No Joke (6 page)

In the sunny opening chapters of “The Baths of Lucca,” the main target of ridicule is Gumpelino, the Jewish convert to Catholicism and newly minted marquis. Matilda reveals her prejudice against this man when she tells Dr. Heine not to be put off by his nose, which then becomes the focus of a
shpritz
(a “spray” or “squirt,” as in a squirt of flavor into a soda, later a Jewish American term for an extended comic riff):

Matilda's warning not to knock against the nose of the man was sufficiently well-founded, a little more length and he'd have surely poked my eye out with it. I don't want to say anything bad about that nose; quite the contrary, it was of the noblest form, and in a sense it's what gave my friend the right to add a Marquis' title to his name. For one could tell from his nose that he came from noble stock, that he descended from an ancient international family with which even our Lord God established nuptial ties without fear of rendering Himself déclassé.
¹¹
This family has indeed come down in the world a notch or two since then, so that, ever since Charlemagne's day, most are compelled to earn their living by peddling old trousers and Hamburg lottery tickets, albeit without in the least letting up on their pride of ancestry or ever abandoning hope of recuperating their old holdings, or at least receiving adequate compensation for emigration,
if ever their old legitimate Sovereign fulfills his promise of restoration, a promise by which He's already led them around by the nose for two thousand years. Did their noses perhaps grow so long from being so long led around by the nose? Or are these long noses a kind of uniform whereby Jehovah, the King of Kings, might recognize His old yeomen of the guard even if they deserted the ranks? The Marquis Gumpelino was just such a deserter, but he still wore his uniform, and it was ever so brilliant, adorned with little crosses and stars and rubies, a red coat of arms in miniature and plenty of other decorations, too.
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Ah, that nose. Where Matilda mocks Gumpel's protuberance, the narrator, speaking as a proper Protestant and without betraying his Jewish origins, beats her at her own game by mocking the bloodline that as a Christian, she shares. Religion is treated as a social commodity. Judaism gets the brunt of the ridicule, but the credulous Jewish tribe comes off more appealingly than does the Jew who believes he is trading up by discarding it. Like Freud in the passage quoted earlier, Heine draws attention to the “noble stock”—ancient and related to God—that he simultaneously puts down, with the nose as the ambiguous marker of both superiority and slavish servitude. Underlying this ambiguity is the reality of Europe, some of whose autocrats were intent on preventing the “progress” of their restive subjects. In such changeable times, did Jews prove their mettle by staying Jewish or by leaving their Jewishness behind?

The dramatic construction of this work assigns to Matilda the meaner prejudice and to the Heine stand-in a loftier
skepticism—one that also distinguishes him from Gumpelino's wholehearted devotion to his new religion and position. Both men are converts, but Gumpelino is
sincere
—in his adopted Catholicism, acquired romanticism, and passion for a married woman. An all-purpose worshipper, an enthusiast of nature, he declares Heine a torn man, a torn soul, “a Byron, so to speak.” But the Byronic author revels in the discordances of his life. “Whosoever claims that his heart is still whole merely acknowledges that he has a prosaic … heart.” Once upon a time the world was whole, but since then the world itself has been ripped in two. “[The] wretched worldwide tear of our time runs right through my heart, and for that very reason I know that the great gods have shown mercy and deemed me worthy of a poet's martyrdom.”
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The divided being personifies the spirit of the times, and none more so than the Jew, living in one place while belonging to another, claiming election and experiencing subjection, and in Heine's case, raised in one religious tradition and acculturating to another without wholly letting go of the first.

It is worth recalling that Heine's near-contemporary Nahman of Bratslav (1772–1810), the Hasidic master from western Ukraine whom I will discuss in the next chapter, is credited with having said
Es iz nito keyn gantsere zakh vi a tsebrokhn harts
, “there is nothing as whole as a broken heart.” (A folk tradition added, “a broken
Jewish
heart.”) The novelty of these insights lay in their elevation of rupture into the defining condition of modern people. The Bible describes how after Moses shattered the first tablets of the law, he returned for a new, unbroken set, thereby upholding the ideal of moral perfection
while acknowledging the difficulty of attaining it. For their part, Nahman and Heine accept fracture—the former in metaphysical and the latter in earthly terms. Yearning is Nahman's expression of faith in the ultimate, messianic reunion beyond the world as we know it. Heine treats his yearning as a comic relic, as if the human were longing for its absent tail.

Another comically bifurcated modern is Gumpelino's valet, Old Hirsch, the third Jew of “The Baths of Lucca,” who never converts to Catholicism like Gumpelino or to Protestantism like Heine, but instead accepts the position of servant as the price of remaining the Jew he is. As he approaches from the distance, the narrator tells us,

I recognized someone whom I'd have sooner expected to meet on Mount Sinai than on the Apennines, and that was none other than Old Hirsch, sometime resident in Hamburg, a man who had not only made his mark as an incorruptible lottery collector but who was likewise so knowledgeable about foot-corns and jewels that he could not only distinguish between the two but also skillfully excise the former and precisely appraise the latter.
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On drawing closer, Hirsch hopes that the author will still recognize him even though his name is now … Hyazinth. Gumpelino is outraged at his servant's revelation of their common past, but Hirsch-Hyazinth compulsively blurts out what his master has tried to conceal. The entire passage is a palimpsest of the newly minted European superimposed on the ghetto Jew—a figure who has adapted to his new condition and name without shedding his old skin. Heine, who else-where
pits Hebraism against Hellenism, here forges a character in whom Jew and Greek are improbably combined. No wonder this man should be a connoisseur at once of bunions and gems, the irritants and adornments of living. Hyazinth later boasts about the money he has saved by retaining his initial when he changed his name—a little joke at the expense of the author, who had presumably enjoyed a similar economy when he exchanged Harry for Heinrich, but who turned out to be both less competent and less well adjusted.

He is also not as funny. Though Heine declares himself the master poet of
Zerrissenheit
, he assigns to his creation Hirsch-Hyazinth the wittiest wordplays, including one analyzed to death by Freud—“I sat next to Salomon Rothschild, and he treated me as his equal, altogether
famillionairely
.”
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The servant describes his master Gumpelino kneeling in adoration every evening for a full two hours before the “
pri
madonna with the Christ child”—a painting that cost him six hundred silver coins. He also yearns for “Hamburg with its apes and excellent humans and
Papagoyim
.”
Papageien
, German for parrots, are here punned into a species of humans who mimic the Gentiles.
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Do these wordplays highlight the imperfect attempts of people to be other than they are or repair a torn world through comically improbable fusions?

Since this work is also a species of bourgeois comedy, servant gets the better of master. Gumpelino is an overreacher: his nose is too long, and his ambitions are beyond his talents. He imagines himself as Romeo, casting his love for “Julie” in Shakespearean verse; just as friar and nurse mismanage the nuptials in William Shakespeare's tragedy, Gumpelino's servant,
Hyazinth, gives “magical” salts to the pining lover just minutes before a note arrives from Maxfield saying that she
can
see him that night after all. The honeypot yields to the chamber pot as Gumpelino is literally flushed out in a cruel scatological jest.

Were this a film by Sacha Baron Cohen or Larry David—two contemporary comics who resort to bathroom humor—the purgation of Gumpel during the night of intended bliss would have constituted its climax. But Heine aims higher. More than Gumpelino's pretensions, at stake for Heine is the reputation of poetry—the supreme form of human expression, quintessence of a nation's achievement, and trustiest manifestation of the zeitgeist. To the ideal of poetry, Heine transfers the respect that he denies to formal religion, declaring it sinful to cheapen the sublime art and heretical to use it to evil ends. Gumpelino spends his night of agony reading
Poems of Count August von Platen
, a book “scented with that curious perfume not in the least related to eau de cologne, and perhaps to be ascribed to the fact that the Marquis had spent the whole night reading it.” Shifting the target of his satire from the consumer to the producer of smelly art, Heine in the last third of the work drops the travelogue frame in order to fatten von Platen up “as the Iroquois do with the captives they look forward to feeding on at a future festivity.”
¹⁷

Many critics, then and since, have pounced on Heine for his ridicule of von Platen, which the Oxford literary scholar Sigmund Prawer calls “a disgraceful performance.”
¹⁸
Prawer was so distressed that he omitted any discussion of the offensive passages in his eight-hundred-page book
Heine's Jewish Comedy
.
With somewhat-greater latitude, the German literary critic Hans Mayer, who was both a Jew and homosexual, suggests that in this contest between two social “outsiders,” Heine exposed anxieties about his own manhood as well as von Platen's.
¹⁹
All this is just to say that the affront of the satire does not appear to have dulled with time. Heine had no use for the forced metrics of von Platen's verse or his veiled, mawkish way of treating his homosexuality. He taunts von Platen's alleged pedophilia (which he has in common with Nero) and practices that have him listening “
a posteriori
to the intimate doings of his enemies.” Von Platen's chief offense, however, was to have written a play,
The Romantic Oedipus
, which “outed” Heine as a former Jew. This clumsy exposure is what earned Heine's retaliatory exposure of von Platen as a beggar pretending to be an aristocrat, a dishonest romancer, an inferior versifier, and a sexual deviant:

Through a few slight modifications in the play's storyline he might … have made better use of Oedipus, the key protagonist of his comedy. Instead of having him kill his father Laius and marry his mother Jocasta, he should, quite the contrary, have had Oedipus kill his mother and marry his father.

Clearly, von Platen had overreached in choosing
his
target.

Prawer's delicacy aside, it is worth inquiring why a work that starts out in sunny comedy should end in an aggression so dark that Heine had to assure his readers: “It's all just a joke.”
²⁰
Heine did not need to be told that his work violated standards of comedy; no, this must have been the ending he
required. There was, indeed, plenty to dislike in von Platen, a lesser talent who had landed a private royal bequest and publication by Cotta, Goethe's publisher—two honors that Heine himself craved. Yet that alone would scarcely have triggered this “excessive and still very, very witty diatribe.”
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Nor would Heine, who flaunted his Byronic character, have protested von Platen's association of Jews with “romantics”—people who were not whole in the classical sense, but instead fatally split in their natures. Mayer's explanation of Heine's outsider complex seems less direct and more contrived than Heine's work itself. What hurt was the self-inflicted wound—the conversion that would forever expose him to charges of inauthenticity, with all its attendant vices: hypocrisy, cowardice, and disloyalty. Von Platen's attempt to hide his own truer, “feminine” nature is compared by Heine to the ostrich, “who believes himself hidden when he's stuck his head in the sand, so that only the bum remains visible.” Von Platen might one day raise his head from the sand and speak as a proud homosexual, while the shame of Heine's conversion could never be erased. In short, von Platen is there to remind Heine that there was no way of cutting off the nose without spiting the race.

As opposed to all the pretenders—Gumpelino, Heine, and von Platen—the moral high ground of the satire is entrusted to the Jew who did not undergo baptism: Hirsch-Hyazinth, the lottery collector. Here is a Jew who had stayed honorable in a corrupting business—unlike the author, who had violated his own standards of integrity. And to whom does Hirsch-Hyazinth ascribe the moral high ground? While mocking all religions—Catholicism smells of incense, Protestantism
is harmless and ineffectual, the old Jewish faith brings nothing but hard luck, and Reform Judaism is too good for the common man—he grants a measure of approval to a poor but contented ghetto Jew, Moses Little Lump, whose sabbath compensates for the woes of the week, and whose history of suffering makes him appreciate the value of life.

[The] man is happy, he need not torment himself with self-cultivation, he sits content in his religion and his green dressing gown like Diogenes in his barrel, he takes pleasure in the light of his candelabrum which he himself doesn't have to polish—and I tell you, even if the candelabrum burns a bit dimly and the hired hand who's supposed to keep it spotless isn't at hand, and Rothschild the Great happened by at that very moment with all his agents, wholesalers, and
chefs de comptoir
, with the aid of which he conquers the world, and Rothschild said, “Moses Lump, you may have a single wish, whatever you want, it shall be done,” … I'm quite sure Moses Lump would promptly reply, “Polish my candelabrum!” and Rothschild the Great would reply in wonderment, “If I wasn't Rothschild, I'd want to be a Little Lump like this!”
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