25. The deluge that accompanied this decision was relentless...

The twenty-fifth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero finds a refuge of sorts in the dark heart of Berlin.

The deluge that accompanied this decision was relentless. It rained for three days straight. Great, heavy, diluvian rain, like it was the end of the world, or the end of Blade Runner, or the beginning of Rashomon…

It was raining when I left Norwich. It was raining when I arrived in London. It rained all night and was raining the following morning, when the train I caught from Victoria station pulled into Gatwick Airport. I sat watching the inundation from inside the terminal, and from the plane itself as it struggled across the tarmac, before taking off and making its way into the heart of the thick, dark clouds from which the downpour came. Above the weather, I glimpsed that other, luminous, untouchable world, but when we landed in Berlin an hour or so later, it was still raining.

An old friend from university was subletting his flat in Kreuzberg. We’d not spoken for a few years, but he’d sent a message to every number in his phone saying the place was available, so I called and said I’d take it (I was drunk). Suddenly, there I was, drenched, standing outside a strange door in strange city, desperately hoping I was in the right place. Berlin was dark and sinister. Shadowy figures with umbrellas moved behind me along a street lined with tall, Soviet-era residential blocks. In the rain, the city’s history – years of suspicion, surveillance, and denunciation – seemed to leach from these buildings, such that I found myself thrown into a stream of quick-fire Cold War fantasies, under observation by the people who passed by, perhaps later to be picked up and interrogated in some drab office, a man out of place, out of time, and most definitely, unwelcome.

Seconds later, the door opened, and Simon was offering me salutations. I followed him up a narrow staircase and into his bright, spacious living room. Over the next few days, we renewed our acquaintance over countless bottles of Sterni, recounting some of the more dissolute times we’d had in Norwich, at dismal student nights, drinking dismal drinks, in the dismal bars and clubs that lined Prince of Wales Road. He was friendly enough, but I could tell by his occasional worrisome looks that he thought I was slightly off my head, concerned that he’d too hastily agreed to leave his surprisingly elegant flat in my care. You’re going to be ok, right, he asked a few days later, as he was packing his things. Yes, of course, I lied. Well, please look after the place and remember to water the plants. No problem, I said, forcing a smile onto the Melpomene mask that had lately become my face.

And so, I was now alone and adrift in Berlin, as the heat of the summer finally gave way to the coldest winter I’d ever known. In those months, from October to March, I don’t think I ever saw daylight more than once or twice. The days were short, and so, like Proust, I very quickly became nocturnal, getting up around three o’clock in the afternoon and going to bed at four or five in the morning. In darkness, I gradually came to know the city, which still seemed haunted by the metal, terror, and sickness of its past. I took to walking the streets, exploring the bars, and scratching indecipherable sentences in my notebook, exactly as I had been doing back at home. Wandering from bar to bar in the hope that just one might hold the promise of a new future, a new love; realising after a beer or two how absurd this was, then moving on somewhere else with the same vain intentions. In that respect nothing had changed, except the fact that the novelty of the new city kept me entertained at least, breathing a different air, speaking a different language, breaking the oppressive chains of habit that being in one place for too long can engender.

Of course, these were the days before the Search, but reading was a bulwark against despair even back then, even if only a temporary one. I found an old copy of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in Simon’s bedroom, and its vision of the Deep South and the strange, sad lives of its people – a tiny shoeless child, a watchful café proprietor, an alcoholic labour agitator – offered something approaching solace. Sat alone in front of the old fuel-burning stove, reading, lamenting, praying, the life of John Singer seemed almost to mirror my own self-imposed exile, where the strange coalescence of memory and self-reflexive narrative played out on the mind’s stage to muted applause. Somewhere in these desolate moments, I first began to understand that another person’s words might offer a route to my own forgotten history.

Apparently, everything we ever see is already in the past. By the time the light reflecting off (or emanating from) an object we’re looking at reaches our eyes, precious nanoseconds, or some even smaller unit of time, have elapsed. Does that mean everything is a memory? Everything a ghost? Or does it all happen too quickly to be relevant? In my scant understanding of the science, I think it depends on the distance, so that the sun we see in the sky is really the sun seven or eight minutes ago. But when it comes to billions of lightyears and the light from stars on the other side of the galaxy, we are looking back in time, and possibly seeing only the remnants of things no longer there.

What a strange but obvious truth. I read about this in another book I found in the flat and couldn’t seem to get it out of my head. Suddenly, it was as if the entire world, and the universe beyond, was littered with phantoms, and that this mass haunting extended into every part of our lives, from the spectral memories of lovers and loved ones we carry with us, to the very people stood before us in the so-called ‘present’ moment. Which is to say nothing of the other competing organic, inorganic and conceptual matter we’re continually compelled to weave into the story that becomes our life, a process which I’d become convinced was merely our best attempt to wrangle something approaching beauty and truth out of the welter of vague fancy, misinterpretation, forgetfulness, revisionism, self-deceit, and downright lies that pass for reality.

In this respect, I think I was always on the lookout for ghosts, hence my fascination with cemeteries. As with Paris, and later London, my time in Berlin was no different, for it wasn’t long before I discovered the majestic Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof, a large eighteenth-century burial ground in the city centre, which counts Hegel, Fichte, and Brecht among its residents. But the grave which really captured my imagination was that of the industrialist August Borsig (mentioned several times by Döblin in Berlin Alexanderplatz), who founded a steam engine factory in 1837 and produced the first German locomotive three years later; a model that beat rival George Stephenson’s engine in a time trial by some ten minutes. His work was in no small part responsible for the development of the country’s railway infrastructure and its wider industrialisation.

Borsig died in 1854 at the height of his career and was succeeded by his son Albert, who continued the company’s successful expansion. It was Albert, I assumed, whose infant likeness was positioned at the base of his father’s tomb, looking fondly at the ornate bust of his old man, which sits beneath a rendering of the starry firmament painted in blue and gold. Albert also died young, like his father and mine (and Proust), around the age of fifty. Perhaps it was this numerical resonance that kept me coming back to this grave, or maybe it was because I’d also been reading a history of Berlin, and it represented that moment in European history when creeping international enmities exploded in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (just prior to Proust’s birth), a time of modernisation on all fronts, when industrialists like the Borsigs were putting into place the technologies that would make the unparalleled destruction of the coming world wars possible.

Written just before the outbreak of the first war, Heinrich Mann’s novel Man of Straw attempts to unravel Germany’s descent into conflict through the portrayal of its morally bankrupt protagonist and his slavish devotion to authority. The book stands as a scathing critique of Wilhelmine bourgeois society and helped earn its author the contempt of the Nazi regime years later. Mann fled Germany once Hitler came to power and settled in America, where his literary career faltered. He died poor and lonely in Santa Monica, but his remains eventually found their way to the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof, which was where, after leaving Borsig, I’d always go next, to stand and gaze at his headstone in a kind of mute orison to the idea of unfulfilled promise. But it was Heinrich’s younger brother, Thomas, who really made a claim over me. The reason was his great novel, The Magic Mountain, which the Travelling Companion had bought me as a birthday present a few years before our split. I’d not yet managed to read it but had taken it with me into exile as a totem to my lost love. It took me most of the nine months I lived in the city to finish it.

Consequently, the self-imposed Alpine incarceration of the novel’s hero became emblematic of my own, as if whatever perverse, masochistic and nonsensical compulsion it is that drives Hans Castorp to stay at the sanatorium where he’d simply gone to visit his sick cousin, wasn’t dissimilar from the force that kept me lost and penniless in Berlin. I’ve little doubt that the self-sacrificial desire that fuels Castorp speaks to a terrible truth at work within every one of us: that which makes a necessary virtue out of suffering. And reading The Magic Mountain is a kind of corollary of this: unfeasibly difficult and yet eminently pleasurable, a protracted and perilous journey which is over much too soon. Hence Mann’s knowing and rather diabolic suggestion that it’s a book best read twice – and that only then will the reader become aware of the grand symphonic movement of its narrative.

I think it was William Hazlitt who wrote about the pleasures of reading the same book multiple times, and I tend to agree with him. Re-reading is a necessarily richer experience. Certain writers especially warrant the effort: Proust of course, and Mann certainly. For such is the elegant synthesis of the real and the symbolic in The Magic Mountain that it makes for a book of astonishing complexity and depth, which even the most accomplished reader will need several passes at to pierce to its sibylline heart.

In allegorical terms, the characters Settembrini and Naphta can be said to represent and parody the conflict between totalitarianism and liberal humanism, between reactionary theocracy and progressive secularism, and ultimately between authority and liberty, which had torn at the heart of European civilisation as Mann worked on his manuscript. Like Proust, he’d had to radically rework his novel following the horrors of the First World War. Reading it, we know that the intellectual battles playing out on top of the mountain will be resolved in a wave of mutilation soon to wash over the flatlands of civility, which will almost certainly drown Castorp, along with millions of others. We realise that his efforts to live again within the folds of the social fabric are to be wasted; and that while this certainly isn’t funny, it is undoubtedly ironic. What the novel brilliantly articulates is the sense that such grim ironies underpin all human experience; something that renders the whole business of living a laughable tragedy on one hand, a desperate and desolate comedy on the other. And that’s without even mentioning the cruel vicissitudes of ‘love’.

Given the fallible and finite nature of the creatures through which it is expressed, love always operates within ironic parameters. We love in spite of this irony, borne on the winds of irrationality, in the hope of redemption and transcendence. We see this at work in both Mann and Proust, who, despite his hostilities to interpersonal love, his intimate dissection of its travails, never ceases to acknowledge its power or influence over our lives. ‘Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us,’ says the Narrator at one point. The external universe cares little whether we’re in love or not, but, so totalising is the experience, we’re just as capable of not giving a fig for the universe if we are.

It was Mann himself who said, ‘For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts’, which suggests his belief in love’s ability to somehow shed its ironic shackles, displace the mortal terror of existence, and even help us articulate some form of faith. Hans Castorp gives it his best shot, and so might we. The final line of The Magic Mountain comes in the form of a question: ‘There were moments when you saw the intimation of a dream of love rising up out of death and this carnal body. And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all around – will Love someday rise up out of this, too?’

Reading Mann’s words on cold, lonely nights in Berlin had the effect of both diminishing and sustaining my own agonies regarding love. The Travelling Companion still loomed large in my thoughts and the cemetery became a place of pilgrimage. By this point, I was under the impression that I could in some way communicate with her while stationed within its walls. It was as if by placing myself in such proximity to the dead that I was showing her I was capable of transcending earthly pain, and that each of us (despite our separation from one another) were the same: simply corpses in waiting. And yet, simultaneously, I was also demonstrating my belief in the power of love to face down death.

Like me, she was enamoured with cemeteries – obsessively photographing the tombstones, the angels, the effigies, the inscriptions she found (pictures she kept in beautifully bound albums beneath her bed) – and so I became convinced that by being amid the graves, amid the dead, she’d know where I was, and that this would bring me fully into her thoughts; a folding of space that would somehow bring us together again. This was finally proven to me when, one day, in a distant corner of the graveyard, I came upon the marble relief of an angel with a face just like hers, which was doubtless the embodiment of her spirit. For weeks afterwards, I’d visit just to stand in front of this perfectly formed statuette and imagine we were caught in each other’s gaze like before, and that all other faces were irrelevant to us. And I’d think how wonderful it would be if she were turned to stone like this, a hapless victim of Medusa, and I could keep her forever in my sight.  

If my strange fantasies bore any relation to those of Hans Castorp, it was surely no accident. In Mann’s book, there’s a sense that the beguiling Claudia Chauchat is in certain respects the reason for Hans’ decision to stay at the sanatorium, and that this emphatic desire for love is also an emphatic desire for death; that the two things cannot be separated, because they’re both, at once, in conflict and in congress with one another. So, it became for me and Berlin. I was there because I no longer cared whether I lived or died, but also, as a counterpoint, because I wanted to reassert my faith in love and in humanity. My nine months in the city would be nothing as compared to Castorp’s seven years on the mountain, and yet present throughout them was the same desire to pass through a state of sickness and near-death with the intention of achieving a greater health, a purification through suffering.

I remember always ending my walks to the cemetery with a drink at a bar called Wurgeengel on Dresdenerstrasse because I knew it was named after Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel – in which a breach of social etiquette triggers a regression into a kind of primal savagery. In the film, a rift in time prevents those in attendance from leaving the house in which they’ve gathered, and they soon resort to magical thinking, invocation and sacrifice to placate the sinister forces now controlling them. I felt similarly trapped, aware of the phantoms forming in my mind. Of all the bars I frequented in Berlin, it always seemed the most appropriate, to say nothing of the sublime gimlets it served, stereotypically precise, reassuringly potent.

When I look back, it’s clear that in many ways reading The Magic Mountain was perfect preparation for reading In Search of Lost Time. Each requires a similar level of devotion; each involves giving preference to fiction over quotidian reality. They are books that require work. In Mann, I began to find a means of combatting the dark thoughts that crowded my brain; a process that would continue and later expand through my reading of Proust. And I was glad of it. For this was around the time when my father and the Travelling Companion began their annexation of that dismal lump of meat between my ears; together, forming a kind of disembodied duo who would bark at me wherever I went. And it wasn’t long before this experience became completely debilitating. On the days when it was at its worst, I did nothing but stay in bed, hiding beneath the covers, where at least it was warm, and I didn’t have to confront anybody or play at normality.

At the time, I was aware that a peculiar combination of grief and jealousy were driving my anguish, but it was only later, when I read Proust, that I achieved any sense of perspective regarding what had happened to me. One of the strangest effects of all, I remember, was the profound physicality of it; throughout most of the months I spent in Berlin there was often a kind of dull pain in the centre of my chest, occasionally exacerbated by sharp stabs, the result of sudden realisations that he was gone forever; or that she was gone for good, her body now closed to me and open to another. Both were painful, but of the two, it was the latter that came to achieve a particular potency during my exile, especially given my own reluctant celibacy.

The truth is, there’s nothing the lover can do when the beloved changes their mind. An act of rejection seems like the most callous thing in the world to the lover, who will carry in his head or heart a deep sense of injustice at being abandoned, which like a parasite, will feed to the point of killing its host, but always pull back before the point of death, for its want of more food. And this is just one of a conundrum of parasites that jealousy breeds, each working away within a part of the victim, each a living part of the lover, and in some strange way, each an internalisation of the beloved’s flesh. This parting gift is left unknowingly, and remains firmly lodged, even when the lover finally manages to muster the courage to walk away. In this turning of the back, there’s a pride of sorts. And even though it doesn’t help in the short term, it is a noble and necessary act of love, which the lover must carry out if he’s to save himself.

In the meantime, there’s merely the slowly dissolving body of the beloved, drip fed into the host’s beleaguered system, whose consciousness is transmuted into the most sordid kind of second-rate pornographic cinema, a relentless unspooling of lips and limbs in close-up; focus-pulls of merging body parts; a miserable mimesis marked by the gratified moans and asseverations of love that are condemned only ever to exist as part of the Foley track of the lover’s mind and never again in reality; a picture of what once was, but also of what now is for some other actor, dark, indistinct and endlessly virile, who has taken the lover’s place in the show.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, I’d become a living, breathing version of Swann, fretting over a real-world version of Odette; or of the Narrator, torturing himself over Albertine. Struck down once again with this demonic affliction that was the jealous mind, left to linger on the new and improved pleasures now charging the beloved’s body and the eternal denial of her gifts, I was in a perpetual sort of anguish. That was Berlin: a subsistence of stubbornness and solitude, which after months of self-pity and idiot rage, of cold showers, and aimless walks in the face of bitter eastern winds, and of reading, always reading, and drinking, always drinking, never got any easier.

And yet, although I felt a great suspicion of love during this time, and was perplexed by what Mann had really thought, I knew even then, in the midst of despair, that I would never give up on it entirely, even if I was to be denied its physical manifestation for the rest of my life, which felt like a real possibility (and which has so far proved to be true). For despite my anguish, I was sure that love, as a non-quantifiable and non-rational thing, was linked to those deep feelings of numinous connection with the world that I felt as a child, and felt about Norwich Cathedral, which had latterly become a place of pilgrimage in my dreams. I couldn’t put this into words but was sure it didn’t need putting into words. And yet, in some strange way, that was exactly what was required: never the answer, but always the attempt, which was what those touched by holy madness like Proust and Mann and Dostoevsky had tried to do. Art is the excavation of that feeling and the raising up of the keen morality that is its bedfellow; together, I felt certain, these things might act as a counterweight to the tyranny, despotism, death and violence that blighted our world. ‘What is hell?’ asks Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov, ‘I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.’

As for my father; well one of the most difficult things I had to face during the bitter months of my German adventure was the frequent and troubling sense of relief I felt that he was gone. Never again would I have to face the intrusive phone calls, or the embarrassment of him turning up at work (not that I had a job), or the ceaseless demands for my time and attention, which were the stuff of everyday exasperation in the last few years of his life. And never again would I have to contend with the nihilism, the despair, the gloom he cast over my world. The truth is that his death was convenient, which is a hard thing to say. Perhaps the first manifestation of grief was the processing of this fact, and dealing with the relief that came with it. I was also curious as to what had gone wrong. It wasn’t something that I’d had time to think about back in Norwich, so preoccupied had I been in contending with the pain and chaos he’d kindled, day in day out, and so mixed up had I been with the Travelling Companion. But something had happened; some sort of destructive seed had finally flowered within him over there in New York, I was sure. And it was one that had so fractured his frangible soul, that he’d ended up trying to emulate Dylan Thomas and failing. Although at least my father had made it back to English shores.

I was also feeling the pull of home. The darkness of Berlin had played its unexpected part in my story, exposing me, albeit inadvertently, to the remedial effects of unfamiliarity, while at the same time incubating some of the stranger mechanisms of my mounting mental dysfunction. When I think back, I sometimes see it as a place in which I made the smallest of steps toward healing myself (as much as anyone is ever ‘healed’), but mostly it was a place of sufferance, of burgeoning truths I didn’t particularly want to face. By the time late spring came around, and the Siberian winds had finally abated, there were practical concerns too. I’d run out of money. Without much thought, I decided to head to London, which I rather foolishly thought might be the best place for the bereaved and broken-hearted, if for no other reason than that it was so full of distractions. How wrong I was.

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Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.