Death in Venice and Other Tales Read online

  A child! thinks the girl with the unstyled hair who, accompanied by a downcast young man, is walking along behind them, her arms swinging freely. An adorable child! What went on in there was a wondrous . . . And in a loud monotone voice she says, “We’re all child prodigies, all of us who create.”

  Well now! thinks the old gentleman who has never gotten past “Three Hunters from Kurpfalz” and whose deformity is now concealed by a top hat. What do we have here? A kind of Pythia, it seems to me.

  But the downcast young man, who understands her to the letter, nods slowly.

  They then fall silent, and the girl with the unstyled hair stares ahead at the three aristocratic siblings. She despises them, but she stares after them until they have disappeared around the corner.

  Hour of Hardship

  He got up from the desk, from his rickety little escritoire, got up as though at the end of his wits and crossed the room with his head hung to the corner stove, which was as tall and thin as a pillar. He put his hands to its tiles, but they had nearly gone cold, for it was long past midnight. So, without having found the small comfort he had sought, he leaned back against it, coughed, drew together the tails of his house robe, its faded lace ribbon dangling from the lapels, and arduously snorted a little air through his nose to clear the passages. As usual, he was congested.

  It was a special, ominous kind of congestion that almost never cleared up entirely. His eyelids were swollen and the edges of his nostrils sore, and throughout his body and head this congestion weighed down like a heavy, painful drunkenness. Or was it the tiresome routine of being confined to his room that was responsible for his lethargy and heaviness of limb? The doctor had again imposed this fate upon him some weeks ago, and God only knew if he had been correct to do so. His incessant catarrh and the cramps in his chest and lower body may have necessitated such confinement, and for weeks now—whole weeks, that was the truth—Jena had been suffering bad weather: miserable, despicable weather, weather you could feel in every nerve, desolate, dark and cold, weather that set the December wind howling in the stovepipe, abandoned and godforsaken, sounding of nocturnal heath in storm and madness, as well as irremediable anguish of soul. But it was no good, this close confinement, either for the thoughts or for the rhythm of the blood from which thoughts came . . .

  The hexagonal room was sparse, sober and uncomfortable, with a whitewashed ceiling that trapped gentle wraiths of tobacco smoke, a tapestry of diagonal plaid against which oval-framed silhouettes hung, and four or five pieces of spindly furniture. It was lit by the two candles burning at the head of the manuscript atop the escritoire, and red curtains covered the upper frames of the windows, nothing more than little ship’s flags of calico gathered up symmetrically on either side, but nonetheless red, a warm, rich red. He cherished them and would have bitterly regretted their absence, for they introduced the only hint of sumptuousness and sensuality into the unfeeling asceticism of the room . . .

  He stood by the stove and directed a fleeting, strain-tormented squint over at the work from which he had fled, this burden, this weight, this stabbing of conscience, this sea to be swallowed, this terrible task that was his pride and his misery, his heaven and his damnation. It straggled along, it stumbled, it stopped—not again, not again! Surely the weather was at fault, or perhaps also the catarrh and his fatigue. Or was it the work itself? Or his work upon it? Was this a star-crossed conception, predestined to yield nothing but despair?

  He had stood up in order to gain some objectivity, for spatial distance from the manuscript often gave him perspective, a more expansive view of the material, making it possible to take the appropriate measures. Indeed, there were instances when his feeling of relief at departing the arena of battle revitalized him. It was a more innocent form of revitalization than liquor or strong black coffee . . . His little cup was on the table. Could it help him overcome his block? No, no, no more! Not only the doctor, but a second, even greater authority had gently cautioned him against such things: it was none other than his counterpart over in Weimar, whom he loved with a rival’s ardent enmity. He was wise. He knew both how to live and how to create, didn’t abuse himself, treated himself with consideration . . .

  Silence prevailed in the house. The only sounds were the whistling of the wind down the narrow Schloßgaße and the tapping of the rain being driven against the window. Everyone was asleep, the landlord and his family, Lotte and the children. And he stood lonely and awake by the cold stove, squinting with a tormented expression over at the work in which his own unhealthy perfectionism prevented him from believing . . . His white neck protruded starkly from his collar, and between the two tails of his house robe one could see his inwardly bowed legs. His red hair was brushed back from his delicate high forehead, exposing two pale-veined indentations at the temples, before falling in thin locks over his ears. At the base of his large Roman nose with its abrupt whitish tip, two thick, nearly connected eyebrows emerged, darker than the hair on his head, which made his sore, sunken eyes look as though they were tragically peering into the distance. Forced to breathe through his mouth, he held his thin lips continually parted, causing his cheeks, freckled and wan from stale indoor air, to slacken and sag . . .

  No, it was a failure—it was all in vain! The army! The army would somehow have to be depicted! The army was the basis of everything! And it couldn’t appear upon the stage—could one even conceive of the artistry gigantic enough to impress it upon the imagination? Moreover, the hero wasn’t a hero at all; he was petty and cold! The basic conception was wrong, the language was wrong, and the whole thing was a dry, monotonous history lesson, diffuse, passionless, utterly unsuitable for the stage!

  Very well, the game was up. A defeat. A misguided undertaking. A total bankruptcy. He felt the urge to write Körner and tell him, good old Körner, who believed in him, who subscribed with a child’s faith to his genius. He would scoff, plead and rant—his friend. He would remind him of Don Carlos, which had also been born of doubt and hard work and revisions, and which had turned out, after all the torment, to be a thoroughly excellent work, a glorious achievement. But that was different. Back then he had still been the man to seize a problem with a happy hand and wring victory from it. Misgivings and struggle? Oh certainly. And he had been sick, probably even more so than now: a starveling, a fugitive, an outsider to the world, oppressed and destitute as a man. But young, still young! Every time, no matter how bent and bowed, his spirit had snapped back, resilient, and after the hours of woe had come others of faith and inner triumph. Those hours came no longer, came hardly at all. A single night of kindled enthusiasm in which he could glimpse in sudden brilliant illumination what could be, if only he were always so blessed, had to be paid for with a week of darkness and paralysis. He was tired, only thirty-seven years old yet already at the end. His faith was no longer alive, his faith in the future, the guiding light in his misery. That was the desperate truth: the years of privation and nothingness, which he had seen as his years of trial and tribulation, had actually been quite rich and fruitful, and now that a little luck had come his way, now that he had escaped his life as a literary pirate into some legitimacy and bourgeois recognition, now that he had obtained an official position and been awarded various honors, now that he had a wife and children, now he was used up and exhausted. Defeated and deflated—that was all that was left.

  He groaned, pressed his hands to his eyes and paced as if pursued throughout the room. That thought just now had been so terrible that he could not bear to remain on the spot where it had occurred to him. He sat in a chair along the wall, dangling his folded hands between his knees, and stared gloomily down at the floorboards.

  Conscience . . . how loudly his conscience cried! He was a sinner. He had sinned against himself all these years, sinned against the delicate instrument that was his body. The extravagances of bold youth, the nights worked through and the days spent in the smoky indoors, wantonly intellectual, heed
less of body, the stimulants he had used to spur himself on to his labor—all of them were now coming back, coming back to exact their revenge!

  But if revenge was being exacted, then he would spite the gods who assigned blame, then imposed punishment. He had lived as he had to live: he had no time for being wise, for being prudent. Here, in the chest, whenever he breathed, coughed or yawned, this pain, always in the same spot, this tiny, diabolical, stabbing, piercing reminder that had never once subsided in the five years since Erfurt, when he had contracted the catarrh, that raging chest fever: what was it trying to tell him? Truthfully, he knew only too well what it meant—the doctor could say what he would. He had no time to compromise on strategic abstinence, to mend his ways and become economical. Whatever he wanted to do, he had to do it soon, today even, quickly . . . Mend his ways and live right? Why was it that precisely his sin, his inclination toward the harmful and ruinous seemed more ethical to him than any wisdom or cold-blooded discipline? Living right wasn’t a matter of wisdom or discipline, or the contempt-bringing practice of good conscience, but rather struggle and despair, passion and pain!

  Pain . . . What a horizon this word opened in his chest! He stretched, arms folded, and from under the reddish, almost connecting eyebrows, his gaze came to life in gorgeous lament. He was not yet wretched, not utterly at least, as long as it was possible to name his wretchedness in proud and noble words. One thing was needed: the spirit to give his life great and beautiful names. Not to blame his suffering on smoke-filled rooms and constipation! To be strong enough for healthy pathos, to see, to feel something beyond the physical world! To be naive in this one respect, while knowing in all others! To have faith, have faith in pain . . . And he did indeed have faith in pain, a deep, personal faith according to which nothing born of pain could be either useless or inferior. His glance flitted over to the manuscript, and his arms folded more tightly across his chest . . . Talent—was talent not itself pain? And if that there, that star-crossed project, caused him to suffer, was it not just as well, was it not almost a positive sign? Nothing had ever just poured out, and his mistrust would first commence in earnest if it did. Words only ever poured out of amateurs and dilettantes, the easily satisfied and the uninformed, those who didn’t live under the strain and discipline of talent. For talent, ladies and gentlemen way back there in the cheap seats, talent isn’t something light and trifling. It’s not just pure, unadulterated ability. It is, at root, need, a critical awareness of the ideal that could be, a discontent that creates and hones its ability only in anguish. And for the greatest and most discontent, talent itself is the sharpest scourge . . . No complaining! No boasting! To think deferentially, patiently about what one bore! And if not a single day or hour of the week was free of suffering—what of it? To think little of the loads and labors, the demands, troubles and strains, to see them as minor—that was the essence of greatness!

  He stood up, took out his snuffbox and inhaled greedily, then put his hands behind his back and paced so demonstratively through the room that the flames of the candles flickered in the draft . . . Greatness! Distinction! World success and the immortality of one’s name! What was all the happiness of the forever unknown compared to this great goal? To be known—known and loved by the peoples of the world! Go ahead, talk of the addictive demands of the ego, you who know not the sweetness of this dream and compulsion! Such demands are common to all extraordinary talent, insofar as it suffers. Just you wait and see, talent says, those of you without a life’s mission, those of you who have it so much easier on earth! And ambition, too, speaks: is my suffering to have been in vain? It must ensure my greatness!

  His nostrils flared beneath his large nose; his eyes glowered and swept the room. His right hand was jammed deep in the lapel of his house robe, while his left dangled down, clenched. A fleeting redness had come over his haggard cheeks, pelted up like the tan of leather by the embers of his artistic ego, by that passion of self that burned unquenchably in the depths of his being. He knew it well, the secret intoxication of this love. Occasionally he only needed observe his hand in order to be suffused with enthusiastic affection for himself, in the service of which he vowed to employ those weapons of talent and art at his disposal. This was allowed, for there was nothing ignoble about it. Deeper still than egotism, there existed an awareness of being in the service of something greater, of consuming and sacrificing himself, admittedly out of necessity, not virtue, but selflessly nonetheless. And this was his most jealously defended point: that no one should be greater than he was without suffering more deeply for such lofty heights.

  No one! . . . He stood still, his hand over his eyes, his upper body partially turned, evasively, as though trying to escape. Already he felt a certain unavoidable thought sting his heart, the thought of him, his counterpart, that bright, sure-handed, sensuous, divinely naive one, that man there in Weimar, whom he loved with a rival’s ardent enmity . . . And again, as always, in profound agitation, in haste and zeal, he felt the beginning of that internal labor which followed from this thought: the assertion of his autonomous existence and artistic identity, separate from that of his counterpart . . . Was he then the greater? In what respect? Why? Would it be a Pyrrhic victory, if he triumphed? Would it make a tragic scene, if he succumbed in the end? A god, perhaps—a hero, he was not. It was easier, too, to be a god than a hero! — Easier . . . His counterpart had it easier! A wise and happy hand to distinguish knowledge from creativity might well make one cheerful and invulnerable and prodigious. But if creativity was divine, then knowledge was heroic, and that man who created knowingly was both: a god and a hero!

  The will to hardship . . . Did anyone suspect how much discipline and self-control a single sentence, a single rigorous thought cost him? For ultimately he was ignorant and ill-educated: an obscure romantic dreamer. It was harder to write a single one of his Philosophical Letters than to construct the best of scenes. Was therefore the former not also perhaps the loftier? From the first rhythmic demand of inner art for material, subject matter, the possibility of effusion, to the thought, the image, the word, the line—what a battle! What a path of suffering! Miracles of longing, such were his works, longing for form, shape, limit, embodiment, the distant longing for the bright, clear world of his counterpart, who simply called the sunlit objects of that world by name, without mediation, speaking directly with the mouth of God.

  Nevertheless, never mind his counterpart. Where was the artist, the poet, who was his equal? Who created from nothingness, as he did, from his own heart? Was it not as music, as pure primeval being, that a poem was born in his soul, long before it ever borrowed likeness and costume from the world of appearances? History, world knowledge, passion: resources and pretexts, nothing more, for something that had little to do with them, that had its home in the Orphic depths. Words, concepts: mere keys for his artistic talent to play upon so as to sound a hidden chord . . . Did anyone know of this? They showered him with praise, these good people, for the strength of purpose with which he played this or that key. And his motto, his ultimate pathos, the great bell he used to beckon the highest battlements of the soul—it lured many . . . freedom . . . In truth, he understood both more and less by it than they did in their celebrations. Freedom—what did that mean? A modicum of middle-class dignity—surely not!—in the presence of princely thrones? Do you even allow yourselves to dream of all that a creative mind ventures to mean by the word? Freedom from what? What ultimately from? Perhaps even happiness, human happiness, this silken restraint, this fair and gentle obligation . . .

  Happiness . . . His lips trembled; it was as if his gaze were shifting inward, and slowly he let his head sink into his hands . . . He was in the adjoining room. Bluish light was shining from the lamp, and the floral curtain veiled the window in silent folds. He stood beside the bed and bent down over that sweet head on its pillows . . . A strand of dark hair curled down over that cheek, which shone with the pale shimmer of pearls, and those childlike l
ips were parted in sleep . . . my wife. Beloved! Did you take note of my longing? Did you come to me to be my happiness? That you are, rest easy! And sleep! Don’t open your eyes in the long shadows of their sweet lashes just yet, don’t let them stare at me as they sometimes do, so large and dark it seems you’re questioning, seeking me. By God, by God, how I love you! It’s just that occasionally I can’t find my feelings because I’m often so very exhausted from suffering, from battling with that task assigned to me by my self. I can never be entirely yours or be wholly happy in you, for the sake of that which is my mission . . .

  He kissed her, then tore himself away from the precious warmth of her sleep, took a look around and went back. The bell reminded him of how far along night was, but at the same time it was as if that bell were benevolently tolling the end to an hour of hardship. He took a deep breath, pressed his lips firmly together, then walked over and picked up his quill . . . No brooding! He was too deep to be permitted to brood. No descending into chaos, or at least no lingering there! To raise, instead, out of the chaos that is fullness whatever is ripe and ready for form and hold it up to the light. No brooding: get to work! Limit, delete, shape, get finished . . .

  And eventually it was finished, that work of suffering. It may not have been any good, but it was finished. And now that it was finished—behold!—it was good after all. And from his soul, from Music and Idea, new works struggled forth, lyrical, shimmering creations in divine form that gave wondrous intimation of their own unfathomable place of birth, just as the shell contains the rushing of the sea from which it is fished.

  Death in Venice

  CHAPTER ONE

  Gustav Aschenbach, or von Aschenbach, as had been his legal name since his fiftieth birthday, had begun a long solitary walk from his apartment on Munich’s Prinzregentenstraße during a spring afternoon in 19—, a year that had for months glared so menacingly at our European continent. Even after lunch, overstimulated by many morning hours of difficult work, full of pitfalls and especially now demanding the greatest caution, judiciousness, probing insistence and exactitude of will, the writer had been unable to put a halt to the relentlessly running machine within him—that “motus animi continuus” which for Cicero is the essence of eloquence—and had been denied the relief of the nap so increasingly necessary at some point each day with the progressive decline in his stamina. Therefore, not long after tea, he had sought the outdoors, hoping that a little fresh air and exercise might revive him and help him put his evening to worthwhile use.