself. The urge to flee was what this was, this yearning for distant lands and new sights, this desire for liberation, forgetting and relief from burden, the urge to get away from his great work, from the day-to-day stations of his rigid, cold, passionate duty. He loved his duty. There was no doubt about that. He could even almost bring himself to love the emotionally exhausting, daily renewed battle between his tenacious, proud, so often tested will and this growing fatigue, which no one could be allowed to suspect and which the finished product could not be permitted to betray in any way, not even through the slightest sign of inadequacy or relaxed concentration. Nonetheless, it was only sensible not to span the bow too tightly—he didn’t want to be obstinate and suppress a need that had emerged in such vivid form. He thought about what he was working on, thought about the point at which he’d bee
n forced to break off, today the same as yesterday, the point which still seemed unwilling to yield either to patient cultivation or to a sudden stroke of genius. He tested it once more, tried to break through or somehow unravel the resistance, before giving up with a shudder of aversion. There was nothing extraordinarily difficult here. What paralyzed him were his scruples about not wanting what he should, which manifested itself in a no longer appeasable fastidiousness. Even as a young man, he had valued fastidiousness as the essence and innermost core of talent, and its demands were the reason he had reined in and cooled off his emotions, for he knew that emotions tend to be satisfied with happy approximates and half-realized success. Could it be that his subjugated feelings were now exacting their revenge by abandoning him, refusing as of today to pick up his art and carry it aloft, taking away all his desire, all his delight in form and expression? Not that he was producing bad work: one advantage of his years at least was that he could rest absolutely assured of his own expertise, confident in it at every moment. Yet while the nation honored him for his talent, this talent no longer gave him any happiness. As far as he could see, what his present work lacked were those characteristic signs of an incendiary, playful spirit which, more than any intrinsic content, being the product of joy itself—a much greater blessing—creates joy in the appreciative audience. He dreaded the summer in the country, alone in that small house with the maid who cooked his food and the servant who brought it to him. He dreaded the familiar faces of the mountain peaks and cliffs that would once more surround him as he worked, dissatisfied and slow. A sudden switch was needed—happy-go-lucky living, idle days, exotic air and an infusion of new blood—so that he might bear his summer and so that his summer might bear fruit. Very well, he’d go away somewhere—he’d thought long enough. No such great distance, not all the way to the tigers. One night in a sleeper car and a three- or four-week siesta at some international vacation spot on the romantic Mediterranean . . .

  Such were his thoughts as the noise from the tram on its wire advanced up Ungererstraße, and upon getting in, he decided to devote that evening to the study of maps and train schedules. On the tram steps, it occurred to him to look around for the man in the raffia hat, his companion during what had certainly been a most momentous wait. The man’s whereabouts, however, remained a mystery, for he was to be found neither in his previous location nor anywhere on the platform nor within the streetcar itself.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The author of that lucid and majestic prose epic based on the life of Frederick the Great, the patient artist and painstaking weaver of that densely populated novelistic tapestry known as Maya, which managed to subordinate so many individual human destinies to a single basic pattern, the creator of that powerful narrative which bears the title “A True Wretch” and which showed an entire grateful generation of youth the possibility for moral resolution more profound than any intellectual knowledge, and finally (to complete the short catalogue of his mature works) the author of that passionately argued treatise “Mind and Art,” whose analytic force and dialectic eloquence had led serious critics to place it on par with Schiller’s great meditation “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry”—Gustav Aschenbach was born the son of a ranking district court official in L., a county seat in provincial Silesia. His ancestors had been military officers, judges and bureaucratic functionaries, men who had dedicated their strict, respectably austere lives to the service of crown and state. More inwardly directed spirituality had manifested itself within the family ranks but once, in the person of a preacher; more sensual, passionate blood had been introduced during the previous generation, by the writer’s mother, the daughter of a Bohemian Kapellmeister. The foreign traits in his appearance came from her. It was the marriage of the servant’s sober devotion to duty with darker, more fiery impulses that had allowed an artist—this particular artist—to develop.

  With the whole of his existence attuned to fame, Aschenbach had proven to be, if not genuinely precocious, then—thanks to a decisiveness and personal pregnance of tone—without doubt precociously mature and clever enough for the public eye. He had made a name for himself while still practically an academy boy. In the ten years that followed, he had learned how to make public appearances from behind his desk, how to manage his fame, how to seem gracious and distinguished in letters that had by necessity—for the demands are numerous on the time of the successful and the respected—to be kept short. By the time he was forty, exhausted by the strain and vicissitudes of his actual work, he was obliged to deal on a daily basis with correspondence postmarked from every corner of the globe.

  Equally removed from the banal and the eccentric, his was a talent that could both impress a broad audience and command the appreciative, demanding interest of those with taste. Even as a young man, he had been under universal pressure to achieve, to achieve nothing short of greatness at that, and had known neither the idleness nor the blithe carefree days of youth. Once, in Vienna, around his thirty-fifth birthday, he had fallen ill. A keen observer had remarked at a party, “Aschenbach, you see, has only ever lived like so”—clenching the fingers of his left hand into a tight fist—”never like so”—unclenching it and letting it dangle relaxed from the arm of his chair. That hit the mark, and what made Aschenbach’s life such an example was the fact that he did not by any means possess a robust constitution and was thus only called, not born, to such constant exertion.

  Medical considerations had kept the adolescent Aschenbach from attending school and required him to be educated at home. He had grown up in solitude, without companionship, and had been forced to recognize himself early on as belonging to that breed of men who lacked, not talent, but the necessary physical foundation for the utmost development of talent—a breed of men who tend to do their best work when young and whose abilities rarely make it very far along in years. “To persevere through all,” however, had always been his motto. In his Frederick the Great novel he saw nothing less than the apotheosis of this imperative, which for him represented the essence of long-suffering, ever-toiling virtue. Moreover, it was one of his most passionate wishes to grow old, for he had always believed that the only artistic talent that could be deemed truly great, sweeping, indeed truly admirable, was that given the chance to bear characteristic fruit every step of the way throughout a human lifetime.

  In order to carry the burdens talent had loaded upon his frail shoulders and to travel the great distances he wanted with them, he needed discipline. This he was lucky enough to inherit from his father’s side of the family. As a forty- or fifty-year-old, at that age when others begin to squander, daydream and self-contentedly postpone the execution of great plans, he would start his morning off early, with splashes of cold water across his chest and down his back. Then he would work for two or three ardently conscientious hours by the light of a pair of tall candles in silver holders at the head of his manuscript, sacrificing to art all the strength he had gathered from sleep. It was pardonable—in fact it was actually a mark of the great triumph of his work ethic—that noninitiates often mistook the world of his Maya or the epic blocks in which Frederick’s heroic life unfolded for products of coiled strength and a massive wind. In reality such lofty edifices had been built up piecemeal, layer for layer, from hundreds of isolated inspirations, the whole and each of its parts only attaining such excellence because their creator possessed an iron-willed tenacity such as had once conquered his native Silesia and had endured the strain of year-long labor on one lone project, devoting exclusively his strongest, worthiest hours to the actual production process.

  For an imaginative work of any significance to make an on-the-spot impact that is both broad and deep, there must be some unspoken affinity, indeed basic agreement between the individual destiny of the author and the general one of his contemporaries and fellow citizens. People don’t know why they celebrate a particular work of art. Far removed from any expert knowledge, they convince themselves of having uncovered a hundred different
examples of its superiority, which then serve to justify their enthusiasm. But the real reason for their praise is something incalculable—sympathetic attraction. Once, in a relatively obscure passage, Aschenbach had stated as much outright, writing that practically everything great that exists does so in spite, having come into existence in spite of worry and anguish, of poverty, isolation, physical weakness, vice, overheated passions and various thousands of other obstacles. This was more than a remark. It was personal experience; it was almost the magic formula for his life and fame, the key to his work. Can there be any wonder, then, that it was also the personal ethos, the public comportment of those characters most idiosyncratically his own?

  Commenting on the novel type of hero favored by this writer—one that recurred in various guises—an early but insightful dissector of his work had written that the Aschenbachian protagonist embodied “a kind of intellectual and youthful masculinity, gritting its teeth, proud in its degradation, standing firm as swords and spears pierced its flesh.” That was a nice way of describing things, precise and perceptive, despite the seemingly too-passive formulation. After all, composure in the face of destiny—grace under fire—involves more than just endurance: it must be actively achieved, positively won. That is why the figure of St. Sebastian is the most beautiful image, if not in all of art, then certainly in all art relevant to this discussion. If you were to look deeply enough into Aschenbach’s fictional world, you could find its equivalent: the sort of elegant self-control that kept its inner decrepitude and biological decay hidden from the eyes of the world until the last possible moment; sallow ugliness that overcame physical disadvantage to ignite its own smoldering lust into pure flame and achieve absolute mastery in the realm of beauty; pale impotence that summoned enough strength from the glowing depths of the human spirit to make an entire proud people kneel at the foot of the Cross and at its own feet as well. Amiable steadfastness in the empty and strict service of form, the life of falsehood and risk, the rapidly self-consuming desire and artistry of a born swindler—if you were to ponder just these few examples of heroic destiny, you could come to doubt the existence of any other type of heroism besides that of weakness. And what type of heroism, after all, could have better suited the times? Gustav Aschenbach was the poet of all those working on the brink of exhaustion, the overburdened, worn-out yet nonetheless unbowed apostles of achievement who, though slight of stature and slim of resource, get by with ecstatic bursts of will and clever allocation, managing, for however short a time, to give the appearance of greatness. They are many; they are the heroes of the age. All of them found their image mirrored in his work, found themselves upheld and exalted, their praises sung, and they knew how to express their gratitude. They heralded his name.