Where Have You Been? (34 page)

It may not have happened quite like this, or in such short order, but one gets a sense of the burgeoning powers within him, the vehement changeable enthusiasms, the bewildering array of possible goals for his endeavors. After his
Abitur
in 1908, Schwitters spent the best part of ten years studying commercial art (this is such a characteristic and unsolved division in him: for a couple of spells in the 1920s he worked as a typographer and an advertiser; somehow he had to alternate work and play) and academic painting, which he did in another provincial capital, Dresden. (The Expressionist painters of the
Brücke
—Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, and the others, little older than Schwitters—were based in Dresden at the time, but our apparently wholly conventional young painter remained unaware of them.) In 1917, after a short, inept spell in the army, he was doing technical drawing in an iron foundry; they were glad to have him and would have kept him; he quit. As late as 1919 and married with a son, he was studying again—architecture, this time—and back in Hanover. But by then he had had a first show of his abstracts in Berlin, and nothing would be quite the same again.

It's always hard to know how and why things happen in the lives of productive people; our culinary or brewing models—combination of ingredients, temperature, time—don't quite work. Why Schwitters at the ripe old age of thirty, following an exhaustive and old-fashioned and rather blinkered grounding, having recently started a family, and in a period of uncertainty and upheaval affecting not just Germany but much of Europe, would turn his hand to making his charmed little abstract collages of scraps of paper and found materials, without the benefit of any of the usual factors-cum-clichés—extreme youth, stewing in a metropolitan hotbed of ideas, examples of others, decisive personal experience—is indeed a puzzle. We are led back to the unsatisfactory but irreducible quality of “primary creativity” and the evidence for it: those dozens of poems, articles, manifestos, sculptures, drawings, and paintings made by Schwitters in the crucial years from 1918 to 1921, and the invention of Merz as “an absolutely individual hat, that fits only one person,” namely, Kurt Merz Schwitters. The only other sort of “answer” I can offer is not really an answer at all but the name of a fictional character: what of Don Quixote de la Mancha, a man in the best years, having lived hitherto in comfortable, provincial obscurity, an assiduous reader of no longer fashionable, at best somewhat specialist literature, and blessed with a character that was the familiar mixture of the romantic, the playful, and the soberly resolute, who one day took it upon himself to do battle with the whole world and became a knight-errant for the good name of Dulcinea del Toboso?

*   *   *

Schwitters—like Quixote—is a maximalist, a Nietzschean “re-valuer of all values,” who has come down to us as a minimalist (we remember scuffles with windmills). As I understand it, Merz was born out of the feeling that the world as of 1918 was trash but that it might be possible to redeem it by taking those things it said were trash and making art out of them; and meanwhile and in any case by overturning all its set opinions and priorities on all subjects. The being a generalist—disregarding the separations and jurisdictions of specialists—was part of the point. This Schwitters did, with all his divers energies: writing, painting, drawing, gluing, building. He designed a Merz stage and wished he knew music well enough to make more of a fist of composing. He left installations wherever he went: the Merzbau in Hanover (1923–1937) was followed by another in Norway (1937–1940) and a third in the English Lake District (begun in 1947 and now the only one to have survived in some sort). He wrote a short novel. He wrote a play. He wrote poems that are all over the map. He wrote some dozens of “grotesques” and some rather conventional, though “treated” fairy tales. The German edition of his extraordinarily varied collected writings comes to five stately volumes. Merz was one man's salvationist movement, nothing less. In that way it differed from its slightly older stablemate, Dada (
né
1916, at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich). According to Merz, everything could or should be art; Dada, though coming out of much the same disgust with the war and the world and the world war, opined that art was finished, and, with more or less of a sneer, offered something else: a bicycle wheel, a urinal. Schwitters's friend Raoul Hausmann described it nicely as “satirical surrealism.” Schwitters accordingly failed his audition for Club Dada, the Bolshevist Berlin branch of the chaotic movement. There is a story about Schwitters going to pay a call on George Grosz, at the time (1920) a leading member of Club Dada. He rang the bell and said: “I'd like to speak to George Grosz. My name is Schwitters.” “I'm not Grosz,” said Grosz, and slammed the door in his face. A little later, there was a second ring. This time, before Grosz could get a word out, Schwitters quickly said: “And I'm not Schwitters either,” and stalked off. The leader of Club Dada, Richard Huelsenbeck, was an enemy for life. He never got over the contradictions of class that Schwitters represented: to him Schwitters was a Romantic, a one-off, a dilettante, the “Kaspar David Friedrich of the Dadaist revolution”—“Kaspar” as in Kasper the clown, not Caspar the actual name of the nineteenth-century German master—“a genius in a morning coat” and “a gifted petit bourgeois” with casserole reek. It's not that there are no politics in Schwitters; viewed holistically, his is as political a project as can be imagined. But believing as he did—in accordance with the principles of Merz—that “Everything is true. And also its opposite” of course got him
nul points
for political consciousness. That particular “club” was bound to blackball him. Basically, Schwitters's starting position is as a double reject; a
refusé
by the
salon des refusés
that was Dada; an individualist who persisted in making and espousing—and living and breathing—art once it was well out of fashion in those progressive circles. A Quixote.

Because, make no bones about it, Schwitters failed. How could he do anything else? It's indicative that in two pages of testimonial quotes assembled at the end of a monograph on him, there are none at all from 1921 to 1957—practically from his first eruption on the scene to ten years after his death! The man had no prime, no maturity, no obituaries, or nothing worth noting! That's not how success looks. He had no movement, no followers, no patrons with deep pockets, no tame critics, and Hanover as a base. All that he did relied much too much on his own energy and charisma to launch it and guide it. It needed the breath from his lungs, his wit and contrariness, his dexterity, his advocacy, his combativeness. Originality gave it its moment. Personality held it together. But he couldn't always be there to paste something blue into a corner, or to raise his force-ten voice and ululate. His projects, like a numerous and unruly family, tugged at his sleeves, clamoring for attention. His work fell into physical disrepair as its range and ambition became implausible. In the end, nothing more honorious than guinea pigs made free with his Merz installations. (But, Schwitters might have countered, what better? One of his projects was to turn an island off the coast of Norway into a museum, to be visited only by animals.)

His work, inevitably, was divided up and became the province of teams of separate specialists: the graphic designers, the installation artists, the sound (or “vocovisual”) poets, the admen and Märchen men, the abstracters and collagistes and Weimaraners and Dadanauts, each made uncomfortable by the others, and sometimes all of them dismayed by something else, like the persistence in Schwitters of conventional landscape painting (in Norway, and then in the Lake District) and portraiture, which seems to scare everyone. Included in a compendious and generously all-pardoning catalog of Schwitters activities, the Dada historian Hans Richter has “painting really terrible portraits, which he loved, and which he then cut up and used piecemeal in abstract collages,” as if he were talking about some retrograde but footling vice like taking snuff. Richter, with his happy abstract ending, is a victim of his own sentimental progressivism. He disregards the crucial second sentence in the Schwitters left-right combination, the “And its opposite.” In point of fact, these good doctors and dentists—their likenesses left and delivered whole—were not painted simply in return for treatment or money; are not an unconsolably ironic cri de coeur at the awful humiliations of exile (England, of course, as one would expect, slightly worse than Norway); and are not some even deeper, more obscure form of mockery either, some triple persiflage. They are a perfectly ordinary and, as we would say, “owned” part of Schwitters's oeuvre. There is always something more simple-hearted—at times, almost simple-minded—in Schwitters than his radical admirers seem to want to think. He really isn't as “withering” or as “hilarious” as they say. Either it was his training or his background, but he had an eye for quality, workmanship, value for money, given as much as received. He wanted his bourgeois contented as much as
épater
'd. I wonder if Schwitters ever had the sort of nutritious pride, aggression, and
contemptum mundi
required for the avant-garde. Even in the heady days of 1920, in a piece called “Merz,” he writes rather modestly and demurely: “I play off sense against nonsense. I prefer nonsense, but that is a purely personal matter. I pity nonsense, because until now it has been so neglected in the making of art, and that's why I love it,” but in 1940, or 1947, when push came to shove, nonsense, though still dearly loved, must have seemed more like an occasional luxury. Even his wildly overrated hit poem of 1919, “An Anna Blume” is sustained more by naïve feeling and folksy Berlinisms than by anything stranger or more corrosive. It's not quite “Tea for Two” but it's not all that different either:

Oh You, beloved of my 27 senses, to you I love!

You, yours, you to you, I to you, you to me,
____
we?

That (incidentally) is beside the point!

(It suffers dreadfully in translation, but the translation at least is Schwitters's own.)

So what's left? Only the windmills, the tenderest, most perishable, most idiosyncratic elements of Schwitters's production, a butterfly diaspora scattered over the world's great modern collections, one here, one there, some of them no bigger than the palm of your hand (and smaller than most reproductions), others the size of a sheet of newspaper and about as robust, rarely looked for in advance by the visitor but instantly and unmistakably recognizable even across a room, an autobiographical fleck, an abstract stain, a validation as pure and concentrated and resolutely singing on a wall as a stamp on the corner of a postcard: the collages. Nothing else gets the sweetness, the melancholy, the joie de vivre, the wit, and the upsettingness of the man as they do. How mechanical and relentless the verbal collage work is by comparison, the blunt intrusions stuffed inside parentheses, no luminosity, no preciosity (not even in the word “bunion”), no gravity, no edge, no swing, how it smugly strains after oddness: “Translation of the artist's worldview. (Bunion treatments in a society at peace, war merchandise.) Total experience greens the brain, but what matters is the shaping.” Whatever you want to call it—the depth, the care, the touch, the talent, the interest, the control, the form—the writing is mostly defective in it. The collages encompass the “everything and its opposite” of Schwitters's aspirations like nothing else, like a dream: they are physical and metaphysical (because of course a cutoff word like “Versaille-” or “Zeitu-” [from
Zeitung
, a newspaper] is nothing if not metaphysical); they are personal communications and exercises in abstract rhythm and construction; they are material and immaterial, scooping up ingredients from maize cigarette papers and feathers and gauze to wood and lumps of old iron and artificial bones; topical and effortlessly timeless (“Immortality isn't everyone's cup of tea,” Schwitters observed); not long ago they were offered for sale for a few marks or given away to friends, now they are beyond price; their component parts—dance cards, cigarette packets, bar bills, all the fragrant and blatant detritus and
déchets
of commerce—are subsumed but never extinguished in the design of the whole; they can be read as color, as line, as words and letters, as forensic evidence, as coded message; they are, according to the critic John Elderfield, tiny epistles in diary form, made of the materials of the day, which gives them a sort of double reality and double expressiveness. When the painter Edvard Munch—who liked to hang on to things, and look after them badly or not at all—said of his pictures that they would be improved once they had got a few holes in them, he should have been thinking of Schwitters, who seems to use only old and worn ingredients in his collages, things that have
already lived
. (It's one of the attributes that make them so moving, just as badly heard or badly reproduced music is more moving than expensive acoustic perfection can ever be: Keep it with Mono, said the 1970s British label, Stiff Records, at least on one side.) The colors come with provenances: one can imagine a favorite lost toy, a beloved shirt, the color of the rubber jujube inside a glass marble as unique as an iris, theater tickets and billets-doux furnishing them forth. Schwitters's colors are the souls of colors, because they are taken from the afterlife. They are ennobled by successive layers of use and disuse: those ochers and bisters, the tart cerise, the bluey-greeny-gray-ey contamination of mold or tarnish or verdigris. Some are dry as straw (like
Miss Blanche
, of 1923), others look lushly underwater (like
Merz Picture Thirty-one
). It would take a color awareness as acute and unconventional as Rilke's, schooled on Cézanne—that “old-fashioned blue letter-paper” in the poem “Blue Hydrangeas” with its hints of “yellow, and violet, and gray”—to match the subtlety and exquisiteness of Schwitters's palette. The lost keeps the found in equipoise, because these collages do not approach you with the triumph and self-congratulation of redemption. They never say: This is what you were looking for, I have it right here. What is in them is still lost, as rambling and fortuitous as the contents of a long-unconsulted desk drawer or pocket. Their mystery is absolutely intact. It has merely found its own provisional arrangement: swirls of squares, the heart and then another heart in
Rossfett
of 1920, determined clockwork cogs in an airy new machine. Luck, glamour, adventure, travel are regular elements, as witness playing cards, skittles, numbers, date-stamped tickets, advertisements for beauty products, flowers, and fabrics. These by-products from a man who tried his hand at much else, and gained relatively little attention for any of it, who lived with his parents and then in the house he inherited from them in a no-account place in Germany, and then in exile, are among the few wonderful and imperishable things of the twentieth century.