A Reading Diary (12 page)

In Buenos Aires, when I was growing up in the late fifties and early sixties, many of my friends came from German Jewish families. Goethe and Schiller were conventional staples of the ancient, all-embracing German
Kultur
that the immigrants had brought in their cardboard suitcases and knotted bundles. In Germany, Schiller (and Goethe) had long lost their dreadful local accents; in the Diaspora, Goethe (and Schiller) had acquired the tone and humour of the shtetl. Whenever a discussion broke out among the German parents of my friends, the one about to lose the argument would shout, ‘ “O
aza nar,’ sagt Goethe”
(“ ‘Oh, what a fool!’ says Goethe”), to which the other would counter,
“ ‘Nebisch,’sagt Schiller”
(“ ‘You nitwit,’ says Schiller”), and the battle would end with a comforting laugh.

Perhaps the void in the English-speaking world exists because Goethe must be entered culturally: not book by book, dipping one’s toe in his writings, but rather by plunging into his vast influence, his oceanic scope, his echoing waves, his horizon-reaching vistas of the world. “I’ll goethe you lot,” our teacher told us on the first day of class at the Pestalozzi Schule (the German school in Buenos Aires, which I attended for a single year), and made us learn by heart “Erlkönig” and
“Es war ein König in Thüle”
and “Gingo Biloba.”

Nietzsche, seldom generous in his praise, saw Goethe as uniquely above nationalities and national literatures. “Goethe,” he wrote in
Human, All Too Human
, “is not just a good and great human being but a civilization in himself.” If that is so, then
Elective Affinities
, written in the last years of his life, reads like a kind of etiquette manual of Goethean civilization.

Note: Goethe wanted to give his son August a toy guillotine for his twelfth birthday. August’s mother, Christiane, was indignant.

The mock-mathematical formulations to outline human behaviour that Goethe puts in Eduard’s mouth (“Look out, my friend, for D! What will B do when C is taken away from him? He’ll go back to his A, his alpha and omega!”) echo in the tests published in our lifestyle magazines. Are you a good lover? Are you a dutiful citizen? Are you a happy person? Tick the boxes and find the formula that applies to you. These are forms of consolation, I suppose, to allow for the illusion that we’re not living in ambiguity.

Charlotte, the architect who supervised the building of our library, tells us that she is planning the new public swimming pool in a nearby village. It needs to be practical, of course, large enough to house the crowds expected every summer, but also emblematic of the mayor’s ambitions, something “grand and modern” as well as “neat and clean.” I suggest that all architecture is unavoidably symbolic. “Unfortunately,” she says.

I’ve reached the moment in the novel when Eduard and the Captain are dabbling in urbanism, discussing the creation of a village that will follow, not the Swiss style of architecture, but merely the Swiss style “of neatness and cleanliness.” A beggar comes up to them, asking for alms.
Eduard, upset at being interrupted, angrily dismisses him. The man withdraws “with small steps,” defending “the right of beggars,” “who could be refused alms but should not be insulted because they were as much under the protection of God and the king as anyone else.”

The Captain’s solution to the problem of begging—systematizing the almsgiving by depositing a sum with an elderly couple who would pay beggars at the exit (not the entrance) of the village—once again resonates for me when I think of the cities I’ve lived in: Calgary, Toronto, Buenos Aires, Paris, London. It is, like the mathematical formula devised to explain away emotions, a method for
not
recognizing the humanity of those in need. I must remember: this is not Goethe, this is the Captain speaking.

Once, as I sat reading on the Paris Métro, a beggar reciting the usual litany of
“Mesdames et messieurs
, I apologize for disturbing you, etc. etc.” from coach to coach suddenly threw down the newspapers that justified his begging and shouted at us, “Look at me! All I want you to do is look at me! I’m a human being too, for goodness’ sake! Look at me, you bastards, under your winter coats you’re all like me!”

Eduard and Charlotte, Ottilie and the Captain feel that their ideas about love place them outside the common
circle of society, just as we, the readers, bound by our own convictions, feel outside the reality of fiction, unwilling even to imagine that we too are the Red King’s dream.

In Lenz’s
Der Waldbruder
, his companion piece to
Werther
, the character based on Goethe writes, “All this contrasts so dreadfully with our style of love.”

The postwoman brings the daily gossip: someone leaving, someone dead, someone getting married. The house at the corner of the village will be rented to a nurse from the local hospital.

Goethe: “Everything seemed to take its accustomed course. For even in the most terrible situations, when everything is at stake, people live on as if it were nothing of importance.” That meekness is always surprising. Auden, in his poem on Breughel’s painting of Icarus falling into the sea, observed that the Old Masters were never wrong about suffering, “how it takes place/ While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” I think of how life went on in Argentina during the military dictatorship, people continuing with their daily lives while their neighbours were being kidnapped and tortured, or pushed into a plane and dropped manacled into the river—
continuing with their shopping, their social calls, their worries about prices and the weather—while news drifted through from time to time about a mysterious disappearance or a late-night arrest, together with excuses half believed in, maybe the neighbours were on holidays, maybe they’d been involved in some criminal activities, maybe they’d moved, and everything seemingly normal, their daily routine uninterrupted, even though, as Auden says, they “must have seen/ Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,/ Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

Goethe has this to say about Eduard’s love for Ottilie: “Secretly, he had given himself over completely to the feeling of his passion.” This is, in some sense, the emotional equivalent of that political passivity—self-absorption masquerading as passion.

I could compose a diary made exclusively of fragments from other diaries. This would reflect my habit of thinking in quotations.

From Ottilie’s diary:

• “Life without love, without the physical presence of the one you love, is nothing but a
  ‘comédie à tiroir J
  a
  conventional farce.” And later: “Politeness of heart”: an extraordinary concept, and so true, immediately recognizable. It is what Chateaubriand calls the emotion in which love is no longer a rapture and has not yet become a “passionate friendship.” “No one wanders under palm trees unpunished, and the way one behaves no doubt must change in a place where elephants and tigers make their home.” Or the contrary, of course. This much-quoted line of Ottilie’s is for me, the wanderer, deeply ironic since it was under palm trees (when I was working for a publishing company in Tahiti during the seventies) that I decided to be true to myself and accept my life as a reader-writer. Every sojourn “under palm trees” is an exile. Ovid weeps at being in a foreign land; Cortázar rejoices in having left Argentina for Paris. And in both cases the imagination is fed by novelty or by contrast. “One always imagines oneself seeing. I think we dream merely to prevent ourselves from ceasing to see.” This precise description of human consciousness, of its terrible, Argus-like wakefulness, gives the whole novel its pathos: the four characters, the author and by extension the reader are constantly aware of their actions, and watch themselves hurtle towards their end without being able to deceive themselves or look away.
  

The books that pile up by the side of my bed appear to read themselves out loud to me in my sleep. Before turning off the light, I leaf through one of them, I read a couple of paragraphs, put it aside, take up another. After a few days, I have the impression of knowing them all.

Among the books by my bed tonight:

• Wayne Johnston,
  The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
  
• Enrique Vila-Matas,
  Bartleby y compañía
  
• Ellery Queen,
  The Vanishing Corpse
  
• Ian McEwan,
  Enduring Love
  
• Stefan George,
  Der siebente Ring
  
• W. G. Sebald,
  Luftkrieg und Literatur
  
• Ryu Murakami,
  Almost Transparent Blue
  
• Dorothy L. Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh,
  Thrones, Dominations
  
• Jacques Le Goff,
  La naissance du Purgatoire
  
• Max Rouquette,
  Ils sont les bergers des étoiles
  

Each of these books capriciously influences my reading of the one next to it. Is all reading associative reading?

I go through the final pages of
Elective Affinities
once again. The last time I read them I was in Calgary, and I remember snow falling very persistently on the street and
the tree outside, filling in any spaces of colour, covering any faults. Goethe had been there too, of course. In one of his collections of maxims he wrote, “Snow is a fictitious cleanliness.” Indeed.

When I lived in Calgary, the papers reported that a native man had been found frozen to death on a bench downtown; the alcohol in his blood had increased the hypothermia, and he lay there, the snow not falling fast enough to hide him from public view. We are each supposed to do our thing, play our role. And what role would that be?

C, accustomed to the rules of Canadian weather, is surprised by the fact that he can plant flowers in our garden as late as November. He has just planted cuttings of Maria Callas roses, a gift from our neighbour. The plot, with its handwritten sign, looks like a little graveyard in which the singer lies buried. From a poem by Stefan George: “Nun
lerne Trauer/ und Ernst von Rosen.”
(“Now learn sadness/ and seriousness from the roses”).

Is that what
Elective Affinities
is anachronistically parodying? Can it be read as a cynical apotheosis of the art of gardening, the art that flourished in the eighteenth century and became a subverted ecology—what one might call a
supremacist view of nature, even—reflected, almost a century and a half later, in Hitler’s concern with “the model of nature”? “We must leave room for pastures,” Hitler explained to Martin Bormann over dinner, on 28 September, 1941. “Nature has made the various regions of the earth in such a way as to ensure a sort of autarky for each.” Earth, for the players in the game of elective affinities, is a frame for their own ambitions: they are each like a little Adam entrusted with the run of Eden, and they can judge each region of the earth accordingly and yet be themselves blind to their Author’s judgment. Planting their roses, redesigning their gardens and tending their trees, they neglect their own lives.

The conclusion of
Elective Affinities
, for me, lies not on the book’s last page but on the deathbed of Joseph Roth, in Paris, on 22 May, 1939. Exhausted and bewildered, Roth hears whispered stories about the crimes at Buchenwald and an image comes to him: There, in what was once called Ettersberg, stands Goethe’s oak, under whose generous shadow the Master used to meet his beloved Frau von Stein. Now, casting that same shadow over the laundry and kitchen of the newly built concentration camp, the oak continues to stand, safeguarded by the so-called Nature Protection Act of the Third Reich. And Roth, with
his last breath, utters his comment, beyond rage and beyond irony:

(I suddenly realize that, due to a fortuitous etymology, I, one future reader among countless readers, am included in the very last word he wrote.)

With this vision, this joke, this heart-shattering observation, Joseph Roth dies.

The house, which we bought two years ago, is a wonderful house, a magical house. It rises on a small hill where once stood a temple to Dionysus, now replaced by a church dedicated to Saint Martin. The church, with which we share a wall, dates back to the thirteenth century, so we believe that the house was built around that time, and then was enlarged four or five centuries later. The adjacent barn collapsed in the early 1800s; last spring we had the walls restored and it now holds the library. Together, both buildings form an open square, each truncated end marked by a pigeon tower. Beyond lies the garden, and a small orchard planted over what was once the cemetery, so that the plums, cherries, figs and nuts that we are promised in the summer have fed on ancient bones. After we first saw the house, in the fall of 2000,1 dreamt constantly of it, perhaps because I hadn’t owned a place, a home to call mine, for the past ten years. We had rented here and there and made believe the places we lived in were ours, but now this house, unbelievably, is home.