on Leo Perutz

 

One of Leo Perutz’s classmates wrote that his first memory of Perutz, an “uncommonly untidy boy” next to whom he sat on the bench at the Patres der Parister school in Prague in the 1890s: “In my first memory of him, I see his dirty, bloody hands; he was the enviable possessor of a wonderful pocket knife with which he’d cut his thumb under the bench, not accidentally but intentionally: “I’m going to shock the teacher,” he said. The he lay his hands stretched out on the desk top. The effect was enormous.”

This is a good story, made better by the fact that, unlike most schoolboy’s with a sense of grotesque (a set that includes almost all schoolboys I have ever known), Perutz went on to employ this sense in novels that somehow combine an extraordinary literary merit and the adventure theme of the thriller. Romances, as R.L. Stevenson called them. He wrote a number of them in the 20s and 30s – becoming a best selling author in 1928 with Wohin rollst Du, Äpfelchen. Then the 30s happened, and Hitler came, first in Germany and then in Austria in 1938. Leo Perutz, a Jew, emigrated to Palestine. He did not like Palestine or Israel, and returned in the 50s to Austria, where he died, failing to publish his last book, By Night Under the stone Bridge. In the late 80s, Perutz’s work was rediscovered. It is almost all translated, now, into English.

Borges was a great fan of Perutz’s novel, The Master of the Last Judgment: he ranked it as one of the greatest locked door mysteries. So, out of idleness and because I’ve been thinking about “investigative” novel plots, I read it last week.

I found it wonderful, although I also found it full of seemingly arbitrary transitions and subplots. They should not have functioned – the book should not have been so gripping – but they were sustained by Perutz’s knack for creating an atmosphere in which the ordinary becomes intermittent. The book was written in the 1920s, and set in the prewar period; perhaps the intermittence of the ordinary has its source in the ordinary slaughter of World War One, in which Perutz served. Or perhaps the source is in the Prague of Kafka and Meyrink, the very birthplace of modernist “weird” literature.

Daniel Kehlmann, the contemporary German novelist, wrote a long essay about Perutz in his “Kommt, Geister. Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen”. Many are the essays that take up the tired rhetorical trope of “compare and contrast” – but Kehlmann does something clever with the trope by dipping it into a passage in a letter from Freud to Arthur Schnitzler. Freud apologizes for being so distant from Schnitzler, attributing that distance to Doppelgängerscheu – fear of the Double. Freud wrote that “behind the aesthetic appearance” of Schnitzler’s work he saw an identity with Freud’s own “presuppositions, interests and conclusions.”  Kehlmmann uses this idea to pair Perutz and Kurt Gödel.

It seems absurd, but Kehlmann makes it work. It turns out that Leo Perutz, besides being a novelist, was also a mathematician. His dayjob, in Vienna, was as a actuarial mathematician for an insurance company, and he even invented a formula in that field which is named for him.

Thus, Perutz is a mathematician and writer of fantastic novels that continually play with the conditions of their form, while Gödel is a mathematician whose work concentrates on the very form of the possibility of truth in mathematics who became a paranoid fantasist in the latter part of his career. In fact, it was out of paranoid fear of poisoning that he starved himself to death.

Gödel, I learned from Kehlmann’s essay, had to flee Austria after the Anschluss not because he was a Jew, but because Nazi officials fired him from his post as a Jew, reasoning that logicians such as Gödel were, practically, all Jews. He was the literal victim of a misconstrual of set theory.

Kehlmann’s pairing is imaginative. I, however, kept thinking of Chesterton while reading the Master of Judgement Day. The Chesterton of The Man who was Thursday, which is also an adventure tale in which the pieces don’t seem to add up. In which the protagonist thinks, about the anarchist group he was investigating:

“He knew that each one of these men stood at the extreme end, so to speak, of some wild road of reasoning. He could only fancy, as in some old-world fable, that if a man went westward to the end of the world he would find something—say a tree—that was more or less than a tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end of the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself—a tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked.”

This is so fine a thought that I will never understand it – which is perhaps the only way to understand it. It could be said about the narrator in Perutz’s novel, Baron von Yosch, who stands as the puzzled investigator/victim of a circle of acquaintances among whom there occurs an epidemic of suicides. The Baron’s story is about those suicides. But the story doesn’t end with the Baron, but – in an epilogue – with the finding of the Baron’s story among the papers he had with him when he fell at the battle of  Limanova. The epiloguist, whoever it is, treats the Baron’s story with peremptory harshness – it is all lies, excuses for the Baron’s crimes. And so the curtain comes crashing down.

Chesterton is, in some ways, not at all Perutz’s Doppelgänger – he was an anti-semitic Catholic fanatic. But like Baron von Yosch, it was as part of Chesterton’s vices, rather than in spite of them, that he forged his narrative vision – his peculiar method of paradox. In one of the Father Brown stories, The Duel of Dr. Hirsch, Chesterton took the Dreyfus case – which, for Chesterton, had at its incongruous center the innocence of Dreyfus, a Jew – and transposes it to the case of Dr. Hirsch, who develops a formula for a weapon for the French government. A messenger with a letter from Dr. Hirsch to the German command explaining where that formula is to be found is discovered by a “chauvinist officer” named Dubosc. Hirsch challenges Dubosc to a duel. One of the officer’s seconds is Flambeau, a French detective and friend to Father Brown. Brown, looking at the letter, sees that is transcribes the location of the formula in a precisely opposite way from where the formula is. It is, in fact, so opposite that, using a rule of opposites, one could easily locate it.

But opposition is, in Chesterton’s view, less a semantic abstraction and more an incarnate absurdity. But means of opposition Father Brown deduces the truth about Hirsch and Dubosc – that in fact they are one man. Hirsch has simply disguised himself, written the letter, accused himself, and shown up Dubosc. “It is all like I was saying to Flambeau These opposites won’t do. They don’t work. They don’t fight.  If it’s white instead of black, and solid instead of liquid, and so on all along the line – there’s something wrong, Monsieur, there’s something wrong.”