Das Urteil (part 2)

The conclusion to the Kafka tale ("The Judgment").  You can read the original here.

Georg stood up embarrassed: "Leave my friends alone.  Thousands of friends could not replace my father.  Do you know what I think?  I think you're not getting enough rest.  But age demands respite!  You are admittedly quite indispensable at work, and you know that, but if our store is threatening your health I'll close it tomorrow for good.  No other way about it.  We have to find another lifestyle for you, initiate you into something new.  And I mean something radically new.  You sit here in the dark when you could have a lot of light in the living room.  You pick at your breakfast instead of eating to keep up your strength.  You sit here with the window closed when the fresh air would do you some good.  No, father!  I'm going to fetch the doctor and we will follow his recommendations.  We'll change rooms: you'll move into the front room, and I'll come here.  This won't be much of a change for you and you'll handle it easily.  But all in due time!  Now lie down for a bit, you certainly need your rest.  Come now, I'll help you get undressed; you'll see, I can do it.  Or would you rather move into the front room right away?  Then you can lie down in my bed provisionally.  That would be a very smart thing to do, by the way."

Georg was standing right next to his father who had let his head and his shaggy white hair fall onto his chest.

"Georg," he said softly without moving.

Georg immediately knelt beside his father; he saw the pupils of his father's mild face looming large in the corners of his eyes directed right at him.

"You don't have a friend in Petersburg.  You've always been a joker and even I haven't been spared.  How could you have a friend over there!  I can't believe that for a minute." 

"Now think about it, father," said Georg, lifting his father from his seat and removing his nightgown as he stood there weakly.  "It's been now about three years since my friend was here visiting us.  I still recall that you weren't particularly fond of him.  At least twice I had to disown him in front of you even though he was still sitting right there in my room.  For sure, I understand your aversion towards him; after all, my friend has his eccentricities.  But then, right after that, you had a nice chat with him.  I was so proud, proud I tell you, that you listened to him, that you nodded as you spoke and asked questions about what he was saying.  You will remember all this if you think about it.  He told us some unbelievable stories about the Russian revolution, such as, for example, when he was on a business trip in Kiev he saw a priest standing on a balcony.  The priest cut a bloody cross into the palm of his hand, raised it up before the rioting crowd and called out to them.  You've since related the story a few times yourself."

While speaking Georg had managed to sit his father back down and remove his underpants, which he wore on top of his linen garb, as well as, more carefully, his socks.  He began blaming himself upon seeing his father's not particularly clean underpants: I keep neglecting him, he said to himself.  Keeping an eye on his father's change of clothes was surely one of his duties.  He had yet to speak specifically with his fiancée about how he planned on taking care of his father in the future since they had agreed by silent consent that Georg's father would simply remain in the apartment.  But now he decided that his father should come with him to his future home.  Upon closer inspection, it almost seemed as if the care that they would be providing him in their new home might come too late.

He took his father in his arms and carried him to bed.  A feeling of horror overcame him as he noticed but a few steps from the bed that his father was playing with his watch chain on his chest.  He couldn't put him right in bed, so strong was his father's grip on his chain.

Hardly was he in bed, however, when everything seemed fine.  He pulled the covers over himself, bringing them a tad above the shoulders.  He sat up, fixing Georg with a not unfriendly look.

"Now come, don't you remember him?" Georg asked and nodded at him encouragingly.

"Am I properly covered?" asked his father, as if he himself couldn't see whether his feet were covered.

"You like it here in bed, don't you?" said Georg and adjusted the bedding to make him a little more comfortable.

"Am I properly covered?" asked his father again and seemed to be terribly interested in the answer.

"No worries, you're properly covered."

"No!" screamed his father, and to make his response even more pronounced, he threw back the covers with a show of strength that made the covers unfurl in the air for a moment.  He then stood up straight on top of the bed, propping himself up with one hand on the ceiling.  "You wanted to cover me, I know, you rascal, but as you can see I am still not covered.  And that's all the strength you have, it's all too much for you.  I certainly know your friend.  He would have been a son after my own heart.  And that's why you've been deceiving him all these years.  Why else?  Do you think that I haven't cried over him? That's why you lock yourself in your office, no one is allowed to bother you, the boss is always busy, only for you to write those fake letters to Russia.  Thankfully no one has to teach your father how to see through the schemes of his own son!  As you now have come to think, you would have brought him down, so down that you could have sat right down on him and he wouldn't have stirred, since now my lord, my son, has decided to get married!"

Georg looked up at the terrifying image of his father.  His Petersburg friend, the one his father suddenly knew so well, gripped him as never before.  He saw him now lost in white Russia; he saw him now at the threshold of an empty, pillaged store.  He was still standing amidst the rubble of the shelves, the spoiled goods, and the falling gas fixtures.  Why now had he had to travel so far away?

"Look at me!" his father screamed, and Georg ran, almost absentmindedly, to the bed to try to understand everything but tripped along the way.

"Because she lifted up her skirts," he began to pipe, "because she lifted up her skirts, that repulsive goose."  And with that he lifted up his own clothes, so high as to illustrate his point and so high that one could see his scar from the war years on his thigh.  "Because she lifted up her skirts so high, this high, so very high, that's why you came on to her.  So that you could satisfy yourself with her without the least disturbance!  And all you've done is shame the memory of your mother, betrayed your friend, and stuck your father in bed so that he can't budge.  But he can budge, now can't he?"  And he stood up completely on his own and waved his legs around.  He was bursting with insight.

Georg was standing in a corner, as far away from his father as possible.  A long time ago he had made up his mind to observe everything completely and precisely so that he could not be surprised, not indirectly, not from behind, not from above.  Now he remembered his long-forgotten resolution and forgot it again as one might pull a short thread through the eye of a needle.

"But this friend has not been betrayed!" said the father, and his waving index finger strengthened his claim.  "I was the traitor here."

"Comedian!"  The word slipped out of Georg's mouth, and immediately realizing the mistake he had made, he bit his tongue.  But it was too late, his eyes froze and his tongue stung in pain.

"Yes, that's right, it's all been a comedy, a good word, that!  What other consolation did your old widowed father have?  Tell me – and for the moment in which you answer may you still be my living, breathing son – what else did I have left, here in my back room, persecuted by treacherous minions, so old I can only feel my bones?  And my son goes on a celebratory tour round the world, doing business that I had set up for him, gorging himself on pleasure trips and walking by his own father with the stoic face of a nobleman!  Do you think I wouldn't have loved you – I, from whose loins you sprang?"

"Now he's going to lean forward," thought Georg, "and then fall and be smashed to pieces!"  These words zipped through Georg's head.

His father did indeed lean forward, but he didn't fall.  Since Georg did not get closer to him as he had been expecting, he raised himself once more.

"Stay right where you are.  I have no need for you!  You think you still have the strength to come here and you're just holding yourself back because you so choose.  And that's where you're utterly wrong!  I am still the stronger of the two of us, much stronger.  Alone perhaps I could have repelled your attack, but your mother gave me her strength, and with your friend I formed a glorious alliance.  And I have all your clients in my pocket!"

"He's even got pockets in his shirt!"  Georg said to himself and thought that this statement could render him powerless throughout the world.  For only a moment did he think this, then he forgot everything.

"Leave your fiancée out of this and come towards me!  I'll sweep you to the side, you won't even see it coming!"

Georg made some faces as if he didn't believe what his father was saying.  His father only nodded towards Georg's corner, confirming the truth of what he said.

"And how did you talk to me today when you came and asked whether your friend should learn of your engagement?  He already knows everything, you silly boy, he already knows everything!  I wrote to him because you'd forgotten to take away my writing utensils and paper.  That's why he hasn't visited us in years:  he knows everything a hundred times better than you do yourself; your unread letters are crumpled up in his left hand as he reads my letters with his right."

He swung his arm enthusiastically above his head.  "He knows everything a thousand times better!" he cried.

"Ten thousand times better!" said Georg, trying to mock his father.  But in his mouth the words sounded deadly serious.

"For years I've waited for you to come to me with this question!  Do you think that anything else worries me?  Do you think I read newspapers?  There you go!"  And he threw Georg a newspaper which had somehow been dragged into bed with him.  An old newspaper with a name quite unknown to Georg.

"How long it took you to mature!  Your poor mother didn't live long enough to see this red-letter day; your friend is going under in his Russia; three years ago he was already yellow enough to die, and I – well you know how things stand with me.  That's why you've got eyes!"

"So you've been waiting to ambush me!" Georg cried.

His father then said with some sympathy: "You probably wanted to say that earlier. Now it is no longer appropriate."

And then more loudly: "So now you know what else there is apart from you.  Up to now you only knew about yourself!  You once were an innocent child, that's true enough, but you were also a devilish human being!  And for that reason you shall know my judgment:  I sentence you to death by drowning!"

Georg felt as if he were being chased out of the room; the smash with which his father fell on the bed behind him resonated in his ears.  On the staircase, whose steps he rushed over like a sheer surface, he came upon his domestic help who was in the middle of cleaning the apartment after the night before.

"Jesus!" she cried and covered her face with her apron, but he was already past her.  He sprang out of the gate and over the walkway, being drawn to the water.  Now he held on to the guardrail like a hungry man to food.  He swung himself over like the excellent gymnast, to the great pride of his parents, which he was in his youth.  He held himself steady with weakening hands, espied a bus between the guardrails which would overcome the sound of his fall, called out softly, "Dear parents, I've really always loved you," and let himself fall over and down.

And at this moment there was no end in sight to the traffic going over the bridge.

Das Urteil (part 1)

The first part to a famous story ("The Judgment") by this Austrian writer on his 130th birthday.  You can read the original here. 

It was a Sunday morning in the finest part of spring.  Georg Bendemann, a young salesman, was sitting in his private quarters on the second floor of one of the low, lightweight houses that had cropped up along the river in an endless strip, distinct almost only in their height and color.  He had just finished reading a letter from a childhood friend who was currently abroad.  Folding up the letter in almost playful slowness and then bracing himself on the desk with his elbows, he looked out the window onto the river, the bridges and the banks on the other shore, all in a faded green.  His thoughts circled around the image of this friend who had officially fled to Russia many years ago, unhappy with his progress at home.  He now ran a business in St. Petersburg – initially, a very successful business – which for a while now had been faltering, as his friend complained during his increasingly sporadic visits.  So he continued working abroad with no end in sight, unfruitfully, with a full beard that would have altered the appearance of many other persons, but which could hardly hide that face Georg had known since childhood, that yellowish skin which probably indicated an illness of some sort.  His friend said that he didn't feel very connected to his fellow exiles from their homeland, nor did he have any interaction with local families, and had resigned himself at last to bachelorhood. 

What was Georg to write to such a man, a man who had obviously gone astray, a man one pitied because there was no way to help him?  Should he advise him to come back home, to shift his life back here, to take up with old friends and acquaintances once more – for which, it should be said, nothing stood in his way – and rely on the help of friends?  Yet this only meant he would be telling him, offending him as much as sparing his feelings, that his attempts at making a life for himself hitherto had failed.  He would be telling him that he should forsake all these efforts and return home, forever and ever to be ogled as a prodigal son who returned without a fortune.  Perhaps this was something only his friends would understand; perhaps he was still just a child who was obligated to follow those successful friends still here at home.  And then was he even certain that all the hurt he was about to inflict upon his friend had some kind of aim?  Perhaps he wouldn't manage to convince him to return – after all, his friend said himself that he no longer understood what was going on at home – and so, despite everything, his friend would stay under foreign skies far away from him, embittered by such suggestions and even more alienated from his friends.  And what if he were to heed Georg's advice and come here – not intentionally, of course, but as a matter of circumstance – feel crestfallen, not be able to get back in with his friends, and without those friends then endure shame?  Now he would have no homeland or friends any more.  Wouldn't it be better for him to stay where he was abroad?  Could one really believe that he would get somewhere if he came back here?

These were the reasons for which Georg couldn't really give him any news; that is to say, in the event Georg wanted to maintain their correspondence.  Were he to do so, he would have to do it without any fear, as if he were reporting to someone he barely knew.  His friend hadn't been home now for more than three years and explained this by referring to the current political instability in Russia, where not even the briefest absence of an unimportant businessman could be tolerated, even as hundreds of thousands of Russians traveled freely throughout the world.  Much had changed for Georg in these last three years.  His mother had died about two years ago, causing Georg to move back in with his father.  His friend had imparted his condolences once he learned of the death, but he had treated the matter very dryly in a letter, which could only be because the mourning associated with such an event was unimaginable when one was so far away.   For a while now Georg, just like everyone else, had been concentrating on his business with great determination.  Perhaps his father had hindered him somewhat in his actual activities when his mother was still alive on account of his father's valuing only his own opinion; perhaps his father had been a bit more reticent since his mother's death, despite the fact that his father was still working in the business; perhaps – and this was, in fact, very probable – felicitous coincidences had played a very important role.  In any case, he had developed his business quite unexpectedly these last two years and had been obligated to double his staff; turnover was up fivefold and more progress was undoubtedly at hand.

But his friend had no inkling of this change in Georg's life.  He had once wanted to persuade Georg to immigrate to Russia, most recently perhaps in the letter in which he sent Georg his condolences, and expatiated upon the prospects that existed for Georg's business branch office in St. Petersburg.  The figures paled in comparison to the breadth which Georg's business had now assumed.  But Georg had no desire to tell his friend of his business success; and had he done so now, after the fact, it would have seemed very odd indeed.   

As a result, Georg confined himself to relating those meaningless incidents that pile up in one's memory when one sits around pensively on a quiet Sunday.  He wanted at all costs to avoid disturbing the impression that his friend had retained of their home city in his long period away, an impression with which his friend had come to terms.  And so it happened that Georg had made three references, in letters quite spread out from one another, to the engagement of an indifferent fellow to an equally indifferent young woman until, quite against Georg's intention, his friend had begun to show an interest in this curious detail.

Yet Georg preferred writing to him about those matters rather than admitting that he himself, about a month ago now, had gotten engaged to Miss Frieda Brandenfeld, a young woman from a prosperous family.  He often spoke to his fiancée about his friend and their strange correspondence.

"Then he won't be coming to our wedding," she said, "and I do have the right to meet all of your friends."   

"I don't want  to bother him," Georg responded.  "Don't get me wrong: he would probably come, at least I think he would come.  But he would feel obliged and hurt; he might even envy me.  And he would certainly feel unhappy and incapable of ever doing away with his unhappiness and going back alone.  Alone, do you know what alone means?"

"Very well, but can't he find out about our wedding by other means?"

"I can't do anything about that, but given his way of life I would say it's unlikely."

"If you have friends like that, Georg, you shouldn't have gotten engaged in the first place."

"Yes, that's both our faults.  But I wouldn't have it any other way."

And then when, breathing heavily under his kisses, she added, "Actually, I'm still bothered by it," he truly understood that it would be harmless to tell his friend everything.

"This is how I am and he has to accept me as I am," he said to himself.  "I couldn't make a person out of me who might be a better friend to him than I am now."  And indeed, he wrote a long letter to his friend that Sunday morning.  He spoke of his engagement to Frieda with the following words: "And I've saved the best news for last.  I have gotten engaged to Miss Frieda Brandenfeld, a young woman from a prosperous family who moved here long after you had left, so you could hardly know her at all.  There will be plenty of time to tell you more about my fiancée; today it is enough to inform you that I am very happy and that the only thing that has changed about our relationship is that instead of a very ordinary friend, you now have a happy friend.  Moreover, in my fiancée, who sends her warmest regards and will soon write to you herself, you will find a real friend, which is no small prize for a bachelor.  I know many things are preventing you from visiting us, but wouldn't my wedding be the right occasion to put these obstacles behind us once and for all?  However you choose, do what is best for you and what you see fit."

With this letter in hand Georg sat for a long time at his desk, his face turned to the window.  An acquaintance who greeted him walking through the street was answered with only an absent smile.

Finally he put the letter in his pocket and crossed out of his room through a small passage into his father's room.  He had not been in there for months.  There had also been no need for him to be there since he had constant interaction with his father in their business.  They would take lunch at the same time in a small eatery, but in the evening each would see to his own meal.  They would still normally sit together when Georg wasn't with his friends or, as was the case lately, with his fiancée – and, as it were, Georg was not with his father that often.  When he was, however, he would spend some time reading his paper, his father next to him with his own paper in their common living room.

Georg was astounded at how dark his father's room was, even now on this sunny morning.  The high walls cast equally long shadows which rose beyond the narrow courtyard.  His father was sitting in a corner by the window.  This corner was decorated with numerous mementos to Georg's deceased mother, and his father sat reading his newspaper which he held sideways in front of his eyes trying to compensate for his poor vision.  The remains of his breakfast were on the table; he didn't seem to have eaten much.

"Ah, Georg!" said his father and came right up to him, his heavy nightgown flapping open at the ends as he walked.  "My father is still a giant," said Georg to himself.  He then added:

"It's really unbearably dark in here."

"Yes, quite dark," his father answered.

"Did you close the window as well?"

"I prefer it that way."

"It's quite warm outside," said Georg, tacking that statement on to his previous remarks, and sat down.

His father cleaned up the dishes from breakfast and put them all on the cupboard.

"Actually, I only came to tell you something," continued Georg as he followed the movements of the old man with a somewhat lost look.  "I have just sent news of my engagement all the way to Petersburg," he pulled the letter ever so slightly out of his pocket and then let it drop back in.

"Why Petersburg?" his father asked.

"Because of my friend there," said Georg and sought out his father's gaze.  "He's so different at work," thought Georg.  "Here he just spreads himself out and crosses his arms over his chest."

"Oh yes, your friend," his father repeated with emphasis.

"You know, father, that I initially wanted to keep my engagement a secret from him.  Out of consideration, and for no other reason.  You yourself know he is a difficult person to deal with.  I said to myself that he might learn of my engagement from other parties, even if that is unlikely given his lonely habits – I can't do anything about that – but he shouldn't learn of it from me."

"And now you've changed your mind?" asked his father, putting down the large newspaper on the window sill and then his glasses atop the newspaper.  He covered his glasses with his hand.

"Yes, now I've thought it through and changed my mind.  If he's a good friend, I said to myself, then my happy engagement also means happiness for him.  And for that reason I could no longer hesitate to make my announcement to him.  Before I sent the letter, however, I just wanted to let you know."

"Georg," said his father and spread his toothless mouth wide.  "Now listen to me.  You came to me so that I could advise you on this matter.  That is doubtless to your credit.  But it is nothing, it is worse than nothing, when you don't tell me the whole truth.  I want nothing to do with things that don't belong here.  Since the death of your dear mother some unpleasant things have taken priority.  Perhaps there will be a time for them as well, and perhaps that time will come sooner than we think.  At work many things escape me, perhaps these things are not being hidden from me – and I won't entertain the assumption that they are being hidden from me – and I am no longer strong enough, my memory is failing me, I no longer have an eye for all those old things.  In the first place, this is the normal course of nature, and in the second place, the death of your mom has hit me much harder than you.  But since we're dealing with the matter right now, with this letter, I beg you, George, don't try to deceive me.  We're talking about a trivial matter, barely worth my breath, but don't try to deceive me.  Do you really have this friend in Petersburg?"

Just Another Love Story

A precise translation of the title of this work would be "Love on film," which may suggest either a documentary featuring a number of amorous mammals or the reason why the term "Scandinavian movie" still makes some Germans blush and giggle.  Its name is odd given its contents, which are brutish, wild, and steeped in the noir tradition, but strange names have not prevented greater works from achieving the recognition they deserve.  As it were, the English re-christening captures the irony and indifference that such a moniker implies, and only elicitable by a rather average protagonist.  And in Jonas (Anders W. Berthelsen) we have our man. 

Jonas lives the bourgeois life but dreams of something brighter and freer.  He has a plain wife, Mette (Charlotte Fich), two rascally children, a mortgage on a modern apartment on this island that he laments, an old and unfaithful car, and two close friends, one relentlessly cynical the other a chuckler.  What distinguishes Jonas from the mediocrity and respectability that harmless bourgeois life entails is his line of work: he spends his time photographing the recently and graphically deceased.  Police photographers do not have the most glamorous of tasks, and one of his friends, Frank, works in forensics staring at corpses night and day.  Frank is single, the son of Slavic immigrants (which might explain his abusive tone when speaking of other such newcomers), and convinced that family life should be a contract drawn up to avoid the flabby loneliness of middle age.  Perhaps Jonas, who dreams of greener pastures, should have taken his cue from Frank and simply had an affair on the side.  Not that such an action would do him any good in the long run, but at least it might have attenuated the attraction to a femme fatale by the name of Julia (Rebecka Hemse).

Julia is not a beautiful woman in any sense of the word.  She hails from a well-heeled half-Swedish family (Hemse herself is Swedish) who indulge her urges to frolic around the world on their dime, and who are thrilled to learn that she has gotten herself engaged to a Dane called Sebastian whom she met while backpacking in Southeast Asia.  But Julia is not quite as thrilled.  The first time we see her, in fact, she has the audacity to endure a bloody and mysterious flashback while driving just as Jonas's car stalls yet again on the freeway.  The result blinds and cripples Julia, as well as renders her amnesiac – although the flashback indicates that she was already having trouble remembering exactly what happened one hot and hopeless day in some place far less luxurious than a Hanoi Hilton.  Being the sappy, sentimental type, Jonas naturally feels responsible for the two-car pileup, especially after his repeated castigation by Mette regarding his decrepit car.  If your wife nags you to near-death, and in that near-death experience you find someone who is strikingly not your wife, is this not kismet?  So as he cradles Julia in his arms waiting for medical assistance she mutters the name Sebastian, at which point Jonas should have gently laid her down on the asphalt and let her die.  He, of course, does nothing of the sort.

What occurs thereafter is patently ridiculous in our conventional view of reality, but quite logical from another angle.  By lying to hospital security for a chance to visit Julia, Jonas – humble, heavy-set Jonas – becomes Sebastian.  Sebastian, the same fiancé whom Julia mentioned to her family; Sebastian, the same fiancé who Frank learns, well-connected to Danish diplomatic missions around the world, was found murdered in Hanoi weeks earlier.  Indeed, a vignette at the very beginning of the film shows a grizzled, thinner man (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and a woman that greatly resembles Julia in some dingy hotel naked, sweaty, and contemplating what they should do with a pistol.  Julia's family quickly embraces Jonas as the Sebastian who just spent nine months loving their daughter, although her rather oblivious father announces his amazement as to how Jonas "is not like Julia's boyfriends, not a rock climber or a drug dealer, but a kind, ordinary fellow," just the Pimpernel they have always sought for their rebellious offspring.  Jonas begins spending more and more time in Julia's room recreating the existence that she cannot recall (a conceit used similarly in this film) until one evening she has had enough chitchat and wants to feel why they loved each other so much in the first place.  Only a few days later Julia whispers to Jonas that she is pregnant, which hitherto was apparently a near-impossibility, prompting Jonas to ask: "Here or in Hanoi?"  The answer he receives, corroborated by an angry physician who accuses him of rape, suggests that something is horribly awry.  And as in all film noir, our hero is already too deeply involved to extricate himself in time.

Hints are generously sprinkled throughout the film as to where this runaway train is heading, and fans of thrillers should have little trouble in deciphering the puzzle.  Nevertheless, a few thoughtful twists make the film more interesting than it should have been, which has always been the hallmark of talent; whether the tale really treats of love, however, depends on your conception of happiness.  In a moment of mantic insight Julia states that she is "terrified of regular meals and rituals" and could not imagine a spouse and two-child home with "friends coming over for dinner at six on Saturdays"; another vignette shows Jonas's life as fitting that description to a tee.  Jonas wants the opposite of all that, which he mistakenly believes to be the blind, disabled woman with a sordid past he holds and kisses in a hospital room he should never have been allowed to enter.  His drifting from Mette is cruel and gradual, but she sniffs it out from the start yet does not try to make herself more desirable because that no longer is an option.  In German the film has yet another title, "Unconditional" (or "Unconditionally"; German is famous for not having distinct adverbial forms), as in the pledge that Jonas as Sebastian makes to Julia and her family, as well as a very different pledge that Julia makes to the real Sebastian.  I suppose it could also refer to the wedding vows that Jonas shatters.  But noir has rarely provided us with any guidelines for good marriages.

Amadeus

I was to be bricked up in fame!  Embalmed in fame!  Buried in fame – but for work I knew to be absolutely worthless!  This was my sentence; I must endure thirty years of being called 'Distinguished' by people incapable of distinguishing! ... And finally – His masterstroke!  When my nose had been rubbed in fame to vomiting – it would all be taken away from me.  Every scrap.

There are two tides in the affairs of men to which we can hardly relate, death and genius.  Death will remain the eternal mystery likewise for fanatic, soulless Darwinists (there are, it should be said, other types), as well as the most pious among the faithful.  Neither one can fully imagine what happens when nothing more happens, even if that nothing should ring for all of time's length.  But genius is a species ever visible both to other geniuses, who will invariably experience pride and kinship, and a lesser grouping that recognizes one sad fact: they themselves are mediocre shades, pale imitations of stars afflicted with enough ability to see what they might have become if their skills had matched their pretensions.  In a lifetime filled with art you will regularly encounter works on uneven pairs bound in envy, but none as famous as this play.

The time is both 1823 and 1783, and the place is Vienna.  Our narrator in bilocation is Antonio Salieri, an Italian composer once a trusted servant of the Habsburg Emperor and a man of one simple aim: to "blaze like a comet over the firmament of Europe."  Salieri is of humble beginnings and pitiable for that very reason; his accomplishments are much more impressive than those of a young man who has always had every opportunity.  When we first meet our grizzled master, he is already a forgotten name, beginning his eighth decade (when most people would have died years before), acerbic, and snacking on the "sweetmeats of Northern Italy" which may symbolize both his pathetic gluttony and the saccharine layers of his compositions.  Salieri is not only the epicenter because we see events filtered through his eyes; his eyes are also representative of our own.  His awkwardness in dealing with a talent so superior to his as to urge him towards suicide smacks of exaggeration until we consider, perhaps with a heavy heart, the many times and many situations in which we have lain beside the green-eyed monster and humored her anxieties.  Iago may be his ancestor, but Iago is prompted by sheer malice, which I am happy to say does not occur in the vast majority of our kind.  He gives his servants a strange order to return early the next morning, ostensibly to shave and feed him, and prepares to spend the entire night awake and alone.  Alone, that is, with his cascading memories of having met and ruined perhaps the greatest artist ever to walk the earth.

Salieri claims some talent, a life of hard work and incommensurate reward, a wrong that can be righted if he were to gain the position of First Royal Kapellmeister – at least, that is his story.  Yet shortly into his opening monologue, another horrific detail comes to light:

Music is God's art.  Already when I was ten a spray of sounded notes would make me dizzy almost to falling!  By twelve, I was stumbling about under the poplar trees humming my arias and anthems to the Lord.  My one desire was to join all the composers who had celebrated His glory through the long Italian past! ... Every Sunday I saw Him in church, painted on the flaking wall.  I don't mean Christ.  The Christs of Lombardy are simpering sillies, with lambkins on their sleeves.  No: I mean an old candle-smoked God in a mulberry robe, staring at the world with dealer's eyes.  Tradesmen had put him up there.  Those eyes made bargains, real and irreversible.

This magnificent passage ensures our sympathy cannot possibly rest with Salieri, because he cannot possibly have in mind a God who wishes beneficence for the world.  And like so many of those resolved to worship the God of Bargains, the clear hues of Salieri's categories begin to bleed.  Our self-designated monk of music will thus begin the second act with a diabolical scheme to "block God in one of His purest manifestations," after having concluded the first act with an indignant discourse to this same Deity on what exactly their bargain was.  And what it consisted of is much less important than the fact that there was one at all.

The beauty of the play's structure is that we know the legend; we know the outcome; we even know the ostensible method of Mozart's demise, and yet we long for the actual interaction between Salieri and the "purest manifestation" of musical talent ever known.  That musical talent is, however, plagued by the bromides that pad lesser minds because what Mozart knows for sure he simply inserts into his music.  He will join and then describe his Masonic lodge, his relationship with his somewhat slutty wife Constanze, his fears about his own mortality, and his distaste for the myths of yore.  Mozart is not portrayed as a modernizer as much as being very modern.  He cusses, he copulates, he lives riotously; at least he does not seem to drink heavily, perhaps because that would be the only vice that could interfere with his work.   His wit is either offensive or mundane ("It is impossible to bore the French – except with real life!"), depending on how motivated he might be to engage those who actually value conversation.  Mozart's disdain for the habits of the world leads him logically to make a few impetuous mistakes, although he does not suspect his downfall until the appearance of a mysterious messenger in a grey mask.

Regrettably, I have never seen Shaffer's play performed, but its premises and covenants lend themselves almost as well to the screen (as realized in spectacular fashion in this masterpiece).  Amadeus will be admired for generations to come as one of the finest dramatic works of the twentieth century and one may imagine its gestures so clearly as if they had always been so.  One courtier compliments Salieri "as if tipping him"; as Salieri is trundled, already an old man, to another awards ceremony, a passer-by comments, "Isn't that one of the generals from Waterloo?"; and we are left to wonder about the real appearance of the visitor in the grey mask who asks Mozart for a hideous favor.  While the hypocorisms and scatology the Mozarts exchange were probably included to exemplify Amadeus's repugnance towards conformist views on music and everything else, they shine with a certain childish authenticity, as if pure genius could only come from a being unaware of his own sins.  Ah, but Salieri knows about sin.  And he knows that the human heart may be inherently good if constantly provoked by the ways of the world.  Only music in its purest form reveals the lining behind the ineluctable modality of the visible, a visible that seems so much more profound and mysterious when accompanied by the melodies of heaven.  And as Salieri himself once wrote, First the music then the words. 

Shut a Final Door

'I was in a bookshop, and a man was standing there and we began talking: a middle-aged man, rather nice, very intelligent.  When I went outside he followed, a little ways behind: I crossed the street, he crossed the street, I walked fast, he walked fast.  This kept up six or seven blocks, and when I finally figured out what was going on I felt tickled, I felt like kidding him on.  So I stopped at the corner and hailed a cab; then I turned around and gave this guy a long, long look, and he came rushing up, all smiles.  And I jumped in the cab, and slammed the door and leaned out the window and laughed out loud: the look on his face, it was awful, it was like Christ.  I can't forget it.  And tell me, Anna, why did I do this crazy thing?  It was like paying back all the people who've ever hurt me, but it was something else, too.'  [Walter] would tell Anna these stories, go home and go to sleep.  His dreams were clear blue.  

"What was the use of having friends," muses the protagonist of this story, "if you couldn't discuss them objectively?"  Perhaps because in so doing you no longer have humans but merely objects, as if you were friends with a lamp or a sunset.  I suppose there are only two ways to get on in the world: on your own strengths or on the backs of others.  I also suppose that the very notion of getting on in the world admits the likelihood that so many struggle, collapse, fail, and die a thousand times before actual corporal extinction.  And those who get on, are they truly happy?  Material wealth can never sustain happiness, because you will inevitably discover someone happier in this same way and because money is always relative, and we are not.  We are absolute beings, related to one another surely and often inexorably, but we are not simply values on a scale to be seen from an indefinite number of perspectives.  In all of us there is something individual and unrepeatable; most souls, sadly, are all too willing to conform because conformity means human relations and acceptance and peace, and also because, we are told, failure is very much a certainty, and "there is always peace in certainties."  But if those who get on do not fail, or do not fail quite as much, what is their destination?   That may be a question for which the upwardly mobile Walter Ranney does not have an answer.

We meet Ranney in the throes of blame, his target a woman called Anna, whom we will encounter much later on.  To Anna he will ultimately attribute "every vice but stupidity" – exactly, we note, what he thinks of himself – yet Anna's "malice" will be one of the last doors slammed in Walter's face.  The first, we learn, may have been in his family as a youth, where his "churchly mother" and a monstrous father conspired to tear him asunder, each attempting an upbringing in his own way (his sister Cecile manages her own escape by marrying "a man forty years her senior," an "excuse" Walter found "reasonable enough").  From this purgatory Walter emerges in New York, where he meets Irving, "a sweet little Jewish boy," and Margaret, who is Irving's girlfriend as far as Irving is concerned.  The problem, of course, is that Irving is indeed concerned, while Walter and Margaret, an uncomely girl redeemed only by a certain "hectic brightness," are not, not at all.  Betrayal taints every fiber of their lecherous shapes, invisible only to Irving, because anyone else would never let his girlfriend spend more than a few polite and distant moments with Walter Ranney.  At length, there is a showdown:

Irving was sitting at the bar, his cheeks quite pink, his eyes rather glazed.  He looked like a little boy playing grown-up, for his legs were too short to reach the stool's footrest; they dangled doll-like.  The instant Margaret recognized him she tried to turn around and walk out, but Walter wouldn't let her.  And anyway, Irving had seen them: never taking his eyes from them, he put down his whiskey, slowly climbed off the stool, and, with a sad, ersatz toughness, strutted forward.    

Irving, you see, is "everyone's little brother," and Walter Ranney would gladly stab his own brother for the opportunity to make something of himself, even if he is not altogether sure what that something might involve.  Margaret in her bright and hectic way sees Walter as a natural in retail sales, perhaps because she intuits that his great strength is making other people believe they need something from him.  As such, she obtains for him an interview with her employer, Kurt Kurnhardt Advertising:  

The K.K.A., so-called, was a middle-sized agency, but, as such things go, very good, the best.  Kurt Kurnhardt, who'd founded it in 1925, was a curious man with a curious reputation: a lean, fastidious German, a bachelor, he lived in an elegant black house on Sutton Place, a house interestingly furnished with, among other things, three Picassos, a superb music box, South Sea Island mask and a burly Danish youngster, the houseboy.  He invited occasionally some one of his staff in to dinner; whoever was favorite at the moment, for he was continually selecting protégés.  It was a dangerous position, these alliances being, as they were, whimsical and uncertain: the protégé found himself checking the want ads when, just the evening previous, he'd dined most enjoyably with his benefactor.  During his second week at the K.K.A., Walter, who had been hired as Margaret's assistant, received a memorandum from Mr. Kuhnhardt asking him to lunch, and this, of course, excited him unspeakably.

Unspeakable actions do ensue, predominantly on Walter's part, but since ours is a story of doors slammed, doors to a father who mocks his child much like Walter teases an admirer in the passage that begins this review, we already understand this to be a tale of comeuppance.  So when he meets Anna, a tall woman who wore "black suits, affected a monocle, a walking cane, and pounds of jingling Mexican silver," we should not be surprised that it is Anna who puts him in his rightful and despicable place (her quip, "you're a man in only one respect, sweetie," precedes a similar line in this famous novel by a few years).  And although Walter has "clear blue" dreams most nights, he will occasionally be subject to a nightmare.  Or a phone call or two –  and we must end our revelations right here. 

Many of his countrymen know Capote only by reputation, not having actually read this magnificent work of genius, but instead absorbed one of its cinematic adaptations (the best of which remains this film).  His wit and impeccable style are an oddity of American literature, which has so valued tales of survival and superation to those which simply explore the artistic dividends of emotional truth.  You will always recognize Capote by his ingenious but hardly conspicuous use of the comma, as well as by the details only visible to a gifted mind: "The look on the boy's face was good for his digestion"; "A small gratifying flurry among the typists preceded him"; "After a pleasant hour of doing nothing but feel exhilarated"; "I love you, he said, running after her, I love you, he said, saying nothing"; "It was as if his brain were made of glass, and all the whiskey he'd drunk had turned into a hammer; he could feel the shattered pieces rattling in his head, distorting focus, falsifying shape"; "A dozen or so people whose names cast a considerable glare in his address book."  Yet the most remembered quote from Shut a Final Door remains its most hackneyed, All our acts are acts of fear, allegedly a last line to a poem, if one that no self-respecting poet would ever have composed.  I personally prefer the very apposite observation that "darlings are rarely serious."  Because that rare and serious darling, if scorned, will learn hate just as fluently as she learned love.