Graphomania
On Gustav Reinfeld (among other things)
I often think about reaching the end of what I can say as a writer. Sometimes this thought comes with a sense of dread; other times with anticipated relief. Dread, because silence often reminds me of death. Relief, since running out of things to write about would free up a great deal of time for other pursuits.
This thought revisited me earlier today, as I wondered what I was going to publish here this week — nothing I could think of seemed interesting enough. Then I realised that there’ll be only a handful of people reading this, that I’m very likely the only one who’s aware that I keep a weekly publication schedule (therefore that no one but me would notice if I derailed), that I’m doing this mainly because I feel like doing it, that you are just a handy excuse to keep me writing within some constraints, and without my practice succumbing to the chaos of some scattered notes here and there (more on this below). And here the writerly blockade was lifted, and suddenly I was churning out this thing you are reading now. I say “this thing”, because I don’t yet know what it is, just like I still don’t know what it is about. I guess we’ll figure out all of this together.
Writing I am, yes, and this leads me to an interesting question: What drives a person to the page? Or rather, why do some people feel the need to write, even when no one is reading? Right here, in this specific sentence, I don’t have a good answer to offer. But I do know that some people feel this compulsion to write, that when the hours of the day drag on and they haven’t been able to sit down to doodle some words for some minutes, they begin to feel an urge to explode. For some writing is a physiological necessity, something that should be treated with the regularity one dedicates to other physiological needs. I include myself in this group.
A while back, my friend Peter Agland classed me as a “graphomaniac”. If it isn’t clear enough, that would be someone who is obsessed with writing. I had never thought about that label before his expert assessment. Now I think that this is a suitable description of who I am. Also, I believe I have found what this thing is about: it’s about graphomania. Graphomania and graphomaniacs. Like yours truly, as we have already established, and like one Gustav Reinfeld.
Gustav Reinfeld (18?–1951) was an Austrian critic, now remembered mainly for the literary columns he published in the Neue Freie Presse, between 1911 and 1914. His public oeuvre might be modest, but his personal archive, preserved in the manuscripts collection of the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, is monumental: 13,645 notebooks, 78,293 loose folios now bound in 395 tomes, and an uncatalogued box containing around 8,000 fragments on improvised surfaces — calling cards, restaurant menus, matchbox covers, theatre programmes, betting slips, Metro tickets, parking fines, etc — simply labelled Flüchtige Schriften.1 Reinfeld maintained that every sentence carries within itself the duty to write a new sentence explaining it; for this reason, much of the texts in the Reinfeld archive consist of glosses upon glosses, corrections upon corrections, prefaces to prefaces, and lists.2
In his memoirs, French-Uruguayan poet Jules Supervielle mentions almost in passing an anecdote that he supposedly heard from Reinfeld’s widow, Klara M. Reinfeld (geb. Kohler, 1882–1967). She told him that the only time she ever saw her husband distressed was during a train journey from Vienna to Trieste. Having filled all the notebooks he had taken with him on the trip, he began jotting manically on the margins of the railway timetable. Once there was no more space here either, he proceeded to write on the carriage walls until he was stopped by the train guards, with whom he got involved in a heated argument. He was arrested upon arrival in Trieste and he narrowly avoided a trial for criminal damage after explaining to the magistrates that the walls of the carriage had become part of his manuscript the moment he started writing on them, and therefore his own property; criminal damage, he went on, can only be committed against the property of others. The case was dismissed not so much on the merits of Reinfeld’s arguments, but because the carriage was due to be repainted the following week.
Reinfeld’s account of this incident extends to more than six hundred pages, most of them dealing not with the arrest itself but with addenda, clarifications, and rewritings of his statement to the magistrates, followed by clarifications to the addenda, amendments to the clarifications, rewritings of the amendments, and so on. How not to love Gustav Reinfeld, the patron saint of compulsive writers.
But there is one small problem with Reinfeld: I made him up. Somewhere at the beginning of the fourth paragraph I realised that I needed a graphomaniac for this thing, and before I had thought to look for one (for there are many of us out there), he began filling notebooks in Vienna. The irony of inventing him in a text that opens with the fear (or hope) of running out of things to write about isn’t lost on me.
If it has escaped you, I’m certain Reinfeld has devoted at least eight notebooks to this matter.
Literally: “Fugitive Writings”. Usually translated in Reinfeldian scholarship as the more prosaic “Ephemeral Writings”.
Most of them lists of glosses, corrections, and prefaces.