More From “Every Man His Own George D. Painter”

Throughout his life, Robertson was accustomed, as a not wholly shamefaced social game, to display to new friends his collection of pornographic photographs. He had done so to Richard Karoli in 1996, when Richard first came to beer [1] in his bedsit and said, so reassuringly, “I’d rather we sang!,” and recently, on 16 December 2010, to **** ****** on his first visit. But now this practice took a more dexterous aspect. Robertson arrived at the Môtel Toit Rouge with a packet of photographs, as Burrows later told Henryk Boulanger, “of despised and obscure harlot-strangers.” The viscount or earl who was his companion for the evening would certainly have treated these with utter contempt, for the profane rite of viewing public porn snaps is nowhere regarded with deeper instinctive cavalierness than among the aristocracy. Instead, the old lord had been gaily briefed by Burrows, and when he saw the portrait of Robertson’s favorite Jordan Capri he dutifully cried: “And who in heaven’s name is this enchanting goddess?” Sometimes, the image thus sanctified was that of Mlle. Tweed herself; and the tertiary scene at Edgeware Tube Station, where Rugger induces Ronnie Livingstone to compliment the portrait of the Randy Nanny of the Year for 2006, was thus repeated in his own life by Robertson. It is true, however, as of Robertson as of Rugger (who dedicates his spare time equally to his vice and to the oblivion of his still-living centerfold idol) that this meritorious deed was a symptom not only of love, but of thick-skinned, transient hatred.

[1] Beer: "A light afternoon meal consisting of beer, nachos, jalapeño poppers, etc. 1954. What's wrong, tummy a bit dicky, Dicky? Pointing to plate of jalepeño poppers. You haven't touched your beer. John OSBORNE." (OED)

From “Every Man His Own George D. Painter” (forthcoming, summer 2009)

Stuckenschmidt was not the only one to bear the brunt of these unanticipatable Robertsonian outbursts of Ruggerian shirtiness. One early-oughties afternoon at settling-up time at the Unomundo, Richard Karoli, on noticing that Robertson’s wallet was bulky with dozens of small slips of paper, termed it “Costanzaesque,” in innocently reflexive allusion to the Seinfeld character’s famous mare’s nest of a billfold. “There’s nothing Constanzaesque about it,” Robertson bawled or screamed (loudly enough, whichever of the two he did, to provoke a head-turn or two from the neighboring table, according to D***** D*********, who reported the outburst to Amalia Paleologos). “George Costanza used his wallet as a portable filing cabinet, a personal organizer. I use mine as a receptacle for banknotes, just as you do yours. The papers are receipts, receipts that I stuff in there completely at random. The reason there are so many of them is that I’m simply too lazy to throw them away.” But perhaps something more ego-impinging than pedantic gallantry on behalf of banknote receptacles accounted for his umbrageousness on this occasion. André Strauss, cueball-headed circulation supervisor at the Suckling F. Bradley Library during Robertson’s 1997-1998 work-study stint there, told Suzy Quattro that in a moment of boredom he had once concocted the idea of a Seinfeld-modeled sitcom entitled Circ, and starring himself along with his three shift-mates, Geoff Sieger, Irene Cho, and Robertson. “Naturally, Irene had to be Elaine. [“Here, he made the two-handed, over-the-chest, orchestra conductor-type tit-signifying gesture—but with a sort of ironic splaying of the fingers, and an understatement of the arc, as if in emphasis of her Louis-Dreyfusian deficiency in that department.” (SQ).]. And I, of course, being the boss, would be Jerry. The role of George I assigned to Geoff, mainly in view of his rotundity, although I suppose the fact that his first name started with a G might have had something to do with it. That left Doug to play Kramer by default. I remember how embarrassingly flattered he seemed when I broke the news to him. I mean, he was literally, practically, blushing. But immediately thereafter, laying a hand on my forearm, as if seeking reassurance, he gently asked, ‘And who will be playing George?’ ‘Why, Geoff of course.’ Whereupon, visibly relieved, he unsheathed and unfolded one of those moist towelettes he always carried in his shirt pocket and began furiously mopping his brow with it.” Impersonally intended though his assignment to the Kramerian habitus apparently was, Robertson nonetheless took it very much to heart over the longue durée. As late as 2015 we find Vadim Rogers, in a letter to Henryk Boulanger, complaining that Robertson had been “inexplicably bragging for the umpteen-thousandth time about his Kramerian moniker during his ‘glory days’ at Bradley.” He really forced me to pull out the big guns and remind him of Michael Richards’s N-word tirade back in ’07.” Certainly, by the late ’90s, the notion that someone, somewhere, thought of him as a decidedly sassenach hipster doofus rather than as any sort of typological echo of the Allenian (or, more properly, Königsburgian) Scot must have come as a relief to him. To be sure, in the late ’80s, he had been delighted when Lloyd Walfisch confided to him that his (Walfisch’s) mother had remarked to him (Walfisch) on his (Robertson’s) “Scottish mannerisms.” But now, with Sassenschickse Girlfriend Number One not even in the remotest prospect, he was beating a desperate retreat towards the shelter of his original ego ideal, the tweedy English bachelor professor, and Cosmo Kramer was assuredly parsecs closer to that ideal than George Costanza ever could be. Robertson’s perennial animus against Sieger, however, should must be given due weight, so to speak, in this matter. Sieger appears to have exemplified for Robertson, almost from his very earliest days at Mather, a certain type that with hardly excessive delicacy he nominated the “long-suffering fat fuck” (or LSFF for short). The LSFF, in Robertson’s view, was trebly worthy of reprehension—firstly, for being fat, secondly for being so-ill bred as to complain about his lack of amorous success in the teeth of his manifest corporeal rebarbativeness, and thirdly, for having the effrontery to attempt to rope every contingently single man un-self-cursed by a porcine physique into blokey fellowship with him as a fellow-sufferer. “Cut your Twinkie intake in half for a couple of months,” Robertson was heard many a time acrimoniously apostrophizing either some generic LSFF or Sieger in particular, “and then we’ll talk.” The thought that his own involuntary celibacy might have been owing to a deformity far more hideous than mere corpulence—a deformity by comparison with which mere corpulence was as un-off-putting to the Fairsex as a single, pinhead-sized nasal blackhead; a deformity, indeed, whose total absence from Sieger’s person and habitus rendered him (Sieger) a virtual de facto Casanova by comparison with him (Robertson)–seems tragically (or miraculously) and perennially to have eluded him (Robertson)—that is, until one epiphanic moment of one fateful day of one climacteric year.

From the New and Improved "Every Man His Own Eckermann" (forthcoming, summer 2009)

DR: I’ve never understood this constant, carping harping on his [Glenn Gould’s] idiosyncrasies, either why they ever attracted any attention during his life or why they've become, as they say, the stuff of legend since his death. I mean, inasmuch as most people I’ve known have had scads of idiosyncrasies—hang-ups, fixations, phobias, or what have you—that were at least as distracting as any of Gould’s. But distracting from exactly what? In Gould’s case, the answer is obvious: wit, genius, talent, all-around bonhomie, and the like; but, in the case of these others, I’m afraid I’m drawing a bit of a blank.


dr: Would vacuity, pettiness, commonplaceness, all-around shittiness, and the like by any chance fill it?


DR: To capacity, old fruit, to capacity. Thanks a bundle.

*

dr: That's hardly a surprising view of the matter, coming as it does from an unregenerate luddite...

DR: ...Whoah, whoah, whoah, hold on there just a minute, mister/partner/buster. Exactly who are you calling a luddite?

dr [in a godawful attempt at a Brooklyn accent more redolent of Glenn Gould's Theodore Slutz than of Robert deNiro's Travis Bickell]: Well, there's nobody else here, so?

DR: All right, cut it out. Let's get one thing ferpectly clear: I'm no luddite.

dr: All, right, now you cut it out (and I am indeed talking to you) a man who owns neither a c******* nor a l*****, who enjoys the usufruct of neither c**** t********* nor h***-s**** i******* a*****...

DR: ...and yet who does, for all that, both own a D** p***** and enjoy the usufruct of l**-s**** i******* a*****. Look, the reason I resent the imputation of ludditehood with a well-nigh Dukakisian degree of vehemence, is that I honestly can't be arsed to shiv a git about what is mistermed "technological progress" one way or the other. TBT, the luddite is every bit as much a parvenu, downmarket, low-rent, bottom-feeding sort of invertebrate as his alleged arch-enemy, the so-called technophile (who is, in fact, at best, a sort of gourmandizer of expensive techno-flavored lolipops). He's worthless because he assumes that any of this shit--I mean, the shit that's been flung at all of us from infancy onwards under the auspices of the dernier cri techologique--somehow actually matters; that in, say, writing a letter by hand and sending it by so-called s**** m**** you're actually fighting the good fight against the forces of so-called dehumanization. I mean because, in the first place, hardly anybody bothered to write to anybody else in the old days, when they had no other choice if they wanted to keep in touch with people far away. They didn't bother because they weren't interested in what their friends or relatives five states or two continents away were up to, because they were too preoccupied with the immediate soap-operatic goings-on of their own environs to cope with the secondhand soap-operatic goings-on in Poughkeepsie or Alice Springs; nor, conversely, did they have either the stamina or the sense of a sympathetic audience on the other end that would have impelled them to rehash these events in cogent prose for the benefit of their Poughkeepsiean or Alice Springian correspondent, even at the ludicrously cheap rate of one or two or (at most) five cents per page.

dr: And in the second place?

DR: And in the second place, no mere augmentation in the speed of the transmission of information will ever, on its own, be capable of counteracting the universal degeneration of the human organism, which--despite all demographic hooplah to the contrary--continues apace with all the remorseless irreversibility it exhibited in the days of our most benighted ancestors. To bring it all back home: I turned 36 this year. I would gladly swap the privilege of instantaneous electronic correspondence with my friends in Europe at 36 for the privilege of being 18 in a world bereft of electrically-powered instruments of any sort. Conversely, for all of my irritation at the c*******-powered chitchat that disturbs my commute on the Number 3 bus (and my 10-year-old fond memories of a Number 3 commute mercifully devoid of such chitchat), I would gladly swap my present situation for that 2026's 18-year-old Number 3 commuter, mercilessly subjected every ten minutes to 30-second bursts of telepathically-instilled cephalomercials for the latest version of the Big Mac or the Prius.

*

DR [on the first movement of Schubert’s Great C Major symphony]: It seems to portray the convergence of several mutually remote and allied armies, from diverse points of the compass, upon a destined battleground. The fact that the battle itself is never fought, nor the enemy ever depicted—that, indeed, the climactic moments are vouchsafed to a couple of spirited dry charges of the cavalry en route along the high road--accounts for the movement's prevailing participation in the aesthetic domain of the cute (and, indeed, ultimately for the participation of the work as a whole in this domain, in defiance of its nickname).

*

DR: Irritating, don't you find it, that we grew up with Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse, like our parents and grandparents before us, and like our children and grandchildren after us--


dr: --So you do plan to sire children after all?--


DR: --all, right, like somebody's children and grandchildren; whereas the ancients, you see, always had their own generationally-tailored childhood fictions and fictional characters that they could grow out of or jettison or what have you. Take Rollo, for example.


dr: How can I take him as such? I've never heard of him.


DR: You see, that's just my point. I'd never heard of him until I started listening to Charles Ives, or, rather, I guess, reading the liner notes to recordings of Charles Ives's compositions. He--Rollo--was apparently some kind of late-Victorian Pollyanna or Goody Two-Shoes.

*

DR: Olesha talks about the “splendid fate” he enjoyed in having been born at the very beginning of the twentieth century, such that (he said) his youth coincided--or was coinciding--with the youth of the century. I think there’s some sort of correspondingly singular fate—I don’t know how splendid it is, but it’s certainly singular—in having been born towards the close of a century, such that the end of one’s youth coincides--or did coincide--with the end of that century. Don’t you think so?


dr: Well, I guess I would think so if the end of youth were such a fixed and determinable moment as the beginning of life.


DR: Ah, but you see, it is.


dr: Sez who? Isn’t it always changing? Isn’t 40 the new 20? And by 2010 won’t 50 be the new 15? [DR thrashes him soundly.] OK, master, I went too far. If you’ll allow me to reiterate: Sez who?


DR: Sez no less an august and Augustan authority than Dr. Johnson.


dr:


DR: Johnson defined youth as lasting from the age of 14 to the age of 28


dr: [Something about the tendentiousness of certain of Johnson's definitions: e.g.,"Whig: a faction".]


DR: [Something about this's (sic) not being one of those definitions.] Anyway, the point is—well, this isn’t really the point, because I really do think he was on to something with this 14-to-28 span of his (or whoever else’s –anything in multiples of seven has the ring of the secular and sacred super-ancientness [Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man])—that I was aware of the definition during my passage through the better part of the interval alluded to in it, such that from about the age of 18 or so I was recurrently counting down, as it were, to the moment of my youth’s expiration. at any rate I guess I must have encountered this definition at the age of 19 at the latest, because I remember being 19 and thinking to myself—in the aisles of Kash ‘n’ Karry Store No. 878, during one of my bagboy shifts (and, further, I suppose, during a price check run [for what other excuse would a bagger have to be in the aisles?])—with no small amount of smugness, “Jeepers! I’m only 19. I’ve still got nine-fourtheenths of my youth to look forward to.”

dr: So what’s this all adding up to, apart from a spirited spell of numerologically-ill inspired navel-gazing?


DR: What it’s all adding up to is the inference that to have been born in April of 1972—or, rather, let’s say, between October of 1971 and September of 1972—was a kind of unparalleled windfall or godsend (and at the same a kind of shot in the foot and curse)—at least to a simultaneously historically and philosophically-minded soul such as I.


dr: Such as I, such as I, such as I, such as I…zzz... How about the rest of us?


DR: I’ll get around to you lot eventually. Or, perchance, never. I mean, seriously, I really do wonder whether anyone who wasn’t born in late ’71 or early ’72 will ever know exactly where I’m coming from.


dr: OK, well, then, let’s pretend I’m exactly…say…halfway between your parents’ age.


DR: You mean that you were born in November of 1948?


dr: Right. In other words, under the so-called shadow of the so-called Cold War, just like you, 23-and-a-half years later. What’s the difference?


DR: The difference, I think consists in this: that even as children you must have been dimly aware of a time (namely, that of the Second World War), when Russia had not been our enemy; whereas during my childhood, the enmity of Russia was a fact of quasi-geological antiquity. For us of the natal class of ’72 there were only two conceivable alternatives: either this horrible standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union would go on forever, or the world would be annihilated.


dr: And just as starkly, presumably, must these alternatives have presented themselves to the natal classes of ’67 and ’77.


DR: Yes, with the difference that when these alternatives were finally annulled, made mincemeat of, or what have you, in late ’89, the natal class of ’67 were already out on their own in the so-called real world; and the natal class of ’77 were not yet of shaving or menstruating age. Whereas for us, who were graduating from high school in that year—well, I don’t know, I guess to appreciate this—to be capable of tearing up over it, even vicariously—you have to be an American—


dr: --As I in fact am, lest you forget.

DR: Why, of course you are, old fruit, and so you know that all Americans—or, at least all Americans born, let’s say, since the Great Depression—believe that the senior year of high school marks—or ought to mark—the apogee of one’s youth; hence, in a certain respect, of one’s life. Polemical exceptions, from Corman to Apatow, have only reinforced this fundamental article of our creed, and I’ve never been a fan of any of these exceptions; or, more precisely, I’ve always doubted the sincerity—nay the possibility--of their apostasy. But that’s neither here nor there: I don’t want to go off on my anti-Freaks and Geeks tear right now. Nor, though, do I want to be understood as tying in my remarks on the Spirit of ’89 into any sort of theodicy of senior-your worship, as attributing metaphysical pre-eminence to the sorts of freedoms one tends to taste for the first time then; nor, sir: you won’t catch me quipping the likes of “What could be more fundamentally antitotalitarian than having 400 horse-powers [sic?] and two tons [sic?] of Scranton-smelted steel and Clermont Ferrand-vulcanized rubber at your beck and call?”; or “Surely, those 22,000 [sic?] East Berliners [the people, not the jelly doughnuts] and I must have felt pretty much the same mixture of dread and wonder on that cold/rainy/humid/muggy late-November night, they as they made their first tentative pickaxe-taps at the Wall separating them from everlasting freedom, I as I gingerly-ly fumbled with my girlfriend’s bra clasps en route to second base.” All I’m going to say is that in that year (’89-stroke-senior) there was no escaping a sense of the intertwinedness of one’s inescapable conviction that everything was going to be supernally fine and dandy in one’s own life from then on out, and the equally inescapable conviction that everything on the world scene was going to be supernally fine and dandy from then on out.. To put it crassly but justly, the each of the phenomena was the other one’s spiritual MSG.


dr: Correlatively, I suppose, you’re bound to argue that those who graduated two years later, in the year of the LA riots; or five years later, during the OJ Simpson trial must have had senior years marked—or, rather, blighted—by a comparatively progressive spiritual MSG policy?


DR: To the extent of their attentiveness to the news of the day, yes, I am so bound and do so argue. Certainly, for my part-stroke-on my end, the comparative blandness of these events dovetails very nicely with the workmanlike, unwatershed-marking character of the corresponding years in my lifeworld: second year of college, first year of graduate school, respectively. They were events of a genre in keeping with the completely rarified aesthetic character the world scene had assumed for me since the fall of the Wall, and that my Lebensweg had assumed since high school.


dr: So, by this point you were simply drifting through the world and your own life in a semi-proverbial mellow haze, in an attitude of genial apathy characteristic of that microepochally-defining character known as the…what was it?...the Idler, or Loafer, or Off-slougher…?


DR: …Slacker, I believe. But no, I wouldn’t say that. That’s what’s misleading about the word aesthetic: in rightly suggesting detachment, it wrongly in turn often suggests boredom. What I mean to say is that at that time world events were no longer the perpetual catalyst of dread that they had been pre ’89. Whereas before 1989 (and after ’01), a headline about a highjacking or kidnapping in any land, however far-off, was enough to induce me to leave the breakfast table altogether, by ’92 newspapers really were for me what Proust assumed they were for everyone in his day—a place where you complacently read about the deaths of thousands in an earthquake in some far-off land while sipping your morning coffee. By then, I was pressing ahead in life, I fancy, with as much alacrity and aplomb as your average doughty youngster with reasonably bright prospects always had done. At the same time, I had made no metaphysical provision, as it were, for what was to happen after January 1, 2000.

dr: Don't you mean after “January 1, 2001”?

[...]

DR: Anyway, I don’t understand how anyone of my microgeneration can take any part of the present gallimaufry of political hysteria seriously; or fail to suffer from (or, should I say, “enjoy”) a sense of total disengagement therefrom. Surely, his recollection of that dopey Sting song “The Russians Love Their Children Too” alone ought to put paid to every trace of “What a Wonderful World It Would Be”-ism chez lui.


dr: Why? Because we now know that the Russians don’t love their children?


DR: No, because we no longer care whether the Russians love their children or not. And further, because most of the people who made a pretence of caring about it then, in the eighties, are still around now, and yet you don’t hear of any celebrities (any non-Russian ones, at least) dividing their calendars evenly between LA and Petersburg, as you might have expected them to end up doing, given their apparent love of the Russian people and the chance to express it, a chance that they of course have had for going on two decades now.

*

dr: Have you any other pet peeves?


DR: Yes: book indexes that don't distinguish page references to the text proper from those to the editor's notes. How crushingly disappointing it is, after encountering, say, a reference to W. C. Fields in the index to a Proust biography--I mean, such that you're duped into thinking by default that Proust had met WCF or admired one of his movies or both--to discover that some utterly inconsequential person a soiree attended by Proust later emigrated to Hollywood, where he wrote screenplays "for, among other luminaries, W. C. Fields"--and all for want of a single lowercase n!

*

DR: Hofmannsthal talks of this signal characteristic of Shakespeare’s young noblemen—a combination of extravagant arrogance and an almost punctilious fear of offending the other person. It’s this characteristic, this combination, that always comes to mind as a corrective whenever I’m tempted to efface Youth from my metaphysical account books.


dr: Really? As if only the young were capable of evincing this admittedly irresistible combination—


DR: --I don’t say that only they are capable of evincing it. But it’s much more winsome and redeeming in them, who by de facto rights (I mean, vis-à-vis their so-called inexperience) have no excuse to feel the one, and by stereotype (I mean, as congenital narcissists) have no occasion to feel the other.


Dr: All right-stroke-well then: as if in empirical fact young people of any caste actually ever still did evince this combination.


DR: I think certain rare birds among do, or did still do in my day as a young person. Have you ever seen that movie Metropolitan?


dr: No.


DR: Well, then, do do, at the earliest opportunity. He’s really cinched it—the director, Whit Stillman —has really cinched this combination, particularly in the character of Nick Smith, played by Chris Eigeman. Actually, Eigeman himself probably contributes a goodly share to the cinchage.

*

DR: Balzac called the Chartreuse the book that Machiavelli would have written had he been exiled to the nineteenth century. I am inclined to think of it more simply as the novel that Fielding would have written had he retired to Italy (yes, Italy of the mid eigtheenth century) rather than to Portugal.

*

DR: Even 30 years on, opera and lieder sung in English put me in mind of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood.

*

DR: There's another thing I'll tell you right up front I just can't deal with.

dr: What's that?

DR: The contingency or facticity of naming.

dr: Eh?

DR: Well, consider this: I'm sure you learned in grade school, as I did, that we call a sandwich a sandwich because some English Earl of Sandwich, who was addicted to gambling, took to eating meat between two slices of bread so as not to have to absent himself from the gaming table even for so brief a duration as a supper.

dr: Yes, of course.

DR: So, that was all fine and dandy--I mean so long as this particular Earl of Sandwich was, as, far as one knew, the first and last Earl of Sandwich, I mean, insofar as he constituted some sort of autochthonous fairy-tale-esque agent whose sole purpose was to christen this everyday staple of Anglo-American (and, indeed, pan-European) cuisine. But then, eventually, upon learning, thanks to Pepys's diary, of an earlier--indeed, the first--Earl of Sandwich the grandfather or great-grandfather of the eponym of the English bocadillo, and of his numerous naval exploits both anterior and posterior to the Revolution--why then, one naturally sought out some biographical data on this later Sandwich, and learned what a nonentity he actually was by comparison with his illustrious Caroline ancestor--how he'd basically, in spite of his official ministerial responsibility, betrayed the martial legacy of the family by frittering away all his time at the card-table.

dr: And what of any of that?

DR: And what of all of that? Why, don't you see? To us a sandwich is a sandwich is a sandwich--but there is in fact an illustrious pre-sandwichian history of the Sandwiches; and, indeed, Edward Montague, the first Earl of Sandwich, in choosing Sandwich as the site of his earldom, was apparently fool enough to imagine that posterity would remember the Sandwiches principally if not exclusively, on account of his personal stalwart indispensability to both sides in the Civil War and the subsequent Restoration.

dr: I'm afraid I still fail to see what separates any of this from one's discovery--yes, in grammar school (if junior high school counts)--that both a Beef and a boot were named after a certain Wellington--

DR: --It differs inasmuch as that Duke of Wellington is the Duke of Wellington, inasmuch as there was no earlier scion of Wellington who bore a heavier portion of the historical yoke than did the winner of the day at Waterloo--

dr: --that is, as far as you know.

DR: Indeed, as far as I know. Yes, indeed, for all I know, a Wellington might have wielded the dagger or sword that delivered King Harold from this life on that unforgettable ** of ****, 1066. And that's just the problem, of course: apart from certain unbudgeables, Napoleon, for instance--

dr: --or Caesar, perchance?

DR: That name, of course, presents a whole nother can of anchoves, which I'd rather not open just now.

dr: Then don't.

DR: Much obliged. Anyway, as I was saying: Apart from certain unbudgeables, like Napoleon, you can never be sure that Mr. or Milord So-and-So whom you've associated with a certain dish or (in the case of Marlboro[ugh]) cigarette is the eponym of the thing in question.

DR. Which is indeed a disquieting revelation. It’s fitting that a great man like Napoleon or Wellington should go about the world haphazardly, unthinkingly shedding his eponymous grace—yes, like a jet of jizzm—on various entrees, desserts, cocktails, hairstyles, cravat-knots, and so on. Likewise, pseudo-paradoxically, that some utter nobody—


dr: --a Hobson or Allen—


DR: --indeed, that these sorts of nonentities should have things named after them. It’s a metaphysical sop to the common man; or, I don’t know, that’s too snooty and besides doesn’t quite clinch the sense of it. You could say, I guess, at the cost of trading snootiness for pretentiousness, that it was an alternative expression of the same bit of the Weltgeist that gave all of those Dickens characters like Barkus and Mr. Dick and Sam Weller and –simple people who were genuinely notable and distinguishable for saying or doing one thing over and over again. But that such time-servers, such epigones, as the third Earl of Sandwich should usurp such a privilege from their more illustrious homonyms; why, that really does defy one’s sense of the metaphysical justness of the world.


dr: You seem pretty worked up about this.


DR: Indeed I am. I am, indeed, positively indignant on behalf of the First Earl. And all the more so because in my worldview he really has begun to displace the lower-case sandwich as the de facto sandwich.


dr: You mean to say that when someone says the word—excuse me, the name—“sandwich” you really do see some pudgy, long-haired bloke in mid seventeenth-century dress and not, say, a BLT or cheeseburger?


DR: Even so. Think of it as the reverse of the metaphysical déclassement of the name famously described by Proust—of the Verdurinization of the Guermantes name, for instance.


dr: I can think of it as any number of things, but I can’t believe it actually takes place.


DR: Well, if you won’t take my word for it, talk to Phil Gyford or language hat or vincente/cumgranosalis or Rex Gordon or Jeannine Kerwin or or Terry Foreman or Robert Gertz. I've a hunch at least one of them will agree with me.

Not Ready for "Eckermann"

From an Ever Writer to a Never Reader
“The annoying thing about the disenchantment of the world,” as Bob Hope would have put it, “is that it starts so early and lasts so long.” I got my first installment of it at the age of five or so, when I learned from my kindergarten teacher that “oakmeal” had nothing to do with oak trees and everything to do with some creepy alien plant called an “oat”; and my most recent one maybe a year ago, when I learned that the Germans had their own prosaically German-sounding word for “swastika,” “Hakenkreuz.” I mean, seriously, f****: how did they manage to persuade themselves that they were descended from Indian nobility using a word like that?

*

The adolescent regards the memories of his childhood as a fifth-century Athenian regarded the Homeric epics, accepting them as a true account of actual events in default of a proper fact-checkable record, paying lip service to the naïve heroism routinely exhibited by his noble ancestor; and yet at bottom believing that the here and now is where it’s at, and that the there and then has absolutely no physical or metaphysical bearing upon it. The middle-aged man, in contrast, is more like a Hellenistic Greek (whose city of origin is perforce irrelevant, natch?). He has the plays, the poems, the histories, the philosophical dialogues, of his Athenian forbears (i.e., his adolescent self) ready to hand. He knows that the events alluded to therein actually happened to men who actually existed, and were recorded by men who knew them and likewise existed. He knows that they cannot be bettered by him, on account not so much of any diminution of ability on his part, as of their own interposition between his so-called creative consciousness and the age of myth whose immediate contiguity was the principal impetus to their inception. One might say that he has an Oedipal relation to his adolescent self; or, perhaps more aptly, that he has Oedipus complex envy of him.

The Stuckenschmidtian Ethics

For Jeff Stuckenschmidt:
Il miglior Fabio

I.
Definition of umbrella: "a light portable device consisting of a circular canopy of cloth mounted by means of a collapsible metal frame on a central stick; carried for protection against lectures on the hazards of not carrying an umbrella."


II.
Annual tally of 'thank-yous' addressed to Suzy Stuckenschmidt, 10,548; annual tally of 'fuck-yous' addressed to Suzy Stuckenschmidt, 10,547. Net result: Love for Suzy Stuckenschmidt. Annual tally of 'thank-yous' addressed to Suzy Stuckenschmidt, 10,547; annual tally of 'fuck-yous' addressed to Suzy Stuckenschmidt, 10,548. Net result: Hatred for Suzy Stuckenschmidt.


III.
There is no such thing as a morally and socially admissible reply to an unfunny joke cracked by an evil person.


IV.
Offscreen, all acting is method acting, and all actors are method actors.


V.
Vulgar relativism is the first refuge of a dickhead.


VI.
The dirtiest word in the English language: because.


VII.
Unfalsifiable retort to a philistine: If you spent an hour inside my head while I was asleep, you would come to envy me my dreams.


VIII.
To say 'we' and mean 'they' or 'you all' is one of the most exoteric compliments.


IX.
Contempt for chronological precision numbers among the coarsest vices of the intellectual petit bourgeois (of the sort of person who is bound to assert, for example, that Proust's apparently blithe disregard of dates issued merely from a conveniently flaky absent-mindedness [I say conveniently because such an interpretation endorses an unreflective wallowing in the minutiae of one's own personal history under the aegis of the assumption that history writ large/as such, etc. is simply irrelevant], whereas one suspects this disregard issued merely from a conscientious and mortality-minded pragmatism; for, as any reader of Proust who has charted the progress of his affective-cum-metaphysical disposition toward a given calendrically-enumerated year will have discovered, dates, for all of their graphically superficial affiliation with the aridly atemporal realm of arithmetic, behave much in the same manner as Proustian names: he will have discovered, say, that 1987 in 2007 is not at all the same sort of creature that it was in 1997). This is not to say, prevailingly, that a clearer view of the contemporaneuosness of certain people and events clues us in to hidden affinities among such people and events across geographical distance; it is to say, rather (and prevailingly) that such a view guards us against the perfidious license of the principle of historical induction, against the assumption that the appearance on the world scene of such-and-such a person or such-and-such an event marked a signal epoch-making moment, against which all conspicuously contrasting people and events are to be regarded (depending on the line of argument) either as epigones of ye bad olde days or as harbingers of the golden age yet to come. How bracing it is to realize, for example, that W. C. Fields, that iconic misanthrope of the post-silent-age of Hollywood, whose living physiognomy stands as an exemplar to stand-up comics of our own day, was an exact contemporary of Robert Musil, but nine years' Proust's junior, and three years' Kafka's senior!


X.
True grit is nurture to advantage pressed,
What oft was fought but ne'er so well redressed.


XI.
"Booty is tooth, and tooth booty,"--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.


XII.
Not even rocket science is rocket science; correlatively, not even brain surgery is brain surgery--but, paradoxically enough, rocket science is brain surgery and brain surgery rocket science.


XIV.
There is no "e" in "Tim."


XV.
If politics is show business for ugly people, it is likewise cinema, theater, cabaret, or vaudeville for people with bad taste.

Antigraph

Last ev'ning, and last ev'ning, and last ev'ning,
Struts out that noble sprint to night from night,
From the first hyphen-mark of forgotten space;
But nary an afternight shall earplug seers
An end from spotless life. In, in long muffler!
Death's e'en the crawling halo, the rich worker
That creeps and lolls her aeon in a pit,
But there is seen anew: it is the show
Shown to the genius, full of sight or smugness
Incarnating plenty.

Positive source: Macbeth V. v. 24-35

A Translation of "Die Fermate" by E. T. A. Hoffmann

(For a PDF version of this translation, go to The Worldview Annex).

The Fermata

Johnann Erdmann Hummel’s serene and sprightly painting Social Life at an Italian Locanda has acquired something of a reputation thanks to the Berlin Art Exhibition of the autumn of 1814, where it was deemed a positive delight to the eyes and the hearts of many a viewer.  A bower, thickly overgrown with foliage—a table brimful of wine and fruit—at the latter, two Italian ladies sitting face to face—the one is singing; the other, playing the guitar--between and behind the pair of them, standing, an abbot who has assumed the duties of a conductor. With battuta held high, he stands poised for the moment when Signora, now lingering over her cadenza with eyes cast heavenwards, rounds out the latter in a long trill; then, he will strike the downbeat, in concert with the guitarist's strumming of the dominant triad. The abbot is the very image of awestricken-ness, of blissful enjoyment—and terribly overwrought to boot.  He would not, for all the world, miss this downbeat by so much as a fraction of a second. He hardly dares to breathe. He would tie fast the wings and mandibles of every bee and gnat in the bower to silence their buzzing.  And to make matters worse for him, their officious host has just come barging in, at this most precious, this most decisive, of moments, to deliver their order of wine.  Behind the bower, a view of an arcade intermittently illuminated by shafts of sunlight—there we see a man on horseback; who, having just now drawn to a halt, is being handed up a dram of the locanda’s vintage.

Before this painting stood two friends, Eduard and Theodor.

“The longer I gaze at this admittedly rather grandmotherly—and yet, for all that, supremely virtuosic—singer, in her splendid costume,” said Eduard, “the longer I savor the solemn, authentically Roman profile and lovely features of the guitarist; the longer I revel in the sight of this most excellent of abbots, the more freely and strongly imbued with actual, kinetic life the painting as a whole seems to me.  To be sure, at a more fundamental level, life is merely caricatured in it, but with what serenity and sweetness! How very much I should like to climb into that bower and uncork one of those exquisite demijohns that are smiling down at me from yonder table.  Indeed, I believe I can fairly smell the noble wine’s sapid bouquet.  But alas: this intoxicating vapor shall not be suffered to mingle with the sober, commonsensical draft that chills us here below.  And so, in honor of this wonderful painting—of art, of gay old Italy, where the love of life burns on undiminished—let us repair thither and crack open a bottle of genuine Italian wine.”

Throughout Eduard's delivery of this disjointed monologue, Theodor had been standing in perfect silence, immersed in his own thoughts. Then, as though waking from a dream, he rejoined, “Yes, let's do that!”; but no sooner had he managed to elude the painting, and—having reflexively trailed his companion's footsteps—found himself at the threshold of the room, than he cast a yearning glance or two back at the singers and the abbot.  Eduard’s proposal was realized effortlessly. They crossed the street and, by and by, found themselves face-to-face with a wicker-sheathed demijohn—a serviceable enough simulacrum of the ones in the wine-bower—in the little blue dining room of the Sala Tarone. “It seems to me,” said Eduard after a few glasses had been drained, to no effect on the score of Theodor's self-immersion, “It seems to me that you were not especially taken with this painting; and certainly by no means as heartily as I was.” ‘Rest assured,” replied Theodor, “I more than fully appreciate the gaiety, the charm—the vitality—of the painting in the highest degree; but the astonishing fact is that it accurately—and, indeed, with the fidelity of a master portraitist in the case of the dramatis personae—depicts a scene from my own life. You will, I trust, grant me that even the sunniest remembrances have an uncanny power to discompose the mind when they catch it unawares, when they suddenly and unaccountably spring forth as if brought to life by the touch of a magic wand.  In just such a fashion has my mind just been discomposed.” “From your own life?” echoed Eduard in astonishment, “You would have me believe that this painting depicts a scene from your own life? I likewise took the singers and the abbot for faithful portraits, but as for the thought that you had encountered them in the flesh? Pray do make some sense out of all this for me: we are, after all, alone; no one comes here at this time of day.” “I would be all too happy to oblige you in that regard; but, unfortunately, to do so would necessarily involve my going back quite a long way indeed—all the way back to the period of my youth.” “Do tell on, and freely,” replied Eduard; “as of now, I know very little of your early history. However long it takes, the worst that will come of it is that we crack open another bottle, which we have resolved to do anyway; what harm can it do anyone, either Mr. Tarone or ourselves?”

“Well: that I ultimately cast all other endeavors aside,” began Theodor, “and gave myself over body and soul to the noble calling of music can come as no great surprise to anyone, for even as a boy I could scarcely trouble myself about anything else, and would plunk away night and day on the keyboard of my uncle’s¹ rickety, jangly old grand piano.” [4] Our little town⁵ was less than a backwater musically speaking; and there was no one there who could give me lessons, apart from a certain capricious old organist who was basically nothing but a bloodless arithmetician,² and who habitually tortured me with the most dismally cacophonous toccatas and fugues. Undeterred by these performances, I conscientiously pressed on with my studies. Oftentimes the old man scolded me with great vehemence; but he never dared to correct my technique in any other way but by playing through the same virtuoso passages over and over again in his idiosyncratic but masterly style, and I soon made my peace both with him and with my chosen art.  What strange states could I be thrown into in those days!--certain passages, particularly in the works of old Sebastian Bach, were like ghost stories to me; and on hearing them I would thrill with such shudders as one willingly surrenders oneself to in one's fantasy-ridden youth. A veritable Eden opened itself to me when, as was wont to happen in the wintertime, the leader of our municipal band of musicians and his colleagues, supported by a couple of feeble sub-amateurs, gave a concert, and I played the tympani in the orchestra, which part I was vouchsafed in virtue of my impeccable sense of rhythm. I realized only much later how insanely laughable these concerts often were. Usually my teacher would play two piano concertos by Wolf or Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, a member of the band would muddle through a bit of Stamitz, and the excise-collector would huff and puff away on the flute with such lung-bursting violence that he blew out both the candles on the conductor’s podium, and they always subsequently had to be relighted. Of vocal music there was nary a trace, a state of affairs much lamented by my uncle, who was an ardent admirer and champion of the musical arts. He still recollected with great fondness the old days, when the four choir-masters of our four churches joined forces in a rendition of Lottchen at Court⁴ at the concert hall. In particular, he loved to extol the latitudinarian spirit in which the singers had laid aside their differences for the sake of art, all the more so as the Catholics and Lutherans alike were alienated from the Calvinist community on account of the linguistic schism between German and French; the French choir-master permitted himself no liberties with Lottchen and sang the role--so my uncle averred--in the most charming falsetto that ever had been wrung out of a human voice-box. At that time there subsisted amongst us (i.e., in our town) a fifty-five-year-old spinster surnamed Meibel, who received a niggardly pension allotted to her in remembrance of her services as a much-fêted vocalist at court; and my uncle sagely surmised that Mlle. Meibel could be persuaded, for a certain fee, to be fêted once again, however modestly, at an official recital. She put on airs and allowed herself to be implored on bended knee for a good long while; but in the end, she gave in, and emerged from the wings of our concert hall to greet her devoted public. She was quite an original, to say the least, this Mlle. Meibel. To this day, the image of her haggard, dwarfish person remains vividly etched in my memory. In an attitude of great solemnity and seriousness—vocal part in hand, and clad in a dress woven out of the most garish combination of hues—she took her place at center stage and saluted the audience with a curt bow. She wore a highly curious head-dress surmounted by a nosegay of ceramic Italian flowers; and as she sang, this coiffure shuddered and pivoted itself about her head in a quite peculiar fashion. When she had finished, and the assembly had rendered unto her its more than modest tribute of applause, she handed her part, with a lordly glance, to my teacher; whose duty it was to fetch forth and present to her her porcelain pug-dog-shaped snuff-box, from which vessel she thereupon extracted a pinch of tobacco with great contentment. Her intonation was hideously shrill; she indulged herself in all sorts of ludicrous ornaments and coloraturas; and you can well imagine how these vocal defects, in combination with her preposterous appearance, must have struck me at the time. My uncle gushed forth a stream of plaudits; I could hardly fathom his behavior, and thus forsook his company in favor of that of my organist, who, in taking a pretty dim view of vocal music in general, and being his constitutionally splenetic self, was more than capable of essaying an amusing parody of the silly old girl's performance.

“The more warmly I seconded my teacher's diatribes against vocal music, the more highly he rated my genius for music tout court. With enormous alacrity he threw himself into the task of instructing me in counterpoint, such that soon enough I was competently composing academic fugues and toccatas.  On one of my birthdays (the nineteenth one), I happened to be performing one of these 'compositions' in the presence of my uncle, when the waiter of our finest inn appeared, announcing the visitation of two foreign ladies newly arrived in town. Before my uncle had had time to divest himself of his floral-patterned dressing-gown, let alone don proper day-clothes, the visitors were already entering the room. You are, of course, aware of the electrical force exerted upon the isolated inmates of a small town by the appearance of any stranger in their midst—well, these two ladies, in traipsing so unexpectedly into my life, were tailor-made to exert just such a force on me, as if by the touch of a magic wand. Picture to yourself two tall, slender Italian women, bedizened in the most splendid hues of the latest fashion, marching right up to, of all people, my uncle, and holding forth to him in the most forceful, albeit mellifluous, tones—but what is this curious language they are speaking?—it only intermittently sounds at all like German!—my uncle cannot understand a word of it—nonplussed, taking a step or two backward—utterly stupefied, he points to the sofa.  They seat themselves—the two of them converse between themselves—and their conversation sounds just like music.

At length, they manage to make it more or less clear to my uncle that they are touring singers, that they want to give a concert in our town, and that they have had recourse to him in his capacity as a competent organizer of such musical events.

Now, in eavesdropping on this conference, I had happened to glean the singers' Christian names, and it was accordingly plain to me that, to the extent that I had heretofore been bemused by their apparition as a pair of virtual twins, I could in like measure now properly distinguish them as individuals. Lauretta—to all appearances the senior of the two—addressed my discomfited uncle point-blank, her radiant eyes flashing in all directions, with great ebullience and much animated gesticulation. Though far from tall, she was decidedly voluptuous; and I was completely transfixed by her many and considerable charms, all of them as-yet terra incognita to me. Teresina, taller, thinner, and of a longish and serious countenance, contented herself with supplying the occasional, albeit more intelligible, interjection. From time to time they would, oddly enough, burst into laughter, as if much diverted by the vainly repeated efforts of my worthy uncle—encased in his silk dressing-gown like a snail in its shell--to conceal the yellow ribbon securing his nightshirt, which had a perfidious tendency to wiggle itself out lengthwise from under his lapels at every attempt. Finally, they rose from the couch; my uncle promised to see to it that a concert would be scheduled for the next day but two, and was most civilly invited, along with yours truly—whom he had presented to them under the style of a ‘young virtuoso’—to take ciocolata with the two sisters at lunchtime. We ascended the staircase with great gravity and ceremony, as though setting out on some sort of adventure that neither of us was quite cut out for. After my uncle, suitably girded for such an enterprise, had delivered himself of a great deal of high-flown oratory on the subject of art, to the comprehension of no one present (either himself or the rest of us); after I had twice scalded my tongue on the boiling-hot chocolate—and yet, for all that, grinned and borne my unspeakable anguish with a stoic equanimity worthy of Scaevola⁹—Lauretta announced that she would sing something for us. Teresina took up her guitar, tuned it, and strummed a few open chords. Never before had I heard such an instrument, whose elusively unresonant timbre reverberated to the core of my very being.  Lauretta entered quite softly with a single note, which she sustained and built up to a fortissimo, before abruptly and audaciously segueing into an intricate figure spanning a full octave and a half. Although I was well acquainted with the opening words of the song—Sento l’amica speme—they now deprived me of the very capacity to breathe, as I had never dreamed they were capable of doing. But this was as nothing to the moment when Lauretta, with unflagging intrepidity, cast off every last vestige of dependence on the score; and when, enfolded as I was in wave upon wave of circumambient sound, my inner music, which had for so long lain dormant and as good as dead, caught fire and burst forth in mighty jets of flame. Ah! For the first time in my life I had heard real music. Next the two sisters joined vocal forces in a rendition of those serious, profoundly understated duets by the Abbot Steffani. Terisina’s rich, pure, heavenly alto voice pervaded my soul; I could no longer contain my inner tumult, and the tears fell liberally from my eyes. My uncle cleared his throat and cast a disapproving glance or two in the direction of my person, but to no avail; for I was in no mere metaphorical sense in another place. This reaction of mine seemed to please the singers, who began inquiring into the precise nature of my musical training; for my part; I blushed at the thought of owning my ‘musical’ busywork under such a head, and with a forwardness imparted by the inspiration of the moment, affirmed outright that ‘today, for the first time in my life, I have heard real music!’. ‘Il bon fanciullo,’ murmured Lauretta in a most fetchingly lovely tone. No sooner had I got home, than, overtaken by a kind of mad delirium, I gathered up my collected ‘works’—all those wretched toccatas and fugues, along with a set of forty-five canonic variations composed by the organist and presented by him to me as a gift in fair copy—and pitched the lot into the fireplace, erupting into great peals of spiteful laughter as the reams of invertible counterpoint crackled and smoked their way into oblivion. I then seated myself at the keyboard and attempted, first, to replicate the sonority of the guitar; next, to plunk out the tunes that had been sung by the two sisters; and, finally, to accompany these purely instrumental efforts at mimesis through the medium of my own voice. Eventually, around midnight, my uncle appeared, exclaimed, ‘It’s high time you left off all this caterwauling and hit the hay!’, snuffed out both my candles, and returned to his bedchamber. I had no choice but to heed his plaint. In sleep—so it seems to me—I was at last vouchsafed the key to the song; for therein I sang Sento l’amica speme with great fluency and feeling.  By the next morning, my uncle had arranged for everybody in town who could play a note on a string or a wind instrument to participate in the rehearsal for the concert. Out of sheer civic pride, he hoped to demonstrate the superiority of our local musical culture. Alas! From the very beginning things took a turn directly contrary to the realization of this hope. Lauretta, from a purely dramatic point of view, put on quite an impressive show; but unhappily she opted to deliver the whole of her performance in a meandering recitative that none of her would-be accompanists knew quite what to make of or do with. Lauretta screamed, wailed, and, indeed, wept in rabid consternation. The organist was then seated at the piano; and upon him she saw fit to let flow a stream of the most vituperative reproaches. Unmoved, he stood up and silently made straight for the exit.  As for the bandleader, Lauretta having flung an Asino maledetto! at his head, he had by now insolently flung his hat on to that same head and slung his violin under his right arm. He likewise headed straight for the back door; his colleagues, with bows fixed athwart fingerboards and mouthpieces upturned, followed his lead.  Now the only local performers left were the supernumeraries, the sub-amateurs, who began casting tearful glances in every which direction; and the excise collector lugubriously exclaimed, ‘Oh God! This has made a changed man of me!’ Every ounce of my bashfulness had by then evaporated; I flung myself into the path of the bandleader, and out of sheer panic begged, besought, and implored him to stay on the security of my pledge to provide him with six fresh minuets with double trios for the public ball. I managed to appease him. He turned round and slowly resumed his place at the podium; his colleagues likewise marched back in; and, in due course, all the requisite instrumental forces were once again assembled and ready to play, apart from the self-evidently still-absent figure of the organist. By then this man was wending his leisurely way across the market square, his progress unhindered by the gravitational pull of so much as a single hand-clap or huzzah. Teresina, in her capacity as a mere spectator, had greeted the whole imbroglio with grimly sardonic laughter; Lauretta, for her part, was now every bit as cheerful as she had so recently been irate. She fulsomely praised me on account of the ‘considerable pains’ I was taking; she asked me if I could play the piano, and before I quite knew what was happening, I found myself seated in the organist’s spot, with the score in front of me.  I had never before accompanied a singer, let alone conducted an orchestra. Teresina sat down next to me on the piano-bench and marked time for me; I received one spirited ‘Bravo!’ after another from Lauretta, and the orchestra fell into line and began playing; everything was going better and better by the minute.  At the second rehearsal everything went off without a hitch, and in the concert itself the transfixing power of the sisters’ voices simply beggared description. It then transpired that the Prince's forthcoming return to the capital was to be attended with much pomp and circumstance; that the sisters had been summoned thither to sing in recital and on stage; and that, pending the necessity of their presence at court, they had elected to tarry a bit longer in our little town: hence they came to grace us with a few further concerts. The adulation of the audience at these events verged on sheer mania. Old Lady Meibel alone dissented in circumspectly taking a pinch of snuff from her porcelain box and opining that such impertinent shrieks as these were hardly deserving of the appellation of vocal music, that a proper vocalist must always sing nice and doose.⁵  Thenceforth my organist, for his part, would have nothing to do with me; and I, for mine, hardly missed his company. I was the happiest man on earth! All day long, I sat next to the sisters, playing accompaniment and copying out parts from scores for their subsequent use at the capital. Lauretta was my ideal; all her petty sulks, all her horrible temper-tantrums—to say nothing of the round of virtuosic keyboard drudgery she put me through—I bore the lot with exemplary forbearance!  After all, she and she alone had disclosed to me what real music consisted in!  I began to study Italian and to try my hand at composing canzonets. And whenever Lauretta sang—and, moreover, praised—one of these compositions; why, I was in seventh heaven! It often seemed to me as though I had neither conceived nor written the composition in question myself; as though the central idea of the piece could shine forth only through Lauretta’s realization of it in song. As for Teresina—well, I never could quite accustom myself to her presence, as she sang only occasionally and seemed to regard my industry as being of but little account; and from time to time I even found myself wondering whether she were not laughing at me behind my back. At length, the day of their departure drew nigh. It was then that I first became conscious of the nature and force of my attachment to Lauretta, and of the impossibility of parting from her. Oftentimes, when inclined to act the part of a smorfiosa⁶ to the hilt, she would caress me; which action, notwithstanding the manifestly innocent attitude of the caresser, never failed to set my blood boiling, and I was restrained from embracing her in an access of amorous fury only by the singular coldness with which she consistently contrived to rebuff my advances.

I had a passably decent tenor voice, which, having heretofore allowed to lie fallow, I now cultivated with the greatest assiduity; such that I found many an occasion for collaborating with Lauretta in the rendition of a handful of those tender Italian duettini that number in the thousands. On the very eve of her departure, we happened to be singing one of these duets, which just happened to be entitled Senza di te ben mio, vivere non poss'io. What hardened soul could bear such a coincidence? In despair, I threw myself at her feet. Bidding me to rise, she exclaimed, 'Ah, my friend! Is our parting really so inevitable?' I pricked up my ears in delighted astonishment. She went on to propose that I should accompany Teresina and her to the capital; inasmuch as I must sooner or later travel abroad in any case if I wished to pursue a career in music. Picture to yourself a man plunging headlong into the fathomless pit of despair, a man who has given up for good on life itself; but who, even as he is bracing himself for the blow that needs must spell his utter annihilation, simultaneously finds himself recumbent upon a magnificent bed of roses while a hundred little glimmers of light of a hundred different colors circle round him, each of them whispering into his ear, ‘Dear heart, you have yet to live!’ Such a man was I at that instant. ‘To the capital, and forthwith!’ my soul peremptorily commanded. I shall not try your patience by relating the particulars of the case I made to my uncle for the necessity of my undertaking this expedition of no great distance. Eventually, he succumbed to the force of my argument; nay, he even vowed to accompany me on the trip. What an upset to all of my calculations this was! Naturally, it was out of the question for me to breathe a word to him of my ultimate purpose in traveling with the two lady vocalists. I was delivered from this plight only at the last minute, when my uncle came down with a serviceably nasty head cold. I left town in the post-carriage, but traveled only as far as the first stage, where I tarried in expectation of the arrival of my goddess. My generously-larded wallet stood me in good stead to handle anything that might be in the offing. Being in a romantic, high-chivalric frame of mind, I wished to escort the ladies on horseback like some knight errant of yore. To this end, I procured a none-too-handsome but (so the dealer assured me!) perfectly docile old nag; and, sitting astride the beast, set out at the appointed time for my rendezvous with the sisters. By and by, the little two-seated carriage pulled up, its back seat occupied by the sisters themselves, its boot by their podgy chambermaid Gianna, a sun-burnished Neapolitan. In addition to its human cargo, the carriage was crammed full of an assortment of cases, baskets, and boxes: the inalienable paraphernalia of the itinerants. My salutation of this long-anticipated pair was, incidentally, attended by much yelping in my direction on the part of two minuscule pug-dogs seated in Gianna's lap. Everything went smoothly and according to plan until we reached the last stage, at which point my horse was untowardly smitten by a hankering for his native land. Experience, inasmuch as it had taught me that outright bullying was to little purpose in such situations as this, now counseled me to seek to win my point by the gentlest of all possible means, but the stubborn old nag was obdurate to my genial coaxing. I was all for pressing onwards, he for turning back; and the upshot of all of my pains was that we went round in circles. Teresina leaned out of the cart and laughed immoderately; while Lauretta, with both hands clasped over her eyes, screamed and wailed as though I were in mortal peril. Emboldened by sheer desperation, I dug my spurs into the very ribs of the beast; and at virtually the same instant, I found myself unceremoniously tossed on to the roadside. The horse stood his ground, and, with neck outstretched, glared down at me in an attitude of unmitigated scorn. I was patently incapable of getting up on my own, and the driver hastened to assist me, while Lauretta, herself newly sprung from the cart, resumed her screaming and wailing and Teresina kept right on laughing. As I had sprained my foot, there was no question of my continuing the journey on horseback. What choice did I have? The horse was hitched to the carriage, into whose confines I was now obliged to withdraw. Picture to yourself two fairly sizable women, a downright fat serving-girl, two pug-dogs, a dozen cases, baskets, and boxes, plus Your Humble Servant, all crammed into a tiny two-seated carriage--picture to yourself, moreover, Lauretta's endless whining about the uncomfortable seats, the Neapolitan's equally interminable chattering and Teresina's irremediable sulking; not to mention the unspeakable aching of my foot: then, and only then, will you come fully to appreciate the peculiar charm of my situation. Teresina could not, as she put it, take it anymore. We drew to a halt, and in a single bound she was out of the carriage. She unhitched my horse, mounted him side-saddle and trotted and curvetted him hither and thither in our plain view. I had to admit that she cut quite a splendid figure. And in the offing were still greater proofs of her grace and sublimity of carriage and movement in the art of horsemanship. She called for, and obtained, her guitar; and, with the reins slung round one arm, and strumming open chords by way of accompaniment, proceeded to sing a succession of stately Spanish ballads. The luminous folds of her silk dress glittered and fluttered this way and that, as zephyrs lovingly wafted the white feathers of her hat aloft and aground and aloft again in time with the music. It all amounted to such a vision straight out of the romances of yore that I could scarcely take my eyes off of Teresina; Lauretta, now cast aside, metamorphosed into a perfect specimen of feminine asininity whose impertinence was becoming ever more insufferable. But, luckily enough, we proceeded apace—either because the horse had overcome his former stubbornness, or because he simply found the company of the songstress more agreeable than that of the paladin—and it was only when we had arrived at the very gates of the city that Teresina climbed back into the carriage.

Picture me now in concerts and operas, picture me reveling in every conceivable form of music-making—behold me in my new capacity as a vocal coach, furiously swotting up the core repertoire for piano, for solo voice, for paired voices, for everything else I have ever heard of. And observe, my friend, what an essential, fundamental change I am now undergoing, pervaded as I am by this wondrous new spirit of virtuosity. Every vestige of my small-town boy's shyness evaporates when I sit down like a proper maestro at the keyboard, in front of the score, to conduct one of my donna's performances. All my thoughts, all my sensations, are comprised by a single sweet melody. I am now composing, in blithe disregard of the rules of counterpoint, all manner of arias and canzonets, which Lauretta is only too happy to sing—in the privacy of her apartment. Why will she never sing any of my pieces in public? I cannot get my head around it! But from time to time, the vision of Teresina astride her proud steed, and with lyre in hand--like the veritable incarnation of the romantic ideal in art—spontaneously impels me to compose one solemn lied in the high style after another. To be sure, Lauretta dallies with notes like a perennially shrewish Queen of the Fairies.  How can she but succeed at anything she attempts? Teresina eschews the full trill, opting, rather, for a simple appoggiatura—or, at most, a mordent—but her clear, drawn-out, undecaying notes illuminate every last nook and cranny heretofore consigned to irremediable gloom, as newly-animated magic spirits gaze, with eyes transfixed, into the innermost recesses of the heart. I can hardly fathom how I have managed to live so long sequestered from such bliss.

At a certain point during the sisters' contractually-allotted benefit night, Lauretta and I were performing a rather lengthy aria by Anfossi. I was sitting, as usual, at the keyboard. We had just arrived at the very last fermata of the piece. On this single measure, Lauretta lavished the full panoply of her vocal technique: she warbled in ascending and descending intervals like a nightingale (on sustained pitches throughout), then launched into a most intricate, variegated succession of trills touching on every note of the scale! To be quite frank, the whole thing struck me as being too long by half, and I was beginning to feel a gentle breeze wafting against my shoulders: Teresina, you see, was standing directly behind me. Now, at just this moment, Lauretta was still building up to her final signature hairpin harmonic trill from which she was planning to segue, a tempo, back into the letter of the score. Here (at just this moment), Satan took possession of me: I pounded out the resolving chord of the cadence with all ten fingers. The orchestra followed my lead, forestalling, at the most fatal instant imaginable, Lauretta's execution of that final trill, with which she had fully expected to bring the house down. Lauretta, looking poisoned daggers at me, snatched up her vocal score, flung it at my head (on encountering which obstacle it fell to pieces), and stormed through the orchestra and clear on out into the wings. No sooner had the tutti fallen silent, than I was on my feet and hurrying after her. She wept, she raved. ‘Out of my sight, you malefactor—!’ she screamed at me, ‘—you devil, who, out of sheer spite, have brought this opprobrium upon me: upon my fame, upon my honor, upon my—ah!-upon my trillo! Out of my sight, you heinous son of hell!’ She immediately fled my presence; I dashed through the exit in pursuit. Meanwhile, of course, somebody had had to keep the show going, that somebody in this case being by default Teresina and the conductor, who, indeed, kept it going long enough to placate Lauretta's fury to such a degree that she was persuaded to return to the stage; this time round, however, I circumspectly recused myself from my keyboard duties. In the sisters’ final duet, Lauretta did in fact and at last execute the signature hairpin harmonic trill, which was delivered with impeccable intonation and received with unanimous applause. But as I well knew that I would never live down Lauretta's chastisement of me in full sight of the great wide world, I was firmly resolved to depart for my native city the very next morning. While I was busy packing up my belongings, Teresina entered my little closet of a bedroom. On taking stock of the import of my preparations, she exclaimed in frank astonishment, ‘Do you really intend to desert us?’ I explained that, in light of the disgrace I had suffered at Lauretta's hands, I could no longer remain in their company. ‘Are you really to be driven away so suddenly,’ asked Teresina, ‘by the demented histrionics of such a self-centered silly old goose, which in any case the goose herself now sincerely regrets? Do you really think you can better shift for yourself on your own than with us? Let me remind you that you have it well within your power to forestall any such future outbursts on Lauretta's part, provided you can bring yourself to set her a suitably stern example. But so far you have been altogether too soft, too good-natured, too indulgent for your own good. To put it bluntly, you vastly overrate Lauretta's talent. True, she has a decent voice that carries far enough and then some; but as for all of these outlandish trills and endless arpeggios—why, what do they amount to but so many cheap circus tricks admired after the same fashion as the so-called death-defying feats of tightrope-walkers? Can anything of this lowly sort penetrate our souls or touch our hearts? I can scarcely stomach the harmonic trill that you sabotaged; I find it both nerve-racking and depressing. And what of all of this labored striving toward the stratospheric heights appropriated to the third position of the violin: does it not constitute a perverse transgression of the natural range of the human voice, within whose limits alone that instrument is truly capable of rousing the emotions?  Thank heaven for the middle register!—and the lower one. For me, nothing can quite compare to a genuine, heartfelt, soul-stirring portamento di voce. Strong and steady intonation, unadorned by superfluous embellishment; a direct emotional expressiveness that takes heart and soul alike into its bold embrace: these qualities together comprise the essence of vocal music, and by these qualities alone do I swear in my singing. Suffer, then, no longer for Lauretta's sake, and turn your thoughts to Teresina, who will gladly suffer for yours, provided that—in conformity with your proper calling—you are willing to serve as my composer and accompanist.  Far be it from me to wish to offend you!—but all your pretty little canzonets and arias taken together can scarcely hold a candle to the mighty—’ Here Teresina sang, in her richly sonorous voice, a simple andante setting of a liturgical text that I had composed a few days earlier.  I had never imagined that it could sound anything like this. The notes forced their way into my soul with miraculous ease; my eyes filmed over with tears of mingled desire and delight; I seized Terisina's hand; I pressed my lips to hers a thousand times; I vowed never to part from her. Lauretta jealously, grimly, furiously observed the flourishing of my liaison with Teresina; and all the while she continued to stand in need of my coaching, because, being a poor sight-reader with a shaky sense of rhythm, she was quite incapable of rehearsing anything new on her own. Teresina was an accomplished sight-reader; her sense of rhythm, moreover, was unequaled. Never did Lauretta so fully give vent to the obduracy and vehemence of her passion as when accompanying her sister. Never, on such an occasion, was the instrumental part even remotely up to snuff. She treated her part as one does a necessary evil: you could scarcely hear the keyboard--always pianissimo, and always getting slower and slower--and each measure, as though having spontaneously popped into her head as a self-contained entity, was different in time from the preceding one. By now I could no longer be bothered to humor her; indeed, I engaged in open war with her perversity in telling her quite pointedly that one might as well not play at all as play without energy, and that there was a difference between carrying a song and floating it to pieces against the tide of its basic pulse. Terisina loyally seconded my opinion. I was now composing sacred music exclusively, and reserving the solo vocal parts in my compositions for the alto register. And although Teresina belittled me often enough, I put up with her nitpicking inasmuch as she was more musically erudite than Lauretta and was likewise (so I assumed) more favorably disposed towards German seriousness.

We were traveling through southern Germany. In a small town of that region we happened upon an Italian tenor en route to Berlin from Milan. Both of my ladies were utterly smitten by their compatriot--he, for his part, could not be parted from either of them; but he took an especial shine to Teresina, and to my hardly negligible annoyance I suddenly found myself consigned to playing a bit part in the drama. One day, just as I was on the verge of briskly marching into the sisters' room with a full score slung under one arm, I happened to overhear an animated conversation taking place on the other side of the threshold, a conversation between my two ladies and the tenor. My name was mentioned: I snapped to attention and eagerly pricked up my ears. By now, I understood Italian so well that not a single word escaped me. Lauretta was recounting the tragic events of that night when, by my ill-timed striking of the downbeat, I had cut short her trill. 'Asino tedesco!' cried the tenor.  I was of more than half a mind to burst into the room and throw the puffed-up drama king out the window, but restrained myself. Lauretta continued by saying that she had wanted to send me packing from the beginning, but that out of sheer pity she had yielded to my abject entreaties to take me under her wing as a pupil in the art of singing, and as my teacher reluctantly continued to endure my company.  Teresina, to my hardly negligible astonishment, corroborated this description of me. ‘He is a good boy,’ she added, ‘and as he is now in quite smitten with me he writes only for the alto register. While he is not completely lacking in talent, he has yet to shake himself free—as he must do—of that awkward stiffness peculiar to Germans. I still hope, for my own purposes, to make a composer out of him; to incite him to compose a few trifles for solo alto, and afterwards to let him go. His endless cooing and pining alone render him thoroughly insufferable; but, on top of that, he persistently tortures me with his tiresome compositions, which have so far been consistently wretched in quality.’ ‘Well, I, at any rate,’ chimed in Lauretta, ‘am happily free of such molestation; but I trust, Teresina, that you will recall how this fellow used to nettle me with his arias and duets?’ Lauretta now launched into one of my duets, a composition that, I must emphasize, she had formerly roundly commended. Teresina followed with the second vocal part, and between the two of them, by way of intonation and diction, they executed the cruelest imaginable travesty of my work. The tenor laughed so hard that the walls echoed; an icy shudder shook my frame—my decision was firm and irrevocable. Noiselessly, I slunk from the door back to my own room by way of the window overlooking the side-street. Directly opposite lay the post office. The Bamberg mail-coach had just driven up, and it was now waiting out its loading interval. The passengers were already standing at the gateway, but I still had an hour left. I hastily gathered up my belongings, magnanimously paid our full reckoning at the inn, and hurried away to the post office. As I rode through the high street, I happened to espy my two ladies, along with the tenor, still standing at the window of their chamber; and, indeed, subsequently poking their heads out at the sound of the post-horn. I withdrew into the background and privately gloated over the ineluctably devastating impression to be made by the bilious letter I had left for them at the inn.”

With remarkable aplomb, Theodor quaffed the fiery dregs of the aleatico that Eduard had just poured out for him. “I would never—” the latter said, as he opened another bottle and poured away the layer of oil drops swimming on the surface of its contents,”—I would never have supposed your Teresina capable of such calculating duplicity. I quite simply cannot exorcise from my mind the enchanting image of her sitting astride that horse, and dancing to and fro in those graceful curvets, and singing those Spanish ballads.” “That was her finest moment,” Theodor interrupted. “I myself can still recall how peculiarly I was moved by that very scene. I forgot all my troubles; Teresina seemed then to be the actual manifestation of some higher order of being. It is only too true that such moments cleave fast to one's being and, quite in defiance of one's expectations, assume many a form that time itself is incapable of effacing. Thus, now, whenever I happen to hear a spirited ballad, the image of Teresina starts to my mind in all its original brilliance of color.”

“But,” said Eduard, “Let us not forget the talented Lauretta; and let us accordingly—having set all grudges aside--drink to the health of both sisters.” And so they did!  “Ah,” said Theodor, “how this wine fairly overwhelms me with its enchanting aroma of Italy—how my every nerve and vein fairly glows with new life!  Ah, why ever was I obliged so suddenly to forsake that glorious country a second time!” “Still,” Eduard interjected, “in none of what you have so far related do I discern the remotest connection to our divine painting, and thus do I surmise that you have more to tell me regarding the sisters; for I readily perceive that the two ladies in the picture are none other than Lauretta and Teresina themselves.” “Indeed they are,” replied Theodor, “and, indeed, all my present wistful hankering after the aforementioned glorious country segues perfectly into what I have yet to relate.  Two years ago, when I was living in Rome but about to leave it, I undertook a little excursion on horseback. In the course of this excursion, I came upon a friendly young girl standing in the forecourt of a locanda, and it seemed fitting that I should beseech this pretty child for a draught of the noble grape. I stood there, on horseback, at the entrance of the house, in an arcade illuminated intermittently, from the side, by shafts of sunlight. From some distance away, my ears caught snatches of singing and guitar-playing. I listened more closely, so peculiarly struck was I by the two female voices, inasmuch as they conjured up in my mind the most unaccountably mysterious remembrances, remembrances that yet refused to take definite shape. I thereupon dismounted and, harkening to every note, approached the wine-bower from which the music seemed to be emanating. The second voice had fallen silent.  The first was singing a solo canzonet.  The nearer I drew to the bower, the further the initial impetus of familiarity receded. Now, the voice was lingering over a fermata, in an elaborate chromatic cadenza. It warbled up and down, up and down the scale, and finally alighted on a single sustained note; but then, a female voice—a speaking voice, not a singing one—suddenly erupted into a torrent of frenzied fault-finding—of curses, oaths, and calumnies! A man protests; another man laughs. A second female speaker joins in the melée. With ever-mounting fury, and ever-evident Italian rabbia, the tempest rages on. At length, I reach and hold fast at the threshold of the bower. Thence an abbot suddenly emerges and runs straight into me; and, indeed, practically bowls me over in his exit. He takes one look at me and I immediately identify him as none other than Signor Ludovico, my trusty intelligencer on all musical doings in Rome! ‘What, in heaven's name—?’ I cry. ‘Ah, Signor Maestro, Signor Maestro!’ he exclaims, ‘Save me, I beg you: protect me from this termagant, from this crocodile, from this tiger—this hyena, this demon of a girl. It is true; it is true: I was conducting Anfossi's canzonet and struck the downbeat too soon, in the middle of the fermata; I cut short her trillo—if only I had not looked into her eyes, into the eyes of that Sataness! The Devil take all fermatas, all fermatas!' With remarkable expedition, the abbot and I hastened into the wine-bower; and there, at a single glance, I recognized my two sisters, Lauretta and Tersina. Lauretta was still screaming and fuming, and Teresina was still vehemently remonstrating with her; the landlord, his bare arms folded across his chest, was looking on and laughing as a girl replenished the table with a complement of fresh bottles. No sooner had the singers taken notice of my presence, than they rushed towards me—‘Ah, Signor Teodoro!’—and overwhelmed me with caresses.  All contention was instantly forgotten. ‘Behold,’ said Lauretta to the abbot, ‘behold: a composer with the grace of an Italian and the strength of a German!’ The two sisters now fell into animated conversation between themselves, a conversation touching on such topics as the happy days of our time together, the precociousness of my youthful musical erudition, our exercises, and the superiority of my compositions (they could never have wished for better songs to sing than mine); Teresina rounding out the whole by informing me that she had been engaged by an impresario to sing some leading tragic roles next Carnival season, but she wished to make clear that she would undertake this engagement 'only on condition that at least one newly-commissioned opera by you figures in the program,' for after all, high tragedy was just my line of work, etc. Lauretta, on the other hand, maintained that it would be a pity were I to curb my contrary predilection for elegance, for levity—in a word, for opera buffa. She said that she had been engaged as a prima donna in several performances in that genre, and that it went without saying that nobody but me would be allowed to compose any opera she was to sing in. You can well imagine the curious mixture of emotions I felt as I was standing between the two of them just then.  You will, moreover, have realized by now that the little gathering I happened upon was the selfsame one depicted by Hummel, and that I happened upon it at the very moment when the abbot was cutting short Lauretta's fermata.” “But surely," said Eduard, “they recalled the circumstances of your parting, and your bilious letter?” “They breathed not a word in allusion to either of them; nor, for that matter, did I, for every last shadow of resentment had long since fled my mind, and my adventures with the sisters become a source of private jocular amusement. I allowed myself but one sop to the bad old days in relating to the abbot how I, a few years previous, and likewise in the middle of an aria by Anfossi, had suffered the same calamity that he had suffered today. Brusquely condensing my entire period of collaboration with the sisters into this single tragicomic episode, and deftly sniping at them along the way, I made the two sisters feel the full measure of my superiority to them, and of the years rich in artistic and private experience that had raised me to such a height.  ‘And yet I was right,’ I concluded, ‘to cut short the fermata when I did, for otherwise the thing would have gone on forever; and, indeed, I believe that if the lady had had her way I would still be sitting at that piano right now.’ ‘But Signor,’ replied the abbot, ‘surely no maestro may presume to give orders to his prima donna; and your transgression, in the concert hall, was perforce of a much more criminal nature than mine, in this bower—actually, I was only a theoretical maestro; no one could have supposed me otherwise—and had I not been overawed by the sight of the sweet fire emanating from these heavenly eyes, I would not have made such an ass of myself as I did.’ The abbot's last sentence had a decidedly salutary effect, for Lauretta, whose eyes had begun to let off sparks of rekindled fury during the earlier part of his speech, was now completely quiescent.

We remained together into the evening. The fourteen years since my parting from the sisters had wrought great changes. Lauretta had visibly aged, but she was still attractive enough. Teresina had held up better and retained her fine figure. Both were fairly colorfully dressed, and their mannerisms were the same as before—in other words, fourteen years younger than the women themselves. At my request, Teresina sang a few of those solemn lieder that had once moved me so deeply, but they seemed not to resonate in my soul in the same way that they formerly had done; and it was the same with Lauretta’s singing, which, although her voice had not perceptibly declined in either range or volume, was nonetheless entirely dissimilar to the Laurettan vocal idiom that still resided in my heart. The obtrusion of this contrast between an inner idea and its none-too-agreeable counterpart in the external world was bound to put me out of humor, as the behavior of the sisters towards me—their simulated ecstasies, their tactless fawning, their condescendingly pre-fabricated offers of patronage—already had done. Eventually, the comical abbot—who flirted with the sisters in the sweetest manner imaginable—together with the fine wine, imbibed in copious quantities, restored to me my good mood, such that the evening cheerfully expired in a puff of unalloyed geniality. With the greatest zeal, the sisters invited me to pay them a visit so that we could come to an agreement about the requirements of the parts that I was to compose for them. I quitted Rome without bothering to seek them out beforehand.”

“And yet," said Eduard, "it is to them that you owe the original awakening of your inner song.”

“To be sure,” replied Theodor, "and quite a few fine melodies to boot, but precisely for that reason I would have been better off had I never seen them again. Every composer can call to mind some original, powerful impression immune to the ravages of time. The spirit immanent in living sound has spoken to him, enunciating a Logos that has appropriated him to its own ends, awakening the spirit long dormant in his soul and causing it to shine forth with eternally unconquerable radiance. Indeed, in being imbued with such radiance, all melodies that come from the heart seem to us to be the rightful property of the women who first ignited the melodic flame therein. Once having heard them, we commit to paper only what they have sung. It is, however, the lot of us fallible mortals, bound as we are to this mud-heap of a world of ours, to endeavor to circumscribe such etherealities within the pitifully straitened limits of terrestrial actuality. So comes the lady vocalist to be our mistress—nay, our wife!; the spell is broken, and our inner melody, erstwhile herald of the glorious realm beyond, debased into the housewife's lament over a broken soup bowl or an ink stain in a batch of clean laundry.  Fortunate beyond compare is the composer who never sets his terrestrial eyes a second time upon the woman who had the mysterious power to kindle his inner music.  Let the young man be violently racked by the torments and disappointments of love, for once he has been separated for good from his fair enchantress, her image will metamorphose into a divine sound that will perdure in an eternal exuberance of youth and beauty, and from this sound will be born the melodies that are and never can be anything but unchanging iterations of this eternal she.  What, then, is this she, if not the highest ideal, which, in the course of its unceasing emanations from within, contingently finds itself mirrored by some essentially alien image in the external world?”

“Strange, but not implausible,” said Eduard, as the two friends strode arm in arm from Tarone's restaurant into the open air.

THE END

Notes


1. My uncle: Johnanna C. Sahlin, editor and translator of Selected Letters of E. T. A. Hoffmann (Chicago, 1977) writes: “According to [Theodor Gottlieb] Hippel's memoirs, [Hoffmann's Uncle] O[tto]. Doerffer was H.’s ‘first teacher in music.’ H. tells about his uncle's musical pursuits in Der Musikfeind, in Fermate [sic] (Pauses [sic]), and in the Kreisler biography” (p. 46 [note to a 23 January 1796 letter to Hippel]).

2. Our little town: Presumably, by default, Hoffmann's native city of Königsberg; in other words, as far as this narrative is concerned, a town as remote from Italy as any German locale could be.

3. Arithmetician: for Hoffmann’s Rechenmeister, but occupationally speaking, the inexcusable anachronism math teacher is probably nearer the denotational mark (while the third plausible alternative, mathematics instructor, is, in the words of a certain translator of Chekhov whose name escapes me, “pure translationese’). Sahlin conjectures that the biographical antecedent of this Rechenmeister was one C. G. Richter (Selected Letters, p. 116 [note to a 28 June 1806 letter to Ludwig Zacharias Werner]). But in her index she gives Richter's dates as 1778-1809; thus, by her account, Hoffmann's “old” organist was in fact two years his junior.

4. Lottchen at Court [Lottchen am Hofe]. A 1767 singspiel with music by Johann Adam Hiller (1728-1804) and libretto by Christian Felix Weisse (1726-1804) after Goldoni and Favart.

5. Doose: In the original text, duse (italics Hoffmann's), presumably a phonetic rendering of Mlle. Meibel's uncultivated (specifically East Prussian?) pronunciation of the French douce. Thanks here are due to Prof. Arndt Niebisch (formerly of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and now of the University of Vienna) for clueing me in to the word's probable Gallic original and putting an end to my futile efforts to derive it from the Italian dulce.

6. Smorfiosa: translatable as either “coquette” or “prude.”  Teresina’s behavior obviously alternates between that of both types.

Translation ©2008 by Douglas Robertson

Translation revised in August 2104