Literature

Alfred Polgar The Small Form

The Small Form My book, An den Rand geschrieben (Written on the Margin), small stories and studies, found very indulgent critics. But the tide had not been felicitously chosen. From the unpretentiousness of its name, many were led to con­clude that the contents of the book would be similarly unpretentious. Others were led to the neat idea that I write my works on the margin because that's just where they belong. Armed with the catchword given them by the title, the readers beat me with it, and with the entry also provided by it, they displaced me. There also came running up, attracted by the phrase "written on the margin," many offensive associations, such as: plain, incidental, irrelevant, notes, jottings, crumbs, hem trimmings, border squiggles. In short, people had a good time critically at my expense, comfortable with the margin in the mouth. And I learned bitterly to regret that I didn't take the advice of good friends and tide my book 'The Silver Bell" or "Clouds to the South-South-North" or simply "Silpelith Rows over the Alders." pan> Humbled but wise by experience, I am calling the present second volume Orchester von oben (Looking Down on the Orchestra). This time, nobody can do anything to me. Now the critics are compelled, if they get to it, to judge the work from its contents and not from its title, and if they want to jab, they can do it with their own point and not with mine. More pernicious than the title was the small form in which the works brought together under the title were composed. My poor stories were made to feel that ten pages of printed paper, placed on a correct scale (equal weights and an equal volume of paper), definitely weighed less than a thousand. In evaluations of my book, its light weight shifted effortlessly from the material to the spiritual, from the unmetaphoric to the meta­phoric. Reading matter that takes five minutes prompted the critical (so to say) notion: reading matter if you need something to do for five minutes. As hours, mostly called "short hours," for which my book may be of use, the following were specified: the hour after lunch, the hour after dinner, the hour before falling asleep, the hour in the trolley, the rained-out holiday hour. Identified as places where the book would be good to read were: the benches around the winter fireplace, summertime meadows, the settee, the ottoman, the hammock, the armchair, the chaise longue, the sofa. The position to be taken on reading: anything that was casual, comfortable, relaxed. True enough, my persistent literary efforts to make ten lines out of a hundred, which involved much torment, reduced me to an author for postprandial and presomnolent hours. True enough, I spin bitter fantasies in my mind of what might have been had I tried instead to pound a hundred lines into a thousand, if I had let it go at that-sunk in the mire of recognition, pleasantly occupied all day long receiving royalties and giving autographs, in possession of a motorboat, a gold fountain pen, and two Scottish sheep dogs, to whom I might give the names of the heroes of my most celebrated novels, not overlooked by inquiries of magazines (what is your favorite dessert? what are you working on and above all why?), pictured in the illustrated gazettes, and swarms of lovely women covetously fluttering all around me . . . But by no means do I want to suggest that my books suffer injustice when people treat them as bagatelles. Those who do, know why they do it, and they have no trouble justilying their opinion, even the false (a chief pleasure and amusement of the critical metier). I am well aware, moreover, that a story of modest volume may also not hold up and that the small form may well be a necessary effect of shortness of breath. But I should like, if I only commanded the appropriate pathos, to speak up for this small form in very big words. For I believe that it suits the tension and need of the time, that it is in any case more suitable, as a flat analogy imagines, than written skyscrapers. I regard episodic brevity as thoroughly appropriate to the role today demanded of writing. Beyond doubt, the wonder of the large work remains, as there remains the justification of a thousand printed pages for one vision whose content could not be accommodated in a more modest space. But among us who write, how few are they who might claim such an awesome portion of space? who of our storytellers and onlookers has such great things to say that he couldn't possibly write any more briefly than he does? where is the mind that revealed to the world at large, with which it is bound, such new and important things about its chemical composition to whom the most con­cise form and formulae were insufficient to capture such revelation? I mean, they must be thoughts rare to the age, worldviews of the greatest clarity and depth, a more than grandiose imagination for the accommodation of which the architecture rather of the novel should be applied. Something more modest in this high form would appear as ludicrous as a cozy nest in monumental style. Life is too short for long literature, too transitory for lingering de­scription and observation, too psychopathic for psychology, too fictitious for novels, the fermentation and decomposition too swift to be preserved in long expensive books lengthily and expansively. That writers find time to write extensively I can understand only as need. The demon eggs them on, abundance oppresses them, the powerful current digs its powerful bed. There's nothing to be done for it. But that people in this tempestuous epoch, agitated by calamities never experienced before, find calm and time, inner time, to read extensively, is a real miracle to me. A great shaking tosses around everything that is standing, sinks the solidly grounded, throws new soil high. How presumptuous it would be to build ponderously and massively on such a foundation! Eternalities seem temporal, the most durable gods false idols, all anchors are weighed, nobody knows where the journey is headed, but that it is headed somewhere and headed somewhere with dazzling speed we feel in our very dizziness. At such a time, who wants to be burdened with superfluous baggage? Ballast has to be discarded-and what doesn't turn out to be ballast? The shortest line from point to point is the rule of the fleeting hour. Even the aesthetic. "Fine literature" with a swollen belly is a contra­diction in terms. “Die kleine Form,” 1926. Original text in Alfred Polgar, KIeine Schriften, 3:369-72.