Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

During the ensuing night Vigoleis staged an auto-da-fé with the fruits of his addled brain. He considered it too risky to tear up the pages and throw them to the rats in the pit for post-mastication. This story of his had to disappear completely from the world. Not one fragment of it must survive for the winds to scatter. Copied! That was the final blow!

Even so, this literary soirée had important ramifications. My reader is probably thinking: of course, a fight on the pilarière with Beatrice, who thinks that the process of self-mutilation has simply gone too far. Wrong. To step out on the path of Providence, we must now sidle up to Captain von Martersteig. I assure you that this will be much more rewarding than if you were to remain a mute witness to Beatrice’s despair. So let us return to the actress’ apartment, where Vigoleis is still seated in the reciter’s chair which, as a result of the bookseller’s suspicions, has turned into a court dock.

The Captain, asked for his verdict as a fellow wielder of the pen, inquired politely if he might take a look at the typescript. He checked it over very carefully, flipping through the pages as all eyes focused on his lips — which were pressed together and refused to open. After a while, Joachim let his monocle drop into his hand and returned the manuscript to me. I was fully prepared to hear him pronounce my grade, “C minus. Sit down!”—the type of evaluation that all teachers use when they can’t keep up with their pupils. Our friend the fighter pilot started discoursing on problems of style and the neglect of narrative frames in modern literature. He even cited the famous but trite saw of Buffon, according to which le style c’est l’homme même , and as for my own style, it was—

“Like a trampoline! Go ahead and say it, Herr Hauptmann ! Or perhaps you prefer a somewhat more profound simile, such as ‘It is dreadful to cross the moor / so gloomy in the mists of heather.’ Or maybe something botanical, if that will be of help: the common shave-grass…”

“ Equisitacae , cryptogamous class of the subspecies of vascular cryptogamous plants,” interjected Friedrich, who had just passed his medical exams.

My style, the Captain said, was immature, or perhaps overripe. It was spiky and thorny, it was undignified and — but he didn’t mean to criticize, he was not a literary scholar, but only a retiree interested in belles lettres . But no doubt about it, the manuscript was neatly typed in triple-space, making the text clear and easy to read, with plenty of room for corrections. His own typescripts, he told us, were an unholy mess; he had a hard time finding things in them, and he had been searching for a long time for someone who could type out clean copy, triple-spaced. He could scrape up the funds for the extra paper, unless his enemy forced him to absent himself from Deyá for long periods of time. Then he reset his monocle at his vacant eye and awaited my reply to his question, formulated so hesitantly as to be unworthy of a professional dive bomber: “Don Vigoleis, would you be willing to become my personal typist?”

When your own efforts go astray, look for success in the work of others. Vigoleis would have no reservations about entering the Captain’s service if he could be told what the gentleman was willing to pay per page.

The retired flyboy said that he had no idea what the going rate on the island was. Perhaps Mr. Emmerich…

Emmerich decided to play King Solomon of Cologne. Two such masterful writers as these, he said turning to our hostess, are surely not going to start picking nits over each other’s work. He could supply paper at a discount. Hurray! And so long, everybody!

No agreement was reached; the case remained undecided. The Captain’s assessment of my style was not far off the mark, but it would have been more accurate to describe it as “cactus style”: it formed branches and offshoots at random, like a cactus with its urge to sprout buds just where you would never expect them. But this occurred to me only later, on the way back home. One more reason to destroy my manuscript.

Robert von Ranke Graves had metamorphosed into an anaconda, hissing at his enemy Martersteig on the public thoroughfare in Deyá. The latter, not yet immune to the British-German venom that was unavoidable on Spanish soil, decided to seek shelter a few weeks longer at the anarchical rooming-house in Palma, and this prompted La Gerstenberg to ask him to be the next to read from his work in progress. After that, she said, he could return to his mountain retreat, and if she ever encountered Graves in the “Alhambra,” she was determined to give him a piece of her mind. This met with a protest from the Captain, who insisted that in true-blue Prussian fashion he was quite able to defend himself. As for reading from his “Monkey Army” manuscript, however, he would be more than happy to be of service.

A week later the Captain mustered his legions of apes in the actress’ apartment. He recited badly. Again and again he lost the thread; it was obvious that his text was badly in need of decent retyping, this time triple-spaced. Nevertheless, what he had to say was well worth listening to. Damn it all! I had not expected the likes of this from the crash-landed fop Martersteig. Page after caustic page, Prussian militarism was castigated here in all its inhumanity, its absurdity, its stupefying emptiness. This was coming from a fellow who knew what he was talking about, and it reached a climax that took my breath away: the monkey battalions parade through the Brandenburg Gate; the German people, unaware that its soldiers in the Kaiser’s uniform are in fact of the simian species, march along in exact rhythm, with shouldered umbrellas. Brehm and his books on the animals of the world were no longer of any use for this work. Protocols of the Teneriffe Chimpanzee Station of the Prussian Academy of Science were creatively exploited here; even a layman could tell that Martersteig’s monkeys behaved as monkeys should. A new Clausewitz was born. The renowned German land of poets, philosophers, and field marshals had brought him forth at a time when the emergency gripping the nation, despite the application of a thousand suction cups, had not been able to suck a single heroic thought out of the country’s citizenry.

“Well—?” The Captain aimed his monocle right at me. What did I think of his style? Was his stylistic amateurism, he asked, getting in the way of his message? Before I could reply, “Hmm…Your style? Very nice, but that’s not the point…,” La Gerstenberg said, “Very nice, if you ask me.” But, she added, she didn’t know much about literature, and nothing at all about military matters.

Herr von Martersteig picked up his manuscript and placed it in a ring binder, closing it with an angry snap. Only then did he send out a somber gaze at his audience. Focusing his monocle on the actress, and speaking in the now familiar barrack-room tonality of his Clausewitzian chimps, he said something like this: “My dear Madam, I am most grateful for your evaluation, which is without question more favorable than I might have heard from the mouth of Vigoleis. ‘Very nice,’ you said. Why not? This is, after all, an opinion — a verdict, and an annihilating one at that. ‘Very nice’—well, well. Then you will now permit me to take my leave…” But before leaving, he asked Vigoleis if he would kindly come to his room for the briefest of discussions of certain technical matters such as a retyping of his “very nice” novel. With that, the mortified Prussian soldier departed from us — not before we noticed his leaving, for he was too lame for that, but a good deal more rapidly than was his wont. A minute later I heard a toilet flushing — aha. Or was he sending his manuscript the way of so many manuscripts? I myself, upon hearing such a verdict from the tragedian, would have ripped up my text in a thousand pieces right in front of her eyes.