William Gass - Middle C

It occurred to Professor Skizzen that the problem with his sentence was: it wasn’t a full twelve-tone row. What really obsessed him was the perpetual variation of a single idea that so perfectly suited music based on twelve tones.

First I felt mankind must perish; then I feared it might not.

Not quite. The right number of words, but he had repeated “I.” How predictable. But he admired the m ’s and f ’s. Terse. To the point. Direct. Like a blow. Modest if it weren’t for the pronoun. Semicolon though?

First Skizzen felt mankind must perish, then he feared it might not.

He had a feeling of great relief before he wondered what he might do with his wayward thoughts if he had no sentence to focus on. Would they dwell upon his coming confrontation and his almost certain ouster from the college? He needed to practice. He was rusty. His fingers were like stuck keys. When had he eaten last? Something green from the garden that Miriam must have mislaid. In F-sharp. No. There was no longer any key. Was “not” too unstressed for an end that was — well — another beginning?

First Skizzen felt mankind must perish, then he feared it might survive.

First

Skizzen

felt

mankind

must

perish

then

he

feared

it

might

survive

But were the “he” and “Skizzen” tones sufficiently distinct? As far as that goes, were “mankind” and “it”? Pronouns were merely pseudonyms trying to be names. He had gotten close, but the sentence’s purity was not complete. It was not pure enough for Webern. Webern, who loved purity and order as much as the Führer did. The Inhumanity Museum was not pure because you would always find, in the neglected corners of these accounts, some helpless decency; and the evidence was not really ordered, only gathered in randomly disposed bunches and hung upside down like drying plants. Anton von Webern, he told his students, believed that the musical world his forefathers knew had dissolved and that a new order was necessary, one that would not tolerate cracks where weeds might grow. Wagner, who pushed tonality as far as Liszt would lead him, died, Kinder , in what year? a show of hands? Ai … In 1883, in the moment, I like to think, that Anton von Webern appeared. Tonality was kaputt . Adherence to the twelve-tone row was salvation.

Or so it seemed to Anton, since he got along quite well in the Vienna of the Nazis, where he taught (for a pittance) until the Americans began to bomb it; where he had his exquisite short works performed (to minuscule audiences); and where prizes (involving no money) were pinned to his chest like a general’s medals. He was a von Webern, a German patriot, his soul grew as the territories of the state did; he dreamed, as did the Führer, of lands lapping at both oceans and admired the purity of some races. The frowns of the authorities and neglect by everyone else eventually silenced the sound of his music, yet his person and his position seemed safe. Ah, mein Klasse , reality is not a twelve-tone row, reality is a sly trickster, a Münchhausen, a femme fatale; because this mild mystical man, Anton Webern, this master of the minute, this Moses of the new commandments, he had a son-in-law, how could he help it? his daughter was not a violin, so (he thought) to prove to herself that she was not one of Daddy’s instruments she married a cheapjack scoundrel, a man who, after the war, traded on the black market not like an ordinary person wanting a bit of butter but like an entrepreneur, making more money than his eyes could understand, buying this stocking, selling that cigarette, what could Anton Webern, good quiet agreeable follower of the Führer, do? anyway the war was over, order was everywhere disgraced, and the composer himself, fleeing American bombs, did I not say? had come to live with his daughter south of Salzburg, a city you, mein Klasse , should know admirable things about — and do you know any? show hands … ai … it’s awful how you are; and there, in this little town of Mittersill, having dined with his daughter, her children, and this grievous mistake-making son-out-law, Webern went considerately to the porch for a smoke — a postprandial cigar — you will have read, heard, a cigarette, no no, a large cigar — and instead stepped into an ambush set by American soldiers for a black marketer who happened to be the very husband Anton’s daughter had chosen to hurt the composer — you will have heard, you will have read, that there was a curfew Anton inadvertently violated, not at all, nonsense, and did he look brainy out there like Arnold Schoenberg? or willowy, beautiful, like Alban Berg? what a name, eh? Alban Berg! Anton Webern, Arnold Schoenberg, what names! no, he was a stoopy muddy-booted peasant who had a hangdog habit, very misleading, but just such a habit of hanging the dog nevertheless. The cigar did not glint, perhaps nothing glinted in the deepening dusk, perhaps it glowed, there was a gesture, a sudden turn, particulars are suspiciously lacking, and some GI, some Greedy Impulse, shot him dead when he turned with a pistol perceived to be in his hand, and this great man of minimal music died as if executed enjoying his last smoke, a picture that may be responsible for the cigarette it is said — you may have heard — he lit up.

Like fog, the professor liked to thicken his Viennese aura by addressing his class from time to time as mein Klasse or to employ unfamiliar word orders. This might remind you — no, of course not, it will not remind you, it reminds me — of another victim of horrible happenstance, one Bruno Schulz — you have had an acquaintance heretofore? how many hands? It was Skizzen’s habit to ask such a question — how many hands? — and he continued to do so more determinedly after he learned that the campus called him Professor Namedrop, because it didn’t hurt his enrollments to be a college character. Moreover, a few students were happy to make the acquaintance of some of these folks on whose behalf he called for a show of hands, as though he were arresting the answers, and even the scoffers loved the stories that followed the unrecognizable name in his lectures — incidents often full of gore and general calamity. They didn’t mind being convicted of ignorance. Had every hand gone up, what would the professor have done with his anticipated and mock disappointment? ai … that no one had ever heard of the creature in question, ai … or knew anything about its name: the person some lout had shot, some loose lady had betrayed, some poet bitten by one of his own rhymes, some thinker clubbed by a thuggish thought.

Skizzen was also overly fond of the cute, riddling, or trick question. Do you know what the letters SS stand for? They stand for the Schoenberg/Stravinsky polarity. They stand for the opposition of the German musical tradition to Frenchified Russki danceatune music. Grinning, the professor would leave it at that — for the nonce.

So, Bruno Schulz — you wonder what is the connection? — he was a writer and a draftsman after all, not a musician — so you should wonder at my claim to relevance. He wrote great Polish prose. He drew nudes — you naughties would like that. One of his drawings depicts a dwarfish man and a hurdy-gurdy — that exhausts his relationship to music. As far as we know. And how far do we know? Anyhow, Schulz is another example of what happens to greatness in this world of ours. Like Webern — shot as a dark marketer by some stupid corn-fed pop-singing assassin who at least had the decency to drink himself to death during the years that followed, from guilt, we may like to imagine. Only the Pole’s case was worse and more so. It happened — Schulz’s life — the lesson of his life, our lesson for today — it happened in Drohobycz which was a small provincial town like Webern’s Mittersill, but located in Galicia, not Austria — you know where is Galicia? nah, no hands — well, it is now the western Ukraine, a region also rich in composers, artists, scholars, and oh yes influential Jews including the founder of Hasidism, a movement of which you know? how many? show hands? nein? with a name like Bruno sewn on him you’d never think … of Jews. They slid slowly away from their faith, the Schulz family, in evidence of which I cite Bruno’s mother, who changed her name from Hendel to Henrietta, though what would be the use? what? well, I spare you Schulz’s low-level life, except he wrote wonders, pictured domineering women, drew men down around the women’s ankles like sagging socks.