Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

by Milan Kundera

  "So I cannot let you make cuts in Jeu de cartes: I think it is better not to play it at all than to do so with reservations.

  "I have nothing to add, period."

  On October 15, Ansermet's reply:

  "I ask only if you would forgive me the small cut in the March from the second measure after 45 to the second measure after 58."

  Stravinsky reacted on October 19:

  "… I am sorry, but I cannot allow you any cuts in Jeu de cartes.

  "The absurd one that you propose cripples my little March, which has its form and its structural meaning in the totality of the composition (a structural meaning that you claim to be protecting). You cut my March only because you like the middle section and the development less than the rest. In my view, this is not sufficient reason, and I would like to say: 'But you're not in your own house, my dear fellow'; I never told you: "Here, take my score and do whatever you please with it.'

  "I repeat: either you play Jeu de cartes as it is or you do not play it at all.

  "You do not seem to have understood that my letter of October 14 was quite categorical on this point."

  Thereafter they exchanged only a few letters, chilly, laconic. In 1961 Ansermet published in Switzerland a voluminous book of musicology, including a lengthy chapter that is an attack on the insensitivity of Stravinsky's music (and his incompetence as a conductor). Only in 1966 (twenty-nine years after their dispute) was there this brief response from Stravinsky to a conciliatory letter from Ansermet:

  "My dear Ansermet,

  "Your letter touched me. We are both too old not to think about the end of our days; and I would not want to end these days with the painful burden of an enmity."

  An archetypal phrase for an archetypal situation:

  often toward the end of their lives, friends who have failed one another will call off their hostility this way, coldly, without quite becoming friends again.

  It's clear what was at stake in the dispute that wrecked the friendship: Stravinsky s authors rights, his moral rights; the anger of an author who will not stand for anyone tampering with his work; and, on the other side, the annoyance of a performer who cannot tolerate the authors proud behavior and tries to limit his power.

  2

  As I listen to Leonard Bernstein's recording of he Sacre du printemps, something seems odd about the famous lyrical passage for E-flat clarinet in the "Rondes print-anieres"; I turn to the score:

  In Bernstein's performance, this becomes:

  The novel charm of the passage above lies in the tension between the melodic lyricism and the rhythm, which is both mechanical and weirdly irregular; if this rhythm is not executed exactly, with clockwork precision, if it is rubatoed, if the last note of each phrase is stretched out (which Bernstein does), the tension disappears and the passage becomes commonplace.

  I think of Ansermet's sarcasms. I prefer Stravinsky's performance, a hundred times over, even if he does push "his music stand up against the podium rail… and counts time."

  3

  In his book on Janacek, Jaroslav Vogel, himself a conductor, discusses Kovarovic's alterations to the score of Jenufa. He approves them and defends them. An astonishing attitude, for even if Kovarovics alterations were useful, good, or sensible, they are unacceptable in principle, and the very idea of arbitrating between a creators version and one by his corrector (censor, adapter) is perverse. Without a doubt, this or that sentence of A la recherche du temps perdu could be better written. But where could you find the lunatic who would want to read an improved Proust?

  Besides, Kovarovics alterations are anything but good or sensible. As proof of their soundness, Vogel cites the last scene of the opera, where, after the discovery of her murdered child and the arrest of her stepmother, Jenufa is alone with Laca. Jealous of her love for Steva, his half-brother Laca had earlier slashed Jenufa's face; now Jenufa forgives him: it was

  out of love that he had injured her, just as she herself had sinned out of love:

  The allusion to her love for Steva, "as I once did," is delivered very rapidly, like a short cry, in high notes that rise and break off; as if Jenufa is evoking something she wants to forget immediately. Kovarovic broadens the melody of this passage (he "makes it bloom," as Vogel says) by transforming it like this:

  Doesn't Jenufa's song, asks Vogel, become more beautiful under Kovarovic's pen? And isn't it still completely Janacekian? Yes, if you wanted to fake Janacek, you couldn't do better. Nonetheless, the added melody is absurd. Whereas in Janacek, Jenufa recalls her "sin" rapidly, with suppressed horror, in Kovarovic she grows tender at the recollection, she lingers over it, she is moved by it (her song stretches out the words "love," "I," and "once did"). So there to Laca's face she sings of her yearning for Steva, Laca's rival-she sings of her love for Steva, the cause of all her misery!

  How could Vogel, a passionate supporter of Janacek's, defend such psychological nonsense? How could he sanction it, when he knew that Janacek's aesthetic rebellion is rooted precisely in his rejection of the psychological unrealism current in opera practice? How is it possible to love someone and at the same time misunderstand him so completely?

  4

  Still-and here Vogel is right-by making the opera a little more conventional, Kovarovic's alterations did contribute to its success. "Let us distort you a bit, Maestro, and they'll love you." But there comes a time when the maestro refuses to be loved at such cost and would rather be detested and understood.

  What means does an author have at his disposal to make himself understood for what he is? Hermann Broch hadn't many in the 1930s and in an Austria cut off from Germany turned fascist, nor later on in the loneliness of emigration: a few lectures explaining his aesthetic of the novel; then letters to friends, to his readers, to his publishers, to his translators; he left nothing undone, taking great care, for instance, over the copy on his book jackets. In a letter to his publisher, he protests a proposal for a promotional line on the back cover of his novel The Sleepwalkers that would compare him to Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Italo Svevo. His counterproposal: that he be compared to Joyce and Gide.

  Let's look at this proposal: what is actually the difference between the Broch-Svevo-Hofmannsthal context and the Broch-Joyce-Gide context? The first con-

  text is literary in the broad, diffuse sense of the word; the second is specifically novelistic (the Gide of The Counterfeiters is the one Broch is claiming connection to). The first context is a small context-that is, local, Central European. The second is a large context-that is, international, global. By setting himself alongside Joyce and Gide, Broch is demanding that his novel be seen in the context of the European novel; he is aware that The Sleepwalkers, like Ulysses or The Counterfeiters., is a work that revolutionizes the novel form, that creates a new aesthetic of the novel, and that can be understood only against the backdrop of the history of the novel as such.

  This demand of Broch's is valid for every important work. I can't repeat it too often: the value and the meaning of a work can be appreciated only in the greater international context. That truth becomes particularly pressing for any artist who is relatively isolated. A French surrealist, a "nouveau roman" author, a naturalistic nineteenth-century writer-all were borne along by a generation, by a movement, known throughout the world; their aesthetic program preceded their work, so to speak. But what about Gombrowicz-where does he fit in? How are people to understand his aesthetic?

  He left his country in 1939, at the age of thirty-five. For his credential as an artist, he brought with him only one book, his novel Ferdydurke, an ingenious work barely known in Poland, totally unknown elsewhere. He landed far from Europe, in Argentina. He was unimaginably alone. The great Argentine writers never came near him. Later, the Polish anti-Communist emigres had little curiosity about his art. For fourteen

  years, nothing happened to him, and then in 1953 he began to write and publish his Diary. It doesn't tell us much about his life, it is primarily a statement of his position, a continuing
aesthetic and philosophic self-interpretation, a handbook on his "strategy"-or better yet, it is his testament; not that he was thinking, at the time, of his death: but as a last, definitive wish he wanted to establish his own understanding of himself and his work.

  He demarcated his position by three key refusals: a refusal to submit to engagement in Polish emigre politics (not that he had pro-Communist sympathies but because the principle of politically engaged art was repugnant to him); a refusal of Polish tradition (one can make something worthwhile for Poland, he said, only by opposing "Polishness," by shaking off its heavy Romantic legacy); lastly, a refusal of the Western modernism of the 1950s and '60s-a modernism he saw as sterile, "unfaithful to reality," ineffectual in the art of the novel, academic, snobbish, absorbed in its self-theorizing (not that Gombrowicz was less modern, but his modernism was different in nature). That third "clause of the testament" is most important and decisive-and is also doggedly misunderstood.

  Ferdydurke was published in 1937, a year before Nausea., but as Gombrowicz was unknown and Sartre famous, Nausea, so to speak, usurped Gombrowicz's rightful place in the history of the novel. Whereas Nausea is existential philosophy in a novels clothing (as if a professor had decided to entertain his drowsy students by teaching the lesson in the form of a novel), Gombrowicz wrote a real novel that ties into the old

  comic-novel tradition (as in Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding), and so existential issues, about which he was no less passionate than Sartre, come across in his book as unserious and funny.

  Ferdydurke is one of those major works (along with The Sleepwalkers and The Man Without Qualities) that I see as inaugurating the "third (or overtime) period" of the novel's history, by reviving the forgotten experience of the pre-Balzac novel and by taking over domains previously reserved for philosophy. That Nausea, not Ferdydurke, became the exemplar of that new orientation has had unfortunate consequences: the wedding night of philosophy and the novel was spent in mutual boredom. Discovered some twenty or thirty years after their creation, Gombrowicz's works, and Broch's and Musil's (and certainly Kafka's), no longer had the potency required to seduce a generation and create a movement; interpreted by a different aesthetic school, which in many regards stood opposed to them, they were respected-even admired-but ill understood, such that the greatest shift in the history of the twentieth-century novel went unnoticed.

  5

  As I've said before, this was also the case with Janacek. Max Brod put himself at Janacek's service as he had at Kafka's: with selfless ardor. He deserves praise: he gave himself over to the two greatest artists ever to live in my native land. Kafka and Janacek: both underrated; both with an aesthetic difficult to apprehend; both victims of the pettiness of their milieu. Prague

  represented an enormous handicap for Kafka. He was isolated there from the German literary and publishing world, and that was fatal for him. His publishers concerned themselves very little with this author whom they barely knew personally. In a book on this problem, Joachim Unseld, the son of a leading German publisher, shows that the most likely reason (I consider the idea very realistic) why Kafka left his novels unfinished is that no one was asking him for them. Because if an author has no definite prospect of publishing his manuscript, nothing forces him to put the finishing touches on it, nothing keeps him from moving it off his desk for the time being and going on to something else.

  To the Germans, Prague was just a provincial town, like Brno to the Czechs. Both Kafka and Janacek were therefore provincials. Kafka was nearly unknown in this country whose population was alien to him, while Janacek, in the same country, was trivialized by his own people.

  Anyone who wants to understand the aesthetic incompetence of the founder of Kafkology should read Brod's monograph on Janacek. An enthusiastic work, it was certainly a great help to the underrated master. But how weak it is, how naive! with its lofty words-"cosmos," "love," "compassion," "humiliated and insulted," "divine music," "hypersensitive soul," "tender soul," "soul of a dreamer"-and without the slightest structural analysis, the slightest attempt to get at the particular aesthetic of Janacek's music. Knowing musical Prague's hatred for the composer from the provinces, Brod wanted to prove that Janacek belonged to the national tradition and that he was every bit as good as the great Smetana, idol of the Czech national ideology.

  He became so obsessed by this provincial, narrow-minded, Czech-focused polemic that the rest of world music slipped out of his book, and of all composers of all periods, the only one mentioned is Smetana.

  Ah, Max, Max! It's no good rushing into the other team's territory! All you'll find there are a hostile mob and bribed referees! Brod failed to utilize his position as a non-Czech to place Janacek in the large context, the cosmopolitan context of European music, the only one where he could be defended and understood; he locked him back within his national horizon, cut him off from modern music, and sealed his isolation. Such first interpretations stick to a work, it never shakes them off. Just as Brod's ideas would forever color all the literature on Kafka, so Janacek would forever suffer from the provincialization inflicted on him by his compatriots and confirmed by Brod.

  Brod the enigma. He loved Janacek; he was guided by no ulterior motive, only by the spirit of justice; he loved him for the essential, for his art. But he did not understand that art.

  I will never get to the bottom of the Brod mystery. And Kafka?-what did he think? In his 1911 diary, he tells this story: one day the two of them went to see a cubist painter, Willi Nowak, who had just finished a series of lithograph portraits of Brod; in the Picasso pattern as we know it, the first drawing was realistic, whereas the others, says Kafka, moved further and further off from their subject and wound up extremely abstract. Brod was uncomfortable; he didn't like any of the drawings except for the realistic first one, which, by contrast, pleased him greatly because, Kafka notes with tender irony, "beyond its looking

  like him, it had noble and serene lines around the mouth and eyes…"

  Brod understood cubism as little as he understood Kafka and Janacek. Doing his best to free them from their social isolation, he confirmed their aesthetic aloneness. The real meaning of his devotion to them was: even a person who loved them, and thus was most disposed to understand them, was alien to their art.

  6

  I am always surprised by peoples amazement over Kafka's (alleged) decision to destroy all his work. As if such a decision were a priori absurd. As if an author could not have reasons enough to take his work along with him on his last voyage.

  It could in fact happen that on final assessment the author realizes that he dislikes his books. And that he does not want to leave behind him this dismal monument of his failure. I know, I know, you'll object he is mistaken, that he is giving in to an unhealthy depression, but your exhortations are meaningless. He's in his own house with that work, not you, my dear fellow!

  Another plausible reason: the author still loves his work but not the world. He can't bear the idea of leaving the work here to the mercy of a future he considers hateful.

  And yet another possibility: the author still loves his work and doesn't even think about the future of the world, but having had his own experiences with the public, he understands the vanitas vanitatum of art, the inevitable incomprehension that is his lot, the

  incomprehension (not underestimation, I'm not talking about personal vanity) he has suffered during his lifetime and that he doesn't want to go on suffering post mortem. (It may incidentally be only the brevity of life that keeps artists from understanding fully the futility of their labor and making arrangements in time for the obliteration of both their work and themselves.)

  Aren't these all valid reasons? Of course. Yet they weren't Kafka's reasons: he was aware of the value of what he was writing, he had no declared repugnance for the world, and-too young and nearly unknown- he had had no bad experiences with the public, having had almost none at all.

  7

  Kafka's testament: not a testament in the p
recise legal sense; actually two private letters; and not even true letters, in that they were never posted. Brod, who was Kafka's legal executor, found them after his friend's death, in 1924, in a drawer among a mass of other papers: one in ink, folded and addressed to Brod, the other more detailed and written in pencil. In his "Postscript to the First Edition" of The Trial, Brod explains: "In 1921… I told my friend that I had made a will in which I asked him to destroy certain things [dieses unci jenes vernichten], to look through some others, and so forth. Kafka thereupon showed me the outside of the note written in ink which was later found in his desk, and said: 'My last testament will be very simple: a request that you burn everything.' I can still remember the exact wording of the answer I gave

  him: '… I'm telling you right now that I won't carry out your wishes." Brod evokes this recollection to justify disobeying his friend's testamentary wish; Kafka, he continues, "knew what fanatical veneration I had for his every word"; so he was well aware that he would not be obeyed and he "should have chosen another executor if his own instructions were unconditionally and finally in earnest." But is that so certain? In his own testament, Brod was asking Kafka "to destroy certain things "; why then wouldn't Kafka have considered it normal to request the same service of Brod? And if Kafka really knew that he would not be obeyed, why, after their conversation in 1921, did he write that second, penciled letter, in which he elaborates his instructions and makes them specific? But let's drop it: we'll never know what these two young friends said to each other on a subject that was, by the way, not their most urgent concern, since neither one of them, and Kafka especially, could at the time consider himself in serious danger of immortality.