Is it possible then too that not everyone can paint after all? Clearly, the painter cannot, not in the sense that the paintspreader associates with the word. The painter and the poet are above all, in the eyes of their contemporaries, those who cannot do what the paintspreaders and the penpushers can do. This is why so many penpushers consider themselves poets and so many paintspreaders painters. The difference usually only becomes apparent once it’s too late. For by that time, a new generation of pushers and spreaders have come of age who already know what the painter and the poet have only just learned.
This also explains why the painter and the poet always appear to belong to the past or the future; they are forever being awaited or declared extinct. If, however, on occasion, one actually happens to pass for the real thing, it isn’t always necessarily the right one.
A Culture Question
Can you tell us what a poet is?
This question ought some time to appear in one of those intellectual competitions in which people dispute the issue: “Who murdered Mr. Stein? (in the novel whose serialization begins in tomorrow’s Sunday supplement)” Or: “What should Roman-three do, if Roman-one makes a different play from the one suggested in the last bridge congress?”
It is not, however, to be expected that a newspaper would readily follow this suggestion, and if it did, then the editors would phrase the question in a more engaging manner. Like this, for instance: “Who is your favorite poet?” But also like this: “Who in your opinion is the greatest contemporary poet?” and “What was the best book of the year?” (Also: “of the month?”) Such questions seem to suggest themselves because of their stimulating effect.
In this way, people learn from time to time what kinds of poets there are, and there are always the greatest, the most important, the most genuine, the most recognized, and the most read. But what, without a superlative, a poet is, and when someone who simply writes is a poet, and not the “well-known author of. .,” — this question has been raised since time immemorial. The issue is clear, and yet the world is ashamed of asking such a question, as though it smacked of the archaic! Yet it will surely come to pass that you will be able to say with certainty what Kaffee Hag, a Rolls Royce, and a glider are, but will be at a loss, when your children’s children ask eagerly: “Great-grandpa, in your day you still had poets; what’s that?”
Perhaps you will try to convince them that poets were about as real as Hell. For we will say with the greatest conviction: “Aw, hell!” “Go to hell!” “Hell’s bells!” “Come hell or high water!” and the like, without really believing in Hell. It’s just a question of the life of a language, and no insurance company would put the smallest premium on the life of the German language. But this argument can easily be rebutted. For however insignificant a role the word “poet” may play in the intellectual history of our time, future generations will find its unexpected, albeit inextinguishable, traces in our economic history! Consider how many people nowadays live off the word poet — the number is almost infinite, even if we completely ignore the wondrous lie claimed by the state, that its sole purpose is the cultivation of the arts and sciences. We might begin by counting the literary professorships and seminars, and proceed to include the entire university structure with its bursars, proctors, secretaries, and others involved in its administration. Or else we can begin with the publishers, and then move on to the publishing concerns with their employees, the agents, the retail booksellers, the printers, the paper and press manufacturers, the trains, the post office, the tax collection office, the newspapers, the ministerial department heads, the superintendents — in short, with enough patience, anyone could spend an entire day calculating the web of these connections. What will always remain a constant is the fact that all of these thousands of people live — some well, some badly, some completely, some in part — off the existence of poets: although no one knows what a poet is, no one can say for certain that he has ever seen a poet, and all of the prize competitions, academies, honors, honoraria, and distributions of honorific titles cannot give any assurance that you can find a living example.
I would estimate that in the whole world today no more than a few dozen of them are still to be found. It is uncertain whether they can live off the fact that we live off of them: Some will succeed at this, others will not — it is an open-ended issue. If we wanted to cite a similar situation for comparison’s sake, we might say that countless people live off the fact that there are chickens, or that there are fish; yet the fish and chickens do not live from this, but rather die from it. In fact, we might add that even our chickens and fish live for a short while off the fact that they must die. But this entire comparison proves untenable when we consider that at least we know what these creatures are, that they actually exist and that they constitute no disruption to the fish- and chicken-breeding industry, whereas the poet, quite the contrary, constitutes a definite disturbance to the businesses built up around his handiwork. If he has money or luck, no one will bother too much over him; but as soon as he makes so bold, lacking the two aforementioned commodities, as to claim his birthright, wherever he happens to come from, he necessarily resembles a ghost who has the gall to remind us of a loan granted to our forefathers at the time of the ancient Greeks.
After a few trivial idealistic protestations by the publishers, he would be asked whether he believed he could produce a piece of literature that could guarantee a minimum sales run of thirty thousand copies; and the editors would recommend that he write short stories, which, however, would have to conform, as is only natural, to the needs of a newspaper. He, however, would necessarily reply that he could not consent to such terms; and he could likewise expect to arouse an equally legitimate displeasure at stage guilds, literary councils, and other cultural organizations. For everyone means well by him, and considering the fact that he can neither write popular plays, best-selling novels nor movies, we are inclined to come to the dark conclusion that if we were to add up all the things that this man cannot do, all that might perhaps be left over would be the fact that he possesses an uncommon talent. This being the case, we cannot help him either, and we would have to be inhuman not to hold it against him, not to want to be free of him.
When on one occasion such a needy ghost scoured the Berlin literary depots, an adroit, young, smartly dressed penpusher who had mastered the most out-of-the-way means of making a living, and for that reason believed that he too had been through the treadmill, expressed this by bursting forth with the following impassioned statement: “My God, if I had as much talent as this jackass, what couldn’t I accomplish!” He was mistaken.
Surrounded by Poets and Thinkers
They say that books have no magnitude nowadays and that writers are no longer able to write lengthy works. This may undoubtedly be so; but, for once, why not look at it the other way around, and consider the possibility that the German reader no longer knows how to read? Does not the reader develop in ever greater measure, the longer the text, an as yet unexplained resistance (not to be confused with displeasure), particularly if the text is genuinely poetic? It is as though the portal through which the book must pass were pathologically chafed and had shut itself up tight. When faced with the task of reading a book, many people nowadays find themselves thrust into an unnatural frame of mind; they feel as though they were made to undergo a disagreeable operation in which they have no confidence.