The White Dominican
Read The White Dominican Online
Authors: Gustav Meyrink
Gustav Meyrink The White Dominican
Chapter 1 Christopher Dovecote’s First Revelation
Chapter 2 The Mutschelknaus Family
Chapter 11 The Head of the Medusa
Chapter 12 He Must Increase, but I Must Decrease
Chapter 13 Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy
Chapter 14 The Resurrection of the Sword
Chapter 15 The Shirt of Nessus
For many years an academic with a special interest in Austrian literature and culture, Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995. He is one of Dedalus’s editorial directors and is responsible for the Dedalus translation programme.
He has published over fifty translations from German and French, including Gustav Meyrink’s five novels and
The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy.
His translation of Rosendorfer’s
Letters Back to Ancient China
won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of
Stephanie
by Herbert Rosendorfer and
The Golem
by Gustav Meyrink.
His translations have been shortlisted three times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize:
Simplicissimus
by Johann Grimmelshausen in 1999,
The Other Side
by Alfred Kubin in 2000 and
The Bells of Bruges
by Georges Rodenbach in 2008.
His website can be visited at
homepages.phonecoop.coop/mjmitchell
Gustav Meyrink, it is possible to think, lived a life that was more like a dream than any of the stories he wrote. He was a bastard, a banker, an inventor, a fin-de-siècle flaneur, a jailbird, a guru who flyted his disciples, a pacifist in love with apocalypse, a magus who condemned the halitosic prattle of occultism. Each stage of his life had the saturated gluey intensity of dream; and the life as a whole seemed spatchcocked out of legend and sleep, a congeries of psychopomp blurbs. He was an Arcimboldi Green Man: rags and patches of life-stuff; granny-knots of circumstance unravelling at a jerk as the century downturned into disaster; a foliate head. The stories he wrote seemed to exfoliate from the life.
He was born Gustav Meyer, in Vienna. His mother was an actress and his father an elderly aristocrat with a position in government. Grotesquely maladroit parent-figures appear and reappear throughout the fiction, most notably perhaps as the crone-courtesan and floundering ectomorph nobleman whose ultimate reconciliation transfigures his third novel,
Walpurgisnacht
(1917; translated by Mike Mitchell for Dedalus in 1993).
He moved to Prague as a young man and became a banker, an athlete, a philanderer, a fencer, and the owner of that city’s first automobile. Much of the carnival night life hinted at in
Walpurgisnacht,
and treated in detail throughout his second novel,
Das grune Gesicht
(1916; translated by Mike Mitchell for Dedalus in 1992 as
The Green Face),
seems to make nineteenth century Prague visible in a crazy mirror, as topsy-turvy as the new century boded to become.
His first marriage ended badly. He remarried under circumstances which seemed scandalous to the Prague world he mocked, and which occasioned vicious gossip. He challenged one of his new wife’s slanderers to a duel, but the challenge was declined on the grounds that, as a bastard, he was inherently incapable of receiving satisfaction. At about the same time, in 1902, he was arrested and imprisoned for three months, on charges of fraud. He was exonerated, but on his release was discovered to have tuberculosis of the spine. He was also destitute. His life as a banker Harlequin had terminated as though he had walked a plank, into a new medium. His first novel,
Der Golem
(1915; translated by Madge Pemberton in 1928 as
The Golem;
a new translation by Mike Mitchell will appear from Dedalus in the spring of 1995), is structured around visions of unbearable parents, occult amnesia, the false polder of the soon-to-be-demolished ghetto, a supernatural doppelganger who evokes a lacerating sehnsucht in the blanked protagonist, surreal interrogations and false imprisonment in a Prague like Kafka’s, and an invisible new life told through a frame story which opens opaque hints of that new life whose details the novel cannot presume to depict.
But before Gustav Meyer’s first life ended, he had begun the life for which he is now remembered. His first story, which was written under the name Meyrink, appeared in the magazine
Simplicissimus
in 1901, and within a few years he had become a central figure in pre-War German literature, a literature whose proleptic convulsiveness and
rightness
about the world to come it is difficult now, nearly a hundred years on, to comprehend. In 1994 it is difficult, and humbling, to realize that they were saying as much as we can about the heartbeat of the century; it is at times almost impossible not to feel that the apocalyptic insights we detect are simply, in fact, endogenous fevers of Expressionism: that we are patching 1910 metaphors into our knowledge of subsequent history, shaving them to fit. This indeed must surely happen: it must surely be the case that we do read them selectively, and that the writers and artists and composers and scholars and thinkers and architects of 1910
could not know
that they were right, that the clock of history (as they intimated) had begun to stutter, setting off all the alarms at once. In the end, however, it may not altogether matter if they knew they were right. In the end, perhaps, it is more important for us to realize that – in their dreams and paranoias and dread – they saw us here.
For English readers, it is not yet possible to know how fully Meyrink’s earliest fiction engaged with the first years of turmoil, as he only began publishing his novels after World War One had already started. His initial reputation on the Continent came from the large number of short stories he published before
The Golem
first appeared, and which were collected in several volumes:
Der heisse Soldat and andere Geschichten
[“The Hot Soldier and Other Stories”] (1903);
Orchideen: Sonderbare Geschichten
[“Orchids: Strange Stories”] (1904);
Das Wachsfigurenkabinett: Sonderbare Geschichten
[“The Wax Museum: Strange Stories”] (1907);
Des deutschen Spiessers Wunderhorn
[“The German Philistine’s Magic Horn”] (1913), the last being a three-volume omnibus incorporating old and new material; and
Fledermase
[“Bats”] (1916). E F Bleiler’s
Guide to Supernatural Fiction
(1983) lists only one short story by Meyrink in English.
The Golden Bomb: Phantastic German Expressionist Stories
(1993) ed Malcolm Green includes a different one; and
The Dedalus/Ariadne Book of Austrian Fantasy: The Meyrink Years, 1890-1930
(1992) ed Mike Mitchell includes five: which is a significant start, but one which shows the largeness of the vista that can be further unveiled now with
The Opal (and other stories)
collection of Meyrink stories translated by Maurice Raraty (Dedalus 1994).
On the whole, we are left with a fever of belatedness, through which the past makes the present (and the future) dance to dead tunes.
The Golem
is meant to be taking place around 1890, but scumbles chronology so thoroughly that the reader will find it hard to avoid conflating the destruction of the ghetto with larger devastations, or the mephitic arousals of psyche emblematized by the golem itself with more widespread (and far more vicious) hysterias.
The Green Face,
which was being drafted as World War One began, is ostensibly set in the future, after the end of hostilities, but the outcome and aftermath of the war are viewed, by an act of occultish legerdemain, through the lens of an ashen retrospect: the labyrinth of the trenches, like some rebirthing of Cthulhu; the end-of-the-world perspectives granted by No Man’s Land; the taste of a world-order exhausted, of the dithering puniness of secular man sifting the ruins for loot. It is astonishing that the book reached publication in the midst of a total war which was being lost. Like
Walpurgisnacht,
which also appeared before 1918, but far more explicitly,
The Green Face
treats the War to End War as a Saturnalia, a
danse macabre
which ends in Wind: in an apocalyptic harrowing of Europe, obliterating the false face of the material world.
Beneath that face (it is a turn of vision fundamental to occult dualism, and it appears in all Meyrink’s work) can be discerned a higher, spiritual world of true effect and cause, which can now be celebrated in a chymical marriage between the scoured protagonist (all his protagonists have been deeply wounded by the harlequinade of appearance) and his dead love (Meyrink females, if they are worthy, are almost certain to be dead).
It may all come down to his actress mother, who abandoned him in early childhood; but it may, as well, have something to do with the fancy-step metamorphosizing almost any European writer of Meyrink’s period engaged in whenever the Female Principle was to be distinguished from the Female Body. Whatever the cause, it cannot be denied that throughout his career Meyrink’s female characters, with the exception of an occasional nurturing crone from the lower orders, occupy only two categories: either they are avatars of Medusa, whose wormy sexuality turns men into stone, imprisoning them in the maya of existence; or they are Beatrice and – having died well before the end of the novel – await their husband-to-be’s union with them in a higher world. Modern readers (of whom half may be presumed to be women) may understandably find this aspect of the male dualist imagination both distasteful and inutile; but it is an inescapable component of Meyrink’s world-view from beginning to end.
In each of the first three novels, a transfiguring chymical marriage climaxes the personal story, though in each of these books the jettisoning of the material world is achieved with a panoramic glitter. After the end of World War One, however, Meyrink discarded the contemporary world, and his late work radically disengages from that Europe of aftermath he had so prophetically limned; there are no more prophetic spasms to remind us now, at the end of the millennium, that our visions of doom are epigonic. At the same time, however, he did continue to adhere to the occult dualisms to which (like William Butler Yeats) he seemed to give credence, and which shaped and fortified his work, though at the same time he never lost his marbles: whenever he was confronted with fraudulence or Golden Dawn vaporizings, he proved to be a savage debunker. But dualism in the hands of any male European writer born in the last century is almost invariably fatal to the female of the species, and it does remain the case that the modern reader may have trouble with some of the more didactic passages of his fourth novel,
Der weisse Dominikaner
(1921), now translated for Dedalus as
The White Dominican
by Mike Mitchell, in a style which admirably captures Meyrink’s sly swift eloquence. There can be no doubt whatsoever that the ongoing Medusa/Beatrice dualism – even when it is toned down by the fact that the only whorish female in the book is far too old to entrap the protagonist – will be hard for most contemporary readers to swallow. What remains?
In the event, a great deal. What
The White Dominican
loses in being the first fruit of Meyrink’s chastened post-catastrophe imagination, it gains in supernal equipoise, in an oneiric serenity which tugs very hard at the roots in dream of our own responses to the allure of Story. We begin with a frame: the author of the tale, who seems to be Meyrink himself, tells the reader that he has never found out for sure whether or not the protagonist of the story “ever actually lived; he certainly did not spring from my imagination, of that I remain convinced.” This protagonist, it turns out, has mysteriously caused Meyrink to call him by his proper, heavily symbolic name, Christopher Dovecote, a name Meyrink claims to be unconscious of having used when drafting his novel; and we are cast immediately into a Tale whose material embodiment (the words we read, the paper we touch) is itself a lesson imparted. To understand the Tale we must understand that the words we read are nothing but echoes, caught in the Medusa dust of corporeality. “Being born on earth is nothing other than being buried alive.” The true Tale will be what we rise to learn.