Telegrams of the Soul Page 2

  Yours,

  Peter Altenberg

  On Writing

  I just came to the realization, to the sudden, illuminating, simple realization, upon receipt of a letter from my true friend, Fr. W., a man most inclined to friendship (he writes with unbelievable verve on one of the finest typewriters) that to write a good letter can only mean to write it such that the recipient be able, while reading it, to hear the letter writer speaking loudly and most emphatically to him, as though seated right there at his side! To be able to completely reconcile in a letter this difference between the one who silently writes and the one who speaks out loud, that’s true letter writing skill! Everything else is literary rubbish crowned with laurels à la pig’s head. Temperament, incivilities, peculiarities, impertinences, tomfooleries, everything must come roaring out, roaring, roaring; or else it’s a contrived, mendacious and, therefore, boring, business! Letter-instant-photography!

  A friend of mine, the watchmaker Josef T., once came to me with a request. He had just laid his lovely 23-year-old beloved in the grave.

  “Peter, you know me, please help me! Write me a proper inscription for my marble tombstone. When may I hope that you think up something appropriate?”

  “Now or never!” I replied right there in the middle of the street.

  He tore out his notebook.

  I wrote:

  “I was the Watchmaker Josef T.,

  And then I found paradise through you—.

  And now I’m the Watchmaker

  Joseph T. again—.”

  You’ve got to pour out all your humanity spontaneously, in a rush; because later it turns into a tasteless sauce! That’s why there are so many tasteless sauces—.

  The Koberer (Procurer)

  “Own up,” said the Count to Mitzi G., “who’d you get to draft this letter to me for you?!”

  “Drafted?! Drafted?! What do you mean by that?!”

  “Drafted! You couldn’t possibly have dreamed it up yourself!”

  “Why not?! You think I’m all that stupid?!”

  “No, yes. But once and for all, you didn’t write this letter!”

  “Who else do you think wrote it?!”

  “That I don’t know. You’re the only one that knows it. Listen, Mitzi, I’ll give you one hundred Crowns if you tell his name!”

  “One hundred Crowns? Make it one fifty!”

  “It was Peter!”

  “What Peter?!”

  “Peter, you know, Peter Altenberg!”

  The letter: “Saw you again last night at the ‘Tabarin!’ Couldn’t talk to you, didn’t dare to. So there I was seated face to face with the guy that had me for a whole year butt-naked under the covers. . . . It was just no use!”

  “How did he ever come to draft this letter for you?!”

  I said to him, I said: “For God’s sake, write me something I’d have written if I knew how to write!”

  “So the letter’s from you after all?!”

  “That’s what I said from the start!”

  So then she patched things up again with the Count.

  Coffeehouse

  You’ve got troubles of one kind or another—get thee to the coffeehouse!

  She can’t make it to your place for whatever perfectly plausible reason—to the coffeehouse!

  Your boots are torn—to the coffeehouse!

  You make four hundred Crowns and spend five hundred—coffeehouse!

  You’re a frugal fellow and don’t dare spend a penny on yourself—coffeehouse!

  You’re a paper pusher and would’ve liked to become a doctor—coffeehouse!

  You can’t find a girlfriend up to snuff—coffeehouse!

  You’re virtually on the verge of suicide—coffeehouse!

  You loathe and revile people and yet can’t live without them—coffeehouse!

  No place else will let you pay on credit—coffeehouse!

  I Drink Tea

  Six P.M. approaches. I sense it coming on. Not as intensely as the children sense the approach of Christmas Eve. But I sense it all the same. At six on the dot I drink tea, a festive satisfaction that never disappoints in this burdensome existence. Something you can count on, to have a becalming bliss at your beck and call. A given completely free of life’s vicissitudes. Pouring the good mountain spring water into my lovely white half-liter nickel-plated receptacle already gives me pleasure. Then I wait out the simmer, the song of the water. I have a huge, semispherical, deep, brick-red Wedgewood cup. The tea comes from the Café Central, wafting with the scent of high mountain meadow, of wild bugle and sunburned pasture grass.

  The tea is golden yellow-straw yellow, never brownish, always light and unoppressive. I smoke a cigarette along with it, a “Chelmis, Hyksos.” I sip it very very slowly. The tea is an internally stimulating nerve bath. You can bear it all better while drinking it. You feel it inside, a woman ought to have that effect. But she never does. She hasn’t yet acquired the culture of serene sweetness so as to affect you like a noble warm golden-yellow tea. She believes she’d lose her power. But my six o’clock tea never loses its power over me. I long for it daily in just the same way and lovingly let it wed my body.

  Perfume

  As a child, rummaging around a drawer in the desk of my beloved, oh so beautiful Mama, the desk made of mahogany and cut glass, I found an empty perfume bottle which still retained the potent scent of a certain unidentified fragrance.

  Many times I’d sneak over and sniff at it.

  I associated this fragrance with all the love, tenderness, friendship, longing, sadness in the world. But for me all these feelings were bound up with my Mama. Later fate fell upon us, unsuspected, like a horde of Huns and inflicted heavy losses all around.

  And one day I dashed from perfumery to perfumery hoping to possibly find in the little sample bottles the fragrance from the mahogany desk drawer of my late beloved Mama. And finally, finally I found it: Peau d’Espagne, Pinaud, from Paris.

  And I remembered the bygone days when Mama 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 and who fretted over me and perhaps even before falling asleep at night prayed for my future happiness . . .

  Later, many young women in their guileless sweet zeal sent me their favorite perfume to thank me from the heart for a beauty tip of my devising, namely that every perfume ought to be rubbed into the skin all over the naked body right after the bath so that it wafts forth like the body’s own true natural essence! But all these perfumes were like the scents of breathtakingly beautiful but rather poisonous exotic flowers. Only the fragrance Peau d’Espagne, Pinaud, from Paris, brought me a melancholic tranquility, even though Mama was no longer there and could no longer forgive me for my sins!

  On Smells

  Women are enormously impressionable, they so easily take on the smells of their surroundings! If she was in the dairy, then for hours afterwards she’ll smell of milk, her hands, her hair, her entire body—. If she was at the green grocers, she’ll retain for hours the smell of all the greens, like a mixed vegetable soup—. In the garden she smells of lilacs or linden trees or just of garden—. On the high mountain meadow of cow pasture land and fresh cut meadow. This is a tragic fate; since she always smells afterwards of the last lout she was with, of the last snob and his repulsive scent, his foul odor of duplicity! She never smells of poets since poets keep a respectful distance, probably on account of their artistic egotism. Most often women smell of “smart alecks” always too close for comfort! That’s when they are most receptive to smells—. Noble ladies definitely ought to remain outdoors in nature or stick to the saintly solitude of their own domicile. It stinks everywhere else!

  Even good books never stink, they are the distillation of all the malodorous sins one has committed of which one has finally managed to extract a drop of fragrant humanity!

  But the other sins can’t be distilled!

  Tulips

  There are geniuses among the tulips, too, just as there are in every manifestation of the organic! Like orchids, for instance. I once had a white tulip that stayed shut tight, immaculate and virginal, for a full fourteen days despite the warmth of my room and water. Only then did it open and brazenly display its stamen and its pistil. And so it remained for another eight days. Others, for instance, will open on the spot in a warm room and water, and are already complete in all their splendor; their petals fall as if stunned by the blow. Still others, especially the speckled ones, evidently just shrivel up like little old grannies, without losing their petals they die off, doggedly resisting life. You throw them away even though there could still be a little spare life left in them! And it may well be so. Tulips are not without smell, they exude to the eyes! It may well be the most exciting, longest lasting scent there is!

  Flower Allée

  Six A.M. It is dry, cool, the sky is a wan white blue, bleu-lacté the French writers would say—.

  A florist dealing in artificial flowers flings back gray wooden shutters, open for business.

  In the dusty window display, spring blooms in sloe blossoms; summer in cornflowers; fall in pink and lilac asters and the feathery pompoms of dandelions.

  A pale shop girl carries white roses out into the street, with which she decorates a carriage parked outside. The flowers smell like old muslin.

  Flower Allée—or this afternoon at four! Box seats, five crowns! Let’em spread the money among the people, thousands profit indirectly, you have no idea! It trickles down to—Why it’s just impossible to think it all the way through.

  Out in the street, a young woman with a sleeping child in her arms stares at the “flying bed of roses,” a slice of “enchantment,” roses and a horse-drawn carriage, the myst
ery of the “beautiful superfluous!”

  The child sleeps soundly in the clear morning air.

  From a first floor window, a young prostitute in her nightgown peeks out from behind a white shade: “Should I hire the carriage, should I not, should I, should I not, should I—?”

  The shop girl looks up: “Slut—!”

  The shop girl yawns, sticks a rose into the coachman’s buttonhole.

  The young mother with the child walks on. The child sleeps soundly in the clear morning air.

  The prostitute pulls down the shade.

  The rose-carriage rolls off; the roses sway, bow, rustle, tremble in the breeze, and one tumbles to the asphalt—

  That afternoon, a woman and a young girl hire the carriage.

  “Les fleurs sont fausses—,” the girl observes.

  “ ‘S ’at so—,” says the woman, “is it really that obvious?!”

  Flower Allée. Access via the Praterstrasse. Flying flower bed. Thousands profit indirectly!

  The young prostitute lies in her bed, asleep. The afternoon sun warms the white shade. She is dreaming: “Rose carriage—.”

  The shop girl reclines on a little whicker chair in the dark, dank artificial flower storeroom, asleep—. She is dreaming: “Rose carriage—.”

  The young woman carries her child through the streets. The child sleeps soundly in the misty afternoon air—.

  The rose that tumbled that morning from the passing carriage stands tall in a glass on a street sweeper’s window sill.

  His little daughter says: “Yuck, it stinks—.”

  To which the street sweeper might have replied: “These are the flowers that blossom on the asphalt of a big city—!” But that’s not what he said. A simple man—it just wasn’t his way—. He muses: “Must be from the Flower Allée—!”

  Uncle Max

  This Max, my uncle, who’s been dead for seven years now, was once very handsome, indeed, extremely handsome, even according to modern standards. Exceedingly slender, exceedingly tall, and with a pug nose. Consequently, he had a love affair with his mother’s, my grand-mamma’s, very young seamstress. He bought himself a small villa with garden in Hietzing, on the High Street, and installed his seamstress there. She planted herself a bed of roses and carnations and was pleased that her dainty lovely little fingers no longer had to suffer from all the sewing. She even nursed them now with malatine and honey glycerin to make up for those awful torturous years. One day the family decided that my tall, handsome, slender uncle with the pug nose ought to make a “match.” “Alright,” he said, “à la bonheur. But what will become of Anna?” Anna was married off to a man who had been terribly fond of her since childhood and had only lacked “nervus rerum” to make her—pardon, himself, happy! Anna went along with everything, since it is better to go along with things when not to go along with them is of little use. So my uncle married and added another floor to the villa in Hietzing. A gardener was engaged to tend to the rose and carnation beds planted by Anna. One day my newlywed aunt said to my tall, handsome, slender uncle: “Say, who was that Anna anyway after whom these lovely well-kept carnations are named?” My uncle peered down at the speckled carnations and could not fathom why this Anna still mattered.

  My uncle has been dead and gone for seven years now and my aunt is a grand-mamma. The only thing that hasn’t changed is the lovely bed of speckled Anna-Carnations in the garden of the Hietzing villa.

  Uncle Emmerich

  My uncle Emmerich had no heart. He speculated on copies of old paintings billed as originals, which, in some cases, later actually turned out to be originals. But finally he went bankrupt. We boys were present at the dinner table on the eve of the “Economic Capitulation in the House of Emmerich,” at which my uncle argued, based on irrefutable evidence in Silberer’s Sports News, his bible, that “Quick Four” was bound to win at the big race on Sunday. Aside from which, he got private tips to that effect from the stable. All of a sudden he looked up and noticed that his wife and daughter were quietly weeping. “Will somebody please tell me why in heaven’s name these dames have started bawling?” he said. Of course they started bawling because of the lost money. What else do women bawl seriously about? Quick Four didn’t win either, neither Quick nor Four, nor in any combination, and my uncle drove home deep in thought on the upper level of the elegant English double-decker sports omnibus (at ten Crowns a seat), armed with the very same binoculars likewise employed by Count Niki Esterhazy. “There goes the dowry of our poor daughters!” my aunt kept weeping. “Teach your child not to need a dowry!” said my uncle. When he auctioned off his collection of paintings, for which he had been derided all his life by the family, it turned out that it had been worth more than all the money he’d squandered otherwise. Henceforth, the family, which had previously called him a dimwit, called him a remarkable man. And my aunt said: “Emmerich, in your heart of hearts you’re a good man after all!”

  My Aunt

  I have an aunt. My first memory of her is as follows: My uncle offered a toast at the wedding dinner. At that very moment I had in my mouth two candied strawberries, a chocolate praline with coffee filling, a hazelnut pâte and a pineapple fondant complete with paper wrapping. Then my father said: “You see . . . !?” He was referring to the quote from Goethe with which the toast concluded. You see how nice it is when you know something, you’re heaped with honors and on top of it all you even get a bride.

  In truth, I saw that such knowledge could get you a rather skinny and not very good looking bride. At the end of the dinner I saw my uncle standing with her beside a yellow silk damask curtain, probably saying to her: “Let me conclude with the wise words of Goethe . . . ,” whereupon my aunt could not help but get an eyeful of the bizarre pattern of the damask curtain.

  Very soon after these events my aunt became fat and my uncle wrote a book about the national prosperity. I only knew that my aunt could laugh like a fool, for instance, if someone said: “You know how Mr. Z. walks, don’t you?! He walks like this . . .” Then she shook herself out laughing and her arms became very short and fat and vibrated with merriment. My uncle considered everything “from the standpoint of a national economist—.” He felt: “The thinking of a man of genius revolves around a set point, taking all sides into consideration; these, for instance, are the counter-arguments—.”

  “How Clotilde can laugh . . . !” the ladies remarked at high tea.

  “Indeed,” said one, “her husband considers it a savings for the GNP, you get more out of nutritious matter, digest it all; laughter is healthy. Grief—a waste of vital strengths, joy—a savings! It’s all a chain reaction.”

  A young girl said: “I think her laughter is a kind of crying; it’s pretty much the same . . . only in reverse . . .”

  “Don’t talk such nonsense,” they said to the young girl. “You’re already ditzy enough.”

  One night I met my aunt with her daughter at a ball. She had on a red silk gown, was very fat and looked just like a mortadella sausage. The daughter hobnobbed with millionaires’ sons with noble “vons” tacked onto their names and decked out in snow-white tails with gold buttons.

  My aunt said to me: “Say, I want to tell you something, come with me . . . !”

  She led me down the halls.

  She stopped in one room.

  “That’s it . . . ,” she said, “will you take a look at her . . . !”

  Seated there was a strawberry blonde American girl who looked like an angel and like the heavens and all the flowers in the field!

  My fat aunt and I just stood there . . .

  My aunt, the mortadella sausage, folded her hands and whispered quietly: “God protect her!”

  I led her back . . .

  She was altogether flustered. “I beg you,” she said, “don’t breathe a word of this to my husband or my daughter, I just showed her to you because you’re so crazy . . .”