The Little Book: A Novel Read online

  No one in the St. Gregory’s academic community could explain the usefulness of knowing so many details about just one of the European cities, especially a second-tier one for those who favored Paris and London, but St. Greg’s boys knew them nonetheless. “The best-dressed army in history,” Wheeler remembered the Haze saying with a touch of irony, “poised on the edge of ignominious defeat. One could go nowhere in Vienna—a café, a restaurant, a table in the Prater, the city’s expansive public park—without being surrounded by military uniforms. In colorful dress and puffery they led the world, with the emperor himself dressed most grandly of all.”

  Now, dislocated in time, Wheeler Burden stared in amazement as he walked past the spacious greens and the grandeur of the enormous public buildings and the new magnificent apartments, the whole area burst with life, the intended ideal. Now, in the Haze’s Vienna, descriptions and musings from the master’s precious “Random Notes” seemed to leap into Wheeler’s brain, not as abstract curiosities for understanding modern history, but as details for survival. To this visitor from another time, the city whose splendor and vitality had existed only in fantastic stories and the perorations of his eccentric old prep school teacher spread out before him in vivid reality. Here before him stood the massive and ornate marble-façaded buildings, nearly all constructed in the last thirty years and representing that burst of confidence and cultural energy unparalleled in the rest of Europe. The very air of imperial magnificence and bourgeois grandeur that the Haze had described so many times now appeared before Wheeler without irony, with absolutely no sign of anything gone awry, provided one stayed out of the city’s depressing and grimy poorer quarters.

  During his forty-plus years at St. Gregory’s, the old Austrian eccentric had kept a loose-leaf binder of reflections about Viennese life in the waning years of the Hapsburg Empire that he called his “Random Notes”—a collection of feuilletons, you might say—that he was constantly refining and reading to his students. “If you understand fin-de-siècle Vienna,” he drummed into three generations, “you understand modern history.” His eyes would then dart around the room to make certain that every boy’s attention was fixed where it ought to be. “It was the grandeur that was important, ” the Haze would intone, imbedding that word in his audience’s collective psyche. “It was the grandeur.”

  In moments of special poignancy and drama, the Haze would produce his prized source, the “Little Book,” he called it, a slim and aged black volume from which he would read with great reverence. “This is from the fin de siècle,” he would say admiringly, and then read a passage that to his mind perfectly captured the flavor of turn-of-the-century Vienna, every student hanging on every elegant phrase. “Writing gets no better than this,” he would say in concluding and closing the book, often with tears in his eyes. The formal title of the sacred slim volume was City of Music, by a Mr. Jonathan Trumpp, but no one ever remembered the title; it was simply the Haze’s revered “Little Book.” And how every St. Greg’s boy knew, loved, and quoted from that book. He would hold the volume in his slender artistic fingers and open to a predetermined page. “Let us see what our eloquent Mr. Trumpp has for us,” he would say, or, “Let us enjoy the magic of the ‘Little Book,’ ” and then he would read some perfectly delicious description of the cultural life of turn-of-the-century Vienna. “Isn’t that writing absolutely exquisite?” And over the years his Jung Wien, sophisticated private school boys who could be cynical about so much in their lives, rarely directed any of their derision at the “Little Book.”

  It all made Vienna at the turn of the century a fascinating place to witness what turned out to be the decline from cultural heights into chaos. “Fascinating,” said the Haze to young intellects, the children of Boston Brahmins, only beginning to grasp his message. “For an impressionable young idealist,” the Haze added, in a piece of self-deprecating biography, “it was horrifying.”

  By the time of his actual visit to the great city, Wheeler’s knowledge of the Haze’s loose-leaf binder, his “Random Notes,” was greater than what one could have expected of the rough-hewn and eccentrically informed adolescent from the provinces he had been in 1957. Before the Haze’s death in 1965, the old man had inexplicably willed the notebook and all his other books and papers to Wheeler Burden. Exactly why no one really understood, especially considering all the illustrious St. Gregory’s alumni and avowed Haze disciples he had to choose from.

  “What ever happened to the Haze’s ‘Random Notes,’ ” alumni would inevitably ask, “and what ever became of his marvelous ‘Little Book’?” Then someone would have to explain that all of the Haze’s “papers,” books included, ended up in the hands of that strange Burden kid from California. After Wheeler became famous, the bequest made a little more sense, but still not much. In fact, it remained a complete puzzlement, until, that is, the 1988 appearance of the great book.

  Five years after the Haze’s death, in 1970, Wheeler, by then a rising rock music phenomenon, showed the black binder to an imperious young editor from the small Athenaeum Press in Boston, who had made a special appointment and a special trip to San Francisco. “Have you read this?” the editor said, pointing to the bulging pages of the binder, as if its contents were outside the bounds of a Woodstock star’s comprehension.

  “Of course I’ve read it,” Wheeler said. “I have lived and breathed it.”

  The editor looked wide-eyed, having discovered in one casual reading what every St. Gregory’s boy had discovered over an entire prep school career. “There are a lot of parallels here,” he said, failed by words. “The music, the arts, the radical politics of turn-of-the-century Vienna feels like today—Woodstock, antiwar protests, the rise of the arts.” He paused, as if it were more than the mind could encompass. Then, as if reading from some preordained script, he offered, “We want to give you a contract. We will publish it, and we want you to be the editor. It’s a big job.” And Wheeler committed to work on pulling together his beloved mentor’s scribbled observations, a task that would come to consume almost fifteen years—in fact, the last fifteen years—of his life. And for some unexplained reason, Athenaeum Press waited patiently.

  So it was that in the late 1980s, years after the passing of the Venerable Haze, the “Random Notes” finally appeared in print. What had been for prep school boys the collected reflections and reminiscences that inspired the beginnings of an understanding of modern history became, when pulled together in one volume, as the Boston Globe reviewer said, “the poignant and prescient descriptions of the end of an era, profound and detailed reflections of a remarkable observer who spent the first third of his life thinking his culture a fantastic pinnacle of civilization and the remaining two-thirds uncovering exactly how it was all the cruelest of illusions. ” The lessons of these essays, it was agreed by most critics, were ones for our own time. Partially because of the book’s timeliness and insight and partially because of the fame of its editor, Wheeler Burden’s refashioning of the Haze’s “Random Notes” became a national best seller. It brought with it a renewed fame and notoriety for a reclusive rock-and-roll icon, a “second coming,” as his mother called it, that would become fatal.

  For the title of the surprise 1988 hit Wheeler chose simply Fin de Siècle.

  4

  Young Vienna

  In 1683, the last mighty Turkish army, the Muslim scourge from the east, attacked Vienna and laid siege for six months. It was a horrible affair that took the walled city to the point of near-starvation before the invaders saw the approaching Polish army and fled home, leaving behind bags of green beans the Viennese thought to be camel food. To an enterprising Pole, a man of the world named Franz Georg Kolschitsky, who had risked his life to summon the savior army, the city owed a favor. Kolschitsky had traveled in the Ottoman Empire and, knowing what the bags were, asked for and was given the seemingly worthless beans. He roasted them. With his personal spoils of war, he organized a small shop to sell the brew from those beans, and the first coffee
house was introduced to Vienna and Western Europe.

  At first, the sensitive Viennese thought the dark Turkish brew bitter and offensive, but when Kolschitsky thought to add sugar and sweet whipped cream to the mix, he created a new Viennese addiction. In the years that followed, Kolschitsky’s establishment, the Blue Bottle, became the gathering place of the intelligentsia, and in time it spawned numerous imitators. At the close of the nineteenth century, in a city with a longstanding housing shortage, clean, well-lighted places to congregate were highly valued.

  Two hundred and some odd years after that final siege by the Turks, Wheeler Burden, new to Vienna himself and with no place to go, found the famous descendant of Kolschitsky’s coffeehouse, Café Central. For a vagrant, it was a godsend. And from his first day, he staked out his territory. He was tired of walking and was beginning to feel lost and out of place. The moment he entered he knew he had found a home. The air was warm and carried the rich fragrance of fresh coffee. The tiled floor and marble tables were the prototype from which so much of the American sense of first class derived. Everywhere he looked were well-dressed, intellectual-looking men and a scattering of women, either in groups or alone, reading the abundant newspapers or talking animatedly. “There were no fewer than forty-five newspapers in Vienna,” the Haze would say, “and a well-appointed café, of which there were too many to enumerate, would subscribe to all of them. And for the small price of a cup of sweetened coffee or mineral water one could pass an entire morning catching up on the news.”

  Wheeler chose a table and sat, picking up the newspaper in front of him. A friendly young man at an adjoining table motioned to him. “Are we English?” he asked with a thick Germanic accent.

  “American,” Wheeler replied.

  The group of four at the table laughed and poked each other with good-natured elbowing that reminded Wheeler of his mean-spirited schoolmates his first year in private school in Boston. He smiled back guardedly, “But I speak German,” he said in their language.

  The young man looked at him cheerfully. “Then you must have heard us,” he said. “My friends insisted you were English. I thought you were French, and von Tscharner there”—he pointed to one of the smiling faces—“thought you were a Czech nationalist. We see Americans so rarely here in our men’s club,” he said, gesturing to the expansiveness of the café.

  “Except for your famous countryman Mark Twain, who seems to be filling our newspapers these days,” one of the young men added cheerfully. Wheeler was reminded suddenly that the famous writer had indeed moved with his family to Vienna for a year and a half sometime around the turn of the century.

  “You are our first unfamous American,” another said. “We didn’t know what to make of you.”

  “Perhaps tomorrow you will join us.” He held out his hand. “My name is Ernst Kleist. I am the would-be world-renowned painter of the group.”

  Wheeler took the hand. “My name is—” He paused. “Harry Truman.” Why he said it he was not sure, but the words were out before he could stop them.

  “Would you join us then, Mr. Truman? There is always one or another of us at this table. We do have our business to do, believe it or not, to make livings or earn our degrees, but we gather here whenever we can.”

  He gestured to his friends. “Those are the new generation of Viennese, a quartet.” He laughed. “We represent the four points of the great Viennese intellectual compass. Karl Claus there is the visceral one, a writer. You know how they are. Always finding connections. He engages the world through his feelings and is forever finding and defending causes.” The young man at Kleist’s left smiled and stuck out his hand, acknowledging the description.

  “Von Tscharner here is the tinkerer, the pragmatic one. He is our architect, redesigning the atrocious inner city. For him, if it works, it is good.” The young man named von Tscharner took Wheeler’s hand and shook it vigorously.

  “And Schluessler over there,” Kleist continued, “is our scientist, our Cartesian: he thinks, therefore he is. He is a university student, a genius in physics, rewriting Newton’s laws of the physical world. For him, everything has to be rational.”

  “And you, Herr Kleist?” Karl Claus inquired buoyantly. “How do you describe yourself?”

  “I am the intuitive one,” Kleist said without hesitation. “I guess you’d say the one who jumps to conclusions and is a mortal annoyance to Schluessler and his rationalists because with no apparent reasoning I am more often right than not.”

  Schluessler jumped in. “Annoying, yes, but Herr Kleist and his friends are rewriting the rules of oil and canvas to make the world forget the Parisians. He and his friend Klimt.”

  “Ah,” said von Tscharner the architect, “but he is better than Klimt, for sure.”

  “When this group gets too serious,” Kleist said, “I am the one who adds the leaven to the loaf.” He looked around proudly. “We represent all stations. ” He paused and patted his chest with a broad mocking smile. “We are the Jung Wien, the Young Vienna, you Americans would say.”

  Wheeler stared. These were the sons of the haute bourgeoisie that the Haze had talked so much about, the famous aesthetic offspring of the parvenu industrial giants and bankers, the ascendant liberals of Vienna who had built the Ringstrasse over the past forty years. Raised by their parents in affluence and materialism, surrounded by works of art, music, and literature, these cultured sons shunned the financial world of their forebears and took up the creative and intellectual life. The grandfather was a peddler from Kiev, who thrived after the establishment of the constitutional monarchy in 1848; the father built the business into an industry; and the sons were born into the luxury it created. Those sons grew up in interesting homes, with fascinating houseguests and dinner conversations, surrounded by art. Having very little interest in the business practices of their rich and powerful fathers, for them aesthetics were everything. It was they who made famous the Viennese coffeehouses, and it was from their ranks that emerged the great intellectual and aesthetic movements that so distinguished Vienna at the turn of the century. The Haze himself took enormous pride in having been a latter-day member of this prestigious group, Jung Wien, he also called it.

  “I would be honored to join you during my stay in Vienna,” Wheeler said.

  “I look forward to getting to know you, Mr. Truman.” Ernst Kleist looked back over his shoulder.

  A young man came bursting through the door, as if late for an appointment. “Aha,” said Kleist, “our last member. Here is the one who brings it all together, our glue, our Renaissance man, our multifaceted genius, too eclectic to pin down to any category, if he can remember to join us. Herr Truman,” he said with a flourish, “may I present our philosopher, Herr Egon Wickstein.”

  Wheeler fixed on the young man with wild eyes and rumpled hair, carrying a small leather portfolio overstuffed with papers. “Wickstein?” He stared involuntarily. “That’s Egon Wickstein,” he said without thinking.

  “You know Wickstein?” Kleist said, surprised.

  Wheeler caught himself from bursting out with an are you kidding? and paused to collect himself. “I know his family,” Wheeler said hastily, struggling to take his eyes away, “very indirectly.”

  “Egon,” Kleist said, “this is my new American friend, Mr. Harry Truman. He knows your family, very indirectly.” The young man looked at him distractedly, awaiting an explanation, and offered his hand. Wheeler took it and found himself staring into the eyes of the most famous philosopher of the twentieth century.

  Wheeler felt a rush of embarrassment. Could he ever explain how he knew this young man, how he would grow up to be a sensation, an intellectual giant, how he had nearly gotten Wheeler thrown out of Harvard College? He shook his outstretched hand. “Actually,” he said with confidence, “I had just been told that you were someone to look up if one were serious about philosophy.”

  The young man seemed a little surprised, but satisfied with the explanation. “I’m glad to meet you, Mr.
Truman, and glad that at least someone thinks me serious. It’s not easy being a university student in this city”—he pointed back to his friends behind him—“surrounded by all these self-appointed highbrow critics.”

  Kleist slapped him on the back with a good-natured laugh. “My friend is modest, Mr. Truman. He is our best student. The rest of us peck away at ideas. Egon brings the encyclopedia with him.”

  As the men chattered amiably around him at the table in the coffeehouse, Wheeler began to piece together all he remembered of the famous Egon Wickstein, whose life would end tragically. Years later, posthumously, Wickstein would enter significantly into Wheeler’s life, when a young Harvard professor would accuse him of plagiarizing a paper from the famous philosopher. And here he was standing by his table at the Café Central. How close he had come to making a huge faux pas. And it was then, at that moment, that Wheeler had the first inkling of the thought: how easy it would have been to have blurted out something unthinking, as he almost did by simply recognizing the name with such enthusiasm. How easy it would be to say something to the young man that he would never forget, to plant a seed that might change the course of his life and change, even if only minutely, the flow of European intellectual history.

  What effect would it have, he began to conjecture, if he walked up to this rather pretentious but charming young Egon Wickstein and told him he was destined to be famous, as both a thinker and a martyr? Would it not change the course of his life? Would it not change his actions just enough to alter imperceptibly the course that was to eventually carry him to his fate?

  Such power, Wheeler thought lightly as he returned to the rich aroma emanating from his newly filled coffee cup. Wheeler felt elated, a new man in a new city, with a new lease on life. But, he knew now, he would have to be careful.

  Wheeler would have thought more about this idea of changing history if he had not suddenly noted a disturbing turn of events. The stern young man whose clothes he was wearing had entered the café and was heading directly toward his table. Wheeler lifted the newspaper and hid his face in it as the man chose a table only a few yards from him. The man motioned imperiously to the waiter, then looked around the café, his eyes passing over Wheeler’s buried face, then ordered his coffee and reached for a paper of his own. A cold shudder ran through Wheeler as he thought of the look in the young man’s eyes. He rose, with his back to the man, then checked furtively over his shoulder to see if he had been noticed. The man seemed intent on his paper, but periodically looked up expectantly as if watching for someone. He had not seemed to notice Wheeler. Perhaps the shave and haircut had altered his appearance enough that he wouldn’t be recognized, but he wasn’t going to test the idea. With his head down, he said good-bye to his new friends, committed to returning tomorrow, and then abruptly left.