The Play of the Eyes, page 17
When he returned to Vienna, some friends founded a Musil Society, the purpose of which was to enable him to work on The Man without Qualities. Its members obligated themselves to monthly contributions. He had a list of contributors and reports were given him about the regularity with which they paid up. I don’t think the existence of this Society shamed him. He believed, quite correctly, that these people knew what they were doing. They felt honored at being permitted to contribute to his work. It would have been even better if more people had felt the urge to join. I always suspected that he regarded this Musil Society as a kind of secret society, membership in which was a high honor. I often wondered if he would have barred persons he regarded as inferior. It took a sublime contempt for money to keep up his work on The Man without Qualities under such circumstances. When Hitler occupied Austria, the jig was up; most members of the Musil Society were Jews.
In the last years of his life, when he was living in utter poverty in Switzerland, Musil paid dearly for his contempt for money. Painful as it is for me to think of his humiliating situation, I wouldn’t have wanted him any different. His sovereign contempt for money, which was not combined with any ascetic tendencies, his lack of any talent for moneymaking, which is so commonplace that one hesitates to call it a talent, partook, it seems to me, of his innermost essence. He made no fuss about it, did not affect to rebel against it and never spoke of it. He took a serene pride in ignoring its implications for his own life, while keeping well in mind what it meant to others.
Broch was a member of the Musil Society and paid his dues regularly. I found this out from others, he himself never mentioned it. Musil’s harsh rejection of him as a writer—in a letter Musil accused him of having in his Sleepwalkers trilogy copied the plan of The Man without Qualities—must have irked him, and one is inclined to forgive him for calling Musil “king of a paper empire.” This ironic characterization is without value in my mind. Even now—long after their deaths—I feel the need of rejecting it. Broch, who had suffered sorely under his father’s commercial heritage, died in exile in just such poverty as Musil. He had no wish to be a king and he was not one. In The Man without Qualities, Musil was a king.
Joyce without a Mirror
The year 1935 began for me amid ice and granite. In Comologno, high above the beautifully ice-clad Val Onsernone, I tried for several weeks to collaborate on a new opera with Wladimir Vogel. It was foolish of me, no doubt, to attempt anything of the kind. The idea of subordinating myself to a composer, of adjusting to his needs, didn’t appeal to me at all. Vogel had told me that this would be an entirely new kind of opera, in which composer and writer would function as equals. This proved to be impossible: I read Vogel what I had written, he listened patiently, but I felt humiliated by his supercilious way of expressing approval with a nod of the head and the one word “Good,” followed by words of encouragement: “Just keep it up.” It would have been easier on me if we had quarreled. His approbation and his words of encouragement soured my enthusiasm for that opera.
I’ve kept some of my notes; nothing could have come of our collaboration. As I was leaving Comologno, he honored me with one more “Just keep it up,” sensing, I’m sure, that he would never receive another word from me. I would have been ashamed to tell him so—what reason could I have given for my lack of enthusiasm? It was one of those puzzling situations that have occurred time and again in my life; I was offended in my pride, though the “offender” couldn’t possibly have guessed what had happened. Perhaps he had given me an almost imperceptible impression that he felt superior to me. But if I was to subordinate myself to anyone, it had to be of my own free will. And it was for me to decide to whom. I chose my own gods and steered clear of anyone who set himself up as a god, even if he really was one; I regarded such a person as a threat.
Yet my weeks in Comologno were not fruitless. One sunny winter’s day I read my Comedy of Vanity to Vogel and my hosts in the open air, and found a better audience than at the Zsolnays’. From then on my hosts were well disposed toward me; they suggested that on my way home I should give a reading at their home in Zurich. They had a fine auditorium suitable for such purposes, and all the intellectuals would be sure to come. The outcome, in January, was my first reading of The Comedy of Vanity to a large but select audience. It was there that I met James Joyce.
I read the first part of the play in unadulterated Viennese dialect. As it never occurred to me that many of those present would not understand this language, I provided no explanatory introduction. I was so pleased with the rigorous consistency of my Viennese characters that I failed to notice the none too friendly atmosphere in the hall.
In the intermission I was introduced to Joyce. “I,” he said gruffly, “shave with a straight razor and no mirror”—a risky business in view of his impaired vision, he was almost blind. I was stunned. His tone was as hostile as if I had attacked him personally. The idea of prohibiting mirrors was central to the play; it occurred to me that this must have exasperated him because of his weak eyes. For a whole hour he had been exposed to Viennese dialect which, despite his linguistic virtuosity, he did not understand. Only one scene had been spoken in literary German, and that was where he had caught the bit about shaving in front of mirrors. This is what his wretched comment had referred to.
Evidently the linguist’s frustration at failing to understand Viennese exacerbated his annoyance, in the one scene he understood, with the idea that mirrors were indispensable. This section, to which he seemed to object on moral grounds, he took personally and reacted by assuring me that he needed no mirror for shaving, that even though he used a straight razor, there was no danger of his cutting his throat. His outburst of male vanity might have been taken from the play. How stupid of me, I thought uncomfortably, to inflict this play on him. It was what I wanted to read, but I should have warned my hosts. Instead, I was glad when Joyce accepted their invitation and realized only when it was too late what havoc I had wreaked with my mirrors. His “no mirror” was a declaration of war. To my own consternation I felt ashamed for him, for his compulsive sensibility, which lowered him in my esteem. He left the auditorium at once; perhaps he thought the mirror play would be continued after the intermission. Someone in the audience told me to take it as an honor that he had come in the first place, and assured me that he had been expected to make some cutting remark.
I was introduced to several distinguished people, but the intermission was not long and I didn’t catch the prevailing mood. My impression was that the people had shown and were still showing curiosity, and that they had not yet made up their minds. I pinned my hopes on the second part of my reading, for which I had chosen the “Kind Father” chapter from the novel that was soon to be titled Die Blendung (Auto-da-Fé). I had often read this chapter in Vienna, to both small and larger groups, and I felt as sure of it as if it had been an integral part of a generally known and widely read book. But as far as the public was concerned, that book did not yet exist, and while in Vienna there was already some talk of it, here it hit the audience with the shock of the totally unknown.
I had hardly spoken the last sentence when Max Pulver, who had come in a dinner jacket, bobbed up like a jack-in-the-box and sang out merrily: “Sadism at night is a bit of all right.” The spell was broken, after that everyone felt free to express his distaste. The guests stayed awhile, I met almost all of them, and each in his own way told me how much the second part in particular had riled him. The more kindly souls represented me indulgently as a young writer, not entirely devoid of talent, but needful of guidance.
Wolfgang Pauli, the physicist, whom I greatly respected, was one of these. He gave me a benevolent little lecture, to the effect that my ideas were aberrant. Then, rather more sternly, he bade me listen to him, since after all he had listened to me. It is true that I hadn’t been listening and consequently cannot repeat what he said, but the reason why my ears were closed to him was something he could never have guessed: he reminded me of Franz Werfel, though only in appearance of course, and in view of what Werfel had put me through exactly a year before, the resemblance was bound to shake me. But the manner of speaking was quite different, benevolent rather than hostile; I think—I may be mistaken—that he was trying to educate me along Jungian lines. After his admonition I managed to get hold of myself. I listened with apparent attention to the end, I even thanked him for his interesting observations, and we parted on the best of terms.
Bernard von Brentano, who had been sitting in the first row, exposed to the full force of my acoustic masks, seemed disgruntled. All he said, in his toneless way, was “I could never do that, stand up and act in front of all those people.” The vitality of the characters had got on his nerves, he thought me an exhibitionist and exhibitionism was offensive to his secretive nature.
One after another was at pains to acquaint me with his disapproval; since many of these people were famous, the proceedings amounted to a sort of public trial. Each of them thought it important to demonstrate that he had been present, and since this was an established fact and could not be denied, to demonstrate his rejection in his own way. The hall had been full; there would be many names to mention; if I knew that any one among them was still alive I would mention him and at least clear him of any imputation of premature approval. The host, who felt sorry for me, finally led me to a gentleman whose name I have forgotten, a graphic artist, and said to me on the way: “You’ll be pleased with what he has to say. Come.” It was then that I heard the one positive statement of the evening. “It makes me think of Goya,” said the artist. But there was no need of this consolation, which I mention only for fairness’ sake, for I didn’t feel shattered or even dejected. I was overpowered by the characters of my Comedy, their ruthlessness, their—I can find no other way of saying it—their truth; and as always after such a reading, I felt buoyant and happy. All the disapproval I had been subjected to merely intensified this feeling; I had felt surer of myself than ever before, and to this feeling the presence of Joyce, in spite of his absurd remark, actually contributed.
During the social part of the evening, which went on for some time, the mood changed for the better. Some erstwhile listeners even managed to talk about themselves so well that they became centers of attraction after all. The most striking of these was Max Pulver, who had already distinguished himself by being the only dinner-jacketed gentleman present and by his little quip about my sadism. He had a few confidential communications to make that attracted general attention. As a writer, he could not have meant much to this distinguished gathering, but for some time he had been busying himself with graphology. His recently published The Symbolism of Handwriting was being much discussed; it was thought to be the most important work on graphology since Klages.
He asked me if I knew whose handwriting had been submitted to him for an opinion. I had no idea, but at the time I took an interest in graphology and showed a satisfactory amount of curiosity. He didn’t keep me on tenterhooks for long; in a voice loud enough for all to hear, he said something about “world-political importance.”
“I shouldn’t talk about it,” he went on, “but I will all the same. I have specimens of Goebbels’s and Göring’s handwriting at my place, and that’s not all. Oh yes, there’s yet another, you can imagine who, but it’s a deep secret. Himmler sent them to me for my opinion.”
I was so impressed that for a moment I forgot my reading and asked: “And what do they show?”
This was six months after the Röhm putsch. Hitler had been in power for two years. The naïveté of my question matched the childlike pride of his announcement. His tone was unchanged in his answer to my question, which sounded affable rather than boastful, with something almost Viennese about it (he had lived for a time in Vienna).
“Very interesting, really,” he said apologetically. “I’d be glad to tell you. But I’m pledged to strictest secrecy. Like a doctor, don’t you know.”
By then the whole company had been alerted to the dangerous names he had mentioned. The lady of the house joined our group. She knew what was going on and she said with a nod of the head in Max Pulver’s direction: “He’s going to talk himself into trouble one of these days.”
Whereupon he declared that he was well able to keep his mouth shut, or they wouldn’t send him such things.
“No one will ever get anything out of me.”
I would give more today than I would have then to know how he worded his analyses.
The list of persons invited included C. G. Jung and Thomas Mann, neither of whom had come. I wondered if Pulver would have boasted to Thomas Mann of the handwriting specimens the Gestapo had commissioned him to analyze. The presence of refugees didn’t seem to trouble him. There were many in the hall: Bernard von Brentano was thought to be one, and Kurt Hirschfeld of the Schauspielhaus was there. I even had the impression that their presence had prompted Pulver to make his “revelations.” I was tempted to throw his “sadism” back in his face, but I was too shy and too unknown.
The actual star of the evening was the lady of the house. Her friendship with Joyce was well known. There was hardly a writer, painter or composer of repute who didn’t come to her house. She was intelligent, one could talk to her, she understood something of what such men said to her, she was able without presumption to talk to them. She took an interest in dreams; that brought her close to Jung, and it was said that even Joyce told her some of his dreams. She had made herself a home in Comologno, a refuge for artists, who could go there to work. Very much a woman, she did things that were not merely calculated to further her own glory. I compared her in my thoughts with the noisy, witless woman in Vienna, who dominated the scene through boasting, greed and liquor. True, I knew that one better, I’d known her for years, and it’s amazing how much you find out when you’ve known someone a long time. Still, I feel justified in comparing her with my hostess of that evening to the latter’s advantage, and if my hostess is still alive, I hope she gets wind of my good opinion.
It was at her house that evening, among her guests who listened to me with disapproval, possibly because they only half understood me, that I recovered my self-confidence. Only a few days before, I had been ashamed to subordinate myself to a composer. Though I respected him, I had reason to doubt that he regarded me as an equal. At the house of this woman in Val Onsernone I had felt this to be a humiliation, though no one was to blame. Now in her Zurich town house she gave me an opportunity to read my latest work, which meant a great deal to me, to people more than one of whom I admired, and to suffer a defeat which was all my own and against which I could pit all my strength and conviction.
The Benefactor
Jean Hoepffner was the owner of the Strassburger Neueste Nachrichten, the most widely read of Alsatian dailies. It was published in German and French, gave offense to no one and stepped on nobody’s toes. It provided all the news needed in Alsace but seldom went beyond matters of regional interest, except in the financial section. Everyone I knew in Strasbourg subscribed, it had by far the largest circulation of any daily, you saw it wherever you went. It wasn’t the least bit stimulating, the cultural section was utterly undistinguished; anyone interested in such matters read the big Paris papers.
The printshop and offices were in the rear of the building on Blauwolkenstrasse (rue de la Nuée Bleue), but the thumping of the presses could be heard in every room front and back. Jean Hoepffner didn’t live there, but he had a two-room apartment on the third floor, which he let out-of-town friends use. It was crammed full of old furniture, for he had a passion for rummaging in junk shops. He was overjoyed when he thought he had made a find and immediately moved it into his guest apartment, which became, as it were, his own private junk shop, except that nothing was for sale. This shop was visited only by the friends who were privileged to stay there, and when Jean Hoepffner’s shining eyes opened wide and came to rest on something which he lavishly and unsuspectingly praised, one didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth, namely, that one didn’t like it at all. One just smiled, shared his pleasure and changed the subject as soon as possible.
When one stayed there for several weeks, as I did, one had to deal with this problem day after day, because in addition to the large stock that was already there, new pieces kept arriving; almost every day he appeared with something new, usually something small; he seemed to feel that he had to contribute to his guest’s comfort by bringing in more and more new and startling objects. The apartment was full, it was no easy matter to find room for anything new, but he found it. I think I have never lived anywhere where the furnishings were less to my taste; everything looked dusty and unused; though the place was cleaned every day, one wouldn’t have been surprised to find mold on everything, but it would have been a purely symbolic mold, because when you looked closely the place was scrupulously clean; it was more the nature of the objects and the fact that nothing went with anything else that gave the impression of mold.
The most amiable conversations were held in these rooms, where I slept and had my breakfast. In the morning, before going to his second-floor office, Herr Hoepffner dropped in to see me and kept me company at breakfast. He had his favorite writers, whom he read over and over again, whom he could not get enough of, and he liked to talk about them. In particular, there was Adalbert Stifter, practically all of whom he had read; some of his stories, he told me, which he was especially fond of, he had read more than a hundred times. In the evening, when he went home from his office, he would be looking forward to his Stifter. He was a bachelor and lived alone with his poodle; an old Alsatian woman, who had been with him for years, cooked and kept house for him. He wasted no time on superfluities; he appreciated the meal that his kindly housekeeper prepared for him, drank his wine with it and then, after playing awhile with his poodle, took up his Stifter, whom he could not praise enough. Of him he spoke more earnestly than of the junk he sometimes brought with him. But between his antiques and Stifter there was obviously a connection, which he wouldn’t have thought of denying.
