The Edit

by J Sydney Jones

  “I’ve thought of that, too. A compromise. I write to her, telling her not to worry.”

  “Fine.”

  “But not from Mexico City. The postmark must be from here. A postcard of the waterfront. A short note saying I’ll write later. That everything is okay. Then later, after getting to know you, then the Mexico City card.”

  “—”

  “It takes the pressure off outside complications.”

  “I’m not sure …”

  “Or weren’t you serious about developing an understanding between us?”

  “I was. … Am.”

  “Then? She already knows I’m here. Reconfirming that would do you no harm. And it would buy us time.”

  “Miss O’Brien, I am tired of being misunderstood. That is why I have been writing these memoirs in the first place. And I think I would like you to read what I have thus far. I think the time has come for that.”

  “Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  PART III

  Several things at the outset: know that I detest the ‘blame-it-on-mommy’ syndrome as much as I do Freudian psychology. They are both aberrations, bad reads. Freud was a great explorer, a miserable clinician. But if you’re going to dabble in either or both, at least get it right.

  You made the point about the stranglehold quality of the female (archetypal) in Viennese turn-of-the-century society. But you want to have it both ways: to simultaneously revile that matriarchal tradition and to get your jollies from it (vis-à-vis Frau Wotruba and your infantile sexuality with her). There are many things about the first sixty pages or so of manuscript to which I draw exception. But perhaps the most blatant was this sexual adventure with Frau Wotruba. What is startling here? Not the fact of sensuality, to be sure. We all experience this extreme eroticism of prepubescence. Sex is the one thing, it would seem, that we are all prepared for from day one. We have a hard-on for life; it is a blind urge to be satisfied by anyone and everyone. Neither is the fact startling that this fully grown woman is dominated by the same urgency that controls the youth. There is, in fact, an extreme honesty in her portrayal. There is no doubt that this happened: She is much too real to have been invented. She is much too human to be mere fiction. Her need and her outlet are not bothersome to me. I am not shocked, though I see how such an invitation could lead to certain warps in the sexuality of the little boy: he the passive recipient, the object to be rubbed against.

  And this is what I do find startling about the scene: that the connection between the all-powerful matriarch and Frau Wotruba has not been made. The boy’s mother comes in for a full dose of scorn on that account (she controls when and where the boy goes out; how much wine the father will drink). This mother is the supreme warlord of the tiny flat. And the boy distances himself from this woman, who may or may not be hiding the castrating shears behind her skirts, early on. Yet, having spoken so sentiently about women in Vienna, it is too bad that you did not see who the real matriarch was in your life, for this role must go to Frau Wotruba. It was she who dominated you, who sent you wild with her rubbings. She used you for her satisfaction only—which, when you come down to it, is what sex is all about.

  We’re not talking about love here, but pure sex. By the end of the relationship (I assume that was finis when your parents discovered you together?) you have rebelled: you now appear to be in control. Yet you noticed she still enjoyed her satisfaction of you—she still employed you for her enjoyment. The stakes had been upped. You were more a participant, but had the situation really changed? Don’t you think she may have prompted your sadism simply to make a stale situation fresher for herself? To spice up the act somewhat? Were you actually in control, or did she simply lead you to believe you were? And being, as you thought, in control, weren’t you even better as a sex partner than before?

  A statement of belief apropos all of this: The dynamics of man and woman together are the basis of all relationships, all things political in the world. The conjugal is the fundamental political map; look at the sex of any age to determine the political climate.

  And what of the day your father jumped into the fountain and could not get out? You were perceptive enough to see this for what it was: the knocking down of the man who stands in the way of your own manhood. Every boy must see his father with his pants around his ankles in order to see the man-ness of him: the father’s humanity and thus his ultimate frailty. If we must, this would be the penultimate act in the Oedipal play in Freudian terms. The father, competitor with the son for the love of the mother, is laid low. His power, his vitality, his very masculinity is destroyed. Which leaves the boy as sole contender for his mother’s heart and bed. Which comes in the final act. But there is something amiss here. If it is true that Frau Wotruba, and not your mother, is the real matriarch in your life, then what are you not telling us? And why have you left us dangling about your parents’ reaction to the scene they witnessed: your spunk all over the woman’s hair; her tits hanging into your face? For I sense that you’re not coming back to this scene. You have moved on in your chronology to early manhood. And what, too, of your father’s real demise as opposed to his symbolic one? You mention his death in an aside. That of course is your prerogative. But I have the feeling this hides something. You are not allowing full disclosure. Such a course is not necessarily required in literature. But you have led us to believe that such will be the case with your writing. Anything less, therefore, than complete honesty is unacceptable.

  Do not misunderstand me: This is not a problem of style. I have very few criticisms apropos your way of writing, though it strikes me you are a trifle stuffier than need be. Perhaps it is the language problem. Why, indeed, do you write in English? Why not German? Especially when writing your memoirs, it would be assumed you’d want absolute ease of expression. I am positive that your choice of language is no accident. I await your explanation on this point.

  I reproduce Miss O’Brien’s handwritten critique of the first part of my manuscript in full. It awaited me the very next morning as I delivered breakfast. I read it drinking my coffee. It angered me then and still does now. I suppose I should be gladdened that she was interested enough in my words to take them seriously. They work for her. They describe a life to which she has no other introduction. Strange, when I began these memoirs, I thought of sharing some elemental truths with a large anonymous audience. Of reaching out to this ur-public from the wisdom and loneliness of old age and telling them the truth about a certain period of history and about a certain man involved in that historical movement. As such, my dream was sublime; there was a degree of grandeur in the thought of reaching those nameless thousands who might read my little book.

  Sharing these things with one other person, however, is a different matter. One is made to feel more responsible for one’s words when the audience is limited and known, rather than when it is vast and amorphous. This accountability is something I never reckoned with. This calling to account by Miss O’Brien is what smarted at first. This must be how every writer feels about every critic: Who are they to judge when they do not put their own intellectual and emotional viscera on the line? They are seagulls to the artistic pelican.

  After reflection, though, I have decided that Miss O’Brien is different from these carrion. She is, like it or not, intimately bound into my life. She is not looking at my work from an artificial, stylistic point of view, but from that of one employing ultimate personal honesty as the benchmark. She has a vested interest in that: She needs to know how capable I am of telling the truth so that we might call a truce on that score. My initial rancor then softens at this realization. I listen to her voice, reread her criticism. I cannot stomach the constant referral to the Jew Freud. His doctrine sickens me. As one of his own kind once said, Freud’s work is a symptom rather than a cure of the contemporary malaise. Oedipus be damned!

  All the same, Miss O’Brien is perceptive. I was not intending to go
back to the family scene: I thought leaving it at that dramatic point would be more effective. After all, what could I relate but how Frau Wotruba threw the cover over me, turned her back on my parents’ air-gulping startled faces, and buttoned her bodice quite calmly. How she did not bother with dissimulation but walked out wordlessly, her hair still flowing about her shoulders. Walked out never to return to our flat, leaving me to explain, as best as I could, what all that naked flesh had meant.

  Thank the deity of your choice, Maria awoke in the midst of Father’s subsequent harangue, and neither of my parents had the heart to continue the conversation in front of the virginal little girl. In the morning, it was as if nothing … and everything … had happened. No word of the transgression was mentioned, yet disapproval hung in the air like the sour smell of boiled cabbage. Something had ended between Father and me; some near intimacy of maleness was cut dead before fully developing. No longer did we go on our Saturday afternoon outings together; there were no more clumsy attempts at the friendship of equals from him—which was fine as it had only made me nervous, anyway. But I felt a loss that I am even today unable to describe.

  At first, I thought the trade-off more than worth it: a view of Frau Wotruba’s breasts and an explosion at my groin were more than compensation for the loss of Father’s attentions. As the months and years wore on, however, the bargain seemed ill-struck and far too one-sided.

  You were right, too, Miss O’Brien, about his death and about the true competition for the real matriarch, but not in the silly Freudian framework you insist upon. This I will presently relate, painful as it is for me.

  By the by, I can easily tell you why I write in English, even though it comes over stilted at times. The reasons are twofold: First, I would like to reach as large an audience as possible with these memoirs. English reaches nearly four hundred million as a primary tongue, countless millions, if not billions, more as a second language. What I have to say is too important to trust to translators and their helpful mistakes. Second, I avoid German so as to avoid any possible sentimentalizing on my part. I want meaning to come with difficulty, not with ease. Thereby all memories will be conjured up, not just the comfortable ones. I abhor selective memory: It is at the very heart of what is kitsch. These words are as much confession as memoir.

  We left the Hubertusgasse not many months after the incident with Frau Wotruba. In my mind, the two seemed to relate directly to each other, but I know this was not the case. It was not a matter of cause and effect, but rather something Father and Mother had been planning for quite some time. I had actively fought against any such plans as removal to a new district. As miserable as I was in the gymnasium where I was enrolled, still I was more fearful of change. With the inherent conservatism of youth, I wanted to cling to the known, even if it was making me miserable, rather than opt for another situation and all its uncertainties. But after my being discovered with Frau Wotruba, I suddenly longed for change: anything that might replace the awful silence in our sitting room at night.

  We moved to Ungargasse one bright day early that summer. School was just out and I was helping with the packing and hauling, hoping to restore some of the old feeling between Father and me. But he only gave me carefully worded directions for packing, spoken as one would to a person with a brain defect, and set me about my tasks, which were largely independent of his own. We had movers come for the large pieces, so there was not even the need for Father and me to lift something in unison. Yet, I held out hope that moving to Ungargasse would somehow change things. I could not understand his reaction: I expected disappointment, but this was worse. Father reacted to the thing as one would to a deep betrayal.

  The new flat did one thing: It supplied privacy, an unknown commodity at Hubertusgasse. I had an alcove off the sitting room, a triangular space just large enough for a three-foot-wide bed and a night table. This was closed off by a length of paisley cloth reaching from floor to ceiling. It was a far cry from the Chinese screen I had lived with for so many years.

  As tiny as this alcove was, I felt fortunate for it; it was my space. I could do with it as I pleased, within reason. All I needed to do was draw the curtain to shut my life off from prying eyes. Upon the night table stood an electric lamp with a massive lead base molded to look like a scallop shell. Next to the lamp was an alarm clock that I seldom used because of the frightful tocking reverberations it set up in the alcove. Behind this, like a talisman I kept by my bed summer and winter, was the snowy bubble of Stephansdom, St. Stephan’s. And always, and increasingly so as I grew older, were the books into which I would escape from the present. I’m afraid my reading list was not very original. It might even have been a trifle retrograde, for my favorite novels of all were those of Karl May and the adventures of his heroes Shatterhand and the Indian Winnetou in the American Southwest. Winnetou, I must confess, was my favorite, for I had all the typical youth’s fondness for the exotic free life of the Indian. For years together, I imagined, as I walked down Vienna’s cobbled lanes, that I was a sleek-footed chieftain on the hunt of bobcat and invading white men. My sympathies lay altogether with the Indian cause. From Winnetou, I learned the fear of encirclement, of encroachment on one’s land by lesser peoples, just as was happening to us Germans and Austrians by the peoples of the east. Hitler, another fan of Karl May’s, was perceptive enough to understand this threat, as well, and to act upon it!

  Other books I enjoyed as a youth: mainly history and historical romances. Anything I could lay my hands on about the Holy Roman Empire or stories from the Norse sagas (these came in one of the first paperback editions I had ever seen, its front covered in the pigeon footprints that I later learned to be runic writing). There were also the Corti biographies of the Habsburgs, which I think still stand the test of time.

  And, by mistake, one time I purchased, with Groschens dearly saved, a battered old volume of The Memoirs of Josephine Mutzenbacher. I had no idea what the book was about, only that it was written by Felix Salten, the creator of Bambi. I had once overheard a schoolmaster of mine laughing about this fact but could not decipher what the joke was. At any rate, I bought the book, to the surprise and lightly concealed disgust of the female proprietor of a dusty secondhand bookshop I frequented off the Graben, but could find no indication it was written by Salten. Beginning it, I was painfully shocked at what I read. Far from being some Pygmalion-like tale as my teacher had been saying (or perhaps it was in the truest sense), the book was actually a pornographic novel based on the sexploits of a famous Viennese demimonde late last century.

  It seemed there was no disgusting vice in which Josephine would not partake if the price or the size of the codpiece were right, and the list of her partners was awesome: from the coal man to the aristocrat to her priest and even to her biological father. I forced myself to read the book through, just to inform myself of what things my school chums found so enlightening.

  I wish I could say I did not find it titillating; on the contrary, it was most arousing. One wonders about our sanity, our very health when perversion becomes the grounds for sexual arousal. I have since talked with many other men who have read that book, and most of them were delighted with it. They found it “dear” or “charming.” I am flummoxed at such descriptions: They found the erotica humorous rather than debasing, cute rather than crude. I guess there is no explaining men.

  That book, in fact, so aroused me that it got me thinking once again of Frau Wotruba and her breasts. I also began wondering about that secret moist furry place my hand had begun to explore between her legs—at the very apex of where her legs and trunk met. Josephine Mutzenbacher made it very plain what that region was. I was now equipped with not only an anatomically accurate description of it, but also a vast assortment of sordid names for it, as well. I wanted very much to touch or gaze upon a woman’s “pussy.” This became an all-consuming urge with me after having read this prostitute’s memoirs. I forgot all about Winnetou for the time being and p
ut the fight with my father clear out of my head. I even left off worrying about my new school, which I would start in the fall. I had only one goal, one purpose in life. I went to sleep thinking of it and awoke thinking of it, usually accompanied by a painful erection.

  This continued throughout June and July and into August of that year, 1928. There were no walks in the country for us that summer, for the vacation money had been spent securing a bigger flat. And it was a hot, humid, and unbearable summer. Occasionally, Mother would take Maria and me to the bathing beaches of the Old Danube, a blind arm of the river with no drainage. The water was thus thick and warm, but it cooled us nonetheless. After swimming, I would lie on my back in the prickly grass under the baking sun, feeling rivulets of sweat build up and finally roll off my belly, between my legs, and even this sweat was charged with eroticism. The mind and consciousness are at once infinite and all too finite, full of caprice and stodgy as hell. It could conjure up pictures of sensuality enough for the rankest of orgies. Like the Cyclops or unicorn, the woman’s yoni took on mythic proportions in my mind: the omphalos of the cosmos. What a lovely instrument of pleasure it was in these fancies: like a breast, but inside out. It would be soft and sweet smelling and would envelop my stiff prick like a fur muff on a cold day. Thus is the imagination. But as the mythic proportions of fabulous pussies soared in one part of my mind, the other hemisphere, the clerk of the cerebrum, was sifting through pragmatics: With whom and how? Fine to daydream, this accountant reminded me, but let’s get on with it. Let’s get our hands and glands on one, he urged.

  But, I complained, I was only a child. Who could I find to let me indulge this passion?

  Do I have to do everything for you? this tidy man of sums said. You know very well who. You know very well how.