And then, as if events were only waiting to confirm these endlessly frightened thoughts, I started to see Bettina’s slow physical collapse. She became sensitive, irritable, prone to sudden fevers; she lost weight; sometimes she gave the impression some unknown toxin had been administered to her. Her mainspring was broken. In my service. Through my fault. In a certain sense, through my fault. So Ganna was the stronger after all. The nightmare had bewitched my Diana on her campaign and made her lame. From the dreadful moment I first saw it, just three weeks ago now, I had only one concern, which was how to lead Bettina back out of the poisoned land. But when I talked to her about it, she laughed at me. The courage that inspirited her was like a glass bell, melodious, uncontaminated, ringing pure.
Yesterday, 26 June, I received for the fourth time a summons to give the oath of disclosure which Ganna was trying to extort from me. I content myself with recording what happened. It was all to do with the alleged hidden fortune I am supposed to have tucked away somewhere. On previous occasions, I had objected to swearing such an oath. Once, taking Bettina’s advice, I had gone away; another time I brought a doctor’s letter. I have never sworn an oath in my life. It struck me as monstrous, a violation of honour, of sense, of all human feeling, that I was to use the name of God to assure Ganna that I did not own the treasures that she, in really the most literal way, wanted to squeeze out of me. I admit I was foolish enough to be afraid of it, as of an attempt on my life. Bettina shook her head over me. She said: ‘What’s the matter, what’s so frightful about it? You don’t have anything to hide. It’s just an empty formality.’ I answered that it was much more than a formality; it was an act of duress, in which the spoken word became fact; and by swearing it you gave yourself utterly into the hands of someone like Ganna. She would never drop her suspicion; every single day, every time I spent a banknote, she and her associates would sniff it; she would nail me to the sworn oath every bit as much as to my signature on the marriage contract thirty years before. Bettina said: ‘Perhaps you’re right. Then the only other possibility is that you go away somewhere. Go away.’
But where was I to go? Back up into the mountains? […] If such a way doesn’t lead to death or to an utterly changed life, then it is a farce. After the conversation with Bettina I wandered around the house and garden all afternoon, I was unable to read, to work, to think, I couldn’t even properly see. Basically it isn’t that endlessly foolish oath that frightens me, it’s all the futility, all that endlessly foolish futility that is destroying my life. […]
But in the end it’s just words on paper, which can be turned and twisted and perhaps challenged by a higher instance. There remains a residue of division and human frailty. The other day I said to Bettina this whole enterprise feels as though I have a hammer that will not do what I want, which is to drive one nail into another, smashing the head of one, the point of the other.
So what do I need? A hand to help me past an obstacle whose nature I cannot ascertain. A human breath to imbue me with the spirit of understanding. Understanding would surely illumine me like a flash of lightning ripping apart the sheet of darkness. And then the devil riding over the wreckage of my life would disappear with a howl into the gulch of his hell. A slightly overdone image. But then I’ve lost all sense of measure. […]
Afterword
My First Wife first saw print in Amsterdam in the autumn of 1934, with the firm of Querido. Its blacklisted German Jewish author, sick for some time with heart and kidney trouble, diabetes and general exhaustion, had managed to complete it and secure its publication with this newly founded firm of exile publishers — having been at the last turned down by the somewhat pusillanimous and anxious Bermann Fischer, the son-in-law and heir to the German Jewish publishing firm of S. Fischer, which had successfully published twenty-eight of Wassermann’s books in an association lasting thirty-two years (the retired founder, Samuel Fischer, increasingly deaf and increasingly terrorized, was himself to die on 15 October of that year) — but did not live to see it, or to write his intended preface to it, having died punctually on New Year’s Day 1934 at the age of an even sixty. The project he was revolving in his mind at the time of his death — because his circumstances were such that he had to go from one book to the next, without the least break, even while contemplating an old age of fear, penury, homelessness, dishonour and exclusion from the literature of his native language — was, ironically, the story of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew.
At that stage, though, My First Wife was not yet a book. It was a book within a much longer book (ostensibly, a little like Italo Svevo’s La Coscienza di Zeno, it was ‘written’ by one character, the writer Alexander Herzog, at the insistence of another, the doctor Joseph Kerkhoven), which was in turn the third volume of a rather wandering and unfocused (and thereby all the more accommodating) trilogy. There was Der Fall Maurizius of 1928 (The Maurizius Case), Etzel Andergast (confusingly titled Doctor Kerkhoven in English) of 1931 and Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz (Joseph Kerkhoven’s Third Existence) of 1934. The last-named is qualified by the German literary historian Peter de Mendelssohn as ‘not a complete success; no one would claim that it was’; as for the trilogy, that was nothing but a ‘superficial bundling-together’ of works that were never ‘intended to go together, formally or thematically’, and were ‘only loosely, even fortuitously, connected by continuities of personnel’, and even then ‘with the characters taking up completely different functions’. Henry Miller, a great admirer of The Maurizius Case, found the author ‘baffled’ — it’s a strange idea — by his own ‘sequels’.
It all sounds, in short, like too many other works by Wassermann, who all his life wrote too much, too quickly, too chaotically and abundantly (the tiny handwriting which he liked to claim saved him thousands of miles of script was actually rather a mixed blessing). Rotted brocade, historical melodrama, brilliance of details but paucity of overall design was a diagnosis he got all his life, from friends and critics alike (his long-serving, long-suffering editor, Moritz Heimann, even suggested he take a break from writing novels). In these last years, moreover, for reasons some of which will have become apparent, he was even more a driven man than ever. The saving difference is that, into his very last book, Wassermann smuggled the manuscript of — call it what you will, his novel, account, protocol, confession, masterpiece — Ganna oder die Wahnwelt, to give it its original title, ‘Ganna, or the Mad World’. If the trilogy had offered some coherence, then surely Bermann Fischer would have shown more interest in keeping the three volumes of it together (even with Nazi blacklists and book-burnings); conversely, if Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz had been all about Kerkhoven, Wassermann would hardly have knocked himself out as he did (he suffered a major heart attack after the last of his meetings with Bermann Fischer in Vienna in November 1933) to get it published. The 2,000-odd pages of the trilogy aren’t the point; the 200-odd pages of My First Wife are.