The World of Yesterday (38 page)

I do not mean to say that I didn’t enjoy my success. On the contrary; it pleased me a great deal, but only in so far as it confined itself to what was separate from myself—my books and the mere letters of my name traced on them. Once, when I happened to be in a bookshop in Germany, I was touched to see a schoolboy who came in, did not recognise me, asked for a copy of
The Tide of Fortune
and paid for it out of his meagre pocket-money. It gratified my vanity when the conductor who asked for my passport in the sleeping car of the train treated me respectfully once he had seen my name, or an Italian customs officer, realising that he had read a book of mine, kindly refrained from treating my baggage roughly as he checked through it. And there is something seductive for an author in the mere quantitative effect his work has on the world around him. By chance I was travelling to Leipzig on the same day as a new book of mine was on its way out of that city for delivery. I felt remarkably excited to see how much human labour I had kept busy, without knowing it, on something that I had spent three or four months setting down on three hundred sheets of paper. Workmen were packing the copies of the book into huge crates, others were groaning under the weight as they took them down to the trucks, to be loaded on to the freight cars of the trains that would transport them to all four quarters of the compass. Dozens of girls had collated the pages in the printing works, the typesetters, binders, shippers and wholesale booksellers had been at work from morning to night, and I calculated that
these books, stacked up like piles of bricks, might almost be enough to build a handsome street. I never arrogantly despised the material side of success. In the early years of my career I had never dared to think that I would earn real money with my books, let alone being able to base a whole lifestyle on them. Now they were suddenly bringing in large and ever-increasing sums of money, and it seemed—and who could foresee the future in our times?—as if they would relieve me of all anxiety. I could indulge my youthful passion for collecting autograph manuscripts, and many of the finest and most valuable of those wonderful relics found their way into my possession, where I cared for them lovingly. In return for what, by comparison, must be called my own rather ephemeral books, I could acquire manuscripts of immortal works, manuscript documents by Mozart and Bach and Beethoven, Goethe and Balzac. I would be putting on ridiculous airs if I were to say I was indifferent to my unexpected success, or even disliked it.

But I am being honest when I say that I enjoyed success only as long as it related to my books and my literary name. When it was transferred to my physical presence it was a nuisance. Nothing in me has been stronger since my early youth than an instinctive wish to stay free and independent. And I felt that anyone’s personal freedom suffers from misrepresentation by photographic publicity. However, the work on which I had embarked simply out of inclination threatened to become not just a career but a business. Mail arrived by every post, stacks of letters, invitations, requests, questions, and all these missives had to be answered. If I went away for a month, I had to spend two or three days when I came back making my way through the accumulated mass and disposing of it before I could get the ‘business’ running smoothly again. Without my wanting it, the marketability of my work had made my books into a kind of industry that called for order, supervision, punctuality and skill if it was going to be run successfully—all of those
being admirable virtues, but unfortunately alien to my nature, and they threatened to disturb my mind and my dreams in the most dangerous way. The more I was asked to take part in literary events, give readings, appear at official occasions, the more reluctant I felt to agree. I have never overcome this near-pathological dislike of letting my person stand in for my reputation. Today I instinctively still sit in the last, most inconspicuous row of seats in a large hall, at a concert or a theatrical performance, and I hate nothing so much as having to show my face on a platform or some other public place. I feel a deep need for anonymity in all areas of life. Even as a boy, I could never understand those writers and artists of an earlier generation who liked to attract attention in the street with their velvet jackets and heads of waving hair, locks dangling down over their foreheads, like my dear friends Arthur Schnitzler and Hermann Bahr, or who sported showy beards and whiskers or extravagant clothes. I feel sure that making his own likeness widely known must unconsciously tempt anyone to feel, in Werfel’s phrase, like a “mirror man”, assuming a certain style not natural to him in everything he does, and with this change in his outward attitude he generally loses his warmth of heart, sense of liberty, and inner freedom from care. If I could begin again today, I would make sure to have my works published under another name, a pseudonym, and then I could enjoy those two happy conditions, literary success and personal anonymity, at the same time. Life in itself is so attractive and full of surprises—why not lead a double life?

F
OR EUROPE, AS I SHALL ALWAYS
remember gratefully, that decade from 1924 to 1933 before one man destroyed our world was a relatively peaceful time. Simply because our generation had suffered so much, we regarded this period of relative calm as an unexpected gift. We all had a sense that we must catch up with everything that the terrible years of the war and its immediate aftermath had stolen from our lives—happiness, freedom, the chance to concentrate on things of the mind. We worked harder, yet with a sense of relief; we moved freely, we experimented, we discovered Europe all over again. There was never so much travelling as in those years—was it the impatience of the young to make up for what they had missed when countries were cut off from each other? Or was it, perhaps, a dark foreboding, a sense that we must take our chance to break out of confinement before the barriers began coming down again?

I travelled a great deal myself at that time, but my travels were not the same as in my younger days. I was no longer a stranger when I went abroad; everywhere I went I had friends, publishers and readers; I was travelling as the author of my books, not as an interested but anonymous tourist. That meant a number of advantages. I could give more forceful and effective support to the idea of the intellectual union of Europe that had dominated my life for years. With that in mind, I delivered lectures in Switzerland and the Netherlands, I spoke in French at the Palais des Arts in Brussels, in Italian in the historic Sala dei Dugento in Florence, which Michelangelo and Leonardo had known in
their time, I spoke English in America on a lecture tour taking me from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. This was a different kind of travelling; wherever I went, I met the most distinguished men of every nation without having to seek them out. While I had looked up to these figures with veneration in my youth, I would never have dared to write them a line, but now they were my friends. I moved in circles that usually haughtily excluded foreigners; I saw the palaces of the Faubourg St Germain, the
palazzi
of Italy, all the private collections. I no longer had to wait at the book-borrowing counters of public libraries to ask for a volume; head librarians personally showed me their carefully guarded treasures. I was a guest of antiquarian booksellers like Dr Rosenbach of Philadelphia, men who sold to the dollar millionaires and whose shops I had timidly passed by when I was only a collector in a small way. For the first time I had a glimpse of life in the higher echelons of society, and with it the pleasant, comfortable feeling that I did not have to ask anyone’s permission to gain entry; everything came to me of its own accord. But was this really a better way of seeing the world? I found myself thinking nostalgically of the travels of my young days, when no one was expecting me, and everything seemed more interestingly mysterious because I was on my own. I did not want to abandon my old way of travelling. When I went to Paris I made sure not to let even my best friends, like Roger Martin du Gard, Jules Romains, Duhamel and Masereel, know I was there on the very first day. First I wanted to wander through the streets as I had in my student days, at liberty and with no appointment to meet anyone. I sought out the old cafés and little restaurants that I used to frequent; I played at being back in my youth. Similarly, when I wanted to work I went to some unexpected, even unlikely places, small provincial towns like Boulogne or Tirano or Dijon. It was wonderful to be unknown, staying in small hotels after establishments that were too luxurious for my liking, alternating between them, choosing light or shade as I liked. And in spite of
all that Hitler took from me later, even he was unable to spoil or destroy my pleasant awareness that I had lived a truly European life as a free man, exactly as I liked, for another decade.

One of those journeys was particularly exciting and instructive—it took me to the new Russia. I had been planning to go there in 1914, just before the war, when I was working on my book about Dostoevsky. Then the bloodstained scythe of war had cut me off from my plan, and since then certain reservations had held me back. For thinking men, the Bolshevik revolution had made Russia the most fascinating country of the post-war period, either enthusiastically admired or fanatically hated by those who knew nothing much about it. Thanks to propaganda and counter-propaganda, both of them equally ferocious, no one knew for certain what was going on there. But we did know that an experiment was being made with something entirely new, and it could determine the future shape of the world for better or worse. Shaw, Wells, Barbusse, the Romanian Istrati, Gide and many others had gone there, some coming home enthusiastic, others disappointed, and I would not have been a man with a mind ready to accept innovation if I too had not felt tempted to form an idea of Russia from the evidence of my own eyes. My books had been very widely distributed there, not just in the complete edition with Maxim Gorky’s introduction but also in small, cheap editions costing only a few copecks that reached the general public, so I could be sure of a welcome. What kept me from going, however, was that at the time travelling to Russia meant adopting some kind of partisan stance, forcing a visitor to endorse or condemn the new Russian society publicly. I had a deep dislike of anything dogmatically political, and I did not want to feel obliged to pass judgement on a vast country and a problem still unsolved after a brief survey of only a few weeks. In spite of my burning curiosity, I could not make up my mind to go to Soviet Russia.

Then, in the early summer of 1928, I was invited to go to Moscow as a delegate representing Austrian writers on the centenary of Leo Tolstoy’s birth, and to speak in his honour at the evening of the festive celebrations. There was no reason for me to avoid such an occasion, since its non-partisan nature would mean there was nothing in the least political about my visit. Tolstoy, the apostle of non-violence, could hardly be presented as a Bolshevik, and I had an obvious right to speak on him as a writer—thousands of copies of my book on him had been distributed. It also seemed to me an important demonstration of European unity for writers of all nations to come together in paying a joint tribute to the greatest among them. So I accepted the invitation, and I had no cause to regret my decision. The journey to Russia through Poland was an experience in itself. I saw how quickly, these days, time can heal self-inflicted wounds. The same Galician towns that I had seen in ruins in 1915 now looked bright and new. I realised, yet again, that ten years are a good part of an individual human being’s life, but no more than the blink of an eye in the life of a nation. In Warsaw, there was no visible sign that armies, either victorious or defeated, had passed through the city twice, three, four times. The presence of elegant women made the cafés sparkle. The officers promenading down the streets, slender and well-groomed, looked more like expert actors playing soldiers in some court theatre than the genuine article. You felt a spirit of enterprise and confidence everywhere, together with legitimate pride that the new, strong Polish Republic was rising from the detritus of centuries. Our journey went on from Warsaw to the Russian border. The land was flat now and the soil sandy; the entire population of every village had assembled in colourful traditional costume at every station, for at the time only a single passenger train a day passed through Poland to the forbidden country over the border and sealed off from all others, so the sight of the shining carriages of an express train, linking the world of the East with the world of the West, was a great event. Finally we reached the border station of
Nyegorolye. A banner the colour of blood was stretched above the tracks, with an inscription in the Cyrillic alphabet which I could not read. Someone translated it for me: “Workers of the world, unite!” In passing under that banner we had entered a new world, the empire of the proletariat, the Soviet Republic. As a matter of fact, the train in which we were travelling was far from proletarian. It turned out to be a sleeper train from the Tsarist period, more comfortable even than the de luxe trains of Europe because it was broader and its pace was more leisurely. I was passing through the Russian countryside for the first time, and oddly enough it did not seem strange to me. In fact everything appeared remarkably familiar—the wide, empty steppes with their slightly melancholy aura; the little huts; the small towns with their onion domes; the men half-peasant, half-prophet with their long beards, greeting us with wide, friendly smiles; the women in brightly coloured headscarves and white aprons selling kvass, eggs and cucumbers. How did I know all this? Solely from the masterpieces of Russian literature, from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Aksakov and Gorky, who had given us such wonderfully realistic descriptions of the lives of these people. Although I did not know the language, I thought I could understand what these Russians were saying—the simple men—touchingly simple—who stood foursquare, legs apart, wearing voluminous shirts; the young workers on the train playing chess, reading or arguing, their restless, active minds stimulated by the call to exert all their powers. Was it Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s love of the people that acted like a memory in me? However that may be, I was overwhelmed, even on the train, by an instinctive sympathy for the childish, touching simplicity of these Russians, whose minds were untaught but acute.

I passed the two weeks I spent in Soviet Russia in a constant state of heightened tension. I observed and listened; I marvelled at the country, I was repelled, fascinated, intrigued; my feelings swung between hot and cold. Moscow itself was
a city of contradictions—here was magnificent Red Square with its great walls and onion domes, wonderfully Tatar and oriental, Byzantine, redolent of old Russia. Next door to it, like a foreign horde of American giants, stood ultra-modern high-rise buildings. Nothing quite went together—the old smoke-blackened icons and bejewelled altars of the saints drowsed only a hundred yards from Lenin’s corpse in his glass casket, clad in a black suit and freshly made up, whether in our honour or not I have no idea. Close to a few shiny new motor cars, bearded, dirty
izvoshiks
whipped their thin little horses on, clicking their tongues. The grand opera house where we writers spoke was a brilliant sight in the fine old Tsarist style, with a proletarian audience present, and crumbling buildings stood in the suburbs like grubby, desperate old men leaning against each other for support. Everything had been old, lethargic and rusty for too long. Now, putting on a sudden spurt, it wanted to be modern, indeed ultra-modern, right up to date with the latest technology. This haste made Moscow seem over-full, overpopulated, and as if it were living in a state of frantic confusion. There were crowds of people everywhere, in all the shops, outside the theatres, and they all had to wait. Everything was over-organised and so failed to work properly. The new bureaucracy, which was supposed to impose order, was still enjoying itself writing memos and making out permits, and everything was delayed. On the great evening of the Tolstoy celebrations, which were supposed to begin at six, nothing got under way until half-past nine, and when I left the opera house feeling exhausted, the other speakers were still holding forth at length. Western Europeans were sure to arrive an hour early for every reception and appointment. Time ran away through your fingers, yet every second was filled with observation and discussion, all of it at fevered pace, and you felt gradually infected by the mysterious Russian inflammation of the intellect, with its wild desire to unburden itself of feelings and ideas in the heat of the moment. Without quite knowing
why, you felt mildly excited yourself. It was something to do with the new, restless atmosphere; maybe you were developing a Russian soul.

Much of what I saw was magnificent, in particular Leningrad, a city planned by princes with audacious minds, a place of broad avenues and mighty palaces—yet at the same time still the oppressive St Petersburg of the
White Nights
, and known to Raskolnikov.
1
The Hermitage museum was truly impressive, and I shall never forget the sight of troops of workmen, soldiers and peasants, hats reverently held in their hands just as they would have taken them off respectfully before icons in the old days, tramping with their heavy shoes through former imperial halls and looking at the pictures with secret pride, as if saying—all this is ours now, and we will learn to understand it. Teachers led round-cheeked children through the halls, art commissars explained Rembrandt and Titian to peasants who listened rather self-consciously, looking timidly up from under their heavy eyelids when details were pointed out. Here, as elsewhere, there was a touch of absurdity in this honest and well-meant effort to turn ‘the people’ overnight from illiterates into connoisseurs able to appreciate Beethoven and Vermeer—but the effort made by one party to the transaction to convey an instant idea of the highest artistic values, and by the other to understand them, gave rise to some impatience on both sides. Children at school were allowed to paint the wildest, most extravagant pictures; girls of twelve had the works of Hegel and Sorel,
2
whom I myself did not know at this time, on the desks in front of them. Cabbies who could hardly read had books in their hands, just because they
were
books and books meant education, so it was an honour and a duty for the new proletariat to get educated. We often found ourselves smiling when we were shown round perfectly ordinary factories and were expected to gaze in wonderment, as if we had never seen such marvels in Europe and America. “Look, electric!” one worker told me proudly, pointing to a sewing
machine and obviously expecting me to break into exclamations of astonishment. Because the Russian people were seeing these technical things for the first time, they humbly thought they had all been thought up and invented by the Revolution and Little Fathers Lenin and Trotsky. So although we were secretly amused, we smiled and admired everything. This new Russia, we thought, resembled a large, wonderfully talented and good-natured child, and we wondered—will it really learn such wide-ranging lessons as quickly as it thinks? Will the great plan go on developing, or will it fail and relapse into the old Russian apathy of Oblomov?
3
Sometimes you felt confident that all would be well, sometimes you doubted it. The more I saw of Russia the less sure I could feel.