The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [232]
“You have this kind of work in London?”
“We have music hall. It isn’t like this. It’s—sillier, and—and more sentimental.”
“We have sentimental things, too, in abundance. Schwabing has invented a word for them, a word I like. Kitsch.”
“Kitsch,” said Charles/Karl.
Another new theatre, Richard Riemerschmid’s Schauspielhaus, had also opened that spring. They went there all together—the tutors, the Sterns, Karl, Griselda and Dorothy—to see Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. The theatre was Jugendstil, and delicately, exquisitely beautiful. The auditorium was a hot red cavern or womb which was also an elven wood. Fine golden tendrils and stems spilled and clambered and tumbled everywhere, irregular, linking balconies to stage, framing the actors. Wilde was dead, now. He had died shortly after Karl and Joachim had seen him in Rodin’s atelier in the Grande Exposition. Karl did not enjoy Salomé, with its rhythmic moaning and sick sensuality. He had got rather attached to the new word “kitsch.” He ventured to say to Joachim that he thought this might be kitsch, and Joachim was shocked, and said no, it was Modern Art, it was freedom of expression. Dorothy stopped looking after a time, and started to try to remember the bones of the body and their names. The actress playing Salomé seemed supple and boneless, like a snake-charmer and a snake, simultaneously. Wolfgang said to Griselda that he believed the play had never been put on in Wilde’s own country, in his own language. Toby Youlgreave, on the other side of Griselda, said it had been written in French and translated into English, but the Lord Chamberlain had stopped the performance. Ah, said Wolfgang. You too have a Lex Heinze. Toby said he thought the reason given was blasphemy, acting biblical characters, not obscenity. The text had been published with illustrations by Beardsley. Naughty illustrations. But clever. Wolfgang said he thought he had seen them, in the tone of one who has in fact no real memory of doing so. He then said Beardsley draws sex, but always coldly. Unlike our artists. The English are cold, they say. He looked quickly at Griselda, and away. Griselda looked at the rich red curtain, closed for the interval. A very faint flush rose in her white cheeks.
Finally, it was the Solstice again, it was Midsummer. In England, Olive presided as usual over a depleted gathering on the lawn. It was a grey day. The fairy queen wore a velvet opera cloak over her floating robes. The absent Youlgreave was replaced, as Bottom, by Herbert Methley, who had finished his novel and resumed his social and amorous dealings. Florian was Cobweb instead of Dorothy. Tom was still Puck. Humphry was still handsome, but there was grey at his temple.
In Munich it was altogether wilder. The artists and Bohemians of Schwabing dressed up whenever they could, celebrated all feasts with gusto, danced in the streets and in courtyards and gardens. Anselm Stern put on a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for marionettes. The puppets, human and stumbling, and the fair folk with trailing wings, rushed through a painted wood, whilst flutes and bagpipes squealed eerily. The Mechanicals were dressed as Bavarian workmen, and danced peasant dances. Oberon had Anselm Stern’s own thin face, Dorothy saw, and one of his characteristic looks of intent, almost dangerous, thought-fulness. Puck looked like Wolfgang, with horns pushing through the unruly hair. Hermia and Helena were Dorothy and Griselda, expressions set in wide-eyed surprise.
After the show they roamed the streets. Midsummer in the south of Germany was warm, was leafy, was inviting. They crossed other groups, and stopped in taverns and cafés to take a beer, or a glass of Riesling. At one point Dorothy, who was dressed as a silver moth, and Griselda, who was dressed