It Cannot be Stormed

by Ernst von Salomon

  He was sitting in one of those beer-houses where artists and writers meet together, to enjoy from their high altitudes a little colleaguely sociability without too far demeaning themselves. He sat neglected in the midst of the smooth-tongued, quick-witted, elegant crowd, a broad-shouldered, countrified figure, his greying hair straggling untidily over his brow, his dark eyes gleaming through his glasses, a figure of fun, elbowed to one side with light jests, like a dishevelled old owl sitting on a branch, belonging more to the night than to the day. Helene saw him and compared. With timid glances, hunched shoulders, his hands clasped together, resenting yet attracted by her overwhelming presence, he broke through his crust of reserve. He plunged into the conversation, with wild, coarse anecdotes, the impact of his words resounding hollowly; his awkward gaiety rebounded on the chain of quick sentences, a metallic prefiguration of some future subject of his brush. The stories he told in his strong, rolling dialect, seemed to have no point or interest. His listeners were probably laughing more at him than at his words, in their embarrassment encouraging him with a semblance of amusement. Helene listened and compared. The painter, naively delighted, more concerned with his own outbreak than with its effect, went on declaiming in the unfriendly atmosphere, telling his simple stories, revealing a background of wild landscape, interlarded with queer, crude jokes and coarse situations. With rising enjoyment he kept up the flow of macabre anecdotes, the very tone of which was making an abrupt rift in the brilliant net of light conversation. Helene recognised a kinship of blood; recognised, too, the poison in the blood; it drove her to fury against the babbling insolence and the bursts of laughter of these people. She attacked their scorn with a sharp sword, took sides with a violent partisanship that allowed of no more mockery. Incredulous, the painter shrank back into himself. Afterwards Helene found it difficult to get at him, to tear him out of the shell in which he tried to take refuge for fear of exposing himself to her. She forced him to meet her on several occasions and each time he turned up like a timid schoolboy. Eventually she went to live with him in his studio.

  The painter came from a little valley in the Black Forest; one of those valleys not yet overshadowed by majestic heights, nestling beneath the spreading highland with its steep gorges and wild, rugged declivities, where the mountains are, as it were, taking breath for their final towering ascent. The little house beside a rushing river, half-way up the mountain-side, where he was born, was the last house of the small town, in whose narrow alleys were collected the outcasts of the forest who had fled from the desperate poverty of the land which had no nutriment to offer them. Grouped round one industry, the handicraft for which the whole district was known, the population kept itself proudly aloof. Though of pure peasant stock it was already completely urban in character. This character, matured and crystallised, scornful of any change, bent to its will those who, strong in the memory of their not-so-distant heritage, found its walls too narrow for their growth and sought perversely to burst their bonds. The seclusion of the valley had nothing to offer to men who, in wanton pride, were discontented with its wealth of natural advantages. Thus the little town acted as an excellent sieve. Only the strongest could force their way through its meshes, and gave it a name for puritanical hardness, while the weaker remnant stayed rooted to the valley like rugged trees spreading out luxuriant branches. Every thought or desire that found its way into the valley from the world behind the mountains, bent in cowardice before the unyielding obstinacy of the townsmen; every power that encroached on the highlands, had to submit to the tyranny of the forest-sweepings. This soil was no doubt favourable to art, but certainly not to an artist, if he imagined that by staying there he would ever be able to pluck laurels from the dark pine branches.

  The boy, brought up in direst poverty, travelled in his dreams far beyond the black, wooded mountain walls. It was not the slopes and meadows, not the wild thickets, not river and mountain that led him away from childish games of adventure and conspiracy, in which boldness alternates with timidity, and which, indeed, like the landscape in which they were set, already contained the germs of what later, purified by the incorruptible will of an artist, was to develop into a new reality. Stories of distant wars, bloody battles, heroic risings and massacres, the terrible sufferings of saints in bright robes, the proud majesty of royal courts, the blood-curdling adventures of lonely and noble brigands and highwaymen, and finally the picturesque figures of folklore took form on every sheet of old paper he could find. They were drawn with clear, firm lines, which might later perhaps gain in sureness, but certainly not in liveliness. He did not shine at school, and, entangled as he was in a mesh of passionate fantasies, it was only natural that he should be misunderstood by those around him. The rare occasions on which the safety-valves at the disposal of every child relieved him from the tense oppression of his inner world, only served to teach him to retire more closely into himself. So the seething torrents of his imagination turned against him, torturing his body, mind, and spirit to the point of exhaustion with their wild extravagances. He was sent to the factory as an apprentice and here his obvious talent was given a chance to develop, over a period of nearly four years, in the depiction of artistic designs of delicate flowers and angels’ heads on enamel. He attended the polytechnic and copied plaster-casts and stuffed cockatoos from thirty-four angles, and was the butt and scorn of his fellow-students. Finally he went to the School of Art, where his individual gift was cruelly cramped but where he was at least given a start. In the war he was a most inefficient convoy soldier, perpetually in trouble with his N.C.O.s. He went through his training in a state on the precarious borderline between dream and reality. All this gave to his line the acrid bitterness of a pamphleteer indicting God and the world; gave to his palette, in which a glowing metallic red was the dominating colour, its merciless realism; gave to his own world, every disturbance in which beat against the thin glass wall of his consciousness with indescribable violence, the perpetual explosive force, which expressed itself outwardly in frenzied outbursts against all restraint, against all social authority, but inwardly tore up the living soil which fed a rank eroticism—manifesting itself in every kind of abnormality apart from actual perversion—and rent the tissue of living fibres, transforming them into a wild confusion—of morbid phantasmagoria, whose content no theory of psychology could have analysed, for it manifested itself already purified by the medium of the spirit—art.

  Nothing was more natural than the protracted outbreak of this force when the shackles inspired by his environment became weaker. The painter was whirled into the midst of the town shaken by revolutionary eruptions, and he rushed into the conflagration where the flames were fiercest. But no aristocrats’ heads were borne on pikes through the town, no capitalists’ bellies were impaled on lamp-posts bending under their weight; the blood that flowed in the gutters was the blood of soldiers and proletarians. There was no mighty gust of freedom announcing the dawn of a new era, but the stench of the putrefying corpse of an epoch that brought with it destruction even in the process of decomposition. Gradually driven from the storm-centre of the movement, the terror, to its periphery, into the dull domain of braggart bumbledom, of literary sparring on the barricades, his insatiable craving drove him to more and more ardent expressions of his revolutionary will. But the staggering procession of the oppressed and wronged was no more than companionship in misery, unutterably alone in their wretchedness, defrauding him of the sacred import of the solidarity which he served.

  In Dadaism, the great farce of artistic exaltation, he was once more exposed to the collective scorn of an unruly coterie. These artists soon tamed themselves to servile entertainment of a public made up of comfortably horrified bourgeois, who, in their amiable attempt to understand, were ready to tolerate the ridiculing of the army and a number of other sacred institutions, or the disgraceful proclamation of the age of machinery in art through the medium of pieces of rag, toothbrushes and horseshoes stuck on to canvases smeared with blobs of pai
nt, but, when confronted with an impudent pictorial criticism by the painter, symbolised by a blaring toy trumpet, of Germany’s noblest figure, they rose as one man and left the gallery in a fury, crying: ‘Goethe!’

  The studio became a den of thieves, a meeting-place for harlots and pimps, criminals and madmen, a night-refuge for persecuted artisans and terrorists, an inferno under the gigantic dusty glass roof, above the grey stone block, crowded with musty, bourgeois activities; and in the midst of the inferno stood the painter working industriously and with painful accuracy at his easel—he was at the next stage by now, Verism, neo-realism—placing his colour with meticulous exactitude, amid a buzz of obscenities and dialectical vapourings, of stormy declamations and arrogant threats, in the stifling exhalations of dust, sweat and filth, himself starving, ragged and devoured by an eternal fire.

  Helene came, she saw, and set to work. She set to work, a beacon of passionate protest. She planted the high heels of her dainty shoes firmly on the rotten floor, and, in one whirl, the whole fine company had flown from the temple. She swept, a raging fury, through the wide room suddenly charged with electric currents; screaming women, with dishevelled hair, filled the staircase with their yells; revolver shots resounded; broken china was sent flying; the air was rigid with hissing, biting insults, with rumbles of discontent; in icy, silent fury the men departed from the inhospitable spot. Helene stayed, and brought up all her reserves to establish the victory. She set about it with innumerable pails of clean water which she poured in streams through the room; with scrubbing and sweeping to efface the last traces of the filth; with needle and thread, for missing buttons and torn trousers were not to be tolerated; with paint-pot and brush; with hammer and nails; with epistolary compositions and telephone conversations, addressed to all the relevant authorities, demanding the installation of a lavatory. There was not a moment’s respite.

  The painter lost the connection which after all had brought him bread and butter, so Helene made his existence secure by her own work. She wrote, translated, acted in films, seized every opportunity with the tenacious grip of her slender hand. She sat upright and taciturn in editorial waiting-rooms; she pushed her way into the narrow corridors of film studios, exposed to the fire of impudent glances, unmoved by the friendly pawing of popular favourites, the sloppy innuendoes of trash-producers. The centre of her thoughts, of her actions, of her burning anxiety, her radiant pride was always the strange man in the studio.

  The painter had done his best to resist. In nights of raging anguish, in hours of bitter despair, he rose up again and again in uncontrolled outbursts against the restraint, trembling for the fruitful abundance of his art. Then, overcome by Helene’s strong, cruel will, in terrifying eagerness for the amazing gift she had brought him, he would collapse, writhing at her pain, clinging to her steel-strong, wiry body, in frenzied fear lest he should lose for ever this piece of reality which had fallen from heaven, and with it lose himself. Helene did not spare him. Everything that he had painted so far, she declared, was rubbish. She led him round the pictures, pointing out where his work had been corrupted by fashion, or distorted by doctrine, unmercifully tore to shreds, wounding him mortally, with her quick words, anything that did not pass muster in her eyes. But when in abject despair, he already felt the very breath of annihilation about his trembling limbs, it was she who, by a gesture, by a tear, by impetuous surrender, by a startling fulfilment of his wildest dream, gave him such wonderful courage that his inhibitions were swept away, his perplexities solved as if by magic, and all his torments and black doubts stilled and transformed into delight. She did not relax her care for a moment; the struggle continued for three years. Helene, with her finger, as it were, on every sensitive nerve, gave way where she felt a real urge for fulfilment, but dammed with a stranglehold the stream that sought an unworthy outlet; she remained always the one critic who was entirely for or entirely against him.

  Time showed that dirt and degradation, confusion and corruption had never fundamentally destroyed the painter. It seemed as though the town had enveloped him like a glass case, under which he had lived alone in his own domain, and that, as soon as the glass case was lifted or broken, the boy from the Black Forest sprang out, stretched his arms and began again from the beginning to live his own life. It was not actually a cure which Helene effected in him, for he was not ill in any respect; it was not a transformation, for the essential in him remained immutable. Helene had known this, and it was this knowledge that had given her the courage, and still gave her the courage, to stake all and, by an indissoluble union, to lead the indomitable spirit, to direct the ebullient force, to impose order upon the elemental urge. If he as an artist was incorruptible, she was equally so as a human being. But now that his liberated creative power was working its way up in bold spirals from its mysterious first principles, the final fusion was consummated. Helene, in order to encourage by example, inspired by her positive will, began to paint herself; and herein lay the test, that she did not paint as he did, nor he as she did, that their very method of attack differed. He visualised things plastically, in speech could only express himself plastically, and the composition of his pictures was graphic; he experimented and sketched in water-colours, but he gave the permanent form of delicate oil-colours to his powerful visions only after a final sublimation. Helene, on the other hand, laid her colours on the canvas broadly with a sure brush, with a faultless sense of composition, and, since she never needed to erase, could do without the skeleton outline of a drawing. Thus this woman was for this man everything at once that a woman can be for a man, and she was inexhaustible.

  The painter, who was nearly forty, experienced his renaissance—a renaissance which did not release him from restraints, but only attained its successful development by moderation and direction, so that, exalted, though not diverted from his path, he was enabled unfalteringly to break through the encompassing limitations which had imposed themselves upon him like a layer of skins, the distant goal before his eyes, the goal that was his and Helene’s, and which drew ever nearer and shed a clearer and clearer light on the gloomy foreground, nor could he appreciate to the full each stage of this development, with its torturing doubts as with its promise, without the ever-ready second presence.

  The first time that Ive visited the studio he found Helene, her face smeared with paint, sitting motionless in a state of rigid, strained absorption at her easel in the middle of the room, with two large cats beside her, while the painter, quill in hand, was standing wrapped in his white coat, bent over a large sheet of paper. The only audible sound was the scratch of his pen.

  When Ive came again, and he came often, so often that it became evident how much he was in need of an environment that brought peace with it, the same sight met his eyes.

  For the first time since he had been in the town he had found people whose whole life, in form and direction, developed from an invisible central point, enclosing every temporal event within a circle, where alone it could be subdued and all true strength allowed full sway. It was Helene who insisted on a dramatic seclusion which was always shattering the abundantly productive temperament of the painter and calling it into question, so that the internal conflict perpetually enlarged the circle. Eloquent testimony of this struggle was given by the pictures on the walls of the studio and in the portfolios on the table.

  Ive’s life had been completely uninfluenced by any form of art—his musical education had been very casual and entirely restricted to the mechanical side—in literature he had had to be content to pick up, eagerly but without any plan, whatever chance brought his way; in the years of development, the most favourable time for enriching the mind with knowledge, like many of his kind, he had been knocking about in the mud of the trenches and had never been able to seek his pleasure in books, theatres, or concerts. And it was with full consciousness of his limitations that he stood in front of the pictures. Yet he could not regard them in silence. Often enough, under stress of emotion, he had quite natura
lly allowed himself to be led into the mild deceit of speaking in terminis technicis. Yet it only made him feel an impulse to sincerity when he saw the painful twitching of the painter’s mouth, such as a hunter might be unable to control, if a harmless pedestrian told him that he had seen an antlered stag grazing on the edge of the wood, and that it had fled at the sight of him. In fact Ive, whose first intimate contact with the sacred art had come so late, could not give himself up to a pure visual enjoyment, looking rather for the strange, involved paths, the spiritual undercurrents. After all, he was himself finding his way, and had laboriously to work towards everything that seemed to him to be attainable, encouraged merely by the pleasure of observing the governing laws more closely as they joined issue with his will.