The Prince of West End Avenue Page 14

  mourning period, for which I, too, of course voted, has granted all of us at the Emma Lazarus Old Vic the opportunity to disengage for a short while from a grueling rehearsal schedule and to relax somewhat the tension that finds outlet only in bickering. Like athletes preparing for an Olympic event, we, too, must pace ourselves, pause, and give to aching muscles a therapeutic respite.

  At any rate, shortly after the siesta hour I went to visit Selma. I had the luxury of time on my hands. But I discovered that she already had a visitor: Gerhardt Kunstler was visible behind the bulletproof glass, slouched on a chair, his arms behind his head, his feet up on Selma's desk (a liberty I think not even the Kommandant would take!). Today he wore jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt. Does he own no socks? Selma, meanwhile, was primping, patting the declivities of her curiously colored hair, obviously enjoying herself. I had been anticipated!

  He saw me and gave his familiar cheeiy wave. I pointed to the bulletin board as if to explain what I was doing in the lobby and pretended to read the notices. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him put a finger to his lips and then wave it warningly before his face. Selma nodded. I began to sense which way the wind was blowing. Selma, that most trusted of "agents," has been "turned."

  I ENCOUNTERED THE KOMMANDANT in the lobby this morning. Lipschitz's death seems to have ruffled the surface of his calm. One might even describe him as skittish, wary, a trifle on edge. He strode toward me, a figure from the London edition of the Gentlemen's Quarterly: an elegant gray cheviot coat with a black velvet collar, a deep maroon tie with a muted design, in his hand a black bowler hat and a tightly rolled umbrella. His shoes gleamed. He stopped before me, barring my way. The sedentary, already in place, leaned toward us.

  "Ah, yes, Korner, there you are. I was hoping to have a word with you."

  "At your service."

  "Quite. Play coming along all right, and so forth?"

  "Well, in view of Lipschitz's sudden departure . . ."

  "Of course, of course. Tragic loss. Er, they tell me, Korner, that you are writing an, er—now this is what I'm told, you understand—you're writing an expose of the Emma Lazarus. Can that be true?"

  "No."

  "Well, then . . ." He crossed his legs and leaned casually on his umbrella.

  "A kind of memoir, I suppose. A few incidents from my young-manhood. From time to time I refer to what's going on here now, more to clarify my own thoughts than for any other reason."

  "Exactly." He smiled coldly. "Nothing libelous, I trust?"

  "I have no intention of publication."

  "Don't nitpick, man. What I want to know is, er—" He paused and tried again, this time striving for jocularity. "You treat us well, I hope?"

  "Naturally."

  "Good. I'd like to see it sometime."

  I did not reply.

  "So be it. A word to the wise, Korner: don't overdo."

  His departure galvanized the sedentary: "Better watch it, Otto." "Say anything about me?" "Remember Lipschitz. None of us is safe."

  Irritably I put down the NbP.

  She looks down modestly at the hands folded in her lap but contrives to glance slyly at me from the sides of lowered lids. "Dr. Goldwasser says the stork is on its way." She looks up, her eyes shining, her cheeks aflame. "Oh, Toto, Toto, we're going to have a baby, a baby boy, I know it will be a little boy, I feel it!"

  Who can express the happiness of that moment, the exaltation! I want to burst. I leap from my chair and gather her in my arms. . . .

  But was that how it was? Is it possible? The past we sometimes tend to see transfigured in a roseate glow. Memory is not to be trusted.

  No, never mind: that is how I remember it.

  they scattered to pursue their separate destinies, they remained united in their idiotic determination to suppress the truth. Huelsenbeck, for instance, claimed that he and Ball had come across the word "accidentally" in a French dictionary, where they found it meant hobbyhorse. Richter pretended that he had always supposed the word to be the joyous Slavonic affirmative "Da! Da!"—a "Yes! Yes!" to life. But Arp was the most cunning obscurantist of all. In Dada an grand air he succeeded in suggesting that anyone who sought the origin of the word was a dry pedant, the very sort of stupid bourgeois blockhead whom the Dadaists from the first had set out to mock. As for Tristan Tzara, he was unexpectedly modest: "A word was born, no one knows how." (In fact, apart from Otto Korner, no one knew better than Tzara himself how the word was born.)

  When Magda Damrosch disappeared from Zurich, my heart stuffed carelessly among her belongings, I was plunged into a misery so profound that I thought I should never recover. At first, fearing that she had tried for Sweden on her own, I was lacerated by wild, romantic imaginings: I saw her traveling penniless according to her "principles," caught by fierce, sex-starved soldiers, interrogated as a spy, shot by a firing squad on a gray, bitter dawn. No doubt I derived some pleasure from my tears. What saved me was an ensuing anger—how could she treat me so!—that I sipped like cognac, a revivifying warmth with whose help I was able to lift up my ego from the rocks on which it lay broken. In brief, I washed, shaved, dressed in clean clothes, and left my room. Once more I began to haunt the Cabaret Voltaire, the Odeon, the Terrasse, the now familiar loci.

  The Gang of Nihilists, meanwhile, were readying themselves for Gala Night, an "Extravaganza" (as Tzara called it) that was now a mere fortnight away and for which they had hired Waag Hall, their ambitions having grown beyond the seating

  capacity of the Cabaret Voltaire and their exhibitionism needing an audience more deliciously shockable than the rowdy students who nightly approved their antics. To me, listening to their gleeful plans and watching their frenetic preparations, it seemed that Gala Night would be little other than their ordinary entertainments writ large, nine parts bad taste and one part vacuity. Magda, for example, should she return in time, was slated to do the splits in an orange tutu and green leotards while Janco played an invisible violin and Tzara brayed one of his painful poems.

  It was, in fact, the possibility of Magda's presence there that caused me to conceive my revenge. I would devise my own "skit" for Gala Night, one that would at once outdo the best that the Gang of Nihilists could come up with and prove to Magda that she could not with impunity trample upon my love. I would announce to the world, or to that part of it packed into Waag Hall, her cruelty to me. Whether I expected by such means to secure her love I am not sure. Certainly I did not want to lose her. In my emotional turmoil, logic played no part. Come what might, I should at the very least salve my bruised pride.

  Tzara at first was cool to the idea of my participation. The volume of Days of Darkness, Nights of Light, which I had lent him some months before, he had not yet found time to glance at. But he could assure me that it served very efficiently as a handsome paperweight. "In a strong draft, however, well ... I can make no promises." He spread his hands, popping his monocle into one of them.

  I swallowed the insult and told him that I did not propose to recite my poems; poetry could safely be left to him.

  He screwed the monocle back into his eye socket. "Well, then?"

  I told him I had in mind a short "skit" with a wax display-

  window dummy. "I'm after something new," I said. "Concrete metaphor."

  He looked doubtful. Janco wandered over, holding a Weisswurst to his lips like a cigar. I described my proposal to him, too.

  "What's the point?" said Janco.

  It was this question of Janco's, I am convinced, that decided Tzara. If there was no evident point, then ipso facto my concrete metaphor should be included. Nevertheless, I would not be allowed to perform alone. Tzara, and perhaps some others, would provide appropriate accompaniment.

  Between that moment and Gala Night, Magda returned to Zurich, and with her Egon Selinger. My desire for revenge was then fueled by hate. I was seized by a recklessness that ripped in tatters my lingering decorum.

  Gala Night arrived at last, warm and damp. A mist had
seeped in off the lake. It lay low along the ground, shifting in eddies and swirls; it snaked in sudden leaps around corners. The Gang of Nihilists, many of them, had been in Waag Hall since midmoming, getting things in order. The stage was decorated with paintings, colored papers, balloons. At its rear, swaying with every passing air current, hung a full-size anatomist's skeleton in a rakish top hat, holding a clock whose hands were stopped at two minutes to midnight, or to noon: the viewer had his choice. (This was their trite comment on the state of Europe in the summer of 1916.) At stage left stood an upright piano festooned with ribbons and bespangled with glittering stars; at stage right was a low table in the center of which sat a huge papier-mache wedding cake surmounted by a representation of Europa and the Bull (another political comment), flanked by Tzara's paraphernalia— cowbells, ratchets, klaxons, and so forth.

  The citizenry of Zurich poured into Waag Hall, determined to be shocked, titillated, disgusted, confirmed in their solid and eternal values. They sat facing the drab curtain in good order, keeping their voices down, looking discreetly around for familiar faces, allowing themselves a quiet cough or two, rustling their chocolate boxes. Tzara peeked at them through a hole in the curtain and scurried back to the wings, a handsome little jackanapes, grinning with pleasure and rubbing his hands together. "Avanti!" he said.

  The curtain opened on a darkened stage that was suddenly bathed in brilliant white light. Ball was discovered in blackface at the piano, playing "Tipperary." There was good-humored clapping, a few nervous giggles. I won't rehearse the sequence of "turns." It was the usual stuff from the Cabaret Voltaire, perhaps a little more elaborate, a little more brazen: the stage, after all, offered a larger area for their high-jinks. Magda was in the wings in leotards and tutu, sitting shamelessly on Selinger's lap. We contrived not to see one another. Meanwhile, the audience got its moneys worth, saw what it had expected to see, was able to jeer, boo, clap derisively, and shout "nonsense!" and "imbeciles!"

  No, never mind the first hour. I shall turn directly to my concrete metaphor, the climax and, as it turned out, the disastrous/triumphant finale to the evening.

  My costume for the occasion was, thanks to my mothers foresight in 1915, the last word in elegance. You would have thought me on my way to lunch with the Kaiser at the very least. I wore an immaculate black coat of formal cut over gray-striped trousers. A silk cravat, precisely knotted and pierced by a pin of black onyx, disappeared into my dove-gray waistcoat. Spats, identical in hue and tone to the waistcoat, protected my sparkling black shoes. I had even acquired a monocle, and this was screwed firmly in place. Even Aunt Manya would have

  been awed, and my mother would have pinched my cheek in delight. And this aristocratic figure, as I supposed myself, walked on stage bearing an ordinary chair as if it were his sacred ancestral escutcheon.

  The citizens grew quiet. Perhaps the civic authorities had in the interest of public order wisely decided to bring the "Extravaganza" to an end, and I was there to make the official announcement. A honking laugh from the back of the hall was met by an immediate and deferential "Ssh-ssh!" Ignoring the sensation I had already created, I went to the precise center of the stage and put down the chair, backed off and contemplated it for a moment, made a minute adjustment, and walked offstage. But before the wondering murmur could assert itself, I was back again, this time carrying in a fireman's lift a headless window dummy, a female mannequin. I lowered it to the chair. Anxious laughter from the citizens.

  As I knelt to adjust the mannequin's position, the audience could now see that painted in neat black lettering over each wax breast was the syllable Mag, and that between these hillocks was a hyphen, thus: Mag-Mag. The nipples, in vivid carmine, peeped through the circles of the central as. The tension in the hall charged the silence. I glanced at the wings: Janco, grinning, gave me a thumbs-up sign; Huelsenbeck held his hand over his mouth; Tzara was hugging himself in ecstasy.

  Onstage, I stood up and backed away from the chair. A single horrified gasp arose from the darkness, an intake of breath that united all elements of the audience. The legs of the mannequin were indecorously spread. But that was not all. (Even now I blush to record the rest; but the historian has his duty, and you may judge from what follows to what extremes the young Korner's passion and rage had led him.) In the area of the mons veneris and the sacrarium below it, I had

  painted a Venus flytrap in grasshopper green, its marginal thorns open to reveal the red blush within. The citizens were mesmerized. From my admirable black coat I removed with a magician's flourish a squat British toothbrush, and this prosaic item I placed in the mannequins right hand. From my inner breast pocket I drew out a rubber douche complete with clyster pipes. Voila! The mannequin's left hand received the douche, the rubber pipes snaking to the floor. I turned to the wings and snapped my fingers; on cue, Ball threw me a bouquet of paper flowers. I bowed politely to the mannequin and offered her the bouquet. That there was no response is not surprising, but at the moment, so convincing must have been my performance, the audience sighed as if in sympathy for me. For a moment, perplexed, I rubbed my chin, and then, inspired, I placed the bouquet in the headless neck-hole. That was it! That was precisely what the mannequin had lacked! Sterile Mag-Mag, cold and cruel, sprouted spring blooms gaily; nevertheless, the Venus flytrap threatened, and neither hand held out much hope. I strode from the stage.

  The silence was at first absolute, thick, sepulchral. Into the silence, assaulting it, seeking to pierce it, break it into fragments, pranced the Gang of Nihilists, myself among them, at last a paid-up member. Ball thumped out Offenbach on the piano, Janco banged the drum, Huelsenbeck and I kicked out a cancan, Emmy Hennings did cartwheels, Magda did the splits, Tzara wiggled his rump like the stomach of a belly-dancer, everyone was occupied. Then we stood in line on either side of Mag-Mag and demanded the right to piss in various colors.

  This was what the good citizens of Zurich had been waiting for. Here at last was the event against which they had been hoarding their fury. The storm broke, at first mildly, with boos and catcalls. But very soon there were more voices, angry voices: "Swine!" "Filth!" "Anarchists!" "Christ-killers!" The

  commotion in the auditorium of Waag Hall drowned us out. It was getting ugly. Janco said we should let down the curtain. Huelsenbeck agreed. But no, Tzara would have none of it. He exulted. The sweat glistened on his forehead. There was a sudden lull as the hall went quiet, as if gulping for fresh breath. Into the silence, Tzara bellowed, "And Calvin, too, if you think of it, was a shitless anal-retentive!" That was enough. That galvanized them. Pandemonium! There were scuffles, fights, the sounds of breaking glass, screams, police whistles. We brought down the curtain.

  LATER WE SAT in the Cafe zum Weissen Bock and talked about the night's events. There had been some arrests, but of our number only Tauschnitz, like me a barely tolerated hanger-on, had been detained. He had been caught in a scuffle when some of the citizens tried to storm the stage. From the rest of us, the police had taken only names and addresses. Perhaps charges would be preferred, perhaps not: the sergeant was noncommittal. The manager of Waag Hall had been roused from his sleep to make an early assessment of the damages. Tsk-tsk. Profits would perhaps cover losses. "There you have the whole rotten system," said Tzara. Selinger, I was pleased to see, had a black eye, but as a consequence, with Magda draped over him all but swooning, was regarded as the hero of the hour, the only one of us tempered in the fire. Tauschnitz, needless to say, was forgotten. All pronounced the evening a thundering success. The Gang was now a force to be reckoned with.

  I, however, was shunted to the sidelines. The table accommodated comfortably all chairs but mine, and so I sat outside the circle, behind and between Emmy Hennings and Richter, who made no attempt to let me in. Magda and I still contrived not to make eye contact. She was, in any case, fully occupied with her hero. I felt quite sick.

  The Gang was trying to pinpoint the precise moment at which the citizens' hostility had first been provoked. B
all thought it was when Arp, in the costume of Wilhelm Tell, seemingly plucked an apple from the generous bottom of his "son," Sophie Tauber; Janco believed it was the scene in which he and Huelsenbeck, as a French and a German soldier, squatted, with trousers down, over a "field latrine" and discussed Swiss courage. But all agreed that the assertion of the "right to piss in various colors" had been the true turning point, and that Tzaras "brilliant" and "inspired" words on Calvin had capped the triumph. They laughed until they had tears in their eyes. And stupidly, I laughed with them. Ball, without embarrassment, loudly passed wind, a cause of fresh laughter. Hamburger would have felt right at home.

  What utterly amazed me then, what amazes me still, was the fact that not one of them, not even the lady in question, recognized in the Mag-Mag painted over the bosom of the mannequin an allusion to Magda Damrosch. How could this be? I have long puzzled over it. The only explanation I can offer (and I confess that it does not wholly convince me) is that having been ideologically programmed to seek no meaning—the only significant point for them being pointlessness—they found none. My frustration was excruciating, my revenge a fiasco!

  And now they set about stealing my coinage from me. "We are on the march," said Tzara, "and I am ready at this midnight hour to offer you, in all appropriate humility and solemnity, the long-looked-for name of our journal." He paused, tasting the moment. The monocle popped into his waiting hand. "Mag-Mag!" He looked around the table at the puzzled faces. "Wake up! Think of what we have here: Maga-zin, Magie, mager!"

  What delight, then, what enthusiasm! These celebrators of unmeaning tumbled over themselves in the hunt for meaning. It became a game.

  "Magma!"

  "Magnet!"

  "Magnidicus! Magnus! Magnificat!"

  "Magot!"

  "Magic!"

  "Then we are agreed?" said Tzara.

  It was intolerable. They had looked everywhere but at Magda Damrosch. What was I to do? My desire for revenge had turned sour in my stomach. To tell them now of my original intention, to explain what they should easily have understood, to spell it out now, with Magda openly caressing Egon Selinger, would be to reveal myself as the utter fool I undoubtedly was. I swallowed bile, but I could not remain silent. Perhaps obliquely the point could yet be made.