In the preceding pages I have consistently been at pains to write a chaotic sort of love into her that broke all bounds and turned destructively in the end against herself. A psychological aberration, in short. Don’t we handle the term love as though it were some jemmy or crowbar that could open any lock? Don’t talk to me about love/hate, or the chase or such things, it wasn’t that. ‘Amor demens’ would be closer to it. But delusion is a mysterious, underexplored element; no mirror has ever caught its reflection, no pen has described it utterly, because it reaches down into the lowest depths of humanity.
Everything that now happened was preformed, prefigured in Ganna. There was no scheme, no fierce unspeakable determination, but it was resolved in her, just as it is resolved that when heat is applied to a boiler steam will seek to escape through the vents. Since she couldn’t have me physically, she had to have me every other way. How, you may ask. Meet me. In every sense of the word. Meet me where I was most vulnerable: she felt herself chosen by destiny for that purpose. If she couldn’t be by me and with me, then within me — if not for my good, to which she firmly believed she was contributing, then to my ill, to which she really did contribute. Madness can do anything.
PSYCHE BLEEDS
I must take care not to fluff the connections. There is a mixture of triviality and breathtaking audacity informing the events which makes it difficult to set them out in hindsight. The sober truth of things runs smack into the pandemonium they created when the brain that bore them followed them through to the end with fanatical logic.
It began one fine day when she told me that she and a journalist friend of hers had adapted my Treasure Seekers of Worms for the cinema. When telling me this, she reminded me of the written permission I had given her to do this eight years before. In the meantime, however, I had sold the book to an American firm. I thought I had told her about this, either verbally or in writing; she claimed I hadn’t. I suppose it was just possible that with everything going on I did forget to mention it to her. In alarm, I warned her against trying to place it anywhere; one couldn’t sell the same thing twice. She claimed she had a right to make the film sale. The fact that I had neglected to tell her about it (the possibility that I might have suppressed the news had the status of a fully fledged fact for her), was to her proof that I was always out to deceive her about my income. I replied that it was only by such windfalls that I had been able to provide for her and the children during the years of the Inflation. She wasn’t interested. She totted up my supposed wealth; the fact that she had benefited from all of it, if not taken the lion’s share, was not thought to be worth mentioning. She refused to withdraw the screenplay. She said her co-author, with whom she had a contract, insisted on his share and was even threatening to sue. I remarked in surprise: how can you sign a contract relating to something that doesn’t belong to you? She replied that her lawyer saw matters differently. Hence I found out that she once more had a lawyer engaged for her, one Dr Mattern. I was left with no alternative but to assign the conduct of the unwanted case to my own lawyer. Hornschuch was back in business. During the final stages of the dispute, I was abroad with Bettina. I was sent newspaper articles in which the quarrel about the screenplay was vulgarly sensationalized with nasty jabs at myself. At the same time, Ganna was again bombarding me with long telegrams in which she swore blind that she was not to blame for the press attacks, which were the work of people who wanted to damage her in my eyes. ‘How does she always know where we are?’ asked Bettina, shaking her head. I had to confess I had told her where we were going. After that, Bettina said nothing.
Hornschuch came up with a settlement. I had to pay Ganna’s journalist friend a considerable sum to compensate him for work he was neither qualified nor hired to do. Ganna herself finally declined the sum she had first demanded, even though she claimed the state of her finances was not such that she could do so with an easy heart; however, for my sake and that of the peace between us, she would give in. At this time she spoke of literary plans and showed me some of her work, asking me to help to secure its publication; she badly needed to earn money. I didn’t understand the urgency, given that she drew an allowance that permitted a person to live comfortably; but I did what I could, if only to be helpful to her, and I did it too against my better judgement, because what she had written struck me as neither entertaining nor useful. I concealed my opinion from her to avoid pointless debates and so as not to disturb her in an occupation that at least kept her from others that might be more destructive.
I was mistaken. It wasn’t long before she came to me with a new project. In order to make money from her house, she decided to add another storey to it and rent out the lower part. Not a bad idea, ceteris paribus; but to put it into effect was an expensive business and involved drawing on her reserves (in case she still had any at the time), and taking out expensive loans. I thought it my duty to warn her. I pointed out the dangers of falling into debt. With smug superiority she dismissed my concerns. There was a disagreeable tendency in her whereby she would take something she was determined to own but didn’t own, and so mortgage it and load it with debt that by the time she did own it, if she was successful, she was left with nothing but the title and the illusion of possession. She resembled a person desperately racing against her shadow, trying and trying to overtake it. Then once the folly of her enterprise struck her, in blind fury she lashed out at the shadow and demanded to be compensated for her effort, her disappointment and the investment of trouble and money. But the shadow was only a stand-in for me, and so it was the living Alexander who had to cough up; there was no getting out of it, he had to pay and pay.
The conversion of the house hadn’t, as I’d supposed, got in the way of her other work. From time to time she made mysterious references to me to some sort of book that she was writing, for which she had the loftiest expectations. So far as I could glean from her words what she had in mind was a prose narrative, an account of her life and sufferings, a memoir of spousal love and constancy. Often she said, wide-eyed, that in the conception of the work she’d above all had me in mind, the only thing that mattered to her being to free me from the error I’d committed; once I’d read her book, seriously and attentively, as she stipulated, then there would be no question but that I, shaken by the truthfulness of her account, would return to her forthwith. All this she said in her typical fashion — threatening, flattering, accusing — in which she had such mastery.
Earlier on in these reminiscences I had occasion once to mention the mischief done by literature. The world I was referring to then was decent and harmless, blatant in its deceits, pathetic even in its efforts to use art and intellect as a figleaf for its nakedness. Since then, three decades have passed. The amateurish belletristic Ganna world of that time is as different from today’s heady iconoclasm as a water pistol is from a Gatling gun. It used to be that they played with their innocent weapons at literary teas; now they are shooting in deadly earnest. They set word-bombs, they throw word-grenades, they poison the world with printer’s ink; every frustrated idiot, every publicity-crazed complainer dumps his revenge complexes from his desk onto the street below; there’s no question of any inner calling, or truth and honesty; paper is cheap, the setter willing, the word costs nothing; the call to arms of the epoch is write and howl down all the other misery of humankind, which gradually gurgles its last under a mound of paper.