I was speechless — as speechless as I was an hour later when, with shaking hands, she stashed the many thousands of schillings I had counted out onto a table in front of her into her leather handbag. I stared intently at her ancient, wizened hands. Had they really opened to release me? We shall see.
A LOOK AT THE DEED
While all this was going on Bettina was sitting in Ebenweiler and waiting. So as not to be completely alone, she had invited Lotte Waldbauer to keep her company. At twelve noon Hornschuch phoned through news of the divorce. When she returned to Lotte in the blue salon, Lotte leaped up because her friend was staggering so. Bettina was indeed on the point of collapse. ‘It’s too much,’ she stammered, ‘too dear,’ and she lost consciousness. It wasn’t money and price that she was referring to with her ‘too dear’, because she only got to hear of the financial conditions I had been forced to accept the following day, when Hornschuch brought her the divorce agreement.
She read it with her typical attentiveness. Then she remained silent for a while, with head down. Then she softly said: ‘But that’s awful.’ Hornschuch made a disappointed face. He thought he deserved thanks. Feebly Bettina held out her hand to him. ‘Don’t think I don’t appreciate your effort and goodwill,’ she said, ‘but look at what that man is taking upon himself! How could he set his name to it! A man who lives off his intellect and imagination!’ Hornschuch didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t able, not then and not for a long time afterwards, to question the excellence of his legal edifice. Most men are a little like that. It’s the gambler and the player in them all, and in their professions. The gifted and honest ones are dazzled by their idea, the mean and brutish ones by success and profit. So between them they rule the world. That’s how Bettina saw them. Besides, from the very beginning she was under no illusion about the situation. She knew with prophetic certainty that the garrotting agreement, as she called it, hadn’t shooed the ghost out of our house. And she said: ‘I’d sooner love in a hut than share a palace with a ghost.’
However embarrassing and chilling it is, I must still, as briefly as I can, talk about the conditions imposed upon me in that notorious deed. There was, first of all, the payment of Ganna’s debts run up over many years. Then, I was accountable for all the legal bills; these, including the demands of Dr Stanger-Goldenthal and the cost of drawing up the deed itself, came to 48,000 schillings. Ganna’s monthly allowance comfortably exceeded the salary of a government minister. In addition there was a considerable sum that I had to raise within the next three years, which was described as Ganna’s emergency fund. That I was also responsible for the upkeep of the children was only to be expected and need not have appeared in the deed as a further compulsory obligation. But Ganna wanted it there and so, from the look of things, I was also in hock to my children. A further condition was clearing the house my friends had given me fourteen years ago of all mortgage debt and making it over to Ganna unencumbered. Very well; one might very well come to terms with such clauses. It was a huge material burden; an investor, a bank director, a captain of industry presumably wouldn’t have sought to oppose it, still greater sums wouldn’t have cost them their sleep; after all, freedom costs money, bourgeois society makes a business transaction out of divorce and a person’s freedom into an object of trade. Very well. The last two clauses were different: that Ganna was to inherit one-third of all sums realized from my writings and my possessions after my death; and further, that, as a guarantee for her allowance, a lien on the Buchegger estate to the tune of 100,000 schillings was to be conceded to her. The first clause was tantamount to disinheriting Bettina, since there were four children plus Ganna who had to share the estate; the second devalued the house in Ebenweiler by loading it with debt, which would help make it unsellable.
The gift of the one house, the lien on the other and the claim on a third of my worldly goods all derived from the marriage contract that, if you’ll remember, I had signed rather skittishly twenty-five years before. Now at last I learned what the so-called ‘revocability’ was all about: namely that, in the event of the marriage ending in divorce, I would not only have to return the dowry of 80,000 schillings, but pay it back twice over. And this doubled capital, with inflation, now came to some 200,000 schillings. You will concede that the kraal knew their business. They had succeeded in taking the naif, who with culpable innocence had run into their toils, and wringing him out. Honour and respect the kraal. A little curtsey to the age of security. And so Ganna took no harm from her sortie into the terrain of literature and the ‘higher life’, while Bettina and Caspar Hauser, beggars both of them for the foreseeable future, will have to look out for themselves. Ganna will sleep peacefully on her securities, as on a pillow of rose petals. Or am I wrong? I know it defies credulity; but all those ‘securities’ only served to shred their lives and mine with them.
MONEY
At first money was a whip, driving me on, without opening any deep visible wounds. My capacity for work multiplied. The experiences of the last few years had ravaged me to such a degree that they seemed to have renewed me intellectually and spiritually, and transformed my picture of the world. All you need is to understand the suffering of a single being, through and through, for him to be the source and focus of everything there is to know about humans. The thing that eats us up inside becomes our fuel, if we are strong enough to keep going. Almost every sickness refines the organism. I no longer allowed myself to be guided by the sweet whims of a spirit loitering in remote imaginings; I heard the call of the now which pierced me more deeply in my solitude than if I’d been in the world’s hubbub. Also, fortune had given me the gift of shutting myself away in working hours against worries and pressures, admittedly only — once the bolts were undrawn and I was a human being again among other human beings — for me to succumb to my fears, my existential panic, my gloomy forebodings, all of them exacerbated by my periods of solitude.
The seeming tranquillity that Bettina and I enjoyed early on in our marriage glossed over the oppressive obligations with which it had been bought. In order to meet them, to finance our own lives and the payments to the Dutchman and to my friend who had helped me to acquire the Buchegger estate, not to mention taxes, I had to earn a vast sum every year; and although, by some freak of fortune and a delirium of creative work, I even managed to top that for the first couple of years, it wasn’t long before I saw myself under pressure and was forced to take out a considerable loan at extortionate rates of interest.
Since my income at the beginning seemed able to keep step with our outgoings, I got into something of the mood of a gambler, trusting to luck, risking ever higher stakes; or of a man who is so deeply indebted, and has given out so many promissory notes that in his life he will have nothing to do with economy of any kind, remains oblivious to rising consumption and greets each inner prompting to prudence with anger and contempt. So I expanded my lifestyle, I ran a household, added to my library, bought a car and took Bettina abroad. The all-too-evident result was that Ganna, who of course remained minutely informed of all of this, was confirmed in the belief that I was in possession of vast means, that she had been crudely deceived and practically criminally deprived of the possibility of securing her fair share by the divorce agreement.
My relationship to money at the time could perhaps best be described by the paradox ‘selfish indifference’. Like anyone who has climbed out of poverty, I was devoted to the pleasures and advantages conferred by money; but not only did I not love money itself, I despised it. Which is to say, I despised it when I had it and couldn’t imagine what it must be like not to have it. I had never been avaricious, but neither had I been carefree. Without my being by nature a lover of luxury, a certain dull sensuality in things I had become accustomed to made it exceedingly difficult for me to do without.