Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Well then, are you a writer or no writer at all? Let’s pay no further heed to what you may have wanted this broad to think about you. Your heart is so abundantly preoccupied with her, that in due course we’re bound to hear more about her from your mouth; no fear of missing out on that. But now, pray tell us in plain language whether you are, or are not, a “man of the pen.”

Fair enough. Judging by the amount I had already written by that time, I was indeed a full-fledged writer, and a prolific one at that. I had inscribed thousands of pages chock-full with my indecipherable hen-scratchings. Only Beatrice was able to make sense of the mess, and it was only for her eyes that I wrote anyway. Love letters? Well, it began with love letters; that’s how I was first lured out of my cave, where, bearlike, I had been sucking my paws in willful hibernation, waiting vainly for daylight to arrive. Strangely enough, I started out using the French language — not because it is the classic medium of love, the language in which, by a fortuitous quirk of fate, the finest love letters of the Western world have been preserved for us: the outpourings of the heart ascribed to Mariana Alcoforado. The numerous attempts at re-translation of her letters into Portuguese are simply unreadable, and in Rilke’s German version, an aesthetic veneer has spoiled the radiant power of the “original.”

Nor was my reason for writing my love letters in French the fact that I had any particular fluency in the language. That was hardly the case. I had to use a dictionary to express what my heart was feeling, but the required precision was not to be found in the Advanced Langenscheidt Dictionary. Was it that I had made impressive progress as a lover? What I needed was not even available in the massive Sachs-Villette, a work that has otherwise served me superbly for solving linguistic conundrums. One of my most indelible intellectual experiences, comparable in importance to my first acquaintance with Karl May, Schopenhauer, Hamann, and Pascoaes, occurred when one day — or I should say one night — I discovered effortlessly, painlessly, and directly, the language for expressing my amorous sentiments — a language I had overlooked as the result of endless doubts and confusions. This language was my very own German. Suddenly I realized that German was not only good for writing poems. And suddenly I found myself filling reams of paper with my mother tongue — which is not to say that I used the language my mother used; mothers generally look askance at their son’s expressions of love for another woman. My average nocturnal emission comprised thirty pages. Once I made it to eighty; twixt dusk and dawn, inspired by the workings of my benighted soul, the words just gushed forth from the Parker Duofold Senior held in my febrile hand, a hand attached to a physically depleted body cowering in the dark, in fear of existence itself. Between God and the Devil, between my heart and hers, from verses of Walther von der Vogelweide to the close analysis of erotic sensations — there was nothing that Vigoleis, like some latter-day Henri Frédéric Amiel, did not commit to paper.

But did all that activity turn me into a “writer”? No, my dear Self, no, and no again, it did not. But then permit me to inquire what other word there might be for such an enterprise. The compilers of Heyse’s Concise Dictionary of the German Language are quite clear about it: a “writer” is not someone who simply writes, but one who writes “works” and has them published. Had any of my “works” emerged from the press? The only “press” I had been involved with was the press of inner turmoil that had given rise to my writing. Had I been able to gain detachment from all the scribbled pages by having them printed and distributed to a reading public, then perhaps my chronic anxiety might have been curable. A true writer (to continue my thoughts on this subject, despite its having no further bearing on me) who suffers for his work must find a certain measure of surcease by sending it to the marketplace, for otherwise he would hardly go to the trouble of putting his work in saleable form. If God had not suffered during the act of Creation, He would have had no reason to display His product as The World. A “suffering God”—such a notion can shed new light on Creation; it might move you to take pity on the Creator if you were not yourself the most abject victim of the eternal tension between what is and what can never be. By “you,” I once again mean my own self, as well as my friend Vigoleis, who is the incarnation of an even more serious anomaly.

My Epistolarium nocturnum , and the harvest of my literary frenzy ( furor poeticus ), would have filled volumes if it were ever printed; that is to say, if I had not withheld the inscribed leaves from posterity, and even (I confess it) from their addressee Beatrice, by committing them to the flames. Whatever portion of my “literature” escaped the coal stove was put into service as garden fertilizer. Neither the onion nor the head of cabbage cared much whether the substance that fed their roots was in verse or prose. In whatever style I composed them, my pages ended up providing nourishment for the fruits of the fields. If challenged, I can furnish the names of horticultural witnesses.

Thomas Mann, whom I first met in Locarno in the summer of 1938, complained bitterly about the writing desks provided in hotel rooms. He never found one that suited his needs exactly; the more expensive the accommodations, the less reliable was the furniture for writing on. I found the poet Henny Marsman to be less fastidious in this regard; he was happy with a slab of wood that didn’t wobble. The wealthy Pascoaes, who could afford tables of gold if he wished, is more humble still; he has composed his entire oeuvre sitting at a tiny round table of the type that a magician carries around in his valise — symbolic of a higher art form, perhaps. Other writers have done entirely without artificial support. They gaze into thin air, and become famous by means of works they have literally written on their knees. I am thinking of Camões, Slauerhoff, Peter Altenberg, the Portuguese arch-poet Barbosa du Bocage, as well as certain Old Covenant prophets like Job, who is reported to have penned the chronicle of his trial of suffering while sitting on his dung heap. So we see that the writing surface is unimportant. But in Pilar’s house there was no usable surface at all, except for a table that we would have to clear for each and every meal. Where was I going to do my work? I refrain from using the word “writing,” now that I have made it sound so suspect in my personal case.

Many other things were missing in the house in question, even certain items that were indispensable for daily living. Having brought a considerable amount of money with us to the island, on the following day we went out and bought all kinds of useful merchandise. By late afternoon, busy hands had delivered them to the apartment. Even a good-sized wooden wardrobe was boosted and thrust up the murky stairway, not without loss of plaster on both walls. Julietta, with whom I had spent all Sunday strolling through the city, came forth with so much eager help and advice that we all forgave her. And it was the evening of the third day. And that’s how it went, midst peace and good cheer, for the rest of the week. One item after another was added to the household, and everyone saw what had been accomplished and purchased, and everyone saw that it was good. As in the Creation Account, I have been able to sketch out this initial period in just a few verses before settling down, again taking the Book of Books as my awe-inspiring model, to narrate the events subsequent to this majestic feat of prestidigitation.

Picture Vigoleis as a beginning student in Spanish. He took his first lessons not from Beatrice, and not from Langenscheidt. As Zwingli had advised, he honed his tongue on the little tongue of Julietta, whose early maturity proved itself also in the field of pedagogy. Of course, I don’t mean “honed” in the literal sense of one surface rubbing against another, although my schoolmistress tried her best to get her pupil’s lips to conform to her own. A professional linguist might contend that Julietta placed particular emphasis on the production of certain plosive phonemes requiring labial closure. But things actually never got that far; our daily exercises never degenerated into the erotic. And besides, I soon got over the steamy confusions of that first day, which is to say that it was no longer impossible for me to concentrate my libidinous longings solely on the mother. My comradeship with Julietta grew stronger once she understood that of the two of us, I was the more childish spirit. Once in a while she played the role of my protectress, and I gladly allowed her to mother me in this fashion. Unfortunately, though, she also soon discovered that she could dazzle me by bringing into play her arsenal of budding femininity. When she found this out, things got stickier for my friend Vigoleis. That’s why he was never able to become as one, heart and soul, with Julietta.