Prater Violet (4 page)

“Oh, Ashmeade…”

Bergmann looked concerned. “He is a great friend of yours?”

“No,” I grinned. “Not exactly.”

“You see, this umbrella of his I find extremely symbolic. It is the British respectability which thinks: ‘I have my traditions, and they will protect me. Nothing unpleasant, nothing ungentlemanly can possibly happen within my private park.' This respectable umbrella is the Englishman's magic wand, with which he will try to wave Hitler out of existence. When Hitler declines rudely to disappear, the Englishman will open his umbrella and say, ‘After all, what do I care for a little rain?' But the rain will be a rain of bombs and blood. The umbrella is not bomb-proof.”

“Don't underrate the umbrella,” I said. “It has often been used successfully, by governesses against bulls. It has a very sharp point.”

“You are wrong. The umbrella is useless.… Do you know Goethe?”

“Only a little.”

“Wait. I shall read you something. Wait. Wait.”

*   *   *

“THE WHOLE
beauty
of the film,” I announced to my mother and Richard next morning at breakfast, “is that it has a certain fixed
speed.
The way you see it is mechanically conditioned. I mean, take a painting—you can just glance at it, or you can stare at the left-hand top corner for half an hour. Same thing with a book. The author can't stop you from skimming it, or starting at the last chapter and reading backwards. The point is, you choose your approach. When you go into a cinema, it's different. There's the film, and you have to look at it as the director wants you to look at it. He makes his points, one after another, and he allows you a certain number of seconds or minutes to grasp each one. If you miss anything, he won't repeat himself, and he won't stop to explain. He can't. He's started something, and he has to go through with it.… You see, the film is really like a sort of infernal machine…”

I stopped abruptly, with my hands in the air. I had caught myself in the middle of one of Bergmann's most characteristic gestures.

*   *   *

I HAD always had a pretty good opinion of myself as a writer. But, during those first days with Bergmann, it was lowered considerably. I had flattered myself that I had imagination, that I could invent dialogue, that I could develop a character. I had believed that I could describe almost anything, just as a competent artist can draw you an old man's face, or a table, or a tree.

Well, it seemed that I was wrong.

The period is early twentieth century, some time before the 1914 war. It is a warm spring evening in the Vienna Prater. The dancehalls are lighted up. The coffee houses are full. The bands blare. Fireworks are bursting above the trees. The swings are swinging. The roundabouts are revolving. There are freak shows, gypsies telling fortunes, boys playing the concertina. Crowds of people are eating, drinking beer, wandering along the paths beside the river. The drunks sing noisily. The lovers, arm in arm, stroll whispering in the shadow of the elms and the silver poplars.

There is a girl named Toni, who sells violets. Everybody knows her, and she has a word for everybody. She laughs and jokes as she offers the flowers. An officer tries to kiss her; she slips away from him goodhumoredly. An old lady has lost her dog; she is sympathetic. An indignant, tyrannical gentleman is looking for his daughter; Toni knows where she is, and with whom, but she won't tell.

Then, as she wanders down the alleys carrying her basket, light-hearted and fancy-free, she comes face to face with a handsome boy in the dress of a student. He tells her, truthfully, that his name is Rudolf. But he is not what he seems. He is really the Crown Prince of Borodania.

All this I was to describe. “Do not concern yourself with the shots,” Bergmann had told me. “Just write dialogue. Create atmosphere. Give the camera something to listen to and look at.”

I couldn't. I couldn't. My impotence nearly reduced me to tears. It was all so simple, surely? There is Toni's father, for instance. He is fat and jolly, and he has a stall where he sells
Wiener Wuerstchen.
He talks to his customers. He talks to Toni. Toni talks to the customers. They reply. It is all very gay, amusing, delightful. But what the hell do they actually say?

I didn't know. I couldn't write it. That was the brutal truth—I couldn't draw a table. I tried to take refuge in my pride. After all, this was movie work, hack work. It was something essentially false, cheap, vulgar. It was beneath me. I ought never to have become involved in it, under the influence of Bergmann's dangerous charm, and for the sake of the almost incredible twenty pounds a week which Imperial Bulldog was prepared, quite as a matter of course, to pay me. I was betraying my art. No wonder it was so difficult.

Nonsense. I didn't really believe that, either. It isn't vulgar to be able to make people talk. An old man selling sausages isn't vulgar, except in the original meaning of the word, “belonging to the common people.” Shakespeare would have known how he spoke. Tolstoy would have known. I didn't know because, for all my parlor socialism, I was a snob. I didn't know how anybody spoke, except public-school boys and neurotic bohemians.

I fell back, in my despair, upon memories of other movies. I tried to be smart, facetious. I made involved, wordy jokes. I wrote a page of dialogue which led nowhere and only succeeded in establishing the fact that an anonymous minor character was having an affair with somebody else's wife. As for Rudolf, the incognito Prince, he talked like the lowest common denominator of all the worst musical comedies I had ever seen. I hardly dared to show my wretched attempts to Bergmann at all.

He read them through with furrowed brows and a short profound grunt; but he didn't seem either dismayed or surprised. “Let me tell you something, Master,” he began, as he dropped my manuscript casually into the wastepaper basket, “the film is a symphony. Each movement is written in a certain key. There is a note which has to be chosen and struck immediately. It is characteristic of the whole. It commands the attention.”

Sitting very close to me, and pausing only to draw long breaths from his cigarette, he started to describe the opening sequence. It was astounding. Everything came to life. The trees began to tremble in the evening breeze, the music was heard, the roundabouts were set in motion. And the people talked. Bergmann improvised their conversation, partly in German, partly in ridiculous English; and it was vivid and real. His eyes sparkled, his gestures grew more exaggerated, he mimicked, he clowned. I began to laugh. Bergmann smiled delightedly at his own invention. It was all so simple, so effective, so obvious. Why hadn't I thought of it myself?

Bergmann gave me a little pat on the shoulder. “It's nice, isn't it?”

“It's wonderful! I'll note that down before I forget.”

Immediately, he was very serious. “No, no. It is wrong. All wrong. I only wanted to give you some idea … No, that won't do. Wait. We must consider…”

Clouds followed the sunshine. Bergmann scowled grimly as he passed into philosophical analysis. He gave me ten excellent reasons why the whole thing was impossible. They, too, were obvious. Why hadn't I thought of them? Bergmann sighed. “It's not so easy…” He lit another cigarette. “Not so easy,” he muttered. “Wait. Wait. Let us see…”

He rose and paced the carpet, breathing hard, his hands folded severely behind his back, his face shut against the outside world, implacably, like a prison door. Then a thought struck him. He stopped, amused by it. He smiled.

“You know what my wife tells me when I have these difficulties? ‘Friedrich,' she says, ‘Go and write your poems. When I have cooked the dinner, I will invent this idiotic story for you. After all, prostitution is a woman's business.'”

*   *   *

THAT WAS what Bergmann was like on his good days; the days when I was Alyosha Karamazov, or, as he told Dorothy, like Balaam's ass, “who
once
said a marvelous line.” My incompetence merely stimulated him to more brilliant flights of imagination. He sparkled with epigrams, he beamed, he really amazed himself. On such days, we suited each other perfectly. Bergmann didn't really need a collaborator at all. But he needed stimulation and sympathy; he needed someone he could talk German to. He needed an audience.

His wife wrote to him every day, Inge two or three times a week. He read me extracts from their letters, full of household, theatrical and political gossip; and these led to anecdotes, about Inge's first concert, about his mother-in-law, about German and Austrian actors, and the plays and films he had directed. He would spend a whole hour describing how he had produced
Macbeth
in Dresden, with masks, in the style of a Greek tragedy. A morning would go by while he recited his poems, or told me of his last days in Berlin, in the spring of that year, when the Storm Troopers were roving the streets like bandits, and his wife had saved him from several dangerous situations by a quick answer or a joke. Although Bergmann was an Austrian, he had been advised to give up his job and leave Germany in a hurry. They had lost most of their money in consequence. “And so, when Chatsworth's offer came, you see, I could not afford to refuse. There was no alternative. I had my doubts about this artificial Violet, from the very first. Even across half of Europe, it didn't smell so good.… Never mind, I said to myself. Here is a problem. Every problem has its solution. We will do what we can. We will not despair. Who knows? Perhaps, after all, we shall present Mr. Chatsworth with a charming nosegay, a nice little surprise.”

Bergmann wanted all my time, all my company, all my attention. During those first weeks, our working day steadily increased in length, until I had to make a stand and insist on going home to supper. He seemed determined to possess me utterly. He pursued me with questions, about my friends, my interests, my habits, my love life. The weekends, especially, were the object of his endless, jealous curiosity. What did I do? Whom did I see? Did I live like a monk? “Is it Mr. W. H. you seek, or the Dark Lady of the Sonnets?” But I was equally obstinate. I wouldn't tell him. I teased him with smiles and hints.

Foiled, he turned his attention to Dorothy. Younger and less experienced, she was no match for his inquisitiveness. One morning, I arrived to find her in tears. She rose abruptly and hurried into the next room. “She has her struggle,” Bergmann told me, with a certain grim satisfaction. “It's not so easy.” Dorothy, it appeared, had a boy friend, an older man, who was married. He didn't seem able to make up his mind which of the two women he liked better; just now, he had gone back to his wife. His name was Clem. He was a car salesman. He had taken Dorothy to Brighton for weekends. Dorothy also had a lover of her own age, a radio engineer, nice and steady, who wanted to marry her. But the radio engineer lacked glamour; he couldn't compete with the fatal appeal of Clem, who wore a little black mustache.

Bergmann's interest in all this was positively ghoulish. In addition, he knew everything about Dorothy's father, another sinister influence, and about her aunt, who worked at an undertaker's, and was having an affair with her brother-in-law. At first, I could hardly believe that Dorothy had really brought herself to reveal such intimate details, and suspected Bergmann of having invented the whole story. She seemed such a shy, reserved girl. But soon they were actually speaking of Clem in my presence. When Dorothy cried, Bergmann would pat her on the shoulder, like God Himself, and murmur, “That's all right, my child. Nothing to do. It will pass.”

He was fond of lecturing me on Love. “When a woman is awakened, when she gets the man she wants, she is amazing, amazing. You have no idea … Sensuality is a whole separate world. What we see on the outside, what comes up to the surface—it's nothing. Love is like a mine. You go deeper and deeper. There are passages, caves, whole strata. You discover entire geological eras. You find things, little objects, which enable you to reconstruct her life, her other lovers, things she does not even know about herself, things you must never tell her that you know…”

“You see,” Bergmann continued, “women are absolutely necessary to a man; especially to a man who lives in ideas, in the creation of moods and thoughts. He needs them, like bread. I do not mean for the coitus; that is not so important, at my age. One lives more in the fantasy. But one needs their aura, their ambience, their perfume. Women always recognize a man who wants this thing from them. They feel it at once, and they come to him, like horses.” Bergmann paused, grinning. “You see, I am an old Jewish Socrates who preaches to the Youth. One day, they will give me the hemlock.”

*   *   *

IN THE HOT little room, our life together seemed curiously isolated. The three of us formed a self-contained world, independent of London, of Europe, of 1933. Dorothy, the representative of Woman, did her best to keep the home in some kind of order, but her efforts were not very successful. Her schemes for arranging Bergmann's huge litter of papers only caused worse confusion. As he could never describe exactly what it was that he was looking for, she could never tell him where she had put it. This sent him into frenzies of frustration. “Terrible, terrible. This definitely kills me. Too idiotic for words.” And he would relapse into grumpy silence.

Then there was the problem of meals. The house had a restaurant service, theoretically. It could produce bitter coffee, very strong black tea, congealed eggs, sodden toast and a gluey chop, followed by some nameless kind of yellow pudding. The food took an almost incredible time to arrive. As Bergmann said, when you ordered breakfast, it was best to ask for what you wanted at lunch, because it would be four hours before you got it. So we lived chiefly on cigarettes.

At least twice a week, there was a Black Day. I would enter the flat to find Bergmann in complete despair. He hadn't slept all night, the story was hopeless, Dorothy was crying. The best way of dealing with this situation was to make Bergmann come out with me to lunch. Our nearest restaurant was a big gloomy place on the top floor of a department store. We ate early, when there were very few other customers, sitting together at a table in the darkest corner, next to a rather sinister grandfather clock, which reminded Bergmann of the story by Edgar Allan Poe.