It is therefore almost inevitable that a writer, a certifiable writer, would come to hold the meaning of the universe for Ganna, to save her from the repellent superficiality of the Mevis empire, the tarn with the five exemplary swans. She dreamed of the role and the mission of an Aspasia. But to be an Aspasia, you needed a Pericles and an Athens. Even to be a Rahel Varnhagen, you still needed a Goethe. But where was there a Pericles, or a Goethe, in the humdrum world of 1898? Well, that’s what dreams are there for, for changing phantasms into reality.
YOURS TRULY
In May of that self-same year, it so happened that I left Munich for Vienna. I had just published a novel called The Treasure Seekers and the book had not gone entirely unnoticed. Some experts were even pleased to praise it at over its worth, and call its author a shining new beacon of light on the horizon, a rather tawdry form of words that was much in vogue at the time. Perhaps they were impressed by the darkness of the material and the seemingly inspired chaos of the narrative; today I can only say I am surprised by the many friendly voices and respectful opinions this unripe product of a twenty-five-year-old tyro managed to garner.
It remained a so-called succès d’estime. My grim financial situation was unaffected. I left Munich in a hurry, firstly to get away from creditors, secondly because a love affair had stirred up so much gossip and odium towards me that my closest friends deserted me and respectable citizens crossed themselves on the pavement when I was pointed out to them. I knew hardly anyone in Vienna, half a dozen admirers, that was all, and admirers are only useful to you so long as you don’t need their help. I had no idea what I was going to live on, since I had only random earnings, and arrogantly rejected the idea of employment. Luckily, I met rich people here and there, who not only had some sympathy for me, but who also had a degree of snobbishness about them; they allowed me from time to time to borrow money from them.
In a quiet part of town behind the Votivkirche, on Lackierstraße 8, I rented an enormous room for myself, furnished, it would appear, from a junk shop, and rather negligently at that. I slept through my days and spent the nights with professional colleagues either in cafés, or else (it being summer) in the Prater, home at the time of a curious institution called Venice-in-Vienna, a ridiculous aping of Venice’s bridges and canals. I walked home in the wee hours, singing loudly to myself in the deserted streets, or, like a drunken student, running the end of my cane clatteringly along the metal shutters of the shops.
Then one day I had enough of the city, and I picked up my rucksack and went a-roving: over the Moravian plain, into the mountains in the south, into the Bohemian Forest, along the Danube, always on Shanks’s pony, rarely with more than ten crowns in my pocket, enjoying my own company or that of some comrade I found myself with. For instance, there was a young man by the name of Konrad Fürst, who had joined forces with me early on in my Viennese time out of a kind of fealty; he had writerly ambitions, though he was a pretty superficial fellow who liked best to play the cavalier, and had little going on upstairs but womanizing. I was impressed and somewhat surprised that he agreed to go on the road with me, and put it down to his admiration. I have always been vulnerable to such an approach. Then there was another man, David Muschilov, a red-haired Jew, who wrote theatre and exhibition reviews for the papers, and took himself for a witty writer, and oh-so incorruptible. He was by no means as incorruptible as he thought, and his wit soon got on my nerves. I have always been chary of witty people. But they were good companions, both of them, and I won’t forget them; they had faith in me, and were happy to share their bread and their money with me, and were always up for pranks of one sort or another.
Overall, then, I was content with the change in my circumstances, and in the more relaxed atmosphere, and among the friendlier Austrians I felt myself reborn. When autumn came and put an end to my gipsy existence I returned to my uncomfortable quarters, which the landlady had let me keep in return for a small deposit, hired — on top of the sorry furniture I had — an old pianino with brown keys and, to the dismay of sensitive ears, would bang away on it for hours on end. Then, all of a sudden, I felt in the mood for another prose work. I had supposed my little rivulet had run dry, but now when I came home at night from the society of my motley friends, I would stay up and write for two hours each night and give myself over to my creations.
THE EFFECT OF A BOOK
Oddly it was through her father that Ganna first got to know about The Treasure Seekers. One of Professor Mevis’s colleagues had pressed my book into his hand, and told him this was something he absolutely had to read. The Professor growled back that he didn’t read novels, but agreed to take the book anyway. Reluctantly he started to read it, was captured in spite of himself, and when he had finished it he was forced to admit that it ‘had something’. So he said to me afterwards. A crime story was professionally interesting to him as a lawyer; admittedly, that was just the frame for a deeper narrative that was inaccessible to him. He had no feeling for the artistic qualities the book certainly possessed; the impassioned diction and the grim atmosphere of the whole were disagreeable to him. Even so he is supposed to have remarked to the colleague who recommended the book to him: ‘Not bad; someone worth keeping an eye on.’ Quite some praise from a constitutional lawyer.
Ganna happened to walk into the room and saw the book on the table. She had heard about it, of course, it had been on her list for a long time. She picked it up; it was seven at night, and by three in the morning she had finished it. Gobbled it up. Avidly, the way you guzzle an elixir, for fear of losing a single drop. What was it about it that so got to her? Why was she compelled to imbibe it so hungrily? I often asked myself that, later. After all, it was incredibly remote to her, it must surely have alienated her, been more off-putting than attractive to her — if beguiling, then only in a technical way, accessible only to one who had dwelt in a similar state himself. Whichever, her sense of the book was indelible and unquestionably genuine. She often talked about it afterwards, and it is not impossible that each time she slightly overstated her initial response, in roughly the way a lottery winner might, when describing the prophetic twitch in his fingers. Certainly, some sixth sense was involved, some sense of affinity. Shortly afterwards she came across my picture in a publisher’s catalogue. She cut it out and pinned it up on the wall next to her bookcase. As she did so, she claimed (and others of her literary set confirmed it) she swore not to rest until she had met me in person. The picture, I have to say, was rather flattering. It’s gone missing since, but unless I’m mistaken it made me look every inch a robber chief.
A GO-BETWEEN IS FOUND
Things developed as follows. In the summer of 1899, Ganna learned from one of her friends that I had been living in Vienna for more than a year. He is intensely private, though, she was told, and it’s not easy to get to meet him. Ganna had rather overblown ideas about writers, and her first notion was of a sort of court, surrounding some heir to the throne. When people in a better position to know broke it to her that I was a poor wretch, she ignored them. She hated to be disturbed in her fantasizing. She would have written to me had she not supposed my flat was awash with such letters, like a post office. If her letter remained unanswered, that would mean she had no chance of getting to me. She researched my circle and sought the acquaintance of individuals who had been named to her. She told me once she had no doubt she would be singed by a ring of fire that surrounded me. She heard more and more about me, met people who knew people whom I saw on a daily basis. She envied these people, she was jealous of them. In the first letters I got from her there was a lot about that. One day — by now it was the middle of winter — she happened to visit an old friend of her mother’s, one Frau von Brandeis. This lady kept a salon, as the expression goes, albeit in a rather modest way. I had taken a few meals there. Ganna’s mouth always spilled what was in her heart, and so she confessed to the old bluestocking what she so devoutly wished for. Frau von Brandeis said: ‘Well, if that’s all it is, help is at hand. I’ll ask him round. Can you come to supper on Tuesday?’ She told me herself that Ganna in her happy shock changed colour and silently kissed her hand.