The Play of the Eyes, page 3
In reading my play I presented myself to Broch with this rage, which through the play had become my own. It overpowered him, but it was the only emotion of mine that had that effect on him. Apart from that, the only influence I had on him was of an entirely different nature, which I did not understand until much later—to be exact, after his death. When Broch could not resist someone else’s impulses or intentions in any other way, he simply took them over.
Broch always gave way; he assimilated by giving way. It was a complicated process, it was his nature, and I believe I was right in relating it to his manner of breathing. But among the numerous items he assimilated, there were some that were too powerful to rest in peace. Sooner or later, troublesome ideas, which upset him and met with his moral disapproval, became his own initiatives. I am certain that years later, when as a refugee in America he went in for the psychology of crowds, he had not forgotten our conversations on the subject. But the content, the substance of what I had said, had made no impression on him. My ignorance, my innocence of the prevailing philosophical terminologies, led Broch to overlook completely the content of what I had said, though it was not without originality. What impressed him was the force of my intention, of my call for a new science which would be developed someday but which thus far only existed in pathetic beginnings—this intention he construed as a command and let it work in him as though it had been addressed to him. When in his presence I spoke of what I intended to do, what he heard was: “Do it!”—though he was not immediately aware of the pressure these words put on him. He was left with the germ of a project, which burgeoned later on, in new surroundings, but bore no fruit.
I have got ahead of myself, so blurring the history of our relationship. But now, after all these years, I feel that I must try to gain a true picture of what happened between us from the start, though neither of us was aware of it, he no more than I.
* * *
In the course of his hurried comings and goings Broch often dropped in on us on Ferdinandstrasse. I saw him as a big, beautiful bird with clipped wings. He seemed to remember a time when he could still fly, and he had never got over what had happened to him. I would have liked to question him about it, but didn’t dare at the time. His faltering manner was deceptive, perhaps he would not have been unwilling to talk about himself. But he reflected before speaking. From him I could not expect fluent confessions such as I heard from most of the people I knew in Vienna. He wouldn’t have spared himself, he was inclined to self-criticism, there was not a trace of complacency in him, he seemed unsure of himself, but this lack of assurance, it seemed to me, was acquired. My positive manner of speaking irritated him, but he was too kind to show it. I noticed it, though, and when he had left me, I felt ashamed. I blamed myself for what I thought was his dislike of me. He would have liked to teach me self-doubt, perhaps he was making cautious attempts at just that, but if so he did not succeed. I thought highly of him, I was very much taken with The Sleepwalkers, because in it he did what I was incapable of doing. The atmospheric element in literature had never interested me, I thought it belonged to the province of painting. But Broch’s way of handling it made me receptive to it. I admired it, because I admired everything that was denied me. It didn’t shake my confidence in my own intentions, but I was amazed to see that there was an entirely different sort of writing, which had its own justification and which, as I read it, liberated me from myself. Such transformations in reading are indispensable for a writer. It is after being strongly drawn to others that he really finds his way back to himself.
Whenever Broch published anything, he brought it straight to Ferdinandstrasse. He attached special importance to his writings in the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Neue Rundschau. It would never have occurred to me that he attached any importance to my opinion. It was not until some years later, when his letters were published, that I realized how much approval meant to him. Though irritated by my assertive manner of speaking, he welcomed my categorical judgments when they favored him and even quoted them in letters to others.
At that time I had an almost mythical interpretaion of Broch’s hurried movements. This big bird had never resigned himself to the clipping of his wings. No longer able to fly up into the freedom of the empyrean, the one atmosphere transcending all humankind, he sought out the particular atmospheres surrounding individuals. Other writers collected people, he collected the atmospheres around them, which contained the air that had been in their lungs, the air they had exhaled. From this collected air he deduced their particularity; he characterized people on the basis of the atmospheres they gave off. This struck me as utterly new, it was something I had never before encountered. I knew about writers in whom the visual and others in whom the acoustic element was dominant. I had never dreamed of a writer who might be characterized by his way of breathing.
He was extremely reserved and, as I said before, seemed unsure of himself. Whatever his eyes fell on, he assimilated—but rhythmically this assimilation was not a devouring but a breathing. He didn’t jostle anything, everything remained as it was, immutable, preserving its particular aura. He seemed to assimilate all manner of things in order to preserve them. He distrusted violent speeches, and whatever good intentions may have inspired them, he suspected evil behind them. To his mind, nothing was beyond good and evil, and one thing I liked about him from the start was that in speaking he took a responsible attitude from first to last and was not ashamed of it. This sense of responsibility was evident also in his reluctance to pass judgment, in what I began at an early date to call his “faltering.”
I accounted for his “faltering”—his long pauses before speaking, though one could see that he was thinking the matter over carefully—by his unwillingness to impose on anyone. It embarrassed him to think of his advantage. I knew that he came from a family of industrialists; his father had owned a spinning mill in Teesdorf. Broch had wanted to become a mathematician and had gone to work in the factory against his will. When his father died, he had to take it over, not for his own sake but because he had to look out for his mother and other members of his family. A kind of defiance had led him to take up the study of philosophy and persist in it; when I first met him, he was attending the philosophical seminar at the University of Vienna, which he evidently took very seriously. His commercial background inspired the same deep distaste in him as mine did in me and he fought against it in every available way. For him, it was a hard fight, because of the years spent running his father’s factory. He was strongly drawn to the exact sciences and did not mind seeing them presented in academic form. I thought of this man of richly active mind as a student. If he was wise enough to be uncertain, how could he find certainty in seminars? What he wanted was dialogue, but he conducted himself as though he were always the learner. I felt sure that this could seldom be the case, for it was obvious that he usually knew more than the persons he conversed with. It was his kindness, I therefore decided, which deterred him from shaming anyone.
* * *
I made the acquaintance of Broch’s mistress Ea von Allesch at the Café Museum. I had met Broch somewhere else. He told me he had an appointment with Ea and had promised to bring me along. He seemed somehow constrained, he didn’t talk in his usual way and he was very late. “She has been waiting a long time for us,” he said. He walked faster and faster, and in the end he seemed to fly through the revolving door, pulling me into the café after him. “We’re late,” he said meekly, before introducing me. Then he said my name. The apprehension had gone out of his voice when he added: “And this is Ea Allesch.”
He had mentioned her to me a few times. Both parts of her name, the “Allesch” and especially the “Ea,” had struck me as unusual and even mysterious. I hadn’t asked him where this name “Ea” came from and never made any attempt to find out. She was no longer young, she must have been in her fifties. She had the head of a lynx, but a velvet one, and reddish hair. She was beautiful, and it appalled me to think how beautiful she must have been. She spoke softly and gently, but so penetratingly that I couldn’t help feeling somewhat afraid of her. She seemed, without meaning to, to dig her claws into one. But I had this impression only because she was always contradicting Broch. She found fault with everything he said. She asked what had kept us so long, she had thought we would never come, she had been sitting there for an hour. Broch told her where we had been. But though he included me, as though citing me as a witness, she listened with an air of not believing a word he said. She made no direct statement but she wasn’t convinced, and after we had been sitting there for some time she reverted to the subject in a sentence shot through with her doubt, as though this doubt had already entered into history and she merely wanted to show us that she was filing it away with all her other doubts.
A literary conversation started up. Wishing to divert her from our offense, Broch recalled how he had gone to see her on Peregringasse just after my reading of The Wedding and had spoken to her about it. He seemed to be asking her to take me seriously. She did not deny what had happened on that occasion but immediately turned it against him. According to her, he had felt crushed; he had wailed that he wasn’t a playwright; oh, why had he ever written a play? he had had a good mind to get it back from the Zurich theater that had it. Broch, she went on, had lately taken it into his head that he had to become a writer. Who could have talked him into that? A woman most likely. Her words sounded gentle, almost ingratiating, but since there was no one present she had any desire to ingratiate herself with, they were devastating. For she went on to say that she was a graphologist and that she had told him after looking at his handwriting that he was not a writer; one had only to compare his handwriting with Musil’s to know that Broch was no writer.
I found this so embarrassing that I jumped at the diversion offered by Musil and asked her if she knew him. Yes, she had known him for years, from her Allesch period and even before, yes, she had known him even longer than she had known Broch. He was a writer, her tone changed completely when she said that, and when she went so far as to add that Musil didn’t think so much of Freud and was not easily bamboozled, I understood that her animosity was directed against everything connected with Broch while Musil stood untarnished in her eyes. She had seen a good deal of him in the days of her marriage with Allesch, who was Musil’s best friend, and now, years after the breakup of that marriage, she still saw him occasionally. Her being a graphologist meant something to her, and she also had her views on psychology. “I’m an Adlerian,” she said, pointing to herself, and, pointing at Broch, “he’s a Freudian.” And indeed, he believed almost religiously in Freud. I don’t mean that he had become a zealot like so many people I knew at the time, but that he was permeated by Freud as by a mystical doctrine.
It was typical of Broch that he didn’t conceal his difficulties. He didn’t put up a front. I don’t know why he introduced me to Ea so soon. He had always known that she wasn’t nice to him when others were present. Possibly he wanted to counter her harsh rejection of his writing with my admiration; if so, I was unaware of it at the time. I discovered only little by little that Broch had been regarded as a patron of the arts, an industrialist to whom the life of the spirit meant more than his factory and who was always glad to help artists. His generosity was still there, but it was easy to see that he was no longer a rich man. He didn’t complain of poverty but of lack of time. All who knew him would have liked to see him more often.
He induced me to speak of myself, to talk myself into a lather and go on and on. I mistook this for a special interest in my person, my plans and purposes, my great designs. I failed to realize that this interest went out to every person, though I might have gathered as much from The Sleepwalkers. Actually it was his way of listening that captivated people. One expanded in his silence, one encountered no obstacles. There was nothing one could not have said, he rejected nothing. One felt ill at ease only as long as one had not expressed oneself fully. While in other such conversations there comes a point where one suddenly says to oneself: “Stop. This far and no further,” where one senses the danger of relinquishing too much—for how does one find the way back to oneself, and how after that can one bear to be alone?—with Broch there was never such a point or such a moment, one never came up against warning signs, one staggered on, faster and faster, as though drunk. It is devastating to discover how much one has to say about oneself; the further one ventures, the more one loses oneself, the faster the words flow; the hot springs rise from underground, one becomes a field of geysers.
This sort of eruption was not unknown to me. Others had spoken to me in this way. The difference was that I usually reacted to others. I was driven to reply, I could not keep silent, and in speaking I took a position, judged, advised, showed approval or disapproval. In the same situation, Broch, quite to the contrary, kept still. His was not the cold or imperious silence known to us from psychoanalysis, where one individual surrenders irretrievably to another, who must not harbor any feeling for or against him. Broch’s listening was punctuated by short, hardly perceptible breaths, which showed not only that one had been listened to but that what one had said had also been welcomed, as though with every sentence uttered one had stepped into a house and made oneself elaborately at home. The little breathing sounds were the host’s words of welcome: “Whoever you are and whatever you may have to say, come in, be my guest, stay as long as you like, come again, stay forever!” The little breathing sounds were a minimum reaction. Fully formed words and sentences would have implied a judgment, would have amounted to taking a position before the visitor had settled in with all the baggage a man carries around with him. The host’s eyes were always directed at the visitor and at the same time at the interior of the rooms into which he was inviting him. Though his head resembled that of a great bird, his eyes were never intent on prey. They looked into the distance, which usually took in the other’s vicinity, and the host’s innermost thought was at once far and near.
It was this mysterious welcome that drew people to Broch. I could think of no one who did not long for it. This welcome carried no signature or evaluation; where women were involved, it resulted in love.
The Beginning of a Conflict
In the course of the five and a half years during which Broch was present in my life, I grew aware only gradually of something which today, since it is a dire threat to all life, has come to be regarded as self-evident, namely, the nakedness of breath. The main sense through which Broch apprehended the world around him was his breath. While others must unceasingly see and hear, and rest from the exercise of these senses only at night when they withdraw into sleep, Broch was always at the mercy of his breath which he could not turn off and merely attempted to structure by means of the barely perceptible sounds that I called his breath-punctuation. I soon realized that he was incapable of getting rid of anyone. I never heard him say No, though he could in a pinch write a No, if the person to whom it was addressed was not sitting and breathing face to face with him.
If a stranger had come up to him on the street and taken him by the elbow, I’m sure he would have followed that stranger without resistance. I never saw this happen, but I could picture such an incident, and I asked myself where he would have followed the stranger. The answer: to a place determined by the stranger’s breath. In him what is commonly called curiosity took a special form, which might be called breath-lust. By observing him, I came to realize that the differentiation of atmospheres is something we do not think about, that one can live for years without becoming aware of it. Anyone who breathed, that is, anyone at all, could captivate Broch. The defenselessness of a man of his age, who had lived as long as he had, who had wrestled with heaven knows what problems, was something stupendous. Every meeting was for him a peril because once he met somebody he couldn’t get away from that person. To get away, he had to have someone waiting for him somewhere else.
He established bases all over town; they could be far apart. When he arrived somewhere, at Veza’s on Ferdinandstrasse, for instance, he went straight to the phone and called Ea Allesch. “I’m at the Canettis’,” he would say. “I won’t be long.” He knew he was expected and gave a plausible reason for his lateness. But this was only the surface reason for his phone call, motivated by Ea’s hostile attitude. Ea wasn’t the only person he phoned—if he had just come from Ea’s and she knew quite well where he was going, then he would ask Veza, who had just welcomed him: “May I make a phone call?” And proceed to tell someone else where he was. The person he called was always the person who was expecting him, and this seemed reasonable since he had to apologize for his invariable lateness. In reality, I believe these phone calls served an entirely different purpose. He was securing his trajectory from base to base, laying the groundwork for having to leave soon. No assault, no capture would stop him.
When one chanced to meet him on the street, his only defense was his manifest hurry. The first thing he said—and it sounded quite friendly, though it took the place of a greeting—would be “I’m in a hurry”; he would move his arms, his clipped wings, as though trying to take flight, flap them a few times, and then let them sink in discouragement. I felt sorry for him at such times and thought: Poor fellow, what a pity he can’t fly! Always having to run like that! It was a flight in two senses: on the one hand, he had to tear himself away from whomever he was with, for he was expected somewhere and en route, and on the other hand, he had to escape from all those he might run into and who might try to hold him fast. I sometimes looked after him as he disappeared down the street: His cape flapped in the breeze like wings. He wasn’t really moving very fast, he only seemed to be; the bird’s head and the cape made an impression of hampered flight, but it never looked ugly or undignified; it had become second nature, a natural mode of locomotion.
