The Play of the Eyes, page 29
As might have been expected with Musil, there were complications from the start. As we knew he disliked going anywhere alone, the invitation included his wife. But in addition he brought two men who had not been invited. One was Franz Blei—gaunt, arrogant, precious—whom none of us would have wanted. The other was a young man unknown to us. Musil introduced him non-chalantly, almost gaily, as an admirer of The Man without Qualities, and Blei added: “From the Café Herrenhof.” So there were the four of them. Musil seemed to feel at his ease under the protection of his wife, his old friend Blei and his young admirer, who didn’t open his mouth but listened attentively. Blei spoke with authority, as though he were founding a journal, while Musil spoke his mind freely and without hesitation.
On the other side of the room, moroseness set in immediately. Blei’s aesthetic pose was deeply repugnant to Wotruba. On entering the whitewashed room, Blei had noticed two Merkels on the wall. He hesitated a moment, then damned them with faint praise. “He’s not without charm,” he said. And after a short pause: “One of the younger lot?”
Quite rightly, Wotruba took the “younger” as a dig at himself, sensed that Blei knew nothing about him, regarded him as nothing more than “young.” He replied with deliberate rudeness: “Hell, he’s as old as you.”
This was an exaggeration. Georg Merkel was not as old as Blei, but he belonged to the same generation as Musil, and Wotruba took the imputation that a picture hanging on his wall must necessarily be by “one of the younger lot” as an impertinence. A little later, when Marian came in with coffee, he blithely interrupted the conversation, saying in a loud voice: “Hey, Marian, do you know what Merkel is? He’s one of the younger lot.”
Scherchen began to unfold his plan for his review. What he wanted was originality and high quality; it should really be something new, no academic material would be considered. It should not be confined to any one modern trend, all would be given a chance to express themselves, regardless of language; translations could always be managed. Musil wanted to know the maximum length of contributions. He was pleased when Scherchen replied: “No limit. We could run a whole play; for instance, I’d welcome a play by my friend Canetti. True, he refuses to give me one. But we’ll bring him around.”
After more than three years he hadn’t forgotten The Wedding. But I wished to publish it only in book form. It was hardly the right moment to discuss all this, but he wanted to make it known that he was not unacquainted with modern literature. The Wedding still struck him as something “new.”
He had hardly spoken when Blei took the floor.
“Plays are not literature,” he proclaimed. “Plays cannot be considered for a literary journal.”
This he said with such an air of certainty that the three of us, Scherchen, Wotruba and I, were dumbfounded. Musil smiled genially.
He was under the impression, I believe, that Blei was giving a good account of himself and had already taken over the management of our journal. Then came a long statement by Blei, which must have been prepared in advance, outlining the program of the projected journal. With every sentence he seemed surer of getting his way. To my amazement the ordinarily so dictatorial Scherchen let him talk. Wotruba’s seething rage began to worry me. He’ll pick him up and throw him out the window, I thought, and despite my own anger, I feared for the life of the distinguished intruder. If I had known that he was partly responsible for discovering Robert Walser, I’d have forgiven him his impertinence, and consideration for Musil would not have been my only reason for treating him with respect. Suddenly Scherchen cut him off:
“My young friends and I have entirely different ideas,” he said. “Everything you say is contrary to our intentions. We want a living organ, not a scholastic petrifact. You come out for restrictions of every kind; we want Ars Viva to stand for expansion, and we are not afraid of the times. There are plenty of other journals for fossils.”
For the first time in all the years I’d known him, Sch. had spoken after my own heart. Wotruba shouted furiously: “I’m not interested in Herr Blei’s opinion. No one invited him. I want to know how Herr Musil feels about the journal.”
Wotruba was famous for his rudeness and no one took it amiss. Anyone meeting him for the first time would have been disappointed if he had behaved differently. He was serious through and through. Worrying about good manners would have made him look ridiculous, as though he were trying to stammer in a foreign language. I felt that Musil liked him, and he didn’t seem offended for Blei, though he had listened to Blei’s disquisition with apparent approval.
Now he stepped, as it were, out of Blei’s umbra and spoke as frankly as Wotruba himself. He wasn’t sure, he hadn’t made up his mind yet. He had an article on Rilke that might do for the journal. Perhaps he’d think of something else. His delivery was firm; not so the content of his remarks. He promised nothing. He was undecided. But he had been invited and received so deferentially that he couldn’t just decline. He felt safe with his retinue. Blei was an old friend, but Blei was capricious and unpredictable, and moreover he had been responsible for suddenly elevating Broch’s Sleepwalkers to Musil’s high level. Broch had not been suggested for the new journal, he was not in Vienna at the time, and knowing how Musil felt about him, we had avoided mentioning him for the present. If one of us had done so, Musil would have declined forthwith and would not have attended the meeting. His rejections were harsh and cutting. Wotruba and I both delighted in the legends that were going around about his way of saying no.
Here, in the company of three acolytes and confronted by three men who were trying to enlist his support, he reacted with a different kind of no—the cautious hesitation of a man who didn’t want to be taken advantage of, but didn’t want to miss a good opportunity either. He wanted time to think, he said neither yes nor no, but tried to get more information. Sch., who had never been so retiring, who seldom said “I” and prefaced every sentence with “my young friends,” was not to his liking. It was obvious to Musil that Scherchen knew nothing of literary matters and would rely on me. I had been rejected because of my heretical mention of Thomas Mann. The stubbornness with which I had nevertheless clung to my opinion that Musil was top man worked in my favor to the extent that he accepted my presence. To Wotruba he felt very much drawn. Wotruba had no connection with literature of any kind; but his words had power, they struck with the force of cannonballs. When Musil took a liking to someone, his face showed surprise—a controlled, moderate surprise. He had full control over his reactions and made no mistake. His astonishment was limited, but that did not detract from its purity. It was not subordinated to any purposes.
When he spoke now, he seemed to be waiting for one reaction, Wotruba’s, as though no one else’s counted. He didn’t take Blei’s orotund proclamation very seriously. He had known Blei’s opinions for a long time and I had the impression that they bored him. He accepted the proclamation because it was made by a supporter, but he didn’t come out in favor of it, he only smiled indulgently, which was a way of distancing himself from it. Wotruba’s rude rejection of Blei, followed by his demand to hear what Musil himself had to say, pleased Musil; and he began quite candidly to examine the plan for a journal. He insisted that he wished to write on a poetic subject, and asked to know more of our intentions.
Sch. said this was lucky, because his wife, who was not present at the conference, took a special interest in poetry, which was quite in the Chinese tradition. Indeed, poetry meant even more to her than music. True, he had met her as a student in a conducting course he had given in Brussels, she had come from China to Brussels expressly to study under him, but he was becoming more and more convinced that poetry meant more to her. Now he was sorry he hadn’t brought her to the meeting. She had given thought to the journal and drawn up suggestions relating exclusively to poetry, she called them her “list.” She would have liked to bring them up at once, but she hadn’t been told that Herr Musil was also a poet, so she had thought it inappropriate to speak of them at the very first meeting. But there was plenty of time, the project called for careful preparation. He would send Herr Musil his wife’s suggestions along with a list of related topics, all of which merited consideration. Unfortunately, his wife spoke only French, he in a pinch could carry on a discussion with her, conversation with her was none too easy, that was another reason why he hadn’t brought her, but her written French had been praised by everyone in Brussels, and Veza too had offered to look through her French notes, to make sure that Herr Musil would have no trouble with them.
It was not like Scherchen to deliver a lengthy plea of this sort. Ordinarily he contented himself with giving orders or explaining musical compositions. But he liked talking about his Chinese wife. He was proud of her, he attracted attention through her. She was an enchanting, highly cultivated woman of good family. She had lived through the Japanese invasion of China, and when she talked about it she acted out the terrible events. Sch. had fallen in love on seeing her, frail, slender, clad in Chinese silk, conducting Mozart in Brussels. But when she talked about war, you could hear the rat-tat-tat of machine guns. Back in Peking, she wrote to him. Sch. had called off all his concerts and taken the Trans-Siberian Railroad to China, planning to stay five days. He allowed no more than five days for wooing and wedding Shü-Hsien. When he got there, he was told that it couldn’t be done so quickly, it took longer to get married, but there again he had won out by sheer force of will, and married Shü-Hsien within five days. Leaving her at home with her parents for the time being, he had jumped into the train and in little more than a month he was back in Europe giving his concerts.
Shü-Hsien arrived a few months later and the two of them came to live with us in Grinzing. There we witnessed the early days of their marriage; they had to communicate with each other in French, hers correct but delivered in a monosyllabic-sounding staccato, his an unspeakably barbaric Franco-German, larded with mistakes and to us totally incomprehensible. He put her right to work, all day she had to copy music for his orchestra. I can’t help wondering when she had time to think up poetic themes for the projected journal. Perhaps she had once spoken to him of Chinese poetry. And then, since he made use of everything that came his way, he asked her to jot down a few ideas. This he now remembered at our conference, and it came in handy. It enabled him to promise Musil something, a list of topics that might appeal to him and that would give Shü-Hsien, who was well versed in French literature, no trouble. He was so full of his Chinese love that he was always glad to talk about her. I liked him at that time. The resentment I had carried about with me since our days in Strasbourg seemed to have evaporated. The new phase had begun with the sudden arrival of a wire from him asking me to meet him at such and such a time at the West Station, where he had an hour’s wait between trains. More out of curiosity than affection, I went. His train pulled in, he leaned out of the window and said: “I’m on my way to Peking to get married.”
Then on the platform he breathlessly told me the story. He spoke with rapture of his Chinese girl, told me how he had been overcome at the sight of her conducting Mozart in Chinese dress. He had words, ecstatic words, for a human being other than himself. He had promised to go and marry her as soon as he heard from her. Now she had written, and it was as though he, who was always issuing orders, were voluntarily submitting to an order from halfway around the world. I had never seen him like that, and as he went on with his breathless tale, I felt that I had suddenly begun to like him. It was almost unthinkable that this workhorse should call off all his concerts and rehearsals for five weeks.
In his haste to be married he had forgotten a few important things. Suddenly Dea Gombrich, the violinist, appeared on the platform. She too had been summoned to the West Station, and she was late. He told her only that he was going to Peking to be married, would she please run and buy him a tie, he needed one for his wedding. She hurried off and came back just as his train was pulling out. She handed him the tie through the window, he stood there smiling and thanked her; his lips were not as thin as usual. He was already on his way to Siberia when I told the story to Dea, who was still out of breath from running so fast.
I had seen him swept off his feet, and my new feeling for him lasted longer than one might have expected. The two of them stayed with us on Himmelstrasse for quite some time. Veza was entranced by Shü-Hsien, who had a good head and in spite of being in love saw Sch. as he was. She could even make fun of him.
Now, at the editorial conference, I didn’t mind his using her as he used everything and everyone. I realized that he had to boast about her because he was still in love with her. Perhaps, I thought, there will be a miracle and it won’t end as everything ends with him, perhaps he will stick to his Chinese woman. My love for things Chinese made me worry about her future. I worried more about her, who was a total stranger here, than I would have about any of his European women. But at this conference on Nussdorferstrasse she was suddenly very much present. Musil, whose main concern was obviously to avoid promising to give the journal a prose piece of any length, and who for that reason had brought up the possibility of poetic subjects, had conjured up Shü-Hsien with his suspicious questions. We had all heard of her, we enjoyed thinking about her, she was our real poetic theme. The magazine came to nothing, but thanks to Shü-Hsien I think we all preserved a pleasant memory of the founding conference.
Hudba. Peasants Dancing
My mother died on June 15, 1937.
A few weeks earlier, in May, I went to Prague for the first time. I still felt light and free. I took a room on the top floor of the Hotel Juliš on Wenceslas Square. From the wide terrace that went with the room I could look down on the traffic, and at night on the lights of the square—a view that seemed made to order for the painter who was living in the room next to mine: Oskar Kokoschka.
For his fiftieth birthday, a big exhibition was being given at the Museum of Applied Art on Stubenring in Vienna. Up until then I had seen only a few of his pictures here and there, but the show had given a powerful impression of his work as a whole. In Prague he was doing a portrait of President Masaryk and he had refused to go to Vienna for the opening. Carl Moll, his old champion in Vienna, had given me a letter for him and had asked me to tell him about the exhibition and remind him of how many admirers he had in Vienna. Moll told me of Kokoschka’s deep resentment against official Austria, not only for its disregard of his work but also because he could not forget the events of February 1934. His mother, whom he had loved more than anyone in the world, had died of a broken heart as a result of the civil war being fought on the streets of Vienna. From her house in Liebhartstal she had seen guns firing at the new workers’ apartment blocks. When buying a house for his mother, who had believed in him from the very first and taken a passionate interest in his painting, Kokoschka had chosen this location because of the view of Vienna. And what had become of that view!
She had been close enough to hear the gunfire. She couldn’t tear herself away from the sight of the fighting. Soon afterward she had fallen ill and had never left her sickbed. Carl Moll had known Kokoschka’s mother and was convinced that without her her son would never have found himself. Now that this woman, who had borne the wonderful name Romana, was gone, he felt that Kokoschka would break with Austria for good. The new regime in Germany regarded him as a degenerate artist; this was the moment for Austria to receive its greatest painter with open arms. But even if the Austrian authorities had been farsighted enough to ask him back with honor, how could he have returned to a country which he held responsible for his mother’s death?
I had heard a good deal about Kokoschka. Anna had told me about a turbulent phase of his life. His passion for Alma Mahler had been made legendary by some of his first paintings. On my first visit to Hohe Warte I had seen a portrait of her as “Lucrezia Borgia,” as she titled it. It was hung in the tireless widow’s trophy room, where she displayed it to all comers with the observation that, sad to say, the artist, who had had talent in those days, had come to nothing and was only a poor refugee.
Now for the first time I saw the man himself, from terrace to terrace; his features were familiar to me from self-portraits. What surprised me most was his voice. He spoke so softly that I could hardly understand him. I paid close attention, but missed a good deal even so. Carl Moll had announced my coming in a letter, but it was by pure chance that I moved into the room next to his. He was not only quiet but self-effacing as well. Still under the sway of his exhibition, I was rather taken aback that he should treat me as an equal. He asked about my book, said he was meaning to read it, Moll had spoken highly of it. Here on the terrace I had the impression that he was curious about me. I felt his octopus eye on me, but it did not seem hostile.
He apologized for being busy that evening, as though he felt obliged to devote an evening to me. His gentleness seemed all the more astonishing when I thought of Anna’s story from her early childhood, when she had answered to the name Gucki. Sitting on the floor in a corner of the studio, she had listened in horror to a jealous scene between Kokoschka and her mother. He had threatened to lock her mother up in the studio, once he may even have carried out his threat. Those scenes had made a lasting impression on Anna. In my imagination they were loud and violent, and I had expected an emotional man who would respond to my news of his show with an angry tirade against the Austrian government. He had only a few disparaging words, and these were softly spoken. His most aggressive feature, I thought, was his chin, which was quite pronounced, very much as he painted it in his self-portraits. But most impressive was his eye, motionless, opaque, undeviatingly on the lookout; strangely enough, I always thought of one eye, just as I have written here. His words came out blurred and toneless, as if he released them haphazardly and reluctantly. He gave me an appointment for the following day and left me in a state of confusion: neither his pictures nor anything I had heard about him seemed compatible with his muted manner.
