A Sad Affair (3 page)

This is the more unexpected from an author who, in his masterly trilogy of novels from the 1950s—
Pigeons on the Grass
(1951),
The Hothouse
(1953), and
Death in Rome
(1954)—showed himself such an adept at the bigger picture: politics, history, society, culture. The world in those books, not unnaturally, is a fallen, a defeated, a recrudescent, and, in its bones, an unreformed world. It's as though the later Koeppen has turned on its head Pascal's nostrum about the cause of human misery being our inability to remain in our rooms; how, he argues, can there be anything as frail and contingent as human happiness, as long as the macro-scene is so full of iniquity? Surely everything—including our rooms and our selves— is warped, if not crushed, by the weight of these bigger tensions and untruths. Love is perhaps the most degraded thing of all: a feeling produced from cynicism, opportunism, or vacancy, a transaction somewhere on the scale between seduction and rape. In a world of rubble, where is one going to find a rose garden?

Koeppen said of himself—whereupon, helpfully, others said it of him—that he never wrote his books at the right time. Just as the books of the 1950s were published to howls of protest and indignation and hurt
amour-propre
, so this book he wrote in 1934—his debut, a young man's book—has nothing of Weimar or fascism or Germany. Its first action is to take its hero out of the country— never even named—and across a border. It barely deigns to use any place-names, and certainly no German ones: not until the action reaches Italy are streets and towns thought to be worth naming. Surely this already, this turning his back on the place just as it was so full of itself, so full of history and catastrophe, and on the cusp of much more history and catastrophe, is a gesture of tacit contempt. Nothing here for Left or Right, it seems to say: A curse on both your houses! Not that it has gone abroad to seek its political quarry either (as Koeppen did in
Death in Rome
, twenty years later); there is almost nothing of the feeling of gathering clouds, a restoration of national pride, and the sinister bombast of Mussolini (of the kind that Thomas Mann got into his wonderful short story from 1930, "Mario and the Magician"), no political curiosity at all. As we see from the later books, it wasn't that this type of thinking and writing was beyond Koeppen, even then, or ever. No, he wants to write the wrong book at the wrong time—even if it's his first.

It's hard to think of another writer as rebellious and ornery and uncompromising as Wolfgang Koeppen; I am reminded a little of Elizabeth Bishop, who said, "I have always written poetry more by not writing it." It was really not a time to make your debut with a love story, from a Jewish publisher. In a fine specimen of Nazi literary criticism—understood as an annex to the penal code, or, less formally, as an incitement to murder—one reviewer, Herbert Göpfert, fulminated:

I at any rate read nothing in these pages relating to love, only those surrogates that certain scribblers once offered in its place. The young persons in this squalid cabaret- and bordello-milieu, talking incessantly across each other of their repressed feelings, are such puny beings that one is forced to put the question quite directly: Are there really still such creatures among us, and if there are, do these striplings and tomboys have to be put in books? If it had been an old émigré writing like this, one might have understood—but a young poet, in our time? Theres only one prescription I have to offer: labor camp!"

Koeppen, in Holland, managed to laugh. (A
Sad Affair
was duly put on the list of condemned books in 1936.)

 What happened was this: Koeppen was a young journalist writing for the
Berliner
Börsen-Courier.
A piece of his was seen and admired by Max Tau, an editor working for the prestigious Jewish publishing house of Bruno Cassirer. They met; Tau was very taken with Koeppen; offered him an advance to write a novel; Koeppen took the advance (took it to Italy), spent it, and came back without the novel. Max Tau—who does seem to have understood his man— realized that the carrot alone would not work, and offered a mild version of the stick to supplement it. They tried locking Koeppen up in empty apartments with a typewriter and plenty of paper. Eventually, one such arrangement worked, and Koeppen wrote his book—as I think he wrote all his books—very quickly. He had a resistance to writing, and in particular to writing what he thought someone else wanted or expected him to write, and this, in conjunction with his journalist's bad habit of leaving everything to the very last minute, must have made him an exasperating author. He wrote little in the course of a long career—five completed novels in sixty years—but when he did, the results were unexpected and worth having. The long periods of truancy surrounding short patches of zeal and productivity are a sort of guarantee. You don't get the oases without the desert. He was lucky in that he found three patient and supportive publishers, Cassirer, Henry Goverts, and latterly Suhrkamp. Tau said: "As an author, he was one of the compulsives, and encouragement and admonition weren't really much use. He would generally take off."

A
Sad Affair
(Eine unglückliche Liebe
, but neither term translates well, and this is the only form of the pairing that I found satisfactory in English) is—it's no very great surprise—almost entirely true. (This also makes it an oddity in Koeppens published fiction: elsewhere, he's not a straightforwardly autobiographical writer.) Friedrich seems utterly real: poor, vague, with secret, remote ambitions, educated, unworldly, intense, gauche, not perhaps very good at being young. The idea of him running everywhere is wonderful— a young man with a full heart and a full head, the sort of literary youth that probably went out of production in the 1980s. A little more surprising is the fact that Sibylle, the ideal and object—
subject
would be a better word—of Friedrich's passion is also about as real as a character in a book can be. She is based on Sibylle
(sic!)
Schloss, a young, half-Jewish (Koeppen doesn't say so) actress. When her career in the legitimate or serious theater was blocked as a result, she fell in with Erika Mann's anti-Fascist
Pfeffermühle
cabaret in Zurich (the unnamed foreign city of the novel), where the renowned German actress Therese Giehse also worked; Giehse, incidentally, is the somewhat Brechtian "peasant woman from olden days," and Mann herself is described as having "a Roman head." Koeppen (he doesn't say this either) wrote one or two chansons for his inamorata to perform. He persuaded her to visit Venice with him. Schloss was in her early twenties, heart-stoppingly beautiful, unconventional in her morality, and an interesting person with an interesting background (somewhat persiflaged by Koeppen). When it was published, Sibylle read and admired
Eine unglückliche Liebe
, and later on, when she worked in Brentano's bookshop on Fifth Avenue, she recommended the German edition to customers looking for "true-life romance." My source is a fascinating and very well-researched book called
Wolfgang Koeppen
, 1933-1948
, published in 2001, by Jörg Döring, who tracked down and interviewed Sibylle Schloss on the Upper East Side, where she still lives. Other characters, like the wonderfully named Bosporus, Walter the critic, Fedor, and others, are also drawn from life. In fact, the only part of the book that is substantially made up is the adventure with Anja.

Tyranny has been described as the mother of metaphor, in which case, love—a state of emergency, a politics of two (a formulation that bridges the gap to Koeppen's later work)—perhaps might qualify as a form of tyranny. Certainly, it is a wonderfully generative—one might call it an aerobic—condition, fully exercising the image-making and likeness-building faculties of the imagination. Friedrich questions, rants, performs, devotes, hymns. He goes through all his gears, gets put through all his paces. And while he says "Yes," Sibylle as indefatigably and insistently says "No," perhaps the two great human freedoms. In her character, it seems to me, Koeppen investigates the pressure put upon beauty, a rather underexplored subject in fiction. Sibylle is a compassionately viewed victim, at least as much as she is a femme fatale, a Salome or a Jael or a Medusa. The beautiful are different, and not just because, as Hemingway would have had to have said, "They are better-looking." The accumulation of private expectation becomes almost a public pressure. The issue for beauty is how to be—or how not to be—publicly owned.

Still,
A Sad Affair
is mostly Friedrich's show, and the book is endearingly full of his instability, his zigs and zags, as he seeks forever to "travel," only to encounter the "frontiers" or the "glass wall" of another's being. (This is the principal metaphorical opposition in the book.) There are memorable descriptions of Friedrich and Sibylle as tunneling toward one another, of Friedrich as "the lover running amok," of Friedrich "in a desert in front of the cloud of a constant mirage." There are gorgeous poetic tributes to Sibylle, from the intimate but virginal "need to loiter in her breath and her bloodstream, to be a child in her womb" to the exalted yet delightfully playful "She was radiant, a contented snail in an invisible house of joy; a young kitten rolled into a ball, feeling the pleasure of being itself, and purring songs of praise to the Almighty," to the desperately sad and utterly authentic-sounding fallback, "She is my contemporary!" There is a lot of what I would call the "impossibilism" of the English Metaphysical love poets, Donne and Marvell, in Friedrich:

My Love is of a birth as rare

As 'tis for object strange and high:

It was begotten by Despair Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone

Could show me so divine a thing,

Where feeble Hope could ne'er have flown

But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.

—M
ARVELL
, "
The Definition of Love"

There are things that are too zany to be faked: Friedrich's superstitious game with himself in the lightbulb factory, nominating bulbs as characters in his drama, "At which point Sibylle went out";
the
folie à trois
with Beck, and the "days of the naughty Sibylles"; the serial, compulsory, rather demeaning friendships with the other men, Sibylle’s successful lovers; the irritation with Magnus, not because he is a rival, but because, like himself, he is in love. It is full of air and fire and water; there is not very much earth.

German critics have seen
A Sad Affair
as a very German book, but it is not without such "un-Germanic" attributes as humor and charm. For all the authentic sadness and earnestness of his pursuit, Friedrich is a borderline comic character. He is, as I think Koeppen was also once described, possibly by himself, "a blithe melancholiac." Koeppen doesn't betray him by mocking him, but he is, shall we say, aware of Friedrich's comic potentialities, his instability, his dither, his unpredictable extremes of modesty and exorbitance: "Sibylle said later that she was convinced that he'd come to shoot her. That was her interpretation of his taut pallor, though there was nothing more behind it than suicide." (This is surely deadpan in every sense.) He is a descendant of the Baudelairean character, the dandy, at once full of conceit and at the same time desperate not to be lower than those he despises. But he is also a softer, less constructed, less
disciplined
character than that; he has no armor and no weapon, no sneer; he tries to be kind and decent and compassionate, even to the likes of Fedor. There is comedy, too, in his intermittent appreciation of the world outside him, where money is raised from friends (if it isn't dropped in the street by bank messengers), or less satisfactorily, by working nights in a lightbulb factory (less restful than it sounds), or selling old clothes one can no longer stand to wear. Or perhaps the whole thing is much simpler than all that: perhaps the idea of so much energy in a character is inherently comic.

A Sad Affair
is ingeniously composed, with probably no fewer than three time schemes (or maybe the term
time signatures
would be useful here too): There is the slow progress through the twenty-four hours or so in Zurich; there is a rather more rapid progress through the weeks in Italy; and fastest of all, in a way, are the episodic flashbacks that are dispersed through the narrative (they are fast at least in the way they bring us up to the present, chronologically, through months, if not years). The square brackets encasing further commentary are a likable and ingenious feature; while the rapid intercutting between Friedrich and Sibylle at the time they are both converging on Venice is utterly cinematic (it is even tempting to think of a split screen at that point). Still, the book throughout has a wonderfully "live" feel. It could be an anticipation of a Beat novel, twenty years later. It doesn't feel like a book written with a plan, from hindsight; it feels adventitious, responsive, open to whatever comes up. If a new character happens along— that strange Neapolitan pimp—put him in. If a new setting takes your imagination, write about it: Sibylle's time in the stiflingly bourgeois world of German provincial repertory theater, where "she suffered nightmares of oversize traffic policemen." If you notice something out of the corner of your eye, don't leave it out: Italian women, "their blue-painted eyelids demurely cast down, and their mouths a shocking red," or drums being carried "in the raw red hands of long-armed young men with unpleasant coughs." It's how someone writes who is in love with writing, who discovers he has talent, senses he can do anything, meet any challenge. This, almost as much as the entanglement with Sibylle, is the story of
A Sad Affair.
In some ways, it's not such a sad affair at all.

Michael Hofmann

Albinen, Valais

July 2002