Artists and Old Age: An Essay on the Creative Personality

by GOTTFRIED BENN

1

SUPPOSING that a certain writer has at some time in his life uttered opinions that are later considered impossible, then good care is taken that these opinions should drag along behind him like the harrow after a farm horse, and everyone is delighted to see them continually hitting him on the heels. Well, that’s part of the game, the writer says to himself, nothing can be done about it. If one were to write nothing but what turned out to be opportune fifteen years later, presumably one would never write anything at all. Let me give one little example of what I mean. In a conversation, a very serious conversation among three old men, our author once wrote: “To be mistaken and yet be compelled to go on believing what one‘s own innermost being tells one — that is man, and his glory begins yonder, beyond victory and defeat.”

From the writer’s point of view this declaration was a sort of anthropological elegy, a ciphered melancholy; but his critics thought differently. It shocked them to the core. Here they said was a blank check for every conceivable political crime. At first the author did not know what these critics meant, but then he said to himself: Oh well, in the nineteenth century the natural sciences made an onslaught on poetry, Nietzsche was fought by the theologians; today it is politics that gets mixed up with everything — all right, let’s leave it at that. Nevertheless, this return of his earlier words to mock him was one of the things that caused our author to look into the question of how other old men had fared and what old age and the process of aging mean for the artist.

What is il like for the artist himself to grow old, to be old? How does he experience it himself? Take Flaubert —there in his house on the high ground, in Rouen, not leaving his room for days on end, and night after night the light from his windows shining out onto the river, so that the Seine boatmen take their bearings from it. He is not old, he is only fifty-nine, but he is worn out, he has bags under his eyes and his eyelids are wrinkled with bitter scorn — scorn of the gent épiciére, those shopkeepers, the middle classes — to be sure, the court, did not pronounce Madame Bovary immoral, but it did recommend him to exercise his gifts of observation on nicer people, people with more goodness of heart. And did that make him write about goodness of heart ? When his Education sentimentale was published, they wrote: A cretin, a pimp, one who dirties the water in the gutter where he washes.

In his youth he wrote that anyone who wanted to create something permanent must take care not to laugh at fame. But how was it later on? Was there anything he did not laugh at? And most of all it was himself he laughed at; he could not look at himself in the mirror while shaving without bursting into laughter. And now he was drawing up a list of the follies of those of the dead whose names constitute what we call humanity. Should he put on yet another record? Sit yet again in the bistro downtown, tense with concentration visually and acoustically, in order to penetrate into the object, to slip behind those faces? Should he once again make that superhuman effort of observation, an effort so Iragic in every instant, picking up expressions, collecting phrases, things one could take one’s stand on?

Such was Flaubert when he was old.

And there’s Leonardo in the little château of Ducloux on the Loire, when Italy was no longer a place for him, all his patrons dead or imprisoned. What does he think of in those evenings? The King is out hunting, and all is still, there is nothing to be heard but the metallic clang of the clock on the tower called Horloge and the cry of the wild swans on the water. By the river there are poplars like those in Lombardy long ago. The King has offered him four thousand guilders for the Gioconda, but he cannot bring himself to part with her. The King goes on insisting, and the old man throws himself at the King’s feet, weeping, making himself a laughingstock before the guests, offering the King his latest, picture, a St. John the Baptist, but not the Gioconda, not that, that picture is his life. Five long years he worked at it, five years he bent over it, silent, growing old, not letting anyone see it. In the room where he painted it there were torsos of Greek statues, dog-headed Egyptian gods in black granite, Gnostic gems with magical inscriptions, Byzantine parchments hard as ivory, with passages of Greek poetry believed eternally lost, clay potsherds bearing Assyrian cuneiform script, Persian magical writings bound in iron, papyri from Memphis, transparent and delicate as the petals of flowers. . . . He had had to transform himself into all that, to lose himself in it, perhaps even to succumb to it. And in this way he lived for five years, dedicated to his inner vision, his one vision. The King and the court thought him a poor fool, but still, he had managed to keep the picture in his room. The spiral staircase up to his bedroom was narrow and steep, and as he climbed it he suffered attacks of dizziness and breathlessness. Then his right side became paralyzed and, though he could still draw with his left hand, he could not paint. Then he spent the evenings with a monk, playing games with little blocks of wood, or cards. Then his left side became paralyzed too. And he had just managed to say, “Arise and cast yourself into the sea,” when he died and lay there, at rest, like a weight that has fallen.

Such was Leonardo da Vinci when he was old.

Evenings of life — oh, these evenings of life! Most of them are spent in poverty, coughing, crookbacked — drug addicts, drunkards, some even as criminals, almost all unmarried, almost all childless — the whole bio-negative Olympic assembly, a European, cisatlantic team of Olympians that has borne the glory and the sadness of post-classical man for four hundred years. Those born under a lucky star managed perhaps to get themselves a house, as Goethe and Rubens did, and those whose lot was meager went on painting to the end of their days without a penny in their pockets, painting their wavy olives, and those who live in the age of the conquest of space look out of a back-room window on a rabbit hutch and two hortensias. Making a survey of them all, one can discover only one thing — they were all under some compelling urge that they could not escape. “If I don’t tremble as the adder does in the snake tamer’s hand, I am cold. Anything I ever did that was any good at all was done in that condition,” Delacroix said. And Beckmann wrote: “I would gladly live in sewers and crawl through all the gutters of the world if that were the only way I could go on painting.” Adders, gutters, sewers — that is the overture to life’s evening.

2

I AM not wallowing in the macabre for its own sake, nor amusing myself with an obsolete picture of things dating from the days of the poètes maudits. These psyehopathological and sociological studies of the lives of men of genius, and of their last days, are none of my making; they are the work of others. The trend of thought may seem a little disconcerting nowadays, when the artist has acquired some of the outer trappings of the solid, respectable citizen and adopts the airs of a functionary, and indeed he feels that he is a functionary, in a definite position, which forces him to seek government commissions and external security. Routine criticism, the reviewing of exhibitions and books commissioned and paid for by newspapers and publishers, has dragged the artist into public life, into the general hodge-podge in which individualism is coming to an end in our epoch. But let there be no mistake about it: he who is under that compelling urge remains inwardly untouched. In a helicopter painted arsenic-green he goes on climbing back into his esoteric studio. It is only a short while since the eighty-three-year-old Degas said: “A picture is something that needs just as much smartness and viciousness as crime does — forgery with a dash of Nature thrown in.”

Perhaps the image of the arsenic-green helicopter is a trifle banal. All the same, let us get into that helicopter for a moment so that we can look down on what we can’t take with us of mankind and the earth.

It is not an ascent that is made with very much love for humanity. Think for instance of that selfportrait of Tintoretto’s, a late work (I don’t remember where it hangs, I only know it from reproductions) — there’s a thing one can’t forget, and there is only one word for it: rancid. Or think of Rembrandt’s last self-portraits — reserved, wary, and as though they were saying: Count me out. None of the great old men was an idealist. It is only dilettantes who dream of the impossible.

Art — these men say — art must put into the picture the relationship there is between the world and the absolute. Art must restore the center, but without losing in depth. Art must represent man as being made in the image of God — if there is anything at all not made in the image of God, not excluding the tiger, I haven’t heard of it —but there simply is no “must” where art is concerned. There’s a radio in this helicopter of ours, and right now it’s playing a hit from the film Moulin Rouge. It makes me shiver with excitement. For a firstrate popular tune sometimes has more of the century in it than a motet, and a word may weigh heavier than a victory.

Up and up we go in our helicopter — earth dwindles away, but we can still make out those colossal complexes, those collectives, those things called institutes and institutions. “I made my way through them too,”one of the old men might say nowadays. “I suffered from depressions, I entered an institution and went to a psychoanalyst. And he said, ‘You are suffering from oral-narcissistic deficiency, you lack an adequate intake of external objects. You are introverted — I suppose you know what I mean by that!’ I replied that introverted and extroverted seemed pretty crude basic concepts to me. There are those who bear a hereditary burden and those who bear none. There are those who are fettered and those who are free. And the first are the more interesting. ʽContactual insufficiency,’ the therapist said, pressing into my hand a booklet entitled You and the Libido, and thereupon fell into a trance.

“Then I heard,” one of those old masters would say today, “that thought makes you free, thought makes you happy. And so I entered another institution and went to the thinkers. But sociology, phenomenology, and the theory of types it all sounds just like Puccini. Ontology where, I ask you, is there any existence of anything outside my pictures? And what is all this stuff about things, anyway? Things come into existence because one admits their existence, that’s to say, one formulates them, paints them. If one doesn’t grant them their existence, they vanish into the realm of unrealily and insubstantiality. These thinkers with their grounds of existence that no one can see, which is utterly formless — all these contributions and contributors— they lurn on the faucet and what comes out is generally a spurt of Plato. Then they take a quick shower, and then the next, one steps into the tub. None of them ever finishes anything. I have to finish my things! I’hey’re all idealists, and they think the whole thing only starts with them. ‘I’hey’re all optimists, and at the age of seventy-five they go and have a new jacket made to measure. But none of these gentry nowadays really thinkunless one excepts Wittgenstein, who said: ‘The limits of language are the limits of my world.’ and ‘What the picture represents is what it means.’ There’s sound thinking, there’s concrete thinking! No loose ends there! There is a systematic self-limitation to the thinking of propositions. That is painterly thinking, that is Lethe, and there myth comes to an end.

And so what is the situation like? Desperate? Send me up some fresh supplies of libido and a guaranteed pre-Spenglerian civilization. The exploration of outer space hasn‘t yet reached the stage where we could start to feel something again at the sight of the stars. Oh, why didn’t I become a landscape painter, professionally busy dashing from the Teutoburger Wald to Astrakhan, and all by aid of the Volkswagen that we have these days? Then I could have some springy woodland earth underfoot!

“How queer the nations are,” our old man goes on thinking. “They want interesting minds, but they also want to be the ones who decide what the interesting minds are to be interesting about. They want internationally famous names, but anyone who writes a word against their pet ideas is instantly crossed off the list. They want to be delivered of works of universal significance, but it is they who organize the mid wives and provide them with textbooks on confinement. Kleist‘s Penthesilea would never have been written if a vote had been taken on it first. Strindberg, Nietzsche, El Greco would never have appeared on the scene. But conformism would have existed all right! It has always been there, only it would never have created the four hundred years of Western civilization.”

Surely there’s no writer who hasn’t often envied painters: they can paint oranges and asphodels, pitchers, even lobsters and other crustaceans, and nobody reproaches them with not having got in anything about the housing problem. But obviously the trade unions have their rights in the case of anything written. Anti-social is the word. Art must . . .” It’s probably a waste of time pointing out that Flaubert gave us a description of the artist’s predicament, of his inability to express all he feels and yearns for, and how he can only express what it is given to him to express within the limitations of word and form.

3

ONLY one kilometer more and we shall have reached the ceiling. The traveler glances down. When the diamond dealer Salomon Rossbach jumped off the Empire State Building he left a mysterious message: “No more above, no more below, and so I leap off.” A good message, the traveler says: no more above, no more below, the center is damaged, the compass needle and the quarters of heaven are no longer valid, but the species is rampant and keeps going by means of pills. The body has grown more morbid, with modern medicine positively offering it thousands of diseases, and they break out of it with scientific vigor — oh, no slur on the doctors, a very fine lot of men, I only mean that in the old days if you were bitten by a mosquito you scratched the place, but today they can prescribe a dozen different ointments and not one of them helps — still, that’s life, it keeps things moving. Our bodies are more morbid than they used to be, but they live longer.

Well, so here we are. The old man enters his studio — a bare room, a big table covered with slips of paper and sheets of notes. He goes up to it, saying to himself: “Now what shall I do with this? — essay, poem, dialogue? The notion that the form is born together with the content is just another illusion hatched by philosophies of art— I can use this here or there, coloring, weaving, fixing it up, all just as I feel like it, I went through my beginning and I am going through my end, moira, my allotted part. Only one thing is certain: When a thing’s finished it must be complete, perfect. Though of course there’s the question: And what I hen ?”

Take another look at the most famous “late” works — what are they like? For instance, there’s Goethe’s Novelle — a menagerie catches fire, the booth burns down, the tigers escape, the lions are loose! And it all works out harmoniously. No, this earth is scorched and bare, flayed by lightning, and today the tigers bite. Or what about the second part of Faust? Undoubtedly this is Germany’s most mysterious gift to the world. But all those choruses, gryphons, lamias, pulcinellos, ants, cranes, and empusac, the whole thing humming and buzzing away, singing to itself, away off to where the fairy rings are and the crowns of stars and the angelic boys — where does it all come from anyway? Let’s face it, the whole thing hovers in the realm of pure imagination, it’s all table rapping, telepathy, hocus-pocus. There’s someone standing on a balcony, unreal, motionless, blowing bubbles — some bright, some dark — conjuring forth more and more clay pipes and straws to blow his iridescent bubbles with—oh, a magnificent God on the Balcony, inculcated with the spirit of the classical and the baroque, with miracles and mysteries dangling from his coattails. But in our day the eye is slightly moist when one looks that way, and that’s all there is to it. That’s how it stands with such works nowadays.

Around the greatest of all, the translators and interpreters keep on circling for a few centuries, but soon there is no one left who understands their language. What then? Primitives, the archaic, the classical, the mannerists, the abstractionists, in a word, the Quaternary Period. But what then? Spaces that are much too big have been opened up to us, and too many spheres, and feelings too weighty—perhaps the making of art is, after all, a rather shallow reaction? Isn’t it perhaps profounder simply to suffer the human substance in silence? What was it the Lord Jehovah put into our essential nature, what was the fate he gave us? Was creative salvation to be our lot, or were we meant to go for the still point, to sit under the Bo tree, immobile, waiting to meet Kama-Mara, the god of love and death? How many hours of my life I have spent pondering on a certain saying of the balcony god’s, turning it this way and that— the saying that “On its highest peak poetry seems to be completely external. The more it withdraws inward, the further it sinks.” What does that mean? Am I supposed to disown my inner being, cheat it, make a fool of it — is that the precondition for poetry? And what else is it? A conjurer’s act, the rope trick, mere nothingness with a glaze over it? And from the Fast I hear them harping on the same tune. The master K’ung-tzu, speaking of painters, says: “He is crude in whose work the meaning has more weight than the line.” In other words, for him too the higher thing is the manipulated thing, the manufactured thing, style. On the other hand, there’s Guardini saying that “Behind every work of art, as it were, something opens up. . . Well, and what is it that as it were opens up? After all, we are supposed to cover it up with paint and hide it. Or what of a great philosopher’s dictum that “Art is the self-manifestation and operation of truth”? What truth, anyway? A truth made up of sketches and designs, a manufactured truth? Or is truth only mentioned in order to let philosophy make a showing, for of course art isn’t concerned with truth at all, only with expression. And then finally we come to the question: What is this expression that thrusts its way in in front of depth? Is expression the same as guilt? It might be.

4

STILL, I dare say I’m too old to unravel these problems. Mists of weariness and melancholy cloud my mind. I can remember having heard Pablo Sarasate playing his fiddle and Caruso singing at the Metropolitan Opera House, with the Astors sitting in the Diamond Horseshoe. I have watched Bergmann operating, and 1 stood on parade before the last Emperor. I began studying by the light of an oil lamp, with Haeckel’s Riddles of the Universe for my forbidden reading. I have ridden and I have flown, but I have also seen the great, sailing-ships upon the seas that no man had ever yet flown across — but that’s all past and gone — all over now. And today I say it was all much more heavily charged than one thought at the time; everything was much more predestined than it seemed. And the oddest thing of all is that one was much more in the air then than one dreamed, believing as one did in one’s autonomy. To take just one example: there were painters who spent their whole life painting in tones of silver or of yellow, and another one who always stuck to brown, and there was a generation that wrote poetry mainly in nouns. It wasn’t a literary caprice, it was in the air — in the air of entirely heterogeneous dimensions. A short time ago I read the following story about Clemenceau. He had just engaged a new private secretary and on the first day he was showing him what the job consisted of. “Some letters,”Clemenceau said, “you will have to draft by yourself. Now listen: a sentence consists of a noun and a verb. If you want to use an adjective, come and ask me first.” Come and ask me first! It’s exactly the same advice that Carl Sternheim gave me when we were both young. “When you’ve written something,”he said to me, “go through it again and cross out the adjectives. Your meaning will be much clearer then.”It turned out to be true. Indeed, the leaving out of explanatory, padding-out adjectives became a sort of compulsion neurosis with my generation.

My generation! But of course the next, one is here by now, the young people, the youth of our time! God preserve their imitative urge for them, and then it wouldn’t be long before the whole thing stops of its own accord. But supposing they were to produce a new style — evoe! A new style is a new type of man. Now, though genetics haven’t produced very much that is clear, one thing seems to be certain: a new generation means a new sort of brain, and a new sort of brain means a new sort of reality and new neuroses, and the whole thing is called evolution, and that’s the way civilization goes on spreading. If I were to give this younger generation of ours some advice, talking down to them from my pulpit of old age, it would be this: “When you have published four of those rhymed or unrhymed things that are called poems, or have drawn a goat more or less true to nature, don’t expect that from now on every time you have a birthday the mayor of your town will call to wish you many happy returns. After all, it‘s only human handiwork you’re doing. You would do well to think occasionally of how when Schubert was twenty-nine someone advised him to buy unlined paper and draw the lines himself, since that was cheaper. What impudence! everyone says nowadays when they hear of it, but of course the same thing keeps on happening all over again, and it isn’t everyone who by the age of thirty-one has reached a stage where he doesn’t need to spend money any more.”

Gentlemen of the rising generation, allow me to be provoking. I do it in the hope of making you tough. Toughness is the greatest blessing an artist can have —the ability to be hard on himself and on his work. Or as Thomas Mann has said: “It is better to ruin a work of art and make it useless for giving to the world than not to go all out at every point.” Or as I tried to put it a moment ago: One thing is certain, when a thing is finished it must be complete, perfect. And in this connection don’t for a moment forget the questionable and devious nature of your undertaking, the dangers and the hatred that surround your activities. Don’t lose sight of the cold and egotistical element in your mission. Your art has deserted the temples and the sacrificial vessels, it has ceased to have anything to do with the painting of pillars, and the painting of chapels is no longer anything for you either. You are using your own skin for wallpaper, and nothing can save you. Don’t let yourself be tempted by “security" — 312 pages, cloth-bound, price 13 marks 80. There is no turning the clock back. The things of the mind are irreversible; they go right along their road to the end, right to the end of the night. With your back to the wall, care-worn and weary, in the gray light of the void, read Job and Jeremiah and keep going. Formulate your principles without regard for anything else, because there will be nothing left of you but your words when this epoch comes to an end, milking an end of all singing and chanting of poetry. What you don‘t say will not be there then. You will make enemies, you will be alone, a tiny boat on the vast ocean. You will shiver in dismay at your own undertaking, but don’t send out an SOS. First of all, there’s no one to hear you, and secondly, after so many voyages your end will be a quiet one.

Ladies and gentlemen, the portrait of old age is finished. We have left the studio. The helicopter is about to land. Out of the cabin there steps an homme du monde, wearing a gray tie and a black homburg, who disappears in the hustle and bustle of the airfield. The airfield is out in the country, and this gentleman strolls up to the edge of it, where he sees poplars like those on the banks of the Loire and like those long ago in Lombardy, and sees the river a ribbon winding away into the distance like the Seine, where once the bargemen looked out for that lighted window in the dark. The same things recur for as long as there is sameness. And when some day nothing is like anything else any more at all and the great rules change — even then some kind of order will persist.

“To be mistaken and yet be compelled to go on believing what one’s own innermost being tells one—that is man, and his glory begins yonder, beyond victory and defeat. . . Yes, he would write that same sentence yet once again, if he had to start till over again, even if it were misleading, even if it were a falsification. After all, what dictum is blameless? Face to face with the Western world, I did my work; I lived as if the day had come — my own day. I was the man that I shall be. And so at the end I take my stand on all the church fathers, all those ancient men with centuries behind them: non eonfundar in detention — I too shall not be condemned eternally.

Translated by Enid Kaiser arid Eithne Withins