Frost: A Novel (16 page)

I opened the door of his room, and saw him engrossed in his newspapers. That is, I saw—because he was sitting behind his bed, in front of the picture whose landscape I hadn’t yet discerned: a brown picture with large black stains that might be houses, but might equally be trees—I saw the newspaper, but behind the newspaper was him. Without putting the newspaper down when I stepped in—he didn’t look up at me—he
left me to sit down where I was. “You find me reading an interesting article about the imperial palace in Persia,” he said. “You know, those people must have quite unimaginable amounts of money. By the way, I’ve read a report on the meeting between the French and Russian foreign ministers. A very odd affair, that, indeed. Are you interested in politics at all?”—“Yes,” I said, a young person’s perfectly natural reply. “I’m really not interested at all in political wheelings and dealings, not anymore. But there was a time, not all that long ago either, when I was always hungry for news of political developments. Politics is the only interesting part of human history. It offers substance for anyone’s meditation. Evidently! Now, as you know, I’ve withdrawn, and follow things in a more casual manner. But the report on the foreign ministers’ conference, that’s something you have to read. Plus, if you feel like it, and I would urge you to, as you’re still young, and still have everything to learn, the article on the imperial palace in Persia. I take it you’re familiar with the history of the Peacock Throne?”—“Yes,” I said. “There are some passing references to it here.” Newspapers were the greatest wonders of the world, they knew everything, and only through them did the universe become animated for their readers, the ability to picture everything was only preserved by newspapers. “You still haven’t been to pick up the last few issues. Would you like to take them with you now?” It was all but dark in the room, and the air was barely breathable. I decided to go right away. “Of course, you have to know how to go about reading them,” said the painter. “You mustn’t just gobble them up, and you mustn’t take them too seriously either, but remember they are miraculous.” To this point, I still hadn’t glimpsed him. “The idea that you get information
about the whole world from a few little pieces of paper,” he said, “and are able to feel involved with everything, without taking a single step, even, if that’s your preference, from the vantage point of your bed! A miracle!” he said. “The dirt which people hold against newspapers is just the dirt of the people themselves, and not the dirt of the newspapers, you understand! The newspapers do well to hold up a mirror to people that shows them as they are—which is to say, revolting.” Sometimes, in effect everywhere and always, “the beauty and the greatness of human beings” could also be gleaned from the newspapers. “As I say, reading the newspapers is an art, the mastery of which is perhaps the most beautiful of all the arts, you know.” Then he folded the newspaper up on his knee, but I still couldn’t see him, because it was suddenly completely dark.

How he once spent four months painting a hand, he told me today. Then, at the end of four months, he fed the painting to the flames. “Not a bad picture. But the hand didn’t work. Later, I painted in a completely different style.” Unlike other painters who have to work in brightly lit studios, he could only work in darkened rooms. “It has to be dark, that’s the only way I can paint. In complete darkness. Not the least light should be allowed. But now I don’t paint anymore.” Before he began on a picture, he would tramp all over the city for days, from one café to the next, one neighborhood to the next, often riding for hours on streetcars and subways, on buses, from one terminus to the other, going on long marches in shirt and pants, mingling with workers and market stallholders, from time to time eating a meat sandwich
somewhere, then sitting in a café again, moving on, past long gray enclosures thrown around pieces of waste ground, through viaducts and playgrounds, to dairies and parks. “I often used to have a rest in a washroom somewhere,” he told me. “Changed my clothes. I changed three or four times a day, I always used to carry three changes of clothes in my briefcase with me, so that I could change whenever I felt like it.” He spent whole afternoons hanging around stations, watching people and trains. “Stations, and especially ugly old stations, have always been an experience for me, from childhood on.” Then he climbed into his elevator and rode up to his studio, straight into the darkness. While he was painting, only he could see his picture, because it was so dark. Before beginning, he disconnected the doorbell, locked up whatever could be locked up, stripped to his shirt. “The picture painted itself through my art,” he said. He didn’t go to bed for days, only loafed around on his two big sofas. Never knew if it was dark outside or not, lost all track of the date. Didn’t know if it was spring or summer or winter. When he thought his picture was done, he drew back the curtains, so abruptly that the light blinded him and he couldn’t see. “Only by and by could I see that it was no good,” he said. “That once again it was just a shot at something that had treated me like a dog, and it was nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing!” All these paintings he ended up shoving behind a wall where friends of his—“friends?”—would occasionally pull out one or other, to transport it to a dealer, or have it photographed or written up. “My paintings were always well reviewed, except by myself,” he said. “Basically there is no criticism, and the people who busy themselves with art are as uncritical as at any time in history. Maybe it was the lack of criticism
that irritated me, and that’s why I never became a good painter?”

“You know,” the painter said, “that art froth, that artist fornication, that general art-and-artist loathsomeness, I always found that repelling; those cloud formations of basest self-preservation topped with envy … Envy is what holds artists together, envy, pure envy, everyone envies everyone else for everything … I talked about it once before, I want to say: artists are the sons and daughters of loathsomeness, of paradisiac shamelessness, the original sons and daughters of lewdness; artists, painters, writers, and musicians are the compulsive masturbators on the planet, its disgusting cramps, its peripheral puffings and swellings, its pustular secretions … I want to say: artists are the great emetic agents of the time, they were always the great, the very greatest emetics … Artists, are they not a devastating army of absurdity, of scum? The infernality of unscrupulousness is something I always meet with in the thoughts of artists … But I don’t want any artists’ thoughts anymore, no more of those unnatural thoughts, I want nothing more to do with artists or with art, yes, not with art either, that greatest of all abortions … Do you understand: I want to get right away from that bad smell. Get away from that stink, I always say to myself, and secretly I always thought, get away from that corrosive, shredding, useless lie, get away from that shameless simony …” He said: “Artists are the identical twins of hypocrisy, the identical twins of low-mindedness, the identical twins of licensed exploitation, the greatest licensed exploitation of all time. Artists, as
they have shown themselves to me to be,” he said, “are all dull and grandiloquent, nothing but dull and grandiloquent, nothing …”

In the store I suddenly realized that school has started again. The whole of the gloomy store was full of schoolchildren, buying books and textbooks and pencils, and grown-ups were looking for pens and ink and drawing paper for their first-graders, and issuing threats and making jokes and laughing and throwing piles of loose change on the counter. The little girl in the black dress, the daughter of the proprietress, couldn’t manage to keep up with counting all the loose change, which the children had probably been hoarding for the past half a year or more. “And another pencil!”—“And another pen!”—“And another pad, just the same!”—“No, not a ruled one!”—“No, I want a red one, not a blue one!” I wanted to buy a pencil and barged forward, but in the end I didn’t care about waiting my turn. How the sweet and the repulsive odors of the children and the grown-ups mingled in this small, almost pitch-black space! Right at the back is the peephole through which you can see out to the snow. I took my pencil, and went outside. There I ran into the knacker, who was dragging a large cowhide behind him. The butcher had given it to him, he said, and he was taking it home and then he would get it tanned, and use it as a bedroom rug. “A cowhide makes a particularly warm bedroom rug,” he said. In the morning he had been down on the construction site; he had arranged a meeting with the engineer, who had given him a tour of the site. They had gone to the canteen together, and eaten a particularly good meal. “It’s much cheaper than the inn as well.” He wanted to ask me whether I thought the
painter was strange. “No,” I said, “he’s a man like any other.” I could be right. He thought the painter was crazy. Something was wrong with him, on this visit anyway. “It’s as though something happened to him in Vienna,” said the knacker. “Yes,” I said, “he’s unusual, but not particularly unusual.” He had seen the painter sitting in the church yesterday, “in the front pew,” shaking his head. The knacker hadn’t drawn attention to himself, so that he could go on observing the painter. The painter had taken a couple of quick paces to the altar, and raised his fist against the monstrance. “Then he walked out of the church, and went down to the pond.” The knacker said: “And the business in the ravine was crazy as well.” I let him move off with his cowhide, which left bloodstains on the snow, uneven bloodstains, and I went to the baker, who changed a hundredschilling note for me, with which I paid for the beer I’d drunk over the last few days. Outside, I ran into the painter, who was wearing his artist’s jacket. “I want to give myself a fright again today,” he said. “Give myself and the world a fright. When I wear this red jacket, I feel like the biggest twit of all time. And people believe I am the biggest twit of all time. Come along, let’s go and get some supper.”

In the evening, once the painter had gone upstairs, the knacker sang songs with the landlady. With an animal undertone, the knacker sang:

And he sang:

During supper, the painter had suddenly said: “Listen! Listen!” In the dreadful sausage-eating, beer-drinking din, he said: “Listen, the dogs.” I couldn’t hear them. But he wouldn’t give up, and without the others sitting at our table noticing, the engineer, the knacker, the landlady, the policeman were sitting there as well, the painter said: “Listen, the dogs! Listen to that barking.” And he got up and walked out, and went up to his room. When I followed him out into the entrance hall and stopped, I could hear through the half-iced-up open front door the long-drawn-out howling of dogs, and sometimes their barking. The endlessly drawn out howling, and the sound of barking biting into it. In front of me I heard the barking and howling, and behind me the laughing and vomiting and smacking of playing cards. Ahead of me the dogs, behind me the customers at the bar. I won’t be able to sleep tonight.

He, the assistant, obviously thinks I can perfectly well carry out an assignment like observing the painter Strauch without taking any harm from it. “Harm! How could it harm you,
observing a suffering human being?” he said. So he understands that his brother is suffering. Not the
extent
of his suffering, which he is unaware of. Because the suffering of the painter exceeds the capacity of the assistant to imagine it. How deep are the painter’s sufferings? Is it possible to determine how deep someone’s sufferings are? And when they are at their deepest? The assistant sent me here thinking I would be able to keep off influences that might be bad for me. Yes, and of course that’s something one has to be able to do, to keep off the so-called bad influence of the people one is in contact with, forced to be in contact with, so that it doesn’t affect one. Deal with it, however difficult it might suddenly turn out to be. Keep your eyes open, you won’t ignore it, you won’t ignore the danger, but will meet it with the correct defense. In the company of the painter, I am of course continually exposed to bad influences. But I can see them, and I can distinguish the point where the bad influences begin, and where the bad influences are not good, because it is also possible for bad influences to be good. Presumably, this encounter will only take its full effect on me much later. Not now. Just as childhood influences are only now unfolding; the experiences you have at eight or nine suddenly shape the thirty-year-old. In the same way as a dye might gradually spread through a body of deep water—water which, furthermore, has always been a tad murky anyway. Is that right? The painter gives me many bearings. He is by no means hermetically sealed away. There are a lot of access points to him, but even so one often finds him where one hasn’t been looking, hasn’t suspected he might be. “I have a rigid conscience,” he says. What does he mean by that? Or when he says: “Reality is incapable of empathy,” saying it to himself, it would appear, with no connection to what he said before or after, I
don’t see what he means. His best ideas come to him while walking. In the fresh air. In the inn, or indoors in other places, he retires into himself, and you can sit with him for hours without getting a single word out of him. Now, silence and a gift for listening, even if no one is speaking, are both things I was born with. At home, sometimes no one would talk for days, at the most someone might ask for a plate or a pencil or a book. I no longer find it so difficult walking at the slow pace the painter likes, though I’m used to going quickly from one impression to the next, rather than stopping all the time, as he does, to sit down and rest. For me, the painter is a big problem I somehow have to solve. A task, in fact. And for him?

What sort of language is Strauch’s language? What can I make of his scraps of thought? Things that initially struck me as disjointed and incoherent, actually possess “truly immense connections”; the whole thing is in the nature of an enormous transfusion of words into the world, into humans, “a pitiless proceeding against stupidity,” as he would say, “an uninterrupted, regeneration-worthy backdrop of sound.”
How
get that down?
What
notes? Schematic or systematic to what point? His outbursts descend on me like rockfalls. Abruptly, things he says detach themselves from the explosive guffaw of ridicule which he reserves for himself “and the world.” Strauch’s language is the language of the heart muscle, a scandalous “cerebral pulse.” It is rhythmic self-abasement under the “subliminal creak” of his own rafters. His notions and subterfuges, fundamentally in accord with the barking of those dogs that he drew my attention to, with which he “scattered me to the air.” Can it still be described as
language? Yes, it is the false bottom of language, the heaven and hell of language, the mutiny of rivers, “the steaming word-nostrils of brains that are in a state of endless and shameless despair.” Sometimes he will speak a poem, and then tear it apart, reformulate it as a “power plant,” “a barracks for the raw philosophy of a wordless tribe,” as he says. “The world is a world of recruits, it needs to be brutalized, you need to teach it to shoot, and not to shoot.” He rips the words out of himself as from a swamp. This violent ripping out of words leaves him dripping with blood.