1913 (34 page)
Authors: Florian Illies
On 11 August, Sigmund Freud continues his journey with his wife, sister-in-law and daughter Anna from Marienbad on to San Martino di Castrozza. This small mountain village in the Dolomites is home to a branch of Dr Von Hartungen’s legendary Riva sanatorium. Freud plans to spend another four weeks recharging here before he has to go to Munich at the beginning of September for that confounded Congress of the Psychoanalytical Society. Freud summons his friend Josef Ferenczi to his hotel; Ferenczi is more than happy to come, and together they work on a strategy for Munich. In the afternoons he goes for his daily constitutional with Anna, arm in arm through the cool forest. A picture of them on one of their walks shows Anna in traditional garb, staring jauntily at the camera, full of confidence, and her father next to her, proud but morose too, even a little anxious. During his stay at the mountain sanatorium he receives treatment for his migraines and chronic cold. Christl von Hartungen prescribes strict abstinence from tobacco and alcohol, and plenty of fresh air. But Freud struggles to re-charge at all. The nearer the event in Munich gets, the more distracted he becomes. Then, in the middle of the night, just one day before his departure, Dr Freud sends for Dr Von Hartungen; he has suffered a fainting fit and requests urgent medical assistance via a calling card.
At the beginning of August, having recovered from the shock caused by the deaths of his father and his dog Frika, Picasso travels to Céret. But his fame is now such that on 9 August the local newspaper
L’Indépendant
runs the following report: ‘The small town of Céret is rejoicing. The Master of Cubism has arrived, ready to enjoy a well-earned rest. So far, the artists Herbin, Braque, Kisling, Ascher, Pichot, Gris and the sculptor Davidson have joined him in Céret.’ All this fuss is a source of anxiety to Picasso. His greatest concern is Juan Gris, for he has mastered the Cubist technique almost as well as Picasso by now, and has the ability expertly to create a whole new world from fragments, wallpaper and scraps of newspaper. Before long, his old friend Ramon Pichot also comes to Céret, attempting to convince Picasso to give money to his most recent lover, Fernande, to help her get by. But Picasso hates being pressured like that, and they come to blows. Picasso and Eva, who stole him away from Fernande, leave in a panic. They head back to pulsating Paris in search of some ‘peace and quiet’, as Picasso – in all honesty – writes in a letter to his art dealer Kahnweiler in Rome. Eva and Picasso move into their new apartment and studio at 5 Rue Schoelcher in Montparnasse.
From there it’s only ten minutes on the new railway line to Issy-les-Moulineaux, where Henri Matisse is now living. Scarcely back from Céret, Picasso and Eva drive out there and spend the summer horse-riding with Matisse. This is such an extraordinary event that it is immediately reported twice to Modernism’s head office, Gertrude Stein. First, a note from Picasso: ‘We’re riding through the Clamart forest’, on 29 August. And then, on the same day, this from Matisse: ‘Picasso is a horseman. We’re out riding together, which comes as a great surprise to everyone.’ The news of the two heroes’ reconciliation quickly becomes the most important topic of conversation in Montparnasse and Montmartre – in other words, the whole world.
‘We are each passionately interested in the technical problems of the other. We undoubtedly profited from one another, it was like an artistic brotherhood’, writes Matisse about the man who was once his
greatest rival. And to Max Jacob, Matisse says: ‘If I didn’t do what I do, I would love to paint like Picasso does.’ And Max Jacob replies: ‘It’s crazy, but Picasso just said the very same thing to me about you.’
Georg Trakl is furious. He wants to see his sister Gretl, but can’t find her. His appointment as a clearing officer in the Viennese war ministry was, of course, a complete joke. He stops turning up and drinks his first five carafes of red wine by midday every day. He takes drugs. His friends Adolf Loos and his English wife, Bessie, prescribe him an immediate dose of: holiday – holiday from himself. They are due to travel to Venice. On 14 August he writes to his friend Buschbeck: ‘On Saturday I’m supposed to travel to Venice with the Looses, which inexplicably makes me somewhat nervous.’ The next day, a second letter, this time with a rare trace of euphoria ignited by the prospect of his first ever holiday: ‘Dearest Buschbeck! The world is round. On Saturday, I will be falling down towards Venice. Further and further – towards the stars.’ Of course, the whole thing turns out to be a failure: a displeasure trip. He who once reached for the stars has ended up with a handful of jellyfish. Even his adored Karl Kraus, who goes to the lido with them, even the caring attention of Adolf Loos, Ludwig von Ficker and their wives can’t brighten Trakl’s mood, which is further clouded by the presence of Peter Altenberg on this ‘staff outing’ of the Austrian intelligentsia. It’s mid-August, and Georg Trakl is walking aimlessly across the Lido in Venice. The sun is shining, the water is warm and the author is the unhappiest person in the entire world. A photograph from those days of 1913 shows him wandering tentatively across the sand, his hair brittle and shorn, his skin as pale as that of a moloch living in a hole deep under the earth. His left hand is curled upwards like a flower bud, his lips are pursed. He has his back to the sea, clearly feeling like a pitiful sight in his bathing costume, lost, homesick and may be mumbling poetry to himself. At night, in the hotel, he writes them down:
Black swarm of flies
Darkens the stone room
And the head of the homeless man
Gazes tormented at the golden day.
Venice, the sinking city, exerts an irresistible pull on the morbidly inclined Viennese intelligentsia in the summer of 1913. As well as Trakl, Peter Altenberg, Adolf Loos and his wife and the Von Fickers, Arthur Schnitzler and his wife, Olga, also arrive in Venice on 23 August. They have travelled from Brioni, and are staying in the Grand Hotel. On the beach they meet more old acquaintances: Hermann Bahr, a bearded giant of a man, and his wife. The very next day, after a gondola ride with Olga, Schnitzler meets with his publisher Samuel Fischer to discuss forthcoming publications. The Fischers are in Venice with their best friends to celebrate their son Gerhart’s nineteenth birthday. Richard Beer-Hoffmann is there, the actor Alexander Moissi, and Hermann Bahr and Altenberg come along too. There’s no mention of Trakl. Unfortunately, they are all ailing from something: Gerhart, the birthday boy, is scrawny and feverish, and Samuel Fischer has an inflammation of the middle ear. But they celebrate anyway, toasting young life and its rich prospects. At the end of August the Schnitzlers set off in leisurely fashion via St Moritz and Sils Maria, where on 28 August in the ‘Waldhaus’, they celebrate Goethe’s birthday and also, just a bit, their tenth anniversary.
We can’t forget Kafka, or his bride! So how did Felice Bauer react to reading the most preposterous marriage proposal of all time? She was distraught. But even she, hardened as she is by now, probably hadn’t thought Kafka capable of surpassing that disastrous note of self-incrimination masked as a marriage proposal. But then Kafka writes his ‘Letter to the Father’. It never became as famous as the one he wrote to his own father. But it deserved to, because it’s simply
incredible. On 28 August, Goethe’s birthday, Kafka asks Felice’s father whether he would entrust his daughter to him. Or rather: he implores him desperately
not
to entrust his daughter to him:
I am taciturn, unsociable, morose, selfish, a hypochondriac and genuinely in poor health. Among my family, the best, most loving of people you could ever encounter, I live as a complete stranger. In recent years I’ve spoken an average of less than twenty words a day to my mother, and I’ve barely ever exchanged more than a few words of greeting with my father. I don’t speak to my married sisters and their husbands at all, unless I have something bad to say. I have no sense of how to co-habit normally with my family. And yet your daughter is supposed to live alongside a person like this, a healthy girl like her, whose nature has predestined her for genuine marital bliss? Is she supposed to bear it, leading a cloistered existence alongside the man who, admittedly, loves her as he’s never been able to love anyone else, but who, by virtue of his unalterable destiny, spends most of his time either shut away in his room or wandering around alone?
Marriage as a stroke of fate. Issue 21 of
Die Gartenlaube
has something to say on the matter:
In some regions of our Fatherland, there still exists a beautiful custom long forgotten elsewhere. The bride, when crossing the threshold of her parents’ house as a girl for the last time before setting off for her wedding, is handed a handkerchief made of new linen by her mother. The bride clasps this handkerchief in her hand during the ceremony, in order to dry her bridal tears. On the wedding night, the young woman then stashes away the little handkerchief in her linen closet, and there it stays – unused and
unwashed – until the day when it will veil the face of its owner, its features now frozen by death, and follow her into the grave. This handkerchief is called the ‘Cloth of Tears’.