Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge Read online

  This was not the death of some dropsical nobody, it was the wicked, princely death that the chamberlain had borne with him his entire life, nourishing it from within. All the excess of pride, will, and lordly power that he himself had not been able to employ during his peaceful, conscientious days was channeled into his death, into that death which now sat at Ulsgaard and lavishly squandered every ounce of itself.

  With what a look the Chamberlain Brigge would have answered someone who asked of him that he die some more peaceful way than this. He was dying his own hard death.

  And when I think of the others I have seen or heard about: it is always the same. They all had their own singular death. Those men who bore theirs in their armor, inside, like a prisoner; those women who became very old and shrunken and then in an enormous bed, as on a stage, with all the family and the servants and the dogs assembled, mindful of them all, calmly and with a magisterial dignity passed away. Even the children—indeed, even the very smallest ones—died not just any child’s death; with a final coalescence they died both as what they already were and what they would have become.

  And what a melancholy beauty it gave to women when they were pregnant and stood there silently, with their two hands resting quietly on their large bellies, in which there were two fruits: a child and a death. Could not that haunting, almost nourishing smile on their inscrutable faces have come from their sometimes feeling that inside them both were growing?

  I have taken action against fear. All night long I’ve been sitting here writing; and now I’m exhausted in a good way, as after a long walk across the fields at Ulsgaard. Still, it’s painful to think that all of that no longer exists, that complete strangers now live in the broad old manor house. Perhaps at this very moment the maids are asleep up in the white room under the gable, sleeping their deep, humid sleep from evening till morning.

  And you have no one and nothing and you roam the world with a trunk and a crate of books and, to speak truly, without curiosity. What kind of life is that really: without a house, without inherited things, without dogs. If you at least had your memories. But who among us does? You may have your childhood, but if so, it is as if interred. Perhaps you have to be old before you can reach down that far. I think it must be good to be old.

  Today there was a beautiful fall morning. I walked through the Tuileries. Everything toward the east that caught the sun was dazzlingly bright, and where the sunlight fell, the mist hung like a gray curtain of light. Gray amid gray, the statues warmed themselves in gardens that had yet to be unveiled. Solitary flowers stood up in the long beds and said “Red” with a startled voice. Then a very tall, slender man came around the corner from the Champs-Élysées; he was carrying a crutch, but no longer thrust it up under his shoulder,—he held it out in front of him, lightly, and from time to time he brought it down firm and loud, as if it were a herald’s staff. He could not suppress a smile of intense happiness, and as he passed he smiled at everything, at the trees, at the sun itself. His stride was shy like a child’s, but uncommonly light, full of the memory of previous walking.

  How much a touch of moon can do. There are days when everything around you is light, luminous, scarcely outlined in the bright air and yet clear, distinct. Even the nearest things have an aura of distance about them, have been pulled back and are only being shown to you, not proffered; while the things that really do recede—the river, the bridges, the long streets and the huge, profligate squares—have stood their distance up behind them, and are painted on it as if on silk. It is impossible to say then what a bright green vehicle on the Pont-Neuf might be, or some red that can’t be held in, or even a simple poster on the wall adjoining a row of pearl-gray houses. Everything is simplified, refigured in a few bright, sharp planes like the face in a Manet portrait. And nothing is trifling or superfluous. The booksellers along the quai open up their crates, and the fresh or faded yellow of the books, the violet-brown of the bindings, the more commanding green of a portfolio: everything harmonizes, has value, takes part, and creates a fullness where nothing is lacking.

  In the street below there’s the following composition: a small handcart, pushed by a woman; at the front of it, lengthwise, a barrel organ. Behind that, at an angle, a portable crib, in which a tiny child is standing up on firm legs, happy in its bonnet, and refusing over and over to be sat down. From time to time the woman turns the organ handle. Then immediately the tiny child stands up again, stamping its feet in its crib, while a little girl in a green Sunday dress dances and shakes a tambourine up toward the windows.

  I feel I must begin working on something, now that I’m learning to see. I’m twenty-eight and have accomplished close to nothing. To be specific: I have written a study of Carpaccio, which is bad, a play called “Marriage,” which tries to prove something that is false by employing dubious precepts, and some poems. Ah, but with poems so little is achieved when you write them early in life. You should wait, and gather meaning and sweetness throughout a life—a long one if possible—and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people imagine, feelings (you have those early enough),—they are experiences. For the sake of a few lines you must see many cities, see many things and people, you must understand animals, you must feel how birds fly, and know the gestures with which small flowers open in the morning. You must be able to think back to roads through unfamiliar regions, to unexpected encounters and to partings you had long seen coming, to certain days of your childhood when what happened is still a mystery, to parents who presented you with a thing of happiness and whom you had to disappoint because you couldn’t grasp how it was supposed to make you happy (it was a happiness for someone else), to childhood illness, which arose so strangely and with so many deep and weighty transformations, to days in silent, pent-up rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to the many different seas, to nights of travel that rushed by on high and flew with all the stars,—and if you have access to all that, it is still not enough. You must have memories of many nights of love and none of them alike, of the screams of women in labor and of soft, tender, sleeping women who have given birth and are closing up again. But you must have also been with the dying, must have sat with the dead in the room with the open window and the sporadic noises. And it is still not enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them as they multiply, and you must have the great patience to wait for their return. For the memories themselves are not the thing. Only when they turn to blood in you, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer distinguishable from your present self—only then can it happen that in a very rare hour the first word of a poem rises up in their midst and issues forth from them.

  But all my poems originated differently—and are thus not poems at all. And when I wrote my play, how badly I erred. Was I such a follower and a fool that I required a third person to relate the fate of two people who were making life hard for each other? How easily I fell into the trap. And yet I must have known that this third person who infests all lives and literature, this ghost of a third person who never existed, has no meaning at all and must be disavowed. He is one of Nature’s pretexts, for she is always careful to divert us from her deepest secrets. He is the screen behind which a drama unfolds. He is the noise at the threshold of the voiceless quiet of a true conflict. One might suppose that it has proved too difficult so far to speak directly of those two souls who are the real issue. The third person, precisely because he is so unreal, is so much easier; they can all write him. From the first moment of their plays you can feel their impatience to have this third person enter; they can hardly wait. As soon as he appears, all is well. But how tedious if he is late. Absolutely nothing can take place without him; everything stands there, stagnates, waits. Yes, and what if this waiting and blockage were all there was? What to do, Sir Dramatist, and you, wise audience who knows about life, what to do, if he were declared missing, this well-liked man about town or that ingratiating young fellow who fits into every marriage like a skeleton key? What to do, for instance, if the devil had taken him? Let’s suppose he did. You’d suddenly notice the unnatural emptiness of the theaters, which have been walled up like dangerous holes; only the moths that live in the cushioned edges of the loges whirr through those baseless cavities. The playwrights no longer enjoy the poshest districts. All the best-known detective agencies are probing every corner of the earth on their behalf, looking for that irreplaceable third person who was himself the plot.

  And all the time they are living in our midst—not these “third persons,” but the two alone, about whom so incredibly much might be said, about whom nothing has ever yet been said—though they suffer and act and try to help themselves and each other but can’t.

  It’s laughable. I sit here in my little room, I, Brigge, who have reached the age of twenty-eight and about whom no one knows anything. I sit here and am nothing. And yet this nothing begins to think, and, five flights up, on a gray Paris afternoon, thinks these thoughts:

  Is it possible, it thinks, that we have not yet seen, known, or said anything real and significant? Is it possible that we have had thousands of years to observe, reflect, and record, and that we have allowed these thousands of years to slip by like a school recess during which we eat our sandwich and an apple?

  Yes, it is possible.

  Is it possible that despite inventions and progress, despite culture, religion, and philosophy, we have remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that even this surface, which might at least have amounted to something, we have covered over with unbelievably drab stuff that makes it look like drawing room furniture during the summer holidays?

  Yes, it is possible.

  Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that we have the past all wrong, because we have always spoken of its crowds, as if we were describing a convergence of many people while ignoring the single person they were standing around because he was a stranger and was dying?

  Yes, it is possible.

  Is it possible that we believed we had to retrieve all that happened before we were born? Is it possible that all of us would have to be reminded that we issued from those who preceded us, that we contain this past, and thus should be impervious to those who claim to know a different one?

  Yes, it is possible.

  Is it possible that all these people know, in the greatest detail, a past that never existed? Is it possible that all realities are nothing for them; that their life is slowly winding down, unconnected to anything, like a clock in an empty room—?

  Yes, it is possible.

  Is it possible to know nothing of girls who nevertheless have lives? Is it possible to say “women,” “children,” “boys,” not sensing (despite all our culture, not sensing) that these words have long since had no plural but only countless singulars?

  Yes, it is possible.

  Is it possible that there are people who say “God” and think they refer to something shared by all? Consider two schoolboys: one buys himself a knife, and his best friend buys one exactly like it on the same day. And after a week they show each other these two knives, and they hardly resemble each other at all—so differently have they been used in different hands. (Oh, says one mother, can’t you own anything for even a day without wearing it out—) And then: Is it possible to believe that one could have a God without using him?

  Yes, it is possible.

  But if all this is possible, if there’s even the slightest chance that it’s possible, then something must be done, for God’s sake! Someone down the line who has had these troubling thoughts must step up and do something about this neglect; even if they’re just anybody, not at all the right person for the job—there’s no one else in sight. This young foreigner of no consequence, Brigge, will have to sit himself down five flights up and write, day and night: yes, he’ll have to write, that’s how it will turn out.

  I must have been twelve or at most thirteen at the time. My father had taken me with him to Urnekloster. I don’t know what prompted him to call on his father-in-law. The two hadn’t seen each other since the death of my mother, many years before, and my father had never been inside the old manor house to which Count Brahe had retired quite late in life. After this one time I myself never saw again that remarkable house, which at my grandfather’s death passed into foreign hands. So when I think back on it now, I see not a complete building but something pieced together by childhood memories. It has been fragmented crazily inside me: over here a room, over there another room, and here a length of hallway, which however doesn’t connect these two rooms but has been preserved as something with its own mysterious rationale. In this same way, everything is scattered throughout me—the rooms, the stairs that descended with such ceremonious grace, and other thin, twisting stairs whose darkness one climbed through like blood passing through veins; the tower rooms, the high, suspended balconies, the unexpected galleries onto which you were thrust when you opened a little door:—all this is still in me and will always be in me. It’s as if the image of this house had fallen down into me from an infinite height and shattered on my ground.

  The only part that has survived intact in my heart—this is how it feels to me, at least—is the banquet hall where we used to assemble for dinner every evening at seven o’clock. I never saw this room by day. I can’t even remember if it had windows, or if it did, what they looked out on; always, by the time the family entered, the candles would already be burning in the heavy branching candelabra, and in a few minutes you forgot the time of day and everything you might have seen outside. This high room (vaulted, as I picture it now) was overwhelming; with its ceiling lost in deepening darkness, with its never-quite-clarified corners, it sucked all images out of you, and left you nothing definite in exchange. You sat there as if void, totally without will, without thought, without desire, without defense. You were like a blank space. I remember that at first this nullifying state almost brought on nausea, a kind of seasickness that I only overcame by stretching out my leg until my foot touched my father’s knee, just opposite me at the table. Only later did I come to feel that he understood or at least sanctioned this odd behavior, even though between us there existed an almost cool relationship which would not have permitted such a gesture. It was nevertheless this slight contact that gave me the strength to make it through these long meals. And after a few weeks of willed endurance I had become, with a child’s almost boundless adaptability, so accustomed to the eeriness of these gatherings that it no longer required effort to sit politely at the dinner table for two hours straight; now, in fact, time tended to pass quickly, for I busied myself with observing those present.

  My grandfather called them the family, and I heard the others also use this term, which was completely arbitrary. For although these four people were distantly related, in no real sense did they belong together. The uncle who sat next to me was an old man whose hard, charred face was marred by several black spots—the result, I learned, of an exploded powder charge; sullen and resentful, he had retired from the army with the rank of major, and now conducted alchemical experiments in some room in the manor house whose location was unknown to me. He was also, I heard a servant say, in contact with a prison that supplied him with corpses once or twice a year, at which time he would lock himself away for days and nights together, dissecting them and preparing them by some mysterious process to resist decomposition. Opposite him at the table was the place of Fraülein Mathilde Brahe. She was a person of uncertain age, one of my mother’s distant cousins, about whom nothing was known except that she maintained an intense correspondence with an Austrian spiritualist who called himself Baron Nolde; she was so completely in thrall to him that she wouldn’t undertake the slightest action without first receiving his approval—or, better yet, his blessing. At that time she was exceptionally plump, of a soft, languid fullness that seemed to have been carelessly poured, as it were, into her bright, loose-fitting dresses; her movements were weary and uncertain, and tears constantly ran from her eyes. And yet: there was something in her that reminded me of my slender and delicate mother. The longer I looked at her, the more I began to find in her face all those refined and nuanced features that I’d not been able to remember except vaguely since my mother’s death; only now, seeing Mathilde Brahe every day, did I know again what my mother had looked like; indeed, perhaps I even came to know it for the first time. Only now did the hundreds and hundreds of details coalesce inside me to create an image of this dead mother, the image that ever since has accompanied me wherever I go. I later realized that in the face of Fraülein Brahe all the qualities of my mother’s features were indeed present; it was just that they had been forced apart, distorted and no longer in contact with one another—as if some stranger’s face had crowded its way in among them.

  Next to this lady sat the young son of a female cousin, a boy about my own age but smaller and frailer. His thin, pale neck reached up from a pleated ruff and disappeared beneath a long chin. His lips were thin and tightly pursed, his nostrils trembled slightly, and only one of his beautiful dark brown eyes could move. From time to time this eye would look across to me calmly and sadly, while the other always remained pointed toward the same corner, as if it had been sold and no longer had any stake in our proceedings.