The Play of the Eyes, page 19
He also knew that I had to protect my manuscript from his judgment, because a word from him, and from him alone, could have destroyed it. To this danger, which I clearly recognized, I exposed neither the novel nor the two plays, and I did not regard this as cowardice, because these three works, which I had not even managed to publish, were all I had. I felt capable of protecting them against anyone else. But against him I would have been defenseless, because instinctively, but also very deliberately, I had raised him up to be my supreme authority, to which I would incline because I needed such an authority no less than my awareness that my three works existed. But now he had come, and oddly perhaps in view of the foregoing, I felt no fear of his presence.
Broch was not in Vienna and Anna was taken up with her sister Manon, who was gravely ill. None of those who had inflicted the humiliation of the year before was present. Not once did Werfel’s “Give it up!” cross my mind, though the sting of hatred was still in me. Those words were intended as a curse on all my future writing, and although I set no store by them, they acted as a curse, for they were flung at the Comedy, which I firmly believed in. The Zsolnay world, which I had never taken seriously, was far away; here I was confronted with what I regarded as the real, authentic Vienna, which I had faith in and which, I was sure, would be the Vienna of the future.
The painters, a compact band led by Wotruba, were unstinting in their applause, which contributed no little to the outward success of my reading. Perhaps it was their applause more than anything else which gave me the impression that the Comedy had at last found its audience. A mistake, as it later turned out, but a forgivable one. Just this once I was able to indulge the feeling that the Comedy had been understood and might exert an influence on the generation for which it was written.
The moment it was over, Musil came up to me and it seems to me that he spoke to me warmly, without the reserve for which he was known. I was confused and intoxicated. His face, not his back, was turned toward me. I saw his face close to mine and I was too overwhelmed to catch what he was saying. Besides, he had little time to say anything, for already a powerful hand had taken me by the shoulder, I was turned around and hugged tight—it was Wotruba, whose brotherly enthusiasm stopped at nothing. I struggled free and introduced him to Musil. It was in that passionate moment that the seeds of their friendship were sown, and though their friendship was to be so eventful that they forgot this isolated moment, it has remained one of the luminous occasions of my life. I have not forgotten it.
We were separated; others crowded around, including many whom I was seeing for the first time. Then someone announced that we were going to the Steindl-Keller, that a room had been reserved on the second floor. It was a long, straggling procession that made its way through the streets; when I arrived and looked into the room that had been set aside for us, a good many people were already seated at the long horseshoe-shaped table. Musil was standing undecided in the doorway with his wife. Franz Zeis, whom he trusted, was trying to persuade him to go in and sit down. He hesitated, looked into the room, but did not move. When I went up to them and respectfully invited him to join us, he excused himself; there were too many people, he said, the room was too crowded. He still seemed undecided, but it was hard for him to reverse himself after expressly declining. In the end he found a table outside the room, and there he installed himself with his wife and the two Zeises.
Perhaps it was better so, for how could I have felt free in his presence? It would have been inappropriate to have him sitting there, hemmed in by all these people, who had come to eat, drink and make noise in honor of a young writer. I had to invite him when I saw him standing in the doorway and sensed his indecision; to accept his exclusion would have been more tactless than to invite him. And quite possibly he had waited for an invitation before declining. All Musil’s defensive gestures, which I saw directed at myself or others, struck me as invariably right. I would hate to lose the memory of them. If this had been my only meeting with him (which was luckily not the case), I would nevertheless have the feeling that I had known him in a precise, appropriate way, compatible with the language of his work.
The atmosphere in the inner room was boisterous. A few of the painters were there, and they didn’t have to be taught how to celebrate. I said to myself that not one person was there whose presence I would have been ashamed of. Fortunately, one does not look at things too closely on such occasions. But especially when toasts began going around, I felt that something was missing. I hesitated, as though I should wait a moment before drinking. I didn’t know why, for I had forgotten the all-important. Perhaps amid this general rejoicing, which had taken hold of me too, I was afraid to tell myself that the decision, the crux, was still to come. I must have expected the judgment, but I wasn’t looking for it. I was not in a state of mind to notice exactly who was there. Little by little, they would all speak up, I could rely on that. But once, just once, I felt that someone was looking at me. No one called out to me. I glanced, without searching, in a certain direction. At some distance from me, frail, rather squeezed in, in total silence, sat Dr. Sonne. As soon as he found my eyes, he raised his glass very gently, smiled and drank my health. It seemed to me that his lips moved, I could hear nothing, there was something unreal about hand and glass; they hovered motionless, as in a painting.
He said no more to me, not even in the following days when we again sat together at one of the round marble tables at the Café Museum. He had spoken to me by raising his glass, by holding it aloft; that meant more to me than any audible words. Since he had heard only parts and no complete work, he didn’t wish to speak. But he hadn’t barred my way, he hadn’t warned me of any danger he had sighted. He had left me a free passage, in his considerate way that respected all life. I interpreted as approval what may even then have been more.
One of those who had come to the Steindl-Keller was Ernst Bloch. I had heard of his Thomas Münzer but had never looked into it. His presence at the reading was noticed by quite a few people, including, as I later found out, Musil. Musil declined my invitation, I went into the inner room. Bloch, who had just found himself a seat, stood up and came over to me. As far as possible in such a crowd, he took me aside and set out to tell me exactly what he thought. He began with an eloquent gesture. “First impression,” he said, and raised both hands, at some distance from each other but palms facing, to slightly above shoulder level. Then with rhythmic emphasis he said: “It—towers.” The interval after the “it” was as striking as the elevation of the hands. The “towers,” so long after the indefinite “it,” was as startling and lofty as a Gothic spire. I looked in amazement at the gnarled, slightly elongated face, the lines of which were brought out by the towering hands. After that he said things that proved he had understood the Comedy. He knew its implications, predicted what would inevitably happen in the second part, and hit the nail on the head. It was a thorough, perfectly organized statement; I could have hoped for nothing better. But it might all have been spoken in a foreign language. “It—towers!” is all that has stayed with me.
The evening had an epilogue that I don’t wish to pass over in silence, though to me it was rather embarrassing. It has to do with Musil and what he was really thinking during the reading, something I could not have suspected and which, in my delight at his presence and friendly treatment of me, would have been lost forever if Franz Zeis hadn’t told me about it some days later.
Franz Zeis was a high official in the patent office and had known Musil a long time. He was a loyal friend, who early recognized his worth. At that time there were perhaps a dozen creative artists whom it was meritorious to stand up for, because it brought no advantage but, if anything, trouble. Some of these banded together in small groups, Schönberg and his disciples for instance; others were isolated. Franz Zeis knew them all and helped them all. He had a fine instinct for their loneliness. He realized that they needed solitude, but he also knew how deeply they suffered from it. He knew Musil best, his touchiness, the distrustfulness of Martha, his wife, who kept watch with Argus eyes lest anyone come too close to him—in short, every particular of this constellation indispensable to so outstanding a mind. Zeis knew all about Musil’s most secret reactions and he was shrewd enough to keep them in mind in his efforts to help Musil.
I told him what I thought about Musil, and once he was convinced of the depth and solidity of my admiration, he told Musil, who took a close look at admiration before accepting it. Franz Zeis always had to submit to an interrogation; every statement he relayed was weighed in the balance and usually found wanting. But if Zeis thought some little thing he heard might meet with Musil’s approval, he could not be discouraged from repeating it. There are two kinds of tale bearers. There are those who do what they can to foment strife, who pass on every pejorative remark they hear, exaggerate it by taking it out of context, so arousing hostile reactions, which they carry back to the original denigrator, and so back and forth until they have completely alienated good friends. This little game gives them an enjoyable sense of power and sometimes they even manage to fill the place of one of the dislodged friends. The other sort of tale bearers—a lot rarer—are those who bear only good tales, do their best to palliate the effects of unfriendly remarks by neglecting to mention them, promote curiosity and, little by little, confidence, until inevitably the time comes when the persons involved, whose meeting has been so patiently prepared for, meet in reality. Franz Zeis was one of these, and I believe he was really eager to relieve Musil’s sense of isolation and to give me the pleasure of knowing him better.
That is just what Zeis did by persuading Musil to attend my reading. Afterward he saw fit to describe Musil’s reactions, and the next time we met he told me things that startled me not a little. First Musil had expressed surprise: “He’s got a good audience,” he had said, and mentioned a few names such as Ernst Bloch and Otto Stoessl. That had impressed him. Then, while I was reading “The Kind Father,” he had suddenly gripped the arms of his chair and said: “He reads better than I do!” Of course, this was far from the truth, everyone knew what a fine reader Musil was; the interesting part of this remark was not its truth content but the form in which he made it. It bore witness to what I later regarded as Musil’s competitiveness. He measured himself against others; to him a mere reading was what an athletic contest was to the Greeks. This struck me as almost insane, it would never have occurred to me to measure myself against him, I put him far above myself. And yet, though I was unaware of it at the time, it may have been a necessity for me, after the humiliation of the year before, to give battle before a better audience and to win.
The Funeral of an Angel
For almost a year she had been presented in a wheelchair, attractively dressed, her face carefully made up, a costly rug over her knees, her waxen face alive with false hope. Real hope, she had none. Her voice was unimpaired, it dated back to the days of innocence, when she tripped about on the feet of a doe and was regarded by visitors as the opposite of her mother. Now the contrast, which had always seemed incredible, was even greater. The mother, who went on living in her usual way, thought better of herself because of her beloved child’s misfortune. The daughter, though paralyzed, was still capable of saying yes; she was engaged to be married.
This engagement was intended to be useful. The choice fell on a young secretary of the Patriotic Front, a protégé of the professor of moral theology who directed the conscience of the regal lady of the house. The young man, who had no compunctions about getting engaged to a woman who had only a short while to live, moved freely about the house when he called on his fiancée. By the side of her wheelchair he became acquainted with all the celebrities who came for the same purpose. With his ingratiating grin, his well-mannered bows and tremulous voice, he became a much discussed figure: the promising young man, whom no one had ever heard of before, who sacrificed himself, his looks, his increasingly valuable time, to give the angel the illusion of a possible recovery. Being betrothed gave her reason to hope that she would marry.
It made quite an impression when the dinner-jacketed young man kissed his fiancée’s hand. As often as Viennese men say “Küss die Hand”—which rolls so easily off the tongue—he actually did it. When he straightened up with the pleasant feeling that he had been seen doing it, that in this house nothing was done in vain, credit was given for everything, especially for depositing a kiss on this hand, when for a moment he prolonged his bewitching bow to his paralytic fiancée, he was standing for both of them. There were some who shared the mother’s belief in a miracle and said: “She will recover. The joy her fiancé gives her will make her well.”
But there were others who looked with anger and disgust on this disgraceful spectacle and cherished very different hopes. They, and I was one of them, wished for just one thing: that mother and fiancé should be struck by lightning, which would not kill but paralyze them, and that the sick girl would jump up from her wheelchair in a panic and be cured. From then on her mother would be wheeled about in her stead, just as attractively dressed, just as carefully made up, with the same high-priced rug over her knees; the fiancé, standing but on roller skates, would be pulled toward her on a chain and would try unsuccessfully to bow and kiss the old woman’s hand. Of course, the girl would put all her purity and kindness into trying to make her mother a present of her recovery and resume her former condition in her stead, but would be prevented by the perpetually unsuccessful bowing and hand kissing. Thus the three of them would be frozen into a waxworks group, which could be set in motion now and then, providing for all time a picture of the state of affairs on Hohe Warte.
But reality knows no justice, and it was the impeccably dinner-jacketed secretary who followed the funeral service leaning on a column in the Heiligenstadt Church. That was the end of his engagement to Manon Gropius; she died as had been foreseen and instead of a wedding he had to content himself with a funeral.
She was buried in Grinzing cemetery. Here again every last possibility of effect was exploited. All Vienna was there, or at least everyone eligible to be received on Hohe Warte. Others came who longed to be invited but never were; you couldn’t keep anyone away from a funeral by force. A long line of cars filed up the narrow road to the cemetery; actually it was more a path than a road; no matter how frantic the passengers of a car might be for a place of honor, passing was unthinkable. In unchanging order, the long file struggled up the hill.
I was sitting in one of these cars, a taxi, with Wotruba and Marian. Marian was in a frenzy of excitement and kept screaming to the driver: “Faster, faster. We’ve got to be up front. Can’t you drive faster? We’re way in back. We’ve got to be up front. Faster, faster!” Her phrases snapped like whips, but it wasn’t a horse she was whipping, it was a taxi driver, and the harder she lashed, the calmer he became. “It can’t be done, lady, it can’t be done.” “It’s got to be done,” Marian screamed. “We’ve got to be up front.” Her excitement came out in sobs. “We’ll be there at the tail end. Oh, this is disgraceful!”
I’d never seen her in such a state; neither had Wotruba. She had long been trying to get him a commission to do a Mahler monument. They kept asking him for new sketches. They kept putting him off on senseless pretexts. Anna, his pupil, had interceded with her mother. Carl Moll had been running himself ragged in Wotruba’s behalf. He had once brought his influence to bear for Kokoschka, and took no less trouble for Wotruba. But always at the last moment something went wrong. I suspected the all-powerful widow, and indeed it was she who sabotaged Wotruba’s candidacy. Alma Mahler had a crush on him, but since Marian was always nearby, she had little opportunity for ensnaring him. She went to his studio with enormous bologna sausages under her arm, and then, after beating a disappointed retreat, she would say to her daughter: “He’s not right for Mahler. He’s too low-class.” Marian, meanwhile, besieged every government bureau that could have the slightest influence on the decision. Her enthusiasm for “Mahler,” as the two of them called the monument, reached its climax on this ride to the funeral of Manon Gropius, who had very little, and in death nothing at all, to do with Mahler.
But Marian Wotruba fumed, and since the car advanced very slowly on its way to the cemetery, she had plenty of time for fuming. “Now you can do it. Try it now. We’ve got to get ahead. Look, we’re the last in line. We’ve got to get ahead.” Wotruba looked at me as if to say: “She’s off her rocker,” but was careful not to say it out loud, for Marian could have transferred her fury from the driver to him. Not that the matter left him indifferent. He too would have preferred to be further forward, closer to the Mahler monument. To a sculptor there is a close connection between tombs and statuary. A cemetery undoubtedly represents the earliest assemblage of stone blocks in his experience, and when the posthumous stepdaughter of a monument-worthy man is concerned, the tie becomes indissoluble.
I don’t remember our arrival. Marian must have propelled us forward through the dense throng of tomb lovers; in the end we were standing not far from the open grave, and I heard the stirring oration of Hollensteiner, custodian of the grieving mother’s heart. She was weeping. It struck me that even her tears were of unusual size. There weren’t many of them, but she managed to weep in such a way that droplets merged into larger-than-life accretions, tears such as I had never seen, enormous pearls, priceless jewels. I couldn’t look at her without gasping in wonderment at so much mother love.
True, the child, as Hollensteiner eloquently pointed out, had borne her sufferings with superhuman patience, but no less great were the sufferings of the mother, who had lived through her ordeal before the eyes of the whole world, which had been kept constantly informed. Meanwhile all sorts of things had been happening in the world, other mothers had been killed, their children had starved to death, but none had suffered what this woman had suffered, she had suffered for each and all, she had not faltered, even now at the graveside she stood firm, a voluptuous but aging penitent, a Magdalen rather than a Mary, equipped with swollen tears rather than contrition, magnificent specimens such as no painter had yet produced. With every word of her orating lover, they went on gushing until at length they festooned her fat cheeks like clusters of grapes. That was how she wanted to be seen, and that was how she was seen. And all those present were at pains to be seen by her. That’s what they had come for, to give her grief the public recognition it deserved. It did their hearts good to be there, on one of Vienna’s last great days before it staggered to its doom and the new masters turned it into a province.
