W e have had several discus- sions lately-if that's the word for our differences-and I did once say something about a general, but not any
particular
one, only inci- dentally to illustrate a point.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v1
For the next few moments Ulrich felt as ifhe had two hearts in his breast, like the confusion of clocks ticking in a watchmaker's shop.
Muster- ing all his willpower, he restored order in his breast and said gently: "No, Bonadea.
"
Bonadea was now on the brink of tears, and Ulrich spoke to her: "Isn't it contradictory that you get yourselfworked up about this one affair just because I happened to tell you about it, whereas you don't even notice the millions of equally unjust things that happen every day? " .
"What difference does that make? " Bonadea pro! ested. "The point is, I do happen to know about this one, and I would be a bad person ifi stayed calm! "
Ulrich said that one had t~ keep calm; absolutely, passionately calm, he added. He had repossessed his hand and sat down ;orne distance from Bbnadea. "Nowadays everything is done 'meanwhile' and 'for the time being,'" he obseiVed. "It can't be helped. We are
driven by the scrupulousness of our reason into an atrocious un- scrupulousness of our hearts. " He poured another whiskey for him- self, too, and put his feet up on the sofa. He was beginning to feel tired.
"Everyone. starts out wanting to understand life as a whole," he said, "but the more accurately one thinks about it, the more it nar- rows down. When he's mature, a person knows more about one par- ticular square millimeter than all but at most two dozen other people in the world; he knows what nonsense people talk who know less about it, but he doesn't dare move because if he shifts even a mi- cromillimeter from his spot he will be talking nonsense too. "
His weariness was now the same transparent gold as his drink on the table. I've been talking nonsense for the last half hour too, he thought. But this diminished state was comfortable enough. The only thing he feared was that it might 'occur to Bonadea to come and sit down next to him. There was only one way to forestall this: keep talk- ing. He had propped up his head on his hands and lay stretched at full length like the effigies on the tombs in the Medici Chapel. He suddenly became aware of this, and as he assumed his pose he actu- ally felt a certain grandeur flowing through his body, a hovering in their serenity, and he felt more powerful than he was. For the first time he thought he distantly understood these works ofart, which he had previously only looked at as foreign objects. Instead of saying anything, he fell silent. Even Bonadea felt something. It was a "mo- ment," as one calls it, that defies characterization. Some dramatic ex- altation united the two of them, and left them mute.
'What is left of me? " Ulric~ thought bitterly. "Possibly someone who has courage and is not for sale, and likes to think that for the sake of his inner freedom he respects only a few external laws. But this inner freedom consists of being able to think whatever one likes; it means knowing, in every human situation, why one doesn't need to be bound by it, but never knowing what one wants to be bound by! " In this far from happy moment, when the curious little wave offeel- ing that had held him for an instant ebbed away again, he would have been ready to ad~t that he had nothing but an ability to see two sides to everything-that moral ambivalence that marked almost all his contemporaries and was the disposition of his generation, or per- haps their fate. His connections to the world had become pale, shad-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 85
286 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
owy, and negative. What right did he have to treat Bonadea badly? It was always the same frustrating talk they had, over and over again; it arose from the inner acoustics of emptiness, where a shot resounds twice as loudly and echoes on and on. It burdened him that he could no longer· speak to her except like this. For the spe~ial misery this caused them both, he came up with an almost witty, appealing name: Baroque of the Void. He sat up to say something nice to her.
"It just struck me," he said to Bonadea, who had kept her seat and dignified position. "It's a funny thing. A remarkable difference: a person able to be responsible for what he does can always do some- thing different, but a person who isn't never can. "
Bonadea responded with something quite profound: "Oh, Ul- rich! " she said. That was the only interruption, and silence closed around them once more.
When Ulrich spoke in generalities in her presence, she did not like it at all. She felt quite rightly that despite her many lapses, she lived surrounded by people like herself, and she had a sound instinct for the unsociable, eccentric, and solipsistic way he had of treating her with ideas instead of feelings. Still, crime, love, and sadness had linked themselves ill her mind, a highly dangerous mixture. Ulrich now seemed to her not nearly as intimidating, as much of a paragon, as he had at ~e beginning of their meeting; by way of compensation she now saw in him a boyish quality that aroused her idealism, the air ofa child not daring to run past some obstacle in order to throw itself into its mother's arms. She had felt for the longest time a free-float- ing, almost uncontrollable tenderness for him. But after Ulrich had checked her first hint ofthis, she forc;ed herself with great effort to hold back. The memory ofhow she had lain undressed and powerless on his sofa on her previous visit still rankled, and she was resolved to sit, if she had to, on that chair in her hat and veil to the very end in order to teach him that he had before him a person who knew how to control herselfas much as her rival, Diotima. Bonadea always missed the great idea that was supposed to go along with the great excite- ment she felt througa the nearness of a lover. Unfortunately, this can, ofcourse, be s. aid oflife itself, which contains~lot ofexcitement and little sense, but Bonadea did not know this, and she tried to ex- press some great idea. Ulrich's thoughts lacked the dignity she needed, to her way of thinking, and she was probably searching for
something finer, more deeply felt. But refined hesitancy and vulgar attraction, attraction and a terrible dread of being attracted prema- turely, all became part of the stimulus of the silence in which the suppressed actions twitched, and mingled, too, with the memory of the great peace that had so united her with her lover for a second. It was, in the end, like when rain hangs in the air but cannot fall; a numbness that spread over her whole skin and terrified her with the idea that she might lose her self-control without noticing it.
Suddenly a physical illusion sprang from al1 this: a flea. Bonadea could not tell whether it was reality or imagination. She felt a shud- der in her brain, a dubious impression as if an idea had detached itself from the shadowy bondage of all the rest but was still only a fantasy-and at the same time she felt an undeniable, quite realistic shudder on her skin. She held her breath. When one hears some- thing coming, pit-a-pat, up the stairs, knowing there is no one there but quite distinctly hearing pit-a-pat-that's how it is. Bonadea real- ized in a flash that this was an involuntary continuation of the lost shoe. A desperate expedient for a lady. But just as she was trying to banish the spook, she felt a sharp sting. She gave a little shriek, her cheeks flushed a bright red, and she called upon Ulrich to help her look for it. A flea favors the same regions as a lover; her stocking was searched down to the shoe; her blouse had to be unbuttoned in front. Bonadea declared that she must have picked it up in the streetcar or from Ulrich. But it was not to be found, and had left no traces behind.
"I can't imagine what it could have been! " Bonadea said. Ulrich smiled with unexpected friendliness. ' Bonadea burst into tears, like a little girl who has misbehaved.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 87
288
GENERAL STUMM VON BORDWEHR VISITS DIOTIMA
General Stumm von Bordwehr had paid his first call on Diotima. He was the army officer sent by the War Ministry as their observer to the great inaugural meeting, where he made an impressive speech, which, however, could not prevent the War Ministry from being passed over-for obvious reasons-when the committees for the great peace campaign were set up, one for each ministry.
He was a not very imposing general, with his little paunch and the little toothbrush on his upper lip in place ofa real mu5tache. His face was round and expressed something of the family man with no money beyond the funds for the statutory bond required when an officer wanted to marry. He said to Diotima that a soldier could ex- pect to play only a modest role in the council chamber. Besides, it went without saying that for political reasons the Ministry of War could not be included in the roster of committees. Nevertheless, he dared maintain that the proposed campaign should have an effect abroad, and what had an influence abroad was the might of a people. He repeated the celebrated philosopher. Treitschke's observation that the state is the power to su. rvive in the struggle of nations. Power displayed in peace kept war at bay, or at least shortened its cruelty. He went on like this for another quarter of an hour, slipping in classi- cal quotations he fondly remembered from his school days; main- tained that those years of humanistic studies had been the happiest of his life; tried to make Diotima feel that he admired her and was delighted with the way she had cond~cted the great conference; wanted only to repeat once again that, rightly understood, the build- ing up of the armed forces that lagged far behind those of the other great powers could be the most impressive demonstration of peace- ful intentions; and for the rest declared his confident expectation that a widespread popular concern for the country's military prob- lems was bound to arise of its own accord.
This amiable general gave Diotima the fright of her life. There ·were in those days in Kakania families whose houses were fre- quented socially by army officers because their daughters married army officers, and then there were families whose daughters did not marry army officers, either because there was no money for the man-
datory security bond or on principle, so they did not receive army officers socially. Diotima's family had belonged to the second sort for both reasons, with the consequence that this conscientiously beauti- ful woman had gone out into life with a concept of the military that was something like an image of Death decked out in motley.
She replied that there was so much that was great and good in the world that the choice was not easy. It was a great privilege to be al- lowed to give. a great sign in the midst of the world's materialistic bustle, but also a grave responsibility. And the demonstration was meant, after all, to arise spontaneously from the midst of the people themselves, for which reason she had to keep her own wishes a little in the background. She placed her words with care, as though stitch- ing them together with threads in the national colors, and burned the mild incense of high bureaucratic phraseology upon her lips.
But when the General had left, the sublime woman suffered an inner breakdown. Had she been capable of so vulgar a sentiment as hatred she would have hated the pudgy little man with his waggling eyesandthegoldbuttonson. hisbelly,butsincethiswasimpossibleshe feltvaguelyinsultedbutcouldnotsaywhy. Despitethewintrycoldshe opened the windows and paced the room several times, her silks rus- tling. When she shut the windows again there were tears in her eyes. She was quite amazed. This was now the second time she was weeping without reason. She remembered the night when, in bed at her hus- band's side, she had shed tears without being able to explain them. This time the purely nervous character ofthe process, unrelated to any tangible cause, was even more evident; this fat general caused tears to gush from her eyes like an onion, without any sensible feeling being involved. She had good cause to be worried; a shadowy fear told her that a wolf was prowling round her flocks and that it was high time to exorcise it by the power of the Idea. This is how it happened that after the General's visit Diotima made up her mind to organize with the greatest speed the planned gathering of great minds who wo~d help her define the proper content ofthe patriotic campaign.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 289
FROM THE CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN ARNHEIM AND DIOTIMA
It greatly eased Diotima's heart that Arnheim had just returned from a trip and was at her disposal.
"Your cousin and I were talking about generals just a few days ago," he instantly responded, with the air of a man alluding to a sus- picious coincidence without wanting to be specific. Diotima received the impression that her contradictory cousin, with his unenthusiastic
. view of the great campaign, also favored the vague menaces emanat- ing from the General.
"I wouldn't like to expose this to ridicule in the presence of your cousin," Arnheim went on, changing the subject, "but I would like to be able to make you feel something you would hardly come upon by yourself, far away as you are from such things: the connection be- tween business and poetry. Of course, I mean business in the largest sense, the world's business, such as I have been fated to conduct by the position to which I was born; it. is related to poetry, it has irratio- nal, even mystical aspects. I might even say that business is quite par- ticularly endowed with those aspects. You see, money is an extraordinarily intolerant power. "
"There is probably a certain intolerance in everything people stake their lives on," Diotima said hesitantly, her mind still on the unfin- ished first part of the conversation. .
"Especially with money! " Arnheim quickly said. "Foolish people imagine it's a pleasure to have money. It is in fact a terrible responsi- bility. I won't speak of the countless lives dependent on me, for whom I represent a sort of fate; let me just mention that my grandfa- ther started by picking up garbage in a middle-sized town in the Rhineland. "
At these words Diotima actually felt a sudden shiver of what she thought was economic imperialism, but this was an error; since she was not quite without the prejudice of her social circle, she as-
sociated garbage removal with what was called in her regional dialect the dungman, and so her friend's courageous confession made her blush.
'With this refining process for waste," he continued his confes- sion, "my grandfather laid the groundwork for the influence of the Arnheims. But even my father was a self-made man, if you consider that it was he who in forty years expanded the fum into a worldwide concern. Two years at a trade school was all he had, but he can see through the most tangled world affairs at a glance, and knows every- thing he needs to know before anyone else does. I myself studied economics and every conceivable branch of science, all quite beyond his ken, and no one has any idea how he does it, but he never misses a detail. That is the mystery of a vigorous, simple, great, and healthy life! "
Arnheim's voice, as he spoke of his father, took on a special, rever- ential tone, as though its magisterial calm had a small crack some- where. It struck Diotima all the more because Ulrich had told her that old Arnheim was supposed to be a short, broad-shouldered fel- low with a bony face and a button nose, who always wore a gaping swallowtail coat and handled his investments with the dogged cir- cumspection of a chess player moving his pawns. Without waiting for her response, Amheim continued after a brief pause:
· "Once a business has expanded to the degree reached only by the very few I speak of, there is hardly anything in life it is not somehow involved with. It is a little cosmos. You would be amazed ifyou knew what seemingly quite uncommercial problems-artistic, moral, po- litical-! sometimes have to bring up in conferring with my manag- ing director. But the firm is no longer mushrooming the way it did in its early days, which I'd like to call its heroic days. No matter how prosperous a business firm may be, there is a mysterious limit to its growth, as there is with everything organic. Have you ever asked yourself why no animal in our time grows bigger than an elephant? You'll find the same mystery in the history of art and in the strange relationships of the life of peoples, cultures, and epochs. "
Diotima was now ashamed of herself for having shrunk from the refining process for waste disposal, and felt confused.
"Life is full of such mysteries. There is something that defies all reason. My father is in league with it. But a man like your eousin,"
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 91
292 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Arnheim said, "an activist with a h~d full of ideas how things could be done differently and better, has no feeling for it. "
Diotima responded to this second reference to Ulrich with a smile suggesting that a man like her cousin had no claim to exert any influ- ence on her: Arnheim's even, somewhat sallow skin, which in his face was . as smooth as a pear, had flushed over the cheekbones, He had succumbed to a curious urge Diotima had been arousing in him for some time now to let down his guard and confide in her totally, down to the last hidden detail. Now he locked himself up again, picked up a book from the table, read its title without taking it in, impatiently laid it down again, and said in his usual voice-it moved Diotima as deeply a~ this moment as the gesture of a man who, in gathering up his clothes, reveals that he has been naked-"! have wandered from the point. What I have to say to you about the General is that you could do nothing better than to realize your plan as quickly as possi- ble and raise the level of our campaign with the help of humanistic ideas and their recognized representatives. But there's no need to
tum the General away on principle. Personally he may be a man of goodwill, and you know my principle of not missing any opportunity to bring the life of the spirit into a sphere of mere power. "
Diotima seized his hand and summed up the conversation in her good-bye: "Thank you for being so frank with me. "
Amheim irresolutely let that gentle hand rest in his own for a mo- ment, staring down at it thoughtfully as though there were some- thing he had forgotten to say.
66
ALL IS NOT WELL BETWEEN ULRICH AND ARNHEIM
Her cousin often took pleasure, at that time, in reporting to Diotima his experiences as His Grace's aide-de-camp, and always made a spe- cial point of showing her the files with all the proposals that kept pouring into Count Leinsdorf's office.
"Almighty cousin," he reported, with a fat folder in his hand, "I can no longer handle this alone. The whole world seems to expect improvements from us. Half of them begin with the words 'No more of . . . ' and the other half with 'Fotward to . . . ' Here is a batch of demands starting with 'No more Rome! ' and going all the way to 'Fotward to kitchen gardens! ' What would you want to choose? "
It was not easy to sort out all the petitions the world was address- ing to Count Leinsdorf, but two kinds surpassed all the rest in vol- ume. One blamed the troubles of the times on one particular detail and demanded its abolition; such details were nothing less than the Jews or the Church of Rome, socialism or capitalism, mechanistic thinking or the neglect of technical possibilities, miscegenation or segregation, big landed estates or big cities, overemphasis on intel- lect or inadequate popular education. The second 'group, on the other hand, pointed to a goal just ahead that, when reached, would suffice to take care ofeverything. These desirable goals ofthe second persuasion differed from the specific evils denounced by the first mostly by nothing more than the emotional plus or minus signs at- tached, obviously because the world is made up of both critical and affirming temperaments. So there were letters of the second cate- gory that joyfully took the negative line that it was high time to break with the ridiculous cult of the arts, because life was a far greater poet than all the scribblers. These letters demanded courtroom reports and travel books for general use; while letters on the same subject · from the first category would be joyfully positive in maintaining that the mountaineer's ecstasy upon reaching the summit outdid all the
293
294 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
sublimities of art, philosophy, and religion, so instead of these one should support mountain-climbing clubs. In this double-jointed fashion the public demanded a slowing·down of the tempo of the times just as much as a competition for the best short essay, because life was unbearably/exquisitely short, and there was a desperate need for the liberation of mankind from/by garden apartments, the eman- cipation of women, dancing, sports, interior decoration, and from any number of other burdens by any number of other panaceas.
Ulrich closed his folder and spoke privately.
"Mighty cousin," he said, "it is amazing that half of them seek sal- vation in the future and the other half in the past. I don't know what we are to make of that. His Grace would say that the present is with- out salvation. "
"Is His Grace thinking in terms of the Church? " Diotima asked.
"He has only just come up with the discovery that in the history of mankind there is no turning back voluntarily. What makes it difficult is that going forward is riot much use either. Permit me to say that we're in a very peculiar situation, unable to move either forward or backward, whtle the present moment is felt to be unbearable too. "
When Ulrich talked like this Diotima barricaded herself in her tall body as in a tower marked with three stars in Baedeker.
"Do you believe, dear lady, that anyone fighting for or against a cause today," Ulrich asked, "who tomorrow by some miracle were to become the all-powerful ruler of the world, would instantly do what he had been clamoring for all his life? I am convinced he would grant himself a few days' delay. "
Ulrich paused. Diotima suddenly turned to him without respond- ing and asked him sternly:
"Why did you encourage the General about our campaign? " "What general? "
"General von Stumm! "
"Do you mean that round little general from the first big meeting?
Me? I haven't even seen him since, let alone encouraged him! " Ulrich's astonishment was convincing and called for an explana- tion on her part. Since it was impossible that a man like Arnheim should be guilty of a falsehood, there had to be a misunderstanding
somewhere, and Diotima gave him the reason for her assumption. "So I am supposed to have spoken with Arnheim about General
von Stumm? I never did that either," Ulrich assured her. "I did talk with Arnheim-just a moment . . . " He searched his memory, then broke into a laugh. "It would be very flattering if Amheim attached so much importance to every word I say.
W e have had several discus- sions lately-if that's the word for our differences-and I did once say something about a general, but not any particular one, only inci- dentally to illustrate a point. I maintained that a general who for stra- tegic reasons sends his battalions to certain doom is a murderer, if you think ofthem as thousands ofmothers' sons, but that he immedi- ately becomes something else seen from some other perspective, such as, for example, the necessity of sacrifice, or the insignificance of life's short span. I used a lot. of other examples. But here you must allow me to digress. For quite obvious reasons, every generation treats the life into which it is born as firmly established, except for those few things it is interested in changing. This is practical, but it's wrong. The world can be changed in all directions at any moment, or at least in any direction it chooses; it's in the world's nature. Wouldn't it be more original to try to live, not as a definite person in a definite world where only a few buttons need adjusting-what we call evolution-but rather to behave from the start as someone born to change surrounded by a world created to change, roughly like a drop of water inside a cloud? Are you annoyed with me for being so obscure again? "
''I'm not annoyed with you, but I can't understand you. " Diotima commanded: "Do tell me the whole conversation! "
'Well, Arnheim started it. He stopped me and formally challenged me to a conversation," Ulrich began. " W e businessmen,' he said to me with a rather puckish smile, quite in contrast to his usual quiet pose, but still very majestic, 'we businessmen are not as calculating as you might think. Actually, we-I mean the leading men, ofcourse; the small fry may spend all their time calculating-we come to re- gard our really successful ideas as something that defies all calcula- tion, like the personal success ofa politician, and, in the last analysis, like the artist's too. ' Then he asked me to judge what he was going to say next with the indulgence we grant the irrational: from the first day he saw me, he confided, he'd had certain ideas about me-and it seems, gracious cousin, that you also told him many things about me, which he assured me he had not needed to hear to form his opinion,
Pseudoreality Prevails · 295
296 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
which was that strangely enough I had made a mistake in choosing a purely abstract, conceptual profession, because no matter how gifted I was in that direction, I was basically a scientist, and no matter how surprised I might be to hear it, my real talent lay in the field of action and personal effectiveness! "
"Oh really? " Diotima said.
"I quite agree with you," Ulrich hastened to say. "There is nothing I am less fit for than being myself. "
"You are always making fun of things instead of devoting yourself to life," Diotima said, still annoyed with him over the files.
"Amheim maintains the opposite. I am under a compulsion to think my way to excessively thorough conclusions about life-he says. "
"You're always sardonic and negative, always leaping into the im- possible and avoiding every real decision," Diotima maintained.
"It is simply my conviction," Ulrich replied, "that thinking is a world of its own, and real life is another. The difference between their respective levels of development at the present time is too great. Our brain is some thousands of years old, but if it had worked out only half of everything and forgotten the other half, its true image would be our reality. All one can do is refuse intellectual par- ticipation in it. "
"Aren't you making things much too easy for yourself? " Diotima asked, without any offensive intention, rather like a mountain look- ing down on a little brook at its foot. "Amheim enjoys theorizing too, but I think he lets hardly anything pass without examining all its as- pects. Don't you feel that the point of thinking is to be a concen- trated capacity for applying-"
"No," Ulrich said.
''I'd like to hear what answer Amheim gave you. "
"He told me that the intellect today is the helpless spectator of real
developments because it is dodging the great tasks of life. He asked me to look at what subjects the arts treat, at what trivia the churches concern themselves with, at how narrow even the perspective of the scholars is-and I should consider that all the while, the earth is being literally carved up! Then he said that this was precisely what he wanted to talk with me about. "
"And what was your answer? " Diotima asked eagerly, supposing
that Amheim had been trying to appeal to her cousin's conscience about his indifferent attitude to the problems of the Parallel Campaign. ·
':I told him that realizing a potential always attracts me less than the unrealized, and I mean not only the future but also the past and missed opportunities. -It seems to me our history has been that every time we have fulfilled some small part of an idea, we are so pleased that we leave the much greater remainder unfinished. Magnificent institutions are usually the bungled drafts of their ideas; so, inciden- tally, are magnificent personalities. That's what I answered. A differ- ence in the angle of perspective, so to speak. "
"How argumentative of you! " said Diotima, with a sense of injury.
"He retaliated by telling me his impression of me when I resist the active life because of some unfulfilled intellectual element in the general scheme. Would you like to hear it? Like a man who lies down on the ground beside a bed that has been prepared for him. A squandering of energy, something physically immoral, is what he called it, to make sure I didn't miss the point. He kept at me to make me see that great goals can be reached only by using the existing eco- nomic, political, and, not least, intellectual structure of power. For his own part, he considers it more ethical to make use of it than to neglect it. He really hammered away at me. He called me a man of action in a defensive stance, a cramped defensive stance. I think he has some sinister reason for wanting to gain my respect. "
"He wants to be helpful! " Diotima cried out in reproof.
"Oh no," Ulrich said. "I may be only a little pebble, and he is a splendid, puffed-out glass ball. But I have the impression he's afraid of me. "
Diotima made no answer. Wh~t Ulrich had said might be pre- sumptuous, but it had occurred to her that the conversation he had just recounted was not at all what it should have been according to the impression she had got from Arnheim. It even worried her a bit. Although she thought Amheim quite incapable of intrigue, Ulrich was gaining her confidence, and so she asked him what she should do about the case of General Stumm.
"Keep him off! " was Ulrich's answer, and Diotima could not spare herself the reproach that she was well pleased with it.
' Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 9 7
:zg8
DIOTIMA AND ULRICH
Diotima's relationship to Ulrich had much improved, now that they had formed the habit of getting together regularly. They often had to drive out together to call on people, and he came to see her several times a week, often unannounced and at unconventional hours. In the circumstances, their being related was convenient for a domestic relaxation of the strict social code. DiotiJ;Ila did not always receive him in the drawing room armored in full panoply from chignon to skirt hem, but sometimes in slight domestic disarray, even if only a. very cautious· disarray. A kind of fellowship had grown up between them that lay mainly in the form of their association, but forms have their inward effects, and the emotions that create them can also be awakened by them.
Ulrich sometimes felt with great intensity that Diotima was very beautiful. On these occasions he saw her as a young, tall, plump heifer of good stock, surefooted and studying with a deep gaze the dry grasses she was feeding on. In other words, even then he did not look on her without the malice and irony that revenged themselves on her spiritual nobility by drawing on images from the animal king- · dom and that arose from a deep annoyance less against this foolish paragon than against the school where her performances were a suc- cess. "How likable she could be," he thought, "if she were. unedu- cated and careless· and as good-natured as a big warm female body always is when it doesn't flatter itself that it has any special ideas! " The celebrated wife of the much-whispered-about Section Chief Tuzzi evaporated from her body, leaving it behind like a dream that, together with pillows, bed, and dreamer, turned into a white cloud all alone in the world with its tenderness.
But when Ulrich came back to earth from such a flight of the imagination, what he found before him was an ambitious middle- class mind eager to associate with aristocratic ideas. Physical kinship together with a strong difference in temperament, incidentally, is
disturbing; sometimes the mere idea of kinship is enough, the con- sciousness of self; siblings often cannot bear each other in a way that goes far beyond anything that might be justified; it derives merely from the existence of the one throwing into doubt the existence of the other, from the slightly distorted mirror image they have of each other. Sometimes Diotima's being about the same height as Ulrich was enough to remind him that they were related and made him feel repugnance for her body. He had transferred to her, with some dif- ferences, a function usually reserved for his boyhood friend Wal- ter-that of humbling and irritating his pride, much as seeing ourselves again in certain unpleasant old photographs has the power
·to humiliate us and at the same time challenge our pride. It followed that even in the mistrust Ulrich felt for Diotima there had to be something of a bond and a drawing together, in short a touch of gen- uine affection, just as his old warm allegiance with Walter still sur- vived in the fonn of mistrust. But since he did not like Diotima, this baffled him for a long time without his being able to get to the bot- tom of it. They sometimes set off on little expeditions together. With Tuzzi's encouragement they took advantage of the fine weather, de- spite the unfavorable time of year, to show Amheim "the lovely sights around Vienna"-Diotima never used any other expression but this cliche-and Ulrich always felt that he was being taken along in the role of an elderly female relation serving as chaperone because Section ChiefTuzzi<! ould not spare the time. Later it happened that Ulrich also drove out alone with Diotima when Amheim was out of town. For such expeditions, as well as for the immediate purposes of the campaign, Amheim had made available as many automobiles as might be needed, since His Grace's carriage, ornate with its coat of arms, was too well known about town and too conspicuous. These cars, incidentally, were not necessarily Amheim's own; the rich al- ways can find others who are only too pleased to oblige.
Such excursions served not merely for diversion but also served the purpose ofwinning support for the campaign from influential or wealthy persons, so they took place more often within the city limits than in the countryside. The cousins saw many beautiful things to- gether: Maria Theresa furniture, Baroque palaces, people still borne through life on the hands of their many servants, modem houses with great suites of rooms, palatial banks, and the blend of Spanish
Pseudoreality Prevails · 299
300 · THE. MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
austerity and middle-class domestic habits in the homes of high- ranking civil seiVants. All in all, it was, for the aristocracy, what was left of the grand manner with no running water, repeated in paler imitation in the houses and conference rooms of the wealthy middle class with improved hygiene and, on the whole, better taste. A rulhig caste always remains slightly barbaric. In the castles of the nobility, cind~rs and leftovers not burned away by the slow smoldering of time were still lying where they had fallen. Close beside magnificent staircases one stepped on boards of soft wood, and hideous new fur- niture stood carelessly alongside magnificent old pieces. The new rich, on the other hand, in love with the imposing and grandiose mo- ments of their predecessors, had instinctively made a fastidious and refined selection. Wherever a castle had passed into middle-class hands, was it not merely seen to be provided with modem comfort, like ah heirloom chandelier through which electric wiring had been threaded, but the inferior furnishings had also been cleared out and valuable pieces brought in, chosen either by the owner or according to the unassailable recommendation of experts. It was not, inciden- tally, in the castles where this refinement showed itself most impres- sively but in the town houses that, in keeping with the times, had been furnished with all the impersonal luxury of an ocean liner and yet had preseiVed, in this country of subtly refined social ambition, through some ineffable breath, some hardly perceptible widening of the space between the pieces of furniture or the dominant position of a painting on a wall, the tender, clear echo of a great sound that had faded away.
Diotima was enchanted by so much "culture. " She had always known that her native country harbored such treasures, but even she was amazed at their abundance. They would be invited together to visit in the country, and Ulrich noticed, among other things, that the fruit here was not infrequently picked up in the fingers and eaten unpeeled, whereas in the houses of the upper bourgeoisie the cere- monial of knife and fork was strictly obseiVed. The same could also be said about conversation, which tended to be flawlessly distin- guished only in the middle-class homes, while among the nobility the well-known, relaxed idiom reminiscent of cabdrivers prevailed. Di- otima presented her cousin with an enthusiastic defense of all this. She conceded that the bourgeois estates had better plumbing and
showed more intelligence in their appointments, while at the nobil- ity's countzy seats one froze in winter, there were often narrow, worn stairs, stuffy, low-ceilinged bedrooms were the behind-the-scenes counterpart of magnificent public rooms, and there were no dumb-. waiters or bathrooms for the servants. But that was just what made it all, in a sense, more heroic, this feeling for tradition and this splendid nonchalance! she wound up ecstatically.
Ulrich used these excursions to examine the feeling that bound him to Diotima. But there were so many digressions along the way that it is necessary to follow them awhile before coming to the point.
At that time, women were encased in clothes from tlu:oat to ankle. Men's clothes today are like what they were then, but they used to be more appropriate because they still represented an organic outward sign of the flawless cohesion and strict reserve that marked a man of the world. In those days, even a person of few prejudices, unham- pered by shame in appreciating the undraped human body, would have regarded a display of nudity as a relapse into the animal state, not because of the nakedness but because of the loss of the civilized aphrodisiac of clothing. Actually, it would then have been considered below the animal state, for a three-year-old Thoroughbred and a playing greyhound are far more expressive in their nakedness than a human body can ever be. But animals can't wear clothes; they have
orily the one skin, while human beings in those days had many skins. In full dress, with frills, puffs, bell skirts, cascading draperies, laces, and gathered pleats, they had created a surface five times the size of the original one, forming a many-petaled chalice heavy with an erotic charge, difficult of access, and hiding at its core the slim white animal that had to be searched out and that made itselfterribly desirable. It was the prescribed process Nature herself uses when she bids her creatures fluff out their plumage or spray out clouds of ink, so that desire and terror raised to a degree of unearthly frenzy will mask the matter-of-fact proceedings that are the heart of the matter.
For the first time in her life Diotima felt herself more than S\! per- ficially affected by this game, though in the most decorous way. Co- quetry was not wholly unknown to her, since it was one of the social accomplishments a lady had to master. Nor had she ever failed to notice when a young man looked at her with a glance that expressed something besides respect; in fact she rather liked it, because it made
Pseudoreality Prevails · 3 0 1
302 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
her feel the gentle power of feminine reproof when she forced the eyes of a man, intent on her like the horns of a bull, to turn away by uttering high-minded sentiments. But Ulrich, in the security of their kinship and his selfless services to the Parallel Campaign, and pro- tected, too, by the codicil established in his favor, permitted himself liberties that pierced straight through the tangled weavings of her idealism. On one occasion, for instance, as they were driving thro~gh the countryside, they passed some delightful valleys where hillsides covered with dark pine woods sloped down toward the road, and Di- otima pointed to them with the lines "Who planted you, 0 lovely woods, so high up there above? '' She of course quoted these lines as poetry, without any hint of the·tune that went along with them; she would have considered that old hat and inane. Ulrich was quick to answer: "The Landbank of Lower Austria. Don't you know, cousin, that all the forests hereabouts belong to the Landbank? The master you are about to praise in the next line is a forester on the bank's payroll. Nature in these parts is a planned product of the forestry industry, a storehouse of serried ranks of cellulose for the manufac- turers, as you can see at a glance. "
His answers were quite often like that. When she spoke of beauty, he spoke of the fatty tissue supporting the epidermis. When she mentioned love, he responded with the statistical curve that indi- cates the automatic rise and fall in the annual birthrate. When she spoke of the great figures in art, he traced the chain of borrowings that links these figures to one another. Somehow it always began with Diotima talking as if on the sixth day of Creation God had placed man as a pearl in the shell of'the world, whereupon Ulrich reminded her that mankind was a tiny pile of'dots on the outermost crust of a dwarf globe. She was not quite sure what Ulrich was up to, though it was obviously an attack on that sphere of greatness with which Diotima felt allied, and most of all she felt that he was rudely showing off. She found it hard to take that her cousin, whom she reg~ded as an intellectual enfant terrible, imagined he knew more than she did, and his materialistic arguments, which meant nothing to her, drawn as they were from the lower culture of facts and fig- ures, annoyed her mightily.
"Thank heaven," she once came back at him sharply, "there are
still people capable of believing in simple things, no matter how great their experience! "
"Your husband, for instance," Ulrich said. "I've been meaning to tell you for a long time that I much prefer him to Arnheim. "
They had got into the habit of exchanging ideas by speaking about Arnheim. For like all people in love, Diotima derived pleasure from talking about the object of her love without, at least so she believed, betraying herself; and since Ulrich found this insufferable, as does any man who has no ulterior·motive in yielding the stage to another, it often happened on such occasions that he lashed out against Arn- heim. Between Arnheim and himselfa relationship ofa peculiar kind had developed. When Arnheim was not traveling, they met almost every day. Ulrich knew that Section Chief Tuzzi regarded the Pros- sian with suspicion, as he did himself from observing Arnheim's ef- fect on Diotima since the very beginning. Not that there was yet anything improper between them, so far as could be judged by a third party who was confirmed in this judgment by the revolting ex- cess of propriety between these lovers, who were evidently emulat- ing the loftiest examples of a Platonic union of souls. Yet Arnheim showed a striking inclination to draw his friend's cousin (or was she his lover after all? , Ulrich wondered, but considered it most probably something like lover plus friend divided by two) into this intimate relationship. He often addressed Ulrich in the manner of an older friend, a tone made permissible by the difference in age between them but that became unpleasantly tainted with condescension be- cause of the difference in . their position. Ulrich's response was al- most always standoffish in a rather challenging way: he made a point of not seeming in the least impressed by speaking with a man who might just as easily have been speaking with kings and chancellors instead. Annoyed with himself because of his lack of propriety, he contradicted Arnheim with impolite frequency and unseemly irony, as a substitute for which he would have done better to enjoy himself as a silent observer. He was astonished that Arnheim irritated him so violently. Ulrich saw in him, fattened by favorable circumstances, the model example ofan intellectual development he hated. For this cel- ebrated writer was shrewd enough to grasp the questionable situa- tion man had got himself into ever since he ceased looking for his
Pst:Udoreality Prevails · 3o3
304 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
image in the mirror of a stream, and sought it instead in the sharp, broken surfaces of his intelligence; but this writing iron magnate blamed the predicament on intelligence itself and not on its imper- fections. There was a con game in this union between the soul. and the price of coal, a union that at the same time purposefully setved to keep apart what Amheim did with his eyes wide open and what he said and wrote in his cloud of intuition. Added to this, to exacerbate Ulrich's uneasiness, was something new to him, the combination of intellect and wealth. When Amheim talked about some particular subject almost like a specialist and then suddenly, with a casual wave of his hand, made all the details disappear in the light of a "great thought," he might be acting on some not unjustified need of his own, but at the same time this manner of freely disposing of things in two directions at once was too suggestive of the rich man who can afford the best and most expensive of everything. He had a wealth of ideas that was always slightly reminiscent of the ways of real wealth. But perhaps it was not even this ~at most provoked Ulrich into creating difficulties for the celebrated man; perhaps it was rather the inclination of Arnheim's mind toward a dignified mode of holding court and keeping house that of itself led to an asso-ciation with the best brands of the traditional as well as of the unusual. For in the mirror of this Epicurean connoisseurship Ulrich saw the affected grimace that is the face of the times, if one subtracts the few really strong lines of passion and thought in it; all this left him with hardly a chance to reach a better understanding of the m. an, who could proba- bly be credited with all sorts of merits as well. U was, of course, an utterly senseless battle he was waging, in an environment predis- posed in Amheim's favor, and in a cause that had no importance at all; the most that could be said for it was that this senselessness gave the sense of the total expenditure of his own energies. It was also a quite hopeless struggle, for if Ulrich actually once managed to wound his opponent, he had to recognize that he had hit the wrong Arnheim; if Amheim the thinker lay defeated on the ground, Am- heim the master of reality rose like a winged being with an indulgent smile, and hastened from the idle games of such conversations to Baghdad or Madrid.
This invulner~bility made it possible for him to counter the younger man's bad manners with that amiable camaraderie the
source of which Ulrich could never quite pinpoint. Besides, Ulrich was himself concerned not to go too far in tearing Arnheim down, because he was determined not to slip again into one of those half- baked and demeaning adventures in which his past had been far too rich; and the progress he observed between Arnheim and Diotima served as an effective insurance against weakening. So he generally directed the points of his attacks like the points of a foil, which yield on impact and are shielded with a friendly little rubber button to soften the blow. It was Diotima who had come up with this compari- son. She found herself mystified by this cousin of hers. His candid face with the clear brow, his quietly breathing chest, the ease in all his movements, all clearly indicated to her that no malicious, spiteful, sadistic-libidinous impulses could dwell in such a body. Nor was she quitewithoutprideiiisopersonableamemberofherfamily; shehad made up her mind from the beginning of their acquaintance to take him under her wing. Had he had black hair, a crooked shoulder, a muddy skin, or a low forehead, she would have said that his views accorded with his looks. But as it was, she was struck by a certain discrepancy between his looks and his ideas that made itself felt as an inexplicable uneasiness. The antennae of her famed intuition groped in vain for the cause, hut she enjoyed the groping at the other end of the antennae. In a sense, though not of course seriously, she some- times even preferred Ulrich's company to Arnheim's. Her need to f e e l s u p e r i o r was m o r e g r a t i f i e d b y h i m , s h e f e l t m o r e s u r e o f h e r s e l f , and to regard him as frivolous, eccentri~. or immature gave her a cer- tain satisfaction that balanced the idealism, becoming increasingly dangerous from day to day, that she saw taking on incalculable di- mensions in her feelings for Amheim. Soul is a terribly grave affair, and materialism by eontrast is lighthearted. The conduct of her rela- tionship with Amheim was sometimes as much of a strain as her salon, and her contempt for Ulrich made her life easier. She did not understand herself, but she noticed this effect, and this enabled her whenever she was annoyed with her cousin over one of his remarks to give him a sideways look that was only a tiny smile in the comer of her eye, while the eye itself, idealistically untouched and indeed even slightly disdainful, gazed straight ahead.
Anyway, whatever their reasons may have been, Diotima ~d Am- heim behaved toward Ulrich like two fighters clinging to athird per-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 305
306 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
son whom in their alternating fear they shove back and forth be- tween themselves; a situation not without its dangers for Ulrich, for through Diotima the question arose: Must people be in accord with their bodies or not?
68
A DIGRESSiON: MUST PEOPLE BE IN ACCORD WITH THEIR BODIES?
Independently of what their faces were talking about, the motion of the car on those long drives rocked the two cousins so that their clothes touched, overlapped a·bit, and moved apart again. One could only see this from their shoulders, because the rest of them was en- veloped by a shared blanket, but the bodies felt this contact, muffled by their clothing, as delicately indistinct as things seen ~ moonlight. Ulrich was n'ot unreceptive to this kind of flirting, without taking it too seriously. The overrefined transmission of desire from the body to the clothes, from the embrace to the obstacles, or, in short, from the goal to the approach, answered to his nature, whose sensuality drove him toward the woman; but its critical faculties held him back from the alien, uncongenial person it suddenly, with relentless lucid- ity, perceived her to be, and this made for a lively tug-of-war be- tween inclination and aversion. But this meant that the body's sublime beauty, its human beauty, the moment when the spirit's song rises from nature's instrument, or that other moment when the body is like a goblet filling up with a mystic potion, was something he had never known, leaving aside those dreams ofthe major's wife that had for the longest time put an end to such inclinations in him.
All his relationships with women, since then, had somehow not been right. With a certain amount of goodwill on both sides that hap- pens, unfortunately, all too easily. From the moment they first began to think about it, a man and a woman find a ready-made matriX of
feelings, acts, and complications waiting to take them in charge, and beneath this matrix the process takes its course in reverse; the stream no longer flows from the spring; the last things to happen push their way to the front of consciousness; the pure pleasure two people have in each other, this simplest and deepest of all feelings in love, and the natural source of all the rest, disappears completely in this psychic reversal.
So on his trips with Diotima, Ulrich not infrequently remembered their leave-taking after his first visit. He had taken her mild hand, an ·artfully and nobly perfected weightless hand, in his own as they gazed into each other's eyes. They both undoubtedly felt some aver- sion, and yet it occurred to them that they might nevertheless fuse to the point of extinction. Something of this vision had remained be- tween them. Thus two heads above cast a horrible chill on each other while the bodies below helplessly melt together at white heat. There is in this something nastily mythical, as in a two-headed god or the devil's cloven hoof, and it had often led Ulrich astray in his youth, when he had experienced it fairly often; but with the years it had proved to be no more than a very bourgeois aphrodisiac, in exactly the same way that the unclothed body substitutes for the nude. Nothi. rrg so inflames the middle-class lover as the flattering discovery of the power to drive another person into an ecstasy so wild that to be the cause of such changes by any other means one would have to
become a murderer.
And truly, that there can be such changes in civilized people, that
we actually can produce such effectsl-isn't this the question and the amazement in . the bold, glazed eyes of all those who dock at the lonely island of lust, where they are murderer, destiny, and God, and experience the maximum irrationality and adventurousness in the greatest comfort?
The repugnance he came to acquire with time against this kind of love eventually extended to his own body too, which had always en- couraged these misbegotten affairs by giving women the illusion of a reliable virility, for which Ulrich was too cerebral and too conflicted.
Bonadea was now on the brink of tears, and Ulrich spoke to her: "Isn't it contradictory that you get yourselfworked up about this one affair just because I happened to tell you about it, whereas you don't even notice the millions of equally unjust things that happen every day? " .
"What difference does that make? " Bonadea pro! ested. "The point is, I do happen to know about this one, and I would be a bad person ifi stayed calm! "
Ulrich said that one had t~ keep calm; absolutely, passionately calm, he added. He had repossessed his hand and sat down ;orne distance from Bbnadea. "Nowadays everything is done 'meanwhile' and 'for the time being,'" he obseiVed. "It can't be helped. We are
driven by the scrupulousness of our reason into an atrocious un- scrupulousness of our hearts. " He poured another whiskey for him- self, too, and put his feet up on the sofa. He was beginning to feel tired.
"Everyone. starts out wanting to understand life as a whole," he said, "but the more accurately one thinks about it, the more it nar- rows down. When he's mature, a person knows more about one par- ticular square millimeter than all but at most two dozen other people in the world; he knows what nonsense people talk who know less about it, but he doesn't dare move because if he shifts even a mi- cromillimeter from his spot he will be talking nonsense too. "
His weariness was now the same transparent gold as his drink on the table. I've been talking nonsense for the last half hour too, he thought. But this diminished state was comfortable enough. The only thing he feared was that it might 'occur to Bonadea to come and sit down next to him. There was only one way to forestall this: keep talk- ing. He had propped up his head on his hands and lay stretched at full length like the effigies on the tombs in the Medici Chapel. He suddenly became aware of this, and as he assumed his pose he actu- ally felt a certain grandeur flowing through his body, a hovering in their serenity, and he felt more powerful than he was. For the first time he thought he distantly understood these works ofart, which he had previously only looked at as foreign objects. Instead of saying anything, he fell silent. Even Bonadea felt something. It was a "mo- ment," as one calls it, that defies characterization. Some dramatic ex- altation united the two of them, and left them mute.
'What is left of me? " Ulric~ thought bitterly. "Possibly someone who has courage and is not for sale, and likes to think that for the sake of his inner freedom he respects only a few external laws. But this inner freedom consists of being able to think whatever one likes; it means knowing, in every human situation, why one doesn't need to be bound by it, but never knowing what one wants to be bound by! " In this far from happy moment, when the curious little wave offeel- ing that had held him for an instant ebbed away again, he would have been ready to ad~t that he had nothing but an ability to see two sides to everything-that moral ambivalence that marked almost all his contemporaries and was the disposition of his generation, or per- haps their fate. His connections to the world had become pale, shad-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 85
286 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
owy, and negative. What right did he have to treat Bonadea badly? It was always the same frustrating talk they had, over and over again; it arose from the inner acoustics of emptiness, where a shot resounds twice as loudly and echoes on and on. It burdened him that he could no longer· speak to her except like this. For the spe~ial misery this caused them both, he came up with an almost witty, appealing name: Baroque of the Void. He sat up to say something nice to her.
"It just struck me," he said to Bonadea, who had kept her seat and dignified position. "It's a funny thing. A remarkable difference: a person able to be responsible for what he does can always do some- thing different, but a person who isn't never can. "
Bonadea responded with something quite profound: "Oh, Ul- rich! " she said. That was the only interruption, and silence closed around them once more.
When Ulrich spoke in generalities in her presence, she did not like it at all. She felt quite rightly that despite her many lapses, she lived surrounded by people like herself, and she had a sound instinct for the unsociable, eccentric, and solipsistic way he had of treating her with ideas instead of feelings. Still, crime, love, and sadness had linked themselves ill her mind, a highly dangerous mixture. Ulrich now seemed to her not nearly as intimidating, as much of a paragon, as he had at ~e beginning of their meeting; by way of compensation she now saw in him a boyish quality that aroused her idealism, the air ofa child not daring to run past some obstacle in order to throw itself into its mother's arms. She had felt for the longest time a free-float- ing, almost uncontrollable tenderness for him. But after Ulrich had checked her first hint ofthis, she forc;ed herself with great effort to hold back. The memory ofhow she had lain undressed and powerless on his sofa on her previous visit still rankled, and she was resolved to sit, if she had to, on that chair in her hat and veil to the very end in order to teach him that he had before him a person who knew how to control herselfas much as her rival, Diotima. Bonadea always missed the great idea that was supposed to go along with the great excite- ment she felt througa the nearness of a lover. Unfortunately, this can, ofcourse, be s. aid oflife itself, which contains~lot ofexcitement and little sense, but Bonadea did not know this, and she tried to ex- press some great idea. Ulrich's thoughts lacked the dignity she needed, to her way of thinking, and she was probably searching for
something finer, more deeply felt. But refined hesitancy and vulgar attraction, attraction and a terrible dread of being attracted prema- turely, all became part of the stimulus of the silence in which the suppressed actions twitched, and mingled, too, with the memory of the great peace that had so united her with her lover for a second. It was, in the end, like when rain hangs in the air but cannot fall; a numbness that spread over her whole skin and terrified her with the idea that she might lose her self-control without noticing it.
Suddenly a physical illusion sprang from al1 this: a flea. Bonadea could not tell whether it was reality or imagination. She felt a shud- der in her brain, a dubious impression as if an idea had detached itself from the shadowy bondage of all the rest but was still only a fantasy-and at the same time she felt an undeniable, quite realistic shudder on her skin. She held her breath. When one hears some- thing coming, pit-a-pat, up the stairs, knowing there is no one there but quite distinctly hearing pit-a-pat-that's how it is. Bonadea real- ized in a flash that this was an involuntary continuation of the lost shoe. A desperate expedient for a lady. But just as she was trying to banish the spook, she felt a sharp sting. She gave a little shriek, her cheeks flushed a bright red, and she called upon Ulrich to help her look for it. A flea favors the same regions as a lover; her stocking was searched down to the shoe; her blouse had to be unbuttoned in front. Bonadea declared that she must have picked it up in the streetcar or from Ulrich. But it was not to be found, and had left no traces behind.
"I can't imagine what it could have been! " Bonadea said. Ulrich smiled with unexpected friendliness. ' Bonadea burst into tears, like a little girl who has misbehaved.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 87
288
GENERAL STUMM VON BORDWEHR VISITS DIOTIMA
General Stumm von Bordwehr had paid his first call on Diotima. He was the army officer sent by the War Ministry as their observer to the great inaugural meeting, where he made an impressive speech, which, however, could not prevent the War Ministry from being passed over-for obvious reasons-when the committees for the great peace campaign were set up, one for each ministry.
He was a not very imposing general, with his little paunch and the little toothbrush on his upper lip in place ofa real mu5tache. His face was round and expressed something of the family man with no money beyond the funds for the statutory bond required when an officer wanted to marry. He said to Diotima that a soldier could ex- pect to play only a modest role in the council chamber. Besides, it went without saying that for political reasons the Ministry of War could not be included in the roster of committees. Nevertheless, he dared maintain that the proposed campaign should have an effect abroad, and what had an influence abroad was the might of a people. He repeated the celebrated philosopher. Treitschke's observation that the state is the power to su. rvive in the struggle of nations. Power displayed in peace kept war at bay, or at least shortened its cruelty. He went on like this for another quarter of an hour, slipping in classi- cal quotations he fondly remembered from his school days; main- tained that those years of humanistic studies had been the happiest of his life; tried to make Diotima feel that he admired her and was delighted with the way she had cond~cted the great conference; wanted only to repeat once again that, rightly understood, the build- ing up of the armed forces that lagged far behind those of the other great powers could be the most impressive demonstration of peace- ful intentions; and for the rest declared his confident expectation that a widespread popular concern for the country's military prob- lems was bound to arise of its own accord.
This amiable general gave Diotima the fright of her life. There ·were in those days in Kakania families whose houses were fre- quented socially by army officers because their daughters married army officers, and then there were families whose daughters did not marry army officers, either because there was no money for the man-
datory security bond or on principle, so they did not receive army officers socially. Diotima's family had belonged to the second sort for both reasons, with the consequence that this conscientiously beauti- ful woman had gone out into life with a concept of the military that was something like an image of Death decked out in motley.
She replied that there was so much that was great and good in the world that the choice was not easy. It was a great privilege to be al- lowed to give. a great sign in the midst of the world's materialistic bustle, but also a grave responsibility. And the demonstration was meant, after all, to arise spontaneously from the midst of the people themselves, for which reason she had to keep her own wishes a little in the background. She placed her words with care, as though stitch- ing them together with threads in the national colors, and burned the mild incense of high bureaucratic phraseology upon her lips.
But when the General had left, the sublime woman suffered an inner breakdown. Had she been capable of so vulgar a sentiment as hatred she would have hated the pudgy little man with his waggling eyesandthegoldbuttonson. hisbelly,butsincethiswasimpossibleshe feltvaguelyinsultedbutcouldnotsaywhy. Despitethewintrycoldshe opened the windows and paced the room several times, her silks rus- tling. When she shut the windows again there were tears in her eyes. She was quite amazed. This was now the second time she was weeping without reason. She remembered the night when, in bed at her hus- band's side, she had shed tears without being able to explain them. This time the purely nervous character ofthe process, unrelated to any tangible cause, was even more evident; this fat general caused tears to gush from her eyes like an onion, without any sensible feeling being involved. She had good cause to be worried; a shadowy fear told her that a wolf was prowling round her flocks and that it was high time to exorcise it by the power of the Idea. This is how it happened that after the General's visit Diotima made up her mind to organize with the greatest speed the planned gathering of great minds who wo~d help her define the proper content ofthe patriotic campaign.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 289
FROM THE CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN ARNHEIM AND DIOTIMA
It greatly eased Diotima's heart that Arnheim had just returned from a trip and was at her disposal.
"Your cousin and I were talking about generals just a few days ago," he instantly responded, with the air of a man alluding to a sus- picious coincidence without wanting to be specific. Diotima received the impression that her contradictory cousin, with his unenthusiastic
. view of the great campaign, also favored the vague menaces emanat- ing from the General.
"I wouldn't like to expose this to ridicule in the presence of your cousin," Arnheim went on, changing the subject, "but I would like to be able to make you feel something you would hardly come upon by yourself, far away as you are from such things: the connection be- tween business and poetry. Of course, I mean business in the largest sense, the world's business, such as I have been fated to conduct by the position to which I was born; it. is related to poetry, it has irratio- nal, even mystical aspects. I might even say that business is quite par- ticularly endowed with those aspects. You see, money is an extraordinarily intolerant power. "
"There is probably a certain intolerance in everything people stake their lives on," Diotima said hesitantly, her mind still on the unfin- ished first part of the conversation. .
"Especially with money! " Arnheim quickly said. "Foolish people imagine it's a pleasure to have money. It is in fact a terrible responsi- bility. I won't speak of the countless lives dependent on me, for whom I represent a sort of fate; let me just mention that my grandfa- ther started by picking up garbage in a middle-sized town in the Rhineland. "
At these words Diotima actually felt a sudden shiver of what she thought was economic imperialism, but this was an error; since she was not quite without the prejudice of her social circle, she as-
sociated garbage removal with what was called in her regional dialect the dungman, and so her friend's courageous confession made her blush.
'With this refining process for waste," he continued his confes- sion, "my grandfather laid the groundwork for the influence of the Arnheims. But even my father was a self-made man, if you consider that it was he who in forty years expanded the fum into a worldwide concern. Two years at a trade school was all he had, but he can see through the most tangled world affairs at a glance, and knows every- thing he needs to know before anyone else does. I myself studied economics and every conceivable branch of science, all quite beyond his ken, and no one has any idea how he does it, but he never misses a detail. That is the mystery of a vigorous, simple, great, and healthy life! "
Arnheim's voice, as he spoke of his father, took on a special, rever- ential tone, as though its magisterial calm had a small crack some- where. It struck Diotima all the more because Ulrich had told her that old Arnheim was supposed to be a short, broad-shouldered fel- low with a bony face and a button nose, who always wore a gaping swallowtail coat and handled his investments with the dogged cir- cumspection of a chess player moving his pawns. Without waiting for her response, Amheim continued after a brief pause:
· "Once a business has expanded to the degree reached only by the very few I speak of, there is hardly anything in life it is not somehow involved with. It is a little cosmos. You would be amazed ifyou knew what seemingly quite uncommercial problems-artistic, moral, po- litical-! sometimes have to bring up in conferring with my manag- ing director. But the firm is no longer mushrooming the way it did in its early days, which I'd like to call its heroic days. No matter how prosperous a business firm may be, there is a mysterious limit to its growth, as there is with everything organic. Have you ever asked yourself why no animal in our time grows bigger than an elephant? You'll find the same mystery in the history of art and in the strange relationships of the life of peoples, cultures, and epochs. "
Diotima was now ashamed of herself for having shrunk from the refining process for waste disposal, and felt confused.
"Life is full of such mysteries. There is something that defies all reason. My father is in league with it. But a man like your eousin,"
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 91
292 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
Arnheim said, "an activist with a h~d full of ideas how things could be done differently and better, has no feeling for it. "
Diotima responded to this second reference to Ulrich with a smile suggesting that a man like her cousin had no claim to exert any influ- ence on her: Arnheim's even, somewhat sallow skin, which in his face was . as smooth as a pear, had flushed over the cheekbones, He had succumbed to a curious urge Diotima had been arousing in him for some time now to let down his guard and confide in her totally, down to the last hidden detail. Now he locked himself up again, picked up a book from the table, read its title without taking it in, impatiently laid it down again, and said in his usual voice-it moved Diotima as deeply a~ this moment as the gesture of a man who, in gathering up his clothes, reveals that he has been naked-"! have wandered from the point. What I have to say to you about the General is that you could do nothing better than to realize your plan as quickly as possi- ble and raise the level of our campaign with the help of humanistic ideas and their recognized representatives. But there's no need to
tum the General away on principle. Personally he may be a man of goodwill, and you know my principle of not missing any opportunity to bring the life of the spirit into a sphere of mere power. "
Diotima seized his hand and summed up the conversation in her good-bye: "Thank you for being so frank with me. "
Amheim irresolutely let that gentle hand rest in his own for a mo- ment, staring down at it thoughtfully as though there were some- thing he had forgotten to say.
66
ALL IS NOT WELL BETWEEN ULRICH AND ARNHEIM
Her cousin often took pleasure, at that time, in reporting to Diotima his experiences as His Grace's aide-de-camp, and always made a spe- cial point of showing her the files with all the proposals that kept pouring into Count Leinsdorf's office.
"Almighty cousin," he reported, with a fat folder in his hand, "I can no longer handle this alone. The whole world seems to expect improvements from us. Half of them begin with the words 'No more of . . . ' and the other half with 'Fotward to . . . ' Here is a batch of demands starting with 'No more Rome! ' and going all the way to 'Fotward to kitchen gardens! ' What would you want to choose? "
It was not easy to sort out all the petitions the world was address- ing to Count Leinsdorf, but two kinds surpassed all the rest in vol- ume. One blamed the troubles of the times on one particular detail and demanded its abolition; such details were nothing less than the Jews or the Church of Rome, socialism or capitalism, mechanistic thinking or the neglect of technical possibilities, miscegenation or segregation, big landed estates or big cities, overemphasis on intel- lect or inadequate popular education. The second 'group, on the other hand, pointed to a goal just ahead that, when reached, would suffice to take care ofeverything. These desirable goals ofthe second persuasion differed from the specific evils denounced by the first mostly by nothing more than the emotional plus or minus signs at- tached, obviously because the world is made up of both critical and affirming temperaments. So there were letters of the second cate- gory that joyfully took the negative line that it was high time to break with the ridiculous cult of the arts, because life was a far greater poet than all the scribblers. These letters demanded courtroom reports and travel books for general use; while letters on the same subject · from the first category would be joyfully positive in maintaining that the mountaineer's ecstasy upon reaching the summit outdid all the
293
294 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
sublimities of art, philosophy, and religion, so instead of these one should support mountain-climbing clubs. In this double-jointed fashion the public demanded a slowing·down of the tempo of the times just as much as a competition for the best short essay, because life was unbearably/exquisitely short, and there was a desperate need for the liberation of mankind from/by garden apartments, the eman- cipation of women, dancing, sports, interior decoration, and from any number of other burdens by any number of other panaceas.
Ulrich closed his folder and spoke privately.
"Mighty cousin," he said, "it is amazing that half of them seek sal- vation in the future and the other half in the past. I don't know what we are to make of that. His Grace would say that the present is with- out salvation. "
"Is His Grace thinking in terms of the Church? " Diotima asked.
"He has only just come up with the discovery that in the history of mankind there is no turning back voluntarily. What makes it difficult is that going forward is riot much use either. Permit me to say that we're in a very peculiar situation, unable to move either forward or backward, whtle the present moment is felt to be unbearable too. "
When Ulrich talked like this Diotima barricaded herself in her tall body as in a tower marked with three stars in Baedeker.
"Do you believe, dear lady, that anyone fighting for or against a cause today," Ulrich asked, "who tomorrow by some miracle were to become the all-powerful ruler of the world, would instantly do what he had been clamoring for all his life? I am convinced he would grant himself a few days' delay. "
Ulrich paused. Diotima suddenly turned to him without respond- ing and asked him sternly:
"Why did you encourage the General about our campaign? " "What general? "
"General von Stumm! "
"Do you mean that round little general from the first big meeting?
Me? I haven't even seen him since, let alone encouraged him! " Ulrich's astonishment was convincing and called for an explana- tion on her part. Since it was impossible that a man like Arnheim should be guilty of a falsehood, there had to be a misunderstanding
somewhere, and Diotima gave him the reason for her assumption. "So I am supposed to have spoken with Arnheim about General
von Stumm? I never did that either," Ulrich assured her. "I did talk with Arnheim-just a moment . . . " He searched his memory, then broke into a laugh. "It would be very flattering if Amheim attached so much importance to every word I say.
W e have had several discus- sions lately-if that's the word for our differences-and I did once say something about a general, but not any particular one, only inci- dentally to illustrate a point. I maintained that a general who for stra- tegic reasons sends his battalions to certain doom is a murderer, if you think ofthem as thousands ofmothers' sons, but that he immedi- ately becomes something else seen from some other perspective, such as, for example, the necessity of sacrifice, or the insignificance of life's short span. I used a lot. of other examples. But here you must allow me to digress. For quite obvious reasons, every generation treats the life into which it is born as firmly established, except for those few things it is interested in changing. This is practical, but it's wrong. The world can be changed in all directions at any moment, or at least in any direction it chooses; it's in the world's nature. Wouldn't it be more original to try to live, not as a definite person in a definite world where only a few buttons need adjusting-what we call evolution-but rather to behave from the start as someone born to change surrounded by a world created to change, roughly like a drop of water inside a cloud? Are you annoyed with me for being so obscure again? "
''I'm not annoyed with you, but I can't understand you. " Diotima commanded: "Do tell me the whole conversation! "
'Well, Arnheim started it. He stopped me and formally challenged me to a conversation," Ulrich began. " W e businessmen,' he said to me with a rather puckish smile, quite in contrast to his usual quiet pose, but still very majestic, 'we businessmen are not as calculating as you might think. Actually, we-I mean the leading men, ofcourse; the small fry may spend all their time calculating-we come to re- gard our really successful ideas as something that defies all calcula- tion, like the personal success ofa politician, and, in the last analysis, like the artist's too. ' Then he asked me to judge what he was going to say next with the indulgence we grant the irrational: from the first day he saw me, he confided, he'd had certain ideas about me-and it seems, gracious cousin, that you also told him many things about me, which he assured me he had not needed to hear to form his opinion,
Pseudoreality Prevails · 295
296 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
which was that strangely enough I had made a mistake in choosing a purely abstract, conceptual profession, because no matter how gifted I was in that direction, I was basically a scientist, and no matter how surprised I might be to hear it, my real talent lay in the field of action and personal effectiveness! "
"Oh really? " Diotima said.
"I quite agree with you," Ulrich hastened to say. "There is nothing I am less fit for than being myself. "
"You are always making fun of things instead of devoting yourself to life," Diotima said, still annoyed with him over the files.
"Amheim maintains the opposite. I am under a compulsion to think my way to excessively thorough conclusions about life-he says. "
"You're always sardonic and negative, always leaping into the im- possible and avoiding every real decision," Diotima maintained.
"It is simply my conviction," Ulrich replied, "that thinking is a world of its own, and real life is another. The difference between their respective levels of development at the present time is too great. Our brain is some thousands of years old, but if it had worked out only half of everything and forgotten the other half, its true image would be our reality. All one can do is refuse intellectual par- ticipation in it. "
"Aren't you making things much too easy for yourself? " Diotima asked, without any offensive intention, rather like a mountain look- ing down on a little brook at its foot. "Amheim enjoys theorizing too, but I think he lets hardly anything pass without examining all its as- pects. Don't you feel that the point of thinking is to be a concen- trated capacity for applying-"
"No," Ulrich said.
''I'd like to hear what answer Amheim gave you. "
"He told me that the intellect today is the helpless spectator of real
developments because it is dodging the great tasks of life. He asked me to look at what subjects the arts treat, at what trivia the churches concern themselves with, at how narrow even the perspective of the scholars is-and I should consider that all the while, the earth is being literally carved up! Then he said that this was precisely what he wanted to talk with me about. "
"And what was your answer? " Diotima asked eagerly, supposing
that Amheim had been trying to appeal to her cousin's conscience about his indifferent attitude to the problems of the Parallel Campaign. ·
':I told him that realizing a potential always attracts me less than the unrealized, and I mean not only the future but also the past and missed opportunities. -It seems to me our history has been that every time we have fulfilled some small part of an idea, we are so pleased that we leave the much greater remainder unfinished. Magnificent institutions are usually the bungled drafts of their ideas; so, inciden- tally, are magnificent personalities. That's what I answered. A differ- ence in the angle of perspective, so to speak. "
"How argumentative of you! " said Diotima, with a sense of injury.
"He retaliated by telling me his impression of me when I resist the active life because of some unfulfilled intellectual element in the general scheme. Would you like to hear it? Like a man who lies down on the ground beside a bed that has been prepared for him. A squandering of energy, something physically immoral, is what he called it, to make sure I didn't miss the point. He kept at me to make me see that great goals can be reached only by using the existing eco- nomic, political, and, not least, intellectual structure of power. For his own part, he considers it more ethical to make use of it than to neglect it. He really hammered away at me. He called me a man of action in a defensive stance, a cramped defensive stance. I think he has some sinister reason for wanting to gain my respect. "
"He wants to be helpful! " Diotima cried out in reproof.
"Oh no," Ulrich said. "I may be only a little pebble, and he is a splendid, puffed-out glass ball. But I have the impression he's afraid of me. "
Diotima made no answer. Wh~t Ulrich had said might be pre- sumptuous, but it had occurred to her that the conversation he had just recounted was not at all what it should have been according to the impression she had got from Arnheim. It even worried her a bit. Although she thought Amheim quite incapable of intrigue, Ulrich was gaining her confidence, and so she asked him what she should do about the case of General Stumm.
"Keep him off! " was Ulrich's answer, and Diotima could not spare herself the reproach that she was well pleased with it.
' Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 9 7
:zg8
DIOTIMA AND ULRICH
Diotima's relationship to Ulrich had much improved, now that they had formed the habit of getting together regularly. They often had to drive out together to call on people, and he came to see her several times a week, often unannounced and at unconventional hours. In the circumstances, their being related was convenient for a domestic relaxation of the strict social code. DiotiJ;Ila did not always receive him in the drawing room armored in full panoply from chignon to skirt hem, but sometimes in slight domestic disarray, even if only a. very cautious· disarray. A kind of fellowship had grown up between them that lay mainly in the form of their association, but forms have their inward effects, and the emotions that create them can also be awakened by them.
Ulrich sometimes felt with great intensity that Diotima was very beautiful. On these occasions he saw her as a young, tall, plump heifer of good stock, surefooted and studying with a deep gaze the dry grasses she was feeding on. In other words, even then he did not look on her without the malice and irony that revenged themselves on her spiritual nobility by drawing on images from the animal king- · dom and that arose from a deep annoyance less against this foolish paragon than against the school where her performances were a suc- cess. "How likable she could be," he thought, "if she were. unedu- cated and careless· and as good-natured as a big warm female body always is when it doesn't flatter itself that it has any special ideas! " The celebrated wife of the much-whispered-about Section Chief Tuzzi evaporated from her body, leaving it behind like a dream that, together with pillows, bed, and dreamer, turned into a white cloud all alone in the world with its tenderness.
But when Ulrich came back to earth from such a flight of the imagination, what he found before him was an ambitious middle- class mind eager to associate with aristocratic ideas. Physical kinship together with a strong difference in temperament, incidentally, is
disturbing; sometimes the mere idea of kinship is enough, the con- sciousness of self; siblings often cannot bear each other in a way that goes far beyond anything that might be justified; it derives merely from the existence of the one throwing into doubt the existence of the other, from the slightly distorted mirror image they have of each other. Sometimes Diotima's being about the same height as Ulrich was enough to remind him that they were related and made him feel repugnance for her body. He had transferred to her, with some dif- ferences, a function usually reserved for his boyhood friend Wal- ter-that of humbling and irritating his pride, much as seeing ourselves again in certain unpleasant old photographs has the power
·to humiliate us and at the same time challenge our pride. It followed that even in the mistrust Ulrich felt for Diotima there had to be something of a bond and a drawing together, in short a touch of gen- uine affection, just as his old warm allegiance with Walter still sur- vived in the fonn of mistrust. But since he did not like Diotima, this baffled him for a long time without his being able to get to the bot- tom of it. They sometimes set off on little expeditions together. With Tuzzi's encouragement they took advantage of the fine weather, de- spite the unfavorable time of year, to show Amheim "the lovely sights around Vienna"-Diotima never used any other expression but this cliche-and Ulrich always felt that he was being taken along in the role of an elderly female relation serving as chaperone because Section ChiefTuzzi<! ould not spare the time. Later it happened that Ulrich also drove out alone with Diotima when Amheim was out of town. For such expeditions, as well as for the immediate purposes of the campaign, Amheim had made available as many automobiles as might be needed, since His Grace's carriage, ornate with its coat of arms, was too well known about town and too conspicuous. These cars, incidentally, were not necessarily Amheim's own; the rich al- ways can find others who are only too pleased to oblige.
Such excursions served not merely for diversion but also served the purpose ofwinning support for the campaign from influential or wealthy persons, so they took place more often within the city limits than in the countryside. The cousins saw many beautiful things to- gether: Maria Theresa furniture, Baroque palaces, people still borne through life on the hands of their many servants, modem houses with great suites of rooms, palatial banks, and the blend of Spanish
Pseudoreality Prevails · 299
300 · THE. MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
austerity and middle-class domestic habits in the homes of high- ranking civil seiVants. All in all, it was, for the aristocracy, what was left of the grand manner with no running water, repeated in paler imitation in the houses and conference rooms of the wealthy middle class with improved hygiene and, on the whole, better taste. A rulhig caste always remains slightly barbaric. In the castles of the nobility, cind~rs and leftovers not burned away by the slow smoldering of time were still lying where they had fallen. Close beside magnificent staircases one stepped on boards of soft wood, and hideous new fur- niture stood carelessly alongside magnificent old pieces. The new rich, on the other hand, in love with the imposing and grandiose mo- ments of their predecessors, had instinctively made a fastidious and refined selection. Wherever a castle had passed into middle-class hands, was it not merely seen to be provided with modem comfort, like ah heirloom chandelier through which electric wiring had been threaded, but the inferior furnishings had also been cleared out and valuable pieces brought in, chosen either by the owner or according to the unassailable recommendation of experts. It was not, inciden- tally, in the castles where this refinement showed itself most impres- sively but in the town houses that, in keeping with the times, had been furnished with all the impersonal luxury of an ocean liner and yet had preseiVed, in this country of subtly refined social ambition, through some ineffable breath, some hardly perceptible widening of the space between the pieces of furniture or the dominant position of a painting on a wall, the tender, clear echo of a great sound that had faded away.
Diotima was enchanted by so much "culture. " She had always known that her native country harbored such treasures, but even she was amazed at their abundance. They would be invited together to visit in the country, and Ulrich noticed, among other things, that the fruit here was not infrequently picked up in the fingers and eaten unpeeled, whereas in the houses of the upper bourgeoisie the cere- monial of knife and fork was strictly obseiVed. The same could also be said about conversation, which tended to be flawlessly distin- guished only in the middle-class homes, while among the nobility the well-known, relaxed idiom reminiscent of cabdrivers prevailed. Di- otima presented her cousin with an enthusiastic defense of all this. She conceded that the bourgeois estates had better plumbing and
showed more intelligence in their appointments, while at the nobil- ity's countzy seats one froze in winter, there were often narrow, worn stairs, stuffy, low-ceilinged bedrooms were the behind-the-scenes counterpart of magnificent public rooms, and there were no dumb-. waiters or bathrooms for the servants. But that was just what made it all, in a sense, more heroic, this feeling for tradition and this splendid nonchalance! she wound up ecstatically.
Ulrich used these excursions to examine the feeling that bound him to Diotima. But there were so many digressions along the way that it is necessary to follow them awhile before coming to the point.
At that time, women were encased in clothes from tlu:oat to ankle. Men's clothes today are like what they were then, but they used to be more appropriate because they still represented an organic outward sign of the flawless cohesion and strict reserve that marked a man of the world. In those days, even a person of few prejudices, unham- pered by shame in appreciating the undraped human body, would have regarded a display of nudity as a relapse into the animal state, not because of the nakedness but because of the loss of the civilized aphrodisiac of clothing. Actually, it would then have been considered below the animal state, for a three-year-old Thoroughbred and a playing greyhound are far more expressive in their nakedness than a human body can ever be. But animals can't wear clothes; they have
orily the one skin, while human beings in those days had many skins. In full dress, with frills, puffs, bell skirts, cascading draperies, laces, and gathered pleats, they had created a surface five times the size of the original one, forming a many-petaled chalice heavy with an erotic charge, difficult of access, and hiding at its core the slim white animal that had to be searched out and that made itselfterribly desirable. It was the prescribed process Nature herself uses when she bids her creatures fluff out their plumage or spray out clouds of ink, so that desire and terror raised to a degree of unearthly frenzy will mask the matter-of-fact proceedings that are the heart of the matter.
For the first time in her life Diotima felt herself more than S\! per- ficially affected by this game, though in the most decorous way. Co- quetry was not wholly unknown to her, since it was one of the social accomplishments a lady had to master. Nor had she ever failed to notice when a young man looked at her with a glance that expressed something besides respect; in fact she rather liked it, because it made
Pseudoreality Prevails · 3 0 1
302 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
her feel the gentle power of feminine reproof when she forced the eyes of a man, intent on her like the horns of a bull, to turn away by uttering high-minded sentiments. But Ulrich, in the security of their kinship and his selfless services to the Parallel Campaign, and pro- tected, too, by the codicil established in his favor, permitted himself liberties that pierced straight through the tangled weavings of her idealism. On one occasion, for instance, as they were driving thro~gh the countryside, they passed some delightful valleys where hillsides covered with dark pine woods sloped down toward the road, and Di- otima pointed to them with the lines "Who planted you, 0 lovely woods, so high up there above? '' She of course quoted these lines as poetry, without any hint of the·tune that went along with them; she would have considered that old hat and inane. Ulrich was quick to answer: "The Landbank of Lower Austria. Don't you know, cousin, that all the forests hereabouts belong to the Landbank? The master you are about to praise in the next line is a forester on the bank's payroll. Nature in these parts is a planned product of the forestry industry, a storehouse of serried ranks of cellulose for the manufac- turers, as you can see at a glance. "
His answers were quite often like that. When she spoke of beauty, he spoke of the fatty tissue supporting the epidermis. When she mentioned love, he responded with the statistical curve that indi- cates the automatic rise and fall in the annual birthrate. When she spoke of the great figures in art, he traced the chain of borrowings that links these figures to one another. Somehow it always began with Diotima talking as if on the sixth day of Creation God had placed man as a pearl in the shell of'the world, whereupon Ulrich reminded her that mankind was a tiny pile of'dots on the outermost crust of a dwarf globe. She was not quite sure what Ulrich was up to, though it was obviously an attack on that sphere of greatness with which Diotima felt allied, and most of all she felt that he was rudely showing off. She found it hard to take that her cousin, whom she reg~ded as an intellectual enfant terrible, imagined he knew more than she did, and his materialistic arguments, which meant nothing to her, drawn as they were from the lower culture of facts and fig- ures, annoyed her mightily.
"Thank heaven," she once came back at him sharply, "there are
still people capable of believing in simple things, no matter how great their experience! "
"Your husband, for instance," Ulrich said. "I've been meaning to tell you for a long time that I much prefer him to Arnheim. "
They had got into the habit of exchanging ideas by speaking about Arnheim. For like all people in love, Diotima derived pleasure from talking about the object of her love without, at least so she believed, betraying herself; and since Ulrich found this insufferable, as does any man who has no ulterior·motive in yielding the stage to another, it often happened on such occasions that he lashed out against Arn- heim. Between Arnheim and himselfa relationship ofa peculiar kind had developed. When Arnheim was not traveling, they met almost every day. Ulrich knew that Section Chief Tuzzi regarded the Pros- sian with suspicion, as he did himself from observing Arnheim's ef- fect on Diotima since the very beginning. Not that there was yet anything improper between them, so far as could be judged by a third party who was confirmed in this judgment by the revolting ex- cess of propriety between these lovers, who were evidently emulat- ing the loftiest examples of a Platonic union of souls. Yet Arnheim showed a striking inclination to draw his friend's cousin (or was she his lover after all? , Ulrich wondered, but considered it most probably something like lover plus friend divided by two) into this intimate relationship. He often addressed Ulrich in the manner of an older friend, a tone made permissible by the difference in age between them but that became unpleasantly tainted with condescension be- cause of the difference in . their position. Ulrich's response was al- most always standoffish in a rather challenging way: he made a point of not seeming in the least impressed by speaking with a man who might just as easily have been speaking with kings and chancellors instead. Annoyed with himself because of his lack of propriety, he contradicted Arnheim with impolite frequency and unseemly irony, as a substitute for which he would have done better to enjoy himself as a silent observer. He was astonished that Arnheim irritated him so violently. Ulrich saw in him, fattened by favorable circumstances, the model example ofan intellectual development he hated. For this cel- ebrated writer was shrewd enough to grasp the questionable situa- tion man had got himself into ever since he ceased looking for his
Pst:Udoreality Prevails · 3o3
304 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
image in the mirror of a stream, and sought it instead in the sharp, broken surfaces of his intelligence; but this writing iron magnate blamed the predicament on intelligence itself and not on its imper- fections. There was a con game in this union between the soul. and the price of coal, a union that at the same time purposefully setved to keep apart what Amheim did with his eyes wide open and what he said and wrote in his cloud of intuition. Added to this, to exacerbate Ulrich's uneasiness, was something new to him, the combination of intellect and wealth. When Amheim talked about some particular subject almost like a specialist and then suddenly, with a casual wave of his hand, made all the details disappear in the light of a "great thought," he might be acting on some not unjustified need of his own, but at the same time this manner of freely disposing of things in two directions at once was too suggestive of the rich man who can afford the best and most expensive of everything. He had a wealth of ideas that was always slightly reminiscent of the ways of real wealth. But perhaps it was not even this ~at most provoked Ulrich into creating difficulties for the celebrated man; perhaps it was rather the inclination of Arnheim's mind toward a dignified mode of holding court and keeping house that of itself led to an asso-ciation with the best brands of the traditional as well as of the unusual. For in the mirror of this Epicurean connoisseurship Ulrich saw the affected grimace that is the face of the times, if one subtracts the few really strong lines of passion and thought in it; all this left him with hardly a chance to reach a better understanding of the m. an, who could proba- bly be credited with all sorts of merits as well. U was, of course, an utterly senseless battle he was waging, in an environment predis- posed in Amheim's favor, and in a cause that had no importance at all; the most that could be said for it was that this senselessness gave the sense of the total expenditure of his own energies. It was also a quite hopeless struggle, for if Ulrich actually once managed to wound his opponent, he had to recognize that he had hit the wrong Arnheim; if Amheim the thinker lay defeated on the ground, Am- heim the master of reality rose like a winged being with an indulgent smile, and hastened from the idle games of such conversations to Baghdad or Madrid.
This invulner~bility made it possible for him to counter the younger man's bad manners with that amiable camaraderie the
source of which Ulrich could never quite pinpoint. Besides, Ulrich was himself concerned not to go too far in tearing Arnheim down, because he was determined not to slip again into one of those half- baked and demeaning adventures in which his past had been far too rich; and the progress he observed between Arnheim and Diotima served as an effective insurance against weakening. So he generally directed the points of his attacks like the points of a foil, which yield on impact and are shielded with a friendly little rubber button to soften the blow. It was Diotima who had come up with this compari- son. She found herself mystified by this cousin of hers. His candid face with the clear brow, his quietly breathing chest, the ease in all his movements, all clearly indicated to her that no malicious, spiteful, sadistic-libidinous impulses could dwell in such a body. Nor was she quitewithoutprideiiisopersonableamemberofherfamily; shehad made up her mind from the beginning of their acquaintance to take him under her wing. Had he had black hair, a crooked shoulder, a muddy skin, or a low forehead, she would have said that his views accorded with his looks. But as it was, she was struck by a certain discrepancy between his looks and his ideas that made itself felt as an inexplicable uneasiness. The antennae of her famed intuition groped in vain for the cause, hut she enjoyed the groping at the other end of the antennae. In a sense, though not of course seriously, she some- times even preferred Ulrich's company to Arnheim's. Her need to f e e l s u p e r i o r was m o r e g r a t i f i e d b y h i m , s h e f e l t m o r e s u r e o f h e r s e l f , and to regard him as frivolous, eccentri~. or immature gave her a cer- tain satisfaction that balanced the idealism, becoming increasingly dangerous from day to day, that she saw taking on incalculable di- mensions in her feelings for Amheim. Soul is a terribly grave affair, and materialism by eontrast is lighthearted. The conduct of her rela- tionship with Amheim was sometimes as much of a strain as her salon, and her contempt for Ulrich made her life easier. She did not understand herself, but she noticed this effect, and this enabled her whenever she was annoyed with her cousin over one of his remarks to give him a sideways look that was only a tiny smile in the comer of her eye, while the eye itself, idealistically untouched and indeed even slightly disdainful, gazed straight ahead.
Anyway, whatever their reasons may have been, Diotima ~d Am- heim behaved toward Ulrich like two fighters clinging to athird per-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 305
306 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
son whom in their alternating fear they shove back and forth be- tween themselves; a situation not without its dangers for Ulrich, for through Diotima the question arose: Must people be in accord with their bodies or not?
68
A DIGRESSiON: MUST PEOPLE BE IN ACCORD WITH THEIR BODIES?
Independently of what their faces were talking about, the motion of the car on those long drives rocked the two cousins so that their clothes touched, overlapped a·bit, and moved apart again. One could only see this from their shoulders, because the rest of them was en- veloped by a shared blanket, but the bodies felt this contact, muffled by their clothing, as delicately indistinct as things seen ~ moonlight. Ulrich was n'ot unreceptive to this kind of flirting, without taking it too seriously. The overrefined transmission of desire from the body to the clothes, from the embrace to the obstacles, or, in short, from the goal to the approach, answered to his nature, whose sensuality drove him toward the woman; but its critical faculties held him back from the alien, uncongenial person it suddenly, with relentless lucid- ity, perceived her to be, and this made for a lively tug-of-war be- tween inclination and aversion. But this meant that the body's sublime beauty, its human beauty, the moment when the spirit's song rises from nature's instrument, or that other moment when the body is like a goblet filling up with a mystic potion, was something he had never known, leaving aside those dreams ofthe major's wife that had for the longest time put an end to such inclinations in him.
All his relationships with women, since then, had somehow not been right. With a certain amount of goodwill on both sides that hap- pens, unfortunately, all too easily. From the moment they first began to think about it, a man and a woman find a ready-made matriX of
feelings, acts, and complications waiting to take them in charge, and beneath this matrix the process takes its course in reverse; the stream no longer flows from the spring; the last things to happen push their way to the front of consciousness; the pure pleasure two people have in each other, this simplest and deepest of all feelings in love, and the natural source of all the rest, disappears completely in this psychic reversal.
So on his trips with Diotima, Ulrich not infrequently remembered their leave-taking after his first visit. He had taken her mild hand, an ·artfully and nobly perfected weightless hand, in his own as they gazed into each other's eyes. They both undoubtedly felt some aver- sion, and yet it occurred to them that they might nevertheless fuse to the point of extinction. Something of this vision had remained be- tween them. Thus two heads above cast a horrible chill on each other while the bodies below helplessly melt together at white heat. There is in this something nastily mythical, as in a two-headed god or the devil's cloven hoof, and it had often led Ulrich astray in his youth, when he had experienced it fairly often; but with the years it had proved to be no more than a very bourgeois aphrodisiac, in exactly the same way that the unclothed body substitutes for the nude. Nothi. rrg so inflames the middle-class lover as the flattering discovery of the power to drive another person into an ecstasy so wild that to be the cause of such changes by any other means one would have to
become a murderer.
And truly, that there can be such changes in civilized people, that
we actually can produce such effectsl-isn't this the question and the amazement in . the bold, glazed eyes of all those who dock at the lonely island of lust, where they are murderer, destiny, and God, and experience the maximum irrationality and adventurousness in the greatest comfort?
The repugnance he came to acquire with time against this kind of love eventually extended to his own body too, which had always en- couraged these misbegotten affairs by giving women the illusion of a reliable virility, for which Ulrich was too cerebral and too conflicted.
