1913 (38 page)

On 9 September, the day Gerhart Fischer dies and disaster is plainly written in the stars, 31-year-old Virginia Woolf is examined by two neurologists after complaining about an ‘inability to feel’. Since August, when she delivered her first novel,
The Voyage Out
, she has lost weight so quickly and become so anorexic that she is barely able to travel and has to be tended to by two nurses. The examination by the neurologists is so humiliating, her feeling of pointlessness so great, that only a few hours after the examination, when the nurses are taking a break, she tries to take her own life with an overdose of the sleeping tablet Veronal. Her husband, Leonard, saves her at the last minute, and she is revived in hospital.

He then sends her to Dalingridge Place, the country seat of her stepbrother George Duckworth. This is ridiculous, in that Virginia Woolf’s collapse dates back to her childhood abuse by that same stepbrother. But her husband, Leonard, seems to be blind to this difficulty, and that same September he writes of his brother-in-law that ‘as a young man he was, it is said, an Adonis’. Virginia Woolf can defend herself only by returning to health. She starts eating again and is able to leave Dalingridge Place in the autumn.

The Fourth Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association is held on 7 and 8 September, in the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich. It is the meeting that Freud and Jung have feared since their split in the spring. The atmosphere is tense and oppressive; both men are on their guard. There are 87 participants on the first day, only 52 on the next. When Jung stands for re-election as chairman, 22 members abstain. Freud has allowed himself to be persuaded to deliver a short lecture ‘On the Problem of Choice of Neurosis’. The next day Jung speaks on ‘The Question of Psychological Types’. The atmosphere, Freud says, is ‘weary and unedifying’. The main event is not the lectures but the seating arrangement: the ‘Freud table’ on one side, the ‘Jung table’ on the other, with icy silence in between. Freud, the father, and Jung, the parricide, barely look at one another – after 8 September 1913 they will never see one another again. Freud is delighted when Lou Andreas-Salomé suddenly appears in the conference room, bringing Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet he knows only from his verses. Freud flees into their arms to escape the atmosphere at the congress, and as soon as the last paper is finished they move on as a threesome, talking non-stop, even joking, and go and eat together. Lou hovers over things, Rilke is beyond Good and Evil. Freud, the patriarch, the great excavator of the unconscious and the repressed, hangs on Rilke’s every word. When Freud’s daughter Anna hears of this, she writes a euphoric letter to her father: ‘Did you really meet the poet Rilke in Munich? Why? And what’s he like?’

Yes indeed, what’s he like? The next day, after these conversations about the unconscious in which Rilke and Freud were immersed on their walk, Rilke goes with Lou, the woman who took his virginity when he was well on in years, and who has now become his mother-substitute, first to see his mother, Phia, who lives in Munich, and then on to Clara and Ruth, his forgotten wife and his forgotten daughter, helping them move into their new flat at 50 Trogerstrasse. Then Lou Andreas-Salomé and Rilke board the train into the mountains, and she analyses his dreams. They talk with great seriousness about the symbolic differences between a phallus and an obelisk.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal lies in his hotel bed in the Vier Jahreszeiten in Munich and dreams that his house has become a French Revolutionary prison – ‘and I am aware that this is the last day of my life: I have been condemned to death.’ All around him are clerks busy writing out death sentences. Then his wife appears: ‘but she is a creature whose face I have never seen before, but as familiar to me in the dream as the woman with whom one has lived for ten years. In a flash we both say to each other that we must not embrace.’ His wife leaves him with the clerks imposing the death sentence. ‘I feel I can’t watch after her, turn towards the window through which the harsh sunlight is falling.’ Hofmannsthal wakes up. He dresses woozily and tries to recover from the dream by going for a walk in the Englischer Garten. But the images won’t leave his head; his body still feels as if it has been sentenced to death. It is still very early, and there are hardly any strollers in the park. A warm autumn sun shines over the trees. He is crossing the little bridge over the Eisbach when – and this is no longer a dream – a man comes towards him, looking like the great interpreter of dreams Sigmund Freud. Freud greets his Viennese acquaintance cordially, asks how he is and whether he has slept well, and says he looks a little upset. ‘All fine, dear Doctor,’ says Hofmannsthal. And then when Rainer Maria Rilke comes around the corner, having agreed to go for a stroll with Freud, Hofmannsthal finally feels as if he is still dreaming. But it is, like everything in this particular year, true.

In an article about first-aid instruction the
Neue Freie Presse
in Vienna writes on 6 September 1913, as if it were the most natural thing in the world: ‘Just as the fate of the injured man on the battlefield depends on the quality of the first bandage, so first aid is of the greatest importance to the prognosis in everyday accidents.’

The symptoms of ‘neurasthenia’, the burn-out syndrome of 1913, are included in the eleven-volume work
Special Pathology and Therapy of Internal Illnesses
. Jung is supposed to write about ‘neurasthenia’ but refuses, because ‘I don’t understand enough about it and also don’t believe in it.’

Franz Kafka leaves Prague at the beginning of September to be cured of his despair and ‘neurasthenia’. His destination is Hartung’s sanatorium in Riva, on Lake Garda. He wanted to travel with Felice, but her father still hasn’t replied to his letter asking for her hand, so he sets off now because he has to go to Vienna for his job, to attend the Second International Congress for the Emergency Services and Accident Prevention, then by train to Trieste, Austria-Hungary’s only port on the Mediterranean, which is enjoying an unparalleled boom. Being a port, its streets and coffee houses are filled with a unique mixture of nationalities, and it is the city where James Joyce lives quietly as an English teacher, spending day after day writing the preparatory studies for his
Ulysses
. So on 14 September, Franz Kafka and James Joyce are in Trieste. Robert Musil is here at this time too, travelling from Rome to Vienna. We can imagine them drinking coffee in the harbour in the late afternoon, before moving on.

Kafka travels on to Venice by ship, and there, at the Hotel Sandwirth, he writes his last letter to Felice Bauer for the time being, after more than two hundred letters and cards since the start of the year. He has recognised that he cannot produce great art if he yields to love and life. In his diary he notes: ‘Coitus as a punishment for the joy of being together. To live as ascetically as possible, more ascetically than a bachelor, that’s the only option for me.’ And then, a few days later: ‘I am going to close myself off to everyone else to the point of oblivion. To make enemies of everyone, talk to no one.’ So he writes on 15 September on hotel writing paper, with a view of the Grand
Canal, oblivious and ‘boundlessly unhappy’, to Felice: ‘What am I to do, Felice? We must say farewell.’

Kafka travels on, suddenly free of the burden of having to be a husband, and when he arrives in Riva, on 22 September, he feels empty and distraught, but also relieved. The brothers Erhard and Christl von Hartungen, who have just tried to cure Freud at their branch in the mountains, now take their next great patient under their wing. There is an introductory therapeutic discussion; the doctors recommend diet, a lot of fresh air and a lot of rowing. In the first week – the sun is shining, and the weather is warm – Kafka is transferred to one of the ‘air huts’ on the beach, to be completely surrounded by oxygen. The therapy seems to be working, and on 28 September he takes a little trip to Malcesine, from where he writes a witty letter to his sister Ottla in Praque: ‘Today I was in Malcesine, where Goethe had the adventure that you would know about if you’d read the
Italian Journey
, which you should do soon.’

On the same day – it’s cooler now, and the first snows are appearing up on the mountain peaks – Kafka moves from his air-hut to the main building of the sanatorium. At table, he writes to his friend Max Brod, ‘I am seated between an old general and a little Italian-looking Swiss woman.’ The little Swiss woman brings Kafka back to life. They devise knocking games between their rooms, play catch in the park. They row out onto the lake together, and drift in their rowing boat: ‘The sweetness of grief and love. Being smiled at by her in the boat. It was the loveliest thing. Only ever the demand to die and just surviving, that alone is love.’ They are both aware that they have only ten days for their love. Then they travel back: Kafka to Prague, the Swiss woman to Genoa, where her family lives. For the first time Kafka hasn’t been thinking about Felice every hour of the day. He has plunged for ten days into a childlike passion that will lead nowhere.