(The author’s experiences in prison are also fed into The Golem.)

A few months later he was cleared of the charges and he resumed his writing and his esoteric researches. He was haunted by horrific apparitions of a green face – and these visitations surfaced in a later novel, Das grüne Gesicht. He also took to travelling on the astral sphere and, it is said, that he or rather his astral double actually manifested itself to his wife one evening. So the Golem is in every sense the artist’s double. The original title for the book, however, was The Eternal Jew and it seems that work on it may have been started as early as 1907. In the same year he and Richard Teschner were working together on an unsuccessful project to establish a puppet theatre. This too is in the novel, this fascination with puppets, moving figures with human shapes but no human life.

Writing was by now a matter of financial necessity for him. Though he had been exonerated, the scandal of 1902 had ruined him. He moved away from Prague and the bulk of The Golem must have been written in Bavaria. At the same time he laboured on a translation of the complete works of Dickens into German, Dicken’s taste for city life, for grotesque characters and heightened sentiment was Meyrink’s too and is patent in The Golem. The final version of the story was related by Meyrink into a dictaphone and transcribed by a secretary. It was first published as a serial in Die Weissen Blatter and then sold to the publisher Kurt Wolff in Leipzig for a lump sum. When the novel appeared in 1915 it was received with immediate acclaim and rapidly sold 200,000 copies.

‘Lurking and waiting … waiting and lurking … the terrible perpetual motto of the Ghetto.’ Cabalism is literary occultism par excellence. The Cabalist and the novelist are jointly committed to the magical creation of a world through the manipulation of words. Some novels – and the novels of David Lindsay and Charles Williams are examples – achieve an effect which is not a purely literary one and an effect which lingers on in the mind of the reader long after the reading of the book has been concluded. The Golem is one of these novels. ‘The path I am pointing out to you is strewn with strange happenings: dead people you have known will rise up and talk with you! They are only images!’.

Robert Irwin

1985  

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Y. Caroutch (ed.) Gustav Meyrink = Cahiers de l’Herne, vol. 30 (1976)

 

E. Frank, Gustav Meyrink (1957)

 

P. Mariel (ed.) Dictionnaire des Sociétés Secrètes en Occident (1971)

 

L. Pauwels and J. Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians (1963)

 

P. Raabe, The Era of Expressionism (1974)

 

G. Scholem, Kabbalah (1974)

 

J. Webb, The Occult Establishment (1981)

 

L. Eisner, The Haunted Screen (1969)

SLEEP

 

The moonlight is shining on the foot of my bed, lying there like a large, bright, flat stone.

Whenever the disc of the full moon begins to shrink and its right-hand side starts to wither – like a face approaching old age, in which one cheek becomes hollow and wrinkled first – that is the time when at night I am seized by a dark and agonising restlessness. I am not asleep, nor am I awake, and in my reverie things I have seen mingle with things I have read or heard, like rivers of different colour or clarity meeting.

I had been reading about the life of the Buddha before I went to bed, and one passage kept on running through my mind in a thousand variations, going back to the beginning again and again:

“A crow flew to a stone which looked like a lump of fat, thinking perhaps it had found something good to eat. But when the crow found that it was not good to eat, it flew off. Like the crow that went to the stone, so do we – we, the tempters – leave Gautama, the ascetic, because we have lost our pleasure in him.”

And the image of the stone that looked like a lump of fat grew in my mind to enormous dimensions:

I am walking along a dried-up river-bed, picking up smooth pebbles, bluish-grey ones with specks of glittering dust.