FRIEDRICH
P.
on
73
word-gaming in
Evening Edged in Gold
strongly suggests that the
deposed tyrant in its heyday must have proved a cruelly efficient
slave-driver.
This last-completed work thus traces the etiology of a literary
oeuvre
in its themes and preoccupations back to the isolation of an
emotionally and sensorially deprived (extreme myopia that went un–
diagnosed) childhood and lonely youth. His compensatory efforts,
voracious and eclectic reading, Schmidt blames for an acceleration
of Ego development, along with that of an imagination feeding
almost exclusively on a rarefied diet, on literature rather than real–
ity! Young Schmidt removed himself to "cerebral worlds," the writer
does the same, especially in his late phase: neurotic necessity has
been converted into creative method, via the "synthetic" imagination
of a mind seeking inspiration more selectively now, more from liter–
ature and pictures than from reality.
(Evening Edged in Gold
has been
shown to be, among other things, the release into dramatic action of
the characters visually frozen into Bosch's
Garden
of
Earthly
Delights-
in a sort of dialectic reversal of the writer's visual emphasis,
one might add.)
If
there is an element of wish-fulfillment in all
this, it is due to this synthesizing esthetic effort. Schmidt, whose
works are in some way the "Mind Games" occasioned by his reading
experiences, in this last work takes stock of a life spent more in litera–
ture than in life.
It
is no mere subjectivism. Like any true artist
Schmidt goes beyond egocentricity to representativeness.
In
the
book the facets of his early Hamburg childhood, for example, have
objective value as a sociological document of life in the lowest
middle-class European suburb, during the hunger years of World
War I and after. Indeed, Schmidt wishes this and other works to be
regarded as psychological autopsy. His self-demonstration of the
etiology of artistic creation is, far from any exhibitionism, even more
selfless than the comparable act of donating one's physical body for
the advancement of anatomical knowledge. Lest the structural rele–
vance of all this be forgotten: Schmidt sums up, comments on, and
"repairs" his life in the polyphonic voices of several figures which
represent personality levels from past and present: three old men
discussing their
status quo
and
ante,
with a fourth figure added for the
sake of poetic justice - a budding young writer named Schmidt. He
is about to set out on a life ruled over by more benign daemons, a life
which shall be more than a reprise of that of his
creator-alter ego.
His
first name is not Arno, for we must assume that he will write differ–
ent books - more's the pity.
