Death in Venice and Other Tales Read online

  And along with the trials and exhilaration of such insight came solitude, for he could not endure the company of harmless people with their cheerfully dim minds, and, conversely, the mark upon his forehead always set them on edge. But his delight in word and form grew sweeter and sweeter, for he liked to say (and had already put in writing) that deep acquaintance with the soul, by itself, would invariably lead to depression, if the pleasures of the well-turned phrase didn’t entertain and lift our spirits . . .

  He lived in large cities and throughout Southern Europe, where he hoped the sun would more fully ripen his art; perhaps it was his mother’s blood that drew him there. But because his heart was dead and loveless, he succumbed to pursuits of the flesh, plunging deep into lust and carnal sin, suffering unspeakably because of it. Perhaps it was an inheritance from his father—the tall, pensive, spotlessly attired man with the wildflower in his buttonhole—that caused him to suffer so down south and occasionally stirred a weak, nostalgic memory in him of a desire of the soul that he had once known and never found again amidst all his other desires.

  A disgust for, a hatred of the senses took hold of him, along with a thirst for purity and respectable peace of mind, yet he continued to inhale the air of art, the mild, sweet fragrant air of eternal blissful spring, in which fertility is ever at work, secretly fermenting and germinating. Thus it came about that he was ceaselessly thrown back and forth between crass extremes, between icy intellectualism and the all-consuming fever of the senses, causing him to lead an exhausting life, tormented by conscience, an exemplary, extravagant, extraordinary life, which he himself, Tonio Kröger, ultimately detested. How very astray! he would sometimes think. How is it that I have fallen into all these eccentric adventures? I’m not some gypsy in a green wagon, not by birth . . .

  But just as his health weakened, his artistic talent increased, becoming selective, discriminating, sumptuous, refined, impatient with all banality and hypersensitive in matters of tact and taste. When he was first published, applause and cries of joy went up from the cognoscenti, for it was a worthy and well-wrought thing he had produced, full of humor and intimately known sorrow. And rapidly his name—the same one his teachers had called out in tones of opprobrium, the same one with which he had signed his first verses in honor of the walnut tree, the fountain and the sea, this combination of Mediterranean and Nordic sounds, this exotically tinged bourgeois name—became a synonym for excellence, for the painful clarity of his vision was augmented by an unusual, bitterly unremitting and ambitious work ethic, which in its struggles with the discriminating impatience of his aesthetic judgment gave rise, under great torment, to works of remarkable quality.

  He worked, not like someone working in order to live, but like someone who, because he places no value on himself as a living person, wants only to work, someone who seeks recognition solely as a creative artist and otherwise goes around gray and anonymous, akin to an actor without makeup, who is nothing so long as he has nothing to act out. He worked in silence, isolated, invisible and contemptuous of those insignificant rivals for whom talent was a social ornament, who, whether rich or poor, whether they went about wild and dishevelled or in monogrammed-tie luxury, were basically concerned with living happy, loveable, bohemian lives, not seeing that good work only arises under the strain of a miserable life, that he who lives cannot work, and that only after having undergone death can one completely become a creator.

  4

  “Am I intruding?” Tonio Kröger asked in the doorway of the atelier. He held his hat in his hands and even bowed slightly, although Lizaveta Ivanovna was a friend of his, from whom he had no secrets.

  “Spare the formalities, Tonio Kröger, and come inside!” she answered in her skipping accent. “It’s common knowledge that you had a proper upbringing and know what’s proper form.” In the process, she laid her brush on the palette, which she held in her left hand, extended her right and looked up at him, laughing and shaking her head.

  “Yes, but you’re working,” he said. “Let me see . . . Oh, you’re making progress.” And he examined by turns the colorful sketches leaning against the stools on either side of the easel and the large canvas with its square-lined drafting grid on which the first patches of color were beginning to appear within a crude, indefinite charcoal outline.

  It was in Munich, in a courtyard building on Schellingstraße, several floors up. Outside, beyond the wide north-facing windows, the sky was blue, birds were chirping and the sun was shining. Newly arrived spring’s sweet breath streamed in through an open casement and mingled with the smell of bonding agent and oil paints that filled the spacious studio. Unobstructed, the golden light of the bright afternoon flooded the expansive emptiness of the atelier, boldly illuminating the rather uneven floor, the unvarnished windowside table with its little bottles, tubes and brushes, the unframed studies on the bare walls, the torn silk tapestry cordoning off a small, stylishly furnished living and relaxation area near the door, the nascent work on the easel, and the painter and author before it.

  She looked to be about the same age as he was, namely a bit over thirty. Clad in a dark blue, well-splattered painter’s apron, she sat on a low stool resting her chin in her hand. Her brown hair, rigidly sculpted and already beginning to gray a bit at the sides, covered her temples in gentle curves and set off her dark, Slavic, infinitely likeable face with its button nose, prominently protruding cheekbones and small, black, glassy eyes. Tense, mistrustful and yet excited, she took stock of her work with a narrow sidelong gaze . . .

  He stood beside her, pressing his right hand to his hip and rapidly twirling his brown mustache with his left. His slanting eyebrows were knitted together, gloomy and strained, and he whistled softly to himself, as was his habit. He was quite meticulously and excellently attired in a sober gray suit of conservative cut. A nervous twitch ran through his wrinkled forehead, over which his dark hair was parted with extraordinary simplicity and exactitude, and his Mediterrean features were already quite sharply defined, as if someone had gone over and emphasized them with a slate pencil. The outlines of his mouth and his chin nonetheless remained soft and weak. After a while he brushed his hand over his forehead and his eyes and turned away.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” he said.

  “Why shouldn’t you have, Tonio Kröger?”

  “I’ve just come from work, Lizaveta, and in my head it looks just like this canvas: a bit of framework, a faint sketch smudged with corrections and a couple patches of color. And now I come here and see the exact same thing. I even find the exact same conflict and contradiction here,” he said, sniffing the air, “that was bothering me at home. It’s odd. When an idea has you in its sway, you’ll find manifestations of it everywhere, you’ll even smell it in the wind. Bonding agent and the aroma of spring, am I right? Art and—well, what is the antithesis? Don’t say ‘nature,’ Lizaveta. ‘Nature’ doesn’t cover it. I should have gone for a walk—though I doubt I would have felt any better if I had. You see, five minutes ago, not far from here, I ran into my colleague Adalbert, the short-story writer. ‘God damn the spring!’ he said in that aggressive way of his. ‘It will always be the most horrible season of the year! How can one come up with even a single reasonable idea, Kröger? How can one be relaxed enough to work out the tiniest epiphany or effect with the blood itching indecently and the attention distracted by a million irrelevant feelings, the sort that always turn out on reflection to be utterly trivial, entirely useless garbage? I’m off to a café. That’s neutral territory, you know, untouched by change of season, one which represents, you might say, the well-removed and elevated sphere of the literary, where a person is only capable of more distinguished forms of inspiration . . .’ And he went to a café; maybe I should have gone with him.”

  Lizaveta looked amused.

  “That’s good, Tonio Kröger, especially the bit about ‘indecent itching.’ And he’s partially right: spring isn’t especially well s
uited to getting work done. But now stand back. Despite everything I’m going to take care of this tiny detail here, this tiny epiphany and effect, as Adalbert would say. Afterward we’ll step into the ‘salon’ and have some tea and you can tell me what’s on your mind; I can see something’s eating you today. In the meantime, please congregate somewhere else, perhaps over by that crate, if you care about your noble vestments . . .”

  “Oh spare me, please. Vestments, Lizaveta Ivanovna! Would you rather I went around in a ragged velvet jacket or a red silk vest? As an artist, one is adventurous enough on the inside. On the outside one should dress properly, damn it, and behave like a respectable person. No, nothing’s eating me,” he said, watching her mix some colors on her palette. “You heard me: it’s just a problem, a conflict that’s been on my mind, that’s been holding up my work . . . What were we talking about just now? About Adalbert, the writer, and about what a proud and determined man he is. ‘The spring is the most horrible season of the year,’ he said, then fled to a café. You have to know your own mind, isn’t that right? You see, spring makes me jumpy too. I also get confused by the fair, if trivial, memories and feelings it awakens. The difference is that I can never bring myself to curse and condemn spring itself, for the fact is that I feel ashamed of myself because it’s so pure and natural and triumphant in its youth. And I don’t know whether I should envy Adalbert or look down on him for lacking any such sensibility . . .

  “It’s hard to work in spring, true enough. Why? Because one feels. And only the rank amateur believes that a creative artist is allowed to feel. That’s the naivest of beginner’s mistakes, one which would raise a smile from any genuine and honest artist—a smile of melancholy perhaps, but smile nonetheless. The main point is never what you want to say. Quite on the contrary, what you want to say is nothing more than the essentially indifferent raw material from which the aesthetic work is put together, with distance, playful but calmly aloof. If you care too much about what you’re saying, if you have too soft a heart for it, you’re assured of a total fiasco. You become mawkish, you become sentimental, the product of your hands will turn out clumsy, ponderous, ungainly, unironic, bland, tedious and banal, and nothing but your audience’s indifference and your own disappointment and heartbreak will be the result . . . That’s the way it is, Lizaveta: emotion—warm, sincere emotion—is always banal and useless. It’s not artistic. The only things that are artistic are the thrills and cold ecstasies that act upon our corrupt artists’ nerves. You have to be both inhuman and extrahuman, you have to maintain a strangely remote, detached relationship toward humanity in order to be able, or indeed even tempted, to try this game, to play at the creation of vivid, artistic depictions of human life. A talent for style, composition and turns of phrase requires this sort of cool, discriminating relationship toward humanity; in fact it presupposes a certain human impoverishment and stultification in the artist himself. For healthy, strong emotion has no taste, and never will. The artist is finished as soon as he becomes a human being and begins to feel. Adalbert knew this and that’s why he took refuge in a café, in his ‘well-removed sphere,’ yes indeed!”

  “Well, God be with him, batushka,” said Lizaveta, washing her hands in a tin basin. “You don’t have to follow him.”

  “No, Lizaveta, I’m not going to follow him, if only because now and then, in the face of spring, I’m still capable of feeling slightly ashamed of my artistic pursuits. You know, sometimes I receive letters from strangers, words of praise and gratitude from my readers, admiring messages from people who have been deeply moved. I read these messages, and my heart is stirred at the warm, ungainly human emotion that has been elicited by my work. A kind of pity comes over me for the enthusiastic naiveté speaking from the lines, and I blush at the thought of how disillusioned these upright citizens would be if they could ever peek behind the curtains, if they in their innocence ever grasped that the last thing a proper, healthy, respectable person does is write, act or compose music . . . none of which prevents me from using their admiration of my genius for encouragement and inspiration, from treating it with massive seriousness, from putting on the face of the ape pretending to be the great man . . . Oh, don’t interrupt, Lizaveta! I’m telling you that I’m sick and tired of depicting humanity without sharing in it . . . Is an artist even a man? Ask any woman! It seems to me that to some degree we artists share the lot of those specially equipped papal choirboys . . . We sing with heartrending beauty. But—”

  “You should feel a little ashamed, Tonio Kröger. Now come have some tea. The water will be boiling any minute, and here are some papirosi. You were talking about soprano singing; please continue. But you should be ashamed. If I didn’t know how proud you were of your career, how passionately dedicated . . .”

  “Don’t say a word about my ‘career,’ Lizaveta Ivanovna! Literature is anything but a career; it’s a curse—there you have it. When does it first make itself felt, this curse? Early on, terribly early on. At an age when you could easily still be living in peace and harmony with God and the world. You start to feel marked out, mysteriously opposed to the others, the ordinary ones, the normal ones, the gulf of irony, skepticism, disagreement, insight and sensitivity separating you from everyone else gapes ever wider, you grow isolated, and from then on communication becomes impossible. What a fate! Assuming your heart still has enough life and love left in it to comprehend the horror! . . . Self-consciousness swells up in you like an infection. Alone among thousands, you feel the mark upon your forehead and sense its unmistakable obviousness to all. I once knew an actor of great genius, who had to struggle against pathological shyness and insecurity in real life. A hyperactive sense of ego made this man, who was both an accomplished artist and an impoverished human being, into a neurotic whenever he lacked a role, whenever he had nothing to depict . . . Anyone who can see two feet in front of his nose can look into a crowd and pick out the artist—a genuine one, that is, not someone whose societal profession is art, but someone called and condemned to it. The feeling of being separate, of not fitting in, of being the center of attention, a simultaneously regal and embarrassed expression, sits in the face. Something similar can be observed in the features of a prince walking in civilian clothing through the masses. Civilian clothing is of no use, Lizaveta! Disguise yourself, wrap yourself completely, dress yourself like a diplomat or an off-duty guards lieutenant: you can hardly look up and speak a single word, before everyone knows that you aren’t a human being, but something strange, alien, different . . .

  “So what is an artist, then? No question has more bitterly demonstrated humanity’s complacency and intellectual laziness than this one. ‘That sort of thing is a gift,’ good people will say, humbly, when they’re under an artist’s spell. And because in their benevolent opinion whatever has an uplifting and edifying effect must naturally have uplifting and edifying origins, no one objects that they are talking about an extremely limited, extremely dubious ‘gift.’ . . . Everyone knows artists are easily offended—well, everyone also knows that this tends not to be the case for people with a clear conscience and a solid foundation of self-confidence. You see, Lizaveta, at the bottom of my soul—to transfer things to that realm—I have the same basic suspicion of the artist as a human type that any of my honorable forefathers in our cramped city up north would have had toward a traveling minstrel or vagabond entertainer who happened to intrude upon his house. Listen to this. I know a banker, a gray-haired businessman, who has a talent for writing short stories. He indulges this talent in his spare time, and what he writes is often quite excellent. In spite—I say ‘in spite’—of this sublime ability, the last thing this man possesses is a clean record; on the contrary, he at one time had to endure a long and indeed justified stretch of incarceration. It was in prison that he first became aware of his artistic gift, and the experience of being a prisoner is the basic theme of all his works. You might draw the somewhat impudent conclusion that you have to have done some sort o
f hard time in order to become a writer. But don’t you also suspect that his experiences in that house of correction might have had less in common with the roots and origins of his artistic talent than whatever it was that put him there in the first place?—A banker who writes short stories, that’s a rarity, right? But a non-felonious, utterly reputable banker who writes short stories—there’s no such thing . . . You laugh, but I’m only half joking. There is no question, no question in the world, more agonizing than that of artistic talent and its influence on human beings. Take the most remarkable creation of the most representative and therefore most influential artist. Take one as morbid and as profoundly ambiguous as Tristan and Isolde, and watch the effect this work has on a young, healthy person with decidedly normal sensibilities. You will observe edification, renewal, warm, honest enthusiasm, perhaps inspiration for his own ‘artistic’ pursuits . . . the good dilettante! What actually goes on inside us artists, however, is entirely different than anything the dilettante with his ‘warm heart’ and ‘honest enthusiasm’ might imagine. I’ve seen artists swarmed by admiring women and youngsters, while I knew . . . One is always making—as far as the origin, symptoms and conditions of artistic talent go—the strangest discoveries . . .”

  “About others, Tonio Kröger—you’ll pardon me for asking—or not just about others?”

  He didn’t respond. He knitted his slanting brows and whistled to himself.

  “Give me your cup, Tonio. It’s not strong. And have another cigarette. Besides, you’re well aware that you don’t have to see things that way . . .”

  “That’s the answer Horatio gave, dear Lizaveta. ‘Twere to consider too curiously to consider so.’ That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “What I’m saying is that you can see things just as curiously from another perspective. I’m just a stupid woman who paints, and if I’m at all capable of responding, of defending your own profession against you, what I come up with won’t be anything new, but only a reminder of what you already know yourself . . . Things like the cathartic and enobling effect of literature, the taming of the passions through knowledge and words, literature as a means to understanding, tolerance and love, the liberating power of language, the literary imagination as the most exalted manifestation of the human spirit and the writer of literature as fully realized human being, as saint—isn’t it to consider curiously enough to consider so?”