"Utz"

[fiefoe]

Bruce Chatwin's slim novel is an engaging trip to Prague and the waning years of the Cold War.

• * Emperor Rudolf II: All the same, I wanted to see the gloomy palacefortress, the Hradschin, where this secretive bachelor — who spoke Italian to his mistresses, Spanish to his God, German to his courtiers and Czech, seldom, to his rebellious peasants — would, for weeks on end, neglect the affairs of his Holy and Roman Empire and shut himself away with his astronomers (Tycho Brahé and Kepler were his protégés). Or search with his alchemists for the Philosopher’s Stone. Or debate with learned rabbis the mysteries of the Cabbala. Or, as the crises of his reign intensified, imagine himself a hermit in the mountains. Or have his portrait done by Arcimboldo, who painted the Emperor’s visage as a mound of fruit and vegetables, with a courgette and aubergine for the neck, and a radish for the Adam’s apple.
• He replied that Prague was still the most mysterious of European cities, where the supernatural was always a possibility. The Czechs’ propensity to ‘bend’ before superior force was not necessarily a weakness. Rather, their metaphysical view of life encouraged them to look on acts of force as ephemera.
• * He would be the last to denigrate a man who risked the labour camp for publishing a poem in a foreign journal. But, in his view, the true heroes of this impossible situation were people who wouldn’t raise a murmur against the Party or State – yet who seemed to carry the sum of Western Civilisation in their heads. <> ‘With their silence,’ he said, ‘they inflict a final insult on the State, by pretending it does not exist.’ <> Where else would one find, as he had, a tram-ticket salesman who was a scholar of the Elizabethan stage? Or a street-sweeper who had written a philosophical commentary on the Anaximander Fragment? <> He finished by observing that Marx’s vision of an age of infinite leisure had, in one sense, come true.
• Utz's mother: Yet, even before Sarajevo, she had foreseen the rising tide of Socialism in Europe, and, twirling a terrestrial globe as another woman might recite the rosary, she would point a finger to the far-flung places in which she had diversified her investments:
• * By the age of nineteen he had published in the journal Nunc a lively defence of the Rococo style in porcelain — an art of playful curves from an age when men adored women — against the slur of the pederast Winckelmann : ‘Porcelain is almost always made into idiotic puppets.’
• ‘An object in a museum case’, he wrote, ‘must suffer the de-natured existence of an animal in the zoo. In any museum the object dies – of suffocation and the public gaze – whereas private ownership confers on the owner the right and the need to touch. As a young child will reach out to handle the thing it names, so the passionate collector, his eye in harmony with his hand, restores to the object the life-giving touch of its maker.
• There was a stubborn side that refused to be bullied. He detested violence, yet welcomed the cataclysms that flung fresh works of art onto the market. ‘Wars, pogroms and revolutions’, he used to say, ‘offer excellent opportunities for the collector.’
• Besides, Marxist-Leninism had never got to grips with the concept of the private collection. Trotsky, around the time of the Third International, had made a few offhand comments on the subject. But no one had ever decided if the ownership of a work of art damned its owner in the eyes of the Proletariat. Was the collector a class-enemy? If so, how? <> The Revolution, of course, postulated the abolition of private property without ever defining the tenuous borderline between property (which was harmful to society) and household goods (which were not).
• * He confessed to being enchanted by the vitality of the fly. It was fashionable among his fellow entomologists – especially the Party Members – to applaud the behaviour of the social insects: the ants, bees, wasps and other varieties of Hymenoptera which organised themselves into regimented communities. <> ‘But the fly’, said Orlík, ‘is an anarchist.’
• * Frederick William of Prussia: He then explained how this weakness for giants had led to one of the most bizarre diplomatic transactions of the eighteenth century: in which Augustus of Saxony chose 127 pieces of Chinese porcelain from the Palace of Charlottenburg, in Berlin, and gave in return 600 giants ‘of the required height’ collected in the eastern provinces.
• A man-made figure was a blasphemy. A golem, by its presence alone, issued a warning against idolatry – and actively beseeched its own destruction.
  ‘Would you say then’, I asked, ‘that art-collecting is idolatry?’
  ‘Ja! Ja!’ he struck his chest. ‘Of course! Of course! That is why we Jews . . . and in this matter I consider myself a Jew . . . are so good at it! Because it is forbidden . . . ! Because it is sinful . . . ! Because it is dangerous . . . !’
• Nor can I say I like Meissen porcelain. I do, however, admire the boisterous energy of an artist such as Kaendler, at play with a medium which was totally new. And I entirely side with Utz in his feud with Winckelmann – who, in his ‘Notes on the Plebeian Taste in Porcelain’, would supplant this plebeian vitality with the dead hand of classical perfection.
• * Utz had chosen each item to reflect the moods and facets of the ‘Porcelain Century’: the wit, the charm, the gallantry, the love of the exotic, the heartlessness and light-hearted gaiety — before they were swept away by revolution and the tramp of armies.
• I saw the characters of the Commedia dell’ Arte: Harlequin and Columbine, Brighella and Pantaloon, Scaramouche and Truffaldino; The Doctor with a corkscrew for a beard; The Captain, who, being Spanish, had a jet-black moustache. <> Utz reminded me how the Italian players – the real ones! – had been masters of extempore who would decide what to play, and how to play it, a mere five minutes before the curtain rose.
• But Prague was a city that suited his melancholic temperament. A state of tranquil melancholy was all one could aspire to these days! And for the first time, grudgingly, he felt he could admire his Czech compatriots: not for their decision to vote in a Marxist government . . . Any fool knew by now that Marxism was a winded philosophy! He admired the abstemiousness of their choice.
• * He and Marta were like children at play, oblivious of caste or class, as they called to one another through the pine trunks: ‘Look what I’ve found . . . ! Look what I’ve found . . . !’ – a russet-cowled boletus, an edible agaric, or a cluster of chanterelles pushing their orange caps above a carpet of moss.
• Everyone in the market was laughing, haggling, giving, taking, proving beyond all doubt, whatever the zealots had to say, that the business of trade was one of life’s most natural and enjoyable pleasures, no more to be abolished than the act of falling in love . . .
• By the end of April, his resentment against the regime rose to boiling-point: for its incompetence, nothing more – he considered it common to complain of collectivisation. By April, too, he felt acute claustrophobia, from having spent the winter months in close proximity to the adoring Marta: to say nothing of the boredom, verging on fury, that came from living those months with lifeless porcelain. <> Before leaving, he would make a resolution never, ever to return – while at the same time making arrangements for his return — and would set off for Switzerland in the best of spirits.
• There followed a hasty packing of suitcases and a train journey to Geneva — where Utz had promised to withdraw the sum in cash. Neither spoke. Dr Frankfurter was congealed with anxiety that Utz might wriggle out of the bargain. Utz was sunk in gloom that he hadn’t gone on bargaining further. <> They shook hands, frostily, on the steps of the Union de Banques Suisses.
• Cowries, he went on, were used as currency in Africa and Asia where they were traded for ivory, gold, slaves or other marketable commodities. Marco Polo called them ‘porcelain shells’: ‘porcella’ in Italian was the word for ‘little sow’.
• * Chinese porcelain, he continued, was one of those legendary substances, like unicorn horn or alchemical gold, from which men hoped to drink the Fountain of Youth. A porcelain cup was said to crack or discolour if poison were poured into it.
• From the seventeenth century, he said, the Emperors of China had made a colossal impact on the European imagination. They were thought to be very wise and to live to a very great age, dispensing arbitrary, impartial justice according to laws derived from Earth and Heaven. They drank from porcelain. They built pagodas of porcelain. The smooth and lustrous surface of porcelain corresponded to the smooth, unwrinkled surface of themselves. Porcelain was their material – as gold was the material of the Roi Soleil.
• The ladies of Berlin find the young alchemist irresistible. His reputation spreads: to King Frederick William, the ‘Giant Lover’, who obtains a specimen of the gold from Frau Zorn – and issues a warrant for Böttger’s arrest.
  Böttger escapes to Wittenberg: a dependency of Augustus the Strong.
  In November 1701 the Kings of Prussia and Saxony hold military manoeuvres along their borders. Which of these indigent sovereigns shall possess the goldmaker? Böttger — like a fugitive nuclear physicist — is escorted to Dresden under armed guard.
• Böttger meets Ehrenfried Walther, Graf von Tschirnhaus. This outstanding chemist, the friend of Leibniz, is on the way to discovering the secret of ‘true’ porcelain, but cannot devise a kiln sufficiently hot to fuse the glaze and the body. He recognises Böttger’s talents, and asks for his co-operation. The alchemist, to save his skin, agrees... In 1708 he delivers to Augustus the first specimens of red porcelain and, in the following year, the white... ‘Arcanum’ — a word usually employed by alchemists – is the official term for the chemical composition of the paste.
• He felt it was foolish to attribute to former ages the materialist concerns of this one. Alchemy, except among its more banal practitioners, was never a technique for multiplying wealth ad infinitum. It was a mystical exercise. The search for gold and the search for porcelain had been facets of an identical quest: to find the substance of immortality.
• * He knew all there was to be known about the ‘mother of alchemy’ Mary the Jewess, a third-century chemist who is said to have invented the retort.
• Jewels and metals, he said, were thought to mature in the womb of the earth. As a pallid foetus matured into a creature of flesh and blood, so crystals reddened into rubies, silver into gold. An alchemist believed he could speed up the process with the help of the two ‘tinctures’: the White Stone, with which base metals were converted into silver; the Red Stone which was ‘the last work of alchemy’ — gold itself!
• Would I now please reflect on the fact that Nebuchadnezzar had the burning fiery furnace heated to seven times its normal temperature when he put in Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego?
  ‘Seven times, I ask you!’ Utz waved his hands in the air.
  ‘Are you trying to tell me that Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were ceramic figures?’
• He appeared to be saying that the earliest European porcelain — Böttger’s red ware and white ware — corresponded to the red and white tinctures of the alchemists. To a superstitious old roué like Augustus, the manufacture of porcelain was an approach to the Philosopher’s Stone. <> If this were so: if, to the eighteenth-century imagination, porcelain was not just another exotic, but a magical and talismanic substance — the substance of longevity, of potency, of invulnerability —
• * I have said that Utz’s face was ‘waxy in texture’, but now in the candlelight its texture seemed like melted wax. I looked at the ageless complexion of the Dresden ladies. Things, I reflected, are tougher than people. Things are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate. Nothing is more age-ing than a collection of works of art.
• The mood, especially in smaller cities along the Volga and Don, struck me as exceptionally buoyant. The Soviet education system, I felt, had worked all too well: having created, on a colossal scale, a generation of highly intelligent, highly literate young people who were more or less immune to the totalitarian message.
• He had, as usual, been right. Tyranny sets up its own echo-chamber; a void where confused signals buzz about at random; where a murmur or innuendo causes panic: so, in the end, the machinery of repression is more likely to vanish, not with war or revolution, but with a puff, or the voice of falling leaves . . .
• The Czechs were always in need of hard currency to finance their various activities: espionage or subversion. I now suspect that the safe-deposit in the Union de Banques Suisses in Geneva was an unofficial shop — with a Mr Utz in charge — through which confiscated works of art were sold.
• A succession of Merry Widows and Countess Mitzis passed through his bed. And if the usual sources of erotic arousal left him cold, he would be driven to frenzy by the sight of a lower larynx, as the singer threw back her head to hit a high note.
• He had tried to preserve in microcosm the elegance of European court life. But the price was too high. He hated the grovelling and the compromise – and in the end the porcelains disgusted him.
  Marta had never given in. She had never once lowered her standards, never lost her craving for legitimacy. She had stayed the course. She was his eternal Columbine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_the_Jewess