During the 1920s and ’30s, Benn found a way of parlaying his short explosive free verse poems into lengthier internal combustion pieces. His characteristic form became the tightly rhymed octave, often in very short two- or three-foot lines. The longings and strictures and surfeits articulated in these are often very beautiful and bizarre, but barely translatable, not even when there are equivalents—perhaps especially not when there are equivalents. What is the English, pray, for: “Banane, yes, Banane / vie méditerranée?” “Banana, yes, banana / Mediterranean life?” I don’t think so. It is as though, having been done in one language (German?), it can never be done again in any other. A blizzard of neologisms, incantatory and highly personal charm words, flower names, and technical terms; sociopathic hatred; a texture of fierce and luxurious depression. Benn pines for “Mediterranean,” “Palau,” “Night,” “Cocaine,” “Anesthesia.” Life is “niederer Wahn,” lower or lesser madness; in its place Benn calls for “thalassale Regression,” for form, trance, elevation. It might seem Decadent, 1890s-style, only there is no pose about it, nothing effete. For all the Verlaine-like sonorities of the poems, there are ferocious energies at work within them. I am conscious that the poems of this period are underrepresented in the present selection of Impromptus. They were too difficult and idiosyncratic for me to carry them into English in any important way. I preferred to go more or less straight from the shocking early to the weary late: to those beerily misanthropic and magically beautiful mutterings of Benn’s last two decades that have always particularly entranced me as a reader. Two world wars, two marriages, two bereavements, careers in the military and medicine, and forty years of writing have gone into their making. “Ausdruck und Stoffvernichtung,” expressiveness and destruction of subject matter, they are. They come with their own silence and space. Like the early poems, they are as they are, are as they want to be. The opposite of art, Benn always argued, is not actually nature but a concern to please.
Thus, the hardness of the early style—the “gargoyles”—is replaced by human tenderness, empathy, puzzlement, a kind of unfocused but unavoidable sadness. It is as though the poems themselves (and this strikes me as extremely rare in poetry, Eugenio Montale’s late, retrobottega poems a further instance) are old, have undergone an aging process, cellular and organic, like flesh. These later poems’ resources—a mild, stoical plaintiveness, a burbling, flaccid syntax, an unsolicited melancholy, a heaping of negatives—are those of age; breathing and humming and carpet slippers and Juno cigarettes and murmuring and pain and a human smell have gone into them—not mere dime-a-dozen words. At bottom, life is unchanged in thousands of years: still solitude, still doubt, still want of recognition; poetry is always questioning and at odds with life; always “the insufferable / difficulties of outward-directed expression.” You see the jowly man in front of his chaotic shelves. That “fascination” that Benn identified as the elusive but irreducible quality of poetry inheres in them as much as it does in the rhyming strophes; effectively, both are collages of the most varied and spirited diction. The growly misanthropic cuss who speaks them is as much an invention and a function of style as the brittle and glitteringly impersonal manner of the octaves. Though light as lace, they are wonderfully heavy with experience, “a pile of life in variegated forms.”
Yeats says the poet “is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.” Not so Benn, not in these last poems. He is absolutely the bundle seated—if not to breakfast exactly, then at least in the corner of the bar after work in the evening, where he downs two or three beers, smokes his Junos, listens to the radio, listens to the chatter of the other customers, scribbles something trenchantly doleful on a pad. It is rare for art to be so perspicuous, to be made from so extravagantly little—sometimes just “a dish / of sausage soup (free on Thursdays / with a beverage)”—so to pair grace with dailiness, discretion with intimacy, a shy wistfulness with stoicism.
Somehow, quite without my realizing it, I have spent half my life with Benn; back in his centenary year, 1986, I reviewed the two-volume edition of his poems and Holthusen’s begun biography of him. He has influenced me not only to translate him in the first place but also while translating him. Over the years, thanks in part to Benn, my own sentences have become more indeterminate, my language more musical, my diction more florid. There is a sort of murmurous, mi-voix, halblaut quality in poems that I adore and, languidly, strive for. I was all the time quietly being readied for a task I hardly dared suppose I would ever take on. I loved these poems when I first read and wrote about them half a lifetime ago; somehow—youth? trepidation? selfish possession rather than working to make them available to an English readership?—I never allowed myself to think I might actually translate them.
HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER
I was pushing twenty-two. It was May or June of 1979, and it was the year, maybe the month I was graduating—in absentia, what else.
People I knew were putting on a Poetry Festival in Cambridge, and I went along to some of the events in the big old Corn Exchange, where the Clash had played, and Richard Hell. My relationship with poetry was that I scorned it, and felt sorry for it. I actually meant words at all times, I didn’t want to be a rock star or a comedian, but poetry as it seemed to propose itself to me, or to me then, was awful. A type of crippled language that couldn’t say what it meant, that was always—like Cambridge, like England—nostalgic for better times, a hopeless anachronism, little better than lavender spats. And yet it was what I was trying to write—fiction had defeated me—and, where possible, to read.
I had known poets, had had an English teacher who was one, and a geography teacher; at school older boys had worn their ties “at half-mast” when Pound died and Auden died, but probably this was my first actual experience of poets. I don’t think my expectations were keyed up. I wasn’t cynical so much as unhopeful.
Into this abeyance marched—well, several people, but most particularly Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who sounds like several people anyway, and certainly does the work of several people. (He writes political essays, and has translated the complete nonsense verse of Edward Lear—and I daresay one could span the arc wider than that.) Enzensberger read, in German, and in English, which I calculated might be his third? or fifth? language (after Spanish, Finnish, Italian), from his long poem Der Untergang der Titanic (published the previous year in Germany; The Sinking of the Titanic—in his own sparkling translation—appeared in 1981). It was immediately apprehensible, it was funny, he read it and talked it with grace and self-deprecation, he beat, in other words, the English at their own game. And this, incredibile dictu, was a countryman of Gert Fröbe’s! In the ratty, rather summerproof England of the 1970s he dazzled in his part Monsieur Hulot, part Paris 1919 John Cale white clothes—Tom Wolfe hadn’t been thought of—and it was all casual. He knew how important it was—in England!—not to be trying, or not to be seen to be trying. I think he even wore plimsolls. It was—pace Yeats—as though he had not a sword but a Dunlop Maxply upstairs.
He read his wonderful confection of the Titanic, which incorporated documentary material, old blues songs, recollections of the end of his time in Havana in 1970, descriptions of famous paintings. His poem was an elegy to capitalism, accidentally—or perhaps it wasn’t an accident?—twinned with a lullaby to communism. It was the Titanic going down—or maybe it was the ship-shaped island of Cuba, the thorn in America’s side, after the failure of the sugar gamble. If cleverness had rosy cheeks and a smile on its face, it would be Hans Magnus Enzensberger. He illuminated us. He illuminated me. I didn’t speak to him till many years later, but I was always grateful to him.
MAX BECKMANN
I have never thought of the German painter Max Beckmann (1884–1950) as an especially vexed or controversial or unregarded figure, but it seems I may have been unusual in that. His work—like Picasso’s, which it sometimes resembles—is unmistakably his own, it di
splays richly individual tendencies and conflicts, an original palette that has always had my particular admiration, an eroticism both explicit and tantalizing, an epic quality that I think of as Mediterranean or Homeric. In its drama and clutter and burstingness, it regularly challenges the very idea of what can be done in a painting. Many of Beckmann’s images—some of the shrewd and masterful self-portraits and portraits, the haunting night paintings, the jumbles of figures that are between dreamy and nightmarish—have become part of my mental furniture. Above all, as what nowadays is called an “icon,” in his fifty-year devotion to a career through the vicissitudes of European history, he seems to me exemplary and heroic. This is based every bit as much on his writing—the World War I letters, and especially the sublime Tagebücher 1940–50, which is not just one of the great art books but one of the great books, tout court—as on his painting. A lot of the early twentieth century German painters also wrote—Gross, Kokoschka, Klee, Schwitters. Beckmann wrote better than the best of them.
It was strange, then, to come to Paris, to the Beaubourg, which owns, it seems, precisely two Beckmann canvases, and see an exhibition mounted out of rue and contrition (and only after long and triumphant conniving), to set before the agnostic and conceited and skeptical French. This show is not a straight retrospective—there was one of those in 1984, to mark the centenary of Beckmann’s birth, with stations in Munich, Berlin, St. Louis, and Los Angeles—but a faintly slanted or themed exhibition, called Max Beckmann, un peintre dans l’histoire. What this chiefly seems to mean is that the sequence of paintings and graphics have been punctuated by three darkened video installation rooms showing World War I infantrymen, 1920s floor shows, and World War II bombing (over the top, topless and top down?) on the grounds, presumably, that all of them—the real thing, not the video—were experienced by Beckmann. It’s a little pat, a little distracting, and, bluntly, a little stupid. It also has the unfortunate effect of making Beckmann, who, with the exception of a few forays into bronze casting, was a painter and draftsman of a solidly traditional kind, old-fashioned, unexciting, even inadequate. By showing us, as it were, the stimulus, it encourages us to second-guess and then even unfairly to criticize Beckmann’s “response.” He was absolutely not a documentary painter, and this standard footage from our “other” century—the one we made earlier—only feeds our vanity and our sense of “yes, we know,” instead of helping us in any way look at the paintings, which are difficult enough. The silence of the flickering black-and-white film loops overwhelms that of the paintings—so many of which contain muted musical instruments or “speaking” theatrical scenes, Carnival, The Dream, Self-Portrait with Trumpet, Begin the Beguine—and destroys their conversation with one another.
Nor does the exhibition make it possible to “hear” Beckmann, in the way that it’s possible to “hear” him from even the tiniest of the journal entries; the prose of his that has been put up on the walls next to the paintings is confined to a gimmicky and provocative series of ten statements from an “Autobiography” of 1924, the blustering assertion “Meine Kunst kriegt hier zu fressen” (plenty of fodder here for my art—said about his experience as an ambulanceman in World War I), and some anodyne remarks about the images from dreams. The framing of the exhibition gives little sense of the scale or the style of Beckmann’s life and personality. More tendentiously, the selection of work seems heavy, portentous, vatic. There are not, for instance, many of the portraits included, or in fact many paintings that one could describe as innocent or simple or arresting—the sort of image that would do well on a playing card and of which Beckmann produced a fair number. (He had a habit, incidentally, of testing his paintings for balance by turning them on their sides and upside down.) I have in mind, in the present exhibition, pieces like the beautiful 1926 Portrait of Quappi in Blue, done, by Beckmann’s standards, in the extremely rapid time of just three days, or Large Fish Still Life of 1927, or Still Life with Fallen Candles of 1929. Nor would one have guessed, on the basis of this exhibition, that fully one quarter of Beckmann’s output—850 oil paintings, one every three weeks over fifty years—were landscapes.
Max Beckmann came from a grand bourgeois background—his father was an industrialist—but lost his parents early in life. He seems always to have been accomplished and was besotted with drawing and painting from an early age. He went to art school at sixteen, having persuaded his hostile uncle to let him go by sketching him. The idea of the artist as socially and financially successful was probably bred into him. (He was also one of the first artists to teach, in the contemporary sense. In 1925, a position was created for him in Frankfurt, which he held until 1932, when the Nazis hounded him out of it. He also taught in the States, at the end of his life.) Success came to him from his early twenties; it is hard even to locate his beginnings. The paintings of young men by the sea (from 1905 and 1943) that begin and end this exhibition could be varied by any number of other pairings. For instance, there is a very strange and assured and attractive Self-Portrait in Florence of 1907, which shows the young man as a commanding and tense, though still pleasant, figure in formal black and wing collar, smoking, against a studio window (and messily colorful Renaissance backdrop outside); the cupped hand holding the cigarette is extended toward the onlooker, part asking for money, part like Christ on the cross. It is typical of the gestural strength and expressiveness of Beckmann’s figures, which seem to begin in sculpture and end in theater. That self-portrait is one of those I miss. Beckmann was never part of any grouping or movement, but he drove himself relentlessly. By the 1910s, he was specializing in large-scale paintings of catastrophes; he did a Titanic and a Messina Earthquake. One of these mass or crowd pictures again might have opened the exhibition; the interest they evince in drama and simultaneity and group dynamic remained with the artist throughout his work.
The First World War—of which the paintings seem prophetic—again changed everything. In his impressive drypoints and drawings—the 1915 Bend in the Canal and the 1916 Assault—the lines look like broken needles. In 1915, Beckmann suffered some sort of breakdown and was invalided out. It is as though he doesn’t really trust the flesh over the bones in Self-Portrait with Red Scarf of 1917. There is a warped and bleached quality about the work he did afterward, an element at once of pain and caricature. Figures are shrunken, molded from plasticine or carved out of soft, yellow wood, they are directly expressive of brutality, as in the horrific carnivalesque torture scene of The Night (which Beckmann worked for five years to bring together), with its Gothic V’s and X’s; or else blithely, queasily, eerily civilian, as in the strange landscapes and townscapes of the early 1920s: The Synagogue, The Nizza in Frankfurt am Main, or Landscape Near Frankfurt (with Factory). These paintings seem to come out of dreams. They share a common pallor and airlessness, though one would have to go to Kafka to bring coherence to the ritualistic violence of the former and the seeming innocence of the latter.
Gradually, the zaniness and unpredictability of these pictures seem to stabilize themselves in the milieu of the circus, and in a sort of fairground palette of candy colors, pink and light green and a buttery yellow that he favored for a time in the mid-1920s, for instance, in the very striking portrait called The Romanian. Beckmann’s clowns are both artist and Christ. Formats lengthen to hold vertical spills of figures—like the Aerial Acrobats of 1928, or the Rugby Players of 1929. Light gradually ceases to matter as an influence or source; shadows disappear as there is little to choose between the burning and the extinguished candles that he includes in many interiors; artificial color—color symbolism too, no doubt—comes to stand in for natural light; there is a sense that many of these paintings were made by neon in the dead of night, which, for all I know, they were. (Beckmann painted in marathon stints, often at night, and he always had several paintings on the go at once, going from one to the other.)
The paintings of the late 1920s—before the onset of lab conditions and the twenty-four-hour clock and the triptychs and the obsessive p
ictorial code involving fishes and masks and uniforms and handcuffs—paintings that still had to be seen before they were painted, paintings that stand in some verifiable relation to a time and a place and a subject, are those Beckmanns I like better than any others. Bathing Cabin (green), Scheveningen at 5 a.m., The Port of Genoa, Portrait of Quappi in Blue, The Theatre Box, Self-Portrait in Dinner Jacket—in most instances, the titles already serve to indicate the highly specific nature of the work—are all variously expressive of privilege and glamour. (“Quappi,” by the way, the nickname of Beckmann’s second wife, Mathilde von Kaulbach, is derived from the syllable “Kaul,” whose only other occurence is in the word Kaulquappe, tadpole. But I don’t know if it was particularly his name for her, or if she already went by it.) In some cases, it is the time of day or night, in some the place, in some the subject or prop. There is no longer the prima facie oddity and cramping of the earlier work, nor the depleted range of colors, nor the interiority, nor the sense of having come out of a series. These are all manifestly external paintings, bold and full and heavy and separate. They are predominantly blue or green or red or black, but in response to a dress, or the sea, or dawn, or night. Color and form are radicalized and simplified till each painting has an almost autonomous expressive beauty. Water at night isn’t ever really the jade green of Genoa—worse luck!—and buildings don’t have that pale, pink-accented crustacean glow, with sour little yellow sparks coming from the curving railway train at the bottom of the picture as it leaves the curving white-arched station, but what a beguiling hypothesis! These are utterly sophisticated, worldly, commanding and yet still magical paintings.
Where Have You Been? Page 24
