Diary of Andrés Fava was written at the same time as Cortázar’s Final Exam, in which Andrés Fava is one of the major figures. Cortázar left the diary out of Final Exam, but it’s a neat complementary text to the novel.

The diary is less another account of the events in the novel; instead, it provides a different picture of Fava and his preoccupations. Various literary interests and ideas predominate, and as a Cortázar-alter ego Fava’s musings more obviously reflect Cortázar’s own (as is also demonstrated by the fact that some of this material prefigures later work by Cortázar).

There’s some sense of the budding writer — once in awe of the local literary scene, now comfortably a part of it — though he is very much still a writer trying to find his way. Sartre is perhaps the major influence, but Fava’s interests range far and wide. The short, dense diary offers glimpses and flashes rather than in-depth commentary, but gives a good sense of Cortázar’s interests and influences. The longer sections do, however, leave one wishing for more: ripping apart Hesse’s Demian over two pages, one wishes more of the books and incidents in Fava’s life were similarly examined.

Fava’s exuberance and romanticism (of sorts) have some appeal. If uncertain of the reasons and unable to always explain with precision (though this is part of what he struggles to get at), he at least feels strongly: “Physical impossibility of listening to Chopin. Disgust. Revulsion.”

There’s quite a bit of the usual (young-)writer-concerns. Occasionally he’s still circumspect, the questions and ideas banal in their familiarity:

What I should study is whether, when I’ve found the right road, what’s actually happened is that I’ve lost all the rest. But mulling it over, considering variations on the theme, he eventually gets more energetic (and convincing):

Write the novel of nothing. Let everything play out in such a way that the reader senses that the horrible theme of the work is that of not having one.

Show the most secret (although today it appears in public) of human suspicions: that of their intrinsic, inherent futility. Insinuate that the religion of the work (in its highest values: art, poetry) is also sport. Thump hypocrisies.

From Sartor Resartus (“no longer tolerable”) to thoughts on epigraphs, there’s a good deal stuffed into this diary, much of it stray stuff. It doesn’t make for a cohesive whole — or much of a narrative arc — but it’s lively and interesting enough to hold one’s attention. And at least he doesn’t take himself too seriously, summing up fairly accurately:

What’s this, Andrés? You, always so careful, so dressy, so Aristotelian. The fog, Andrés, the fog?

Diary of Andrés Fava is a small, incidental work, more writers-journal than actual fiction, but it is certainly of interest to any Cortázar-fan, and even those not familiar with him (or even Final Exam) can enjoy it.

 

My greatest failure as a reader is my inability to read literature in a second language. I have something of an ADD problem with languages, and have never gained fluency in any beyond English. I learned Spanish in high school, Gaelic in college, Russian in my free time, and I’m now just beginning to dabble in French. I may know enough Spanish to get me around Spain on vacation without looking like a total idiot, but I’m lucky if I can count to ten in Russian anymore without throwing in a few Gaelic numerals.

Recently I noticed just how much I was missing out on when I saw how many works by Julio Cortázar (1914 84), one of my favorite writers, have not been translated into English. Archipelago recently released the first English translation, by Anne McLean, of The Diary of Andres Fava. I was so impressed by the novella that I wanted to get in contact with McLean to talk about the work of translation and the books of the masterful Belgian-born Argentine who is so well-known by Spanish and Latin American readers, but virtually invisible to English-speaking ones.

McLean translates works mostly from South America and Spain, but Spanish is actually her fourth language, and she didn’t speak a word of it until well into her 20s. She was politically involved at the time, and had traveled to Guatemala to see the revolution first-hand.

“I didn’t really have a plan,” McLean says. “I just went traveling and spent a few months in Mexico and ended up staying in northern Guatemala for half a year, and then a bit longer than that in Nicaragua. A few months after the Sandinistas lost the elections, I came to England for a while, and used to go to Spain when my visas ran out to teach English, improve my Spanish, and get some circulation back in my toes.”

When McLean first moved to England in 1996, she saw an ad for a master’s program in “The Theory and Practice of Literary Translation.” Since earning her MA, she’s translated works by Javier Cercas, Ignacio Padilla, Carmen MartÌn Gaite and Paula Varsavsky. The authors themselves hail from a range of countries including Spain, Cuba, Argentina and Mexico. Translating works from different lands that ostensibly have a common tongue presents an interesting challenge for someone in McLean’s line of work. “There are many, many different Spanishes,” the translator says, *#8220;just as there are lots of different Englishes.”

She continues: “The variations in vocabulary and accent between, and within, Iberian and American Spanish don’t necessarily have much to do with the styles of the authors who write in them, though sometimes, of course, they do. If there’s a lot of dialogue, and especially if it’s colloquial, it’s very difficult to keep alive in translation, but it’s not necessarily more difficult to translate slang from Buenos Aires than slang from Barcelona; the tricky thing is to make it sound believable in English, but still have the characters who are speaking it sound as if they’re from Buenos Aires or Barcelona. “A few years ago I co-translated a novel called Shadow Without a Name, by Ignacio Padilla. Ignacio’s part of a group Mexican writers who, fed up with flying iguanas and thunderclaps of butterflies, deliberately set their novels in Europe and write in a sort of mid-Atlantic Spanish. My natural English is Canadian and [co-translator] Peter Bush writes in British English, so we ironed out each other’s idiosyncrasies in a way that was quite true to Ignacio’s intentions in the original.”

But McLean didn’t get her first chance at translating Cortázar until a she used a little bit of friendly harassment.

As a reader, it had taken McLean a few runs at works by Cortázar before she really got it. “I readBlow-Up and Hopscotch and We Love Glenda So Much in the 1980s before I knew any Spanish, and I was intrigued, but I didn’t really get obsessed until I read Deshoras, probably in about 1993 or so. There’s a story in that book his last collection of short stories called ‘Pesadillas’ (‘Nightmares’) that was a breakthrough for me, because it was the first time a piece of writing in Spanish hit me with full force.”

The Harvill Press in 1998 reprinted some of Cortázar’s work in an anthology of short stories, and McLean tried to convince them to bring out more. Her perseverance paid off when a Harvill editor, Euan Cameron, eventually passed along her name to Archipelago Press in the U.S. when they were looking for a translator for The Diary of Andres Fava; the result of McLean’s effort was brought out last month.

Literature in translation may always be low-profile in bookshops, but what can lead to even greater frustration for McLean is the simple lack of appreciation for a writer who is one of her favorites.

“In decent bookshops you see Hopscotch and Blow-Up, and in really good ones, you might find a few more. But he has become an obscure author in English, which Spanish and Latin American readers find pretty hard to believe.”

“On the one hand,” she continues, “it is a great shame that more of his work isn’t in circulation in English, but it also means there are many, many readers who still have the discovery of Cortázar to look forward to, and that’s something I envy. I think a Julio renaissance is long overdue, and it could be time to look at re-translating a lot of his early stories.”

 

Noted above as one of the foremost exponents of the long novel for his astonishing Hopscotch, the Argentine Cortázar (1914-1984) is also a master of the short story, and of other brief proses that defy category. Andres Fava’s Diary is a kind of appendix to Cortázar’s earliest, but posthumously published, novel, Final Exam. Fava being one to that book’s main characters, a young writer who bears, in sensibility, a remarkable resemblance to his author. These journal entries, jottings, philosophical doodles, sketches, dream narratives and brief essays reveal the lively mind of the developing artist in the act of creating himself. While Final Exam throws considerable light on Fava’s character, showing his social interaction with a small circle of friends in mid-century bohemian Buenos Aires, the Diary is a delight unto itself in its exposure of the young Cortázar as a work in progress, thinking about everything, talking to himself, searching for the voice to serve his art, visiting the realm between waking and sleeping, reaching into childhood for clues to the roots of imagination: “A low, white, translucent sky, so hard up against me that if I turn my head I feel it in the my hair, in my ears. It’s not the sky, it’s the sheet on my summer bed. I’m ten years old and traveling inside my bed.” The light touch of Anne McLean’s translation catches Cortázar’s tone and wit with exquisite precision.

 

This is a book designed for the sheer pleasure of reading. Its rough-paper cover is handsome and feels good in the hand, and the stories and vignettes printed within are short and consumable within minutes. In this case the book-buyer is truly a “consumer.” There’s no plot, no difficulty, no need even to read them in order. You just pick out one after the other and consume it as you please.

Each one takes you back to a time when literature was not hype, not “riveting,” not “jaw-dropping,” and not “a must read.” It was a time when you were thrilled by an author’s curious point of view, unexpected turn of phrase and strange semblance of form. You had to read his work because it did something to you, maybe went straight to your heart and mind, and you wanted to feel the way he felt and see the way he saw. It’s a different kind of “must read” and a different kind of purpose, so private that you almost hope the book will not find many readers, because the pleasure seems so much your own.

Yet one could find a utilitarian purpose in it. Peter Altenberg walks out in the city and sees people every day or on occasion, in the midst of life. He notes something down at his cafe or goes home with an idea in mind. This he commits to paper as fast as he can to capture the moment. He is convinced that “Everything is remarkable if our perspective of it is remarkable! And every little local incident written up in the daily newspaper can sound the depths of life, revealing all the tragic and the comic, the same as Shakespeare’s tragedies!” Once the idea is on paper, it is fixed and he does not touch it again. It has crystallized into a prose poem. Writers constipated with the weight of significance and classes in creative writing burdened with technique could find a lesson here. As I said, it’s a different time, when writing a tribute to a beautiful shopkeeper, or a thoughtful prostitute, or a radiant bird is purpose enough.

In Telegrams of the Soul there are quite a few shopkeepers and pretty women, all treated with such a delicate love that you take it into your heart and cannot help but project it onto the quite different women you see in the world today, no less pretentious and no less vulnerable than the anonymous souls of the past. There are also a lot of little girls, perhaps too many. And aristocrats and relatives and historical figures whom Alterberg admires (Franz Schubert). And a few animals besides (kingfisher, lion, agoutis). Some pieces are humorous, such as “Theater Evening,” where the author babysits a poodle for a lady that both he and the dog impatiently hope will return; others are cruel, such as “Twelve,” where a little girl catches little fish and tosses them on the ground to die, while an old woman to the side mourns for them. Some are reflective, such as “Fellow Man,” which begins: “No man can abide another, in matters big or small, he just can’t do it, that is his eternally unspoken tragedy.” All are unique, so I won’t try to paraphrase any more.

The 85 or so prose poems are translated in a fluid and effervescent manner by Peter Wortsman, who does not, like most translators of German, eschew the American idiom. Here we have “for crying out loud,” “grin and bear it,” “yuck” and even “arghh,” bringing the Viennese setting close to home. Wortman also provides a charming afterword describing Altenberg as an overgrown child and ideal subject for Sigmund Freud. He characterizes his works as modern fairytales minus the “once upon a time” and usually the “happily ever after.”

As mentioned, the volume is done up beautifully, its brown cover illustrated with a stirring brown-yellow-red portrait of Altenberg done by blazing genius Oskar Kokoschka in his Expressionist period. The back cover contains blurbs — originally words of praise — by Karl Kraus, Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann. Thus the little-known miniaturist Altenberg appears in the center of the glorious Viennese-Germanic culture that blossomed in the first decades of the twentieth century, and his little stories draw in the other greats of the day — Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Georg Trakl, Egon Shiele, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, all those mentioned in the wonderful volume Wittgenstein’s Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin. And so, after such ease of reading and such excessive literary pleasure, you get a bonus: cultural enrichment. The way it used to be.

 

Southern Humanities Review
Spring 2006

“Who’s that supposed to be?” “That’s Peter Altenberg.” “Yeah, but who’s that??” Who indeed? The stuffed effigy of Peter Altenberg has been slouching in a seat near the door of Vienna’s Café Central for years, put there originally as a joke when that venerable establishment reopened in 1986, but now a permanent fixture, consistently more often the subject of tourists’ questions and more often photographed than any other object in the place. Who indeed? A native son of Vienna who lived from 1858 to 1918. In his earlier, fleshly life, a constant fixture at Café Central during its own earlier incarnation, a writer after several attempts at other jobs and professions had failed, an inveterate lounger, scrounger, looker, and wanderer, supported less by his writings and more by the largesse of friends and his brother, though the recipient’s gratitude was somewhat askew at best and occasionally replaced by rage and threats of violence if some object of his worship, often a lady of the night or a teenage girl, was demeaned by the harsh words of one of those supporters. Whose original name, Richard Engländer, had been exchanged for that of a favorite Danube vacation town, Altenberg, plus “Peter,” the nickname of a little girl whose brothers wouldn’t allow themselves to be waited upon by someone with a girl’s name. A balding, stocky, slouched, sad-eyed figure of a man with pince-nez, a walrus or Nietzschean moustache, depending on one’s preference, wearing baggy tweeds, a Sherlock-Holmes-style cloak, and lindenwood sandals regardless of the weather, and yet despite his appearance, or perhaps because of it, the subject of portraits by more than one of Vienna’s artists (Kokoschka’s is on the cover). Who, while preaching sound diet and the out-of-doors, used — very probably overused — Slivovitz, laxatives, and the sedative Paraldehyde, whose pungent, but not entirely repellant, odor doubtless pervaded the Vienna hospitals in which Altenberg was occasionally housed, as it did every big city hospital after the turn of the century. Who somehow, despite this impressive list of rather negative traits, not only remained in the good graces of most all and sundry, but was able to generate real affection toward himself, and the long list of those favorably disposed included, significantly, Karl Kraus, renowned and feared for his ability to smell out and slay the dragons of literary pretension and hypocrisy, both in person and in his periodical Die Fackel (“The Torch”). Peter Altenberg’s brief offerings, each a fine example of the Viennese feuilleton style, each as fragile and shimmering as a soap bubble, each as changeable and ambiguous as a holograph, were, and are, consistently able to evoke the aura of a life of joy and the joy of life. Savored slowly, they are unlikely to leave the reader unchanged.

Peter Wortsman has rightly chosen to begin his anthology with “Autobiography,” which says a great deal about both the author’s personality and his literary technique. In the very first sentence he gives a false date of birth, which, one supposes, should warn the reader to take everything else with a grain of salt. Altenberg’s father, pictured in blue robe and velvet collar and reading French periodicals, states that he was not overly vexed that his son remained an idler for so many years and, hence, he’s not overly honored that he’s a poet now. But is he a poet? “No way,” Altenberg shouts. Should we take that statement at face value or imagine that he wants us to conclude just the opposite? What he writes, he says, are “extracts,” and he compares them to bouillon cubes that have to be dissolved in the reader’s own lust for life in order to make them into a palatable, digestible broth. He labels his writing “the telegram style of the soul,” thus providing the title for this anthology. He presents himself as poor, but completely himself, the “Man without Compromises” (in fact he is the very antithesis of the “Man without Qualities” even before there was such a man), and, in answer to the question of how far that gets one, says “One hundred Guldens a month and a few ardent admirers.” Is that bad? Or good? And he confesses that his life, perhaps like his father’s, has been “devoted to the boundless admiration of God’s artwork, woman’s body,” an admiration which translated into a good deal of his daily activity (a friend remarked that “dotty old Peter“ had turned the heads of a large number of respectable and an equal number of not-so-respectable women) and informed a good deal of his writing, as is made clear by the selections in this anthology. Nude studies of teenage girls adorned the walls of his humble room on the top floor of Vienna’s Graben Hotel. Under one was the caption “There is but one indecency in the naked — to deem the naked indecent ” One senses a distant ancestor of Humbert Humbert here, but one more zesty, forthright, and without the philosophy, the gloom, and the oppressive weight of mortality. In fact, Altenberg’s whole attitude toward sexuality must have seemed, in some quarters at least, like a breath of fresh air in a city where Freud was finding his patients among those turned neurotic by the suppression of their instincts and Schnitzler was making a name for himself by writing about the sleazy, predatory side of eros.

When P. A. (in this first selection, Altenberg already displays his tendency to refer to himself in the third person — sometimes just by his initials — shades of Bob Dole) wakes, he sees those pictures of nudes and knows he’ll be able to take in stride the trouble and stress of existence, thanks to having been “endowed with two eyes to drink in the holiest loveliness on earth.” Elsewhere he refers to eyes as “those most precious organs . . . inexhaustibly rich,” whereas the pleasures of other organs are fleeting. That emphasis on seeing has been used to brand Altenberg an impressionist, which is not entirely fair, since he was at pains to have people see things as they really were. He characterized himself as “just a little pocket mirror,” and one of his books, As I See It, led to arguments as to which word of the title ought to receive the accent. “See” won. And when it comes to seeing, it’s the little things that count. Not big things, big events — “All the least consequential things are monumental.” Clearly, despite Altenberg’s free spirit and womanizing, in other words, there is a strong pedagogical thread to his writings. At the end of “Autobiography” he confesses to the belief that he had “. . . a hand in infusing a whiff of the Greek cult of beauty in the harried life of a few young fools.” Then, typical of the gentle dialectic with which many of his writings are suffused, he says, “But that too may only be a utopia.” Of the contradictions present in Altenberg’s writings, as well as in his life, Karl Kraus said, “The artist’s contradictions are contradictions within the beholder who does not experience day and night simultaneously.”

Legend, and another of his stories, would have it that Altenberg’s career as a writer began when he was found by Arthur Schnitzler and other members of the Young Vienna writers group scribbling an essay at a table in Café Central. How did he write? Again, if we care to believe what he says in “A Letter to Arthur Schnitzler” he simply took a piece of paper, then tossed off a title without thinking anything over, and hoped that what came out would have something to do with the title. Writing was the “natural organic spilling out of a full, overripe person.” No revisions. People mistake such things for “. . . little rehearsals, whereas they are, alas, already the very best I can do. But what’s the difference? I couldn’t care less if I write or not.” (Sixteen books is not a bad score for someone who didn’t care one way or the other.) He remains a writer of “worthless samples” — the finished product never appears. But short pieces are surely dangerous ground for authors — and, for that matter, translators and reviewers as well — so it’s hard to imagine not wanting to polish them carefully. Take “Poverty,” all of 74 words long and yet it says everything that needs be said about the subject: a little girl, the daughter of a poor widow, tells Peter Altenberg she has to take a trip to the “Doll Doctor.” Someone has given her a doll with only a top half. “If she’d had a bottom half, too, they damn sure wouldn’t have given her to me ” Hard to think that this piece did not receive considerable deliberation. And the fact that many selections begin and end with nearly similar sentences also speaks for some degree of crafting. On the other hand, the Graben Hotel has framed examples of works that Altenberg dashed off on house stationery. Whatever the reader’s thoughts are about such claims of spontaneity, the good news is that he or she need not be uncomfortable at reading an anthology: Altenberg’s books themselves look like anthologies, full of things of variably short length, without any overriding internal organization. Wortsman has selected wisely, and equally wisely toned down the author’s annoying use of triple dashes (pace Céline) in the originals. The remaining bursts of combined question marks and exclamation points (likened to scourges that thrash the Philistines into paying attention?) are quite enough.

These writings are by no means just Alka-Seltzer tablets for the headaches of human existence, however. Many are bittersweet, describing lives that are one continuous, sad song of disappointment if not heartbreak, and in presenting them, Altenberg shows himself to be an expert matador in the arena of kitsch, never slipping beyond simple but sympathetically presented facts into tearful pathos or worse, even when it came to writing about his own impending death (“It’s my fate, and you, death, are not responsible for the inescapable catastrophe of my existence.”). In “Uncle Max,” Max’s mistress, saved by him from a life of drudgery as a seamstress, is eventually thrown over when his family forces him to marry properly. Anna is then “married off to a man who had been terribly fond of her since childhood,” going along with it since “it is better to go along with things when not to go along with them is of little use.” The reader will find it less easy in the future to shrug off the lines from Die Fledermaus — “glücklich ist, wer vergisst, was nicht mehr zu ändern ist” (happy the one who forgets things that can’t be changed anyway). In “Marionette Theater,” a little girl has been taken to the theater by her old grandfather and is so excited that all she can tell her mother is “I was at the theater.” Mother wants more details, gets no more than a repetition of the same statement, and replies, “What a little ninny.” Whereupon Peter A. replies, “That says it all. Need anything more be said? ” The bald statement is sufficient shorthand for the whole rush of excitement the little girl feels. Put off, her mother begins a litany of sadness. Deserted, left with a child, left all alone. Housework, nothing more. She orders the little girl to say thank you. Altenberg thinks, “These words, ‘say thank you’ . . . were like shots fired in peacetime. The hell with ‘say thank you.’” Clearly children, that is to say little girls, are given carte blanche to not say thank you, to be arbitrary, even cruel—to little, caught fish and other little girls — since their very being places them in the realm of minor goddesses.

Sooner or later, the reader will identify the persistent scent of the Biedermeier era throughout these pages, more than can be attributed to just the occasional references to Schubert. One can almost hear Metternich instructing his ambassadors “We will gain much as we demand little” as one reads these tender tales of hearth and home, with their emphasis on the small events of life, the joys of modest possessions such as Altenberg’s walking sticks (for the handle of one, a girlfriend made a protective leather sheath — Freud reportedly hyperventilated upon reading that passage) and his collection of picture postcards, a subject which was later set to music by Alban Berg. But whereas contemporaries looked upon Altenberg’s collecting zeal as one more bit of evidence of his looniness, he himself sagely remarked, in “Peter Altenberg as a Collector,” that the activity of collecting provides “two healthful deflections from the leaden weight of one’s own self,” first, the pleasure of collecting, itself, and second, the pleasure of doing so on behalf of someone else — he’d just sent his postcards and their display cases to a lady in faraway Hamburg.

The leaden weight of self is also avoided by Altenberg’s sometimes becoming the butt of his own stories: in “An Experience,” while visiting a friend in the suburbs, he misses the last tram home, but is rescued by two familiar, hail-fellow-well-met ladies of the oldest profession, who take him along in their carriage, proving to the friend that the “golden Viennese heart” is not dead after all. But later, after lengthy haggling, the ladies stick Peter with the ten-crown taxi fare (remember: that’s a significant portion of his monthly income ). Miffed at having been taken advantage of, he pays up, gets out, and pens a note to the friend, telling him to hold off on declaring the golden heart still alive. Next day, he meets one of the “sweet young things,” who tells him the rest of the story: after they dropped Peter off, she got up and drove the carriage, the coachman got into the passenger compartment with the other girl and pulled the shades. At the conclusion of the interlude, the coachman gave Peter’s ten crowns to the girls. “A proper gentleman — let that be a lesson to you.” Altenberg, who has thus paid for the girls’ ride and the coachman’s pleasure, writes his friend to tell him that the golden Viennese heart is indeed alive and well It’s the sort of frequently used reversal that, in yet another way, warns the reader against being hidebound — in thought or otherwise.

Given some of the author’s antics, as well as his writings, it may seem surprising to say that a certain amount of well-directed moralizing is mixed in here as well. Perhaps “moralizing” is the wrong word. Perhaps “worldly wisdom” and a respect for others as individual humans with feelings is a better way of putting it, the wisdom residing in the fact that respect for others may well bring tangible benefits to its practitioner. In “The Mouse,” having checked into a hotel, Peter finds his sleep disturbed by nibbling. The haughty hotel staff refuse to consider the possibility of a mouse, particularly when the complaint is lodged by a visitor who showed up with nothing more than two pairs of socks and a bottle of Slivovitz. He buys a trap, catches the rodent, and is on his way to wave it under their noses when he realizes he’s going to give offense for no very good reason, disposes of it elsewhere, and goes on enjoying the perks that come with being considered somewhat daffy. In “The Walking Stick,” he decides not to insist to the shopkeeper that his walking stick has not actually been repaired. Better to avoid proving that the other person’s in the wrong and go on being treated with kid gloves because one is a “stick nut.”

In fact, if there is a common theme underlying these diverse writings it is this: that the flip side of his strong, and often theatrical, Bohemian individualism is, again somewhat surprisingly, a deep respect and thoroughgoing gentle fondness for each and every individual he seems to have met — including himself — which prevents his writings from becoming nasty caricatures and infuses them with a sunny and uplifting spirit. The stage settings for that spirit, provided by Altenberg’s incredibly sensitive social antennae and his words, provide a picture of fin-de-siecle Vienna that is vivid, lively, finely detailed, and amazingly comprehensive for all its brevity. Significantly, only the war that would destroy forever the possibility of leading a life like his gets short shrift; otherwise it’s all there: literati, chambermaids, artists such as Klimt, the Café Fledermaus, the downtrodden souls, the upper crust, oddities such as shivering Africans on exhibit, the coffeehouse as a preventive for suicide and homelessness, psychiatry, illness, and even a rant on clothing styles (in “Psychology”) that surely has to be a parody of the sartorial tastes and tirades of his dear friend, that pot-banger of an architect, Adolf Loos. Someone called Altenberg the “carnival barker of life,” and that certainly fits if one compares his writings to the brittle dryness of Stefan Zweig’s much-better-known picture of the same society, The World of Yesterday But perhaps “solo violinist of life” would be more accurate, one with a huge repertoire of rousing gallops and polkas, but some sad melodies as well.

So, Servus to you, Peter Altenberg. Glad you never tried to hang yourself from that window box but wrote for us instead. You always did deserve to be remembered by more than a couple of portraits, a café named after you, and a dummy that occasionally gets dusted off and fluffed up; and now, thanks to Peter Wortsman, who has expertly and empathetically supplied you with English words, and the daring Archipelago press, which gave you pages and a face, you will be more widely remembered.

(Many thanks to Raimund Höflinger of Café Central and Michaela Wimmer of Graben Hotel for providing information concerning Altenberg memorabilia.)

John S. Barrett

 

In fin-de-siècle Vienna, the specters of the twentieth century were already stirring. Right-wing mass movements engulfed the once liberal bastion. A disconsolate artist by the name of Adolf Hitler stalked the streets and taverns. At the same time, an effervescent intellectual, literary, and aesthetic culture was awakening. Vienna was a vibrant center of nascent twentieth-century modernism, inhabited by such seminal figures as Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gustav Klimt, Adolf Loos, and Arnold Schoenberg. Its legendary coffeehouses were hotbeds of radical innovation.

The prose-poet Peter Altenberg (née Richard Engländer, 1859-1919) numbers among the coffeehouse luminaries as one of the most captivating. Karl Kraus called him “the freest soul of the epoch.” Born into a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family, he indulged in a bohemian lifestyle in Vienna’s cafés and brothels, and wrote “extracts from life,” sketches that evoked everyday impressions with utmost abbreviation. As he confessed with his characteristic ebullience (and chronic overuse of the exclamation point), “I’d like to capture an individual in a single sentence, a soul-stirring experience on a single page, a landscape in one word!” His “telegram style of the soul” enchanted Thomas Mann, who remarked, “If it be permitted to speak of ‘love at first sound,’ then that’s what I experienced in my first encounter with this poet of prose.” Peter Wortsman’s new translation of a selection of Altenberg’s writings, Telegrams of the Soul, deftly reproduces the sonority, zest, and lyricism of the original prose.

A Baudelaire-inspired dandy, Altenberg sported an enormous mustache, baggy clothing, walking sticks, and open sandals. His celebration of individual fashion as a mode of self-expression (“For everything is an essay about the person who selected it and gladly dons it!”) no doubt resonates better with present-day readers than his ardor for thirteen-year-old girls. Some of his other traits are likely to provoke ambivalence: how do we, in our work-crazed culture, regard his fervent praise of idleness and his near religious practice of it? (Altenberg was in fact medically exempt from work due to “over-excitation of the nerves,” which ultimately landed him in the madhouse, and a concomitant “incapacity for gainful employment,” but he probably saw no need for an excuse to cultivate the fruits of idleness.) How do we evaluate his inveterate aestheticism and his claim that “little things in life supplant the ‘great events’” at a moment when the formidable social and political forces gripping Europe were propelling it into world war?

Altenberg’s aesthetics of the commonplace emanated from his conviction that “the significant things in life have absolutely no importance.” His keen poetic attention to quotidian minutiae and surface ephemera lends his prose its fresh and seductive appeal. Franz Kafka described him as “a genius of nullifications, a singular idealist who discovers the splendors of this world like cigarette butts in the ashtrays of coffeehouses.” Altenberg’s miniaturist method corresponds to his delight in the ornaments of fashion, his tendency to find significance “in the necktie, in the cloth of a dress, in the hat…in a thousand unlikely incidentals all the way down to the cufflinks….”

In Wortsman’s illuminating postscript to Telegrams of the Soul, he discerns a kinship between Altenberg’s technique of compression and the birth of the Correspondenzkarte (postcard) in Austria in 1869. He also likens Altenberg’s style to the Feuilleton, a first-person, impressionistic form of journalism widely practiced among literati and public intellectuals of the day. According to Wortsman, the influence on Altenberg’s sensibility of the general acceleration of communications “in the era of telegraphy, lightning fast trains, and automobile cars”—as Altenberg’s friend Egon Friedell put it—makes his writing particularly compatible with today’s electronic age. Such intuitions appear to have guided Wortsman in his translation: he fires off the sentences with an alacrity that mimics Altenberg’s brisk rhythm and tone.

Take, for example, the opening passage from Grammophonplatte (Gramophone Record), Altenberg’s evocation of Schubert’s Die Forelle (The Trout): In Musik umgesetztes Gebirgswässerlein, kristallklar zwischen Felsen und Fichten murmelnd. Die Forelle, ein entzückendes Raubtier, hellgrau, rot punktiert, auf Beute lauernd, stehend, fließend, vorschießend, hinab, hinauf, verschwindend / “Mountain stream water burbling crystal clear between cliff and pine tree permutated into music. The trout, a ravishing predator, light gray with red speckles, lurking, standing, flowing, shooting forward, downward, upward, disappearing.” Sentence construction, cadence, pace, the fall of the syllables – these elements conform precisely to the German. The fidelity of Wortsman’s translation to the musicality of the original is exceptional. Almost beat-by-beat he replicates the sprightly pulse of Altenberg’s percussive prose.

 

Wiener Roast: Peter Altenberg’s short prose pieces wryly limned prewar Vienna

2006-02

With his walrus moustache, the disheveled, baggy clothes he designed himself, sandals on bare feet in all weather, and exquisite walking sticks, Peter Altenberg was a fixture in the cultural life of fin de siecle Vienna. He was a master of the vignette, a diviner of the telling detail, a prose poet of the demimonde. Altenberg was a Baudelaire with only a touch of spleen. Elegant, arch, and concise, his snapshots of life on the margins were not without bite. In cheerful disillusion, he deflated the hypocrisy and social niceties that were so important to the refined Gemuutlichkeitof the middle and upper classes, but he did so with enough wit to amuse rather than insult his audience.

Take “Poverty,” in which the narrator relates a conversation with his ten-year-old dinner guest, Karoline B., whom he describes as “the little daughter of a poor widow, perfection in the making, already a profoundly human creature.

“Tomorrow, Sir, I have to travel far out to the ‘Doll Doctor’ in the Fifth District!”
“What ever for?”
“Somebody gave me a doll. She only has a top half.”
“Curious!”
“Why curious?! If she’d had a bottom half, too, they damn sure wouldn’t have given her to me!”

Laconic but pointed, in similar fashion the two-sentence “Philosophy” took aim at the voyeurism and superiority masquerading as anthropologic interest when the Viennese public went to view an authentic West African tribal village set up as a year-long exhibit in the Vienna Zoo.

Visitors to the Ashanti Village knock in the evening on the wooden walls of the huts for a lark. The goldsmith Nothei: “Sir, if you came to us in Accra as objects on exhibit, we wouldn’t knock on the walls of your huts in the evening!”

In 1914, Altenberg was nominated jointly with Arthur Schnitzler for the Nobel Prize in Literature. But the war intervened, and Altenberg’s reputation, despite such admirers as Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannstahl, Franz Kafka, and Robert Musil, then as now was mainly restricted to German-speaking countries. If not translated well, his deceptive simplicity and surface frivolity can cloy, turning his writing into period pieces. Alexander King’s collection, Peter Altenberg’s Evocations of Love, in 1960, and Harold Segel’s 1993 anthology, The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, 1890-1938, offered brief introductions to Altenberg’s work. Now Telegrams of the Soul, Peter Wortsman’s translations of ninety prose pieces selected from Altenberg’s fifteen books, deepens the acquaintance. There is some overlap with King’s collection, but Wortsman’s limber translations are surer and more reliable. On the other hand, Telegrams of the Soul could—and should—have been twice as long, with more of Altenberg’s late writing, which became increasingly cynical as his mental stability frayed.

Born Richard Englander in 1859, Peter Altenberg was the eldest son of wealthy, assimilated Jewish parents. He betrayed no hint of literary skill for several decades. In fact, until his first book was published in 1896, he showed little sign of any talent whatsoever: An elementary school teacher described him as a “genius without abilities.” After desultory studies in law and medicine and a failed venture in bookselling, he was diagnosed by a psychiatrist as “constitutionally unfit for employment” because of his “nervous hypersensitivity.” Altenberg’s cultured, tolerant father never quite lost faith in him, but neither did he have much hope for him. In an autobiographical sketch, Altenberg notes that, when asked if he was proud of his son’s literary success, Moritz Englander replied, “I was not overly vexed that he remained an idler for thirty years. So I’m not overly honored that he’s a poet now! I gave him his freedom. I knew that it was a long shot. I counted on his soul.” As for Frau Englander, whom Altenberg passionately worshiped, she was far less understanding, preferring to remain estranged from her eccentric son even after his reputation soared. Altenberg’s literary quest was a search for that very quality of soul his father had put his faith in, and for the mysterious, inaccessible femininity his mother represented. He dove after those “pearls of the soul that roll under the table and are picked up by no one.” Altenberg had no time for the “great events” in life. The little things—the cloth of a dress, neckties, cufflinks, a stray remark—revealed more to him about the bearers’ true selves than any particular accomplishment. The insignificant, the flawed, the unfinished—these were his paths to revelation. “There are three idealists: God, mothers and poets! They don’t seek the ideal in completed things—they find it in the incomplete.” Unfortunately, Altenberg’s own mother’s idealism did not outlast his childhood. Still, his memory of it never faded. In “Perfume,” he associates the scent his mother wore when he was young “with all the love, tenderness, friendship, longing, sadness in the world,” as she was “the only womanly presence able to arouse pleasure and pain, ardent longing and deep despair, but who would always, always forgive whatever I’d done.” Next to the melancholic tranquility of his mother’s Peau d’Espagne, Pinaud, all the perfumes sent to him by guileless young women were merely the scents of “breathtakingly beautiful but rather poisonous exotic flowers . . . even though Mama was no longer there and could no longer forgive me for my sins!” The story “Theater Evening” describes his wait, with his beloved’s poodle, for her return from the theater. He and the dog watch the door, sinking deeper into despondency with each passing hour. But even the mistress’s return, “with her sweet, soft sliding steps,” can’t still the “longing, longing, that flows from the hearts of man and beast.” From this hopeless longing Altenberg sought refuge on the margins, among prostitutes and working-class women, and in his idealization of prepubescent girls. His “mystic cult of beauty,” with its element of self-conscious buffoonery, is neatly captured in a sketch not included in Telegrams.

He and she are sitting side by side on a bench, at night, in the ducal garden. In the stillness she says, “Would you like to kiss me?”
HE: “Yes.”
SHE: “My hand?”
HE: “No.”
SHE: “My mouth?”
HE: “No.”
SHE: “I think you are revolting!”
HE: “I wanted to kiss the hem of your gown.”

Altenberg befriended and even fell in love with some of the Africans who lived in the Ashanti exhibit, as did his father. (In fact, Moritz’s affection for the Africans was ridiculed locally as a congenital condition passed down from his son.) Among the Ashanti, Altenberg found the natural dignity, candor, and sincerity that he believed European civilization had all but extinguished. The Africans, he found, were free of his contemporaries’ rampant egotism, which turned human relations into a contest. True friendship among Europeans had become rare. “Only after death do we fully fathom the distinctive qualities of a loved one, delve deeper into their essence, the living manifestations of which no longer disturb us. So long as he lived he committed the irritating maladroitness to be someone other in his thinking and feelings than ourselves!”

A passionate collector of postcards of landscapes, children, and women (often nude), Altenberg passed his frequent bouts of insomnia obsessively rearranging the more than fifteen hundred cards he kept in three lacquered boxes. It was as effective a therapy as any. On himself “as collector,” he noted, “‘Collecting’ means being able to concentrate on something situated outside the sphere of one’s own personality, yet something not quite so perilous and thankless as a beloved woman—” The family business, importing goods from Croatia, had been passed on to his younger brother and went bankrupt in 1905. So Altenberg supported himself by writing theater reviews as well as his prose pieces. His needs were few, aside from the bottles of vodka he kept under the bed and large quantities of beer, but his increasing emotional and financial instability left him reliant on the kindness of friends, patrons, and lovers. Until his death in 1919, Altenberg moved from one seamy hotel to another; his most permanent address was his regular table at the Cafe Central.

Charming, fragile, witty, incisive, self-deprecating, Altenberg proved an irresistible case study. Freud believed he suffered from “aesthetic impotence.” Schnitzler called him a “professional neurotic.” Unsuited as he was to the more practical demands of life, Altenberg shrewdly recognized the advantages of playing up his neuroses, provided he was in a condition to do so. In “The Mouse,” he tells of checking into a good hotel with just two pairs of socks and two large bottles of slivovitz, for “unseen eventualities.” His complaints about a mouse in his room are coldly dismissed by the hotel staff. After a chambermaid finds one of the books he has written, the staff begin to treat him as an invalid, overlooking his “little weaknesses.” Having caught the mouse, however, he just gets rid of it, realizing his “aura of a man without luggage, with two pairs of socks, two bottles of slivovitz, a book entitled What the Day Brings, and who already claims to see mice every night, would thereby be considerably shaken,” making him just one more kvetching, transient guest. The empty mouse trap on the floor the next morning brings “even greater deference,” and his departure is met with the “friendliest expression of sympathy and devotion.” “Everything is remarkable if our perception of it is remarkable! And every little local incident written up in the daily newspaper can sound the depths of life, revealing all the tragic and the comic.” Peter Altenberg did not aspire to anything so ambitious as Stendhal’s view of the novel as a mirror carried along a roadway. He was content with his unfinished, “worthless samples.” “I’m a just a kind of little pocket mirror,” he wrote, a “powder mirror, no world-mirror.” But that was more than enough to reflect his world.

Tess Lewis writes frequently on German-language literature.

 

Short prose, a little-acknowledged but widely practiced genre, had a highpoint around 1900, in Vienna. A vibrant crucible of modernist culture (in which Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Sigmund Freud, and Oskar Kokoschka rubbed shoulders), it found its keenest expression in sketch-writing for newspapers and magazines, and Altenberg (1859-1919) was its most celebrated practitioner. Writing self-conscious, self-referential pieces, Altenberg cultivated the image of an indolent bohemianism. The 90 pieces Wortsman chose (out of hundreds) offer a good variety, revealing Altenberg as a close observer of mundane environments and events, as anecdotalist and eavesdropper, as autobiographer, allegorist, journalist, and, always, writer. One sequence of seven here—which records Alternberg’s impressions of “the inhabitants of an African show-village … a live exhibit in Vienna” — is rich with fascinating pre-postcolonial ambivalence. Altenberg has been translated before, notably in Alexander King Presents Peter Altenberg’s Evocations of Love, ed. by Alexander King (1960), and the outstanding The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, 1890-1938, ed. by Harold Segel (CH, Mar’94, 31-3673), and these three volumes overlap a bit, but not much. King’s translations are skilled but unreliable (he sometimes stitched together or abridged pieces), but Segel’s and Wortsman’s are impeccable. Wortsman’s afterword to the present volume is informative and elegant. Summing up: Essential. All collections of modern literature.

 

A little book on the portent of the littlest things

2005-04-29

Telegrams of the Soul is short enough to be read at one sitting, but I would advise against that. It’s the sort of book best kept at hand for dipping into at odd moments — while lingering over your coffee at breakfast, or waiting for the commuter train to arrive, or just before you turn out the light beside your bed.

This is, after all, a book whose author assures us that “the significant things in life have absolutely no importance.” It’s the little things that count: “In the necktie, in the cloth of a dress, in the hat . . . in a thousand unlikely incidentals. . . . For everything is an essay about the person who selected it and gladly dons it! He discloses himself to us!”

I first heard about Peter Altenberg when I was in high school. Author Alexander King, who was one of the regulars on The Tonight Show when it was hosted by the great Jack Paar, used to talk about Altenberg all the time. Both were native Viennese. Richard Engländer, who wrote under the name Peter Altenberg, was born there in 1859.

He was the quintessential Romantic bohemian, who scorned the straitlaced fashions of his time, preferring loose-fitting leisure attire and sandals. He consorted with prostitutes, lived in hotel rooms (Vienna’s Hotel Graben now has a Cafe Altenberg), and listed the Cafe Central (the favorite watering hole of turn-of-the-century Vienna’s writers, artists and intellectuals) as his official address — and today, the Cafe Central features a life-size statue of Altenberg sitting at a table.

He was born a Jew but converted to Catholicism in 1900. He was excessively fond of the plum brandy known as slivovitz and was also dependent on sedatives. His admirers included Franz Kafka, Arthur Schnitzler and Thomas Mann (who described his first encounter with Altenberg’s prose as an example of “love at first syllable”). He may be best known nowadays to concertgoers, thanks to Alban Berg’s Five Orchestral Pieces After Picture Postcard Texts of Peter Altenberg.

As befits a writer who thought greatly of little things, Altenberg was a miniaturist. The longest piece in this collection is just over four pages. Many are less than a page.

An insomniac, Altenberg wrote at night, sitting up in bed. In “A Letter to Arthur Schnitzler,” he says that he wrote “altogether freely, without any deliberation. I never know my subject beforehand, I never think it over. I just take paper and write.” Whether this is literally true or not, it is certainly true that what he wrote comes across as spontaneous. He would have made a great literary blogger.

He wrote a book called M”rchen des Lebens (Fairy Tales of Life). Included here is his “Retrospective Introduction to My Book M”rchen des Lebens,” in which he provides the perfect summary of his outlook: We “can all become poets . . . if we only take pains not to let slip a single pearl which life in its rich bounty tosses up every now and then onto the flat dreary beachhead of our day.”

His nonconformism notwithstanding, Altenberg was remarkably representative of his time and the city he rarely ventured far from (in “Traveling,” he describes “one dirt cheap pleasure I know that’s altogether free of disappointments, to study the train schedule from mid-May on and pick out the very train with which you would, if only . . .”). His attitude toward the elevator (“a great mystery”) and the automobile (it “wants to whisk away what’s left of your already overly burdened soul”) suggests a sensibility distinctly more 19th than 20th century.

And in fact, in “A Sunday (12.29.18),” published posthumously, it becomes clear that the price of maintaining his carefree persona was profound sadness and loneliness. World War I must have been a peculiarly poignant disaster for him. By the time he died, in 1919, he must have been painfully aware that the era of his flourish had predeceased him.

 

 

Has any other writer enjoyed unwavering acclaim across a whole range of readership on every level for 110 years, from the time an enthralled Karl Kraus sent a sample of Alten-berg’s vignettes to Fischer in 1986 to the jam-packed coordinated exhibits in Vienna’s Jewish Museum and Literaturhaus in 2003? Idolized by Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Felix Salten, Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and of course Kraus, among countless others, Altenberg fascinates readers no less today, including a remarkable number of people who usually “hate to read” but who find a compelling personality completely articulated. Articulated in the brilliant immediacy of the writing, of course, the writing in turn revealing a sensibility that seems to grow only more free in its individuality of thought, more admirable in its courageous rejection of shallow convention, more intrepid in embracing true happiness, more daring in its erotic and aesthetic discoveries as years pass. Tourist-drawing kitsch aside, it’s no wonder that a mannequin of Altenberg, of all writers, still sits at his table in the Café Central. Richard von Schaukal Altenberg had unexpected admirers provides one key to Altenberg’s art, the lack of any boundary between living and writing: “Seine sonderbaren Bücher . . . sind nicht Bücher, die man als Bücher liest, sondern die dazu dienen, ihn aufzufinden, der in allen Zeilen . . . ist, Peter Altenberg, der Dichter . . . Es handelt sich immer nur um Peter Altenberg, den Menschen, denn das und nichts anderes ist Peter Altenberg, der Dichter.” The weft of subjective and objective, of ascetic and decadent, of strict documentary and feuilleton, of self-absorption and relentless outward view, of free-wheeling improvisation and inconspicuous but extreme stylistic discipline are the fusions that so fascinated his fellow writers and subsequent readers.