Peter Camenzind (3 page)

I have inherited important traits from both my parents. A modest worldly wisdom, a trust in God, and a calm, taciturn disposition from my mother, and from my father, irresoluteness, the inability to handle money, and the art of drinking heavily and with full awareness of it. However, the last-mentioned trait was not in evidence during my tender years. I have my father's eyes and mouth, my mother's slow, heavy gait, her build and her strength. My father in particular, and our people in general, endowed me with natural peasant cunning but also with their melancholy and tendency to baseless fits of depression. Since it was my destiny for many years to make my way far from home, among strangers, I would have been better equipped had I taken a good measure of lightheartedness with me on my travels.

Fitted out with these characteristics and a new set of clothes, I began my journey into life. My parents' gifts have stood me in good stead, for I went out into life and have held my own ever since. Yet something must have been amiss that science and a wordly life never set right. Though I can scale a mountain, row for more than ten hours at a stretch, and if necessary kill a man singlehanded even today, I am as incompetent as ever in the art of living. My early, one-sided preoccupation with the earth, flowers, and animals has stunted in me the growth of most social graces. Even today my dreams offer remarkable proof of how much I tend toward a purely animal existence. For I often dream of myself lying on some shore as an animal, generally as a seal, conscious of such an intense feeling of well-being that, on waking, the recovery of my human dignity fills me not with pride or joy but with regret.

I was given the usual preparatory-school education, although my board and tuition fees were waived; it was decided that I should become a philologist. No one knows exactly why. There isn't a more useless or more tiresome subject, and none with which I felt less kinship.

My school years passed quickly. Fights and lessons alternated with hours during which I felt homesick, and hours filled with impudent dreams about the future or devoted to the worship of science. In the midst of this, my innate lassitude would suddenly assert itself, getting me into all kinds of trouble, until thwarted by some new enthusiasm.

“Peter Camenzind,” said my Greek professor, “you are stubborn and single-minded and one of these days you'll break your neck.” I took a close look at the stout, bespectacled figure, calmly listened to his pronouncement, and found him amusing.

“Peter Camenzind,” remarked the mathematics instructor, “you're a genius when it comes to wasting time and I regret that the lowest mark I can give you is zero. I estimate that your exercise today deserves a minus two and a half.” I looked at him, pitied him because he squinted, and thought him very tedious.

“Peter Camenzind,” my history professor once said, “you're no great shakes as a student, but you'll make a good historian all the same. You are lazy but you know how to differentiate between the momentous and the trivial.”

Even that did not strike me as exceptionally important. Still, I respected my teachers because I thought they were in possession of the secret of science and science overawed me. And though my teachers were of one mind about my laziness, I managed to make some headway and my place in the classroom was just forward of center. Indeed, it did not escape me that school and school science were an inadequate patchwork, but I was biding my time. Beyond these preparations and fumblings there lay, I assumed, a realm of pure intellect and an unambiguous dead-certain science of truth. Once I reached this realm I would discover the meaning of the dark confusion of history, the wars of the nations, and the fearful questions that bother each and every soul.

Another yearning, however, held an even stronger and more urgent sway over me: I longed to have a friend. There was Kaspar Hauri, a brown-haired, serious-minded boy two years older than I, who had about him a calm and self-assured air, who held his head erect and spoke little to his classmates. I venerated him for months. I followed him about in the streets and longed to be noticed by him. I felt envious of every person he greeted and of every house I saw him leave or enter. But he was two classes ahead of me and presumably felt superior even to those in the same grade as he. We never exchanged as much as a single word. Instead, a puny, sickly boy attached himself to me, without any encouragement on my part. He was younger than I, timid and untalented, but he had beautiful doleful eyes and features. Because he was weak and somewhat misshapen, he was subjected to much bullying in his class and looked to me, strong and respected as I was, for protection. Soon he became too ill to attend school. I did not miss him and quickly forgot him altogether.

One classmate of mine was a boisterous fellow, short, fair-haired, and easygoing, with a thousand tricks up his sleeve—a musician, a mimic, and a clown. It took some doing on my part to win his friendship and this wily and irrepressibly cheerful little contemporary always treated me somewhat patronizingly. But at least I now had a friend. I visited him in his room, read a number of books with him, did his Greek homework, and in turn let him help me with math. We also went on a number of walks together and must have looked like bear and weasel on those occasions. He always dominated the conversation, was gay, witty, and completely at ease; I listened and laughed and was glad to have such a lighthearted friend.

One afternoon, however, I came upon him just as the little charlatan was amusing several friends with one of his favorite stunts. He had just impersonated one of the teachers when he called out: “Guess who this is!” And he proceeded to read a few lines from Homer, imitating my embarrassed demeanor, my nervous voice, my rasping country accent, and my habit of blinking and shutting my left eye when concentrating. It looked very funny and was rendered wittily and ruthlessly.

As he closed the book and collected his well-deserved applause, I stepped up to him from behind and had my revenge. I said nothing but gave my shame and wrath graphic expression with a single powerful slap in his face. Immediately afterwards the lesson began, and the teacher noticed my former friend's tears and his swollen red cheek—this boy was also his favorite pupil.

“Who did that to you?”

“Camenzind.”

“Camenzind, stand up. Is that true?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why did you slap him?”

No reply.

“Did you have a reason?”

“No, sir.”

So I was severely flogged and wallowed stoically in the ecstasy of innocent martyrdom. But since I was neither stoic nor saint but a schoolboy, I stuck my tongue out at my enemy after I had been punished—to its full length.

Horrified, the teacher let fly at me. “Aren't you ashamed of yourself? What is the meaning of this?”

“It's supposed to mean that he's a rat and I despise him. And he's a coward besides.”

Thus ended my friendship with the mimic. He was to have no successor, and I was forced to spend my adolescence without a friend. And though my opinion of life and of mankind has undergone a number of changes since that time, I always remember that slap in the face with deep satisfaction, and I only hope the fair-haired boy hasn't forgotten either.

At seventeen I fell in love with a lawyer's daughter. She was beautiful and I am genuinely proud that all my life I have fallen in love only with very beautiful women. What I suffered because of her and other women, I will tell another time. Her name was Rösi Girtanner and even today she is worthy of the love of better men than I.

At that time, all the untapped vigor of youth coursed through my limbs. With my schoolmates I was forever becoming involved in the wildest scrapes. I was proud of being the best wrestler, batter, runner, and oarsman—yet I still felt melancholy. This had hardly anything to do with being unhappily in love. It was simply that sweet melancholy of early spring, which affected me more strongly than others, so that I derived pleasure from mournful visions of death and pessimistic notions. Of course, someone was bound to make me a gift of Heine's
Book of Songs,
in a cheap edition. What I did with this book did not really qualify as reading. I poured my overflowing heart into the empty verses, suffered with the poet, composed poems with him, and entered states of lyrical intoxication that were as well-suited to me as a nightgown to a little pig. Until that time I had had no idea of “literature.” Now there followed in rapid succession Lenau, Schiller, Goethe, and Shakespeare; suddenly the pale phantom, literature, had become a god.

With a delicious shudder, I felt streaming toward me from these books the cool but pungent fragrance of a life not of this world yet real nonetheless, a life whose waves now pounded where it sought to realize its fate—in my ecstastic heart. In my reading nook in the attic the only sounds to reach me were the hourly chimes from the nearby tower and the dry clapping of nesting storks, but there the characters of Shakespeare's and Goethe's worlds walked in and out. The sublime and the laughable aspects of everything human were revealed to me: I realized the enigma of the sundered unruly heart, the deep meaningfulness of the world's history, and the mighty miracle of the spirit that transfigures our brief stay and through the power of reason raises our petty lives into the realm of fate and eternity. When I stuck my head out through the narrow dormer window, I could see the sun shining on the roofs and in the narrow alley. With astonishment I would listen to the tangled small noises of work and everyday existence rushing up. I sensed the loneliness and mysteriousness of my attic nook filling with great spirits as in remarkably beautiful fairy tales. And gradually, the more I read and the more strangely the roofs, streets, and everyday life affected me, the more often I was overcome by the timid and intimidating feeling that I too might be a visionary: the world spread out before me expected me to discover part of the treasure, to rip the veil that covered the accidental and the common, to tear my findings out of chaos and immortalize them through the gift of poetry.

With some embarrassment I began composing a few poems, and gradually several notebooks filled up with verses, sketches, and short stories. They have perished; probably they were worth little, but they made my heart beat faster and filled me with ecstasy. My critical faculties and powers of self-examination were slow in catching up with these attempts. I did not experience my first great and necessary disappointment until my last year in school. I had already begun the destruction of my juvenilia—my scribbling had become suspicious to me—when I came upon a few volumes of Gottfried Keller's works, which I immediately read two or three times in succession. Then suddenly I realized how far removed my stillborn pipe dreams were from real, genuine, austere art. I burned my poems and stories, and with some of the embarrassed feeling that accompanies a hangover, I looked soberly and sadly out at the world.

Chapter Two

A
S FOR LOVE
, I must confess to having retained a youthful attitude to it all my life. For me, the love of women has been a purifying act of adoration, a flame shooting straight up from my melancholy, my hands stretched in prayer toward the blue heavens. Owing to my mother's influence and my own indistinct premonitions, I venerated womankind as an alien race, beautiful and enigmatic, superior to men by virtue of inborn beauty and constancy of character, a race which we must hold sacred. For, like stars and blue mountain heights, they are remote from us men and appear to be nearer to God. Since life did not always treat me gently, the love of women has been as bitter for me as it has been sweet. Although I still cherish women, my chosen role of solemn priest has often changed all too quickly into the painfully comic one of fool.

Rösi Girtanner and I passed each other almost every day on my way to dinner. She was seventeen, and with her firmly supple body, thin face, and fresh skin, she radiated the same quietly soulful beauty with which all her ancestors were endowed and which her mother possesses to this day. This ancient and blessed family for generations produced a line of women who were quiet and distinguished, with blooming health and flawless beauty. There exists a sixteenth-century portrait by an unknown master of a daughter of the Fugger family, one of the most delicious paintings I know: the Girtanner women all bore some resemblance to her, including Rösi.

Of course, I was unaware of this likeness at that time. I simply watched her as she walked by in her gay dignity, and I sensed the nobility and simplicity of her character. I would sit pensively in the dusk until I succeeded in conjuring up a clear image of her. Then an uncannily sweet shudder would shake my boyish soul.

Before long these moments of joy became overcast and cost me bitter pain. I suddenly realized that she was a stranger: she neither knew me nor asked about me. My beautiful vision was in fact a theft; I stole a part of her blessed being. When I felt this with most acute agony, I beheld her presence so distinctly and breathtakingly alive that a warm wave of darkness flooded my heart, making every nerve ache.

In the daytime this wave would suddenly overwhelm me in the middle of class, or even in the middle of a fight. I would close my eyes, lower my arms, and feel myself slipping into a warm abyss, until the teacher's voice or a classmate's fist woke me out of my reverie. I became withdrawn. I would run out into the open and gaze with astonished dreaminess at the world. Now I discovered how beautiful and varicolored everything was, how all things were suffused with light and breath, how clear and green the river was, how red the roofs were, and how blue the mountains. This beauty did not divert my attention; I only savored it quietly and sadly. The more beautiful everything was, the more alien it seemed, as I had no part in it and stood at its edge. In this benumbed state, my thoughts would gradually find their way back to Rösi: if I were to die at this very moment, she would not know, would not ask, or be distressed.