Gondola Press Ltd.

About Me

2011-11-06T12:35:00.000-08:00

by michael sympson

Every man past his forties has become a certified rogue!

Chinese Proverb

My mother was thedaughter of a Holocaust victim. She was what the Nazis called a “mischling.”Her mother, too, had problems to certify as a person of an Aryan pedigree; shewas raised in an orphanage in Baden, a spa in the South of Germany. Granny wastenacious and indestructible and very loud. When I slept over in her place, shewas living with a Polish refugee, a rabbi and tailor of fine clothing. Whyeverybody was calling him “Schlemiel” is not quite clear, I don’t recall hisfirst name. When the two of us talked, it was always about the shaggy mare he’dleft behind in Poland. How her head used to vigorously nod up and down withevery step. Horses were the chosen topic between him and me and visiting himwas my alibi when I went out to play with the other kids in the rubble of theruins. After Schlemiel’s death, already in her eighties and bent over her canealmost at a right angle, granny still made her own arrangements and traveledunaccompanied to India, the country of her honeymoon and years of happiness,before her first husband, old Cohn, had made his fatal decision to repatriateto the fatherland. It gives an idea of her mental toughness and how she managedto keep her three surviving daughters away from the unwanted attention of theNazis.

After the war, in 1946or 1947, her youngest daughter fell in love with an allied officer. The firsttime they laid eyes on each other was at the cinema where she worked usheringthe people with a torch to their seats. After five weeks the two did somethingthat was strictly against the rules in occupied Berlin. They fraternized. In1949, this became the cause for my existence.

According to Aristotle,we are not yet fully human before the fortieth day after birth, the moment whenmost babies learn to gratify their parents with a little peal of laughter. I doremember been wheeled about in a pram, but this was of course later, when Ialready was a toddler and grew up to become this insufferably cheerful boy onthe photographs with blond curls and ringlets running down to the shoulders – Iabsolutely hated to have a haircut. I once overheard my mother talking of thewinter in ‘49. The cold was murderous and tore off the flesh from your bones.There was nothing money could buy to heat the home. So my mother and herfriend, Frau Nolte, went out on a pillaging spree. The friend was a neighborliving in a studio further down the corridor. I still recall a very tall woman,smelling of marzipan and mothballs; now and then she gave me a drop of milk ina tiny demitasse and our dog once stole a fish from her. The two women had totravel some distance before they found a fence with enough planks left to tearoff, break and kick the wood to size and pack it underneath me into the pram.My contribution was to lie on top, swaddled in blankets, and look cute. Myfirst career-move as a thief! It was a long way home and the two women luggedthe pram down the stairs to the underground. A cop, wearing this shako withcockade and batch, approached, and, as the friendly servant to the public, heoffered a hand to carry the pram. The moment he lifted his end of the pram herealized of course that something here was wrong. Our neighbor saw the changein his face: “Yeah,” she said,talking down on him with a booming voice, “it’sa heavy baby, isn’t it?” The law looked up to her, kept quiet and continuedhelping the women down the stairs and then departed with a curt salute.

Our home was once abaron’s city mansion. Along a windowless corridor, we and five other familiesoccupied rooms with tall ceilings and stucco ornaments of seashells and chubbylittle boys. The loo was an improvisedaffair outdoors in the backyard.

From time to time somekind of hiss, a drizzle from somewhere behind or inside the wall would send areminder that the structure was crumbling. Nobody heeded the warning until oneday a patch of stucco fell from the ceiling and missed my mother’s buttocks bya hair’s breadth as she bent over at the stove. I saw it from my high chair bythe window. Behind the house the court for drying the laundry and beating thedust out of the carpets opened to a weed infested bombing site. Beating thestuffing out of your carpet is a rather therapeutic activity – much better thana session on the couch with Doctor Freud. My mother took down the carpet at leasttwice a week for a comprehensive thrashing; I could hear the thumping echoricocheting in the narrow confines of the backyard. Towards the bombing site,at the bottom of an improvised and rather steep stairway, there was a flowerbedfringed with bricks set in a jagged saw-pattern. I fell over on these stairsand hit my head on one of those pointy bricks. When I came around I woke upwith stitches on my forehead; the scar is now barely visible.

My earliestout-of-house memory is me dangling my feet from a seat close to an elevatedpodium with ropes all around and two man facing each other in the middle, bothdressed in olive green tricots that leave the shoulders bare and reveal some ofthe hair on their chests. The light was blindingly bright and the guy on theright threw a punch at the other’s face, I could clearly see that his nose wasdented on the ridge. Without flinching the recipient was swiping his brow withthe thing on his hand that looked to me like the brown earthenware vessel mymother used to store her salt and hone her kitchen-knife (a worn blade, morelike a paring-knife) on the vessel’s rim. In the ring, there was such anearthenware vessel on every hand (I don’t recall a referee); this was the firsttime I was confronted with boxing gloves and I had no idea. The two tried toland a hook to the adversary’s body at the same time and the two gloves meethalfway, I imagined with a loud clang, no doubt it must have been earthenwarevessels, what else could it be? I turned my head to the man sitting on myright. He jumped up shouting something and snapped his fingers at the two guysin the ring. This man was my father. A younger, less pudgy father than I use toremember: this fellow here had coal-black hair and the toned limbs of a boxer,one that is coming at you from below, head first and determined to get throughto your short ribs, come what may. That I remember. For me, my father was andalways will be remembered as a fighter. He was a member of his unit’s boxingsquad and he also played ping-pong. He had ambition and a good forehand while Ionly play a so-so backhand and somehow lack the killer instinct. Stillstanding, my father looked down to me, smiling but also with a strangelycalculating look, as if he tried to figure out something. I saw him moving hislips, but what was he saying? Whatever it was, the noise all around us –initially distinct screams and calls suddenly uniting in a throaty roar andthen ebbing away in single calls and screams – must have drowned out what myfather was trying to say. I only remember the boyish smile. Unfortunately Ican’t tell you how the bout had ended. But I still like to watch boxing. WhenMuhammad Ali was still Cassius Clay he was truly a picture of grace, and fast,unbelievably fast. It’s a pity that they don’t show the old black and whitereels more often. When my father took me to this event I must have just crawledout of my infantile amnesia. So strange! Why is it, that we lose all ourmemories from the first four years of our lives? What is the function of thisincomplete amnesia? Yes, incomplete: we don’t need to relearn how to walk orbrush up on our toilet training, thank you very much; we already know how tospeak! Or is it speech that is adding a new dimension to our faculties ofremembering and the element of time – past, present and future? The nextrecollection is I riding on an improvised child’s seat screwed to the frame ofmy father’s bicycle, with the bombed out ruins right slipping by left and righton deserted streets. The day was overhungbut warm and the odd raindrop hit my face.

My biggest impressionfrom this period of the awakening mind had a surprisingly stealthy gait for thegigantic size of his legs; legs like the pillars of a temple. His name wasShantih and he had bristles on his furrowed forehead and slightly smelled ofurine. My grandmother was employed at the zoo, and my mother and I came tovisit her.

We met at theelephants’ enclosure and the women were talking when they brought out Shantihand geared him up for the day ahead. The animal was employed as a peoplecarrier, lumbering along with hordes of squealing kids on his back. Standingclose to the elephant, I reached out and began to pummel his enormous leg withthe palm of my hand. Suddenly I felt a tight grip around my chest, lost groundunder my feet and was lifted up towards an inspecting eye. I was too surprisedto feel fear and Shantih had a good hard look at this bundle of stunnedpetulance before he gently set me down again. He and I became friends. For therest of the season I saw him almost every morning and he lifted me up to hisback and patiently listened to what I had to tell him. I liked to pull at hisbristles and his ears. He didn’t mind. One day his handler didn’t allow me toget near. The animal was in the must and incessantly weaving from side to side.The smell was intense; it was the last time I’ve seen Shantih. My father wastransferred to Bavaria and I entered school.

Bavaria was (still is?)a catholic country with a capital "C" and no anti-clerical traditionwhatsoever. Well, that is not quite true. Johann Adam Weishaupt (1748 – 1830) was born in Ingolstadt. Weishaupt was the founder of theIlluminati; Johann Adam Freiherr von Ickstatt (1702 – 1776), a prominent figure ofthe Enlightenment in Bavaria, was his godfather and educator. So many names, somany unknowns, I am afraid, but the man has left a mark on our world and thegreat George Washington knew it. He said: “Itwas not my intention to doubt that, the Doctrines of the Illuminati, andprinciples of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary,no one is more truly satisfied of this fact than I am,” and very well hemight – the first president of the United States was a Free Mason andIlluminati himself. After Weishaupt went public with his intention, “to do what the heads of the ecclesiasticaland secular authorities ought to have done by virtue of their offices,” and“at a time, when there is no end ofabusing and making game of secret societies, I shall make use of this humanfoible for a real and worthy goal, for the benefit of people,” he wasforced to leave Bavaria and settled in Gotha, half an hour’s walk away from thehome of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Weishaupt published a Complete History of the Persecutions of the Illuminatiin Bavaria (1785), and An Apology for the Illuminati (1786). Of course none ofthis ever filtered down to us kids in school. Nor did anybody mention thestrict Catholic upbringing of many top Nazis coming from this region, likeHeinrich Himmler. The intensity these lederhosen people habitually attached toreligion could be pretty scary. On every wall there hung a crucifix, at school,in the shops, at the crossroads. I guess my crush on Buddhism at the age ofnine was a reaction to all this. The infatuation endedin yawns over the endless litanies to dissociate yourself from your attachmentsand so shield yourself from suffering.

My attachments definewho I am. If I suffer for it, well, that is the price to be paid for existingand be somebody, anybody at all. There is no such thing as a free lunch. The mottoon the Sympsons’ coat of arms is “nil desperandum,” never give up, and not: “Better don’t try.” I think what really had put me off was thisunderhanded way of labeling as “suffering” what makes it a joy to be alive:food, girls, the arts, thinking, and just pottering about.

On public holidays myparents and I watched from the window the Catholics walk in procession behindtheir priest, a balding man decked in heavy brocade. He seemed to be hiding hisface behind the monstrance, a reliquary with nothing but a wafer in it,supposed to be the Christ’s living flesh. When the procession had past, theroad was clear to cross over to where our car was parked and like almost everySunday we set out for – what was the expression? – “a spot of motoring.”

Along the way westopped for lunch in the towns surrounding the area. Towards the South youcould see the Alps looming, sometimes letting through the Sirocco from Africa.It affects the local microclimate and many people have a migraine on such day,the hospitals even suspend surgery. Only many years later I discovered that ourweekly excursions – by whose design I cannot tell – more or less followed theitinerary of Monsieur Montaigne who’d traveled the very same region some fourhundred years earlier. His book made me realize the changes this oncehospitable region of Bavaria had undergone since the religious wars. Aftereating we indulged my mother and stared at the loud colors and histrionicdisplays of the local Baroque churches. Well, they are pretty. “Look at this flatulent cherub; this one, heblows the horn,” my mother said. I thought of the chubby little boys withtiny penises on the stucco ceiling in Berlin. I think it was in 1959, when myfather went to a jewelry shop to buy my mother a ring. The shop belonged to thegoldsmith from the ground floor of the same apartment block where we wereliving; a man with a ruddy complexion, watery blue eyes, and as soft-spoken asa hummingbird. The patter of small talk over the merchandise on the countertook a turn to politics and this neighbor dropped the unguarded remark that “next time there will be not that many left.”My mother overheard this, and she made a fist – not threatening, just squeezingthe thumb underneath the fingers – something I have often seen her doing, whenshe felt insecure or uncomfortable. We left the shop rather suddenly. Later myfather found out, that in a former life, the hummingbird had been anSS-Hauptsturmführer. (This was the only time ever I saw my father uncertain ofwhat to do next. My habitual indecisiveness is not a trait I've inherited fromhim.)

School was not myfavorite thing. I assimilated letters rather slow and with dyslexic quirks inthe “q,” “p,” “g” and “d” department, and not just when writing longhand.These letters are still my most common typos. I later learned that this issomehow related to my difficulties of spontaneously working out that “left,”means going left and “right” going right. Sometimes I heard voices shout at me.I turned around, and there was nobody. The episodes ended at the age of seven,after I had finished reading my first book. It was Cooper’s Deer Slayer.

After entering Grammarschool I shook off all my learning handicaps virtually from one day to thenext. Don’t ask me how. I developed a habit of doing my homework in the lastten minutes of the previous lesson, shielded from sight by a barricade ofbooks. My desk was at the back of the classroom. Naturally the teacher wascraving my attention and bombarded my desk with a well-aimed piece of chalk. ButI really couldn’t help him here; I had to finish homework. Nevertheless I wasasked to transfer to a desk in front. Guess what: I was suddenly in a zone ofcalm and peace and could work on my homework undisturbed. Everything was rightunder the teacher’s eyes, yet he was far too occupied supervising the unrulydesks at the back – a valuable lesson in the art of misdirection.

I began perusing myparents’ rather odd collection of books, most of it unsuitable for children; myfather was a voracious reader of mysteries and crime stories but his absolutefavorite were the Hornblower novels by C.S. Forester (1899 – 1966). Until his dying dayhe returned to them time and again; I read them, too. There was also adisheveled Youngster’sEncyclopedia from 1928, with photographs from the interior of agigantic zeppelin and blueprints for a winged box kite of about my own sizethat carried a camera and could do aerial photography. Mind you, 1928! A littlelater I read Emil and the Detectives. It was followed by Tintin’s Adventures in the Jungles of the Andes, a comic book. Thenext book was an enormous tome, and most of it was not meant for young readers.It comprised a translation of the Völsunga Saga; the Edda, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, the Legends of King Charlemagne, Musäus’ ironic anddry Legends of Rübezahl, Gottfried AugustBürger's Wondrous Tales of theCampaigns and Adventures at Sea and Land of Baron of Münchhausen, mixed with often lewdlegends from the crusades – I got erections over Monica in a story of a ménageà trois. The death of Bayard, the battle charger of Count Raymond, moved me totears. Bayard was a horse of miraculous strength; he could carry all four ofthe brothers who resisted Charlemagne in their castle of Monte Alban. In theend the seditious brothers had to yield to overwhelming force.

The terms of surrenderdemanded the horse to die. With millstones around neck and feet, the stallionwas pushed into the river. Bayard struggled to the surface, turned his head andlooked for his master. The eyes of the horse and of the count met, and Bayardgained the strength to clamber back on dry land. So the King ordered CountRaymond to look away next time. Burdened with even more millstones the horsewas pushed back into the river. Again Bayard emerged from the water. He lookedfor his master and whinnied. Count Raymond wept, but turned his back tothe scene. Bayard knew he was abandoned and drowned.

The “Völsungensaga” was my first lesson in cosmology. I learned that theworld was created from the corpses of the first sentient beings, a giant andhis wife, killed by the gods of “Asgard,”the celestial fortress. (And where did the gods come from? A goat had lickedthem out of a block of salty ice. Sounds about right!) The Babylonians and theCanaanites have told similar stories; traces of these are preserved in theBible. "Tehom" (Gen.1: 2) the dragon ofwater-world threatened to drown the tribe of the Elohim (a plural but not thePluralis Majestatis) in high heaven. So thewarlike "Yahweh" the god ofthunder, mounted his chariot and assailed Tehom with hail and lightning. Heslew Tehom’s son “Leviathan,” and cutto pieces an unidentifiable “Rahab” (Ps. 74: 14-15; 89: 9-10; Isaiah 51: 9-10). Like the gods of the Völsungensaga, the Elohim then shaped the Sun,the Moon, and the Stars from the slain carcass, stretching out the skies like atent cloth (Job 9: 7-8, 26: 5-10, 13). This inaugurated theheroic age of intercourse between the immortals and the daughters of men (Gen. 6: 4).I was nine, when I read the Bible cover to cover out of sheer curiosity, nobodyasked me to.

God’s command not to “boil a kid in his mother's milk” (Ex. 34: 26) struck a sympatheticchord, but to see the Son of God curse a fig tree for not yielding fruit out ofseason still leaves me singularly unimpressed. I know, the little scene is supposedto prove the power of faith that moves mountains, but let’s get real: everyidiot can spoil a tree. Make it bloom and yield that would have been themiracle. And the more the story reveals of its protagonist, the less Iunderstand how anybody possibly could expect “salvation” from this character.

The gospels admittedlyare designed to be religious propaganda, they answer to yearnings of the middleclass from the first century. We are often told that early Christianity camefrom the grassroots, a haven of the poor, yet nothing could be further from thetruth: Christianity was formulated by artisans and burghers, some of them weremen and women of considerable means, neither too poor to shoulder charity as anobligation, nor too rich to be careless in their generosity – their spokesmanwas allegedly a tent-maker. The rabble-rouser from Galilee is a man with whomit is difficult to identify, especially if you are Paul. Paul would rather notknow what this Bolshevik from Galilee had in mind when he praised the lilies inthe field and decreed, “who doesn’t work,shall not eat.” He also hated women and said so. For him it was all aboutthe follow-up to the crucifixion.

Oursources, however, don’t make bones of the fact that there were people standingright next to the “event” who saw nothing out of the ordinary: no suddendarkness, no corpses walking out of their graves, no earthquake, no eclipse, noJesus, only the squealing and whooping of a group of Galileans and this Peterwith hands as large as coal shovels, saying with a straight face: “These are not drunk, as ye suppose,” because “God had raised up Jesus of Nazareth on thethird day, and showed him openly,” and now listen to this: “Not to all the people,but unto chosen witnesses” (Acts 2: 15, 10: 41). EmperorFrederick II of Hohenstauffen (1194 – 1250) used to share a jokewith Sultan Al-Kamil about “the threeconmen, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed.

I don’t know much aboutMoses, the rabbis in Babylon have depicted him as a dim witted but determinedand even genocidal terrorist (Exodus 12: 29; 12: 35; 32: 27), but the other two “prophets” as well have become therole models for our latter day David Koreshs and Osama Bin Ladens: Mohammedpoisoned water-wells and robbed caravans “in self-defense” (Koran Al-i-Imran 3: 123; Al-Anfal 8: 7), while Jesus organizedan uprising under the walls of Caesarea – the seat of the Roman administrationfor Judea. He promised his companions that “Iappoint unto you a kingdom, as my Father has appointed unto me, that ye may eatand drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelvetribes of Israel” (Lk. 22: 28-30; Jn. 14:1-3).The attempt ended in utter failure and Jesus was seen running from the police,daring to show his face in Jerusalem as it were “only in secret” (Jn. 7: 8-10).He went preaching, “through every townand village,” with his companions and a sizeable entourage of women, “Mary called Magdalene, Joanna the wife ofHerod's steward, Susanna, and many others,” who ministered “unto him” – what is the expression – “from their substance” (Lk. 8: 1). It is easy to overlook whatis written here between the lines: most of these women were married and hadleft behind their husbands and children. When he comes through a village Jesusexorcises “demons” and drives pigsover a precipice. From where in this Jewish orthodox neighborhood the pigssuddenly emerge, the narrator forgot to tell us (Mk. 1: 15, 1: 39, 6: 7, 6: 11, 9: 1(!), 13: 26; Mt. 10: 5; Lk. 9: 62, 10: 1, 11: 20), but that much is certain, everybody, whether Gentileor Jew, believed in demons in those days. Jesus himself held itup as his chief credential: “If I withthe finger of God cast out devils, how can you doubt the kingdom of God is comeupon you” (Mk. 1: 15,1: 39, 6: 7, 6: 11, 9: 1(!), 13: 26; Mt.10: 5; Lk. 9: 62, 10: 1, 11: 20).Then “he forbade these miracles to bemade known, even in cases where they could not possibly be kept hidden, withthe sole purpose of making people more eager to talk of them” (Reimarus, Fragments by an AnonymousWriter).

His family and neighbors– parents, four brothers and two sisters (Mk. 6: 3), somewhere an aunt, hismother’s sister is mentioned (Mk. 3:31-35, 6: 3-4; Mt. 13: 55-58; Jn. 2: 4), didn’t think too highlyof him (Mt. 13: 55-58); the feeling was reciprocated.The good people of Capernaum, of course, knew him only too well, they had seenhim growing up in the streets. There also seemed to have been a wife, theperson who knew Jesus in his underwear, a thought, that has unsettled thecustodians of the faith ever since, but our source has Jesus reading from theTorah in the synagogue (Lk. 4: 19),which, I am told, in those days was permitted only to married men. In the end therealization dawns on Jesus, that “God” is not somebody you should put yourtrust in (Mk. 15:34). Not exactly a heartwarming story.

After my second smallpocks vaccination I ran a high fever and became delirious, holding on with bothhands to a copy of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. In panic my mother called our practitioner fromacross the street, Dr. Löw. With somedifficulty she pulled the book out of my hands and I never finished it. I stillfind the gloom in Dickens overpowering, this “soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grownsnowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun” (Dickens, Bleak House). At the age of twelve, Ibegan reading my first real philosopher, Plato, and developed a habit ofsleeping in the buff under open window curtains. In the light of the stars Idreamed of suntanned Greeks debating ‘arete’and ‘eros’ under marbled porticos anda blazing blue sky. I mused over Plato’s archetypes, a sort of transcendentalcookie cutter. I still sleep in the buff, but my infatuation with Plato hasfaded since I’ve discovered why he was the Nazi’s favorite Greek: Plato was aproponent of star chambers, censorship, mandatory cadet schools, marching bandsand the breeding of the blondest. After school and during the holidays we kidsused to be away from home all day long. I often missed the curfew and got agood talking-to. One day, already running late, I was about to cross the streetand had no eyes for the lorry rushing at me from the left. It would havesquashed me to pulp had not from behind the hand of a stranger grabbed my arm.

A matter of splitseconds – I came sooo close, I could feel the vehicle’s slipstream pulling metowards the road. Then the anonymous hand loosened its grip and the hyperactiveboy scooted across the street without even looking back or saying a word ofthanks. I never told my parents. But should the person who saved my life readthis, I extend a belated, a very belated, “thankyou.” Bless you Sir, or Madam. Thankfully there were not too many inquiriesabout my whereabouts.

Almost every day ourgang used to meet on the river under the weeping willows. The girls were atleast as intrepid as the boys. As a test of mettle we crossed an out-of-townbridge on the outside of the handrail, lose your grip and you drop ninety feetinto shallow waters, the rapids running only inches over the rocks. Not that wedidn’t appreciate the danger. One of us, and it wasn’t one of the girls, lookeddown and froze and it took some coaxing to get him to the other end. With our bicycleswe toured the hamlets, straining upwards towards the Alps. Late in afternoon weturned our bicycles around and trundled down the falling altitude, barelystepping into the pedals. On weekends I was allowed to stay up late and fatherand son bonded over a common interest in astronomy.

My father was anengineer and was never shy to express a healthy disrespect for academic andmetaphysical baloney. Engineering has to get it right or the wheels won’t spin.That’s the benchmark. My father was hoping to find in me a budding engineer.Well, he was a Scot. So, it was a real disappointment for my old man when inthe end classicism got the better of me. I fell under the spell of C.Schneider’s hymn on the Hellenistic world in two mighty and very expensive tomes (Kulturgeschichte desHellenismus, 2 volumes, Munich 1967 – 1969), the book has never lost its lure, even now when thisglow lingers on only as a distant memory.

Nevertheless, in ourdiscussions about stars and distant galaxies, I pretty early came to therealization that this Universe is a tad too vast to be “created.” This wasstill years before the work of Benoît Mandelbrot, (1924 – 2010), who has opened our eyes to awhole new understanding of the dynamics between “chaos” and “order.” Partlythis is, because most of us don’t understand the nature of chance. When youplay the lottery your chance of hitting thejackpot is a very, very long shot, but the moreplayers participate, the odds for somebody to win shrink ininverted proportion. In other words, the critics of evolution base their doubtson an anthropocentric bias. So, before we get all giddy over some or other “anthropic principle” – the alleged“fine-tuning” of the Universe to our needs – somebody better explains why hethinks it is not we who are fine-tuned to given conditions.

In the last year atgrammar school, four of us graduates began pooling funds for an old Mercedes.Not exactly with the blessing of our worried parents we planned to take theroute through the Balkans, Anatolia and Iran to Katmandu, then sell the car andfrom the proceeds pay for the flight home. That was before the Russians hadinvaded Afghanistan.

On the way we stoppedat the ruins of Persepolis, the old capital of King Cyrus (580 – 529 BC). A barren plane, thesun beating down on solitary columns, in the cloudless sky a huge bird drawingcircles. The people here were poor but hospitable and always up in arms oversome age-old feud, trading bullets from rooftop to rooftop because once upon atime the one guy's granddaddy had had the temerity of leering at the otherguy’s granny; a story without a happy ending. Our guide motioned to the roofsto cease firing and let us pass. A meal was prepared for us, a sheep’s head,and to the guest of honor – me – they offered the best part: the eyes. A weeklater I fell ill and had to say good-bye to my companions and take the planefrom Kabul. I never made it to Katmandu.

Back home I first wentinto advertising and then, after consultations with my professor, continued tostudy Roman archeology and English literature. At night I worked shifts as asubeditor for a tabloid, helped along with uncounted cups of strong coffee.Psychologists on the campus paid me a fee for serving as guinea pig in theirstudies on sleep deprivation. I saw spider webs in every corner and expectedthe walls to warp under my touch. In the foliage of the trees and in the grainof my wooden furniture I saw elfin beings peek at me; I flinched from theimaginary swipe of fluttering hair on my face.

During my final semesterI first assisted in Yugoslavia at the excavation of a “Mithreum”– a chapel of Mithras, the bull slaying redeemer of the Roman soldier – andthen joined a team in Tunisia and Morocco, mapping and photographing Romanepigraphs for a new survey.

A veteran of the Frenchlegion assisted the team, liaising with the authorities and the native nomads.In his youth he had joined the Legion the old-fashioned way. He was seventeenwhen recruiting officers had shanghaied him from a coal mine across the border.That was his story and he stuck to it. Now he looked forward to retirement anda little home in the Loire Valley. He introduced me to a sheikh (or “Amenokal”)of the Touareg. They call themselves the “Imouhar,”the free people. A formal visit was arranged; I showered and in my best outfitdrove to the camp, accompanied by the veteran as the interpreter. The receptionwas friendly and I was invited to have a bath before the meal. I said, I hadalready showered, but the Veteran’s translation of my reply made these peoplesmile. I was led to a man-sized cauldron with a blazing fire underneath and wasasked to undress. Was I to become the meal’s main course? Water is on a premiumin the Sahara, and only a rather shallow puddle steamed at the bottom of thebathtub, practically singeing my testicles. A man with a couple of missingteeth in his smile helped me clambering into the tub. As I soon realized, hehad a pair of very strong hands. Without using soap he began massaging the dirtout of my epidermis.

It was a humblingexperience, even with the excuse of an hour’s drive through the desert in anopen jeep. I thought I was clean, but the man collected from my skin a ball ofgunk the size of a walnut. The following meal was a spicy affair, but thelegionnaire’s experience got me through this: don’t try washing down the heatin your mouth with water; instead ask for bread and chew it slowly! After themeal tea in tiny thimbles was served, the kind of tea hat enables you to speakfluently in fourteen languages at once.

After graduation I hadto make a choice. A manufacturer of chemical products offered a position withthe opportunity for worldwide travels on expense account. I took it.

Before I could go onthe road my contract required me to do six months in research and development.So I donned a white smock and checked in into the laboratory on a Tuesday.Chemistry had always been my least loved subject before an informal chat with aphysicist (sic!) had opened my eyes. Chemists never speak about electrons onthe outer shell of an atom. But chemistry, it seems, is all about the rightnumber of these electrons when atoms interact and form molecules. Theresearchers in the lab were after a new photosensitive compound and by trialand error the team tabulated and tested dozens of substances according to their“radicals,” the little dot to the right of the symbol, and this over and overagain. I got ready to do what I was hired for.

My first assignment wasa client in communist Czechoslovakia. In my company car I entered the outskirtsof Prague almost at midnight. I knew a hotel room was waiting for me, a moldytime capsule of gilded elegance in scarlet velvet. Nimbly threading my waythrough the pitch-dark suburbs I approached the bright lights announcing thedowntown when suddenly I was caught on a crossroad that seemed to receiveone-way lanes from every possible direction. It was eerily quiet.

Prague is the hometownof the writer Franz Kafka and the moment gave a whole new meaning to the word “Kafkaesque.” I tried backing out, but Ialready knew what was going to happen next. There would be a cop waiting togive me a ticket. And so it was.

Motioned to wind downthe window, I got a nose full of exhalations from a cigarette and the sourscent of stale beer in the breath. The man steadied himself with one hand onthe roof of my car. The law clearly was in need of a shave, but he was theauthority, and I understood that there was no point in protesting my innocence.So I paid and didn’t ask for a receipt. Lost in thoughts the man continuedholding on to the roof. I waited. At last he took off his hand and gave way.The film director Milos Forman used Prague as location for his film Amadeus with the secret policeas extras on his set. Most of them were in it for the American cigarettes andthe cans of pineapple. Time and again Milos had to remind hisAmerican crew to “forget logic! This isCzechoslovakia.” Actually Forman used the wrong term. It was not the lackof logic that was worrying. The next day, my contacts directed me into a yellowhaze of dust. It came from factory stacks and burning dumping pits, whichsurround Prague with a ring of sulfur, like a circle from Dante’s hell.

My assignment in Praguewas followed by travels to Italy, Portugal and Spain. In a restaurant in MadridI shook hands with a man in an expensive suit, a bit on the stocky side, wellfed, soft skinned, articulate, a handshake like a wet sponge. He arrived in amotorcade and introduced himself under a generic name – “Senior Muños.” Everybody else in the room knew him as the king’schief of security. Before the soufflé he passed around the table his identitycard and his Beretta. The document showed his photograph and a number with anendless row of zeros followed by a six at the end. This seemed to be the point.Only the royal family had figures that low on their ID. The Beretta was a machothing. They do this in those countries. After this encounter my firm thought Iwas ready to represent them in Los Angeles. I landed for a stopover in New Yorkand decided to travel the remaining distance by car on the Interstate 80. Iwanted to see America. A friend provided me with an old Cadillac. She was puttogether from two wrecks from the fifties and although the paint was not great– I would lie if I said it was pink – the tail fins were as flashy as ever. Shegot me safely across the continent, although the handwritten license plate on apiece of red cardboard in the rear window raised more than one patrol officer’seyebrow; but it was perfectly legal.

In Los Angeles, I linedup to open a bank account; I presented my passport to the girl at the counterand received a lecture that in America only the driver’s license is a “proper ID.” This settled I went out fora quick lunch. What seemed a humble hot-dog-stand turned out to be a gatheringof the rich and beautiful; reclining in their Lincolns and Porsches, they ate,dripping relish and mustard on their diamond rings.

I retired the Cad for aBuick Skylark, red as a fire engine, and scheduled a weekend for a much-anticipatedtrip to Nevada.

Colleagues had warnedme of patrol cars lurking to catch you speeding. Yet on this night a carstudded with antennas, like a porcupine with spikes, was overturning me,tailgated by an entire convoy tooting their horns to fall in with them. Theporcupine in front carried illegal radar detecting equipment. From far away LasVegas floated on the horizon like an illuminated airstrip. Our convoy arrivedin Vegas at about ten o’clock. That night I was determined to make ten thousanddollars at the roulette. That was my target.

Oh I was good! Iunderstood the game. I knew the percentages; I could set myself targets. Istarted with five hundred and in a very short time I piled up stacks of chipsbefore me, worth a trifle more than five thousand. It should have been thesignal to leave and had I done so I probably would still be gambling. I didn’tof course.

The croupier and I werethe only people at this table. I had a target. The croupier looked at me andbarely noticeable shrugged his shoulders when I placed my next bet. Two hourslater I left the Casino without my American Express card. Cold turkey. Neveragain the clinking of chips and the nervous patter of little thuds hurtlingacross the crap table. No more sympathetic noises from the young man next to mewho says he admires my game. A typical night on the strip. The trance of neonlights, people sliding by in their cars like in a fluorescent fish tank. Thechills after the adrenaline crash when stepping out into the street. Theaimless walk before backtracking to the car park. A drop of water from someair-conditioner hitting the face. I still had a car key and a car fitting tothe key. Back in L.A., I was offered a career change and for a moment it got methinking. The man making the offer had the looks of Mahatma Gandhi – withoutthe loincloth. Gandhi owned five houses with a Jaguar in each garage. He wasmarried to a woman in her first pregnancy; there was a blonde mistress and herjust born baby, and a Japanese ex-wife, the mother of an already married son,who was serving with the Marines. There was Kirby, the Doberman. They allwere living within a mile’s distance of each other, helping one anotherchanging diapers and buying a dress for the party tonight. Gandhi’s firm wasregistered in Switzerland. Most of his business he conducted from his faxmachine in the bedroom. Do you need a tank or a fighter plane? Gandhi is yourman. For handguns go to Walmart. In the end I thought the better of the offerand stuck with my employer. He sent me on a new assignment to South East Asiaand China. I met my wife and settled down, teaching and studying.

China inflicted a bitof a culture shock. At moments I found myself lost in the streets, surroundedby a chaotic congestion of screeching traffic, of shop signs I couldn’t read,of disintegrating concrete and an unspeakable, roach infested ugliness in theutilitarian architecture. Yet after midnight the city could be of anintoxicating magic. We toured the abandoned streets on our scooter, a red Vespa, the driftingdust from the numerous construction sites had settled, and despite, or perhapsas an effect of the polluted air, the krypton lights disseminated the gentleluster of a gigantic jellyfish hovering in the greenish, slightly hazy,translucence of the sky, dangling countless tentacles onto the emptyplaygrounds. Now and then we stopped there for a moment on the swings; from thechains our hands rubbed off the slimy sweat of the big city. At this late houreven the home was quiet. Chinese families are a noisy and temperamental affair;the headlight over the door to your room is left open, the clan would be veryunhappy should one of their own drift out of earshot. In the eighties privacywas still a foreign concept for China.

Among the colony of expatriatesI made the acquaintance of a Jesuit from Australia. He helped me to find my waythrough the Chinese classics. I learned to respect the Jesuit’s touch in thesematters. Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong SJ (1912 – 2003) is a book I return to,time and again.

The one Chinese writerI consider as an absolute must-read is the Han historian Ssu-ma Ch‘ien (Sima Qian), (145 – 90 BC), a stupendousstoryteller. His emperor gave him a rough deal. Ssu-ma stood up, defending theintegrity of a colleague in office and was neutered for his temerity. Ssu-mawrote before the innovation of ink and paper. With untiring patience, hisclerks singed signs with read hot needles onto uncounted slabs of bamboo,1,500,000 words altogether. Ssu-ma was not your typical Confucian gentleman,uptight, polished and slightly bigoted. He was a sensitive individual withloyalty high on his agenda. His career was an existence under tight supervision. As a courtier he lived confined to a dormitory leave only once every five days to “wash his hair,” a euphemism for relaxing in the presence of a lady of light manners. He was a creature of his circumstances and did not think of his treatment as an injustice; bystanding up for Li Ling, who was not even his friend, Ssu-ma knew he had itcoming, and his refusal to commit “honorable” suicide marked him as an outcastin the eyes of his peers. Yet he could not bear the thought to leave his workunfinished.

China has always been atyranny. For two millennia Confucianism was the only ideological spanner in theworks to keep it civil; for the Confucian courtier, a dangerous position to bein: Confucian officials have been seen to lay down their life for holding up aprinciple of benevolent paternalism. There is no possible comparison with thepolitical structures in the West, not even when thinking of the Roman Empire.On the heights of their tyranny and their contempt for human rights, there wasno Roman Caesar, and there is no modern dictator, daring to ignore the factualsovereignty of “the people.” They know it is the irreplaceable cornerstone oftheir own powers. There cannot be any concept of legality, (which is notnecessarily the same as “justice”) let alone a democracy, without at leasttacitly acknowledging the people’s sovereignty.

My favorite Chinesepoet is Su Tung-po (1037 – 1101) – his penname; his realname is Su Shih – a free spirit as far as this is possible in China. He alsowas the political adversary of the economist and reformer Wang An-shih (1021 – 1086). Wang achieved therare feat of being hailed as a political forerunner on both sides of the TaiwanStraits. His intrusive paternalism was right down the lane of Chiang Kai-shekand Mao Tse-tung. Yet instead of easing the burden for the peasantry, hismeasures achieved exactly the opposite and the impoverished farmers abandonedtheir fields causing a countrywide famine. Wang retired from office.

It was nine o’clock inthe evening after rush hour.

The street under thewindow was empty and barely lit. My wife should have been home for over anhour; I decided to take a leisurely walk into the direction from which I wasexpecting her arrival. Half a mile down the road, the street was utterlydesolate, except for a parked pickup with a load of protruding scaffoldingpoles. Behind the pickup was a large puddle on the tarmac that lookedlike axle grease. I noticed a mangled Vespa on the sidewalk and suddenlyrealized I'd stepped into the puddle.

A friend – the chiefsurgeon of the local university clinic – helped searching for my wife in thehospitals up and down the city. We found the morgue holding her remains; herupper body was left covered; they said it would be better not to look at herface.

In 1991 I returned toEngland and settled in Neasden, London, where H.G. Wells says the Martians hadlanded. In 1997 I began corresponding with the person who is my sweetheart andwhom I have to thank that this website ever materialized. Dawn and I firstmoved to Florida and in the year after 9/11 we went back to England, and, withthe blessing of the immortals, we shall live happily ever after.

Our first apartmentoverlooked the River Thames, a hundred yards away from the crypt wherePocahontas is laid to rest. We now live in a place looking out on tall trees,where the squirrels leap across the treetops.

To be continued – perhaps

The unknown Russian – Vladimir Sirin

2011-10-30T07:21:00.000-07:00

by michael sympson

The good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense.

Vladimir Nabokov

Hereis the thing: authors are unreliable judges in matters of their own fiction.

For example take Stephen King. He believes in all honestyLisey’s Story is the best thing he has ever written;yet many of his most devoted readers will disagree. They don’t like theextensive recreation of private language and inside jokes running over hundredsof pages – it keeps them at a distance; as far as I can tell the author hadmore fun here in the writing, than any of his readers will ever have in thereading. Give me Duma Key anytime. Some authors even teachclasses on the critical appreciation of good fiction. Nabokov’s lectures atCornell are accessible in print. It’s good stuff – thanks to Vladimir we noticeTolstoy observing a mother tensing the muscles of the bare underarm when shesqueezes in the bath the sponge over her baby. This tanned underarm willreappear in King, Queen, Knave. So how is it then that even an author of statureseems purblind when it comes to the merits of his own work?

Part of the answer lies of course in the fact, that theauthor intensely remembers the joys and pains of composition, taking this as ameasure. We understand now, why the Invitationto a Beheading is taking such a high place in Nabokov’s esteem of his ownwork. What does a critic know anyway? “If I wouldn’t write my novels, these... people – and tick the thumb over the shoulder with such contempt –wouldn’t even know how to pay for their grocery.” (The author who saidthis, died in poverty, while his critics indeed do their shopping in abrand-new BMW. Something here is very wrong). Sirin’s books pay homage to theauthors he valued. Even his first American book, Bend Sinister has the distinct feel of Bely’s Petersburg, although, if I may say so as someone who reads Russianonly in translations, it is far more sensual and intimate than the prototype. Pnin is the mostDickensian of Nabokov’s books, while Ada elicits a shrug over the post-pubescent and beyondbounds inflated fantasy of a dirty old man. Crébillon’s Sofa goneberserk!

Come to think of it, the more I read of him, the more Iappreciate that young “Vladimir Sirin” was a muchgreater writer than his older alter ego could ever hope to become in America.In this sense Bend Sinister wasalready the last hurrah. After test-running TheTrue Life of Sebastian Knight, “Vladimir Sirin”tried once more his hand in a foreign language and discovered it wasn’t quiteup to his own standards and henceforth published under his pen name “VladimirNabokov.” Yes, I am kidding, but tell you what: I once had a Russian student, ajournalist; he had grown up in Manhattan where his parents lived as accreditedpersonal at the Soviet Embassy. He was already bi- or trilingual when we metand he wanted me to help him becoming quad-lingual – is that the word? – before moving on and establish his own syndicalizednews agency, meant to serve a free association of independent journalists. Wetalked about the future of Kazakhstan, the incident at Waco and Russianliterature. I asked what Russians think of Nabokov? “Our number three,” he said. Number three of what? “Oh Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Tolstoy,Gogol, Chekhov, Bely, Goncharov, Pasternak, Bulgakov, Mayakovski, Dostoyevsky, Zinoviev – take yourpick.” He mentioned a few more names I’d never heard of before – Russiansdo read and appreciate Nabokov’s Russian prose as a major accomplishment intheir language. That said, the author’s handicap as a writer in English liessomewhere else: Lolita suffers from alack of belonging, a sense that only comes with the attachment to an urbanambience, and be it only as a mirage in the distance. There is no great noveleven possible without this urban undercurrent. Raymond Chandler would be anobscure nobody without the smog of Los Angeles hovering over the scene. Thinkof Dickens and London, of Dublin and James Joyce – who recollected the detailswhile living in exile. Even Homer knew it already. What would the Iliad bewithout the looming citadel of Troy? The emigrée Sirin, although torn fromhis roots, was at least blessed with a thick layer of memories from hisadolescence in Petrograd and later was still young enough to absorb theemotional impact of his immediate surrounding in Berlin, although he dreadedit. Dread is not love, but it still is a form of attachment. When he finallygot the necessary visas to expatriate himself and his family to Paris hiscareer as a great Russian writer came to an end. A personal tragedy; the restis cleverly staged nostalgia.

I can understand that a writer may be dismissive of hisown early attempts – but not to see in King,Queen, Knave the originality, the rich sensuality of detail and the fluidand seemingly effortless delivery of just the best book he was to write for along time, is rather strange. In the foreword, Nabokov says, that when heedited the translation, he felt the book was “sagging”and gave it an editorial overhaul. Good editing is the key to successfulwriting. Nabokov published this book in the year 1927 – three years after Kafka’sdeath and five years after the publication of the Ulysses by James Joyce. Nabokov always claimed that at the time hewas oblivious of Kafka – which is very possible, if indeed his German was asbad as he wants us to believe it was. (However in his Cornell lectures Ispotted in the footnotes some rather discerning remarks on the stylisticshortcomings in Kafka’s novels.) Yet in the book’s preface he also says that he“hardly knew”the Ulysses by James Joyce. That isnot what Nabokov is telling us in his own autobiography. What Nabokov didn’tdeny was his familiarity with Marcel Proust and of course with the finest ofthe Russian novelists: Turgenev, Chekhov and the mighty Tolstoy. Mashenka,clearly, was Nabokov’s homage to the venerated AntoninChekhov, although here and there we get already a taste of the Nabokovian touch: “Only for a very short time had he been genuinely in love –in that state of mind in which Lyudmila had seemed wreathed in a seductivemist, a state of questing, exalted, almost unearthly emotion, as when musicplays at the very moment when one is doing something quite ordinary, such aswalking from a table to pay at the bar, and gives an inward dancelike qualityto one’s simple movement, transforming it into a significant and immortalgesture” (Nabokov, Mashenka).

In Sirin’s second novel, King, Queen, Knave, a very gifted author has found his own voice.The story itself – well it has been told before: a suburban but glamorousMadame Bovary from Berlin Pankow – “she was noEmma, and no Anna” (Nabokov,King, Queen, Knave) – is cuckolding herhusband, who will never know. Let that not spoil your appetite. Art and lifealways rehearse from the same script, but every rehearsal is different. On Sundays, on the elegant street in the western sectionof the city, he would wear his new overcoat and walk quite differently. Nowhowever, was not the moment for that – the cold was intense. That big-citySunday walk had not been easy to copy. It consisted of stretching the arms welldown and crossing one’s hands (good gloves were essential) below the lastbutton of the overcoat as if to keep it in place as one advanced at a very slowstrut, with toes pointing out at each step. Thus promenaded the Kurfürstendammdandies, sometimes in pairs, now and then looking around at a girl withoutchanging the position of their hands but merely giving a slight backward jerkof the shoulder. Despite the cold, Franz felt multiplied and exaggerated as onedoes after a show, and he began to whistle. “To hell with her husband. What wasshe doing now? She must be home and undressing. That yellow-bristled pig.Pestering her, no doubt. To hell with him! Now she is sitting on the bed,peeling off her stocking. Three or four houses more and she will be naked. WhenI reach that street lamp she will lower her head on the pillow. I cross thestreet, and she turns off the light. Wonderful violinist – and so beautifullystaged, there was really something heavenly about it. The conjurer was goodtoo. Simple tricks, no doubt: make good money by deceiving people. Now she issound asleep. She sees my house in her dream and hears the divine violin. Damnthis key. Always behaving as if it had never been in this lock before”(Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave). This was written in the age of “modernism,” of themonologue intérieur, of Andrei Bely’s StPetersburg, of Stravinsky, Webern, and Prokofiev, of Gertrude Stein and theBauhaus, of the crackling radio and the rasping voice of the rabble-rouser fromAustria, of the first shadow games of what was to become television. CharlesLindberg landed his airplane in Le Bourget, Paris. My mother missed school becauseshe stared all morning at a giant zeppelin drifting over Berlin.

Vladimir Sirin was a modernistwithout the ostentatious attitude. Hemingway somewhere said that a writershould write his best against the dead writers and beat them one by one. However“I wouldn’t fight Count Tolstoy, becauseI know he would knock my ears off” (Hemingway). When Hemingwaytalked about other authors, he spoke about Russians – most of the time. Americaseemed worth mentioning to him only for the sake of Henry James, Stephen Craneand Mark Twain, although not exactly in that order.

For Nabokov the “fight” waswith the best of Marcel Proust’s perceptiveness and combining it with thepenetrating sensuality of Tolstoy and his remarkable technique of flyingtransitions between the thoughts and perceptions of the characters; in theclosing sequence of Anna Karenina, Tolstoyhas given us even the first example for the interior monologue. I am not anexpert in modernist Russian literature from the period between 1905 and the MayRevolution in 1918, at least not beyond Roman Jacobson, Mayakovsky and theFuturists – I did read Vladislav Chodasevic – yet be it as it may, King,Queen, Knave has a modernist feel. “The hugeclock hand is still at rest but is on the point of making its once-a-minutegesture; that resilient jolt will set a whole world in motion. The clock facewill slowly turn away, full of despair, contempt, and boredom, as one by onethe iron pillars will start walking past, bearing away the vault of the stationlike bland atlantes; the platform will begin to move past, carrying off on anunknown journey cigarette buts, used tickets, flecks of sunlight and spittle; aluggage handcart will glide by, its wheels motionless; it will be followed by anews stall hung with seductive magazine-cover-photographs of naked, pearl greybeauties; and people, people, people on the moving platform, themselves movingtheir feet, yet standing still, striding forward, yet retreating as in anagonizing dream full of incredible effort, nausea, a cottony weakness in one’scalves, will surge back, almost falling supine. – There were more women thanmen as is always the case at partings” (Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave). The transitions between third person narrative andinterior monologue in the Ulysses arerather clumsy and abrupt; in Nabokov’s novel they are inconspicuous andelegant.

The reader is left todrifting in and out of “the mist of small talkand tinkle – that particular tinkle half-glass, half-metal, peculiar to theprocess of human feeding” (Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave).Franz, the protagonist, arrives in Berlin on not exactly the most auspiciousnote.

“He cluckedhis tongue and lay still. – Complicated but familiar poverty (that cannotafford spare sets of expensive articles) now resulted in primitive panic.Without these glasses he was as good as blind, yet he must set out on aperilous journey across a strange city.”... “The clean air whistled in his ears, and thehorns called to each other in celestial voices. He caught a whiff of dry leavesand a branch nearly brushed against him.” (Apparently we siton the open top of an old roof-master.) “Heasked a neighbor where he should get off. He began counting the stops so as notto have to ask again, and tried in vain to distinguish cross streets.”... “At last his stop came. He clambered down thesteep stairs and cautiously stepped on the sidewalk. From receding heights afaceless traveler shouted to him: on your right! First street on your – “... “The gate emitted an odd buzzing sound. Hewaited a little and pressed the button again. Again the wicket buzzed. No onecame to open it. Beyond lay the greenish haze of a garden with a house floatingthere like an indistinct reflection. He tried to open the gate himself butfound it unyielding. Biting his lips he rang once more and held his finger onthe button for a long time. The same monotonous buzzing. He suddenly realizedwhat the trick was, leaned against the gate as he rang once more” ... “Later when he remembered this meeting, the mirage of thegarden, that sun-melting dress, he marveled at the length of time it had takenhim to recognize her. In the unsubstantial radiance of his myopia, Martha boreno resemblance at all to the lady in the train who had glowed like a pictureand yawned like a tigress – for a ridiculous moment she thought this impetuousintruder was about to take her head between his hands.” ... “On the lawn near the porch stood a very tall beachumbrella and under it a small table and several wicker armchairs. Martha sat down,and Franz, grinning and blinking, sat down beside her. She decided that she hadstunned him completely with the sight of her small but expensive garden. – “It’sso quiet here,” said Franz. “I thought Berlin would be so noisy.” – “Oh, but welive almost in the country,” she answered” At this moment there appeared fromsomewhere, as if in a token of sympathy, the specter of a dog which turned outupon closer examination to be an Alsatian. Lowering his head, the dog placedsomething at Franz’s feet. Then it retreated a little, dissolved momentarily,and waited expectantly. – “That’s Tom,” said Martha. “Tom won a prize at theshow. Didn’t you Tom” (she spoke to Tom only in the presence of guests). Out ofrespect for his hostess, Franz picked up the object the dog was offering him.It proved to be a wet wooden ball covered with tangible tooth marks. As soon ashe took up the ball, raising it up to his face, the specter of the dog emergedwith a bound from the sunny haze, becoming alive, warm, active, and nearlyknocking him off his chair. He quickly got rid of the ball. Tom vanished. “Fineanimal,” he observed with revulsion, as he wiped his wet hand against thechintzed chair arm” (Nabokov,King, Queen, Knave). At last, thepredestined cuckold is making his entry.

“Dreyer cameat his fast bouncy walk. He wore an ample white overcoat with a white scarf.Three rackets, each in a differently colored cloth-case – maroon, blue, andmulberry – protruded from under his arm; his face with its tawny mustacheglowed like an autumn leaf. His wife had come out to the porch. She gave him along cold glance, coldly nodded, and went back into the house. “That hateful,undignified, genial tone he always must take with inferiors,” she reflected asshe passed through the ivory-white front hall where the impeccable, hospitablewhite comb and white backed brush lay on the doily under the pier glass. Theentire villa, from whitewashed terrace to radio antenna, was that way – neat,clean-cut, and on the whole unloved and inane.” ... “On Monday Franz splurged: he purchased what the opticianassured him was an American article. The rims were of tortoise shell – allowingno doubt for the well-known fact that chelonians are frequently and variouslymocked. The haze dissolved. The unruly colors of the universe were confinedonce more to their official compartments and cells” (Nabokov,King, Queen, Knave).

The visuals are absolutelystunning. “Only one thing really told him he wasin the metropolis: some strollers wore marvelous clothes! For instance,plus-fours, very baggy below the knee, so as to make the wool-stockinged shinlook handsomely slender. That style he had never seen before, though boys inhis hometown also wore knickerbockers” (Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave). Only Tolstoy could have written this – if he had been avery different person with different interests. So he left it to VladimirSirin.

For the duration of a book,a reader submits himself to the author, to his instincts, emotions, hisintellect and knowledge. We succumb to the spell, suspend our judgment andfollow his lead. But even the poorly equipped reader will sense the hollowrhetoric, when an author fails to actually take this lead, when, to be blunt,he fails to dominate. On reflection, you as the reader may not like to bedominated, but that is the unavoidable dynamic behind the process of readinggood fiction. Deal with it and live in the moment!

King,Queen, Knave is the book where VladimirSirin not only experienced the delirious joys of composition, but also didallow his instincts to run free; and they are good instincts.

This is not a critique. I amnot telling you how to read. With the right book in your hand you are going tobe carried along without my prompting. I am just wondering. What makes usappreciating fiction? How is it possible to find escape and enchantment in astory even if in our sober moments the subject matter does not really appeal toour tastes? From an author’s point of view, of course, it would be neat to knowhow these things work, and make it a reproducible effect.

A Chestnut in the open Fly – Laurence Sterne

2011-10-29T07:09:00.000-07:00

by michael sympson

In my opinion, to write a book is for all the world like humming a song – be but in tune with yourself.

Laurence Sterne

As a reader, I am just likeeverybody else. I hate it to be getting bored. I like my page-turners, whetherSF, crime or mystery, whatever is keeping me awake. What I don’t like is the hypedup lemon, thundering down on me because some critic is dragging a living out ofdoing the hyping. Sometimes these critics seem to come in hordes. They havePhDs front and aft and call themselves scholars. They are in the academicbusiness of mutual masturbation. Nothing personal; we all have to pay ourmortgage, but I find it annoying getting caught in a battle of books overhomespun “anatomies” of “archetypes” and “modes.” Take it from me: James Joyce is overrated – – most of the time. Not that I mind “experimental literature,” not at all, it can be very entertaining and witty, but it is still a branch of entertainment not an exercise in academia. Granted, not everybody is getting entertained by the same thing. But if you like reading – well you want to read a good book, a pleasing book. Somebody has compared Ulysses with modern physics which is not exactly a topic for the layperson, but hey! There is a difference between searching the truth and entertaining. The one must not exclude the other, but a novel’s primary purpose is to tell a pleasing lie, while even the sexiest algorithm will give only the geeks and engineers a hardon.

So,when I read The Life and Opinions ofTristram Schandy, Gentlemen, for the first time, because it was supposed tobe the crown jewel of English literature, I was certainly not the only onechewing with dull determination my way through never ending sentences thatinsanely exceeded every normal person’s attention span. “Normal,” that is, forour generation of the thirty-second television commercial! Clearly, from coverto cover, this author was flowery and rambling away in an unbearable archaicdiction. Let’s face it, like Diogenes in search of a fellow human being, Iwould have to go out with a lantern in open daylight to find somebody readingthe Tristram for nothing but hisreading pleasure. That James Joyce had mentioned the book on the first page of Finnegan’s Wake was not exactly arecommendation.

Inother words, it took me some time to get over the hump, but the moment Istopped listening to the bull on the back of the dustcover and in the editor’sforeword, and began making up my own mind, things became interesting, and Imean really interesting.

Onlya complete oaf could be immune against the charm of the following scene, Sterne’stake on a ‘damsel-in-distress’ situation, where the protagonist approaches alady, with a face “not critically handsome,” (thank you very much) butwith something in it, “which, in the frame of mind I was in, attached me much more to it – itwas interesting.” (If you listen to advise, don’t tell “her” that.Instead, do what Voltaire on such occasion used to recommend: “give it fiveminutes and I have talked away my ugly face.” Of course you would haveto be a talker – like this fellow here:

“This certainly, fair lady!” hebegins, “raisingher hand up a little lightly as I began, must be one of Fortune's whimsicaldoings: to take two utter strangers by their hands – of different sexes, andperhaps from different corners of the globe, and in one moment place themtogether in such a cordial situation as Friendship herself could scarce haveachieved for them had she projected it for a month” – a neat pickupline old sport, but it seems to backfire.

“Your reflection upon it,” thewoman says, “shewshow much, Monsieur, she [the goddess of friendship – whoever shewas] hasembarrassed you by the adventure. – When the situation is what we would wish,nothing is so ill-timed as to hint at the circumstances which make it so: youthank Fortune, continued she – you had reason – the heart knew it, and wassatisfied; and who but an English philosopher would have sent notice of it tothe brain to reverse the judgment? In saying this she disengaged her hand witha look which I thought a sufficient commentary upon the text.” Oh dear! The man is mortified, because “with the loss ofher hand, and the manner in which I had lost it carried neither oil nor wine tothe wound: I never felt the pain of a sheepish inferiority so miserable in mylife,” yet “the triumphs of atrue feminine heart are short upon the discomfitures. In a very few seconds shelaid her hand upon the cuff of my coat, in order to finish her reply; so someway or other, God knows how, I regained my situation.” (Lucky you!) “I forthwith beganto model a different conversation for the lady, thinking from the spirit aswell as moral of this, that I had been mistaken in her character; but uponturning her face towards me, the spirit which had animated the reply was fled –the muscles relaxed, and I beheld the same unprotected look of distress whichhad first won me to her interest – melancholy! to see such sprightliness theprey of sorrow – I pitied her from my soul; and though it may seem ridiculousenough to a torpid heart” – not at all Sir, we all have ourmoments – “I could have takenher into my arms, and cherished her, though it was in the open street, withoutblushing.”

“The pulsations of the arteries along my fingers pressing across hers,told her what was passing within me: she looked down – a silence of somemoments followed,” our hero says, stillfishing for clues. “There wants nothing, said I, to make it so, but the comic use whichthe gallantry of a Frenchman would put it to – to make love the first moment,and an offer of his person the second. It is supposed so at least – and how ithas come to pass, continued I, I know not: but they have certainly got thecredit of understanding more of love, and making it better than any othernation upon earth; but for my own part, I think them arrant bunglers, and intruth the worst set of marksmen that ever tried Cupid's patience. – To think ofmaking love by sentiments! I should as soon think of making a genteel suit ofcloths out of remnants: – and to do it – pop – at first sight by declaration – issubmitting the offer and themselves with it, to be sifted with all their poursand contres, by an unheated mind.” I can’t help wondering whetherthis came out right at all, yet surprise, surprise, “the lady attended as if she expected Ishould go on.”

All right then, now shoot straight and don’tmake a mess of it:

“Consider then, madam,” continued I, laying my hand upon hers – “thatgrave people hate Love for the name's sake – that selfish people hate it fortheir own – hypocrites for heaven's – and that all of us, both old and young,being ten times worse frighten'd than hurt by the very report – what a want ofknowledge in this branch of commerce a man betrays, who ever lets the word comeout of his lips, till an hour or two at least after the time, that his silenceupon it becomes tormenting. A course of small, quiet attentions, not so pointedas to alarm – nor so vague as to be misunderstood – with now and then a look ofkindness, and little or nothing said upon it – leaves nature for your mistress,and she fashions it to her mind.” Okaaay… bull’s-eye!

“Then I solemnly declare, said the lady, blushing – you have been makinglove to me all this while” (Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey).

I don’t know about you, but here is a truewriter! All he needs to get a scene on the paper are two strangers of theopposite sex – naturally – and a locked door to which the key is missing. Nospecial effects, no props, no makeup artistry, just the magic of the word andimagination.

LaurenceSterne (1713– 1768)had his appointment with destiny ratherlate in life. Living the dissolute existence of a man of the cloth with friendsin the gentile establishment, he’d earned himself the reputation of aconversationalist and wit. At the age of forty-nine, he offered his first andonly novel to a publisher who of course knew better than to risk his money andreputation on this nonsense. Publishers think they know everything. So, Sternepitched himself the costs for printing and publishing. Publishers know nothing.And authors usually have neither the money nor the necessary publicity machineto properly launch their product. In Sterne’s case it was all word of mouth andthe old boys network; and that turned out to be working amazingly well. Thebook gained instant popularity and the proceeds paid for a new home in Coxwold.Sterne christened it “Shandy Hall,” alovely cottage but deficient in plumbing. Sterne enjoyed every bit of his fame;he had tuberculosis and he knew his days were numbered. Book five to nine ofhis novel were written under the shadow of the ultimate deadline. Pressed fortime, the arguably most eloquent of all English authors began recycling his oldlove letters for the benefit of an increasing number of groupies in his fanmail. When his only daughter inherited her father’s considerable debts she soldthese letters for one thousand guineas. As was to be expected, this ruinedSterne’s reputation with the Victorians.

Weknow his last words. The moment his heart was about to stop, Sterne suddenlylooked up, stretched out his hand and said, “there it is!” The inevitableresurrection man exhumed the corpse and the sudden realization on whom theroyal surgeon was just performing a postmortem made a close friend faint in theoperating theater. A scene Sterne himself could have invented. He had a knackfor looking at things from a strange angle.

“Mr. Shandy, my father,Sir, would see nothing in the light in which others placed it; – he placedthings in his own light; – he would weigh nothing in common scales; – no, hewas too refined a researcher to lie open to so gross an imposition, – to comeat the exact weight of things in the scientific steel-yard, the fulcrum, hewould say, should be almost invisible, to avoid all friction from populartenets; – without this the minutiae of philosophy, which would always turn thebalance, will have no weight at all. Knowledge,like matter, he would affirm, was divisible in infinitum and the grains andscruples were as much a part of it, as the gravitation of the whole world. – Ina word, he would say, error was error, – no matter where it fell, – whether ina fraction, – or a pound, – 'twas alike fatal to truth, and she was kept downat the bottom of her well, as inevitably by a mistake in the dust of abutterfly's wing, as in the disk of the sun, the moon, and all the stars ofheaven put together” (Tristram Shandy,Book 2, Chapter XIX).

Eventhe great Dr. Johnson (1709 – 1784) confessed being baffled and failedto appreciate the depth and structure, which underscores the seemingly motleysurface of Sterne’s novel. In 1776 his verdict was: “Nothing odd will do long. 'Tristram Shandy' did not last” (Boswell, Life of Johnson). Yet despitethis verdict of the pundit’s pundit, Sterne had it all put together withextreme care.

Howmeticulous he was one can gather from a seemingly apropos remark in the firstvolume of the novel: “And I think, continued he, that the shock I received theyear after the demolition of Dunkirk, in my affair with widow Wadman; – whichshock you know I should not have received, but from my total ignorance of thesex, – has given me just cause to say, that I neither know nor do pretend toknow any thing about 'em or their concerns either” (Tristram Shandy, Book 1, Chapter XXXII). Apparently just a loose piece of conversation, soon to beforgotten over other, no less anecdotal matters and over Uncle Toby'shobby-horse – hornworks and curtains – yet believe it or not, it already tiesthe knot for the climax of Uncle Toby's story in Book IX, some 450 pages later.So, all the ingredients are measured and in the right place, like the dough ofa good pastry ready to be kneaded and punched into shape. But before we rollover the dough and press it with the heel of our hand, and do so again andagain, we shall place a raisin right in the center. After some kneading androlling – nothing that Newton’s laws couldn’t explain down to the last detail –it will no longer be possible to assert the raisin's actual position, despitean exhaustive knowledge of all the inertia and variables of the physicsinvolved. Sterne had single-handedly invented ‘chaos theory’ long beforeanybody else would think of the ‘butterfly effect.’

“Kneading”here means, you make a meticulous exposition of your story before breaking upthe plot and reassemble the pieces in a different order, designed to misleadthe reader with mirrors and tobacco smoke. Things may appear chaotic andconfused, but I can assure you, there is probably not a single sentence in Tristram Shandy that could pass as arandom caprice.

Theproof is in the statistics. From 1759 to 1767, it took Sterne eight years topublish nine very slim sequels of this product of “whim and tomfoolery,” averaging some sixty pages each. Even GustaveFlaubert (1821– 1880),a notoriously meticulous and slow composer, has produced more written copy inless time – about one hundred pages a year. Sterne spent two seasons of theyear at the desk – writing by longhand of course. In Book 4, Chapter XXV, theauthor is quite explicit about his care and craft. Tristram Shandy is the realization of a plan, a very careful plan.Yet all this labor over the dash and the exclamation mark raises a fairquestion:

“Good Lord! said mymother, what is all this story about? – A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick – Andone of the best of its kind, I ever heard.”

Giventhe fact, that this is the final sentence and a verbatim quote from Rabelais (1495 – 1553,part 4 in Motteux's translation) this is a declaration of artisticpedigree. Sterne is telling us with whom he wishes to be compared. The other,quite often mentioned forerunner is Cervantes (1547 – 1616), but to getthe idea what Tristram Shandy is allabout we need to look somewhere else: “It is about an hour and a half's tolerable good readingsince my uncle Toby rung the bell, when Obadiah was ordered to saddle a horse,and go for Dr. Slop, the man-midwife; – so that no one can say, with reason,that I have not allowed Obadiah time enough, poetically speaking, andconsidering the emergency too, both to go and come; – though, morally and trulyspeaking, the man perhaps has scarce had time to get on his boots.”

“If the hypercritickwill go upon this; and is resolved after all to take a pendulum, and measurethe true distance betwixt the ringing of the bell, and the rap at the door; –and, after finding it to be no more than two minutes, thirteen seconds, andthree-fifths, – should take upon him to insult over me for such a breach in theunity, or rather probability of time; – I would remind him, that the idea ofduration, and of its simple modes, is got merely from the train and successionof our ideas – and is the true scholastic pendulum, – and by which, as ascholar, I will be tried in this matter, – abjuring and detesting thejurisdiction of all other pendulums whatever.” “Pendulums?”What is he talking about? “I would therefore desire him to considerthat it is but poor eight miles from Shandy-Hall to Dr. Slop, the man-midwife'shouse: – and that whilst Obadiah has been going those said miles and back, Ihave brought my uncle Toby from Namur, quite across all Flanders, into England:– That I have had him ill upon my hands near four years; – and have sincetraveled him and Corporal Trim in a chariot-and-four, a journey of near twohundred miles down into Yorkshire – all which put together, must have preparedthe reader's imagination for the entrance of Dr. Slop upon the stage, – asmuch, at least (I hope) as a dance, a song, or a concerto between the acts”(Tristram Shandy, Book 2, Chapter VIII).

Inother words, to the great distress of Tristram's father “the ideas of time and space – or how wecame by those ideas – or of what stuff they were made – or whether they wereborn with us – or we picked them up afterwards as we went along – or whether wedid it in frocks – or not till we had got into breeches – with a thousand otherinquiries and disputes about Infinity Prescience, Liberty, Necessity, and soforth, upon whose desperate and unconquerable theories so many fine heads havebeen turned and cracked” (Tristram Shandy, Book 3 Chapter XVIII).

Youheard him right! It is all about time – measured by the movements of thatparticular pendulum with which nature has endowed half of the human race, thehalf, that according to the divine author “pisses against the wall” (I Sam. 25:34).Sterne’s book is a forerunner to Proust’s Àla Recherche du Temps Perdu – in both instances a story of past erectionsand missed opportunities, but, in my opinion, infinitely more witty andinsidious than Proust’s take on the subject, although certainly not on a parwith Proust's meticulous visuals for which Sterne and his readers were stilllacking the impressionistic eye of a later era. Sterne was a writer of theRococo, for him nature is a French garden with boxwood shrubs trimmed to formgeometrical brain teasers; the only wild beast is a cow causing mayhem amongthe scaled models of fortifications on Uncle Toby's bowling green. Most of thevisuals are close-ups and portrait shoots, vivid enough but not exactly apicture of God's plenty.

Thepeople in Sterne's book talk and think, they don't move a lot. Knowing hislimitations, Sterne gives the reader the benefit of a “torn out” chapter at thebeginning to Book IV, and he wouldn't be Sterne, if he didn't follow upimmediately with a chapter on torn out chapters.

Irecommend making use of a loose calendar sheet as your bookmark in order tokeep taps on the actual chronology of every incident. Eventually you may noticethat the widow Wadman affair is actually the beginning of the whole story thatprecedes even the narrator’s own birth, yet Sterne has put it at the end as theconclusion to his story. Time, Sternian time, in an anticipation of themultiplying universe of Everett, is constantly pursuing alternative directions;every anecdotal turn takes on a life of its own, seemingly disjoined from therest. The interactions between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy, Tristram's parents, alwaysend in a split of worlds mutually ignorant of each other and completely out ofsync. So the reader follows the discourse, is going places and travels present,past and future, back and forth, north by north-west, and all the time theprotagonists just sit in the parlor and waffle away over puffs of tobaccosmoke, while Mrs. Shandy writhes in labor. “It is two hours, and ten minutes – and no more – cried myfather, looking at his watch, since Dr. Slop and Obadiah arrived – and I knownot how it happens, Brother Toby – but to my imagination it seems almost an age”(Tristram Shandy, Book 3 Chapter XIII).

Eventually,long after the reader has finished reading, the “hero” will come to light, butwe are already informed that it will be, to his father's great distress, with anose squashed by Dr. Slope's forceps. Bad news! Not just for the poor babe, butit stirs unwelcome memories and continues a family tradition of – well what?The men of the Rococo wore breaches, codpieces had come out of fashion, but thetrousers were still tight and the ladies, when keeping their eyes level, stillcorrelated a man's nose to the size of the bulge going down on one of the innerthighs. And why on Earth does Mr. Shandy agree to have his son baptized underthe single one name he seems to be hating most: “Tristram?” A question that starts niggling the reader from the verybeginning – but for more than three whole books it is never to be addressedagain.

Sterneperforms a truly astonishing trick. The whole novel, which appears to be allover the place, is actually folded like a telescope into the space of oneafternoon at Mr. Shandy's parlor. Well almost!

Bythen the very same publisher who had rejected the submission of the firstvolume, beseeched Sterne to accept a handsome contract for the sequels.Publishers know nothing. The author became the lion of London society; hesupped with the Prince of Wales, befriended the celebrated actor David Garrickand in his own carriage would return in triumph to Coxwold with a purse full ofguineas from the Bishop of Canterbury. The annual revenues of a parson underLord Fauconberg's patronage feathered him nicely.

Weuse to give James Joyce credit for the innovation of his time-management in theUlysses. Joyce himself of course knewbetter. In the opening paragraph and in the gatekeeper scene of Finnegan's Wake he says so himself,albeit in his typical fashion by “confessingin foreign tongues” (Stanislaus Joyce,Diaries). Underneathall this pseudo-mythological mummery Joyce gives us a scene from his time inTriest, when his brother Stephen had grabbed him at the door, before Jamescould escape to the pubs. So, of course, TristramShandy is neither an exercise in stream of consciousness nor of some orother postmodern claptrap. The hot chestnut dropping from Dr. Phutatorius’napkin into the open fly of his breeches is frying his dick for real.

Whata modern reader may fail to realize is the author's consummate familiarity withthe conventions of an ancient science – the art of delivering a speech.Sterne's artistic pedigree goes all the way back to Cicero and Horace. Mr.Shandy's parlor is Sterne's vehicle for the Aristotelian three unities ofspace, time and character. The novel, by and large, is a three-act drama. Actone: birth; act two: frailty and death; act three: courtship, which would opena new chapter in the eternal cycle of life and death had Uncle Toby not beenafflicted by that hideous wound in his groin. Sterne is not a clairvoyant likeMr. Joyce & Company; the characters in Sterne's Novel still need toactually tell each other what they think and feel. Yet the incidents are notexactly in sync with the verbal exchanges. It is all about the way our mind isworking, Freudian slips and all. Mr. Shandy tries to explain it to his brother:“To understandwhat time is aright, without which we never can comprehend infinity, insomuchas one is a portion of the other – we ought seriously to sit down and considerwhat idea it is we have of duration, so as to give a satisfactory account howwe came by it.” But uncle Toby isnot convinced,“what is that to anybody? quoth my uncle Toby. For if you will turn your eyesinwards upon your mind, continued my father, and observe attentively, you willperceive, brother, that whilst you and I are talking together, and thinking,and smoking our pipes, or whilst we receive successively ideas in our minds, weknow that we do exist, and so we estimate the existence, or the continuation ofthe existence of ourselves, or any thing else, commensurate to the successionof any ideas in our minds, the duration of ourselves, or any such other thingco-existing with our thinking. Now, whether we observe it or no, continued myfather, in every sound man's head, there is a regular succession of ideas ofone sort or other, which follow and succeed one another in our minds at certaindistances, just like the images in the inside of a lanthorn turned round by theheat of a candle. – I declare, quoth my uncle Toby, mine are more like asmoke-jack.”

Neverdid an author know the rules so well in order to break them all. A verytalented scriptwriter might be able to catch one and the other of the manythreads in this tightly woven tale. However it is my impression that on thesilver screen every flashback weakens the overall impact of a film using thatploy. I don’t complain. Tristram Shandyis living proof for the power of the written word; it can accomplish things noother medium could even hope to emulate.

Inthe end, all things considered, the book turns out to be one humongous slab ofpenis-talk which in an age where we have “vaginatalk” on the stage seems no longer so terribly risqué. So maybe it is notsuch a mystery after all, that most women wrinkle their noses in disgust anddeclare not to like the book. Well, what do they know anyway? This isa book for the guys. “It is curious to observe the triumph of slight incidents over the mind.What incredible weight they have in forming and governing our opinions, both ofmen and things – that trifles, light as air, shall waft a belief into the soul,and plant it so immoveable within it – that Euclid's demonstrations, could theybe brought to batter it in breach, should not all have power to overthrow it.”

Into the Crystall you shall fall!

2011-10-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

bymichael sympson

You will oblige me by letting your active imagination enclose you in the crystal for a few minutes.

E.T.A. Hoffmann

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s father wasan attorney at law. He came from a long line of innkeepers selling booze to thepeasants in Warschallen and Tonk (the Polish part of Frederick Le Grand'sPrussia). In the evening the snifters and nightcaps lined up like Frederick'sguards on parade. The younger of his two sons was four when the parents divorced.The father took the older son with him to Insterburg in Lithuania, whileHoffmann and his mother moved in with his aunt Sophie Dörffer in Königsberg.

On their arrival undulating squeals greeted them, cuttingthrough the air like knives. The screaming came from Frau Werner, the womanliving in the apartment upstairs. She suffered from schizophrenia. Her son,Zacharias (1768 – 1823) later became a popular dramatist, briefly joined theFree Masons and after three divorces and uncounted one-night-stands convertedto Catholicism. He took holy orders and became a popular preacher. So in theend, he fulfilled what Frau Werner had known all along – her Zacharias wasactually Jesus Christ. Over the years the constant squealing from upstairs madeHoffmann’s mother grow hysterical. When he came home from school, she greetedher son with long sobbing sessions.

Hoffmann’s uncle – “the old Sir” (Hoffmann, Letters) –was a magistrate of the city and confirmed bachelor. He took charge of youngHoffmann’s education. His nephew immediately set the tone by emptying “the content of several chamber-pots over the uncle’s laundered breeches hanging out to dry.” The unexpected sight of the washing line sagging underthe weight of his dripping pantaloons, not to mention the rather peculiar odor,brought tears to the uncle’s eyes. The women came out to commiserate. Hoffmann,too, chimed in with sympathetic noises and after a cool glance at the sky hesaid: “This always happens when the clouds look so green.” Apparently the prankster was never found out. Hoffmannenrolled at the university of Königsberg to study law. It was the Alma Mata ofthe philosopher Immanuel Kant. The philosopher was already world-famous then,but as far as Hoffmann was concerned, the great man could just as well havelived on the far side of the moon. Neither in his books nor in hiscorrespondence Hoffmann ever mentions Kant – not with a single word. Instead,he studied the Italian language. A labor of love, paying attention to everyshade of difference between the local vernaculars, and this long before JohannWolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832) had published his ItalianJourney in 1816 and made Italy afashionable destination for the German tourist. For Hoffmann Italy was the landof the commedia del arte and the dramatist Carlo, Count Gozzi (1720 – 1806).In his stories Hoffmann is not particularly good on historical subjects – theneedlessly famous Master Martin the Cooper is the pits, if you ask me– but to rustle up some fluff in Italian costumes he managed to do withconsummate ease, despite of never having seen Italy with his own eyes.

He was slow and selective in the choice of hisacquaintances, yet once committed a loyal friend for life – a friendship thatwas reciprocated. A fellow student, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1775 – 1843),was the son of a famous satirical writer; he and Hoffmann looked ahead to apromising career in Prussia’s judicial system. Another friend from this periodwas the son of a Jewish wine merchant, Julius Eduard Itzig (1780 – 1849). In 1804, in theprocess of assimilation, Itzig would change his name to “Hitzig” and laterbecome one of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s publishers, leaving us his biography.

Already as a boy Hoffmann had penciled recognizableportraits of his family; so whenever his studies left him the time, hecontinued practicing drawing and oil paint, in our days he would have been acaricaturist, but the hands in his graphic work always look more like bushelsof bananas. His true love, however, was music. Hoffmann devoted to it everyfree hour of the day, while “at night I am a very witty author” (Hoffmann, Letters, 1796).Except for letters, nothing of his writing has survived from this period, buthe already added to the family’s income with giving music lessons.

In 1798, Hoffmann passed his bar-exam with distinction.As a treat he went to bed with his piano student, Mrs. Dora Hatt. She was amarried lady with a heart of gold. She also had the syphilis and passed it onto Hoffmann. The bacteria incubated and bid their time. Unaware of his conditionthe young attorney fell in love with his cousin Minna Dörffer. He was 22 with apromising career ahead, so what could possibly stand in his way? "When such a gifted man asks a girl who has grown out of romantic infatuations, i.e. has reached the age of twenty-three or twenty-four, the innocent question: ‘will you make me happy by giving me your hand, my precious one?' she generally answers, with blushing cheeks and downcast eyes, ‘Speak to my dear parents; I obey their command, I have no will of my own!' Her parents, however, fold their hands and say: ‘If it is God's will, we can have no objection, dear son-in-law!'" (Hoffmann,Master Flea). But the betrothal nevermaterialized and after four years of waiting, Hoffmann lost patience. He nowhad risen to the position of an assessor to the district court in Posen,Silesia, and in 1802, he married heels over head Maria Thekla MichalinaRorer-Trzynska, a down to earth Polish woman from the town’s middle-class.Maria had a pair of fine blue eyes, a head of raven-black curls, a faircomplexion and curves in all the right places. She took nonsense from nobody,least of all from her husband. It turned out to be a good marriage.

Hoffmann continued to advance in the judicial system andthe young couple received an invitation to the annual costume ball. After acouple of drinks, Hoffmann pulled out his sketchbook and began drawingcaricatures of the local dignitaries. Everybody had a good laugh – "this chap has talent"– but when confronted with one's own portrait things didn’t seem so funnyanymore.

Retribution was swift. The Hoffmanns spent the next twoyears in Plock, a godforsaken hamlet in Poland. The soft thud in the nameclings to the tongue as persistent as the squishing mud roads clung toHoffmann's shoes. There was no money, no educated conversation, no nothing.Hoffmann binged on nightcaps until he hallucinated. "I may be permitted, kind reader, to doubt whether you have ever been enclosed in a glass bottle, unless some vivid dream has teased you with such magical mishaps. You are enfolded by a dazzling glitter, all the objects on every side appear illuminated and surrounded by rays of light in all the colors of the rainbow – this shimmering light makes everything quiver, shake, and rumble – you are floating and unable to move a muscle, in what seems like frozen ether, squeezing you so tightly, that it is in vain for your spirit to issue commands to your lifeless body." (Hoffmann, The Golden Pot).At last, von Hippel’s already considerable influence engineered Hoffmann’stransfer to Warsaw and Hitzig sent money to cover travel expenses. Hoffmannthrew himself into Warsaw’s society life. He founded a musical academy andproduced his first opera. He wrote the lyrics and the music, painted thedecorations, rehearsed the orchestra and trained the singers. Clients who camefor legal advice tell us, that "if Hoffmann wasn't in his office then with certainty he could be found at the opera house underneath a mural he painted on the ceiling, dressed in a painter's smock and sitting on a scaffold, surrounded by pots of paint and a bottle of wine. It happened quite often that the parties in a legal action had to ask their way around to find him and when meeting him couldn't believe their eyes. But when presented with the administrator's decree he would climb down from his scaffold right away, wash his hands, and hurrying ahead, dictate on the go a legal instrument of such competence, that even the most discerning scrutiny could find no fault with it."

Hoffmann was a fashion conscious dresser, however ifconfronted with him, one could barely avoid staring, his incessant grimacingand the twitch on his brow left an unforgettable impression. Two mightysideburns descended from an unruly shock of black hair deep down into aclean-shaven face with eyes of a pale grey, an aquiline nose, and a thin-lippedmouth. Hoffmann seemed of a small frame, almost a midget when standing up, butin a sitting position was just as tall as his wife and everybody else. Peoplenoticed sudden spasms in his gait; in his conversation Hoffman spoke in asomewhat husky voice, accentuating the rapid torrent of his words with gesturesand bobbing nods.

In 1805, Maria gave birth to a daughter, Cäcilia. In1806, in celebration of King Friedrich Wilhelm and Queen Louise’s jubilee, thenew opera house in Berlin called Hoffmann to the podium to conduct the openingperformance. The world was his oyster. Yet in October of the same year, underthe ill-advised influence of the queen and of the hawks in the cabinet, Prussiaentered into war with France. Bonaparte defeated the Prussians at the Battle ofJena-Auerstädt, and even flashing the queen’s enormous cleavage at the man fromCorsica – Louise was a looker – didn’t safe the country from a humiliatingtreaty with losses of territory and large indemnities payable to the Frenchoccupants. Every civil servant refusing allegiance to the new master foundhimself on the street. Suddenly the Hoffmanns were without income and addinggrief to misery, little Cäcilia died of the measles. Hoffmann began consideringmusic as a career. He really had the gift. In the coming years, Carl Maria vonWeber and even Richard Wagner professed to have drawn inspiration from hiswork. Hoffmann himself, with a respectful bow to the towering Beethoven, lookedup to Mozart as his model. In 1808, he replaced the “Wilhelm” in his initialsand became “Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann,” accepting a call to the operahouse in Bamberg. He got off to a bad start.

Hoffmann's first production flopped after only threenights and the theatre went into receivership. A new management continued toemploy Hoffmann's talents. He painted the backdrops and composed the oddoverture, yet when he suggested bringing Shakespeare and Calderon to the stage,he was politely ignored. So, for most of the time, Hoffmann scrounged togethera meager living from giving piano-lessons. He sold an anonymous novel that still is missingfrom the academic editions, and for good reason. Sister Monica is an emulation ofDiderot’s La Religieuse amplifying on the sex.

The nuns and the prioress in a convent discuss variationsof coitus interruptus and the effects of flogging the athletic lover's baretush with thorny rose-flowers during the act. The thing brought quick money andHoffmann felt encouraged to start publishing under his own name, not fictionyet, but essays and critical reviews on contemporary music. It earned himwell-deserved recognition and covered a few bills. Hoffmann took an interest inhypnotism. Under the term of “Mesmerism,” it was all the rage with the ladiesin the drawing rooms. Hoffmann acquainted himself with literature onpsychotherapy and even paid the local asylum a visit. The doctors stillbelieved in the therapeutic benefits of forcing a leather mask on the patient,making him look like Hannibal Lecter. Bamberg was and still is a prettymedieval town; the food was good and the people hospitable. Although money wastight, Hoffmann began to feel at home. Frau Hoffmann, however, began to suspectsomething else lying behind her husband’s attachment to Bamberg; and she wasright. There was a pretty face in town, with blue eyes and glossy black hairtied in a bun.

It belonged to Hoffmann’s piano student, thefourteen-year-old Julia Mark. For two years Julia’s caprices continued sendingthe infatuated Hoffmann on an emotional roller-coaster ride, an entirelyplatonic affair, costly, and never consummated. Years later, Hoffmann hasrationalized the situation: “A competent professional novel writer would now have the ideal opportunity to discourse theoretically upon the vast difference between loving and being in love. Much might be said about the sensual urges, the curse of Original Sin, and how the heavenly Promethean spark should also light the torch of Hymen, a good clear household lamp, in whose light you can read, write, knit, and sew. And if a crowd of cheerful progeny should sometimes smear their faces with raspberry jam, just like other children, why, that is the way of things here below. Besides such heavenly love is an admirable subject for sublime poetry, and the best thing about it is, that this love is no mere idle fancy, but really does exist, as many people can attest, who have fared both well and badly with such love” (Hoffmann, Princess Brambilla).In Hoffmann's case it was to be the “faring badly” part.

Over long stretches his diary is a delirious record ofhis alcoholic and amorous obsessions, sometimes in a German spelled out inGreek letters, so that his wife would not read it. A tad touchy and given to suddenmood swings at the best of times, Hoffmann kept a cryptic account of thesechanges, recording his “romantic and religious mood,” in one moment, only to be “wound up to satirical griping,” in thenext, and then start to “obsess to the point of madness.” Hedescribed himself as “humorous and angry,” untila switch in his head turned and he became “musical and over the top,” “content yet indifferent,” “romancing and in an unpleasantly anxious mood,” “extremely angry,” and “excessively romantic and capricious.” Hewould feel “exotic and out of sorts,” “wound up, yet poetically pure,” “very comfortable with myself,” “brash, ironic and morose,” “completely screwed,” “exalted to utter awe of myself and my state of poetic mastery, constantly patting myself on the back without measure,” all this within a matter ofhours and days. Knowing that his wife was reading in, he switched to Italian: “Senza entusiasmo,” “senza exaltazione,” “getting by,” “un poco exaltato,” “senza poetica,” “very gay,” “ma senza furore ed un poco smorfia,” etc., everywhere betweenthese entries interspersing images of a winged wineglass and a “Kt” for “Kätchen,” a character from Heinrich von Kleist’s drama Kätchen of Heilbronn. Hoffmann used it as an acronym for Julia Mark. His finances deteriorated to afuzzy cloud of petty loans and Hoffmann saw no other way out but sending hiswife back to her parents, while he would stay behind and clear the debts.

That is what he was telling Maria. What Hoffmann reallywas hoping for is unclear. Unlike him, Julia knew exactly what she was doing; apenniless piano teacher was not part of her plans. When in the end even thisblindest of all lovers came to the realization that Julia had lost hervirginity to another man, he could no longer close his eyes to the fact thatthe teenager was not the angel of innocence he’d made her out to be. In a fitof jealousy and rage Hoffmann lost it completely.

At a soiree with Julia, her family and many of Bamberg’snotables present, he drunk himself delirious and made a scene. Two burlyattendants threw him out into the street, but Julia’s little secret was nolonger a secret. The next morning, abject and overhung, Hoffmann realized hewould never see Julia again and he couldn’t bear the thought. He wrote a longletter of apology to Julia’s parents. It makes painful reading. The ambiguityof Julia’s character became the great theme in his fiction. Hoffmann is onrecord with 72 stories and three novels. In most of them Julia appears in oneor the other guise, usually as the story’s femme fatale. At long last, in 1813,the opera house in Dresden offered him a position as musical director. A loanfrom his friend von Hippel helped Hoffmann to pay off his debts. He wrote tohis wife, asking her to meet him in Dresden. He promised to be good.

The Hoffmanns reunited in a city under siege. It wasBonaparte’s last stand against a coalition of Russian, Austrian and Prussiantroops. Both armies left their casualties to the care of the citizenry. Thewounded slept on the cold flagstones inside the churches, covering themselveswith their coats. Anesthetics were unknown, surgeons didn’t wash their handsand the surgical instruments carried the stains of previous amputations.Amazingly fifty percent of all amputees did actually survive.

For lack of proper bandages their wounds were dressed intorn sackcloth from a local salt-mill. A change of dressing tore off the flesh.Twice a day the convalescents were fed a bowl of soup or porridge from kegsvery similar to those used to collect the soldiers’ feces. Proper plumbing wasstill a thing of the future. Most households sent their maids to draw waterfrom the public wells. There was the constant threat of cholera. Even in thefinest restaurants it was not uncommon to spot fleabites underneath thewaiter's sleeve cuff. The allies bombarded the city with canister and mortarbombs; the barrage killed people in the streets. The Hoffmanns had rented aloft studio. Together with the women, men and children in the house they soughtshelter under the arched basement arcade. There was no food and nobody dared toapproach the water-well further down the road; a grenade, tearing off half hishead – “an absolutely disgusting sight” (Hoffmann, Diary) – had killed asoldier pumping water there. Shrapnel hit the civilian standing next to him inthe belly, and with his own hands still pulling together his spilledintestines, the man bled to death. Only minutes later the Emperor Napoleonpassed by on horseback at the exact same spot. Hoffmann sneaked away and throughthe winding back lanes made it to the shop of his wine merchant. The shop wasclosed. Hoffmann rattled the shutters and hollered up to the windows until themerchant opened and provided him with wine and rum. Back in the shelter,Hoffmann shared his loot with the others, while his wife accompanied a FrauStein to her apartment upstairs, where the women scraped together victuals fromthe pantry. It was not always that bad, but the fighting went on for two weeks.

In the city, despite the curfews, people made everyeffort to go on with life as usual. The opera continued to perform. Afterconcert, Hoffmann used to escape from the curfews into his favorite basementtavern. He smoked dozens of clay pipes and held long conversations with awalking carpet of a golden retriever. The dog rested his mighty head onHoffmann's knee and for hours worshipped him with his brown eyes. Now and thenhe drummed the floorboard with a heavy wag of his tail. Back home an incomingmortar bomb shattered the windowpanes of Hoffmann's studio-loft. There was amoment of stunned silence. Then the smoke dispersed and the neighbors heardHoffmann’s hysterical laughter and the popping of champagne corks. On the wayto work, Hoffmann had to cross the bridge at the Brühlschen Garden. It happenedto be a crowded place. Emperor Napoleon and his generals peered through theirpocket telescopes at ammunition barges further down the river.

The Emperor was in a foul temper, he thundered at hisstaff, his horse tried to find a spot to put down its hoofs, and Hoffmann “with danger to my person” (Hoffmann,Diary) squeezed by, trying to drawon himself as little attention as possible.

After the retreat of the French, Hoffmann and a companionfrom the opera surveyed the battlefield. The bodies of the French were beingundressed and buried in unmarked mass graves, their uniforms and arms collectedin piles at the wayside. The bodies of the Russian grenadiers were still lyingwhere they had fallen during the final attack, crumpled and with torn off limbs,often an expression of fury on the faces. A young officer – “barely older than 23” – had fallen, still holdinghis saber high, smashed in the chest by a cannonball. “His death was easy” (Hoffmann, Diary). Only a few yardsaway Hoffmann’s companion sighted a Russian grenadier sitting upright andcheerfully chewing his ration, both his feet shot to pulp. He had been sittingthere in his blood for four days. The man was thirsty and the two hustled tofind him water.

In the same week Hoffmann’s wife slipped on the stairsand suffered a deep head wound. The incident left Hoffmann badly shaken.It was a stark reminder what he had in Maria. Coming home from his binges, he used to work on his fiction all night in the small hours until the light in the windows turned grey. SometimesHoffman began screaming when he saw theteapot on his desk pulling faces and the ornamental lilies on the wallpaperturn their snakeheads. Maria would arise from her sleep, light a candle and in herlaced nightcap shoo away the demons from Hoffmann’s desk. Sitting next to him with herneedlepoint she would keep him company until he had finished with work. It was time to put an end to this kind of bohemian life; Hoffmann felt his wife deserved better.

In 1814, the indomitable von Hippel again pulled stringsand the couple returned to Berlin. Hoffmannwas reassigned to the Prussian Courtof Appeal as deputy of the Chief Justice. He was to investigate “demagogic” activities at the universities in Prussia. ButHoffmann was a public prosecutor, not a hired gun. He felt no sympathy for these revolutionaries; yet he knew it was wrong to prosecute people for what they were thinking if they didn’t commit any crime. He sent a memoir to the chief of police in Berlin, Karl Albert von Kamptz, insisting on the “necessity for justice to be strictly impartial and without regard for person and position” (Hoffmann). Von Kamptz didn’trespond, his orders came directly from the king, but he took mental note ofwhat he thought to be Hoffmann’s insubordinate impertinence. To him thinking “was in itself a dangerous undertaking, and all the more so when performed by dangerous individuals” (Master Flea).

By now Hoffmann andhis wife occupied a small but expensive loft apartment whichoversaw the opera house and the elegant boulevard at the centre of Prussia’s capital. Theflat had low ceilings and lacked in plumbing, but was connected to fresh waterand the couple shared their home with a very respectable cat. The passerbywould see him sit by the window, dressed in a robe of fine silk and a redskullcap, smoking a long pipe while petting the purring tabby. Hoffmann’sgood-natured generosity made him a local celebrity. After his death people inthe markets would still remember him supplementing the insufficient funds ofsome or other poor child so that it could buy itself a large bag of fresh plumswithout being told of the benefactor. But it was characteristic for thisbenefactor, to agonize on the way home over the possibility that these plumscould actually become the cause of cholera and in the end kill the child. (Master Flea).

Still not entirely debt-free, the Hoffmanns lived the good life with champagne breakfasts and oysters at sunset. The whine merchant delivered a never ending supply of Italian wine, fine cognac and plenty of less respectable booze, except for beer. “Beer makes you stupid,” Hoffmann used to say. The couple ran up sizeable bills with their caterers. They could afford it. By now Hoffmann had become the biggest earner in German literature. Local restaurants asked for his endorsement.

As a writer Hoffmann was aninnovator and the living proof that originality must not be an obstacle forpopular success.

He also possessed the enviable ability to completelyignore his critics. As one of the first, Hoffmann developed in his fiction theprotagonist’s character through his actions instead of summarizing it in anintroductory description. The people populating his stories are allowed to havea subconscious. The hero might, “as it often happens in our excessive anxiety to do something,” forget “the crucial point: he had run through the streets until he was out of breath before it occurred to him that he should have asked for the address” (Hoffmann,Princess Brambilla). Hoffmann was not the only writer of his generation, who was captivated by Cervantes, especially by the Exemplary Tales. The material came handy for his own yarns of conflict between the imagined and the real, and in turn Hoffmann inspired thegenerations to follow. The great Alexander Pushkin (1799 – 1837)was not the only one of noted authors, who stooped to lift an entire story fromHoffmann. With a few very minor changes, Pushkin translated the Queen of Spades into Russian and sold it as his own. In Sweden the writer Clas Livjin used Hoffmann’s story to make a novel of it, which De La Motte Fouqué (1773 – 1831) translated back into German in 1825.

HoweverHoffmann’s way of threading through his best stories – The Golden Pot, Little Zaches, Princess Brambilla, Master Flea – appearances of the supernatural remained entirely his own. Every character in Hoffmann’s fictionis living double and triple lives: Archivarius Lindhorst is a salamander from Atlantis and at the same time a librarian in Dresden, Klein Zaches is actually a Mandrake root, the fairy who opened for this little miscreant the doors to a political career is living incognito as the prioress of a convent, and sorcerers from bygone ages survey the modern world from the heights of abandoned water towers and factory stacks. Sometimes, as in Princess Brambilla, the individual impersonation is understood to be a mere mask, an assumed character, before the events reveal that the “mask” is actually the real deal. Yet “let this not confuse you, my good Sir, what you behold is a dream” (Hoffmann, Master Flea).

In 1819, Hoffmann published his last and technically mostbrilliant novel. The Life and Opinions of Murr, the Tom, interspersed by a Fragmentary Biography of Johannes Kreisler, the Musician. The book pretends to be acat's “memoir” written by the ingenious animal on the wastepaper from adiscarded biography, which the bookbinder “accidentally” had forgotten toseparate from the cat’s manuscript. The novel was an immediate success andHoffmann wrote a sequel. Royalties came in, in paper-wrapped rolls ofgold-coins, and the grateful publisher added a crystal bowl with the carvedportrait of the feline genius.

Hoffmann received applause from the most unexpectedplaces. On March 28, 1820, his wife found in the mail a letter written inBeethoven’s own hand, expressing the composer’s admiration. Sadly, only a fewweeks after the publication of the second part of Murr’s biography, peoplefound in their daily paper the cat's obituary: “Hereby I beg humbly to announce to sympathetic patrons and friends, that on the night from 29th to 30th November this year, after a short but severe illness, my beloved ward, the Tomcat Murr, died in the fourth year of his promising existence, and awakened to a better life. Whoever knew the immortal youth and saw him tread the path of virtue and justice, will understand my deep grief and honor it – in silence. Berlin, November 30th, 1821; Hoffmann.”

Readers who expect from their author their daily fix ofsocial concern often dismiss Hoffmann out of hand, and it is true, first andforemost he is an entertainer. But this doesn’t mean he was blind to “the progressing age and the deteriorating situation of our noble classes,” which explained “their tactless behavior towards the cultured commoner; a mixture of appreciation and intolerable condescension and of a deep despair that the triviality of their past glory will be exposed to the knowing gaze of the wise, and their shortcomings held up to ridicule” (Hoffmann, The Devil's Elixir).Feeling the shadows lengthening, Hoffmann became reckless in expressing hiscriticism. In chapter four of Master Flea we read: “A strange man, strange both in his clothing and in his whole demeanor, appeared before the Town Council. He said that he was a Privy Aulic Counselor, and that his name was Knarrpanti. He then produced from his pocket a paper with a large seal and handed it over with a civil bow. His expression clearly conveyed how surprised the Council would be by the exalted station which he, Privy Aulic Counselor Knarrpanti, occupied, and by the important task which had been assigned to him, and what respect the Council would now accord him. With a self-satisfied smile, he assured the Council that his exceptional sagacity had already succeeded in identifying the culprit. On being reminded that there could only be a culprit if a crime had been committed, Knarrpanti observed that once the culprit had been identified, the crime would follow automatically. Even if the principal charge could not be proved, owning to the obduracy of the accused, only a shallow and superficial judge would be incapable of introducing issues into the enquiry which would blemish the accused somehow and justify the arrest.” And Hoffmann concluded: “What a skill it is to make the most trivial matter seem important and derive ill-feeling from it! Born with this skill, the counselor aimed to appear judicious, wise, adroit, and above all, so loyally devoted to his prince that he was called a pillar of the state, on whom the monarch’s wellbeing depended, when his only concern was about Number One – himself” (Hoffmann, Master Flea).

As it turned out, even before the book was published,somebody recognized in Knarrpanti the portrait of the chief of police, vonKamptz. This somebody was the Prussian censor. He dropped von Kamptz a note.What was Hoffmann expecting to happen? That von Kamptz would “retire in disgrace, and the people, seeing him walk past, hold with loathing their noses and surrender their seats if he happened to patronize the same restaurant” (Hoffmann,Master Flea)?

Given the facts it is easy to express contempt for vonKamptz, but even this authoritarian careerist had his redeeming graces. Thewriter Karl Gutzkow (1811 – 1878) camefrom a poor family. In 1831 von Kamptz had become the minister of justice andtook a shine to the student, who was just beginning to publish. Von Kamptzallowed Gutzkow to accompany him on his daily walks. He helped out with ticketsto soirees at the Royal Palace (not without discretely improving the youngman’s wardrobe) and even slipped him confiscated literature from the censor'soffice. Their ways parted when Gutzkow associated with the liberal oppositionand was forced to leave the country.

In Hoffmann's case, on the other hand, no love was lostbetween the two. Von Kamptz ordered a disciplinary inquiry. On February 23,1822 two deputies of the justice department climbed up the stairs to Hoffmann’sapartment and at his bedside were taking down a dictated deposition for furtherinvestigation. Hoffmann's syphilis had progressed to the final stages. He wasparalyzed and tied to a wheelchair. To test his neural responses, his doctorswere singeing spots of flesh along the spinal cord and he greeted guests with a “can you smell the bacon?”

In the evenings Maria pushed her husband in his wheelchair to the opera house. She was aware that her husband had a crush on the prima donna singing the title part, the charming Johanna Eunicke (1798 – 1856). The lithographed images depict the actress dressed in a flowing empire line, with bare arms and a somewhat uptight hint of a cleavage. Miss Eunicke was not exactly what you would call a “knockout,” not like her famous colleague from Sweden, Jenny Lind. However in Johanna’s endearing face one may detect an expression that can make a man wish to know her better. Maria didn’t seem to mind – in 1822, Madame Eunicke was the mistress of Prince Hermann of Pückler-Muskau (1785 – 1871). The ice cream is named after him. He was a dandy of obscene wealth who used to show in public in a carriage drawn by a team of reindeers. The prince attended the premiere of Hoffmann’s last and most popular opera, Undine, a great event for the still somewhat provincial Berlin.

After only five performances a fire destroyed thetheater’s magazine with all the decorations and costumes. The hot air carriedthe first actor's baroque hairpiece high into the sky and it sailedmajestically and threatening through the night, like a meteor of fire. In adrawing Hoffmann has preserved the moment when a royal guardsman aiming hismusket through the window of the apartment next door, was trying to shoot downthe truant hairpiece. Hoffmann continuedworking from his deathbed.

When he was no longer able to hold a quill hedictated to his wife. His last short story is a sketch in green,green, and more green. Spring has sprung and the first person narrator iswaiting for his sweetheart “Johanna” under the trees at a parkway. Mariastopped writing and gave her husband a long look. Shaking her head, shecontinued taking his dictation.

Trying toavoid further trouble in the pending investigation, Hoffmann instructed his publisher in Frankfurt to excise offensive passages beforegiving Master Flea into print. Frankfurt was outside of von Kamptz’sjurisdiction, but the turd of a publisher voluntarily handed over Hoffmann'sincriminating letters. The plot thickened, but Hoffmann passed away justin time. His sendoff was on June 28, 1822 on the Jewish cemetery, anarrangement by Julius Hitzig. Again it was the assiduous von Hippel who secureda pension for the widow.

The file in the von Kamptz affair was officiallyclosed in 1908, after eighty-six years. Only then it became possible to publishin full the text of Hoffmann's Master Flea.

The Shame – Franz Kafka

2011-10-27T11:39:00.000-07:00

by michaelsympson

There was mentioning of the conservatory, but only as a beautiful dream, which to become true was unthinkable, and the parents didn’t even like to hear those innocent words.

Franz Kafka

Kafka’s diaries cover the period from 1911 to 1923, but he wasseen scribbling in notebooks as early as 1898. Visitors having coffee with hisparents saw the boy sit in a corner, chew on his pen and write. Somebody asked:“What is hewriting?” An uncle took away the notebook from under the boy’s handand looked. “Ohnothing. The usual stuff” (Diaries1/19/1911).

Franz was hurt; he never forgot or forgave the remark. Hisearliest manuscript that never made it to the printers – the Description of a Struggle – is anexample for a writer with nothing to say and jerking it all off: “Childish games,I deliberately cultivated a facial tic, or would walk across the ditch witharms crossed behind my head. My writing began the same way” (Diaries 1/24/1922). That’s how it is for everybody. By 1915 this grimacing andstrutting earned Kafka the Theodor Fontane Award – 800 Reichsmark, aconsiderable sum. He was as eager as every other author to get published. Thehabitually irreverent Bertolt Brecht, too, expressed respect in his reviews. Soit would be wrong to think Kafka didn’t receive any recognition. He did, justnot from the one person that mattered most to him.

At home there was little support for his artistic ambitions. Hehad three sisters – Elli, Valli and the youngest, Ottilie or “Ottla.” “My sisters were only partly on my side.Elli when she was a child was such a clumsy, tired, timid, bad-tempered,guilt-ridden, over-meek, malicious, lazy, greedy, miserly child, I could hardlybring myself to look at her, certainly not to speak to her, so much did sheremind me of myself. But all this changed when, at an early age – this is themost important thing – she left home, married, had children, and becamecheerful, carefree, brave, generous, unselfish, and hopeful” (Letter to the Father). Ottla was Kafka’s favorite sister and hisstaunchest supporter. Unlike her brother she knew how to hold her own and tookno nonsense from anybody. “You simplycan't talk to her at all, she flies straight in your face," said thefather, and it was she who rented for Franz a studio at 22, Alchemist Lane inPrague’s Castle District.

It was his first place for himself and Kafka could writeundisturbed well into the grey hours of morning.

When he still lodged with the family in No 3, Celetna Street, thewindow of his room opened to a small lane “across from a dress shop, where a shop girl always usedto stand in the door. There I was in my room, just a little past my twentiethbirthday, incessantly passing back and forth, busy cramming for the bar exam,trying to memorize material that made no sense to me whatsoever. It was summer,very hot at the time, altogether unbearable. I kept stopping at the window, thedisgusting Roman law clenched between my teeth, and finally we managed tocommunicate by sign language" (Letter to Max Brod). The sordid beginning for manymore sordid one night stands with barmaids, waitresses, and shop girls.

They’ve all left traces in his writing: “He seduced a girl in a small place in theIser mountains. After a brief effort to persuade her, he threw the girl – hislandlord’s daughter who liked to walk with him in the evening after work – downin the grass on the riverbank and took her as she lay there unconscious withfright. Later he had to carry water from the river in his cupped hands to pourit over the girl’s face to restore her. The simple girl who lay before him, nowbreathing regularly again, her eyes still closed because of fear andembarrassment, could make no difficulty for him; with the tip of his toe, he,the great, strong person, could push the girl aside. She was weak and plain,could what happened to her have any significance that would last even untiltomorrow? Would not anyone who compared the two of them come to thisconclusion?” (Diraries 3/12/1012). A fantasy perhaps, but Kafka often depicted his leading women assluts and easy prey.

“Anondescript little blonde with sad features, thin cheeks, and a surprisinggaze, a gaze of exceptional superiority. When this gaze descended on K., itseemed to him to be the gaze that had already decided matters concerning him,whose existence he himself still knew nothing about, but of whose existencethat gaze now convinced him. K. kept watching Frieda from the side even whileshe spoke with Olga” (The Castle, trans. Mark Haman). Frieda isthe girl behind the bar in the tap-room and she is the mistress of Klamm, oneof the lower ranking stewards in the castle.

Only hours later the new arrival and the girl are rolling on thefloor under the counter. “Her small body was burning in K’s hands; they rolled afew paces in an unconscious state from which K. repeatedly but in vain tried torescue himself, bumped against Klamm’s door, and then lay in the small puddlesof beer and other rubbish which littered the floor. And as though Frieda hadbeen fortified by K’s consent, she clenched her fist, knocked on the door, andcried “I’m with the surveyor. I’m with the surveyor.” Yet this wasnot what ‘K.’ had intended. “K. rose, kneltbeside Frieda, and looked about in the dull early morning light. What had justhappened? Where were his hopes? What could be expected from Frieda, now thatall was betrayed” (TheCastle). Not surprising, once she looked throughthis conman, Frieda is going to jilt ‘K.’for one of his assistants, after, thanks to ‘K.’ she had lost her employment and reputation. But ‘K.’ isn’t running short of women.

There is Olga to fall back upon, Amalia, and Pepi. “For a moment hehad to cover his eyes, so lecherously was he staring at her” (The Castle). In The Trial, we readof a certain Fraulein, a Miss ‘Bürstner.' The name derives from the verb"bürsten" – German for"brushing" – which in German is a vulgar euphemism for sexualintercourse. And this is no coincidence. There is sex all over the place.

‘Joseph K.’ is startingan affair with his attorney's maid on the very first consultation, right underher employer's nose. Shabbily dressed judges have women delivered to theirchambers; in the painter’s studio, the king-sized bed barely leaves space foranything else, and you hear the painter's models giggle behind the door. The Trialis the most guilt-stricken of Kafka’s stories, even more so, than the Metamorphosis. From scene to scene theshadows thicken. “Uneasyhe looked around; the light of the candle fell far short of the opposite wall.And indeed something began to stir in the corner. His uncle lifted the candlehigher, and in the light, an older gentleman could be seen sitting by a littletable.” He “arose laboriously, apparently displeased that he had beenbrought to their attention. It seemed as if he wanted to wave off all greetingsand introductions with his hands, which he flapped like little wings, as if hewished by no means to disturb the others by his presence, imploring them toreturn him once more to darkness, to forget his presence” (The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell). This apparition in chiaroscuro is supposed to be the clerk ofthe court – but one wonders. The hearings convene in the strangest places, inattics and lofts, under the bare rafters of top floors, in the sub-tenancies ofunfinished housing projects. The lower charges at these conventions arebeggarly and sly, and you never know whether your friendly janitor is not oneof “them.”

And what kind of court would allow a capital verdict to beannounced by proxy? In the mystifying twilight of the Cathedral ‘Joseph K.’ is the only visitor, lured tothe church under the pretense of a business appointment. The verdict is passedfrom the pulpit by a priest. After his pronouncement the priest steps down fromthe pulpit and turns out to be the most amiable person.

The two discuss the parable Beforethe Law, the story of someone who wants nothing so badly as access to thelaw. The “entranceis assigned only” to this petitioner but he is too intimidated topass the guard and in the end dies waiting. One should not isolate this parable from itssurrounding; ‘Joseph K,’ the haughty know-it-all is prevented by his ownshortcomings to ever reach the inner sanctuary. In his conversation with thefriendly priest, ‘Joseph K.,’ islending a polite ear, but shows only a superficial interest in the exegeticexplanations. In the era of Stalin, McCarthy and Jean Paul Sartre it becamefashionable to read into Kafka's novels an “existentialist” indictment againstoppression and persecution. ‘Joseph K,’like the victims of the Inquisition, is never told the charges, yet, in keepingwith his character, something quite reasonable seems to be expected, a changeof heart perhaps, or a sign for redeeming humility. An indicator that theediting by Kafka’s friend and self-appointed custodian of Kafka’s legacy, MaxBrod, has gone astray is the original order of the chapters: the manuscriptopens with the protagonist visiting a club and socializing with senior figuresof the establishment: “It consisted almost exclusively of judges, publicprosecutors, and attorneys. ‘K.’ had been introduced into this company by thebank’s legal representative. He was soon acknowledged as an expert in business,and his views on such matters were accepted – though not without a touch ofirony – as the final word. ‘K.’ had a good advisor at his side in Hasterer, thepublic prosecutor, who also drew closer to him as a friend” (The Trial). Max Brod reshuffled of the chapters for greater dramatic effect,and placed the arrest at the beginning.

The book is has the inertia and dreamlike quality of a propernightmare, neither resembling the Brazilian death squads nor the institutionalterror of a totalitarian state. And it is some sort of justice after all. The Trial’s protagonist is not untypical fora senior manager on the climb. ‘Joseph K.’works in the head office of a bank. He has competitors in the hierarchy, thevice president quite literally is pitching camp on his desk. He is a sharpdresser, who moves with ease in the company of chief administrators and CEOs,but in his dealings with people depending on him, ‘Joseph K.’ behaves like a real asshole. Yet the trial beginsto sap his strength. There was a time when he commanded the time of hisclients; now, at the mere sight of him, they pull up the brief case under theirarm a little tighter. He is bound to lose the trial, and he is guilty in thefull sense of the word.

Like all of Kafka’s novels, TheTrial is an unfinished fragment. This is even more so the case with The Castle. When I read this book forthe first time, I noticed the indifference of the staff in the castle. From theoutset it is a struggle just to get their attention. The protagonist’sshenanigans leave everybody unimpressed, except for the subservient women.Again Max Brod’s editing seems to suggest a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress, yet W.H. Auden in The Dyer’s Hand asserts the opposite, that the castle, far frombeing a place of redemption, appears to be the nesting place for a horde of “Gnostic demons” (Auden).Apparently none of the critics cares to observe that ‘K.’ the “surveyor,” is a con-man, a trickster, who tries to wheedlehis way into a community that has no use for him. “Surveyor, I see now that you will have togive up many fantasies before you can become a decent janitor” (The Castle), says the beadle of the local parish. So when the people in thecastle unexpectedly honor this charade and even provide ‘K.’ with two assistants, they actually give him a chance. But ‘K.’ is far from seeing this as anopportunity. He is too self-centered – a typical trait of protagonists in Kafka’sstories. Instead, as mentioned, he is going to start the affair with Frieda,and after being jilted another affair, all of which examples for Kafka’s verycharacteristic brew of illicit sex and dingy circumstances. Throughout thenovel the protagonist’s self-esteem is riding high to the point of preposterousconceit; he rather identifies with the castle’s staff than with the lowlypeople who actually help him survive, yet he has no qualms of exploiting them.

In all of Kafka’s books there is an element of allegory. It was1924 and Kafka already on his deathbed, when he corrected the galley proofs fora new collection of stories: A HungerArtist. The title story summarizes Kafka’s view on the artist’s socialinsignificance: “Duringthese last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedlydiminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one’sown management, but today that is quite impossible. We live in a differentworld now” (The Hunger Artist,trans. Muir).

Writing is a weird form of living, let alone making a living. In theend the truth of the matter is rather simple: “I always wanted you to admire my fasting,”said the hunger artist. “We do admire it,” said the overseer, affably.” “Butyou shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist.” “Well then we don’t admireit,” said the overseer, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?” “Because I have tofast, I can’t help it,” said the hunger artist. “What a fellow you are,” saidthe overseer, “and why can’t you help it? Because,” said the hunger artist,lifting his head a little and speaking with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss,right into the overseer’s ear, so that no syllable might be lost, “because Icouldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should havemade no fuss and stuffed myself, like you or anyone else” (The Hunger Artist).

The abandoned manuscript of the “Castle” was Kafka’s most extensive exploration on the theme of theartist as a social parasite. A whole lifetime Kafka had written libel againsthis father’s disregard and in the end he admitted defeat.

He put in a letter what he didn’t dare say to his father’s face: “The aversion younaturally and immediately took to my writing was, for once, welcome to me. Myvanity, my ambition did suffer under your soon proverbial way of hailing thearrival of my books: "Put it on my bedside table!" My writing was allabout you; it was an intentionally long and drawn-out leave-taking from you.But how little all this amounted to! In the place where I lived I was spurned,condemned, fought to a standstill; and to escape to some other place was anenormous exertion, something that was, with small exceptions, unattainable forme.” (Letter to the Father,trans. Kaiser and Wilkins). So whatwas the way out for Kafka, the only “way out; right or left, in any direction” (A Report to an Academy, trans. Muir)? For Kafka it is the escape into fantasies. America or The Missing isthe purest example.

There are moments of Dickensian intensity: “A cop who was just doing his rounds in thestreet, took in the shirt-sleeved man into his lowered gaze, and stopped.Robinson, also spotting the cop was foolish enough to call out to him from theother window, ‘it’s nothing, nothing at all,’ as though it were possible toshoo away a policeman like a fly.” Kafka considered the firstchapter “asheer imitation of Dickens” (Diaries10/8/1917). He later published it separately underthe title The Stoker. Eventually theyoung Karl Rossmann will arrive in the “Theatre of Oklahoma,” a fantasy that wouldhave put a smile on the face of Sigmund Freud. “‘Karl,’ called one of the angels. Karllooked up, and was so pleasantly surprised he started to laugh. It was Fanny. ‘Fanny,’he cried and waved up to her. ‘Come here!’ called Fanny, and she parted herrobes, revealing her pedestal and a narrow flight of steps leading up. ‘Am Iallowed to go up?’ asked Karl. Only now did Karl begin to grasp the size ofAmerica” (America, trans. MichaelHofmann).

Much, if not all of his printed work had begun as an entry in hisdiaries and for Kafka “automatic writing,” as if in a state of trance was theonly way to go about it. My personal favorite is A Country Doctor: “I was in great perplexity; I had to start on an urgentjourney; a seriously ill patient was waiting for me in a village ten miles off;a thick blizzard of snow filled all the wide spaces between him and me; I had agig, a light gig with big wheels, exactly right for our country roads; muffledin furs, my bag of instruments in my hand, I was in the courtyard all ready forthe journey; but there was no horse to be had, no horse” (The Country Doctor, trans. Muir). In the grey hours he would climb out of this “beautifullystrong dream of composing” (WolfgangAmadeus Mozart, Letters) with greatdifficulty: “Thisstory, ‘The Verdict,’ I wrote in one sitting during the night of the 22/23rd,from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. I was hardly able topull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. Theanxious strain and joy; how the story developed before me, as if I were walkingon water. Several times in this night I carried my own weight on my back. Howeverything can be expressed, how for everything, the strangest fancies, therewaits a great fire to perish and rise again. It turned blue outside the window.Two men walked across the bridge” (Diaries, 9/23/1912). For all his life Kafka hoped towrite something “largeand whole, well shaped from beginning to end; and it would be possible, calmand with open eyes to hear it read as the blood relation of a healthy story”(Diaries, 10/20/1911), yet one doesn’t write an entire novel in one sitting. Theserious novelist better possesses the logistic ingenuity to organize his labor.

Some six hundred letters have reached us fromhis contorted correspondence with his fiancé Felice Bauer (1887-1960). The two engaged and separated twice, Kafka askingFelice to signal her agreement to the breakup by sending a postcard left empty.Kafka announced his engagement to Julie Whoryzek (1891 – 1939), the daughter of a synagogue janitor and shoemaker. Isuspect the father knew the ways of his son. He said he would have to sell thestore and emigrate to escape this shame for the family name. “She probablyput on a fancy blouse, something these Prague Jewesses are good at, and rightaway, of course, you decided to marry her. And that as fast as possible, in aweek, tomorrow, today. I can’t understand you: after all, you're a grown man,you live in the city, and you don't know what to do but marry the first girlwho comes along. Isn't there anything else you can do? If you're frightened,I'll go with you” (Letterto the Father).

It was the last straw in a long history of downers between thetwo. Then Kafka met the love of his life, Milena Jesenska (1896 – 1944), and this started something the father couldn’t reach: “Milena: what arich, heavy name, almost too full to be lifted and in the beginning I didn’tlike it much, it seemed to me a Greek or Roman gone astray in Bohemia, violatedby Czech, cheated of its accent, and yet in color and form it is marvelously awoman, a woman you take into your arms and away from the world, away from thefire, and she presses herself willingly and trusting into your arms; only thestrong accent on the ‘i’ is bad, doesn’t the name keep leaping away from you?Or is it perhaps only the leap into luck you make yourself under your burden?”

A Sellout with Conviction – Gottfried Benn

2011-10-26T07:38:00.000-07:00

by michael sympson

If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an effect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense.

Ernest Hemingway

During the 1920s, the German essayist and poet Gottfried Benn (1886 –1956) had found a small but seemingly informedfollowing even in France. The acclaim created enemies, and as it so happened,most of them came from the socialist left. The playwright Bertolt Brechtcompared Benn’s way of pairing up the most arcane rhyme-words with a brothel’sreception room, “where the girls are madeto meet their clients in an atmosphere of perfectly casual convenience.”

Yet in 1932, Benn was still in a position to point out to hiscritics that he had repeatedly suffered rude attacks from the extreme right aswell. With a look at his early poetry, the Nazis’ propaganda machineblacklisted him as a “decadentintellectual, pervert and sodomite.” In debates on the radio Benn revelledin his role of the tough talking cynic. His publications before 1933 containedpassages which could be interpreted as “liberal;” in a remarkable essay he wasthe outspoken supporter of unrestricted abortion, but over the years, evenwell-meaning colleagues and friends began to sense something over the top inBenn's position of ‘uncompromising irrationality:’ “I read in Montesquieu, because the EmperorCaligula had descended from Anthony as well as from Augustus, he said he wouldpenalize the senate if they dared to celebrate the holiday he had created to commemoratethe victory of Actium, but he would also penalize them for not celebrating it;and when his sister, Drusilla, had died and been deified, he decreed that itwas high treason to mourn for her, because she was a goddess, and at the sametime it was a criminal offence not to mourn, because she was his sister. Thisgave me the idea. I had to think of this, when people faced up to me. It becamethe form in which I recognized whoever stepped into my way; it was these flipsidesof the same coin, which revealed to me the people’s true nature. It is astructure of “either – or,” in which man uses to operate when he isprofessionally involved or practicing safe sex. One way as well as the other,on both occasions the same anal retentive personality down to the dirt underthe fingernails, and always coerced into social compromise; be it for food orfor the next quickie, it is always this mediocre balance, this cheap andsheepish sub-text of “positive thinking” (Epilogue, 1926). So it shouldn’t be too surprisingwhen we hear of critics who made a prediction of his disgrace, two years beforeit actually happened. Yet when in 1933 Benn emphatically committed himself toHitler’s new regime, it still startled even the most outspoken of his opponentsto actually see the prophecy fulfilled.

In 1926, with his reputation still intact, Benn published a briefautobiography: “Bornas the son of a Lutheran pastor and of a French women from a place nearYverdon,” he wrote, “I grew up in ahamlet of about three hundred people. I went to grammar school, thenUniversity, read two years linguistics and theology, then enrolled for medicineat the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Academy, served in the army as a doctor of theterritorial forces, but was soon discharged – because during training a kidneyloosened after six hours on horseback – continued my medical education,traveled to America, inoculated steerage passengers in the lower decks, went towar, conquered Antwerp, had a jolly time behind the front-line, lived for aperiod in Brussels. Now I live in Berlin, make my living as a specialist ondermatology and venereal diseases, consultation hours every evening five toseven. I registered and certified, obtained degrees, practiced medicine as anintern, wrote on diabetes in the army, on vaccines for the clap, on hernia, oncancer statistics, received from the University of Berlin the golden medal foran essay on epilepsy; whatever I produced in literature I have written inspring 1916, except for the Morgue which had been published by A. R. Meyer in1912.

Iwas the doctor of a clinic for prostitutes, a completely isolated post, livedin a confiscated house of eleven rooms, alone with my valet, had few duties,was permitted to go in civvies, had no obligations, no ties to anybody, barelyunderstood the language; strolled through the streets, watched the foreignfolk; an exceptional spring, three months beyond any comparison, not a daypassed without a barrage at the Yser, yet it barely affected the daily routine;life swung like a pendulum in an air of silence and solitude; I lived on theedge where the existence is ending and the self is beginning. My thoughts oftenturn back to those weeks; this was the life, it will not come again, everythingelse is just blah” (Epilogue, 1926). In Brussels Benn was the physicianattending the trial and execution of Nurse Edith Cavell.

Benn was a man with many masks.

During the early 1930s he corresponded with three sweethearts atthe same time. In his letters, Benn had a way ofposturing in a slangy, slick, and very rapid idiom, dashing out his messages oneverything that came to hand: postcards, prescription pads, foolscap andletterheads from his office. His hand was barely legible, even Benn himselfwould decipher it only with difficulties. Heliked to fictionalize the addressee's persona and put her on a pedestal.To the actress Thea Sternheim, he would snuggle up as an old crony and comrade in arms,and in the next letter play up to the maternal instincts of the film-actressand playwright Elinor von Büller-Klinkowström, presenting himself as a crustyoutcast who once in his life and only for her let slip his guard; this was Bennat his most intimate. And under the same post-date we read messages to Käthevon Porada, a seasoned journalist from Austria. With a grace and wit, remindingof Oscar Wilde, Benn would hit on her as the protective chaperon who watchesover an innocent girl, lost in the jungle of life. Each of these woman, in factall the women in Benn's life, were either emancipated professionals or seasonedsociety-women; they had sharp minds and strong personalities; they were tall,attractive, well educated and often well connected.

Before 1933 Benn posed as the ostentatious city slicker: “only in thestreets of the big city sing and mourn the muses.” Under the Nazis,with a nod to their blood and soil ideology, he suitably remembered hisbarefooted childhood in the potato fields. After 1945 it was all city-talkagain.

The new masters seemed to delight in havingBenn’s good name join their cause and adding his prestige to their poorinternational standing. Benn was allowed to hold on to his position as senatorof the Prussian 'Academy of Fine Arts,' an appointment of great prestige. Formost of his admirers this was just beyond belief and one morning Benn found inhis mail a letter by Klaus Mann (1906 – 1949), the sonof Thomas Mann. He asked the hard questions:

“I couldn't make myself believing what I have heard about yourstatements on the recent events in Germany, that you – in fact as the only Germanauthor on which we had counted – have not resigned from the Academy. In whatkind of company do you think you find yourself now? What is it that could makeyou lend your good name to characters so low, that they defy any comparison inthe whole of European history; characters of such depravity that the worldturns in disgust? Your name had been to us a symbol for the highest standardsand an almost fanatical purity; how many friends must you lose to make commoncause with this hateful rabble, and what kind of friends are you about to gain?Who is going to understand you there? Who of them has actually an ear for yourlanguage? It seems to be almost a law of nature, if one isn’t very careful, astrong leaning towards the irrational will practically by default end up in thearms of the extremist right. First the grand gesture against civilization, amove, which, as I know very well, can be very tempting for an intellectual, andall of a sudden we have a cult of violence and, before you know it, there is AdolfHitler. I greatly appreciate any answer you are willing to give. My address:Hotel de la Tour, SANARY s.m. (VAR).”

This was a letter mailed to him in private,yet Benn decided to go on the airwaves for his answer: “I must tell you that one can speak aboutthe events in Germany only to people, who have seen it with their own eyes.Only those who went through the thrills of the last few months, who, from hourto hour, perusing the dailies, listening to the radio and watching thetorchlight parades have experienced it first hand, who day and night wrestledwith their scruples, even those who did not open their arms to these events andfound it more a cause for alarm, with these, one can talk. But with emigrants,who went abroad, one cannot. Because they have missed the opportunity toassimilate the true thrust of such outlandish term as the “nation,” not in anintellectual and abstract way, but as a hands on experience. They have missedout to see the national substance, which, in your letter, you liked to addresswith such disparaging arrogance; have missed to see it doing the work ofhistory, perhaps a tragic work, full of visions and imagery, but safely on thecourse to its destiny. You make it look as if what happens in Germany is a dangerfor civilization, as if barbarian hordes have invaded and threaten the idealsof humanity. But let me ask you, how do you think does history move on? Do youreally think it is very active at your French spas?”

“I think you would see things much clearer if youleft behind this novelistic view of history and would accept it for what it is,the fundamental grand sweep, the inevitable thrust; I think you'd be closer toan understanding of the events in Germany, if you stopped considering historyin terms of a balance sheet from the bourgeois bookkeeping of the 19th century;history doesn't owe you anything, but you everything to her, she doesn't knowyour democracy, even not your perhaps arduously maintained rationality; historyat her crossroad to a new human manifestation has no other method and no otherstyle than giving birth from the inexhaustible womb of the race and let itfight its way to the top and create its vision from whatever substance is athand, never retreating, suffering for its actions, driven by the laws of life.”

“In your letter you are saying: “First the grandgesture against civilization, then a commitment to barbarity, and before youknow it, there is Adolf Hitler.” This you have written at a juncture, when thebankruptcy of your opportunistic understanding of progress had become apparentalmost everywhere on Earth, when it becomes obvious that it was a narrow,frivolous, and hedonistic idea, that never at any crucial point in time, theessence of man had been interpreted other than in irrational terms. 'Irrational,'as in being close to Creation, as in being creative. Why won't you understandin your Mediterranean ambience, that the events in Germany have nothing to dowith political maneuvers, nothing to do with anything that could be explained,turned and twisted in your well known methodology; this is the arrival of a newbiological type, history goes through another mutation, and a people is readyto improve on its breeding.”

“Of course the breeder understands, that man is arational being, but more importantly, man is profound and rooted in mythology.So of course it is understood that in the future interventions at thebiological foundation have to happen, because man is older than the FrenchRevolution, more complex than thinkers of the enlightenment would like tobelieve. So of course man is perceived largely in natural terms, closer tocreation, so much more wonderful and one with nature, than the barely twomillennia of the old antithesis between idea and reality would give him creditfor. If only you amateurs of civilization, you troubadours of modern progresscould see it, we are not talking here of policies and government; this is avision of the rebirth of mankind, perhaps a very ancient notion, perhaps thelast and grandest idea of the Caucasian race. I commit myself to the new state,it is my people who are opening a new road.”

“Who am I to exclude myself, do I know any better?No! I can try to guide my people to the best of my abilities, but if I fail, itstill is my nation. 'Nation' means so much! I owe this nation my intellectualand economic existence, my entire life, my relationships, the sum of myunderstanding. From this nation rose my ancestors; to it my children shallreturn. I grew up in a village and between the herds; I still know what 'home'means. The metropolis, industry, and intellect, the epoch under whose shadow Iwalk, all the powers of the century which my work addresses – there are momentswhen all this tortured life is sinking away and nothing else is left, than theopen plains, the wide horizon, the seasons, soil, simple words, folk.”

“I am not a member of a political party, unacquaintedwith any of their leaders, I don't expect to make new friends. It is myfanatical purity for which you give me so much credit in your letter, my purityof thought and sentiment, that compels me to give you this answer.”

”It is the increasing reduction of the humanstature that motivates to breed a stronger race. And a new race can only risefrom a terrible and violent turmoil. It is something a liberal andindividualistic era seems to have forgotten, so you are in no position toaccept the challenge and foresee the political consequences. All of a suddeneverybody has to make a decision, and this is also true for me: either to livein comfortable privacy or commit myself to the state. I have decided for thestate and I must accept it as a consequence of my commitment, if you from yourplace is sending me his farewell” (A Reply to the Political Emigrants,1933).

Only in retrospect one realizes how much ofBenn’s own beliefs was contained in this speech, convictions going back atleast to 1929, four years before the Nazis came to power. It gives us aninkling what Benn and the Nazis may have had in common. When Benn broadcastedthis response, he had been on air with a whole series of speeches on breedingand eugenics. In his essays Benn noted with approval the rating systemintroduced in the United States to facilitate an extended program of geneticscreening. Then came 1934 and the night of the long knives, the so-called'Roehm-Putsch.' The realization dawned on Benn that it is one thing to spit ondemocracy and the right to vote and another no longer to be safe in your houseand face arrest or worse at any whim of an unpredictable tyranny. In hisprivate circle, we are told, Benn became dangerously vocal about this; heprepared a script to go on air with a plea that “poetry is in need of more inner Freedom.” Benn should and could have known better and notjust with hindsight. He could have taken the cue from another author in exile,a man he had admired and for whom he prepared to broadcast the obituary.

The, in his days highly acclaimed and likeBenn somewhat oracular, writer and poet Stefan George (1868 –1933) lived a solitary life, carefully shieldinghis homosexuality from the public eye. A circle of adolescent friends withconnections to Germany's aristocracy and right wing conservatives supported hisaloof existence. The elitist outlook in George's publications, his socialaffiliations and his oracular expressions led the Nazis to believe that he andhis considerable prestige could be pulled in, in support of their cause. Likethe death-squad in Dirty Harry theNazis badly misjudged the man's intentions. In fact in 1944, Claus Schenk Countvon Stauffenberg (1907 – 1944), a former protégé of StefanGeorge, almost succeeded in assassinating Hitler.

George did not live to see vonStauffenberg's gallant attempt and execution. He left Germany as soon as thenew regime extended an invitation to fill a position as the new president ofthe Prussian 'Academy of Fine Arts.' George died eleven months later in exile.At first, the Nazi’s commissioned Gottfried Benn to go on air with an obituary.But then, after reading the script, the new masters changed their mind andrather preferred to smother the solitary grave of Stefan George under a huge swastikaattached to a ribbon of the size of an unscrolled lavatory towel. The plannedbroadcast about “themost impressive phenomenon of crossbreeding and diffusing influence in all ofGermany's history” (GottfriedBenn) was postponed indefinitely. Benn waslosing his uses for the regime and he found himself stricken from the list ofGPs permitted to write prescriptions under the national health insurance act.In his profession this was tantamount to a death sentence; with no inheritanceand no other means, Benn knew no longer how to pay the rent for his tinyapartment in Belle Alliance street.

Leaving the country, seemed out of thequestion, Benn could imagine the kind of reception waiting for him among the emigrés, and there was also the problem of absorbing a foreign language wellenough to continue publishing; so, in 1935 he called on the assistance ofinfluential friends from the Great War and reactivated in the army's medicalcorps. An act of sheer self-preservation, yet he lost nothing of his pomposity,coining the phrase: “The army is the aristocratic form of emigration.” Not quite the same as “realizing his error,” asmost of his biographers like to address Benn’s run for cover. In fact Benncontinued to appear in print with a leading publisher until 1936. Only in 1938he was officially banned from further publication. Once he had been silencedthere was no danger of further persecution. Although it is also true that onthe height of German victories, Benn privately circulated a number of savagelycritical essays and a rather inflammatory poem. Had it fallen into the wronghands, it could have meant his imprisonment or worse. But let’s not foolourselves. Benn was neither a resistance fighter, nor did he – as we shall see –object to the crucial tenets of the regime: what he objected to, were thepersonalities who implemented these tenets; their lack of professionalism andbreeding.

By now Benn could only publicize in hisfunction at the medical staff of the German High Command. He was ordered toproduce a study on the causes for suicide. He knew it could cost war widowstheir pensions if their husbands committed suicide in the trenches. Aftercollecting suitable sources from every part of the world he supported theassertion that suicide is a spontaneous act, born out of a moment's despair.His conclusion was accepted and the widows continued to receive their pensions.Yet even as late as 1949, after the demise of the “Third Reich” and fully awareof the horrors of the extermination camps, Benn still had the gall to say in aprivate letter that “even today, I am of the opinion, that the N.S. was agenuine and profound attempt to rescue the teetering West” (Letters).

Why had he to be such an ass? Did his ownjargon trip him up? Or was there something more substantial than merely a caseof oracular rhetoric and intoxication with one’s own slogans?

We got a taste of it in his answer to theemigrants from 1933. Benn’s terminology to “explain” politics and culture,draws on medicine and biology, a pseudo-scientific Darwinism, that was currencyamong the top Nazis themselves. Benn was dead serious on the subject ofeugenics; to him, this was proper science and a necessity to deal withhereditary diseases. We have a letter to his closest friend, from 1937; it israther hysterical in tone. “My sister has been diagnosed with glaucoma. A mutation inthe genetic material, there was never anything of this kind in the familybefore, most of us have excellent eyesight and my father never needed specs,not even in his eighties. As her next relative I have to be tested too. This isawful. It means all of a sudden this branch of the family is finished, ourgenes can't be permitted to pass on, we all have to be sterilized” (Letters to Oelze). Thisleaves little doubt that Benn, at least in principle, was in agreement with the“science” behind the Nuremberg Laws. Based on these laws the Nazis started with“mercy killings” of the mentally impaired years before the holocaust and called for the mandatorycastration of carriers with hereditary diseases. The methods to kill childrenwith Down syndrome “humanely” were the same as later employed for the “finalsolution” in the death camps.

Thewar was about to reach the final phase. Because of the constant air raids thehigh command transferred personnel to bases in the East. “The garrison held the highground, overseeing the city like a citadel. “Montsalvat” said a lieutenant,apparently an opera aficionado, and indeed it was almost inapproachable.

“The immediate surroundingis full of strange features; the streets are mere dirt roads, some leading intogullies, some navigating the hills, the houses isolated with not a single pathdirected to them, it’s a mystery how people actually arrive at the door. Thefences are like in Lithuania, moss covered, low and dripping wet. A man appearsin the evening with a cat on his left shoulder, the cat has a piece of cordaround the neck, is keeping a precarious balance, tries to get down; the manlaughs. Low drifting clouds announce coming rain, everywhere are poplars, blackunder a purplish light, with barely ever a brighter opening in between. A senseof the unreal prevails, almost theatrical, flat like a film set. Over theguardhouse, in big letters, it says: “General von Strantz, base.” For threedays I amuse myself asking the guard whether he knows anything about thisgeneral from the Great War. The man stands to attention, but I never get ananswer, completely unknown this general, gone, sunken, with his standard,motorcade and staff milling around his person. Only two decades have passed andalready nobody remembers.

“ Anothertide of conscripts is flooding in into the barracks. One notices two differenttypes of recruits. The sixteen year old, undernourished, impoverished,intimidated, pathetic figures from the national labor-levy, docile and willing,and the elderly, the fifty to sixty year old from Berlin. On the first day theyare still the lords of the manor, wear civvies, buy themselves a newspaper,have a spring in the step that tells you “we are CEOs and managers, consultantswith pretty wives and central heating; this here wil pass, can’t touch usreally, is mildly amusing even.” The next day they have received their kit andthey count for less than the dirt under their boots. One yell of the sergeantand they run through corridors on the double, give him twenty, lug aroundammunition crates, squeeze on helmets. The training is brief, two or threeweeks; it is interesting to see them go to the shooting range on the second dayalready – previously that used to be the case only after four to six weeks.Then, in the dead of night they fall in with backpack, rolled up coat and tentcloth, gasmask, the automatic and the rifle – nearly 120 pounds to carry – andoff they go to the platform where the train is waiting in the dark. This exitinto the darkness is spooky. An invisible brass band marches ahead, is playingrousing rhythms, followed by the column marching silently into eternaloblivion. The whole thing is a brief affair, just a sudden split in the fabricof silence and blackness, leaving behind the plateau in the darkness of a nightwithout sky. The next morning there will be new arrivals. Ever new tides of manpowerfloat in and out, new waves of blood, destined, after learning to disassemble arifle and shooting a couple of rounds, to ebb away towards so called enemies inthe eastern steppes. It would be incomprehensible, if there wasn’t theappearance of the commanding general, a charismatic figure in purple and gold,who shoots and orders to shoot; his pension is not yet in immediate jeopardy” (BarrackII, Room 66).

Thefall of 1944 was dangerously parched. “The fields areinfested with mice, the potato harvest has been catastrophic, carrots andbeetroots contain not enough sugar. The loss of the territories to the Eastmeans for the nation the loss of two months of bread, one month of fat, onemonth of meat. The rations are further reduced. There is no more leather forboots; no more prosthetic limbs for the amputees, no shoestrings, no dentures,no bandages, no Petri-dishes and not enough doctors; entire divisions take thefield without a surgeon. The civilians depend on one practitioner per 25,000people, and she has no petrol for her car.”

When Benn’s presence wasrequired in Berlin, catching a train had become an adventure. “At two o’clock a.m. awonderful train stops, eight sleeper cars, four coaches of the 1st and 2ndclass, each almost empty, an armored antiaircraft coach at the end. I board thetrain. Immediately I am followed by an SS man and asked to get off. I don’tunderstand. The man reports to me that it is the train from the supremecommand, only for use by the top brass. Now I understand. I could carry ahand-grenade in my briefcase. So I take the next train and squeeze into atoilet of the 3rd class, I in my colonels uniform, with two laborers from theEast squeezing my elbows. The door to the toilet remains open, women andchildren can’t help using it, the door is jammed, and moving away isimpossible, but nobody seems to mind. I need to change trains. In the next oneI find a 2nd class compartment. Three underage punks, in party uniform, stretchout on the cushions. White haired women, and mothers with babies are leftstanding in the aisle. The master race whips out a bottle of brandy and abundle of cigars (for lesser mortals the daily rationing allows for one cigarand no brandy) and for the next three hours they go on invigorating themselvesfor party-duties ahead (“Strength through Joy”). Next day we read in thenewspapers that the largest numbers among war casualties and those receivingdecorations come from the ranks of the party, way more than the nationalaverage. Exemption from service is something unheard of. And then the sentence:“Appearances to the contrary, as occasionally seen, are completely misleading.” Apparentlythese punks were a part of this misleading appearance” (Barrack II, Room 66).

Christmas 1944 was approaching. “We receive 100grams of liverwurst as an extra ration, and in addition to the weekly meatration there is 25% of gravy powder. And also, who is willing to give up on 30grams of margarine and 100 grams of sugar can place an order for a stollen. Isign up to the list. Christmas carols are prohibited, instead it is officiallysuggested to reflect on the solstice and the renewal of the light emanatingfrom the womb of Mother Nature; the commanding officers are instructedaccordingly. The grounds linger under a grey light, a grey like the wings ofseagulls diving into the oceans. Christmas eve has arrived. In the morningthere was a tremendous air raid on Berlin; one wonders whether the apartment isstill intact, and who among the few remaining acquaintances left to live there,has survived it. Then it is evening, the stollen is delivered to the door. Iask the orderly how he is coping with his respiratory troubles; he is hard ofhearing, we communicate with some difficulty. I look again out to the grounds,into the distance towards the lowlands and the eastern steppe – so near andimmediate, soaking up uncounted generations who never had the time to arrive atsome modicum of clarity and understanding. Eve is descending, it is Holy Night” (BarrackII, Room 66).

For Benn the war ended in Berlin, the placeof the most savage fighting in the last days of the Reich. “If on January 27,1945 you had the nerve to approach the town’s commandant and ask “when theRussians are coming what are we going to do with our belongings here, now,after we had them brought from Berlin with so many difficulties,” his aide decamp, a SS-captain, says “who is talking like this will be shot; the Russianswon’t break through, perhaps a stray tank may appear in the distance, but thetown will be held, and who is sending his wife back to Berlin is going to beshot, too.” The following night at five o’clock a.m. the alarm sounds, we areunder artillery fire and with nothing but a briefcase we walk home through ablizzard in -10º Celsius, on icy allay ways, choked by endless trains ofhorse-drawn wagons with dead children dropping over the side. In Küstrin we geta place on an open bullock cart, which carries us the sixty kilometers toBerlin arriving at Bahnhof Zoo under constant antiaircraft salvos. At home wefound strangers squatting in the flat, the rooms were emptied of any furniture,we fell asleep on the floor, covering ourselves with my cloak and withnewspapers, and in the morning we awake to the howling of the sirens” (Barrack II, Room 66).

Because of the savage fighting in thestreets, Benn evacuated his wife to a small village on the river Oder, deemedto be a safer place, while he remained in Berlin. For days she received no newsof her husband, and as the approaching armies entered the village she believedhim dead. When the customary raping of women started, Benn's wife took poison.A refugee from the East conveyed the news.

Benn survived and after his denazificationin 1948 assumed the rôle of the doyen of German literature. He enjoyed thecontroversies surrounding him and died in 1956.

The Thunderbolt of Mirabeau

2011-10-25T12:19:00.000-07:00

by Heinrichvon Kleist (1811)

translated and edited by michael sympson

Well so say it man, instead of this “says he, says she” and no end; when are you going to come to the point?

Heinrich von Kleist, The broken Jar

I recall the “thunderbolt” of Mirabeau, with which he dismissedthe King’s demand on June 23, when the Speaker of the King ordered the assemblyto disband and leave the premises.

The deputies tarried to leave and theSpeaker of the King asked whether they had heard the King’s command? “Yes,” said Mirabeau, “we have heard the King’s command,” I amsure, that he had not the slightest idea yet of the bayonets, when he made thisstill humble reply “yes, Sir,” herepeats, “we have heard it,” one cansense, he still has not a clue of what he is going to say, “yet, what gives you the right,” hecontinues, and suddenly it opens a fountain of immense ideas, “to communicate orders to us? We are therepresentatives of the nation!” Now he had what he needed! “The nation issues orders, it does not takeorders” he said emphatically, and after a deep breath, bringing theinsolence to a head, he says: “And tomake myself perfectly clear,” and only now the words float to the surfacethat truly express the sense of defiance filling his soul, “tell your king, that we will not leave ourstation here other than on the point of bayonets.” After which, satisfiedwith himself, Mirabeau fell back on his chair.

If, for a moment, we step into the shoes ofthe King’s Speaker, we can imagine him being utterly dumbfounded, not dissimilarto the law of electricity, according to which a body without charge in thestate of zero suddenly is charged when brought in touch with the field of amagnet. And, very much like the charge that amplifies in the electrified body,our speaker’s courage, when seeing his opponent’s devastation, turned to themost reckless enthusiasm.

All things considered, the twitch of theupper lip on the Speaker’s face, or an indecisive fiddling with the sleeve cuffmay have been the cause for the French Revolution.

We read, that, after the Speaker of theKing had departed, Mirabeau again rose from his chair and moved for tworesolutions: firstly to institute the assembly as the Nation’s Chamber ofDeputies, and secondly to establish its constitutional immunity. Since he hadreleased his charge like an electrical conductor, Mirabeau had returned to hisnatural state, and, awaking from the spirit of the moment, suddenly wasintimidated by the prospect of imprisonment and yielded to the voice ofprudence. This is a curious coincidence between the events in the world ofphysics and in the world of morals, which, if we put our mind to it, can bediscovered everywhere even in the mere circumstantial.

Before English was invented

2011-10-24T06:29:00.000-07:00

by michael sympson

I cannot bear men who believe that women serving in the Palace are bound to be frivolous and wicked, although I suppose the prejudice is understandable. After all, women at Court do not spend their time hiding modestly behind fans and screens, but walk about, looking openly at the people they meet.

Sei Shonagon

These days we use to remember only Marco Polo as the first European, who, traveling the ancient silk road, made it all the way to China – but there exists the record of an otherwise unknown Italian trader who had reached China already a generation before Marco Polo, probably as passenger on an Arab merchant vessel. His narrative speaks of a whole colony of foreign merchants like him living in Quanzhou, a city facing the Taiwan Straits. Under the Song Dynasty (Chinese: 宋朝, 960 AD – 1127) Quanzhou was the world’s largest harbor and a center of maritime commerce. So it is not beyond conjecture that one day such merchant from Europe took passage on a Chinese junk and landed on the island of Honshū, from where he continued by ox-cart.

After a bone-shaking journey on unpaved roads, this merchant would have arrived at the Imperial Capital Kyoto, a world apart from the bustle and industry in Quanzhou. We know such travels have been made – Murasaki Shikibu (973 AD – 1025) in her novel tells us of an embassy coming from Korea.

Kyoto was the only secular center of urban life in the Japan of the Heian era (794 AD – 1185) – Nara the older capital had developed to a center of worship and towering monasteries – similar to Lhasa in Tibet – but was also famous for the pottery manufactured here. Yet even the newer Kyoto must have struck the visitor from the mainland as a still very rural town, although there were industries: blacksmiths, paper makers, weavers and tailors, carpenters, perhaps even an early print shop. When we think of medieval Japan, things like Ukiyoe, Ikebana and Bonsai, come to mind, Karate and Aikido, eating raw fish, Kabuki, Noh and Bunraku, Samurais and Ninjas, Bushido, Zen and Tatami mats covering the floor (“only a thief will step on it in his shoes” I have been told). We think of Geishas and Tokanoma scrolls hanging behind a single exquisite flower, of soy sauce and public baths. Not a single one of these things existed in the Heian era (794 AD – 1185). There was, however, already Sumo wrestling, going back to about 250 AD, strictly as an activity at the Shinto shrines.

Wood was the preferred building material. The typical mansion was painted in bright colors, sometimes under a roof of glossy shingles, but more often ducked under a thick wattle roof. The structure was suspended on round pillars of plain wood with a slightly elevated floor, deep eaves and open piling to keep out the damp. Set in an elegantly landscaped garden with artificial lakes, miniature hills, and carefully placed rocks, the compound was surrounded by a whitewashed stonewall with covered entrances wide enough to let an ox-cart through. Indoors the Ladies and Gentlemen slept on rolled out straw mats with a wooden block as pillow. The rooms were sparingly furnished with solitary chests of drawers, a brazier and a lamp. A six-foot portable frame supported the decorative “curtain of state,” which was to protect the ladies of the house from prying eyes; callers were asked to take a seat on the gallery surrounding the sliding walls of the compound, or in the corridor between the apartments. Hygiene was still a thing of the future. Highborn gentlemen could be caught cracking lice on their chests. Without heating, the inhabitants shivered through the winter with only a thin screen between them and the snow. During summer they sweated in fumigated silk robes.

They bathed once a year, if at all. Life was short.

The educated Japanese – and that included women of the upper class as well – was a scholar of Chinese culture and as such still trapped in a time warp. To him China hadn’t changed since the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907 AD). Tang architecture and the splendor of Tang implements and porcelain remained the model of elegant living for the Japanese courtier; Tang poetry and folklore provided the staple of cultivated conversation. Yet the real China across the sea was very different.

Under the Song the population had doubled in numbers. For the peasant life was still as harsh as it always had been, and the social experiments of the reformer and Prime Minister Wang An-shih (1021 – 1086) didn’t help at all. Wang completely failed and yet he achieved the rare feat of being honored as a great reformer by the modern governments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

The eleventh century was a world of barely surviving subsistence economies; only in China industry and agriculture produced a considerable surplus. Watermills powered mechanized foundries and industrial assembly lines. China became the first state ever to establish a national bank and issue paper money. In the morning the urban slicker picked up a piece of fresh pastry together with his daily newspaper. For lunch he patronized teahouses and restaurants, some offering service on eight floors at the same time. In the evening he invited friends to the theatre. Big publishing houses flooded the shops with the earliest penny novels known to the human race.

In Japan on the other hand, there was virtually no urban middle class that could have enjoyed the entertainment and amenities, and yet the two finest pieces of urban literature from this period came from here: Sei Shonagon’s Pillow-Book, finished and published in 994 AD, and a generation later Murasaki Shikibu’s sumptuous novel The Tale of Prince Genji. Leaving alone these books and the great poets, essayists and travel writers of the Chinese, what else from the eleventh century is still worth a modern reader’s attention? A handful of Norse sagas and the sensual lyrics sung in Cordoba – the rest, whether Gregorian Chants or the Nibelung, deserves to be forgotten, and I mean bury it for good. Yet if we are honest with ourselves, even the Laxdæla Saga and the Story of Burnt Njal are barely more than an antiquarian’s delight and a lit-student’s pain, and the songbook of Mutamid, the Emir of Seville (1075 – 1141), interesting as it is – – – well who remembers that anyway?

Murasaki Shikibu was a descendant of the Fujiwara, the clan ruling country and emperors for two centuries by marrying their women into the imperial family. The Fujiwara saw to it that the imperial court was kept entertained, leaving for the man on the throne as few opportunities as possible to involve himself with politics.

Astrology and the Chinese calendar controlled the rhythm of life, the seasons and the festivals: the ‘New Year’ and the ‘Blue Horses’ in winter, the ‘Hollyhock Festival’ in spring, the summer ‘Festival of the Iris,’ festivals for the dead, for Chrysanthemums, for the first harvest, and in October the ‘Gosechi Dances.’ With its emphasis on gorgeous ceremony and ritual, Shingon Buddhism was the perfect tool in the Fujiwara’s program of control through dissipation. The religion was as affluent and firmly established in Japan as the Church of England in eighteenth century in England. It was a principal escape for the nobility and abdicated emperors sought asylum in the monasteries. Discarded empresses became distinguished abbesses of great influence.

When it rained men and women played board games indoor. Cock fighting was a popular pastime among the men. The ladies and lords in the palace dressed in elaborate couture, the women plucked their eyebrows clean and replaced them with a smudge of paint higher up the brow. It was customary to constantly keep the white powdered face hidden behind a fan and to dye the teeth black; these women would never show themselves in the nude, not even in their most intimate moments. The handwriting of both genders was expected to be neat and the faux pas was unforgivable should you ever forget to follow up on your latest tête-à-tête with a proper love letter. Preferably it should be attached to a dew-dripping sprig from a plum tree, and it absolutely had to be delivered only minutes after departure – about 4.30 a.m. A well executed calligraphy could get you a long way to atone for an otherwise unimpressive text – “just a little nothing” it said in one instance – in this world of unrelenting leisure a love affair easily foundered on poorly executed handwriting. Everything was expected to be perfect and yet to appear casual – the calligraphy, the ink, the choice of paper, the seemingly negligent way this was folded, the appearance and dress of the messenger to whom the delivery was entrusted. The imperial courtier was up all-night, rotating through a roster of mistresses, and the amorous visitor better made it snappy: “I can’t bear it to see a man visit his lady in the palace,” Sei Shonagon noted in her diary, “and then still keep hanging around for a bite to eat” (Sei Shonagon The Pillow-Book).

Perhaps once a year the busy philanderer was even able to make time visiting his wife; after all only commoners and peasants made due with just one woman.

The conduct of lovers was an art based on an exacting etiquette of behavior and taste. Real privacy in these crammed conditions of gaping lattices, shifting screens and curtains of state barely reaching to the floor was not easy to come by; indeed the lover actually advertized his presence by hanging his trousers over the lady’s curtain stand. There was no “abomination of the flesh,” neither in the sense of Christian sin, nor as an expression of Confucian bigotry. The infidelity of “the man with the mobility of a bee and of the woman rooted like a flower in her bed” (Murasaki Shikibu, Diary) was part of the institution, however, it still was infidelity. Jealousy figures large in the literature of the period; it became the cause for violence and even insanity. The ideal man was gentle and sensitive, on suitable occasions even ready to shed a tear or two, and he was expected to master a wide range of artistic skills. He was a slightly effeminate figure with a round white face, powdered and scented, keeping the more masculine attributes underneath his robes for the hours when all cats are grey. That, at least, was the theory.

In the real world things were a little different.

Stuffing their perfumed handkerchiefs up the sleeve, these men liked to impress with their prowess in the sports – football, archery, horse racing, polo and wrestling – and after a stag night well into the grey hours “the old Minister of the Right, Lord Akimutsu,” made himself a nuisance and “came staggering along the aisle and banged into the screen behind which we sat, tearing a hole in it. What really struck us was that he is getting far too old for this sort of thing. But I am sure he did not at all know that this was the impression he was making. Next followed the snatching of fans from the faces of the ladies, the roaring laughter and the shouting of jokes, many of which were in very bad taste” (Murasaki Shikibu, Diary).

After the Empress Sadako had passed away a new consort, the sheltered teenage empress Akiko, was taking her place. Murasaki Shikibu was one of the ladies waiting on her. Murasaki’s real name is unknown; perhaps the author was called Murasaki after the heroine in her novel. She was born in 973 AD in Kyoto. After her husband’s death in 1001, Murasaki considered devoting her life to religious service, but by 1005 she was a member of the staff at the palace. From 1007 to 1010, she kept a diary, our main source of information about her life. She seemed to have had no illusions about life at court, neither about her mistress nor the situation she found herself in: “Everybody knows how strongly the Empress is opposed to anything that smacks of flirtation; indeed, if you want to stay on good terms with Her Majesty you better don’t show yourself outside of your room when there are men about. I can imagine how some of our senior ladies, with their air of almost ecclesiastical severity, must make a rather forbidding impression at the world at large. In couture and appearance we certainly cut a wretched figure, for to show the lightest sign of caring for such things ranks with Her Majesty as an unpardonable fault. Although I cannot help thinking that Her Majesty’s outlook is far too narrow and uncompromising, it is easy enough to see how it had come to this state of affairs. When Her Majesty for the first time came to Court, her mind was so entirely innocent and her own conduct so completely impeccable that on top of the extreme reserve which is natural to her, it was inconceivable that she should ever compromise herself in a way that would occasion even the most trifling confession. Consequently, whenever she heard one of us admit to some slight shortcoming, whether of conduct or character, she henceforth regarded this person as a monster of iniquity. Being young and inexperienced she had no notion that such things were of everyday occurrence, brooded incessantly upon the wickedness of those about her, and consorted only with persons so staid that they could be relied upon not to cause her a moment’s anxiety. Thus she has gathered a circle of very worthy young ladies on the merit of sharing all of Her Majesty’s opinions. Yet in some curious way they seem like children who have never grown up” (Murasaki Shikibu, Diary).

A psychologically very acute observation and apparently worlds apart from the society of cultured libertines Sei Shonagon is introducing us to in her Pillow Book. Murasaki belonged to a different generation in the imperial staff, ready to elbow out the libertines of the ancient regime. She seemed to harbor a particular dislike for the ageing Sei Shonagon (965 AD – 1010): “Sei Shonagon’s most marked characteristic is her extraordinary narcissism. Her chief pleasure consists in shocking people; and as each of her eccentricities is becoming only too painfully familiar, her stunts to catch attention become more and more desperate. Once a person of taste and refinement, she has now abandoned all restrain from making a spectacle of herself, even under the most inappropriate circumstances. Soon she will have forfeited all claims to be regarded as anything but a buffoon, and what will become of her when she is going to be too old for her present duties?” (Murasaki Shikibu, Diary).

The palace had always been a viper’s nest of intrigue. At some point her patrons either withdrew their support from Sei Shonagon or for a number of reasons they lost their influence. The records are sketchy. In about 1010, she and her little daughter were seen wandering the streets of Kyoto in torn clothes, trying to sell worthless stuff picked from the rubbish dumps. How it could have come to this is unknown.

The Tale of Genji was composed in the decade between 1001 and 1010. The book is a testimony to Murasaki’s sensitivity, her love of nature, and her great learning in many subjects. It was she, and she alone, who single-handedly invented the modern novel. With no model to follow, she was feeling her way into The Tale of Prince Genji, slowly maturing it in a drawn out process of many years that here and there has marred the story with inconsistencies. We talk about a fat book by any standard and we have no idea how Lady Murasaki managed to keep it all together. Did she use notebooks and files for reference? How many drafts preceded the final product? Were there any preliminary drafts at all? We just don’t know. Living in a remote setting on the outer rim of the world where never anything happens, her astuteness in reading people and with great subtlety draw the traits of her characters from a mosaic of little incidents, in itself is already nothing short of miraculous, but then to put it all together in a realistic and even engaging story of real people doing real things is sheer genius.

The protagonist, Prince Genji, is depicted as a multidimensional personality and a peerless lover who has his ups and downs. “With consummate sensitivity, he responds differently to meet the needs of each woman he captivates. That his character has enthralled readers ever since the tale first appeared is a tribute to its author. But the novel is also unforgettable for its rich poetry, imagery, and imaginative wordplay” (Edward G. Seidensticker).

Her novel is a book that after its “discovery” in the West seemed effortless to transcend the boundaries of time and setting. But hold your horses – this is a translation we are talking about. Murasaki was truly a great writer, introspective and with enough ego to hold her own in a society, where the talents and characteristics that have made her the author she became, were exactly the opposite of what people expected from a person in her position: “That I am very vain, reserved, unsociable, wanting always to keep people at a distance; that I am wrapped up in the study of ancient stories, conceited, living all the time in a fantasy world of my own and scarcely realize the existence of other people, save as the butt of jokes and snide remarks – such is the not always unfounded opinion of me that most people hold, and they are prepared to dislike me for it. Only after they get to know me, they are surprised to find me approachable and gentle – in fact, quite a different person from the monster they had imagined. Nevertheless, I know that I have definitely set myself up at Court as an ill-natured censorious prig. What can I do, it is in my nature, which I cannot possibly change. Yet already I do a hundred things, which a few years ago I should never have dreamed myself capable of doing. So strange indeed are the hidden recesses in the heart of man, that I shall no doubt continue to part with one scruple after another, till in the end what now appears to me sheer depravity and abandon will seem perfectly proper and natural. Thus I reflect upon the unreality of all our attitudes and opinions...” (Murasaki Shikibu, Diary).

In a previous life she must have been my sister, or, who knows, I was a woman, but that doesn’t explain the unique quality of her work, a quality that appears to have remained exceptional and ahead of its time well until the arrival of Marcel Proust (1871 – 1922) – without the Frenchman’s verbiage.

On the other hand there is no translator of her work into any of the Western Languages that did not know or could have known Marcel Proust. In his days Arthur Waley (1889 – 1966) was the most respected translator of Chinese and Japanese classics. His rendition of the Tale of Prince Genji from 1935 is the first in English and still considered an English classic in its own right; Jorge Luis Borges read Waley’s rendition and was impressed with Lady Murasaki’s ability of putting a visual impression into a few well-chosen words. Borges was acutely aware of the gulf separating two very different worlds of literary conventions and cultural traditions, yet even so he may have failed to fully appreciate the true pedigree of these examples of iconic writing – they may own as much of their charm to the translator as allegedly to the author.

Or they may not. Personally, after only a few pages in slightly stilted diction, I got the impression that this Arthur Waley had not a single artistic bone in his body. His rendition of Sei Shonagon’s Pillow-Book is sheer butchery – he obviously didn’t like the person who wrote it and denounced her work as “quite commonplace.”

Translating is a tricky business. How should a foreign text be ferried across? How should we receive it? As an exotic yet thoroughly anglicized arrival with all the documents and visa to become a citizen of the land, or as an artifact for the literary archaeologist, with copious notes and preserving with the utmost care every crumb of soil clinging to it from the original ambiance? Is Nabokov’s barbed dissection job of Pushkin’s Onegin doing anything for you, or would you not prefer the slick redoing of Pushkin by – oh, I don’t know – Tony Kline perhaps? I guess that depends what you want to do: read and enjoy, or write a thesis for comparative lit at Cornell. As far as I am concerned, call the translation police if you must, but I rather enjoy my book.

So, I wouldn’t worry too much about Waley's amplifications, undoubtedly inspired by a desire to make the text immediately intelligible to the foreign reader, but his method of translation leaves much to be desired when rendering the allusions and references to the conventions and the poetry of the period. Then again how much of it could come across anyway without thousands of footnotes and scholarly commentaries in the margins? Such footnote must not just leave the reader baffled over something he hadn’t suspected, but should provide the full context, explain the culture, introduce us to people we’ve never heard of before and never will again, even recite the complete poem behind the allusion: all of this very interesting for the archeologist busy with rummaging his boxes of classified artifacts, but not exactly a joy to read. The Chin Pin-mei is a novel, and as such a very good one, not a just a handbook of Chinese pornography.

Besides, nothing usually comes across as wrong as a poem from a different culture. In different ages people wax poetic over different matters and use different conventions to put their sentiment into words. Explaining this convention doesn’t exactly enhance the poetic impact. Neither does rendering the poem on the model from a different convention necessarily diminish the essence of what the poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 – 1843), pretty much ahead of his time, has considered a poem to be: “the metaphor of a sentiment.” Even the metaphor of the Song of Solomon, conveys a recognizable sentiment. The tall neck of a suntanned beauty likened to “the tower of David built for an armory, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men” (Song of Songs 4: 4), is still as vivid an image as it was in the days of composing pastorals under the rule of Alexander’s successors. The real problem here is that a first class poet can only appear as the pale shadow of his true self if the translator is lacking his talent – which he almost always does. In other words the people in Murasaki’s novel are recognizable characters because, beyond the exotic differences, they and we have something in common. Otherwise the book would be unreadable.

Waley’s method was to take a passage of the original, read it a few times, making sure he had in his memory most of the important aspects, quickly write an English version and then check to make sure there are no major omissions. He should have done OK in my opinion, provided of course he was the man to give free rain to the physiological and emotional constituents of his own sentiments and the ones of the authoress. Here is where he fell short. His problem was not the Japanese language but the neurotic introversions of a mediocre Englishman of his period. (Somebody called him a “renaissance-man;” where did this come from? I am not aware he ever booked a passage to Japan.) So what Waley managed to bring across, as his mentor Ezra Pound once observed about “nearly all of his translations,” was “marred by his bungling English and defective rhythm.” A mere matter of style? Style is everything that matters here! Style is the way an author interfaces with his world.

When the translator Edward Georg Seidensticker (1921 – 2007) decided to give Murasaki’s novel another go, he certainly approached his subject with the respect and sensitivity it deserves. However, the distinctively modern feel of the delivery makes one wish to consult the original – was Madame Shikibu really so far ahead of her time?

Unfortunately Seidensticker’s rendition is marred with countless instances of awkward grammar, not to mention the typographic errors in my text. Seidensticker compared his job with that of a counterfeiter – the “task is to imitate the original down to the last detail,” he said, and this allows only one conclusion that those awkward blemishes are part of the original as well. In an interview he explained how difficult it could be to remain faithful to the original using Shakespeare’s line: “‘Good night, sweet Prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’ It is an utterly simple line and I think it is a very, very beautiful line,” Seidensticker said. “It contains 14 syllables in English. I have looked at all the main translations into Japanese and they all contain at least three times that number of syllables. It takes longer to say something in Japanese than it does in English, and so the rhythm must be different.”

Seidensticker has been credited as “the best translator of Japanese that has ever lived.” Let’s hope the critic paying the compliment knew Japanese. A rather ancient form of Japanese to be precise, so ancient, it comes from a time when English was not yet invented!

Remember your last visit to the bookshop when out of idle curiosity – or perhaps you fell for the hype on the cover – you had a look into Beowulf? You were shocked to find it written in the original Anglo-Saxon and hurriedly shut the book, looking left and right whether anyone had seen you. OK, that is laying it on a bit thick, yet this is exactly the problem confronting the translator of the Tale of Genji. The Japanese themselves read transliterations into modern Japanese. What version did Seidensticker use, I wonder? Remember your last visit to the bookshop when out of idle curiosity – or perhaps you fell for the hype on the cover – you had a look into Beowulf? You were shocked to find it written in the original Anglo-Saxon and hurriedly shut the book, looking left and right whether anyone had seen you. OK; that is laying it on a bit thick, yet this is exactly the problem confronting the translator of the Tale of Genji. The Japanese themselves read transliterations into modern Japanese. What version did Seidensticker use, I wonder? Could it be this book has been hyped up for no better reason than being the first realistic novel of all times, which is just as full of clumsy imperfections as to be expected from a first attempt? A possibility not to be dismissed, but the Japanese don’t seem to agree. Perhaps that is to be expected – one has to be a son of a bitch from Argentina to point out “the worship of every line of this utterly cold and unfeeling Englishman William Shakespeare” (Jorge Luis Borges) for what it is – a piece of hype. So how is one to decide based on translations alone and with no Japanese? Well, if this novel is really as good as it is cracked up to be, it should be able to carry itself – even as a mere shadow of itself in a so, so translation.

Where Waley erred on the side of amplification, Seidensticker seems to leave out here and there something that is not completely inessential. In chapter five Prince Genji is visiting a Buddhist monastery in the mountains. Arthur Waley renders it as follows:

“Genji felt very disconsolate. It had begun to rain; a cold wind blew across the hill, carrying with it the sound of a waterfall – audible till then as a gentle intermittent plashing, but now a mighty roar; and with it, somnolently rising and falling, mingled the monotonous chanting of the scriptures. Even the most unimpressionable nature would have been plunged into melancholy by such surroundings. How much the more so Prince Genji, as he lay sleepless on his bed, continually planning and counter-planning.” No doubt, Waley amplifies on the original; he tries to produce a self-explanatory text. His rendition of the Japanese “mono no aware” as “plunged into melancholy” misses the mark. He may not have been much of a classicist – but in his days every schoolboy was still made familiar with Virgil’s “sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt” – there are tears in the wake of mortality – which in ancient times expressed a kind of all-pervasive sadness underpinning all our emotions and views.

In Seidensticker’s version the same passage reads: “Genji was not feeling well. A shower passed on a chilly mountain wind, and the sound of the waterfall was higher. Intermittently came a rather sleepy voice, solemn and somehow ominous, reading a sacred text. The most insensitive of men would have been aroused by the scene. Genji was unable to sleep."

Seidensticker's choice of words is more than questionable: “reading” suggests Buddhist monks would read the sutras in private rather than chanting it as a prayer. Worst of all, the phrase “aroused by the scene” is really ill chosen, since Genji, still reeling from a bad breakup, found his visit to the mountains anything but erotically stimulating. On the other hand Waley at least was trying to make head and tail of the waterfall filling a stagnant pool – “taki no yodomi mo masarite” – which Seidensticker, who was probably aware of the allusion to a poem from the Kokinshu, a canonical collection of Heian poems, preferred to sidestep altogether. The gist of the poem is a plea of unrequited love that is getting nowhere with the woman, while even the waters of a waterfall are getting everywhere. A Japanese reader from the eleventh century would immediately recognize the reference – the European reader from the twenty-first century has neither heard of the poem nor of the collection where it came from, and most likely never will. For all uses and purposes it should suffice to find the sentiment conveyed in the phrase as it stands. Knowing the allusion doesn’t add anything to the emotional impact. Seidensticker understood this, but he poured out the “stagnant pool” with the water, and that is something the conscientious translator doesn’t do. Therefore I reedited this passage: “Genji was not feeling well. A chilly mountain wind sprayed the slopes with showers and the sound of the waterfall filling the stagnant pool below grew louder with the rising water. Intermittently one could hear a rather sleepy voice, solemn and somehow ominous, reciting a sacred text. The scene would have depressed the most insensitive of men. Torn between conflicting thoughts, Genji was unable to sleep.”

Murasaki Shikibu passed away in about 1025 in Kyoto.

I heard this is Rice they are planting

2011-10-22T12:25:00.000-07:00

by michael sympson

Elegant things: A white coat worn over a violet waistcoat. Duck eggs. Shaved ice mixed with liana syrup and served in a bowl of new silver. A rosary of rock crystal. Snow on wisteria or plum blossoms. A pretty child eating strawberries.

Sei Shonagon

In the eyes of the Asian nations during the Dark Ages, and especially of Japan, China was the beacon of culture and civilization. It was more than professional courtesy when the Arab merchant, trading spices and luxury items across the Indian Ocean, admitted to his Chinese business partner that the splendors of China outshone the amenities of Bagdad. Between 960 AD and 1127 the rule of the Song Dynasty (Chinese: 宋朝) inaugurated an almost modern era of urban industry, of learning and comfort. China was the first country ever to establish a national bank and issue paper money. Gunpowder was mainly used for the fireworks on New Year’s Day until the minister of war in the Chinese cabinet thought of using it for siege engines and rocket launchers. The troops of the Song carried semi-automatic weapons, crossbows that could discharge thirty arrows per minute with the flick of a lever. A colony of foreign merchants – some of them came from Italy, a whole generation before Marco Polo – were living in Quanzhou, a city facing the Taiwan Straits, the world’s largest harbor and a center of maritime commerce that we know also included Japan. The “western barbarians” living here watched the urban denizens go to the playhouses and eat out in eight story-high restaurants with service in every floor, and every morning before work these people picked up without fail fresh pastry from the vendor together with the daily newspaper. The newspaper was written in those foreign pictographs – it made our man from Italy wonder: what could be so important, that people needed to read about it every day? Himself coming from a barely literate country he was simply amazed by the high degree of literacy in this place. Big publishing houses flooded the bookstalls with the earliest penny novels known to mankind. Chinese scientists invented marvels of mechanical engineering – precision instruments for astronomy and the detection of earthquakes. The curriculum in the schools was based on the Confucian classics and required the candidate to graduate with a “five-legged essay.” In the year of the battle of Hastings a young man prepared for his exams in the civil service who would become China’s finest poet, one of the four or five greatest: Su Tung-po (1037 – 1101). His calligraphies and monochromes are still admired.

Few if any of the foreigners ever came to see the countryside. You needed a permit from the Chinese authorities. So our man from Italy – no doubt a seasoned merchant, who had seen the world – could only guess how hard it was to work in the rice paddies, a life not at all helped by the social experiments of the reformer and Prime Minister Wang An-shih (1021 – 1086). And yet, in this world of subsistence economies, China’s industry and agriculture produced a huge surplus. The transmission belts of the watermills powered mechanized foundries and industrial assembly lines. No doubt, China held pole position on our planet in commerce and industry, and yet the Chinese would eventually lose their lead because they never invented glass, and without glass there are no optical instruments, no light bulbs and no vacuum tubes.

For the first time in Chinese history, a standing navy patrolled the seaboard and we hear of maritime expeditions and the invention of a compass discerning due north. The innovation would have been of great value to the Vikings who still depended on dead reckoning for their navigation. In 985 AD Bjarni Herjólfsson sailed from Iceland to Greenland and went off course; he sighted land after three days sailing due West. Bjarni spoke of his discovery to Leif Ericson who planted the first European settlement on American soil. The rest of Europe didn’t pay any attention. King Harald Hardrada of Norway prepared for the invasion of England. The Anglo-Saxon King had a message for him: “I will give you six feet of English soil, and since you are tall six feet and ten inches.” From Hadrada’s armada only thirty ships made it back to Norway.

From the Rhine-Valley to Novgorod the merchants pooled their commerce in the Hanseatic League; they fought piracy with their own standing navies and defended their chartered liberties against the feudal warlords – glorified highwaymen in chain mail who hand on sword, extorted privileges, estates and moneys from the monarchs and the burghers and from each other. At night the dank lanes under a slippery coat of horse manure merged into the shadow of damp, fortress-like cathedrals with Roman arches, only in Cordoba gas lanterns illuminated the Arabian nights. Al Andalus was a shining bacon of culture and learning – the only on European soil. The foundation of Oxford would have been pointless without a crate of books purchased in Toledo – transcriptions of the Greeks, books on mathematics and astronomy. The ladies from the court of a local emir passed on their art to the Troubadours of the Languedoc. For the pope this carried the smell of heresy and he ordered to eradicate the Cathars with every means possible: “You just kill, the lord will know his own.”

Our man from Italy – fragments of his memoir can still be found in the archives of Genoa – decided to board a junk in the Chinese port setting sail for Japan. He landed in Honshū, from where he continued by ox-cart.

After a bone-shaking journey on unpaved roads, the merchant arrived at the Imperial Court in Kyoto, a world very different from the bustle and industry in Quanzhou. We know such travels have been made – Murasaki Shikibu (973 AD – 1025) in her novel tells of an embassy from Korea.

Kyoto was still the only secular center of urban life in all of Japan. When we hear of Japan, we think of Ukiyoe, Ikebana and Bonsai, of Karate and Aikido, of raw fish for lunch, of Kabuki, Noh and Bunraku, of Bushido, of Zen and of Tatami mats on the floor, of Geishas, of Samurais and Ninjas; of Tokanoma scrolls hanging behind a single exquisite flower; of soy sauce, public baths and the bullet train, of industrial might and computer controlled heated toilet seats. Not a single one of these things existed in the Heian era (794 AD – 1185), but there was already Sumo wrestling, going back to about 250 AD, strictly as an activity at the Shinto shrines – however the religious life of Japan in the Heian period was dominated by Buddhism.

With its emphasis on gorgeous ceremony and ritual, Shingon Buddhism was as affluent and firmly established in Japan as eight hundred years later the Church of England would be in 18th century in England. It was the principal escape for the nobility. Abdicated emperors retreated to the monasteries; discarded empresses became distinguished and influential abbesses. Yet among all that din of gongs and bells, of praying and chanting, a lady in waiting from the Imperial Palace would rather peek through the curtain on the scrumptious gentleman next door, a man considerably younger than her. Unfortunately he had eyes only for the service and seemed in tears over the arcane doctrines of a sermon the lady didn’t catch. With a sigh she noted: “A preacher ought to be good-looking. For, if we are properly to understand his worthy sentiments, we must keep our eyes on him when he speaks; should we look away, we may forget to listen. Accordingly an ugly preacher may well be the source of sin – but I really must stop myself here. If I were still young, I might risk the consequence of putting down such impieties, but even in my present station, I should be less flippant” (Sei Shonagon, Pillow-Book). Wood was the preferred building material. The typical mansion was painted in bright colors, sometimes under a roof of glossy shingles, but more often ducked under a thick wattle roof. The structure was suspended on round pillars of plain wood with a slightly elevated floor, deep eaves and open piling to keep out the damp. Set in an elegantly landscaped garden with artificial lakes, miniature hills, and carefully placed rocks, the compound was surrounded by a whitewashed stonewall with covered entrances wide enough to receive an ox-cart. Indoors the Ladies and Gentlemen slept on rolled out straw mats with a wooden block as pillow. The only furniture was the occasional chest, a brazier and a screen. A six-foot portable frame supported a decorative “curtain of state,” which was to protect the ladies of the house from prying eyes, callers were asked to take a seat on the gallery outside of the sliding door or in the corridor between the apartments. Hygiene was still a thing of the future, even in Japan. His lordship was caught cracking the lice on his chest. With no heating, the inhabitants shivered through the winter with only a thin sliding door between them and the snow. During summer they sweated in fumigated silk robes.

They bathed once a year, if at all. Life was short.

The educated Japanese – men and women of the upper class – was a scholar of Chinese culture and as such still trapped in a time warp – to him China hadn’t changed since the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907 AD). Tang architecture and the splendor of Tang implements and porcelain remained the model of elegant living for the Japanese courtier. There was virtually no urban middle class. And yet the finest pieces of urban literature from this period anywhere on the planet came from here: Sei Shonagon (965 AD – 1010) finished and published her Pillow-Book in 994 AD.

She was a lady in waiting at the court of Kyoto, a descendant of the Fujiwara, the clan that for two centuries ruled the country and the emperors by marrying their women into the imperial family. Under the tutelage of his Fujiwara councilors, His Majesty whiled away the days placing bets on the life expectancy of a piled up mountain of thawing snow.

Yet even keeping watch over a dwindling snowdrift offered an opportunity to shine: “The snow lay thick on the ground and it was so cold that the lattices had all been shut. I and the other ladies were sitting with Her Majesty, chatting and poking the embers in the brazier. ‘Tell me, Shonagon,’ said the Empress, ‘how is the snow on Hsiang-lu peak?’ I told the maid to raise one of the lattices and then rolled up the blind all the way. Her Majesty smiled. I was not alone in recognizing the Chinese poem she had quoted; in fact all the ladies knew the lines had even rewritten them in Japanese. Yet no one but me had managed to think of it instantly. ‘Yes, indeed,’ people said when they heard the story. ‘She was born to serve an Empress like ours.’” That was later, on the peak of Sei Shonagon’s powers. Initially the young lady commenced her service on a rather unpromising note: “When I first went into waiting at Her Majesty’s Court, so many different things embarrassed me that I could not even reckon them up and I was always on the verge of tears. As a result, I tried to avoid appearing before the Empress except at night, and even then I stayed behind a three-foot curtain of state. On one occasion Her Majesty brought out some pictures and showed them to me, but I was so ill at ease that I could hardly stretch out my hand to take them. She pointed to one picture after another, explaining what each represented. ... It was a very cold time of the year and when Her Majesty gave me the paintings I could hardly see her hands, but, from what I made out, they were of a light pink hue that I found extraordinarily attractive. I gazed at the Empress with amazement. Simple as I was and unaccustomed to such wonderful sights, I did not understand how a being like this could possibly exist in our world.” Sei Shonagon had no pretensions to being a scholar. She was a wit, loyal to her empress, yet neither much liked by her colleagues nor interested to find it in her heart to develop a liking for them. She had an eye for the graces of manly elegance and dispensed her favors with the freedom, which the custom of the period both permitted and expected. A cut above most of the society women at Court, Sei Shonagon steps out of the pages of her book as a snappy dresser, elegant and quick to take the measure of others but not willingly submitting to being judged herself. She was as proud as a wellborn and well-bred lady of the Heian era possibly could be, something of a snooty bitch, flaunting her ignorance of everyday practical matters with a sneer: “I was told they were planting rice.” As for “inconsequential” people like you and me, we would have counted only as the odd object of amusement: “Carpenters have such peculiar customs of eating their meals.” That was certainly worlds apart from “a man of scholarly accomplishment,” who “is inexpressibly splendid. Though he may be of a dreadfully low ranking (sic!) and no joy to look at, he fills you with awe and envy at the way he can spend time in the presence of those at the very highest levels, as their tutor and mentor to be called upon for scholarly consultations. It’s also splendid to see him praised for his dedicatory prayer, or a memorial presented to the throne, or some preface to poetry.” The man she was speaking of was obviously a geek: even in Sei Shonagon’s world, men preferred to impress the ladies rather with their prowess in the sports – football, archery, horse racing, polo and wrestling. When it rained men and women played board games indoor, mainly go and shogi – the Japanese variation of chess. Cock fighting was a popular pastime. Astrology and the Chinese calendar controlled the seasons and festivals: the ‘New Year’ and the ‘Blue Horses’ in winter, the ‘Hollyhock Festival’ in spring, the summer ‘Festival of the Iris,’ festivals for the dead, for Chrysanthemums, for the first harvest, and in October the ‘Gosechi Dances.’

Sometimes it may seem the diarist had nothing weightier to note than the couture of the season – those impressive under-robes of red silk. Yet in the next sentence she impales on her pen another of her pet hates: “How I hate it to have in the morning the lover rush about to collect his kit and mutter under his breath when fishing for his socks under the straw-mat.” In her world it was a rare thing, that “Two women, let alone a man and a woman, vow themselves to each other forever, and actually manage to remain on good terms to the end.” Sei Shonagon was an unashamed libertine, and the palace was not exactly a school of bourgeois virtues. “When I imagine what it is like to be one of those women who live at home, faithfully serving their husbands – women who have not a single exciting prospect in life yet who believe they are perfectly happy – I am filled with scorn. Often they are women of quality, yet have no opportunity to find out what the world is like. Even less can I bear men who believe that women serving in the Palace are bound to be frivolous and wicked, although I suppose the prejudice is understandable. After all, women at Court do not hide behind fans and screens, they walk about and look the people they meet in the eye.”

With phenomenal sensitivity Sei Shonagon has recorded in her book the minutest sensations – the monotonous creaking of a carriage axle, little gestures, the crease in your trousers or the swishing of a curtain over polished floorboards. Not everything has to be pretty to catch her attention. Under the heading of “Worthless Things” she speaks of people who’re “both ugly and unpleasant” in the same breath with “clothing starch that’s gone bad – I know an awful lot of people hate this, but that’s no reason why I shouldn’t note it here. And why should I avoid mentioning the soot-stained fire tongs that are submitted to the flames after a funeral? After all, these are things that exist in the world. I never intended this book to be seen by others, so I’ve written whatever came to mind, without worrying too much whether people would find it strange or unpleasant.” A little later she is utterly enchanted with the way someone is turning his head sideways when holding a book to the dimming candle. Her pleasures may seem simple but they are refined: “You’ve read the first volume of a tale you hadn’t come across before,” she writes, “and you long to go on with it – what a joy when you find the other volume. It is also wonderfully pleasing when you’re at a soirée in the presence of Her Majesty, and as she speaks, it’s you she singles out to look at. Or if one of your poems is talked of by everyone and noted down when they hear it. This hasn’t happened to me yet (sic!), but I can imagine how it would feel. Or when someone you don’t like meets with some misfortune, you’re pleased even though you know this is wicked of you.” Not being the most patient person in the world – “the most boring time of all is when it rains” – the “spiritual” sessions at the annual retreat to a Buddhist monastery became something of a chore.

It was customary to constantly keep the white painted face hidden behind a fan and to dye the teeth black; the eyebrows were clean-shaven and replaced by a smudge of paint higher up on the brow. These women would never show themselves in the nude, not even in their most intimate moments. The handwriting was expected to be neat and the faux pas was unforgivable should you – yes you Sir! – ever forget to follow up with a proper love letter on your latest tête-à-tête. Preferably it should be attached to a dew-dripping sprig from a plum tree, and it absolutely had to be delivered only minutes after departure – about 4.30 a.m. Well-drawn calligraphy could get you a long way to atone for an otherwise unimpressive text – “just a little nothing” it said in one instance – in this world of unrelenting leisure a love affair easily foundered on a poorly executed handwriting. Everything was expected to be perfect and yet to appear casual – the calligraphy, the ink, the choice of paper, the way this was folded, the appearance and dress of the messenger to whom the delivery was entrusted. The imperial courtier was up all-night and rotated through the roster of his mistresses on a tight schedule. The amorous visitor better made it snappy: “I can’t bear it to see a man visit his lady in the palace and then still hang around for a bite to eat” (Sei Shonagon).

Perhaps once a year he made time for a visit to his own wife; only commoners and peasants used to make due with just one woman in their entire life.

The conduct of lovers was an art based on an exacting etiquette of behavior and taste. Real privacy in these crammed conditions of gaping lattices, shifting screens and barely foot-long curtains of state was not easy to come by; indeed the lover actually advertized his presence by hanging his trousers over the lady’s curtain stand. There was no “abomination of the flesh,” neither in the sense of Christian sin, nor as an expression of Confucian bigotry. The infidelity of “the man with the mobility of a bee and of the woman rooted like a flower in her bed” was something of an institution, however, it still was infidelity. Jealousy figured large in the literature of the period; it became the cause of violence and even madness. The ideal man was gentle and sensitive, on suitable occasions even ready to shed a tear or two, and he was expected to master a wide range of artistic skills. He was a slightly epicene figure with a round white face, powdered and scented, keeping the more masculine attributes underneath his robes for the hours when all cats are grey.

That was at least the theory. In the real world, after a stag night: “the old Minister of the Right, Lord Akimutsu, came staggering along the aisle and banged into the screen behind which we sat, tearing a hole in it. He is getting far too old for this sort of thing. But I am sure he did not at all notice what impression he was making when he snatched the fans from the faces of the ladies, and with a roaring laughter shouted jokes, many of which in very bad taste” (Murasaki Shikibu, Diary).

For Sei Shonagon this kind of drunken revel seemed OK; whether sober or drunk, she always kept an arrow of irreverent sarcasm in her quiver; it was not easy to impress her. She knew that she was endowed with more brains than most people in her surrounding and she used these brains to express her ostentatious femininity – listen to this: “We arrive after nightfall in an unfamiliar place. For fear of being too conspicuous, one refrains from lighting a lamp but prefers to sit near the other people, even though they are hidden in the dark ....” Compare this with anything you might have read in the Norse sagas, the rest of Europe didn’t produce anything worth reading in those days – except perhaps for the poetry at the court in Cordoba.

During her service in the palace, Sei Shonagon harbored dreams of retiring after her dismissal to “a large, attractive house.”

“My family would of course be staying with me; and in one of the wings I should have a friend, an elegant lady-in-waiting from the Palace, with whom I could converse. We would meet to discuss recent poems and other things of interest. We should read together our letters and together compose our answers. If my friend has visitors, I should receive him in one of our beautifully decorated rooms and on a rainy day invite him to stay.” For some reason this was not to be. The records are sketchy.

About 1010 she and her little daughter were seen wandering in torn clothes the streets of Kyoto, trying to sell worthless stuff picked from the rubbish dumps. How it came to this is unknown.

We know that much, however: due to the death of the Empress Sadako in childbirth Sei Shonagon had lost the most important of her benefactors and friends at court. A new consort took Sadako’s place, the sheltered teenage empress Akiko. She was surrounded by a new generation of ladies in waiting ready to elbow out the libertines of the ancient regime: “Everybody knows how strongly the Empress is opposed to anything that smacks of flirtation,” wrote Akiko’s lady in waiting, the immensely gifted and astute Murasaki Shikibu in her diary. For Sei Shonagon she had a few choice words: “Sei Shonagon’s most typical characteristic is her extraordinary narcissism. Her chief pleasure consists in shocking people; and as each of her eccentricities is becoming only too painfully familiar, her stunts to catch attention become more and more desperate. Once a person of taste and refinement, she has now abandoned all restrain from making a spectacle of herself, even under the most inappropriate circumstances. Soon she will have forfeited all claims to be regarded as anything but a buffoon, and what will become of her when she is too old for her present duties?” (Murasaki Shikibu, Diary). Indeed, what became of her? We shall never know.