by Jay Parini
Benjamin had in fact loved many women, and each he had loved singly, finding some instance of the Divine in every one of them. Each breath, each caress, each point of laughter or tears was unique. But he could not deny that nature—as embodied by the attraction of men to women—had him fully in its febrile grip, and only death could free him. The ideal of married love, as conceived by Goethe, was achievable only through escape—the leap from nature to whatever lies beyond. Perhaps before the face of God, love and marriage were possible. But never here. Life was only missed connections, sleights of affection, approximate words.
The face of Goethe, not God, floated before him as an actual vision. He studied the long, arrogant nose, the massive brow, which was larger on one side than the other, a distortion that drew every eye toward him. He saw the feminine lips that curled in a wry smile, the eyes that coolly observed everything and gave away nothing. What was this attraction to Goethe? This fanatical dependence on the image of genius captured in one man? Was it merely a dream of total competence? Goethe had indeed perfected his life, as Benjamin had not. The master, whose life was founded on concealments, appealed to him in ways he could barely explain.
As a very young man, Benjamin had read the well-known biographies by Gundolf (which he disliked) and Baumgartner, and he had fixed a vision of perfection in life. Having conceived of Goethe in such a fashion, was there nothing left for him but failure? How does one emulate a god?
Benjamin’s own poetry had come to nothing but mere fragments, echoes of Goethe, Heine, and Georg. His stories were mostly unrealized, however ingenious. He did not possess the sheer coldness of heart required of a major artist. Even as a critic, he had not yet published an important book. His doctoral thesis at Bern, on Romantic art criticism, had remained deservedly unpublished. His postdoctoral study of the origins of German tragedic drama of the Baroque period was decidedly a botch; indeed, his assessors in Frankfurt (among them the pretentious and dull-witted aesthetician Hans Cornelis) had rejected it, and him, describing the treatise as “obscurantist, willful, convoluted.” It was no wonder his academic career had skittered to a halt.
Benjamin had tried to write a major exposition of Goethe’s life and work for the New Soviet Encyclopedia, but that, too, came to nothing: aimless, endless notes, a draft of an essay too rough to seem worth fixing. Even his masterwork on the Parisian arcades had exploded in his hands like a loose pack of cards. The final version, which he clutched to his cheek as a makeshift pillow, would need considerable work. But ultimately, ultimately, it would justify his labors. Here was the sign and signal of his genius.
Even it, however, was finally a book of fragments. His life was composed of fragments, quotations from other, better writers. His days were lived between quotation marks, and the high points of his existence merely italicized and familiar phrases. When he was working on his treatise on German drama, he had gathered more than six hundred quotations, had pinned them to the wall of his room: one index card for each quotation in his tiny hand. A compulsive collector of phrases, bits of poetry, aphorisms, he had lately come to believe the ideal critic was merely a gifted assembler of quotations. “The great book of the future,” he had written to Adorno, “will consist of fragments torn from the body of other work; it is a reassembly, a patchwork quilt of meanings already accomplished. The great critic of the future will remain silent, gesturing firmly but himself unable, or unwilling, to speak.”
The face of Jula flashed before him again, replacing Goethe. She was much prettier than Goethe, he thought, laughing softly to himself. “I love you, Jula,” he whispered, reaching involuntarily toward his trousers. Was it possible that erotic motions could stir in this, the bleakest night of his life? Were sex and death so prone to mingle?
He remembered only too well that terrible stay with Jula on the Côte d’Azur. He was by then a “free” man, was he not? The marriage to Dora had dissolved, and Jula was traveling with him. On the train, she had put her head affectionately on his shoulder, and he had been pleased when an elderly gentleman looked at them jealously. Jula was his now, he had thought. She had seemed quietly eager for his love for some time, although (despite what Dora had charged) they had never actually had full intercourse. Jula had always withdrawn from his advances at the last moment, whispering, “Another time.” How many “other times” were there?
He had come to the Côte d’Azur to pursue this relationship to its natural climax. It was like a ball tossed into the air: One had to hear it, even see it, land. They had taken a room in a boardinghouse by the sea called the Mariposa, a clean, crisp room with a high, vaulted ceiling and white, virginal walls. The room smelled of plaster, and daffodils were bunched in a vase beside their bed—a sign of early spring. The elderly landlady winked at him coyly as she handed him the key to their room, which she knew had only one bed. “Pour monsieur et madame,” she said, aware that neither of them boasted a matrimonial ring.
The butterflies in Benjamin’s stomach turned to wasps in a glass jar as he watched Jula undress, her back against him as she sat on a low stool before an unframed mirror. The bare room somehow added to her nakedness as she sat, quietly, before the mirror and contemplated her own body: the alabaster skin, the dark pubic hair, the taut, expansive breasts. Her stomach protruded ever so slightly.
Benjamin undressed, his damp clothes pooling on the floor. He crossed the room, utterly naked, erect, his feet cold on the blue ceramic tiles. He pressed himself into the hollow of her spine.
“I cannot make love with you,” she said, flatly.
“I love you, Jula,” he said.
“There’s something wrong between us,” she insisted.
“My darling Jula.”
“Forgive me, Walter. I would do this, were it possible. You must believe me.”
He pressed against her harder now, swollen to a point of exquisite pain.
“Please, Walter, don’t.” She dangled her black hair before her face like a curtain, and the vertebrae at the back of her neck glistened like an ivory chain. “I don’t want this.”
It was too late, however, for him to stop. He could not control himself.
Jula did not move but let him finish.
Benjamin wiped her back clean with a white towel, saying, “I’m so sorry, my darling. I am ashamed of myself.”
She was sobbing now, her shoulders shaking.
Benjamin led her gently to the bed. He tucked her into the cool sheets and smoothed her hair on the pillow. Her back was turned to him, but she had stopped sobbing. It was possible, he told himself, that he had broken the ice, and that tomorrow their relations would improve. But he also knew better. Something had always been slightly amiss between himself and Jula. They were like radios tuned to different channels.
It was the same with Asja. Those brief, hideous months when she stayed with him in Berlin under false pretenses still puzzled and enraged him. What was her point? She had let him make love to her, but without reciprocal enthusiasm; it was as if she were fulfilling some grim duty. “This is not love,” he said to her one time, in the midst of intercourse, “it is hydraulics.”
She had sat up abruptly in bed. “It is what you wanted, isn’t it?” she said. “To fuck.”
“Why do you torment me, Asja? I love you,” he had responded.
“You love yourself,” she said.
“Please, dearest. You know that from the first time I saw you—in the little shop in Capri—I have thought about you again and again. I…I…” The limitations of his expression, so mired in cliché, were agony, and he stuttered toward silence.
Asja raised her eyebrows and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke into his face. After a while, she said, “You’ve been thinking about a lot of things, Walter. Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps you think too much?”
“You are mocking me,” he said, getting out of bed. “This is not lovemaking. I don’t know wha
t to call it.”
Asja sighed. She had left Bernhard Reich back in Moscow, alone and unhappy, for no good reason. To annoy him, perhaps. They had been feuding ever since that dread winter when Benjamin came to stay with them. Reich had, with some justice, considered himself abused by them both, although he blamed Asja for the way she flirted with Benjamin right under his nose. He had seen her, on two or three occasions, put a hand on the poor man’s knee. If only he had known the worst: the way she seized him on several occasions and kissed him, voraciously. Once, during their kissing, she had let him reach under her blouse and cup her small breasts in his hands. “I want to fuck you,” he had said to her. She replied, coyly, “Not now. Perhaps another time.”
Benjamin could not understand the way she had unexpectedly marched into Berlin that spring and weirdly, even cruelly, offered herself to him like a fillet on a platter. He recalled their first time in bed together, drawing his legs up to his chest now in the musty straw, shivering. She had undressed him first, a peculiarly sexy move, then stood kissing him for a very long time, melting around him. Floor after floor tumbled through the burning house of his body. At last, she pushed him onto the bed and consumed him.
Her lust had been distracting, upsetting. It was not followed by the tenderness he expected; indeed, she dressed quickly and went into the kitchen to make herself a drink. She sat alone by the window of his small room, staring at the rain, which made traceries on the glass. Her cheeks were wet with tears.
Benjamin could not comfort her. “What is wrong, my Asja?” he asked, stroking her hair.
“It has nothing to do with you, Walter,” she said.
“I wish it had. I could help you.”
“I must return to Moscow.”
“There is nothing for you there. I am here. You must stay with me. We can work out whatever problems you may have. I can help you, if you will let me.”
“I must go,” she said.
He would have let her go willingly, if that would have cured her sadness. But he knew it wouldn’t, and she knew it, too. So she stayed, and for two months he lived in complete agony beside the woman he loved more than life itself. The nonsense of this horrified him.
Asja, like a vast foreign city, remained inaccessible yet alluring; he could follow her down labyrinthine ways and hope, foolishly, that satisfaction would occur, that they would meet, embrace, commingle. But without her genuine assent, that sacred commingling could never occur. Even while sharing his bed, she had proved the most difficult text he had ever tried to read, a site of contradictory signs. She demanded his complete attention, like a poem, but she did not reward his attention with a reciprocal gaze. Often, she mocked him, as in Moscow one day when he sat beside her bed in the pale green room of the sanatorium for hours; instead of thanking him, she wondered aloud if he would soon “be sitting beside some Red general with a fawning gaze.” Then her whip cracked again, more loudly: “That is, if the general is as stupid as Reich and won’t toss you out.”
Reich had stoically put up with Benjamin, aware that Asja was toying with him as a cat would with a helpless mouse before eating it alive. Reich had indeed pitied him, and offered brotherly advice. They were both, after all, fighting the same battle. “If you were to attend cell meetings in Berlin, you would find many women like Asja, real firebrands,” he said. Benjamin had wondered how Reich could have been so foolish. You cannot substitute, in love, one body for another. He could fall in love with a million other women, but they would not be Asja, just as Asja was not Jula. Nevertheless, it intrigued him that each woman was Woman, too: a piece of the Platonic form.
Leaving Moscow with a battered suitcase on his knees, his eyes wet, his heart contracting painfully, he had decided that erotic love was impossible, at least for him. If he learned one thing in the past few years, it was that he must move beyond the inanity of possession; the lust for women was all part of an outmoded bourgeois desire for property. His desire to own Asja, or Jula, had been retrograde. He would, from this point on, focus on his writing.
For years he hovered between the apparently opposite poles of the aesthetic and the political. He worshiped writers like Goethe and Proust as the embodiment of the aesthetic, then swerved toward the position that Asja occupied: the Party position. Now, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, on this terrifying border, he knew that if he should survive this war, he would argue that only in the convergence of the aesthetic and the political was the art of the future going to find a new life. “Una vita nuova,” he muttered aloud, savoring the phrase.
He fell asleep wondering what this art of the future might look like. Somehow, he sensed that reading as he had known it was coming to an end; works of art, too, were doomed by their very reproducibility. How could one put a value on something multiplied into infinity? Then again, one could hardly deny the profound effect of films and photography; the cinematic image held massive sway throughout the Third Reich, for example. Hitler’s propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl, had created something completely unreal and yet monstrously effective: The Führer would not be as thoroughly embedded in the public mind without her and her ilk.
Benjamin imagined a future in the West when capital controlled the film industry so thoroughly that every image became a product, with each film itself creating a further line of products. Clothes, furniture, architecture, family constructs, love relations, tastes in art, music, even literature, would be mastered by men like Cecil B. DeMille. Morality would rest with them—the Masters of the Image. Eventually, reality would exist on film or have no credibility; people would work to make enough money to have their lives filmed, and they would be considered successful only if the image they could find on their private monitor matched some elusive archetype. The boundaries between art and life would be obliterated, and the job of the emperor (or prime minister, president, or king) would be to decide which was which, but even he (or she) would be so constructed by cinematic images that nobody would know what to believe; the ontological crises of the future were dazzling to contemplate.
Benjamin opened his eyes with a start, aware that he had been drifting in the no-man’s-land between sleep and waking. Disoriented at first, he looked through the window at the cold sky, which had turned slate gray but was tinged with violet. The hushed moments before dawn were a time of day he always treasured. The moon had by now dropped over the far horizon, yet the sun had not begun its rampant charioteering as he groped his way out of the straw pile, desperate to pee.
Standing in the entrance to the stable, he relieved himself on stones that cobbled the entrance; the dark urine hissed and stank, misting the stones. The stars had been thoroughly absorbed by night, digested; a rosy hue was beginning to appear over the mountains, and Benjamin could see the peak that would be his to climb. In the valley below, faintly, he could hear a cock crow.
Feeling groggy, his joints stiff and swollen, hungry and wild with thirst, he limped to a mound behind the stable, dragging his briefcase. The dirt formed a kind of easy chair, with a back of moss; he settled into the seat to watch the sun rise. His mind returned—a tongue to a broken tooth—to Asja Lacis.
He had tried to resign himself in Moscow to life without eros, but this was impossible. He continued to think of Asja almost daily, sometimes removing photographs of her from his wallet and studying them like Rembrandts, trying to conjure her presence, to hear her voice. Mysteriously, he found her in the green eyes of a dozen other women, some of whom he followed through the streets like a pathological lecher. He had paid for the services of dozens of whores, squeezing his eyes tight at the moment of orgasm, inventing Asja over and over. He had missed her so badly. His life, without her, was empty.
And he missed Jula, too, though not so badly. Asja meant more to him. She was brighter, quicker, meaner. She had exacted more from him than anybody else, even his mother, the exhausting Pauline, who had dogged him emotionally for decades. She had never understood his s
piritual side, his desire to lift himself above the commercial world of his father. She had supported him, covertly, by sending money, but she had withheld the essential thing: that uncomplicated affection he craved so badly, even today.
In his briefcase, tucked in a pouch behind his manuscript, was a small book of verse by Goethe. He flipped the pages to a favorite poem:
Heart, why now this rude insistence?
What is it that makes you grow
so alien inside me, strangely tense?
Heart, I scarcely know you now.
Gone are the things I once held dear,
and the pangs that I fear;
gone is your ardor and your rest.
Dear heart, what makes you feel unblessed?
It is just the way her youth entrances,
and her form as well, its perfect flower.
And the kindness of her sidelong glances,
each of which displays her power.
When I try to stay, or to withstand
her sweet barrage, I’m helpless. Hand
in hand we go. Her slight command
is more than I can ever stand.
She holds me by some silver thread
that’s from a magic spindle spun.
I gaze upon her dear, wild head
and know that I am thus undone.
The sorcery is strong that holds me,
binds me, my desire, molds me.
Where is the man I used to be?
Oh, tyrant love, please set me free!
