Correction: A Novel (29 page)

“I certainly don’t” underlined. They’d found his shoes at the rim, his jacket too, six months after they noticed that he was gone, his young wife hadn’t missed him until then, from the fact that his shoes and his jacket were found on the rim of that cleft in the rock they deduced that he had thrown himself down the cleft, but there’s no real proof, these clues, yes, but no proof at all, because nobody can get down into the bottom of that cleft. Many people had supposed he’d gone abroad, but then some mountain climbers found his shoes and his jacket at the rim of the cleft, so he must have, I suppose, taken off his shoes and his jacket before he threw himself down into that rock cleft, he
didn’t want to throw himself into that rock cleft in his jacket
and shoes,
so Roithamer. Another of those
lonely men,
underlined, acquiring a wife at the unhappiest time of his life, a wife who brought him to the point where he threw himself down that rock cleft. The inclination to suicide as a character trait as in the character of my cousin who finally threw himself into that rock cleft, a specific kind of suicide, first climbing up those high mountains, just to throw himself into the depths of that rock cleft, so Roithamer. Because he spoke of it so often and with such passion and such scientific precision at the same time, they no longer believed that he would actually commit suicide, for anyone who talks about it as much as our cousin did, as incidentally the others did too, his father for instance always talked about suicide and kept bringing it up and every time in a better organized frame of mind, such a man, they think, won’t really commit suicide, on the contrary, such a man keeps clarifying the idea of suicide in his head and as a result he doesn’t commit suicide,
having this clarification in his head and
being constantly capable of analyzing this clarification, he simply can’t
commit suicide anymore,
because he has this constant clear understanding of suicide, so Roithamer, to act out in reality something he’d always been talking about and which must basically always be repellent to him, he simply couldn’t do it, every possible argument, every possible reason, every possible negation could lead to anything, usually to a mortal disease, but not to suicide, so Roithamer, because ultimately everything inside such a head is against self-destruction, and ‘ yet it’s remarkable how regularly such a man will talk about suicide and about self-destruction, the subject gave him no peace, it tended to warp his reason, which he then proceeded to restore again, and yet one couldn’t help being struck, so Roithamer, by the way our cousin kept talking almost incessantly about suicide after his marriage to the doctor’s daughter from Kirchdorf, but nobody took him seriously, so Roithamer, nobody had the slightest apprehension that he would actually commit suicide, because he was constantly talking about suicide as if he were talking about a subject he entirely understood, though it did remain fascinating to him, just as though he were talking about some work of art, with the most scientific detachment. And anyone who talks so scientifically about suicide, as though it were a work of art, talks about it with a clear precision that humbles the rest of us, why, such a person simply doesn’t commit suicide. Not until he nevertheless did commit suicide, of course, throwing himself down that fissure in the rock, so Roithamer. But to return to my subject, I was speaking of human unions, of living together, of marriage, so Roithamer. People are forever denying the proven fact, so Roithamer, the simple fact of nature’s workings, that the female sex, because it is female, nobody dares to say it in so many words nowadays, that the female sex is anti-intellectual and emotionally predisposed to champion emotion, that it is in fact against intellect in all its possible aspects just as it is emotionally predisposed to emotion in all its possible aspects, so Roithamer. The current fashion is one thing, nature is something else. But then, our times are given over to nonsense and to warping all ideas and all the facts and turning them topsy turvy. I personally know from experience, so Roithamer, that the female human being, “female human being” underlined, that the female sex is incapable of going beyond the first impulse in the direction of the life of the mind. In our case, that of my mother and me, she was only interested in winning me over even if in the process she had to destroy everything I am, my personality, my character, my mind, she had to try it, again and again, in her perverse determination that it must be possible eventually to turn so stubborn a mind as mine, a mind so crazily intent on its own inventions, from its single-track obsession with itself,
my
self that is, and push it into a crude, Eferding-type domesticity, so Roithamer. She had to cut me down to her own Eferding size, her own existential minimum, and with me she meant to achieve this fully, not only partially as with my father, whom she certainly managed to alienate from himself to at least a high degree, she did alienate my father from himself to
a very high, to an ominous degree,
as she knew, to her lifelong (Eferdingian) satisfaction. To be fascinated by a man who is different from his observer, viewer, antagonist, yet pitting everything against this man and against the fascination he exerts, to be bent on taking from him everything that makes him fascinating. That woman from Eferding basically hated everything I did or didn’t do and everything my sister did or didn’t do and everything my father did and didn’t do, the victims of her hatred were primarily all those with whom I had intellectual intercourse, beginning with all natural scientists, writers, even poets, philosophers named in my books, in whom she thought she recognized me, and she thought she recognized me in all the books I had in my room, in the most widely differing books belonging to me and used by me all the time. In each one of these books she was
bound
to recognize me and she hated these books as she hated me, but she didn’t dare to destroy the books, to do away’ with them, she didn’t have the nerve to do that even though her thoughts and everything in her tended in that direction. If I merely think of all the things we came to quarrel about on our socalled walks, with such regularity and occasional obsessiveness, we’d taken our nature walks only to quarrel, always, we walked through the woods, and quarreled, over the meadows, and quarreled, through our gardens, and quarreled, even on the grassy riverbanks, always outwardly exemplars of the greatest serenity at the outset, we quarreled and transformed those grasslands in no time into a noisy, suddenly malignant landscape, where our attacking voices, shouting nothing but insults, could be heard, so Roithamer, all up and down the river. And it always began with trivia, but all these trivia had soon triggered off enormities against our fellow beings, against everything. Even in company the Eferding woman was incapable of controlling herself, of restraining herself, and so our father never took her out socially, after his first efforts along those lines had failed lamentably. Because the good name of
all
Altensam was always at stake, he had never taken his wife, our mother, the Eferding woman, to any social gathering, though she craved going out socially, but because of my father’s adamant refusal to take her out she soon found it possible to go out only to
her
own kind of social gathering, the so-called Eferding social gatherings and no longer to the Altensam social gatherings, but her own kind didn’t interest her, what she wanted was to get into Altensam society, which my father, however, denied her; I barred her way, so my father often said, so Roithamer, otherwise she’d have robbed Altensam, which had already lost most of its good name in her time, the Eferding woman’s time that is, she’d have robbed Altensam of all that was left of its good name, so my father, so Roithamer, “all that was left” underlined, but the consequence of this, that my father, after those first failed tries, simply no longer took her along into society but left her sitting at home, was that our mother, the Eferding woman, suddenly hated Altensam more than anything in the world, “more than anything in the world” underlined. My father had fallen prey to the error that he could turn a person like the Eferding woman, an Eferding person that is, into an Altensam person, one kind of person can never be made into another kind of person, so Roithamer, “never” underlined, most especially not an Eferding person into an Altensam person, it was probably because of this error that he took her home and married her, because he understood too late that you can never make an Altensam person out of an Eferding person, never change one species into another. Now and then she tried reading a book, it was all a hypocritical pretense, “hypocritical pretense” underlined, a book of which I had a very high opinion, a book about which I might have said something in her presence showing my great esteem for it, but these efforts of hers were from the first a transparent pretense, of course the Eferding woman’s
position
in Altensam was always untenable, she should never have come to Altensam in the first place, for if such a person, who isn’t an Altensamer, goes to Altensam, so Roithamer, that person will be destroyed, everything will be done to destroy such a person, to remove the person from Altensam because this is a person who doesn’t belong in Altensam, because this person is different by nature, “different by nature”

underlined, the Eferding woman should never have committed the crime of coming to Altensam, our father should never have brought her to Altensam,
he should have explained to her,
but he brought her up to Altensam out of embarrassment and weakmindedness and exposed her from the first to a situation she simply wasn’t equal to handling, even if she never realized it, she, the Eferding woman, simply never had been equal to Altensam, though most of the time she might have thought she was equal to Altensam, even that she dominated Altensam, most of the time, she was not equal to Altensam, though she actually came to dominate Altensam, so Roithamer, as I know, actually did dominate Altensam, but she was never really equal to it, so Roithamer, our father had to pay dearly for the crime of marrying an Eferding woman, so Roithamer, the Eferding woman had to pay for her crime of coming up to Altensam with lifelong unhappiness, for it was by the fact of coming to Altensam that the Eferding woman became an unhappy person, prior to that, in Eferding, in her father’s house, as the daughter of a butcher and an innkeeper, she’d never been unhappy, or she wasn’t likely, during those years, to be considered an unhappy person, not until she came to Altensam. The photographs I’ve seen that show her as the butcher’s daughter, innkeeper’s daughter from Eferding, don’t show an unhappy person, they show a young, though already old person, but’ not an unhappy person, the pictures of her in Altensam that I’ve seen, and my own experience are of an unhappy and always old person who is constantly ailing.

We children naturally showed no consideration whatever toward our mother,

“no” and “whatever” underlined, we, my sister and I, so Roithamer, we Altensamers in contrast to the Eferdingers, our brothers. In the early days when I returned from England, for instance, the Eferding woman had often said she’d like to walk down to Stocket with me, because she knew that I always liked walking down to Stocket, but once she’d walked down to Stocket with me, it was soon obvious to me that she’d really had no desire whatever to walk down to Stocket with me, because basically she hated this walking-down-to-Stocket with me and hated Stocket and hated the people down in Stocket. Or else she affected to be interested in a scientific article because she knew that I was interested in this article, but it was all pretense,

“pretense” underlined, so Roithamer. On such occasions I always countered with some malevolent remark that exposed her utter impudence, and our mutual hatred was reestablished. But it’s not true that we didn’t
want
to be in agreement. But if I happened to say, I hold so-and-so in contempt, for such-and-such a reason, she always instantly agreed with my verdict and so with my remark, without thinking, and this was bound to repel me. If I happened to show a liking for a certain play and praised this play, she felt obliged to praise the play though she hadn’t seen it, not for my sake, as I know, but for her own sake, even though she didn’t know the play, she nevertheless thought she could praise it too, and I was repelled by that. For instance I’d always said, time and time again, that I loved Goethe’s novel,
Elective Affinities,
but I knew that she hated
Elective Affinities,
basically there was no book in the world she hated as intensely as she hated
Elective
Affinities,
yet she claimed that she shared my love for
Elective Affinities,
this was simply bound to repel me, so Roithamer. Then she claimed to have read Novalis, though she had never read as much as a line by Novalis, but every time it wasn’t really an effort to come closer to me, to try and bring about a real accord between her and me, between us, but rather an attempt to set a trap, but I never went into this trap, at least not in later years, for at first, in my childhood and youth, I did indeed and very often walk into her traps, the Eferding woman had always set traps in Altensam and all of us had always walked into her traps.
Elective Affinities
as a trap set for me, so Roithamer.

She had often given me to understand that she was intellectually engaged upon the same subject at the same time I was, but I’d soon found out that it was nothing more than one of her pretenses, that again she’d set me a trap that I was supposed to walk into. All these notes to be utilized one day for a description of my mother, in comparison with my sister and in contrast with my father and brothers, so Roithamer. We must always utilize, work up, everything. When we’re occupied with a so-called intellectual subject, and this subject is so great that we’re totally fascinated by it, we must be absolutely alone in our room (Hoeller’s garret) or wherever we happen to be, even if we’re not (in reality) in Hoeller’s garret, nevertheless in Hoeller’s garret, the place where we happen to find ourselves occupied with such a subject must become Hoeller’s garret for us, we mustn’t tolerate the slightest distraction, even if it came from the person closest to us (sister), we must forestall everything that interferes or could interfere with our concentration on that subject, and therefore could destroy, annihilate, extinguish this subject, which fascinates us, for such a subject is too easily destroyed and annihilated and extinguished and it always is the only subject for us, “only”