blood and shame

"I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." - Chesterton

I ordered Hans Fallada's The Drinker after self-exiling to Phoenix, licking my wounds from a humiliating break-up and trying to plot together some kind of future. As expected the self-flagellation starts on page one. The prose is simple but effective; not much intellectual legwork required, but difficult to take in still for its accuracy. As a pedestrian observer, one is perhaps familiar with the continued mileage Slavoj Zizek gets from Lacan, specifically the bit about the jealous husband whom suspects his wife of infidelity; the question isn’t whether or not the jealousy is well-founded, but rather, why the husband so badly needs the jealousy as a function of his identity. The success of The Drinker rests on Fallada’s ability to flesh out this dilemma to a maddening degree.

"At all costs I wanted to avoid showing how much I suffered through these insults and my growing isolation."

In my copy Melville House seems bent on selling the more sympathetic aspects of the author’s remarkable life, conspicuously leaving out the nasty bits. From the back cover we get the impression Fallada’s time in an insane-asylum under the Third Reich is the focus of the novel. It’s a choice factoid for pushing units when you consider the literary fame associated with someone like, say Alekandr Solzhenitsyn. You’ll have to read John Willet’s afterward to find out how he got there in the first place, or why Fallada, on the eve of fleeing Germany decided at the last minute to unpack his bags. This is a controversial matter. Consider the likes of Thomas Mann, and many others included, whom chose to migrate to the U.S, settling in Southern California in opposition to Goebbels's censorship. Mann himself is on the record for believing "any books which could be printed at all in Germany between 1933 and 1945 are worse than worthless and not objects one wishes to touch." He goes on, "A stench of blood and shame attaches to them. They should all be pulped".

For the express purpose of making my point, let's go-ahead and take Fallada's reputation as part and parcel with his work. You'd be hard pressed to find a more sordid Wikipedia entry than the episode where his lonely teenage self makes a suicide pact with his only friend. In an effort to retain some trace of honor, they stage a duel. Accounts vary. It is believed that his friend intentionally misfired. Fallada's aim on the other hand was true, striking his companion dead cold, leaving Fallada to turn the gun on himself, thus firing directly into his own chest twice, somehow surviving. The remainder of the author’s life is marked by occasional success and bouts of addiction ranging from morphine to alcoholism. Indeed, close friends attributed any period of stability he may have enjoyed to his wife. This was an opinion upheld by Fallada, at least for short-while. 

It should come as no surprise that The Drinker was written in the wake of a divorce; the incident that landed our author in the nut house was a blow-out between he and his ex-wife. Again, he fired shots. Already pegged for maintaining “subversive ideas” this time Fallada was arrested by the SS. Later in his life, and much to his own determent, he would make more clear his disdain for the powers that be. In The Drinker, however, I appear to be alone in being unable to detect any substantial ant-Nazi subtext. Ostensibly, the only figurehead Fallada seems concerned with is himself.

The weight of perception looms large over our man, Ewrin Sommer. He can't stomach the fact that his wife, Magda, is more capable at managing his small business than he. Facing inadequacy and growing tension within the household, Sommer spends his time, almost comically, finding new ways to sweep his financial affairs under the rug before his wife notices. He hasn't yet taken to drink when, like many addicts, he’s already grown accustomed to enduring new lows, buoyed with the illusionary faith of being only a few witty remarks away from turning his luck around. A line from Mike Leigh's Naked comes to mind; resolve is never stronger than in the morning after the night it was the weakest. Sommer's aim is the reinstate his superiority within the household. It takes half the book to realize he likely never held it. 

“Then I recalled my loveless existence. I had always longed for love and appreciation, secretly of course, and I had had it in full measure, from Magda, as well as from my fellow citizens. Then gradually I had lost it. I didn’t know how it had all happened. Had I lost love and appreciation because I had grown so bad, or had I grown so bad because I had lost its encouragement? I found no answers to these questions...”

From here, rationalizations and false equivalencies lead to paranoia in a death-by-inches fashion. The first-person narrative carefully omits objectivity, letting hope bloom eternal for the hero and reader alike. The level of self-awareness Fallada endows Sommer with is ironic because it's a central character flaw masqueraded as a virtue. Towards the end, Sommer is told quite rightly by his doctor that he's too easily offended, suggesting his problems started long before he reached for the bottle. Still, even after the horrendous acts he's committed, this line is hard to swallow. It follows a period of routine systemic neglect at the hands of public institutions, the kind that today would demand reform. This concludes Sommer's longest stretch of sobriety, a lonely enterprise, though spurred by bad faith. It's clear Fallada wants to show step-by-step how a “respectable man”, an oft-repeated phrase in the book, can succumb to madness, simultaneously capsizing our notions of self and madness.  

I don't find the middle portion all that interesting. Perhaps this is where the "oppressive society" bears its teeth. It's true that conditions at both the prison and the hospital are deplorable, but the intent doesn't qualify as an expose. The "powers without heart, without compassion, without human qualities" are not what led to Sommer's down fall(though they certainly don't help!). Earlier in the book he flirts with the notion of descending into nothingness, but he can't quite follow through. Not yet. In the context of the story these institutions represent the indifference of the universe should a person choose to take that route. There's no reasoning, no pleading, and no one left to deceive. Weeks after finishing the book, I am parsing my notes for additional signs of Sommer's undoing. His unwillingness to accept his place next to his wife, routinely described as efficient, I find heart breaking. Beneath his misogyny, narcissism and self-awareness is someone truly incapable of seeing what is happening. It's a tragedy very much in the vein of Madam Bovary. Up until the end Magda's presence in the story is decidedly restrained; the reader is as uncertain of her as Sommer is. In a strange way, he is right to rebuke her attempts to reach him. After the luster of acquired intimacy wears off, one is left with the same innate faculties one brought into the relationship. In other words, Sommer’s problems are a question of self-acceptance, something no relationship can solve, but only numb.

I was recently reminded of “A Millhouse Divided”, a high-point in The Simpsons canon in which Millhouse’s parents get divorced. Kirk Van Houten’s illegible drawling of dignity and his sappy demo-tape (Can I Borrow A Feeling?) suggests the same tone-def processing we get from Fallada’s subject. It’s a car accident you can’t resist rubber necking. After hitting rock bottom and serving what feels like a lifetime in prison, none of the harrowing conditions Sommer endures make a dent. Quite the opposite, every new injustice further cements him into a state of bitterness — he isn’t worthy of the dignity that comes with suffering. To return to Lacan, it no longer matters whether or not he gets reinstated; the walls between him and reality are up, and they are’t going anywhere. His vows towards improvement are empty gestures because they assume a capacity for gravitas otherwise absent. What makes this an unsettling conclusion are the brief moments of lucidity in which Sommer appears capable of agreeing.

Love casually removes the mask; lower for some, less for others. That image then reflects back to us from our beloved. It would be wise not to grow attached to what we see. The Drinker opens with Sommer unable to identify why, after 14 years without an argument he and his wife suddenly can no longer stand each other. From there he scrambles to rebuild an image he mistook as definite and true. It's no coincidence in the end when Magda struggles to recognize him; he's unshaven, malnourished and most poetic of all, has had the tip of his nose bitten off. If this is Sommer's true face it is a pitiful manifestation once dutifully concealed. More telling, perhaps is how quickly he's grown accustomed to it.

A.G