Inner Workings Read online

  By linking himself with Herma, Musil took a major step in breaking the erotic spell that his mother held over him. For some years Herma remained the focus of his emotional life. Their relationship – straightforward on Herma’s side, more complex and ambivalent on Robert’s – became the basis of the later story ‘Tonka’, collected in Three Women (1924).

  In intellectual content, the education Musil had received at his military schools was decidedly inferior to that offered in the classical Gymnasia. In Brno he began attending lectures on literature and going to concerts. What began as a project in catching up with his better educated contemporaries soon turned into an absorbing intellectual adventure. The years 1898 to 1902 mark a first phase of literary apprenticeship. The young Musil identified particularly with the writers and intellectuals of the generation that flowered in the 1890s and contributed so much to the Modernist movement. He fell under the spell of Mallarmé and Maeterlinck, rejected the naturalist credo that the artwork should faithfully (‘objectively’) reflect a pre-existing reality. For philosophic support he turned to Kant, Schopenhauer and (particularly) Nietzsche. In his diaries he developed for himself the artistic persona of ‘Monsieur le vivisecteur’, one who explored states of consciousness and emotional relations with an intellectual scalpel. He practised his vivisective skills impartially on himself, his family, and his friends.

  Despite these new literary aspirations, Musil continued to prepare for a career in engineering. He passed his examinations with distinction and moved to Stuttgart as a research assistant at the prestigious Technische Hochschule. But his scientific work began to bore him. While still writing technical papers and working on an instrument he had invented for use in optical experiments (he would later patent the instrument, hoping rather unrealistically to be able to live on the royalties), he embarked on a first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless. He also began to lay the ground for a change in academic direction. In 1903 he formally abandoned engineering and departed for Berlin to study philosophy and psychology.

  Young Törless was completed in early 1905. After it had been turned down by three publishers, Musil offered the manuscript for comment to the respected Berlin critic Alfred Kerr. Kerr lent Musil his support, suggested revisions, and reviewed the book in glowing terms when it appeared in print in 1906. Despite the success of Young Törless, however, and despite the mark he was beginning to make in Berlin artistic circles, Musil felt too unsure of his talent to commit himself to a life of writing. He continued with his philosophical studies, taking his doctorate in 1908.

  By this time he had met Martha Marcovaldi, a woman of Jewish descent seven years his senior, separated from her second husband. With Martha – an artist and intellectual in her own right, au courante with contemporary feminism – Musil established an intimate and erotically intense relationship that lasted for the rest of his life. The two were married in 1911 and took up residence in Vienna, where Musil had accepted the position of archivist at the Technische Hochschule.

  In the same year Musil published a second book, Unions, consisting of the novellas ‘The Perfecting of a Love’ and ‘The Temptation of Quiet Veronika’. These pieces were composed with an obsessiveness whose basis was obscure to their author; though short, their writing and revision occupied Musil day and night for two and a half years.

  In the war of 1914–18 Musil served with distinction on the Italian front. After the war, troubled by a sense that the best years of his creative life were slipping away, he sketched out no fewer than twenty new works, including a series of satirical novels. A play, The Visionaries (1921), and the story collection Three Women, 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 projected 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, reflects at length on what form its next festival of self-congratulation should take. The novel was intended to render a ‘grotesque’ (Musil’s word) vision of Austria on the eve of the World War.1 Supported financially by his publisher and by a society of admirers, he devoted 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 second volume proved harder to write. Cajoled by his publisher, yet full of misgivings, he allowed an extended fragment to appear in 1933. In secret he began to fear he would never complete the work.

  A move back to the livelier intellectual environment of Berlin was cut short by the coming to power of the Nazis. Musil and his wife returned to Vienna, where the air was full of ill omen. Musil began to suffer from depression and general poor health. Then in 1938 Austria was absorbed into the Third Reich, and the Musils removed themselves to Switzerland. Switzerland was meant to be a staging post en route to a haven offered by Martha’s daughter in 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 during World War Two, when its first priority, overriding all humanitarian considerations, was not to antagonise Germany. Pointing out that his writings were banned in Germany and Austria, Musil pleaded for asylum on the grounds that he could earn a living as a writer nowhere else in the German-speaking world. Though permitted to stay, he never felt at home in Switzerland. He was little known there; he had no talent for self-promotion; the Swiss patronage network disdained him. He and his wife survived on handouts. ‘Today they ignore us. But once we are dead they will boast that they gave us asylum,’ remarked Musil bitterly to Ignazio Silone. He was too depressed to make headway with the novel. In 1942, at the age of sixty-one, after a bout of vigorous exercise on the trampoline, he had a stroke and died.2

  ‘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.’ Turned away by commercial publishers, she privately published a third volume of the novel, consisting of fragments in no hard and fast order.3

  Musil belonged to a generation of German-speaking intellectuals who experienced the successive phases of the breakdown of the European order between 1890 and 1939 with particular immediacy: first, the premonitory crisis in the arts, embodied in the first wave of the Modernist movement; then the war of 1914–18 and the revolutions spawned by the war, which destroyed both traditional and liberal institutions; and finally the rudderless postwar years, culminating in the Fascist seizure of power. The Man without Qualities – a book to some extent overtaken by history during its writing – set out to diagnose this breakdown, which Musil more and more came to see as originating in the failure of Europe’s liberal elite since the 1870s to recognise that the social and political doctrines inherited from the Enlightenment were not adequate to the new mass civilisation growing up in the cities.

  To Musil, the most stubbornly retrogressive feature of German culture (of which Austrian culture was a part – he did not take seriously the idea of an autonomous Austrian culture) was its tendency to compartmentalise intellect from feeling, and then to relax into an unreflective stupidity of the emotions. He encountered this split most clearly among the scientists with whom he worked, men of intellect living what he considered to be coarse emotional lives. The education of the senses through a refining of erotic life seemed to him to hold some promise of lifting society to a higher ethical plane. He deplored the rigid roles, extending even into the realm of sexual intimacy, enforced by bourgeois mores on both women and men. ‘Whole countrie
s of the soul have been lost and submerged as a consequence,’ he wrote.4

  Because of the concentration he displays in his work, from Young Törless onwards, on the obscurer workings of sexual desire, Musil is often thought of as a Freudian. But he himself acknowledged no such debt. He disliked the cultishness of psychoanalysis, disapproved of its sweeping claims and its unscientific standards of proof. He preferred psychology of what he ironically called the ‘shallow’ – that is, empirical and experimental – variety.5

  Both Musil and Freud were in fact part of a larger movement in European thought. Both were sceptical of the power of reason to guide human conduct; both were diagnosticians of fin-de-siècle Central European civilisation and its discontents; and both took on the dark continent of the feminine psyche as theirs to explore. To Musil, Freud was a rival rather than a source.

  Musil’s preferred guide in the realm of the unconscious was Nietzsche. In Nietzsche Musil found an approach to questions of morality that went beyond a simple polarity of good and evil; a recognition that art can in itself be a form of intellectual exploration; and a mode of philosophising, aphoristic rather than systematic, that suited his own sceptical temperament. The tradition of fictional realism had never been strong in Germany; as Musil developed as a writer, his fiction became increasingly essayistic in structure, with only perfunctory gestures in the direction of realistic narrative.

  Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (Verwirrungen are perplexities, troubled states of mind; Zögling is a rather formal term, with upper-class overtones, for a boarder at a school) is built around a story of sadistic victimisation at an elite boys’ academy. More specifically, it is an account of a crisis that one of the boys, Törless (his first name is never given), undergoes as a result of taking part in the deliberate humiliation and breaking down of a fellow student, Basini, who has the misfortune to be caught stealing. The exploration of Törless’s inner crisis, moral, psychological, and ultimately epistemological, rendered largely from within the boy’s own consciousness, makes up the substance of the novel.

  In the end Törless has his own breakdown and is discreetly removed from the school. Looking back, Törless feels he has weathered the storm and come through. But it is not clear how far we should trust this self-assessment, since it seems to be based on a decision that the only way of getting along in the world is not to peer too closely into the abysses opened up in us by extreme experience, particularly sexual experience. The single glimpse we are allowed of Törless in later life suggests that he has become not necessarily a wiser or a better man, merely a more prudent one.

  In later life Musil denied that Young Törless was about youthful experiences of his own or even about adolescence in general. Nevertheless, the originals of Basini and of his tormentors Beineberg and Reiting can easily be identified among the boys Musil knew at Mährisch-Weisskirchen, while one of Törless’s deepest confusions – about the nature of his feelings toward his mother – is mirrored in Musil’s own early diaries. The gap between Törless’s outward sangfroid and the seething forces within him, between the well-regulated operation of the school by day and the eerie nocturnal floggings in the attic, has its parallel in the gap between the orderly bourgeois front presented by the Törless parents and what their son darkly knows must go on in private.

  The master metaphor that Musil uses to capture these incommensurabilities (what Törless himself calls ‘incomparabilities’) comes from mathematics. Living in among the whole numbers and fractions of whole numbers – which together make up the so-called rational numbers – and somehow made to interlock with them by the operations of mathematical reasoning, are the infinitely more numerous irrational numbers, numbers that evade representation in terms of whole numbers. Adults, led by Törless’s teachers, seem to have no trouble in making the rational and the irrational cohabit, but to Törless the latter are vertiginously beyond his grasp.

  Concluding his testimony at the inquiry into the Basini affair, Törless claims to have resolved his mental confusion (‘I know that I was indeed mistaken’) and to have emerged safely into young adulthood (‘I’m not afraid of anything any more. I know: things are things and will remain so for ever’). The assembled teachers fail completely to understand the point of what he is saying: either they have never had experiences like his, or they have tightly repressed them. Törless is unusual in the thoroughness with which he has faced – or been driven to face – the darkness within; whether or not we regard as self-betrayal his later adoption of the pose of the self-absorbed aesthete, he is certainly, in his confused youth (confusion, Verwirrung, is a word Musil uses with continual irony), the figure of the artist in modern times, visiting the remoter shores of experience and bringing back report.6

  Despite the amoralism that makes Young Törless so much a product of its age, the moral questions raised by the story will not go away. Beineberg, the more intellectually inclined of Törless’s comrades, has a vulgar-Nietzschean, proto-Fascist justification for the punishment they inflict on Basini, which is that the three of them belong to a new generation to which the old rules no longer apply (‘the soul has changed’); as for pity, pity is one of the lower impulses and its promptings must be overcome. Törless is not Beineberg. Nevertheless, his own particular perversity – making Basini talk about what has been done to him – is morally no better than the whippings the other two carry out; while in the homosexual acts he performs with Basini he is at pains to show the boy no tenderness.

  In a world in which there are no more God-given rules, in which it has fallen to the philosopher-artist to give the lead, should the artist’s explorations include acting out his own darker impulses, seeing where they will take him? Does art always trump morality? This early work of Musil’s offers the question, but answers it in only in the most uncertain way.

  Musil did not disown Young Törless. On the contrary, he continued to look back with pleased surprise at what he had been able to achieve, even at a technical level, at so early an age. Its master metaphor, with its implication that our real, rational, everyday world has no real, rational foundation, is extended in The Man without Qualities, where Musil likens the spirit in which the brother and sister Ulrich and Agathe undertake their ‘journey to the end of the possible’, the perilous exploration of the limits of feeling that lies at the heart of the book, to ‘the freedom with which mathematics sometimes resorts to the absurd in order to arrive at the truth’.7 Musil’s work, from beginning to end, is of a piece: the evolving record of a confrontation between a man of supremely intelligent sensibility and the times that gave birth to him, times he would bitterly but justly call ‘accursed’.8

  (2001)

  4 Walter Benjamin, the Arcades Project

  THE STORY IS by now so well known that it barely needs to be retold. The setting is the Franco-Spanish border, the time 1940. Walter Benjamin, fleeing occupied France, seeks out the wife of a certain Fittko he has met in an internment camp. He understands, he says, that Frau Fittko will be able to guide him and his companions across the Pyrenees to neutral Spain. Taking him on a trip to scout the best route, Frau Fittko notices that he has brought along a heavy briefcase. Is the briefcase really necessary, she asks? It contains a manuscript, he replies. ‘I cannot risk losing it. It . . . must be saved. It is more important than I am.’1

  The next day they cross the mountains, Benjamin pausing every few minutes because of his weak heart. At the border they are halted. Their papers are not in order, say the Spanish police; they must return to France. In despair, Benjamin takes an overdose of morphine. The police make an inventory of the deceased’s belongings. The inventory shows no record of a manuscript.

  What was in the briefcase, and where it disappeared to, we can only guess. Benjamin’s friend Gershom Scholem suggested that the lost work was the latest revision of the as yet unfinished Passagen-Werk, known in English as the Arcades Project. (‘To great writers,’ wrote Benjamin, ‘finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work t
hroughout their lives.’) But by his heroic effort to save his manuscript from the fires of fascism and bear it to what he thought of as the safety of Spain and, further on, the United States, Benjamin became an icon of the scholar for our times.2

  Of course the story has a happy twist. A copy of the Arcades manuscript left behind in Paris had been secreted in the Bibliothèque Nationale by Benjamin’s friend Georges Bataille. Recovered after the war, it was published in 1982 as it stood, that is to say, in German with huge swathes of French. And now we have Benjamin’s magnum opus in full English translation, by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, and are at last in a position to ask the question: Why all the concern for a treatise on shopping in nineteenth-century Paris?

  Walter Benjamin was born in 1892, in Berlin, into an assimilated Jewish family. His father was a successful art auctioneer who branched out into the property market; the Benjamins were, by most standards, wealthy. After a sickly, sheltered childhood, Benjamin was sent at the age of thirteen to a progressive boarding school in the countryside, where he fell under the influence of one of the directors, Gustav Wyneken. For some years after leaving school he would be active in Wyneken’s anti-authoritarian, back-to-nature youth movement; he would break with it only in 1914, when Wyneken came out in support of the war.

  In 1912 Benjamin enrolled as a student in philology at Freiburg University. Finding the intellectual environment not to his taste, he threw himself into activism for educational reform. When war broke out, he evaded military service first by feigning a medical condition, then by moving to neutral Switzerland. There he stayed until 1920, reading philosophy and working on a doctoral dissertation for the University of Berne. His wife complained that they had no social life.