The White Dominican Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title

  The Translator

  Introduction

  The White Dominican

  Gustav Meyrink The White Dominican

  Chapter 1 Christopher Dovecote’s First Revelation

  Chapter 2 The Mutschelknaus Family

  Chapter 3 The Nightwalk

  Chapter 4 Ophelia

  Chapter 5 The Midnight Talk

  Chapter 6 Ophelia

  Chapter 7 The Cinnabar Book

  Chapter 8 Ophelia

  Chapter 9 Solitude

  Chapter 10 The Garden Seat

  Chapter 11 The Head of the Medusa

  Chapter 12 He Must Increase, but I Must Decrease

  Chapter 13 Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy

  Chapter 14 The Resurrection of the Sword

  Chapter 15 The Shirt of Nessus

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  The Translator

  For many years an academic with a special interest in Austrian literature and culture, Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995. He is one of Dedalus’s editorial directors and is responsible for the Dedalus translation programme.

  He has published over fifty translations from German and French, including Gustav Meyrink’s five novels and The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy. His translation of Rosendorfer’s Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of Stephanie by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink.

  His translations have been shortlisted three times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize: Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen in 1999, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin in 2000 and The Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach in 2008.

  His website can be visited at homepages.phonecoop.coop/mjmitchell

  INTRODUCTION

  Gustav Meyrink, it is possible to think, lived a life that was more like a dream than any of the stories he wrote. He was a bastard, a banker, an inventor, a fin-de-siècle flaneur, a jailbird, a guru who flyted his disciples, a pacifist in love with apocalypse, a magus who condemned the halitosic prattle of occultism. Each stage of his life had the saturated gluey intensity of dream; and the life as a whole seemed spatchcocked out of legend and sleep, a congeries of psychopomp blurbs. He was an Arcimboldi Green Man: rags and patches of life-stuff; granny-knots of circumstance unravelling at a jerk as the century downturned into disaster; a foliate head. The stories he wrote seemed to exfoliate from the life.

  He was born Gustav Meyer, in Vienna. His mother was an actress and his father an elderly aristocrat with a position in government. Grotesquely maladroit parent-figures appear and reappear throughout the fiction, most notably perhaps as the crone-courtesan and floundering ectomorph nobleman whose ultimate reconciliation transfigures his third novel, Walpurgisnacht (1917; translated by Mike Mitchell for Dedalus in 1993).

  He moved to Prague as a young man and became a banker, an athlete, a philanderer, a fencer, and the owner of that city’s first automobile. Much of the carnival night life hinted at in Walpurgisnacht, and treated in detail throughout his second novel, Das grune Gesicht (1916; translated by Mike Mitchell for Dedalus in 1992 as The Green Face), seems to make nineteenth century Prague visible in a crazy mirror, as topsy-turvy as the new century boded to become.

  His first marriage ended badly. He remarried under circumstances which seemed scandalous to the Prague world he mocked, and which occasioned vicious gossip. He challenged one of his new wife’s slanderers to a duel, but the challenge was declined on the grounds that, as a bastard, he was inherently incapable of receiving satisfaction. At about the same time, in 1902, he was arrested and imprisoned for three months, on charges of fraud. He was exonerated, but on his release was discovered to have tuberculosis of the spine. He was also destitute. His life as a banker Harlequin had terminated as though he had walked a plank, into a new medium. His first novel, Der Golem (1915; translated by Madge Pemberton in 1928 as The Golem; a new translation by Mike Mitchell will appear from Dedalus in the spring of 1995), is structured around visions of unbearable parents, occult amnesia, the false polder of the soon-to-be-demolished ghetto, a supernatural doppelganger who evokes a lacerating sehnsucht in the blanked protagonist, surreal interrogations and false imprisonment in a Prague like Kafka’s, and an invisible new life told through a frame story which opens opaque hints of that new life whose details the novel cannot presume to depict.

  But before Gustav Meyer’s first life ended, he had begun the life for which he is now remembered. His first story, which was written under the name Meyrink, appeared in the magazine Simplicissimus in 1901, and within a few years he had become a central figure in pre-War German literature, a literature whose proleptic convulsiveness and rightness about the world to come it is difficult now, nearly a hundred years on, to comprehend. In 1994 it is difficult, and humbling, to realize that they were saying as much as we can about the heartbeat of the century; it is at times almost impossible not to feel that the apocalyptic insights we detect are simply, in fact, endogenous fevers of Expressionism: that we are patching 1910 metaphors into our knowledge of subsequent history, shaving them to fit. This indeed must surely happen: it must surely be the case that we do read them selectively, and that the writers and artists and composers and scholars and thinkers and architects of 1910 could not know that they were right, that the clock of history (as they intimated) had begun to stutter, setting off all the alarms at once. In the end, however, it may not altogether matter if they knew they were right. In the end, perhaps, it is more important for us to realize that – in their dreams and paranoias and dread – they saw us here.

  For English readers, it is not yet possible to know how fully Meyrink’s earliest fiction engaged with the first years of turmoil, as he only began publishing his novels after World War One had already started. His initial reputation on the Continent came from the large number of short stories he published before The Golem first appeared, and which were collected in several volumes: Der heisse Soldat and andere Geschichten [“The Hot Soldier and Other Stories”] (1903); Orchideen: Sonderbare Geschichten [“Orchids: Strange Stories”] (1904); Das Wachsfigurenkabinett: Sonderbare Geschichten [“The Wax Museum: Strange Stories”] (1907); Des deutschen Spiessers Wunderhorn [“The German Philistine’s Magic Horn”] (1913), the last being a three-volume omnibus incorporating old and new material; and Fledermase [“Bats”] (1916). E F Bleiler’s Guide to Supernatural Fiction (1983) lists only one short story by Meyrink in English. The Golden Bomb: Phantastic German Expressionist Stories (1993) ed Malcolm Green includes a different one; and The Dedalus/Ariadne Book of Austrian Fantasy: The Meyrink Years, 1890-1930 (1992) ed Mike Mitchell includes five: which is a significant start, but one which shows the largeness of the vista that can be further unveiled now with The Opal (and other stories) collection of Meyrink stories translated by Maurice Raraty (Dedalus 1994).

  On the whole, we are left with a fever of belatedness, through which the past makes the present (and the future) dance to dead tunes. The Golem is meant to be taking place around 1890, but scumbles chronology so thoroughly that the reader will find it hard to avoid conflating the destruction of the ghetto with larger devastations, or the mephitic arousals of psyche emblematized by the golem itself with more widespread (and far more vicious) hysterias. The Green Face, which was being drafted as World War One began, is ostensibly set in the future, after the end of hostilities, but the outcome and aftermath of the war are viewed, by an act of occultish legerdemain, through the lens of an ashen retrospect: the labyrinth of the trenches, like some rebirthing of Cthulhu; the end-of-the-world perspectives granted by No Man’s Land; the taste of a wo
rld-order exhausted, of the dithering puniness of secular man sifting the ruins for loot. It is astonishing that the book reached publication in the midst of a total war which was being lost. Like Walpurgisnacht, which also appeared before 1918, but far more explicitly, The Green Face treats the War to End War as a Saturnalia, a danse macabre which ends in Wind: in an apocalyptic harrowing of Europe, obliterating the false face of the material world.

  Beneath that face (it is a turn of vision fundamental to occult dualism, and it appears in all Meyrink’s work) can be discerned a higher, spiritual world of true effect and cause, which can now be celebrated in a chymical marriage between the scoured protagonist (all his protagonists have been deeply wounded by the harlequinade of appearance) and his dead love (Meyrink females, if they are worthy, are almost certain to be dead).

  It may all come down to his actress mother, who abandoned him in early childhood; but it may, as well, have something to do with the fancy-step metamorphosizing almost any European writer of Meyrink’s period engaged in whenever the Female Principle was to be distinguished from the Female Body. Whatever the cause, it cannot be denied that throughout his career Meyrink’s female characters, with the exception of an occasional nurturing crone from the lower orders, occupy only two categories: either they are avatars of Medusa, whose wormy sexuality turns men into stone, imprisoning them in the maya of existence; or they are Beatrice and – having died well before the end of the novel – await their husband-to-be’s union with them in a higher world. Modern readers (of whom half may be presumed to be women) may understandably find this aspect of the male dualist imagination both distasteful and inutile; but it is an inescapable component of Meyrink’s world-view from beginning to end.

  In each of the first three novels, a transfiguring chymical marriage climaxes the personal story, though in each of these books the jettisoning of the material world is achieved with a panoramic glitter. After the end of World War One, however, Meyrink discarded the contemporary world, and his late work radically disengages from that Europe of aftermath he had so prophetically limned; there are no more prophetic spasms to remind us now, at the end of the millennium, that our visions of doom are epigonic. At the same time, however, he did continue to adhere to the occult dualisms to which (like William Butler Yeats) he seemed to give credence, and which shaped and fortified his work, though at the same time he never lost his marbles: whenever he was confronted with fraudulence or Golden Dawn vaporizings, he proved to be a savage debunker. But dualism in the hands of any male European writer born in the last century is almost invariably fatal to the female of the species, and it does remain the case that the modern reader may have trouble with some of the more didactic passages of his fourth novel, Der weisse Dominikaner (1921), now translated for Dedalus as The White Dominican by Mike Mitchell, in a style which admirably captures Meyrink’s sly swift eloquence. There can be no doubt whatsoever that the ongoing Medusa/Beatrice dualism – even when it is toned down by the fact that the only whorish female in the book is far too old to entrap the protagonist – will be hard for most contemporary readers to swallow. What remains?

  In the event, a great deal. What The White Dominican loses in being the first fruit of Meyrink’s chastened post-catastrophe imagination, it gains in supernal equipoise, in an oneiric serenity which tugs very hard at the roots in dream of our own responses to the allure of Story. We begin with a frame: the author of the tale, who seems to be Meyrink himself, tells the reader that he has never found out for sure whether or not the protagonist of the story “ever actually lived; he certainly did not spring from my imagination, of that I remain convinced.” This protagonist, it turns out, has mysteriously caused Meyrink to call him by his proper, heavily symbolic name, Christopher Dovecote, a name Meyrink claims to be unconscious of having used when drafting his novel; and we are cast immediately into a Tale whose material embodiment (the words we read, the paper we touch) is itself a lesson imparted. To understand the Tale we must understand that the words we read are nothing but echoes, caught in the Medusa dust of corporeality. “Being born on earth is nothing other than being buried alive.” The true Tale will be what we rise to learn.

  We enter the main story, which is told in the first person by Dovecote himself. He is an orphan, abandoned as an infant on the steps of the local church, but soon is adopted by the dominant figure in the town, Baron Bartholomew von Jöcher, Freeman and Honorary Lamplighter. The town itself is never named. It lies downstream from the capital of the country, which is not named either. Only Paris – which is also the name of the fraudulent impresario who is the real father of the Beatrice figure we are soon to meet – can be recognized as a place inhabiting mortal history. The river comes north from the capital, almost completely encircles the town, and departs south-ward; on the neck of land separating the river flowing north and the river flowing south is the Baron’s house, which has been occupied by his family for something like thirteen generations. Each new generation of von Jöchers abandons the floor occupied by its predecessor, and moves upwards within the house, which must therefore, like so many labyrinth-portals to other worlds, be bigger inside than out. The town itself – empoldered by the river and guarded by the house whose occupants are themselves Guardians of (and Aspirants to) the Threshold to the upper levels – seems utterly secure.

  Within this polder, at the top of this ladder of generations of Guardians, Christopher grows up. He finds he is the Baron’s true son. He falls in love with the girl who lives in the house next to his. Her name is Ophelia. She too has difficulties in relating her nature to her corporeal parentage: her ostensible father, the town’s coffin-maker and a man mentally damaged from the time his own father buried him alive in a coffin as a punishment, is not her father at all. Her true father, the reprehensible impresario Paris with his camp aristocratic mien, and her mother, the failed whorish actress, connive in repression and bad faith. But she transcends her corporeal bondage, she returns Christopher’s love, and – as any reader experienced in Meyrink will know from the fact of that love for the protagonist, and from her name – she soon dies, voluntarily. But by then Christopher has undergone night journeys into occult realms; he has been told that he is destined to become transfigured, to rise from the top of the Tree of the Lamplighter family into true reality; and he treats her death as a confirmation of betrothal.

  To this point, in The White Dominican, we have been gifted with scenes of epiphanic calm which alternate with “real-world” episodes of Dickensian splendour (Meyrink translated Dickens earlier in his career) whenever the lovable, duped coffin-maker comes into view. From this point onwards, in passages that shift levels of import as do dreams, we are invited to follow Christopher into his inheritance. Some of the terms of that invitation are couched with a didactic precision some readers may find distressingly liturgical, because Christopher’s ascension is that of a magus, cloaked in arcana; but the flow of the ascent is irresistible.

  And the visitations of the Medusa, the corporeal world, in false likenesses of the dead Ophelia, have a power that easily transcends the doctrinaire sexual Manicheeanism through which Meyrink articulates his vision of “the impersonal force of all evil, using the mute forces of nature to conjure up miracles which in reality are only hellish phantasms serving the ends of the spirit of negation.” But “the head of Medusa, that symbol of the petrifying force that sucks us down,” has no final sway, and the chymical marriage will ultimately be consummated, in some realm the pages of the book cannot reach. So be it.

  We may baulk at some of the terms in which it is put. But it is his final word. After this novel came only the alchemical tales published as Goldmachergeschichten [“Tales of the Alchemists”] (1925) and the intermittently brilliant Der Engel Vom Westlichen Fenster (1927); translated by Mike Mitchell for Dedalus in 1991 as The Angel of the West Window], about Doctor Dee; neither book coins a new metaphor to replace the Medusa. It seems clear that for the Meyrink of the post-War years, the image of the Medusa was definitive. The
Medusa, it is possible to think, was nothing less than the entirety of the world which opened its maw to sensitive men and women in 1914. The Medusa, whose image he unforgettably presented to his readers, stares upon us through every newsreel the century has disgorged. It is the tetanus which fixes us upon the wheel of time. It is surely not Gustav Meyrink’s fault that, for most of us, there will be no chymical marriage.

  John Clute

  The White Dominican

  GUSTAV MEYRINK THE WHITE DOMINICAN

  From the Diary of an Invisible Man

  Preface

  “X or Y has written a novel.” What does that mean?

  It is quite simple: he has used his imagination to portray people who do not really exist, has invented experiences for them and woven it all together. In broad terms that, or something like it, is the general opinion.

  Everyone assumes they know what imagination is, but there are very few who are aware of the remarkable forms of imaginative power that exist.

  What is one to say when one’s hand, usually such a willing tool of the mind, suddenly refuses to write the name of the hero of the story one has thought up, and insists on choosing a different one instead? Is it not enough to make one pause and ask oneself, “Am I really the one who is ‘creating’ this work, or is my imagination merely some kind of receiver for supernatural communications? Something like what is called, in the sphere of wireless telegraphy, an aerial?”

  There have been cases of people getting up in their sleep at night and completing pieces of writing, which, tired from the day’s toil, they had left unfinished, and finding better solutions than they would probably have been capable of when awake. People tend to explain such things by saying it was done by their subconscious, which is usually asleep.