Jack Zipes

Audio

Transcript

Ramona Koval: Jack Zipes joins us from a Minneapolis studio. Welcome again to The Book Show, Jack.

Jack Zipes: Thank you very much.

Ramona Koval: I think we should begin by reading a very short fairy tale, The Story about the Good Man, because I think this encapsulates lots of things that our man was trying to do.

Jack Zipes: [reading from Once upon a time there was a good man... to ...meanwhile the good man died.]

Ramona Koval: And that's the end of the story, children.

Jack Zipes: Yes, it's not 'they lived happily ever after'. He didn't live happily ever after with mosquitos.

Ramona Koval: So is that more than 'give them an inch and they'll take a mile'?

Jack Zipes: Sort of. You know, this was written in 1933, and Schwitters was very political. He wasn't one of these didactic political orthodox leftists, but he was very disturbed by Hitler's rise to power and of course his assumption of power in 1933, and to a certain extent I think he wrote this as a political parable talking about if you give these blood-suckers (the Nazis) some of your blood, don't expect to live.

Ramona Koval: Let's put him in context because Kurt Schwitters wasn't strictly a Dadaist artist, he created his own version of the art movement, he called it Merz. What is Merz?

Jack Zipes: He desperately wanted to be recognised by the Berlin Dadaists, particularly by Richard Huelsenbeck and George Grosz who were the leaders of the left wing Dadaist movement in Berlin. And though his work was very similar to some of theirs, they felt that he was too straight in his appearance and the way he approached life. He wasn't as engaged politically as they were, so they rejected poor Kurt Schwitters. He came at around that time, around 1918, 1919, and he came across in the newspaper a sort of an ad for the Commerzbank, the commercial bank, so he decided to take the latter part of 'commerz' and just use 'merz' to describe the type of actually Dadaist, surrealist, constructivist art that he was interested in, and it was very similar.

Schwitters was in some ways more radical then the so-called leftists because of the fact that he did not buy the straight orthodoxy of the communist movement or other socialist parties of that time, and he felt that to a certain extent they were more bourgeois than he was. So he enjoyed mocking them and also wrote essays that defied their approach to art, saying that basically his type of Merz art was a belief that all human beings can become artists and they must learn how to break boundaries and free themselves from all constrictions so they can be in touch with their instincts, with their drives and their wishes. And he also felt that one should make anything art. He was one of the original artists who dabbled a great deal in so-called found art.

Ramona Koval: So he did montages from rubbish and stuff he found around the place.

Jack Zipes: Oh yes, anything. And then he lived with his parents for a long time and they had a huge house in Hanover, Germany, and he was given the second and third floors, his parents wouldn't let him touch their domain, and he would bring home branches, sticks, rubbish, newspapers, magazines, pencils, anything he could find on the street or in ash cans, and he would create what he called a Merzbau. In other words, a Merz construction within the house, and he redesigned the second and third floors of the house in which he lived.

Ramona Koval: So his mother wasn't saying, 'Clean up your room before you have dinner'?

Jack Zipes: No, his parents must have been amazingly tolerant. He was an only child, he was very unique...

Ramona Koval: They didn't have any room for any other children obviously, they'd given him the second and third floors.

Jack Zipes: Well, he did marry and he had one son whom he adored, and his wife, and his wife basically had to keep house in his Merz construction on the second and third floors.

Ramona Koval: You say he had a scurrilous imagination and while he had a biting sense of humour he was melancholy. How else would you describe him? Give us a sort of pen portrait of what he was like.

Jack Zipes: He was a bundle of contradictions because his wife was a typical...what we call the German hausfrau, the woman who stayed at home and looked after the house and the son. She was very intelligent and so on but nevertheless she was supposed to look after the house, and he would always dress in a vested suit and go abroad to Holland, to Austria, to Norway and so on in his vested suit, and he was a performance artist.

Not only was he a painter, not only was he a very well known poet, but he was an amazing orator and he would do these crazy performances throughout Europe and would surprise people because he was not your typical bohemian. He was very debonair to a great extent. As I said, he was very tall and he made a sort of dignified impression. So away from the family this sort of bourgeois man would thrill bohemian audiences with his very strange performances where he would read some of these fairy tales that were improvised to a great extent and also show works.

He would also organise, naturally, a lot of art exhibits. Most of his paintings, by the way, are in the leading museums in the world, particularly his collages that he did essentially from 1920 until he fled the Nazis in 1937. But when he came home he was a wonderful husband. He also did have affairs, but he was very devoted to his wife and his parents, and at home in Hanover he would behave himself, although he did have some meetings...he would invite people to look at his Merz apartments, so he did have evenings at his house but they were always more or less tame compared to what he did on the road.

Ramona Koval: Let's talk about the fairy tales themselves. Why did he start writing fairy tales and how did they relate to this idea of Merz?

Jack Zipes: He began writing fairy tales...first experimental fairy tales for children, and they were graphically designed in a way that preceded the types of experiments in children's literature by 50 years. He was way ahead of his time. The one that I had illustrated for the book which was a copy of his fairy tale called The Scarecrow shows amazing humour, a way to construct fairy tales in a way that children would have to think about letters, about words, about the formation of characters.

Ramona Koval: So they're just very graphic, I just should describe, they're sort of like concrete poems too, aren't they.

Jack Zipes: Yes, exactly. But needless to say, this experiment was not going to work because he was 50 years out of his time. Nowadays there are artists who are...not many, but there are some artists who have done this type of work.

Ramona Koval: So the images are formed by the letters from the alphabet, making little pictures, as well as you can read the words of the tale around them. How were they received? Was anybody talking about them?

Jack Zipes: That was the problem; they were not received. They were so avant-garde that he and his collaborators (one was Kate Steinitz) decided that it wasn't worth it to pursue this path. In the meantime Germany was undergoing a severe inflationary problem in 1923, and he had to think of ways to help his family earn money to support their property and also his family. That's when he began doing these performance artist skits, and he would write fairy tales and perform them and then have them printed in newspapers.

So the first two or three fairy tales were published in newspapers, and after that he basically wrote them for performance sake and they were never published. Only three of the 30-odd tales that I published in the book were ever published in Germany or in England during his lifetime. But the fairy tales are very similar to his paintings. They are types of collages and parodies of classical art or classical fairy tales, and they suggest always that individuals in order to be happy (and he never thought people knew how to be happy) had to really free themselves of banal ideas and typical standardised ways of writing fairy tales...

Ramona Koval: Or being happy indeed. Because he wrote many fairy tales about happiness, and you say he was obsessed by happiness. He didn't believe in 'happily ever after'. What was his personal philosophy about happiness and how does that come though in a fairy tale like Lucky Hans which is a bit long for us to read but why don't you just tell us about this story.

Jack Zipes: Lucky Hans is a tongue-in-cheek tale about an opportunist young man who finds a rabbit and takes the skin off the rabbit (this is during this inflationary period) and then puts it on himself and earns some money by...people think that he's a bear or something...

Ramona Koval: I couldn't work out...how come a little rabbit skin is turned into a big bear skin? Is that because of the inflation rate?

Jack Zipes: Right, that's true, but of course when he takes it off it does shrink. He eventually does take it off, and eventually he swindles a very rich man by flattering his daughter, or his daughter is taken with him, and of course he's an opportunist...I'm sorry, he swindles the bank by selling the rabbit skin who thinks it's a bear skin to the banker for a lot of gold. And eventually he becomes the heir to the rich man's fortune and marries the dumb, rich man's daughter. So it's a play upon this notion of false happiness. He wanted to attack this Disney-like notion of happy; the prince will come, the woman is lying comatose and she's sweet and beautiful like a Barbie doll, and eventually they'll ride off into the blue sky to his castle.

Ramona Koval: I wonder what his wife thought about that one.

Jack Zipes: She enjoyed him, she was totally devoted to him. We don't have her diaries, she unfortunately died in 1944 from cancer, but then all their houses in Hanover were bombed during the bombings in 1944 and '45. So nothing of her letters has survived unfortunately. But she tolerated him.

Ramona Koval: But he sounds like he doesn't think that his settled life with his wife and all the things that you are told about being happy is actually about being happy. He talks about really being satisfied or being...having wisdom instead of being smart, and being satisfied with life instead of begin happy.

Jack Zipes: Yes, I think that he essentially believed that you had to be more of a realist and take things as they are and not pretend. He was always trying to rip into the hypocrisy of life. And he also saw life as a struggle. One of his very last tales about a cat and a mouse shows that the cat and mouse eventually, even though they're egged on by the owner of the house to destroy one another, they decide...looking at the way they were being oppressed by this woman, they decide to gang up on her and rip her apart and eat her. It's sort of very black, what the Germans call galgenhumor, 'gallows humour', so he had that sense of gallows humour for sure but he also saw that there were bright spots in life as long as you try to pierce all the illusions and all the contradictions that exist all around us. But I think you're right, he didn't believe that one could ever really truly by happy. At the most one can feel somewhat fulfilled and somewhat satisfied as long as you were doing what you wanted to do.

Ramona Koval: So you said he wasn't perhaps...these fairy tales weren't well known in his life time, many were unfinished, so how did you go about collecting his work into this volume?

Jack Zipes: I knew of Schwitters' fairy tales quite some time ago, but I didn't realise that he had written so many. I came across in the '70s a wonderful German scholar, managed to find in Oslo...because Schwitters and his son escaped to Norway, got away from the Nazis, and almost all the manuscripts of that were left behind in England first and then brought to Oslo by his son, they were in the Oslo National Library. A German scholar discovered them and printed four volumes, not just of the fairy tales but short stories, essays, plays, poems and other...there is no correspondence but it added up to four volumes.

One of the volumes which consisted of many, many different types of stories, not all fairy tales, I began, after I finished a book in the 1990s, on a general collection of Weimar fairy tales in which I included one of his tales. I began studying and then was asked to do a reprint of the Weimar fairy tale book that I did, and the editors asked whether Schwitters did other fairy tales. Well, I went back and discovered that...selecting what I thought could be considered fairy tales, I found about 33. They just wanted one or two others for the new edition of the Weimar fairy tales, and so I then approached Princeton University Press and they were excited about the project.

Ramona Koval: And they should have been too. Jack, in your introduction to the fairy tale collection you suggest that Schwitters' writing in the '20s speaks to the politics of today. In what way?

Jack Zipes: I think that in America (I don't know how it is in Australia) there is so much...particularly under the last president but even our new president, Obama, there is so much hypocrisy, so much spectacle and illusion that is going on that very few people are afraid to say that the emperor isn't wearing his clothes or isn't wearing any clothes, and I think that Schwitters cuts through this type of illusion, false optimism, speeches that are really empty, and he lets us think or provokes us to think for ourselves so that we can understand that there is really no such thing as happiness but there is truth, there is some honesty and there are things that we can really see with our own eyes.

Ramona Koval: It's a lovely book, Kurt Schwitters' Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales. It's translated and introduced by Jack Zipes, and published by Princeton University Press. Jack, it's been fantastic talking to you again on The Book Show, thank you.

Jack Zipes: Thank you for reinviting me.

Publications

Title: Lucky Hans and other Merz Fairy Tales

Author: Kurt Schwitters and translated by Jack Zipes

Publisher: Princeton University Press