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  PART ONE

  The Wedding

  Büchner in the Desert

  Kant Catches Fire, as the novel was then titled, had left me ravaged. I could not forgive myself for burning the books. I believe I had got over my regrets about Kant (later Kien). He had been treated so cruelly while I was writing the book, I had gone to such lengths repressing my pity for him, hiding the relief, the sense of liberation I felt at the thought of ending Kant’s life.

  But the books had been sacrificed to this liberation, and when they went up in flames, I felt that the same thing had happened to me. I felt that I had sacrificed not only my own books but also those of the whole world, for the sinologist’s library included everything that was of importance to the world, the books of all religions, all thinkers, all Eastern literatures, and those of the Western literatures that were still in any sense alive. All that had burned, I had let it happen, I had made no attempt to save any part of it; what remained was a desert, and I myself was to blame. For what happens in that kind of book is not just a game, it is reality; one has to justify it, not only against criticism from outside but in one’s own eyes as well. Even if an immense fear has compelled one to write such things, one must still ask oneself whether in so doing one has not helped to bring about what one so vastly fears.

  Catastrophe had taken root in me and I could not shake it off. Seven years before, the seed had been sown by Karl Kraus’s book The Last Days of Mankind. But now the thought of catastrophe had taken a personal form that stemmed from the constants of my life—fire, whose connection with crowds I had recognized July 15, and books, which I lived with day after day. Different as the protagonist of the novel was from me, what I had put into him was something so essential that after it had served its purpose I could not take it back with impunity.

  The desert I had created for myself began to cover everything. Never have I felt the threat to the world in which we live more intensely than after Kien’s death. The unrest into which I had relapsed was like the earlier state in which I had planned my “Human Comedy of Madmen,” with the difference that something crucial had happened in the meantime and that I felt guilty. The cause of my unrest was not unknown to me. At night, and by day as well, I ran through the same streets. There was no question of my undertaking any new novel, let alone one of the series I had planned. My enormous undertaking had been stifled in the smoke of the burning books, and in its place, wherever I happened to be, I saw nothing that was not threatened by a catastrophe that might descend at any moment.

  Every conversation I overheard in passing seemed the last. What has to be done in last moments was being done under terrible, merciless pressure. But the fate of those threatened was closely bound up with themselves. They had brought themselves into a situation from which there is no escape. They had taken the most extraordinary pains to be the kind of people who deserve their ruin. Every pair of interlocutors I listened to seemed to me as guilty as I had been when I kindled that fire. But though this guilt, like some special sort of ether, so permeated everything that nothing was free of it, in other respects people remained exactly as they had been. The situations they were in were unmistakably their own, independent of the man who perceived them and assimilated them. His only contribution was to give them direction and fuel them with his own anxiety. Every breathtaking scene, which he took in with the passion of the perceiver, whose only reason for being had become perception, ended in catastrophe.

  He wrote at a headlong pace and in gigantic letters—graffiti on the walls of a new Pompeii. His writing was a preparation for a volcanic eruption or earthquake: you know that it’s coming soon, that nothing can stop it, and you write what went before, what people, separated by their activities and circumstances, did before, not suspecting that their doom was close at hand, inhaling the stifling atmosphere with their daily breath and for that very reason, before the catastrophe has actually begun, breathing a little more hectically and insistently. I wrote scene after scene, each stood by itself, none was connected with any other, but all ended with an immense catastrophe, which alone connected it with the others. When I now look at what has remained of them, they seem to have been engendered by the night bombings of the world war that was yet to come.

  Scene upon scene, written on the run, in frantic haste—each ended in catastrophe, and immediately after it there began a new scene, enacted among different people and having nothing in common with those that preceded it but the deserved catastrophe with which they all ended. Each resembled an indiscriminate, all-embracing judgment, and the most severely punished was he who presumed to pass judgment on others. For he who wished to avert the judgment brought it about. It was he who saw through these people’s lovelessness. He grazed them in passing, saw them and left them, heard their phrases, which lingered in his ears, joined them with others that were equally loveless, and when his head threatened to burst with remembered self-seeking phrases, he was driven to record the most urgent of them.

  The worst torment in those weeks was my room in Hagenberggasse. For over a year I had lived there with my prints of the Isenheim altar. The most merciless details of the crucifixion had penetrated my flesh and blood. As long as I was working on the novel, my prints seemed to be in the right place, they spurred me on in one and the same direction, a merciless goad. I wanted the suffering they gave me, I got used to them, I never let them out of my sight, they became converted into something which, apparently, had nothing to do with them; for who would have been presumptuous or foolish enough to liken the sinologist’s sufferings to those of Christ? And yet a kind of connection had established itself between the prints on my walls and the chapters of my book. I needed the pictures so badly that I would never have put anything else in their place. Nor did I let myself be put off by the horror expressed by my infrequent visitors.

  But then, when library and sinologist had gone up in flames, something strange and unexpected happened. Grünewald recovered his old force. Once I stopped working on the novel, the painter was there independently, and in the desert I had made for myself he alone held power. When I came home, I was terrified by the walls of my room. Grünewald intensified my sense of menace.

  In that period reading was no help to me. I had lost my right to books, because I had sacrificed them for the sake of my novel. When forcing myself to fight back my feeling of guilt I reached out for one of my books, as though it were still there, not burned, not destroyed, and then forced myself to read it, it soon disgusted me, and those I knew best, those I had loved longest, disgusted me the most. I remember the evening when I picked up Stendhal, who every day for a year had encouraged me to work, and dropped him in anger, not on the table but on the floor. Such was my despair at my disappointment that I didn’t even pick him up but left him lying there. On another occasion I had the absurd idea of trying Gogol. Even “The Overcoat” struck me as silly and arbitrary, and I wondered why I had ever bee
n moved by it. None of the familiar works out of which I had developed appealed to me. Perhaps by burning those books I had indeed destroyed all that was old. The volumes still seemed to be there, but their content was destroyed, none of it was left within me. Every attempt to resurrect what had burned infuriated me and aroused my resistance. After several pathetically unsuccessful attempts, I ceased to pick up books. My shelf of “great” works, those I had read innumerable times, remained untouched; it was as though they were no longer there; I no longer saw them, I no longer reached out for them, the desert around me had become total.

  Then one night, in a state of mind that could not have been more desolate, I found salvation in something unknown, which had long been on my shelf but which I had never touched. It was a tall volume of Büchner bound in yellow linen and printed in large letters, placed in such a way that it could not be overlooked, beside four volumes of Kleist in the same edition, every letter of which was familiar to me. It will sound incredible when I say that I had never read Büchner, yet that is the truth. Of course, I knew of his importance, and I believe I also knew that he would someday mean a great deal to me. Two years may have gone by since I had caught sight of the Büchner volume at the Vienna bookshop in Bognergasse, taken it home and placed it next to Kleist.

  * * *

  Delayed encounters have played an extraordinary role in my life. These have been with places, people or pictures as well as books. There are cities I yearn for as if I had been predestined to spend my whole life there. I resort to all kinds of subterfuges to avoid visiting them, and every new opportunity I neglect to take advantage of increases their importance for me enough to make it appear that I lived for them alone and would have perished long ago if no such places existed. There are persons I so much enjoy hearing about that I seem to know more about them than they do themselves, yet I avoid looking at pictures of them and make no attempt to find out what they look like. And there are persons whom I see for years in the same street whom I think about, whom I look upon as enigmas that I have been appointed to elucidate, and yet I don’t address a word to them, I pass them by in silence, as they do me; we exchange questioning looks, yet we both keep our lips firmly sealed. And I conjure up our first conversation in my mind, eagerly anticipating the many surprises in store for me. Finally, there are persons I have loved for years without their suspecting it; I grow older, and the prospect of my ever telling them so becomes more and more illusory, though I never cease to think of that glorious moment. Without these elaborate preparations for things to come, I should find it impossible to live, and I know for sure that they are no less important to me than the sudden surprises that come from nowhere and overwhelm me on the spot.

  I wouldn’t think of naming the books for which I am still preparing myself, including some of the most famous in all world literature whose greatness—attested by a consensus of those whose opinions I have valued down through the years—I have no reason to doubt. It seems evident that after twenty years of expectation an encounter with such a work will be a tremendous experience, and perhaps this is the only way of achieving the spiritual rebirth that saves one from routine and decay. Be that as it may, at the age of twenty-six I had known the name of Büchner for a long time, and for two years I had had a very conspicuous volume of his work in my bookcase.

  One night, in a moment of extreme despair—I was sure I would never again write anything, sure I would never again read anything—I picked up the yellow volume and opened it at random—to a scene from Wozzeck, as the name was then written, the scene in which the doctor speaks to Wozzeck. It was as if I had been struck by lightning; I read that scene, I read all the rest of the fragment, I read the whole fragment over and over, how often I cannot say, innumerable times it must have been, for I read all that night, I read nothing else in the yellow volume, I read Wozzeck over and over from beginning to end. I was so excited that I left the house before six in the morning and ran to the Stadtbahn. I took the first train to the city, rushed to Ferdinandstrasse and woke Veza out of a deep sleep.

  The chain was not fastened and I had the key to her apartment. We had made this arrangement in case some emergency should drive me to her early in the morning. In the six years of our love this had never happened, so that now when Büchner sent me running to her she was understandably alarmed.

  The end of the ascetic year during which I was writing my novel had come as a great relief to her, and I doubt if any subsequent reader of the novel could have been as relieved as she was when the gaunt sinologist went up in flames. She had feared new vicissitudes, further adventures. Before writing the last chapter, “The Red Rooster,” I had stopped working for a week, and she had interpreted my pause as doubt, as dissatisfaction with my ending. As she saw it, Georges would be assailed by misgivings on the return journey to Paris. Suddenly he would understand his brother’s true condition. How could he have left him alone! At the next station he gets out and takes the train back. He forces his way into the house, packs up Peter’s things and carries him off to Paris. There Peter becomes one of his brother’s patients, an unusual patient, to be sure, resisting treatment with all his strength. But in vain; little by little he too finds his master in Georges.

  Something told her that I was seriously tempted to prolong the struggle between the two brothers, the covert dialogue begun in that long last chapter but by no means exhausted. When she heard that “The Red Rooster” had finally been written, that the sinologist had carried out his plan, her first reaction was one of disbelief. She thought I was trying to set her mind at rest, for she knew that I knew how worried she had been about the life I was leading. The third part of the novel had affected her deeply, and she felt sure my own mind would be endangered if I persisted in digging deeper into the sinologist’s persecution mania. Thus nothing could have been more natural than her relief when I read her the last chapter. She persuaded herself that the worst was over, when in fact I was entering on my most abysmal period, the period I have called my “desert.”

  Yet it soon became evident to her that now more than ever I was avoiding her and everyone else, that though I was not doing anything particular, I found little time for her or for my few friends. When I did see her, I was monosyllabic and morose. There had never been this kind of silence between us. Once she lost control and cried out: “Now that he’s dead, your book character has taken possession of you. You’re just like him. Maybe that’s your way of grieving for him.” She was infinitely patient with me, but I resented her relief over Kant’s death. Once when she said: “Too bad Theresa isn’t an Indian widow, she’d have thrown herself into the fire,” I countered bitterly: “He had better companions than a woman, he had his books; they knew what was fitting and proper and they went up in flames with him.”

  After that she kept expecting me to turn up one night or one morning with the news that she feared above all, that I’d changed my mind, that the last chapter wasn’t right, that for one thing the style jarred with the rest of the book, so I’d torn it up. Kant had come back to life, the whole thing was going to start in again, there would be a second volume of the same novel, and it would keep me busy for at least a year.

  She was terrified when I woke her up on that Büchner morning. “Aren’t you surprised to see me so early? I’ve never done this before.” “No,” she said. “I’ve been expecting you.” She was already looking desperately for a way of deterring me from going on with the novel.

  But I started right in with Büchner. Had she read Wozzeck? Of course she had read Wozzeck. Who hadn’t? She spoke impatiently, she was still waiting for the unwelcome truth, the real reason for my coming. There was something disparaging in her tone—I felt offended for Büchner.

  “And you don’t think much of it?” There was anger, menace, in my voice. Suddenly she caught on.

  “What?! Who doesn’t think much of it? Why, I think it’s the greatest play ever written in German.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. I stammered the first thing that
came into my head: “But it’s only a fragment.”

  “A fragment? You call it a fragment? What’s missing from it is better than what’s present in any other play. We could do with more such fragments.”

  “You never mentioned it to me. Have you known Büchner long?”

  “Longer than I’ve known you. I read him long ago. I came across Büchner at the same time as Hebbel’s Journals and Lichtenberg.”

  “But you never said a word about him. You often showed me passages from Hebbel and Lichtenberg. But not a word about Wozzeck. Why?”

  “I even hid it. You could never have found my Büchner.”

  “I read it all night. Wozzeck. Over and over from beginning to end. I couldn’t believe that such a work exists. I still can’t believe it. I came here to bawl you out. First I thought you’d never heard of it. But I realized that was impossible. For you with your great love of literature. So you must have read Büchner, but you’ve kept him away from me. For six years we’ve talked about everything under the sun. But you’ve never once uttered the name of Büchner in my presence. And now you tell me you hid the book from me. I can’t believe it. I know your room inside out. Prove it. Show me the book. Where have you hidden it? It’s a big yellow book. How can it be hidden?”

  “It’s neither big nor yellow. It’s an India-paper edition. See for yourself.”

  She opened the cabinet where she kept her favorite books. I remembered when she had shown me that cabinet for the first time. I knew it well. How could she possibly have hidden Büchner in it? She took out several volumes of Victor Hugo. Behind them, flat against the back wall, lay the Insel Verlag edition of Büchner. She held it out to me. I didn’t like seeing Büchner in that reduced format. I still had the big letters of the night before my eyes, that was how I wanted to see Büchner.