His walrus mustache was emblematic, like Walt Whitman’s wild wooly beard: no mere untrimmed tuft growing wild, but a Zeitgeist gage, a canny alley cat’s whiskers tailor-made to fit through tight fixes. And like the bewhiskered Brooklyn bard, to whom he has been compared—in stance, not style—Peter Altenberg (1859– 1919), the turn-of-the-century Viennese raconteur-scribe, was a walker and a talker and an inveterate loll-about. Both had a penchant for lyrical digression and irregular punctuation, but the similarity stops there. For while Whitman went on at length in epic outbursts of freewheeling verse, Altenberg choked back the flow.
His own avowed paradigm for the pearls he spit out, most while propped up in bed in bouts of chronic insomnia, was Charles Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris (1869). Yet whereas Baudelaire’s pioneering work comprises texts that tease and test but never forsake the playing field of poetry, Altenberg extracted the poetic essence of impressions and spat them out in spare narratives situated to the prose side of the divide.
Other formal influences include the “Correspondenzkarte,” the world’s first postcard launched and disseminated in Austria in 1869, which subsequently sparked a vogue; and the Feuilleton, a lyrical form of first person journalistic prose often of a decidedly purple slant produced by, among other Viennese wordsmiths of the day, the young Theodor Herzl before the latter forsook belles lettres for the nation-building business.
The artfully crafted fairy tales of the great Dane, Hans Christian Andersen, have been noted as yet another influence. And Altenberg’s writings can indeed be read as pruned Märchen minus the “once upon a time” and without any pretense of a “happily ever after.” “We relegated fairy tales to the realm of childhood, that exceptional, wondrous, stirring, remarkable time of life!” he wrote (in a text entitled Retrospective Introduction to My Book, Märchen des Lebens [The Fairy Tale of Life], 1908).
But why rig out childhood with it, when childhood is already sufficiently romantic and fairytale-like in and of itself?!? The disenchanted adult had best seek out the fairytale-like elements, the romanticism of each day and each hour right here and now in the hard, stern, cold fundament of life!
Disenchanted adult or overgrown child, Altenberg never quite managed to break out of his self-constructed cocoon, except on the butterfly wings of his writing and the charmed cadences of his café conversation. Like his English contemporary, Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), Altenberg idealized childhood as the indigenous province of poetry and adulated children as its natural priests and purveyors. Like Carroll, he also flirted with a photographic (though to my knowledge, never practiced) pedophilia, prizing above all his possessions a collection of suggestive postcards, many of pre-pubescent girls. Like Carroll, he too managed to metamorphose (or sublimate) his worship of young girls into the stuff of literature. Did not Dante do the same with his Beatrice fixation and Petrarch with his predilection for Laura?
The fact that Altenberg clung psychologically to the province of childhood, reticent to forsake its cozy confines for the constant compromise and abject spiritual poverty of adulthood, can either be viewed—depending on your point of view—as indisputable proof of imaginative fortitude or a telltale sign of the emotional frailty that landed him in a mental asylum and ultimately led to his psychological and physical collapse. His Viennese contemporary, Sigmund Freud, would have had a field day analyzing a rife knot of neuroses, but analysis was not Altenberg’s inclination or forte and his neuroses proved nourishing. Thirteen books and a copious posthumous opus, including reams of letters and inscribed postcards, attest to a prodigious and prescient verbal fortitude that outlived his own collapse and that of the world that produced him.
Born into a prosperous assimilated Jewish family in Vienna in 1859, the young Richard Engländer (who later took the pen name Peter Altenberg) was labeled by a grade school teacher as a “genius without abilities.” The characterization bears a striking parallel to the title of the great Viennese novel, The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil (an ardent Altenberg fan), the first part of which appeared in print in 1931. Altenberg described himself as “the man without compromises,” in a concise five-and-a-quarter page long “Autobiography,” in his third book, Was der Tag mir zuträgt [What the Day Brings], 1901.
He flunked the writing segment of his high school graduation exam, as self-promulgated apocryphal legend has it, responding tersely to the theme: “The Influence of the New World,” with a single word: “potatoes.” Passing the test a year later, he took up and promptly abandoned the study of medicine, botany and the law, respectively, and half-heartedly explored the business of selling books, before finally concluding that he preferred to write them.
In 1883, a psychiatrist hired by his concerned father diagnosed “over-excitation of the nervous system” and concluded an “incapacity for employment.” Altenberg took it as a one-way ticket to Literary Bohemia and the life of the coffeehouse poet, of which he became the epitome, and never looked back. His befuddled, albeit tolerant, father provided a modest living allowance until the family business (subsequently bequeathed to a brother) went bust, leaving the down at the heels Bohemian henceforth beholden to the fickle kindness of strangers. The grateful son wrote of his father in the aforementioned “Autobiography”:
He [the father] was once asked: “Aren’t you proud of your son?!”
He replied: “I was not overly vexed that he remained an idler for 30 years. So I’m not overly honored that he’s a poet now! I gave him his freedom. I knew that it was a long shot. I counted on his soul.”
Long before his words found their way into newspapers and periodicals, Altenberg was well-known as a vetted Viennese eccentric who lodged in various hotels and traipsed around town in baggy clothes of his own conception (he was a pioneer in leisure wear), curious walking sticks and open sandals whatever the weather, favoring the companionship of young girls and loose women. He gave out as his official address the Café Central—also the sometime haunt of Russian émigrés Leon Trotsky and his chess partner Vladimir Ilyich Lenin—where Altenberg presided over his own table of garrulous caffeine-primed regulars.
How and when he first broke into print is the stuff of another homespun legend. One day, the author recalls, the members of Vienna’s ascendant literary avant-garde, Jung Wien, caught him scribbling away at his café table and immediately recognized his talent. The poet Richard Beer-Hoffmann is said to have first appreciated his writing, but it was the brilliantly sardonic critic Karl Kraus who sent Altenberg’s fledgling selection of prose to S. Fischer Verlag, the foremost German publisher of the day, which promptly published his first book, Wie Ich Es Sehe [How I See It] in 1896. The book was a popular sensation and immediately put its author on the map.
“If it be permitted to speak of ‘love at first sound,’ then that’s what I experienced in my first encounter with this poet of prose,” wrote Thomas Mann. Other impassioned literary partisans included the playwright Arthur Schnitzler, the poet and librettist Hugo von Hofmannstahl, and Felix Salten, the versatile author of, among other works, the children’s book classic Bambi and the underground pornographic classic The Adventures of Jose phine Munzenbacher.
Salten’s incisive description of Altenberg’s prose bears mention:
Some [of his pieces] are like steel projectiles, so tightly enclosed in themselves, so complete and precise in their form; and like projectiles, they pierce the breast; you are struck and you bleed. Some are like crystals and diamonds, sparkling in the multicolored reflections of the light of life, gleaming with captured rays of sunlight and glittering with a hidden inner fire. Some are like ripe fruits, warm with the waft of summer, swollen and sweet . . .
And just next door in Prague, the young Franz Kafka took Altenberg’s terse writing style to heart and mind as a literary model for his own work. “In his small stories,” Kafka observed,
his whole life is mirrored. And every step, every movement he makes confirms the truth of his words. Peter Altenberg is a genius of nullifications, a singular idealist who discovers the splendors of this world like cigarette butts in the ashtrays of coffeehouses.
Coffeehouse poet par excellence, Altenberg claimed to toss off his texts in a cavalier fashion for the throw-away pages of weekly and daily newspapers. “I view writing as a natural organic spilling out of a full, overripe person,” he wrote in a letter to Schnitzler. “I hate any revision. Toss it off and that’s good—! Or bad! What’s the difference?!”
But tossed off, carefully crafted or both, there is nothing sloppy about his spare aesthetic. The extreme economy of his sketches sometimes reads more Japanese than Viennese—an elective affinity born out by the caption he inscribed for a lady friend on a postcard of Japanese women posing under blossoming cherry trees:
The Japanese paint a blossoming branch—and it is spring in its entirety! We paint all of spring—and it’s hardly a blossoming branch!
His Japanophile propensity is reiterated in the sketch “In Munich,” in which he presses his stuffy fellow Europeans to “Learn from the Japanese!” lauding the latter as “an artistic people.”
Altenberg’s first direct exposure to the Japanese sensibility occurred at the Sixth Exhibition of the Wiener Secession in 1900, a show exclusively devoted to the art of Japan though chronologically too late to have influenced his style, which appears to have sprouted Athena-like out of his brain and remained more or less unchanged throughout the two decades of his active writing career, this encounter with an alien world view must have felt strangely affirmative, more homecoming than departure, more mirror than window.
It was not his first flirtation with the exotic. Altenberg’s second book, Ashantee, published in 1897, recounts his dealings with and vivid impressions of the inhabitants of an African show-village on display for a year as a live exhibit in Vienna’s zoological garden. The grotesquery of the very premise of such an exhibition is lampooned in a short reflection entitled “Philosophy”:
Visitors to the Ashanti Village knock in the evening on the wooden walls of the huts for a lark.
The goldsmith Nôthëi: “Sir, if you came to us in Accra as objects on exhibit, we wouldn’t knock on the walls of your huts in the evening!”
Yet rather than stand above it all and wag a virtuous finger at the crude voyeurism of Viennese visitors, for whom the Africans on display were little more than talking animals, Altenberg de-constructs the spectacle by stepping inside it. He falls in love and loses his heart to various black girls and ladies “on display” and peals off their shell of otherness—an otherness he knew all too well under his own white skin, as a baptized Jew trying to pass in an often hostile world given to Catholic piety and Teutonic cult.
But while Altenberg the author let his imagination wander to exotic climes and loved to wax eloquent about Nature, à la Ralph Waldo Emerson, Altenberg the man was a hopeless homebody, a die-hard city slicker who dared not venture outside his beloved Vienna, except to revisit nearby Austrian spas and resorts cherished in childhood, and on a few occasions, to soak up the sun and surf on the Lido outside Venice. A piece entitled “Traveling” is, in fact, devoted to the “dirt-cheap pleasure altogether free of disappointments, to study the train schedule from mid-May on and pick out the very train with which you would, if only . . .”—in short, the pleasure of staying put.
Perils lurked outside the safe periphery of the urban grid. Altenberg’s Nature is at once an idealized locale and a metaphor for an unleashed sexuality which he both craved and feared. Consider the unabashed phallic fantasy that underlies the following paean to the great outdoors from the aforementioned “Autobiography”:
As a boy I had an indescribable love for mountain meadows. The mountain meadow steaming under the blazing sun, fragrantly wafting, alive with bugs and butterflies, made me downright drunk. So too did clearings in the woods. On swampy sunny patches sit butterflies, blue silken small ones and black and red admirals and you can see the hoof print of deer. But for mountain meadows I had a fanatical love, I longed for them. Under all the white hot stones I imagined there lurked poison adders, and this creature was the very incarnation of the fairy tale mystery of my boyhood years. It replaced the man-eating ogre, the giant and the witch. All the bites and their consequences, the terribly slow and torturous pain, I knew it all by heart, how to treat a wound and so on. The wondrously delicate gray-black body of the adder seemed to me to be the loveliest, most elegant creature, and when I loved a little girl I always pictured again and again only one thing happening: an adder bit her in the foot on a hike and I sucked out the venom to save her!
Enamored as he was of Nature’s lure, he preferred to take it in limited doses. In the same text, he admits to never actually having seen an adder. “It remained for me a bad but sweetly disturbing dream.”
Readers disinclined to the short form may indeed find Altenberg’s sketches a bit claustrophobic and his attachment to his native stomping ground positively suffocating. It may seem at times as if he managed to stretch the city itself into a giant nursery navigated on a hopscotch grid. And though Altenberg’s Vienna is peopled with pimps and prostitutes, cabbies and call girls, florists and floozies, there is a certain childlike innocence about them all. The hookers may not all wear their hearts on their sleeve, but they won’t give you the clap. And some of them, like the hired subject of “Poem,” even write verse. His cast of characters comprise a collection of more or less accommodating playmates in an elaborate game with rules of his own devising. Even the most venomous types have been defanged. In “My Gmunden,” a mysterious stranger with paranoid delusions encountered, notably not in Vienna but in the resort town of Gmunden, pulls out a Browning revolver and bids the narrator enjoy his supper—“Because it’s your last!” In the story, the threatening stranger becomes an odd sort of Doppelgänger, a troubled comrade in arms, a fellow Meshuganeh.
In the short form, Altenberg isolated and delineated pleasures and pitfalls, savoring the former and attenuating the sting of the latter, compressing life into tiny parcels of manageable experience and prescribing them like pills to his reader.
He played his own heartstrings like a harp, plucking and letting go, teasing himself into a neverending state of excitation, and in the process eliciting a flurry of charged preludes. Whether taken as crystallized spasms of a crippled libido or as grains of irritation compounded into pearls, these texts transcend the moment of their creation and cry out with a remarkable modernity.
While such celebrated Fin-de-Siècle literati as Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannstahl read dated and a bit dowdy today, the sputtering sparks of a fire gone cold, Altenberg’s clipped “telegram style” resonates like bolts of prescient lightning leaping from one turn of the century to the next. “Only in the era of telegraphy, lightning fast trains and automobile-cabs,” wrote his friend and promoter, Egon Friedell, “could there emerge such a poet whose passionate desire it is to always stick to the essential.”
Western Union has since given way to AOL and the trains and cars have accelerated considerably. The angst-ridden rapid-fire era of the telegram and the tommy-gun has spawned the frenetic age of email and e-war, with love and death on demand at the press of a button. Raised on the knowledge that an atom of matter is all it takes to make a pretty big bang, we’ve refined our taste for the essential. E=MC2, the concise epic of the 20th century, is, after all, only three letters long. Now that we’ve turned the corner into the 21st century, Altenberg’s telegrams of the soul read right up to date.
Peter Wortsman