theaterof art;I was fascinated by everything in the Sebastiansplatz, which for many years remained for me the very center of Vienna. Gradually I acquired what I may call a conception of art;I met all the artists, all the geniuses, as well as all those who were set upon becoming artists and geniuses. Observing Joana in the Sebastiansplatz, I was able to see how such a society comports itself,how it develops, how it is attracted, cultivated, nurtured and tamed, and how it can ultimately be abused and exploited. To put it in the simplest terms: in the Sebastiansplatz I studied society — and not only artistic society — and began to get a clear view of how it functioned. It was in the Sebastiansplatz that I first saw what artists were, what they were like,and what made them what they were. I also learned what they were not and never could be as long as they lived. In the Sebastiansplatz I was free to study them as I have never been able to since, with supreme intensity and hence with supreme receptivity, for at that time I was capable of the utmost intensity and receptivity. I may say that it was in the Sebastiansplatz that I first got to know human beings; I already knew them to some extent, better than many others in my position, but it was only in the Sebastiansplatz that I found out what human beings were really like, human beings of every kind, by making a conscious study of them. It was in the Sebastiansplatz that I began to evolve a method of watching and observing people which was to become my own personal art, an art which I was to practice for the rest of my life. It was in the Sebastiansplatz that I learned not only to admire human beings and human society, but also to despise them, I thought, to find them at once attractive and repellent. It was in the Sebastiansplatz that I first became clearly aware of the power and the impotence of artists, and of human beings in general; it was as though I was able at last to disperse the impenetrable fog that had hitherto blocked my view of so-called artistic society. Never before or since have I seen so many artists almost every day and every night as I did in the Sebastiansplatz, and all these artists — most of whom, it occurs to me, were probably what I would now call non-artists,and probably remained such — flitted in and out of the apartment in the Sebastiansplatz, while I stayed there nearly all the time, admiring Fritz as he sat dedicatedly working at his tapestries, and loving Joana as she dreamed of her future fame in the biggest of all Vienna’s studios. Today, if I see some so-called celebrity mentioned in the newspapers, it is almost certain to be somebody I met in the Sebastiansplatz. Joana’s fellow students who had studied and qualified with her at the Reinhardt Seminar had long since disappeared in the many theatrical cesspits that existed in Vienna in those days. Meanwhile Elfriede Slukal, in what she believed to be a moment of clairvoyance, decided to transform herself into Joana and become the wife of Fritz the tapestry artist. While her former colleagues had for years been forced into the nerve-racking business of pandering to a sick public with an insatiable appetite for entertainment, prostituting themselves to a brand of literature that can be described only as pathetic, it is possible that Joana had already given up her dreams of having her own career and was concentrating solely on furthering that of her tapestry artist. She staked her whole talent — not only an artistic talent, but her phenomenal social talent—on her devoted Fritz, and in this she was successful right from the start. For without Joana, Fritz would never have become the international tapestry artist he now is; he would certainly not have won the big prize in São Paulo for his Associative Mountain Range,and without Joana he would not be the famous professor who from time to time hits the headlines, as they say, in today’s newspapers and magazines. Joana sacrificed herself for Fritz, it seems to me, and never recovered from her sacrifice; this was probably the cause of the lifelong despair she had to endure, without ever showing it, a despair which I think probably broke her, as they say, though not until eight or nine years after the collapse of her marriage, when she tried to find consolation with John, the commercial traveler. She made of Fritz what she had wanted to make of herself — a respected, celebrated and finally world-famous artistic personality. She forced him to the top because she could not force herself to the top; of the two of them it was Fritz,not she, who was actually cut out for world fame. From the moment she realized that she was not cut out for a career, let alone for an international career and international fame, she forced Fritz into a career, into an international career, into the straitjacket of an international career, as it now strikes me, but this brought her only temporary, not permanent, satisfaction. Without Joana, it seems to me, Fritz would have remained a charming pipe-smoking painter and carpet weaver, catering to middle-class demands, an affable fellow who was content with his work, his pipe and a glass of wine before he went to bed, either alone or in company. Joana more or less jolted him out of his mediocrity, first causing the artistic sap to rise and then bringing him into full bloom. But in the long run Joana could not be satisfied by Fritz’s tapestries, which in due course hung in all the important museums and on the walls of executive suites in all the big industrial concerns, insurance companies and banks: the more well-known, the more famous his name and his art became, the more dejected she, the author of his success, was bound to be. When Fritz was at the zenith of his fame, Joana herself had naturally reached the nadir of dejection, but by now she could no longer break off her work, the building up and perfecting of her Fritz, at this high point in his career; Fritz was her one work of art, at which outwardly she continued to labor, progressively increasing its dimensions, though in her heart of hearts, as they say, she had long since come to hate it. It was, I think, this process of being perpetually forced to go on adding to the stature of her work of art and in doing so to push herself down to ever greater depths, that brought about her ruin. Joana was finally crushed, it seems to me, by the immense weight of the work that she had created and brought more or less to completion — by her beloved Fritz. What she had been unable to achieve in herself, namely the birth of a great artist, a so-called major artist, she achieved in the person of Fritz, and when the work had become reality and she saw what she had done, what she had on her conscience, it literally frightened her to death. If we cannot become what we want to become, we resort to another person — inevitably the person closest to us — and make of him what we have been unable to make of ourselves, Joana had probably thought, and so, I think, she fashioned Fritz into this colossal work of art which finally crushed and destroyed her. No one who knew Fritz would have thought it possible for him to become the world-famous artist he did become, or for his work to achieve the international acclaim it did achieve, for it was obvious to all that everything about him was quite incompatible with fame of such magnitude. Yet despite what everyone thought he did become a world-famous figure, thanks, I believe, to Joana. It was she, I believe, who transformed the honest unpretentious Fritz into the celebrated man of the world he is today, because she was able, through her absolute dedication, to invest in him everything she was forced to deny herself, a boundless and unquenchable thirst for fame. I have no hesitation in saying that Fritz is Joana’s handiwork; I will go further and say that Fritz’s art, the works he created, all the tapestries that now hang in famous museums throughout the world, are really Joana’s, just as everything he is today derives from Joana, is Joana. But obviously nobody takes an idea like this seriously, even though of course such ideas, which are not taken seriously, are actually the only serious ideas and always will be. It is only in order to survive, it seems to me, that we have such serious ideas which are not taken seriously. What am I doing in this company, with which I have had no contact and have wanted no contact for twenty years, people who have gone their own way just as I have gone mine? I asked myself, sitting in the wing chair. What am I doing in the Gentzgasse? And I told myself that I had momentarily yielded to sentimentality in the Graben and that I should never have yielded to such disgraceful sentimentality. To think that I weakened for a moment in the Graben and made myself cheap by accepting an invitation from the Auersbergers, I said to myself, sitting in the wing chair, people whom I’ve despised and detested for so many years! For no more than a moment we become disgustingly sentimental, I told myself in the wing chair, and commit the crime of stupidity, going somewhere we ought never to go and even visiting people we despise and detest, I thought, sitting in the wing chair: I’ve actually come to the Gentzgasse, and this is without doubt not just an act of folly, but conduct of the most contemptible kind. We become weak and walk into the trap, into the social trap, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, for to me this apartment in the Gentzgasse is nothing but a social trap, and I’ve just walked into it. For there can be no doubt that the Auersbergers feel nothing but hatred for me, and so do all the other members of the party in the by now foul-smelling music room, as they await the arrival of the actor from the Burgtheater, who is enjoying such a great success in The WildDuck,as Auersberger’s wife never tires of repeating, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. They’ve been waiting for him longer than they’d ever have waited for me, I thought. The actor’s bound to make their evening, I thought — this self-important theatrical blockhead! For the sake of this disagreeable individual they’ve let themselves be kept waiting over two hours for a supper which the hostess insists on calling an artistic dinner,probably because that’s what she’s always called her dinners, though I remember them only too clearly as revolting dinners,I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Whether at Maria Zaal or in the Gentzgasse, dinners at the Auersbergers’ were always more or less revolting; they always wanted to give the grandest dinners and always convinced themselves that they succeeded, but in reality their dinners were always revolting and ridiculous, utterly ludicrous and unappetizing, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. They were always meant to be the acme of refinement, but they always turned out to be the acme of tastelessness — they were intended to be the most splendid occasions, but they unfailingly turned out to be unmitigated disasters, I recalled in the wing chair. The food was supposed to be superb, yet what was dished up was always inadequate, I thought; whenever they gave a supper party they planned to serve the choicest food, but time and again what eventually arrived on the table fell so far short of what they had planned as to be positively embarrassing. Basically their suppers never worked out: the food was never particularly good, though it was often quite good, and the wine was never particularly good, or even quite good: it was uniformly bad — of poor quality and served either too warm or too cold, and it was always either too sweet or too dry, I recalled in the wing chair. And as hosts the Auersbergers always came unstuck,as they say, right at the beginning of any supper party or dinner party they gave: after the first two or three mouthfuls they would invariably rise to each other’s dreadful provocations and drag their guests, willy-nilly, into the chaos of their personal lives. They never showed any consideration for their guests, whom they would start pelting quite shamelessly with their marital filth when they tired of merely pelting each other; in addition to the inadequate food they would dish up their own distasteful innards in front of the outraged guests, whom they finally drove away with their marital brawls, their mutual insults, and their torrents of mutual recrimination. I can remember scarcely a single supper with them, either at Maria Zaal or in the Gentzgasse, that did not culminate in some marital explosion; all their dinner parties — or rather supper parties — in the Gentzgasse would finally blow up, in the truest sense of the word, and at Maria Zaal they usually left behind a scene of conjugal carnage and a foul stench of unholiest matrimony, I thought, sitting in the wing chair and looking into the music room. The Auersbergers were perversely obsessed with their own social indigence, she because she came of a rather ridiculous family belonging to the Alpine gentry of Styria, he because his maternal grandfather had been a butcher’s assistant at Feldbach and his father a petty local government official. This was no doubt why they always felt they had to hoist themselves up the social ladder, an effort that required all the energy they could muster and was always obvious to the eye of the trained observer, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. All her life she was constantly trying to escape from her origins, just as he was from his — she from the idyll of her gentle Styrian birth, he from the paternal destiny of petty local officialdom and the maternal low-pressure zone inhabited by butchers’ assistants — all of which was bound to appear irresistibly comic to anyone around them who had eyes to see and ears to hear. She was forever trying, by every means at her command, to climb just one rung further up the ladder from her pathetic Styrian idyll into the higher echelons of rural barons and counts, though in all the years I have known the Auersbergers her endeavors were of no avail, for whenever she so much as got a grip on this higher rung of the nobility which she so fervently wished to reach, she was brutally and unceremoniously thrust down by those who occupied it, by the very people with whom she longed to be associated, and this, I know, caused her endless pain. She failed in all her attempts to reach this superior rung of the rural nobility and hold on to it — at least for a while, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, for she knew that she could not hold on forever.