Night Games: And Other Stories and Novellas (2 page)

TIME WA s when unrecognized geniuses were the order of the day. One
almost had to die in relative obscurity before the world discovered one's
importance. Today the reverse obtains. In a twinkling, some young hotshot is declared absolutely indispensable; then, in the time it takes for the
media to start pumping up the next one, our purported genius is historyalbeit not history of art, music, or literature.

There remains, though, to this day the odd undervalued genius, not
so much undiscovered as neglected. A prime example of this is the Austrian novelist, short-story writer, and playwright Arthur Schnitzler
(1862-1931). Although he thought of himself as of the second rank, and
although his fame has faded somewhat even in German-speaking countries (while his popularity in France is considerable), I do not doubt that
he will in time be recognized as the master he was, the equal or superior
of such other Austrian geniuses-even if they came from Prague or some
other part of the far-flung Austro-Hungarian Empire- as Kafka, Musil,
Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Horvath, and Roth, to name only the most obvious
ones.

For me, Schnitzler belongs in the vicinity of Proust, Joyce, and
Chekhov. Like Proust, he can analyze psyches down to their subtlest,
most secret tremors and convey this in complex, refined, and chiseled
language. Like Joyce, and well before him, he put the stream of consciousness to supremely character-revealing use while also evoking the
atmosphere and essence of a big city. And like Chekhov-both in drama
and narrative-he brought to pulsating immediacy any number of dash ingly histrionic or shadowily marginal lives, bestowing on most of his
characters a fine compassion never veering into sentimentality, patronization, or special pleading.

These Schnitzler characters, on page or stage, speak a language that
blends near-scientific naturalism with a soaring, but never uncontrolled,
poetry (in the fiction, of course, located more often in the descriptions).
Schnitzler is the lyricist of mundane existence, the comically or cuttingly
ironic observer, the nonbeliever in any transcendence who nevertheless
flirts with mysticism and searches in the nooks and crannies of vanity,
greed, concupiscence, hypocrisy, and even banality for that which might
still deserve the designation Soul.

Although Eros and Thanatos, sexual love and death, were his chief
concerns, he was alert to all the strange, irrational, indeed extraordinary
vagaries and pitfalls of so-called ordinary life. Grist for his exceedingly
fine mill were the transience of love, the mysteries of contempt and hate,
the dark forces toying with human behavior, the fragility, brevity, or futility of lives. Though the exercise of any, even the most trivial, kind of
power matters greatly to Schnitzler's characters, erotic fulfillment is an
equally consuming pursuit, even if-as these stories illustrate-bliss is
pitifully short-lived, often lasting no longer than one night or just a single
hour.

But this melancholy evancescence and its accompanying frustrations are examined with the scientific rigor of a physician, which Schnitzler for many years was. His eminent laryngologist father coerced Arthur
to follow in his footsteps, though the youth's heart was in aesthetic and
bohemian pleasures for which the Vienna of that period was ideally
suited, and which Arthur did not wholly give up. An empire in its decline
is the breeding ground for both a heartbreakingly true art and for epicurean, even convulsively decadent, pursuits. The close proximity of
nonchalant wealth and throttling poverty (and the easy fall from one to
the other through various kinds of gambling) made for, among other
things, the kind of sexual exploitation by idle young gentlemen to which
pretty but impecunious young women readily exposed themselves. And
not only they: also well-off but underoccupied young housewives, the targets of artists and minor but indulged aristocrats, usually members of
the officer class.

It was a snake-filled Eden. As the distinguished historian Golo
Mann put it: "Why did Austrian statehood that exhibited so many tolerant traits nevertheless end up becoming so culpable? Alas, there was
much hatred in old Austria, and Vienna itself, golden Vienna, spawned it
as a marsh does feverish diseases. Hate of the little folks for the Jews (of
whom there were numerous and affluent ones in the capital), stirred up
by demagogues but extending even to major political parties; hate of the
burgers for the Social Democrats; hate of the constituent nationalities,
Germans and Slavs, for each other; hate of the unsuccessful for the more
prosperous: Hate."

As the literary historian Ernst Alker observed: "If much of [Schnitzler's writing] may now feel like curiosities of an inconceivably idyllic
era whose people, despite favorable living conditions, had a knack for
being very unhappy, the fact remains that a vanished epoch here achieves
its literary expression." Or, to quote another scholar, Reinhart Muller-
Freienfels, we have here "the finally vain attempt of [Schnitzler's] characters to escape the comfortless reality of their existence into fantasies
and self-deceptions, into art, into the attitude of the distanced spectator,
even into suicide; at last also into concentration on the immediate, unmediated moment."

So there was Dr. Schnitzler (even if literary success had made him
relinquish medical practice), the cool-eyed diagnostician of the age's excesses-including his own; and Arthur the poet, several of whose plays
are indeed in polished verse, and all of whose prose is suffused with a
poet's hypersensitive perceptions. In short, a hard-nosed realist and elegiac post-romantic in the same skin. Perhaps the greatest tribute Schnitzler received was from his erstwhile colleague and friend Sigmund Freud,
who subsequently stopped associating with him for fear-supreme com-
pliment!-of falling too much under his influence. Even so, Freud wrote
Schnitzler in t 9o6: "I often asked myself in amazement where you could
have gotten this or that secret knowledge I had to acquire through
painstaking investigation of the subject, and I eventually got to the point of envying the writer whom I otherwise admired." And again in 1922, on
Schnitzler's sixtieth birthday, "At the root of your being, you are a psychological depth explorer as honestly unprejudiced and unafraid as anyone ever."

To repeat, then, in no other writer is the febrile polarity Love (or
Sex) and Death more powerfully ubiquitous than in Arthur Schnitzler,
scion of the dying Habsburg Empire. Why is it that periods that so thrill
to sex are also thrall to death? Is it identification with threatening social
change? Or is the post-coital animal triste in a state of exhaustion and
blankness that presages annihilation? Or is the swift waning of ecstasythe death of passion-the foreshadowing of death itself?

In his bachelor days as junger Herr, the handsome Schnitzler was
less successful than others with the siisse Madel (sweet young girls). His
most enduring affair was with Jeanette (actually Anna) Heger, a needleworker with whom he fell into instant reciprocal love. About a previous
girl he had written: "I could not seem to be completely happy with her. I
don't think I am wrong in ascribing the blame for this to the hypocritical
element in my nature and the capital of mistrust that went with it, which
paid dividends in the form of self-torture and the desire to torture others;
but I was also irked that I was wasting my time, my thoughts, my finest
emotions on a basically insignificant creature."

Eventually the fine passion for Jeanette took a similar turn: "Now
we were together evening after evening, yet somehow couldn't be happy.
I tormented her incessantly with my jealousy, strangely enough not in
connection with the months just gone by but with the more distant past.
She wept, kissed my hands humbly, yet couldn't assuage me. Sometimes-and not under the influence of some baseless hypochondriac
mood or other-I felt on the verge of despair and filled with dread as I
realized the futility and irrevocable passing of the years."

In these passages, as in countless others from Schnitzler's letters
and memoirs, you recognize the traits of the typical Schnitzler hero and
some of his female companions. It may be that what made the writer
such a keen dissector of neurotic relationships was that he was his own
best physician as well as neediest patient.

It is no accident that of the nine stories herein included, eight re volve wholly or in large measure around a death. The ninth contains no
death and ends on a positive note as a blind beggar realizes that his
sighted brother was not stealing from him but for him; yet the realization
comes as the two are about to be delivered to the law.

Still, that is as close as we get to a happy ending. But what about
Dream Story, which owes its recent celebrity to Stanley Kubrick's
wretched movie version, Eyes Wide Shut? In it, a young married couple
become briefly estranged: he through a rather harmless confession of his
wife's that piques his jealousy, and through some nocturnal adventures
that indirectly turn him even more against her; she through a dream betokening intense latent resentment of her husband. Yet, in the end, they are
reconciled and seem to resume normal family life. But did not their
strongest sexual fulfillment come after a masked ball at which each of
them was aroused by seductive strangers? What does this say for their future happiness?

Schnitzler's focus is admittedly narrow. Dueling, for example,
which he execrated, claims one life in these stories and raises its head in
a couple of others. The experience of a lover at the deathbed of his adulterous beloved has its counterpart in a scene where a husband discovers
at the deathbed of his wife that his best friend, who has come to console
him, was sleeping with her. But such similarities hardly matter because
what Schnitzler explored so inspiredly was the particular, the individual,
the unique, however superficially similar to some other particular and
unique. He himself defined his procedure: "To be an artist means to
know how to polish the rough surfaces of reality so smooth that it may
mirror all of infinity from the heights of heaven to the depths of hell."
But what if this mirror is not so huge, merely a pocket mirror handled
with surpassing dexterity?

In a typically waspish essay, the brilliant but malicious critic Karl
Kraus described Schnitzler as "standing between those who hold a mirror
up to the time, and those who hold a bedroom screen up to it; somehow
he belongs in the boudoir." What was intended as a dig comes out a compliment. Yes, Schnitzler was, though a reflector of his times-note the
pungent details, piquant digressions, apparent irrelevancies with which
he enriches his stories, creating a background almost as dense and ab sorbing as the foreground-even more one of those Chinese or Japanese
screens that modestly concealed people's beds. But weren't those very
screens witnesses to two supreme human experiences: the making of
love and the meeting up with death?

So yes, Schnitzler divided his attention between the often anti-climactic everyday and the dramatic climaxes of love and death. He encompassed great passions, great hatreds, and great losses. Also petty
obsessions, ludicrous peeves, and stony detachments. You cannot read
him without feeling that this man really understood. And, in feeling that,
learn from him.

JOHN SIMON