No More Learning

This was now, after the lean, the fat intellectual kine. This poet's portentous ideal- ism corresponded to those big deep brass instruments in the orches- tra that resemble upended locomotive boilers and produce an unwieldy grunting and rumbling. With a single note they muffle a thousand possibilities. They huff and puff out huge bales of timeless emotions. Anyone capable of trumpeting poetry on such a scale- Arnheim thought, not without bitterness-is nowadays rated by us as a poet, as compared with a mere literary man. Then why not rate him as a general as well? Such people after all live on the best of terms with death and constantly need several thousand dead to make them enjoy their brief moment of life with dignity.
But just then someone had made the point that even the General's dog, howling at the moon some rose-scented night, might if chal- lenged defend himself by saying: "So what, it's the moon, isn't it? I am expressing the timeless emotions of my race! " quite like one of those gentlemen so famous for doing the very same. The dog might even add that his emotion was unquestionably a powerful experi- ence, his expression richly moving, and yet so simple that his public could understand him perfectly, and as for his ideas playing second fiddle to his feelings, that was entirely in keeping with pre-
vailing standards and had never yet been regarded as a drawback in literature.
Arnheim, discomfited by this echoing of his thoughts, again held back the cigar smoke between lips that for a moment remained half open, as a token barrier between himself and his surroundings. He had praised some of these especially pure poets on every occasion, because it was the thing to do, and had sometimes even supported them with cash, though in fact, as he now realized, he could not stand them and their inflated verses. "These heraldic figures who can't even support themselves," he thought, "really belong in a game pre- serve, together with the last of the bison and eagles. " And since, as this evening had proved, it was not in keeping with the times to sup- port them, Arnheim's reflections ended not without some profit for himself.
go
DETHRONING THE IDEOCRACY
It probably makes sense that times dominated by the spirit of the marketplace see as their true counterpart those poets who have noth- ing at all to do with their time, who do not besmirch themselves with the topical concerns of their daybut supply only pure poetry, as it were, addressing their faithful in obsolete idioms on·great subjects, as though they were just passing through on earth, coming from eter- nity, where they live, like the man who went to America three years ago and is already speaking broken German on his first visit home. This is much the same as compensating for a big hole by setting a hollow dome on top of it, and since the higher hollowness only en- larges the ordinary one below, nothing is more natural, after all, than that such a period fostering the cult of personality should be followed by one that turns its back on all this fuss over responsibility and greatness.
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Arnheim tried ca~tiously,experimentally, and with the cozy sense of being personally insured against damage, to feel his way into this conjectured future development. This was certainly no minor under- taking. He had to take into account everything he had seen in recent years in America and Europe: the new dance fanatics, whether they were jazzing up Beethoven or transposing the new sensualism into fresh rhythms; the new painters, who tried to express a maximum of meaning by a minimum oflines and colors; the art of the fllm, where a gesture universally understood, presented with. a new little twist, took the world by storm; and finally he thought of the common man, who already, as a great believer in sports, was kicking like a furious baby in his efforts to take possession of Nature's bosom. What is so striking about all this is a certain tendency to allegory, if this is under- stood as an intellectual device to make everything mean more than it has any honest claim to mean. Just as the world ofthe Baroque saw in a helmet and a pair of crossed swords all the Greek gods and their myths, and it was not Count Harry who kissed Lady Harriet but a god of war kissing the goddess of chastity, so today, when Harry and Harriet are smooching, they are experiencing the temper of our times, or something out ofour array of ten dozen contemporary myths, which of course no longer depict an Olympus floating above formal gardens but present the entire modem hodgepodge itself. On screen and on stage, on the dance floor and at concerts, in cars, on planes, on the water and in the sun, at the tailor's and in the business office, there is constantly in the making an immense new surface consisting ofim- and expressions, ofgestures, role-playing, and expe- riences. All these goings-on, each with its distinct outward forms, in the aggregate suggest a body in lively circular motion, with every- thing inside it thrusting out toward the surface, where it enters into combination with all the rest, while the interior goes on seething and heaving with amorphous life. Had Amheim been able to see only a few years into the future, he would have seen that 1,920 years of Christian morality, millions of dead men in the wake of a shattering war, and a whole German forest of poetry rustling in homage to the modesty ofWoman could not hold back the day when women's skirts and hair began to grow shorter and the young girls of Europe slipped off eons of taboos to emerge for a whUe naked, like peeled bananas. He would have seen other changes as well, which he would hardly
have believed possible, nor does it matter which of those would last and which would disappear, if we consider what vast and probably wasted efforts would have been needed to effect such revolutions in the way people lived by the slow, responsible, evolutionary road trav- eled by philosophers, painters, and poets, instead of tailors, fashion, and chance; it enables us to judge just how much creative energy is generated by the surface of things, compared with the barren conceit of the brain.
Such is the dethronement of ideocracy, of the brain, the displace- ment of the mind to the periphery: the ultimate problem, Amheim thought. This has always been life's way with man, of course, restruc- turing humankind from the surface inward; the only difference is that people used to feel that they in tum should contribute some- thing from their inside to their outside. Even the General's dog, which Arnheim now kindly remembered, would never have under- stood any other line of development, for this loyal friend of man's character had still been formed by the stable, docile man of the pre- vious centuxy, in that man's image; but its cousin the prairie wolf, or the prairie rooster, would have understood readily enough. When that wild fowl, dancing for hours on end, plumes itself and claws the ground, there is probably more soul generated than by a scholar link- ing one thought to another at his desk. For in the last analysis, all thoughts come out of the joints, muscles, glands, eyes, and ears, and from the shadowy general impressions that the bag of skin to which they belong has of itself as a whole. Bygone centuries were probably sadly mistaken in attaching too much importance to reason and intel-
ligence, convictions, concepts, and character; like regarding the rec- ord office and the archives as the most important part of a government department because they are housed at headquarters, although they are only subordinate functions taking orders from else- where.
All at once, Arnheim-stimulated perhaps by a certain dissolving of tensions under the influence of love--found his way to the re- deeming idea that would put all these complications in perspective; it was somehow pleasantly associated with the concept of increased turnover. An increased turnover of ideas and experiences was unde- niably characteristic of the new era, if only as the natural conse- quence of bypassing the time-consuming process of intellectual
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assimilation. He pictured the brain of the age replaced by the mech- anism of supply and demand, the painstaking thinker replaced, as the regulating factor, by the businessman, and he could not help enjoy- ing the moving vision of a vast production of experiences freely min- gling and parting, a sort of pudding with a nervous life of its own, quivering all over with sensations; or a huge tom-tom booming with immense resonance at even the lightest tap. The fact that these im- ages did not quite jell, as it were, was already owing to the state of reverie they had induced in Arnheim, who felt that it was just such a life that could be compared with a dream in which nne finds oneself simultaneously outsidt::, witnessing the strangest events, and quietly inside, at the very center of things, one's ego rarefied, a vacuum through which all the feelings glow like blue neon tubes. It is life that does the thinking all around us, forming with playful ease the con- nections our reason can only laboriously patch together piecemeal, and never to such kaleidoscopic effect. So it was that Arnheim mused as a man of business, while at the same time electrified to the twenty tips of his fingers and toes by his sense of the free-flowing psycho- physical traffic of the dawning age. It seemed to him far from impos- sible that a great, superrational collectivity was coming to birth and that, abandoning an outworn individualism, we were on our way
back, with all the superiority and ingenuity of the white race, to a Paradise Reformed, . bringing a modem program, a rich variety of choices, to the rural backwardness of the Garden of Eden.
There was only one fly in the ointment. Just as in dreams we are able to inject an inexplicable feeling that cuts through the whole per- sonality into some happening or other, we are able to do this while awake-but only at the age of fifteen or sixteen, while still in school. Even at that age, as we all know, we live through great storms offeel- ing, fierce urgencies, and all kinds ofvague experiences; our feelings are powerfully alive but not yet well defined; love and anger, joy and scorn, all the general moral sentiments, in short, go jolting through us like electric impulses, now engulfing the whole world, then again shriveling into nothing; sadness, tenderness, nobility, and generosity of spirit form the vaulting empty skies above us. And then what hap- pens? From outside us, out of the ordered world around us, there appears a ready-made form-a word, averse, a demonic laugh, aNa- poleon, Caesar, Christ, or perhaps only a tear shed at a father's
grave-and the "work" springs into being like a bolt of lightning. This sophomore's "work" is, as we too easily overlook, line for line the complete expression of what he is feeling, the most precise match of intention and execution, and the perfect blending of a young man's experience with the life of the great Napoleon. It seems, however, that the movement from the great to the small is somehow not reversible. We experience it in dreams as well as in our youth: we have just given a great speech, with the last words still ring- ing in our ears as we awaken, when, unfortunately, they do not sound quite as marvelous as we thought they were. At this point we do not see ourselfas quite the weightlessly shimmering phenomenon ofthat dancing prairie cock, but realize instead that we have merely been howling with much emotion at the moon, like the General's much- cited fox terrie. r. ·
So there was something not quite in order here, Amheim thought, arousing himselffrom his trance-but in any case, a man must move with the times, he added, now fully alert; for what, after all, should come more naturally to him than to apply this tried-and-true princi- ple of production to the fabrication of life as well?
91
SPECULA TIONS ON THE INTELLECTUAL BULL AND BEAR MARKET
The gatherings at the Tuzzis now resumed their regular and crowded course.
At a meeting of the Council, Section Chief Tuzzi turned to the "cousin," saying: "Do you realize that all this has been,done before? " With a glance, he indicated the seething human contents of the
home of which he was currently dispossessed.
"In the early days of Christianity, the centuries around the birth of
Christ. In that Christian-Levantine-Hellenistic-Judaic melting pot
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where innumerable sects crystallized. " He launched on a list: "Ada- mites, Cainites, Ebionites, Collyridians, Archontians, Euchites, Oph- ites . . . "With a funny, hasty deliberateness of tempo that comes of slowing the pace in order to conceal one~s fluency on a subject, he recited a long series of pre- and early-Christian sect names, as if he were hying to give his wife's cousin to understand that he knew more about what was going on in his house than, for reasons ofhis own, he usually cared to show.
He then went on to specify that one of the sects named opposed marriage because of the high value it placed on chastity, while an- other, also prizing chastity above all, had a funny way ofattaining this aim by means of ritual debauchery. One sect practiced self-mutila- tion because they regarded female flesh ~ an invention ofthe Devil, while another made its men and women attend services stark naked. There were those who, brooding on their . creed and coming to the conclusion that the Serpent who had seduced· Eve was a divine per- son, went in for sodomy, while others tolerated no virgins among their flock because their studies proved that the Mother of God had borne other children besides Jesus, so that virginity was a dangerous heresy. Some were always doing the opposite of what'others were doing, for more or less the same reasons and on the same principles.
Tuzzi. delivered himself of all this with the gravity appropriate to a historical disquisition, however peculiar the facts, yet with an under- tone of what were then called smoking-room stories, They were standing close to the wall; the Section Chief threw his cigarette stub into an ashtray with a grim little smile, still absentmindedly eyeing the throng of guests, as though he had meant to say only enough to last the time it takes to finish a cigarette, and ended with: "It seems to me that the differences ofopinion and points ofview in those days show a state of affairs not too dissimilar to the controversies among our intellectuals today. They'll be gone with the wind tomorrow. If various historical circumstances had not given rise at the right mo- ment to an ecclesiastical bureaucracy with the necessary political powers, hardly a trace ofthe Christian faith would be left today. . . . "
Ulrich agreed. "Properly paid officials in charge of the faith can be trusted to uphold the regulations with the necessary firmness. In general I feel that we never do justice to the value of our vulgar qualities; if they were not so dependable, no history would be made
at all, because our purely intellectual efforts are incurably controver- sial and shift with every breeze. "
The Section Chief glanced up at him mistrustfully and then imme- diately shifted his gaze away again. That sort of comment was too unbuttoned for his taste. He nevertheless acted in a noticeably friendly and congenial fashion, even on such short acquaintance, to- ward this cousin of his wife's. He came and went and had the air, amid all that was going on in his house, of living in some other, closed world, the loftier significance ofwhich he kept hidden from all eyes; yet there were always times when he could hold out no longer and had to reveal himself to somebody, if only indistinctly, for an instant, and then it was always this cousin with whom he struck up a conver- sation. It was the natural human consequence of feeling neglected by his wife, despite her occasional fits of tenderness for him. At such times Diotima kissed him like a little girl, a girl of perhaps fourteen, who out of heaven knows what affectation suddenly smothers an even littler boy with kisses. Tuzzi's upper lip, under its curled mus- tache, would then instinctively draw back in embarrassment. The new c01iditions in his household got him and his wife into impossible situations. He had certainly not forgotten Diotima's complaint about his snoring, and had also, meanwhile, read the works of Arnheim and was prepared to discuss them with her; they contained some things he could accept, a great deal that struck him as all wrong, and a cer- tain amount he did not understand, though serene in the assumption that this was the author's. problem rather than his own. But he had always been accustomed in such matters simply to state the authori- tative opinion of a man experienced in these things, and. the present likelihood ofDiotima's contradicting him every time, ofhaving to de- bate with her points he considered to be beneath him, struck him as so unfair a change in his private life that he could not bring himselfto have it out with her; he even caught himself in vague fantasies of having it out in a duel with Arnheim instead.
Tuzzi suddenly narrowed his beautiful brown eyes in irritation and told himself that he must keep a sharper watch on his moods. The cousin beside him-not at all the sort of man Tuzzi would normally want to become too closely involved with-only reminded him of his wife through an association ofideas that hardly had any real content, the mere fact of their being blood relatives. He had also noticed for
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some time that Arnheim seemed, rather cautiously, to be·favoring this young man, who for his own part did not conceal his marked antipathy to Arnheim: two obselVations that did not really amount to much, yet were enough to make Tuzzi aware of his own inexplicable liking for Ulrich. He opened his eyes again. and stared briefly like an owl across the room, without really looking at anything.
His wife's cousin, incidentally, was staring straight ahead just as Tuzzi was, bored but at ease with him, and had not even noticed the pause in their exchange. Tuzzi felt obliged to say something, like a man who fears that his silence might give away his inwardly troubled condition.
"You like to take a cynical view," he said with a smile, as if Ulrich's remark about the bureaucratic administration of religious faith had only just been allowed to come to his attention, "and I daresay my wife is not unjustified in fearing to count on your support, despite her sympathies for you as a ~ousin. If I may say so, your views on your fellowmen tend to be on the bearish side. "
"What an excellent term for it! " UlriGh said, clearly please~. "Even though I'm afraid I don't quite live up to it. It's really history that has always taken a bearish or a bullish line with all mankind-bearish when it is using trickery or violence, and bullish more or less in your wife's manner, by trying to have faith in the power of ideas. Dr. Arn- h~im, too, ifyou can believe what he says, is a bull. While you, as a professional bear amid this choir of angels, must have feelings I would be interested to hear about. "
He regarded the Section Chief with a sympathetic expression. Tuzzi drew his cigarette case from his pocket and shrugged his shoul- ders. 'What makes you think that my outlook must be different from that of my wife? " he countered. He had meant to discourage the per- sonal turn the conversation had taken, but his retort had only rein- forced it. Luckily, Ulrich had not noticed this, and went on: 'We're made of stuff that takes on the shape of every mold it gets into, one way or another. "
"That's over my head," Tuzzi replied evasively.
Ulrich was glad to hear it. Tuzzi's way was the opposite of his own, and he took real pleasure in talking With a man who refused to be goaded into an intellectual discussion and had no other defense, or would use no other, than to interpose his whole person as a shield.
His original dislike of Tuzzi had long since reversed itself under the pressure of his far greater dislike of the doings under Tuzzi. 's roof; he simply couldn't understand why Tuzzi put up with it, and could only try to guess. He was getting to know him only very slowly, as one keeps an animal under observation, outwardly, without the ease of insight their words give us into people, who talk because they are clearly impelled to. What appealed to him at first was the dessicated look ofthe man, who was ofjust middle height, and the dark, intense eye, betraying much uneasy feeling, not at all the eye of a bureaucrat, t nor did it seem to fit in with Tuzzi's present personality as revealed in conversation; unless one assumed something not altogether unusual, that it was a boy's eye peering out from among the man's features, like a window opening out of an unused, locked-up, and long-forgot- ten part of the interior. The next thing Ulrich had noticed was Tuzzi's body odor, something of china or dry wooden boxes or a mix of sun, sea, exotic landscapes, an obdurate hardness and a discreet whiff of the barbershop. This odor gave Ulrich pause; he had come across only two people with a distinct personal odor; the other onl:l was Moosbrugger. When he called to mind Tuzzi. 's sharp yet subtle smell and also thought of Diotima, whose ample surface ~manated a fine powdery scent that did not seem to mask anything, it came to contrasting kinds of passion that seemed to have nothing to do with the actual life this rather incongruous couple shared. Ulrich now had to make an effort to call his thoughts to order before he could re- spond to Tuzzi's cool disclaimer.
"It's presumptuous of me," he resumed, in that faintly bored but resolute tone in which one apologizes for having to be a bore in one's tum, because· the situation leaves one no alternative, "it certainly is presumptuous of me to offer you my definition of diplomacy, but I do it in the hope that you will straighten me out. Let me put it this way: diplomacy assumes that a dependable social order can be achieved only by mendacity, cowardice, cannibalism, in short, the predictable baseness of human nature. It is based on a bearish ideal- ism, to resort once more to your admirable expression. This is sad in a fascinating way, because it goes with the assumption that our higher faculties are so ambiguous in nature that they can lead us equally well to cannibalism as to the Critique o f Pure Reason. "
"It really is too bad," the Section Chief protested, "that you have
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so romantic a view of diplomacy and, like so many others, you con- fuse politics With intrigue. There may have been something in what you say when diplomacy was still being conducted by highborn dilet- tantes, but it no longer applies in an age of responsible social leader- ship. We are not sad, we are optimistic. We must have faith in the future, or we could not live with our conscience, which is no differ- ent from everyone else's. If you must talk of cannibalism, then all I can say is that diplomacy can take credit for keeping the world from turning cannibalistic; but to do so, one has to believe in something higher. "
· "What do you believe in? " Ulrich demanded bluntly.
"Oh, come now," Tuzzi said. ''I'm no longer a boy, who might an- swer such a question point-blank. All I meant was that the more a diplomat can identify himself with the spiritual currents of his time, the easier he will fmd his profession. And vice versa: we have learned in the course of a few generations that the more progress we make in every direction, the greater our need for diplomacy-but that's only
natural, after all. "
"Natural? But then you're saying just what I've said! " Ulrich ex-
claimed, with all the animation consistent with the image they wished to present, of two civilized men engaged in casual conversa- tion. "I pointed out with regret that our spiritual and moral values canriot sustain themselves in the long run without support from what is material and evil, and you reply, more or less, that the more spiri- tual energy is at work, the niore caution is needed. Let us say, then, that we can treat a man as a worm and by this means get him to do not quite everything, and we can appeal to what is best in him and by this means get him to do not quite everything. So we waver between these two approaches, we mix them, that's all there is to it. It seems to me that I may flatter myself on being in far greater accord with you than you're willing to admit. "
Section Ghief. Tuzzi turned to his inquisitor; a tiny smile lifted his little mustache, and his gleanling eyes took on ~ ironically indulgent expression as he tried to find a way to end this conversation, which was as unsafe as an icy pavement underfoot, and as pointlessly child- ish as boys skidding on such a pavement. "You know," he answered, "I hope you don't regard this as too crude of me, but I must say tPat philosophizing should be left to the professors. Always excepting our
official great philosophers, whom I hold in greatest esteem and all of whom I've read; they're what we've got to live with. And our profes- sors, well, it's their job, there doesn't have to be any more to it than that; we have to have teachers, to keep things going. But other than that, the fine old Austrian principle that a good citizen shouldn't rack his brains over everything still holds water. It hardly ever does any good, and it is a touch presumptuous too. "
The Section Chief rolled himself a cigarette and held his peace; he felt no further need to apologize for his "crudeness. " Ulrich, watch- ing his slender brown fingers at their work, was delighted with Tuzzi's half-witted effrontery.
"You have just stated the same, very modem principle that the churches have applied to their members for nearly two thousand years, and which the socialists have begun to follow too," he said politely.
Tuzzi shot him a glance to see what the cousin meant by this anal- ogy; expecting Ulrich to expatiate on it further, he was already an- noyed in anticipation of such interminable intellectual indiscretion. But the cousin contented himself with indulgently scrutinizing the man at his side with his pre-1848 mentality. Ulrich had long assumed that Tuzzi must have his reasons for tolerating his wife's relationship with Amheim within certain limits, and would have liked to know what he hoped to gain by it. It still mystified him. Was Tuzzi acting on the same principle as the banks with respect to the Parallel Cam- paign (they were keeping as aloof from it as they could without quite giving up their chance to have a finger in the pie) and meanwhile being blind to Diotima's new springtide oflove, which was becoming so obvious? Ulrich was inclined to doubt it. He took a certain plea- sure in scrut nizing the deep furrows and seams in the man's face and
watching the hard modeling of the jaw muscles when those teeth bit into the cigarette holder. Here was an image ofpure masculinity. Ul- rich was a bit fed up with talking to himself so much, and enjoyed trying to imagine what it must be like to be a man of few words. He supposed that even as a boy Tuzzi had disliked other boys who talked too much, the kind who grow up to be intellectuals, while the boys who would rather spit through their teeth than open their mouths tum into men who prefer not to waste their time, but seek to com- pensate in a<::tion or intrigue, in simple endurance and self-defense,
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for not indulging any more than they can help in those inescapable acts of feeling and thinking which they somehow find so profoundly embarrassing that they wish· they could use thoughts and feelings only to mislead other people. Had anyone said such a thing to Tuzzi, he would naturally have denied it, just as he would deny anything too emotional, because he would not, on principle, tolerate exaggera- tions and eccentricities in any direction. It was simply out of order to speak to him about what he so admirably represented in person, just as it was to ask a musician, an actor, or a dancer what he was really getting at,· imd Ulrich was tempted at ·this point to pat the Section Chief on his shoulder or gently run a hand through his hair, some wordless pantomime or other for the sympathetic understanding be- tween them.
The one thing that Ulrich did not take fully into account was that Tuzzi, not only as a boy but now, that very moment, felt the urge to spit between his teeth in a blast of masculinity. For he sensed some- thing ofthat vague benevolence at his side, and he felt ill at ease with it. He realized that his remark about philosophy contained an admix- ture of elements it was not advisable to risk on an outsider, and he didn't know what had possessed him to let himself go so rashly with this cousin (for some reason this was what he always called Ulrich). He couldn't stand voluble men, and wondered with dismay whether he might unconsciously be trying to win this man over as an ally where his wife was concerned; the thought darkened his skin with shame, because such help was unacceptable, and he involuntarily took several steps away from Ulrich, masking his impulse with some awkward excuse.
But then he changed his mind; moved back, and asked: "Inciden- tally, have you wondered at all why Dr. Amheim is staying with us so long? " He suddenly imagined that such a question would be the best proof that he regarded any connection between Amheim's stay and his wife as out of the question.
The cousin gave him an outrageously dumbfounded stare. The an- swer was so obvious that it was hard to think what else to say. "Do you think," he said haltingly, "that there must be a special reason for it? If so, it would be business, surely? "
"I have nothing to go on," Tuzzi answered, feeling every inch the diplomat again. "But could there be another reason? "
"Of course there can't actually be any other reason," Ulrich conceded civilly. "How very observant of you. For my part I must admit that I never gave it any thought at all; I assumed that it had more or less to do with his literary bent. Wouldn't that be another possibility? " ·
The Section Chieffavored this with no more than an absent smile. "In that case you would have to give me some notion why a man like Arnheim has literary interests in the first place," he said, to his in- stant regret, because he could see the cousin winding up for one of his lengthy answers.
"Have you never noticed," Ulrich began, "that an incredible lot of people can be seen these days talking to themselves on the street? "
Tuzzi gave a shrug.
"There's something the matter with people. It seems they're un- able to take in their experiences or else to wholly enter into them, so they have to pass along what's left. An excessive need to write, it seems to me, comes from the same thing. You may not be able to spot this in the written product, which tends to tum into something far removed from its origin, depending on talent and experience, but it shows up quite unambi~ouslyin the reading of it; hardly anyone reads anymore today; everyone just uses the writer to work off his own excess on him, in some perverse fashion, whether by agreeing or· disagreeing. "
"So you think there's something the matter with Amheim's life? '' Tuzzi asked, all attention again. "I've been reading his books lately, out of curiosity, because so many people seem to think he has great political prospects, but I must say I can't see what need they fill, or any purpose to them. "
"Putting this question in more general terms," the cousin said, "when a man is so rich in money and influence that he can have any- thing he wants, why does he write at all? It boUs down to the naive question Why do professional storytellers write? They write about something that never happened as if it had actually happened, obvi- ously. Does this mean that they admire life as a beggar admires the rich, whose indifference to him he never tires of describing? Or is it a form of chewing the cud? Or a way of stealing a little happiness by creating in imagination what cannot be attained or endured in reality?
"
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"Have you never written anything yourself? " Tuzzi broke in.
"Much as it troubles me, never. Since I am far from being so happy that I have no need of it, I am resolved that if I do not soon feel the urge to write; I shall kill myself for being constitutionally so totally abnormal. "
He said this with such grave amiability that his little joke uninten- tionally rose up from the flow ofthe co~versationlike a flooded stone surfacing as the water recedes.
Tuzzi noticed, and ta~y covered it over. "All in all, then," he concluded, "you are only confirming my point that government offi- cials begin to write only when they retire. But how does that apply to Amheim? "
The cousin remained silent.
"Do you know that Amheim's view of this undertaking to which he is sacrificing so much of his expensive time is totally pessimistic and not at all bullish? " Tuzzi suddenly said, lowering his voice. He had just remembered how Amheim, in conversation with himself and his wife, had at the very outset expressed grave doubts about the pros- pects of the Parallel Campaign, and the fact that he happened to re- call this at this particular moment, afte~so long ·a time, struck him somehow as a diplomatic coup on his own part, even though he had been able to find out virtually nothing, so far, about the reasons for Amheim's prolonged stay.
The cousin's face actually registered astonishment.
Perhaps he was only accommodating Tuzzi with this look, because he preferred to go on saying nothing. In any case, ~oth gentlemen, who were separated the next moment by guests coming up to them,
were in this fashion left with the sense of having had a stimulating talk. .
92
SOME OF THE RULES GOVERNING THE LIVES OF THE RICH
Having so much attention and admiration lavished on him might have made any man other than Arnheim suspicious and unsure of himself, on the assumption that he owed it all to his money. But Am- heim regarded suspicion as the mark ofan ignoble character, permis- sible to a man in his position only on the basis of unequivocal financial reports, and anyway he was convinced that being rich was a personal quality. Every rich man regards being rich as a personal quality. So does every poor man. There is a universal tacit under- standing on the point. This general accord is troubled only slightly by the claims of logic that having money, while capable of conferring certain traits of character on whoever has it, is not in itself a human quality. Such an academic quibble need not detain us. Every human nose instantly smells the subtle scent of independence, the habit of command, the habit of always choosing the best of everything for oneself, the whiff of misanthropy, and the unwavering sense of re- sponsibility that goes with power, that rises up, in short, from a large and secure income. Everyone can see at . a glance that such a person is nourished and daily renewed by quintessential cosmic forces. Money circulates visibly just under his skin like the sap in a blossom. Here there is no such thing as conferred traits, acquired habits; noth- ing indirect or secondhand! Destroy his bank account and his credit, and the rich man has not merely lost his money but has become, on the very day he realizes what has happened, a withered flower. With the same immediacy with which his riches were once seen as one of his personal qualities, the indescribable quality of his nothingness is now perceived, smelling like a smoldering cloud of uncertainty, irre- sponsibility, incapacity, and poverty. Riches are simply a personal, primary quality that cannot be analyzed without being destroyed.
But the effect and the functions of this rare property are most complicated, and it takes great spiritual strength to control them.
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456 • T H E ·M A N W I T H 0 U T Q U A L I T I E S
Only people with no money imagine riches as a dream fulfilled; those who have it never tire of explaining to those who do not have it how much trouble it gives them. Amheim, for instance, had often pon- dered the fact that every technical or administrative executive in his firm had a great deal more specialized knowledge than he did, and he had to reassure himself every time that, seen from ! 1 sufficiently lofty perspective, such things as ideas, knowledge, loyalty, talent, prudence, and the like can be bought because they are available in abundance, while the ability to make use of them presupposes quali- ties given only to the few who happen to have been born and bred on the heights.
Another equally burdensome problem of the rich is that everyone wants money from them. Money doesn't matter, of course, and a few thousands or t~ns of thousands more or less make hardly any differ- ence to a rich man, and so rich people like to emphasize at every opportunity that money does not affect a human being's value one way or the other, meaning that they would. be equally valuable even without their money, and their feelings l(re apt to be hurt when they feel misunderstood on this point. It is really too bad that such misUn- derstandings keep arising, particularly in their dealings with gifted people. Such people remarkably often have no money, just projects and talent, which does not lessen their sense of their own value, and nothing seems more natural to them than to ask a rich friend who doesn't care about money to put his surplus at the service of some good cause or other. They don't seem to understand that their rich friend would like to support them with his ideas, his abilities, his cha- risma. Besides, their expectations place him in a false position with respect to money, the nature ofwhich demands increase, just as ani- mal nature is set on procreation. Money can be put into bad invest- ments, where it perishes on the monetary field of honor; it Will buy a new car, even though the old one is still as good as new, or enable its owner to stay at th~ most expensive hotels in world-famous resorts, accompanied by his polo ponies, or to establish prizes for horse races or art, or to give a party for a hundred guests that costs enough in one evening to feed a hundred families for a year: with all this, one throws one's money out the window like a farmer casting out seed, so that it will come back with interest through the door. But to give it away quietly for purposes and people who are of no use to it is simply
to commit murder most foul upon one's money. The purposes may be good, and the people incomparable, in which case they should be given every kind of help-except with money. This was a principle with Arnheim, and his consistent application of it had gained him a reputation for taking a creative and active part in the intellectual ad- vancement of his time. ·
Arnheim could also claim that he thought like a socialist, and many rich people do think like socialists. They don't mind their capital being decreed to them by a natural law ofsociety, and are firmly con- vinced that it is the man who confers value on property, not vice versa. They can calmly discuss a future when they will no longer be around, which will see the end of property, and are further con- firmed in regarding themselves as social-minded by the frequency with which upright socialists prefer to await the inevitable revolution in the company ofthe rich rather than that ofthe poor. One could go on like this for a long time, describing all the functions of money Am- heim had mastered. Economic activity cannot really be separated from the other intellectual activities, and it was surely natural for him to give money as well as good advice to his intellectual and artistic friends when their need was urgent, but he did not always give it, and he never gave them much. They assured him that he was the only man in the whole world they could ask for money, because he alone had the necessary intellectual grasp of the matter, and he believed them, because he was convinced that the need for capital permeates all human functions much like the need for air to breathe, but he also met them halfway in their vision of money as a spiritual force by ap- plying it only with the most tactful restraint.
Why is it, anyway, that a man is admired and loved? Isn't it an al- most unfathomable mystery, rounded ;md fragile as an egg? Is a man more truly loved for his mustache than for his car? Is the love aroused by a sun-bronzed son of the South more personal than that aroused by a son of a leading industrial magnate? In a period when almost all well-dressed men were clean-shaven, Arnheim went on sporting a Vandyke beard and a clipped mustache; this small, extra- neous, yet familiar presence on his face reminded him somehow, rather agreeably, whenever he was letting himself go a bit in talking to his always eager listeners, ofhis money.
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93
EVEN THROUGH PHYSICAL CULTURE IT IS HARD TO GET A HOLD ON THE CIVILIAN MIND
For along time the General had been sitting on one ofthe chairs that lined the walls around the intellectual arena, his "sponsor," as he liked to call Ulrich, occupying the next chair but one, while the free chair between them held refreshments in the form of two wine- glasses they had carried away from the buffet. The General's light- blue tunic had been creeping upward, until it now formed furroWs over his paunch, like a worried forehead. They were absorbed in lis- tening to a conversation going on just in front of them.
"Beaupre's game," somebody was saying, "is positively touched with genius; I watched him here this summer, and the·previous win- ter on the RiViera. Even when he slips up, luck stays on his side and makes up for it. And he slips up fairly often, because the actual struc- ture ofhis game negates a really sound tennis style-but then, he's a truly inspired player, which evidently exempts him from the normal laws oftennis. "
"As for me, I prefer scientific tennis to the intuitive kind," some- one objected. "Braddock, for instance. There may be no such thing as perfection, but Braddock comes close. "
The first speaker: "Beaupre's genius, his dazzling unpredictability, is at its peak at the point where science fails. "
A third voice: "Isn't calling it genius overdoing it a bit? "
"What would you call it? Genius is what inspires a man to return the ball just right at the most unlikely moment! "
''I'm bound to agree," the Braddockian said in support, "that a personality must make itself felt whether a man is holding a tennis racket or the fate of a nation in his hand. "
"No, no, 'genius' is going. too far," the third man protested.
The fourth man was a musician. He said: "You're quite wrong. You're overlooking the physical thinking involved in sport, because you're evidently still in the habit of overvaluing the logical, system-
atic kind of thinking. That's practically as out of date as the prejudice that music enriches the emotional life, and sport is a discipline of the will. But physical movement in itself is so magical that we can't stand it without some kind of buffer. You can see that in films when there's no music. Music is inward motion, it supports the kinetic imagina- tion. Once you have grasped the sorcery in music, you can see the genius in sports without a second's hesitation. It's only science that's devoid of genius; it's mere mental acrobatics. "
"So then I'm right," Beaupnfs fan said, "when I say that Brad- dock's scientific game shows no genius. "
"You're not taking into account that we would need to start by re- vitalizing the term 'science,' " the Braddock fan said defensively.
"Incidentally, which of them outranks the other one? " someone wondered.
No one knew the answer. Each of them had frequently beaten the other, but no one knew the exact figures.
"Let's ask Arnheim! " someone suggested.
The group dispersed. The silence in the area of the three chairs lingered on. At last General Stumm said pensively: "Well, I was lis- tening to all that the whole time, you know, and it seems to me you could say the same thing about a victorious general, leaving out the music, perhaps. So why do they call it genius when it's a tennis player and barbarism when it's a general? "
Ever since his sponsor had suggested that he try getting through to Diotima by advocating physical culture as his particular cause, he had given considerable thought to the question of how he <:ould best use this promising approach to the civilian mind, despite his personal aversion to the actual practice of it; but the difficulties, as he was forced to observe again and again, were inordinately large.
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94
DIOTIMA'S NIGHTS
Diotima wondered how Arnheim could stand all these people, visibly enjoying himself, when her own feelings corresponded all too Closely to what she had expressed a number of times in saying that the world's business was no more than un peu de bruit autour de notre ame.
There were times when she looked around and saw her house filled with the cream of society and culture-and felt bewildered. It reduced the story of her life to nothing but that extreme contrast be- tween the depths and the heights, between the young girl's anxiety inside a tight middle-class world and now this blinding life at the summit. Already poised on a dizzily high narrow ledge, she felt the call to lift up her foot once more, toward an even greater height. The risk was seductive. She wrestled with the resolve to enter into a life where action, mind, soul, and dream are one. Basically she no longer fretted over the failure of a crowning idea for the Parallel Campaign to emerge; nor did her vision of a World Austria still mat- ter quite so much; even her discovery that for every great projection of the human mind there was an equally valid opposite had lost its terrors fo. r her. The really important movements of life have less to do with logic than with lightning and £Ire, and she had grown used to not trying to make sense of all the greatness by which she felt sur- rounded. She would gladly have dropped her campaign altogether and married Amheim, as a little girl solves her problems by forget- ting all about them and leaping into her father's arms. But the in- credible ramification of her project had her trapped. She could take no time to think. The outer chain of events and the inward one ran on independently side by side, even as she tried in vain to link them up. Just like her marriage, outwardly appearing happier than ever, when in fact everything was inwardly dissolving.
Had Diotima been able to act in character, she would have spoken
frankly with her husband; but there was nothing she could tell him. Was it love she felt for Amheim? What they were to each other could be given so many names that even this trivial one occasionally sur- faced among her thoughts. They had never even kissed, and an ut- most intermingling of souls was something Tuzzi would not understand even if such a thing were confessed to him. Diotima her- self sometimes wondered at the fact that nothing more reportable was going on between herself and Amheim. But she had never dropped her good-girl's tendency to look up, ambitiously, to older men, and she could more easily have imagined something at least describable ifnot actually tangible going on between herselfand her cousin, who seemed younger than herself and upon whom she looked down just a little, rather than with, the man she loved and who seemed so to appreciate her ability to dissipate her feelings into gen- eral reflections on the loftiest plane. Diotima knew that one had to let oneself tumble headlong into radical changes in one's circum- stances and wake up amid one's new four walls without quite know- ing how one got there, but she felt exposed to influences that kept her wide awake. She was not entirely free from the distaste the typi- cal Austrian of her period felt toward his German kin. In its classical form, which has become a rarity in our day, this distaste corre- sponded more or less to an image of the venerated heads of Goethe and Schiller planted guilelessly on bodies that had been fed on sticky puddings and gravies, and shared something of their nonhuman in- wardness. And great as Amheim's success was in her circle, it did not escape her that after the first surprise certain resistances made them- selves felt, never taking on form or coming out into the open, yet·by their whispering presence undermining her self-assurance and mak- ing her aware of the differences between her own bias and the reser- vations felt by many persons upon whom she had been accustomed to model her own conduct. Now, ethnic prejudice is usually nothing more than self-hatred, dredged up from the murky depths of one's own cpnflicts and projected onto some convenient victim, a tradi- tional practice from time immemorial when the shaman used a stick, said to be the repository of the demon's power, to draw the sickness out of the afflicted. That her beloved was a Prussian troubled Di- otlma's heart with further terrors, of which she could form no clear
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image, so she was surely not quite unjustified in perceiving her wav- ering condition, so sharply different from the brute simplicity of her married state, as a passion.
Diotima suffered sleepless nights, during which she was tom be- tween a Prussian industrial autocrat and an Austrian bureaucrat. In the state between trance and dream, Amheim's great, luminous life passed in parade before her. She saw herself airborne at this adored man's side through a heaven of new honors, but it was a heaven of a distasteful Prussian blue. Meantime, in the black Austrian night, the yellow body of Section Chief Tuzzi still lay beside her own. She was only dimly aware of this, as of a black-and-yellow symbol of the old Kakanian culture, though he had little enough of that. It was backed by the Baroque fa~ade of ~er noble friend Count Leinsdorf's great town residence, and the shades of Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn, and of Prince Eugene of Savoy, Austria's liberator from the Turks, hovered over it, like homesickness anticipating actual exile. Diotima could not make up her mind to take such a step outside her own world, just like that, even though she almost hated her husband for being the obvious obstacle. Inside her beautiful big body, her soul felt helplessly trapped as in a vast landscape in full flower.
"I mustn't be unfair," Diotima thought. "The government official, the man given over to his work, may no longer be awake and open and receptive, but in his youth he might have been capable of it. " She remembered certain moments when they :were still engaged to be married, though even then Section Chief Tuzzi had been no lon- ger exactly a youth. "He achieved his position and his personality by hard work and devotion to duty," she thought tolerantly, "and. he has no suspicion that it has cost him his own personal life. "
Ever since she had achieved her social triumph she thought more indulgently of her husband, and so she now made him yet another inward concession. "No one is a born rationalist' and utilitarian," she reflected. ''W e all start out as a living soul. But ordinary, everyday existence silts us up, the usual human passions go through us like a firestorm, and the cold world brings out that coldness in us that freezes the soul. '' Perhaps she had been too reticent to force him into facing up to this. How sad it was. It seemed to her that she could never summon up the courage to involve Section Chief Tuzzi in the
scandal ofa divorce, such a shattering blow to anyone as wrapped up as he was in his public role.
"Even adultery is preferable! " she· suddenly told herself.
Adultery was what Diotima had been considering for some time. To do one's duty in one's appointed place is a sterile notion; quan-
tities of energy are poured out to no purpose! The right course is to choose one's place and shape one's circumstances deliberately. Ifshe was going to condemn herself to staying with her husband, there still remained a choice between a useless and afruitful martyrdom, and it was her choice to make. So far Diotima had been hampered by the moral sleaziness and th! 'l unattractive air of irresponsibility that were inseparable from all the stories of adultery that had ever come her way. She simply couldn't imagine· herself in such a. situation. To touch the doorknob of a certain kind of hotel room seemed tan- tamount to diving into a cesspool. To slip, with rustling skirts, up s o m e s t r a n g e staircas~a c e r t a i n m o r a l c o m p l a c e n c y o f h e r b o d y r e - sisted the thought. Hasty kisses went against her grain, as did clan- destine words of love. Catastrophe was more in her line. Those last walks together, choked good-byes, torn between a mother's duty and love, were much more her style. But owing to her husband's thrifty disposition she had no children, and catastrophe was precisely the thing to be avoided. So she opted, if it should come to that, for a Renaissance model. A love that had to live with a dagger through the heart. While she could form no very clear image of this, there was something decidedly upright about it, with a background of classic ruins under fleeting clouds. Guilt and its transcendence, passion ex- piated by suffering, trembled in this image and filled Diotima with an unutterable intensity and awe. "Wherever a person finds her highest potential and the richest field for her energies is where she belongs," she thought, "because it is'there that she can do the most to intensify life as a whole! "
She looked at her husband as best she could in the dark. Just as the eye does not register the ultraviolet rays of the spectrum, so this ra- tionalist would never notice certain emotional realities of the inner life!
Section ChiefTuzzi was breathing evenly, suspecting nothing, cra- dled by the assumption that during his well-earned eight hours of
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mental absence nothing of importance could be happening in Europe. Such tranquillity did not fail to impress Diotima, and more than once she pondered the idea: Renunciation! good-bye to Am- heiml great, noble words of anguish, heaven-storming resignation, leave-taking on the scale of a Beethoven; the powerful muscle of her heart tensed up under these demands made on it. The future bil- lowed with conversations full of a tremulous, autumnal brilliance, the pPignancy of far-off blue mountain ranges. But could renuncia- tion coexist with the double marriage bed? Diotima started up from her pillows, her black hair flying in wild ringlets. Section Chief Tuzzi's sleep was no longer the sleep of innocence but rather that of a serpent with a rabbit in its belly. She came dangerously close to waking· him up and, in view of this new dilemma, shrieking in his face _that she must, she must and would, leave him! Such a flight into hys- teria in her conflicted situation would certainly have been under- standable, but her body was too healthy for that; she felt that it simply did not react with the requisite horror to Tuzzi's proximity. She faced the absence of this horror with a dry shudder. No tears succeeded in running down her cheeks, but oddly enough it was the thought of Ulrich that gave her a certain comfort in this particular situation. These days she normally never gave him a thought, but his peculiar remarks about Wl;Ulting to abolish reality, while 1\mheim overestimated it, had a mysterious overtone, a hovering note Di- otima had ignored at the time, only to have it surface in her mind during these night watches of hers. "All it means is that one shouldn't wony too much about what is going to happen," she told herselfirri- tably. "It's the most commonplace idea in the world! " Yet even as she phrased this thought so badly and simplistically, she re! llized that it contained something she did not understand, the very thing that acted on her like a sedative, paralyzing her despair along with her consciousness. Time flitted away like a dark shadow line, as she com- forted herself that somehow her inability to muster a lasting despair might also redound to her credit; but this consoling thought no lon- ger took hold.
At night thoughts keep flowing through alternately bright and dark patches, like water in high mountains, and when they quietly reap- peared after a while Diotima felt as though she had merely dreamed all that earlier frothing. The boiling little stream behind the dark
mountain range was not the same as the quiet river she slid into at the end. Anger, loathing, courage, fe! ll", all had drained away, there must be no such feelings, they didn't exist: In the soul's struggles with itself there is no one to blame! Ulrich, too, slipped back into oblivion. All that was left now were the ultimate mysteries, the soul's eternal longings. Their moral worth does not depend on what one does. It does not depend on the movements of consciousness or of passion. Even the passions are only un peu de bruit autour de notre arne. Kingdoms may be won or lost while the soul does not stir, and one can do nothing to attain one's destiny; in its own time it grows out of the depths of one's being, serene and everyday, like th! 'l music of the spheres. Tht=ln Diotima lay awake more than ever, but full of confidence. Such thoughts, with their final period somewhere out of sight, had the beauty of putting her to sleep very quickly, even on the most sleepless nights. Like a velvety vision, she felt her love fusing with the infinite darkness that reaches out beyond the stars, insepa- rable from herself, inseparable from Paul Arnheim, immune to all schemes and set purposes. She hardly found the time to reach for the tumbler of sweetened water she kept on her little night table for her insomnia but used only at the very last moment of consciousness, be- cause it always slipped her mind when she was agitated. The soft sound of her drinking purled, like lovers' whisperings behind a wall, beside her husband's sleep, unheard by him; then Diotima lay back reverently on her pillows and sank into the silence of unconscious being. ·
95
THE GREAT MAN OF LETTERS: REAR VIEW
It is almost too familiar a phenomenon to be worth mentioning: Once her celebrated guests had realized that the seriousness of her campaign did not call for any great effort on their part, they behaved
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like mere people, and Diotima, her house filled with noise and high ideas, was disappointed. High-minded as she was, she was ignorant ofthat law ofcircumspection which makes a man's conduct in private the opposite of his professional conduct. She did not know that politicians who had called each other liars and crooks in the assembly hall went amicably to lunch side by side in the dining hall.