Old Masters (8 page)

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We are everything that was in our ancestors, absolutely everything, plus what is in ourselves. To be related to Stifter has been a precious enormity to me all my life, until I discovered that Stifter was not the great writer or poet, whichever, whom I had venerated all my life. That I am related to Heidegger I have always known because my parents let it out at every opportunity. We are related to Stifter, and we are also related to Heidegger, and to Bruckner too, my parents would say at every opportunity, so much so that I often felt embarrassed. To be related to Stifter people always regard as something quite fantastic, certainly in Upper Austria but also throughout Austria, and it counts at least as much in society as if someone were to say that he was related to the Emperor Francis Joseph, but to be related to Stifter
and
to Heidegger, that is the most extraordinary and the most amazing thing that one can imagine in Austria, and indeed also in Germany. And if, at a suitable moment, Reger said, you then add that you are related to Bruckner too, the people simply cannot recover from their amazement. To have a famous poet among one's relatives is already something special, but to have also a famous philosopher among one's relatives is of course even more fantastic, Reger said, and on top of it to be related to Anton Bruckner is the ultimate. My parents often mentioned his fact and of course derived advantage from it. The only crucial thing, however, was to mention these relationships in the right place; of course it goes without saying that they spoke of their relative Adalbert Stifter whenever they sought an Upper Austrian advantage, for instance from the provincial government on which every Upper Austrian is time and again dependent, or that Anton Bruckner was invoked chiefly when they had a problem in Vienna, Reger said; in the event of a Linz or Wels or Eferdingen problem, that is to say an Upper Austrian problem, they of course mentioned that they were related to Stifter; if they had a Vienna problem they would say that Bruckner was a relative of theirs, and when they were travelling through Germany they would say, a hundred times a day, that Heidegger was a relative of theirs, and they would always say that Heidegger was
a close relative
of theirs, without honestly stating how closely Heidegger was actually related to them, because in fact Heidegger is related to them and hence also to me, albeit, as the phrase is,
very distantly. To
Stifter, on the other hand, we are related
very closely
and to Bruckner also
fairly closely,
Reger said yesterday. That they were also related to a double murderer who spent the first half of his adult life in Stein-on-Danube and the second half in Garsten near Steyr, which are the two biggest Austrian penal establishments —that, needless to say, they never mentioned, although they should have invariably mentioned it in the same way. I myself have never shrunk from saying that one of my relatives had been a prisoner in Stein and in Garsten, which is probably the worst thing an Austrian can say about his relatives, on the contrary, I have mentioned the fact more often than would have been necessary, which of course can also be interpreted as a character flaw, Reger said. Similarly I never concealed the fact that I have tuberculosis and that I have always had tuberculosis, he said, and I have never in my life been afraid of this flaw or weakness. I have very often said that I am related to Stifter and to Heidegger and to Bruckner and to a double murderer who served his sentence in Steyr and in Stein, even when I was not asked about it, Reger said yesterday. We have to live with our relationships, no matter what they are, he said. After all, we
are
those relationships, he said,
within myself I am all those relatives combined.
Reger loves fog and gloom, he shies away from light, that is why he goes to the Kunsthistorisches Museum and that is also why he goes to the Ambassador, because at the Kunsthistorisches Museum it is just as gloomy as at the Ambassador, and while in the mornings he can, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, enjoy his ideal temperature of eighteen degrees Celsius, he enjoys his ideal afternoon temperature of twenty-three degrees Celsius at the Ambassador, quite apart from anything else that, as he puts it, suits him at the Kunsthistorisches Museum on the one hand and at the Ambassador on the other. The sun can no more penetrate into the Kunsthistorisches Museum than it can into the Ambassador, that is as he likes it, because he does not like solar radiation. He avoids the sun, there is nothing he shuns more than the sun.
I hate the sun, you know that I hate the sun more than anything in the world,
he says. What he likes best are foggy days, on foggy days he leaves the house very early in the morning, actually takes a walk, which he does not normally do, for basically he hates walking. I hate walking, he says, it seems so pointless to me. I walk, and while I am walking I keep thinking how I hate walking, I have no other thoughts at the time, I cannot understand that there are people who are able to think while walking, to think of something other than that walking is pointless and useless, he says. I prefer to walk up and down in my room, it is then that I have my best ideas. I can stand by the window for hours, looking down into the street, that is a habit I acquired in childhood. I look down into the street and observe the people and ask myself who are these people, and what is moving them down there in the street, what keeps them going, that, as it were, is my principal occupation. I have always exclusively concerned myself with people, nature as such has never interested me, everything in me was always related to human beings, I am, you might say, a fanatic for human beings, he said, naturally not a fanatic for humanity but a fanatic for human beings. I have always only been interested in human beings, he said, because in the nature of things they repelled me, I have never been attracted more intensively by anything than by human beings and at the same time never more thoroughly repelled by anything than by human beings. I loathe people but they are, simultaneously, the sole purpose of my life. When I get home from a concert at night I very often stand by my window until about one or two in the morning, looking down into the street and observing the human beings passing there below. During that observation I gradually develop my work. I stand by the window, looking down into the street, and at the same time I work on my essay. Towards two in the morning I do not, as you might think, go to bed but I sit down at my desk and write my essay. I go to bed around three in the morning but I get up again about half-past seven. At my age, of course, I no longer need a lot of sleep. Sometimes I sleep for only three or four hours, that is quite sufficient.
Everybody has his
bread-giver,
he said hypocritically,
my
bread-giver
is The Times.
It is good to have a bread-giver, it is even better to
have a secret
bread-giver.
The Times
is my secret master, he said yesterday. I had been observing him for a long time now without actually seeing him. He said yesterday that naturally he did not have every opportunity but certainly a great many opportunities in his childhood, and during his youth which followed upon his childhood, and that in the end he had not decided in favour of any one of those opportunities as a professional career. As he had been under no compulsion to earn a living, since what he had inherited from his parents was not to be underrated; he had for many years, undisturbed, followed only his ideas, his predilections, his inclinations. From the outset it had not been nature that attracted him, on the contrary, he had avoided nature whenever he could do so, art had attracted him,
anything artificial,
he said yesterday,
absolutely anything artificial.
Painting had disappointed him at an early stage, from the outset it had seemed to him the unspiritual among the arts. He read a lot, and passionately, but the idea of writing himself never occurred to him, he did not think he could do it. He loved music from the outset, it was in music that he eventually found what he had missed in painting and also in literature. I certainly do not come from a musical family, he said, on the contrary, my people were all unmusical and altogether completely hostile to the arts. Only after my parents died was I able to indulge in my first predilection. My parents had to be dead for me to be able to do what I wanted to do, they had always blocked my access to my predilections, to my passions. My father was an unmusical person, he said, my mother was musical, as I believe, even highly musical, but her husband over the years had
driven
her musicality
out of her.
My parents were a
frightful couple,
he said, they secretly hated one another but were unable to separate. Possessions and money held them together, that is the truth. We had many beautiful, expensive paintings hanging on our walls, he said, but they never looked at them once in all those decades, we had many thousands of books on our shelves but they never read a single one of those books in all those decades, we had a Bösendorfer grand piano standing there but for decades no one had played it. If the lid of the piano had been welded shut they would not have noticed it for decades, he said. My parents had ears but they heard nothing, they had eyes but they saw nothing, they probably had hearts but they felt nothing. Amidst that chill I grew up, he said. I did not suffer any hardship, but even so I was in the depths of despair every single day, he said. My whole childhood was nothing but a period of despair. My parents did not love me and I did not love them. They never forgave me for having made me, all their lives they never forgave me for having made me. If there is a hell, and of course there is a hell, he said, then my childhood was that hell. Childhood probably always is hell, childhood is
the
hell, he said, no matter what kind of childhood, it is hell. People say they had a happy childhood, but it was hell all the same. People falsify everything, they also falsify the childhood they had. They say they had a happy childhood, and yet they lived through hell. The older people become the more readily they say they had a happy childhood when it cannot have been anything other than hell.
Hell does not lie ahead, hell is behind us,
he said,
because hell is childhood.
What it cost me to escape from that hell! he said yesterday. While my parents were alive it was hell for me. My parents blocked everything within me and about me, he said. In a ceaseless mechanism of suppression they nearly protected me to death, he said. My parents had to be dead for me to be able to live, when my parents died I revived. In the end it was actually music that vivified me, he said yesterday. But of course I did not wish, nor was I able, to be a creative or even a performing artist, at least not a creative or performing musical artist, but only a
critical
one.
I am a critical artist,
he said, I have been a critical artist all my life. Even in childhood I was a critical artist, he said, the circumstances of my childhood made me a critical artist in an entirely natural way. I certainly regard myself as an artist, that is as a critical artist, and as a critical artist I am of course also creative, that is obvious, hence a
performing and creative critical artist,
he said. What is more, a creative and performing critical artist of
The Times,
he said. I certainly regard my brief reports for
The Times
as works of art, and I think that as the author of these works of art I am always in one person and simultaneously a painter and a musician and a writer. That is my greatest delight: to know that as the author of these works of art for
The Times I
am a painter and a musician and a writer in one, that is my
greatest
delight. I am not therefore, as the painters are, only a painter, and I am not, as the musicians are, only a musician, and I am not, as the writers are, only a writer, you must understand that
I am a painter and a musician and a writer all in one.
That is what I perceive to be the greatest happiness, he said, to be
an artist in all the arts
and yet reside in one of them. It is possible, he said, that the critical artist is the one who practises his own art in all the arts and is aware of it, utterly and totally aware of it. This awareness makes me happy. To that extent I have been happy for over thirty years, he said, even though by nature I am an unhappy person. A thinking person is by nature an unhappy person, he said yesterday. But even that unhappy person can be happy, he said, time and again, in the truest meaning of the word and of the concept
as a diversion.
Childhood is the black hole into which one was thrust by one's parents and from which one must climb out unaided. Most people never succeed in getting out of that black hole which is their childhood, all their lives they are in that black hole, they cannot get out and they become embittered. That is why most people are embittered who fail to get out of the hole of their childhood. It certainly calls for a superhuman effort to get out of the hole of childhood. And unless we get out of that blackest of holes at an early stage we never get out of it at all, he said. My parents had to be dead for me to get out of that blackest hole of my childhood, he said, they had to be
definitely dead, in fact for ever,
you
understand, for me to get out of the hole of my childhood. What my parents would have liked best was, immediately after my birth, to have locked me up in their safe along with their jewellery and their bonds, he said. I had embittered parents, he said, who suffered all their lives from their bitterness. In all the pictures I have of my parents, and whenever I look at them, I see their bitterness. There are practically no other children than children of embittered parents, that is why all parents look
so
embittered. All these faces are marked by bitterness and disappointment, you scarcely find any that are not, you may walk through Vienna for hours on end, for instance, and all you see in those faces is bitterness and disappointment, and things are no different out in the country, the country faces too are full of bitterness and disappointment. My parents made me, and when they saw