A Man of Letters, page 36
One can see, after this, why Musil has been compared with Proust – though, if the translation is to be relied upon, he does not write as well – yet, where Proust seeks to crystallise a past, Musil is always pushing through that strange undergrowth to find out, if possible, where he is, where life is tending, and what is the explanation. His book is a crab-wise search for a future, for what has not yet been given the sleeping draught.
In the first half of Part One of the novel the time and scene are the Vienna of the Austrian Empire. The main episodes are Ulrich’s love affairs with the guzzling singer and with a rueful nymphomaniac; his friendship with a gifted but unstable girl and with a superb bourgeois lady, notorious for mind, whom he calls Diotima, and who goes in for the True, the Good, the Beautiful on the grand scale. Diotima is a monument, an outsize schoolgirl. But the larger themes are political and social. Before long we have, by brilliant implication, an amusing but moving picture of a complete society whose intentions become nobler the nearer it is to destruction. Nobler and more absurd. For Musil has invented a wonderful farce called the Collateral Campaign. This vague political movement is meant somehow and simultaneously to celebrate the Emperor’s birthday, boost Austrian culture – with a meaning glance at the Germans – preserve the stagnant existing order and yet arise spontaneously from the hearts of the common people and bring new spiritual life to the greatest minds desiccated by scepticism, intellectualism, etc. In short it is an all-purpose piece of uplift which is touchingly sincere and hopelessly muddled. It is very fond of the word ‘true’ – not patriotism but ‘true’ patriotism, not values but ‘true’ values. The comic beauty of the Collateral Campaign is that it can never settle on its precise form; it swells into committees, exhausts all the cliches, and turns into its opposite: a movement for chauvinism and rearmament. Really it is a midwife of Fascism. Nothing is more certain of comic reward than Musil’s sympathy. It is tender and deadly.
The people of the Collateral Campaign are ‘good’. They are responsible. They represent ‘the best elements’. They can choose. They choose ridiculously. But what of the bad, the irresponsible who cannot choose – a man like the homicidal maniac Moosbrugger who may or may not be executed? (He wants to be executed because he has an almost pettifogging regard for the law.) The Moosbrugger case puts its shadow on all the characters in the book and one of Musil’s feats as a novelist is to show us exactly how Moosbrugger seeps into every mind in some way or other. If society is tending towards progress what is it going to do about this Caliban? Ulrich reflects; ‘If mankind could dream collectively it would dream Moosbrugger.’ If we do not know by what absolute standards to settle the Moosbrugger case, then a great social catastrophe is inevitable. Writing in the ‘twenties Musil could hardly have been more prophetic.
There is an interesting account of Musil’s life in the very good introduction to the Wilkins and Kaiser translation of his novel. He came, we are told, of a gifted family. He was educated for the Army, fought in the 1914 war, became a civil engineer, a distinguished inventor, a mathematician, a psychologist, and was about to teach philosophy at Munich before he turned to writing. Musil brought to his writing not only the capacity for seeing but also the habit of hypothesis. Ulrich is, in many ways, Musil translated. In his several attempts to define what he means by ‘the man without qualities’, he notes,
He will perform actions that mean something different to him from what they mean to others, but is reassured about everything as soon as it can be summed up in an extraordinary idea.
Or again, the translators give us these lines from the page he was adding to the last volume of his novel on the day he died:
Of course it was clear to him that the two kinds of human being … could mean nothing else than a man without qualities and, in contrast, the man with all the qualities that anyone could manage to display. And the one might be called a nihilist, dreaming of God’s dreams – in contrast to the activist who is, however, with his impatient way of acting, a kind of God’s dreamer too, and anything but a realist, who goes about being worldly clear and worldly active.
Consciousness was Musil’s real subject, not the ‘stream’ but the architecture, the process of building, stylising and demolishing that goes on in the mind. How does an idea like the Collateral Campaign grow in various minds? How, sensuously, does it breed? At what point does sensation become idea? How does reality look after that intoxication? These things bring out Musil’s alacrity and focusing power as a novelist; for though he never stops talking he always enacts what he sees. He has a poetic yet practical ability for showing an idea coming to someone – a slow-minded and simple aristocrat, a blackamoor servant, a woman beginning to feel indignation and remorse in love, any transition in fact from one state of consciousness to another. He has the merit of loving people for their essence. There is, to take one example, a striking study of that special bourgeois protege, the failed artist who takes to blaming his failure on the collapse of culture. From a hero he has turned into a petty domestic tyrant and rules his wife, who has ceased to love him, by making her play duets on the piano. Their marriage is sustained by a neurotic frenzy of piano-playing:
The next moment Clarisse and Walter shot away like two railway engines racing side by side. The music that they were playing came flying towards their eyes like the glittering rails, then vanished under the thundering engine and spread out behind them, as a chiming, resonant, miraculously permanent landscape.... Precise to a fraction of a second, gaiety, sadness, anger, fear, love and hatred, longing and weariness went flying through Walter and Clarisse. It was a union like in a great panic. But it was not the same mindless, overwhelming force that life has....
The more music sublimely unites them, the more they are separated in life, each thinking his way away from the other. Walter, the rejected husband, fearing failure and impotence, begins to slip into thoughts comfortably too large for him, and ends by playing Wagner for erotic reassurance. Here he begins to strike wrong notes. Claris-se’s mind jumps from image to image and to questions becoming more and more savage: does civilised life yearn for brutality? Does peacefulness call for cruelty? For there is an empty room in Clarisse where ‘something tore at the chains’. At the end of this volume we get a glimpse of that empty room.
In making raids into Musil’s novel one risks either making it sound thin or melodramatic in the heavy Central European way; a pound of realism to a ton of essay-writing. He is, on the contrary, subtle, light, liquid, serious. He is, no doubt, a bit over-fond of himself, perhaps a bit too tolerant to the T who is never brought up against anything stronger than itself; a bit too much on the spot, especially in the love affairs. What the novel does show is that the habit of intellectual analysis is not stultifying to drama, movement or invention, but enhances them. It is a delightful insight that a movement like the Collateral Campaign, which has no distinctive idea, will inevitably attract all those people in the Austrian Empire who have only one idea; it is perfect that Ulrich shall be put in charge of sorting out these cranks. His theories, the whole apparatus of the book, are the forgiveness of the artist, not the examination papers of the master. Consciousness is, for him, a pardonable folly. Some critics have discerned what they believe to be a mythological foundation to this novel, in the manner of Ulysses; the density, suggestiveness and range could support the view. For it is cunningly engineered. The second volume of The Man Without Qualities sustains the impression of a major writer of comedy in the Viennese manner, and of an original imagination.
A French friend of Musil’s, M. Bernard Guillemin, suggests that what Musil meant by ‘a man without qualities’ (Mann ohne Eigen-schaften) was ‘a man completely disengaged and uncommitted or a man in quest of non-accidental attributes and responsibilities selfchosen – the German counterpart of Gide’s “homme disponible” though there is nothing of Gide in Musil’s work’. In the later volumes, it is said to have worried Musil himself that a character as disengaged as Ulrich is will eventually become isolated and by passed by life. The sense of adventure which exhilarates the early volumes becomes paralysed in the later ones, where the intellectually liberated man is not able to take the next step into ‘right action’. It is significant that Musil’s novel was never finished. He had spun a brilliant web of perceptions round himself and was imprisoned by them.
In this second volume, the absurd Collateral Campaign is still going on in Austria, Diotima, the lofty-minded Egeria, who runs the social side, discovers the ‘soul’ just as she is getting tired of her husband, a high government official. She has risen out of the middle classes into aristocratic society, and she plants this idea of the soul in an international financier and arms manufacturer, a German called Arnheim. There are Generals who come in because ‘the Army must keep an eye on things’; Diotima’s social rivals appear to keep an eye on her, and so on. There is a wonderfully complete picture of a society at the edge of the precipice of 1914. The novelist’s comic sense of character is speculative, and is strengthened by his penetration into the kinds of consciousness current at the time, into how private ideas become public, and public ideas affect the emotions of private life.
In the meantime, the Moosbrugger case – Moosbrugger is the homicidal sex maniac awaiting execution – underlies the social picture and makes its own disturbing footnotes. What about the law’s attitude to insanity in murder; what about violence in the state, in personal life? At the most unexpected moments, Moosbrugger – who is merely a name in the papers to most of the characters – raises his idiot head and poses his devastating questions. ‘Ordinary life,’ Ulrich concludes, ‘is an intermediate state made up of all our possible crimes.’ So Musil dresses a platitude in epigrammatic form; he becomes rather free with epigrams; but his gift is to enact epigrams imaginatively.
In this volume the analysis of character is done at much greater length than in the introductory volume and so there is more discussion and less action. Of the portraits, Arnheim’s and the absurd yet subtle General’s are the most impressive, but we must not omit the girl Gerda and her lover who are moving towards an early form of Fascism. Musil’s Arnheim is by far the most cogent and exhaustive study of a millionaire magnate’s mind that I have ever read. The irony is exact and continuous. Arnheim, for example, had ‘the gift of being a paragon’:
Through his understanding of this delicate interlocking of all forms of life, which only the blind arrogance of the ideologist can forget, Arnheim came to see the prince of commerce as the synthesis of revolution and permanence, of armed power and bourgeois civilisation, of reasoned audacity and honest to goodness knowledge, but essentially as a symbolic prefiguration of the kind of democracy that was about to come into existence … he hoped to meet the new age half-way.
Under the influence of his love for Diotima, Arnheim seeks to bring about the ‘fusion of interests between Business and the Soul’. His craving for power leads him to writing books: ‘with positively spectral prolixity’ his pen began to pour out reflections on ‘the need of this fusion’ and ‘it is equally certain that his ambition to master all there was to be known … found in the soul a means of devaluing everything that his intellect could not master’. Arnheim is morally devastated by his love for Diotima, for she is monumentally high-minded; and Musil has the pleasure of showing us a sumptuous, high-minded femme du monde reduced to the frantic condition of a woman forced to the bed of a testy, cynical husband, and a magnate paradoxically reverting to his native instincts the more his ‘soul’ is elevated. All roads leave from the soul, Musil reflects, but none lead back to it: Arnheim is no more than a magnate after all and, once Diotima can be his, he falls back on the old maxim that in love, as in business, one had better spend only the interest, not the capital. Arnheim’s character reminds one of Walter Bagehot’s dictum that a kind of intellectual twilight, with all its vagueness, is necessary to the man of business and, towards the end of this volume, Musil reveals what Arnheim is really after in the ideological mists of the Collateral Campaign and the higher life of Diotima: he is after control of the Galician oilfields,
Ulrich, the man without qualities, is the natural enemy of Arnheim; his natural foil is the comic General. An air of unworldliness in civilian life is an obligatory mask of the military profession; all ‘a poor soldier man’ may permit himself to point out is that, if the military have a virtue, it is their sense of order. There is a farcical scene of discussion when this soldier describes his visit to the National Library where he approaches the whole task of improving his mind in the spirit of the strategist. The General is a wit in his way. Even after a carefully worked-out campaign of reading, in which he allows for substantial casualties, he discovers it will still take him 10,000 years to read what is necessary. ‘There must be something wrong about that,’ he says, raising his glass of brandy.
Musil writes with the heightened sensibility of a man in love; that is to say, under the influence of the unrest of seeking a harmony and completion in things. The Collateral Campaign itself is a kind of communal love affair. In the description of love affairs and especially in the portraits of women in love, Musil is truly original; in managing scenes of physical love, he has not been approached by any writer of the last fifty years. What has been missing, in those accounts, has been Musil’s transcendent subject: the sense of the changing architecture of consciousness. He brings the effect of the imagination into the fears and desires of these women, their sense of living out an idea which may indeed well be a love fantasy about quite a different lover from the one in whose bed they lie. He is sensitive to the power of ‘erotic distraction’. Of Rachel, the maid who goes to bed with a fellow servant because she has been stirred by the touch of a guest’s hand, he writes:
The object of this yearning was actually Ulrich, and Solimon was cast in the role of the man whom one does not love and to whom one will nevertheless abandon oneself – a point on which Rachel was in no sort of doubt whatsoever. For the fact that she was not allowed to be with him, that for some time past they had hardly ever spoken to each other except in a whisper, and that the displeasure of those in authority over them had descended upon them both, had much the effect on her as a night full of uncertainty, uncanny happenings, and sighs has on anyone in love; it all concentrated her smouldering fancies like a burning glass, the beam of which is felt less as an agreeable warmth than as something one will not be able to stand much longer.
The high-minded love affair, the violently neurotic, the absurd one, the desperate affair carried on against the will, the one crossed by other lives; from all these Musil extracts the essence with dignity and gaiety, the comi-tragedy of human loss and incompleteness. The history of love is the history of absence, of arrival and departure. He is able to do what no contemporary ever does: to move from the imaginative and emotional to the physical without change of voice; even the naked fight on the bed or the brazen or terrified undressings are not marred by the worst fault of our erotic realism: its unconscious grotesque. The tenderness, subtlety and disinterestedness of Musil’s intelligence enable him to do this; and the almost conversational style. Critics tell us that, whatever the awkwardness of translation may be, he has in German a style that is as lucid as that of Anatole France and less florid than Proust’s. One cannot judge this, though the translation of the second volume seems to me an improvement on the first. (The whole difficulty has been to avoid translating German abstractions into the kind of technical or administrative super-jargon which these become in English.) Musil is an addiction. The most irrelevant criticism made of him by some Germans and Austrians is that his kind of cafe sensibility is out of date. It may certainly be familiar in Schnitzler and Svevo, but Musil’s whole scheme prophetically describes the bureaucratic condition of our world, and what can only be called the awful, deadly serious and self-deceptive love affair of one committee for another. And he detects the violence underneath it all. In only one sense is he out of date: he can conceive of a future, of civilised consciousness flowing on and not turning back sick and doomed upon itself.
(1962)
Alessandro Manzoni
I Promessi Sposi
I Promessi Sposi (in English, The Betrothed) is often said to be ‘the only Italian novel’. It is certainly the only Italian novel that can be compared with the great European novels of the nineteenth century. It was begun in 1821 when Scott dominated European taste and when Balzac had not emerged from the writing of shockers, and it was revised many times before the final edition of 1840. The last rewriting is said to have taken twelve years and the result is that we have a compendious Romantic work in a state of real digestibility which neither Balzac nor Scott troubled to attain. The Betrothed was Manzoni’s only novel. It contained the fullness of his mind, his sensibility and creative power and (as Mr Colquhoun, a new translator, says in a very informative preface to a new edition) seems to represent the culmination of an experience to which life could add no more. In Italy this novel is a kind of Bible; long passages are known by heart; its reflections are quoted in the political debates that have taken place in Italy since the war. But in England, possibly because the chief translation was done over a hundred years ago – and not very well, by a clergyman who disapproved of its theology – the book has been but mildly regarded. The English had already the novels of Scott, with their energetic romance, their bourgeois valuation of life, their alternating choice of the highly coloured and the domestic. Scott was a Tory and, though a generous man, he drew in his horns before the outcome of the Enlightenment, whereas Manzoni had exposed his mind to it in his youth. Our critical ancestors preferred a safer, unreal Italy and, later on, the libertarian, anti-clerical Italy of the Risorgimento. Among the mass of Victorian readers we must remember those who were drawn towards Manzoni by the Oxford movement; but in matters of piety the critics seem to have preferred their own Protestant vigour and sentiment to Manzoni’s obedient, passive, Catholic gravity, and it is a good indication of Victorian feeling that the clergyman who translated Manzoni said that he wished the name of Christ could be substituted for that of the Virgin throughout.
