These unfortunate separations, throwing him back upon the desert base from which he was ever setting out anew, formed part of the frieze of disaster through which he represented himself as forever fleeing under the vicious darts of his drastic horoscope.
Housing his poverty as animals tracked down enter abandoned holes or a honeyless bee might return to an empty hive — of all the makeshift burrows he found for himself in an unearned earth, so desolate and perilous seemed his escapade in some far away, dismantled villa he described to us that it has stuck in my mind. He had lived there one summer, with some caressive Mädchen who, when she left the place, had forgotten to ask him to give up his key. And so it was that Insel, fallen once more under the heel of fate, crept back to that love-swept lair and, shutting himself up in one of the rooms, lived on the floor. “I could draw there,” he pointed out to us thankfully. And one saw him, day alone, morrow alone, where the air was the breath of his own hunger, warily sneaking out at dark in search of a remnant of food, or, just as possibly, so complex is the status of the artist, dining with affable millionaires every other night. It comes back to me now that Insel had started this episode as the story of a haunted house.
“One day when I had hidden there so long,” he said, “as to make one with the everlasting silence, I was startled by the sound of footfalls descending the stairs. ‘Who could descend having never ascended?’ I asked myself. ‘What could have embodied itself under the roof to come down upon my isolation?’ I at once turned the key in my lock and waited, listening to those fearful feet. At intervals they would halt, and at every halt I could hear the echoes of heavy fists pounding on a door. And the footsteps grew louder, the pounding nearer — to the pounding of my heart.” Frau Feirlein and I hung on his words while, “Those heavy unreal fists fell in a rain of blows on the last door — the door,” continued Insel, “that shut off the bearable emptiness of the room I was living in from the unbearable emptiness of the house as a whole.”
I imagined his quivering breast receiving, through the transmission of his fear, the ghostly blows aimed at the door affording his outer defense as he stood face to face with it. “Not daring to stir,” he proceeded, “I was almost choking for terror it would hear me breathe, when gradually I perceived a softer noise come to succeed that ominous pounding. I do not know what impulse this aroused in me, my one desire having been to remain undiscovered, that caused me so suddenly to fling myself on that door and to open it — outside stood a very severe looking Huissier. He was sealing up the rooms. And, as usual,” added Insel in utter discouragement, “They hauled me before a magistrate.”
His father, he said, was a Schlosser, which turned out to mean “blacksmith,” and very early in Insel’s life, as in the episode in the empty villa, his destiny appeared to me to get mixed up with keys. I cannot remember in detail the vague accidents in which his minor salvations depended upon keys except for a fleeting impression of Insel crawling under his destitute couch in search of some kind of key to a gas meter confused with an intermittent flitting in and out of gas men and electricity bill collectors who would come to cut him off and who, owing to some either mental or manual hocuspocus of Insel with the key, ended by turning the gas or electricity on. Thus leaving him at least two elements of life.
“Don’t Schlossers make keys?” I asked.
“Surely,” he agreed.
“Well, you’ve inherited the keys your father made. You’ll see the whole of your life will turn on a key. Some people are accompanied throughout their career by a fixation of their destiny — yours is a key. While Dali, for instance, is fated to the most extravagant of publicities. He is inclined to accept my theory, for some of the shrillest gags in his already fabulous advertisement were the result of sheer coincidence, yet pointing out plainly the effective procedure to be followed thenceforth. He told me it all originated with his first lecture on surrealism in Spain, when the mayor, who was acting as chairman, fell down dead at his feet, almost as soon as he began — a windfall for journalists.”
Insel, as if after this he feared his trips along the road to ruin might fall a little flat, changing his tempo, began to show off, surprising us with a burst of magnificence, he became so hilariously wealthy he juggled a fortune. “I spent ten millions in a year,” he enthused. “Not one car, but bunches of cars I gave each of my friends, and the orchestras I ordered, the clusters of beautiful women I hung upon myself in those Berlin nights.”
“Where did you get it all?”
“Forging,” he replied, with the same elation with which he had dispensed for our entertainment his retrospective largess. “Es war wirklich prachtvoll—we made bank notes in sheaves. You see, as a boy I was apprentice lithographer, and my technique was so remarkable I got raked in by a gang of crooks. We practically bought up Berlin before we were caught, and I was only in jail nine months.”
“How was that?”
“Oh, one of the gang who escaped arrest used his influence. But I had time to reflect,” he commented. “I saw other careers open to talent. In that long solitude I conceived of a greater wealth than the wealth of banks. Within myself I found the artist.”
2
ON THE GROUNDS THAT HE WAS STARVING TO death, he would exact from us the minutiae of advice on his alimentary problems to subsequently toss all advice aside in his audacious irresponsibility. Presenting himself as a pauper to the charitable organization of the Quakers, he had harvested, among other things, packages of macaroni and several pounds of cocoa, and as if these staple aliments were already consumed, he begged us to counsel him what to do now. He shook his head over the suggestion that he go there again. “My last supply is yet too recent,” he objected. But, Frau Feirlein told me, on the morrow he presented himself at her flat with these same Quaker gifts intact as an offering preliminary to his indistinct courtship. “What is the use of cocoa to me,” he argued with my bewilderment, “I have no sugar.” And, for some vague reason, one took the opposition of his prodigality to his mendicancy as a matter of course. This reason consisted in an intuition, so deeply imbedded in one’s subconscious it would not rise to the surface of the mind until the final phase in one’s analysis of him — that this skeletal symbol of an ultimate starvation had need of a food we knew not of. Throughout his angling for compassion on behalf of his utter destitution, one never resented his open carelessness in throwing back the fish.
Meanwhile, his reserved distinction, as of an aristocrat who should in a lasting revolution have experienced yet unimaginably survived the guillotine, was so consistent it claimed one’s respect for his nonsensical manner of being alive. But once was this impression dispelled when, in courteous haste to answer a question, he shifted the part of a hard roll sandwich he was eating, out of the way, horrifyingly developing a Dali-like protuberance of elongated flesh with his flaccid facial tissue. As if unexpectedly the Schlosser one had hitherto been incapable of relating to him had at length intruded upon us with his anvil stuffed in his cheek.