The Play of the Eyes, page 24
When Veza’s sound instinct went hand in hand with her warmth, she was irresistible. She had soon won me over and I took Friedl on walks. Writing was one thing that could not be learned; but one could go walking with this girl and find out what she had in her. She was in high spirits; sometimes she ran a few steps ahead and waited for me to catch up. “I have to let my feelings out,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re letting me come with you.” I got her to talk about herself. She talked freely, she never stopped talking, always about people she knew at home. For some time she had been allowed to be present at soirées. She hadn’t the slightest respect for the distinguished guests and saw them as they were. Some of her comical remarks amazed me and I pretended not to believe her, I said she must be exaggerating, that such things were impossible. At that she laid it on so thick that I couldn’t stop laughing, and once I started to laugh she invented more and more. Then I too started inventing. Which is just what she had wanted, a contest in inventing.
I gave her “tests.” I asked her about the people we passed on our walks, especially those she did not know. She was to tell me what she thought of them, and their story as well if something good occurred to her. There I had something to go by, because I too saw these people and was able to judge what she perceived in them and what escaped her. I corrected her, not by finding fault with an oversight or imprecision, but by giving her my version. This sort of competition became a passion with her, but what interested her was not so much her own inventions as my stories. These talks of ours were very spontaneous and lively. I could tell when something troubled her, because then she fell silent and sometimes, luckily not very often, she was taken with despondency. “I’ll never be able to write. I’m too sloppy and I don’t get enough ideas.” Sloppy she was, but she had ideas to burn. Her leaning toward fantasy didn’t trouble me in the least. That is just what was most lacking in most of the young writers I knew.
I sometimes asked her to make up names for people we saw. That was not her forte and she didn’t especially enjoy it. She preferred talking about what people did and talked about at home. Sometimes it was harmless chatter and revealed little more than her undeniable gift of imitation. But then suddenly she would amaze me with something monstrous. She would say it as though it didn’t shock her in the least; she didn’t suspect how strange it was and that it didn’t at all fit in with her childlike sparkle and her light step.
Apart from the few days of her marriage she had always lived in Grinzing. She had been born in a motorcar. When her mother felt her labor pains coming on, her father had sat her down in his car and had her driven to the hospital. As usual he had talked nonstop. When they got to the hospital, the baby was lying on the floor of the car, it had come into the world without either of them noticing. Friedl attributed her restlessness to being born in a moving car. She was always having to go away, she couldn’t stand it anywhere; when her husband, who was an engineer, went to the factory, she couldn’t bear waiting at home for him. On one of the first mornings, she ran away, left the house, left Pressburg, and came home to Grinzing. There she knew every pathway. She would often run off into the woods. She liked meadows even better. She would squat down to pick flowers and disappear in the grass. On our walks I sometimes noticed the longing looks she cast at the meadows, but she controlled herself, because one of us would be telling a story, and that meant even more to her than her freedom. She was attracted most to small, unimpressive things, but she was not unreceptive to views, especially when there was a bench to sit on and a table to go with it, and one could order something to drink.
But what interested her most was what could be communicated in words. I have never known a child to listen more avidly. After I had challenged her in every possible way, our duel always ended in my telling her a story, and the excitement with which she took in every word moved me more deeply than I would have been willing to admit.
The Fragility of the Spirit
It was a varied life that I led in those few years in Grinzing. It contained so many contradictory elements that it would be hard for me to describe them all. I lived them all with equal intensity, and though there was no ground for satisfaction, I did not feel threatened. I stuck obstinately to my main project. I read abundantly, took notes for my book about crowds and discussed the subject with anyone worth talking to. Seldom has anyone clung so tenaciously to a project. It was not possible to understand what was going on—a great deal was going on, and a lot more was moving rapidly to center stage—on the basis of any of the current theories.
We were living in an imperial capital, which was no longer imperial, but which had attracted the notice of the world with daring, carefully thought-out social projects. New and exemplary things had been done. They had been done without violence, one could be proud of them and live in the illusion that they would endure, while in nearby Germany the great madness spread like wildfire and its adherents seized all the commanding positions. Then in February 1934 the power of the Vienna municipal government was broken. Its leaders were despondent. It was as though all their work had been in vain. What was new and original in Vienna had been wiped out. What remained was the memory of an earlier Vienna, which was not far enough back to be exonerated from its share of guilt for the First World War, into which it had maneuvered itself. The local hope that had stood up to poverty and unemployment was gone. Many who could not live in such a void were infected with the German plague and hoped to achieve a better life by being absorbed into the larger country. Most failed to see that the actual consequence could only be a new war, and when the few who saw clearly pointed this out, they refused to believe it.
My own life, I repeat, was varied and throve on its contradictions. I found justification in my ambitious project, but I did nothing to hasten its execution. Everything that happened in the world contributed to the experience that went into it. This was no superficial experience, for it went beyond the reading of newspapers. Everything that happened was discussed with Sonne as soon as I heard about it. He commented on the events in different ways, frequently changing his vantage point as a means of seeing more clearly, and ended by presenting a résumé of the various perspectives, in which the weights were equitably distributed. These were the most important hours of my day, a continuous initiation into world affairs, their complexities, crises and surprises. They never discouraged me from going on with my own studies, in ethnology, for example, which I pursued more systematically than before. If only because of the humility I felt in Sonne’s presence, I seldom let myself be tempted to speak to him of an idea that I regarded as new and important; still, we found common ground in conversations on the history of religions, a field in which his knowledge was overpowering and mine had developed little by little to the point where I could always understand him and was in a position to question ideas that did not satisfy me.
He showed no impatience when I spoke of my own intention of elucidating the behavior of crowds. He listened to what I had to say, thought about it and said nothing. He did not interfere with my burgeoning thoughts. It would have been easy for him to ridicule my concept of the crowd, which was becoming increasingly rich and complex and could not be subsumed in any definition. In a single hour he could have demolished what I regarded as my lifework. He never discussed the matter with me, but neither did he discourage me and try (like Broch) to get me to abandon my undertaking. He was careful not to help me; he never became my teacher in any matter bearing on crowds. Once when I nevertheless broached the subject, hesitantly and in a way reluctantly, for his opposition could have imperiled my whole project, he listened to me calmly and earnestly, kept silent for longer than usual in our discussions and then said almost tenderly: “You’ve opened a door. Now you must go in. Don’t look for help. One must do that kind of thing alone.”
He seldom said that, and was careful to say no more. He didn’t mean that he refused to help me. If I had asked him, he would not have withheld his help. But I had asked him no questions when I began. I had spoken of what already seemed clear to me; perhaps I had only wanted him to puncture my idea if he thought it wrong. In speaking of a “door,” he had shown that he did not think it wrong. He had merely warned me, as was his way, with a gentle hint. “One must do that kind of thing alone.” With that he had warned me against the theories that were going around and that explained nothing. He knew better than anyone that they barred the way to an understanding of public affairs. He was friends with Broch, whom he respected and perhaps even loved. When they spoke together, the conversation undoubtedly turned to Freud, with whom Broch was obsessed. How Sonne bore this without making insulting comments I would have been glad to know, but it was quite impossible to ask him so personal a question. That he had weighty objections to Freud I had discovered on one occasion when I came out violently against the “death instinct.” “Even if it were true, he would have no right to say so. But it’s not true. Things would be much too simple if that were true.”
I looked on the exchange between Sonne and myself as the true substance of my day; it meant more to me than what I myself was writing. I was in no hurry to finish anything I was then working on. For this there were several reasons, the most important being my awareness that I didn’t know enough. I was far from regarding my project as pointless; my belief in the necessity of discovering and applying the laws governing mass behavior and power over the masses was unshaken. But with the events that were descending on us, the scope of my project kept expanding. My conversations with Sonne sharpened my sense of what was to come. Far from minimizing the threat, he made me more and more aware of it, as though providing me with a unique telescope, which he alone was able to adjust properly. At the same time I came to realize how contemptibly little I knew. Ideas alone were not enough. The sudden illuminations that I was rather proud of might even bar my way to the truth. There was danger in intellectual vanity. Originality wasn’t everything, nor was strength or the devastating recklessness I had learned from Karl Kraus.
I was extremely critical of the literary pieces I was then working on and left them unfinished. I didn’t abandon them forever, I pushed them aside. This was no doubt what most worried Veza. Once in a serious conversation she went so far as to say that Sonne’s influence on other people’s minds made them sterile. He was indeed the best of critics, she had finally come to recognize that, but one should consult him only if one had a finished piece of work to show. One should not associate with him day after day. He was a man of renunciation, perhaps a pure ascetic and sage. He foresaw the worst but did not fight against it. What good did that do me? When I came home from a meeting with him, I seemed paralyzed; she could hardly get me to open my mouth. Sometimes, in fact—and this was a severe blow to me—she had the impression that he was making me cautious; I’d stopped reading her the things I was working on. I had no chapter of a new novel, no new play to show her. When she tactfully asked me, my answer was always: “It’s not good enough for you, it needs more work.” Why had everything been good enough for her in the past? Why had I been more daring?
It had begun, she said, with Anna’s humiliation of me; that had been as clear as day to her, and she had long dreaded my reading of the Comedy on Maxingstrasse. That was why she had made friends with Anna—to find out what she was actually like; for I had idealized her and glorified her, if only by contrasting her to her mother. She now knew Anna well enough to realize that in connection with her one couldn’t speak of a defeat, she didn’t love like other women and certainly not like her mother. She had her own optical laws, you could gaze on her and admire her, you could regard her eyes as supremely beautiful, but you should not suppose that they saw you. When once her eyes had fallen on someone, she had to play with that person and win that person for herself, like a ball of wool, an object, not like a living creature. This play of the eyes was the only dangerous thing about her, otherwise she was a good friend, trusting, generous, even reliable. The one thing you must not do was try to bind her. Without her freedom she could not live, she needed it for her eye-play, if for nothing else, but that was her deepest need, it would never change, not even in old age; a woman endowed with such eyes couldn’t help herself, she was a slave to the needs of her eyes, not as victim but as huntress.
I was amused at Veza’s eye mythology. I knew there was a good deal of truth in it and I knew how much Veza had helped me by making friends with Anna. But I also knew how mistaken she was in another point: my friendship with Sonne had not sprung from my bad luck with Anna; it was sovereign, the purest need of my nature, which was ashamed of its dross and could only improve or at least justify itself by earnest dialogue with a far superior mind.
Invitation to the Benedikts’
What I had liked about Frau Irma, Friedl’s mother, when I first met her at the Liliput Bar, was her simple, unpretentious way of talking; you had no hesitation in believing what she said. Her face had a kind of roundness I had never seen before, but it was not a Slavic face, though that too would have been attractive. Then I heard from Friedl that her mother was half Finnish. She had been born in Vienna but from childhood on had paid frequent visits to her mother’s family in Finland.
One of her aunts, whom they often spoke of in the family, had distinguished herself by her independent life and intellectual achievements. Aunt Aline had lived in Florence for years and had translated Dante into Swedish. She owned an island off the coast of Finland and often went there to write. Pride and the desire to keep herself free for intellectual pursuits had stopped her from marrying. Friedl was her favorite niece and she intended to leave her her island. I enjoyed hearing Friedl talk about this island. She cared nothing for possessions, but she delighted in the idea of having an island of her own. She had never been there but she had no trouble visualizing it, especially during winter storms, when one would be wholly cut off from the mainland. She never mentioned the island without solemnly offering it to me as a trifling gift, her only way of expressing her veneration for her literary mentor.
Sometimes I accepted the island, sometimes I didn’t. After all, Aunt Aline had worked on the Swedish Dante there. A generous gift, I was pleased with it, especially as it seemed to imply a long life for me. In the course of Friedl’s talk about the beauty and solitude of the island, I learned, quite incidentally, something about her that impressed me far more—to wit, that her godmother had been Frieda Strindberg, Strindberg’s second wife, who had been a childhood friend of her mother. It was from her that Friedl got her name and something else as well. When her mother was in despair over her sloppiness, she would say: “You’ve inherited that from your godmother, Frieda. Apparently one can inherit character traits by way of one’s name.” Frieda Strindberg was thought to be the sloppiest person in the world. Friedl as a child had been taken to see her. The disorder in the house had made such an impression on her that often when left alone she had done her best to copy it in her room at home. She had opened all the drawers and closets, thrown her clothes all over the place, and gleefully sat down on the mess, thinking that now she had a room like her godmother’s. But she had never admitted to her mother how she came by her brilliant idea. That was her biggest secret, which is why she had to confide it to me. I must never come into her room unexpectedly, for if I once caught sight of that mess I’d be so horrified that I wouldn’t take her on any more walks. I had no intention of dropping into her room, so I thought no more about it, but the Strindberg connection intrigued me and I believe that was what gave the Benedikt household a new dimension for me.
Friedl must have seriously pestered her mother over the choice of guests with a view to luring me to one of their lunches. For boring as she herself found these affairs, rarely as she consented to attend them, she had soon gathered from our conversations that I suspected something evil and unsavory where she saw only stiffness and boredom. From childhood on, she had heard only famous names. For a time—she was already going to school—she imagined that all grown-ups were famous, which to her mind was no particular recommendation for either category. If a new name was mentioned frequently in the house, there could be only two explanations: Either someone had suddenly become famous—in that case, how do you get him to accept an invitation? Or someone who had long—always, it seemed to her—been famous had arrived in Vienna and of course he would come and dine with them. It had never occurred to her that there might be any other possibility; it was always the same, and that’s why it was so boring. But now, when we saw each other and she mentioned a certain person who came to the house, she sensed my surprise. And then I would ask: “What! He comes to your house?” As if it were forbidden to set foot in her house. She noticed that to certain other names I did not react at all, that their coming did not surprise me, that according to Die Fackel’s rules they were the right people for this house. But she began to take an interest in others, the ones who shocked me. She realized that with them she could lure me to her house. But it took time and elaborate preparations.
“Thomas Mann came to lunch yesterday,” she said, and gave me an expectant look.
“What does he talk about with your father?”
That just popped out of me, and it came to me only afterward how tactless my question had been, as it showed in what contempt I held her father. Evidently I thought him incapable of carrying on a conversation with Thomas Mann.
“Music,” she said. “They talked about music the whole time, especially Bruno Walter.”
