“Joy” is not quite the right word, of course. Comes the day, and suddenly life goes quiet. It is no longer joy you desire, but at least you no longer feel cheated and annihilated. When that day comes, you see quite clearly that you have seen it all and have had your punishments and rewards, both precisely in the proportion you have deserved. If you lacked the courage, or were simply not quite heroic enough to strive for something, you did not get it. End of story. So it’s not joy really, just resignation, acceptance, and calm. In due course it comes your way. It’s just that you have had to pay dearly for it.
As I was saying, back in the family house we were not only conscious of our class roles, but were prepared to play them. Whenever I think of childhood I see darkened rooms. The rooms are full of magnificent furniture, like in a museum. It’s a place in constant need of cleaning and tidying. Sometimes the cleaning makes a lot of noise and involves electrical equipment and open windows, at other times the process is silent and unseen, employing rented staff, but it always entails somebody, a servant or someone in the family, stepping into the room to tidy something away, to blow a speck of dust off the piano, to smooth something out, or to rearrange the folds of a curtain. The apartment was always being jealously tended, as if everything in it — the furniture, the curtains, the pictures, our very habits — were somehow objects on exhibit, artifacts in a museum that needed constant attention, repair, and cleaning, and we had to walk through the halls of this museum on tiptoe because it was inappropriate to walk and talk without restraint among exhibits that insist on a holy hush. There were so many curtains: even in the summer they soaked up the light. The chandeliers hung from the high ceilings, their eight-armed illumination somehow aimless in rooms where everything swam in an indistinct gloom.
Glazed cabinets lined the walls, full of relics that both staff and family passed in a state of awe, objects one never touched or picked up or examined closely. There were gilt-rimmed pieces of Alt Wien porcelain, Chinese vases, paintings on ivory, portraits of unknown men and women, ivory fans never used for fanning people, tiny items made of gold or silver or bronze; pitchers, animals, miniature dishes, none of which were ever used. One cabinet contained the “family silver” the way a casket might contain the bones of a saint. The silver dining service was hardly ever used, which was also the case with the damask tablecloths and the fine china; they were all there to be guarded according to the secret rules of the house, preserved for an incomprehensible, hard-to-imagine, special ritual when there would be twenty-four places at table. But the table never was laid for twenty-four. We had guests, of course, and then the silver service, the damask, the porcelain, and the glass exhibits would be brought out, and the dinner or supper would be conducted with such anxious, careworn ceremony you might have thought the company was far less concerned with eating than with conducting a terrifyingly complex operation in which no one should commit any kind of faux pas or break a plate or glass in the course of conversation.
The facts themselves will be familiar to you in your own life; I am talking about the feelings that constantly welled up in me when I was there, in the rooms of my parents’ house; feelings in childhood and even later, as an adult. Yes, there were guests for supper or simply calling by; we lived there and “used” the place, but under the practical, everyday aspect of living there, the house had a deeper meaning and purpose: that meaning and that purpose were locked in our hearts like a last line of defense.
I will always remember my father’s room. It was a long room, a real hall. The floors were covered with thick oriental rugs. There were a great many pictures on the walls, of all kinds: expensive paintings in gilt frames, paintings showing distant, never-seen forests, oriental ports, and unknown men of the last century, mostly with beards and dressed in black. An enormous writing desk stood in one corner of the room, the kind known as a diplomat table, over three yards long and some five feet wide, complete with a globe of the world, a copper candelabrum, a tin inkpot, an attaché case of Venetian leather, and a mass of ornaments and mementos. Then there was a collection of heavy leather armchairs gathered around a circular table. By the fireplace surround two bronze bulls were engaged in combat. The pediments of the bookcases displayed other bronze items, eagles and bronze horses, and a tiger half a yard in length, looking ready to spring. That too was made of bronze. And all along the walls a range of glazed bookcases. They contained a vast number of books, four, maybe five thousand, I don’t know exactly how many. Literature had its own bookcase, as did religion, philosophy, and social science, the works of English philosophers bound in blue buckram, and sets of all kinds bought from an agent. No one actually read these books. My father spent his time reading the newspapers and accounts of travel. My mother did read, but only German novels. Book dealers occasionally sent us their latest acquisitions and we got stuck with them, so the valet would have to ask Father for the keys and arrange the newly accumulated volumes in the cases. They were careful to lock the cases, of course, ostensibly so that the books should be protected. The truth is they were locked so as to prevent anyone ever taking a book out on a whim, which rash action might result in them being confronted by the secret and possibly dangerous material it might contain.
This room was referred to as Father’s “study.” No one in human memory had ever actually studied there, least of all my father. His study was the factory and the club he frequented in the afternoons with other manufacturers and financiers, where he would enjoy a quiet game of cards, read the papers, and debate matters of business and politics. My father was undoubtedly a clever man with a sound sense of the practical. It was he who had developed the factory from the workshop set up by my grandfather and expanded it into a major enterprise. It grew in his care until it became one of the country’s leading businesses. This required strength, art, foresight, and a deal of ruthlessness — in fact, everything required by any enterprise where one man sits in a room on the top floor deciding what should go on in all the other rooms of all the other floors on the basis of instinct and experience. My father had sat in that particular room of our factory for forty years. It was where he belonged, where he was honored and feared, his name being mentioned with respect throughout the business community. I have no doubt at all that my father’s commercial morals, his concepts of money, work, usefulness, and capital, were exactly those the world, his business partners, and his family would have expected of him. He was a creative sort of man: in other words, not one of those tightfisted, ugly capitalists who sit on their money and squeeze all they can out of their employees, but someone naturally bold and entrepreneurial who respected work and aptitude and paid talent better than he did mere mechanical ability. But all this — father, the factory, the club — was yet another form of association: that which was sacred and ritualistic at home was the same, only less refined and more secretive, at work and in the world at large. The social circle founded by my father among others would accept only millionaires as members, always just two hundred of them, no more. When a member died, the circle chose a replacement with the same care and delicacy as did the Académie Française its own members or the order of Tibetan monks the new Dalai Lama among the upper classes of Tibet. Everything — the selection process and the invitation — was carried out with the utmost secrecy. The select two hundred felt, despite title or rank, that they constituted a power in the state greater than even that of a governmental department. They were the alternative power, the invisible partner with which official power was obliged to parley and come to agreement. My father was one of them.