Astonishingly, Julie thought the book would win him back. Lawyers — ‘thirty or forty lawyers’ — clustered in several countries, in several jurisdictions. The only satisfaction for the dying Wassermann was naming them for predatory or carnivorous birds: pelican, stork, crane and so forth.
I offered my sense that My First Wife is set at a pivotal moment in the relations between men and women. By this I mean not only that it is set in Vienna at the time of Freud, and that it plays in the decades either side of the First World War — the decades, if you will, of Women’s Suffrage — but also that it ends a certain kind of late-nineteenth-century male fantasy about women and society and money and art, namely that it was possible by adroit use of the last of these to make an impression on the first three. Originally, the idea — French, as all these things originally are — had been that there was an opposition, an enmity even, between the artist and his tasteless, foolish, moneyed public; the painter, the poet, the musician loathed and despised the bourgeois, and in return was maudit, ‘cursed’ for it. There was no niche for the artist in society and, if there was, he shouldn’t take it. His superiority, his aristocracy even, resided in his nerve endings. He was an outsider. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, and the children of the bourgeoisie became cultivated and even a little neurasthenic themselves, there was finally some accommodation between the two. Each had something to offer the other, something to tempt him with. The bourgeois felt scandalous stirrings of a latent creativity, and the artist, tired of outlawry, a hankering for comfort and possessions.
Individual authors — like Dickens or Byron — may have come to money before, but Wassermann belonged to the first commercially successful generation; they made writing look like a reasonable career option: Lion Feuchtwanger (1884–1958), Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929), Thomas Mann (1875–1955), Franz Werfel (1890–1945), Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), even Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), though his great success came later. The successful authors bought themselves imposing villas and cars (often more than one of each), kept secretaries and domestic staffs, holidayed exhaustively in the mountains or by the seaside, travelled the length and breadth of Europe and beyond, and thought of themselves as deserving members of the grande bourgeoisie. That is, they continued to lay claim to the inheritance of the French bohémiens, but in practical terms they expected a lifestyle of mahogany and silver and libraries. They demanded personal freedoms and the kudos of rebellion or unconventionality for themselves, but they also wanted presentable families (Thomas Mann’s pretty mob in sailor suits) and beetling castles or plush architect-designed homes (or, as was the case with Wassermann, both). The days of dying in garrets or taking one’s lobster for a walk were over. No, these writers were a startlingly worldly bunch. Stefan Zweig (who admittedly was born into a wealthy manufacturing family) owned Beethoven’s desk and Goethe’s pen and Leonardo and Mozart manuscripts, and lived, when he cared to, in a fourteenth-century bishop’s palace above Salzburg that his lovely and capable aristocratic wife had found for him; Thomas Mann was immortally described by Hermann Kesten as ‘hartnäckiger Villenbesitzer’ (an obstinate or determined or serial owner of villas); while, sounding rather petulant in his almost fetishistic litany of aspirations, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (himself the son of a banker) wailed: ‘I finally want a house with Empire furniture, a smell of lavender, Old Vienna porcelain and music being played, where people can drop in, listen in silence, and maybe chat quietly, or not as the case may be.’
Jakob Wassermann, who had lost his mother at the age of nine, repeatedly run away from a broken home, known starvation and rags, was mostly self-educated, and felt his Jewishness more and differently than many of the Austrians with whom he mingled, didn’t quite fit into such a scene. In terms of family, class, education, socialization, ethnicity, nationality, provincialism, he stuck out. Yes, he had the required ‘demonic’ touch — the allure of the French line of descent, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Huysmans, Nerval, he was a reasonably early reader and admirer of Dostoevsky, and ‘demonic’ was also one of his favourite words, though with his risible Franconian accent he tended to mispronounce it as ‘temonic’ — only the noun that he paired it with when describing himself was ‘Kleinbürger’, or petit bourgeois, an extraordinary coinage and an extraordinary notion. It would be something like glorying in being a ‘demonic suburbanite’ or even a ‘demonic C2’. His lavish standard of living may have earned him envy and incomprehension, but it was the only thing that stood between himself and the abyss.
In terms of their respective typology, you can see Alexander Herzog as late-poète-maudit and Ganna as late-femme-fatale. The poor, gifted writer/orphaned seventh son will carry off the book-loving bourgeois-princess-cum-ugly-duckling. Then either she will remain an episode — a novella, so to speak — or else they will both be transformed, he by love and she by him. He will get over his coolness and disdain, she will discover wifely virtues. What other way can it be? It’s a foregone conclusion. Only this story doesn’t end with wedding bells and ‘happily ever after’ (it would be shocking enough if it did!). Art is short, life is long. Alexander fails to tame his Ganna; Ganna can neither mellow, nor hold him. He, with the beam in his eye, is fixated on the mote in hers; she, thinking she has him, lets him go. Neither can change, but both develop the full and terrifying range of their latencies. The strife gets deeper and wilder. We see it all. The poet finds himself over-matched by the bluestocking. She has resources and determination of which he had no inkling. She arms herself with finance, society, business, the law; she reaches into undefended places of his of which he had no idea. In the end, the demonic bourgeoise simply pulls rank, and has the temonic Kleinbürger on toast. He may sneer at the style of it — the carpet bag, the cloche hat, the dyed hair, the unaired smell — but he loses and loses and never stops losing: home, career, freedom, happiness. The book ends, and he hasn’t finished losing.
There was a third heading: the sheer intense and true drama of the story. It’s like the House of Atreus, or Oedipus, or Macbeth. It’s that very rare thing, a twentieth-century tragedy, played out with twentieth-century resources and recourses, with courts and banks and publicity. ‘In the depths, everything becomes law,’ says (a little surprisingly) Rilke. Things get worse, as calmly and methodically as in a Hitchcock movie. It’s not just what happens, it’s every stage of that happening; you start with a lobster and a bayleaf in a pan of cold water. What began by looking to the forever canny observer Arthur Schnitzler as a cold and blatant case of a marriage of convenience on Wassermann’s part, ends up with the man hounded, frankly, to death. It is the victim’s portrait in poison of his killer. Ganna — Julie Speyer — outlived Wassermann by almost thirty years.
Michael Hofmann, 2012
Bibliography and Acknowledgements
Barbara Hoffmeister: S. Fischer, der Verleger. Eine Lebensbeschreibung (Frankfurt, 2009)
Thomas Kraft: Jakob Wassermann (Munich, 2008)
Peter de Mendelssohn: ‘Jakob Wassermanns letztes Werk’ — afterword to Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz (Munich, 1982)
Henry Miller: Maurizius Forever (San Francisco, 1946)