Telegrams of the Soul (2 page)

Well, that's what I've got.

My life has been devoted to the boundless admiration of God's artwork, “woman's body!” The walls of my humble room are practically papered over with perfect studies of the nude. All are hung in oaken frames with captions. A fifteen-year-old bears the motto: “Beauté est vertue.” Beneath another it says: “There is but one indecency in the naked—to deem the naked indecent!”

Under yet another it says: “This is how God and the poets dreamed you up. But feeble little man invented modesty and covered you, en-coffined you!”

When P.A. wakes, his glance falls on the holy splendor and he takes the trouble and stress of existence in stride, since he was endowed with two eyes to drink in the holiest loveliness on earth!

Eye, oh eye, Rothchild-chattel of man!

But the others stare, they ogle life like the toad ogles the water-lily.

I'd like these words inscribed on my tombstone: “He loved and saw.”

Yes, indeed, to live in inner ecstasies, to get yourself all hot and bothered, piping hot, to let yourself be set on fire by the beauties of this world, that was all we ever wanted, father and son, that was all.

But whereas the old man was still somewhat attached to everyday life, at times colliding with it, the younger one fled immediately and without a second thought from this dungeon of duty.

True, I am poor, poor, but my noble father gave me the treasure which few fathers in their gentle wisdom grant their sons: “Time for development and freedom.” That allowed my uncorrupted soul to lovingly abandon itself to the inconceivable treasures which every hour of every day spill like pearls onto the desolate shore of life, allowed it to abandon itself to the tragic or the tender events, and grow, grow—.

My Mama was once a very delicate, strikingly lovely lady with fine hands and feet and slender joints. Like a gazelle. Once my father brought back from England a very pretty girl. He said to Mama: “This, my dear, is Maud-Victoria. She is the prettiest girl in England.” My Mama saw that she was indeed the prettiest girl in England and said in a downright sorrowful voice: “Will she have to stay with us from now on?” Whereupon, my father was so moved that he sent the “prettiest girl in England” back where she came from.

When my father paid frequent visits to the Ashantee girls,
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my dearly beloved girlfriends, and gave them silk scarves as gifts, everyone said: “The old man and his son are two of a kind.”

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 hoofprint 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 would bite her in the foot on a hike and I'd suck out the venom to save her!

I knew the terrain inside out in which adders must necessarily make their homes, trod through it, lay in wait; but in my entire life I have never spotted a live adder, even though the region around Schneeberg is crawling with them. It remained for me a bad but sweetly disturbing dream.

Ever and again I imagined the scene: my beloved is bitten, above the ankle. Everyone stands around helpless and desperate. Then I fetch a flask of gentian root spirit from the nearest chalet, engender the proper state of intoxication, the only remedy. Then she says: “Heavens, however did you know that?” And I say simply: “I read it in Brehm—”

Always, everywhere I waited for adders. They never came.

At age 23, I worshiped a thirteen-year-old girl, wept through my nights, got engaged to her, became a book dealer in Stuttgart so as to hurry up and earn enough money to be able to fend for her later. But nothing came of it. Nothing ever came of my dreams.

I never found anything else in life worthwhile except for a woman's beauty, the grace of a lady, so sweet, so childlike! And I view anyone who ever prized anything else as a poor fool swindled out of his life!

Give your all to the implacable day and the merciless hour, but know it and feel it that your holiest and truest moments are only those in which your stirred and stunned eye falls upon a female graceful and soft! Better know it, life's lackey, that you're a day laborer, a carter, a prisoner, a recruit, a self-deceiver deceived by life, and that only by the grace of a “saintly lovely woman” could you ever rise to an aristocrat or king!

I only value the little things I write insofar as they shed a little light for the man drawn and drained by a thousand duties on the lovely, graceful and mysterious being at his side. Consumed by the tasks
of his implacable day, he dare not view woman as a rare and inscrutable being in and of herself, but rather as nothing more than a partner in his miseries! Her world is dear and understandable to him only insofar as he derives blessings from it. The other life is left to the poets! Thus do these souls ever so slightly removed from life take up their lyres again and again to exalt with their tears the noble creatures of which the others take brutal advantage! I myself have only suffered at the foot of these beauties to whom I have consecrated my lost and unnecessary existence. Still I believe I had a hand in infusing a whiff of the Greek cult of beauty in the harried life of a few young fools! But that too may only be a utopia.

Poor and forsaken, I live out what's left of my life, my glance still seeking out a noble woman's hand, a graceful step, a gentle face turned away from the world. Amen.—

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In 1897, Altenberg often visited, promptly befriended and idolized the subjects, especially the young women, of a live human exhibit of Africans from the Gold Coast in a reconstructed village erected at Vienna's Zoological Garden in the Schönbrunn Palace Gardens. A curious example of Fin-de-Siècle flirtation with the exotic, Altenberg, characteristically, metamorphosed that flirtation into a heartfelt passion.

We relegated fairytales to the realm of childhood—that exceptional, wondrous, stirring, remarkable time of life! But why rig out childhood with it, when childhood is already sufficiently romantic and fairytale-like in and of itself? The disenchanted adult had best seek out the fairytale-like elements, the romanticism of each day and each hour right here and now in the hard, stern, cold fundament of life! Even the truly predestined poets with their more impressionable hearts, eyes and ears fetch their telling tidbits from actual occurrences, listening in on the romance of life itself. The rest of us can all become poets too if only we take pains not to let slip a single pearl which life in its rich bounty tosses up every now and then onto the flat dreary beachhead of our day!

Everything is remarkable if our perception of it is remarkable! And every little local incident written up in the daily newspaper can sound the depths of life, revealing all the tragic and the comic, the same as Shakespeare's tragedies! We all do life an injustice in surrendering poetry as the exclusive province of the poet's heart, since every one of us has the capacity to mine the poetic in the quarry of the mundane! The poet's heart will forfeit this privilege through the evolution of the intrinsic culture of the common human heart!

 

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Märchen des Lebens
(The Fairytale of Life), 1908

July 1894

Dear Dr. Arthur Schnitzler,

Your lovely letter made me truly inordinately happy. So how do I write?

Altogether freely, without any deliberation. I never know my subject beforehand, I never think it over. I just take paper and write. Even the title I toss off and hope that what comes out will have something to do with it.

One must have confidence, not force the issue, just let oneself live life to the fullest, frightfully free, let it fly—.

What comes out is definitely the stuff that was real and deep down in me. If nothing comes out then there was nothing real and deep down in me and that doesn't matter then either.

I view writing as a natural organic spilling out of a full, overripe person. Thus the failings, the pale cast of thought.

I hate any revision. Toss it off and that's good—! Or bad! What's the difference?! If it's only you, you and nobody else, your sacred you.The term you coined “self-searcher” is really terrific. But when will you write “self-finder”?

My pieces have the misfortune always to be taken for little rehearsals, whereas they are, alas, already the very best I can do. But what's the difference?! I couldn't care less if I write or not.

The more important thing is that I be able to show in a circle of refined, cultured young people that the little spark is fluttering in me. Otherwise, one has the impression of seeming so pressed, so importunate, as if everyone looked askance. I'm already enough of an “invalid of life.” Your letter made me very very happy! You're all so kind to me. Everyone full of goodwill. But you really did say such absolutely wonderful things to me. Especially that term “self-searcher.”

With no profession, no money, no position and already hardly any hair, you can well imagine that such gracious recognition from a “man in the know” falls on very welcome ears.

Thus am I and will I ever remain a writer of “worthless samples” and the finished product never appears. I'm just a kind of little pocket mirror, powder mirror, no world-mirror.

Yours,

Peter Altenberg

I just came to the realization, to the sudden, illuminating, simple realization, upon receipt of a letter from my true friend, Fr. W., a man most inclined to friendship (he writes with unbelievable verve on one of the finest typewriters) that to write a good letter can only mean to write it such that the recipient be able, while reading it, to hear the letter writer speaking loudly and most emphatically to him, as though seated right there at his side! To be able to completely reconcile in a letter this difference between the one who silently writes and the one who speaks out loud, that's true letter writing skill! Everything else is literary rubbish crowned with laurels à la pig's head. Temperament, incivilities, peculiarities, impertinences, tomfooleries, everything must come roaring out, roaring, roaring; or else it's a contrived, mendacious and, therefore, boring, business! Letter-instant-photography!

A friend of mine, the watchmaker Josef T., once came to me with a request. He had just laid his lovely 23-year-old beloved in the grave.

“Peter, you know me, please help me! Write me a proper inscription for my marble tombstone. When may I hope that you think up something appropriate?”

“Now or never!” I replied right there in the middle of the street.

He tore out his notebook.

I wrote:

“I was the Watchmaker Josef T.,

And then I found paradise through you—.

And now I'm the Watchmaker

Joseph T. again—.”

You've got to pour out all your humanity spontaneously, in a rush; because later it turns into a tasteless sauce! That's why there are so many tasteless sauces—.

“Own up,” said the Count to Mitzi G., “who'd you get to draft this letter to me for you?!”

“Drafted?! Drafted?! What do you mean by that?!”

“Drafted! You couldn't possibly have dreamed it up yourself!”

“Why not?! You think I'm all that stupid?!”

“No, yes. But once and for all, you didn't write this letter!”

“Who else do you think wrote it?!”

“That I don't know. You're the only one that knows it. Listen, Mitzi, I'll give you one hundred Crowns if you tell his name!”

“One hundred Crowns? Make it one fifty!”

“It was Peter!”

“What Peter?!”

“Peter, you know, Peter Altenberg!”

The letter: “Saw you again last night at the ‘Tabarin!' Couldn't talk to you, didn't dare to. So there I was seated face to face with the guy that had me for a whole year butt-naked under the covers. . . . It was just no use!”

“How did he ever come to draft this letter for you?!”

I said to him, I said: “For God's sake, write me something I'd have written if I knew how to write!”

“So the letter's from you after all?!”

“That's what I said from the start!”

So then she patched things up again with the Count.