Fuelling the monstrous stove

Here and there on NZBC, our Director General has mused about why some ideas just won’t let go but keep springing back into the mind. Certain obsessions, it seems, stay with you no matter where you go. One such harmless obsession for me has been Carl Spitzweg’s 19th Century painting, Der arme Poet (The Poor Poet), which hangs in the Alte National Galerie in Berlin, and which I first saw briefly on German TV in 1985. (Click here to study a larger representation of it).

Recently I’ve seen the film about this painting again, in the form of a 10-minute segment in the Masterworks series on the Arts Channel: an old poet with a quill in his mouth, in a leaky attic room, tucked up in a makeshift bed.

So here am I, on Thursday 11 August, at 17:00 in Auckland, New Zealand, linked inconsequentially back to the 1980s when I was living in Hamburg, and from there back to Germany in 1839 when Spitzweg painted this version of Der arme Poet (a picture so popular that he painted several versions of it, like a band remixing a hit single).

Today, that short film from the 1980s tells me again, this time erroneously, that this version “hangs in the National Gallery of West Berlin”, reminding me that it was made before the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. The film I first watched, rapt, as I scribbled notes into a notebook in a small apartment next to the biggest cemetery in the world, was in German; this version has been translated into English. But I still have the fragmentary notes I made when I first saw it:

Der arme Poet: From the title of a painting by German artist Carl Spitzweg, b. 1808, d. 1885, in the Berlin West Nationalgalerie. Old man in white nightcap quill in mouth, in bed with umbrella, night-cap, spectacles (pince-nez?), pierced ear, quill in mouth, manuscript in left hand, books on floor, leak in ceiling, holes in life.”

There remain, 20 years on, many unanswered questions. Upon first glimpsing the painting, I thought that the circle formed by the poet’s right thumb and forefinger was one of creative striving, as though he sought to articulate some complex or elusive idea. We’ve all been there. But no, said the German narrator, all those years ago (and I can still hear his self-satisfied voice), the poor poet is holding onto something more tangible.

“The real object of his attention, clutched tightly between shivering fingers, is a flea, whose days surely are numbered,” says the English narrator, with consummate assurance.

Somewhere, in pencil studies for the original painting, Spitzweg must have made a note that it was a flea in the poet’s hand. How else would we know that today? It isn’t visible in the painting. Hearing this, though, was like discovering that I’d been mishearing my favourite song lyric for 2o years. Instinctively, I feel like disagreeing with the experts, and even the artist.

It isn’t a flea.

As someone who didn’t study art (and who never studied much of anything beyond A-level) but who knows what he likes, I have often taken comfort from the fact that experts rarely agree about the symbolism in works of art. In the case of another of my favourite artists, Hieronymus Bosch, the experts have no more idea about the meaning of the symbolism in works such as Das Steinschneiden (The Cutting out of the stone) than a complete novice such as myself.

“Why does that bloke have a funnel on his head, then?” They haven’t got a bloody clue. I love that.

So no one will be able to tell me conclusively why the poor poet has a pierced ear but no earring.

They haven’t got a bloody clue.

I’m striving hard to formulate another idea, though; something that’s gnawing at me, something that won’t let go, no matter how hard I try to concentrate on work and paying the bills. It’s this line uttered by the narrator as though it’s an indisputable truth:

“The painter has gone to extraordinary lengths to ridicule his subject.”

But is that really true? Isn’t this poet, in fact, some kind of hero to the artist? He is to me. He’s far from ridiculous. Sad, perhaps, but not ridiculous.

The world of The Poor Poet may indeed be a Dickensian one, but he reminds me more of the much younger Gordon Comstock in George Orwell’s Keep The Aspidistra Flying, who remained faithful to a ridiculous idea to the point of absurdity and yet still somehow managed to retain a sense of dignity. And the “monstrous stove” that “takes up most of the available space” is actually a second character in a work that’s been composed with a sense of irony that’s easily missed at first glance:

“By placing his poet at the centre of the picture, and giving him an old umbrella as a halo, Spitzweg is wickedly comparing his scene to the central panel of a medieval triptych.”

On the spine of one of the poet’s books is the title Gradus Ad Parnassum (The Steps to Parnassus). “Every poet’s goal,” the narrator reminds us. And then:

“Bundles of papers (probably the poet’s own work) have been thrust into the stove for future burning… For when the time comes to light the stove, another bundle of his works must be sacrificed.”

That’s what I love about Der arme Poet, and it’s also the thought that won’t let go of me: the beautiful pragmatism of the poet burning his own work — cutting out the middleman — to stay alive. In my recognition of this image, I feel, is the idea of what The Poor Poet may have been to Spitzweg. Why else would the stove have figured so large in his composition?

Next to it, the Latin inscription on the top pile of papers translates as “the third bundle of my works”.

The film makes the point that, in the Renaissance and Romantic eras, “artists and writers stood on an equal footing with dukes and cardinals — they didn’t live in hovels”. In the age in which Spitzweg painted, poetic ideals were not tolerated; and such intolerance, famously, also drove Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels out of Germany.

“The Poor Poet is a picture intent on ridiculing high ideals. Today we may smile, but what we are watching is the revenge of the philistines,” the narrator concludes. But Spitzweg was no philistine; the reason The Poor Poet still speaks to us today is that there’s a big helping of affection on the plate alongside the comical main ingredient.

Spitzweg may have been known as a “Biedermeier” painter (a style characterising simple pleasures of everyday German life in a time of peace, prosperity and the Gemütlichkeit Germans prize so highly), but it’s simplistic to suggest that he’s merely making fun of the poet — although plenty of more learned sources disagree with me.

But why would a painter poke fun at a poet, however delusional the poet might be? No matter how wealthy Spitzweg had become from selling his harmless, uncontroversial paintings, he must surely have been vaguely aware of how treacherous and fickle the art world could be. He must have known that he might at any time fall out of favour, run up bills, rile his creditors and be forced to burn his own sketches to keep himself warm.

I know a few writers and artists who covet a romantic notion of the garret. I don’t live in one myself; I live beyond my means in order to exorcise the ghouls of procrastination. Nothing encourages hard work quite like a whopping monthly rent bill.

A working writer’s garret exists mainly in his or her mind, or is foisted upon them from the minds of publishers who, truth be known, would prefer not to have to read anything if they could avoid it. That’s why artists and writers around the world would rather give away their best work than “put on their literary hats” for 30 bucks an hour.

And that’s why blogs are so popular among writers who wouldn’t normally get out of bed, pick up the pen or boot-up their computer unless there were a publisher willing to sign a cheque in the not-too-distant future. The blog is our monstrous stove, into which we happily push the third bundle of our works so we can cut out the middleman.