Telegrams of the Soul (17 page)

So then they all sat around him in the dear little café with the brown-yellow wallpaper and everyone, every last one of them, wanted to help, but naturally nobody had even the slightest inkling of the constant inconceivable havoc he had to endure in that ravaged brain and spinal cord (like the husk of a living corpse), his nervous system laid low by excessive use of sleeping pills (Paraldehyd), while all other organs remained, despite his 60 years, in impeccable working order. They drank tea with raspberry syrup, chocolate, coffee, they ate bread with butter, and one of them even had ham with his buttered bread. No one suspected what destruction, wrack and ruin the poet suffered, but everyone naturally tried in the most inept way to be of some assistance to this curious creature who meant so much to his friends, treasured by each on account of his own special purpose and aspirations, dreams and despair, indeed for the sum total of his own oh-so-complicated existence inscrutable to himself; everyone tried to help save the poet from sliding into the abyss, and simultaneously, to help save himself! To no avail.

He had sunk deep into the swamp of the sinful abuse of his sleeping pills, and the concern of his few true friends just slid off him like little globs of quicksilver sliding off a glass plate!

They all sat around him in the dear little café with the brown-yellow wallpaper, sipping tea with raspberry syrup, chocolate (1918!), shots of Schwechater, double malt beer etc., etc., etc., wanted to help, help, help, and yet had not the faintest notion of just how the poet was being ripped apart from inside out, a living corpse, his very essence expunged. No help is possible, no friendship, no selfless surrender, when the stubborn brain, consumed by its own sickness, almost deliberately, it seems, forsakes what could still be saved. So one by one, at irregular intervals, the friends all take their leave, deeply disappointed, and you are obliged to endure your last torments, to live through them alone! You won't
drag anyone along on life's, nay, death's slide into the abyss; every him, every her cuts and runs from you, the anointed one, in that last fearful hour; they can't do anything more for you than they've already done! Farewell, luckless poet who gave us all the gift of his soul and did himself in with it!

Farewell!

__________________

*
Published posthumously

 

His walrus mustache was emblematic, like Walt Whitman's wild wooly beard: no mere untrimmed tuft growing wild, but a Zeitgeist gage, a canny alley cat's whiskers tailor-made to fit through tight fixes. And like the bewhiskered Brooklyn bard, to whom he has been compared—in stance, not style—Peter Altenberg (1859– 1919), the turn-of-the-century Viennese raconteur-scribe, was a walker and a talker and an inveterate loll-about. Both had a penchant for lyrical digression and irregular punctuation, but the similarity stops there. For while Whitman went on at length in epic outbursts of freewheeling verse, Altenberg choked back the flow.

His own avowed paradigm for the pearls he spit out, most while propped up in bed in bouts of chronic insomnia, was Charles Baudelaire's
Spleen de Paris
(1869). Yet whereas Baudelaire's pioneering work comprises texts that tease and test but never forsake the playing field of poetry, Altenberg extracted the poetic essence of impressions and spat them out in spare narratives situated to the prose side of the divide.

Other formal influences include the “Correspondenzkarte,” the world's first postcard launched and disseminated in Austria in 1869, which subsequently sparked a vogue; and the Feuilleton, a lyrical form of first person journalistic prose often of a decidedly purple slant produced by, among other Viennese wordsmiths of the day, the young Theodor Herzl before the latter forsook belles lettres for the nation-building business.

The artfully crafted fairy tales of the great Dane, Hans Christian Andersen, have been noted as yet another influence. And Altenberg's writings can indeed be read as pruned Märchen minus the “once upon a time” and without any pretense of a “happily ever after.” “We relegated fairy tales to the realm of childhood, that exceptional, wondrous, stirring, remarkable time of life!” he wrote (in a text entitled
Retrospective Introduction to My Book, Märchen des Lebens
[The Fairy Tale of Life], 1908).

Disenchanted adult or overgrown child, Altenberg never quite managed to break out of his self-constructed cocoon, except on the butterfly wings of his writing and the charmed cadences of his café conversation. Like his English contemporary, Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), Altenberg idealized childhood as the indigenous province of poetry and adulated children as its natural priests and purveyors. Like Carroll, he also flirted with a photographic (though to my knowledge, never practiced) pedophilia, prizing above all his possessions a collection of suggestive postcards, many of pre-pubescent girls. Like Carroll, he too managed to metamorphose (or sublimate) his worship of young girls into the stuff of literature. Did not Dante do the same with his Beatrice fixation and Petrarch with his predilection for Laura?

The fact that Altenberg clung psychologically to the province of childhood, reticent to forsake its cozy confines for the constant compromise and abject spiritual poverty of adulthood, can either be viewed—depending on your point of view—as indisputable proof of imaginative fortitude or a telltale sign of the emotional frailty that landed him in a mental asylum and ultimately led to his psychological and physical collapse. His Viennese contemporary, Sigmund Freud, would have had a field day analyzing a rife knot of neuroses, but analysis was not Altenberg's inclination or forte and his neuroses proved nourishing. Thirteen books and a copious posthumous opus, including reams of letters and inscribed postcards, attest to a prodigious and prescient verbal fortitude that outlived his own collapse and that of the world that produced him.

Born into a prosperous assimilated Jewish family in Vienna in 1859, the young Richard Engländer (who later took the pen name Peter Altenberg) was labeled by a grade school teacher as a “genius without abilities.” The characterization bears a striking parallel to
the title of the great Viennese novel,
The Man Without Qualities,
by Robert Musil (an ardent Altenberg fan), the first part of which appeared in print in 1931. Altenberg described himself as “the man without compromises,” in a concise five-and-a-quarter page long “Autobiography,” in his third book,
Was der Tag mir zuträgt
[What the Day Brings], 1901.

He flunked the writing segment of his high school graduation exam, as self-promulgated apocryphal legend has it, responding tersely to the theme: “The Influence of the New World,” with a single word: “potatoes.” Passing the test a year later, he took up and promptly abandoned the study of medicine, botany and the law, respectively, and half-heartedly explored the business of selling books, before finally concluding that he preferred to write them.

In 1883, a psychiatrist hired by his concerned father diagnosed “over-excitation of the nervous system” and concluded an “incapacity for employment.” Altenberg took it as a one-way ticket to Literary Bohemia and the life of the coffeehouse poet, of which he became the epitome, and never looked back. His befuddled, albeit tolerant, father provided a modest living allowance until the family business (subsequently bequeathed to a brother) went bust, leaving the down at the heels Bohemian henceforth beholden to the fickle kindness of strangers. The grateful son wrote of his father in the aforementioned “Autobiography”:

Long before his words found their way into newspapers and periodicals, Altenberg was well-known as a vetted Viennese eccentric who lodged in various hotels and traipsed around town in baggy clothes of his own conception (he was a pioneer in leisure wear), curious walking sticks and open sandals whatever the weather, favoring the companionship of young girls and loose women. He gave out as his official address the Café Central—also the sometime haunt of Russian émigrés Leon Trotsky and his
chess partner Vladimir Ilyich Lenin—where Altenberg presided over his own table of garrulous caffeine-primed regulars.

How and when he first broke into print is the stuff of another homespun legend. One day, the author recalls, the members of Vienna's ascendant literary avant-garde, Jung Wien, caught him scribbling away at his café table and immediately recognized his talent. The poet Richard Beer-Hoffmann is said to have first appreciated his writing, but it was the brilliantly sardonic critic Karl Kraus who sent Altenberg's fledgling selection of prose to S. Fischer Verlag, the foremost German publisher of the day, which promptly published his first book,
Wie Ich Es Sehe
[How I See It] in 1896. The book was a popular sensation and immediately put its author on the map.

“If it be permitted to speak of ‘love at first sound,' then that's what I experienced in my first encounter with this poet of prose,” wrote Thomas Mann. Other impassioned literary partisans included the playwright Arthur Schnitzler, the poet and librettist Hugo von Hofmannstahl, and Felix Salten, the versatile author of, among other works, the children's book classic
Bambi
and the underground pornographic classic
The Adventures of Jose phine Munzenbacher.

Salten's incisive description of Altenberg's prose bears mention:

And just next door in Prague, the young Franz Kafka took Altenberg's terse writing style to heart and mind as a literary model for his own work. “In his small stories,” Kafka observed,

Coffeehouse poet par excellence, Altenberg claimed to toss off his texts in a cavalier fashion for the throw-away pages of weekly and daily newspapers. “I view writing as a natural organic spilling out of a full, overripe person,” he wrote in a letter to Schnitzler. “I hate any revision. Toss it off and that's good—! Or bad! What's the difference?!”

But tossed off, carefully crafted or both, there is nothing sloppy about his spare aesthetic. The extreme economy of his sketches sometimes reads more Japanese than Viennese—an elective affinity born out by the caption he inscribed for a lady friend on a postcard of Japanese women posing under blossoming cherry trees:

His Japanophile propensity is reiterated in the sketch “In Munich,” in which he presses his stuffy fellow Europeans to “Learn from the Japanese!” lauding the latter as “an artistic people.”

Altenberg's first direct exposure to the Japanese sensibility occurred at the Sixth Exhibition of the Wiener Secession in 1900, a show exclusively devoted to the art of Japan though chronologically too late to have influenced his style, which appears to have sprouted Athena-like out of his brain and remained more or less unchanged throughout the two decades of his active writing career, this encounter with an alien world view must have felt strangely affirmative, more homecoming than departure, more mirror than window.

It was not his first flirtation with the exotic. Altenberg's second book,
Ashantee,
published in 1897, recounts his dealings with and vivid impressions of the inhabitants of an African show-village on display for a year as a live exhibit in Vienna's zoological garden. The grotesquery of the very premise of such an exhibition is lampooned in a short reflection entitled “Philosophy”:

Yet rather than stand above it all and wag a virtuous finger at the crude voyeurism of Viennese visitors, for whom the Africans on display were little more than talking animals, Altenberg de-constructs the spectacle by stepping inside it. He falls in love and loses his heart to various black girls and ladies “on display” and peals off their shell of otherness—an otherness he knew all too well under his own white skin, as a baptized Jew trying to pass in an often hostile world given to Catholic piety and Teutonic cult.