Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  At a humbler level, the Diaries include lists of books he has read, coded notations on his sex life with Martha and worries about his health. Musil was a heavy smoker. Smoking was inconvenient (it made it impossible for him to work in public libraries), but he could not give it up. ‘I treat life as something unpleasant that one can get through by smoking!’ (p. 441)

  An unattractive side of Musil’s character surfaces in resentment of the success of writers he considers his inferiors, among them Franz Werfel, Stefan George and Stefan Zweig, and in fits of huffiness when he is not paid the respect he believes he is due.

  The sculptor Fritz Wotruba, one of the few friends of Musil’s last years, remarked on the gap between Musil’s polite relations with certain people in public and the sharp attacks he would launch on them in private. The fame of Thomas Mann rankled particularly. Mann has lowered his sights to suit the capacities of his audience, Musil comments scornfully in his Diaries, whereas he, Musil, writes for future generations.

  Mann’s path briefly crossed Musil’s in Switzerland, where Mann was feted as a great writer, Musil ignored. From Switzerland Mann went on to the United States, where, Musil complained, he did little to aid his beleaguered European fellow writers. The truth is that Mann sent a handsome letter to the British PEN proposing that the club sponsor the emigration of ‘our great colleague Robert Musil’. Another contemporary whom Musil disparaged in the privacy of his diary, Hermann Broch, added his voice, ‘Robert Musil belongs among the absolute epic writers of world stature.’ Hearing later what Mann had written on his behalf, Musil was brought up short: he had been unjust, he acknowledged to himself.7

  Musil is, of course, inconsistent in sneering at Mann for accommodating himself to the taste of his readers while blaming the same readers for neglecting him, Musil. Sometimes Musil recognises this inconsistency and tries to persuade himself that the obscurity of his own ‘double exile’ – from his home and from public attention – is to his advantage. ‘The feeling that I never quite fully belong either here or anywhere else is not weakness anymore but strength. Now I have found myself again and also my way of facing the world.’ The stance towards the world to which he refers is, of course, an ironic one. ‘Irony has to contain an element of suffering in it. (Otherwise it is the attitude of a know-it-all).’ (Diaries, p. 485)

  VI

  Musil had an astute sense of his own capacities. ‘[I have] an intellectual imagination.’ (Diaries, p. 327) ‘I am alert to processes in me and in others which elude most people.’ (Quoted in Luft, p. 72) Equally acute are his insights into weaknesses in his work. The novellas constituting Unions, he sees in retrospect, lack narrative tension. ‘Grigia’, the story in Three Women based on his wartime experiences, he dismisses as ‘a disaster’. The Man without Qualities itself is ‘overburdened with essayistic material that is too fluid and does not stick’. (Diaries, pp. 458, 411)

  There are long periods when he is stalled, unable to write. He wakes in the morning in a state of ‘intellectual despair’, of ‘powerlessness mingled with a dreadful loathing . . . at the thought of having to go back to the thing [i.e., The Man without Qualities]’. His books ‘do not have any urgent appeal’, and he is unable to discover within himself the ‘gesture’ that would be needed to bring about such appeal. He feels like giving up. Nevertheless, he plods on, with a dim sense that what he is doing may be important. His self-explorations, because they take place within ‘an existential crisis’ – a crisis, personal and historical, of failure – might serve to ‘shed . . . light on to the surrounding epoch’. (pp. 341, 449, 463)

  Now and again he looks forward hopefully to a day when his labours on the novel will have ceased and he can make a living more easily, writing essays. He plays with essay titles, makes notes, drafts passages. But the drafts do not read well: it is as if his mind is elsewhere.

  There is much bleakness in the entries from the late years. Libido is waning, and he interprets this as ‘the absence of a will to live’. ‘Scales fall from one’s eyes. You see those you love in a merciless light.’ He does not like what he is writing yet does not want to change it. ‘I am a total stranger to myself and could be either a critic or a commentator of my own work.’ (pp. 442, 393, 490)

  VII

  As the prospect of completing The Man without Qualities began to seem more and more remote, Musil played with the idea of using the notebooks as the basis of a new project. ‘I must rather write on the subject of these notebooks,’ he tells himself, and even makes up a title: The Forty Notebooks. (p. 462)

  As he imagines it, the new work will have two aims: to address the future of Germany, including its historical guilt; and to chart the growth of his own œuvre, presenting it ‘in the right way’ (richtig: Musil does not elaborate on what this means). Tracing the rise of ‘the present set of problems grouped around [The Man without Qualities]’, he tells himself, will surely not be difficult. But when he starts exploring the plan in greater depth, he loses heart. Does he have the energy to embark on a ‘reconstruction of the almost incomprehensible path’ of his own evolution? (p. 467)

  Yet the autobiographical project attracts him. ‘This epoch deserves to be handed down just as it is . . . not in the distanced mode of [The Man without Qualities] but . . . seen in close-up, as a private life,’ he writes in 1937. ‘If I describe my life as being exemplary, as a life in this age that I want to hand down to later ages, this can be toned down with irony and the objections raised [namely that one takes oneself too seriously] will then fall away. My probing of conscience, contemplation of shortcomings and the like, will also find their place here as a reproduction of the times.’ (p. 430)

  Musil’s plans to transform his notebooks into something else were never carried out. Yet in a strange way, it is as a body of writing which, intermittently and somewhat wistfully, gives rise to the stillborn hope of becoming a literary work in its own right that the Diaries take on a life of their own. In their latter stages they are in effect an admission by a great writer in dark times that he has come to a dead end and that he does not have it in him to rescue himself through a heroic new project, yet half hoping, nevertheless, that the record of his travails, in all its integrity and all the evidence it will present of a true and full engagement with the accursed era into which he was born, can be brought to weigh in his favour. This gives the Diaries an emotional dimension, even a dimension of pathos, that Musil could not have planned, and that turns them into a moving document.

  VIII

  The Diaries cannot have been easy to translate. Since Musil is writing for his own eyes only, observations arrive out of the blue, contextless, sometimes in condensed or cryptic form. Philip Payne, their translator, copes admirably. Even when the general drift is dark, he seems able to intuit where Musil is going. His version is, by and large, of the highest order. The few lapses occur in careless moments. Some instances: when Musil remarks in 1941 that the Catholic Church has lost its Religiosität, he means that it is without the spirit of religion, not without religiosity, as Payne has it. Musil writes of his admiration for a work of Dostoevsky’s called The Player, in English the novella is better known as The Gambler. Musil imagines Stendhal and Balzac trading insults, Balzac calling Stendhal a scribbler, Stendhal calling Balzac a Fex. Payne translates this colloquial Austrian word as ‘gusher’, but Musil is being more pungent than that: a clown, an eccentric enthusiast. (pp. 491, 469, 491)

  Though the notebooks were never reworked for publication, Musil’s writing is so disciplined, his word choice so exact, that sentence follows sentence with a pointedness that seems to come naturally. Here and there, even while remaining true to Musil’s sense, Payne fails to capture that pointedness; or – a related failing – translates the words without translating their meaning. For instance, Musil observes that by birth he belonged, however peripherally, among the ‘class dictators’. (p. 439) What does he mean? The context does not help. Was Klassendiktator a jargon term in the 1930s? At moments like this one expects a trans
lator to be an interpreter too.

  Certain of the editorial decisions are also open to question. The English Diaries consist of a selection from the Tagebücher edited by Adolf Frisé. Quite justifiably, Payne relies heavily on Frisé’s notes, augmenting them here and there, but more generally cutting them down. This pruning is not always wisely done. In 1939, for instance, Musil read three articles – one on Freud, one on mathematics, one on Polish philosophy – which made such an impact on him that he stapled them to his notebook. What were these articles? Frisé gives not only the bibliographic particulars but, in two cases, brief synopses. Payne gives nothing.

  Between April 1908 and August 1910, and again for the period 1926–8, there are no entries. We know that two of Musil’s notebooks were stolen in 1970. Do the gaps mark the lost notebooks? A few words of explanation would have helped.

  The volume ends with a fifteen-page list of the passages in Frisé that Payne has omitted. Valuable though it may be in itself, this list is unlikely to be consulted by anyone who cannot already read German. An index would have been more useful, but there is no index. Four photographs are reproduced, showing Musil at the ages of seven, twenty, and twenty-two, and his wife a year before he met her; there is nothing of later date. In addition to Payne’s own concise, informative and critically acute Preface, there is a rambling Introduction by Mark Mirsky which duplicates much of what Payne has already said. All in all, an oddly put together compilation.

  IX

  Musil’s climb to eminence and even to greatness from the obscurity of the war years began in the 1950s. In the English-speaking world his most effective promoters were the scholar-translators Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, who in the Times Literary Supplement praised him as ‘the most important novelist writing in German this half century’ and followed up their claim with a translation of The Man without Qualities (three parts, 1953–60). The book was well received in Britain but not, at first, in the United States: ‘a . . . bumbling mass of Teutonic metaphysics’, wrote the New Republic reviewer.8

  The materials left in Martha Musil’s hands amounted to some 10,000 manuscript pages. (This Nachlass is now available on CD-ROM. Thus, ironically, the merest graduate student can find a way through the Musilian labyrinth with an ease that Musil himself, despite his elaborate cross-referencing system, never possessed.) Scholarly explorations began in 1951; the first fruits in German were an edition of The Man without Qualities by Frisé consisting of the portions of the text more or less finalised by Musil with some supplementary drafts. A war of words then broke out over the question of whether Frisé was entitled to prefer one of Musil’s possible endings (carnal union between Ulrich and his sister Agathe) to another (mystical union between the two). The four-volume Gesammelte Werke of 1978 presents Frisé’s compromise. The draft continuation is no longer given in unambiguous form. Instead, we have first the chapters finished and approved by Musil; then those chapters still being worked on at the time of his death (often with variants); and, finally, a selection from the remaining material.

  In the new translation of The Man without Qualities (Knopf, 1995), the second volume is bulked out with with some 600 small-print pages of Frisé’s supplementary material in a helpful new arrangement by Burton Pike, editor of the Knopf project and perhaps the best translator Musil has had thus far. The main body of the work, consisting of the author-approved chapters, is translated by Sophie Wilkins, previously the translator of Thomas Bernhard, and not to be confused with Eithne Wilkins. Ms Wilkins had gone on record in advance criticising the older Kaiser/Wilkins version for its ‘errors and misunderstandings’ and for the Britishness of its language.9 Her translation corrects the old errors but introduces some new ones; it updates the language at the cost of a certain flatness of style. Perhaps the most often quoted sentence in the book – ‘If mankind could dream collectively, it would dream Moosbrugger’ (Kaiser/Wilkins) – comes out leadenly, in the new version, as ‘If mankind could dream as a whole, that dream would be Moosbrugger.’ (MwQ, vol. 1, p. 77)

  Musil did not end and probably could not have ended his huge novel. Even in terms of its internal logic, it is far from complete. Plot elements are in place for which no outcome is in sight, even in the drafts (one thinks of the consequences for Agathe of forging her father’s will); major decisions still loom which Musil seems to be postponing (whether Ulrich is to have an affair with Clarisse, for instance). More seriously, one must doubt whether the framework Musil has built can support the ever-increasing weight of history it is being called upon to bear.

  Musil’s notes indicate that, even in the 1920s, he was sensitive to the question of why he should have embarked on so determinedly ‘pre-war’ a novel. (MwQ, vol. 2, p. 1723) He seems to have been confident, however, that its conception was flexible enough to allow it to foreshadow, at least at the level of presentiment, the realities of postwar Europe as well. (Here Musil would seem to have been relying heavily on the figure of Moosbrugger, the psychopathic sex murderer, to embody the violently self-liberatory impulses of peoples bewildered by the conditions of modern life – impulses that would in due course be exploited by the fascist movements. Moosbrugger is a minor character in the text as we have it, but he bulks large in the drafts.)

  More and more, Musil’s last-minute decision, in 1938, to withdraw the last twenty chapters of Part 3 when they were already in the hands of the printers seems the correct one. These chapters consist substantially of an exposition of Ulrich’s theory of the emotions; they are the last chapters to have borne, or nearly to have borne, their author’s imprimatur. They have been praised for their lyricism, but that lyricism now seems rather too airy, and the whole sequence bereft of the sharpness of observation that characterises Musil’s prose at its best.

  The problem is not just with the writing but with Ulrich as well. The broad scheme of the novel is to push forward two counterpointed story lines: while a spiritually bankrupt Austria is allowed to play out its last days, Ulrich, with and through his sister, will negotiate a mystical-erotic withdrawal from society. ‘For the sake of a world which could still come, one must hold oneself pure’, he says in self-justification. (MwQ, vol. 2, p. 1038) But in the context of a fictional Europe of 1914 which was increasingly being asked to take on, at a symbolic level, the burden of the Europe of 1938–9 as well, Ulrich’s retreat must have seemed – and here, one must concede, the Diaries yield no supporting admission on Musil’s part – a less and less adequate or even appropriate gesture. The ethical and the political sides of the novel were drifting apart.

  Reading The Man without Qualities will always be an unsatisfying experience. In the kind of edition offered by Frisé or by Pike, we reach the last of the 1,700-odd pages in a state of confusion, even of disappointment. But, given the richness of Musil’s drafts, given too the scale of the crisis in European culture that he was trying to map, not only in The Man without Qualities but in the parallel action of the Diaries, too much is preferable to too little.

  10 Josef Skvorecky

  I

  JOSEF SKVORECKY SHOT into notoriety when, at the 1959 congress of the Czech Writers’ Union, his novel The Cowards (written 1948–9, published 1958, English translation 1970) was denounced by Party spokesmen as ‘profoundly alien [in spirit] to our beautiful democratic and humanistic literature’. It is not clear why, at that moment in history, Skvorecky in particular was singled out as whipping-boy. But The Cowards, a satirical look at Czech society in 1945, when the German occupiers were moving out and the Soviet liberators moving in, hardly fitted the socialist-realist mould; while its author’s middle-class, Catholic background and doctorate from Charles University for a thesis on Thomas Paine clearly made him fair game. The effect of the banning that ensued was predictable: The Cowards circulated illegally and was widely read; its author became a cult figure among the young.

  News of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia reached Skvorecky while he was on a visit to France. The question was: should he return? In 1948, when the Commun
ists first took power, he was in his twenties and full of energy. Now, in his mid-forties, the resilience and optimism of youth were gone. He and his wife chose exile: a teaching stint in Toronto prolonged itself into residence, and eventually the Skvoreckys became Canadian citizens.

  In three decades since quitting his native land Skvorecky has not been prolific as a novelist. As his Czech experience has become more remote, and as Communist Czechoslovakia – indeed, Czechoslovakia itself as a political entity – has receded into the past, the material and the passions out of which the earlier novels grew have – naturally – run dry. At the same time Skvorecky seems to have found it hard to transplant himself imaginatively to a new North American environment. He continues to publish his books in Czech first (until recently via the publishing house Sixty-Eight, run by his wife Zdena Salivarova and himself, an enterprise whose contribution to keeping Czech literature alive during the 1970s and 1980s was incalculable) and only subsequently in English translation.

  The Engineer of Human Souls (Czech 1977; English translation 1985) was the last novel to rely heavily on Skvorecky’s Czech experience. Dvor̆ák in Love (Czech 1983; English translation 1986) follows Anton Dvor̆ák during the four years he spent as director of the National Conservatory in New York, a period that included the composition of his Symphony no. 5 (‘From the New World’) of 1893. The novel is held together by Skvorecky’s love of music – not only Dvor̆ák’s but the music of African Americans, of which Dvor̆ák himself was, of course, a passionate advocate (‘The future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies . . . These are the folk songs of America,’ he wrote).1 This gentle and affectionate book may be read as Skvorecky’s first attempt to locate a Czech American tradition in which there would be space to set loose his imagination, and thus to refashion himself positively as a Czech North American rather than negatively as a Czech exile. The Bride of Texas (1992; English translation 1996) is the second.