Telegrams of the Soul
Telegrams of the Soul
Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg
Selected, translated and
with an afterword by Peter Wortsman
archipelago books
Copyright © 2005 Archipelago Books
First Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.
English Translation copyright © 2005 Peter Wortsman
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Altenberg, Peter, 1859–1919.
[Prose works. Selections. English. 2005]
Telegrams of the soul : selected prose of Peter Altenberg / selected, translated, and with an afterword by Peter Wortsman.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-9749680-8-0 (pbk.)
I. Altenberg, Peter, 1859-1919—Translations into English.
I. Wortsman, Peter. II. Title.
PT2601.L78A6 2005
838'.91208—dc22 2004027895
Archipelago Books
232 Third Street #A111
Brooklyn, NY 11201
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Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg
Translations of “Flower Allée,” “The Mouse” and “In the Stadtpark” were first published in Fiction. An earlier version of “P.S. (to P.A. from P.W.)” previously appeared under a different title in A Modern Way to Die, small stories and microtales, by Peter Wortsman, Fromm International Publishing Corporation, New York, 1991.
Cover art: Oskar Kokoschka, Peter Altenberg, 1909.
© 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ProLitteris, Zürich
All rights reserved
This publication is made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
to my father’s wit and my mother’s soul
P. W.
Contents
Autobiography
Retrospective Introduction to my Book Märchen des Lebens
A Letter to Arthur Schnitzler
On Writing
The Koberer (Procurer)
Coffeehouse
I Drink Tea
Perfume
On Smells
Tulips
Flower Allée
Uncle Max
Uncle Emmerich
My Aunt
Career
The Bed
Celebrity
Poem
Love
Theater Evening
Poverty
The Little Silk Swatches
Day of Affluence
Traveling
In the Volksgarten
Marionette Theater
At Buffalo Bill’s
Saint Martin’s Island
The Kingfisher
The Drummer Belín
Twelve
Seventeen to Thirty
Schubert
Gramophone Record
A Real True Relationship
The Nature of Friendship
October Sunday
Fellow Man
The Reader
Modern Diogenes
Conversation
Albert
The Private Tutor
Conversation with Tíoko
The Automaton
Adultery
Philosophy
Akolé
Complications
The Novice Postal Clerk
Conversation with a Chambermaid
Afternoon Break
The Mouse
The Hotel Room
Elevator
Visit
Little Things
Idyll
My Ideals
Peter Altenberg as Collector
On the Street
The Walking Stick
A Walk
Psychology
Discovery
Persecution Complex
January, on the Semmering
The Steamboat Landing
In Munich
My Summer Trip, 1916
My Gmunden
An Experience
In a Viennese Puff
Putain
Human Relations
The New Romanticism
Cabaret Fledermaus
Newsky Roussotine Troop
The Interpretation
Subjectivity
Aphorisms
The People Don’t Always Feel Altogether Social-democratic
Big Prater Swing
Sunset in the Prater
The Night
Sanatorium for the Mentally Imbalanced (but not the one in which I wiled!)
Mood
July Sunday
In the Stadtpark
A Sunday (12.29.1918)
To Make a Long Story Short: The Prose of Peter Altenberg (an afterword)
P.S. (to P.A. from P.W.)
There are three idealists: God, mothers and poets!
They don’t seek the ideal in completed things—
they find it in the incomplete.
Peter Altenberg
Telegrams of the Soul
Autobiography
I was born in 1862, in Vienna. My father is a businessman. He has one distinguishing quality: He only reads French books. For the past 40 years. Above his bed hangs a wonderful likeness of his God “Victor Hugo.” Evenings he sits in a dark red armchair, reading the Revue des deux Mondes, dressed in a blue robe with a wide velvet collar à la Victor Hugo. There’s not another idealist like him in this world. He was once asked: “Aren’t you proud of your son?”
He replied: “I was not overly vexed that he remained an idler for 30 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!”
Yes, indeed, oh noblest, most remarkable of all fathers, for the longest time I squandered your godly gift of freedom, doted on noble and altogether ignoble women, loafed around in forests, was a lawyer without studying law, a doctor without studying medicine, a book dealer without selling books, a lover without ever marrying, and finally a poet without composing any poetry. Can these short things really be called poetry?! No way.They’re extracts! Extracts from life. The life of the soul and what the day may bring, reduced to two to three pages, cleansed of superfluities like a beef cow in a reduction pot! It’s up to the reader to re-dissolve these extracts with his own lust for life and stir them back into a palatable broth, to heat them up with his own zest, in short, to make them light, liquidy and digestible. But there are “soulful stomachs” that can’t tolerate extracts. Everything ingested remains heavy and caustic. Such constitutions require 90 percent broths, watered-down blends. What are they supposed to dilute the extracts with?! With their own “lust for life” maybe?
Consequently, I have many adversaries, “dyspeptics of the soul,” quite simply. Bad digesters! “Finishing” is the artist’s all. Even finishing with himself! And yet, I maintain: that which you “wisely withhold” is more artistic than that which you “blurt out.” Isn’t that so?! Indeed, I love the “abbreviated deal,” the telegram style of the soul!
I’d like to capture an individual in a single sentence, a soul- stirring experience on a single page, a landscape in one word! Present arms, artist, aim, bull’s-eye! Basta. And above all: Listen to yourself. Lend an ear to the voices within. Don’t be shy with yourself. Don’t let yourself be scared off by unfamiliar sounds. As long as they’re your own! Have the courage of your own nakedness!
I was nothing, I am nothing, I will be nothing. But I will live out my life in freedom and
let noble and considerate souls share in the experiences of this free inner life, by putting them out in the most concentrated form on paper.
I am poor, but I am myself! Absolutely and completely myself! The man without compromises!
How far do you get with that? One hundred Guldens a month and a few ardent admirers.
Well, that’s what I’ve got.
My life has been devoted to the boundless admiration of God’s artwork, “woman’s body!” The walls of my humble room are practically papered over with perfect studies of the nude. All are hung in oaken frames with captions. A fifteen-year-old bears the motto: “Beauté est vertue.” Beneath another it says: “There is but one indecency in the naked—to deem the naked indecent!”
Under yet another it says: “This is how God and the poets dreamed you up. But feeble little man invented modesty and covered you, en-coffined you!”
When P.A. wakes, his glance falls on the holy splendor and he takes the trouble and stress of existence in stride, since he was endowed with two eyes to drink in the holiest loveliness on earth!
Eye, oh eye, Rothchild-chattel of man!
But the others stare, they ogle life like the toad ogles the water-lily.
I’d like these words inscribed on my tombstone: “He loved and saw.”
Yes, indeed, to live in inner ecstasies, to get yourself all hot and bothered, piping hot, to let yourself be set on fire by the beauties of this world, that was all we ever wanted, father and son, that was all.
But whereas the old man was still somewhat attached to everyday life, at times colliding with it, the younger one fled immediately and without a second thought from this dungeon of duty.
True, I am poor, poor, but my noble father gave me the treasure which few fathers in their gentle wisdom grant their sons: “Time for development and freedom.” That allowed my uncorrupted soul to lovingly abandon itself to the inconceivable treasures which every hour of every day spill like pearls onto the desolate shore of life, allowed it to abandon itself to the tragic or the tender events, and grow, grow—.
My Mama was once a very delicate, strikingly lovely lady with fine hands and feet and slender joints. Like a gazelle. Once my father brought back from England a very pretty girl. He said to Mama: “This, my dear, is Maud-Victoria. She is the prettiest girl in England.” My Mama saw that she was indeed the prettiest girl in England and said in a downright sorrowful voice: “Will she have to stay with us from now on?” Whereupon, my father was so moved that he sent the “prettiest girl in England” back where she came from.
When my father paid frequent visits to the Ashantee girls,* my dearly beloved girlfriends, and gave them silk scarves as gifts, everyone said: “The old man and his son are two of a kind.”
As a boy I had an indescribable love for mountain meadows. The mountain meadow steaming under the blazing sun, fragrantly wafting, alive with bugs and butterflies, made me downright drunk. So too did clearings in the woods. On swampy sunny patches sit butterflies, blue silken small ones and black and red admirals and you can see the hoofprint of deer. But for mountain meadows I had a fanatical love, I longed for them. Under all the white hot stones I imagined there lurked poison adders, and this creature was the very incarnation of the fairy tale mystery of my boyhood years. It replaced the man-eating ogre, the giant and the witch. All the bites and their consequences, the terribly slow and torturous pain, I knew it all by heart, how to treat a wound and so on. The wondrously delicate gray-black body of the adder seemed to me to be the loveliest, most elegant creature, and when I loved a little girl I always pictured again and again only one thing happening: an adder would bite her in the foot on a hike and I’d suck out the venom to save her!
I knew the terrain inside out in which adders must necessarily make their homes, trod through it, lay in wait; but in my entire life I have never spotted a live adder, even though the region around Schneeberg is crawling with them. It remained for me a bad but sweetly disturbing dream.
Ever and again I imagined the scene: my beloved is bitten, above the ankle. Everyone stands around helpless and desperate. Then I fetch a flask of gentian root spirit from the nearest chalet, engender the proper state of intoxication, the only remedy. Then she says: “Heavens, however did you know that?” And I say simply: “I read it in Brehm—”
Always, everywhere I waited for adders. They never came.
At age 23, I worshiped a thirteen-year-old girl, wept through my nights, got engaged to her, became a book dealer in Stuttgart so as to hurry up and earn enough money to be able to fend for her later. But nothing came of it. Nothing ever came of my dreams.
I never found anything else in life worthwhile except for a woman’s beauty, the grace of a lady, so sweet, so childlike! And I view anyone who ever prized anything else as a poor fool swindled out of his life!
Give your all to the implacable day and the merciless hour, but know it and feel it that your holiest and truest moments are only those in which your stirred and stunned eye falls upon a female graceful and soft! Better know it, life’s lackey, that you’re a day laborer, a carter, a prisoner, a recruit, a self-deceiver deceived by life, and that only by the grace of a “saintly lovely woman” could you ever rise to an aristocrat or king!
I only value the little things I write insofar as they shed a little light for the man drawn and drained by a thousand duties on the lovely, graceful and mysterious being at his side. Consumed by the tasks of his implacable day, he dare not view woman as a rare and inscrutable being in and of herself, but rather as nothing more than a partner in his miseries! Her world is dear and understandable to him only insofar as he derives blessings from it. The other life is left to the poets! Thus do these souls ever so slightly removed from life take up their lyres again and again to exalt with their tears the noble creatures of which the others take brutal advantage! I myself have only suffered at the foot of these beauties to whom I have consecrated my lost and unnecessary existence. Still I believe I had a hand in infusing a whiff of the Greek cult of beauty in the harried life of a few young fools! But that too may only be a utopia.
Poor and forsaken, I live out what’s left of my life, my glance still seeking out a noble woman’s hand, a graceful step, a gentle face turned away from the world. Amen.—
__________________
*In 1897, Altenberg often visited, promptly befriended and idolized the subjects, especially the young women, of a live human exhibit of Africans from the Gold Coast in a reconstructed village erected at Vienna’s Zoological Garden in the Schönbrunn Palace Gardens. A curious example of Fin-de-Siècle flirtation with the exotic, Altenberg, characteristically, metamorphosed that flirtation into a heartfelt passion.
Retrospective Introduction to my Book Märchen des Lebens*
We relegated fairytales to the realm of childhood—that exceptional, wondrous, stirring, remarkable time of life! But why rig out childhood with it, when childhood is already sufficiently romantic and fairytale-like in and of itself? The disenchanted adult had best seek out the fairytale-like elements, the romanticism of each day and each hour right here and now in the hard, stern, cold fundament of life! Even the truly predestined poets with their more impressionable hearts, eyes and ears fetch their telling tidbits from actual occurrences, listening in on the romance of life itself. The rest of us can all become poets too if only we 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!
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, the same as Shakespeare’s tragedies! We all do life an injustice in surrendering poetry as the exclusive province of the poet’s heart, since every one of us has the capacity to mine the poetic in the quarry of the mundane! The poet’s heart will forfeit this privilege through the evolution of the intrinsic culture of the common human heart!
_
_________________
*Märchen des Lebens (The Fairytale of Life), 1908
A Letter to Arthur Schnitzler
July 1894
Dear Dr. Arthur Schnitzler,
Your lovely letter made me truly inordinately happy. So how do I write?
Altogether freely, without any deliberation. I never know my subject beforehand, I never think it over. I just take paper and write. Even the title I toss off and hope that what comes out will have something to do with it.
One must have confidence, not force the issue, just let oneself live life to the fullest, frightfully free, let it fly—.
What comes out is definitely the stuff that was real and deep down in me. If nothing comes out then there was nothing real and deep down in me and that doesn’t matter then either.
I view writing as a natural organic spilling out of a full, overripe person. Thus the failings, the pale cast of thought.
I hate any revision. Toss it off and that’s good—! Or bad! What’s the difference?! If it’s only you, you and nobody else, your sacred you.The term you coined “self-searcher” is really terrific. But when will you write “self-finder”?
My pieces have the misfortune always to be taken 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.
The more important thing is that I be able to show in a circle of refined, cultured young people that the little spark is fluttering in me. Otherwise, one has the impression of seeming so pressed, so importunate, as if everyone looked askance. I’m already enough of an “invalid of life.” Your letter made me very very happy! You’re all so kind to me. Everyone full of goodwill. But you really did say such absolutely wonderful things to me. Especially that term “self-searcher.”
With no profession, no money, no position and already hardly any hair, you can well imagine that such gracious recognition from a “man in the know” falls on very welcome ears.
Thus am I and will I ever remain a writer of “worthless samples” and the finished product never appears. I’m just a kind of little pocket mirror, powder mirror, no world-mirror.