The Secret Knowledge

by Andrew Crumey

  1941

  New York

  The story is told of a marvellous automaton with the appearance of a Turk seated at a chessboard, a hidden mechanism enabling it to move and play. In fact it was operated by a concealed hunchback pulling strings. Hannah Arendt thinks of it as she sits in the respectably shabby reception area of the Institute for Social Research. She arrived here in New York with her husband only a few days ago; before that they were in Lisbon for three months trying to arrange the crossing. Plenty of time to ponder the costumed robot that wins every game through trickery.

  It’s a sunny June morning and she can hear the rumble of traffic outside. The secretary offers her coffee, says cheerfully that Dr Adorno will be with her soon, but Hannah declines the drink, she can taste bitterness already. Her visit is not for Adorno’s sake, she despises the man. She is here because of Walter Benjamin.

  Friendship is considered an abbreviation of the customary distance between people; yet it need do nothing to alter the quantity of separation, only its quality. Hence the paradox that the greatest mark of friendship, as of enmity, is silence. When Hannah saw Walter in Marseilles, the two of them having been brought together again through the frantic scramble for visas, she was shocked at how haggard and distressed he was. In an atmosphere of urgency and desperation he entrusted to her a collection of his own papers, instructing that if she reached America first then she must take them to Adorno. Nothing else was said. The Institute for Social Research, originally based in Frankfurt, had supported Benjamin’s work; these same Marxist scholars tried to bring him to New York to join them in exile. Hannah appreciates their exertion; but unlike hers it was a collective effort, and the room where she waits is pervaded by the same oppressive aura of bureaucratic uniformity. The coffee table has the Institute’s publications available for perusal; the chair she sits on is made neither for work nor comfort, only for a condition of delay that everyone hopes will not be too protracted. What exactly do they do here? Much of their labour, she has heard, is invested in making applications to charitable funding bodies.

  In Lisbon she read Walter’s writings, copied and discussed them, above all his essay ‘On The Concept Of History’, a work he must have considered a kind of testament. There the mechanical Turk serves as metaphor for historical materialism, a theory supposedly able to demonstrate, despite all contrary evidence, that humanity is progressing towards a better state. Free the captive hunchback, Walter seemed to be saying, discard the ridiculous machine; yet nine months ago he was beaten by it. He thought he could enter Spain without a French exit visa; other refugees had done it before, unmolested. But on just that day, the one he chose for his escape, the rules were different. On the chessboard the king lies toppled while the automaton withdraws its triumphant arm, the expression on its face unaltered.

  Theodor Adorno comes in, short and bald, even uglier than she remembers, with his big dark eyes and upper-bourgeois air of entitlement some women supposedly find attractive. He looks surprised. “You?”

  “Didn’t the secretary tell you I was here?”

  “She said there was a Frau Blücher to see me, I didn’t realise it was you.”

  Names these days have become as fluid as nationalities; the dark-suited scholar who scrutinises her so circumspectly used to be called Wiesengrund until he dropped his father’s surname, blatant as a yellow star, replacing it with the more attractive Italian one that had been his mother’s. Hannah will never forgive him for that; her excuse is the more conventional one of recent remarriage, previously she was Frau Stern. They are both in their mid-thirties yet Wiesengrund-Adorno has the manner of an elder statesman puffed up by surroundings he considers prestigious: surplus floor-space on the campus of Columbia University. He looks at her with eyes devoid of desire; Hannah knows how philosophers make love and how they express contempt, explaining either as the fruit of reason. She sees his curiosity drawn exclusively towards the folder of documents on her lap. She explains their origin.

  “We should go to my office.”

  The state of emergency that grips the world is not the exception but the rule: following Adorno along the corridor is little different from appearing at the consulate in order to be assessed for survival by a bland functionary who tells everyone not to take it personally. Humanity is superseded by the reconfiguration of paperwork meant to replicate it, by rules that must be followed, the rules of an artificial second nature. Walter Benjamin was to have been saved by some headed notepaper the Institute sent him, showing his own name among the listed members. Hannah Arendt’s passport has been her political activism; a stipend from the Zionist Organization of America pays for the room she and her husband have rented on West 95th Street, where the landlady is a vegetarian bird-watching hiker who forbids smoking. In Europe that would make her a fascist; in America things are different, apparently.

  Teddie Adorno goes to sit behind his desk while Hannah Arendt perches on the chair facing him, crossing her legs beneath the precious folder. Is this how she seduced Heidegger, he wonders, while for Hannah it is another round in the chess match. Walter told her to bring the papers to Adorno because he was the one man likely to publish them. It was Hannah whom Walter trusted as a genuine friend; she is witness and bearer of the legacy.

  “I have something you should see,” Adorno tells her. From the drawer of his desk he brings out a battered correspondence box stuffed with letters and retrieves a creased postcard, sliding it across the table into Hannah’s view. She stares at the neat French script.

  In a situation without escape, I have no other choice but to finish it all. It is in a little village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me that my life must end.

  She’s heard already, of course, how Walter and his companions were detained in a hotel where Walter apparently took an overdose of his own heart medicine. But not this final message.

  I ask you to pass on my thoughts to my friend Adorno and to explain to him the situation in which I have found myself. There is no more time for me to write all the letters I would have wished to write.

  She is astonished, also instinctively doubtful. “This is not Walter’s hand.”

  “He wrote the message for Henny Gurland who was with him in Portbou. She thought it best to memorise and destroy it, then wrote this copy once she was safe.”

  Terror heightens and perfects the faculty of memory; the most exact antithesis to thought is unlimited freedom of writing, eliminating its value in the same way alchemists feared the easy manufacture of gold would render their discovery futile. Teddie watches her re-read the postcard and can imagine it the centrepiece of a Hollywood dramatisation, sentimental history vignetted to the accompaniment of violins. She’s never liked him, not since his criticism of her first husband’s work on the philosophy of music. She’s no longer even married to the man but still bears the grudge. Somehow, Adorno thinks, Frau Blücher cannot appreciate the dialectic of memoration and forgetfulness.

  “Now you should read this,” she says, leaning forward to place the folder on his desk.

  “Later, of course.”

  “The first piece is rather short, I should like to hear your thoughts.”

  She watches as he opens the folder and lifts the uppermost item, ‘On The Concept of History’. The story of an automaton rigged to win every game: the theory of progress. Walter had been trying to write a book about nineteenth-century Paris but there were only voluminous notes, disconnected sketches; material the self-styled Institute for Social Research could never use since it failed to conform to their or anyone else’s prefabricated system. Walter’s was the sort of mind the Nazis would have delighted in liquidating.

  Adorno’s initial perusal is a swift assessment of names and references; to Hannah he looks, with his glasses perched on his broad bald forehead, like someone marking an end-of-term paper. Lines from Brecht bear testimony to the unfortunate delinquency of Benjamin’s thought, his willingness to embrace shock, populism, mysticism. Each numbered section a mere paragraph
or two, a general deficiency of analysis and rigour, one describes a painting Adorno knows, Klee’s Angelus Novus. Walter owned it, paid a thousand marks for it. The angel is the figure of history, looking retrospectively at chaos and disaster: we are blown backwards into the future by a tempest. This is the painting that will later come to Adorno, rolled in a cardboard tube, just like the postcard and the essay he will not publish, an act that Arendt will publicly condemn. Already the years are filled with nowness from the end of time.

  “This is remarkable,” Adorno murmurs after a while. “He has clarified so much of what we discussed.”

  Envy, Benjamin writes, is something we feel most strongly, not towards what was or will be, but with regard to what might have been. “People we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us.” His suicide note, if genuine, appears to express this envy most starkly: “all the letters I would have wished to write.” In an introduction that Arendt will provide for a collection of his essays published in 1968, she will liken Benjamin to his own description of Kafka: “once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him.” Alike too, though, in their apparent unenviousness, a purity of vision evoking the austere generosity of universal friendship without specific object, a quality sometimes termed saintliness. Benjamin’s final sentence would then express unregretful humility: words that need never be said. History is ultimately redemptive.

  But what of the world the rest of us inhabit: the world of envy? Then it no longer matters what was, is, or will be, but rather what could have been, what might be. In a world driven by envy, history becomes the multiple image of its alternatives, a condition inextricably linked with pastiche. To escape is impossible, to ignore is to surrender; Adorno is sufficiently unfree of envy to appreciate his deceased colleague’s insight.

  “I know you can’t possibly agree with any of it,” Hannah says.

  Adorno looks up, as mystified by her latest comment as by her first appearance. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he is arguing against everything that you and this so-called Institute claim to stand for.”

  It is the kind of crude rhetoric he has come to expect from a woman whose philosophical career has advanced itself in men’s beds as much as in seminar rooms. She has given him five minutes to glance at the essay then insists he should feel defeated by it. In those five minutes he has probably understood more than she managed in the whole of her ferry crossing. He has seen numerous drafts and fragments of Walter’s Paris project; it appeared at one stage as though the proposed work would consist almost entirely of quotations, with hardly any theoretical explanation at all. At least this final essay shows where he was heading.

  Since arriving in America, Adorno has divided his time between the Institute and a publicly funded investigation into the state of radio broadcasting. He is planning to write a book with Max Horkheimer explaining how the Enlightenment gave rise to its opposite, a form of mass deception nowadays propagated by a thriving culture industry. It will be published in 1947 and read by hardly anyone. Arendt will publish The Origins Of Totalitarianism four years later and it will make her internationally famous. He reads aloud another part of the essay. “Within three decades they managed virtually to erase the name of Blanqui.” Arendt stares blankly at him. “You know how strangely fascinated he was by Blanqui?”

  This is a move on the board that Hannah has not been anticipating.

  Adorno explains, “He wrote very excitedly to me about a forgotten book he’d found, L’Éternité par les astres. He saw it as profoundly important to his project.”

  Planets where history goes differently, worlds created out of sheer envy and boredom, a universe where an alternative 1941 is happening right now to participants unaware of their genericity. Destiny, chance, fate: all are illusory in the magic-lantern show of history, the eternal now that makes everything feel new when really it is unconscious repetition. Adorno hears this universe every time he turns on the radio and is subjected to the latest dance tune, no different from the last. Modern existence is combinatorial, a rearrangement of terms robbed of meaning, and Walter was trying to reinvigorate meaning through intellectual montage; all he lacked was a coherent theory. The essay shows that had he been able to come to America, then together they would have elucidated that theory. Contingencies preclude that happy outcome, and this is why Adorno will not publish. It has nothing to do with personalities or the distasteful mess of life.

  Arendt rises. “I have fulfilled my duty to my friend. Now you must respect your own obligation.”

  “He didn’t give these papers in order that they would be made public in a wholly uncritical way. We shall have to look closely at all of this. Perhaps there is something that can be saved from the disaster.”

  “It’s saved already.”

  “Salvation is an immanent concept.”

  “Like damnation?”

  The cruellest twist is what both already know: that immediately after Walter killed himself, the Spanish authorities had a change of heart and decided the Jews need not have been detained after all, they would not be deported back to France, but were instead free to travel onwards as they had intended. Had he not given in to despair, Walter would have reached America with the others.

  Adorno says, “He sent me a draft introduction for his Paris book, where he talked about Blanqui’s absurd cosmology. False histories offering infinite variety at the expense of value, multiplied lives worthless as dust. A desire for everything that instead yields nothing; the essence of modernity.”

  “You could have done more to save him. We must at least make sure he did not die in vain.”

  Adorno shakes his head. “He has already done that for us. In death he asserted the uniqueness of existence. There is only one world, and it is the world where our friend took his life. That he took it for no reason, that he need not have left his great work unfinished and in ruins, serves only to heighten the preciousness of what we are denied.”

  Chapter Six

  Paige is getting ready to go to college, standing in the living room of her flat hurriedly finishing a cup of coffee when her phone rings.

  “Hello, Paige?”

  His tone’s friendly but she doesn’t recognise the voice. “Who is this?”

  “My name’s Julian Verrine. I’m trying to get in touch with David Conroy. Do you know where I could find him?”

  “Why should I?”

  “You’re his student, aren’t you?”

  “Not any more. They told me he’s on sick leave.”

  He chuckles. “Is that what they’re calling it? No, David’s on another of his walkabouts, he does it now and again, goes AWOL and leaves everyone else to pick up the pieces.”

  “You’re from the college?”

  “I was meant to be arranging some performances, can’t get hold of him. Has he contacted you?”

  “I heard he’d had a breakdown.”

  “He’ll come up for air soon enough, always does.”

  “How did you get my number?”

  “David thinks very highly of you, says you’re the best he’s seen in years. A bit rough round the edges but definite star quality: his exact words.”

  “Really? I’m amazed.”

  “That’s why he gave you that piece to learn.”

  “The Klauer?”

  “You still have it?”

  “No.”

  He pauses. “We should talk. You’re obviously quite a talent.”

  “Not exactly ready for the big time yet,” she laughs, warmed by flattery.

  “There are opportunities even for someone at your stage. Let’s say we meet and throw a few ideas around.”

  “But…”

  “How do you feel about crossover?”

  Does he think he can make her a pop star? “I don’t know.”

  “I’m looking to showcase some new talent, young hopefuls, you appreciate I’m thinking aloud here, really we should talk. Lunch tomorrow? Even if it goes nowher
e you’ll at least get a decent meal out of me.”

  And in a moment it’s all arranged, she hangs up thinking this could be a psycho stalker or the biggest break of her life.

  It’s three weeks since she showed up for a lesson with Mr Conroy only to be told he was unwell. Her tutor since then has been Mrs White, and when Paige arrives to see her she’s still thinking about Verrine’s call, wondering whether to mention it. They’re working on Chopin’s Scherzo in C sharp minor, Mrs White wants Paige to play it at a student recital later in the term. Mrs White is nearly at retirement age, has a grown-up daughter in Australia and a son who’s an anaesthetist; she’s fat and motherly, in a purple angora sweater with her spectacles hanging from a chord on her ample bosom. Paige can’t imagine ever being like her.

  “You’re still using your old fingering,” Mrs White points out, interrupting Paige’s performance, saying it as if she were disapproving of the amount of salt being added to a pot of soup.

  “Sorry,” says Paige. She’s been practising it exactly the way Mrs White wants, different from the fingering in the score and anything that would have occurred to Paige naturally, but supposedly better. Mrs White can do her own fingering perfectly and expects every one of her students to do the same. Paige tries again, they get along for a page or two.

  “No ritardando there,” Mrs White reminds her. She chose the Chopin Scherzo for Paige to learn because, she said, it shouldn’t only be for those “big muscly boys”, and the unwanted image that came to Paige’s mind was of Sean, now going out with someone else according to social media and more particularly Ella. The Scherzo alternates between the muscly stuff and what Mrs White calls the “feminine” passages: Chopin, she maintains, was deeply in touch with his feminine side. These episodes are like flowing water, ripples on a lake; the other parts are solid rock. But whenever Paige tries to pursue this imagery she only ends up with Sean, herself, and the foetus.

  The family photographs in Mrs White’s comfortably furnished room are more prominent than the piano that serves as support for several of them. The anaesthetist is seen in various stages: nappies, school uniform, geeky graduate, nervous bridegroom. The daughter looks like a younger Mrs White, embracing her own children in sharp antipodean sunlight, declaring success to the world, though Mrs White herself has an old-fashioned modesty that is immediately comforting. Her lessons typically begin with tea and end with biscuits (“I mustn’t,” she always insists, taking a Hobnob from the china plate). Mrs White says she never had any ambitions to be a soloist, would have liked to have done more touring as a chamber musician but had two children to bring up and, well, had to make choices.