The Opal, and Other Stories
Gustav Meyrink
The Opal (and Other Stories)
Selected and translated from the
German with an Introduction
by Maurice Raraty
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Ardent Soldier
The Brain
Izzi Pizzi
The Violet death
Terror
Petroleum, Petroleum
The Curse of The Toad
The Black Ball
The Preparation
Dr. Lederer
The Opal
The Man in the Bottle
Blamol
The Truth-Drop
Dr Cinderella’s Plants
Saint Gingolph’s Urn
The Ring of Saturn
Automobile
The Waxworks
Fever
What’s the use of white dog shit?
Humming in the Ears
Bal Macabre
Coagulum
The Secret of Hathaway Castle
Chimera
A Suggestion
The Invalid
G.M.
Wetherglobin I
II
Introduction
All the stories translated here are taken from a collection first published under the title Des deutschen Spießers Wunderderhorn in 1913. It is an odd and characteristically barbed title. In the first place it is intended to remind us of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn’), a collection of verses put together by the German Romantic poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano in 1806/8, and so embedded in the popular consciousness as to have become an indispensable part of any sentimental German-speaker’s literary ‘heritage’. In Meyrink’s terms however it also calls to mind by implication the heritage of the ‘Spießer’, that is, the ‘Philistine’, the conventional, correct bourgeois of few literary pretensions, who possesses the book only because it is the proper thing to have in one’s domestic library.
And yet of course the stories he is about to unfold are anything but the proper thing to have in such circumstances, with their withering attacks upon the pillars of order, of upright respectability and authority: the pompous, empty-headed Wilhelminian military officer, the self-important medical man or the bureaucratic government official, in short, all ‘normal’ assumptions about comfortable and civilised living. Instead, he presents an alternative, subversive underworld of mysterious uncertainties, inexplicable by the rational means of post-Enlightement Western thought. It is a world of absurdities, of dreams and nightmares of occult oriental magic, of the horrors that lie beneath the surface, which may be raised through the extension of reality by means of a little imagination.
Meyrink’s style and use of language is similarly suitably allusive, extremely spare, but consequently all the more vivid in the occasional multiplicity of underlying significances and implications. Occasionally (as in Blamol, for instance), he indulges in an extended joke, turning the whole world upside-down into an undersea parody of reality.
Prior to the publication of Des deutschen Spießers Wunder-horn many of these tales had appeared in one or other of three smaller collections: Der heiße Soldat und andere Geschichten (1903); Orchideen, Sonderbare Geschichten (1904), and Das Wachsßgurenkabinett, Sonderbare Geschichten (1907). Even before this however most of these ‘strange stories’ were issued as contributions to the famous satirical weekly SimpUcissimus between October 1901 and July 1908. Der heihe Soldat indeed, the title story of the first collection (translated here, with suitable ambiguity, as The Ardent Soldier), was Meyrink’s very first published work. In keeping with the bizarre nature of some of the stories, it too gave his literary career a curious start, for when it was first received at the offices of SimpUcissimus it was consigned to the wastepaper basket by a sub- editor of the paper, who considered it to be the work of a ‘madman’, and it was only by chance that it was picked out again on the point of his walking stick by the writer Ludwig Thoma, idly rummaging about. He however on reading it recognised it as a work of‘genius’, had it printed, and commissioned more.
The Ardent Soldier, though it is the earliest story to come from Meyrink’s pen, is already written in characteristic style, and contains most of the themes of his subsequent work. All these tales however predate the period of Meyrink’s greatest (but relatively short-lived) fame, generated by the publication of his best-known novel The Golem in 1915.
Meyrink did not set out to be a writer. Born in 1868, he was the illegitimate son of a Viennese actress, Maria Meyer (he changed his name to Meyrink partly on the grounds of a supposed family link to an ancient Bavarian noble line called Meyerinck, but also because he felt he ‘shared the name of Meyer with too many people’) and a Württemberg government minister, the impressively named Gottlob Karl Freiherr Varnbühler von und zu Hemmingen, who generously provided for his son a sum of money in trust that was to enable him in 1889 on attaining his majority to set up as a banker in Prague, in association with the nephew of the poet Christian Morgenstern.
The House of Meyer & Morgenstern was anything but conventional: Meyer, the dandy, with new access to money, determinedly cut a dash with his clothes and his accessories, always in the most modern fashion. He kept white mice and other more exotic pets, by all reports quite deliberately in order to shock and provoke the worthy citizens of Prague. His unorthodox background made him already conscious of his position as an ‘outsider’, beyond the limits of conventional bourgeois society, and he seemed determined to live up to it. By nature essentially an introvert, he countered the tendency by displaying a provocative exterior.
The tension remained, however, and at some point in the ensuing months it culminated in a suicide attempt. Whether it was genuinely intended or not, Meyer was diverted from blowing his brains out – another way to epater le bourgeois perhaps? - by the fortuitous appearance of a publisher’s flyer under his door at the very moment he was raising the pistol. He picked it up, and found an advertisement for a new book ‘On life after death’. This dramatically serendipitous event was sufficient to stir an interest in the occult, and for several years after this he was seriously involved, becoming for instance a founder-member of the Theosophical Society branch in Prague (1891). Such activity is perhaps reflected in a passage from What’s the use of White Dog Shit? Where the narrator remarks in passing that ‘the next thing I did was to immerse myself in the study of the history of secret societies. There can’t be a single fraternity left that I haven’t joined ...’
Meyrink is clearly not incapable of self-irony, for he did indeed join a number of similar organizations, becoming for instance (in 1893) an ‘Arch Censor in the Mandala of the Lord of the Perfect Circle’. Again perhaps this provides an oblique clue to the all-seeing qualities ascribed to the perfect sphere in The Truth-drop. He read deeply in the literature of the occult, taking an interest especially in its Indian and Tibetan connections. The Violet Death, The Opal and The Black Ball each illustrate the mysterious power that he felt underlay such esoteric knowledge. He did however rapidly become disillusioned with the institutions of the occult, even while retaining a belief that enlightenment comes to the individual only through the individual effort of the brain, and he persisted in a belief in the curative powers of yoga, which he practised for many years. Its residual impact on the stories is however ambivalent, and overlaps with the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, with which he also experimented at this time.
Meyrink is for instance fond of representing figures in yoga-like poses and trances:
‘I took up the pose, raised both arms above my head in imitation of the statue, and lowered my fingers until the nails just brushed my scalp …
... I c
annot believe that I could have fallen asleep. Suddenly there seemed to come echoing out from somewhere inside me a sound ...’ (Dr. Cinderella’s Plants).
In this passage it becomes uncertain whether what then follows is an account of a real experience or just a mad vision. Similar behaviour, directed towards some kind of control of the events surrounding the protagonist, can be found for instance in The Ring of Saturn, or in The Man on the Bottle, where there is also a parallel set of contortions/distortions, this time affecting the victim of a cruel punishment.
Alternatively, other stories should rather be read as visions of a drug-fevered mind: Bal Macabre for instance offers the consequences of a bout of mushroom poisoning, while Fever or Rupert’s Drops suggest the more familiar atmosphere of an opium-induced dream. A Suggestion goes further, towards Gogol’s Diary of a Madman perhaps, or even Maupassant’s story of spectral obsession Le Horla, in recounting the stages by which a mind gradually collapses into insanity.
Slightly more conventional science also plays a role in these tales, though it too can be treated with a satirical eye. Meyrink makes fun of popular naiveté in describing the panic induced by an image of a chameleon appearing in the night sky (Dr. Lederer), but on a less surreal level he touches, sometimes quite uncannily, on ideas well ahead of his time. The villain of Petroleum, Petroleum who threatens to suffocate the world by covering the entire surface of the oceans in oil is undoubtedly more believable (and consequently terrifying) now than he was in 1902. The Truth-drop offers an insight into the universe mirrored in a single droplet of liquid: it does not take too much imagination to see a parallel in the invention of television. And The Black Ball presents to the reader familiar with modern cosmological theory a genuinely frightening scenario more real than anything Meyrink could have supposed, in portraying the mystic powers of oriental thought which, allied to the emptiness of certain Western minds, can produce a black hole that can swallow up an entire universe.
He is however not averse occasionally to turning the tables, by demonstrating the superiority of scientific theory to experience, as for instance in The Automobile, where we are treated to a demonstration of why the internal combustion engine cannot possibly work: a theory spectacularly and explosively proved in the denouement of the tale, though there is also something uncanny about the accuracy of the professor’s prediction – or is it just his supreme mathematical ability?
In yet other tales Meyrink offers a more light-hearted and whimsical touch. The Curse of the Toad – curse of the toad with its curious motif of repetition resurrects a very simple, and very old, joke dressed up in mysterious eastern splendour; The Secret of Hathaway Castle has all the trappings of gothic horror to disguise the problem faced by anyone charged with the expense of maintaining a large and decaying property. Similarly, G.M. also presents an elaborate joke, though this one does have the hard edge of satire directed at planning authorities and human greed. The motif of the lure of buried wealth here is a topic which recurs in such stories as Chimera or Coagulum, though the latter also hints at something much more unpleasant than gold that is hidden, as does, a fortiori, the tale of The Urn of St. Clngolph. Buried in another sense, within one’s own head, the secret of Humming in the Ears reveals a common acoustic phenomenon in psychologically disturbing terms.
The interest in oriental occultism when allied to a particular aspect of medical science gives rise to some of the most vividly disturbing of all Meyrink’s stories, in which the malign and mysterious figure of Dr Mohammed Daryashkoh repeatedly reappears. The Brain, Dr Cinderella’s Plants, The Waxworks and The Preparation are all morbidly obsessed with the scientific possibilities inherent in anatomical deconstruction, and the horrific preservation of the vital functions of mere parts of humans. Meyrink is fascinated by the opportunities presented by a post-Frankenstein world, and the darker aspects of medical practice are thus revealed.
On a more down-to-earth level, he can flirt with eroticism (Bal Macabre, Izzi Pizzi, Blamol) to uncover a seamier side of the world that ‘respectable’ society prefers not to acknowledge, and he does not miss any opportunity to attack the smug, browbeating and blinkered complacency of established doctrines, especially within the medical profession, as for instance The Brain reveals, where the eminent medical Professor ignores the most dramatic event of the tale which leads to the death of Martin Schleiden, because he is so anxious to stress the failure of the victim to follow his instructions. Schleiden has just died of shock at seeing a brain spill out from a plaster head dropped by a man carrying it in the street. Meyrink’s implied suggestion is that the brain is somehow mysteriously connected with Schleiden’s own displaced consciousness, in consequence of a disagreeable experience he had at the hands of some witch-doctors in the Sudan. But all the professor can say, brushing such ideas aside – or rather, not contemplating them at all – is that ‘you are asking me about irrelevances which I have neither the time nor the leisure to pursue ... I have in the most explicit terms prescribed to your brother a total abstention from any kind of excitement. This was a Medical Prescription! Your brother was the one who chose not to follow that advice.’ A similar attitude is taken in The ardent Soldier where in the face of an 80 degree fever the possible involvement of an Indian medicament as the cause is dismissed as ‘irrelevant’, and a nonsensical explanation in pseudo-medical jargon is offered, which is supposed to pacify the curiosity of the ignorant public.
The particular quality of bile reserved for doctors in these stories, matched only by Meyrink’s hatred of the military, and especially of its officer corps, can in part be accounted for by reference to further episodes in the life of this, in the view of the upright citizenry of Prague, highly unorthodox banker.
In 1900 he suffered a kind of paralytic trauma, identified by his doctors as tuberculosis of the spine. Conventional treatment having little effect (The Invalid perhaps reminds us of this experience), Meyrink was convinced that his yogic exercises were more beneficial than any medication, and came to believe in due course that they had indeed cured the condition. It is not surprising then to find that the sea-lily in Blamol similarly suffers paralysis on eating a ‘Blamol’ pill, and that the pompous cuttlefish doctor should assert, without a trace of irony, that ‘Blamol works, like all such agents, not when you take it, but only when you spit it out.’ The title of the story is, incidentally, almost certainly a pun on ‘Darmol’, a popular patent digestive remedy of the time.
Meyrink’s high-profile and eccentric behaviour, his illegitimate origin and an irregular liaison with the woman who was to become his second wife (in 1905) while his first wife (whom he married in 1893) refused to divorce him, all contributed towards a latent conflict with a bourgeois society expecting a different set of principles from a banker, and this culminated in 1901 in Meyrink learning that while he had been ill, he had been gravely insulted by an Army Reserve officer (and a medical man to boot) Dr Hermann Bauer. Meyrink demanded satisfaction in a duel. This was refused, on the grounds of his known illegitimacy. To have accepted his challenge, and thus to treat him as an equal, honourable and worthy opponent would apparently have damaged Dr Bauer’s military honour. The ending of Coag-utum amply illustrates Meyrink’s feelings on that score.
Others took advantage of his weak position at this time too, accusing him of irregular banking practices. The outcome of it all was a period of imprisonment from January to April 1902 (an experience of which the story Tenor is perhaps a reflection) while the case was investigated, only to be dropped when the principal witness vanished on realising that his accusation was about to be shown to be worthless. The damage was however by then done: as a banker Meyrink was ruined, and he was obliged to turn elsewhere. The Simplicissimus satires over the next seven years were the result.
The impact of these stories was immense. They certainly contributed to an increase of some 500% in the circulation of Simplicissimus over the period in which they appeared. But they were strong meat for some, and with the advent of the First World Wa
r their open satire, especially of military ideas, attitudes and competence, and their depiction of the officer class in particular as empty-headed strutting peacocks (The Black Ball) driven by blind nationalism (’Wetherglobin) became unacceptable to established representatives of authority.
In 1916 the collected volume of 52 stories in all was banned in Austria, and especially after (and perhaps because of) the huge increase in his popularity following the publication of The Golem in 1915, which put him among the most famous of living German authors, Meyrink became more and more the focus for nationalist attacks, which used him as a scapegoat for the lack of progress in the War, impugned his patriotism, accused him of ungentlemanliness and lacking in decent manners (The Ring of Saturn was pilloried as an insult to German womanhood), and drew attention to his supposed Jewishness – his actress mother Maria Meyer being wilfully or otherwise confused with a Jewish actress Clara Meyer. One critic (Bartels) remarked sarcastically that Meyrink might well deny being a Jew, but his literary character and style were still typical of one. The very success of The Golem, albeit shortlived, which was at least partly to be ascribed to nothing more than astute publicity and advertising, but whose content also chimed in with the mood of 1917, a prevalent desire to escape from the present horror into a perceived fictional occult horror, contributed to his vilification as unpatriotic and decadent. It is notable that Meyrink’s Collected Works of 1917 in fact omit five of the stories that had appeared in the edition of 1913.
The attacks on Meyrink were fundamentally directed at the satirist, but by now he had moved on, withdrawing from the public eye and concentrating more and more on the esoteric and the occult. He died in 1932, but by then he was a nearly forgotten figure. The Third Reich would of course have no time for him, and it is only in a more recent and sympathetic age that his work has begun to resurface.___________________________________________________________