He [the father] was once asked: “Aren’t you proud of your son?!”
He replied: “I was not overly vexed that he remained an idler for 30 years. So I’m not overly honored that he’s a poet now! I gave him his freedom. I knew that it was a long shot. I counted on his soul.”
Long before his words found their way into newspapers and periodicals, Altenberg was well-known as a vetted Viennese eccentric who lodged in various hotels and traipsed around town in baggy clothes of his own conception (he was a pioneer in leisure wear), curious walking sticks and open sandals whatever the weather, favoring the companionship of young girls and loose women. He gave out as his official address the Café Central — also the sometime haunt of Russian émigrés Leon Trotsky and his chess partner Vladimir Ilyich Lenin — where Altenberg presided over his own table of garrulous caffeine-primed regulars.
How and when he first broke into print is the stuff of another homespun legend. One day, the author recalls, the members of Vienna’s ascendant literary avant-garde, Jung Wien, caught him scribbling away at his café table and immediately recognized his talent. The poet Richard Beer-Hoffmann is said to have first appreciated his writing, but it was the brilliantly sardonic critic Karl Kraus who sent Altenberg’s fledgling selection of prose to S. Fischer Verlag, the foremost German publisher of the day, which promptly published his first book, Wie Ich Es Sehe [How I See It] in 1896. The book was a popular sensation and immediately put its author on the map.
“If it be permitted to speak of ‘love at first sound,’ then that’s what I experienced in my first encounter with this poet of prose,” wrote Thomas Mann. Other impassioned literary partisans included the playwright Arthur Schnitzler, the poet and librettist Hugo von Hofmannstahl, and Felix Salten, the versatile author of, among other works, the children’s book classic Bambi and the underground pornographic classic The Adventures of Jose phine Munzenbacher.
Salten’s incisive description of Altenberg’s prose bears mention:
Some [of his pieces] are like steel projectiles, so tightly enclosed in themselves, so complete and precise in their form; and like projectiles, they pierce the breast; you are struck and you bleed. Some are like crystals and diamonds, sparkling in the multicolored reflections of the light of life, gleaming with captured rays of sunlight and glittering with a hidden inner fire. Some are like ripe fruits, warm with the waft of summer, swollen and sweet. .
And just next door in Prague, the young Franz Kafka took Altenberg’s terse writing style to heart and mind as a literary model for his own work. “In his small stories,” Kafka observed,
his whole life is mirrored. And every step, every movement he makes confirms the truth of his words. Peter Altenberg is a genius of nullifications, a singular idealist who discovers the splendors of this world like cigarette butts in the ashtrays of coffeehouses.
Coffeehouse poet par excellence, Altenberg claimed to toss off his texts in a cavalier fashion for the throw-away pages of weekly and daily newspapers. “I view writing as a natural organic spilling out of a full, overripe person,” he wrote in a letter to Schnitzler. “I hate any revision. Toss it off and that’s good—! Or bad! What’s the difference?!”
But tossed off, carefully crafted or both, there is nothing sloppy about his spare aesthetic. The extreme economy of his sketches sometimes reads more Japanese than Viennese — an elective affinity born out by the caption he inscribed for a lady friend on a postcard of Japanese women posing under blossoming cherry trees:
The Japanese paint a blossoming branch — and it is spring in its entirety! We paint all of spring — and it’s hardly a blossoming branch!
His Japanophile propensity is reiterated in the sketch “In Munich,” in which he presses his stuffy fellow Europeans to “Learn from the Japanese!” lauding the latter as “an artistic people.”
Altenberg’s first direct exposure to the Japanese sensibility occurred at the Sixth Exhibition of the Wiener Secession in 1900, a show exclusively devoted to the art of Japan though chronologically too late to have influenced his style, which appears to have sprouted Athena-like out of his brain and remained more or less unchanged throughout the two decades of his active writing career, this encounter with an alien world view must have felt strangely affirmative, more homecoming than departure, more mirror than window.
It was not his first flirtation with the exotic. Altenberg’s second book, Ashantee, published in 1897, recounts his dealings with and vivid impressions of the inhabitants of an African show-village on display for a year as a live exhibit in Vienna’s zoological garden. The grotesquery of the very premise of such an exhibition is lampooned in a short reflection entitled “Philosophy”:
Visitors to the Ashanti Village knock in the evening on the wooden walls of the huts for a lark.
The goldsmith Nôthëi: “Sir, if you came to us in Accra as objects on exhibit, we wouldn’t knock on the walls of your huts in the evening!”
Yet rather than stand above it all and wag a virtuous finger at the crude voyeurism of Viennese visitors, for whom the Africans on display were little more than talking animals, Altenberg de-constructs the spectacle by stepping inside it. He falls in love and loses his heart to various black girls and ladies “on display” and peals off their shell of otherness — an otherness he knew all too well under his own white skin, as a baptized Jew trying to pass in an often hostile world given to Catholic piety and Teutonic cult.
But while Altenberg the author let his imagination wander to exotic climes and loved to wax eloquent about Nature, à la Ralph Waldo Emerson, Altenberg the man was a hopeless homebody, a die-hard city slicker who dared not venture outside his beloved Vienna, except to revisit nearby Austrian spas and resorts cherished in childhood, and on a few occasions, to soak up the sun and surf on the Lido outside Venice. A piece entitled “Traveling” is, in fact, devoted to the “dirt-cheap pleasure altogether free of disappointments, to study the train schedule from mid-May on and pick out the very train with which you would, if only. .”—in short, the pleasure of staying put.
Perils lurked outside the safe periphery of the urban grid. Altenberg’s Nature is at once an idealized locale and a metaphor for an unleashed sexuality which he both craved and feared. Consider the unabashed phallic fantasy that underlies the following paean to the great outdoors from the aforementioned “Autobiography”:
As a boy I had an indescribable love for mountain meadows. The mountain meadow steaming under the blazing sun, fragrantly wafting, alive with bugs and butterflies, made me downright drunk. So too did clearings in the woods. On swampy sunny patches sit butterflies, blue silken small ones and black and red admirals and you can see the hoof print of deer. But for mountain meadows I had a fanatical love, I longed for them. Under all the white hot stones I imagined there lurked poison adders, and this creature was the very incarnation of the fairy tale mystery of my boyhood years. It replaced the man-eating ogre, the giant and the witch. All the bites and their consequences, the terribly slow and torturous pain, I knew it all by heart, how to treat a wound and so on. The wondrously delicate gray-black body of the adder seemed to me to be the loveliest, most elegant creature, and when I loved a little girl I always pictured again and again only one thing happening: an adder bit her in the foot on a hike and I sucked out the venom to save her!