`Outside the Sphere of One's Own Personality'

Peter Altenberg (1859-1919), the Viennese feuilletonist much admired by Musil, Kraus, Schnitzler and Thomas Mann, collected postcards instead of paintings, just as he wrote brief, unclassifiable prose works instead of novels. Not essays, stories or sketches, they seem to have no precise literary counterpart in English-language traditions. Peter Wortsman translated a selection, Telegrams of the Soul, published two years ago by Archipelago Books. One piece, a single long paragraph, is titled “Peter Altenberg as Collector.” Like much of his work its tone and speaker are fluid and shifting. The narrator tells us he has:

“. . . for many years been an absolutely fanatic collector and have, just like the millionaires, managed through abundant sacrifices to amass a cherished, painstakingly selected, exquisite gallery of pictures: 1,500 postcards, 20 Hellers apiece, in two lovely Japanese cabinets, each with six compartments.”

The speaker realizes that “the truly cultivated individual had to divest himself of his treasures so as to be able to experience while still alive that most profound, that peerless pleasure of `giving,’ of `bestowing’ a thing of value upon a beneficiary.” So he ships the collection to “a young woman in Hamburg, the only one among all women able to appreciate such a present.” Altenberg, a womanizer of no fixed abode, a reliably undependable patron of Vienna’s coffee houses, is having a little joke. As he writes at the end of the piece:

“`Collecting’ means being able to concentrate on something situated outside the sphere of one’s own personality, yet something not quite so perilous and thankless as a beloved woman --.”

As a newspaper features writer I developed a sub-beat devoted to collectors. When someone organizes his life around a quest, devoting much time and money to acquisition, sometimes sacrificing family, friends, and conventional notions of happiness and fulfillment, the result is irresistible to a writer who fancies himself a student of human folly. I interviewed a man who collected money issued by leper colonies, and a woman who collected sand. She had hundreds of samples, in precisely labeled pharmaceutical bottles, arranged by continent and mineral content. Both collected things that were, at least symbolically, worthless. Who visits leper colonies, and what would you buy there? What do you do with sand, except protect it from the wind?

I’ve interviewed collectors of refrigerator magnets, Bakelite radios, cocktail napkins, ’49 and ’50 Mercurys, jigsaw puzzles, Gone With the Wind memorabilia, matchbooks and the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. What these objects share is homeliness, a scorned humility of purpose. They’re not Fabergé eggs but all are benignly evocative of the past, of simple pleasures, of, as Altenberg puts it, “something situated outside the sphere of one’s own personality.” My maternal grandmother collected kitschy salt and pepper shakers (when I see one today, I think of her), and I know a guy who collects books, tens of thousands of them, and rents climate-controlled space for their storage, and seldom reads anything. Both organized a chaotic and otherwise insignificant corner of existence. In “Unpacking My Library,” Walter Benjamin writes:

“Every passion borders on chaos, that of the collector on the chaos of memory.”