Where Have You Been?

by Michael Hofmann

  ARTHUR SCHNITZLER

  None of the Moderns saw very much of the nineteenth century. (The word “modern” itself only started to come into general use in the 1880s and 1890s.) There is an odd twilit group of writers who straddle the centuries but who carry any amount of nineteenth-century baggage intact. Among them I would count the Austrian—nay, the Viennese—playwright and story writer Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931). When Peter Gay wrote his magisterial study of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, he called it Schnitzler’s Century. Other “pre-Moderns” for me would include poets like Yeats (born in 1865), Cavafy (1863), and Rilke (1875), and prose writers like Chekhov (1860), Hamsun (1859), and Svevo (1861). They are on the cusp. They are still sequential, social writers. They come before abstraction, atonality, anomie, and the cult of difficulty. The novel is not yet part poem, part essay. The poem not yet a heap of beautiful syllables in foreign alphabets. Things may be out of kilter—Chekhov and Yeats are largely about that—but they still believe in kilter. At the very least, they remember it.

  Schnitzler’s reputation may have dipped somewhat, but that’s still only relative: in his lifetime he was a hugely popular and scandalously controversial writer. His plays were given big productions one after another, and when they weren’t—his Reigen (or La Ronde) had to be pulled in 1921 in Vienna and Berlin after anti-Semitic and neopuritanical sentiments were unleashed in tandem at this “most vulgar bordello piece” written to incite “the prurience of Asiatic intruders” (i.e., Viennese Jews)—why, then, it was even bigger news. Collections of his stories and novellas—even the list of titles fills two pages in the S. Fischer Verlag catalog—went through forty, sixty, even a hundred printings. Not now, sure, and not in English. But there are still many people who have seen Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut or David Hare’s The Blue Room, or who remember Max Ophüls’s 1950s film of La Ronde, and wondered about the author and the texts they were adapted from.

  There are two new translations of Schnitzler’s fiction, by Margret Schaefer: a collection called Night Games, containing the novella of that name, and “Dream Story” (the original of Frederic Raphael’s screenplay for the Kubrick film), and seven shorter stories; and Desire and Delusion (the title is the publisher’s, or the translator’s), comprising three novellas: Flight into Darkness, Dying, and Fräulein Else. The situations are tense with promise, the stories are shapely and, as we would say, “deliver,” and if your tastes run to some of these “pre-Modern” authors, or Maupassant, or the shorter Dostoevsky, then these are probably for you.

  The shorter stories have more in the way of obvious action: they turn on such things as duels and gaming debts, seduction, dishonor, betrayal, and sudden death. None of it is particularly serious; it’s as though even in his prose, Schnitzler is still the playwright, putting on a spectacle, amusing his audience. He gives you protagonists but not characters. With very few exceptions, the young men and officers and professional types and married women and harlots in his stories seem to cry out for actors and actresses to give them a little reality. Schnitzler himself noted that he was more interested in “cases” than in individuals. This can be attributed to his analytical, if not cynical, cast of mind, and his medical objectivity—his father was a doctor, and he himself practiced, briefly—but I feel it more as a literary shortcoming in him. (Certainly, it’s not something one can say about Chekhov, who was also a doctor.) There is not the increment in inwardness or intensity one might expect from the private form; but as I observed earlier, this is still social writing. One reads with suspense, pleasure, sometimes amusement during the more extravagantly cynical stories (“Baron von Leisenbohg’s Destiny”) but without any profounder attachment or vulnerability.

  As a writer, it seems to me Schnitzler has two somewhat contradictory principal gifts: he is methodical, and he loves to surprise. In the novellas in Desire and Delusion, written somewhat later, the emphasis is on the former, perhaps as a deeper, more reputable quality in literature. The first two pieces observe a long process to its culmination. In Flight into Darkness, it’s the morbidly suspicious nature of Robert, the central figure, finally erupting in a murderous attack; in Dying, which is a much better story, it’s the progression of Felix’s fatal illness and its effect on himself and his sweetheart, Marie. The illness, or the prognosis, destabilizes their relationship; it’s almost like a ménage à trois. Here, Schnitzler is absolutely intent and believable; if there’s a shock, it’s the shock of truth, not a coup de théâtre. The fluent array of feelings he shows in his couple is kaleidoscopic: “Marie did not stir from the sickbed. What an endless afternoon it was! Through the window, which was left open upon explicit orders from the doctor, came the gentle odors of the garden. And it was so quiet! Marie mechanically followed the dance of the sunbeams on the floor. Felix held her hand almost without interruption. His own was cool and moist and gave Marie an unpleasant sensation.” All life and all pleasure are away from him. It’s a wonderfully—savagely—surprising end to quite an idyllic little passage.

  The third novella, Fräulein Else, is some sort of masterpiece. It makes it into the literary histories as the earliest sustained example of stream-of-consciousness writing in German—or even outside French! (Dujardin’s Les Lauriers sont coupés from 1888 was the first; Schnitzler’s earlier story from 1900, “Lieutenant Gustl,” had been a lesser assay.) Description can’t really do justice to this piece. One would like it to go on forever. The feeling is like being behind someone else’s frontal bone. Else is a pretty seventeen-year-old, on holiday in the Tirol with wealthier cousins. When the story begins, she’s abandoning a tennis match to go back to the hotel; a telegram has advised her to expect an express letter from her mother. The news turns out to be dire: her father is in sudden urgent need of a large sum of money; the parents have tried all the avenues open to them in Vienna, without any success; then it occurs to her mother that one Herr von Dorsday, a wealthy art dealer staying at the same hotel, who might even be thought to owe them a favor, could be approached by Else. It’s a typical Schnitzler setup (the one in Night Games is similar), but because it’s told in the first person, and in real time, the accusations of melodramatic contrivance and shallow characterization fall away. Nor can Schnitzler do without his usual surprise—another telegram arrives halfway through to say the required sum is not thirty thousand but fifty thousand gulden—but that little ratcheting doesn’t really matter.

  One can quote from almost anywhere in the story to catch the speed and brightness of the girl’s mind and her desire to have some sort of effect on life now both perverted and made more urgent by the sudden exigency: “The Alpine glow has faded. The evening is no longer gorgeous. The whole place seems dreary. No, it’s not the place. It’s life itself. And I’m sitting here calmly on the windowsill. Papa is to be locked up. No. Never, never. He mustn’t be. I’ll save him. Yes, Papa, I’ll save you. It’s very easy, after all. Just a few nonchalant words—I’m good at that.”

  I notice that both the passages I’ve quoted are couched in terse, powerful sentences. That isn’t typical; generally, Schnitzler’s prose is a bit long-winded. It can be read with pleasure and ease, but rarely with delight. He hasn’t been helped by his translator, whose work I found stodgy, without the suavity that makes the long-windedness bearable, and with diction that’s both dull and uncertain. I don’t know that you can “contemplate phrases” as you’re preparing to speak; to be concerned with one’s “postmortem reputation” doesn’t sound right to me, nor does “the multifaceted sound of people talking.” “She couldn’t banish the feeling of well-being that had begun to pervade her whole being” is pretty calamitous, especially when the next sentence is, “She just felt good.” A character “gave the room a cursory inspection,” only, again in the next sentence, to find “It was roomy…” The dictionary will offer “compulsion” and “attitude”—probably two of the most skewed words in English right now—for “Zwang” and “Haltung”—so in the context of a passage in praise of dueling they’
re unusable. These are all tiny things, not ruinous by any means, but still they add up over the course of a book or two books. It comes down to tact, or feel. Here are two excerpts from “Dream Story,” the first is Margret Schaefer’s translation, the second is by J.M.Q. Davies:

  “‘It’s nine o’clock,’ the father said. ‘Time for bed.’ And as Albertine had also bent down to her, the parent’s [sic] hands now met on the beloved forehead, and their glances met with a tender smile no longer meant only for the child.”

  “‘Nine o’clock,’ said her father, ‘time for bed.’ And as Albertine too had now bent over the child, the parents’ hands touched as they fondly stroked her brow, and, with a tender smile that was no longer intended solely for the child, their eyes met.”

  Which is the better one? Well, I would suggest it’s the one that doesn’t use “met” twice, that doesn’t contain “the beloved forehead,” that permits touching, and that doesn’t end with the child. (What happens next isn’t going to involve it.) It’s no great mystery, and nothing much to do with German. Both “translate” the German, but I’m afraid only one of them writes English.

  THOMAS BERNHARD

  The Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) once said: “You have to understand that in my writing the musical component comes first, and the subject matter is secondary.” It’s a strange thing for the professional controversialist and Austropathic ranter to say—somebody who bombards us with content, and bombards content, and bombards us—that we should attend to the form, balance, and measure in his work, when everything in it would seem to lead to the giggle and gasp of hurt given or received, or the hush and squeal of scandal, but it is sound advice. Before we talk about the quality of the opinions, or the kilotonnage of the diatribes, or the relentlessness of the perspective (is anything exempt?), we ought to talk about the patterns of repetition and variation of the unspooling sentences in the unparagraphed prose. If Bernhard is anything, he is a stuck harpsichord record, bleeding and knocking out its trapped and staggered shards of shrilly hammered phrases.

  Old Masters (1985) is Bernhard’s penultimate novel. It comes before Extinction and after Cutting Timber (also known as Woodcutting and Woodcutters), which was seized on publication, because the couple who thought they recognized themselves in it, the Lampersbergs, old friends of Bernhard, had an injunction taken out against it. (Publicity not being an advantage to them in their circumstances, they eventually relented.) Old Masters is typical of Bernhard in that it is both a parodically eccentric version—it’s not sure, or one isn’t sure, as often in Bernhard, if it’s a skit or a pured, laboratory version—of life, but it is at the same time reassuringly solidly mounted. A Bernhard novel is a bizarrely skewed but immediately familiar planet, whose rules and concerns we grasp as readily as those of Le Petit Prince. Old Masters takes place in a single location, more or less in real time, and yet is able to take in its purview most things under the sun. Come to think of it, including even the sun: “He avoids the sun, there is nothing he shuns more than the sun,” it says in Ewald Osers’s calm and thoughtful translation. Nothing happens, and little is revealed; it is mostly talk and remembered talk, and thought and remembered thought.

  Reger, music philosopher and for the past thirty-four years Vienna music critic for the Times of London, for which he knocks out (as he complacently puts it) “those brief works of art which are never longer than two pages” (could there ever be such a figure!?), recently widowed, has summoned his friend Atzbacher to meet him at half past eleven in the Bordone Room in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where, for many years, he has been in the habit of holding court every other day—a court of one, or one and a half—and where, mostly coincidentally, Tintoretto’s painting White-Bearded Man hangs: Atzbacher, the younger man, working on some chronic and unpublished work of philosophy, and very much in thrall to the domineering Reger (“my imaginary father”), comes to the museum an hour early, so that he can stand next door in the Sebastiano Room and, as it were, warm up by observing Reger without himself being seen; watch his interactions with the museum attendant Irrsigler (“Jenö!”) whom Reger has, over the years, converted into a sort of auxiliary personal retainer as he has made the settee in the Bordone Room into a sort of exclusive public headquarters and thinking place for himself; and replay their old conversations to himself, and Reger’s trenchant views on this and that. At the set time, Atzbacher appears—he knows the value Reger places upon punctuality—and the conversation—no longer remembered or reconstructed, but “live” or “actual”—is intensified, until the book ends with a cautious stab at a little more of the world: Reger has—ill-advisedly in view of much that has gone before—purchased a couple of theater tickets and invites Atzbacher to take in a show with him. It is Kleist’s comedy The Broken Pitcher at the Burgtheater. “The performance was terrible,” notes Atzbacher in the book’s last put-down. It is a real ending, slight but real, no mean feat.

  It’s a personal thing, but also an Austrian thing. In The Man Without Qualities, Musil says, “The man of genius is duty-bound to attack.” Perhaps it’s the sweetness and pleasingness of the rest of the culture that means that anything honest or anything good will always be critical. Anyway, Bernhard has always had his superior ranters spitting pessimism and disaffection, leaving, as Germans say, “not a good hair” on anything or anyone. They are said to be based, in life, on Bernhard’s grandfather, the totally obscure Austrian writer Johannes Freumbichler who, as the English say, “took him in hand,” and to whose memory and example he remained devoted. The role of the baobab in St.-Exupéry is played by the grandfather in Bernhard. Gathering Evidence, Bernhard’s five-part autobiographical memoir, begins with the eight-year-old Bernhard borrowing his “guardian’s” (a nervous word for the man who later became his stepfather) bicycle, which is several sizes too big for him, and making a doomed attempt to ride it up hill and down dale to his grandfather’s house in another town. It seems probable to me that the re-valuation of all values (Nietzsche) required to make one a writer took place very early in Bernhard’s life, when he decided that Freumbichler was not a talentless wastrel who made life miserable for everyone around him (which seems on the face of it a view with much to commend it) but a misunderstood genius whose every word was worth recording; and by the same token that the world was not mostly a dim and well-meaning sort of place, higgledy-piggledy and inefficient but broadly correct and, in any case, hopelessly set in its ways, but a sinister and perverted conspiracy that produced only deformed individuals and institutions and that should be opposed and exposed every step of the way, ideally by a grand, insouciant, terrifying, and old soliloquist (and the greatest of these, somehow, is old: master is good, but old is better, in age only is our salvation, and Bernhard, alas for himself, did not live to be old). If the whole world, all received opinion, all authority, all ease and rewards are in one pannier, one’s duty is to jump into the other without even looking, Jeanne Moreau–style. The unwritten motto of Bernhard, in life and work, is contra mundum. In other books, this Freumbichler figure takes on the world or its Austrian microcosm by himself in arias of virtuosic hatred, here it is more the braiding of Reger’s dominant voice with the alert, repertorial voice of Atzbacher, and the copying voice of Irrsigler, who has, “over the years, appropriated verbatim many, if not all, of Reger’s sentences,” in a sort of lopsided barbershop trio. One that sings, as it were, only the black notes.