The Secret Knowledge (Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback)

by Crumey, Andrew

  He should address the question they keep asking him. At one of his lectures a girl came and handed him a teddy bear, simply trying to embarrass him, and said to the audience, how is critical theory to become critical practice? Some applauded, others jeered, but the question dogs him. He is a thinker, a theoretician, but what the youth of today demand is action, any sort of action. Class struggle is a mythology that lies conveniently within their grasp. By asking people to think, he becomes identified with the forces of oppression.

  He has been accused of suppressing or distorting Benjamin’s work because Benjamin was insufficiently Marxist, or else too much of a Marxist. His frantic and ultimately doomed efforts to give Benjamin research money and get him out of Europe are portrayed as manipulation, the arbitrary exertion of power. He has been a selective and partisan editor of their published correspondence. Let’s be honest about all this. If Benjamin had not killed himself then he would not be on the pedestal posterity has made for him. He’s like Anne Frank, a symbol that becomes a substitute for thought, a point of adhesion for pre-existing emotion. What of the forgotten? What of those denied even the status of concept?

  He’s beginning to feel his age. Two tasks lie before him: his aesthetic theory, which he expects to be his most lasting work, and his book on Beethoven. Perhaps he should talk about one of those. As long as some bearded hippie doesn’t intervene.

  He’s already asleep when Gretel gets back, doesn’t see her until next morning. Of course she’ll be coming to the symposium; how could she miss such an important event? She loved Walter too. But she hasn’t heard anything about the programme, nor can Teddie enlighten her. He understands it’s a university event, but the organisation of it has been ramshackle, he’s not even sure if it’s intended for academics or the general public. Somebody noticed the anniversary, that’s all. Felt it should be marked. Adorno’s publisher is possibly involved. Perhaps the entire thing is a marketing exercise.

  It takes place that night; Adorno shows up and among the audience in the large, well-filled auditorium he sees at least three women with whom he has been romantically involved, a few others with whom he’d like to be. He’s expecting to give a lecture but the stage has a row of chairs behind a long table, microphones for half a dozen participants. Nobody bothered to tell him anything, explain what was wanted. There are many faces he doesn’t recognise, faces who appear not to recognise him.

  A young fellow comes and shakes him by the hand, introduces himself as chairman for the evening, journalist on one of the left-wing newspapers. Can’t be any older than thirty, thinning hair and thick-rimmed glasses, an earnest demeanour that gives him the air of someone in fancy dress. Other participants materialise; a lecturer Adorno knows, a writer, a woman who’s apparently a film-maker, people from the margins of Frankfurt’s intelligentsia. Such eclecticism mirrors only the most unfortunate aspect of Benjamin’s endeavour. Adorno foresees a talk on Benjamin’s use of hashish.

  Eventually it gets going; they all have ten minutes to make whatever claim they can on the public’s attention. The film-maker is planning a work based on Benjamin’s life; this is the first that Adorno has heard of the project, which strikes him as tasteless and banal, the epitome of everything to which Benjamin stood in opposition. The lecturer then uses his ration of time to speak about the student protests and police violence, asking what Benjamin would have thought of it and reaching no conclusion more illuminating than that Walter would have been as upset about it as everyone else in the room. He was, that is to say, one of us, an emblem like those Baroque images he discussed so penetratingly, whose captions can signify anything we want them to.

  The writer’s offering is strangest and most outrageous of all: a story about Walter, a fictional depiction of the man Adorno knew personally, as though he were some legendary hero. This, thinks Adorno, is the limit point of historical sentimentalism; his gorge is rising even before he hears the first words of the story, the introduction is bad enough. Benjamin, the writer explains, was fascinated by the figure of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, and his theory that there are other worlds like our own, but with altered histories. Sheer nonsense, Adorno mutters to himself, barely concealing his words; Benjamin’s interest was a small and characteristically eccentric part of a far larger analysis of the conditions of nineteenth-century capitalism. And so, the writer continues, in a way that is I hope faithful to Benjamin’s insights, I have imagined how it might have been otherwise, if Benjamin had not died while fleeing from the Gestapo, but had instead escaped.

  Adorno pushes back his seat, about to leave. The chairman stares at him, alarmed, and waves him to remain, a gesture that is both a request and a command. Adorno manages not to listen to the story, its inconsequentiality rendering it surprisingly easy to ignore, instead he looks at Ulrike, remembers her naked body when they made love, remembers every sound she made, and thinks how futile life is. In everything we do there is an element of exchange, and contemporary social relations, he reflects, are becoming subject to a devaluation far greater than what befell the Reichsmark nearly half a century ago. The result is a lapse into authoritarianism.

  People are applauding that stupid story. Now at last it’s Teddie’s turn. He leans forward into the welcoming ambit of the microphone. “I knew Walter Benjamin,” he says. “More importantly, I have spent decades studying problems that engaged his thought. A man’s ideas, if they are at all original, are the property of no one, not even the man himself. To consider them such would be to deny them the autonomy that is their claim to significance. My intervention in Benjamin’s ideas has been criticised in some quarters. This, however, is the practice to which critical theory naturally gives rise. Benjamin, who was a gifted linguist, once wrote of the task of the literary translator, saying it was not to make the translated work appear as if it were not a translation, but rather to make the work appear what it is, foreign, the product of a different culture. And everything we read is a kind of translation. Everywhere is a foreign country. I lived for some years in America, and all the time there I considered myself a European. Here in Europe, I feel at times as if perhaps I have become an American.”

  There is a shout from the audience, Adorno cannot hear the words but a moment later a person in another part stands up and begins shouting back. Two activists from opposing factions are having an argument. People tell them to sit down, order is restored though it is a false and uneasy order. He looks at Ulrike again but her attention is on the demonstrators. It is his wife Gretel who gazes lovingly at him, convinced as always by every word he says.

  “Walter Benjamin’s intention was to join me and my colleagues in America. An imaginative novelist might speculate on the ensuing biographical events, but who could envisage the philosophical insights that would have resulted, except for a philosopher? There we see the limitation of fiction in relation to philosophy, for fiction deals with the particular, the accidental, the psychologically arresting; whereas philosophy, while traditionally it encompassed only the most abstract and conceptual, nevertheless, in Benjamin’s view and in my own, ought also to account for the particular, the unique, the never to be repeated or replicated. Then philosophy would finally have conquered fiction, and for the latter there would be no need. Why, we may ask, did Walter Benjamin, that most exquisite of prose writers and most discerning of critics, never write a novel, nor attempt one? It was because of this realisation he had, that a fully formed materialist conception of history would render fiction obsolete, like the magic-lantern shows he wrote about, which have been replaced by the distractions of cinema. Philosophy is truth, not fiction. And the truth is that Walter was a melancholy man as well as a genius. The truth is that even if the Gestapo had not pursued him, he would probably have killed himself in the end, if not in Spain then in some hotel room in New York, upset over yet another unrequited love affair. Was it his destiny? No, it was his predisposition. So forgive me, ladies and gentlemen, if I express my displeasure at the ease with which this man whom I knew has become
an intellectual commodity.”

  An activist gets to his feet and this time his words are clearly heard. “You deny freedom and are a fascist.”

  Adorno answers calmly. “I deny the legitimacy of authoritarianism masquerading as free speech.”

  But there are more shouts, drowning him out, and then, as if a pre-rehearsed moment in the proceedings has finally been reached, three young women bring out a banner made of pieces of paper or card taped together, painted with bright green letters that say something not entirely legible about workers of the world. The girls shuffle out of their row in the audience and bring the banner to the front, accidentally tearing it on the way, then when they reach the stage, completely unopposed, they discard the remains of the banner and two of them sing while the third begins removing her clothes. At this point the celebration of Walter Benjamin’s seventy-fifth birthday reaches its end.

  Adorno is in his office at the university next day when he gets a phone call. The woman says her name but he doesn’t catch it; he assumes it’s one of the protesters and considers putting the receiver down; but no, she isn’t phoning to apologise or launch a further attack, she had nothing to do with the demonstration; in fact, she says with an embarrassed laugh when he questions her, she’s an elderly and, she likes to think, perfectly respectable lady. She simply wants to meet and discuss with him a matter concerning Walter Benjamin. This afternoon, perhaps?

  She proposes a park; the weather recommends it, though there is also an air of mystery to the assignation. Is the conversation to be of a kind she would prefer no one to overhear? Parks, in Adorno’s mind, are a place for clandestine lovers wishing to proclaim an illusory freedom. The woman says she’s elderly but that could still signify fewer years than his own. Her voice is beautiful.

  He arrives early and waits on a bench. Some sort of bird is hopping on the grass, he doesn’t know the name. Sunlight perforates the trees, momentarily dazzles him, connects him with primal warmth. He remembers hearing it claimed that the sun emits radio waves.

  Then he sees her, approaching slowly. Yes, he thinks, it’s surely her, incongruous by her dignity, a moving statue, relic of an earlier time, perhaps a decade older than himself, yet straight-backed and without a walking stick. And yes, she’s beautiful. He rises to greet her; she extends her slender hand.

  “I am Yvette Carreau.”

  He finds himself making a bow, crooking his arm for her to hold. An old, extinguished world has come alive.

  “My late husband was a collector,” she explains as they begin walking, for she says she would prefer it, and he hears a trace of a French accent that hadn’t been apparent on the telephone.

  “A collector of what?”

  “Miscellaneous objects and distractions. Also something of a gambler, willing to part with large amounts of money for items that might prove worthless. And a hunter, determined to catch the quarry he sought.” She stops and turns to look at Adorno. “He met your friend Walter Benjamin on the night before he died.”

  Now Teddie understands. This woman has no interest in him, only in the past he represents, the connection with history. She wants to tell him an anecdote he can put in a book or lecture. “Were Benjamin and your late husband intimately acquainted?”

  “They met on only that single occasion. Some people say once is as good as never, but I’ve always felt that a single meeting can mean more than a thousand.”

  “An interesting observation. So your husband was in Portbou?”

  “And I was with him, at the Hotel de Francia. Louis had the visas and Benjamin had what Louis wanted in return.”

  “My God.”

  “You see now why I wanted to meet.”

  “You could have told me this long ago.”

  “Not while Louis was alive. My late husband insisted there was a plot against my life, a secret cabal, from which he alone could protect me.” They’re reaching a boating pond; now Yvette would like to sit and watch the glittering water broken only by paddling ducks and the empty boats moored and rocking at the edge. They position themselves at a respectful distance from one another on the bench she selects. “Louis was a good and loyal husband. But he never believed that I really loved him, I see that now.”

  Adorno gives a cough of embarrassment. “What went wrong with the visas? Did Benjamin not have enough money for them?”

  Yvette shakes her head. “All I know is what Louis told me, which is that Benjamin had somehow, quite unwittingly, acquired a book containing crucial evidence of the conspiracy. Louis wanted it in exchange for the visas he’d procured at great risk. And so I sat in the restaurant of the hotel while Louis went upstairs to see Benjamin, who had been arrested with some other Jews. A gramophone played nearby, it was a balmy evening and in different circumstances it could all have been romantic and pleasurable, yet I was tired, depressed, fearful. And when Louis came back he told me that he had the book, its former owner had the travel documents. We returned to our own hotel and next day back across the border to France. It was only much later that I learned the poor refugee had been a scholar of some importance, and that instead of trying to use the visas he had decided to take his own life.”

  Adorno is sceptical. “What was the book?”

  She smiles. “Long ago I was engaged to a musician named Pierre Klauer. Fate stole him from me, but I was left with the key to his desk, where he said his latest work was to be found. It was Louis who retrieved it, a piano score ominously titled The Secret Knowledge. And how I treasured that relic of my sweetheart. So many times I wept over it, clutching it until the pages became bent and faded, but determined that it should live forever. Louis’ acquisition of the work, right from under the noses of Pierre’s parents, was the first indication to me, both of his ingenuity, and of the threat we jointly faced. Pierre’s death was the work of an underground sect; I risked being their next victim. The music, Louis explained, was a coded message, the protocols of the organisation, but it lacked one vital thing. Pierre gave me the key to his desk, but not the key to the code. This was what had somehow fallen into the hands of Walter Benjamin, a book the society was determined to recover, at whatever cost.”

  Adorno glances at his watch. “This is most… unusual.”

  “I see that you are doubtful of my story. And you are right to be – for it was built on a lie. Louis always kept from me the secret knowledge that he said could only harm me, but when he passed away I felt as though my own life were no longer worth living. Come now, damned conspirators, I said to myself. Come and kill me, but before I die I shall unlock the code, break the spell of fear itself. I knew where the book was kept, knew the combination of the safe. Louis had forbidden me from opening it and I had obeyed, but now what else was I to do? So I brought it out into the light of the day, the slender volume that Walter Benjamin thought could save his life, as well as other papers stored with it. I sat at Louis’ desk and looked at those cursed documents. And I realised at once: I had been deceived.”

  “What did you see?”

  “First the book, written in some unknown language and peppered with symbols, hieroglyphs; it was no cipher but was itself in code. Why had this confused jumble been kept hidden from me? What might I have learned from it? Only that it was meaningless. But more than the book, it was the other papers that drew my attention, for what I had before me were notes for Pierre’s work, sketches and drafts. Surely my husband must have retrieved these from the composer’s desk along with the score, for a moment this was what I thought. But the pages told a different story. Mingled with musical notation there were verbal comments, suggestions, mathematical equations. The handwriting was not Pierre’s. I even retrieved the letters I still kept from him, in order to verify what was so immediately obvious to me.”

  “He could have worked with an assistant.”

  “No, professor, there was no assistant. Because you see, I recognised the handwriting at once. I told myself it couldn’t be true, yet there was no other explanation. The man who wrote those word
s was my husband. Certainly there was another hand at work in the drafts, another style of writing, but when I examined it all closely, so very closely, I understood what had gone on. As well as Pierre’s letters I revisited the most sacred item of all, the score. And like a detective, with a magnifying glass in my hand, I discovered what I knew must be the truth. The work was a forgery. My husband, Louis Carreau, cobbled it together as a way of winning me for himself. He said he knew Pierre, this much I believe is true, and he must have seen his writing, practised until he was able to replicate it, penned what looks like an entire piece of music and claimed to have taken it from Pierre’s desk. Made me hide it, so that in all the years I never heard it. I expect it would be only crude noise. Poor Louis had no ear for music.”

  “Surely you must hate him for it.”

  “I pity him. He saved me from my misery after Pierre died, but that was not enough, instead he felt the need to invent some other kind of salvation, more tangible and persuasive, that would bind us together. A great hoax reinforced by so many strange incidents over the decades, obscure items he acquired. And I never suspected a thing, because from the very start, Louis had done what would make his story most convincing, he had created the essential piece of material evidence that would extinguish all doubt. Some women lose a husband and discover he had another wife and home, another life, making a mockery of the love they claimed to feel. But when I discovered how I’d been deceived, it had the opposite effect. He did it all for me, because he thought he had to. He simply couldn’t believe that I might love him only for what he was, for the good and pure heart that he had. How I miss the years of happiness we might have shared.”