The Angel of the West Window Read online

  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 biography of Gustav Meyrink: Vivo: The Life of Gustav Meyrink was published by Dedalus in November 2008.

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

  CONTENTS

  Title

  The Translator

  Introduction

  My New Novel

  The Angel of the West Window

  Assja Shotokalungin

  Private Diary

  The First Vision

  The Second Vision

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Gustav Meyrink (1868-1932) came relatively late to literature. He began his first story in a sanatorium, where he was convalescing from tuberculosis, in 1901. It was published that year in the famous satirical magazine, Simplicissimus, and was the first of many short stories in which he combined fantasy and humour with biting satire of the complacency of the pre-war bourgeoisie. His first – and best-known – novel, Der Golem, appeared in a magazine in 1913; in its book form published in 1915 it was an immediate success. Three more novels followed in the next few years: Das grüne Gesicht (The Green Face) 1916, Walpurgisnacht 1917 and Der Weiße Dominikaner (The White Dominican) 1921. In the 1920s he largely abandoned his own creative work to edit mystical and occult writings, an activity which was the product of his profound personal interest in the occult. Like his hero, John Dee, Meyrink in his own life experienced the suspicions and rumours which preoccupation with the occult engenders; indeed, he may well have encouraged them in his early years. During the war he was attacked both by the pen and by stones thrown at his house, though these attacks were probably directed more at his satire than at his occult tendencies. Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster was his last novel and appeared in 1927 when he was already beginning to be plagued by both health and financial problems. It, too, derives from his studies of the occult and is his longest and most complex work.

  It is said that Meyrink’s first story was thrown into the waste paper basket at the Simplicissimus offices, whence it was retrieved by the editor, Ludwig Thoma. This is probably a legend, but so many of the real facts of Meyrink’s own life were fantastic that he is the type of person around whom legends gather. He was born in Vienna, the illegitimate son of an actress, Maria Meyer, and an aristocrat in the service of the King of Württemberg, Karl Freiherr von Varnbüler. Later rumours that he had royal blood in his veins were not discouraged by Meyrink. (Meyrink was originally a pseudonym; in 1917 he adopted it as his real name.)

  Although the difference in status made a marriage out of the question, his father paid for his education. Most of his schooling took place in Munich but was completed in Prague, where his mother had moved in 1883. In the twenty-three years he lived there, until he moved to Bavaria in 1906, he became a well-known figure, above all as a dandy and man-about-town capable of outrageous behaviour. He followed the principle of épater le bourgeois in practice long before it became the dominant tone of his writing. Although he only settled in Prague as an adult, the city and, above all, the atmosphere of mystery about its old streets was a determining factor behind his writing, even after he had moved away. Meyrink was probably the author who more than any other created the romantic image of Prague which played an important role in the German literature and cinema of the first decades of this century. (Others were the young Rilke and Kafka, with whom this image of Prague is now mostly associated.)

  In 1889 he founded a bank (was it mere chance that his partner was the nephew of the German poet, Christian Morgenstern, who mingled nonsense humour with mysticism?). He married in 1892 but later had an affair with Philomena Bernt, whom he eventually married (in Dover, a kind of continental Gretna) after he had finally managed to get a divorce in 1905. This affair caused one of the many scandals he was involved in. Meyrink challenged two officers to a duel but they, afraid of his reputation as an outstanding swordsman, refused on the grounds that he was illegitimate and therefore not satisfaktionsfähig, whereupon Meyrink challenged the whole officers’ corps. In the same year, 1902, came the events that led to the ruin of his business. Meyrink was accused, by an official he had attacked in the press, of using spiritualism to influence his clients, especially female ones. He spent almost three months in goal before his name was cleared, by which time the bank had collapsed. His blossoming career as a writer was an important source of income, though he did find other work at times, most congenially, perhaps, as a representative for a champagne producer.

  Meyrink’s interest in the occult was aroused by another of those incidents which are almost too good to be true and in which his life was so rich. In 1891 he suffered a nervous breakdown; his decision to commit suicide was overturned by an occultist leaflet which was pushed under his door. Whether this is fact or part of the self-created legend, what is certainly true is that from that time onward he showed an active interest in all aspects of the occult. Some of that interest was scientific and scholarly: he exposed tricksters and false mediums, carried out alchemical experiments and published critical editions of mystical texts. But he was also interested in mysticism as a practical art and as a counter to the prevailing materialism and positivism. He took hallucinatory drugs, practised yoga and studied Eastern philosophy. In the same year as the publication of his final novel he became a Buddhist.

  *

  The Angel of the West Window is a fictional summation of Meyrink’s preoccupation with the occult, but not in any simple, direct way. The reader should not look to it for a message, for, say, Meyrink’s final distillation of the wisdom of the mystics. Many of the theories and ideas he would have come across in his researches are there, it is true. But none is presented as the sole key to knowledge. They all contribute to his portrayal of the search which is all we can know of the ultimate goal. Through the fictional world he has created, Meyrink is trying to convey to the reader the sense of a reality where, as one commentator puts it, “everything is different from outward appearances, but only the outward appearances are accessible” (Marianne Wünsch). It is a comment that is also frequently made about the world of Meyrink’s contemporary, Franz Kafka.

  The two main characters of The Angel of the West Window, the historical figure from the age of Queen Elizabeth, John Dee, and his fictional modern descendant, the narrator, both pursue a tightrope course between normally distinct categories which merge and separate in varying constellations. Male and female, for example, are on one level distinct: the symbol of the male blood line of the Dees is the suitably phallic spear of Hywel Dda, whilst at the end Jane “takes the woman’s road of sacrifice”; and in the transcendental sphere where the novel ends there are separate male and female realms. On another level, however, they intermingle: the narrator’s mystical marriage with “Elisabeth” is a union with the female element dormant w
ithin himself which produces the self-enclosed whole which has echoes of both incest and hermaphroditism; “the Queen is within me, I am within the Queen: child, husband and father from the very beginning. ... Woman no more! Man no more!” This ambiguity – in which opposites can be distinct and at the same time merge, can be external to the hero and at the same time are situated within him – appears in the theme of sex which is an undercurrent running through much of the novel. The woman who is the eternal temptress of man appears in different guises with different names which are all variants of the same basic form: Isaïs, Sissy, Assja. Jane/Johanna appears to be a counter-figure embodying self-sacrificing love. But it is the erotic that attracts Kelley to Johanna, and when the narrator calls on Jane his cry is intercepted by Assja because, Lipotin tells him, ‘Jane’ represents his “vital erotic energy”. The distinctions are further blurred by the fact that ‘love’ and ‘hate’ are also closely related; the succubus, Assja, feeds on the hatred that the narrator thinks will protect him from her. He succumbs to the succubus and yet is saved. In another reversal of expectation, what looks like the road to destruction turns out to be a detour that leads to his goal.

  The conclusion is not explicable in neatly rational terms, in terms of good v. evil and the ultimate triumph of the former confirming a one-dimensional moral universe. Rather, Meyrink’s universe is multi-layered and different ‘worlds’ exist alongside, interlinked with, each other. The hero’s triumph is not that he overcomes evil, but that he recognises himself and fulfils his destiny within his own allotted sphere. Instead of being “erased from the Book of Life”, which was the threat posed by Isaïs, the entelechy that is both the narrator and John Dee becomes a link in the great chain of being.

  *

  If Meyrink’s own life was full of fantastic episodes, then this was even more the case with the person he chose as the central figure of his last novel: the life of John Dee was so remarkable that Meyrink had to invent little. John Dee was one of the outstanding scholars of the Elizabethan age, especially in the field of mathematics and related disciplines. Meyrink even makes him less of a prodigy than he was: born in 1527, he went up to Cambridge in 1542 and in 1550 was lecturing to the assembled scholars of the Sorbonne on geometry and was offered a permanent post there. At that time the occult and the natural sciences were not as rigidly separated as today. Dee was an astrologer and hermeticist and gradually became more and more involved in alchemy and crystallomancy. He fell under the influence of an obviously very plausible rogue called Kelley, travelled the continent looking for noble and regal patrons – they included Count Lasky, the Emperor Rudolf, the King of Poland and Count Rosenberg – and finally returned to England where he died in poverty in 1608.

  Beside his scientific works, Dee published a self-justificatory pamphlet which included a biography; he also kept minutes of the séances (which he called “actions”) in which he called up various spirits. Meyrink has used a wealth of this material, from the main events of Dee’s life down to minute details. Thus the historical Dee was imprisoned by Bishop Bonner (on suspicion of using magic to assassinate Queen Mary – in the novel Dee is imprisoned under King Edward); in prison he shared a cell with a certain “Barthlett Grene” whom Meyrink builds up into an important character. The first protestant martyr under Mary was John Rogers – is that where Meyrink took the name for the narrator’s cousin?. Dee briefly mentions a “Moschovite” he encountered – whom Meyrink turns into the figure of Mascee. The biography also briefly mentions someone called Gardner who “declared to me a certayn great philosophicall secret of a spirituall creature”; in the séance minutes one of the many mysterious statements from the spirits is “The Tree is sprung of a graft” and another, “He that is before is a Gardener”. From this kind of material Meyrink builds up the mysterious figure of Gärtner/Gardner, the imagery of the rose-trees and grafting and the whole mystic brotherhood into which the hero is taken up after his death. The real Kelley had had his ears cut off (for counterfeiting) before he met Dee, he was knighted by the Emperor Rudolf and he did die when he fell while attempting to escape from prison. He did also lust after Dee’s young (second) wife, but the details of that episode are stranger than Meyrink’s version: Kelley transmitted (invented?) orders from the Angel that they were to have all things in common, including their wives (Kelley was also married). When Dee demurred, he refused to take part in any more séances and left. After a while he returned and Dee had become so desperate for Kelley’s clairvoyant skills that he agreed to the wife-swapping arrangement; they even drew up a contract for a mariage à quatre which Meric Casaubon included in his edition of Dee’s records of his séances, A True and Faithful Relation of What passed for many Yeers Between Dr John Dee ... and Some Spirits published in 1659.

  *

  In The Angel of the West Window there is a great difference between those parts of Dee’s life that take place in England and those that are set in Prague. The Castle of Mortlake could be a castle anywhere, it is merely the indistinct background to Dee’s experiments in alchemy and spirit-raising. Prague, on the other hand, is so vivid – both visually and in atmosphere – that is it almost a protagonist in the story. The castles of Hradcany and Karlštejn have a physical presence lacking in any of the English settings, a presence as powerful and as brooding as anything in Der Golem. The same is true of the two monarchs: both have an incalculable capriciousness, both rule in an atmosphere of suspicion, but whilst we see this in Elizabeth merely through Dee’s complaints about the way he is treated, in Rudolf it is there in the detailed physical description (including the famous Habsburg lip) and the repeated image of the bird of prey. Even today one can follow Dee and Kelley round those of the streets of old Prague that still survive, along the Street of the Alchemists, say, or through the Old Town Square. The Ghetto, where he goes to visit Rabbi Löw (who is also one of the main figures in Der Golem) has disappeared, but lives on in the imagination through its recreation by writers such as Meyrink. In spite of the figure of John Dee, The Angel of the West Window belongs to Prague, not to Prague the Czech capital. but to that Prague of the mind where the “other” world seems to make its presence tangible and in the creation of which Meyrink’s stories and novels played the most important role.

  My New Novel

  Sir John Dee of Gladhill! A name that few people will ever have heard of! It was about 25 years ago that I first read the story of his life – a life so adventurous, so fantastic, so moving and terrible that I have never found anything to compare with it. The account so etched itself on my soul that as a romantic young man I used to wander up to the Street of the Alchemists on the castle hill in Prague and daydream of John Dee coming out of one of the dilapidated doors of the crooked little houses and speaking to me of the mysteries of alchemy; not of the alchemy by which man seeks to solve the riddle of how to make gold from base metals, but of the occult art by which he strives to transform himself from mortal clay into a being that will never lose its self-awareness. There were months on end when the figure of John Dee seemed to have been purged from my memory, but then, often in dreams, it would reappear, distinct, clear and ineradicable. These dreams were rare but regular, not unlike the 29 February in a leap year that you have to imagine composed of four separate quarters before you can call it a whole day. We are all the slaves of our ideas, not their creators, and later, when I became a writer, I knew for certain that John Dee would not leave me in peace until I had resolved to record his life-story in a novel. It is now two years since I made the “resolve” to start the novel. But whenever I sat down at my desk I would hear an inner voice mocking me, “You’re going to write a historical novel?! Don’t you realise that all historical material gives off the stench of the grave, a sickening smell of mouldy feathers with nothing of the freshness of the living present?!”

  But as often as I decided to give up the plan, “John Dee” would call me back to the work, however much I tried to resist. Finally I solved the problem by hitting on the idea of inte
rweaving the story of a living, contemporary figure with that of the “dead” John Dee, of making the work a double novel, so to speak. – – Am I that living, contemporary figure? The answer could be yes or no. They say an artist painting a portrait always involuntarily puts something of his own face into the picture. It is probably the same with writers.

  Who was John Dee? That is what the book is about. Suffice it to say he was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth of England. He advised her to make Greenland – and North America – subject to the English crown. The plan had been approved, the military were waiting for orders, but at the last minute the capricious Queen changed her mind. The map of the world would look different today if she had followed Dee’s advice! At the failure of the plan on which he had set his whole life, Dee decided to conquer a different country from the terrestrial “Greenland”, a country beyond the imagination of most people today, a “country” whose existence is mocked today just as much as “America” was at the time of Columbus. John Dee set off for this country, as unwavering in his determination as Columbus. But his journey took him farther, much farther than Columbus, and was more wearisome, more gruesome, more gruelling. The bare recorded facts of Dee’s life are harrowing enough, how much more harrowing must the experiences have been of which we know nothing? Leibnitz mentions him, but history has decided to ignore him: it prefers to categorise anything it cannot understand as “mad”. But I take the liberty of believing that John Dee was quite the opposite of “mad”.

  One thing is certain: John Dee was one of the greatest scholars of his age; there was no monarch in Europe who would not have welcomed him at his court. Emperor Rudolph brought him to Prague where, according to legend, he made gold from lead. But, as I have already indicated, his most fervent endeavours were not directed towards the transmutation of metals but towards another kind of transmutation. What that is I have tried to demonstrate in my novel.