The Averys’ taste in china, furniture, and room temperature was Continental modern. As we sat at their table, speaking German with varying degrees of success, drinking coffee that went cold in five seconds, the leaves I saw scattering across the front lawn could have been German leaves, blown by a German wind, and the rapidly darkening sky a German sky, full of autumn weltschmerz. Out in the hallway, the Averys’ dog, Ina, an apologetic-looking German shepherd, shivered herself awake. We weren’t fifteen miles from the tiny row house where Avery had grown up, but the house he lived in now, with its hardwood floors and leather upholstery and elegant ceramics (many of them thrown by Doris, who was a skilled potter), was the kind of place I now wished I’d grown up in myself, an oasis of fully achieved self-improvement.
We read Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, stories by Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, and a novel by Robert Walser that made me want to scream, it was so quiet and subtle and bleak. We read an essay by Karl Kraus, “The Chinese Wall,” about a Chinese laundry owner in New York who sexually serviced well-bred Caucasian women and finally, notoriously, strangled one of them. The essay began, “Ein Mord ist geschehen, und die Menschheit möchte um Hilfe rufen”[10]—which seemed to me a little strong. The Chinatown murder, Kraus continued, was “the most important event” in the two-thousand-year history of Christian morality: also a bit strong, no? It took me half an hour to fight through each page of his allusions and alliterative dichotomies—
Da entdecken wir, daß unser Verbot ihr Vorschub, unser Geheimnis ihre Gelegenheit, unsere Scham ihr Sporn, unser Gefahr ihr Genuß, unsere Hut ihre Hülle, unser Gebet ihre Brust war…[D]ie gefesselte Liebe liebte die Fessel, die geschlagene den Schmerz, die beschmutzte den Schmutz. Die Rache des verbannten Eros war der Zauber, allen Verlust in Gewinn zu wandeln.[11]
— and as soon as I was sitting in Avery’s living room, attempting to discuss the essay, I realized that I’d been so busy deciphering Kraus’s sentences that I hadn’t actually read them. When Avery asked us what the essay was about, I flipped through my xeroxed pages and tried to speed-read my way to some plausible summary. But Kraus’s German opened up only to lovers with a very slow hand. “It’s about,” I said, “um, Christian morality…and—”
Avery cut me off as if I hadn’t spoken. “We like sex dirty,” he said with a leer, looking at each of us in turn. “That’s what this is about. The dirtier Western culture makes it, the more we like it dirty.”
I was irritated by his “we.” My understanding of sex was mainly theoretical, but I was pretty sure I didn’t like it dirty. I was still looking for a lover who was, first and foremost, a friend. For example: the dark-haired, ironic French major who was taking the modernism seminar with me and whom I’d begun to pursue with the passive, low-pressure methods that, although they’d invariably failed me in the past, I continued to place my faith in. I’d heard that the French major was unattached, and she seemed to find me amusing. I couldn’t imagine anything dirty about having sex with her. In fact, in spite of my growing preoccupation with her, I never came close to picturing us having sex of any kind.
THE PREVIOUS SUMMER, to prepare for the seminar, I’d read Rilke’s novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. It immediately became my all-time favorite book, which was to say that there were several paragraphs in the first part of it (the easiest part and the only part I’d completely enjoyed) which I’d taken to reading aloud to impress my friends. The plot of the novel — a young Danish guy from a good family washes up in Paris, lives hand to mouth in a noisy rooming house, gets lonely and weirded out, worries about becoming a better writer and a more complete person, goes for long walks in the city, and otherwise spends his time writing in his journal — seemed highly relevant and interesting to me. I memorized, without ever quite grasping what I was memorizing, several passages in which Malte reports on his personal growth, which reminded me pleasantly of my own journals:
Ich lerne sehen. Ich weiß nicht, woran es liegt, es geht alles tiefer in mich ein und bleibt nicht an der Stelle stehen, wo es sonst immer zu Ende war. Ich habe ein Inneres, von dem ich nicht wußte. Alles geht jetzt dorthin. Ich weiß nicht, was dort geschieht.[12]
I also liked Malte’s very cool descriptions of his new subjectivity in action, such as:
Da sind Leute, die tragen ein Gesicht jahrelang, natürlich nutzt es sich ab, es wird schmutzig, es bricht in den Falten, es weitet sich aus wie Handschuhe, die man auf der Reise getragen hat. Das sind sparsame, einfache Leute; sie wechseln es nicht, sie lassen es nicht einmal reinigen.[13]
But the sentence in Malte that became my motto for the semester was one I didn’t notice until Avery pointed it out to us. It’s spoken to Malte by a friend of his family, Abelone, when Malte is a little boy and is reading aloud thoughtlessly from Bettina von Arnim’s letters to Goethe. He starts to read one of Goethe’s replies to Bettina, and Abelone cuts him off impatiently. “Not the answers,” she says. And then she bursts out, “Mein Gott, was hast du schlecht gelesen, Malte.”[14]
This was essentially what Avery said to the six of us when we were halfway through our first discussion of The Trial. I’d been unusually quiet that week, hoping to conceal my failure to read the second half of the novel. I already knew what the book was about — an innocent man, Josef K., caught up in a nightmarish modern bureaucracy — and it seemed to me that Kafka piled on far too many examples of bureaucratic nightmarishness. I was annoyed as well by his reluctance to use paragraph breaks, and by the irrationality of his storytelling. It was bad enough that Josef K. opens the door of a storage room at his office and finds a torturer beating two men, one of whom cries out to K. for help. But to have K. return to the storage room the next night and find exactly the same three men doing exactly the same thing: I felt sore about Kafka’s refusal to be more realistic. I wished he’d written the chapter in some friendlier way. It seemed like he was being a bad sport somehow. Although Rilke’s novel was impenetrable in places, it had the arc of a Bildungsroman and ended optimistically. Kafka was more like a bad dream I wanted to stop having.
“We’ve been talking about this book for two hours,” Avery said to us, “and there’s a very important question that nobody is asking. Can someone tell me what the obvious important question is?”
We all just looked at him.
“Jonathan,” Avery said. “You’ve been very quiet this week.”
“Well, you know, the nightmare of the modern bureaucracy,” I said. “I don’t know if I have much to say about it.”
“You don’t see what this has to do with your life.”
“Less than with Rilke, definitely. I mean, it’s not like I’ve had to deal with a police state.”
“But Kafka’s about your life!” Avery said. “Not to take anything away from your admiration of Rilke, but I’ll tell you right now, Kafka’s a lot more about your life than Rilke is. Kafka was like us. All of these writers, they were human beings trying to make sense of their lives. But Kafka above all! Kafka was afraid of death, he had problems with sex, he had problems with women, he had problems with his job, he had problems with his parents. And he was writing fiction to try to figure these things out. That’s what this book is about. That’s what all of these books are about. Actual living human beings trying to make sense of death and the modern world and the mess of their lives.”
11
Now we find out that our prohibitions were Nature’s procrastinations, our secrets her opportunities, our shame her spur, our danger her enjoyment, our defenses her cover, our prayers her breeding season…Fettered love loved its fetters; beaten love, its pain; filthy love, its filth. The revenge of the exiled Eros was the magic of turning every loss into a gain.
12
I’m learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything penetrates into me more deeply and doesn’t stop at the place where, until now, it always used to end. I have an inner life that I didn’t know about. Everything goes there now. I don’t know what happens there.
13
There are people who wear the same face for years, naturally it gets worn out, it gets dirty, it splits at the folds, it stretches like a pair of gloves that you’ve worn on a trip. These are thrifty, simple people; they don’t change their face, they never even have it cleaned.