The Blind Accordionist Page 11

  Much of this classifying impulse, I believe, is at work in Gogol’s clerks and low-level functionaries, Kafka’s job as an insurance man, Babel’s jobbing crooks and squaddies, Bruno Schulz’s shopkeepers, cooks, and cleaners, Robert Walser’s quiet dreaming of the functionary, the orderly, “little, but thoroughly.”9

  Guyavitch never had much time, and it is as if he knew this. Guyavitch was a man, I feel, always looking for a home, but a home that did not exist. “The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location,” wrote Flannery O’Connor, and this was very much Guyavitch’s problem. I wonder if he ever did find that place. So little we know.

  I have always wondered, for example, how this man who—I believe—moved so much carried his writings with him. Joseph Roth didn’t bother, happy to lose them once published. I wonder if Guyavitch was the same. What did he carry? A notebook, or but a few scraps of paper? A typewriter seems unlikely. Pen or pencil? His apparent reluctance in this respect, his almost a priori refusal to be commemorated, may be one of the reasons so little is known of him.

  According to W. G. Sebald, Robert Walser was another writer “only ever connected with the world in the most fleeting of ways.” In his essay “Le promeneur solitaire,” Sebald writes of Walser that “nowhere was he able to settle, never did he acquire the least thing by way of possessions. He had neither a house, nor any fixed abode, nor a single piece of furniture…Even among the tools a writer needs to carry out his craft were almost none he could call his own. He did not, I believe, even own the books that he had written.”

  In 1929, Walser voluntarily admitted himself to the Waldau mental hospital in Bern. Adolf Wölfli was there, too. Wölfli had been admitted thirty years previously, then a dangerously violent psychotic, but he had begun to draw, and his doctor, Walter Morgenthaler, took an interest in the work, giving Wölfli a new pencil and two large sheets of paper every Monday morning. By Wednesday, the pencil would be used up, and Wölfli would beg scraps of paper from other inmates or find packing paper, tissues, or labels and use the stub of his pencil or anything else he could find to cover them with his incredibly intricate drawings. Each Christmas, he was given a box of coloured pencils. Over thousands and thousands of pages, and more than twenty years, Wölfli told and retold his life as an epic fantastical narrative, forty-five volumes of it, in which he projected himself as a knight, an emperor, and a saint.

  Walser may have known Wölfli, though their stays only overlapped a year. Wölfli died in 1930. Over the next twenty-six years, Walser kept on writing, also using a pencil, in microscopic handwriting, his letters but a millimetre high, using an old-style Germanic script, Sütterlinschrift. He called these writings the Bleistiftgebiet, the “pencil zone.” He used envelopes, newspapers, the backs of business cards, receipts, calendar pages, often torn into long strips and sometimes written on in two directions, filling the paper entirely. Thousands of them. They were only discovered after his death, and for a long time thought to be in code.10

  While taxonomies offer their pleasures, however, they are usually wrong. Linnaean classification cannot always cope with our increased understanding of the natural world. The Periodic Table has had to be constantly reinvented. The Beaufort Scale has no mention of a wind-battered heart, and the International Phonetic Alphabet has no symbol for a guttural roar or a cry of grief. While there is pleasure in attempting to put order on the random chaos of this world, I—like Guyavitch—have little time for taxonomies, or genres. When things become blurred, they become interesting.

  Daniil Kharms, for example. Born in Saint Petersburg in 1905, Kharms wrote absurdist poems, brutal children’s fables, minute-long plays, and five-line novels, often all at the same time. In his apartment, he kept a contraption made from rusty springs, empty cigarette packets, a bicycle wheel, and some jam jars. He said it was “a machine” and, when asked what kind, replied, “No kind. Just a machine.” Kharms called his writings sluchai—a near-untranslatable word that can mean event, incident, opportunity, occasion, emergency, circumstance, or chance. He had no school or genre so formed his own movement, Oberiu.11 It had one other member.12

  In Kharms’s world, old ladies invite themselves into your flat to die or develop a habit of falling out of windows, shattering into pieces as they hit the pavement. Pushkin is incapable of sitting on a chair and eventually has his legs replaced with wheels. Men in black coats appear at the moment of erotic climax, and people disappear without warning. Hunger, bad alcohol, and random violence inhabit cramped apartments. Stories end abruptly, often with a slap in the face to the reader, or an assertion that the writer can’t be bothered anymore. His stories are grim jokes in which every line isn’t a punch line as much as a punch. Kharms is Gogol starved to the bone, Kafka in a really bad mood. His stories are the things Babel’s characters may have had nightmares about, or the hallucinations Robert Walser suffered. I wonder if Guyavitch ever read him.

  “Jenny Greenteeth” has nothing to do with Kharms. It may have been inspired by a story about the mining town of Falun in southern Sweden, described as being “as horrible as hell itself” by Linnaeus when he visited in 1733. Falun had been a centre for copper mining since the tenth century, and income from the mines propped up Queen Christina’s imperial ambitions and attempts to make Stockholm one of the several cities known as the “Athens of the North.”13 In letters written during his stay there, Linnaeus described the rickety wooden ladders descending hundreds of feet into the pits, the sweat pouring from the miners’ bodies as though they were swimmers more than miners, the obligatory drunkenness (breakfast was three or four pints of ale), the bread made from a flour of tree bark. The town was divided into two sides, which became known as the “delightful side” and the “hellish side.” The hellish side, the side of the mines, consisted of the Great Pit and the Great Mountain. Men dug in the pit or tunnelled under it and dragged out the biggest rocks they could haul. They heated the rocks to an extreme temperature, then smashed them open to extract the copper ore. This process gave off thick clouds of sulphur, leading the entire town (including the delightful side) to be frequently swathed in thick clouds of stinking murk. The pit was where they dug, the mountain made from what they discarded.

  On Midsummer’s Eve in 1687, the mine collapsed, making the pit even deeper. In 1719, miners found a body in a disused and flooded tunnel. “Fat” Mats Israelsson had been perfectly preserved (perhaps by the high mineral content of the water in which he had drowned), and was identified by his former fiancée, Margaret Olsdotter, now an old woman, who had not seen him for over thirty years. Once in the open, the body turned to something approaching stone, leading him to be known as the “petrified miner.” They buried him again, then dug him up again in 1860 when the floor of the church in which he had been buried began to subside and put him on display in a glass case until 1930.

  Guyavitch may have heard this original story, or heard Achim von Arnim’s ballad about it, or seen Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s play on the subject, or read Johan Peter Hebel’s brief tale “Last Farewell,” or E.T.A. Hoffman’s longer “The Mines of Falun.” Hoffman’s story was originally published in The Serapion Brethren, a four-volume collection of stories14 that Hoffman originally attributed to various hands (some real, others fictional15) before eventually claiming sole responsibility. Why Hoffman would want to do this is unclear. Perhaps he merely wanted to evade the burden of authorship, the cruel glare of critical scrutiny.

  While scopophobia is the fear of being looked at, eisoptrophobia the fear of seeing one’s own reflection, and ommetaphobia is the fear of eyes, it seems strange that as yet, there is no word for the fear of being photographed. All of these conditions are, in some ways, connected to the fear of being photographed, but there is more, surely, something unique—is it the fear of discovery? Or the fear of seeing oneself in a past moment? Is it a more atavistic fear of exposure to the rays of the camera?
Or of what ghosts the picture may reveal? How can you watch without being seen? Is this what “Sosia and the Captain” is about? Or is this yet another tale of shifting identities, rootlessness, dissimulation, and fear of exposure? Or is it, more simply, a love story?

  “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed,” said Gary Winogrand, and Guyavitch wrote, I might say, to find out what things were like once he had written about them. That, however, would be to suppose that there are “things” that exist independently of our way of seeing them, or knowing them, and I am increasingly uncertain if this is true.16 Telophobia is a fear of endings, or of explanations.

  Of the story “Dead Johann,” I have nothing to say.17

  “Both in art and in our general ideas about the passage of human life there is assumed to be a general abiding timeliness,” wrote Edward Said in his essay “Thoughts on Late Style.” A life should adequately correspond to its allotted span, and art should respect that. But it doesn’t work that way, does it? Said goes on to write that “artistic lateness” is not “harmony and resolution” but “intransigence, difficulty and contradiction,” and for proof of this there is in the story “The Visitors” an example of Guyavitch’s late style.18

  We cannot even know this was the last story Guyavitch wrote, but I feel sure that it is. It has both a leaving of home and a homecoming, an end and its beginning. It is valedictory and welcoming. It has intransigence, difficulty, and contradiction and holds them all, smoothing nothing away. Again we are brought back to Guyavitch’s choice of the short form. There is no destiny in a short story. It explains nothing. A novel ties everything up and turns life into fate. A story goes on, shifting, being told and retold. It has no home, it continues its wandering.

  And yet: There has to be an ending. Books demand one, readers demand one, life demands one.

  In February 1852, Gogol burnt all of his manuscripts after the Devil played a practical joke on him and told him to. He died a week later. Seventy-two years after that, it wasn’t quite tuberculosis that finished Kafka, aged forty, in a sanatorium just outside Vienna, but its laryngeal form, which made eating almost impossible. While editing the final draft of “A Hunger Artist,” he starved to death. Fifteen years after that, in May 1939, Joseph Roth died in “increasingly distressed circumstances” (according to the New York Times obituary), an impoverished alcoholic. Scarcely a week earlier, Isaac Babel had had a knock at the door in the night from the drivers of the one-way taxi to the Lubyanka. “They did not let me finish,” were his last known words. (A series of stories about a small-time gangster who makes his way through the Soviet system went missing; in 1987, a KGB agent claimed he’d burned them.) It can never really be known, but Babel spent up to two years there, eventually being murdered in 1941, the year Daniil Kharms, in Leningrad under siege from Nazi forces, had a similar call and simulated insanity to at least get himself into a psychiatric ward. On February 5, 1942, his wife Marina Malich managed to scrape together enough food to take to her husband, and when she arrived at the hospital was told he had died of starvation three days earlier. Eight months later, Bruno Schulz, still in Drohobych, now under Nazi occupation, was walking back from the baker’s, where he had almost miraculously managed to procure a loaf of bread. He was murdered by a shot from a Nazi officer who was the jealous rival of another Nazi officer who had not yet murdered Schulz but instead used him to paint pictures in his house. (Drawings, paintings, and a story called “The Messiah” went missing, and have never been found.) Fourteen years later, on Christmas Day, 1956, a group of children out walking discovered the body of Robert Walser lying in the snow. Walser, as was his custom, had also gone out walking. His hat had fallen off. The police took photographs, and now everyone can see the scene. Fifty years earlier, in the Geschwister Tanner, Walser’s first book—the story of Simon Tanner, who likes to take solitary walks and has plentiful siblings—Simon is out alone in the snow and comes across a man lying in the road. The man’s hat is across his face and he is wearing a yellow suit, too thin for the snow but similar to one Walser himself had worn when younger. “His face and hands had long since frozen,” wrote Walser, “and his clothes clung to his frozen body.” Simon pulls a “small, thin booklet” from the dead man’s coat pocket. “It seemed to contain poems; Simon no longer distinguished the characters. It had become utter night. The stars sparkled through the gaps in the fir trees, and the moon was watching the scene in a narrow, delicate hoop.”

  I could say that what we do undoes us, and that what we make in turn makes us. I could write about how we tangle with the world and how the imaginary can become the real, but that would not be true. So often, it is nothing but the brutality and arrogance of others that destroys. These writers all live their afterlives in their work, or what we have of it. But so many have none. We don’t know what happened to Guyavitch, so what can we do but invent him?

  Endings are the most difficult, always. Perhaps we should trust middles, after all, the underrated muddle, the less told, the difficult part. If beginnings are never really quite what they seem, neither are endings. There’s a difference between ending and stopping. How to end something. The tearful departure, the marriage announcement. The poignant moment as the protagonist heads off again, down the road or upstream, wondering what may next befall them. The pack is shuffled again, the clock reset. The neat tie-up, the sudden reveal, the twist. The epiphany, perhaps, or the suspended moment. The gradual fade or the sudden

  Skip Notes

  1 “We all come out from under Gogol’s overcoat,” said Dostoevsky (allegedly).

  2 In Joseph Roth’s Radeztky March, Kovacs has “an unreasonable fear of cards,” insisting on playing only dominoes, while Kafka’s Hunger Artist complains about card players as they distract his audience, and Daniil Kharms wrote, “as for card players, I would have them executed.”

  3 There’s a great Otto Dix one, a whole series by Cézanne, a good Georges de la Tour, the lesser-known but vital Les joueurs de tric-trac by the Le Nain brothers (c. 1650), and—possibly contemporaneous with Guyavitch—Frank Gascoigne Heath’s 1909 A Game of Cut-Throat Euchre. Photographs, even—a fine August Sander from 1920, Farmers Playing Cards, could almost be an illustration for a Guyavitch story.

  4 Sixtus V, who may have been pope when the picture was painted, issued an edict against gambling but stopped short of banning the playing of cards outright, instead levying a hefty tax on card players. It has been suggested that a later pope coined the caveat, “Foolish the man who plays with five aces and no knife.”

  5 The dreamlike eeriness of this picture recalls certain pictures of Paul Delvaux (I am thinking particularly of Der Wachmann, Loneliness, or Forest Station), as well as more thematic genre paintings, in which the genre isn’t card players but the interiors of train carriages: Tirzah Garwood’s Train Journey, Leopold Egg’s The Travelling Companions, John Tenniel’s railway guard peering at Alice through an oversized pair of binoculars, and a number of pictures from Max Ernst’s sequence Une semaine de bonté, for example.

  6 The curious reader is directed to Isaac Babel’s “Salt,” Bruno Schulz’s “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s “The Branch Line,” Charles Dickens’s “The Signal-Man,” Primo Levi’s “One Night,” Georgi Gospodinov’s “A Second Story,” Italo Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Traveler,” Thomas Bernhard’s “Early Train,” Diego Marani’s “The Man Who Missed Trains,” Lydia Davis’s “The Magic of the Train,” Eley Williams’s “Alight at the Next,” Joanna Walsh’s “Hauptbahnhof,” and Clemens Meyer’s “The Beach Railway’s Last Run,” among several others. Tolstoy died at a railway station.

  7 Here I think about how appropriate his name is, this man of many languages: born into Yiddish and Hebrew, he wrote his first stories in French, later learning Russian, Ukrainian, and German.

  8 There have been several cl
aims made—see the section on suggested further reading for more information.

  9 The motto of the Benjamenta Institute in Walser’s Jakob von Gunten.

  10 While in a Nazi insane asylum, Hans Fallada wrote some three books in microscopic handwriting, constantly rotating the page and writing between the lines until the paper seemed a sheer block of black, staying his possible execution while he wrote. In 1944, the Russian poet Tatiana Gnedich translated all of Byron’s Don Juan (from memory, with improvements) onto a few sheets of paper, each letter smaller than a pin head, when imprisoned in a Soviet labour camp.

  11 A name chosen, Kharms said, because it means nothing at all.

  12 Kharms’s friend Alexander Vvedensky.

  13 Other contenders include Edinburgh, Vilnius, Liège, Jyväskylä, and Huddersfield.

  14 Not unlike Cervantes’s Novelas Ejemplares.

  15 These included Adelbert von Chamisso and Baron Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. (For the latter, see The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, entry no. 11)

  16 “We usually regard the word as the shadow of reality, its symbol,” wrote Bruno Schulz. “The reverse of this statement would be more correct: reality is the shadow of the word.”