The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [89]
When she died I inherited many of her books of poetry. Her personal numbering system means that Rilke’s Das Stundenbuch is no. 26, his book on Rodin no. 28, Stefan George is EE no. 36 and her grandmother’s books of poems are nos 63 and 64. I send my father off to a university library that has some of her books to check when she read them, and I have to stop as I find myself late at night looking through Elisabeth’s copies of French poetry, the twelve volumes of Proust, early editions of Rilke, for comments in the margins, scraps of forgotten lyric, a lost letter. I remember Saul Bellow’s Herzog spending his nights shaking out banknotes that he had left in volumes as bookmarks.
When I do find things, I wish I hadn’t. I find a transcription by her of a poem by Rilke written on the back of a page from a desk diary from Sonntag Juli 6, black and red like a missal. There is a translucent gentian marking a page in Rilke’s Ephemeriden; the address of a Herr Pannwitz in Vienna tucked into Valéry’s Charmes; a photograph of the sitting-room at Kövesces in Du Côté de chez Swann. And I feel like a bookseller judging the sunning of the cover of a book, marking the annotations, assessing its possible interest. It is not only a trespass on her reading, which feels strange and inappropriate, but close to a cliché. I am turning real encounters into dried flowers.
I remember that Elisabeth didn’t really have much feel for the world of objects, netsuke and porcelain, just as she disliked the fuss and bother around which clothes you put on in the morning. In her last flat she had a great wall of books, and only a narrow white shelf on which were balanced a small Chinese terracotta of a dog and three lidded jars. She was supportive of my making pots – and wrote me a handsome cheque once when I was trying to build my first kiln – but was mildly amused by the idea of me making things for a living. But what she loved was poetry, the world of things, hard and defined and alive, made lyrical. She would have hated my fetishising of her books.
In Vienna in the Palais Ephrussi there are three rooms in a row. On one side is Elisabeth’s room, a sort of library, where she sits and writes poetry and essays and letters to her poetic grandmother Evelina, to Fanny and to Rilke. On the other is Viktor’s library. In the centre is Emmy’s dressing-room with its great mirror and dressing-table with its posy of flowers from Kövesces and the vitrine of netsuke. It is opened less often.
These are hard years for Emmy. She is in her early forties, with children who need her attention but who turn away. They all worry her in different ways, and they no longer come to sit and talk and confide about their days as she dresses. There is the little boy in the nursery to complicate things. She takes them to the Opera as it is neutral territory: Tannhäuser with Iggie on 28th May 1922, Tosca with Gisela on 21st September 1923, and the whole family to Die Fledermaus in December.
In these hard years there are not quite so many excuses for dressing up in Vienna. Anna is no less busy here – a lady’s maid is always kept busy – but the room is no longer the centre of the life of the house. It is quiet.
I think of this room and remember Rilke writing of ‘a vibrating stillness like that in a vitrine’.
23. ELDORADO 5–0050
The three older children leave the city.
Elisabeth, poet, is the first to go. She receives a doctorate in law in 1924, the first given to a woman from the University of Vienna. And then a Rockefeller Scholarship to travel to America – she is off. She is redoubtable, my grandmother, clever and focused, and she writes about American architecture and idealism for a German journal, how the ardour and fervour of skyscrapers fit with contemporary philosophy. When she returns she moves to Paris to study political science. She is in love