Adepts in Self-Portraiture Read online

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with a passion for self-revelation, trumpets his sexual irregularities. In the contrite vein, he deplores that he, author of Emile, the famous treatise on education, should have rid himself of his offspring by depositing them in the revolving box at the foundling hospital. Such frankness is suspect. The pseudo-heroic admission was, perhaps, a mask of inhumanity to hide something he found it impossible to acknowledge. The probability is that he never had any children at all, being incompetent to procreate them! Tolstoy, in his Confession, shrilly proclaimed himself whoremonger, murderer, thief, and adulterer; but he would not write a line acknowledging the meanness which made him treat his great rival Dostoevsky so ungenerously. Gottfried Keller, who was familiar with this trick of raising the dust, wrote sarcastically about autobiography in general: “One autobiographer will acknowledge the seven deadly sins, and will conceal the fact that he had only four fingers on his left hand; another will sedulously describe the birthmarks on his back, while he is as silent as the grave concerning his conscience-pricks for having borne false witness. When I compare one with another and study their parade of sincerity, I am led to ask myself whether anyone is sincere, and whether sincerity is possible!”

  To expect perfect sincerity in self-portraiture (or elsewhere) would be as absurd as to expect absolute justice, freedom, and perfection here on earth. The most passionate, the most resolute determination to be true to the facts is frustrated at the outset by the undeniable fact that we have no trustworthy organ of truth, that our memory cheats us before we can begin the work of self-portraiture. Memory is not in the least like a register kept in a well-ordered office, a place in which all the documents relating to every detail of our lives are laid away in store. What we vaunt as memory is submerged in the rushing stream of our blood; it is a living organ, subject to the mutations of such organs; it is not a cold-storage chamber, in which every feeling can retain its natural essence, its original odor, its primary historical form. In this complicated flux to which in our haste we give the specious name of memory, events roll one over the other like pebbles in the bed of a stream, rubbing one another down till they become unrecognizable. They adapt themselves one to another; range themselves this way and that; show a perplexing talent for mimicry thanks to which they adopt shapes and colors conformable to the groundwork of our desires. Everything, almost without exception, undergoes distortion in this transformatory element. Every subsequent impression overshadows the earlier ones; every new memory modifies the old ones, and may sometimes actually reverse their significance.

  Stendhal was the first to recognize this untrustworthiness of memory, and to acknowledge his own incapacity for recording his experiences with historical accuracy. A classical instance is his admission that he could no longer be certain whether the impressions persistent in his mind as to “crossing the Great Saint Bernard” were really vestiges of personal experiences on the famous pass, or memories of an engraving of the region seen by him at a later date. Marcel Proust, Stendhal’s spiritual heir, gives an even more striking example of memory’s capacity for distortion. In boyhood, he tells us, he saw “Berma” in one of her most famous roles. Before seeing her, his fancy had been full of anticipations, which had been merged in the subsequent real impressions of the actress; at the play, his impressions were influenced by the opinion of his companion, and next day they were further transformed by what he read in the newspapers. When, in after years, he saw Berma in the same part, both he and she having become different persons meanwhile, he was no longer able to decide what had originally been his “true” impression.

  Memory, ostensibly an infallible gauge of truth, is in reality an enemy of truth. Before a man can set himself to the description of his life, there must exist in him an organ competent to produce instead of reproducing; he must have a memory capable of exercising poetic functions, competent to select essentials, to emphasize and to slur, to group things organically. Thanks to this creative power of memory, every autobiographer must involuntarily become a romancer when he undertakes to describe his own life. Goethe, wisest among moderns, knew this. When choosing a name for his autobiography, he renounced the claim to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Dichtung und Wahrheit, poesy and truth, might serve as title for every volume of self-portraiture.

  Nevertheless, though it be true that no one can tell the absolute truth about himself, and though everyone who writes his own life must inevitably deal with the record imaginatively, the very attempt to be truthful demands supreme integrity in all who write confessions. No doubt the pseudo-confession, as Goethe called it, confession under the rose, in the diaphanous veil of novel or poem, is much easier, and is often far more convincing from the artistic point of view, than an account with no assumption of reserve. Autobiography, precisely because it requires, not truth alone, but naked truth, demands from the artist an act of peculiar heroism; for the autobiographer must play the traitor to himself. Only a ripe artist, one thoroughly acquainted with the workings of the mind, can be successful here. That is why psychological self-portraiture has appeared so late among the arts, belonging exclusively to our own days and to those yet to come. Man had to discover his continents, to fathom his seas, to learn his language, before he could turn his gaze inward to explore the universe of his soul. Classical antiquity had as yet no inkling of these mysterious paths. Caesar and Plutarch, the ancients who describe themselves, are content to deal with facts, with circumstantial happenings, and never dream of showing more than the surface of their hearts.

  Before he can throw light into his own soul, a man must be aware of its existence, and this awareness does not begin until after the rise of Christianity. Augustine’s Confessions breaks a trail for inward contemplation. Yet the gaze of the famous divine was directed, not so much inward, as towards the congregation he hoped to edify by the example of his own conversion. His treatise was a confession to the community, a model confession; it was purposive, teleological; it was not an end in itself, comprising its own answer and its own meaning. Many centuries were to pass before Rousseau (that remarkable man who was a pioneer in so many fields) was to draw a self-portrait for its own sake, and was to be amazed and startled at the novelty of his enterprise. “I am planning,” he writes, “an undertaking which has no precedent... I wish to present my fellows with the portrait of a man sketched with perfect fidelity to nature, and I am myself this man.” With the credulousness of every beginner, he still supposes that the ego is “an indivisible unity,” and that “truth” is something tangible and palpable. He is still naïve enough to fancy that when the last trump sounds he will appear before the Great Judge and say, pointing to the book in his hand, “This was I.” We of a later generation no longer share Rousseau’s simple faith. Instead, we have a fuller and hardier knowledge of the multiplicity and profundity of the psyche. In our craving for self-knowledge, we lay bare the nerves and the blood vessels of every thought and feeling, following them into their finest ramifications. Stendhal, Hebbel, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Amiel, the intrepid Hans Jaeger, have disclosed unsuspected realms of self-knowledge by their self-portraiture. Their successors, provided with more delicate implements of research, will be able to penetrate stratum by stratum, room by room, farther and yet farther into our new universe, into the depths of the human mind.

  Let this be a consolation to those who have been led to fear that art will decay in a world rendered unduly conscious by the advance of psychological technique. Art does not cease; it merely takes new turns. A decline in mythopoetic faculty was inevitable. Fantasy is ever most vigorous in childhood, and only in the childhood of a nation is it prone to luxuriate in mythology and symbolism. In compensation for the loss of visionary power, we get a capacity for clear and well-substantiated knowledge. Such a trend is obvious in the contemporary novel, which is becoming the embodiment of an exact science of the mind, whereas of old it was content to draw boldly on imagination. Yet in this union of imagination with science, there is no suppre
ssion of art; there is merely a renewal of an ancient family tie. When science began, with Hesiod and Heraclitus, it was still poesy, orphic words and soaring hypotheses. Now, after a divorce which has lasted for thousands of years, the investigatory intelligence and the creative have joined hands once more; and poesy, instead of describing a realm of fable, describes the magic of our human life. The unknown wonders of the physical universe can no longer stimulate imagination, now that the world has grown familiar from the tropics to the poles, now that its fauna and its flora are everyday objects of contemplation, even the creatures that dwell in the amethystine abysses of the sea. Everything on the terrestrial globe has been weighed and measured, named and docketed, leaving in the physical realm nothing but the stars as objects for flights of fancy. More and more, therefore, must the spirit, impelled by the undying urge for knowledge, look inward, to probe its own enigmas. The internum aeternum, the spiritual universe, still offers art an inexhaustible domain. Man, as his knowledge widens, as he grows more fully conscious, will devote himself ever more boldly to the solution of an insoluble problem, to the discovery of his own soul, to the pursuit of self-knowledge.

  Salzburg, Easter 1928.

  CASANOVA

  (1725-1798)

  Il me dit qu’il est un homme libre, citoyen du monde.

  MURALT, WRITING OF CASANOVA IN A LETTER TO ALBRECHT VON HALLER, JUNE 21, 1760

  THE MAN AND THE BOOK

  He tells himself the story of his life. This is his entire literary output — but what a story!

  Casanova is an exceptional instance, a chance intruder in world literature, above all because this famous charlatan has as little right in the pantheon of creative geniuses as the name of Pontius Pilate has in the Creed. His rank as imaginative writer is as questionable as his invented title of nobility, Chevalier de Seingalt: the few verses he penned hastily betwixt bed and the gaming table in honor of one lady or another reek of musk and academic paste; one who would read his Icosameron, a monstrosity of a Utopian romance, needs the patience of a lamb under the hide of a jackass; and when the excellent Giacomo begins to philosophize, it is hard to keep from yawning. In very truth, Casanova has as little claim to enter the company of great writers as he has to a place in the Almanach de Gotha; in both he is a parasite, an unwarrantable intruder. Nevertheless, this son of a shady actor, this unfrocked priest, this ununiformed soldier, this notorious cheat (a superintendent of police in Paris describes him in his dossier as a “fameux filou”), is able to ruffle it for a large part of his life among emperors and kings, and dies at last in the arms of a great nobleman, the Prince de Ligne: and, though he seems a mere pretender in the world of letters, one among many, ashes to be blown about by the winds of time, his roaming shade has found a place for itself among the immortals. Here, too, is an even more remarkable fact. Whereas nearly all his noble fellow countrymen, the sublime poets of Arcady, the “divine” Metastasio, the distinguished Parini, and the rest of them, are to be found only on the upper shelves of the libraries, have become material for dry-as-dust studies — his name, uttered with an indulgent smile, is still on everyone’s lips. According to all earthly probability, his erotic Iliad will still be very much alive, and will still find admiring readers, long after La Gerusalemme liberata and Il pastor fido have been gathering the dust of ages upon their unread tops. At one stride, the cunning adventurer has outdistanced all the great writers of Italy since Dante and Boccaccio.

  Stranger yet, for such immense winnings, Casanova has staked nothing at all; he has overreached fate, and secured immortality by artifice. This gamester knows nothing of the overwhelming sense of responsibility which burdens the true artist. Not for him the corvée of unsociability which severs the writer overburdened with work from the warm world of everyday life. Casanova knows nothing of the dread pleasure with which the author plans a book, or of the eagerness for perfection which is his tragic associate and torments like an unquenchable thirst. No part of his experience is the mute but masterful and ever unsatisfied demand of fancied shapes to be endowed with earthly circumstantiality, the longing of ideas to be liberated from earth and to soar upwards into the ether. He knows nothing of sleepless nights, followed by days which must be spent in the dull and slavish labor of polishing words and phrases, until at length the meaning shines with all the colors of the rainbow through the lens of speech; nothing of the multifarious but unseen toil of the creative writer, unrewarded and often unrecognized for generations; nothing of the man of letters’ heroic renunciation of the joys of life. Casanova, as everyone knows, took life easily enough, sacrificing not a morsel of his joys, not an hour of his sleep, not a moment of his pleasures, to the stern goddess of immortality. He never lifted a finger to secure fame; and yet to him, born under a fortunate star, fame has come superabundantly. As long as he had a gold piece or two in his pocket, a drop of oil with which to keep the flame of love alight, as long as he was still able to throw the dice, he had no thought of keeping company with the serious-minded spirit of art, or of soiling his fingers with ink. Only when all doors had been closed upon him, when women began to laugh at his amorous advances, when he was lonely, a beggar, and impotent, when the joys of life had become irrecoverable memories — only then, when he was a shabby and splenetic old man, did he turn to work as a substitute for livelier experiences. Only then, urged on by the lack of pleasure, by boredom, tormented by anger as a neglected cur is tormented by the mange, did he grumblingly set to work to tell the story of the septuagenarian Casaneus-Casanova, the story of his own life.

  He tells the story of his own life. This is his entire literary output — but what a story! Five novels, twenty comedies, a sheaf of novelettes and episodes, and a superabundance of fascinating situations and anecdotes, trodden like grapes to form the must of an exuberant narrative: the result is a life history which assumes the aspect of a perfectly rounded work of art though it has not had the ordering touch of the master of literary art. Herein we find the most convincing solution of that which at first seems the inexplicable mystery of his fame. What makes Casanova a genius is, not the way in which he tells the story of his life, but the way in which he has lived it. That life itself is this great artist’s workshop, is at once his matter and his form. To this work of art, really and truly his own, he has given himself up with the creative ardor which imaginative writers in general devote to verse or to prose, glowing with the fiery resolve to stamp every moment, every still undecided possibility, with the highest dramatic expression. What another has to invent, he has actually experienced; what another must form in imagination, he has figured forth in his warm and voluptuous body: that is why, in this case, the pen and the fancy have no need to adorn the truth; enough that they should take a tracing of an existence which has already been effectively staged. No writer of his day, and scarcely a writer since unless it be Balzac, has invented so many variations and situations as Casanova experienced; and throughout a whole century no other man has ever lived a life swinging in such bold curves. Compare, as regards pure wealth of happenings (not as regards spiritual substance or depth of experience) the biographies of Goethe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and other contemporaries, with Casanova’s own. How much they seem, regarded in the light of that comparison, to run in grooves, how monotonous, how narrow, how provincial appear these lives — purposive though they are, and animated with creative will — beside the elemental career of the adventurer, who changes countries, towns, estates, occupations, worlds, and women, as easily as he changes his shirt; who is everywhere and instantly at home; who is always ready to welcome new surprises. These others are but dilettantes in matters of enjoyment, just as Casanova is a dilettante in the world of letters. That is the eternal tragedy of the man of the spirit, that he, yearn though he may to fulfill his mission by experiencing all the voluptuousness of life, is nevertheless bound to his task, slave of his workshop, fettered by self-imposed duties, tied to order and to earth. Every true artist lives the larger half of his life alone, engaged in a duel
with his creative work. Not in direct experience, but only through the mirror of fancy, may he enjoy the multiplicity of existence. To none but the uncreative, to none but the man of pleasure, to none but him who lives for life’s own sake, is it permitted to give himself unreservedly and directly to reality. One who aims at a goal must renounce the delights of hazard. What the artist creates in imagination is, as a rule, what he is debarred from actually living.