Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  9 Robert Musil’s Diaries

  I

  BORN IN THE autumn years of the Habsburg Empire, Robert Musil served His Imperial and Royal Majesty in one bloody continental convulsion and died halfway through the even worse convulsion that followed. Looking back, he would call the times in which he lived ‘an accursed era’; his best energies were spent on trying to understand what Europe was doing to itself. His report is contained in a huge unfinished novel, The Man without Qualities; in a series of essays collected in English under the title Precision and Soul; and in a set of notebooks newly translated as Diaries, 1899–1941.1

  Musil’s path to authorship was an unusual one. His parents, from the Austrian upper bourgeoisie, sent him for his education not to a classical Gymnasium but to military boarding schools, where he learned, if little else, to dress dapperly and take care of his body. At university he studied first engineering (he designed and patented an optical instrument which was still being manufactured commercially in the 1920s), then psychology and philosophy, taking his doctorate in 1908.

  By this time he was already the author of a precocious first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), set in a cadet school. Abandoning the academic career for which he had prepared himself, he devoted himself to writing. Unions, a pair of cerebrally erotic novellas, appeared in 1911.

  When war came, Musil served on the Italian Front, with distinction. After the war, troubled by a sense that the best years of his creative life were being stolen from him, he sketched out no fewer than twenty new works, including a series of satirical novels. A play, The Visionaries (1921), and a set of stories, Three Women (1924), won awards. He was elected vice-president of the Austrian branch of the Organisation of German Writers. Though not widely read, he was on the literary map.

  Before long the satirical novels had been abandoned or absorbed into a master project: a novel in which the upper crust of Viennese society, oblivious of the dark clouds gathering on the horizon, discusses endlessly what form their latest festival of self-congratulation should take. It would be, he said, a ‘grotesque’ vision of Austria on the eve of war, an Austria which would be ‘a particularly clearcut case of the modern world’. (Diaries, p. 209) Supported financially by his publisher and by a society of admirers, he gave all his energies to The Man without Qualities.

  The first volume came out in 1930, to so enthusiastic a reception in both Austria and Germany that Musil – a modest man in other respects – thought he might win the Nobel Prize. The continuation proved more intractable. Cajoled by his publisher, yet full of misgiving, he allowed an extended fragment to appear as the second volume in 1933. ‘Volume One closes approximately at the high point of an arch,’ he wrote. But ‘on the other side it has no support’.2 He began to fear he would never finish the work.

  A move to the livelier intellectual environment of Berlin was cut short by the rise to power of the Nazis. Musil and his wife returned to Vienna, to an ominous political atmosphere; he began to suffer from depression and poor health. Then in 1938 Austria was absorbed into the Third Reich. The couple removed themselves to Switzerland. Switzerland was meant to be a staging post on the way to the United States, but the entry of the United States into the war put paid to that plan. Along with tens of thousands of other exiles, they found themselves trapped.

  ‘Switzerland is renowned for the freedom you can enjoy there,’ observed Bertholt Brecht. ‘The catch is, you have to be a tourist.’ The myth of Switzerland as a land of asylum was badly damaged by its treatment of refugees. The overriding priority of the Swiss government during the years 1933–44 was not to antagonise Germany. Supervision of resident aliens fell under a Fremdenpolizei whose chief disparaged philanthropic agencies for their ‘sentimental meddling’ and made no secret of his dislike of Jews. Ugly scenes took place at border posts as refugees without entry visas were turned back. (To the credit of ordinary Swiss people, it must be said there was a public outcry.)3

  The Man without Qualities had been banned in Germany and Austria in 1938 (the ban would later extend to all of Musil’s writings). In applying to the Swiss government for asylum, Musil was thus able to claim that he could not earn a living as a writer elsewhere in the German-speaking world. Yet nowhere in Switzerland did the Musils feel welcome. The Swiss patronage network disdained them; friends abroad exerted themselves only lackadaisically on their behalf (or so it seemed to Musil); they survived on handouts. ‘Today they ignore us. But once we are dead they will boast that they gave us asylum,’ said Musil to Ignazio Silone.4 Depressed, he could make no progress with the novel. ‘I don’t know why I cannot manage to write. I seem to be under a spell.’ (Diaries, p. 498) In 1942, at the age of sixty-one, he had a stroke and died.

  ‘He thought he had a long life before him,’ said his widow. ‘The worst is, an unbelievable body of material – sketches, notes, aphorisms, novel chapters, diaries – is left behind, of which only he could have made sense. I have no idea what to do.’5 Turned away by commercial publishers, she published privately a third and final volume of the novel, consisting of chapters and drafts in no hard and fast order. After the war she tried to interest American publishers in a translation of the whole, without success. She died in 1949.

  II

  The diaries to which Martha Musil refers are notebooks which Musil had kept from the age of eighteen. Meant at first to record his inner life, they soon began to serve other purposes as well. By the time of his death he had filled over forty of them, some of which were lost or stolen or destroyed in the postwar years.

  Although Musil calls these books Hefte, notebooks, his German editor prefers the term Tagebücher, diaries, and the English translation follows suit, though what we would think of as diary entries are in fact outweighed by summaries of and extracts from books, sketches for fiction, drafts of essays, lecture notes and so forth. Even the German edition excludes some of this material. The text of the English Diaries is less than half as long as the German and gives only a slim selection of drafts. Readers who expect to follow in the Diaries the progress of The Man without Qualities will be disappointed: they should turn, rather, to the drafts reprinted in the translation of the novel published by Knopf in 1995. On the other hand, the Diaries allow a picture to emerge of Musil responding to the history of his times. This is particularly true of his last years, when entries become more expansive, perhaps because by this time his energies were not being poured so fully into The Man without Qualities.

  In his study Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture, David S. Luft identifies two key moments in Musil’s political evolution, both connected with the First World War. The first was his experience of the wave of patriotic passion that accompanied the outbreak of war, a passion that, to his surprise, he found himself sharing (‘the ecstasy of altruism – this feeling of having, for the first time, something in common with one’s fellow Germans’). (Diaries, p. 271) The second was the Versailles Treaty of 1919, and what this punitive settlement meant for those who had hoped the exhausting war would at least give birth to a new political order.

  The account Musil gives, in the Diaries, of how the humiliations of Versailles led to the rise of Nazism, will not easily be bettered. Fascism, in Musil’s analysis, was a reaction against challenges of modern life – principally industrialisation and urbanisation – for which the German people were unprepared, a reaction which then grew into a revolt against civilisation itself. From the moment the Reichstag burned in 1933, Musil foresaw how badly Germany was about to betray itself. ‘All the liberal fundamental rights have now been set aside’, he writes from Berlin, ‘without one single person feeling utterly outraged . . . It is seen as a spell of bad weather . . . One might feel most profoundly disappointed over this but it is more correct to draw the conclusion that all the things that have been abolished here are no longer of great concern to people.’ (p. 379)

  Of Hitler he writes, ‘We Germans brought forth the greatest moralist of the second half of the preceding century [viz. Ni
etzsche] and are today bringing forth the greatest aberration in morality that there has been since Christendom. Are we monstrous in every respect?’ (p. 388)

  Musil was affected at every level of his life by the rise of Nazism and the rejection of the best of the German heritage that Nazism represented. ‘[Hitler says] you must believe either in the future of N[ational] S[ocialism] or the downfall of [Germany] . . . How is it possible still to work when one is in this position?’ (Setting down these words in Vienna in 1938, Musil prudently does not name Hitler, using instead a private code-name ‘Carlyle’.) National Socialism made Musil invisible by driving him into exile and banning his books; it is hard not to suspect that his growing hopelessness before the task of finishing The Man without Qualities came, at least in part, from a sense that his project, conceived in a spirit of what he thought of as ‘gentle irony’, had been overtaken by the chariots of history. (pp. 389, 466)

  III

  From early on, Musil used people around him, including family and friends, as models for his fiction. The first notebook (1899–1904) includes a fictionalised treatment of his own childhood and adolescence, with a cast of characters who will resurface decades later in The Man without Qualities.

  His most striking use of personal material is in the story ‘Tonka’ (in Three Women), whose central character is based closely on Herma Dietz, a young working-class woman with whom he had a serious and lengthy liaison despite the intense disapproval of his mother. In the Diaries we see Herma fulfilling a double function. At one level, she is closely observed by Musil the writer as a model for the fictional Tonka. At another, she is the source of troubled feelings to Musil the man. Despite her denials, Musil had reason to believe Herma had been unfaithful to him. To his circle of friends he preached the transcendence of jealousy, but privately he felt ‘a steady drip of poison’. (p. 60) What should he do?

  The move he makes is deeply Musilian. Neither giving in to jealousy, nor, by an act of will, conquering it, instead he turns himself into a character in the story of Herma/Tonka, and tries, through the distancing power which fiction allows, to become the person that, at an ethical level, he wants to be.

  To judge from the clarity and intensity of Musil’s writing, in both the diary entries relating to Herma and, later, the achieved story ‘Tonka’, the ethical-aesthetic experiment works. Robert (or his created fictional self R) visibly grows before our eyes, becoming less youthfully brash, less cynical, more tolerant, more loving. ‘Her [i.e., Herma/Tonka’s] fateful liaison with R’, he writes to himself, ‘gives symbolical form to the fact that . . . one cannot place faith in the understanding.’ (p. 61) If he loves Herma he must believe in her innocence. Fiction has thus become an arena for working out his relations with others, a laboratory for the refinement of the soul. The young Musil is learning to love; and, in a strange way, the more he loves, the more clearsighted and intelligent he becomes.

  Herma Dietz died in 1907. By then Musil had already met Martha Marcovaldi, who had left her Italian husband to study art in Berlin. Soon he was living with Martha and her children; in due course they were married. ‘[Martha] is something that I have become and that has become “I”.’ he writes in the Diaries. (p. 122) The perfecting of their love – a love that would include a perverse readiness to betray each other – became a new ethical project in his life.

  IV

  To Musil, the most stubborn and retrogressive feature of German culture (of which Austrian culture was a part – at no time did he take seriously the idea of an autonomous Austrian culture) was its tendency to compartmentalise intellect from feeling, to favour an unreflective stupidity of the emotions. He saw this split most clearly among the scientists with whom he worked: men of intellect living coarse emotional lives.

  From the earliest notebooks, Musil evinces a concern with erotic feeling and the relations between the erotic and the ethical. The education of the senses through a refining of erotic life seems to him to hold the best promise of bringing humankind to a higher ethical plane. He deplores the rigid sexual roles that bourgeois society has laid down for women and men. ‘Whole countries of the soul have been lost and submerged as a consequence,’ he writes.6

  In asserting the sexual relation as the fundamental cultural relation, and in advocating a sexual revolution as the gateway to a new millennium, Musil is curiously reminiscent of his contemporary, D. H. Lawrence. Where he differs from Lawrence is in not wishing to exclude the intellect from erotic life – indeed, in seeking to eroticise the intellect. As a writer, he is also capable of an unmoralising brutality of observation that is simply not in Lawrence’s repertoire. He watches a young woman watching her mother kiss a younger man. ‘Up till now she has only known a woman’s kiss as a tentative gesture; but this is like a dog sinking its teeth into another.’ (Diaries, p. 398)

  Despite his interest in the metamorphoses of desire, explored with unparalleled subtlety in Unions, Musil was unsympathetic to the psychoanalytic movement. He disliked its cultishness, disapproved of its sweeping claims and its unscientific standards of proof. Psychoanalysis, he remarks disparagingly, deploys a mere handful of explanatory concepts; whatever these concepts do not cover is ‘left completely barren [with] . . . not a single path . . . [leading] on further from there’. In psychoanalysis, ‘insights of great importance [intermingle] with things that are impossible, one-sided, even dilettante’. He prefers psychology of what he ironically calls the ‘shallow’ – that is, experimental – variety. (pp. 481, 391, 465)

  For the widespread view that Musil was indebted to Freud, and more deeply than he cared to acknowledge, the Diaries offer little support. The fact is that Musil and Freud were part of a larger movement in European thought. Both were sceptical of the power of reason to guide human conduct; both were critics of Central European civilisation and its discontents; and both assumed the dark continent of the feminine psyche as theirs to explore. To Musil, Freud was a rival rather than a source. Nietzsche remained his true guide in the realm of the unconscious.

  Musil is particularly resistant to claims for the universality of Oedipal desire. Looking back on his own adolescence, he can recollect no desire for his mother, only distaste for her ageing body. ‘Is that not the truth – the sad and healthy and non-invented truth? It is the opposite of psychoanalysis. The mother is not an object of desire but a mood-barrier, a stripping away of the mood of every desire, should chance present the young man with any sexual opportunity.’ (p. 397)

  Would Musil have been so sure of himself if, before writing these words in the late 1930s, he had reread his notebook of 1905–6? Here, in breathlessly novelettish prose, the young Musil drafts a scene of erotically charged reconciliation between his fictional hero and the hero’s mother. Decades later, the energies at work in this scene will be drawn upon in the incestuous love between Ulrich, the man without qualities, and his sister Agathe.

  V

  Musil uses his notebooks less to explore memories from the past than to capture useful data in the present. Among the most vivid entries are extended memoranda: pages of close observation of flies caught in flypaper (later to be used in an essay), and of cats mating in the garden of his Geneva home. Some of his notes are marvels of deft precision: birdsong ‘like the touch of soft, busy hands’. (p. 88)

  Notes on a visit to an insane asylum in Rome in 1913 (Diaries, pp. 158–61) form the basis of the chapter entitled ‘The Lunatics Greet Clarisse’ in Part 3 of The Man without Qualities, via a series of drafts included in the Knopf translation. (vol. 2, pp. 1600–3, 1630–43) Working on the episode, Musil makes it richer and more disturbing by giving it through the eyes of Clarisse, Ulrich’s unstable, Nietzsche-worshipping childhood friend and later (in one possible continuation of the story) mistress. (The most striking feature of these and many other drafts is how fully conceived and realised they are, and how finished the writing is. All that is unsettled about them is where they will fit into the whole.)

  Among the writers who mattered to Musil and on who
m he reflects in the Diaries, from Mallarmé in his youth to Tolstoy late in life, the dominating figure remains Nietzsche. He is oddly indifferent to James Joyce, but feels an affinity to G. K. Chesterton. (For a while Musil and Joyce lived a few houses apart in Zürich. They never spoke to each other.)

  Musil recognised Nietzsche’s influence on him as ‘decisive’. (Diaries, p. 433) From Nietzsche he took a form of philosophising that is essayistic rather than systematic; a recognition of art as a form of intellectual exploration; the affirmation that man makes his own history; and a way of treating moral questions that goes beyond the polarities of good and evil. ‘Master of the floating life within,’ he called him. (MwQ, vol. 2, p. 62)

  Some of the obiter dicta in the Diaries are memorable. On Emily Brontë: ‘A tiny portion of irony and this housekeeper with her righteous misdeeds would be a figure of global dimensions’. On Hermann Hesse: ‘He has the weaknesses appropriate to a greater man than he actually is.’ (pp. 188, 486)

  On culture and politics he can be mordantly aphoristic: ‘The German doesn’t know which he likes better, Heaven or Hell. But he is definitely thrilled with the task of bringing order to one or the other – and probably he slightly prefers the task of setting Hell in order.’ After Goebbels has launched a decree forbidding ‘destructive criticism’, Musil writes, ‘Since criticism is forbidden I have to indulge in self-criticism. No one will take exception to this since it is unknown in Germany.’ (pp. 490, 445)