The Clown

by Heinrich Böll

  What worries me so much is my inability to limit myself, or, as my agent Zohnerer would say, to concentrate my talents. My acts are too much of a mixture of pantomime, artistry, clowning—I would be a good Pierrot, but I could also be a good clown, and I vary my acts too often. I could probably have lived for years on my turns called a Catholic and a Protestant sermon, a Board of Directors meeting, traffic, and a few others, but when I have done an act ten or twenty times I find it so boring that I can hardly keep from yawning right in the middle, literally, I have the worst time controlling my mouth muscles. I am bored with myself. When I stop to think that there are clowns who perform the same acts for thirty years, my heart sinks as if I were condemned to eat a whole sack of flour with a spoon. I must enjoy doing a thing, otherwise I get sick. It suddenly occurs to me that I might possibly be able to juggle or sing: just excuses to get out of practicing every day. At least four hours’ practice, six is better, even longer if possible. I had neglected that too during the past six weeks and just done a few headstands, handstands, and somersaults every day and some exercises on the rubber mat I always carry around with me. Now my injured knee was a good excuse for lying on the sofa, smoking cigarettes, and inhaling self-pity. My latest new pantomime, the Minister’s Speech, had been quite good, but I was fed up with caricatures and anyway never got beyond a certain point. All my lyrical attempts had failed. I had never managed to portray human nature without being horribly corny. My acts Dancing Couple and Going to School and Returning from School were at least artistically passable. But then when I tried a man’s career, I always dropped back into doing a caricature. Marie was right when she said my attempts to sing to the guitar were an attempt at escape. What I do best are the absurdities of daily life: I observe, add up these observations, increase them to the nth degree and draw the square root from them, but with a different factor from the one I increased them by. Every morning at all the big railway stations thousands of people arrive to work in the city—and thousands leave by train to work outside the city. Why don’t these people simply exchange their places of work? Or take the long lines of cars crawling past each other during rush hour. Exchange the places where people work or live, and all the stink and fumes, the dramatic arm-waving of the policemen, could be avoided: it would be so quiet at the intersections they could play parchesi there. From this observation I composed a pantomime where I use only my hands and feet, my face remains immobile and snow-white in the middle, and with my four extremities I manage to give an impression of a tremendous amount of rushing movement. My aim is: as few props as possible or, even better, none at all. For the act Going to School and Returning from School I don’t even need schoolbooks; the hands holding them are enough, at the last moment I run across the street in front of clanging streetcars, jump on buses, off them again, shopwindows divert my attention, I write misspelled words with chalk on housewalls, I stand—late—in front of the scolding teacher, put down my books and slide into my seat. The lyrical quality of childhood is something I manage to portray quite well: in a child’s life there is a greatness in the banal, it is strange, random, always tragic. A child, too, never takes time off as a child; time off does not begin until the “principles of order” have been accepted. I observe all the various ways of knocking off work with fanatical zeal: the way a workman puts his pay envelope in his pocket and gets on his motorbike, the way a broker finally lays down the telephone, puts his notebook away in a drawer and locks it, or the way the girl in the grocery store takes off her apron, washes her hands and fixes her hair and lips in the mirror, picks up her handbag—and away she goes, it is all so human that I sometimes feel inhuman because I can only portray time off as one of my acts. I have discussed the question with Marie of whether an animal can take time off, a cow chewing the cud, a donkey dozing beside the fence. She said she thought animals that worked and so could take time off would be blasphemous. Sleep might be something like time off, a wonderful thing that humans and animals have in common, but the leisurely quality of leisure consists after all in the conscious experiences of it. Even doctors have time off, and recently even priests. That annoys me, they have no business to and they should be able to understand that about the artist. They need to know nothing about art, about mission, calling, and all that nonsense, but about the nature of the artist. I have always argued with Marie as to whether the God in whom she believes takes time off or not, she always insists he does, gets out the Old Testament and reads me the story of the Creation: And He rested on the seventh day. I countered with the New Testament and said it was possible the God of the Old Testament had taken time off, but the idea of a Christ taking time off was quite inconceivable to me. Marie went pale when I said that, she admitted she found the idea of a Christ taking time off blasphemous, that he might have enjoyed himself but had hardly enjoyed leisure.

  I can sleep like an animal, dreamlessly as a rule, often only for a few minutes and yet with the feeling I have been gone for an eternity, as if I had stuck my head through a wall beyond which lies endless darkness, oblivion and leisure, and what Henrietta was thinking of when she suddenly dropped her tennis racquet on the ground or her spoon in the soup or tossed the playing cards into the fire: nothing. I asked her once what she thought about when it came over her, and she said: “You really don’t know?” “No,” I said, and she said softly: “Of nothing, I think of nothing.” I said, but it’s not possible to think of nothing, and she said: “Yes, it is, I am suddenly quite empty and yet kind of drunk, and I long to throw off my shoes and my clothes—to get rid of all ballast.” She also said it was such a wonderful feeling that she was always waiting for it, but it never came when she waited for it, always unexpectedly, and it seemed to last forever. It had happened to her a few times in school too, I remember my mother’s vehement phone conversations with the teacher and the expression: “Yes, yes, hysterical, that’s the word—and please punish her severely.”

  Sometimes I get a feeling of wonderful emptiness like when I play parchesi when it has gone on for more than three or four hours; just the sounds, the rattle of the dice, the taptap of the little men, the click when one is taken. I even managed to get Marie, who prefers chess, addicted to this game. It was like a drug for us. Sometimes we played it for five or six hours on end, and the waiters and chambermaids who brought us tea or coffee showed the same mixture of uneasiness and annoyance in their faces as my mother did when it came over Henrietta, and sometimes they said what the people in the bus had said when I went home from Marie’s: “Incredible.” Marie invented a very complicated system of keeping score with points: according to whether you got thrown out or threw the person out, you got points, she worked out an interesting chart, and I bought her a four-color pencil so that she could mark down the passive values and the active values, as she called them. Sometimes we played it on long train journeys, to the amazement of respectable passengers—until I suddenly realized Marie was only going on playing with me because she wanted to please me, to soothe me, to relax my “artist’s soul.” Her thoughts were far away, it began a few months ago when I refused to go to Bonn, although for five days in a row I had no performance. I didn’t want to go to Bonn. I was scared of the group, was scared of meeting Leo, but Marie kept on saying she had to breathe “Catholic air” again. I reminded her of how we had gone back to Cologne from Bonn after the first evening with the group, tired, miserable and depressed, and how she had kept saying to me in the train: “You are so sweet, so sweet,” and had fallen asleep against my shoulder, waking up only a few times when the conductor called out the names of the stations: Sechtem, Walberberg, Brühl, Kalscheuren—each time she jumped, started up, and I pressed her head down again onto my shoulder, and when we got out at Cologne West she said: “We should have gone to a movie.” I reminded her of all that when she began talking about having to breathe “Catholic air,” and I suggested we go to a movie, or go dancing, or play parchesi, but she shook her head and went off to Bonn by herself. I have no idea what she means by “
Catholic air.” After all, we were in Osnabrück, and the air there couldn’t be all that un-Catholic.

  11

  I went into the bathroom, poured some of the stuff Monika Silvs had put out for me into the tub and turned on the hot water. Having a bath is almost as good as sleeping, just as sleeping is almost as good as doing “the thing.” That’s what Marie called it, and I always think of it in her words. I simply could not imagine that she would do “the thing” with Züpfner, my imagination just hasn’t room for such ideas, just as I was never seriously tempted to poke around in Marie’s underwear. I could only imagine that she would play parchesi with Züpfner, and that infuriated me. There was nothing I had done with her that she could do with him without seeming like a traitor or a whore. She couldn’t even spread butter on his toast. When I imagined her picking up his cigarette from the ashtray and smoking it I nearly went out of my mind, and the knowledge that he didn’t smoke and probably played chess with her was no consolation. After all, she had to do something with him, go out dancing or play cards, he had to read aloud to her or she to him, and she had to talk to him too, about the weather or about money. Actually the only thing she could do for him without having to think of me all the time was cook, for she did this so rarely for me that it would not necessarily be treason or whoring. I felt like phoning Sommerwild right away, but it was still too early, I had made up my mind to wake him up at two thirty in the morning and have a long talk with him about art. Eight o’clock in the evening, that was too respectable an hour to call him up and ask him how many principles of order he had fed Marie with already and what commission he would get from Züpfner: a thirteenth-century crucifix, or a fourteenth-century madonna from the Rhineland. I also considered the method I would use to kill him. Probably the best way to kill esthetes is with valuable objets d’art so that in death they can still get mad over an act of vandalism. A madonna would not be valuable enough, and it would be too solid, he could die happy in the knowledge that the madonna had been saved, and a painting is not heavy enough, although the frame might be, only then again he would find consolation in the thought that the painting itself might be spared. Perhaps I could scrape the paint off a valuable painting and suffocate or strangle him with the canvas: not a perfect murder but a perfect murder of an esthete. It wouldn’t be easy, either, to send a healthy specimen like that into the next world, Sommerwild is tall and slim, of “dignified” appearance, white-haired and “kindly,” a mountain-climber and proud of having participated in two world wars and winning a medal for athletics. A tough opponent, in tiptop condition. There was nothing for it but to dig up a valuable metal objet d’art, made of bronze or gold, perhaps marble would do, but I couldn’t very well go to Rome first and make off with something from the Vatican Museum.

  While the bathwater was running, I happened to think of Blothert, an important member of the group whom I had only seen twice. He was a kind of “Rightist counterpart” to Kinkel, also a politican but with a different background and from a different “milieu”; Züpfner was to him what Fredebeul was to Kinkel: a kind of disciple, a “spiritual heir,” but to call up Blothert would have been even more senseless than to ask the walls of my apartment for help. The only thing which aroused a halfway recognizable sign of life in him was Kinkel’s baroque madonnas. The way he compared them with his own showed me how abysmally they hated each other. He was president of something or other which Kinkel would like to have been president of, they still called each other by first names as they had gone to school together. On each of the two occasions I saw Blothert I got a shock. He was of medium height, very fair and looked about twenty-five, when someone looked at him he grinned, when he said anything he first ground his teeth for half a minute, and of every four words he said two were “the Cabinet” and “Catholon”—and then you suddenly saw he was over fifty, and he looked like a student aged by secret vices. A weird character. Sometimes he tied himself in knots when he said a few words, began to stammer and said “the Ca Ca Ca Ca,” and I felt sorry for him till he finally spat out the rest of the word, “binet” or “tholon.” Marie had told me about him, that he was “spectacularly intelligent.” I have never received any proof of this claim, and on only one occasion did I hear him say more than twenty words: when the group were talking about the death penalty. He had been “unreservedly in favor,” and what surprised me about this statement was the fact that he did not pretend the contrary. As he spoke his face wore an expression of triumphant bliss, he got tangled up again in his Ca Ca and it sounded as if with every Ca he was cutting off someone’s head. Now and then he would look at me, and every time in surprise as if he was refraining from saying “Incredible,” he didn’t refrain from shaking his head. I believe someone who is not a Catholic simply doesn’t exist for him. I kept thinking that if the death penalty introduced he would plead for the execution of all non-Catholics. He also had a wife, children, and a telephone. Then I decided after all to phone my mother again instead. I remembered Blothert when I thought of Marie, for he would be constantly in and out of the house, he had something to do with the Executive Committee, and the thought of his being one of her regular visitors horrified me. I am very fond of her, and perhaps her girl guide’s words, “I must take the path that I must take,” were to be taken as the valediction of an early Christian martyr who is about to be thrown to the wild beasts. I also thought of Monika Silvs and knew that one day I would accept her compassion. She was so pretty and so sweet, and she had seemed to me to fit into the group even less than Marie. Whether she was busy in the kitchen—I had once helped her to make sandwiches too—whether she was smiling, dancing, or painting, it was all so natural, even though I did not care for the pictures she painted. She had listened too long to Sommerwild holding forth about annunciation and revelation and almost all she ever painted now was madonnas. I would try and talk her out of that. It simply can’t be a success, even if you believe in it and can paint well. They should leave all that madonna painting to children or devout monks who don’t consider themselves artists. I wondered whether I would succeed in talking Monika out of her madonna painting. She is not an amateur, she is still young, twenty-two or three, without a doubt still a virgin—and this terrified me. The horrible thought occurred to me that the Catholics had assigned me the role of being her Siegfried. She would end up by living with me for a few years, being nice to me, until the principles of order began to take effect, and then she would return to Bonn and marry Von Severn. I blushed at the thought and abandoned it. Monika was such a nice girl, and I didn’t like making her the object of wicked thoughts. If we arranged a date, I would first have to talk her out of Sommerwild, that ladies’ man who looked so much like my father. Except that my father makes no claim beyond that of being a halfway decent exploiter, and this claim he lives up to. With Sommerwild I always have the feeling he could just as well be a hotel or concert manager, a public relations officer in a shoe factory, a well-groomed popular singer, perhaps even the editor of a fashionable “literary” magazine. Every Sunday he preaches at St. Korbinian’s. Marie took me along twice. The performance is more embarrassing than anything Sommerwild’s superiors ought to permit. I would rather read Rilke, Hofmannsthal and Newman one by one than have someone mix me a kind of syrup out of all three. During the sermon I started to sweat. There are certain deviations from the norm which are more than my vegetative nervous system can bear. That that which is, is, and that that which is in suspension is suspended—I shudder when I hear expressions like that. Then I would rather listen to some inept, pudgy pastor stammering out the incomprehensible truths of this religion from his pulpit without deluding himself that he is delivering a polished sermon. Marie was sad because nothing in Sommerwild’s sermons had impressed me. What was especially depressing was that after the sermon we all sat around in a café not far from St. Korbinian’s, the whole café filled up with artistic people who had been to hear Sommerwild’s sermon. Then he came himself, a kind of circle formed around him, and we were dr
awn into the circle, and this synthetic stuff that he had uttered so glibly from the pulpit was chewed over two or three or even four times. A very pretty young actress with golden long hair and the face of an angel who, so Marie whispered to me, was already “three quarters” converted, was almost ready to kiss Sommerwild’s feet. I don’t think he would have stopped her.

  I turned off the bathwater, took off my jacket, pulled my shirt and undershirt over my head and threw them in the corner, and I was just getting into the tub when the phone rang. I know only one person who can make the phone ring with such a vigorous, virile sound: Zohnerer, my agent. He speaks so closely and intimately into the telephone that I am afraid every time of getting his spit in my face. When he wants to say something nice to me he begins the conversation with: “You were magnificent yesterday”; he just says that, without knowing whether I was really magnificent or not; when he wants to say something unpleasant, he begins with: “Now listen, Schnier, you’re not Chaplin, you know”; this doesn’t mean at all that I am not as good a clown as Chaplin, but merely that I am not famous enough to be able to afford to do something which has annoyed Zohnerer. Today he would not even say anything unpleasant, nor would he announce the imminent end of the world, the way he always did when I canceled a performance. He would not even accuse me of a “mania for canceling.” Probably Offenbach, Bamberg, and Nuremberg had canceled too, and he would add up over the phone all the expenses accumulating on my account. The phone went on ringing, manly, vigorous, virile, I was just about to throw a sofa cushion over it—but I pulled on my bathrobe, went into the living room, and stopped in front of the ringing telephone. Managers have strong nerves, persistence, words like “sensitiveness of the artistic soul” are to them words like “Lager Beer,” and any attempt to talk seriously to them about art and artists would be just waste of breath. They also know perfectly well that even an unscrupulous artist has a thousand times more conscience than a scrupulous manager, and they possess one all-conquering weapon: the sheer knowledge of the fact that an artist simply cannot help doing what he does: painting pictures, traveling up and down the country as a clown, singing songs, carving something “enduring” out of stone or granite. An artist is like a woman who can do nothing but love, and who succumbs to every stray male jackass. The easiest people to exploit are artists and women, and every manager is from one to ninety-nine per cent a pimp. The ringing of the phone was absolutely a pimp’s ringing. He had found out from Kostert, of course, when I left Bochum, and knew for certain that I was at home. I tied the belt to my bathrobe and lifted the receiver. Immediately his beery breath hit me in the face. “Damn it all, Schnier,” he said, “what’s the big idea, letting me wait so long.”