Five Women
Authors: Robert Musil
Five Women
Robert Musil
Translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser
The Temptation of Quiet Veronica
Preface by Frank Kermode
If you admire
Ulysses
you will almost certainly know
Dubliners
and
The Portrait;
your general impression of Thomas Mann probably derives not only from
The Magic Mountain
and
Doctor Faustus
but also from
Death in Venice.
But if you do not read German and yet are conscious of the value of Musil's vast novel,
The Man Without Qualities,
you have been until the publication of this book deprived of access to stories which are just as closely related to that book as the earlier works of Joyce and Mann to their masterpieces.
Robert Musil is still the least read of the great twentieth- century novelists, at any rate in the English-speaking countries, but this neglect can hardly last much longer; and when it becomes the custom to read and value him it will seem surprising to nobody that one speaks of him as belonging to the same class as Joyce and Mann. Most of his unfinished novel is now translated; his first book,
Young Törless,
is also available in English. He wrote two important plays, and these still have to be read in German; but the most urgent need was for a version of these five stories, and that has been most happily supplied by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, whose skill as translators is matched only by their immense and unique knowledge of their chosen author. They have made it possible for us to reach a fuller understanding of a rich and difficult master.
Musil was an Austrian, with some Czech in his ancestry. He was born in Klagenfurt in November 1880, to an engineering professor who could paint and a musically gifted mother. His school days were spent in military academies, formidable institutions of the kind described in
Young Törless.
At sixteen he abandoned the Army and studied engineering at Brno; but quite soon after graduating he gave that up, too, and went to the University of Berlin for courses in philosophy and psychology. Before he took his doctorate in 1908 he had published
Young Törless
(1906) ; and although he was a successful philosopher, and might equally well have been a successful engineer or indeed a successful soldier, this remarkable first novel decided the issue, and he chose a literary career. Having to combine original writing with other work—especially after his marriage in 1910—he was first a librarian and then a newspaper editor. In 1911 he published a small book called
Unions,
containing the stories here translated as "The Perfecting of a Love" and "The Temptation of Quiet Veronica." From 1914 he served in the Austrian Army, both at the front and as editor of an Army newspaper. When the war ended he worked as press liaison officer at the Foreign Ministry and then as scientific adviser to the War Ministry. These assignments no doubt provided plenty of material for
The Man Without Qualities,
which contains, among so much else, a good deal of satire on bureaucrats. In 1922 he abandoned all other employment and became a freelance writer. This did not prove easy; in 1934 a group of friends formed a society to support him while he worked at the great, perhaps unfinishable novel. But before that he had produced, along with much journalism and two plays, the stories which came out in 1924 as
Three Women
and are the first three of the present volume. Musil fled Austria when the Nazis took over in 1938 and lived in Switzerland, working at
The Man Without Qualities,
until his death in 1942.
The Man Without Qualities
is unlike the other great novels of its period in about everything except its stature. Ironical, deeply serious, acute and extravagant, extremely personal and yet nowhere—on the surface at any rate—obscure, it is a work of fantastic intelligence, of pervasive eroticism, of completely original mysticism. It cannot be described in a paragraph, but it is an experience which no one who cares for modern literature should be without. He may be exasperated but he must see that this book, unfinished, extravagant, tiresome as it is, is the real thing. And the earlier stories will help him to do so.
Three Women
("Grigia," "The Lady from Portugal," "Tonka") was published in the middle of a great literary period and stands comparison with its contemporaries.
Unions,
thirteen years earlier, has rather more the character of the
fin de siècle
(as indeed may be said of
Death in Venice),
but Musil valued it highly, perhaps because it contains, in a different blend and without irony, the same constituents—a nervous obliquity, a mystique of the erotic, a deep interest in the borders of the human mind, those uneasy frontiers with the human body and with inhuman reality—that go to the making of
The Man Without Qualities.
Musil's is notoriously a world in political collapse, the end of a great empire; but more central to his poetic writing (at times he makes one think of a prose Rilke) is the sense of a world in metaphysical collapse, a universe of hideously heaped contingency, in which there are nonetheless transcendent human powers. These he represents always by the same complex and various image of eroticism, which reaches its fullest expression in the big novel.
The Man Without Qualities
has among its themes nymphomania, incest and sex murder, not at all for their prurient interest but as indices of the reaches of consciousness. Moosbrugger, the murderer, thinks, when he is not killing, that he is by his personal effort holding together the world; the story of the love between Ulrich, the book's hero, and his sister was, according to Musil, to take us to the "farthest limits of the possible and unnatural, even of the repulsive"; and yet if one theme can be called central in
The Man Without Qualities
it is this one, and nobody could think Musil anything but overwhelmingly serious in his treatment of it. Erotic ecstasy is beyond good and evil ("all moral propositions refer to a sort of dream condition that's long ago taken wing") and exemplifies the power of our consciousness to cross the borderline formerly protected by what are now the obsolete fortresses of traditional ethics and metaphysics.
Throughout his career Musil explored this borderline. He kept a notebook on medieval mysticism and labeled it "Borderline Experiences." It interested him that the mystic, speaking of his incommunicable experience of God, will usually do so by analogies with erotic pleasure. Ulrich, a considerable authority on love-making, decides that the transformation of a sane man into a frothing lunatic by the pleasures of the bed is only "a special case of something far more general"—namely, our ability to undergo a quasi-erotic metamorphosis of consciousness which gives us what is in effect a second state of consciousness interpolated into the ordinary one. Like E. M. Forster, whose greatest novel,
A Passage to India,
came out in the same year as
Three Women,
Musil believed that the heightening of consciousness which makes possible the order and the perceptions of good fiction has something in common with erotic feeling; and meaningless contingency is the enemy of novels as well as love. For Musil the two metamorphoses of consciousness —art and love—ran together, and the sheer polymorphousness of the erotic was the subject as well as the analogue of his fiction.
To some extent this was already the case in
Young
Törless,
and it is altogether so in the stories here translated. All have erotic themes, and most are concerned with female eroticism and with love as a means to some kind of knowledge. Here, as in the later novel, love is extremely various and free of the considerations of parochial ethics. In "Quiet Veronica" it is bestial, in "The Perfecting of a Love" it is profligate. "Grigia" and "Tonka" are variants of the medieval
pastourelle—
the seduction, in "Grigia," of a peasant girl by a man of higher social class, and in "Tonka" of a shopgirl by a student; but in either case the sexual situation is a figure for what is beyond sex. To study the behavior of people in love is, for Musil, to study the human situation at its quick. Even when there is only delighted animality, or when, as in "Tonka," there is an avowed absence of love and of intellectual communion, in a milieu of poverty and disease, sex remains the central ground for Musil's study of the potentialities of human consciousness.
The earliest of these stories is "The Temptation of Quiet Veronica," which appeared in an earlier and very different version as "The Enchanted House" in 1908. One's first thought is to relate this story, in its later form, to the literature of the Decadence; but its opaque surface, and the erotic feeling which occasionally pierces it, reflect Musil's preoccupation with the penetrating of reality by consciousness under the stimulus of sex. In short, it is not a failed attempt at the literature of neurasthenia, but a perhaps overworked statement of what we have seen to be Musil's principal theme. What we remember is not the pathology but Veronica's sense of her own body as she undresses, and Johannes, on the point of suicide, sensing himself as somehow rooted in the randomness of life. "The Perfecting of a Love" has a stronger and more visible story, and again there is a touch of romantic agonizing—"voluptuous enervated horror... nameless sin." But there is also much to distinguish it from run-of-the-mill decadence: the sharp picture of the amber twist issuing from a teapot on the first page; the detached view of Claudine dressing ("all her movements took on something of oafishly sensual affectation"); the sexuality of the stranger, which causes "a scarcely perceptible displacement of the surrounding world." Finally sex, represented as a defense against the "horribly gaping contingency of all one does," achieves a low and commonplace realization in the hotel cut off by snow; and from a body disagreeably swelling with lust emerges an image of love and union. "The Perfecting of a Love" cost Musil more nervous effort than any other work, and it is curiously central to his achievement. It is entirely lacking in the worldly irony and the "essayism" with which, in the great novel, he tried to relate its themes to the whole surface of modern life; but it is for all that a work which, in its uncommunicative, oblique fashion, expresses an understanding of human capacity, an intelligent and modern creativeness, comparable with those displayed in the contemporary writings of Lawrence and Thomas Mann.
By the time
Three Women
was published, thirteen years later, Musil had given up this somewhat hermetic manner, though he had not, as yet, developed the ironical discursiveness of
The Man Without Qualities.
Standing between his early and late manners, this book nevertheless has the same preoccupation with the erotic metamorphosis of consciousness and might also have been called
Unions.
The difference from the earlier work could be expressed as a new willingness to find a place in his stories for straight narrative (the "low, atavistic" element in fiction which Forster comically deplored and which troubles most experimental novelists). Not that this simpler form of satisfaction has the effect of making the stories simple, considered as a whole. They are still parables, and still, in the manner of parables, refuse to submit themselves to any single interpretation. In "Grigia," Homo is distinguished from the peasant community by his association with urban technology as well as urban civility; there is a futile rape of the land as well as easy seduction of women. Homo rediscovers the pleasant animality of sex, and with it a love for his absent wife and perhaps even for death. The climax of the tale has an insoluble ambiguity; but it is worth noting that ambiguity is a property not only of the narrative but also of the texture of the book. There are many passages of strange resonant poetry, for instance the description of behavior of hay when used as a love-bed. "Grigia" has the obliquity of high intelligence and idiosyncratic creativity. So too has "The Lady from Portugal," though its parable announces itself more clearly because its elements —love and union, spirituality and sickness—are placed at a great historical distance. And if "Tonka" is the best of all the stories, it is so not in virtue of its more down-to-earth theme, but be- causes one senses in it a stricter relation between the narrative and the texture.
The story of "Tonka" seems almost commonplace beside the others, but that is only because of its superficial resemblance to the stories of Zola or the De Goncourts or George Moore. It treats of the quasi-mystical aspects of sex in the least promising of relationships. The liaison is of apparently low power; there is nothing involved that can be called love, indeed there is hardly any discernible communication between the pair. On the other hand there is a curious lack of amorous or spiritual self-aggrandizement, there is goodness and nature. Above all there is guilt, but even guilt somehow escapes the conventional categories and remains as it were unattached to real personalities. When Shakespeare's Cressida was unfaithful, Troilus could not believe his senses: "This is and is not Cressida." In the same situation Tonka steadfastly
is
Tonka, the "nobly natural" shopgirl who has nevertheless quite certainly been unfaithful. These ambiguities reflect the ambiguities of human reality; Musil once wrote that he saw no reason in the world why something cannot be simultaneously true and false, and the way to express this unphilosophical view of the world is by making fictions. As Tonka's lover notices when he debates with himself the question of marrying or leaving her, the world is as a man makes it with his fictions; abolish them and it falls apart into a disgusting jumble.