What seems overwhelmingly likely to have been the case is that Wassermann, knowing he was dying and wanting to put out what was quite obviously the major story of his adult life, but — for reasons of pride, because he was something of a public figure, to protect the feelings of some of the survivors, perhaps not knowing how else to do such a thing — in such a way that it remained at least deniable, or half-hidden, ‘gave’ it to the character of Alexander Herzog. He built, if you like, a haystack for his needle. Because, as anyone reading it then or now can tell instantly, Ganna or (now) My First Wife is the true account of Jakob Wassermann’s first marriage to Julie Speyer of Vienna, with almost nothing omitted or changed. It is, de Mendelssohn says, ‘exactest, most scrupulous autobiography’, ‘authentic to the last detail’, ‘the true confession of the death-marked author, Jakob Wassermann’. Readers who knew the couple smirked or shuddered, according to taste. They confirmed (it’s easy to imagine): this is her all right — and him all right. When ‘Sami’ Fischer’s wife, the meddlesome and generally wrong-headed Hedwig, read Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz, her suggestion to Wassermann — which speaks both to its self-sufficiency and its shock value — was that he leave out the Ganna section! (Still, even that response confirms me in doing the opposite: omitting the trilogy.) But there it is. Wassermann’s last baggy novel didn’t mind; his shapeless trilogy had nothing to say. It was not, finally, so much a framing device as a pair of shutters, or a lid. The pity of it is how well Wassermann’s stratagem worked. Until I blundered upon Ganna, and was promptly electrified, I had no idea such a thing existed; I had never heard of it. (Has anyone ever written so rivetingly about marriage?) Relative to its quality, urgency and interest, the 2008 German edition of Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz I worked from has no readers. It has the status of an obscure also-ran among a once-fashionable and successful oeuvre that has almost in its entirety failed to survive. Effectively, what Wassermann did was to keep his best and most anguished work hidden from view for the best part of eighty years. It is time it were seen.
Both the writing and the — however misguided — publishing bespeak a once-in-a-lifetime, if not actually a mortal, exertion. The circumstances of the only book that I think can stand comparison with My First Wife, Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, are not dissimilar. Both books come wreathed in fiction: with Hughes it is the claim that these poems were ‘birthday letters’ written on Sylvia Plath’s anniversary over many years; with Wassermann it is the wholly uninteresting, wholly forgettable framing narrative. ‘In wartime,’ as Churchill said — and both books belong, so to speak, to military history, as well as embracing wars, the First in the case of Wassermann, the Second with Hughes — ‘truth must be protected by a bodyguard of lies.’ Both books were fought off by their authors for as long as humanly possible. Both books would not have been published without the prospect of imminent death. Both books have an unmistakable and inimitable burn.
In progressive, ‘zooming-in’ order, it seems to me that My First Wife has three distinct claims on our attention. It is, first and widest, a story of a rare intensity and drama. It is, second, a story set at a pivotal juncture in the long struggle between men and women — at the very moment of sorpasso, I would say. And, third, it is the story of a man of some eminence and gifts, trying to be unimpassioned and truthful about what he did and what was done to him. Let me go through these three layers, these three distances, in reverse order.
My First Wife is almost wholly true. Nothing of significance has been omitted. There was such a family as the Mevises in turn-of-the-century Vienna, descended from a wealthy German industrialist, with six daughters and a dominant professor father; they were the Speyers, and they were indeed known ‘all over town’; Julie Speyer was Ganna Mevis. In 1898, the then twenty-five-year-old Wassermann arrived in Vienna from Munich, following the publication of his first novel. He met Julie in circumstances like those related in the book (the agency of the well-meaning Frau von Brandeis), and the relationship developed, with Julie making the running, and Wassermann, as he relates, a mixture of awestruck, obliging, stoic and venal. The interview between Wassermann and his father-in-law passed off just as related. The wedding took place in January 1901. Honeymoon in Italy, pregnancy, return, shuttling around the Viennese suburbs — all as related. For three children, read four children (two boys and two girls — they were born in 1901 and 1903, 1906 and 1915). For meadow, read meadow. Ditto school foundation. For the extraordinary gift of a house on the edge of the city, read the extraordinary gift of a house on the edge of the city — and then, later, another one in the mountains, in Ebenweiler/Altaussee (for the generous Dutch businessman who couldn’t settle in the area, read Salomon Deventer). For sister-in-law Irmgard, read sister-in-law Agnes (though there seems little sense in disbelieving that there was an affair. Infidelities on Wassermann’s side were numerous, and — pace Herzog — not all that discreet).
Herzog’s confusion in face of the war was Wassermann’s. It was in 1915 that Wassermann first met Marta Karlweiss (Bettina Merck); by 1918 they were living together; in 1919 Wassermann finally asked for a divorce. Ganna writes an article about her husband; Julie a whole book: Jakob Wassermann und sein Werk (for his fiftieth birthday — 1923). She collects and publishes his letters; she collects and publishes his letters. The agonizingly slow separation, following a few summers in which Ganna and Bettina ‘shared’ Alexander in the country, was real. The seasonally/economically conditioned hopping from place to place in Ebenweiler/Altaussee was real. Wassermann and Marta moved into the newly offered villa in 1923; ‘little Caspar Hauser’ — his actual name was Carl Ulrich — was born in 1924. Protracted legal manoeuvrings found their — provisional — end in a — for Wassermann — staggering, ruinous divorce agreement as late as 1926. Nor was Julie done. In her maniacal possessiveness, she launched wave upon wave of proceedings (even at the time of Wassermann’s death, there were still cases pending). She wrote a roman à clef — Psyche Bleeds in the book, in actuality Das lebendige Herz: Roman einer Ehe (The Living Heart: Novel of a Marriage) — that came out in 1928. The blurb went like this:
With this work of fiction, the hitherto little known Viennese authoress quietly, nobly and authoritatively takes her place at the side of her former husband, Jakob Wassermann, his equal not least in her valiant endeavour to truthfully plumb the deeply tangled relations between two human beings. The Living Heart is a novel about the end of a writer’s marriage, of how — by ill luck, external circumstances and intrigues on the part of another woman — it was possible for a great man to become sundered from his family. In the midst of emotional storms, the character of the first wife attains an unforgettable scale.