Art is a jealous mistress
Kathy O'Shaughnessy
Ama Mahler grew up an artist's daughter. Her father was the gifted painter Emil Schindler, who noted gloomily in his diary: 'I must live among men, however much I despise them.' Alma adored him, and identified with his view of artists as a kind of super-race, to which she was deter- mined to belong. She needed to feel unique all her life, and art was the means at hand.
Born in 1879, moving in the brilliant artistic circles of early 20th-century Vienna, Alma never became the composer she wanted to become. Instead she fell in love with Klimt, Mahler, Kokoschka, Gropius and Werfel, and became, broadly speaking, indispensable and a source of inspiration to each. 'I believe in you and am risen from the dead', wrote Kokoschka; 'you are the woman, I am the artist. .."Be the instru- ment of my rebirth!', said the novelist Franz Werfel. 'I have only one great wish', wrote Walter Gropius to his mother (with innocent ardour, although he, like all Alma's husbands, was ruthlessly cuckolded by her), 'that I may live up to her expecta- tions.'
These love affairs were transactions. She loved them; they had to be great. If they tended towards laziness, Alma was there, bossily urging. Franz Werfel escaped her 'daily inquisitions' by leaving Vienna and going to Bad Ischl, where he bumped into Albrecht Joseph. Grinning 'like a naughty boy', he confessed his truancy CI got away'.) Werfel spoke too soon. Joseph recounts how later that evening when dining he recognised Alma's voice in the restaurant. 'You have been here for three weeks', she was demanding, 'and what is the result on paper? Not one line!'
She was an exacting muse, and Suzanne Keegan recounts her life with insight and fluency, packing her narrative with felici- tous detail, moving quickly to young adult- hood in Vienna. At 17 Alma was an arrestingly beautiful and talented pianist, already familiar with works of Nietzche,
Schopenhauer and Plato. With her intelli- gent feeling for art, her powers of self-
dramatisation (revealed somewhat dreadfully in the diaries), combined with her compulsive need to be idolised, she appeared to those she met to incarnate the spirit of German Romanticism. The hard core of her egotism certainly didn't shine in her 21-year-old face, and it was at this age that she attracted Mahler.
They met in November 1901, and by the end of the month had decided to marry. Mahler's arrival jostled another admirer, Zemlinsky, from his perch, but only just. Tortured by her emban-as de choix, Alma worried that Zemlinsky might become 'great'. Mahler was then famous principally as a conductor: what if she rejected Zem- linsky only to find that Zemlinsky became more famous than Mahler!
Keegan adroitly brings Mahler into the story, and their married life and its rituals makes fascinating reading. Keegan is drily objective towards Alma, but allows herself some sympathy when describing the prob- lems facing a girl marrying a driven genius twice her age. `To live for you, to die for you, Almschi', were Mahler's last written words to her, scrawled across his sketched tenth symphony, before his death in 1911. In their last years together Alma had been unfaithful with Walter Gropius, a betrayal that stoked Mahler to renewed, desperate ardour that is painful to read about. Physically sick, and in a tormented ecstasy, he believed he had Alma back in his heart while she was in fact seeing Gropius. After his death Mahler was succeeded by Kokoschka, then Gropius again, whom she married, and finally Franz Werfel, her third and last husband.
Alma captivated her artists instanta- neously. 'I believe that wherever she goes, and wherever she sets foot in the world of men she is mistress' said Klimt. This magnetism escapes the reader: her thoughts, recorded in her diary, are monotonously self-referential. Often using voluptuous, high-flown language, the thoughts tend to show coarse, childish motives with amazing transparency — the child's triumph, the desire to hurt. She
'Actually, I started on drugs and drifted into athletics.'
receives jewels from her absent husband, and notes with satisfaction that her friends were 'eaten up with envy'. Angry at Gropius's mother, who did not like her, she writes to Gropius: 'Tell her that the doors of the whole world, which are open to the name Mahler, will fly shut to the totally unknown name, Gropius'. Meeting Father Johannes Hollnsteiner, she writes solemnly of wishing to profit from his 'noble, un- ostentatious way of communicating his knowledge; adding, with important coy- ness, that he is 38, 'and thus far has not met Woman'. Woman was, of course, com- ing his way in the now bulky shape of Alma. Her diaries show a striking lack of self-awareness, and no irony.
Alma was as inconsistent as a child. Incredibly selfish, she was also generous, vital, and supportive of friends in need. Two of her husbands were Jewish, she fled from and despised the Nazi regime, yet she would praise the 'medical facilities' of the concentration camps, to Werfel's under- standable fury; and when his books were burned, she wrote: 'All at once he is a nosy little Jew with no great talent for the masses...
Anti-Semitism rears its head again in Walter Gropius, in the odd outburst from this otherwise very humane, brilliant architect who had such vision and motiva- tion. The result of collaboration betwen author and subject, Reginald Isaacs' book was originally 1300 pages, but is here a manageable 344. The biography is affec- tionate, dispassionate, admirably lucid. The photographs are a delight. Alma pops up like a monstrous queen, barely aware of Gropius's ordeal in the war that he loathed, not permitting him to come near his new-born baby when he pitches up on brief leave, grimy with exhaustion (his dirty exterior repulsed her; she thought he looked like a 'murderer'). She was oblivi- ous to Gropius's interests, which weren't really hers. Founder of the Bauhaus, Gropius was inspired by his idea of indus- try and art working together, moved by his war experience to try to realise an ideal where the workman, 'now a slave to indus- trial labour', has 'light, air, hygiene'. These heady, almost revolutionary days in the Bauhaus are filled with such figures as Moholy-Nagy, Mies Van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Paul Klee, Bartok. There is a lovely description of the early joyous days of his second marriage to Use Frank, where they are tranfixed by the gramophone, the first in the Bauhaus community.
Gropius strove to keep politics from destroying the Bauhaus, but in 1928 the pressures were too great and he resigned. Although strangely slow to condemn the Nazi regime, in the next decade he was obliged to leave Germany. Like Alma, who ended up in New York drinking a bottle of Benedictine a day, and many other Ger- mans at that time, he settled comfortably in America, where he lived until his death in 1969.
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