The Play of the Eyes, page 16
Her love of freedom meant a great deal to her; it was the main reason why no relationship could hold her for long. It was so strong that when she formed a new relationship one always had the impression that she didn’t take it seriously but conceived it from the start on a short-term basis. On the other hand, she wrote “absolute” letters and expected “absolute” declarations. The letters written for her may have meant more to her than love itself, and what captivated her most were the stories one told her.
I often went to see her, especially after she acquired the studio on Operngasse, and spoke to her of everything that interested me. I told her what was going on in the world and what I was writing. Sometimes, when I was full of Sonne, I spoke to her of very serious matters; she always listened, apparently with deep interest. Then after long hesitation I took Sonne to her studio—he had expressed interest in Gustav Mahler’s daughter—and presented her with what was for me the best thing in the world, the quietest of men. I introduced him with the respect that I owed him and had never concealed from her, and she reacted with the generosity that was the best thing about her; she took him for what he was, admired him despite his ascetic appearance, listened to him as she always listened to me, but with the degree of earnestness that I expected in his presence, and asked him to come again. The next time I saw her alone, she praised him, said she found him more interesting than most people, and often asked when he would repeat his visit.
Yet he had made some discerning comments about her heads, and I had passed them on to her; even in her large figures he recognized an unrealized romantic yearning. The tragic, he said, was still beyond her reach, and she had nothing whatever in common with Wotruba, for she had been inspired by music, which played no part in his work. Her figures were related to aspects of her father’s music and owed more to her will than to her inspiration. There was no way of knowing what would come of her work; possibly, thanks to some break in her life, something very important. He spoke benevolently, he knew how much she meant to me and wouldn’t have hurt my feelings for anything in the world, but I could tell by the way he relegated hope in her work to the future that for the present he found little originality in it. Still, he spoke well of her heads. He especially liked the one of Alban Berg; Werfel’s, he thought, was as bloated as Werfel’s sentimental novels, which he detested. Werfel, he observed, had infected her with himself; she had exaggerated his hollow sentimentality in such a way that some people who were quite familiar with his ugly real-life head would find it significant as portrayed.
She listened to Sonne as I listened to him. She never interrupted, never asked him a question, he couldn’t ever talk long enough for her. He never stayed more than an hour. Seeing her surrounded by stone, dust and chisels, he assumed she wanted to work. Her tools told him how resolutely she worked, he needed none of her figures for that. He was struck by the resemblance to her father in the lower part of her face, where the will is localized. There alone did he recognize her as Gustav Mahler’s daughter, for her other features, her eyes, forehead and nose, were not the least bit like his. She was most beautiful when she was listening in her impassive way, her wide-open eyes full of what she was listening to, a child for whom a serious, sometimes dry, but above all exhaustive report became a fairy tale. She was like that when I told her a story, and now he was there, he whose words meant as much to me as those of the Bible when he recited them to me. I listened to the very different things he said for her, and I was able without embarrassment to watch her as she listened. Here, I felt, she was no longer in her mother’s world, she had passed beyond success and utility. I knew that she was finer and nobler than her mother, neither greedy nor bigoted, but that the massive old woman’s power play repeatedly drove her into situations that had nothing to do with her nature, that concerned her not at all, situations in which she was obliged to follow instructions, a marionette moved by malignant wires.
Only in her studio was she free from all this and that may have been why she was so attached to her work. Her work was the last thing her mother would have urged on her, for considering the effort it required, it was unprofitable. But I don’t believe she was at her freest when I was alone with her, for though she wanted me to come, everything depended on incessant exertion, on my invention, and of this I was so well aware that I would not have felt justified in staying if no ideas occurred to me. She seemed freest when I brought Sonne to see her. Because then, without hesitation or affectation, she submitted to a lesson the depth and purity of which she perceived, which was of no use to her, which she could not apply, which would have made no impression on any of her mother’s retinue, for the name of Sonne meant nothing in those quarters; as he wished to have no name and consequently had none, he would not even have been invited.
When after an hour he stood up and left, I stayed behind. I am sure he thought I would want to stay longer, but it was only a kind of delicacy that held me. I thought it unseemly to leave the studio at his side. I had brought this extraordinary man to the studio; I was a kind of retainer, who showed him the way. Now he knew the way and wished to leave. In this no one should interfere with him. On his way he went on thinking, he continued the conversation with himself. If he had asked me to, I’d have gone with him. But he was too considerate to express such a wish. He thought me privileged because I often went to the studio. But that was all he knew. It would never have occurred to me to tell him any more about so intimate a matter. He may have suspected how downcast I was. But I don’t believe so, because he never tried to comfort me in his inimitable way, by describing an ostensibly very different situation, which was simply a transposition of my own. So I stayed on, and when we met next day at the Café Museum, he made no mention of our visit. I hadn’t stayed long after his departure. I waited only long enough for him to be out of reach, then I made up a pretext for taking my leave of Anna.
We didn’t discuss him. He remained inviolable.
PART THREE
Chance
Musil
Musil was always—though one wouldn’t have noticed it—prepared for defense and offense. In this posture he found safety. One thinks of armor plate, but it was more like a shell. He hadn’t built the barrier he put between himself and the world, it was an integral part of him. He eschewed interjections and all words charged with feeling. He looked with suspicion on mere affability. He drew boundaries between objects as he did around himself. He distrusted amalgamations and alliances, superfluities and excesses. He was a man of solids and avoided liquids and gases. He was well versed in physics; not only had he studied it, it had become part and parcel of his mind. It seems doubtful that any other writer has been so much a physicist and remained so in all his lifework. He took no part in vague conversation; when he found himself surrounded by the windbags it was impossible to avoid in Vienna, he withdrew into his shell. He felt at home and seemed natural among scientists. A discussion, he felt, should start from something precise and aim at something precise. For devious ways he felt contempt and hatred. But he did not aim at simplicity; he had an unerring instinct for the inadequacy of the simple and was capable of shattering it with a detailed portrait. His mind was too richly endowed, too active and acute to content itself with simplicity.
No company made him feel inferior; although in company he seldom went out of his way to pick a quarrel, he did interpret every controversy as a fight. The fighting started later, when he was alone, sometimes years later. He forgot nothing. He remembered every confrontation in all its details, and since it was an innermost need with him to triumph in all of them, this in itself made it impossible for him to complete a work intended to encompass them all.
He avoided unwanted contacts. He was determined to remain master of his body. I believe he disliked shaking hands. In his avoidance of handshaking, he was at one with the English. He kept his body supple and strong and took good care of it. He paid more attention to it than was usual among the intellectuals of his day. To him sports and hygiene were one, they governed his daily schedule, and he lived in accordance with their requirements. Into every character he conceived he injected a healthy man, himself. In him extreme eccentricity contrasted with awareness of health and vitality. Musil, who understood a great deal because he saw with precision and was capable of thinking with even greater precision, never lost himself in a character. He knew the way out, but liked to postpone it because he felt so sure of himself.
To stress his competitiveness is not to diminish his stature. His attitude toward men was one of combat. He did not feel out of place in war, in war he sought to prove himself. He was an officer, and tried by taking good care of his men to make up for what he regarded as the brutalization of their life. He had a natural or, one might call it, a traditional attitude toward survival and was not ashamed of it. After the war, competition took its place; in that he resembled the Greeks.
A man who put his arm around him as around all he wished to appease or win over became the most long-lived of his characters and was not saved by being murdered. The unwanted touch of this man’s arm kept him alive for another twenty years.
Listening to Musil speak was a particular pleasure. He had no affectations. He was too much himself to put one in mind of an actor. As far as I know, no one ever surprised him playing a role. He spoke rather rapidly but never in a rush. One could never tell from his way of speaking that several ideas were pressing in on him at once. Before expounding them, he took them apart. There was a winning orderliness in everything he said. He expressed contempt for the frenzied inspiration that was the principal boast of the expressionists. To his mind inspiration was too precious to use for exhibitionistic purposes. Nothing so sickened him as Werfel’s foaming at the mouth. Musil had delicacy, he made no display of inspiration. In unexpected, astonishing images he suddenly gave rein to it, but checked it at once by the clear progression of his sentences. He was hostile to torrents of language, and when to the general surprise he submitted to someone else’s, it was with the intention of swimming resolutely through the flood and demonstrating that the muddiest waters have a far shore. He was glad when there was an obstacle to overcome, but he never showed his determination to take up a fight. Suddenly he was standing self-reliant in the midst of the subject, and one lost sight of the battle, one was captivated by the subject matter, and even when the victor stood supple but firm before one, the argument itself had become so important that one forgot how eminently victorious he had been.
But this was only one aspect of Musil’s public behavior. His self-assurance went hand in hand with a sensibility I have never seen outdone. To come out of himself, he had to be in company that recognized his rank. He did not function everywhere, he needed certain ritual circumstances. There were people against whom his only defense was silence. He had something of the turtle about him, there were many people who knew only his shell. When his surroundings didn’t suit him, he didn’t say a word. He could go into a café and leave it again without having uttered a single sentence. I don’t think that was easy for him; though you couldn’t tell it by his face, he felt offended throughout this silent time. He was right not to recognize anyone’s superiority; among those who passed as writers in Vienna, or perhaps in the whole German-speaking world, there was none of his rank.
He knew his worth, in this one decisive point he was untroubled by doubt. A few others knew it too, but not well enough for his liking, for to give their support of him greater force, they would mention one or more other names in the same breath. In the last four or five years of Austrian independence, during which Musil returned from Berlin to Vienna, the avant-garde trumpeted three names: Musil, Joyce and Broch, or Joyce, Musil and Broch. Today, fifty years later, it is not hard to understand why Musil was not particularly pleased at that odd triad. He categorically rejected Ulysses, which by then had appeared in German. The atomization of language went against his grain; if he said anything about it, which he did reluctantly, he called it old-fashioned, on the ground that it derived from association psychology, which according to him was obsolete. In his Berlin period he had frequented the leaders of Gestalt psychology, which meant a good deal to him; he probably identified his book with it. The name of Joyce was distasteful to him; what that man did had nothing to do with him. When I told him how I had met Joyce in Zurich at the beginning of 1935, he grew irritable. “You think that’s important?” I counted myself lucky that he changed the subject instead of leaving me flat.
But he found it absolutely insufferable to hear Broch’s name mentioned in connection with literature. He had known Broch a long time, as industrialist, as patron of the arts, as late student of mathematics, and he refused to take him seriously as a writer. Broch’s trilogy struck him as a copy of his own undertaking, which he had been working on for decades, and it made him very suspicious that Broch, having scarcely begun, had already finished. Musil didn’t mince matters in this connection and I never heard him say a kind word about Broch. I can’t remember the details of what he said about Broch, possibly because I was in the difficult situation of thinking highly of them both. Tensions between them, let alone a quarrel, would have been more than I could bear. I had no doubt that they belonged to the small group of men who made writing hard for themselves, who did not write for the sake of popularity or vulgar success. At the time that may have meant even more to me than their works.
It must have given Musil a strange feeling to hear about this triad. How was he to believe that somebody recognized the importance of his work if that somebody mentioned him in the same breath with Joyce, who to his mind represented the antithesis of what he was trying to do? And even when Musil, who had no existence for the readers of the then popular literature, from Zweig to Werfel, was glorified, he found himself in what he regarded as unfit company. When friends told him that someone had praised The Man without Qualities to the skies and would be overjoyed to meet him, Musil’s first question was “Whom else does he praise?”
His touchiness has often been held against him. Though I was to be its victim, I would like to defend it on the strength of my profound conviction. He was in the midst of his great undertaking, which he was determined to complete. He could not know that it was destined to be endless in two senses, immortal as well as unfinished. There has been no comparable undertaking in all German literature. Who would have ventured to resurrect the Austrian Empire in a novel? Who could have presumed to understand this empire, not through its peoples, but through its center? Here I cannot even begin to say how much else this work contains. But the awareness that he himself, he alone more than anyone else, was this defunct Austrian Empire gave him a very special right to his touchiness, which no one seems to have appreciated. Was he to let this incomparable material that he was be buffeted this way and that? Was he to let it suffer any admixture that would sully it and mar its transparence? Touchiness concerning one’s person, which seems ridiculous in Malvolio, is not ridiculous when it relates to a special, highly complex, richly developed world which a man bears within himself and which, until he succeeds in bringing it forth, he can protect only by being touchy.
His touchiness was merely a defense against murkiness and adulteration. Clarity in writing is not a mechanical aptitude that can be acquired once and for all; it has to be acquired over and over again. The writer must have the strength to say to himself: This is how I want it and not otherwise. And to keep it as he wants it, he must be firm enough to bar all harmful influences. The tension between the vast wealth of a world already acquired and the innumerable things that demand to enter into it is enormous. Only the man who carries this world within himself can decide what is to be rejected, and the late judgments of others, especially of those who bear no world whatever within themselves, are paltry and presumptuous.
This touchiness made him react against the wrong kind of food. And here it should be said that a reputation, too, must be constantly fed if it is to steer the project of the man who bears it in the right direction. A growing reputation requires its own sort of food, which it alone can know and decide on. As long as a work of such richness is in progress, a reputation for touchiness is best.
Later on, when the man who has preserved himself by being touchy is dead and his name is displayed in every marketplace, as ugly and bloated as stinking fish, then let the snoopers and know-it-alls come and draw up rules for proper behavior, then let them diagnose touchiness as monumental vanity. No matter, the work is there, they can impede its progress no longer, and they themselves with all their impertinence will seep away without trace.
* * *
Some people ridiculed Musil’s helplessness in practical matters. The first time I mentioned Musil to Broch, who was well aware of his worth and not inclined to malice, he said to me: “He’s king of a paper empire.” He meant that Musil was lord of people and things only when at his writing desk, and that otherwise, in practical life, he was defenseless against things and circumstances, bewildered, dependent on other people’s help. Everyone knew that Musil couldn’t handle money, that he even hated to touch it. He was reluctant to go anywhere alone; his wife was almost always with him, it was she who bought the tickets on the streetcar and who paid at the café. He carried no money on him, I never saw a coin or bank note in his hand. It may be that money was incompatible with his notions of hygiene. He refused to think of money, it bored and upset him. He was quite satisfied to let his wife shoo money away from him like flies. He had lost what he had through inflation, and his financial situation was very difficult. His means were hardly equal to the long-drawn-out undertaking he had let himself in for.
