Books: Spelled Out in Blood

THE MARQUISE OF O—AND OTHER STORIES (318 pp.)—Heinrich von Kleist —Criterion ($5).

The Marquise was clearly pregnant, but she didn’t know how she had gotten that way. Hers was not the usual fault of having been too generous to too many men. She was a virtuous Italian lady of noble birth, a gentle widow and devoted mother. Her father, mother and doctor were not amused when she denied having entertained any man, and a midwife sternly reminded her that only the Virgin Mary had been raised above the law of nature. Whereupon the baffled Marquise put an ad in the paper, described her predicament and asked any man to come forward who might be responsible. When the man shows up, with an explanation of the mystery, no reader will be unduly surprised—or sorry.

The Marquise of O— was not popular in its day, and neither was its author, Heinrich von Kleist. He was a sickly, unprepossessing young German who had gone into the Prussian army like his father before him, but quit to the disgust of his family at the age of 21. After years as an itinerant student, he began to write a series of plays which his contemporaries were hardly aware of but were praised by later critics. One of the plays was burned by Goethe, who threw the manuscript into his stove because of its “damnable perversity.” In all of Von Kleist’s work he saw “a body well planned by nature, tainted with an incurable disease.” Whatever the taint was, it was fatal. Von Kleist, whose own letters almost certainly prove that he was a homosexual, had a weakness for death pacts. In 1811, at 34, he made one with a married woman and carried it out near Berlin by shooting first her and then himself.

What critics exhume is seldom the writer who was buried. Where Goethe found perversity and disease, critics today find “true greatness,” “a hero of the modern spirit,” a precursor of Stendhal, Freud, D. H. Lawrence and Franz Kafka. Thomas Mann, Germany’s greatest 20th century novelist, calls Von Kleist in the preface (written in 1955) to this book a “storyteller of the very first order.” In this first English translation of his collected stories, the proofs are not always convincing. The compulsive violence that runs through these tales (notably Michael Kohlhaas, The Earthquake in Chile) is not odd in a man writing during the Napoleonic years. What is strange to find in a writer who is claimed by moderns is the crass hand of coincidence in the place of credible invention, the tears that stain letters, the use of brutalized detail in place of character-building.

Author Von Kleist has the true storyteller’s instinct, and most of the time he doles out such strong stuff as keeps the pages turning. That would be tribute enough. To credit him with insights he did not have is to play the familiar critics’ game of he’s-greater-than-he-reads.