The Play of the Eyes, page 4
I have begun by speaking about what was incomparable in Broch, of what distinguished him from all other people I have known, but that is not the whole story. For quite aside from the mysterious respiratory phenomena that conditioned his appearance and physical reactions, I had conversations with him that gave me food for thought and that I would have liked to prolong. I came to him with an unspent eagerness to admire. A storm of opinions, convictions, and projects beat down on him, but whatever I said, whatever I did to win his favor, nothing could efface the powerful impression I made on him with my two hours’ reading of The Wedding. This impression was at the bottom of everything he said to me for the next few years, but he was too kind a man to let me notice it. He never said anything to suggest that I made him feel uneasy.
In The Wedding the house caved in and all perished. Of course, he recognized the despair that had led me to write it. In those years, many including Broch himself had experienced this same despair. But it disturbed him to see it expressed in this merciless form, as though I myself were a part of what was threatening us all. I don’t believe that he came to any conclusion about it. Karl Kraus, whom because Broch was nineteen years my senior he had read long before me, and who was much more violent than I was, had meant a good deal to him. Kraus seldom figured in our conversations, but he never mentioned the name without respect. I’m sure I never saw Broch at any of Karl Kraus’s lectures, for I wouldn’t have forgotten a head like his. Possibly he stayed away from the lectures after he himself began to write; or perhaps he had come to find them stifling. In that case he was bound to be appalled by a work like The Wedding, motivated by similar apocalyptic terrors. But these are conjectures, I shall never know for sure what was behind Broch’s secret antagonism; it may have been nothing more than my assiduous courtship of him, which he tried to evade as he did all courtship.
My first conversations with him, at the Café Museum, took place at lunchtime, but neither of us ate. They were animated conversations in which he held up his end. (It was only later that I was struck by his silences.) But our talks did not last long, perhaps an hour. Regularly, just when our exchange had become so interesting that I’d have given anything to go on, he would suddenly stand up and say: “I must go to Dr. Schaxl’s now.” Dr. Schaxl was his analyst, and since he always arranged to meet me just before his appointments with her, I had the impression that he went to his analysis every day. I felt as if he had hit me on the head; the more freely and openly I had spoken—every word of his had added to my élan—the wiser and more penetrating were his answers, the more deeply his announcement wounded me; moreover, I took the ridiculous name of Schaxl as an insult.
Here are two people conversing; and now one of them, Broch, for whose words I’m thirsting, the man who wrote The Sleepwalkers, stands up, cuts himself off in midsentence with a view to confiding, as he did every day (or so I thought), in a woman whose name is Schaxl and who is an analyst. I was filled with consternation. I felt ashamed for him; I hardly dared picture him lying down on a couch to tell her things that no one else would ever hear and that perhaps he would never even write. One would have to know the earnestness, the dignity, the beauty with which he sat listening, to understand why it struck me as so demeaning that he should lie down and speak to someone whose face he could not see.
Yet today it seems quite possible that Broch was running away from my verbal avalanche, that he could not have borne a longer conversation with me and that was why he arranged to meet me just before his analysis.
Be that as it may, he was so addicted to Freud that he did not hesitate to employ Freudian terms in their commonly accepted meanings in serious conversation, as though their validity were beyond question. This was bound to distress me in one who had read so much philosophy, for it implied that he regarded Freud as the equal of Plato, Spinoza and Kant, whom he so greatly revered. He said things which had become platitudes in the Vienna of those days in the same breath as insights hallowed by centuries-long admiration, including his own.
* * *
A few weeks after our first meeting Broch asked me if I would care to give a reading at the Popular University in Leopoldstadt. He himself, he said, had read there a few times and would be glad to introduce me. Feeling very much honored, I accepted. My reading was scheduled for January 23, 1933. Before the turn of the year, I brought Broch the manuscript of Kant Catches Fire. A few weeks later, he asked me to go and see him on Gonzagagasse, where he lived.
“What do you mean by this?”
Those were his first words. With a vague gesture he indicated the manuscript that was lying beside him on his desk. I was so taken aback that I could think of nothing to say. That was the last question I would have expected of him. How could the meaning of a novel be summed up in a few sentences? Feeling that I had to make some answer, I stammered something more or less unintelligible. He apologized and withdrew his question.
“If you knew, you wouldn’t have written the novel. That was a bad question.”
Seeing I was unable to formulate my ideas, he tried to narrow the field by excluding everything that could not be regarded as the purpose of my book.
“You weren’t just trying to write the story of a fool? That can’t have been your real purpose. And you weren’t simply trying to portray an eccentric figure in the manner of E. T. A. Hoffmann or Edgar Allan Poe?”
I replied in the negative and he did not question my answers. I brought up Gogol. Since Broch had been struck by the grotesqueness of my characters, I thought I would cite a model on whom I had actually drawn.
“I was influenced more by Gogol, I wanted the most extreme characters, at once ludicrous and horrible, I wanted the ludicrous and the horrible to be indistinguishable.”
“You’re terrifying. Do you want to terrify people?”
“Yes. Everything around us is terrifying. There is no longer a common language. No one understands anyone else. I believe no one wants to understand. What impressed me so much in your Huguenau was that the characters are so confined within their different value systems that no understanding between them is possible. Huguenau is very much like my characters. This is not apparent in his manner of speaking. He still converses with other people. But there is a document at the end of the book, Huguenau’s letter stating his demand on the widow Esch. This is written in his very own language: the language of the pure businessman. You drew a radical distinction between this man and everyone else in the book. That is exactly what I have in mind. That is what I tried to do throughout, with every character and in every passage of my book.”
“But then they cease to be real people. They become abstractions. Real people are made up of many components. They have contradictory, conflicting impulses. If you don’t take account of that, how can you give a faithful picture of the world? Have you a right to distort people to such a degree that they cease to be recognizable as human beings?”
“They are characters. People and characters are not the same thing. The novel as a literary genre began with characters. The first novel was Don Quixote. What do you think of the protagonist? Does he strike you as too extreme to be credible?”
“Those were different times. In a day when chivalric romances were all the rage, he was a credible character. Today we know more about man. Today we have modern psychology, which gives us insights that we simply can’t ignore. Literature must operate on the intellectual level of its day. If it lags behind the times, it becomes a kind of kitsch, subservient to purposes unrelated to literature.”
“You seem to imply that Don Quixote means nothing to us today. To my mind it is not only the first novel, it is and remains the greatest of novels. To my mind it lacks nothing; no modern insight is absent from it. I’d even go so far as to say that it avoids certain errors of modern psychology. The author does not undertake to investigate man, he does not try to show all the possible components of an individual, he creates characters, whom he delineates sharply and opposes to one another. Their interaction is the source of what he has to say about man.”
“But much of what concerns and torments us today could not be expressed.”
“Of course not; things that didn’t exist at that time could not be expressed. But today new characters can be devised; and a writer who knows how to operate with them can express our present preoccupations.”
“But in art as in other fields there must be new methods. In the age of Freud and Joyce everything can’t remain as it was.”
“I too believe that the novel must be different, but not because we are living in the age of Freud and Joyce. The substance of our times is different, and that can be shown only through characters. The more they differ from one another, the more extreme their characters, the greater will be the tensions between them. The nature of these tensions is all-important. They frighten us, and we recognize this fear as our own. They help us rehearse our fear. In psychological investigation we also encounter fear and take note of it. Then new methods, or methods which at least seem new to us, are devised to liberate us from it.”
“That is not possible. What can liberate us from fear? Maybe it can be diminished, but no more. What you have done in your novel and in The Wedding as well is to heighten fear. You rub people’s noses in their wickedness, as though to punish them for it. I know your underlying purpose is to make them repent. You make me think of a Lenten sermon. But you don’t threaten people with hell, you paint a picture of hell in this life. You don’t picture it objectively, so as to give people a clearer consciousness of it; you picture it in such a way as to make people feel they are in it and scare them out of their wits. Is it the writer’s function to bring more fear into the world? Is that a worthy intention?”
“You have a different method of writing novels. In Huguenau you have used it consistently. You contrast different value systems, good ones and bad ones. The religious world of the Salvation Army lass is confronted with Huguenau’s business world. Thus you bring in a compromise and partly alleviate the fear you have created with your portrayal of Huguenau. I read your trilogy without stopping, it filled me, it created new areas within me; they have endured and now, six months later, they are still there. I can say beyond the shadow of a doubt that you have broadened and enriched me with it. But you have also comforted me. Insight gives comfort. But is that the only function of insight?”
“You believe in alarming people to the point of panic. In The Wedding you’ve undoubtedly succeeded. After it came only destruction and disaster. Do you want this disaster? I suspect that you want the exact opposite. You would gladly help to show a way out. But you do nothing of the kind; in both The Wedding and the novel, you end cruelly, mercilessly, with destruction. In that there is an uncompromising quality that I have to respect. But does this mean that you’ve given up hope? Does it mean that you yourself have not found a way out or that you doubt the existence of a way out?”
“If I did, if I had really given up hope, I couldn’t bear to go on living. No, I just think we know too little. I have the impression that you like to talk about modern psychology because it originated in your own back yard, so to speak, in a particular segment of Vienna society. It appeals to a certain local patriotism in you. Maybe you feel that you yourself might have invented it. Whatever it says, you find in yourself. You don’t have to look for it. This modern psychology strikes me as totally inadequate. It deals with the individual, and in that sphere it has undoubtedly made certain discoveries. But where the masses are concerned, it can’t do a thing, and that’s where knowledge would be most important, for all the new powers that are coming into existence today draw their strength from crowds, from the masses. Nearly all those who are out for political power know how to operate with the masses. But the men who see that such operations are leading straight to another world war don’t know how to influence the masses, how to stop them from being misled to the ruin of us all. The laws of mass behavior can be discovered. That is the most important task confronting us today, and so far nothing has been done toward the development of such a science.”
“Nothing can be done. In this field everything is vague and uncertain. You are on the wrong road. You can’t discover the laws of mass behavior, because there aren’t any. You’d be wasting your time. You’ve told me several times that you regard this as your true lifework, that you are resolved to spend years on it, your whole life if need be. You’d be wasting your life. Better stick to your plays. You’re a writer. You can’t devote yourself to a science that isn’t science and never will be.”
* * *
We had this conversation about the study of mass behavior more than once. Broch, as I’ve said, always treated his interlocutor gently, as though he might damage him in some way if he expressed himself too forcefully. What interested him most was always the other’s individuality and the premises on which it functioned. Consequently our arguments were seldom violent; he couldn’t bear to humiliate anyone, and for that reason he took care not to be too much in the right.
All the more conspicuous were the occasions when we did clash violently. He was irrevocably opposed to the name I had given the central character in my novel, who in the manuscript I gave him to read was still called Kant. The title Kant Catches Fire also infuriated him; as though I had wished to imply that the philosopher Kant was a cold, unfeeling creature, who in my cruel book was forced to catch fire. He never said this in so many words, but he did say that the use of this name, which he so highly revered, struck him as unseemly. And indeed his first word of criticism was “You’ll have to change the name.” In this he remained uncompromising and almost every time we met he asked: “Have you changed the name?”
He wasn’t satisfied when I said that name and title had always been provisional, that I had decided, even before meeting him, to change both in the event of publication. “Then why not now?” he insisted. “Do it in the manuscript.” That provoked my resistance. It wasn’t like Broch to give orders, but this sounded like an order. I wanted to keep my original title, provisional or not, as long as possible. I left the manuscript just as it was and waited for the time to come when I would make the change because I wanted to and not under pressure.
The second point Broch insisted on was the impossibility of developing a psychology of the masses. Here his opinion made no impression on me. Much as I admired him as a writer and a man, much as I (vainly) courted his affection, I wouldn’t have dreamed of giving in on this point. On the contrary, I tried to convince him that new discoveries could be made, that there were relationships in this field that, strange to say, had never been considered. He usually smiled at my observation and seemed to take little interest, but he listened. He only grew indignant when I criticized certain Freudian conceptions. Once I tried to make it clear that a distinction must be made between panic and mass flight. It was true, I said, that a crowd disintegrates when it panics. But, as is shown by fleeing herds of animals, a crowd can take flight without disintegrating; it can, moreover, develop a collective feeling in the course of flight. “How do you know?” he asked. “Were you ever a gazelle in a fleeing herd?”
There was one thing, I soon discovered, that always impressed him: the word “symbol.” When I spoke of “crowd symbols,” he pricked up his ears and made me explain exactly what I meant. I had been thinking at the time about the connection between fire and crowds and since, like everyone else in Vienna, he remembered July 15, 1927, he pondered my words and brought them up from time to time. But what really appealed to him was what I had said about the sea and the drops of water in it. I said that I felt a kind of pity for the drops of water on my hand, because they had been separated from the great body to which they belonged. Intrigued by what he saw as an approach to religious feelings, and in particular by my “pity” for the poor isolated drops of water, he began to find something religious in my “psychology of the masses” project and to speak of it in this light. This attitude I resisted, for I regarded it as a reduction of my idea, but little by little I stopped discussing the matter with him.
The Conductor
He compressed his lips to make sure no praise would escape them. He attached the greatest importance to accurate memorizing. At an early age, in straitened circumstances, he attacked difficult texts and mastered them bit by bit in his few free moments. At the age of fifteen he made his living playing the fiddle in a café. Pale and drawn from lack of sleep, he kept a volume of Spinoza hidden under his music and in brief pauses learned the Ethics by heart, sentence by sentence. His study was unrelated to his work and was simply an independent step in his education. There were many such oddities in his development, and there was no real connection between his inner and outward lives apart from the exertion that both cost him. The essential was his indestructible will; it needed new obstacles to contend with and found them throughout his life. Even in his old age his will was dominant; it was an inexhaustible appetite, but because of his constant preoccupation with music, it became a rhythmic appetite.
The love of study, with the help of which he improved himself as a young man, stayed with him all his life, side by side with his professional activity. In the face of great difficulties, he became a conductor at an early age, but that was not enough for him. He never found total fulfillment in conducting, and that may be why he never became a really great conductor. He kept looking for what was different, because it offered him something more to learn. The many different schools that had come into being in this period of musical renewal were for him a godsend. Every school, provided it was new, set him new tasks and tackling new tasks was what he was best at and wanted most. But no task, however challenging, could claim all his attention. He took on many, he dug his teeth into them, none could be too difficult. What interested him above all was to study and master a new composition and—most important—to put it over, in other words, to present it as perfectly as possible to a public that had no related experience, to whom such music was unfamiliar, repellent and ugly. With him it was a question of power. First he had to coerce the musicians, compel them to play this music as he wanted it played. Once he had the musicians in hand, the resistance of the public—the greater, the better—remained to be broken down.
