Cultural Amnesia (106 page)

Similarly, Schnitzler did not censor his insecurity. In all aspects of his adult life he made himself the complete figure
of bourgeous solidity: he was practically part of the Ringstrasse, the great circuit of buildings in central Vienna that really amounted to a theatre whose sets, as it were, were set in stone.
But he maintained access to his unease. He had grown up and flourished in the tolerance of the old
k.u.k
society. But it was the tolerance that bothered
him. Tolerance could be withdrawn. If one of the boys on the hillside—it is Leo who sees deepest—points out to the others that the age-old hostility runs deeper than they think, he is
certainly expressing the author’s unsleeping doubt, if not his overmastering conviction. The whole allure of Schnitzler’s extensive range of work depends, like human beauty, on the
ineluctable reality of evanescence. Read in the original, his plays rank him with Ibsen and Chekhov, but most particularly with Chekhov, and not just because Schnitzler, too, was a doctor by his
first calling. The dynamic in Ibsen is of chickens coming home to roost. In Chekhov it is of the falling leaves. Schnitzler’s short stories, sketches and novellas rank him with Chekhov
again, although
Leutnant Gustl
makes you think also of Joyce, because it exhausted the possibilities of the interior monologue before
Joyce had even begun to explore them. Schnitzler’s paragraph-sized aphorisms are philosophical essays in themselves. And if he had written nothing else,
Der Weg ins Freie
would make him one of
the
novelists of modern Europe. In my shelves, the thin-paper volumes of
Schnitzler’s complete works form one of those points in space where gravity increases to draw light in so that it can’t get out: get near and you will go in with it.

But the illumination in there is phosphorescent. Schnitzler knew that he was writing about a social order
in decay. He never gave up on the world—he thought that civilization, no matter how it transformed itself, would continue—but he did say a clear goodbye to the social order into which
he had been born. He described it in such loving detail that we are tempted to think of his emotional imperative as nostalgic. But it wasn’t. He was a realist. The wonderfully named
American critic Joseph Wood Krutch said about Cervantes that only a romantic can be realistic enough, and there is something in what he said. Schnitzler’s romanticism, however, was not a
self-serving overlay but part of his perception of the world, which for him, because he was an attractive man lucky in love, was always full of sexual adventure even into his old age. From that
aspect, he was a small boy in a sweet shop. But he had no illusions about the sweet shop’s proprietors. He didn’t let the strength of his personal satisfactions blind him to the
general fragility of the world in which he enjoyed them. There lies the main difference between Schnitzler’s Belle Époque and Joseph Roth’s. Schnitzler was there, and told the
truth. The compulsive liar Roth looked back on it, nostalgic for its lost coherence. Roth’s
Radetzkymarsch
is a great novel. You don’t have to
know much about the Austro-Hungarian Empire to see that. The more you do know, however, the more you see that
Radetzkymarsch
is a beautiful dream.
Schnitzler is the man to show you the reality—the one and only path into the clear.

No spectre assails us in more varied disguises than loneliness,
and one of its most impenetrable masks is called love.

—ARTHUR SCHNITZLER,
Buch der Sprüche und Bedenken
, P. 117

In 1927, in Vienna, the Phaidon Press, as one of its first publications, brought out a
little linen-bound collection by Arthur Schnitzler whose title can be translated as Book of Sayings and Thoughts. I found my copy, in a house full of books sold by the children of refugees, on
Staten Island in 1983 and have been reading it ever since. No taller than the length of my hand or wider than the palm, it can be carried easily in a jacket pocket. I think it is one of the great
books of the modern world. In not many more than two hundred small pages of Bodoni bold print, it contains the summation of a lifetime’s introspection by a man who travelled into his own
psychology with the same bravery that men later showed when they travelled into space. The difference is that everything he found was alive. You could call the book’s paragraphs
aphorisms—he sometimes used the same term himself—but I prefer to call them essays, bearing in mind that Montaigne called it an
essai
when he
tried to draw conclusions from the endless titration of his experience and his reading. Schnitzler had lived everything he wrote down: the longer ago he had lived it, the more he had thought
about it, so the book often gives the impression of light at great depth, with colours leaping to surprised life, as if they were not used to being on show. (When Jacques Cousteau first took
powerful sources of light down to shelves of coral that had never been illuminated before, he asked: what is all this colour doing down here?) Some of the most disturbing essays are about love,
which for Schnitzler always started with physical love, even when he was getting on in years and had become a bit less capable. When he was young he must have been capable indeed; and even, by
his own account, indiscriminately predatory. But in the long run, multiplicity of experience didn’t coarsen his perceptions. It refined them, often against his will. There is no element of
consolation in this single-sentence essay about love and loneliness. But there is no despair either. Quite apart from the surrounding anti-Semitism that aroused his constant fury, there was a lot
about Viennese life that drove Schnitzler to recrimination—he took a bad review no better than any other playwright—but he never quarrelled with love just because it left him lonely.
He counted himself lucky to find it at all: surely the sane attitude.

Was he right about the impenetrable mask? Wrong at the start, and
right in the end: because love,
unlike loneliness, is more of a process than a permanent condition. In the German, the “most impenetrable masks” are
undurchschaubarsten
Masken
—the masks you can’t see through. (We might note at this point that “loneliness” is feminine: arbitrary genders really are arbitrary, but in this case
it’s a nice coincidence.) When love comes, there is no mask: or shouldn’t be. There is nothing to see through, because you are not lonely. There really is another person sharing your
life. But later on a different truth—one you are familiar with, but hoped to have seen the last of—comes shining through. Unlike light in space, it needs a medium to do so, and the
medium is the mask itself, seen in retrospect. You are lonely again. You were really lonely all along. You have deceived yourself.

It would have been a desolating view if Schnitzler had been quite sure of it. But if he had been quite
sure of it he would not have gone on worrying at it. On the same great page—great books have great pages, and in this book page 117 is one of the greatest—he tries again. “That
we feel bound by a steady longing for freedom, and that we also seek to bind someone else, without being convinced that such a thing is within our rights—that is what makes any loving
relationship so problematic.” The question here is about possessiveness, and the first thing to see is that there would be no possessiveness if there were nothing real to possess. So this
is not loneliness concealed by an impenetrable mask. This is the other person, whom you love enough to be worried about her rights. You are worried, that is, about someone who is not yourself.
You want to be free, and assume that she does too: but you want her to be yours. You could want that with a whole heart if your heart were less sympathetic. There have been men in all times, and
there are still men all over the world, who have no trouble in believing that their women belong to them. But those men are not educated. If Schnitzler’s writings on the subject can be said
to have a tendency, it is to say that love provides an education. What is problematic about the relationship is essentially what tells you it is one. It might not be an indissoluble bond, but as
an insoluble problem it gives you the privilege of learning that freedom for yourself means nothing without freedom for others. When you love, the problem begins, and so does your real
life.

Still on the same page, but at the top—I have taken the paragraphs in a different
order here, to restore a sequence that he might have deliberately scrambled—he develops the theme of love and loneliness in a blood-chilling direction. “Each loving relationship has
three stages,” he says, uncharacteristically sounding rather like Hannah Arendt or W. H. Auden setting out a philosophical fruit-stall, “which succeed one another imperceptibly: the
first in which you are happy with each other even when silent; the second in which you are silently bored with each other; and the third in which silence becomes a form that stands between the
lovers like an evil enemy.” This would be a less terrible thing for him to have said if it had no truth in it that we recognized. But most of us will acknowledge the familiar declension of
a passion gone sour. Some passions, of course, ought to go sour, to make room for a fresh one that might even stay fresh. It should be said in a hurry that Schnitzler himself was nothing like
Proust in this respect. Proust says, over and over in
À la recherche du temps perdu
, that love always intensifies into jealousy: that it
doesn’t just convey within itself, but actually consists of, the seeds of its own destruction. For Proust things seem to have been like that in real life.

Schnitzler’s real life was different. As far as one can deduce from Renate Wagner’s exemplary biography
Arthur Schnitzler
, he was never promiscuous in the usual sense of not caring who the woman was. Until a good way into his mature years, he seems to have
been moved to end an affair early mainly out of fear that the woman might get the same idea first. Once he got used to the probability that he would not be betrayed, he formed enduring
relationships. The memory of Olga Waissnix stayed dear to him after her untimely death. He might never have let go of his wife (the other Olga, born Olga Gussmann) if she had not insisted on her
freedom so as to pursue her career as a singer unimpeded. She was a bit of a Zelda, as things turned out: she started her career too late, failed at it, and they had been too miserable together
for him to want her back in the house. But they stayed close. His love for the young actress Vilma Lichtenstern was as enduring as it was intense: her death in a car crash left him devastated.
Clara Pollaczek consoled him in his old age, although she might have been less loyal if she had known that the old man had yet another young lady tucked
away in the wings.
Though he did not enjoy telling lies, he was a master of tactical silence. But it would be a big mistake to suspect him of stunted feelings. His feelings were large, and very generous: if you
compare him to a truly selfish Pantaloon like Bertrand Russell, the difference is decisive. Schnitzler was a verifiable believer in female liberty and fulfilment. He wanted his women to become
themselves for their benefit, and not just for his.

Nevertheless he was an exponent of what the therapists of today would call a compartmentalized emotional life. The
subversive element, however, was in how he drew creative energy from the compartments. He thought that men’s minds worked that way and he did an impressive job of dramatizing his view, to
the extent that Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud both thought him a master psychologist. But very few psychologists of today would agree, expecially if they were working as counsellors; and by the
American measure, which demands a married couple, volubly happy for their whole lives, his idea of the silent enemy sounds like the Fiend incarnate. The American measure of the eternally happy
couple requires two people with half a personality each. Schnitzler worked by the European measure, in which two complete individuals might or might not get on. Which of these measures we take
for a paradigm could be a matter of choice. But Schnitzler, although he did not go so far as to insist that all men were like him, believed that there
was
no choice. For him, the civil convention and the impulse in the soul were at odds, and out of the conflict he made his drama. Artistically, it was a decision beyond reproach: but the result was a
body of art incomprehensible in America, which is the real reason he has never become world-famous. Ibsen, yes, and even Strindberg. In America, Strindberg can be Edward Albee’s
acknowledged ancestor: the two lovers in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
can tear each other apart right there on Broadway. They are, after all, a
married couple, together forever, like a pair of turtle doves with brass knuckles. But only the novels of Philip Roth acknowledge a mental world in which Schnitzler might be a master, and
Roth’s heroes must concede the misery and confusion at being in the expensive, shameful grip of lust in action, as if they were Henry Miller’s crapulent bohemians in better suits.
Schnitzler conceded no such thing. He thought that the battle
between imagination and fidelity was a fact of life. Even today, more than seventy years after his death, those
who think he had a point must still reach up for his works as if to the top of the rack, where dangerous publications are shrink-wrapped in cellophane. The civilization whose pent desires he did
so much to explore is still not ready for him.