Letter from Oskar Kokoschka to J.P. Hodin

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[Translation/transcription]

120 Eyre Court, NW8

Sunday, 15 February 1948

My dear Master Hodinus,

Thank you for the very interesting material for the book. I was particulary touched that it was conveyed by such a beautiful postwoman. But I was taken aback when your wife Pamela told me that I'm to read it in a week because you want to travel to Sweden with the sketched materials. I still have no idea how you intend to give form to this material without also weakening the effect of the precious fragments that are already visible, such as the one about fascination. It seems to me that you'll need another year for this task. After all, you only write a book like this once in a lifetime. Whatever reasons you may have for your haste, I will not be convinced by any argument if I think you're doing damage to yourself. You've started something remarkable here; you've dug deep and hinted at mysteries that only you and I understand.

And so, particularly in this instance, a form that will stand the test of time is an essential requirement. You must reckon with incomprehension on the part of the reader, for whom this spiritual realm is terra incognita. At the same time you must be aware of what you owe to yourself as a writer - a writer who has to find the form for pronouncements and communications without literary precedent. It needed your particular sensibility to even touch upon this spiritual realm. By virtue of your inclinations towards psychoanalysis and alchemy you were predestined to uncover this material, but the form in which you want to convey it to the world is yet to be found.

In the short time available I was of course only able to look briefly at the manuscript, though I did notice some inaccuracies that I must correct before they're made public because they have a bearing on the description of intimate matters and family affairs, or the circumstances of my creative work and the processes it entails. In general I would suggest that my own statements, where these are recorded in writing, should be reproduced in the original language or in English, which is the language I've used for most of my lectures. As I understand it, the book is to be published in Swedish, so that the process of translating the originals twice would render them quite unrecognisable.

With a little self-critique, which you can't possibly have yet because your head's still far too hot from writing up all that material, you'll inevitably tell yourself that this text doesn't yet constitute a book that's ready for print. I can't consent, for example, where you reproduce conversations in which you attribute trains of thought to me and have me say things on the basis of shorthand notes, where you've forgotten how one thing led to the next. These passages need to be discussed, since, as you well know, I myself am never satisfied with my own work until it's attained its most lucid final form. I have to vouch for the words you have me say.

May I advise you, then, to dedicate yet more time to the book? I'm happy to make myself available as often as you wish in order to represent this book to the world in a way that your reputation and mine would seem to demand.

Most sincerely yours,

Oskar Kokoschka


[Enclosure:]

Dear Seffrl,

Will you come away with me somewhere in this war-torn world, battered though it is by the struggle for markets? Vienna is a rubble heap too now. Before long, paradise will be the only place that hasn't been 'blitzed'. Perhaps they don't know exactly where it is. Will you write to me and let me know how you're doing? I may have false teeth but I still have a heart that's impervious to 'spin' from the 'adults' - I don't take their slogans more seriously than those touted by the École de Paris or the solutions floated by high finance. I know what I have to do in this world and I won't let anyone show me how to do it. I love life and I love my friends!

Yours,

OK


This book was written when Kokoschka was already sixty years old. It is the portrait of the artist in his mature years. The events of his life and art are seen from this point in time, as a whole, as that imponderable thing that is human life, with its ups and downs, its coming and passing. I write this book as a personal confession, perhaps because I tend to project onto Kokoschaka's fate everything that is of value to me as well as the things that I fear. The advantage of this approach is that the book has been composed with care and, unlike other products of modern art writing, does more than merely fill a gap in the market. It may have the disadvantage of not being objective, but is anything truly objective? In any case, whose place is it to subject genuine greatness to criticism, even when it goes astray? In our times, when the real is becoming so rare and the realm of art is increasingly dominated by incompetents, I feel no strong desire to pontificate on this. What is it to be objective? A year, electric light, one pound sterling. Nothing can be explored other than through a living conscience. Man alone is the measure, the only possible living entity by which the bewildering abundance of external events can be encapsulated as a harmonious and necessarily self-rounding whole. He is the monad, the lens that gathers up the light and points it in one direction. At this juncture someone will perhaps object that it depends on the quality of the lens...

Though what follows are conversations, I have tried to keep myself in the background. In this book I wanted to appear only as a gallery visitor who, in those quiet afternoon hours when no-one is around, speaks with the pictures he loves until he succeeds in rousing them from their enchanted sleep.

And so the book can now speak for itself, in the guise it has been given. Its form is based not on individual events but on an idea of Kokoschka that has taken shape in me over many years. For only thus, I thought, could a description of an artist achieve that something which hovers like a melody around the words of a poem, that ineffable quality which bursts forth from the colours and forms in a painting, that aura of an effervescent and ever-changing personality who wrestles with his own powers and with the world and yet remains just as he was in the beginning.

[illegible handwritten note]

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