a trap for what the professor correctly assumes is the enfeebled German brain - Gottfried Benn goes angling for monsters

Michael Hofmann’s Gottfried Benn is a bit like a character in a novel about an old man ruminating over his past mistakes.  This novel is innovatively presented as a translation of the old man’s poetry and prose, but also including the original German poems, which are sometimes great masterpieces.  That last part is the one no novelist can do.  Not many.

Benn moves from his early stark shockers (“two hundred pages, thin stuff, one would be ashamed if one were still alive,” as Benn described his own poems in 1921) to a bold lyricism to a loose, conversational style, like I’m meeting him in a bar:

from Nocturne

From the saloon bar the rattle of dice on a wooden tabletop,
beside you a couple at the anthropophagous stage,
a chestnut bough on the piano adds a natural touch,
all in all, my kind of place.  (p. 123)

Somehow the booze leads Benn to think of its effect on his primitive brain – he is a doctor, remember – and then to the primitive ocean, long before man,

before consciousness and conception,
no one went angling for monsters,
no one suffered deeper than ten feet,
which if you think about it isn’t so very much.

Benn made one big mistake.  In 1933, he “drifted into the Nazi orbit” (Hofmann, p. xvii) and supported them in the minor but real ways a poet can support a bunch of culture-obsessed ideologues.  What is impressive about Benn is that within a year and a half he had realized his mistake.  “It dawned on Benn that the Nazis were not a bunch of pessimistic aesthetes like himself, but rather imbued with a sanguinary optimism…”  (xvii).  How many artists disentangle themselves from their bad politics so quickly?

Who knows what might have happened to Benn, but, as strange as it sounds, he was saved by the war.  For Benn, a doctor specializing in venereal diseases, military service was like a writer’s retreat.  Stationed in some boring behind-the-lines backwater military hospital, he could finally get to work on his writing.  Both the first and second world wars were highly productive times for him.  So odd.

During World War II, his writing would have got him shot if the wrong people had known he was doing it.

The second-longest prose piece in the book is an extraordinary piece of memoir, “Block II, Room 66” (1944), “the address of the quarters where I was billeted for a number of months” (308).  Recruits pass through, each batch both younger and older than the last, the training period shorter every time, “[e]ver new waves of men, waves of blood, destined to dribble away into the Eastern steppes after a few shots and gestures toward so-called enemies” (310).  The nation’s leaders become more obvious confidence men and thugs, “club wielding clowns, heroes with brass knuckles” (312); the propaganda grows more rancid and desperate.  The “individualist felt like a one-man cosmic catastrophe” (315), the irony being that this is how Benn always felt.

As with Karl Kraus, the rise of the Nazis had the effect of ruining the satirists’ ironies.  “Block II, Room 66” has a streak of Kraus running through it.  Benn is enraged by the use of German poets in Nazi propaganda.  “Listen: in the Naval Review of November 1943… that makes its way through our blocks, a professor for church and international law at a Bavarian university treats questions of war at sea (a church lawyer?) under four aspects,” supporting his claims with quotations from Rilke and Hölderlin:

Now, it’s possible to come at the Duino Elegies from many angles, but to interpret them as in some sense warlike is something they really won’t bear.  The allusion to Rilke is a trap for what the professor correctly assumes is the enfeebled German brain.  (318)

Then it’s Christmas.  Then the Russians come.  “The part that lives is not the same part that thinks, that’s a fundamental fact of our existence, and we had better get used to it.”  But Benn does get a lot of writing done.

Michael Hofmann's translation of Gottfried Benn - unlike Brecht, he’s not even unpopular

It was The Blue Lantern, I believe, who alerted me to the 2013 publication of Michael Hofmann’s translations of Gottfried Benn, Impromptus: Selected Poems and Some Prose.  Nearly half prose, in effect.  Benn is a strange case.

And yet we’re talking of someone of the eminence of, say, Wallace Stevens, someone most Germans (and most German poets too) would concede as the greatest German poet since Rilke.  (xiv)

The horrible thing about that sentence is that it might even be true.  “Most Americans would concede that Wallace Stevens is someone they have never heard of” – also true.

The word “concede” and the dig at the German poets gives hints of the difficulty.

Benn’s first book, the 1912 Morgue and Other Poems, is a pamphlet of five autopsy poems, some of which are as grisly as that sounds.  A punk gesture.

Little Aster

A drowned drayman was hoisted onto the slab.
Someone had jammed a lavender aster
between his teeth.
[skipping the dissection]
Drink your fill in your vase!
Rest easy,
little aster!  (9)

That aster recurs frequently over the next forty years.  Some people find it useful to call this Expressionism, but Benn, a young doctor, was just writing what he knew.  And what he knew was dissection, skin problems, and venereal diseases.  These subjects suited his dark temperament.

A normal life and a normal death –
I don’t know what they’re good for.  Even a normal life
ends in an unhealthy death.  Altogether death
doesn’t have a lot to do with health and sickness,
it merely uses them for its own purposes.  (from “Restaurant,” a much later poem, 127)

I have picked a couple of examples that sound especially prosy in English, but Benn – a slightly older, less shocking Benn – worked with form and rhyme and the usual business.  He reminds me of Verlaine sometimes, creating musical beauty whatever the subject.

Ich kann mir keine Bücher kaufen,
ich sitze in den Librairien:
Notizen – dann nach Aufschnitt laufen: –
das sind die Tage von Turin.

I can’t afford to buy books;
I sit around in public libraries,
Scribble notes, then go for cold cuts,
These are the days of Turin.

The tragic speaker here, by the way, is an ill Friedrich Nietzsche; soon, in the next stanza, he will hug the horse.  The more conventionally formed Benn poems are from the 1920s and 1930s, but Hofmann warns me that any sense of movement is an illusion of the translator based on his failure with most of the poems from this period.

I’m afraid they were too difficult and idiosyncratic for me to carry them into English in any important way.  (xxii)

He gives an example, just two lines:

Banane, yes, Banane
vie méditerranée?

Banana, yes, banana
Mediterranean life?

Says Hofmann:  “I don’t think so.”

But Hofmann gives me better than Benn has gotten before:

Thus unsuccessfully transmitted, Benn has no English admirers; unlike Brecht, he’s not even unpopular.  (xiv)

And more importantly, he has given me more Benn.  Because what this book really gives is not deathless verse, not on the English side of the page at least, but a strong personality, like in a novel.  I ought to write one more post about that, the flavor of Benn.

The Best Books of 1912, as if I would know - Rest easy, little aster!

The Best Books of 1912 – you know, I usually do not push on to the 20th century.  Ignorance is the reason.  I have read most of the books I suggested as the Best (surviving) Books of 1812 and 1862, but I do not believe I have read more than three books from 1912, and more importantly I have not spent much time – what metaphor should I use – living in 1912.  I do not know what any of it means.

So I will now write pretending that I do know (but I do not).  Ideas I might develop if I knew more.

Two of the books I have read are Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Leo Tolstoy’s posthumous Hadji Murad.  What else has lasted as well as these?  George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.  Shaw’s reputation seems to be slipping now, and Johnson’s ascending.

Now I start rummaging.  Stefan Zeromski’s The Faithful River is said to be an important Polish novel.  Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier is in print.  Perhaps our economic hard times have given it new life; I do not know what is in it.  Anatole France’s Les dieux ont soif (The Gods Are Thirsty), Saki’s The Unbearable Bassington, D. H. Lawrence’s The Trespasser, Willa Cather’s Alexander’s Bridge – what kind of audience do these books have now?  Lawrence and Cather both have big fun in 1913.  Max Beerbohm still has a cult audience, of which I am a member in bad standing, so A Christmas Garland, his book of literary parodies, still has some readers.

In art history, 1912 means this:

In other words, everyone has gone innovation-crazy and is turning traditional painting inside-out.  But in fiction: Dreiser, France, Tolstoy, for pity’s sake – fiction has not yet taken the Modernist turn.  Virginia Woolf said that everything changed in 1910, but she may have been off by a couple of years.

Then again, 1912 saw the first books from Gottfried Benn, Anna Akhmatova, and Robinson Jeffers.  Something is changing in poetry:

from Gottfried Benn’s Little Asters

A drowned drayman was hoisted on to the slab.
Someone had jammed a lavender aster
between his teeth.
As I made the incision up from the chest…
[yikes, what have I done, let’s skip this part]
Drink your fill in your vase!
Rest easy,
little aster!

Five more surprising survivors from 1912:  The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock, and two Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, Tarzan of the Apes and A Princess of Mars.  That last one I have read many times.  The Burroughs books are available in special Library of America editions, and the Leacock has a Norton Critical Edition!

Who would have guessed?  If you are lazily speculating on which of today’s books will be read a hundred years from now, do not hesitate to include your favorite massively popular fantasy novel series.

Note to self for future research:  is A Princess of Mars a descendant of Flaubert’s Salammbô?

Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” is a proud possession of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.