The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (32 page)

The book is set in 1913, on the eve of the Great War, in the mythical country of Kakania. Kakania is clearly Austria-Hungary, the name referring to
Kaiserlich und Königlich
, or K.u.K, standing for the kingdom of Hungary and the imperial-royal Austrian crown lands. Though daunting in length, it is for many the most brilliant literary response to the developments of the early twentieth century, one of a handful of works “incapable of over-interpretation.” It has been described as post-Bergson, post-Einstein, post-Rutherford, post-Bohr, post-Freud, post-Husserl, post-Picasso, post-Proust, post-Gide, post-Joyce and post-Wittgenstein. And, it goes without saying, post-Christian.

There are three intertwined themes, which provide a loose narrative. First, there is the search by the main character, Ulrich von——, a Viennese
soldier-turned-engineer-turned-mathematician-turned-intellectual who models himself on the “hard spiritual courage” of Nietzsche. His search to penetrate the meaning of modern life involves him in a project to understand the mind of one Moosbrugger, the murderer of a young prostitute. Ulrich is in his early thirties and unmarried and has recently returned to Vienna after several years abroad. Though his mind still works like that of a scientist, he is (like Musil himself) no longer inspired by the scientific approach—in fact, passion has largely left his life and he joins the pre-war Viennese world, partly social, partly intellectual. Second, there is Ulrich’s relationship (and love affair) with his sister, Agathe, with whom he had lost contact in childhood. Third, the book is a social satire of the Vienna of the time. Musil had not completed a fourth part of his massive work when he died, nearly destitute, in Switzerland, in 1942. (He never lost his acerbity: “Today they ignore us,” he told a friend. “But once we are dead they will boast that they gave us asylum.”)

Musil researched the book in an almost scientific way, gaining access to a murderer in a Viennese jail. At one point he has Ulrich note that the murderer is tall, with broad shoulders, that “his chest cavity bulged like a spreading sail on a mast,” but that on occasion he feels small and soft, like a “jelly-fish floating in the water,” when he reads a book that moves him. No one description, no one characteristic or quality, fits him. It is in this sense that he is a man without qualities: “We no longer have any inner voices; reason tyrannizes our lives.” Moosbrugger, who does not believe in God, only in what he can figure out for himself, runs his life according to a deadly logic (other people are there “only to get in his way”) that leads him to murder.

Thus, the real theme of the book is what it means to be human in a scientific age. If all we can believe in are our senses, if we can know ourselves only as scientists know us, if all generalizations and talk of values, ethics and aesthetics are meaningless, as the philosophers of the Vienna Circle were saying (see chapter 14), how are we to live? The writing is a tour de force, full of acerbic, original and witty observations: “In times to come, when more is known, the word ‘destiny’ will probably have acquired a statistical meaning.” “The difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind,
while the madman has only one.” “One should love an idea like a woman; be overjoyed to get back to it.”
19

Nevertheless, Musil never quite gave up hope that some way might one day be found to bring the advances of science and technology, and even military precision, to the realm of the spirit, though he realized how elusive this hope was. “It is not in someone’s gift anymore to interpret his or her experiences without doubt, hesitation and second-guessing—with all our knowledge now, explanations of phenomena have, as it were, the heart cut out of them: kindness is a special form of egotism; emotions are glandular secretions; eight- or nine-tenths of a human being consists of water; moral freedom is an automatic by-product of free trade; statistical graphs of births and suicides show that our most intimate personal decisions are programmed behavior. [Ulrich] is always right, but never productive, never happy, and never, except momentarily, engaged.”
20

Musil accepts that the old categories in which men thought—the “halfway house” ideas of racialism, or religion—are of no use anymore, but with what are we to replace them? Like Rilke, he offers the notion of submission through one of his characters, here Clarisse, married to Ulrich’s estranged childhood companion. She decides that “one is obliged to surrender oneself to an illusion if one received the grace of having one.” This would find an echo across the Atlantic in the plays of Eugene O’Neill (see the next chapter). Nothing is straightforward in
The Man without Qualities
, but this idea—that being able to form a stable relationship with one great overriding idea, knowing it to be only one alternative among many, amounting to a secular form of grace in the modern world—may be taken as a kind of conclusion. It echoes the “shared fictions” of Henry James.

THE OTHER CONDITION

Musil also used a particular—secular—definition of the soul, as “a certain state of excitement,” which arose from his view that there are two ways of being in the world—and these two ways are explored throughout
The Man without Qualities
and provide an idea of how we are to live in a disenchanted world
.
The “normal condition,” as he called it, is the world of
science, business, capitalism, “the scientific attitude toward things, which amounts to seeing things without love.”
21
“In contrast to facts, actions, business, the politics of force . . . stand love and poetry. These are conditions that rise above the transactions of the world.”

David Luft tells us that, for Musil, Eros is like art “because it focuses attention; it abstracts, hypnotizes, and changes states of being in an attempt to affect the world in magical ways.” Musil was convinced that an age of science and capitalism had lost track of this suppressed side of the self. “The normal condition is keyed to what is useful, the other condition to what is enhancing.” His point was not that the everyday reality we know is unimportant but that it is enclosed in clichés and not “imaginatively challenged.”
22
He argued that the lack of understanding in the realm of the soul was the source of contemporary suffering, although for him, as noted, the soul was a form of excitement, and the “religious” and “ethical” task of the artist was to free the human being from the rigidity of tradition, whether intellectual or emotional, so as to use experience to engender—and enhance—more motivation.
23

The real challenge for Musil was for mankind to work out ways of maximizing the amount of time an individual could spend in the other condition (he called it “the other condition” because it was so undefined he did not think it right to use a more specific term). The real goal of a novel, for him, was not to take part in philosophical debate but to help “the founding of the realm of the spirit.” The language of feelings had not kept pace with modern developments.
24
He thought that the average person in the 1920s was “a far more involved metaphysician than he is usually willing to concede. . . . A dull, persistent feeling of his strange cosmic situation seldom leaves him. Death, the tininess of the earth, the dubious illusion of the self, the senselessness of existence, which become more pressing with the years: these are questions at which the average person scoffs, but which he nonetheless feels surrounding him all his life like the walls of a dark room.”
25

Musil believed that all the great religions were born of the “other condition,” but they had become clichéd, “rigid, hard and corrupt” like skeletons, and it was the job of literature—of all art—to regain this other condition. This is what part three of
The Man without Qualities
faces up to, the “con
dition” of love between Ulrich and Agathe.
26
Musil thought there was a need for more femininity in modern culture, that women were more open to the other condition, which he described as “a condition of the undisturbed insideness of life. . . . [Ulrich] wants to live
in
something rather than
for
something, insideness often being ‘a world without words.’”
27
In their intense love relationship, Ulrich and Agathe become sensitive to the other way of relating to the world, “they experience a spiritual union. In this dissolution of the borderline between ego and non-ego . . . [they] experience a sense of participation in the world, a supra-heightening. . . . This holiday experience, beyond the tyranny of churches and moralists, provides the sense of insideness that has been missing from their lives.”
28

Musil was at pains to say that this state of grace, the other condition, can never be made into a norm, and we shouldn’t try. “The normal human pattern is to take a vacation from one condition of being into the other.” We will know when we are in this state of grace, he says, because we experience it as a rising feeling, rather than the normal condition, one of sinking. When it occurs, this makes us “not so much Godless as much more God-free.”
29

Each of the individuals in this chain—Heidegger, Rilke, Musil—was much more imaginative than Weber. Re-enchanting the world is a much more positive activity than merely mourning its disenchantment.

12

The Imperfect Paradise

I
t was the age of the flapper, of bathtub gin and raucous jazz bands, of the Charleston. It was the age of the silent-screen movie star, no graduated income tax and some of the longest, sleekest automobiles ever built. Speaking of the few short years between the end of the First World War and the stock market crash of 1929, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “The Jazz Age now raced along under its own power, served by great filling stations of money.” Here is Amory Blaine, the young autobiographical hero of Fitzgerald’s 1920 novel,
This Side of Paradise
: “I’m rather pagan at present. It’s just that religion doesn’t seem to have the slightest bearing on life at my age.” And the novel concludes: “Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty, gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” Fitzgerald’s capture of the mood of the era was so accurate that Gertrude Stein labeled
This Side of Paradise
the bible for the younger generation.
1

MONEY REPLACES GOD

Henry Idema, the author of several of the above sentences, argues that secularization, in America certainly, accelerated in the 1920s. In 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, the novelist Sherwood Anderson wrote to
a friend: “You know, my dear, it is not only the hunger and destitution—it’s something gone out of America—an old faith lost and no new one got.” Van Wyck Brooks, the critic and historian, said that the post-war generation found themselves “born into a race that has drained away all its spiritual resources in the struggle to survive and that continues to struggle in the midst of plenty because life itself no longer possesses any meaning.” Idema found three things happening simultaneously during that time: an increase in neurosis, due to the absence of the comfort people had traditionally enjoyed from the established churches; the “privatization” of religion; and a shift away from religious traditions toward affluence and materialism.
2

Idema, an ordained Episcopalian clergyman with a PhD in religion and psychological studies from the University of Chicago (see chapter 18), thought that secularization had psychological roots. For him traditional religion derived its power, as Freud had said, from the family—the young child in its pre-oedipal state finding protection in the mother and later deriving discipline and respect for authority from the father. The two-parent family, in Idema’s words, was a Freudian love triangle that the child learned to negotiate to achieve emotional maturity, and where many of the basic familial psychological functions, of protection and authority, were taken over by the churches. In the modern world, however, where, increasingly, mothers went out to work and were absent for long periods, and fathers might be even more absent, working unsocial hours in an often distant factory, the young child no longer interiorized parental values in the traditional way, and so no longer looked to the church.

Idema found support for his arguments in the sociological landmark
Middletown
by Robert and Helen Lynd, a survey of what was later revealed as Muncie, Indiana, recording, among other things, the impact of new industries on a middle-American town—in particular the roles of the radio, the movie projector, the phonograph, the telephone, cosmetics and, above all, the automobile. In
Echoes of the Jazz Age
, Fitzgerald remembered exactly that: “As far back as 1915 the unchaperoned young people of the smaller cities had discovered the mobile privacy of that automobile given to young Bill at sixteen to make him ‘self-reliant.’ At first, petting was a desperate adventure even under such favorable conditions,
but presently confidences were exchanged and the old commandment broke down.”
3
The automobile had become “a house of prostitution on wheels,” according to one Middletown judge, while “Sunday driving” was denounced by the town’s ministers.

Partly, the Great War was responsible. John Peale Bishop, a classmate of Fitzgerald’s at Princeton, certainly thought so: “The most tragic thing about the war was not that it made so many dead men, but that it destroyed the tragedy of death. Not only did the young suffer in the war, but so did every abstraction that would have sustained and given dignity to their suffering. The war made the traditional morality unacceptable; it did not annihilate it; it revealed its immediate inadequacy. So that at its end, the survivors were left to face, as best they could, a world without values.”

Disillusionment, in particular in regard to religion, stands out in the American novels of the period: in Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises
and
A Farewell to Arms
, Sherwood Anderson’s
Beyond Desire
,
Winesburg, Ohio
,
Dark Laughter
and
Windy McPherson’s Son
, Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
and
Tender Is the Night
. And, as Edmund Wilson noted about Fitzgerald’s
The Beautiful and Damned
: “[T]he hero and heroine are strange creatures without purpose or method, who give themselves up to wild debaucheries and do not, from beginning to end of the book, perform a single serious act: but you somehow get the impression that, in spite of their madness, they are the most rational people . . . wherever they touch the common life, the institutions of men are made to appear a contemptible farce of the futile and the absurd. . . . The inference is that, in such a civilization, the sanest and most credible thing is to live for the jazz of the moment and forget the activities of men.”

After the automobile, and perhaps even ahead of it, the expansion of education was regarded, by the Lynds at least, as the most secularizing force, in particular higher education. “Education,” they wrote, “is a faith, a religion.” It had the effects it did partly because, in taking them away to university, higher education helped young people break with home traditions. But it was not only that. “Education appears to be desired frequently not for its specific content, but as a symbol.” It stood in many people’s minds for an openness to alternatives to traditional (religious) values and in this way “replaced religion as the most significant guide
to life.” Fitzgerald captured some of this, too, in his story “Benediction,” where Lois explains to her brother, a Roman Catholic priest and monk, “I don’t want to shock you, Keith, but I can’t tell you how—how
inconvenient
being a Catholic is. It doesn’t seem to apply anymore. As far as morals go, some of the wildest boys I know are Catholics. And the brightest boys—I mean the ones who think and read a lot, don’t seem to believe in much of anything anymore.”
4

Science mattered too. The Lynds concurred with Fitzgerald on evolution. In
This Side of Paradise
, Amory Blaine says of the older generation, “They shuddered when they found out what Dr. Darwin was about.” In Middletown, the Lynds discovered that “[t]he theory of evolution has shaken the theological cosmogony that had reigned for centuries.” Alongside this came the rise of modern psychology. In his book
Only Yesterday
, published in 1931, the American historian and editor of
Harper’s
Frederick Lewis Allen put it this way: “Of all the sciences it was the youngest and least scientific which most captivated the general public and had the most disintegrating effect upon religious faith. Psychology was king. Freud, Adler, Jung and Watson had their tens of thousands of votaries.”
5

Idema went on to say that, despite the undoubted attractions of the changes overtaking America in the 1920s, a price was to be paid. There was, he said, an “extraordinary increase” in neurosis, in divorce, in sexual and emotional conflict, which was reflected in both the literature of the time and in the personal lives of the authors. Sherwood Anderson’s
Beyond Desire
was originally to be called
No God
. One contemporary said of Fitzgerald, “When Scott ceased to go to mass he began to drink.”
6

Idema argued that Anderson’s books mainly chronicle “the American loneliness” that accompanied the weakening of traditional religious practices, and that the same is true, to an extent, of Ernest Hemingway’s. “It was given to Hawthorne to dramatize the human soul,” wrote John Peale Bishop. “In our time Hemingway wrote the drama of its disappearance.” More than that, though, Idema said Hemingway was especially concerned with the breakdown of religious communities and that the young replaced them with new communities that had their own secular rituals.

Idema showed, for instance, in
The Sun Also Rises
, that the protagonist, Jake Barnes, finds in trout fishing and bullfighting “the peace he does not
find in the church.” “In the novel,” he writes, “religion no longer functions for Jake and his peers. Trout fishing and bullfighting become its secular substitutes. They function
like
church rituals and, thus, replace them. In an important sense, then,
The Sun Also Rises
depicts trout fishing and bullfighting as secular (even pagan), psychological, and private—not religious.”
7
Idema goes on: “An efficacious ritual, whether sacred or secular, integrates thoughts with emotions. Second, ritual binds the anxiety of individuals.”

The critic Irving Howe had this to say about Anderson’s Winesburg inhabitants: “They are distraught communicants in search of a ceremony, a social value, a manner of living, a lost ritual that may, by some means, re-establish a flow and exchange of emotion.” In an early Hemingway story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” the prolegomenon to
The Sun Also Rises
, the main character, Nick Adams, engages in a number of rituals in preparation for trout fishing—splitting off a slab of pine, putting up his tent, gathering grasshoppers
properly.
Carlos Baker, professor of literature at Princeton, says that one of Hemingway’s father’s favorite words was “properly.” “When in the outdoors with his son, everything had to be done in the proper way, whether building a fire, rigging a rod, baiting a hook, casting a fly, handling a gun, or roasting a duck or a haunch of venison.”

Henry Idema compares all this with what the Lynds observed in Middletown: “When religion began to decline, people sought out secular ‘centers of “spiritual” activity.’” The Lynds mentioned the “service” and “civic loyalty” ethic of the Rotary Club and even the town’s (very successful) basketball team. “‘Rotary and its big ideal of Service is my religion,’ said one Sunday school worker in Middletown. ‘I have gotten more out of it than I ever got out of the church.’”
8

In
Death in the Afternoon
, Hemingway was more specific in comparing bullfighting with church ritual. He insisted on the ancient origins of both, compared matadors with altar boys and wrote that bullfighting “takes a man out of himself and makes him feel immortal,” “gives him an ecstasy that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy.” Bullfighting also creates a community, he said, a temporary community “moving all the people in the ring together and increasing in emotional intensity as it proceeds.”
9

But the most obvious effect of secularization from the 1920s to the 1980s, says Idema, is America’s obsession with affluence and its symbols. Sherwood Anderson faced this issue in
Winesburg, Ohio
, where money replaces God as the unifying symbol in the life of Jesse, the main character, who nonetheless suffers a nervous breakdown. But it was Fitzgerald, above all, who best described this new surrogate religion. Fitzgerald himself was raised a Catholic but came to regard money, not religion, as the source of security. In “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” one character says of his hometown: “The simple piety prevalent in Hades has the earnest worship of and respect for riches as the first article of its creed—had John felt otherwise than radiantly humble before them, his parents would have turned away in horror at the blasphemy.”

SOMETHING GORGEOUS THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH GOD

And then there was
Gatsby
. At one point a short story, “Absolution,” was going to form the first part of the book, a picture of Gatsby’s early life. It was not, in the event, included in the final version, but tells the story of Rudolph Miller, a young boy growing up in the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, forced by his strict Roman Catholic father to confess the sin of lying to the local parish priest. The boy is fearful of this encounter but finds to his amazement that the priest has the humanity to show him that he himself is in an even worse state, and rambles on about an amusement park with a big wheel “made of lights turning in the air,” urging the boy to go and see it. “All this talking seemed particularly strange and awful to Rudolph, because this man was a priest. He sat there, half terrified, his beautiful eyes wide open and staring at Father Schwartz. But underneath his terror he felt that his own inner convictions were confirmed. There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God.”

Fitzgerald returned to this theme several times, once in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” in which a group of men in the fictional town of Fish gather each evening to watch the passing of the seven o’clock transcontinental express train from Chicago: “The men of Fish were beyond all reli
gion—the barest and most savage tenets of even Christianity could gain no foothold on that barren rock—so there was no altar, no priest, no sacrifice; only each night at seven at the silent concourse by the shanty depot, a congregation who lifted up a prayer of dim, anaemic wonder”—here, too, was something gorgeous that had nothing to do with God.
10

THE NEXT GREATEST POWER TO FAITH

At one point in his career Wallace Stevens broke his right hand in two places after provoking a drunken fight in Key West with Ernest Hemingway, cracking the other man’s jaw and getting knocked to the floor himself. At another point, discouraged from drinking alcohol by his wife, he turned himself into a connoisseur of teas. This may make Stevens seem like a colorful bohemian, but this was a man who, from 1916 until his death nearly forty years later in 1955, was a three-piece-suit-and-tie businessman, head of the fidelity and surety claims department at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in Connecticut. Stevens is not easy to pigeonhole, and that certainly applies to his artistic activities.