Doing Better than Othello
FALKENBERG, BETTY
Doing Better than Othello The Story of My Wife: The Reminiscences of Captain Störr By Milan Fiist Translated by Ivan Sanders PAJ Publications. 336pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Betty...
...Among the backdrops he used are London, Paris and Friesland—places he had never seen...
...I can't tell the two of us apart anymore...
...What can I do...
...By writing it the author kept his sanity in a world more depraved than any he could contrive...
...Andwhatdoyouneedcocainefor...
...With age they become thicker, denser, and while they proliferate, your brain atrophies...
...The translator has attempted to preserve Fust's nervous, staccato rhythms as well as a certain colloquialism of diction...
...For example, in hopes of tracking down her alleged lover, he sprinkles flour on the stairs to their apartment...
...Likeanaccursedgod one pounds away in complete solitude, and in one's wrath creates a new world...
...She has no choice but to leave him...
...Reassured by a friend that she loved him to the end, and buoyed by his vision, he manages to carry on...
...Whoever granted me life seeks also to wreck it.'" Apart from an outburst against Mahler ("the ravings of a famous gusher" is how Störr deprecates the music he hears —and, one feels, secretly loves) there is not a single contemporary reference in the entire book...
...But a little later I relented: 'All right, don't get scared...
...devours its own products, just about everything it was wrought...
...More prescient than Othello, he sees what a corroding force it can become...
...In a fit of rage worthy of Pozdnischeff in The Kreutzer Sonata (Tolstoy was a favorite of Fust's), he starts destroying his wife's mugs, her potted plants, all her precious baubles...
...The latter proves a tricky business, and it often results in a false key, a " here and now" too transitory to work...
...You are walking up a staircase and suddenly see yourself coming toward you, that is, your reflection in a mirror, and you are stunned...
...It was almost as if my two eyes went out for a walk and I saw them coming toward me now...
...Whatever it brings into being it also destroys...
...Was it you?' [Pit] asked sarcastically, "you created yourself?' "'Maybe there isn' t even such a thing as creation,' I answered without hesitation...
...Ultimately, Fust's novel is a grand spoof...
...I have no intention of becoming an addict...
...Finally, he yanks down the chandelier...
...The hero of this strange novel is a self-tormenting Dutch sea captain, a huge bear of a man...
...Consider the calf that would suck at the very slaughterhouse doorstep./And everything else that goes down in unhappy last reluctance...
...How did the iconoclastic Captain survive in isolation from the culture around him...
...There just isn't...
...Horrabin Pit, his Budapest landlord, that began with Störr complaining about the postman's refusal to bring the mail up to his room: '"Who created you, may I ask...
...Well, that is what this was like, in a way...
...Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg Contributor, "Partisan Review," New York "Times Book Review" "Moor, she was chaste...
...Störr is less passive than these creatures...
...Or in my ear, for that matter,' I added grudgingly...
...For it wasn't she who was walking there, but I myself, I swear—some integral part of me...
...Whatisthis?' shecried...
...Just look at the hair growing in your ear,' I said to him, for I had a terrific urge to insult the old man...
...Captain Störr's mounting uncertainty over his wife's faithfulness causes him to resort to schemes that are not only extreme but frequently absurd...
...His emotions are on the big side too, especially his jealousy...
...For how else can one undo the curse that is life than by recreating, reshaping, re-examiningit...
...And I'll tell you why not...
...I begin to understand now what prompts some people to write...
...Despite its rather desultory plot, The Story of My Wife is entirely convincing as a tragicomic study of supreme obsession...
...Think of the giant oak when it snaps in the hurricane, shuddering...
...In fact, he tells us: " I tried out life, it didn't work...
...Creation...
...Here and there it leaps out in the dialogue, as in an uncordial exchange between the Captain and Mr...
...Years later, on a bus in Paris, he imagines he sees her walking down the street, "nonchalantly, absently even, toward the light...
...What is all this smut and dust?'" He tells her it is cocaine, "because it occurred to me that that's what it looked like...
...But when one remembers that it was written by a Hungarian Jew in the years 1935-42, the novel takes on another dimension altogether...
...Transfixed, he expands upon his thought...
...Yet so overriding is this passion with him that it destroys his wife's life, and his own...
...In 1933 Füst wrote these lines: "Look at the bird in the air, when she shrieks who ever comes to help her...
...Hints of it, you realize, lie in references to Philo of Alexandria and Jacob's ladder...
...But this last thing I am not giving up...
...Still, it is a spirited effort, at last making available to the reader of English a document as memorable as it is original...
...she lov'd thee, cruelMoor...
...The real landscape of the novel, though, is a mental one, overgrown with black broodings and gray doubts...
...Tomakemylifemorebearable...
...Immediately following this incident, Captain Störr learns that his wife perished tragically of pneumonia in Barcelona, shortly after their separation...
...I just want to kill myself.'" Behind the mock tone lurks a real despair that issues from the same depths as the author's poetry...
...Alas, jealousy being the infernal mania that it is, such words are rarely heeded in time...
...One of Hungary's most innovative modern poets, Milan Füst (1888-1967) undertook The Story of My Wife when he was 47, shutting himself up in his Budapest villa for seven years...
...It'sruiningyourclothes, darn it...
...So much for your notion of creative evolution...
Vol. 71 • July 1988 • No. 13
