1913 (45 page)

On 13 November,
Swann’s Way
, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s great novel
In Search of Lost Time
, is published. After the book was turned down not only by the Fasquelle and Oldenbourg publishing houses and the
Nouvelle Revue Française
but also by André Gide, the then editor at Gallimard, Proust had the book published by Grasset at his own expense. No sooner does he hold the first copy in his hands than his chauffeur and lover Alfred Agostinelli splits up with him. Everyone else falls for the author. Rilke reads the book only a few days after its publication. It begins with the golden words
‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’ –
‘For a long time I went to bed early’ – and in saying this, Proust touched the nerve of an exhausted avant-garde who, from Kafka to Joyce, from Musil to Thomas Mann, boasted in their diaries whenever they managed to go to bed before midnight. Going to bed early – to the ever weary pioneers of the modern age it seemed like the bravest struggle against depression, drinking, senseless distraction and the advance of time.

In Munich, Oswald Spengler goes on feverishly writing his mammoth work
The Decline of the West
. The first part is finished. Spengler’s state of mind: similar to that of the West. His diary: a tragedy. He notes: ‘I have never had a month without thoughts of suicide.’ And yet: ‘Inwardly I have experienced more than perhaps any other human being of my time.’

Alma Mahler always piled her hair up high so that it often came tumbling down in conversation or while dancing. She had made an art of letting the dark tendrils fall into her face at precisely the right moment, sending men out of their minds. Today she grants this joy to Kokoschka again. Because he has just completed the double portrait of them both, the painting that has stood on his easel since the start of the year, and which shows Alma and the painter on a stormy sea. He originally wanted to call it
Tristan and Isolde
, after the Wagner opera from which she sang to him the first time they met. But then Georg Trakl gave the painting the title
The Bride of the Wind –
and that was the one that stuck. In November, Kokoschka, deeply in debt, writes to his dealer Herwarth Walden in Berlin:

Modesty has never been Oskar Kokoschka’s strong point. But the surprising thing is: Alma Mahler actually sees
The Bride of the Wind
as Kokoschka’s long-awaited masterpiece. ‘In his large painting
The Bride of the Wind
he has painted me lying pressed trustingly against him in a storm amid high winds – entirely dependent on him, a tyrannical expression on his face, radiating energy as he calms the waves.’ She liked that. It was how she saw herself: full of energy, reposing, calming the waves. Alma, the ruler of the world. That was how she had imagined her lover’s masterpiece. A blind homage. She
studiously ignores the fact that she once promised to marry him for it. But as a reward he is allowed to come out to Semmering, because her new house is ready. And he is allowed to paint a new picture there.

In Breitenstein, Alma has had a curious house built for herself, on the land that Mahler bought three years previously. The house looks like an over-sized chimney, dark, with larch shingles still being fitted to the roof; the verandas running along the outside make all the rooms dark and gloomy. A temple to melancholy. Hanging in the sitting room is Kokoschka’s portrait of Alma as the poisoner Lucrezia Borgia. And beside it, in a glass case, Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony, open at the page where the dying composer wrote his cries: ‘Almschi, dearest Almschi.’

Kokoschka’s only reward for his
Bride of the Wind
was to paint the sitting room in Semmering, a fresco above the fireplace, 4 metres wide. The subject is, surprisingly enough: Alma Mahler and Oskar Kokoschka. Or as Alma puts it: ‘showing me, pointing in spectral brightness at the sky, while he appeared standing in hell, wrapped in death and serpents. The whole thing is based on the idea of a continuation of the flames in the hearth. My little “Gucki” stood next to it and said: “Can’t you paint anything but Mami?” ’ Good question. Answer: No.

Rilke sits in Paris, thinking distractedly about summer and autumn in Germany. As he travelled uneasily back and forth between all his wives and
über
-mothers, between Clara, still his wife, his ex-lovers Sidonie and Lou, his summer love Ellen Delp, his mother, his helpless admirers Cassirer, von Nostitz and von Thurn und Taxis. Keep everything open, don’t go down any one path, wherever it may lead: that is what Rainer Maria Rilke is thinking on 1 November. As an attitude to life it’s disastrous. As poetry it’s a revelation:

In Augsburg, Bertolt Brecht is suffering: it is November, and the season of colds. And the fifteen-year-old schoolboy is suffering from everything going: his diary records headaches, sniffles, catarrh, stitches, back pains, nosebleeds. There are short daily bulletins about his own ‘condition’. He observes his pains with relish and works himself up to a secondary state of illness: ‘Morning Doctor Müller came. Dry Bronchitis. Interesting illness. Anyone can have sniffles.’

The phrase ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’ appears in England for the first time in 1913. It comes from the book
Rustic Speech and Folklore
, by Elizabeth M. Wright.

Emil Nolde works his way towards the South Sea. On 6 November he crosses the Yellow Sea to China. The steamer
Prince Eitel Friedrich
takes five days to reach Hong Kong, passing by Taiwan. From Hong Kong the expedition group then continues on the steamer
Prince Waldemar
across the South China Sea to German New Guinea. But when
he comes ashore in the far-off German colony, he is perturbed. He finds not an untouched paradise but an enormous car boot sale. In November 1913 he writes home, ‘It is depressing to note that all the countries here are swamped with the very worst European knick-knacks, from paraffin lamps to the coarsest cotton materials, dyed in inauthentic aniline colours.’ To see that, he complains, he didn’t need to make the journey. He leaves his painting equipment in his suitcase and flees.

On 2 November, Burt Lancaster is born.