JACOB WASSERMANN

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22231, 23 October 1937, Page 18

JACOB WASSERMANN

If your interest in the novel is in plot or outward movement, then Wassermann is not the man for you. He is concerned with the inner landscape and his novels are an affirmation of an aspiring faith being darkened by doubt, yet not quite darkened. More than anything else, his novels are spiritual allegories dominated by the sense of pain, the sense of guilt, the sense of justice. As he himself says: "An author does not need to give special proof of spiritual development by the elements and by the earth from which he has sprung. His work provides and contains that demonstration. His thoughts dig very deeply into the roots of an understanding which could not be won but by bitter pain and travail. German and Jew Apart from the problem, always difficult of the complex mind of the thinker fighting its way to creative expression, there was above all else the racial problem, the problem of the Jew living in the land of the Gentile. German by adoption and by birth, yet always a Jew, Germany and its life had no centre of gravity for Wassermann; and his whole life was a wearing fight for his own soul, and the soul of- the German world. His spirit was closely bound up with a country which had disintegrated and which now scourges the whole Jewish race; and while his restless mind struggled to produce seething and sometimes unreleased forms and images, there was all the time tVie background o£ his ( exI treme poverty, the degradation of material want. Heine, the Germani Jew, was harassed with the same racial conflicts, belonging to both worlds yet to neither. But Heine's biting sense of humour could divert unrelieved tragedy, whereas Wassermann could never laugh. In Wassermann's autobiography "My Life as German and Jew," we find a penetrating and pitiless analysis of German anti-semitism. He shows the Jew as the eternal scapegoat and in particular his own acute problems of living in one country and being of another race. So that there are three salient points to remember in reading Wassermann: first, the sense of inferiority and shame driven into him as Jewish member of a German community; second, his economic background, which was, in his formative years, one of grinding poverty such as we in this country could never know; and third, the difficulties, contradictions, and torments of his own artist's nature. The boy is always father to the man. Under pressure of gloomy imaginings this brooding youth had to fight and find his way of escape by telling stories on the long winter evenings when he helped his mother pick over the lentils. Finding his own extraordinary powers in this direction, this wonderful finding of The Word, in which by his invention he could bridge the hitherto unbridged gulf between his raptures and his torments, he would tell his brother stories in the dark and hold him spellbound. Soon he felt the need to write down these nocturnal narratives, and at 15 wrote his first novel. His last novel, "Joseph Kerkhoven's Third Existence," was not long finished before he died in his country home in Styria in his sixtyfirst year. A Great Trilogy "Joseph Kerkhoven's Third Existence" is the last of the trilogy be-

A Life-Work Completed (SP-CIAIX* WmITTES VOB TUB PB-8».) [By JESS BARCLAY]

ginning with "The Maurizius Case, which is mainly a study of a Viennese youth, Etzel Andergast, singularly and strangely haunted by a passion for abstract justice. Etzel s spiritual adventures are depicted m the second novel, "Etzel Andergast, but in this last book, while Etzel becomes a source of disquiet in Joseph and his wife, he does not actually appear. A melancholy interest attaches to "Joseph Kerkhoven," as it not only completes a trilogy, but completes the life work of one of the most important novelists of our times, a man who lived and died, tormented and tragic, like one of his own characters. Wassermann could rightly be called the Dostoevski of our times; arid I know of no other who is so truly in the same line of descent, who deals with the same transcendent problems with the same painful search for God, and moves in the same imponderable grey world of spirit. The Russian is the great pioneer of the psychology of crime; but owing to the findings of such experts as Freud, Adler, and KraftEbbing, the neuro-pathological field has been enormously extended and clarified since his day. It is in the synthesising of such knowledge that Wassermann is a master. .His extraordinarily equipped understanding of medico-biology throws a searchlight on the obscure working of the human mind, the self-deceptions and evasions which are in us all. The novel centres upon four remarkable characters, all of epic size. Joseph and his wife Marie, Alexander Herzog and his wife Bettina. Their interactions are displayed with the precision of a scientist. Truth and Illusion Alexander Herzog is a novelist who, after nineteen years of hell with his first wife, Ganna, meets Bettina and joins with her; but their whole subsequent life together is darkened by the ravings of his first wife. Alexander's journal, in which he describes Ganna, who, while she is one of the chief characters, never appears outside the journal, is almost frightening in life-likeness. So long has she been bedevilled by illusion that it has become her only reality, and she all but shatters the lives of Bettina and Alexander, until they come under the healing hands of Joseph and Marie. Joseph and Bettina are both given the written history of Herzog's tragedy. Bettina turns to Joseph for help: Alexander has given her a picture of life, but Joseph does more. He makes her understand life. With every subtlety Joseph shows Alexander how he has been suffering all his life from a deep-rooted sense of guilt and that he, Alexander, has woven a huge illusion even about Ganna, that mistress of the illusion. We must not forget, either, Ganna's passion for figures. Her 40 lawyers, her interminable divorce proceedings, the over-laden woman who wrote everything, dramatised everything, who suffered from "verborrhoea." The Albanian proverb, "Not the murderer but the murdered man is guilty," might easily have been an utterance from a character out of Wassermann. As with all true creators, he created out of his own living tissue. Wassermann's men and women have always been symbols for his ideas and visions. And they have been of more than common calibre.

According to Milward Kennedy, there is a type of detective novel in which American writers excel English writers—one that reflects the crude life of a particular stratum of society wher<- virtue and vice are little removtu from one another, and reflects it with a hard American candour. .. _. . .

In Richard Church's opinion the long-short story—the novel of 100 to 150 pages—is a delightful artform, but it is the publisher's despair. Lending libraries won't have it. Their objection is that their customers read it too quickly.