However, at that receptive time of life when friendships are easily made, and social and political differences have not yet become entrenched, a young man really learns better from his contemporaries in the same line of business than from his superiors. Once again I felt—although now on a higher and more international level than at school—how fruitful collective enthusiasm is. While my Viennese friends almost all came from the bourgeoisie, and indeed nine-tenths of them from the Jewish bourgeoisie, so that we were merely duplicating and multiplying our own inclinations, the young people of this new world came from very different social classes both upper and lower. One might be a Prussian aristocrat, another the son of a Hamburg shipowner, a third from a Westphalian farming family. Suddenly I was living in a circle where there was also real poverty, people in ragged clothes and worn-out shoes; I had never been near anything like it in Vienna. I sat at the same table as heavy drinkers, homosexuals and morphine addicts, I shook hands—proudly—with a well-known con man who had served a jail sentence (and later published his memoirs, thus joining our company as a writer). What I had hardly credited in realist novels was present here, teeming with life, in the little bars and cafés that I frequented, and the worse someone’s reputation was the more I wanted to know him personally. This particular liking for or curiosity about people living on the edge of danger has, incidentally, stayed with me all my life; even at times when more discrimination would have been seemly, my friends used to point out that I seemed to like mingling with amoral and unreliable people whose company might be compromising. Perhaps the very fact that I came from a solidly established background, and felt to some extent that this ‘security’ complex weighed me down, made me more likely to be fascinated by those who almost recklessly squandered their lives, their time, their money, their health and reputation—passionate monomaniacs obsessed by aimless existence for its own sake—and perhaps readers may notice this preference of mine for intense, intemperate characters in my novels and novellas. And then there was the charm of the exotic and outlandish; almost everyone presented my questing mind with a gift from a strange new world. For the first time I met a genuine Eastern Jew, the graphic artist E M Lilien, son of a poor Orthodox master turner from Drohobycz, and so I encountered an aspect of Jewishness previously unknown to me in its force and tough fanaticism. A young Russian translated for my benefit the finest passages from the Brothers Karamazov, unknown in Germany at the time; a young Swedish woman first introduced me to the pictures of Munch; I visited painters’ studios to observe their technique (admittedly they were not very good painters), a believer in spiritualism took me to seances—I sensed the diversity of a thousand forms of life, and never tired of it. The intense interest which at school I had shown only in literary form, in rhymes, verses and words, was now bent on human beings. From morning to night, I was always with new and different acquaintances in Berlin, fascinated, disappointed, even sometimes cheated by them. I think that in ten years elsewhere I never have enjoyed such a variety of intellectual company as I did in that one short semester in Berlin, the first of my total freedom.
It would seem only logical for my creative impulse to have been enhanced to a high degree by all this stimulation. In fact exactly the opposite happened—much of my self-confidence, greatly boosted at first by the intellectual exhilaration of my schooldays, was now draining away. Four months after the appearance of that immature volume of poetry I couldn’t understand how I had ever summoned up the courage to publish it. I still thought the verses good in themselves, skilful, some of them even remarkably craftsmanlike, the end result of my ambitious enjoyment of playing about with form, but there was a false ring to their sentimentality. In the same way, after this encounter with reality I felt there was a whiff of scented notepaper about my first novellas. Written in total ignorance of real life, they employed other people’s techniques at second hand. A novel that I had brought to Berlin with me, finished except for the last chapter, was soon heating my stove, for my faith in my powers and those of my class at school in Vienna had suffered a severe setback after this first look at real life. I felt as if I were still a schoolboy and had been told to move two classes lower down. After that first volume of poems there was a gap of six years before I published a second, and only after three or four years did I publish my first prose work. Following the advice of Dehmel, to whom I am still grateful, I used my time translating from foreign languages, which I still regard as the best way for a young writer to gain a deeper, more creative understanding of the spirit of his own mother tongue. I translated Baudelaire, some poems by Verlaine, Keats, William Morris, a short play by Charles Van Lerberghe, and a novel by Camille Lemonnier[3] to get my hand in. The more personal turns of phrase in every foreign language initially present a translator with difficulties, and that in itself is a challenge to a young writer’s powers of expression which will not come into play unsought, and this struggle to persist in wresting its essence from the foreign language and making your own equally expressive has always given me a special kind of artistic pleasure. Since this quiet and rather unappreciated work calls for patience and stamina, virtues that I had tended to ignore out of a sense of daring ease while I was at school, it became particularly dear to me, because in this modest activity of interpreting illustrious works of art I felt certain, for the first time, that I was doing something really meaningful which justified my existence.
I was now clear in my mind about the path I would tread for the next few years; I would see and learn a great deal, and only then would I really begin. I did not plan to present myself to the world with rashly premature publications—first I wanted to know what the world was all about! The astringency of Berlin had only increased my thirst for such knowledge. And I wondered what country to visit that summer. I opted for Belgium, which had seen a great artistic upturn around the turn of the century, in some ways even outshining France.
Khnopff and Rops in painting, Constantin Meunier and Minne in sculpture, van der Velde in arts and crafts, Maeterlinck, Eekhoud and Lemonnier in literature set high standards for modern Europe. But above all I was fascinated by Emile Verhaeren, because he showed an entirely new way ahead in poetry. He was still unknown in Germany—where for a long time the established critics confused him with Verlaine, just as they got Rolland mixed up with Rostand—and it could be said that I discovered him for myself. And to come to love someone in that way always redoubles one’s affection.
Perhaps I should add a little parenthesis here. Today we get too much experience, and get it too fast, to remember it well, and I do not know if the name of Emile Verhaeren still means anything. Verhaeren was the first Francophone poet to try doing for Europe what Walt Whitman did for America—declare his belief in the present and the future. He had begun to love the modern world and wanted to conquer it for literature. While other writers regarded machines as evil, cities as ugly, the present as unpoetic, he felt enthusiasm for every new discovery and technical achievement, and his own enthusiasm spurred him on; he took a close interest in science so that he could feel that passion more strongly. The minor poems of his early work led on to great, flowing hymns. “Admirez-vous les uns les autres”, marvel at one another, was his message to the nations of Europe. All the optimism of our generation, incomprehensible today at the time of our terrible relapse, found its first poetic expression in him, and some of his best poems will long bear witness to the Europe of the time and the kind of humanity that we dreamt of then.
3
Charles Van Lerberghe, 1861-1907, Belgian Symbolist poet. Camille Lemonnier, 1844-1913, Belgian poet and novelist.