The Invention of Solitude (16 page)

“Everything went smoothly enough. The baby, however, was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck so tightly that he could hardly breathe. He was blue….

“I tried desperately to restore the baby’s respiration and finally he started breathing; he turned from blue to pink. All this time Marina was smoking, silent, not uttering a sound, looking steadily at the baby, at me….

“I came back the next day and then saw the child every Sunday for a good many weeks. In a letter (May 10, 1925), Marina wrote: ‘Altschuller directs everything concerning Mur with pride and love. Before eating, Mur gets one teaspoonful of lemon juice without sugar. He’s fed according to the system of Professor Czerny, who saved thousands of newborn children in Germany during the war. Altschuller sees Mur every Sunday. Percussion, auscultation, some kind of arithmetic calculation. Then he writes down for me how to feed Mur next week, what to give him, how much butter, how much lemon, how much milk, how gradually to increase the amount. Every time he comes he remembers what was given last time, without carrying any notes…. Sometimes I have a crazy desire just to take his hand and kiss it’….

“The boy grew quickly and became a healthy child adored by his mother and her friends. I saw him for the last time when he was not yet one year old. At that time Marina moved to France and there she lived for the next fourteen years. George (Mur’s formal name) went to school and soon became an ardent student of literature, music, and art. In 1936 his sister Alia, then in her early twenties, left the family and France and returned to Soviet Russia, following her father. Marina stayed now with her very young son, alone in France … under extreme hardship, financial and moral. In 1939 she applied for a Soviet visa and returned to Moscow with her son. Two years later, in August 1941, her life came to a tragic end….

“The war was still on. Young George Efron was at the front. ‘Good-bye literature, music, school,’ he wrote to his sister. He signed his letter ‘Mur.’ As a soldier he proved to be a courageous and fearless fighter, took part in many battles, and died in July 1944, one of hundreds of victims of a battle near the village of Druika on the Western Front. He was only twenty years old.”

The Book of Memory. Book Four.

Several blank pages. To be followed by profuse illustrations. Old family photographs, for each person his own family, going back as many generations as possible. To look at these with utmost care.

Afterwards, several sequences of reproductions, beginning with the portraits Rembrandt painted of his son, Titus. To include all of them: from the view of the little boy in 1650 (golden hair, red feathered hat) to the 1655 portrait of Titus “puzzling over his lessons” (pensive, at his desk, compass dangling from his left hand, right thumb pressed against his chin) to Titus in 1658 (seventeen years old, the extraordinary red hat, and, as one commentator has written, “The artist has painted his son with the same sense of penetration usually reserved for his own features”) to the last surviving canvas of Titus, from the early 1660’s: “The face seems that of a weak old man ravaged with disease. Of course, we look at it with hindsight—we know that Titus will predecease his father….”

To be followed by the 1602 portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh and his eight-year old son Wat (artist unknown) that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. To note: the uncanny similarity of their poses. Both father and son facing forward, left hands on hips, right feet pointing out at forty-five degree angles, the left feet pointing forward, and the somber determination on the boy’s face to imitate the self-confident, imperious stare of the father. To remember: that when Raleigh was released after a thirteen-year incarceration in the Tower of London (1618) and launched out on the doomed voyage to Guiana to clear his name, Wat was with him. To remember that Wat, leading a reckless military charge against the Spanish, lost his
life in the jungle. Raleigh to his wife: “I never knew what sorrow meant until now.” And so he went back to England, and allowed the King to chop off his head.

To be followed by more photographs, perhaps several dozen: Mallarmé’s son, Anatole; Anne Frank (“This is a photo that shows me as I should always like to look. Then I would surely have a chance to go to Hollywood. But now, unfortunately, I usually look different”); Mur; the children of Cambodia; the children of Atlanta. The dead children. The children who will vanish, the children who are dead. Himmler: “I have made the decision to annihilate every Jewish child from the face of the earth.” Nothing but pictures. Because, at a certain point, the words lead one to conclude that it is no longer possible to speak. Because these pictures are the unspeakable.

He has spent the greater part of his adult life walking through cities, many of them foreign. He has spent the greater part of his adult life hunched over a small rectangle of wood, concentrating on an even smaller rectangle of white paper. He has spent the greater part of his adult life standing up and sitting down and pacing back and forth. These are the limits of the known world. He listens. When he hears something, he begins to listen again. Then he waits. He watches and waits. And when he begins to see something, he watches and waits again. These are the limits of the known world.

The room. Brief mention of the room and/or the dangers lurking inside it. As in the image: Hölderlin in his room.

To revive the memory of that mysterious, three-month journey on foot, crossing the mountains of the Massif Central alone, his fingers gripped tightly around the pistol in his pocket; that journey from Bordeaux to Stuttgart (hundreds of miles) that preceded his first mental breakdown in 1802.

“Dear friend … I have not written to you for a long time, and meanwhile have been in France and have seen the sad, lonely earth; the shepherds and shepherdesses of southern France and individual beauties, men and women, who grew up in fear of political uncertainty and of hunger…. The mighty element,
the fire of heaven and the silence of the people, their life in nature, their confinedness and their contentment, moved me continually, and as one says of heroes, I can well say of myself that Apollo has struck me.”

Arriving in Stuttgart, “deathly pale, very thin, with hollow wild eyes, long hair and a beard, and dressed like a beggar,” he stood before his friend Matthison and spoke one word only: “Hölderlin.”

Six months later, his beloved Suzette was dead. By 1806, schizophrenia, and thereafter, for thirty-six years, fully half his life, he lived alone in the tower built for him by Zimmer, the carpenter from Tubingen—
zimmer
, which in German means
room
.

TO ZIMMER

The lines of life are various as roads or as

The limits of the mountains are, and what we are

Down here, in harmonies, in recompense,

In peace for ever, a god will finish there.

Toward the end of Hölderlin’s life, a visitor to the tower mentioned Suzette’s name. The poet replied: “Ah, my Diotima. Don’t speak to me about my Diotima. Thirteen sons she bore me. One is Pope, another is the Sultan, the third is the Emperor of Russia….” And then: “Do you know what happened to her? She went mad, she did, mad, mad, mad.”

During those years, it is said, Hölderlin rarely went out. When he did leave his room, it was only to take aimless walks through the countryside, filling his pockets with stones and picking flowers, which he would later tear to shreds. In town, the students laughed at him, and children ran away in fear whenever he approached to greet them. Towards the end, his mind became so muddled that he began to call himself by different names—Scardinelli, Killalusimeno—and once, when a visitor was slow to leave his room, he showed him the door and said, with a finger raised in warning, “I am the Lord God.”

In recent years, there has been renewed speculation about Hölderlin’s life in that room. One man contends that Hölderlin’s
madness was feigned, and that in response to the stultifying political reaction that overwhelmed Germany following the French revolution, the poet withdrew from the world. He lived, so to speak, underground in the tower. According to this theory, all of the writings of Hölderlin’s madness (1806–1843) were in fact composed in a secret, revolutionary code. There is even a play that expands upon this idea. In the final scene of that work, the young Marx pays Hölderlin a visit in his tower. We are led to presume from this encounter that it was the old and dying poet who inspired Marx to write
The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
If this were so, then Hölderlin would not only have been the greatest German poet of the nineteenth century, but also a central figure in the history of political thought: the link between Hegel and Marx. For it is a documented fact that as young men Hölderlin and Hegel were friends. They were students together at the seminary in Tübingen.

Speculations of this sort, however, strike A. as tedious. He has no difficulty in accepting Hölderlin’s presence in the room. He would even go so far as to say that Hölderlin could not have survived anywhere else. If not for Zimmer’s generosity and kindness, it is possible that Hölderlin’s life would have ended prematurely. To withdraw into a room does not mean that one has been blinded. To be mad does not mean that one has been struck dumb. More than likely, it is the room that restored Hölderlin to life, that gave him back whatever life it was left for him to live. As Jerome commented on the Book of Jonah, glossing the passage that tells of Jonah in the belly of the whale: “You will note that where you would think should be the end of Jonah, there was his safety.”

“The image of man has eyes,” wrote Hölderlin, during the first year of his life in that room, “whereas the moon has light. King Oedipus has an eye too many perhaps. The sufferings of this man, they seem indescribable, unspeakable, inexpressible. If the drama represents something like this, that is
why. But what comes over me as I think of you now? Like brooks the end of something sweeps me away, which expands like Asia. Of course, this affliction, Oedipus has it too. Of course, that is why. Did Hercules suffer too? Indeed…. For to fight with God, like Hercules, that is an affliction. And immortality amidst the envy of this life, to share in that, is an affliction too. But this is also an affliction, when a man is covered with freckles, to be wholly covered with many a spot! The beautiful sun does that: for it rears up all things. It leads young men along their course with the allurements of its beams as though with roses. The afflictions that Oedipus bore seem like this, as when a poor man complains there is something he lacks. Son of Laios, poor stranger in Greece! Life is death, and death is a kind of life.”

The room. Counter-argument to the above. Or: reasons for being in the room.

The Book of Memory. Book Five.

Two months after his father’s death (January 1979), A.’s marriage collapsed. The problems had been brewing for some time, and at last the decision was made to separate. If it was one thing for him to accept this break-up, to be miserable about it and yet to understand that it was inevitable, it was quite another thing for him to swallow the consequences it entailed: to be separated from his son. The thought of it was intolerable to him.

He moved into his room on Varick Street in early spring. For the next few months he shuttled between that room and the house in Dutchess County where he and his wife had been living for. the past three years. During the week: solitude in the city; on the weekends: visits to the country, one hundred miles away, where he slept in what was now his former work room and played with his son, not yet two years old, and read to him from the treasured books of the period:
Let’s Go Trucks
,
Caps for Sale
,
Mother Goose.

Shortly after he moved into the Varick Street room, the six-year old Etan Patz disappeared from the streets of that same neighborhood. Everywhere A. turned, there was a photograph of the boy (on lampposts, in shop windows, on blank brick walls), headlined by the words: LOST CHILD. Because the face
of this child did not differ drastically from the face of his own child (and even if it had, it might not have mattered), every time he saw the photograph of this face he was made to think of his own son—and in precisely these terms: lost child. Etan Patz had been sent downstairs one morning by his mother to wait for the school bus (the first day following a long bus driver strike, and the boy had been eager to do this one little thing on his own, to make this small gesture of independence), and then was not seen again. Whatever it was that happened to him, it happened without a trace. He could have been kidnapped, he could have been murdered, or perhaps he simply wandered off and came to his death in a place where no one could see him. The only thing that can be said with any certainty is that he vanished—as if from the face of the earth. The newspapers made much of this story (interviews with the parents, interviews with the detectives assigned to the case, articles about the boy’s personality: what games he liked to play, what foods he liked to eat), and A. began to realize that the presence of this disaster—superimposed on his own and admittedly much smaller disaster—was inescapable. Each thing that fell before his eyes seemed to be no more than an image of what was inside him. The days went by, and each day a little more of the pain inside him was dragged out into the open. A sense of loss took hold of him, and it would not let go. And there were times when this loss was so great, and so suffocating, that he thought it would never let go.

Some weeks later, at the beginning of summer. A radiant New York June: clarity of the light falling on the bricks; blue, transparent skies, zeroing to an azure that would have charmed even Mallarmé.

A.’s grandfather (on his mother’s side) was slowly beginning to die. Only a year before he had performed magic tricks at A.’s son’s first birthday party, but now, at eighty-five, he was so weak that he could no longer stand without support, could no longer move without an effort of will so intense that merely to think of moving was enough to exhaust him. There was a family conference at the doctor’s office, and the decision was made to send him to Doctor’s Hospital on East End Avenue
and Eighty-eighth Street (the same hospital in which his wife had died of amniotropic lateral sclerosis—Lou Gehrig’s disease—eleven years earlier). A. was at that conference, as were his mother and his mother’s sister, his grandfather’s two children. Because neither of the women could remain in New York, it was agreed that A. would be responsible for everything. A.’s mother had to return home to California to take care of her own gravely ill husband, while A.’s aunt was about to go to Paris to visit her first grandchild, the recently born daughter of her only son. Everything, it seemed, had quite literally become a matter of life and death. At which point, A. suddenly found himself thinking (perhaps because his grandfather had always reminded him of W.C. Fields) of a scene from the 1932 Fields film,
Million Dollar Legs:
Jack Oakey runs frantically to catch up with a departing stage coach and beseeches the driver to stop; “It’s a matter of life and death!” he shouts. And the driver calmly and cynically replies: “What isn’t?”