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7r0773r · 8 months

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Brenner by Hermann Burger, translated by Adrian Nathan West

. . . the stalwart maxim nomen ist omen. . . . (p. 4)

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And Proust says of novel-reading that it is magical like a deep dream . . . (p. 10)

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There are ur-phenomena of tone, color, and scent often predestined, so to speak, irrespective of their contingent nature, to tune an existence like a stringed instrument; and the adult, when he attends a concert, an exhibition, a theater opening, searches, as though after a vanished picture book, for the traces of these earliest magical impressions. I remember very clearly one afternoon at the Waldau, my grandparents' restaurant, I must have been three at the time, when I was ordered to take my obligatory nap, which was always a torment to me, for just as in the corner in my parents' bedroom in the manufacturer's villa on the Sandstrasse in Menzenmang — fabrikants, the noblest genitive — there, too, in the so-called Jews' Salon on the landing overlooking the salon, I was tied down with rubber cords, the door was left open, I could hear the rush of the Wyna coursing through the valley, the hammering of the riveters in the die works or the rolling mill, the shunting of the Rollbock boxcars at the aluminum factory, the piping of a locomotive, perhaps, like a faraway shriek, schoolchildren on the playground, apart from all that just tedium, counting dead flies, the scuff of chair legs in the parlor, the click and clack of billiard balls muffled at times by felt, my parents often helped my father's sisters during service, if a special occasion was afoot, they'd shwoop in, they may have been setting the table for the Frohsinn men's choir, because the swinging door to the office flapped repeatedly open and closed, and a diffuse activity reigned in the garde-manger. The child, bound and sleepless on a very bright day in bed — paradox of paradoxes — tries to orient himself, and all of a sudden hears a scattering of piano chords curtly struck, gliding up so softly they bring tears to my eyes, a breath of Sylvester's Day magic in the midst of a summer workday; I was still a little cheroot, I understood nothing of music, but years later, when I had my harmony lessons where my father's cousin lived, at the Pfendsack house on the Ölbergstrasse, I managed finally to grasp what it was that had taken hold of me, to analyze this series of tones that seemed to drift like flakes of gold in bottles of Danziger Goldwasser, a descending melody from major and minor sixths, the series, intended for C major, must have opened with the G-E interval and ended with F-D, that is, descending from the tonic with the 6/4 chord without C from dominant to subdominant — which corresponds to the melancholy of blues — but instead of stopping at A-F, it fell two steps further to D minor.

As we know, the young Mozart could drive his father to the verge of madness with an unresolved seventh, but far more galling was this insistence on F-D, an interval which, with its suppressed A minor, demands the G seventh and a release through the tonic, and I had to endure this tension not only through two hours of nap time in the Jews' Salon, but through the entirety of puberty until my harmony lessons began; and considering it might just have been the servant girl, Irmeli, in a transport of sportiveness or sorrow, who struck the nicotine-yellow keys of the ordure-brown Burger & Jacobi piano, the indulgent reader may gather from these tobacco sheets the ways fortuity reigns in the childhoods of creators, artistes, better said, but even more so, how immense is the power of music — here nothing less than magic — over as yet uncultivated natures. Still, I couldn't help but cry, because the descending cadence G-E, F-D, E-C, D-B, C-A, B-G, A-F, G-E, F-D recalled to me the painting of corn fields in the salon, a restrained landscape study in tender lilac, muted gold, and dusty green, showing the stretch of land beneath the Stierenberg, not far from the Waldau, where the Erlkönigstrasse skirts the Wachtal meadow next to de drüeich, the three oaks, before wending its way to Rickenbach. All the little oil in its white stucco frame showed was a softly curving path lost in the stalks of a swaying grain field with hints of red poppies under the taut, desolate balloon silk of a summer sky with scant ribbons of storm clouds. Just like the major sixth, with its polka-like opening, the breach in the cornrows ended in a no man's land that presented a riddle to the child stewing in his boredom, yearning all the while for his mother: what happens to the path after it curves, is it even still there in the depths of the picture? Decades later, gravely ill, in autogenic training, as I recited over and over the mantra "My breath is calm and effortless, my forehead is cool," I would hallucinate this mauve-gold cornfield; in the deckchair beneath the Canadian silver poplars on the gravel terrace in Menzenmang, I felt the ache for this painting of cornstalks; on Doctor Rohnstein's couch in Buchs, this image from the Waldau materialized; everywhere, always, this single landscape. (pp. 21-24)

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. . . Nonsense alone makes bearable a world where everything strives for a higher sense. (p. 73)

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Though it is only late in life, via a gratifying digression on cigars, that I have finally put ink to paper, let the apprehensive rest assured, l'appétit viendra en mangeant, my debut in this dubious métier will likewise be my farewell, but there is one thing I know, to second Bert May: our backbreaking labor is an archeology of the soul, there is no remembrance without fiction, no recollection without invention, true poets, from whose ranks this thwarted tobacco salesman is naturally excluded, are those who live by lying, who lie like print, as the German adage has it, and as we note here a certain consonance among the words lie, lure, and louche, we cast doubt on how things really were and cajole the indulgent reader to follow us into the regions where the subjunctive reigns, how things might have been; we use metaphor — from the Greek metapherein, to carry across, according to Bert May — to grant coherence to that which simply cannot have occurred, for life is a dice game, through a long night of play you may wait in vain for the six to come up, out rolls one after exasperating one; or else a wheat-blonde fairy announces six lotto numbers on the TV screen — a stroke of luck that never comes for millions but lands twice for a select few — hence the high art of creation may be thought superior to life, because the scribbler does not leave the order of the balls to chance, literature is the award of that once-in-a-lifetime jackpot. Here my friend Adam Nautilus Rauch will vigorously object, that still and all, the world has its laws, physical, botanical, chemical, astronomical, and it would be a deep affront to his earnestness in the enjoyment of life — a credo for which I would declare my utmost respect, were the duration of my existence not curtailed by a terminal diagnosis — to see literature and art confounded with magic and games of chance: what do craft and trickeration have to do with the linguistic organism, the swindler relies on the marvels of a moment, the epic poet is an artist of perpetuity, the sorcerer's appearances deceive, the creator's, however much he lies, do not. And the critic — my two boys' local Sigismund Markus — has urged me, after a cursory inspection of these pages, to stick to the relevant facts of my life as a cigarier, ye hef te know how te dishtinguish relevant en irrelevant. (pp. 129-30)

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The method of the captioned sketch, as opposed to the snapshot taken with the camera, I owe to my first-semester drawing lessons with Professor Hans Ess, it allows us a horizontal projection with four planes, same as the ones I executed as a child absorbed in simultaneous perspective; in contrast to the photograph, it puts not everything to paper, but only what corresponds to the inner architecture of our intentions, we may magnify details, scale becomes flexible, and, let me add, the drawing takes us an hour, whereas controlling for lighting, fiddling with the bells and whistles, pressing click takes no more than a few minutes. In this hour's work we see more, and more precisely, than during that post-mortem pasting of our memories into an album; we are not like tourists reminiscing about having been "there," even if, admittedly, these tobacco leaves attempt to share with the reader how, for the span of a brief, heady happiness, we were allowed to be citizens of the earth. (pp. 165-66)

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You see, Herr Brenner, what we have here is a marriage of poetry and tobacco, in the fifties of the preceding century the custom in the workshops of Don Jaime Partagas was to read Victor Hugo aloud while binder, wrapper, and filler were rolled, and in the days before the war for Cuban independence, the galleys were hotbeds of agitation. They banned reading or commenting on the news of the day, and this led to popular uprisings. In his memoirs, Zino affirms that the Cuban independence movement, which finally proved victorious in 1901, had its birthplace in the historic cigar factories. Radio first made inroads at Cabañas y Carbajol, a top brand that is sadly no longer around; nowadays, Castro's teachings and pop music have pushed poor Hugo aside. Imagine if, instead of the oldies, they recited Gabriel Garcia Márquez, whom admittedly I myself have never read? And so on and so forth with our disputation . . . (p. 204)

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Will neither of the esteemed versifiers take a bit more trout? No, Frau Irlande has had enough, Bert has already lit one of his black cigarettes, betraying his boorishness par excellence, but Hermann Arbogast Brenner, as per previous, will not stage a war of religion over the sore point of dry drunkenness, he gathers the fish scraps as his cemetery-grandmother used to do, and while poetess and poet amble off into the garden, perhaps to recite in tandem Hesse's "Lanterns on a Summer Night" in the niche or next to the gurgling fountain, I take the plates to the hunter's room and try to persuade Hombre, still sleeping off his stupor from the cider, to partake of a cold fillet of trout. He is lying there beneath his woolen blanket; his smooth skull, dotted with warts, moles, and pimples, is tucked into the crook of his arm; he has not even removed his coattails, and I think to myself, no one incapable of describing such a soul's inner life deserves the title of poet, for on the brackish surface of its waters, where the fires of eau-de-vie burn, skim the wrecks of svelte ships that poetesses have sent forth sailing into night, it may be, I think heretically, staring at the serpent in the spirit jar, that the eminent Georges and Rilkes and their like thrive in a soil of profound inhumanity; men like Hombre are the base matter their hearts transform into sublimity, the fate of the nameless is the price paid for the crystalline phrases printed in cursive in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the elf-queens suck their blood, inhuman, because their verses tread on corpses. The precious essence of O-so-noble compassion is only to be had at the cost of someone else's going to the dogs. And this is the basis of the thoroughgoing mendacity of the artist's calling, because what the public sees is the twinkling diamond and never the fathomless shafts where the kaffir breaks off the precious stones, it's a fact, the lyricist's trade is Apartheid. (pp. 304-05)

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When my beloved wife and two sons, whom I coddled like seedlings in the soil of Vuelta Abajo, fled Brunsleben like rats abandoning a sinking ship after years of attrition from my illness, one and all among my circle agreed that I couldn't hold it against them. My friend Fernanda Blanca of Blankenberg shot me a stare hot with indignation: Don't you understand, no one could take all that. Her feminist-tinged protest suffers from a single logical failing. There is one person who must take it, and that is the depressive himself. And here is where the glaring injustice lies: he is forced to cling to the war hero's code, the kamikaze mentality of fight to the last man. O numberless dilettantes of mercy! A rule-abiding Exitus exitus with the help of one hundred tabs of Vesparax could still be portrayed as euthanasia. Do you not see that Hermann Arbogast Brenner could more calmly make his peace with the world if a higher court would lend him a thoughtful hand in view of his life's unbearableness? Do you not see his salesman's pride prevents him from taking the blame for this faillisement? But no: all others have the right no longer to stand him, he alone is condemned to endure his own sinister company. And he will never forgive you this grave offense: that in your schadenfreude, you left him to smolder in his hell. Let us temper that a bit: he would never have forgiven you had he not discovered in the Stechlinesque spirit of Brunsleben a medium that unmasks your diabolical self-righteousness — in tobacco, a potion against the danger of earthquakes in mind and spirit. (pp. 350-51)

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A miser is not just someone who pinches pennies, who doesn't like to splurge or give, it is a person who never treats himself. He labors under the delusion that a little ledger exists in Heaven with an annotation in the profits column stating that he made it to a hundred by shopping at the organic market. All the world's misery originates with underachievers. Hitler had to kill millions for failing to achieve his dream. Had he known, like Churchill, how to savor a Havana, there would never have been a Second World War. (pp. 352-53)

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At this point, at the latest, Hermann Arbogast Brenner must bring this analogy to an end, for a lover never is and never will be a luxury good to be savored, but a person with her own contradictions. A cigar can be procured when the craving strikes, a woman who shares not just our bed, but our miseries, cannot. To meet one is a gift, a bit of mercy, even. Love is not an exchange of hormones, but the highest, happiest hours this crippled planet holds in store for us. You can be happy alone with a cigar, but not in love. The blue haze gets lost in the ether, our wish to be understood by someone will never go away. If it did, we would be lost forever. The rose may bloom without ifs and buts, and unfold its splendor in a graveyard. But it can only be called happy when it is found and plucked. (p. 354)

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One formal reminiscence after another rose to the surface. If I registered every detail of the artist's treatment of the satchel as it floated off in the tragedy of Johnny-Head-in-the-Air, if I saw there was no need to redraw the river in every scene, that the narrowly hatched waterway already suggested distance, this was the discovery of an important aesthetic principle: the representation of the general through the particular. I turned my entire attention to these details now. Here were the three fish. They jumped from the cool water as Johnny stepped over the wall of the quay, they swam off in haste as he tumbled inside, bunched together they observed as he was pulled out with a long pole, with a laugh they looked up at the sopping wet dimwit. This was the foundation for my success as a draftsman in all the contests held by clothing brands, department stores, and automobile factories that I sent my sketches to. I must thank Amden for this, in part. For it was pain that made me see. (pp. 379-80)

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Unto ashes shalt thou return, for nowhere is it written man has a right to a modicum of bliss. (p. 399)

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