The Lady in Gold (8 page)

His listeners were astonished, and delighted—Twain spoke and read what he had famously termed “the awful German language.” They leaned forward to listen, as Twain threatened to reform German “
so that when you need it for prayer it can be understood Up Yonder.”

Among the guests laughing at Twain's send-up was the journalist
Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political
Zionism and a friend of Twain. They had covered the Dreyfus affair together in Paris, in which a Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, had been unfairly accused by the French of spying for the Germans—a case that was a cause célèbre of anti-Semitic scapegoating.
Twain began his Vienna sojourn by openly defending Dreyfus at the salon of ardent pacifist
Bertha von Suttner, who would be the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. This prompted the anti-Semitic
Reichspost
newspaper to sniff at “
the unavoidable Mark Twain, who seems to have no idea of how he is being mishandled by the Jews in Vienna.”

Vienna would watch every move of the man the press called “Our Famous Guest.” The city of 1.7 million had forty-five newspapers, a score of cultural journals, and a dozen humor magazines. Twain's appearances would be covered by
Stefan Zweig.

As Twain socialized with the high society, he puzzled over the anti-Semitism of Vienna. “
The Jew is not a burden upon the Charities of the State, nor of the city. When he is well enough to work, he works; when he is incapacitated his own people take care of him,” Twain wrote a friend in Vienna. “His race is entitled to be called the most benevolent of all the races of men.”

Twain and his family made a highly watched outing at his friend Theodor Herzl's play,
The New Ghetto,
which predicted that invisible social walls would prevent Jewish assimilation as durably as the old walled ghettos of days past.

It could even be said that Twain influenced early psychoanalysis.
Sigmund Freud was a regular at lectures of “
our old friend Mark Twain,” though there is no evidence that they ever met. The therapist took notes that would turn up in his
Jokes
and Their Relation to the Unconscious.
Freud confessed to skipping the lecture of a prince's doctor to see Twain brag about teaching six members of the imperial family watermelon-stealing techniques—an anecdote Freud used in
Civilization and Its Discontents.
Freud would quote Twain in
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
and
Interpretation of Dreams.

Historians believe Freud was also influenced by Mark Twain's September
1899
Harper's
essay, “Concerning the Jews,” which Twain wrote in Vienna. Why is it, Twain asked, that “
the Jews have thus ever been, and are even now, in these days of intelligence, the butt of baseless, vicious animosities? I dare say that for centuries there has been no more quiet, undisturbing, and well-behaving citizen, as a class, than that same Jew.

“
Will it ever come to an end?” Twain wrote. “Will a Jew be permitted to live honestly, decently and peaceably like the rest of mankind?”

Twain delighted his new Viennese friends by becoming mixed up in open ridicule of Vienna's anti-Semitic mayor,
Karl Lueger, through a mysterious mock letter, published in the
Neue Freie Presse,
and bearing the signature “Mark Twain.” The letter described a heated city meeting on the “Jewifying” of judgeships—the anti-Semitic term for allowing Jews into the judiciary. The letter reported that Mayor Lueger recommended tolerance of Jewish judgeships, which made the writer so happy he jumped to his feet and waved his hat in the air, yelling, “
Long live Lueger! Long live the Jews!” until someone punched him, knocking him out cold. According to the letter, he awoke at the Hotel Metropol with broken bones and missing teeth. “I won't very soon forget the session of your city council,” “Twain” concluded brightly in the letter—which was edited by the newspaper's
feuilleton
editor, the Zionist
Theodor Herzl, Twain's friend.

Twain protested he had been the victim of a hoax. But the letter's trademark humor suggested he had been in on the joke. Twain did in fact report on government, and he embellished his notes with satire. At one long-winded government meeting, Twain wrote in his notebook that a “
tallow-chandler” had wandered in and accused Vienna's leading anti-Semites, Lueger and Schönerer, of having Jewish great-grandmothers—plunging the chamber into an uproar. “
Invented a new name tonight for [Schönerer's] party: ‘The Louseboy's Party,' ” Twain scribbled to himself.

Twain's daughter Clara was studying piano with the young Russian Jewish composer
Ossip Gabrilowitsch, whose seductive manner and kisses would so beguile Adele Bauer's friend Alma that she found herself falling in love with him, though she said a friend told her he was “
ugly as a Russian Jew after a pogrom.” Ossip began an attentive courtship of Clara that made it clear Twain would gain a Jewish son-in-law.

Twain and his family of “
innocent wild Americans” rubbed shoulders with everyone from Johann Strauss to Emperor Franz Joseph. But anti-Semites focused their suspicions on his many social ties to Jews. Old Testament names like Samuel were customarily Jewish in Vienna, and anti-Semites began insisting “Mark Twain” was an attempt by Clemens
to disguise his Jewish roots. The anti-Semitic press began to taunt him as “
the Jew Mark Twain.” One cartoon showed Twain surrounded by greedy Jewish merchants caricatured as hook-nosed Shylocks.

Twain was unfazed. His depression had lifted. He was writing a play with the Vienna playwright
Sigmund Schlesinger, and the two men joked about a role for
Katharina Schratt. Like the rest of Vienna, Twain was quoting
Fledermaus:
“Happy he who forgets what cannot be changed.”

At his desk overlooking the Danube Canal, Twain finally began to write again. His new story, “The Mysterious Stranger,” was reminiscent of the Goethe Faust tale, beloved by the Viennese, of a man's deal with the devil. “
It was past midnight,” Twain wrote, when down on the Morzinplatz, he saw “a tall, handsome stranger, dressed in black.” With a “rush of wind, a crash of thunder, and a glare of lightning,” the Prince of Darkness appeared. He had “an intellectual face, and that subtle air of distinction which goes with ancient blood and high lineage.” Vienna “is my favorite city,” Satan told Twain. “I was its patron saint in the early times. I still have much influence here, and am greatly respected.”

In less than two years, Twain had become intimately acquainted with Vienna's most virulent demon.

When Twain moved his closely watched spectacle from Austria in the fall of 1899, Adele had chosen her wedding date.

Vienna, too, was at a threshold. In November 1899, Freud published
The Interpretation of Dreams,
his anatomy of the unconscious impulses driving individuals and society.
It took six weeks for the first review to appear, a snide dismissal that epitomized the isolation suffered by emerging modernists who tried to express ideas that did not conform to hostile convention.

On the brink of the twentieth century, Vienna was, in the words of one new writer,
Karl Kraus, an “
isolation cell in which one was allowed to scream.” But this isolation of genius was ending. The salons of the emerging “second society,” run by the small coterie of Jewish intellectual women, would open a forum for new ideas and art. In the process, the women who hosted them would gain influence they could never have aspired to in Vienna's hostile tradition-bound institutions.

Adele was one step closer to joining this world on December 19, 1899, when she emerged a bride from Vienna's grand Stadt Temple and stepped carefully onto the cobblestones of Seitenstettengasse.

Klimt is often described as a recluse. But at the turn of the century, he was a doting intimate to the host of loyal patrons who supported his search for a new language of art. Klimt's most important private patron that year was
Serena Lederer, the wife of spirits manufacturer
August Lederer, who belonged to the same circle of prominent Jewish businessmen as Moritz Bauer and Ferdinand Bloch.

Serena, high-spirited, outgoing, and extroverted, had appeared in Klimt's Burgtheater painting. Klimt had painted an 1899 portrait of Serena in a flowing white dress, and stayed on to give Serena drawing lessons.

Klimt was a regular at the Lederer dinner table, and his complaints about “
petit-bourgeois” narrow-mindedness were familiar to the family. “
If only people would analyze less and create more,” Klimt lamented.

Klimt was nervous, and rightly so. He was working on the most important, high-profile commission in the empire. He was to create a series of immense ceiling murals for the
University of Vienna, to immortalize the quest for knowledge of
one of the oldest universities in the Germanic world, which had opened its doors in 1365. Klimt was to illustrate the themes of Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence.

Klimt was now working on
Philosophy,
using the passages of life, from conception to death, as a visual representation of the drama of human existence. He was apprehensive about the reaction. The various officials were probably expecting a neoclassical tableau of great philosophers in Greek togas. They might not appreciate Klimt's attempts to visually grapple with mortality and a search for meaning in which God played no evident role.

At Klimt's studio, Serena's daughter Elisabeth, age six, found his work-in-progress difficult to comprehend. Klimt told her gently that he “
liked it this way, and I could only understand this when I was older.”

Klimt unveiled
Philosophy
at the
Secession in March 1900, revealing a world in which men and women floated in frightening uncertainty. The figures were naked, realistic, with wrinkles and bony hips. A vulnerable old man with shriveled genitals bowed his head in despair. A woman clutched her breasts in anguish. A man and a woman embraced, as an almighty being in the guise of a woman surveyed a dystopian abyss of existential angst.

The painting was subtitled
Victory of Light over Darkness.
But this shapeless void didn't reassure anyone that darkness had been vanquished.

This vision of an uncertain future could not have been comforting to an imperial family shaken to the core by
the suicide, in January 1899, of Crown Prince Rudolf, after apparently shooting his nubile mistress, Marie Vetsera, a month after she turned seventeen. The shocking deaths at the royal estate at Mayerling robbed the emperor of his son—and the empire of an heir to the throne.

To the correspondent of a Munich art magazine, Klimt's
Philosophy
showed mankind as “
a dull, spineless mass” that “struggles in its battle for happiness and knowledge and remains a mere pawn in the hands of nature.”

Once they recovered from their shock, nearly a hundred university professors protested. The university rector,
Wilhelm Neumann, said Klimt's mural was too vague. Philosophy should not be “
portrayed in a puzzling painting; as a puzzling sphinx,” he said, “at a time when it sought to find its source in the exact sciences.” The Vienna writer
Karl Kraus found the mural solipsistic: “
Who is really interested in how Herr Klimt imagines Philosophy?” he asked.

“
He must allegorize her as the philosophical minds of the times see her,” jibed Kraus, who was gaining increasing influence with his critical essays in his magazine,
Die Fackel
—The Torch—and was a member, with
Felix Salten and the Vienna playwright
Arthur Schnitzler, of an intellectual salon at Café Griensteidl that had earned the writers' hangout its nickname, Café Megalomania.

Philosophy
“
not only provoked a fierce debate in the world of journalists but among all circles that thought of themselves as intellectual,” Serena's daughter Elisabeth recalled. “They gave their pros and cons, but spent most of their time with ugly irrational yelling. The government was on the same side as the howling mob.” Klimt was angry. “
You must not become a creature like them, like those who creep and slither around,” he told Elisabeth.

Vienna officials hoped Klimt would turn in more acceptable illustrations of the second and third murals,
Medicine
and
Jurisprudence.
But “
while the war of the pens was raging,” Elisabeth recalled, Klimt told his friends he would paint the next two murals exactly as he had planned. “Klimt didn't think of delivering them. Klimt said he would keep his paintings ‘even if I have to throw out this mob with my own hands,' ” Elisabeth wrote. “Whoever saw the gestures he made, and the glowing of his eyes, which usually were so gentle, had to find him fearsome. Since, by the way,
there was probably no professional boxer at that time who would have wished to take him on.”

Serena and
August Lederer offered to buy the ridiculed murals, if necessary, to free Klimt from the financial obligation of the commission. The close relationship between Klimt and the house of Lederer did not go unnoticed. “
Herr Klimt initiates Frau Lederer into the art of
Secessionist painting,” wrote
Karl Kraus in November 1900. “Just as every aristocrat used to keep his Jew-in-residence, so today every stockbroker has a Secessionist in the house.

“
This rapport between modern art and idle-rich Jewry, this rise in the art of design, capable of transforming ghettos into mansions, occasions the fondest of hopes,” wrote Kraus, who had renounced Judaism in 1899 and now treated his readers to anti-Semitic barbs, like a derisive new expression for the work of Klimt and the Secession: “
le goût juif
”—Jewish taste.

Gustav Klimt, tired of painting state commissions, shocked his state patrons with art some found pornographic. (
Illustration Credit 9.1
)