Insel Read online

  I still retain wisps of the irreal crises in his footloose career that, as he related it, grew up, story by story, a frail edifice of lies and memory out of our marble tabletop. It was securely buttressed by groups of obese tradesmen who, in their agglomerated leisure, were playing belote. He told us, his gray eyes atwinkle with the inner security the possession of a strange surplus fortune, balancing destitution, gives to men of genius, he had solved the problem of keeping alive without any money and thus had lived for sixteen years.

  A man who finds himself economically nude, should logically, in the thickset iron forest of our industrial structure, be banged to death from running into its fearfully rigid supports. He is again the primordial soft-machine without the protective overall of the daily job in which his fellows wend their way to some extent unbattered by this sphere of activity. For them, the atrocious jaws of the gigantic organism will open at fixed intervals and spit at them rations sufficient to sustain their coalescence with the screeching, booming, crashing dynamism of the universal “works.” For the révolté, for one incapable of taking it as it is, this metal forest of coin bearing machinery will partially revert to the condition of nature preserved in him, and show patches of moss as if he had projected there some of the verdure rooted in him. Oases of leisure, succorable, soft if ragged lining to the cage of practical mankind, these mossy refuges, along the life of a wayward spirit who refuses to do as he is told, preferring to find out for himself what to do, mostly materialize as the hospitalities of modest little women who find a temporary relief from their innate anxiety in association with an irresponsible man in whom the honest desire for survival of his creative impulse gets dishonestly mixed up with his amatory instinct.

  Insel, as he talked, seemed to be recurrently emerging from predicaments of which, if some were lamentable, many were quite diaphanous as though nothing of him but the most subtle aspects of his peculiar temperament had got into them—He varnished his painting of the past with a gentle irritation of commentarial laughter. Unlike other men, he took delight in confessing that all his women had deserted him, divorced him, thrown him out. How he had pled with those women to have patience. “I am tired of supporting a waster,” they would tell him at last. “But they were wrong,” averred Insel. “While I appeared irretrievably idle, Ich habe mich entwickelt—I was developing,” he explained, the mischief dancing defiantly in his eyes. And this Entwicklung I would not estimate blurred my view of Insel. I saw his image grown suddenly faint, imploring the shadow of woman “—to only wait—in the end—the end—I shall achieve glory.”

  These unfortunate separations, throwing him back upon the desert base from which he was ever setting out anew, formed part of the frieze of disaster through which he represented himself as forever fleeing under the vicious darts of his drastic horoscope.

  Housing his poverty as animals tracked down enter abandoned holes or a honeyless bee might return to an empty hive—of all the makeshift burrows he found for himself in an unearned earth, so desolate and perilous seemed his escapade in some far away, dismantled villa he described to us that it has stuck in my mind. He had lived there one summer, with some caressive Mädchen who, when she left the place, had forgotten to ask him to give up his key. And so it was that Insel, fallen once more under the heel of fate, crept back to that love-swept lair and, shutting himself up in one of the rooms, lived on the floor. “I could draw there,” he pointed out to us thankfully. And one saw him, day alone, morrow alone, where the air was the breath of his own hunger, warily sneaking out at dark in search of a remnant of food, or, just as possibly, so complex is the status of the artist, dining with affable millionaires every other night. It comes back to me now that Insel had started this episode as the story of a haunted house.

  “One day when I had hidden there so long,” he said, “as to make one with the everlasting silence, I was startled by the sound of footfalls descending the stairs. ‘Who could descend having never ascended?’ I asked myself. ‘What could have embodied itself under the roof to come down upon my isolation?’ I at once turned the key in my lock and waited, listening to those fearful feet. At intervals they would halt, and at every halt I could hear the echoes of heavy fists pounding on a door. And the footsteps grew louder, the pounding nearer—to the pounding of my heart.” Frau Feirlein and I hung on his words while, “Those heavy unreal fists fell in a rain of blows on the last door—the door,” continued Insel, “that shut off the bearable emptiness of the room I was living in from the unbearable emptiness of the house as a whole.”

  I imagined his quivering breast receiving, through the transmission of his fear, the ghostly blows aimed at the door affording his outer defense as he stood face to face with it. “Not daring to stir,” he proceeded, “I was almost choking for terror it would hear me breathe, when gradually I perceived a softer noise come to succeed that ominous pounding. I do not know what impulse this aroused in me, my one desire having been to remain undiscovered, that caused me so suddenly to fling myself on that door and to open it—outside stood a very severe looking Huissier. He was sealing up the rooms. And, as usual,” added Insel in utter discouragement, “They hauled me before a magistrate.”

  His father, he said, was a Schlosser, which turned out to mean “blacksmith,” and very early in Insel’s life, as in the episode in the empty villa, his destiny appeared to me to get mixed up with keys. I cannot remember in detail the vague accidents in which his minor salvations depended upon keys except for a fleeting impression of Insel crawling under his destitute couch in search of some kind of key to a gas meter confused with an intermittent flitting in and out of gas men and electricity bill collectors who would come to cut him off and who, owing to some either mental or manual hocuspocus of Insel with the key, ended by turning the gas or electricity on. Thus leaving him at least two elements of life.

  “Don’t Schlossers make keys?” I asked.

  “Surely,” he agreed.

  “Well, you’ve inherited the keys your father made. You’ll see the whole of your life will turn on a key. Some people are accompanied throughout their career by a fixation of their destiny—yours is a key. While Dali, for instance, is fated to the most extravagant of publicities. He is inclined to accept my theory, for some of the shrillest gags in his already fabulous advertisement were the result of sheer coincidence, yet pointing out plainly the effective procedure to be followed thenceforth. He told me it all originated with his first lecture on surrealism in Spain, when the mayor, who was acting as chairman, fell down dead at his feet, almost as soon as he began—a windfall for journalists.”

  Insel, as if after this he feared his trips along the road to ruin might fall a little flat, changing his tempo, began to show off, surprising us with a burst of magnificence, he became so hilariously wealthy he juggled a fortune. “I spent ten millions in a year,” he enthused. “Not one car, but bunches of cars I gave each of my friends, and the orchestras I ordered, the clusters of beautiful women I hung upon myself in those Berlin nights.”

  “Where did you get it all?”

  “Forging,” he replied, with the same elation with which he had dispensed for our entertainment his retrospective largess. “Es war wirklich prachtvoll—we made bank notes in sheaves. You see, as a boy I was apprentice lithographer, and my technique was so remarkable I got raked in by a gang of crooks. We practically bought up Berlin before we were caught, and I was only in jail nine months.”

  “How was that?”

  “Oh, one of the gang who escaped arrest used his influence. But I had time to reflect,” he commented. “I saw other careers open to talent. In that long solitude I conceived of a greater wealth than the wealth of banks. Within myself I found the artist.”

  2

  ON THE GROUNDS THAT HE WAS STARVING TO death, he would exact from us the minutiae of advice on his alimentary problems to subsequently toss all advice aside in his audacious irresponsibility. Presenting himself as a pauper to the charitable organization of the Quakers, he had harv
ested, among other things, packages of macaroni and several pounds of cocoa, and as if these staple aliments were already consumed, he begged us to counsel him what to do now. He shook his head over the suggestion that he go there again. “My last supply is yet too recent,” he objected. But, Frau Feirlein told me, on the morrow he presented himself at her flat with these same Quaker gifts intact as an offering preliminary to his indistinct courtship. “What is the use of cocoa to me,” he argued with my bewilderment, “I have no sugar.” And, for some vague reason, one took the opposition of his prodigality to his mendicancy as a matter of course. This reason consisted in an intuition, so deeply imbedded in one’s subconscious it would not rise to the surface of the mind until the final phase in one’s analysis of him—that this skeletal symbol of an ultimate starvation had need of a food we knew not of. Throughout his angling for compassion on behalf of his utter destitution, one never resented his open carelessness in throwing back the fish.

  Meanwhile, his reserved distinction, as of an aristocrat who should in a lasting revolution have experienced yet unimaginably survived the guillotine, was so consistent it claimed one’s respect for his nonsensical manner of being alive. But once was this impression dispelled when, in courteous haste to answer a question, he shifted the part of a hard roll sandwich he was eating, out of the way, horrifyingly developing a Dali-like protuberance of elongated flesh with his flaccid facial tissue. As if unexpectedly the Schlosser one had hitherto been incapable of relating to him had at length intruded upon us with his anvil stuffed in his cheek.

  Only towards the close of his reminiscences did he seem to have shared a responsibility with normal men: “They sent me to war,” he told us wryly, voicing that unconvincing complaint against their perpetual situation in the ridiculous made by people who, pleasing to laugh at themselves, one suspects of aiding destiny in detaining them there, “in two left-foot boots, and,” trotting his fingers along the table in a swerve, “the one would follow the other,” he explained as the mental eye also followed that earlier Insel—out of the ranks; on the march to a war that, at its blasting zenith, ceased to be war, for, in elaborating his martial adventures, Insel turned out to have been taking part in a film.

  A wound up automaton running down, Insel ceased among the clatter of our amusement.

  “I know how you can make money,” I exclaimed agog with enthusiasm. “Write your biography.”

  “I am a painter,” he objected. “It would take too long building a style.”

  “You’d only have to write the way you paint. Minutely, meticulously—like an ant! Can you remember every moment, every least incident of your life?”

  “All,” he replied decisively.

  “Then start at once.”

  “It would need so much careful editing. In the raw it would be scandalous—”

  “Scandalous,” I cried scandalized— “the truth? Anyway you can write under a pseudonym.”

  “People would recognize me.”

  “Don’t you know anything of the world? The artist’s vindication does not lie in ‘what happens to him’ but in what shape he comes out.”

  “Oh,” said Insel disinhibiting, “very well. It’s not the material that is wanting,” he sighed wearily, “the stacks of manuscript notes I have accumulated!”

  Then, “No,” he reversed, “it’s not my medium.”

  “Insel,” I asked breathlessly, “would you let me write it?”

  “That would be feasible,” he answered interested. “We will make a pact. Get me to America and you have the biography.”

  “Done,” I decided. “I’ll write at once. America shall clamor for you.”

  “Don’t overdo it,” warned Insel, “it never works.”

  “You can have your dinners with me and tell me— Can you really remember—the minutest details?”

  “Every one,” he assured me.

  “What a book,” I sighed with satisfaction.

  “Flight from Doom—every incident distorted to the pattern of an absurd destiny,” Insel was looking delighted with himself.

  He came out to dinner on a few evenings and I would talk with him for hours. The minute details were fewer than I had bargained for, his leitmotif being his strangeness in so seldom having spoken.

  “My parents noticed it at once,” he told me. “As a child I would remain absolutely silent for six months at a time.”

  He did not give a fig for heredity. All his relatives were chatty.

  Another thing he had found in himself was his aptitude for housework. He had once married a stenographer, who simply could not arrange the kitchen with the same precision as he.

  “She tried so hard—for so long. She never came up to the mark. What I disliked was her plagiarism. Why,” demanded Insel with retrospective annoyance, “could she not have worked out a system of her own?”

  So they separated. Later, when Insel and I became uncannily intimate I understood what his unique orderliness had done to the girl—given her the jitters!

  Nevertheless, he himself seemed sometimes to have difficulty in locating things. Once during coffee he drifted off to the lavabo and on his return took a seat some tables away from the one at which he had left me. In the same slightly deferent sociable concern he continued to “pay attention”—

  The strain on this biography would consist in his too facile superposing of separate time—his reminiscences flitted about from one end of his life to the other.

  “I saw an antique dealer carrying a picture to a taxi the other day—a portrait of some women. They were extraordinarily attractive to me; I was sure we would have been profoundly congenial. It was labeled ‘The Brontë Sisters.’ Do you know of anyone by that name?” asked Insel, who had not read Goethe nor heard of Shakespeare. “The dealer told me they were authoresses—I feel I should care for what they have written.”

  “The sister Emily wrote Wuthering Heights. I suppose it is one of the greatest novels ever written. I never remember for very long, after having read it, what it’s about—yet whenever I think of it—I find myself standing on wild moors—alone with the elements—elements become articulate—. You would care for it very much.”

  I began to think it improbable I should even find a basis for this biography. He was so at variance with himself, he existed on either side of a paradox. Even as he begged for food to throw away, forever in search of a haven, he preferred any discomfort to going home. Constantly he thanked his stars for an iron constitution—while obviously in an alarming state of health.

  3

  AT LAST THE BIOGRAPHY ABORTED AS HAD THE Quaker oats.

  The first stage of Insel’s intimacy completed, when he evidently intended to let you further “in on” his show, he insisted on your reading Kafka, just as on assisting at a foreign opera one is handed a book of the words.

  Study this well he tacitly commended. It will give you an angle of approach. “In Kafka,” he explained, “I found a foreshadowing of my hounded existence, recognized the relentless drive of my peculiar misfortune.”

  Der Prozess was the volume he borrowed to lend me, and I lay awake reading on and on and on, curious for the book to begin, when, with one eye still open, I came upon the end to fall asleep in the unsatisfied certainty of having become acquainted with an undeniable, yet perhaps the most useless, genius who ever lived.

  Enraged with bitter disappointment, “Zum Teufel,” I berated Insel, when he appeared for our next session. If he was a lunatic, he was prodigious, dressing up his insanity in another man’s madness. It was no use to me. Flight from Doom, with its pattern of absurd destiny, had already been written.

  “You atrocious fake—you have no life to write—you’re acting Kafka!”

  “And I,” answered Insel, as I turned him out, “see clearly into you. Your brain is all Brontë.” Flying the colors of his victory, he sauntered off.

  4

  I THOUGHT I HAD DROPPED INSEL. I WAS MISTAKEN. Some weeks later I was writing letters when all of a sudden I st
opped. An urgent telepathy impinging on my mind, I automatically dashed off a card. When I looked to see what I had so unpreparedly written—this is how it began:

  “It is interesting,” Insel was to remark significantly later on. “Your note to me was couched in flawless German.”

  For a while I sat wondering to what appeal, and why, I had answered. I did not care if Insel were in trouble. Obviously he fabricated trouble and far be it from me to deprive him of it—. I threw the card into the waste paper basket, and started for the post. When I had opened the front door I shut it again and retrieved the postcard. Before the letter-box I put it in my pocket and turned away, only to go back— with a relieved determination I posted it.

  Insel must have crossed my message for in a couple of hours he panted into my place all undone, despairingly waving a sheet of blue paper.

  “Das blaue Papier,” he articulated hoarsely, ducking his head as if the Papier was one of a shower of such sheets bombarding him in his dash for escape.

  “Something the matter? Have a porto. Sit on a chair. Whatever it is—out with it!”

  “Das blaue Papier,” he reiterated, casting a haunted look over his shoulder. On its return that look fell in with some photographs of paintings lying on the table.