Remember Me (4 page)

But in a way to have him gone for the time being was a relief. He was content to sit alone in darkness and to think. He would give Wagner anything. Together they would create a world better than this one. The only safety in the world is the safety of a work of art. It is the safety the inarticulate long for. They know it exists, but they cannot enter it. With Wagner he would. For the first time in his life, to be alone filled him with a delicious thrill.

But Wagner could not think without the presence of a woman. He went back to his hotel to worry; and in the absence of any of those great placid creatures on whom he begot their husbands’ children and his own works, sat down to write a letter. He had at last found his prince, and would do anything to keep him, but the world must know that, for already, he understood, Ludwig had a certain moral reputation that could not but soil his own. And yet he felt excited. He was on the threshold of that greatness he had so long planned for himself, the door to it had been unlocked, and as a result he felt grateful. “You cannot conceive the magic of his eyes. If only he remains alive. It is such an incredible miracle,” he wrote to his last mistress but one.

Indeed, the eyes were peculiar. They seemed to have
the ability to see around events to what lay on the other side of them. If he had not known all kings to be basically irrelevant, Wagner would have been disturbed, for those eyes remained in his mind even when the face was no longer clear, like the staring eyes of a forest, that look out at the passing traveller, see everything, and say nothing. To see everything is to see too much. There were things which Wagner did not wish to have seen. To his letter he added a prudent footnote: “He is
unfortunately
so beautiful and intelligent, so full of feeling and so marvellous, that I am afraid his life might vanish like a dream of the gods in this vulgar world.” If the letter were to be intercepted, that would read nicely, for though compliments are all very well, a private letter is usually taken to be more sincere, particularly if read
surreptitiously
. After writing the words, he stared at them with surprise, perceiving them to be true.

What was the King? Who was his friend in the
ante-room
? Would his friend be amiable or an adversary? How much power did he have over the King? Would he have to be supplanted? As for Ludwig himself, Wagner was equally uncertain. Beautiful? Yes, but beauty fades. Intelligent? Undoubtedly, but he knew nothing of music. Full of feeling? He certainly seemed to understand the libretti very well. The whole exciting business, though no doubt it would soon grow tiresome, was certainly marvellous. Adolescence was a dangerous country, but if it produced another opera, after all, why not? He would reap the King’s favour like a profitable crop. He smiled and blew out the candle. All was well. He had already been granted an allowance from the Treasury. It would pay his debts. Later he could ask for more.

In some ways Wagner was an enviable man: there wasn’t an ounce of pity or compassion in his soul. But he
saw certain difficulties all the same. Rarely is greatness recognized, except by accident, or for the wrong reasons, for greatness is unique, and we can recognize only what we have already seen.

The King was a beautiful boy. He might have been Parsifal. But clearly he wanted to live always on the heights, into which he as clearly planned to buy his way. But genius, having no market value, cannot be sold or bought. Nor could Wagner sit all day long at Starnberg, writing incessantly and visited only by a disembodied idealist. Wagner was a man, as well as a genius. He could already tell that as a man he had desires for which the young king would have neither approval nor
understanding.
He would have to be careful. For the king also had desires, and they were probably ambiguous. Also those eyes saw too much. Very well, Wagner would go to Berg on the Starnbergersee for a while, if that would please the King, but he would not live there without company of his own choosing. There were some things which the King need never know.

S
o it was not so difficult to get Wagner to Berg, after all.

Royal families have always tucked away somewhere a small modest house where they go to earth to become human, only to discover they have forgotten how. Since everyone becomes an imitation of himself in time, this lends to the behaviour of royalty a curious facelessness, for from earliest childhood they have had no one to imitate but the idea of royalty itself, which has no face.

Of such somewhat pathetic domestic retreats, Berg had always been Ludwig’s favourite, even as a child. It was a toy. He always felt better there, and he felt better now. It was May of 1864, and he was ecstatically happy.
Wagner
was established across the lake. Ludwig was alone, but to think of Wagner was even more satisfactory than to be with him, and besides, the Master must work, and as long as he knew where the ideal companion was and what he was doing, Ludwig did not care whether he was present or not. He had him in imagination, everywhere.

For instance he and Wagner might have taken a walk into the crags, and communed with the moon in the hovering insect stillness of the night, under the shade of some dead tree. Or they might have climbed the
Watzmann
together, that mountain which seemed the genius
of the lake. Such things were better to imagine than to cause to be. It was a great pleasure to be able to walk alone in the cool night, thinking of someone else, and he savoured the experience accordingly. The night was what he would have had people be, impersonal yet tender.

The moonlight glittered supernaturally on the lake, so that through the trees the water became something more than water. The woods surged towards him, like
bounding
dogs, yet through the slender tree trunks the
pulsating
blue-white light of the lake offered him salvation. Salvation was what he wanted. He approached the shore as Parsifal approached Monsalvasch, the magic,
unattainable
castle of the grail. The light within the edges of the nightwood touched him profoundly. Wagner had given him a soul. If it was transformation he desired, it could be found here, where the branches interwove and grew in every direction, like the leitmotifs of the Master’s operas.

In the distance rose the Alps. Across the water
glimmered
little lights. It was a moving moment, and he was glad he was alone. As a captive child he had looked across this water to Possenhofen. It was in the library there that he had first come across the works of the Master. Now, in another villa across the lake, the Master was near him. Somewhere across the lake he was thinking, creating,
indestructible
and pure. Ludwig was his inspiration.

Suddenly the lights of Wagner’s villa twinkled and guttered out. The sky seemed to lighten by contrast. The night was cold. Ludwig shivered. Something seemed to have happened to his happiness. Release he must have of some kind, or else explode. By now he knew what form that release would take, and though he hated it, have it he must. It was too hard to wait for Lohengrin.

He turned and strode swiftly towards the stables, for
by accident he had climbed on the wave of his own lower sensations, and felt himself driving in towards shore, helpless to avert the shattering of the crest. It was at such moments that he went mad and loathed himself
profoundly
. Each time he did this sort of thing he vitiated the bottled-up energy that he needed to drive him higher and higher, until at last he might burst out into the
milky-white
meadows of the mind where the Master was, and freedom from the self as well. Each time he tried to
control
himself; the tension became too great and he dropped back. Each time the sense of defeat afterwards was more terrible. Servants have more uses than one, but it made him hate the sight of them.

An hour later, shuffling back to Berg, his big body furtive in the trees, he avoided the look of the lake. He dared not look at it until sleep had renewed him again, otherwise he would spoil everything. The lower desires were abominable. At the time they meant everything. Afterwards they meant the loss of everything. They worked against the Self. And sex is not love. One will never find love down there.

He entered Berg and slept until afternoon.

When he woke, it was fearfully, as though he expected to be caught out and punished. But the world had other punishments in store for him. It could wait for a while, so that for once he awoke to a world exactly as he would have wished to see it. While he slept the landscape had come alive, with that dazzling transcendence which
overwhelms
people when they are exacerbated, or deeply moved.

He went for a walk. Seedlings swayed between the roots of whole dynasties of trees. He loved the natural world. He could understand the pathos of snow melting drop by drop from the tip of a fir bough, in a way that
he could understand nothing else. Now for a moment the world seemed to return his love. It was a consolation, in a way, for he had begun to realize certain things about the Great Friend.

Wagner had never seen a tree in his life. Such was the speed of his imagination, such was its haste to arrive at its destination, that whole forests swept by him in a green blur, like a sheet of flames; and when he did reach his destination, which was the last note of the last act of the next work but one, sure enough, there was the green blur, immortal forever as a background to some of the least convincing and most ignoble gods and goddesses who ever peopled a mythology. It was a shame. He missed so much. Ludwig was aware of the dryness of each single constituent leaf in the comity of a tree.

Where could he ever find love? He had summoned Wagner to find out. But far from giving it, Wagner did not even seem capable of accepting it when it was offered. To Ludwig love was a necessity. To Wagner it was only a convenience. To realize that was very sad.

Love for the world’s small things is furtive and hides out of sight, peering at infinity through the grasses with nictitating eyes. Of such was Dürer’s world. Of such was his. But Wagner was not like that.

Ludwig had hoped to find refuge in a work of art. Yet all the things he loved, the fragile, the precious, the
transparent,
the infinitely rare, the cherished individuality of life, had no place in Wagner’s world at all. Ludwig could not take them there with him, for in that world the
particular
did not exist. That dates the operas badly; for only those things which usually escape the attention of others survive contact with the ineffable, only those grasses too tiny to be trampled underfoot, those moments too swift to be shared.

And yet it was May. Ludwig was bewildered. The world was so kind, that it seemed impossible that the men and women in it could be cruel. The little
inexperienced
white buds of apple trees popped into day and found it wet. The most transparent of invisible snails, street cleaners of the lake, were scavenging the water. Bushes, shrubs, grass, and anything that had roots, had grown one sixty-fourth of an inch. A stream, running too rapidly, jumped its banks and obliterated a meadow with flowers, which settled in clouds like dusting powder after a cold bath. The woods turned themselves to a loving statement of that detail which Wagner could not cherish. It was their reparation to a king too young to grieve.

It seemed to Ludwig that there were angels in the wood, and that they spoke to him. When the natural world was kind or understanding, he always felt an
immense
joy. But he could not give that joy a name, and it did not occur to him that joy could be a form of
consolation
. He hurried on to meet Wagner, suppressing an emotion which, from passion, had almost turned to dread. And that dread had swept over him so suddenly, that he scarcely realized its nature.

He looked around him at the wood. But angels are invisible. Only in art can we draw the likeness of what cannot be seen. He was alone. He had realized
something
.

Wagner’s metaphysics was built on flesh and would not survive its foundations. Wagner could never
understand
the cool, sand-swept cities of the androgynous, where the sexless hold their silver rites like grave
children
or infant Ptolemies. That was the trouble between them. Ludwig knew that. Wagner could treat an erotic boy only as he would treat a woman. He could never cast his being into those great waves of consciousness which
break on no shore, where the sexless swim like charming dolphins, loyal only to the advent of an Arion. Ludwig demanded a Mozart, to whom sex was merely, and justly, a parable. Wagner knew nothing about parables. He had only a myth, and it had taken him long enough to find even that.

Not for an instant had he been willing to accept
Ludwig
as anything but walking surety at the local bank. Ludwig knew that as soon as he learned that the Master had sent for his whole performing circus of disciples, for Hans von Bülow, and for Hans von Bülow’s wife. Wagner’s lungs were too small to breathe the air even of those mountains he cast up. He had to have creature comforts adapted to the plain.

It was not pleasant and Ludwig was badly shaken. Wagner had been unwilling to stay at Starnberg, so
Ludwig
had bought him a house in the Briennerstrasse, in Munich. Whenever he went there he felt appalled, and he soon came to avoid it. Art was solitary and pure, and now there were all these people between him and it. The house was vulgar and ostentatious. He could not find Wagner in it anywhere. It reeked of women. The house his grandfather had built for Lola Montes, the actress, must have looked like this, but at least Lola Montes had been a woman, and a lovely one at that, with the dark face of a spider. Wagner was not a woman. Why, therefore, did he live like one? His house was like the apartment of a fashionable actress. It was kitsch.

Artists were supposed to be naked, noble, and severe. Art was a religious exercise, a preparation for
enlightenment
. This house was like a vestry after mass. It stank of attar of roses and rose de Bengale. Ludwig blinked and longed for the woods.

He picked up a bibelot from an end table and wondered
what to say. The box was supposed to be of gold and tortoise shell, but the tortoise shell was celluloid and the ormulu was pinchbeck. He opened it and it was empty. It had no use. He put it down.

Wagner sat like an actress between engagements, bloated and waiting for someone. It was not for him, of that Ludwig was sure. He knew that as soon as he came in. This was Tannhäuser before him, not Lohengrin, but Tannhäuser in the body of a dwarf. Ludwig shut his eyes.

Wagner looked perplexed. Perhaps the King felt
unwell
? He had clearly decided to be obliging. He asked if Ludwig would be back that evening. His eyes were watery and furtive. There would be caviar and iced champagne. He might just as well have rubbed his hands together with glee. It was the food of the upper classes. In this life some of us partake of one Host, and some of another.

Ludwig winced. The vulgarity of it was appalling. At any moment Wagner might belch. Did he really believe that the pinnacle even of worldly recognition was merely to eat Strassbourg paté every day for lunch? He wandered round the room uneasily, aware of the man sitting there, but the Great Friend was gone. Only the Master
remained
, and the Master was a lie. Only his works were true. Ludwig wanted to cry, but he would not be seen in tears by anyone. He rushed out of the house. It was a moment of disillusion. Even back in the security of his own apartments in the Residenz, the parquet stretched around him like an ominous desert.

He could not bear the solitude. He fled to the theatre, which connected with the palace by a short passage. In the theatre the world was real, and he must somehow banish the thought of that grubby, wet-fingered little man
with his lolling head, or else he would lose even
Lohengrin
. We can forgive the gods everything but their
incarnations
.

It was Lohengrin he worshipped, not Wagner.
Somewhere
he must find a Lohengrin. For Lohengrin was a creature of the mountains. His home was in the snows and cloistered woods of Monsalvasch. He descended to flatland only to save the innocent. But in the opera
Lohengrin
there were no mountains. There was only the estuary of a dying town. The air Ludwig breathed had to be thin air. The fustian atmosphere of the house in the Briennerstrasse was mortal to him.

Once in the theatre and he felt safer. There was a
performance
that night of
Wilhelm
Tell
by Schiller. The audience was sparse. He crept into the empty vestibule alone, after the curtain had gone up, and let himself quietly into the darkness of the royal box. From below him came the distant echoes of superhuman voices,
roaring
out the pathos of great poetry. He sat down with relief.

After the sleepy pears of the Briennerstrasse, to taste the pure passion of Schiller was to bite on a sharp apple, and to feel the mouth refreshed. Nobility of character conquered the tyranny of the self high in Switzerland. Salvation was over the border, in Uri. The young hero scrambled up a cardboard alp to save his people. The actor’s name was Rohde. Ludwig watched him with attention. The young man had a certain address. Some of Wagner’s best works had been written in Switzerland. Perhaps love might lie there. He must go to Switzerland, perhaps with this same Rohde, and find out.

With the right companion, high on the exaltation of an alp, perhaps freedom would at last be possible. For since without love we live in chains, with love freedom
might be conceivable. Only on such peaks lay the holiness of mankind.

Below him the curtain rang down. He would make the trip incognito. Rohde was not only handsome, but his speeches had a cold metallic fire, like the hooves of horses waiting on cobbles on a frosty morning.

When it had seemed there was none, he felt a way opening before him once again. He left before the final curtain and went to his rooms. If the greatness of Wagner resided only in his works, then his body would not accomplish Ludwig’s release, nor would his friendship. He must find someone else, it did not much matter whom or whose. He felt himself once more carried along by that inferior wave which he feared only after it had reached a coast. He did not care. Children are
perfectionists.
They long to destroy themselves, so that they may be reborn the next day. And in keeping his
imagination
alive, he had also kept something of the child he had always longed to be. He fell asleep, feeling the dawn of a blessed irresponsibility.