Before writing an article, he would engage in obsessive preparation: brush his teeth, wash his hands, attempt to defecate, wash his hands again right before grabbing the sheet of paper. Usually, to eliminate any tempting distractions, he would masturbate, empty himself, perforate himself, make a clean slate of his body.
Two or three times a week, he went to the newspaper office to retrieve his mail from a little gray pigeonhole with his name on it. He immediately threw away the envelopes, which only ever contained prints from galleries alerting him of their upcoming exhibitions. Thus, several times a week, he felt summoned. His books wouldn’t reach him, having been stolen.
He never went to vernissages: he dreaded being attacked, and deep down he must have had a certain scorn for the people he might have encountered there. Out of a kind of paranoia typical of his newspaper, he gladly refrained from attending. His name remained mysterious.
He knew that he was being paid to empty himself. That his energy was being diverted into this civil service of writing. When his spirits were at their lowest, he would imagine he was an amphibian pinned to a cork board, half dead, still twitching from the occasional electric shock. Rarely did anything in photography provoke him, resuscitate him, arouse in him any jolts of writing. And yet, even if he had nothing to say, he still had to give an account: he worked for a daily and was paid per article.
Out of a perhaps idiotic sense of integrity, he traveled to wherever he was summoned, even to those exhibitions too insignificant to merit attention. And when he had to review a book, he read it to the last line, even if doing so didn’t interest him or benefit his article in the slightest. As a matter of principle, he never inserted quotations: bored by recopying, he told himself that his word was as good as another’s.
Sometimes, when he was intimidated by the length of the article he had to write—or when his subject was too unfamiliar to him—he did research, read supplementary materials and took notes on them. But the mass of accumulated material hampered him, blew away his own ideas: he didn’t know how to integrate it. Thus, he often preferred to remain ignorant, for fear that his writing would be blocked and he would feel himself becoming a pathetic drudge. He was determined to preserve his pleasure.
When he went into a gallery, the first thing he did was take a quick look at everything. Then, almost systematically, he took notes. He went back to each photo and described its visible elements and, more rarely, his impressions of it. Taking notes allowed him to leave his memory vacant until the writing of the article. He was afraid of remembering all these images that he often didn’t like.
When the time came to write the article—often to get it out of the way, because he didn’t feel like writing it—he took his notes and immediately transcribed them. There were always objects and details in the image that told him something, joined forces with his own imagination. His articles were reproached for being merely descriptive, and verbose.
Just as often, he didn’t reread his notes. He felt confident about his object of critique, which he no longer described, but instead took apart, assuming a position of intelligence (of impunity?).
Some nights, he woke up with a fatigue of images in his head, an insomniac presence of images running idle, having replaced words (he hadn’t dreamt in sentences for a long time). The images were neither horrifying nor precise: it was the very fact that his head was filled with images (as opposed to bodies and scenery, as it should have been), as well as the sense of obligation to put them into words, that triggered the nightmare. A civil servant’s nightmare, in short.
He wasn’t sure what drove people to photograph things so frantically, brandishing a camera between themselves and others, between themselves and situations. What he understood and respected the most were family photos and erotic photos. They weren’t pretentious, and they could support various affections and desires. Otherwise, photography mostly seemed to be an activity for the lazy and smug.
Before each article, he experienced a moment of anguish, of mild torture. He knew that at the same time the next day, his article would already be in the paper, and often he didn’t know yet what it would consist of. The rapid interval between the idea and the publication frightened him (and so many stages escaped him: the typesetting and copyediting, the page layout, the printing). There was always a certain risk, a risk of the impunity of the newspaper overseeing the article, a sort of responsibility.
Day after day he stacked newspapers between the trestles of his work table. Sometimes he went through them and clipped out his articles, which he then placed in a folder. But he never reread them.
He lamented the fact that he didn’t receive more letters, whether scathing or supportive.
When writing an article, he almost always felt like he was missing out on the article he could have written. The article only became acceptable once it was typed, when he was rid of it.
He owned a small camera (a Rollei 35) that would have made him a laughingstock of the profession that posed him as its critic. He found technique to be something overhyped by camera salesmen; he thought that a good face or object was enough to constitute a subject; he viewed more advanced cameras as mere fetish objects, like writers’ Montblanc pens. He never happened to take his camera out into the street and be struck by something, then capture it. Waiting for just the right moment would have seemed to him a waste of time. But he loved photographing the faces and bodies of those he loved. And sometimes, when he did intend to stay in one place for a while to tackle an idea (scars on people’s faces, fifteen-year-old boys with their mothers, cadavers in the morgue), he would quickly abandon it, discouraged, bored by the process and the logistics.
He lived off the economy of his body. After putting it deliberately to bed, he would annihilate it, as it were, when he forced himself to wake up early to write an article. And this was what displeased him: to be—just like a laborer—a producing machine, with even his body brought to heel, his sleep transformed into a positive, mechanical phase of work, a sort of battery, a rejection of sensual pleasure.
It became a vicious circle: when he was supposed to write an article, he would begin desiring to write for himself, and once the article was written, he was already thinking about the next one. All he ever wrote in his diary were notes, which grew shorter and shorter.
In the middle of an article he found easy to write, he suddenly desired to go haywire, to make himself sick, to complicate the writing, which for him could not be self-evident, so he frantically consumed, like poison, some Christmas chocolates.
When he had to write an article on the photos of August Sander, he came down with a fever, likely triggered by the impossibility of writing it. He was impressed by the perfection of these photos, by the madness of Sander’s project, which had consisted in attempting to establish in interwar Germany a sort of social nomenclature connected to morphological types. Unable to sleep, he wrote and rewrote the article, stumbling over turns of phrase. When a courier arrived at seven the next morning, he was still in front of his typewriter.
Just as there was an attempt at “objectivity” in Sander’s photos, he wanted to bring the same objectivity to his essay, by providing biographical details and defining the type of work in a simple manner. But on rereading the published article a few days later, his fever having broken, he found in it all the terms of his illness and his solitude, and realized that through these photos, which were nevertheless foreign to him, he had spoken only of himself.
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These biographical notes were drawn up according to the recovered diary of Paul K., as well as his articles on photography published in Die Zeit between 1950 and 1955. (H.G.)
The Editor
For three years, I carried out an investigation of an editor. Though said to be sinister, he was capable of brief, intense moments of exultation. It was just that he didn’t like to share these with his authors. He rubbed his hands at the ascetic disposition of one of them, who slept on a straw mattress and transferred his author’s rights over to him, and at the aristocratic disposition of another, a penniless but no less altruistic lord of the manor. Sometimes, he expressed out loud his nostalgia for that lavish time when good writers used to pay their editors to get published.
He readily invoked crisis. He was the most discouraging person I ever met, yet my discouragement came to an end when I realized that his pessimism was never motivated by anything besides the certainty of profit. He must have killed several authors in this way, denying them the least amount of support and then, when they were at their most destitute, throwing some paltry author’s expenses in their face, which he never falsified, no, he was the definition of honesty—which he couldn’t say of some of his colleagues—and yet he increased his fortune by causing authors to doubt themselves and pushing them to the point of giving up. He set up a fund for himself on their skin. Suicides were good for boosting sales, and for biographies. He only offered his authors publicity upon their death—their private or social, symbolic or factual death. He conned their heirs to enrich his own. At times he even contemplated disowning his children, who, he led people to believe, were the only reason for his stinginess.
When, without warning, one of his authors brought him a new manuscript, which had taken a year or two of work, he appeared overwhelmed. First he told the author he’d have to refuse it, regardless of its quality, since sales had become so unpredictable. He pontificated on the cowardice and clan mentality of the critics, the stagnation of public taste, the dishonesty of fads. The author shouldn’t have any hope: the book wouldn’t interest anyone, no paper would mention it, booksellers and sales reps—he had to admit—were saying they were already bored stiff by the idea of having to sell a new book by that author, let alone read it.
Then the next morning, all atingle, he made sure to wake up the discouraged author, snatch him out of the numbness and confusion of his poor sleep. He apologized profusely, giving the author no chance to respond, further battering him with a salvo of compliments whose tardiness was meant to make him all the more grateful. With a note of careful yet spirited enthusiasm in his voice, the editor backtracked on the previous day’s pessimism: of course they wouldn’t sell a thousand copies of the book, but at least it was splendidly written, and if this one didn’t work out, maybe if the author made a tiny bit of effort to follow his advice, the next one would sell better, within reason.
His advice: write longer books with more complicated storylines that, above all, delved into the great timeless themes: love, death, war. The author hung up and went to spit a bit of bile in the bathroom sink.
Later that morning, the editor put a pen in his hand and, under the seal of confidence, had him sign a contract binding his hands and soul to five new books—which now brought the number of works subject to the illegal “right of first refusal” up to eighteen—with no financial compensation, but rather an exhaustive receding of his rights: whittling down here and there, from one contract to the next, his 1 percent royalties, having him willingly waive any and all adaptation rights. Then the editor went for a nice meal by himself at a nearby restaurant, where he was greeted as a man of importance despite his insistence on ordering from the low-cost menu.
Two weeks later, the author received his galleys, proofread and copyedited by the editor himself, who, in addition to his own job, also acted as a proofreader, as a translator into all languages (due to the insolent financial expectations of the so-called professionals), and even as a door-to-door salesman, for clearly no one was interested in reading anymore and thus every book sold was a victory, you only had to read the opinion polls and certain scientific studies to realize the horrible truth: future generations would be so rusty at the obsolescent practice of reading that, physiologically speaking, they wouldn’t be able to derive the slightest pleasure from it. The author was asked to sign copies with cold yet considerate inscriptions for those critics whom the editor despised.
He was always in need of a fight, even if it was a pure whim concocted by this hunger: in these instances he’d go up and down the small publishing house over which he ruled, throbbing, wringing his hands and staring at his shoes, to scold any visitors who inadvertently praised whatever adversary he’d invented for himself. He didn’t rest until he’d won the battle, and he never finished winning it, for when one matter was resolved he’d wilt until he found a new one. The more absurd it was, the more he’d bask in the glory of his triumph in advance.
Sundays were worse than dismal, even cruel. He’d have no one left to win over, to enlist in his fight. Irritated by his wife’s calmness, he’d go curse out a forest.
