A Heaven of the Book

The perfection of the life or the perfection of the work: these are the options Yeats set before his fellow poets. It was, he knew, an impossible choice. A life perfected one day disappears, unrecorded. A work can survive but only if one sacrifices one’s life to perfecting it. It is a circle that cannot be squared. Few writers have had the audacity to even attempt it. One of them, the Austrian experimental poet Friederike Mayröcker, is currently in the seventh decade of a career devoted to erasing the distinction between life and work.

Mayröcker was born in Vienna in 1924, the eldest daughter of middle-class parents ruined by the Great Depression. During the Allied bombing of Vienna, she was conscripted by the Luftwaffe and served as a “flak girl” at one of the anti-aircraft defense towers the Nazis set up around the city. She began writing poetry as a teenager and published early, her first poems appearing in a volume of the prestigious literary journal Plan alongside Brecht and Lorca. In 1954, she met her future husband, the experimental poet Ernst Jandl, at a Youth Culture Week in Innsbruck. Over the next four-and-a-half decades, until his death in 2000, Jandl was, as Mayröcker poignantly puts it, her “HAND and HEART PARTNER,” her collaborator in life, love, and art. Together they were the power couple at the center of the neo-Dadaist Wiener Gruppe, an influential movement that took part in the great literary ferment of postwar Austria, whose more familiar representatives include Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, and Peter Handke. She made her living as a public school English teacher until 1969, when she retired early to focus on her poetry.

In short, Mayröcker has lived the semi-public life of a successful writer in a small liberal democracy during a relatively stable and prosperous period of its history. Her political views may be guessed but are not made explicit in her writing. There are scattered references in her books to her family’s poverty during the Depression and to her memories of living in a city undergoing aerial bombardment and then military occupation, but the postwar reckoning with the Third Reich is not a central theme of her work, as it was for many other German-speaking writers of her generation. Political events such as May 68, the Vietnam War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq receive similarly scant treatment. Mayröcker is not the kind of writer who lives in, through, or for the newspaper. She is a poet who writes in the intersection between the most personal moment—the passing thought—and the indisputably universal one—individual death. If this seems like negligence, an unjustifiable retreat into the privacy of the self, perhaps it also conceals a secret wisdom: all roads lead to death, and politics is only one of them.

The “reality backdrop,” as Mayröcker calls it, of her work, is mundane. She gives readings and interviews, arranges contracts with her publishers, attends concerts, listens to records, reads books, visits art museums, travels and dreams of traveling, spends vacations in the countryside, takes walks in the park, has coffee at cafés, eats meals at restaurants, has affairs, visits doctors, maintains a vast correspondence with a tight-knit group of friends largely drawn from Vienna’s academic and artistic elite, and literally tends the garden she keeps in the tiny one-bedroom apartment on the Zentagasse, where she has lived since 1951. Over the years, she has amassed so many plants, papers, bookshelves, records, writing machines, trinkets, and other mementos that she has had to nail important objects to the walls so they will not get lost; one of her friends compares the “chaos of her room” to a three-dimensional collage, as though she were living in a “Beuys installation” or, better yet, in one of her poems. But most of all, she writes. And writes. And writes.

Indeed, if there is anything personally noteworthy about Mayröcker, it is her longevity as a published author. As she approaches her 96th birthday, she has written more than 100 books of poetry and prose and authored or coauthored dozens of radio plays and a libretto. For this vast and still-expanding corpus, she has received more than 40 literary awards, including the Georg Büchner Prize, the German equivalent to the Pulitzer. In the words of the poet and essayist Wayne Koestenbaum, one of her foremost American admirers, Mayröcker is “among the world’s greatest living writers.” If the Swedish Academy rewarded talent commensurate to the prestige of the Nobel Prize, she, not Handke, would have been the Austrian writer to win it in 2019.

Yet she remains little known outside the German-speaking literary world. Paradoxically, Mayröcker’s sheer productivity has proven to be an obstacle to her reception. Only 12 of her books—around one-tenth of her total output—have been translated into English. Although her fruitful cross-pollination of “post-surrealist” collage techniques, Steinean syntax, deconstructionist meditations on writing, and autofictional documentary travels far better than, say, Jandl’s sound poetry, whose effects cannot be separated from German, it is nonetheless extremely challenging and labor-intensive to translate. Translation is never simply a matter of finding passable equivalents between expressions in two different languages, but few writers require one to actually “‘invade’ their poems, to ‘body-snatch’ them, in order to think and thus write ‘like’ [them],” in the words of poet and critic Donna Stonecipher, who translated études (2012), the first volume of Mayröcker’s trilogy of prose poems. (Incidentally, Stonecipher’s metaphor captures the exhaustive—and sometimes exhausting—experience of reading Mayröcker too.)

As a result, English-language readers are missing, among others, Tod durch Musen (1966), the early collection that first brought her to prominence in Austria; her 337-page, single-sentence tour de force Mein Herz, mein Zimmer, mein Name (1988); cahier (2014) and fleurs (2016), the final two volumes of the aforementioned trilogy; as well as all the shorter lyrics that did not make it into, or were written in the years since, poet and translator Richard Dove’s generous selection, Raving Language (2007). What books English-language readers do have appear not in the order in which they were written but according to the vicissitudes of three different Anglophone publishing industries. For these reasons, reading the 1,000 or so pages of Mayröcker currently or soon-to-be available in English can sometimes feel like trying to intuit the features of a continent by hopping back and forth around the barrier islands that lie just off the coast.

Complicating matters further is that there is no way to neatly divide Mayröcker’s writing into conventional genres. It is not just that her prose relies on the kinds of sound play, syntactical disjunction, typographical innovation, and repetitions familiar from lineated verse or that her lineated verse can read like a prosaic bricolage of objects and events and quotations but also that, like a medieval prosimetrum, both modes can appear within the same book. Even the texts that are overwhelmingly prose are often chopped up into short, page-length sections distinguished only by their date of composition or by the names of their dedicatees, as in this prose passage from études:

                                        languished almost the whole day with
                                        BUBI in the garden and find flowers and
                                        blindworms festive in thicket and thistle-
                                        holt…”
 
and everyone asks, what are you reading these days &c., while the
little skill = little bird bill, on the doormat. A potpourri of night
pills, &c., aussi the dying dark-blue hyacinths in the glass ……..
back then Salzburg ’54 as I set off for London, 1 vehement spring,
we found 1 hotel room to say goodbye: my memories faded, &c.,
I don’t remember what happened there …….. I didn’t want, you
know, I did not want to go away at all, didn’t want to leave you, but I wasn’t crying about that, when will I turn into 1 swallow.
Rolled up in a ball the dirty laundry on the piano, oh I wandered,
lost, while the lea strewn with leaves : this forsakenness of my eyes,
it’s all just bricolage
 
11.1.11 (tr. Donna Stonecipher)

It is difficult to know, in any given instance, whether passages such as these are to be read as discrete prose poems or as pearls in the necklace of a longer “narrative” whose clasp has been broken and lost. The borders in her writing between the fictional, the autofictional, the autobiographical, and the simply diaristic are just as difficult to parse.

In fact, with a few exceptions—the Woolfean, Waves-like expository dialogue of with each clouded peak (1973) or the dramatic monologues of Heiligenanstalt narrated by Romantic composers (1978)—the divisions between Mayröcker’s books themselves seem arbitrary, a publisher’s contrivance. Really, her books are the ongoing elaboration of a single autobiographical “proëm,” “a living cosmos” of increasing refinement, intensification, and reflexivity. “I think one can no longer get free from 1 longer text,” she reflects, as she so often does, about her development as a writer. One “wants to keep adding 1 little bit and 1 little bit more,” she writes in The Communicating Vessels.

Periodization, therefore, seems indispensable, and one could perhaps do worse than Dove’s chronology: “‘pre-existence’ (1940s and 1950s), ‘experimental writing’ (1960s and early 1970s), and then ‘existence’, meaning a very conscious pilgrimage through the valley of the shadow of death, which began around the time of her fiftieth birthday.” Two caveats apply here, however. The first is that Mayröcker’s so-called pilgrimage has lasted some four-and-a-half decades, longer than the careers—indeed the lives—of many other poets. The second is that nearly all of the work currently in English is drawn from this period. For an English-language reader, her writing is not just a singular example of what Edward Said, paraphrasing Adorno, called “late style”—it is all late style.

Judging only from what we do or will soon have in English translation—Night Train (1984), written in the aftermath of her father’s death, her ars poetica brütt, or The Sighing Gardens (1998), written in the aftermath of her mother’s death and the explosion of creativity that followed Jandl’s death on June 9, 2000, and produced Requiem for Ernst Jandl (2001), The Communicating Vessels (2003), And I Shook Myself A Beloved (2005), Paloma (2008), Scardanelli (2009), études (2012), and a number of her most powerful short lyrics—it is nevertheless safe to say that Mayröcker is the major elegist of our time, our comprehensive chronicler of the mind and body in extremis. Over the past quarter century, she has constructed a vast work of mourning, a mausoleum of text, a heaven of the book, where, one after another, she places the loved ones she has survived for safekeeping, leaving, as always, space enough for herself to join them when the time comes.

To age gracefully and die tranquilly, to meet the painful breakdown of the body without complaint and confront the terror of non-existence with equanimity: this is what Western culture expects of us as we come to the end of our lives. There is, after all, a certain logic to accepting what one cannot change and a certain dignity in accepting logic. It is an ideal few achieve. Mayröcker rejects it altogether.

“[T]he monstrosity of death, the outrage, the scandal death, I will never be able to grasp it, accept it,” she writes in brütt, at age 75, on the cusp of the deaths of her mother and of her husband, the two most significant people in her life. “[A]pparently I am not mature enough for this life, and not yet ripe enough for my own death, sometimes I think that I am standing at the beginning, at the beginning of my life, of my writing, as if I still had everything before me, an intimation that I have a few years’ time and can perfect myself—” (tr. Roslyn Theobald). This fits Said’s conception of late style to a T. “Late style,” after all, “is what happens when art refuses to abdicate its rights in favor of reality.”

***

The special relationship between poets and death has long been a part of poetry’s mythos. As Anne Carson observes, “a poet is someone who saves and is saved by the dead,” and “the poet’s power to negate the negating action of death derives from [her] special view of reality, a view that sees death everywhere and finds life within, a view that perceives presence as absence and finds a way to turn the relation inside out.” Poetry, in this conception, is a kind of apotropaic magic. In Mayröcker’s death-haunted late style, the poet’s power expresses itself in a rigorous program of documentation and transcription—“I registered all the smallest and most significant hand movements and followed everything I did or remembered with the attempt to immediately formulate it all, that is, transform everything taking place into language”—to preserve in poetry what is being lost or has been lost in life (And I Shook Myself A Beloved, tr. Alexander Booth). Not for nothing have German reviewers compared the relationship between Mayröcker and Jandl to that of Orpheus and Eurydice, with the gender roles reversed.

The prongs of Mayröcker’s poetic program are twofold. The first—familiar from the “warts and all” tradition of autobiography that extends from the Confessions of Augustine and Rousseau to the confessional poets of our own time—is ethical: the courage to write what readers might regard as unflattering, unseemly, self-indulgent, self-pitying, vulnerable, abject, or in poor taste. Where aging and grieving are concerned, this taboo is particularly strong, especially against writing by women.

It takes courage for Mayröcker to be as frank as she is about the loss of physical attractiveness, her worries that people will view her as a “hag” and a “bag lady,” and the persistence of her sexual desire, for younger lovers, well into old age. It takes courage, too, to catalogue her incontinence, her “bowel hysteria[s],” her moments of memory loss, her diminishing sight and hearing, her hand cramps, her insomnia, the fluctuations of her blood pressure, and to say that her many visits to her various doctors are motivated by a “high-percentage hypochondria.” It takes courage to admit to the constant fear of death, for which she takes sedatives, and to document her wavering faith in the life she’s chosen for herself. But above all, it takes courage to be frank about the feelings of rage, abandonment, longing, loss of identity, loss of meaning, and pure pain that are part of the common human experience of grief: “No, I screamed inside myself in 1 terrible uproar, no quiet and peaceful holiday, but storm-like unsettling coming over me in massive waves, tattered, tousled, disheveled, fiery and soft …” (The Communicating Vessels, tr. Alexander Booth).

The second—and more distinctive—prong of Mayröcker’s program is aesthetic. Refining the collage techniques of her experimental period, she develops a series of “stenographic” tools for transcribing the minutest details of conscious experience. Though these tools are largely artifacts of her use of her Hermes Baby typewriter, as Jonathan Larson notes in his translator’s introduction to Scardanelli, she could just have easily edited them out in a second draft. Rather, she preserves and presents the traces of her transcription process for their poetic effects on readers. Instead of the indefinite article, for example, she uses the numeral 1, and instead of writing once she writes 1x, heightening the ontological singularity of the respective object or event that follows. Her abbreviations of common words, such as small and large (kl. and gr. in German; sm. and lg. in English), have a similar effect of defamiliarization and compression. More conceptual is her use of the French-style colons (with one space on either side), equal signs, plus signs, or backslashes between two nouns in order to yoke juxtaposed images into a kind of deliberately unnatural synonymity. Finally, her idiosyncratic uses of typography and punctuation allow her to suture together lines, phrases, refrains, quotations, and sentences paratactically, creating the accelerated, jagged visual and sonic rhythms of the “raving language” that is her poetic signature:

by the second, itself, and have to
hurry GET MOVING before the sun rears up, REVOLTS etc.,
I stand by the window or crouch in a ball : a bundle in
the corner. Large butterfly geranium leaf
on the flagstones in the corridor : pressed flat / like
the past – (I’d like this sentence in the tiniest print!).
Here and there the innermost plantations, look, the orangerie!,
writes Marcel Beyer : smells of camel, or movable
baptismal angel. And thus Artaud’s face thought-body or -blood,
Artaud’s anemone hand.
THIS IS 1 LOVE-LETTER!, the points of the mountains, the sharp
eyes like needles pinned to my nature, alas! Nature, pi-
nned to my own body-skin, alas, woe is me! I scream
writhe finish myself off, the flooded eye the feathered
eye, this nature or what!, this chiffre full moonlight –
you come into the room, I’m waiting for your voice
I’m writing deluded letters which you’ll never receive,

such thin and vulnerable skin-intercourse, this is 1 merciful
weather, the whitethroat’s kiss in the gardens . . this
word in the wire in communion I’m dreaming of you, and
ecstasy itself, this magpie,
have just invented language raving language. (tr. Richard Dove)

In the prose poems of études—whose name is in keeping with her notion that she is perpetually returning to the beginning of her writing—Mayröcker takes these techniques further with multiple columns of text, the insertion of French and English expressions into her German sentences, and even the substitution of pictograms for words. But if there is one stylistic constant throughout her work, from the 1965 lyric “total text or approaching the bulrushes / bullshit of truisms” to études, it is the way she often ends a sentence, poem, or chunk of prose with the word etc. or &c. as if to say “this line of thought could be continued indefinitely.” More unsettling than the gentler ellipsis, an iambic metron that syncopates rather than fades away, it is an acknowledgement that all endings are artificial, except for one. For Mayröcker, a poem stops only when the writer stops wishing—or stops being able—to write it. She refuses closure, poetic or otherwise. She forgoes, to quote Said once more, the fiction of “transcendence and unity” that underpins the conventional lyric in favor of a perpetual “[deepening of] lateness.” Etc. is the only immortality we will ever taste in this life.

Just as she sometimes flirts with the consolations of prayer and images of the afterlife only to revert to her “religious trust in [her own] language,” soul-talk creeps into Mayröcker’s work occasionally, only to be discarded in favor of a resolutely materialist poetics of the body, by the body, and for the body. The soul and the body are nothing more than wet rags (“2 wet rags : soul and body”). Mayröcker’s writing process is a series of “poetic palpitations” that require her to “work [herself] into the materiality of language that produces electrification.” Elsewhere she describes her process as a kind of fusion with her typewriter: “an enormous amount of energy came gushing out…of my skull, there is a chase going on inside me, there is a machine loose, some kind of machine is loose inside me…” (brütt). For Mayröcker, the poet’s task is not to create poems, insofar as these are understood as linguistic objects separable from the poet; it is to fashion her body into a kind of transcription machine through years of labor and discipline, from which the poems are graphemic runoff, excreta, discharge. If “spirit is a function of matter,” as she approvingly quotes Jandl saying, poetry is a “fornication in the brain” (And I Shook Myself A Beloved). It is only by “writing with the body” that “life can be metamorphosed into language,” and it is only by being metamorphosed into language that life survives the inevitable breakdown of the body.

The result of this apparently impersonal, even mechanistic attitude toward writing is intimacy and comprehensiveness beyond what more conventional approaches to confessional lyric and autofiction offer. Readers learn, for example, what her favorite color is (fuchsia), her preferred pen (felt-tipped), the book she rereads more often than any other (Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card), her bizarre childhood pastime (collecting empty matchboxes in which she saves her parents’ toenail clippings), the make of her father’s pre-war automobile (Talbot), the name of the sedative she has been prescribed (Demetrin), the strange phobia of her mother (to playing cards), what she uses as a paperweight (a Cretan rock given to her by a friend), what side of her body she leans on when she writes (the left), Jandl’s preferred headgear (a black beret), the occasion she and Jandl first tried Coca-Cola (at the Winterbach teacher’s home in 1955), not to mention what she happens to be thinking at any moment she connects to her Hermes Baby writing machine. Such are the infra-ordinary and apparently insignificant details that emerge and combine to form the telltale rhythms of a unique literary sensibility for whom Henry James’s imperative to be a person “on whom nothing is lost” is treated as a matter of life and death.

***

“For me there is no life without writing,” Mayröcker said in a 2016 interview with the magazine Der Standard. “I want to write up until the end, until I literally cannot write anymore.” She has since added another two books, another two radio plays, and a children’s story to her oeuvre. One day, of course, “nature” will bring her long, singular poem to its inevitable conclusion, at which point, to paraphrase Auden’s elegy for Yeats, she will finally become her admirers. Until then, as she told the interviewer, she will continue to “write for [her] life.” Etc.