A Savage Noble

At sixty-seven, GREGOR VON REZZORI shocked the literary world with Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. His daring new work, The Death of My Brother Abel, will be published by Viking later this year. An excerpt from it begins opposite, and below FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY introduces the patrician novelist

"If I'm aging well, it is because I refuse ever to feel boredom, nostalgia, Weltschmerz, poshlust," Gregor von Rezzori says. "Those are all vulgar, bourgeois states of mind; a true aristocrat is never either nostalgic or bored."

Von Rezzori is a tall, suave, leonine, quintilingual European with impish blue eyes and a lightning wit. His majestic, courtly manner makes him look as if he were perennially hosting a reception in some Middle-European palace. The descendant of an impoverished Sicilian noble family who moved to Vienna in the eighteenth century ("I am a true hidalgo, a penniless nobleman with nothing but a pen for a sword and a burning ambition"), he received his first acclaim in the English-speaking world upon approaching the age of seventy. And he views this belated fame with unmitigated bliss. "It is all for the best, late fame. I've always delighted in masks, disguises. When I was younger, my favorite fantasy was to serve as chauffeur or butler in a grand American house, and only gradually have it discovered that I was superior to my employers."

Von Rezzori became a cult figure in Germany three decades ago with such books as Maghrebinische Geschichten and Oedipus dor Stalingrad ("They are nearly untranslatable; but tell any cafe waiter in Berlin or Frankfurt that you are a friend of mine and you will be superbly served!"), yet he gained international success only in 1981, with the publication of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. His renown is bound to grow with his new novel, The Death of My Brother Abel, a manic, fervidly recounted journey through fifty years of European decadence (1918-68), which the author describes as "deliberately barbaric and crude in style, willfully transgressing all boundaries of proper taste."

The most experimental and ambitious of von Rezzori's works, Abel is the first of two volumes of a long novel whose central theme is "the dilemma of building a new society when all political ideologies, all myths of technological progress have proved equally bankrupt—a dilemma resolved only by becoming a writer and creating microcosms of personal order." Abel's texture is Nabokovian in its multilingual references and its precision of sensory detail, and often Celinesque in its iconoclastic, prurient energy. Its structure is as intricately chaotic as the decades it chronicles, as disconnected as a succession of unedited film takes. "This novel is like an island," the author adds. "The narrator is the lighthouse beam, rapidly turning in 360-degree motion, giving almost simultaneous and often contradictory perspectives of the island's landscape."

The Death of My Brother Abel also reflects the fifty years of European tumult which von Rezzori observed (as a radio journalist, a purveyor of filmscripts, and a sometime illustrator) from vantage points as varied as Bucharest, Vienna, Rome, Milan, Berlin, Munich, Paris, Hamburg, and his native Bukovina. After decades of peregrination, the author now feels permanently settled in his spacious farmhouse some twenty miles from Florence, where he delights in "the most absolute pleasure in life—watching things grow— making my own wine and olive oil, taking care of my seventeen pugs."

"For many decades," Gregor von Rezzori recalls in talking about his recent acclaim, "I'd felt like some retarded village idiot, playing with pebbles and mumbling in an incomprehensible language. And suddenly the world tells me I'm not a fool; the world becomes a friend!"

What traits of character, in von Rezzori's view, enable him to face advancing age with such grace and joy? "I am an aesthetic absolutist and an ethical nihilist," he says. "The key to late wisdom is to avoid all value judgments, to gradually loosen your grip on things, live with the eternal now, go with the flow without a trace of regret, very much like the Taoist Way of Chinese thought." What is the single most important thing in von Rezzori's life? "Friendship," he answers without a second's hesitation. "Friendship," he repeats categorically, "the central ingredient to any happiness, vastly superior to romance, family, children, sexual love, and all that crap."

—Francine du Plessix Gray

Chitchat with a Ghost

From The Death o f My Brother A bel

I like driving long stretches at night. The roads are emptier, and I'm more lonesome, more intimate with myself. I love being encapsulated in the spaceship of the car, which hums and zooms like a hornet into the foresprayed glare of the headlights. This has something of the boyhood delight in concealment, in caves and grottoes— I love my snuggly isolation in the big womb of night. Nowhere else—not even here, in the glow of the lamp over my papers, while Paris snores all around me—am I so autocratically isolated. In my car, I am a sovereign who detaches himself from the profane bustle of the surrounding world with a few shifts of the clutch. A bold isolationist who holds his fate in his hand and races toward it, tracking down the etiological secret of the aleatory. Anything Chance may hurl at me has the character of necessity.

And I don't have to be alone if I don't want to. Sometimes, by pressing a few buttons, I invite abstract guests in: voices that speak to me in many languages, music whose sounds I pull along with me over windswept hilltops, through the ravines of black forests, past dead villages with their rows of houses that fall back as though mown down. I press a button again, which cuts off my visitors, denying them entry into my spaceship. While the world around me is as silent as in the Carboniferous, I fly, I dash through its blackness: hovering in the shimmer of the dashboard lights as though I were lying in the sickle moon that cuts through the rushing clouds of an autumn night.

No, no, it certainly wasn't exhaustion that made me strike the sails of my flagship in Reims. Quite the contrary. The truth is so trivial that I am ashamed to write it down here: I was homy.

I had already been homy in Munich. My car had been waiting since noon with freshly changed oil, a grease job, a full tank of gas, and the tire pressure carefully checked. Packed with my suitcases, briefcases, portfolios, and the cartons of papers for my book (I dragged them everywhere), the car stood ready in front of the hotel. It was a flat, low monster, like a predatory bug, and a small pack of more or less expert observers were always gathered around it. In the grouplet of scraggly-dressed young Germans (even in gypsy garb, they manage to have something stiffly awkward about them), I was struck by the gaze of a girl: dark, beautiful, relaxed, wide open in the eternal primal question: "Is that you?"

I took this gaze along into the smoky turquoise into which the blue of the Bavarian sky had faded on this October day, gilded with autumn foliage. And now the turquoise also filled the roads with magic spaciousness. It hinted at a night frost; pale, wan, and hazy, it shimmered around the dividing and hardening contours of the neo-Gothic gables and neoClassicist moldings and the Baroque-capped twin church towers. My curved windshield sucked in pallid strings of light and split them up. To the left, the massif of the railroad station, star-studded red and green, accompanied me for a while. White-waving columns of steam with capitals edged in a dawn-red blaze tumbled up into the blue, rolling with a fiery glow—the romantic early period of technology, when it still had a volcanic character. On the right, tooth gaps in the line of buildings recalled the bad wartime and worse postwar time; architectural horrors of the Age of Promoterism and the Age of Reconstruction glided past, then, while the rail strings frazzled out under black Egyptian tau symbols with emerald and ruby eyes, flattened out into suburban bungalows. Next, housing-development row cottages and crumbling suburban villas hid behind front-yard thickets—a couple of big Technicolor gas stations. . .1 turned into the Autobahn—and the gaze of the girl whom I would never again meet hung over me like the Star of Bethlehem. But I hurried away from it.

I did it without melancholy. I was even exhilarated: faithless by blood. I love to leave towns in gathering twilight. Then I don't have to say farewell to them. I just wait for the moment when the broken light disintegrates their density, pulling them apart as though with a magical molecular expansion and thus canceling their gravity. I drive for a while into the darkening countryside. The evening is a sigh of relief. The earth is liberated of the bad dream of another wildly marauding human day. The city falls back. Gradually, the mange that it spreads along its outskirts is healed. Once I'm beyond it, the city's magnetism lets go of me; I too can breathe more freely again. Behind me, the descending night swallows up the city. It no longer exists; it was never real, only a dream: the echo of an existence I attempt to escape.

Soon I had uncoupled myself from the evening suburban homecomers on the Autobahn, dived beneath overpasses that hissed away above me, and plunged into the denser and denser texture of evening, which, after a few precarious minutes of sharply dividing sky and land, caught them both in its veil and let them blur into each other. The huge deep-sea eyes of my diving bell were switched on. In its interior, the lights on the instrument panel were already glowing. The speedometer needle had quickly scaled past the apex of the dial and scurried down its right half; now, reeling slightly, it hung over the final marks. The tachometer needle hovered calmly beyond the border span that a red segment ordered it not to cross. To my right, in the scattered, powdery glow of my lights, fields and meadows flickered like the blue-gray checkered backs of cards fanned out in the hand of a nimblefingered player, then were swiftly raked in by the edge of my side window. To my left, like bristles under a sharp stroke, the trunks of a forest bent toward me... I was hurled into the dark space and toward that place of uncertain encounters dashing ahead of me. Its harbingers were the pale tracer bullets of the dividing line, sometimes the red-glowing rectal eyes of a truck, which I signaled to before the shadowy monster loomed and towered to my right and whooshed past me.. .1 was warned. I was holding my destiny in my hand. I was sovereign.

But I was not alone. I had invited a friend in: Schwab, who was dead now. And I chatted with him—in the manner that had always irritated him the most: in the parodying rattle of culture-vulture chitchat, in which I could insert the barbs of my malice, which had to lodge in the matters he took seriously

"—for instance, the European heritage. Can you tell me why you take it so seriously? It's a sackful of fictions, that's all. With some mental hygiene, one should be able to shake it off. Sentimental values at below-cost prices. Nowadays, any self-respecting person has a Biedermeier dresser in his assembly-line bungalow. Even in America. There, it's Colonial-style, of course. Very popular lately. Those fellows used to be way ahead of us, lacking a past as they did. But now they're spending their advantage on dubious antique furniture. They too are discovering their history. Not as a trauma, you understand, but as a Western. Living in the past in sentimental re-creation. The Western is timeless. The eternal song of man creating Civilization against Nature. The Biedermeier dresser in a vacation bungalow is a barbaric booty: a souvenir plucked out of Civilization's refuse. The Western is life; the Biedermeier dresser at best a genre picture. The thing that gave the American myth its persuasive strength was the kick with the boot heel, which is all that the hero of the Western has to offer the Biedermeier dresser when he wants to push it to where it can catch the bad man's bullets. Could people like us do that? What would you do if bullets started flying? You would spread out your arms and throw yourself in front of the Biedermeier dresser. A martyr to the memento industry. Shall I confess something to you? I'm disgusted at myself. I'm sickened by the evasive way I sneak out of cities as night falls as if from the scene of a collective infamy which I have taken part in but would like to be absolved from. I share the guilt for transforming our world into a heap of gravel, but I carry off a small booty. I've spirited away something of the museum exhibit, and with it I slip into the black sack of night, which draws tighter and tighter around me. I steal away with a voluptuously tickling fear in the back of my neck. My memory breaks the precious stones from the now worthless settings. I carry the city along, virtually purged of artistic invalidity: for instance, a Munich consisting of nothing but spicecard cottages, gingerbread palaces, wax-dip churches, crowding around color-splotched squares on which mushroom cultures of parasols proliferate, among which rustic market women peddle their tiny witch-brooms of soup greens. A Munich of jovial, house-proud streets, which lead to the water-lily tangles of Schwabing's art nouveau landscape garden jungle. A Munich, consequently, no longer existing outside my imagination, which utilizes old postcards and fairy-tale illustrations as cutouts placed in front of a totally different reality. But I imagine I have taken along its soul, the soul of a burghers' city aware of being a royal residence, aired by mountain breezes and set with Hellenistic serenity in pleasing farmland, and granted forever the sweet melancholy of an autumnal fin-de-siecle summer resort where the arts abound in fruitful liberty. I envisage this under the glass bell of a delicately fleecy sky, powerfully blue, with the lace of snow-covered Alpine peaks along its brim. And I visualize it for solace, when I realize I am breathing a sigh of relief to leave Munich, the real, present one, which transmits entirely different, nightmarish impressions: an unreality confusedly spun into the steel-brace network of high rises, the display-window unreality of department stores, an unreality that, from behind the reflections of swarms of contemporaries and torrents of traffic-lava— reflections insanely reiterated as in a fly's faceted eye—offers the instrumentarium of a modern-day deification of Nature: the tents, raincoats, hiking boots, sleeping bags, folding boats, snowshoes, loden coats, felt hats of the bawling backpackers:

Oh, just see the archer stride

Over hill and dale,

Bow and arrow at his side.. . .

We suffer, we sensitive people, because our history runs counter to our civilization... Do you see the difference between us and the Americans? I mean, the difference in selfesteem, which gave any gum-chewing G.I. the right to kick us in the arse with the heel of his boot when we bent over to pick up his cigarette butt? Not because we were beaten but because we had given ourselves up, because we had betrayed our dream of Anthropolis. We Europeans, the heirs of all the dreams that built up Western civilization, we slip like marauders out of the cities, where bulldozers are still digging out the last bombs of W.W. II. With full camping gear, we throw ourselves on the bosom of Mother Nature in order to escape the decay of our heritage. The hero of the Western rides toward the city—the city he wants to help build, to cleanse of all evil, to turn into Anthropolis, city of mankind. These are two entirely different attitudes in the world. No wonder our city gnaws at our hearts like a black bug. . . We woeful heirs! We need Nature for recreation, every time we have betrayed the dream that we could stand up against her merciless greed. Every time she has devoured another bit of what was built up against her throughout millennia, we seek comfort in her bosom. And when she herself has had a little feast of several million corpses, then we seek for the crumbs under her table; then once again we recall our heritage, our priceless antiques. Slightly irritated because so and so much of lesser artistic value is handed down along with them. Just think, for instance, what incredible clumsiness it took for life to alter, diminish, or add even the slightest thing in Tuscany after the blessed moment of two and a half centuries from the birth of Cimabue (c. 1240) to the death of Piero della Francesca (1492: also the year of Lorenzo the Magnificent's death). The very idea! What misled historical development to continue in its natural way of growth and decay? Here, it produced a masterpiece. Couldn't it leave it alone and turn to another region that had not yet fully flourished? Michelangelo—fine. But in Florence he was already stylistically out of place. Far too Baroque, that man, far too lush, too un-Tuscan. Rome, all right. That was his home. That was his true hometown. There he could let off steam. Even at the risk of depriving Florence and the world of a wonderful tomb, he should have limited himself to Rome. It would have spared us some of the worst horrors of the nineteenth century. But certainly after him: from the seicento to the settecento (which had quite delightful results elsewhere, for example in the Veneto) they should have simply prohibited any artistic attempt in Florence. Just imagine if you and I had got control of the matter in time. What a Disneyland of cultural history Europe would have become! An Italy without the Risorgimento. The Netherlands, where after Vermeer anyone who touches a brush has his right hand chopped off. In Germany, the natural development would have been halted shortly before the Thirty Years' War (although I have to admit: Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus was worth that little feast of Mother Nature). And of course, without this barbarity, all those highly gifted sons of pastors would never have turned up, the later writers to whom your Fatherland owes so much—nor would I have had the benefit of the spirit of my Uncle Helmuth. The profession of private tutor might have blossomed even more richly, although less protestant. It might also have produced important pupils and not just poetry and philosophy. But I am speaking of the truly plastic arts, the 'formative arts,' as they are known in German: pleasant to our senses, and therefore truly civilizing, arts that, unlike literature, do not stir up our brains. Intellect is a precarious thing, after all. It testifies to a high aesthetic sensibility that the old aristocracy had domestics to take care of thinking. Be that as it may: we'd know how to present this Wonderland of Europe, varnished like the color prints of the Propylaean History of Art, neatly cleared of the refuse of cultural decline here and there, the comers swept clean of the feces of epigoni. In short, a U.S.A.-perfected Yurop: a gigantic museum in Mr. Getty's sense, splendidly lucid in its arrangement, its inscriptions intelligible even to the analphabetic, purged of the stylistic anachronisms committed by those who are behind the times, the latecomers. Just think of the treasures of Europe's landscapes as designed here by Lorenzetti, there by Altdorfer, there again by Breughel, there by Le Lorrain, here by Caspar David Friedrich, there by Constable and Turner, here by Courbet, Corot, and Cezanne! Imagine this pleasure adorned with Piranesi mins and crowned with hilltop towns a la Matthaus Merian, towns by Paolo Uccello, by Diirer, by Canaletto, on whose squares we are greeted by Praxiteles and Brancusi, and whose halls relieve us with frescoes by Giotto and Picasso. Gardens by Le Notre, where we ensconce ourselves with Hanau porcelain and Gothic twopronged forks to feast on nightingale tongues prepared according to Lucullan recipes, and to sip at our Mouton Rothschild from Cellini's crystal goblets, while behind the ornamental shrubbery, following a libretto by Herr von Hofmannsthal, a Klimt-costumed lady of the Viennese haute volee surrenders to a Bocklin faun. Is this not precisely the image and musical theme of Europe that you carry within yourself? Admit it: cultural history—that's as surprising, as frightening, as the garden of Bomarzo. No matter where you go, no matter where you turn, the monsters of arts and artists come toward you, insanely multifarious, and shoo you from reality into nightmarish unreality. Too much culture is harmful to mental health. Just think of the sad fate of Huysmans's des Esseintes. I, for my modest part (bom under the sign of the Ram, with the Archer in my ascendant and half a dozen sputniks in my first house)—I was not made to live a rebours. I cannot exist in a world that haunts me with its rubble. I would rather do without the European heritage. I don't want to sneak out of the cities like a marauder. I don't want to shut my eyes in the suburbs, in the residential districts and principal avenues, only to open them at the Renaissance town hall, the Gothic cathedral, and the cement-propped remnants of the Roman walls. Memory is a sin! Our kind is already sufficiently afflicted as it is. There are things I haven't even told you. For instance: the way the trauma of art worship was inflicted upon me at an early age, thanks to my beautiful mother, whose life was so brief, and to my aristocratic uncles, so well versed in many kinds of splendors. Starting with Uncle Ferdinand's coin collection and the uncounted pilgrimages to historic monuments in the hinterland of the Cote d'Azur, I was infected with the black bug of art idolatry. At first, these trips got me excited mainly because I was allowed to sit next to the chauffeur in Uncle Agop's Isotta Fraschini or in Uncle John's Rolls-Royce (Mama herself drove a Stutz). I would wear a little raccoon coat, a leather auto helmet, and far too large, simply enormous goggles, in which my head looked like a horsefly's. In the front seat, I watched the landscape shifting, sliding, blending, Proustian early experiences that put me on the dangerous road. Soon I zealously leafed through the art books lying around everywhere—of which Gobineau's Renaissance, in a deluxe folio edition with tissue-covered illustrations, has remained vividly in my memory. Then the magazines—including one named La Gazette du Bon Ton and published by a M. de Brunhoff, the same man whose King Babar was to snatch forth my four-year-old son's first aesthetic judgment twenty-seven years later: 'Daddy, this is so beautiful!'—strange words in the mouth of a four-yearold, aren't they?—but more and more kids get infected at a tender age... By the way, the numbers of the Gazette du Bon Ton I saw as a six-year-old must have been old issues. The magazine no longer appeared in the time I am speaking of— 1925. It had ceased publication in Paris in 1916 and was continued, strangely enough, in Berlin until 1919 by Flechtheim. I once found an issue in Aunt Selma's room. Thus does the cultural heritage intertwine generation with generation. It was only natural that I fell in love with a Vogue fashion model. . .Last but not least, Miss Fern's brazenly acrid bell tones and rolling R's also transmitted culture, especially when she spoke about Florence, a name that sounded like a flourish of muffled drums. Before the war, she had looked after a little girl 'of a very noble family' there, and she always held up her charge's exemplary breeding to me. In a strange blend of desire, envy, and hatred, I was secretly and hopelessly in love with the little girl: in the future, my Beatrice, my anima: Dame Cultura in person.

I cannot exist in a world that haunts me with its rubble. I would rather do without the European heritage.

"Only a year later, in 1926, after my mother's death, I was in for it, my friend. I spent the following twelve years in Vienna: the first four in a totally idiotic school in the Twelfth District, then eight in the dreadful obtuseness of a high school in the Thirteenth District. And you know: what kept me from going completely obtuse during the twelve bitter years of this apprenticeship in triviality, mere usefulness, or pure decorativeness (culture as a status symbol), what protected me from becoming a will-less instrument of the Zeitgeist, chaff in the wind of time—it was the City. The City as a promise as well as an object of hatred, you understand: the Jerusalem still to be built: Anthropolis—city of all mankind .. . The promise of the city comforted me first for the loss of my mother and all the luxurious circumstances and happenstances of my previous life. Of course, I was despairing, disturbed, disoriented. But even as a child, I wasn't exactly sentimental.

"I convinced myself that the things I was told were true, and that my mother really had gone off on a long trip from which she would return one fine day and take me home again—yet I simultaneously knew that this was nonsense: that my mother had died and the truth of her death was merely lying in wait in order to shoot out from its hiding place and pounce on me, as the paralyzing terror of reality pure and simple. But in the meantime there were so many new and exciting things to see, to hear, and to experience. The city of Vienna was around us—a promise as stimulating as life itself at that time.

"Incidentally, I must say to their credit that my Viennese relatives made an honest effort to ease my adjustment. Uncle Helmuth very plausibly explained to me the principle of the steam engine and (I suppose because he was taken in by my precocious powers of apprehension) recommended that I read Helena Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled. Unfortunately, the text was beyond me; aside from a few descriptions of occult phenomena that terrified me to the marrow of my bones, it left no trace in my mind. Aunt Selma, ranging hungrily about, seized hold of my need for affection—with moderate success, I'm afraid to have to say. Aunt Hertha, lecturing me in a soft, sugary voice laced with philistine vinegar, did not succeed in hiding a certain petit bourgeois insecurity; yet, despite her nagging, the liberation from Miss Fern's discipline was at first agreeable, even though I vaguely missed the support, like someone accustomed to a tight corset and now released from it. And Cousin Wolfgang was, simply, a gift from heaven: my first buddy and fellow rogue for my first mischief.

"The dark bedroom that we shared for twelve years, Cousin Wolfgang and I, may have been uniformly murky at first, but on closer view, once the eyes had adjusted to the finer light values in the darkness, something shimmered through the narrow cracks between the blades of the window blinds, shimmered regularly, now brighter, now darker, now more reddish, now more bluish, casting a dim reflection on the linoleum-covered floor. This shimmer was Vienna, one of the legendary big cities, whose name had echoed in the conversations of my diverse uncles whenever they brought my beautiful young mother all manner of splendors (returning conquistadors, laying gifts at the feet of their empress): dresses crustily embroidered in castle-garden-bed patterns and glittering with diamond clasps, gigantic circular boxes containing hats adorned with feathers (I believe they were called aigrettes) from ospreys and birds of paradise, diadems from Cartier, red-white-and-green eardrops (baked out of rubies, diamonds, and emeralds) from Buccellati, furs from Revillon, deliciously soft, tenderly flattering the cheeks, still dimly redolent of a sweet little animal through the hint of lily of the valley, crocodile-leather vanity cases from Hiess—in a word: luxury articles. Do you share the belief of others: namely, that I mythologize my background as a whore's child?

"What I meant to say was simply this: I had been able to watch the ambassadors of the great cities lay their patterned splendors before my mother (there was usually something for me too: a deeply loved cloth dog named Bonzo, for instance, but let us forget these details, our chat is already overladen with them). In any case, for me it had been only a matter of time before I would visit these cities and probably even live in them. Soon, I would drive through seething streets in Uncle Bully's Delage, be led by Miss Fern through vast parks to fountains spraying their water up to the clouds—so close that a puff of air, bewitchingly redolent of autumn leaves, fresh garden soil, gasoline, and roasted chestnuts, would carry a fine shower of the rainbow-flickering spray over me—and soon, one night, I would be in one of the luxury hotels of these cities, and could listen to the roaring surf of the streets while, with a beating heart, I tried to envision the images that would be unfurled tomorrow. . .

The trauma of art worship was inflicted upon me at an early age, thanks to my beautiful mother, whose life was so brief, and to my aristocratic uncles.

"Previously, I had, so to speak, viewed only the covers of their paperback editions, and very casually at that: with a glance, say, through a wagon-lit window into the sooty pigeon blue of a railroad station where, under the title (Bucharest, Budapest, Belgrade, Trieste, and so forth: edition speciale, bonne pour les Balkans), red-capped (incidentally, extremely ragged) porters dragged baggage around, and the little wagon of oranges, chocolate bars, and lemonade bottles was always too far away for someone to call it over. . .

"and sometimes, as under a thumb cropping over the edge of a book, a brief glimpse of an open page: seen through a dueling network of struts and stays (while the train lumbered dully across a bridge), a street filled with buglike vehicles and teeming antlike people. . . and even this image had been alive with anxious promise. . .

"Now I was actually in one of the truly big representatives of those big cities. I had not yet penetrated to where its heart, beating red and blue, seemed to glow in a melting pot—but it was really just a matter of days. The world that had sunk away from me was still lying about me (if no longer quite intact, it was at least available with relatively little effort). . .

"The world I had lost did not seem gone forever—as it would be in 1938. But one day I found myself walled out from that world by a neighing collective laughter. At that time, you see, when I was still in the same class with Cousin Wolfgang, who was only a few months older than I and hesitant in his intellectual development, at the local school of our district (Vienna, Twelfth District, Schonbrunn), I was seduced by the Tempter into believing that I still lived in my lost world. In contrast to Cousin Wolfgang, I was not shy. Miss Fern had taught me a kind of trusting frankness that made me unsuspicious of, albeit reserved toward, strangers. I did not hide the fact that I knew all sorts of things, that I could read and write and even chat in dainty childhood French and fluent nursery English. Vast amazement on all sides; a few of my schoolmates quickly moved away from me, while the teacher (who smelled dreadfully of old clothes), with a self-conscious grin, pressed his scraggly chin into his collar, as an intention warmly fermented beneath the Adam's apple and the diaphragm to mollycoddle me into becoming an instrument of humiliation for my coarse schoolmates.

Continued on page 104

Continued from page 74

"It was not yet in my nature to see through such political maneuvers— that was to be the first fruit of my education—and I called attention to myself by boldly letting the small, naked worm of my finger push out from the compost that was the mass of pupils: I announced that I could even recite a few stanzas of a rather difficult and very beautiful English poem. Very well! Permission granted. I was planted in front of the blackboard. The teacher stood by his desk with a squashed smile, embarrassed, twisting his brownish-yellow cuff. Hurling out my arm toward him, raising an accusing finger against him, I commenced:

Has God, thou fool! work'd solely for thy good,

Thy joy, thy pastime, thy attire, thy food?

(now, as Miss Fern taught me, face the audience!)

Who for thy table feeds the wanton fawn,

For him as kindly spread the flowery lawn:

(arm and finger yanked toward the ceiling)

Is it for thee the lark ascends and sings?

(shaking my head in ecstasy)

Joy tunes his voice, joy elevates his wings.

(taking a small step forward; then, somewhat softer, more intimate)

Is it for thee the linnet pours his throat?

Loves of his own and raptures swell the note.

(again addressing the teacher, firm)

The bounding steed you pompously bestride

Shares with his lord the pleasure and the pride.

(thundering)

Is thine alone the seed that strews the plain?

The birds of heav'n shall vindicate their grain.

(again to the audience)

Thine the full harvest of the golden year?

Part pays, and justly, the deserving steer:

(proclaiming)

The hog that ploughs not, nor obeys thy call,

Lives on the labours of this lord of all.

"Well, that was it. As I stood there, highly satisfied—Miss Fern would have praised me for an excellent recitation— there was silence. But then it broke loose. Beginning with one of the little friends with whom I was destined to sail out into the blue ocean of cheerful knowledge, an uncontrollable splutter emerged from his snot-clogged nostrils—and that was the signal for a collective discharge. They erupted. They howled and bawled with laughter. They doubled up, rolled over one another, curled up and through one another, pissed in their pants in fits of vulgar orgasm. . .and here I must try to be very clear in describing what this laughter produced in me.

"It will instantly put you on the wrong track if I tell you that my first emotion was erotic pleasure—yes indeed; I made the acquaintance of a feeling I had never known before, something that I now can name: mortification. And this was also (aside, naturally, from my Freudian baby-lascivity, and so on) my first erotic stirring; more precisely: it intimately involved my first conscious erotic stirring. .. but be wise enough to avoid an 'Aha!' (uttered with pleasurably closed eyes and leaving an aftertaste)— This delight, I tell you, was ethereal. . .You can believe me: I have since relived those moments thousands of times: I have had every chance for conscientious analysis. In the foreground—inundating me with a hot wave of blood—was: mortification. Behind it, something else opened up, and there the erotic budded. But needless to say, at the time I did not realize what it was. I merely sensed it. From then on, it was to remain in me as a certain, albeit not effable, urge.

"The yowling and neighing of my little schoolmates naturally had an immediate and painful effect. I saw the shaking and rolling of the little stubbleskulls, the obscenely gaping mouth-caverns and red ears dissolving into a rainbow-sparkling radiance in a monstrance of tears, heard their roar through a sharp seething in my ears, tickled by a sobbing from my throat. Nevertheless, this was, so to speak, a straightforward matter: it erected the wall that separated me once and for all from any kind of fellowship, barricaded me outside the much lauded community in which the others lived so well, so self-complacently. I, for my little part, was now assigned my destined place. I felt as lonesome and abandoned as the Ace of Spades in the hollow of a not yet apperceived recognition. Only much later should I understand that from that moment onward I belonged to those who destroy cities, not to those who build them. I only knew that I was mockingly watched by the eyes of that model Florentine girl whom Miss Fern had planted as an anima in my soul. . . and my hatred against her moved into my dear endocrine glands and settled there for all time. Hatred: the 'measuring emotion,' as someone so accurately put it. I knew that I would get my revenge.

"And that is why, dearest friend, this humiliating early experience regrettably did not have any edifying Dickensian consequence. I did not tarry in majestic isolation, filling the hollow of a not yet apperceived recognition with zealous study, safeguarding the dangerous terrain of the emotional world with solid knowledge. My vital self deserted with flying colors and joined the ruffians. For even though the laughter of my tormentors had irrevocably barred me from their community, I became the leader of their brutality. For twelve long years, I was the conductor of their collective baseness. Whenever anyone more finely textured, helpless, apparently awkward wandered into the common lowlands and stimulated the collective mirth, it was I who sounded the alarm with a first splutter from snot-clogged nostrils.

"Only once did I reveal on what side I really stood. I have to beg for your kindly patience about this trial, too, or my early experience will not enjoy the counterpoint that life manages to arrange so well. I'll keep it brief:

"A few years later, Cousin Wolfgang's educational path had already separated from mine. Uncle Helmuth's explanation of the principle of the steam engine had not found the same swift grasp in him as in me; he was considered backward in many respects, anyhow, and so they decided to give him a humanistic education and me a more scientific one. My only cultural accomplishments were occasional cartoons (drawn clandestinely under my desk, unnoticed by the teachers). They were accurate, mordant caricatures, and so successful that the fame of my genius reached the upper classes. Where a pupil named Czerwenka (isn't it odd what trivial details stick in the mind?) was having certain difficulties in keeping up with his class and lacked even halfwaydecent marks in just about every subject. He turned to me with a request initiated with a poke in the ribs: could I prepare a drawing on the theme of 'summer,' a homework assignment, which he could hand in as his own?

"Why not? I even enjoyed the idea. Asking a few questions off the point, I took Czerwenka's intellectual measurements and gazed at his thick face and ink-stained (incidentally, conspicuously small, effeminate) hands in order to fathom his psychology. In the very next class (descriptive geometry), I drew a picture of Summer such as might presumably be reflected in Czerwenka's inmost being: a canal shore with the exposed innards of a gas plant in the background—everything shaped rollerlike, a kind of cyclopean cylinderism— and in the foreground a group of sphereheaded bathers, sinking elephant legs and barrel torsos into the sluggish water. Thick, sure contours—you would have recognized a talented imitation of Leger.

"Czerwenka was most satisfied. This was precisely what he wanted and would have put on paper, but, alas, he had no knack for expressing himself with a pencil. The drawing teacher seemed to know this too. He told Czerwenka point-blank that the drawing could not be his. Who had done it for him? Czerwenka, cornered, gave him my name. 'I don't believe you!' said the drawing teacher, and sent for me.

"The drawing teacher was a gangly, jittery, rather young man who, it was rumored, had an artistic private life: he was counted among the talents of the Viennese Secession, was honorably represented with dynamic pen-and-ink drawings in its annual exhibits, and taught at our school only because of artistic destitution. His indifference to our achievements seemed to confirm this gossip about him. As for me, I had always used his classes to do my homework for the next few classes, where, in turn, I pursued my drawing activities. He had noticed this and had shrugged, with that scornful disgust that is the final weapon of a broken-winged teacher against the ringleader of class perfidy.

"For the first time I stood before him face-to-face. 'Did you draw this?' he asked, holding the drawing out to me amid the tense silence of the upperclassmen.

"Czerwenka morosely nodded toward me, his eyes downcast. So I said, 'Yes.'

"The drawing teacher pushed a piece of chalk into my hand, pointed at the plaster model of a flayed muscle man bending an imaginary bow in an unrealistic lunge, and said, 'Copy that!'

"I began at the nape of the skinned bow-bender and with one stroke drew the S of the back line down to the corded nodules of his buttock musculature and along the thigh, the back of the knee, the calf, to the heel—I got no farther. For the drawing teacher ripped the chalk out of my hand, peered at me wildly under the tangled shock of hair on his forehead, sized me up and down, and said, 'You bastard!' Stomping back to his desk and tossing the chalk into the dusty cardboard box at the blackboard, he muttered, as though to himself (but so loudly that everyone could hear), 'And someone like this is vegetating in this idiotic school!' Before reaching his desk, he turned back to me and shouted, 'Tell your parents they're morons—morons and criminals! Tell them that / said so. My name is Weidenreich—Leopold Weidenreich. Go on—get the hell back to your class!'

"The incident might have had no aftermath if I—yes, now look—if I had not been surrounded henceforth by an enigmatic aura—how shall I put it?—as though marked by a mark of Cain that separated me from my classmates far more than my obscure background, my (now rather rusty) knowledge of languages, my hysterical clowning, and my cantankerous way of spoiling for a fight. This aura rather annoyed them and turned them against me, and yet it had definite authority. A short time later, Czerwenka (six feet three and three years my senior, but now only one class

closer to me) advanced toward me to deliver the punches he had planned for me. I checked him with a single glance that blended grandeur and malice; the mere glance of my eyes drew an opaque veil over his. He took off with his tail between his legs..."

Chatting thus with my dead friend, I had soon covered the distance to Kehl and driven across the Rhine.

By the time I neared Reims, the gaze of the Munich girl had bored so deep into me that I sprang a leak. I yearned for human contact.

Translated by Joachim Neugroschel