Concrete

  Everybody suffers, my dear little brother, but you despise life. That’s your misfortune, that’s why you’re ill, that’s why you’re dying. And you soon will die if you don’t change, she said. I could hear it clearly now, more clearly than when the words were uttered in that cold, unfeeling manner of hers. My sister the clairvoyant — absurd! She’s probably right though, that it would be a good thing to get away from Peiskam for a while, but I’ve no guarantee of being able to start my work anywhere else, let alone get on with it. Several times during dinner she exclaimed, Mendelssohn Bartholdy! as if to give herself some particularly intense amusement, probably because she knew precisely that each time it was bound to cut me to the quick. The fact is that well over ten years ago I told her I was thinking of writing something -1 didn’t say a book or an article, but something - on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. At that time she’d never heard of Mendelssohn Bartholdy. It now drove her mad to hear me mention the name at every end and turn. She couldn’t bear to hear it any longer, at least from me. She forbade me ever to utter the name again in her presence. If Mendelssohn Bartholdy was to be mentioned at all, then it must be by her: that gave her pleasure because she knew, after trying it out for ten years, that it was bound to make me look ridiculous. Besides, she hates Mendelssohn’s music — that’s just like her. How can one love Mendelssohn when there’s Mozart and Beethoven! she once exclaimed. There would never have been any point in my explaining why I had chosen to work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. For years the name Mendelssohn Bartholdy has carried an emotive charge for both of us, bringing us into collision and sparking off all our dreadful, unhealthy and hence agonizing conflicts. You only love Mendelssohn Bartholdy because he’s a Jew, she said scornfully. She came out with this remark for the first time on her last visit, quite out of the blue, and perhaps it was true. She had turned up, ruined my work, and in the end almost ruined me. Women turn up, get you in their toils and ruin you. But hadn’t I sent for her? Hadn’t I suggested that she should come to Peiskam, for a few days? I’d sent her a telegram inviting her to Peiskam. Only for a few days though, not for months. How far gone I must have been to wire her! What I actually hoped for from her was help, not destruction. But it’s always the same: I beg and beseech her to help me, and she ruins me! And knowing this, I wired her. For the hundredth time I invited my destroyer to my house. It’s true that I wired to her for help: she didn’t come to Peiskam uninvited. The truth is always terrible, but it’s always better to stick to the truth than to resort to lies, to lying to oneself. But I hadn’t said in my telegram that she was to stay for months, because having my sister in my house for months is hell, and I told her so. I said, When you’re here for months it’s hell, and she laughed. My dear little brother, she said, you’d have gone to pieces if I’d left you alone again so soon. You probably wouldn’t have survived. I didn’t reply, perhaps because I realised at this moment that she was right. But what good is it now to argue with myself as to whether I sent for her or not? The facts are no longer in question. But the fact is that she ought to have left, simply cleared out of Peiskam, the moment I was capable of starting my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. But a person like my sister isn’t perceptive enough to see when such a moment has come. And naturally I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that it had, that I was capable of writing my study or whatever of Mendelssohn, probably about a hundred and fifty pages or even more, and that it was time for her to clear out. So suddenly I hated her — she probably didn’t know why — and cursed her, and in this way I missed my chance of starting work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. But I was probably ashamed to tell her that I had made her come to Peiskam only because of this work, which I’d not yet begun, that I was capable, in other words, of exploiting her as a mere tool for my intellectual product. The so-called man of the intellect constantly walks all over others, killing them and making corpses of them for his intellectual purposes. When the moment comes, such a man of the intellect, so called, would have thought nothing of sacrificing for his intellectual product the one person who had made it possible, misusing him and doing him to death in his devilish speculation. I’d thought I could misuse my sister in this way, but my calculation didn’t work out. On the contrary, I had committed the greatest folly by wiring to my sister in Vienna, Come for a few days. As it transpired she would have come to Peiskam that very day anyway, without being invited, because she was sick of Vienna, suddenly sickened by the continual parties and all these unendurably brainless people. She deserved it, because in recent months she’d been overdoing her socializing. I clapped my hands to my head when I realised that I could have saved myself the telegram, for had I not sent it I should probably have had the courage to tell her after a few days that it was time for her to clear out. As it was, I didn’t have the courage, since I’d asked her to come. It would after all have been unparalleled impertinence to ask her to come and then to throw her out of the house. In any case I knew her too well not to realise that if I’d told her to clear out she wouldn’t have dreamt of it. She’d have laughed in my face and then taken over the house completely. On the one hand we can’t be alone, people like us; on the other we can’t stand company. We can’t stand male company, which bores us to death, or female company either. I gave up male company for years because it’s totally unprofitable, and female company gets on my nerves in no time. Admittedly I’d always credited my sister with the ability to rescue me from the hell of being alone, and, to be honest, she often has succeeded in dragging me out of the black, hideous, revolting, stinking bog of loneliness, but lately she has no longer had the strength, and probably not the will either; perhaps she has doubted for too long whether I am really serious, as is proved, after all, by the way she continually teases me unmercifully about Mendelssohn Bartholdy. I hadn’t written anything for years — because of my sister, I always maintain, but perhaps also because I am no longer capable of writing. We’ll try anything in order to be able to start work on a study, absolutely anything, and we don’t recoil from even the most terrible things if they’ll make it possible for us to write such a study, even if they involve the greatest inhumanity, the greatest perversity, the gravest crime. Alone in Peiskam, surrounded by all these cold walls and with only the banks of fog to look at, I shouldn’t have had a chance. I had tried the most senseless experiments: for instance I had sat on the stairs which lead from the dining room to the first floor and declaimed a few pages of Dostoyevsky, from The Gambler, in the hope that this would help me to begin my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy, but naturally this absurd experiment was a failure, ending with a prolonged shivering fit and with my tossing to and fro in bed for several hours, dripping with sweat. Or I would run out into the yard, breathe in and out deeply three times and then stretch out first the right arm, then the left, as far as possible. But this method too only led to exhaustion. I tried Pascal, then Goethe, then Alban Berg — in vain. If only I had a friend! I said to myself again, but I have no friend, and I know why I have no friend. A woman friend! I exclaimed, so loudly that the hall echoed, but I have no woman friend either; I quite deliberately have no woman friend, since that would mean giving up all my intellectual ambitions. One can’t have a woman friend and at the same time have intellectual ambitions if one’s general condition is as bad as mine. There’s no question of having a woman friend and intellectual ambitions! Either I have the one or I have the other; to have both is impossible. And I decided very early in favour of intellectual ambitions and against having a woman friend. I never wanted a male friend from the time I was twenty and suddenly began to think independently. The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me — I have no others. And I’d always found it hard to have any relationship with another person — I wouldn’t think of using such an unappetizing word as friendship, a word which is misused by everybody. And even early in my life there were times when I had no one—I at least knew that I had no one, though others were always asserting that I did have someone. They said, You do have someone, whereas
I knew for certain that I not only had no one, but — what was perhaps the crucial and most annihilating thought — needed no one. I imagined I needed no one, and this is what I still imagine to this day. I needed no one, and so I had no one. But naturally we do need someone, otherwise we inevitably become what I have become: tiresome, unbearable, sick — impossible, in the profoundest sense of the word. I always believed that I could get on with my intellectual work if only I were completely alone, with no one else around. This proved to be mistaken, but it is equally mistaken to say that we actually need someone. We need someone for our work, and we also need no one. Sometimes we need someone, sometimes no one, and sometimes we need someone and no one. In the last few days I have once more become aware of this totally absurd fact: we never know at any time whether we need someone or no one, or whether we need someone and at the same time no one, and because we never ever know what we really need we are unhappy, and hence unable to Start on our intellectual work when we wish and when it seems right. I believed fervently that I needed my sister in order to be able to start my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. And then, when she was there, I knew that I didn’t need her, that I could start work only if she wasn’t there. But now she’s gone and I’m really unable to start. At first it was because she was there, and now it’s because she isn’t. On the one hand we overrate other people, on the other we underrate them; and we constantly overrate and underrate ourselves; when we ought to overrate ourselves we underrate ourselves, and in the same way we underrate ourselves when we ought to overrate ourselves. And above all we always overrate whatever we plan to do, for, if the truth were known, every intellectual work, like every other work, is grossly overrated, and there is no intellectual work in this generally overrated world which could not be dispensed with, just as there is no person, and hence no intellect, which cannot be dispensed with in this world: everything could be dispensed with if only we had the strength and the courage. Probably I lack extreme concentration, I thought, and I went and sat in the ground floor room which my sister, for as long as I can remember, has always called the salon — which is dreadfully tasteless, for there’s no place for a salon in an old country house like this. But it’s just like her to use this designation for the ground floor room. She uses the word salon all too readily, but of course in Vienna she really has a salon — she actually runs a salon, though the way she runs it would be a subject for a large dissertation if I cared to write one. So I stretched out my legs in the downstairs room which my sister calls the salon — every time I hear the word it makes me want to vomit. I stretched them out as far as possible and tried to concentrate on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. But naturally it’s quite wrong to begin a work of this sort with On the third of February 1809 … I hate books and articles which begin with a date of birth. Altogether I hate books and articles which adopt a biographical and chronological approach; that strikes me as the most tasteless and at the same time the most unintellectual procedure. How shall I begin? It’s the simplest thing in the world, I told myself, and I can’t understand why this simplest thing in the world eludes me. Perhaps I’ve made too many notes, written down too much about Mendelssohn Bartholdy on these hundreds and thousands of bits of paper that are piled up on my desk? Perhaps I’ve done too much work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy, my favourite composer? I’d often wondered whether I hadn’t overdone my research on Mendelssohn Bartholdy and whether this was the reason why I was now incapable of starting my work on him. A subject that has been overworked can no longer be realised on paper, I told myself. I had masses of evidence to prove this. I won’t list all the projects I didn’t succeed with because I’d overworked them in my head. On the other hand, Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a subject requiring years, if not decades, of research. If I say I’ve got the whole article, essay, book, or whatever in my head, then it follows that I can’t realise it on paper. That’s how it is. Is this the case with Mendelssohn Bartholdy? It almost drives me crazy, indeed demented, to think that I might have overworked the subject, and that it was therefore pointless, on the one hand, to telegraph my sister, as a rescuing angel so to speak, and, on the other, to throw her out of the house, and so on. I’d spent two weeks in Hamburg and two in London. It was in Venice, curiously enough, that I’d found the most interesting documents relating to Mendelssohn Bartholdy. To ensure myself the best possible protection I had at once withdrawn to the Bauer-Griinwald, to a room which had a view of the church of San Marco across the red-tiled roofs, and studied these documents, which I had borrowed from the archbishop’s palace. In Turin I had found a number of Mendelssohn autographs on Carl Friedrich Zelter, and in Florence a whole pile of letters written to his Cecile. I made my own copies of all these texts or had them copied and brought the copies back to Peiskam. But these journeys in pursuit of Mendelssohn took place years ago, some of them more than ten years ago. I set aside a room to house this Mendelssohn material and finally managed to catalogue it all, often spending whole weeks in this room (which is above the green room on the first floor!). It was not long before my sister christened it the Mendelssohn Room. At first, I believe, she actually spoke of the Mendelssohn Room with genuine respect, but in the end only with scorn and contempt, in order to hurt me. Only after some years did I begin moving various items which seemed important from the Mendelssohn Room to my desk, always hoping and believing that the moment was not far away when I could begin my work. But I was wrong. My preparations have now been going on for years, for more than a decade, as I have said. Perhaps, it occurs to me, I ought not to have interrupted them by doing other things, perhaps I shouldn’t have begun anything on Schönberg or Reger, or even contemplated the Nietzsche sketch: all these diversions, instead of preparing me for Mendelssohn, simply took me further and further away from him. And if only these subjects, of which I can no longer give a complete list, had at least led to something! But they only proved to me again and again how hard it is to produce any intellectual work at all, even of the briefest and apparently most peripheral kind — though obviously there can’t be any such thing as a peripheral intellectual work, not to my mind at least. All these attempts to write on Schönberg, Reger and so on had basically been merely distractions from my main subject; moreover, they had all been failures, a fact which could only weaken my morale. It’s a good thing I destroyed them all, all these attempts which eventually got stuck in the initial stages and would now cause me profound embarrassment had they ever been published. But I’ve always had a sound instinct about what should be published and what should not, having always believed that publishing is senseless, if not an intellectual crime, or rather a capital offence against the intellect. We publish only to satisfy our craving for fame; there’s no other motive except the even baser one of making money, which in my case, thank God, is ruled out by the circumstances of my birth. Had I published my essay on Schönberg I shouldn’t dare to be seen in the street any longer; the same would be true if I’d published my work on Nietzsche, although that was not a complete failure. To publish anything is folly and evidence of a certain defect of character. To publish the intellect is the most heinous of all crimes, and on a number of occasions I have not recoiled from committing this most heinous of crimes. It wasn’t even done out of a crude urge to communicate, because I’ve never wanted to communicate my ideas to anybody. That has never attracted me. It was a craving for fame pure and simple. What a good thing I didn’t publish my work on Nietzsche and Schönberg, not to speak of Reger! If I am nauseated by all the thousands and hundreds of thousands of publications by ofher people, I should be unutterably nauseated by my own. But we can’t escape vanity and the craving for fame. If necessary, we are prepared to yield to it with our heads held high, even though we know that we are acting in an unpardonable and perverse manner. And what about my work on Mendelssohn Bar-tholdy? I’m not going to write it just for my own satisfaction, after all, and then leave it lying around when it’s finished. Naturally I intend to publish it, whatever the consequences. For I actually believe that this work
will be my most successful, or rather my least unsuccessful. I certainly am thinking of publishing it! But before I can publish it I have to write it, I thought, and at this thought I burst into a fit of laughter, of what I call self-laughter, to which I have become prone over the years through being constantly alone. Yes, you’ve first got to write the work in order to be able to publish it! I exclaimed to my own amusement. By suddenly laughing at myself like this I had actually released all my tension; I got up and went to the window. But I couldn’t see a thing. Thick fog clung to the windowpanes. I leant against the sill and tried, by continuous concentration, to descry the wall on the other side of the yard, but despite the most intense concentration I couldn’t make it out. Only twenty yards away and I can’t see the wall. To exist alone in such fog is madness! In a climate like this, which makes anything and everything a thousand times more difficult! It oppressed me, as it always did at this time of the year. I knocked on the windowpane with my index finger to see whether I could scare some bird outside, but nothing stirred. In the same way as I had tapped the pane I now tapped my head and dropped back into the chair. Ten years and not one successful piece of work! I thought. Naturally that has robbed me of all credibility. My sister spreads it around in Vienna that I am a failure, especially in those quarters where the effect is most devastating for me. I’m continually hearing her say to all and sundry My little brother and his Mendelssohn Bartholdy. She’s not embarrassed to call me a madman in everybody’s hearing. Someone who’s no longer quite right in the head. I know she talks like this about me and gets me an exceedingly damaging reputation everywhere. She recoils from nothing in order to get money, that is to do business, and rather than ruin a party she’d call me anything. She has no scruples, and she can behave abominably. On the other hand I’ve always loved her, with all her dreadful faults — loved her and hated her. Sometimes I’ve loved her more than I’ve hated her, and vice versa, but most of the time I’ve hated her because she’s always acted against me, quite consciously, by which I mean clear-mindedly, for her clear-mindedness has always been beyond question. She’s always been the realistic one, just as I’ve always been the imaginative one. I love you because you’re so imaginative, she often says, but there’s more disdain than admiration in this remark. When someone like her says I love you it’s mere hypocrisy. Or am I being grossly unjust? She always said I love you to her husband, until he could no longer endure it and cleared off to Peru, which to us seems like the end of the world, never to return. Husbands who have been deceived and lied to and made to look fools have for centuries fled to South America, never to return. It’s a tradition that goes back a long way. I’m one for lovers, she once said. I’ve always been unsuited to marriage. The very idea of having a husband round my neck for life has always been distasteful to me. I don’t know why I did marry in the end. Was it perhaps to please our parents? The business she was left with when her marriage broke up involved — and still involves — nothing but the biggest and most desirable properties in Austria, the value of which runs into millions. When her husband left her she turned the business into one which some people — the serious ones — would call disgusting and others would call incredibly successful. I am on the side of the serious ones, rightly or wrongly. To me the life my sister leads now is something to be ashamed of, being built solely on profit. Donating a million to charity at the end of the year, then gleefully reading about it in the newspapers and laughing herself silly for weeks, as she herself says she does — I find that revolting. On one occasion she made over to the church a palace near Siena — admittedly over-run by rats — to be used as an old people’s home, at the same time contributing two million schillings for extensions to the building. She had inherited it from a certain old Prince Ruspoli, who died of kidney failure. She had met him in Rome and had corresponded and gone to parties with him for years, maintaining that she was a relative of his. When I asked her whether she was going to Italy to see the palace when the restoration was finished she said quite baldly no, she wasn’t interested. She really had no time for old buildings — for old people yes, she said contemptuously, but not for old buildings. I have to put myself in good standing with the church, my little brother, she said. I found this whole procedure and what she had to say about it highly distasteful. But she’s like that. She’s always turning up with some twit or other who wears shoes made by Nagy, what is more with metal tips which give them a revolting, unnatural gait, claiming that these people are relatives of hers, and consequently of mine. I have no relatives, I always tell her. I have only intellectual kin. The dead philosophers are my relatives. She always responds to this with her sly smile. But you can’t go to bed with philosophy, my little brother, she would often say, to which I would reply, just as often, Of course I can, and at least I don’t defile myself by doing so. This remark of mine once led her to announce, at a party in Miirzzuschlag to which she had dragged me after hours of nonstop nagging, My little brother sleeps with Schopenhauer. He alternates between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. With this she scored the expected success, as always at my expense. All my life I have admired the ease with which my sister is able to conduct a conversation. Even now — in fact to an even greater extent now — she surmounts the most difficult social obstacles with supreme ease — if indeed such social obstacles exist for her at all.