There were always hotels, those stations of the soul,
As he wandered around Europe, in search of something
That cool dispassionate prose could only guess at,
Some innocence beyond the grasp of “”form” and “structure”.
If they called him a great man, who was he to argue?
That was what he had worked for from the first, after all;
To prove himself the hero, the champion of letters,
A second Goethe, the soul and conscience of the race.
Bred for profit in the quays and mansions of Lubeck,
Scion of merchant princes, faithful both to man and to God,
He would do what was superior, correct and noble,
Serve the cause of culture and tradition to the end,
And no one, he prayed, would see the wretch within,
Suffering the exquisite torments of the damned,
Yearning for forbidden love, for disreputable ecstasies,
For lyrical beauty in a smiling young hotel waiter’s face.
How else could he perfect himself, master his life,
But through sacrifice, renunciation, self-inflicted pain?
He knew no other way; it was chivalry’s perversion,
The ancestral quest continued in thinner weaker blood,
The stray son weeping for the fall of his fathers’ house,
Sighing invalid in love with his own congenital malaise.
He had always been alone, solitude his sad vocation,
The necessary test of the prophet, the medicine man,
Killing the health in himself in order to heal others,
Tempted by the devil, torn apart, yet never giving in.
From his hotel window he could look discreetly down
At the handsome young tennis coach on the court below,
Hurt by his splendour, envying such weightless skill and flair,
While he, for his sins, laboured to write a single page a day,
Taking pride in his scrupulous bourgeois martyrdom.
Then he would sit at the piano, his grave dignified face
Betraying no emotion as his long sly fingers lingered
Over the keys, coaxing music from the empty afternoon,
Vicarious hints of the “transcendent”, the “absolute.”
Haloed by the smell of rich cigars and eau de cologne,
Grey-suited and stiff as any businessman or banker,
His ruined teeth rotting in his tight-lipped sensual mouth,
He groped for the perfect sounds to evoke his mood,
Coveting the same such majesty for life as for art.
The world had believed his clever lies, his legerdemain;
He had conjured a product people wanted to buy,
The finest luxury at affordable prices, filling a void,
While others less canny had neglected to set up stalls.
He reckoned fame and praise in the counting-house,
As the currency of greatness, the only compensation;
Otherwise, why would anyone so torment himself,
While those around lived in comfortable ignorance,
Wholly themselves without self-doubt or self-hatred?
Everyday at the same time he was there at his desk,
Surrounded by cosy clutter, in his prismatic oubliette,
His children tiptoeing past the door in biblical dread,
Minions of a despot, fearful of his cold inhuman wrath;
He saved his twisted love for himself and for his work,
Where passion and austerity met in grim confusion,
Frustration’s discipline perfected with patience
To serve the higher cause for which he had been born.
The sensual pleasure of words was his only solace,
While the world fell into chaos and barbarism again;
Who better than he to speak for reason and humanity
With ancestral authority, the imprimatur of the dead?
Politics were an inconvenience, a duty to discharge;
Democracy was so hard to love, that only catastrophe
Could make him its paladin, lest all he had lived for
Be annihilated on the bonfires of forbidden books.
All he wanted was to preserve the best of tradition,
The comforts and graces of the old world.
If they only knew how he longed for the commonplace!
His admirers never saw him locked behind his study door,
Sobbing, trembling, convulsed by dread and panic,
Shedding another skin, another life, another disguise.
But could they not read? Could they not guess the truth
So guiltily made flesh in words, in elegant fictions?
Why, sometimes he almost longed to be found out.
He kept his secret diaries locked in his drawer,
Confessions of torment and self-disgust, yearning
To be “normal”, freed from the never-ending shame
Of the hopeless deviant, diseased and isolated,
Secretly proud of his sickness, his precious artifice.
Sometimes he thought he was scarcely human,
So cold and remote, always observing from a safe distance,
Afraid to get involved, lest he start to feel, to succumb
To the mundane, and shed real blood like everyone else.
Could ambition not conquer self-disgust after all,
And the self-created image not become the man?
More and more, in the arms of his wife, in the dark,
Performing the perfunctory duties of the husband,
He saw her face become that of a beautiful boy,
Her body the splendid torso of a divine ephebe,
His platonic passion consummated on the sly.
He had married for ambition and conformity,
Deceiving the world but not himself, not his soul,
Sacrificing desire and love for the world’s approval;
What did it matter anyway, all that bestial surrender?
However or whoever one did it with, it was ugly,
The brutish distraction of the stupid undisciplined,
Their substitute for knowledge, wisdom or religion.
Irony was his fatal mistress; the reflex of a hollow man,
Believing in nothing, a fraud, a confidence trickster,
A capering jester in the guise of a philosopher-king,
An actor knowing just how much to show or hide.
Ah, how easy it was to impress with grand ideas!
To make a show of conscience, philosophy and wisdom.
“Order” was his demon, the suave oppression of the lost,
Rage held in check with a tyrant’s will, gathering force
As the stakes were raised, the voluptuous dreams forsworn.
Only the unattainable could make him want to love;
To look, not to touch, to yearn, to fall secretly in love,
Acting gout in his head the most extravagant passion,
The grand affairs he would never dare to live for real,
In all those grand hotels, with their bell boys and porters,
Where a fleeting look could thrill him to the marrow,
Unsettle him for days or weeks, with limitless fantasies,
Tantalise him to the most exquisite extremities of frustration,
Paroxysms of exhilaration and despair, then melancholy
To stimulate him long after; there was always the chance
Of a poetic encounter in a lift or in a corridor, a brief glance
Signalling so much, too much to bear, all that he was missing,
That tender simple humanity in which he did not share.
The joke was on him after all; he, the great humanist,
Whose humanity was abstract, parodic, and incomplete.
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