Chapter 26Christl and GreeceCHRISTL UND GRIECHENLAND
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
I now painted a great deal, and Christl v. H., the doctor's son1, asked me to portray him as “Christl of the Ultental.” With his dark eyes he flattered his way into my desolate heart. Then he took soul and senses from me almost by force. I knew well enough that it could not become a lasting happiness, the ripe woman and the youth. But I locked my reason away. — He was very gifted, and my fantastical heart played me the old trick of believing that my love could give him greatness. We then met for three blessed days in Riva. Later his father learned of the affair and was outraged at it. But I wrote him a mailed-fist letter: that he could only be grateful to me if his son were drawn upward by me, instead of succumbing to every temptation in the whirlpool of Vienna. He answered me deeply moved, and gave our friendship his blessing until death. It lasted a year and brought me infinite pain. — —
I went to Corfu again. Christl visited me there and soon became the idol of all the children, who ran after him. He held consulting hours free of charge and cured free of charge — he was the born children's doctor. My best poems in Cross of the South came into being then. Among others this one:
The Buds Are Swelling.2 Veiled and shrouded, the mountains' splendour, No light on the heavy cypresses' night, Only the buds on the rigid branches Stand veiled and are silent. They are silent in the blueing spring season, They grow on into blessedness — The buds are swelling and are silent! Will the night come at last when, in a loving arm, I lean on the mountain slope, so blissfully warm, Under golden orange branches? And the blossoms open their eyes, And a shining spring shudders up? — The buds are swelling and are silent.
And many from the Flammenmal. Later I travelled on to Sappho's Leap on Leukos and to Ithaca. I had found a very comical travelling party in an ancient Dr. Reitmeyer from Munich and my peasant landlord Stavro from Gasturi. The one was afraid to make the journey alone, and the other, the “interpreter,” failed, because all the new impressions “took his speech away.” In the end I walked the nine hours to Sappho's Leap entirely alone, with a little Greek doctor, Aristomenes. It was an illumination to me, the view from Sappho's Leap into the turquoise-blue billows, sprayed with foaming surf right up to the highest cliffs. —
Then I travelled on to Itea and Delphi, where even then the first intimation of my later novel Pythia3 dawned on me. Olympia and the Hermes almost overwhelmed me. In Corinth and Acrocorinth too I revelled in an artist's delights. Athens for the second time I enjoyed quite differently, far more thoroughly and deeply than the first time in the past year, after the Dalmatian still life. Most sublime of all, though, the Acropolis seemed to me by full moon. — In Athens I met “Katharina,” my travelling companion from Scotland, but she soon made me nervous with her man-hunting ways. Yet it gave me satisfaction that now, thanks to my two stays of several months on Corfu and my chatting with Stavro, I could make myself very well understood in modern Greek and demand in any xenodochion everything I wanted and needed. Now the sixfold command of languages had been achieved.
We then travelled on to Constantinople. Skutari and Bulgurlu made the deepest impression on me there. And the bazaar. And the Constantinople dogs, which have now been done away with4 — and the Princes' Islands!
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑Christl v. H., the doctor's son — Christoph Hartung von Hartungen the younger, born 22 May 1882 — the student who came along to Runkelstein in chapter 25. She was born in 1854, so the “ripe woman and the youth” were fifty and twenty-two. He was the second son of Heinrich Mann's doctor, then a medical student in Vienna — which is the “whirlpool of Vienna” she tells his father he is better off out of. Her prediction that he was “the born children's doctor” was right: he took his medical degree at Padua in 1914, worked in the family sanatorium at Riva del Garda, married the concert pianist Ida Bodanzky in 1912, and met Freud while serving as spa physician at San Martino di Castrozza. That his father, the physician who had watched the whole Mitterbad summer, answered her broadside “deeply moved” and blessed the thing is the most surprising sentence in the chapter. And note what it does to chapter 25: she went to Tyrol to meet the writer, and came away with the doctor's son. (Christoph Hartung von Hartungen (b. 1882))
- ↑The Buds Are Swelling. — The poem is in Kreuz des Südens (1907) — but not in this form. The memoir's text differs from the printed one in wording, punctuation and the division of the stanzas, which means she was quoting from memory or from a manuscript rather than copying out her own book. Four differences, all small and all telling. The book has “Sie schweigen von blauender Lenzeszeit” — they are silent about the spring — where the memoir has “in blauender Lenzeszeit,” silent in it; the book runs on with a comma where the memoir sets her dash; the book breaks the stanza after “die Knospen schwellen und schweigen!” so that the question about the loving arm opens a new one; and the book ends on that same line with an exclamation mark, where the memoir lets it fall away into a full stop. Twenty years after Corfu she remembers the poem as quieter and more resigned than she published it.
- ↑the first intimation of my later novel Pythia — Pythia is also the title of chapter 74, near the end of the memoir — so this half-sentence at Delphi is the seed of a book she is still going to write, and of a chapter we have not reached. The Pythia was the priestess through whom Apollo spoke at Delphi: a woman whose whole authority consisted in a voice that was granted to her, and who was not believed to be speaking for herself. For a painter who had spent thirty years being told that a woman's talent was borrowed, it is a subject chosen with some precision. Whether the novel was ever finished or published is one of the open questions about her bibliography; the memoir chapter of that name will say more.
- ↑the Constantinople dogs, which have now been done away with — The street dogs of Constantinople, a wonder of the city to every nineteenth-century traveller, were rounded up in 1910 and put ashore on the waterless island of Sivriada to die. Her “now” is the writing present, and dates it after 1910. Tens of thousands of dogs were shipped out of the city in the summer of 1910, in the name of modernisation, and Constantinople heard them howling across the water for weeks. The episode was reported all over Europe and remembered as a civic disgrace. Preuschen sets it down in a half-line, between the bazaar and the Princes' Islands, as one more thing that was there when she went and is not there now — the same tense as “the frames were never found” and “I never heard from him again.” It is also a small dating device: the chapter is being written at least six years after the journey it describes, which fits the composition date of 1917 that chapter 12 gives.