The Play of the Eyes, page 2
“Have you hidden any other books from me?”
“No. This is the only one. I knew you wouldn’t touch Victor Hugo, I know you don’t read him, behind him Büchner was safe. Incidentally, he translated two of Victor Hugo’s plays.”
She pointed them out to me. That annoyed me and I handed back the volume.
“But why? Why did you hide him from me?”
“Be glad you hadn’t read him. Do you think you could have written anything if you had? He’s the most modern of writers. He could be living today, except that there’s no one like him. No modern writer can take him as a model. A modern writer can only hide his head and say: ‘Why am I writing? I should hold my tongue.’ I didn’t want you to hold your tongue. I believe in you.”
“In spite of Büchner?”
“Let’s not go into that now. Some things are bound to be unattainable. But you mustn’t let the unattainable crush you. Now that you’ve finished your novel, there’s something else of his that I want you to read. Another fragment, a story, Lenz. Read it now.”
I sat down without another word and read the most wonderful piece of prose. My night of Wozzeck was followed by a morning of Lenz, without a moment’s sleep in between. My novel that I’d been so proud of crumbled into dust and ashes.
It was a hard blow, but fortunate. After listening to the chapters of Kant Catches Fire—I had read them all to her—Veza thought of me as a playwright. She had lived in fear that I would never find my way out of my novel. She had seen how deeply I had entangled myself in it and how much it had taken out of me. She was aware of my unfortunate tendency to undertake tasks that would drag on for years, and she hadn’t forgotten my plans for a “Human Comedy of Madmen”; I had often spoken to her about it. The view of the Steinhof insane asylum had impressed her at first, but she had soon come to detest it. It seemed to her that my fascination with madmen and misfits had increased during my work on the novel. My friendship with Thomas Marek troubled her too. I took his part violently, aggressively. Once when I went so far as to say that this paralytic was more important than any empty-headed ingrate walking on two legs, she ridiculed my fanaticism.
She was really worried about me. My profession of love, in the “Madhouse” chapter of the novel, for all those regarded as insane, convinced her that I had crossed a perilous threshold. She was seriously alarmed by my reclusiveness, by my admiration for individuals who were totally different, by my desire to break off all ties with a degraded mankind. In speaking to her, I had represented the manias of some people I knew as perfect works of art, and tried to give her a step-by-step account of how a mania of my own invention had come into being. She had often objected, partly on aesthetic grounds, to the exhaustiveness of my account of a case of persecution mania. I would point out that such cases could not be described in any other way, that every detail, every trifling step was important. I tried to convince her that earlier literary accounts of madness were unreliable. She replied that it must be possible to describe such states succinctly, in such a way as to bring out their development. With this I radically disagreed; that sort of writing, I argued, threw more light on the author’s vanity than on the subject in point; madness, it should finally be realized, was not something shameful, but a phenomenon with its own meanings and implications, which were different in every particular case. This she denied and—though she believed nothing of the kind and took this position solely out of concern for me—defended the prevailing psychiatric classifications. She displayed a special weakness for the concept of “manic-depressive insanity,” though she was rather more reserved in her use of “schizophrenia,” which was then becoming fashionable.
Her intention in all this—to steer me away from this kind of novel—was clear to me. I was fiercely determined not to let myself be influenced by anyone, not even by her, and cited my, as I believed, successful novel in defense of my position. Though I myself felt guilty of arson and suffered severely under my guilt, this, I felt, did not detract from the value of my novel, which I did not doubt for one moment. Though, once it was finished, all my plans had been concerned with the theater, it does not seem impossible that after a period of exhaustion I would have started a novel of no lesser length, dealing with some other mania.
But the night when I picked up Wozzeck, and the following morning when Lenz hit me in my state of fatigue and hyperexcitation, were decisive. In a few pages I found everything that could be said about Lenz’s specific condition; to expand this into a full-length novel would be unthinkable. My obstinate pride had been defeated. I did not start another novel and months went by before I regained my confidence in Kant Catches Fire. By that time I was possessed by The Wedding.
It may sound pretentious when I say that I owe The Wedding to the impact of Wozzeck that night. But I cannot sidestep the truth just to avoid giving that impression. The visions of catastrophe that I had conceived up until then were still colored by Karl Kraus. Only the worst things happened, they happened all at once and for no reason at all. These happenings were witnessed by a writer and denounced. He denounced them from outside, holding a whip over each scene of the catastrophe. His whip gave him no rest, it drove him headlong, he paused in his course only when there was something to whip, and no sooner was the punishment administered than his whip drove him on. Essentially, the same thing happened over and over again: people engaged in their daily activities spoke the most banal words, stood unsuspecting on the brink of disaster. Then came the whip and drove them over the edge; all fell into the same abyss. Nothing could have saved them. For their statements never changed; their statements were appropriate to their persons, and the man who had framed them was one and the same, the writer with the whip.
Through Wozzeck I discovered something for which I found a name only later: self-denunciation. The characters (apart from the protagonist) who make the strongest impression introduce themselves. The doctor and the drum major strike blows. They attack, but in such different ways that one hesitates to use the same word “attack” in both cases. But an attack it is, for that is its effect on Wozzeck. Their words, which are not interchangeable, are directed against him and have the gravest consequences. But that is only because they portray the speaker, who with them delivers a hard blow, a blow that will never be forgotten, by which one would recognize him anywhere and at any time.
These characters, I say, present themselves. They have not been whipped into place. As though it were the most natural thing in the world, they denounce themselves, and in their self-denunciation there is more vainglory than condemnation. They are, in every case, present before a moral statement has been made about them. We think of them with horror, but our horror is mixed with approval, because in presenting themselves they are unaware of the horror they arouse. There is a kind of innocence in their self-denunciation; no juridical net has yet been prepared for them (though perhaps such a net will be thrown over them later on), but no indictment even by the most powerful satirist could be as powerful as this self-indictment, for it encompasses the whole man, his rhythm, his fear, his breath.
Another reason for the strength of these characters is no doubt that they are given the full value of the word “I,” which a pure satirist grants to no one except himself. There is enormous vitality in this direct and by no means parenthetical “I.” It has more to say about itself than has any judge. A judge speaks largely in the third person; even the direct address in which the judge says his worst is usurped. Only when the judge relapses into his “I” is he present in the full horror of his function, but then he himself has become a character who unsuspectingly presents himself, the giver of judgment, in his self-denunciation.
The captain, the doctor, the bellowing drum major step forward, as it were, of their own accord. No one has lent them their voice, they speak their selves and with these selves strike out at one and the same object, namely, Wozzeck; it is in striking him that they come into being. He serves them all, he is their center. Without him they would not exist, but of this they are no more aware than he is, one might even say that he infects his tormentors with his innocence. They cannot be other than they are, and it is in the essence of self-denunciation that they make this impression. The strength of these characters, of all characters, is their innocence. Should we hate the captain, should we hate the doctor because they could be different if only they wanted to be? Should we hope for their conversion? Should the play be a mission school, which such characters should attend until they can be written differently? A satirist expects people to change. He whips them as if they were schoolboys. He prepares them to appear before moral authorities at some future date. He even knows in what way they should be improved. Where does he get his unshakable certainty? Without it, he could not even begin to write. He starts by being as dauntless as God. Without actually saying so, he stands in for God and feels comfortable about it. The thought that he may not be God doesn’t trouble him for a moment. For since such a supreme authority exists, one can always set oneself up as His deputy.
But there is a very different attitude, which sides with the creature and not with God, which defends the creature against Him and may even go so far as to disregard God altogether and concentrate on humankind. One who takes the attitude that human beings cannot be changed, though he would like to see them different. Human beings cannot be changed by hatred or punishment. They accuse themselves by representing themselves as they are, and this is self-indictment, it does not come from someone else. A writer’s justice cannot consist in condemning them. He can invent their victim and show the marks they make on him as if they were fingerprints. The world is swarming with such victims, but it is very hard to take one as a character and make him speak in such a way that the marks remain recognizable instead of being blurred and made to look like accusations. Wozzeck is such a character, we see what is done to him while it is being done, and not a word of accusation is added. Through him, the marks of self-denunciation become recognizable. Those who have struck him are present, and when it’s all over with him they are still alive. The fragment does not show the manner of his ending, it shows what he does, shows his self-denunciation after that of the others.
Eye and Breath
My relationship with Hermann Broch was foreshadowed, more than is usually the case, by the circumstances of our first meeting. It had been arranged that I should read my Wedding at the house of Maria Lazar, a Viennese writer with whom we were both, independently of each other, acquainted. A few guests had been invited. Among them were Ernst Fischer and his wife, Ruth, who the others were I don’t remember. Broch had said he was coming, he was late and we waited some time for him. I was about to begin when he turned up with Brody, his publisher. There was time only for brief introductions; we had not yet spoken to each other when I started reading The Wedding.
Maria Lazar had told Broch how much I admired The Sleepwalkers, which I had read during the summer of 1932. He had seen nothing of mine, nor could he have, since nothing had been published. I had been enormously impressed by The Sleepwalkers and even more by Huguenau; I regarded him as a great writer, while in his eyes I was a young man who admired him. It must have been mid-October, I had completed The Wedding seven or eight months before. I had read the play to a few friends who expected great things of me—but never to more than one at a time.
Broch, on the other hand, and this is the crux of the matter, was exposed to the full force of The Wedding before knowing anything else of mine. I read the play with passion, the characters were clearly differentiated by their acoustic masks, and now, years later, I still hear them the same way. I read the play without stopping and it took more than two hours. The atmosphere was tense, there may have been a dozen people there in addition to Veza and myself, but I felt their presence so keenly that there seemed to be many more.
I had a good view of Broch, I was struck by the way he sat there. His bird’s head seemed to sink slightly between his shoulders. During the “caretaker” scene, the last of the prologue, which now strikes me as the strongest in the whole play, I noticed his eyes. I think it was during the dying Mrs. Kokosch’s sentence—“Listen, husband, there’s something I have to…” which she has to start over and over again and is unable to finish—that I encountered Broch’s eyes. If eyes could breathe, they would have held their breath. They waited for the sentence to be completed and this expectant pause was filled with Kokosch’s quotation of Samson. It was a twofold reading; the spoken dialogue, which was hardly dialogue, because Kokosch wasn’t listening to the dying woman’s words, was accompanied by a secret exchange between Broch’s eyes, which had taken the dying woman under their protection, and myself, as I began time and again to say her sentence, which kept being interrupted by the caretaker’s lines from the Bible.
This was the situation in the first half hour of my reading. Then came the actual wedding, and it began with great indecency, which did not embarrass me at the time because I hated it so. I may not have fully realized at the time how true to life these repellent scenes are. One source for them was Karl Kraus, another was George Grosz, whose Ecce Homo I had admired and detested. But most of the material was supplied by my own observation.
In reading the sordid middle section of The Wedding, I never gave a thought to the people around me. I was possessed, I felt I was gliding through the air, carried by these horrible, sordid speeches which had nothing to do with me, which inflated me and forced me to fly with them, rather in the manner of a shaman, though I wouldn’t have known it at the time.
But that night it was different. Throughout the middle part I felt Broch’s presence. His silence was more penetrating than that of the others. He checked himself as though holding his breath, I’m not sure exactly what he did, but I felt it had something to do with breath and I believe I was aware at the time that he breathed differently from all the others. His silence withstood the terrible uproar my characters were making. There was something physical about it, it was produced by him, it was a silence that he created, and today I know it was connected with his way of breathing.
In the third part of the play, the catastrophe and dance of death, I lost all contact with my surroundings. My exertion had worn me down, I was so caught up in the rhythm that is crucial to this section that I couldn’t have said what impression I was making on any of my listeners, and by the time I had finished I wasn’t even aware of Broch’s presence. Something had happened in the meantime; it was as though I were still waiting for his arrival. But then he spoke, he said that if he had known my play, he wouldn’t have written his. (He was evidently working on a play at the time, most likely the one that was later produced in Zurich.)
Then he said something that I do not want to repeat here, though it showed a remarkable insight into the genesis of my play. Without knowing him, I was sure he was really moved. All through the reading, Brody, his publisher, had an amiable grin on his face; I didn’t like it at all. He had not been moved; it seems possible that my attack on bourgeois morality had ruffled him, and that he grinned to hide his displeasure. Or possibly that was his nature, perhaps nothing moved him. What he and Broch had in common—for undoubtedly they were friends—is more than I can say.
The two of them didn’t stay long, they were expected somewhere else. Though Broch had turned up with his publisher—which suggested a kind of self-assurance—he struck me, by the end of my reading, as vulnerable—in an attractive sort of way, meaning that he was easily affected by events, by the ups and downs in human relationships. This may have struck most people as weakness, and I have no objection to calling it weakness because to me weakness at that level of intelligence is a distinction, a virtue. But when members of the business world in which he moved or of any similar social group speak today of his “weakness,” I want to slap their faces.
It is not without misgiving that I speak of Broch, for I’m not sure of being able to do him justice. I expected so much; from the start I courted him, though he did his best to stop me; blindly I admired everything about him, such as his beautiful eyes, in which I read everything imaginable, excepting any sign of calculation. There is hardly a noble trait that I did not find in him, and how naïvely, how heedlessly I succumbed to my fascination, making no secret of my immense ignorance. For though I was really open and eager to learn, my thirst for knowledge had as yet borne no fruit. As I see it today, I had thus far learned very little and in any case nothing in what was his chosen branch of knowledge: contemporary philosophy. His library was largely philosophical; unlike me, he did not shy away from the world of abstract ideas; he was addicted to ideas as other men are to nightclubs.
He was the first “weakling” I had met; victory or conquest was of no interest to him, and he was certainly not boastful. He was not a man to proclaim lofty purposes, whereas every second sentence of mine was: “I mean to write a book about that.” I couldn’t express a thought or perhaps even a mere observation without adding: “I mean to write a book about that.” But this was no vain boast, for I had written a long book, Kant Catches Fire; it existed in manuscript, few people knew of it, and I was projecting another, which I regarded as my lifework, a work about “crowds.” Thus far my preparations for it amounted to little more than personal experiences (but they went very deep) and wide, voracious reading, which, I believed, had a bearing on “crowds”—but was actually related in no lesser degree to everything else. My whole life was geared to a great work, I took the idea so seriously that I was capable of saying unsmilingly: “But it will take decades.” He could not help recognizing my tendency to include everything in my plans and ambitions as an authentic passion. What repelled him was my zealotic, dogmatic way of making the improvement of mankind dependent on chastisement and without hesitation appointing myself executor of this chastisement. I had learned that from Karl Kraus, I didn’t imitate him deliberately, I wouldn’t have dared, but a good part of his being had gone into mine, especially, in the winter of 1931–32 while I was working on The Wedding, his rage.
