Death in Venice and Other Stories (21 page)

Equally removed from the banal and the eccentric, his was a talent that could both impress a broad audience and command the appreciative, demanding interest of those with taste. Even as a young man, he had been under universal pressure to achieve, to achieve nothing short of greatness at that, and had known neither the idleness nor the blithe carefree days of youth. Once, in Vienna, around his thirty-fifth birthday, he had fallen ill. A keen observer had remarked at a party, “Aschenbach, you see, has only ever lived like
so
”—clenching the fingers of his left hand into a tight fist—”never like
so
”—unclenching it and letting it dangle relaxed from the arm of his chair. That hit the mark, and what made Aschenbach's life such an example was the fact that he did not by any means possess a robust constitution and was thus only called, not born, to such constant exertion.

Medical considerations had kept the adolescent Aschenbach from attending school and required him to be educated at home. He had grown up in solitude, without companionship, and had been forced to recognize himself early on as belonging to that breed of men who lacked, not talent, but the necessary physical foundation for the utmost development of talent—a breed of men who tend to do their best work when young and whose abilities rarely make it very far along in years. “To
persevere through all,” however, had always been his motto. In his Frederick the Great novel he saw nothing less than the apotheosis of this imperative, which for him represented the essence of long-suffering, ever-toiling virtue. Moreover, it was one of his most passionate wishes to grow old, for he had always believed that the only artistic talent that could be deemed truly great, sweeping, indeed truly admirable, was that given the chance to bear characteristic fruit every step of the way throughout a human lifetime.

In order to carry the burdens talent had loaded upon his frail shoulders and to travel the great distances he wanted with them, he needed discipline. This he was lucky enough to inherit from his father's side of the family. As a forty- or fifty-year-old, at that age when others begin to squander, daydream and self-contentedly postpone the execution of great plans, he would start his morning off early, with splashes of cold water across his chest and down his back. Then he would work for two or three ardently conscientious hours by the light of a pair of tall candles in silver holders at the head of his manuscript, sacrificing to art all the strength he had gathered from sleep. It was pardonable—in fact it was actually a mark of the great triumph of his work ethic—that noninitiates often mistook the world of his
Maya
or the epic blocks in which Frederick's heroic life unfolded for products of coiled strength and a massive wind. In reality such lofty edifices had been built up piecemeal, layer for layer, from hundreds of isolated inspirations, the whole and each of its parts only attaining such excellence because their creator possessed an iron-willed tenacity such as had once conquered his native Silesia and had endured the strain of year-long labor on one lone project, devoting exclusively his strongest, worthiest hours to the actual production process.

For an imaginative work of any significance to make an on-the-spot impact that is both broad and deep, there must be some unspoken affinity, indeed basic agreement between the individual destiny of the author and the general one of his contemporaries and fellow citizens.
People don't know why they celebrate a particular work of art. Far removed from any expert knowledge, they convince themselves of having uncovered a hundred different examples of its superiority, which then serve to justify their enthusiasm. But the real reason for their praise is something incalculable—sympathetic attraction. Once, in a relatively obscure passage, Aschenbach had stated as much outright, writing that practically everything great that exists does so in spite, having come into existence in spite of worry and anguish, of poverty, isolation, physical weakness, vice, overheated passions and various thousands of other obstacles. This was more than a remark. It was personal experience; it was almost the magic formula for his life and fame, the key to his work. Can there be any wonder, then, that it was also the personal ethos, the public comportment of those characters most idiosyncratically his own?

Commenting on the novel type of hero favored by this writer—one that recurred in various guises—an early but insightful dissector of his work had written that the Aschenbachian protagonist embodied “a kind of intellectual and youthful masculinity, gritting its teeth, proud in its degradation, standing firm as swords and spears pierced its flesh.” That was a nice way of describing things, precise and perceptive, despite the seemingly too-passive formulation. After all, composure in the face of destiny—grace under fire—involves more than just endurance: it must be actively achieved, positively won. That is why the figure of St. Sebastian is the most beautiful image, if not in all of art, then certainly in all art relevant to this discussion. If you were to look deeply enough into Aschenbach's fictional world, you could find its equivalent: the sort of elegant self-control that kept its inner decrepitude and biological decay hidden from the eyes of the world until the last possible moment; sallow ugliness that overcame physical disadvantage to ignite its own smoldering lust into pure flame and achieve absolute mastery in the realm of beauty; pale impotence that summoned enough strength from the glowing depths of the human spirit to make an
entire proud people kneel at the foot of the Cross and at
its own
feet as well. Amiable steadfastness in the empty and strict service of form, the life of falsehood and risk, the rapidly self-consuming desire and artistry of a born swindler—if you were to ponder just these few examples of heroic destiny, you could come to doubt the existence of any other type of heroism besides that of weakness. And what type of heroism, after all, could have better suited the times? Gustav Aschenbach was the poet of all those working on the brink of exhaustion, the overburdened, worn-out yet nonetheless unbowed apostles of achievement who, though slight of stature and slim of resource, get by with ecstatic bursts of will and clever allocation, managing, for however short a time, to give the appearance of greatness. They are many; they are the heroes of the age. All of them found their image mirrored in his work, found themselves upheld and exalted, their praises sung, and they knew how to express their gratitude. They heralded his name.

He had been young and raw along with the times and, poorly guided by them, had publicly stumbled. He had blundered, embarrassed himself, violated tact and good judgment in both word and work. Nevertheless, he had also achieved the goal of dignity, toward which, in his way of thinking, all great talent possessed an inborn drive and impulse. Indeed you could say his entire development had been a conscious and hard-nosed climb toward dignity, to the ultimate abandonment of any inhibiting skepticism and irony.

Easily comprehensible fiction that is filled with lively figures and does not unduly tax the reading mind may delight the middle-of-the-road masses, but youth, with its uncompromising passion, can only be captivated by what is problematic. Aschenbach had certainly been problematic, and as uncompromising as any boy. He had indulged the imagination, strip-mined the intellect, pulverized promising seeds, revealed secrets, incriminated talent and exposed art itself. Indeed, even as his verbal sculptures had entertained, exalted and inspired the devout enthusiasts, the young artist had also held the
twenty-year-olds breathlessly enthralled with his cynical pronouncements about the dubious nature of art and the artist himself.

There seems to be nothing, however, to which unalloyed imagination, conscious of its duty, becomes more quickly inured than to the stinging, bitter lure of the intellect. There can be no doubt that the apprentice's most dourly conscientious labor proves shallow against the experienced master's profound resolve to reject intellectual knowledge, to dismiss it, to step over it with head held high, insofar as it serves in the least to lame, discourage or derogate his own will, his capacity for action, his feelings or even his passion. How else could that famous short story “A True Wretch” be understood except as an outburst of contempt for the vulgar pseudopsychology of his age, embodied in that ridiculous weakling, that half-pint scoundrel, who, inspired by moral velleity, weakness and turpitude, attempts to glorify his own pathetic existence by driving his wife into the arms of a fresh-faced boy, telling himself that plumbed depth justifies despicable deeds? The brunt of those words, in which dissipation was disdained, signalled Aschenbach's own repudiation of moral relativism, of all sympathetic attraction to the abyss. It announced his rejection of that all-forbearing maxim which says that to know is to forgive: what was being prepared, indeed realized, here was that “miraculous rebirth of unfettered innocence,” to which the talk returned, explicitly and not without a portentous emphasis, in one of his interviews shortly thereafter. Strange coincidences! Was it not a creative consequence of this “rebirth,” this new dignity and rigor, that readers then began to notice in him an almost hypertrophic increase in aestheticism, that aristocratic purity, simplicity and formal symmetry which would henceforth give his entire output an unmistakable, surely intended stamp of classical mastery of technique? And yet moral conviction beyond the realm of knowledge, of all-unravelling and all-inhibiting intellect—did this not amount to a simplification in its own right, a moralistic reduction of the world and the
human soul? And did it not also entail an encouragement of what was evil, forbidden, ethically indefensible? Does not form have two faces? Is it not simultaneously moral and amoral—moral, insofar as it is the ultimate expression of discipline; amoral, even immoral, insofar as it automatically entails ethical indifference, aspiring to make all that is ethical bow down before its own proud, unchecked scepter?

Be that as it may. Development is destiny—and how could one unfolding to the applause and mass faith of a broad popular audience not be different from one transpiring without the luster and gratitudes of fame? Only the eternal vagabond yawns and tries to scoff when a great talent outgrows its libertinistic incubation period, expressly affiliates itself with the dignity of the human imagination and claims the court privileges attending a lonely existence full of solitary, unshared suffering in battle, which has brought societal influence and accolades. How much playfulness, spite and sheer pleasure is there anyway in talent in its formative stages? With time, something official, pedagogical, crept into the public Gustav Aschenbach. His style dispensed in later years with boldfaced audacities, subtle and original nuances, to become paradigmatic and solid, polished and familiar, conservative, formal, even formulaic. Moreover, like the Louis XIV of historical record, the older he got, the more he purged his vocabulary of words with vulgar associations. At this point it happened that the ministry of education adopted select passages from his work as mandatory school reading. His own inner sense of himself was confirmed—and he did not demur—when a newly crowned German prince wished to honor the creator of Frederick by bestowing upon him, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, the title of personal nobility.

Early on, after a few unsettled years trying out various locations, he selected Munich as his permanent residence and lived there enjoying a position of the highest bourgeois respect, the sort of respect that is occasionally granted to men of intellect in certain exceptional cases. The marriage he concluded while still a young man, to a
girl from an academic family, ended after a few short years of happiness with her death. He was left with a daughter, already married. He had no son.

Gustav von Aschenbach was slightly below average height, clean-shaven and brunet. His head looked a bit too large for the almost delicate figure he cut. His brushed-back hair, thinning on top, quite thick and heavily gray at the temples, framed a high, lined, perhaps even scarred forehead. The bow from a pair of rimless gold glasses dug into the base of his stout Roman nose. He had a wide mouth equally wont to droop and suddenly tense up and purse, a set of cheeks gaunt and furrowed, and a clearly defined chin with a delicate cleft. Great moments of destiny seemed to have passed over this head, which he usually held at somewhat of an angle, as though in pain. It had been art, though, that had taken over the work, otherwise associated with a difficult and stormy life, of wringing these physiological changes. Behind these brows had been born the lightninglike exchanges between Voltaire and the king as they debated war; these eyes, gazing with such weary depth through those glass lenses, had seen the bloody inferno of the
lazaretti
during the Seven Years' War. Art—understood as personal experience, too—is life raised to a higher power. It gives a deeper pleasure and exacts a quicker toll. It etches the real traces of the imaginative mind's adventures onto the face of its servant and produces, though that servant may lead an external existence of monastic calm, nerves that in the long run are overindulged, hypersensitive, exhausted and perennially craving, such as a lifetime of dissipate passions and pleasures can hardly equal.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

Several matters, literary and practical, kept the eager traveler in Munich for an additional fortnight after that fateful walk. He finally ordered that his country house be made ready for habitation within four weeks' time
and departed one day between the middle and the end of May, taking the night train to Trieste, where he delayed only twenty-four hours before embarking for Pola the following morning.

He was looking for something exotic and disconnected, but within quick reach, so he took up residence on an Adriatic island not far from the Istrian coast, highly praised of late, with natives in colorful rags babbling wild sounds and beautiful sets of jagged cliffs wherever there was access to the sea. But the rain, the humidity, a self-contained hotel clientele of provincial Austrians and the lack of that peacefully intimate contact with the sea which only a soft, sandy beach can provide conspired to oppress his mood and never allowed him to feel as though he had found the place he was meant to be. Some impulse within—toward what he didn't know—made him restless. He began studying ship schedules and inquiring around when, suddenly, the surprising but obvious destination materialized before his eyes. Where did you go when you wanted to arrive, overnight, somewhere incomparable, somewhere fairy tale–like and exotic? It was clear as day. What was he doing here? He'd gotten off track. He'd wanted to go there all along. He wasted no time canceling his ill-made reservations. A week and a half after his arrival on the island a speedy motorboat was carrying him through the early morning mists back to that wartime harbor. He only stepped foot on land long enough to walk up the gangplank onto the damp deck of a passenger ship waiting under steam to depart for Venice.