The Play of the Eyes, page 18
I once asked him why he kept reading the same things. He didn’t resent the question, but it surprised him. What else was there to read? He couldn’t bear modern writing, everything was so gloomy and hopeless, never a single good person. It just wasn’t true, he said, he had seen something of life, he had met lots of people in his work, and he had never come across a single bad person. You had to see people as they are and not impute evil intentions to them. The writer who had seen this most clearly was Stifter, and ever since Jean Hoepffner discovered that, all other writers had bored him or given him a headache.
At first I had the impression that he had read nothing else. But there I was wrong, for it turned out that he had another favorite book which he had read no less often. It might come as a surprise to me, he said. He seemed to feel the need of apologizing before confiding the name. We should know, he explained, what the world would be like if there were bad people. It was an experience we needed, though of course it was an illusory experience. He had had this experience. Even though he knew that the picture this book painted was totally untrue, it was written so wonderfully that one had to read it, and he read it over and over again. Just as there are people who read crime novels for the pleasure of recovering from them, so to speak, of returning to the real world, he read his Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma. I admitted that Stendhal was my favorite French author, I had looked upon him as my master and tried to learn from him. “Learn from him?” he said. “The only thing you can learn is that fortunately the world is not like that.”
He was convinced that The Charterhouse of Parma was a masterpiece, but a masterpiece of deterrence, and his conviction was so pure that I felt abashed in his presence. Something made me speak truthfully of myself, and I soon told him what I had written. I told him the story of Kant Catches Fire, and he listened with interest. “That sounds like even better deterrence than The Charterhouse of Parma. I’ll never read it. But it’s good such a book exists. It will have a good effect. The people who read it will wake up as from a nightmare and be thankful that reality is different.” But he could see why no publisher, not even those who had spoken respectfully of the manuscript, had dared publish it. It took courage to publish such a book, and that was a rare commodity.
I believe he wanted to help me and disguised his wish with exquisite tact. He himself wouldn’t read such a thing, my account of it had been too repellent. But he had heard from our friend Madame Hatt that I had not yet published a book, and that seemed unfortunate for a writer who was almost thirty. Since it wasn’t exactly his cup of tea, he thought up an educational justification for the existence of such a novel: deterrence. Without transition and without hesitation, in the course of the same conversation, he suggested that I look around for a good publisher who believed in the book. Then he, Jean Hoepffner, would guarantee the publisher against loss. “But,” I objected, “it’s quite possible that no one will want to read my book.”
“Then I’ll make good the publisher’s loss,” he said. “I’m much too well off, and I have no family to support.” He made it sound like the most natural thing in the world. He had soon convinced me that there was nothing he would rather do, nothing simpler, and at the same time he proved to me that the world wasn’t the least bit like my book, that there were good people in it. He was certain that anyone who read my book would return with renewed confidence to the real world of good people.
* * *
On my return to Vienna I had a lot to talk about. My travels had taken me to Comologno and Zurich, Paris and Strasbourg; unusual things had happened and I had met remarkable people. When I reported to Broch, his candid response, proffered with less hesitation than usual for him, was that he envied me for just one thing, my meeting with James Joyce. Now, I had no reason at all to be so pleased with that meeting. His rudely macho remark—“I shave with a straight razor and no mirror”—had struck me as contemptuous and hostile. Broch disagreed; in his opinion it showed that my reading had touched a chord. Joyce, he assured me, was incapable of stupidity and with those words he had laid himself bare. Would I have preferred some smooth, meaningless remark? Broch turned the sentence round and round and tried various interpretations. Its contradictory character appealed to him, and when I accused him of treating this banal and utterly uninteresting sentence as an oracle, he agreed without hesitation; yes, that’s just what it was, and he went on looking for interpretations.
If the Comedy had disconcerted Joyce, Broch went on, that was all to the good. Of course he had understood it perfectly; did I imagine that a man of his stamp could live so long in Trieste without mastering the Austrian dialects? When he kept interrupting all my attempts to tell him more about my trip with further talk about Joyce—another possible interpretation had occurred to him—I realized that for him Joyce had become a paragon, a figure one tries to emulate and from whom one can never quite dissociate oneself. Broch, who was himself the soul of kindness, refused to be put off by anything I said about Joyce’s cruel arrogance. He insisted that this seeming cruelty resulted from his many eye operations and couldn’t be taken seriously. What interested him, Broch, was the self-assurance with which Joyce carried his fame; no one else’s fame was as distinguished, as elegant as his. This was the only kind of fame Broch cared about, and nothing would have made him happier than to be noticed by Joyce. Years later the hope of producing a work remotely comparable to Joyce was to play an important part in his conception of The Death of Virgil.
All the same, he was delighted when I told him about Jean Hoepffner and was no less amazed than I at his offer. A man who read hardly anything but Stifter, who rejected modern literature en bloc, who after the first few pages would have put aside Kant Catches Fire with horror, had offered to provide for the publication of this same book. “Once it’s published,” said Broch, “it will make its way. It’s too intense, too gruesome perhaps to be forgotten. Whether you’ll be doing your readers a good turn with this book, I don’t dare decide. But there’s no doubt that your friend is doing a good deed. He is acting contrary to his prejudice. It’s a book he couldn’t possibly understand. But he’ll never read it. He’s not even doing it to curry favor with posterity. He just has a hunch that you are a gifted writer and he somehow wants to do literature a good turn, because it has done so much for him with Stifter. What I like best about him is the way he lives in disguise. The director of a printing press and newspaper. What greater disguise could there be? You’ll easily find a publisher.”
* * *
He was right, and in a way he helped, though not in exactly the way he intended. A few days later he saw Stefan Zweig, who was in Vienna for two reasons. He was having extensive dental work done, and he was setting up a new publishing house for his books, which the Insel Verlag in Germany was no longer able to publish. I believe nearly all his teeth were extracted. A friend of his, Herbert Reichner, was publishing a magazine called Philobiblon, which was not at all bad. Zweig decided to let Reichner publish his books and to find him a few other presentable works for window dressing.
Soon after my return I ran into Zweig at the Café Imperial. He was sitting alone in one of the back rooms, holding his hand over his mouth to hide the absence of teeth. Though he did not like to be seen in that condition, he beckoned me over to his table and bade me be seated. “I’ve heard the whole story from Broch,” he said. “You’ve met Joyce. If you have someone who will guarantee your book, I can recommend it to my friend Reichner. Get Joyce to write a preface. Then your book will get attention.”
I told him at once that this was out of the question, that I couldn’t make such a request of Joyce, that he hadn’t seen the manuscript, that he was almost blind and couldn’t be expected to read such a thing, but that even if he could read as easily as anyone else, I’d never ask such a favor of him. I went on to say that I wouldn’t ask anyone to write a preface, that the book should be read for its own sake. It needed no crutches.
All this sounded so harsh that I myself was rather taken aback. “I only wanted to help you,” said Zweig. “But if you don’t wish…” Back went his hand over his mouth, and that was the end of our exchange. I went my way without the least regret that I had turned down his proposal so firmly. I had saved my pride and lost nothing. Even had it been possible—in my opinion it was not—the thought of publishing my book with a preface by Joyce, regardless of what it said, stuck in my craw. I despised Zweig for suggesting it. But fortunately, perhaps, I didn’t despise him so very much, for when a few days later I received a letter from the Herbert Reichner Verlag, speaking, it’s true, of the guarantee but making no mention of a preface, and asking me to submit my manuscript, I took counsel with Broch, who advised me to send it in. And so I did.
An Audience
The first consequence of my increased self-assurance was my reading at the Schwarzwald School on April 17, 1935.
I had been to see Frau Dr. Schwarzwald, but not very often. Maria Lazar, to whom I also owed my friendship with Broch, had brought me. The legendary educator was an enormous talker; the first time she saw me she pressed me to her bosom as if I had been her pupil from infancy and had poured out my heart to her innumerable times. But despite her overflowing friendliness, I preferred the taciturn Dr. Schwarzwald, a small, slightly crippled man, who hobbled in on a cane and then sat morosely in a corner, where he submitted to the visitors’ interminable, and the Frau Doktor’s even more interminable, chatter. His head, which may be known to the reader because of a portrait by Kokoschka, looked, as Broch once remarked, like a root.
The smallish room in which visitors were received was even more legendary than Frau Dr. Schwarzwald, because it would be hard to think of a celebrity who had not been there at one time or another. Vienna’s truly great had sat there long before they gained general recognition. Adolf Loos had come and brought young Kokoschka with him; so had Schönberg, Karl Kraus, Musil and any number of others. It is interesting to note that all these men, whose work would withstand the test of time, gathered there. But it should not be thought that any of them took a particular interest in Frau Dr. Schwarzwald’s conversation. She was regarded as an impassioned educator with modern, liberal ideas; she was helpful and indulgent and her pupils idolized her, but since her talk was a hopeless jumble, her intellectual callers found her not only uninteresting but downright tedious. She was looked upon as a well-intentioned bore, but the people one met at her house were not bores, and there were never too many at a time. I listened to them and watched them closely, they imprinted themselves on my mind as if they had come to sit for their portraits. In a way, perhaps, I usurped the role of the great portraitist who made their acquaintance there and really did paint their portraits.
Whoever might be present, the most unforgettable was the taciturn Dr. Schwarzwald; his silent severity seemed to obliterate his wife’s chatter. And then there was a person whom one felt to be the heart of the household, the marvelous Mariedl Stiasny, Dr. Schwarzwald’s friend, who took care of him and not of him alone, for she managed the school and ran the household. She was a beautiful, radiant woman of lively intelligence, neither talkative nor silent, her laughter was like fresh air to all those who lived in the house or merely went in and out. When you dropped in for a visit, she wouldn’t just be sitting there, she was always busy, but she would look in from time to time to see how things were going, and whoever might be in attendance, whatever kings of the intellect you had just met, you caught yourself waiting for Mariedl Stiasny to appear. When the door opened, everyone hoped it would be she, and some of us, I’m afraid, would have been slightly disappointed if it had been God the Father instead. In the rather ridiculous argument I had had with Broch about the “good” person, we had not, inconceivable as it may seem, thought of any woman, for if either of us had mentioned this particular woman, that would have been the end of our argument.
As might be expected, Fritz Wotruba had long been visiting the Schwarzwalds. He came irregularly and never stayed long, but what drove him away was not Frau Dr. Schwarzwald’s chatter, he was used to that from Marian, his wife; it was his intense restlessness, his passion for the streets of this neighborhood not far from Florianigasse, which were his true home. He always felt better out of doors than in, and after the obligatory first visit was paid, it was not easy to get him to make another. When I told him, not without pride, about the unanimously unfavorable reaction of my Zurich audience, he said: “Those people don’t understand the Viennese language. You must give a big reading here.” It was the Viennese voices that had drawn him to the Comedy, and he thought I owed it to myself to read it to a Viennese audience.
It may have been his wife, the practical Marian, who thought of the large auditorium at the Schwarzwald School. Though my reading was not to be taken as a school function, the Schwarzwalds agreed to provide the hall. Everything else was handled by Marian Wotruba, handled with a vengeance. The hall was packed. Most if not all the members of the Sezession and the Hagenbund were there, painters and sculptors, the architects of the Neuer Werkbund, a few of whom were known to me. Marian must have talked them all, singly and collectively, into a stupor. But there were also people who were not in her province, writers and others who meant a good deal to me.
I must mention the two I esteemed most highly. One was the angel Gabriel, as I privately called Dr. Sonne, and as secret as this name, which he bore only for me and which I am now revealing for the first and only time, was his presence. He managed to be seen by no one and yet I felt protected by his sword. The other was Robert Musil, who came with his wife and with Franz and Valerie Zeis, who were good friends of his, as they were of mine, and who for some time had been tactfully laying the groundwork for this meeting. The presence of Musil meant more to me than had that of Joyce two months before in Zurich. For while Joyce was at the peak of his well-deserved fame, Musil, whom I had been reading seriously for only a year, struck me as equally deserving of fame; moreover, he was closer to me.
I read the same passages as in Zurich but in inverse order, starting with the “Kind Father” chapter of the novel and ending with the first part of The Comedy of Vanity. This may have been the better order, but I don’t believe that alone was responsible for the different reception. Wotruba was right in saying that nothing was more authentically Vienna than what I had chosen for this reading. Besides, the audience expected more. In Zurich no one but my hosts had ever heard of me, for all the others I was an unknown quantity. And then, without explanation, to be assailed by this fairground, these voices, these characters. Here quite a few of the people knew who I was, and Marian had given those who didn’t a good talking-to. In Zurich the quick shifts from one to another of these very divergent characters supposedly all talking at once made my head reel and kept me too busy to watch for reactions, as one ordinarily does when giving a reading. Consequently, it was only later, when it was all over, that I became aware of the total absence of understanding.
Here, from the very start, I sensed expectation and wonderment, which encouraged me to read as if my life depended on it. The gruesome “Kind Father” scene aroused horror, the Viennese knew the tyranny of their janitors and I don’t believe any of my listeners would have dared doubt the veracity of this character as long as they were all sitting there together exposed to him. After this scene the Comedy began like a liberation from the ghoulish janitor and then little by little developed a horror of its own. If here again a few members of the audience were horrified, they blamed the realities represented rather than the author. I met with animosity only among the close friends of the house, and the only real dressing-down I got was from Karin Michaelis, a Danish writer, who angrily accused me of inhumanity. While she was talking, even Frau Dr. Schwarzwald fell silent for the first and only time. She said nothing, she didn’t even favor me with her friendly chatter, for which I had been prepared. Her silence contributed to the success of the evening.
For I was full of the presence of Dr. Sonne and Musil. I saw Musil facing me in the second row and felt a slight twinge of fear that he would get up and go in the short intermission I had arranged after the “Kind Father,” just as Joyce had done after the Comedy in Zurich. But he didn’t get up and he didn’t go; on the contrary, he seemed spellbound. Sitting as rigid as usual, he leaned slightly forward; his head gave the impression of a projectile aimed at me, but restrained by his prodigious self-control. As I found out a little later, this impression, which engraved itself forever on my memory, was not an illusion, though the explanation, when I heard it, was bound to surprise me.
Sonne, to whom I give second billing just this once, was invisible. I knew I wouldn’t find him, so I didn’t look for him. But for me this was a decisive moment in our relationship. After all the conversations he had favored me with for more than a year, this was his first encounter with any of my writing. I had never shown him a manuscript; he had realized, though not a word had ever been said about it, that I felt ashamed of not yet having published a book, and that with him, who shunned all publicity, but only with him, I lost this sense of shame. He never asked me about it, he never said: “Wouldn’t you like to show me the novel Broch has told me about?” He never said anything, because he knew that as soon as the book was out and it was no longer possible to make changes, I would bring it to him.
