When I look back at my life I can remember few happier moments than those at the beginning of what might be called my non-university studies. I was young, and did not yet feel that I ought to be achieving perfection. I was reasonably independent, the day had twenty-four hours in it and they were all mine. I could read what I liked and work on what I liked, without having to account to anyone for it. The cloud of academic exams did not yet loom on the bright horizon. To a nineteen-year-old, three years are a long time, rich and ample in its possibilities, full of potential surprises and gifts!
The first thing I began to do was to make a collection—an unsparing selection, as I thought—of my own poems. I am not ashamed to confess that at nineteen, fresh from grammar school, printer’s ink seemed to me the finest smell on earth, sweeter than attar of roses from Shiraz. Whenever I had a poem accepted for publication in a newspaper, my self-confidence, not naturally very strong, was boosted. Shouldn’t I take the crucial step of trying to get a whole volume published? The encouragement of my friends, who believed in me more than I believed in myself, made up my mind for me. I was bold enough to submit the manuscript to the most outstanding publishing house of the time specialising in German poetry, Schuster & Löffler, the publishers of Liliencron, Dehmel, Bierbaum and Mombert,[1] in fact the whole generation of poets who, with Rilke and Hofmannsthal at the same period, had created the new German style. And then, marvellous to relate, along in quick succession came those unforgettably happy moments, never to be repeated in a writer’s life even after his greatest successes. A letter arrived with the publisher’s colophon on it. I held it uneasily in my hands, hardly daring to open it. Next came the moment, when, with bated breath, I read the news it contained—the firm had decided to publish my poems, and even wanted an option on my next one as a condition. After that came a package with the first proofs, which I undid with the greatest excitement to see the typeface, the design of the page, the embryonic form of the book, and then, a few weeks later, the book itself, the first copies. I never tired of looking at them, feeling them, comparing them with each other again and again and again. Then there was the childish impulse to visit bookshops and see if they had copies on display, and if so whether those copies were in the middle of the shop, or lurking inconspicuously in some corner. After that came the wait for letters, for the first reviews, for the first communication from unknown and unpredictable quarters—such suspense and excitement, such moments of enthusiasm! I secretly envy young people offering their first books to the world those moments. But this delight of mine was not self-satisfaction; it was only a case of love at first sight. Anyone can work out, from the mere fact that I have never allowed these Silberne Saiten—Silver Strings—the title of my now forgotten firstborn, to be reprinted, what I myself soon came to feel about those early verses. Nor did I not let a single one of them appear in my collected poetry. They were verses of vague premonition and unconscious empathy, arising not from my own experience but from a passion for language. They did show a certain musicality and enough sense of form to get them noticed in interested circles, and I could not complain of any lack of encouragement. Liliencron and Dehmel, the leading poets of the time, gave warm and even comradely recognition, to their nineteen-year-old author; Rilke, whom I idolised, sent me, in return for my “attractively produced book” a copy from a special edition of his latest poems inscribed to me “with thanks”. I saved this work from the ruins of Austria as one of the finest mementos of my youth, and brought it to England. (I wonder where it is today?) At the end, it seemed to me almost eerie that this kind present to me from Rilke—the first of many—was now forty years old, and his familiar handwriting greeted me from the domain of the dead. But the most unexpected surprise of all was that Max Reger, together with Richard Strauss the greatest living composer, asked my permission to set six poems from this volume to music. I have often heard one or another of them at concerts since then—my own verses, long forgotten and dismissed from my own mind, but brought back over the intervening time by the fraternal art of a master.
This unhoped-for approval, together with a friendly reception by the critics, encouraged me to take a step that, in my incurable self-distrust, I would never otherwise have taken, or not so early. Even when I was at school I had published short novellas and essays as well as poems in the modern literary journals, but I had never tried offering any of these works to a powerful newspaper with a wide circulation. There was really only one such quality newspaper in Vienna, the Neue Freie Presse, which with its high-minded stance, its concentration on culture and its political prestige occupied much the same position thoughout the entire Austro-Hungarian Monarchy as The Times did in England and Le Temps in France. None of even the imperial German newspapers were so intent on maintaining a high cultural level. The editor, Moritz Benedikt, a man of inexhaustible industry and with a phenomenal talent for organisation, put all his positively daemonic energy into outshining all the German newspapers in the fields of literature and culture. When he wanted something from a famous author, no expense was spared; ten, twenty telegrams were sent off to him one after another, any kind of fee agreed in advance; the literary supplements of the holiday numbers at Christmas and New Year were whole volumes full of the greatest names of the time. Anatole France, Gerhart Hauptmann, Ibsen, Zola, Strindberg and Shaw found themselves keeping company in the paper on such occasions, and its influence on the literary orientation of the entire city and country was immeasurable. Progressive and liberal in its views as a matter of course, sound and circumspect in its opinions, this paper was a fine example of the high cultural standards of old Austria.
1
Detlev von Liliencron, pseudonym of Friedrich, Baron von Liliencron, poet, 1844-1909. Richard Dehmel, 1863-1920, poet. A close friend of Liliencron, and much influenced by Nietzsche. Otto Julius Bierbaum, 1865-1910, poet, novelist and dramatist. Alfred Mombert, 1872-1942, poet.