Insel (6 page)

A wound up automaton running down, Insel ceased among the clatter of our amusement.

“I know how you can make money,” I exclaimed agog with enthusiasm. “Write your biography.”

“I am a painter,” he objected. “It would take too long building a style.”

“You’d only have to write the way you paint. Minutely, meticulously—like an ant! Can you remember every moment, every least incident of your life?”

“All,” he replied decisively.

“Then start at once.”

“It would need so much careful editing. In the raw it would be scandalous—”

“Scandalous,” I cried scandalized— “the truth? Anyway you can write under a pseudonym.”

“People would recognize me.”

“Don’t you know anything of the world? The artist’s vindication does not lie in ‘what happens to him’ but in what shape he comes out.”

“Oh,” said Insel disinhibiting, “very well. It’s not the material that is wanting,” he sighed wearily, “the
stacks
of manuscript notes I have accumulated!”

Then, “No,” he reversed, “it’s not my medium.”

“Insel,” I asked breathlessly, “would you let
me
write it?”

“That would be feasible,” he answered interested. “We will make a pact. Get me to America and you
have
the biography.”

“Done,” I decided. “I’ll write at once. America shall clamor for you.”

“Don’t overdo it,” warned Insel, “it never works.”

“You can have your dinners with me and tell me— Can you really remember—the minutest details?”

“Every one,” he assured me.

“What a book,” I sighed with satisfaction.

“Flight from Doom—every incident distorted to the pattern of an absurd destiny,” Insel was looking delighted with himself.

He came out to dinner on a few evenings and I would talk with him for hours. The minute details were fewer than I had bargained for, his leitmotif being his strangeness in so seldom having spoken.

“My parents noticed it at once,” he told me. “As a child I would remain absolutely silent for six months at a time.”

He did not give a fig for heredity. All his relatives were chatty.

Another thing he had found in himself was his aptitude for housework. He had once married a stenographer, who simply
could
not arrange the kitchen with the same precision as he.

“She tried so hard—for so long. She never came up to the mark. What I disliked was her plagiarism. Why,” demanded Insel with retrospective annoyance, “could she not have worked out a system of her own?”

So they separated. Later, when Insel and I became uncannily intimate I understood what his unique orderliness had done to the girl—given her the jitters!

Nevertheless, he himself seemed sometimes to have difficulty in locating things. Once during coffee he drifted off to the lavabo and on his return took a seat some tables away from the one at which he had left me. In the same slightly deferent sociable concern he continued to “pay attention”—

The strain on this biography would consist in his too facile superposing of separate time—his reminiscences flitted about from one end of his life to the other.

“I saw an antique dealer carrying a picture to a taxi the other day—a portrait of some women. They were extraordinarily attractive to me; I was sure we would have been profoundly congenial. It was labeled ‘The Brontë Sisters.’ Do you know of anyone by that name?” asked Insel, who had not read Goethe nor heard of Shakespeare. “The dealer told me they were authoresses—I feel I should care for what they have written.”

“The sister Emily wrote
Wuthering Heights
. I suppose it
is one of the greatest novels ever written. I never remember for very long, after having read it, what it’s about—yet whenever I think of it—I find myself standing on wild moors—alone with the elements—elements become articulate—.
You
would care for it very much.”

I began to think it improbable I should even find a basis for this biography. He was so
at variance with himself, he existed on either side of a paradox. Even as he begged for food to throw away, forever in search of a haven, he preferred
any
discomfort to going home. Constantly he thanked his stars for an iron constitution—while obviously in an alarming state of health.

AT LAST THE BIOGRAPHY ABORTED AS HAD THE Quaker oats.

The first stage of Insel’s intimacy completed, when he evidently intended to let you further “in on” his show, he insisted on your reading Kafka, just as on assisting at a foreign opera one is handed a book of the words.

Study this well he tacitly commended. It will give you an angle of approach. “In Kafka,” he explained, “I found a foreshadowing of my hounded existence, recognized the relentless drive of my peculiar misfortune.”

Der Prozess
was the volume he borrowed to lend me, and I lay awake reading on and on and on, curious for the book to begin, when, with one eye still open, I came upon the end to fall asleep in the unsatisfied certainty of having become acquainted with an undeniable, yet perhaps the most useless, genius who ever lived.

Enraged with bitter disappointment,
“Zum Teufel
,” I berated Insel, when he appeared for our next session. If he was a lunatic, he was prodigious, dressing up his insanity in another man’s madness. It was no use to me. Flight from Doom, with its pattern of absurd destiny, had already been written.

“You atrocious fake—you have no life to write—you’re
acting
Kafka!”

“And I,” answered Insel, as I turned him out, “see clearly into you. Your brain is all Brontë.” Flying the colors of his victory, he sauntered off.

I
THOUGHT
I
HAD
DROPPED INSEL. I WAS MISTAKEN. Some weeks later I was writing letters when all of a sudden I stopped. An urgent telepathy impinging on my mind, I automatically dashed off a card. When I looked to see what I had so unpreparedly written—this is how it began:

“It is interesting,” Insel was to remark significantly later on. “Your note to me was couched in flawless German.”

For a while I sat wondering to
what
appeal, and why, I had answered.
I did not care
if Insel were in trouble. Obviously he fabricated trouble and far be it from me to deprive him of it—. I threw the card into the waste paper basket, and started for the post. When I had opened the front door I shut it again and retrieved the postcard. Before the letter-box I put it in my pocket and turned away, only to go back— with a relieved determination I posted it.

Insel must have crossed my message for in a couple of hours he panted into my place all undone, despairingly waving a sheet of blue paper.

“
Das blaue Papier
,” he articulated hoarsely, ducking his head as if the
Papier
was one of a shower of such sheets bombarding him in his dash for escape.

“Something the matter? Have a
porto
. Sit on a chair. Whatever it is—out with it!”

“
Das blaue Papier
,” he reiterated, casting a haunted look over his shoulder. On its return that look fell in with some photographs of paintings lying on the table.

“
Whose
pictures are these?” asked Insel, immediately collected, and staring at each in turn with entire attention. “
Who
could have done these?”

“They are mine.”

“You are an extraordinarily gifted woman,” he said, still staring at them. “Oh, how I wish I could read your book.”

“It’s not like those pictures,” I laughed and told him their brief history.

“ ‘Those’ are my ‘last exhibition’ cancelled the moment the dealer set eyes on them.”

“Good God,” muttered Insel under his breath.

“I felt, if I were to go back, begin a universe all over again, forget all form I am familiar with, evoking a chaos from which I could draw forth incipient form, that at last the female brain might achieve an act of creation.”

I did not know this as yet, but the man seated before me holding a photo in his somewhat invalid hand had done this very thing—visualized the mists of chaos curdling into shape. But with a male difference.

Well, it turned out that the blue paper was a summons for rent involving the evacuation of his studio.

Insel’s system in such emergency was this:

Never to pay. To work himself into an individualistic kind of epilepsy whenever served with a summons or notified to appear in court to explain why the money was not forthcoming. Computing illusory accounts to find the exact sum he could promise to pay by a certain date, knowing full well he would not be able to pay anything at all, in order to scare himself into fits awaiting the fatal appointment.

Now one could watch him following the path of pursuit at an easy canter, having proved he had something definite to flee from.

His role was helplessness personified. So here he was without a roof. In spite of the ceiling a pitiless rain seemed to be falling upon him already.

Whenever I have seen poor people asleep on stone seats in the snow, like complementary colors in the eyes, there arise in my mind unused ballrooms and vacationers’ apartments whose central heating warms a swarming absence. To the pure logician this association of ideas might suggest a possible trans-occupation of cubic space, while mere experience will prove that the least of being alive is transacted in space, so much does sheer individuality exceed it; that providing a refuge for a single castaway brings results more catastrophic than a state of siege.

So I kept saying to myself, “Remember, you don’t care a damn what happens to this thin man.” While what he did was to fill the room with all men who are over-lean. And the room fell open, extending to space—as such—to remind me of my futile superposition of stone benches on ballrooms. My lips opened automatically. “Don’t be fools,” I admonished them. “Keep out of this. You’ll get me into an unnecessary jam.” In the end I must have given in, for
I heard myself telling him, to my despair, he could live in my flat when I had gone to the country. “If that’s any help,” I added dubiously. “It solves half my problem,” he thanked me with appreciative warmth.

The result of this lapse of protective selfishness was days of agony. I had intended to run off to the country at once. But now—I sat looking at that apartment obsessed with the necessity of disencumbering it of personalia. The onus of trying to make up one’s mind where to begin overpowered me.

The psychic effort of retracting oneself from the creative dimension where one can remain indefinitely—like a conscious rock—immovable—in intellectual transmutation of long since absorbed actualities, while the present actuality is let to go hang—was devastating.

The contemplation of a bureau whose drawers must be emptied—the idea of some sort of classification of manuscript notes and miscellaneous papers— that in habitual jumble are easily selectable by the remembrance of their subconscious “arrangement,” the effort to concentrate on something in which one takes no interest, which is the major degradation of women, gives pain so acute that, in magnifying a plausible task to an inextricable infinity of deadly detail, the mind disintegrates. The only thing to do is to rush out of the house and forget it all. So disliking to leave one’s work in favor of some practical imperative, in begrudging the time to undertake, one wastes triple the time in being averse to thinking.

Something would have to be done about it. Fortunately, after more than a week of this paralyzing resistance, I came across a long painting overall. Its amplitude made something click in my brain. I at once became animated with
that operative frenzy which succeeds to such periods of unproductive strain. Sewing up its neck and sleeves on the Singer, I obtained a corpse-like sack, and stuffing it full of scribbles I tied it up, and, throwing it into a superfluous room, locked the door on it with a sigh of relief. I was once more myself.

In the meanwhile Insel had come to take me to see one of his rare paintings in the possession of a friend who was liable to
feed him at crucial moments.

In the taxi I inquired,
“
Was haben Sie schönes erlebt
since I saw you?”

“I had two negresses at once,” he answered, all aglitter.

“Two,” I echoed anxiously. “I hope you didn’t have to pay them.”

“Oh, no,” he assured me.

“So they liked the look of you,” I teased with friendly disdain.

“Yes,” he concurred apologetically.

“And—was it nice?”

“Well,” he reflected, “I thought it was going to be nice. And now the trouble is to get rid of them. And what have you
erlebt
?” he commented.

“Not quite so
much
—anyhow.”

I saw the picture. Its various forms, at once embryonic and precocious, being half-evolved and of degenerate purpose, were overgrown with a hair that never grew anywhere else—it was so fine. And when our host had gone out of the room Insel stared at it amazed. His face became rigid with incredulity. “I cannot believe I ever painted anything so wonderful,” he murmured. “How did I do it?” he begged himself to explain.

When we got out on the street again I walked some
paces off parallel to him in order to observe him. Adverse remarks with ordinary men it is politic to keep to oneself, while to withhold one’s comments from Insel would have appeared impolite. His very personality taking the form of a question mark, it would have shown a lack of perspicacity when intentionally confronted with a self-composed conundrum, not to attempt unobserved, the intriguer, underrated.