THE ENGLISH GARDENS
20]
he was composing his request for the grant. Actually, he wanted
to live a little, particularly in Munich, a city he had first seen
and grown to love at the end of the war when he had been a
Private First Class and an interpreter at nearby Dachau. Neither
the horrors of the concentration camp, nor the apparent un–
consciousness of these horrors in neighboring Munich had dam–
aged his affection for the city. His mind did not work that way.
The Baroque, the Rococo, the high-flown nineteenth-century
romance of painters and poets, the buildings of the Assam
brothers, the palaces of Nymphenburg, the riches of Lembach
and Caspar David Friedrich-these held his attention. He liked
the size of the city, knew its opera stars .and ballet dancers and
celebrities like Erich Kastner. He had late morning coffees with
them and got into theaters on their passes. And, what's more, he
felt confident he was a favorite of theirs.
Now again, he started humming. A way of pacifying his
conscience-without actually writing a poem- had come to
him :
he would send off that letter about Munich he had promised to
his last serious love affair. She was back in New York busy, no
doubt, with her own literary life; yet she was arranging a series
of readings for him, next year. She kept urging him to write
such a letter, for she claimed she could sell it, somewhere.
Thinking, humming, warming to the idea, he turned into the
small streets and squares pressed up against the English Gardens.
As
he approached the pension walls he was as usual softly sing–
ing a song of Miiller's- not quite as Schubert had set it.
His landlady, the Grafin von Erlach, had rented him the
library of the house. It was a big square tall room, four walls
of books broken only by two windows onto the garden. The only
door was backed by shelves and, when closed, disappeared into
a section devoted to the journals of English tourists. He had the
habit of picking up one of these on his way to his bath or the
w.c. There was a fireplace which said, in deeply engraved gold–
filled letters,
"Nihil Volo Nisi Ut Ardeat"-I
wish only to burn,
a motto he now took to heart. He stripped off his poor poet's
