Wittgenstein's Nephew (11 page)

only when I am sitting in the car
, between the place I have just left and the place I am driving to. I am happy only when I am traveling; when I arrive, no matter where, I am suddenly the unhappiest person imaginable. Basically I am one of those people who cannot bear to be anywhere and are happy only between places. Years ago I believed that such a fatal condition would soon lead inevitably to total madness, which I have dreaded all my life, but in fact it preserved me from it. My friend Paul suffered from the same disease: for many years he was always traveling, simply in order to get away from one place and go to another, but he never succeeded in finding happiness on arrival. This was something we often talked about. In the first half of his life he traveled back and forth between Paris and Vienna, between Madrid and Vienna, and between London and
Vienna, as was normal for someone of his background and means. I did the same—naturally on a more modest scale, though no less obsessively—switching between Nathal and Vienna, between Venice and Vienna, even between Rome and Vienna. I am the happiest traveler—when I am on the move, moving on or moving off—but the unhappiest arriver. Clearly this is a morbid condition. We shared another obsession, which can also be classified as a disease. This is the
counting disease
, from which Bruckner also suffered in his latter years. For whole weeks and months I have a compulsion, whenever I take a streetcar into the city, to look out of the window and count the spaces between the windows of the buildings along the route, or the windows themselves, or the doors, or the spaces between the doors; the faster the streetcar travels, the faster I have to count, and I feel I have to go on counting until I am almost demented. Thus, when traveling by streetcar through Vienna or some other city, I have often tried to escape this counting sickness by making a point of not looking out of the window and fixing my eyes on the floor, but this requires tremendous self-control, of which I am not always capable. My friend Paul also had this counting disease, but to a far more serious extent, and he often told me that it made traveling by streetcar unendurable. And we shared another habit that often drives me to distraction: when walking along the sidewalk he would not, like other people, step on the paving stones indiscriminately but had to proceed according to a carefully thought-out system: for instance, after two whole paving stones he had to place his foot precisely at either the top or the bottom end of the third, not indiscriminately
in the middle. With people like us nothing could be left to chance or carelessness—everything had to be thought out with geometrical, symmetrical, and mathematical precision. I observed Paul's counting disease and his eccentric walking habits
right from the beginning
. People always talk about the attraction of opposites, but in our case the attraction was due to the countless things we had in common; this soon struck me about him, and him about me. We shared so many hundreds and thousands of likes and dislikes, often being attracted to the same people and repelled by the same people. But this does not mean that we agreed about everything, that all our tastes and opinions were identical. He loved Madrid, for instance—I hated it. I loved the Adriatic—he hated it; and so on. However, we both loved Schopenhauer, as well as Novalis and Pascal, Velázquez and Goya, and we were both equally repelled by the wild but utterly unartistic El Greco. In the last months of his life, the
Herr Baron
was a mere shadow of his former self, as they say, and the more spectral the shadow became, the more everyone dissociated himself from it. I myself could naturally not feel the same about Paul's shadow as I had felt about the real Paul of earlier days. We hardly saw each other, because he often did not leave his apartment in the Stallburggasse for days on end, and we seldom arranged to meet. The
Herr Baron was going out like a light
, as they say. From time to time, without his suspecting it, I saw him in the city center, walking along laboriously, yet trying hard to maintain his accustomed bearing, by the walls of the houses in the Graben, into the Kohlmarkt and up to St. Michael's Church, then into the Stallburggasse. He was only the
shadow of a man, in a very real sense, and this shadow suddenly frightened me. I did not dare to go up and speak to him. I preferred to have a bad conscience rather than to meet him. As I watched him, I suppressed my conscience and refrained from approaching him, because I was suddenly afraid. We shun those who bear the mark of death, and this is a form of baseness to which even I succumbed. Quite deliberately, out of a base instinct for self-preservation, I shunned my friend in the last months of his life, and for this I cannot forgive myself. Seen from across the street, he was like someone to whom the world had long since given notice to quit but who was compelled to stay in it, no longer belonging to it but unable to leave it. Dangling from his emaciated arms—
grotesque, grotesque
—were the shopping nets in which he laboriously carried home his purchases of fruit and vegetables, naturally apprehensive that someone might see him in this wretched state and afraid of what they might think. Perhaps the reason I did not go up and speak to him was that I was equally embarrassed and wished to spare him. I do not know whether it was because I was afraid of someone who was the embodiment of death or because I felt I had to spare him an encounter with someone who was not yet destined to go the same way. It was probably both. Watching him, I felt ashamed. I felt it shameful that I was not yet finished, as my friend already was. I am not a good character. I am quite simply not a good person. I dissociated myself from my friend, like all the others who had been his friends, because, like them, I wanted to dissociate myself from death and was afraid of being brought face to face with it. For
everything
about my
friend now spoke of death. Toward the end he naturally did not try to make contact.
I
had to get in touch with him, but I did so at longer and longer intervals, constantly inventing new and more pathetic excuses. Now and then we went to the Sacher and the Ambassador, and of course to the Bräunerhof, which was the most convenient meeting place for him. When I could not get out of it I met him alone, but I preferred to go with friends, so that they could share the dreadful burden, which was almost too much to bear alone. The more remorseless his disintegration, the more elegantly he dressed, but the expensive and elegant clothes he wore—inherited from a Prince Schwarzenberg who had died years earlier—made the sight of him sheer torture, for there was scarcely any life left in him. The sight was not grotesque but simply shocking. No one really wanted to have anything more to do with him, for the person they occasionally saw in the city center, carrying his shopping nets or standing utterly exhausted by the wall of some building, was no longer the man to whom they had been attracted for years, who had entertained and endured them, whose endless cosmopolitan fooleries had relieved their mindless boredom and whose jokes and anecdotes had given them something that they, in their Viennese and Upper Austrian stolidity, could never match. Gone were the days when he would give absurd accounts of his worldwide travels or when he would indulge his fondness for irony and sarcasm and deploy all his theatrical talents in merciless accounts of his family, whose contempt had hardened into hatred and whom he described as a curiosity cabinet containing a collection of Catholic-Jewish-Nazi specimens. Nothing he now had to offer had the whiff of the big wide world, as
they say; there was only the odor of wretchedness and death. His clothes, though as elegant as ever, no longer made the same debonair impression or aroused the same unfailing admiration: they seemed shabby and threadbare, like anything he still ventured to say. He no longer took taxis to Paris, or even to Traunkirchen or Nathal, but sat huddled in the corner of a second-class compartment on his way to Gmunden or Traunkirchen, wearing woolen socks and carrying a plastic bag containing his tennis shoes, which were now his favorite footwear. On his last visit to Nathal he wore a dirty postwar polo shirt, which was made for him in the days when he was a sailing enthusiast and had been out of fashion for nearly half a century, and the tennis shoes I have just mentioned. On entering the yard he no longer looked up but stared fixedly at the ground. Even the most delightful music I played him, a Bohemian wind quartet, only briefly dispelled his despondency. Various names cropped up, names of lifelong companions who had long since withdrawn their companionship. But no proper conversation developed. He spoke in disjointed, incoherent phrases. Most of the time, when he thought he was unobserved, his mouth hung open, and his hands trembled. As I drove him back to Traunkirchen, to what he called his hill, he sat silently clutching his plastic bag, which contained a few apples that he had collected in my garden. During this journey I recalled his behavior at the first performance of my play
The Hunting Party
, an unprecedented flop for which the Burgtheater provided all the requisite conditions. The absolutely third-rate actors who performed in the play did not give it a chance, as I was soon forced to recognize, in the first place because they did not understand it and in the second
because they had a low opinion of it, but being a makeshift cast assembled at short notice, they had no option but to act in it. They could not be blamed even indirectly, after the failure of the original plan to assign the principal roles to Paula Wessely and Bruno Ganz, for whom I had written the play. In the event, neither appeared in it because the whole ensemble of the
Burg
(as the Viennese call it, with a kind of perverse affection) joined forces to prevent Bruno Ganz from appearing at the Burgtheater. Their opposition was prompted not only by existential
dread
, as it were, but by existential
envy
, for Bruno Ganz, a towering theatrical genius and the greatest actor Switzerland has ever produced, inspired the ensemble with what I would describe as the
fear of artistic death
. It still strikes me as a sad and sickening piece of perversity, and an episode in Viennese theater history too disgraceful to be lived down, that the actors of the Burgtheater should have attempted to prevent the appearance of Bruno Ganz, going so far as to draw up a written resolution and threaten the management, and that the attempt should have actually succeeded. For as long as the Viennese theater has existed, decisions have been made not by the theater director but by the actors. The theater director has no say, least of all at the Burgtheater, where all the decisions are made by the
matinee idols
, who can be unhesitatingly described as feebleminded—on the one hand because they have no understanding of the theatrical art and on the other hand because they quite brazenly prostitute the theater, both to its own detriment and to that of the public—though it has to be added that for decades, if not for centuries, the public has been prepared to put up with these Burgtheater
prostitutes and allowed them to dish up the worst theater in the world. When once these
matinee idols
, with their celebrated names and feeble theatrical intelligence, are raised to their pedestals by the mindless theatergoing public, they maintain themselves at the pinnacle of their artistic inanity by totally neglecting whatever theatrical potential they possess and shamelessly exploiting their popularity, and stay on at the Burgtheater for decades, usually until they die. After the appearance of Bruno Ganz had been prevented by the machinations of his colleagues, Paula Wessely, my first and only choice for the role of the general's wife in the play, also withdrew. Thus, having foolishly entered into a binding contract with the Burgtheater, I had to put up with a first performance that I can only describe as unappetizing and that, as I have indicated, was
not even well intentioned
. For, faced with the least displeasure on the part of the audience, the totally untalented actors who were cast in the main parts at once took sides with the audience, following the age-old tradition by which Viennese actors conspire with the audience against a play and have no compunction about stabbing the author in the back as soon as they sense that the audience does not take to his play in the first few minutes, because it does not understand it and finds both the author and the play too difficult. It goes without saying, of course, that actors ought to go through fire, as they say, for an author and his play, especially if it is new and has not been tried out before, but unlike their colleagues in the rest of Europe, Viennese actors—and especially those at the Burgtheater—are not prepared to do this. If they sense that the audience is not instantly enthusiastic about
what it sees and hears after the curtain goes up, they at once desert the author and his play and make common cause with the audience, prostituting themselves and turning what it pleases them, in their infantile presumption, to call
the premier stage of German-speaking Europe
into the world's first theatrical whorehouse. And the disastrous opening of my
Hunting Party
was not the only occasion on which they have done this. I could see from my seat in the first gallery that these Burgtheater actors turned against me and my play as soon as the curtain went up, because it did not instantly catch on, as they say. They immediately trimmed their acting accordingly and gave an atrocious performance of the first act, as though they were in duty bound to play my
Hunting Party
in such a way as to say to the audience,
We're against this frightful, inferior, revolting play
, not the management, who've
forced
us to perform it. We're performing it, but we'd rather have nothing to do with it; we're performing it, but it's worthless; we're performing it, but only with reluctance. In no time they had allied themselves with the audience and killed me and my play stone dead, as they say, betraying my producer and delivering the most insolent
coup de grace
to my
Hunting Party
. Naturally the play I had written was quite different from the one that was actually performed by these unspeakably perfidious thespians. I could scarcely bear to sit through the first act, and as soon as the curtain came down I jumped up and left, conscious of having been deliberately and monstrously betrayed. It was clear after the first few sentences that the actors were against me and were going to wreck my play. In the first few minutes they made it a vehicle for their