Chapter 16A Transaction — “Gloria”EINE TRANSAKTION — »GLORIA«
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
Back home again, I one day received a letter from an “admirer of my art,” asking to be allowed to visit my studio. Then the writer came, a gentleman with the manners of a man of the world, Otto B. He was in his early forties, with slightly greying hair, beautiful Polish eyes1 that were usually lowered, Paris shoes and English suits. He spoke six languages, as I do, was widely travelled and surrounded with the nimbus of the mysterious. He told me, for instance, of great overseas transactions, and of how many millions he had already lost and won and lost again. — Soon he came more often, always with some delicate attention. I was just then painting my picture “Gloria.”2 The goddess of fame, in a grove of laurels, stretches up towards the flowering trunks; her other hand holds out a luxuriant branch towards hundreds of outstretched hands: pale, nervous artists' hands, broad, seizing conquerors' fists, delicate, soft, wrestling women's hands, hands of asceticism, hands of voluptuousness — hands that believe they can snatch at fame by the most various roads. Bleeding, through thorns, they stretch up towards it. How many in vain! — “Take the laurel, if you can and dare” is the motto of the picture. With the expression of the “Gloria” B. found a good deal to criticise, and brought me photographs of eyes that seemed to him more suitable — in short, he tried to penetrate into all my interests. Soon we spoke only French, English or Italian together. He had a thorough command of those languages. The linguistic gift of the Poles!
He told me that his father, a retired Prussian cavalry captain, had a villa of his own in Lichterfelde with his second wife. This stepmother had set him at odds with the father he tenderly loved. He now only visited the revered man's garden in secret, at night, to breathe the same air with him just once. It was very beautiful and affecting. He was an engineer by profession, employed at a large salary in a factory for flying-machines, and had already brought about many patented inventions and improvements. After a few weeks, in which he had worked his way up to being a friend of the house, he asked me whether I would not and could not marry him. It came as a surprise to me, and I fought a hard fight; in the end I said yes. I had no passion for him, it is true, but he seemed very cultivated and thoroughly congenial to me. After all, perhaps my dead husband had sent him to me to ease my distress of soul. — So now we were engaged. But, strangely: from that day on his flowers and attentions ceased. —
Maria Janitschek, who was living in Berlin at the time and often came to see me, was enchanted with him and said she could envy me. One day — he now came every evening from six until ten — he seemed very depressed and out of sorts. When I asked what was the matter he would not answer at first; at length he confessed that a friend had offered him a brilliant security which he was obliged to sell at half price, but that he could not do the business, since at the moment he did not have the twelve hundred marks required for it. I told him I would consider whether I could not let him have them. That made him visibly more cheerful. The next day I handed him the money and asked for a receipt. In a fortnight it was to have doubled. But the first of July came, and the “doubling” was postponed to the first of August. B. was always very disagreeably affected by my many questions, and by my surprise that he had still not handed me a receipt. He had always forgotten it, but it was safely kept at his home. —
It was very hot, the children were at Höckendorf with the old lady, and I decided to go to the sea, to Sylt. B. wanted to go to Grünau, where he supposedly owned a boat. On the eve of my departure he stormed my good heart once again. But he set about it wrongly. — His friend's mistress, he said, would have to pawn her diamonds over a paltry few hundred marks. But that did not bring me to hand him over precisely the sum that made up my travelling money. Our parting was very cool. He then wrote that he must take his own life: his friend had disappeared with my money and the security. Or something of that kind. — I recognised that a swindler had crept into my confidence, put the matter into the hands of the court, and wrote to his father at Lichterfelde. He really did exist, and answered by return that he had cast his son off decades ago for dishonourable actions. The son then swore the oath of disclosure.3 I never saw the money again. He himself came once more and tried to ensnare me with fresh lies — I showed him the door and showed him my contempt. This episode did not cheer me up. But years later I painted the swindler in my novel “Yoshivara” as the “trafficker in girls.”4 He came out of it far too well even so. — In the end, the whole gain an artist has from all their bitter experiences and disappointments is that these give them material. Material and models, dearly paid for!5
On Sylt I had come to know a Bohemian student of theology who, like all Bohemians, was very musical, and an interesting muddle-head besides. — Being with him had distracted me a little from my low spirits. This man, Ludwig L., was later to intervene unpleasantly in my life.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑beautiful Polish eyes — »Polenaugen« — and then, three sentences later, “the linguistic gift of the Poles!” She types the man by nationality twice on one page, admiringly, which is how the period's ethnic thinking usually shows up in her: as a compliment. It is the same move as the “gypsy blood” Telmann offered her as praise in an earlier chapter, and it is worth reading with the con in view. Everything she lists about Otto B. is a costume — Paris shoes, English suits, six languages, overseas millions, the nimbus of the mysterious — and the nationality is being used as another piece of it, by him as much as by her. That piece, at least, was real: he is very probably the engineer Otto Brzostowicz, whom she sued for a loan of 1,200 marks made, by her own pleading, on 13 September 1901 (Deutscher Reichsanzeiger, 13 October 1902). The German Empire of 1900 held a large, poorly treated Polish population, and a Polish charmer of mysterious wealth was a stock figure. She notices the surface with a painter's precision and reads none of it.
- ↑I was just then painting my picture “Gloria.” — A full description of a lost allegorical painting, given in a sentence and a half because a con man happened to be standing in front of it. It is the most complete account of any of her pictures in the book. Reconstruct it from her words: a laurel grove; the goddess of Fame reaching up with one hand towards the flowering trunks, holding a heavy branch out with the other; and beneath her hundreds of hands reaching up through thorns, bleeding — pale nervous artists' hands, the broad grasping fists of conquerors, women's hands “delicate, soft, wrestling,” hands of asceticism, hands of voluptuousness. Her motto for it: “Nimm den Lorbeer, wenn du's kannst und wagst” — take the laurel, if you can and dare. It is a picture about wanting to be famous, painted by a woman who was, and it belongs beside Mors Imperator and the Lebenssphinx among her large allegories. Untraced, like all of them. Note too that the sitter's eyes were being second-guessed by a swindler bringing photographs to the studio — and that the goddess's expression is the part he attacked.
- ↑The son then swore the oath of disclosure. — The »Offenbarungseid«: a debtor summoned before the court to swear on oath that he has disclosed everything he owns. It was the formal end of a man's credit and, in the Germany of the day, of his standing. The paragraph is a complete confidence trick set down by its victim without a word of self-defence. Every element is textbook — the flattering letter, the six languages, the mysterious overseas millions, the estranged father visited in secret at night, the once-only opportunity, the friend who must sell at half price, the receipt always forgotten, the doubling postponed by a month, the second and larger ask timed for the eve of her departure, and the threat of suicide when it fails. She checked the one detail that could be checked — she wrote to the father in Lichterfelde, who really existed, and who replied by return that he had disowned his son decades ago. What she does not do anywhere in the chapter is excuse herself.
- ↑I painted the swindler in my novel “Yoshivara” as the “trafficker in girls.” — A character in Yoshiwara identified as a portrait from life — and this man is the model for the trafficker who sells girls into the brothel quarter the novel is named after. It is the most useful sentence in the chapter, because Yoshiwara is one of the works this site publishes. Her verb is »abgemalt« — painted from the model, the studio word, not “based on.” She is telling us that the novel's most contemptible figure was drawn from a man she had agreed to marry, and that in her judgement she let him off lightly. Note also her own spelling here, “Yoshivara” with a v, against the Yoshiwara of the title page. (Yoshiwara)
- ↑Material and models, dearly paid for! — »Stoffe« — subject matter, the raw stuff a writer or painter works from. Her statement of what a life of disasters is finally for, written at sixty-three, two paragraphs after being defrauded of twelve hundred marks by a man she had promised to marry. It is the nearest thing to a creed she gives, and it explains the memoir's method. She does not narrate the swindle to be pitied or to warn anyone; she narrates it because it turned into a book. Set beside the one regret of chapter 11 — that she painted when she might have walked with her husband — it is consistent and fairly bleak: everything that happened to her was, in the end, assessed by what it yielded for the work.