No More Learning

It hardly ever does any good, and it is a touch presumptuous too. "
The Section Chief rolled himself a cigarette and held his peace; he felt no further need to apologize for his "crudeness. " Ulrich, watch- ing his slender brown fingers at their work, was delighted with Tuzzi's half-witted effrontery.
"You have just stated the same, very modem principle that the churches have applied to their members for nearly two thousand years, and which the socialists have begun to follow too," he said politely.
Tuzzi shot him a glance to see what the cousin meant by this anal- ogy; expecting Ulrich to expatiate on it further, he was already an- noyed in anticipation of such interminable intellectual indiscretion. But the cousin contented himself with indulgently scrutinizing the man at his side with his pre-1848 mentality. Ulrich had long assumed that Tuzzi must have his reasons for tolerating his wife's relationship with Amheim within certain limits, and would have liked to know what he hoped to gain by it. It still mystified him. Was Tuzzi acting on the same principle as the banks with respect to the Parallel Cam- paign (they were keeping as aloof from it as they could without quite giving up their chance to have a finger in the pie) and meanwhile being blind to Diotima's new springtide oflove, which was becoming so obvious? Ulrich was inclined to doubt it. He took a certain plea- sure in scrut nizing the deep furrows and seams in the man's face and
watching the hard modeling of the jaw muscles when those teeth bit into the cigarette holder. Here was an image ofpure masculinity. Ul- rich was a bit fed up with talking to himself so much, and enjoyed trying to imagine what it must be like to be a man of few words. He supposed that even as a boy Tuzzi had disliked other boys who talked too much, the kind who grow up to be intellectuals, while the boys who would rather spit through their teeth than open their mouths tum into men who prefer not to waste their time, but seek to com- pensate in a<::tion or intrigue, in simple endurance and self-defense,
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452 •THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
for not indulging any more than they can help in those inescapable acts of feeling and thinking which they somehow find so profoundly embarrassing that they wish· they could use thoughts and feelings only to mislead other people. Had anyone said such a thing to Tuzzi, he would naturally have denied it, just as he would deny anything too emotional, because he would not, on principle, tolerate exaggera- tions and eccentricities in any direction. It was simply out of order to speak to him about what he so admirably represented in person, just as it was to ask a musician, an actor, or a dancer what he was really getting at,· imd Ulrich was tempted at ·this point to pat the Section Chief on his shoulder or gently run a hand through his hair, some wordless pantomime or other for the sympathetic understanding be- tween them.
The one thing that Ulrich did not take fully into account was that Tuzzi, not only as a boy but now, that very moment, felt the urge to spit between his teeth in a blast of masculinity. For he sensed some- thing ofthat vague benevolence at his side, and he felt ill at ease with it. He realized that his remark about philosophy contained an admix- ture of elements it was not advisable to risk on an outsider, and he didn't know what had possessed him to let himself go so rashly with this cousin (for some reason this was what he always called Ulrich). He couldn't stand voluble men, and wondered with dismay whether he might unconsciously be trying to win this man over as an ally where his wife was concerned; the thought darkened his skin with shame, because such help was unacceptable, and he involuntarily took several steps away from Ulrich, masking his impulse with some awkward excuse.
But then he changed his mind; moved back, and asked: "Inciden- tally, have you wondered at all why Dr. Amheim is staying with us so long? " He suddenly imagined that such a question would be the best proof that he regarded any connection between Amheim's stay and his wife as out of the question.
The cousin gave him an outrageously dumbfounded stare. The an- swer was so obvious that it was hard to think what else to say. "Do you think," he said haltingly, "that there must be a special reason for it? If so, it would be business, surely? "
"I have nothing to go on," Tuzzi answered, feeling every inch the diplomat again. "But could there be another reason? "
"Of course there can't actually be any other reason," Ulrich conceded civilly. "How very observant of you. For my part I must admit that I never gave it any thought at all; I assumed that it had more or less to do with his literary bent. Wouldn't that be another possibility? " ·
The Section Chieffavored this with no more than an absent smile. "In that case you would have to give me some notion why a man like Arnheim has literary interests in the first place," he said, to his in- stant regret, because he could see the cousin winding up for one of his lengthy answers.
"Have you never noticed," Ulrich began, "that an incredible lot of people can be seen these days talking to themselves on the street? "
Tuzzi gave a shrug.
"There's something the matter with people. It seems they're un- able to take in their experiences or else to wholly enter into them, so they have to pass along what's left. An excessive need to write, it seems to me, comes from the same thing. You may not be able to spot this in the written product, which tends to tum into something far removed from its origin, depending on talent and experience, but it shows up quite unambi~ouslyin the reading of it; hardly anyone reads anymore today; everyone just uses the writer to work off his own excess on him, in some perverse fashion, whether by agreeing or· disagreeing. "
"So you think there's something the matter with Amheim's life? '' Tuzzi asked, all attention again. "I've been reading his books lately, out of curiosity, because so many people seem to think he has great political prospects, but I must say I can't see what need they fill, or any purpose to them. "
"Putting this question in more general terms," the cousin said, "when a man is so rich in money and influence that he can have any- thing he wants, why does he write at all? It boUs down to the naive question Why do professional storytellers write? They write about something that never happened as if it had actually happened, obvi- ously. Does this mean that they admire life as a beggar admires the rich, whose indifference to him he never tires of describing? Or is it a form of chewing the cud? Or a way of stealing a little happiness by creating in imagination what cannot be attained or endured in reality? "
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454 • THE MAN WITH. 0UT ·QUALITIES
"Have you never written anything yourself? " Tuzzi broke in.
"Much as it troubles me, never. Since I am far from being so happy that I have no need of it, I am resolved that if I do not soon feel the urge to write; I shall kill myself for being constitutionally so totally abnormal. "
He said this with such grave amiability that his little joke uninten- tionally rose up from the flow ofthe co~versationlike a flooded stone surfacing as the water recedes.
Tuzzi noticed, and ta~y covered it over. "All in all, then," he concluded, "you are only confirming my point that government offi- cials begin to write only when they retire. But how does that apply to Amheim? "
The cousin remained silent.
"Do you know that Amheim's view of this undertaking to which he is sacrificing so much of his expensive time is totally pessimistic and not at all bullish? " Tuzzi suddenly said, lowering his voice. He had just remembered how Amheim, in conversation with himself and his wife, had at the very outset expressed grave doubts about the pros- pects of the Parallel Campaign, and the fact that he happened to re- call this at this particular moment, afte~so long ·a time, struck him somehow as a diplomatic coup on his own part, even though he had been able to find out virtually nothing, so far, about the reasons for Amheim's prolonged stay.
The cousin's face actually registered astonishment.
Perhaps he was only accommodating Tuzzi with this look, because he preferred to go on saying nothing. In any case, ~oth gentlemen, who were separated the next moment by guests coming up to them,
were in this fashion left with the sense of having had a stimulating talk. .
92
SOME OF THE RULES GOVERNING THE LIVES OF THE RICH
Having so much attention and admiration lavished on him might have made any man other than Arnheim suspicious and unsure of himself, on the assumption that he owed it all to his money. But Am- heim regarded suspicion as the mark ofan ignoble character, permis- sible to a man in his position only on the basis of unequivocal financial reports, and anyway he was convinced that being rich was a personal quality. Every rich man regards being rich as a personal quality. So does every poor man. There is a universal tacit under- standing on the point. This general accord is troubled only slightly by the claims of logic that having money, while capable of conferring certain traits of character on whoever has it, is not in itself a human quality. Such an academic quibble need not detain us. Every human nose instantly smells the subtle scent of independence, the habit of command, the habit of always choosing the best of everything for oneself, the whiff of misanthropy, and the unwavering sense of re- sponsibility that goes with power, that rises up, in short, from a large and secure income. Everyone can see at . a glance that such a person is nourished and daily renewed by quintessential cosmic forces. Money circulates visibly just under his skin like the sap in a blossom. Here there is no such thing as conferred traits, acquired habits; noth- ing indirect or secondhand! Destroy his bank account and his credit, and the rich man has not merely lost his money but has become, on the very day he realizes what has happened, a withered flower. With the same immediacy with which his riches were once seen as one of his personal qualities, the indescribable quality of his nothingness is now perceived, smelling like a smoldering cloud of uncertainty, irre- sponsibility, incapacity, and poverty. Riches are simply a personal, primary quality that cannot be analyzed without being destroyed.
But the effect and the functions of this rare property are most complicated, and it takes great spiritual strength to control them.
455
456 • T H E ·M A N W I T H 0 U T Q U A L I T I E S
Only people with no money imagine riches as a dream fulfilled; those who have it never tire of explaining to those who do not have it how much trouble it gives them. Amheim, for instance, had often pon- dered the fact that every technical or administrative executive in his firm had a great deal more specialized knowledge than he did, and he had to reassure himself every time that, seen from ! 1 sufficiently lofty perspective, such things as ideas, knowledge, loyalty, talent, prudence, and the like can be bought because they are available in abundance, while the ability to make use of them presupposes quali- ties given only to the few who happen to have been born and bred on the heights.
Another equally burdensome problem of the rich is that everyone wants money from them. Money doesn't matter, of course, and a few thousands or t~ns of thousands more or less make hardly any differ- ence to a rich man, and so rich people like to emphasize at every opportunity that money does not affect a human being's value one way or the other, meaning that they would. be equally valuable even without their money, and their feelings l(re apt to be hurt when they feel misunderstood on this point. It is really too bad that such misUn- derstandings keep arising, particularly in their dealings with gifted people. Such people remarkably often have no money, just projects and talent, which does not lessen their sense of their own value, and nothing seems more natural to them than to ask a rich friend who doesn't care about money to put his surplus at the service of some good cause or other. They don't seem to understand that their rich friend would like to support them with his ideas, his abilities, his cha- risma. Besides, their expectations place him in a false position with respect to money, the nature ofwhich demands increase, just as ani- mal nature is set on procreation. Money can be put into bad invest- ments, where it perishes on the monetary field of honor; it Will buy a new car, even though the old one is still as good as new, or enable its owner to stay at th~ most expensive hotels in world-famous resorts, accompanied by his polo ponies, or to establish prizes for horse races or art, or to give a party for a hundred guests that costs enough in one evening to feed a hundred families for a year: with all this, one throws one's money out the window like a farmer casting out seed, so that it will come back with interest through the door. But to give it away quietly for purposes and people who are of no use to it is simply
to commit murder most foul upon one's money. The purposes may be good, and the people incomparable, in which case they should be given every kind of help-except with money. This was a principle with Arnheim, and his consistent application of it had gained him a reputation for taking a creative and active part in the intellectual ad- vancement of his time. ·
Arnheim could also claim that he thought like a socialist, and many rich people do think like socialists. They don't mind their capital being decreed to them by a natural law ofsociety, and are firmly con- vinced that it is the man who confers value on property, not vice versa. They can calmly discuss a future when they will no longer be around, which will see the end of property, and are further con- firmed in regarding themselves as social-minded by the frequency with which upright socialists prefer to await the inevitable revolution in the company ofthe rich rather than that ofthe poor. One could go on like this for a long time, describing all the functions of money Am- heim had mastered. Economic activity cannot really be separated from the other intellectual activities, and it was surely natural for him to give money as well as good advice to his intellectual and artistic friends when their need was urgent, but he did not always give it, and he never gave them much. They assured him that he was the only man in the whole world they could ask for money, because he alone had the necessary intellectual grasp of the matter, and he believed them, because he was convinced that the need for capital permeates all human functions much like the need for air to breathe, but he also met them halfway in their vision of money as a spiritual force by ap- plying it only with the most tactful restraint.
Why is it, anyway, that a man is admired and loved? Isn't it an al- most unfathomable mystery, rounded ;md fragile as an egg? Is a man more truly loved for his mustache than for his car? Is the love aroused by a sun-bronzed son of the South more personal than that aroused by a son of a leading industrial magnate? In a period when almost all well-dressed men were clean-shaven, Arnheim went on sporting a Vandyke beard and a clipped mustache; this small, extra- neous, yet familiar presence on his face reminded him somehow, rather agreeably, whenever he was letting himself go a bit in talking to his always eager listeners, ofhis money.
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93
EVEN THROUGH PHYSICAL CULTURE IT IS HARD TO GET A HOLD ON THE CIVILIAN MIND
For along time the General had been sitting on one ofthe chairs that lined the walls around the intellectual arena, his "sponsor," as he liked to call Ulrich, occupying the next chair but one, while the free chair between them held refreshments in the form of two wine- glasses they had carried away from the buffet. The General's light- blue tunic had been creeping upward, until it now formed furroWs over his paunch, like a worried forehead. They were absorbed in lis- tening to a conversation going on just in front of them.
"Beaupre's game," somebody was saying, "is positively touched with genius; I watched him here this summer, and the·previous win- ter on the RiViera. Even when he slips up, luck stays on his side and makes up for it. And he slips up fairly often, because the actual struc- ture ofhis game negates a really sound tennis style-but then, he's a truly inspired player, which evidently exempts him from the normal laws oftennis. "
"As for me, I prefer scientific tennis to the intuitive kind," some- one objected. "Braddock, for instance. There may be no such thing as perfection, but Braddock comes close. "
The first speaker: "Beaupre's genius, his dazzling unpredictability, is at its peak at the point where science fails. "
A third voice: "Isn't calling it genius overdoing it a bit? "
"What would you call it? Genius is what inspires a man to return the ball just right at the most unlikely moment! "
''I'm bound to agree," the Braddockian said in support, "that a personality must make itself felt whether a man is holding a tennis racket or the fate of a nation in his hand. "
"No, no, 'genius' is going. too far," the third man protested.
The fourth man was a musician. He said: "You're quite wrong. You're overlooking the physical thinking involved in sport, because you're evidently still in the habit of overvaluing the logical, system-
atic kind of thinking. That's practically as out of date as the prejudice that music enriches the emotional life, and sport is a discipline of the will. But physical movement in itself is so magical that we can't stand it without some kind of buffer. You can see that in films when there's no music. Music is inward motion, it supports the kinetic imagina- tion. Once you have grasped the sorcery in music, you can see the genius in sports without a second's hesitation. It's only science that's devoid of genius; it's mere mental acrobatics. "
"So then I'm right," Beaupnfs fan said, "when I say that Brad- dock's scientific game shows no genius. "
"You're not taking into account that we would need to start by re- vitalizing the term 'science,' " the Braddock fan said defensively.
"Incidentally, which of them outranks the other one? " someone wondered.
No one knew the answer. Each of them had frequently beaten the other, but no one knew the exact figures.
"Let's ask Arnheim! " someone suggested.
The group dispersed. The silence in the area of the three chairs lingered on. At last General Stumm said pensively: "Well, I was lis- tening to all that the whole time, you know, and it seems to me you could say the same thing about a victorious general, leaving out the music, perhaps. So why do they call it genius when it's a tennis player and barbarism when it's a general? "
Ever since his sponsor had suggested that he try getting through to Diotima by advocating physical culture as his particular cause, he had given considerable thought to the question of how he <:ould best use this promising approach to the civilian mind, despite his personal aversion to the actual practice of it; but the difficulties, as he was forced to observe again and again, were inordinately large.
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94
DIOTIMA'S NIGHTS
Diotima wondered how Arnheim could stand all these people, visibly enjoying himself, when her own feelings corresponded all too Closely to what she had expressed a number of times in saying that the world's business was no more than un peu de bruit autour de notre ame.
There were times when she looked around and saw her house filled with the cream of society and culture-and felt bewildered. It reduced the story of her life to nothing but that extreme contrast be- tween the depths and the heights, between the young girl's anxiety inside a tight middle-class world and now this blinding life at the summit. Already poised on a dizzily high narrow ledge, she felt the call to lift up her foot once more, toward an even greater height. The risk was seductive. She wrestled with the resolve to enter into a life where action, mind, soul, and dream are one. Basically she no longer fretted over the failure of a crowning idea for the Parallel Campaign to emerge; nor did her vision of a World Austria still mat- ter quite so much; even her discovery that for every great projection of the human mind there was an equally valid opposite had lost its terrors fo. r her. The really important movements of life have less to do with logic than with lightning and £Ire, and she had grown used to not trying to make sense of all the greatness by which she felt sur- rounded. She would gladly have dropped her campaign altogether and married Amheim, as a little girl solves her problems by forget- ting all about them and leaping into her father's arms. But the in- credible ramification of her project had her trapped. She could take no time to think. The outer chain of events and the inward one ran on independently side by side, even as she tried in vain to link them up. Just like her marriage, outwardly appearing happier than ever, when in fact everything was inwardly dissolving.
Had Diotima been able to act in character, she would have spoken
frankly with her husband; but there was nothing she could tell him. Was it love she felt for Amheim? What they were to each other could be given so many names that even this trivial one occasionally sur- faced among her thoughts. They had never even kissed, and an ut- most intermingling of souls was something Tuzzi would not understand even if such a thing were confessed to him. Diotima her- self sometimes wondered at the fact that nothing more reportable was going on between herself and Amheim. But she had never dropped her good-girl's tendency to look up, ambitiously, to older men, and she could more easily have imagined something at least describable ifnot actually tangible going on between herselfand her cousin, who seemed younger than herself and upon whom she looked down just a little, rather than with, the man she loved and who seemed so to appreciate her ability to dissipate her feelings into gen- eral reflections on the loftiest plane. Diotima knew that one had to let oneself tumble headlong into radical changes in one's circum- stances and wake up amid one's new four walls without quite know- ing how one got there, but she felt exposed to influences that kept her wide awake. She was not entirely free from the distaste the typi- cal Austrian of her period felt toward his German kin. In its classical form, which has become a rarity in our day, this distaste corre- sponded more or less to an image of the venerated heads of Goethe and Schiller planted guilelessly on bodies that had been fed on sticky puddings and gravies, and shared something of their nonhuman in- wardness. And great as Amheim's success was in her circle, it did not escape her that after the first surprise certain resistances made them- selves felt, never taking on form or coming out into the open, yet·by their whispering presence undermining her self-assurance and mak- ing her aware of the differences between her own bias and the reser- vations felt by many persons upon whom she had been accustomed to model her own conduct. Now, ethnic prejudice is usually nothing more than self-hatred, dredged up from the murky depths of one's own cpnflicts and projected onto some convenient victim, a tradi- tional practice from time immemorial when the shaman used a stick, said to be the repository of the demon's power, to draw the sickness out of the afflicted. That her beloved was a Prussian troubled Di- otlma's heart with further terrors, of which she could form no clear
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462 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
image, so she was surely not quite unjustified in perceiving her wav- ering condition, so sharply different from the brute simplicity of her married state, as a passion.
Diotima suffered sleepless nights, during which she was tom be- tween a Prussian industrial autocrat and an Austrian bureaucrat. In the state between trance and dream, Amheim's great, luminous life passed in parade before her. She saw herself airborne at this adored man's side through a heaven of new honors, but it was a heaven of a distasteful Prussian blue. Meantime, in the black Austrian night, the yellow body of Section Chief Tuzzi still lay beside her own. She was only dimly aware of this, as of a black-and-yellow symbol of the old Kakanian culture, though he had little enough of that. It was backed by the Baroque fa~ade of ~er noble friend Count Leinsdorf's great town residence, and the shades of Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn, and of Prince Eugene of Savoy, Austria's liberator from the Turks, hovered over it, like homesickness anticipating actual exile. Diotima could not make up her mind to take such a step outside her own world, just like that, even though she almost hated her husband for being the obvious obstacle. Inside her beautiful big body, her soul felt helplessly trapped as in a vast landscape in full flower.
"I mustn't be unfair," Diotima thought. "The government official, the man given over to his work, may no longer be awake and open and receptive, but in his youth he might have been capable of it. " She remembered certain moments when they :were still engaged to be married, though even then Section Chief Tuzzi had been no lon- ger exactly a youth. "He achieved his position and his personality by hard work and devotion to duty," she thought tolerantly, "and. he has no suspicion that it has cost him his own personal life. "
Ever since she had achieved her social triumph she thought more indulgently of her husband, and so she now made him yet another inward concession. "No one is a born rationalist' and utilitarian," she reflected. ''W e all start out as a living soul. But ordinary, everyday existence silts us up, the usual human passions go through us like a firestorm, and the cold world brings out that coldness in us that freezes the soul. '' Perhaps she had been too reticent to force him into facing up to this. How sad it was. It seemed to her that she could never summon up the courage to involve Section Chief Tuzzi in the
scandal ofa divorce, such a shattering blow to anyone as wrapped up as he was in his public role.
"Even adultery is preferable! " she· suddenly told herself.
Adultery was what Diotima had been considering for some time. To do one's duty in one's appointed place is a sterile notion; quan-
tities of energy are poured out to no purpose! The right course is to choose one's place and shape one's circumstances deliberately. Ifshe was going to condemn herself to staying with her husband, there still remained a choice between a useless and afruitful martyrdom, and it was her choice to make. So far Diotima had been hampered by the moral sleaziness and th! 'l unattractive air of irresponsibility that were inseparable from all the stories of adultery that had ever come her way.
She simply couldn't imagine· herself in such a. situation. To touch the doorknob of a certain kind of hotel room seemed tan- tamount to diving into a cesspool. To slip, with rustling skirts, up s o m e s t r a n g e staircas~a c e r t a i n m o r a l c o m p l a c e n c y o f h e r b o d y r e - sisted the thought. Hasty kisses went against her grain, as did clan- destine words of love. Catastrophe was more in her line. Those last walks together, choked good-byes, torn between a mother's duty and love, were much more her style. But owing to her husband's thrifty disposition she had no children, and catastrophe was precisely the thing to be avoided. So she opted, if it should come to that, for a Renaissance model. A love that had to live with a dagger through the heart. While she could form no very clear image of this, there was something decidedly upright about it, with a background of classic ruins under fleeting clouds. Guilt and its transcendence, passion ex- piated by suffering, trembled in this image and filled Diotima with an unutterable intensity and awe. "Wherever a person finds her highest potential and the richest field for her energies is where she belongs," she thought, "because it is'there that she can do the most to intensify life as a whole! "
She looked at her husband as best she could in the dark. Just as the eye does not register the ultraviolet rays of the spectrum, so this ra- tionalist would never notice certain emotional realities of the inner life!
Section ChiefTuzzi was breathing evenly, suspecting nothing, cra- dled by the assumption that during his well-earned eight hours of
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mental absence nothing of importance could be happening in Europe. Such tranquillity did not fail to impress Diotima, and more than once she pondered the idea: Renunciation! good-bye to Am- heiml great, noble words of anguish, heaven-storming resignation, leave-taking on the scale of a Beethoven; the powerful muscle of her heart tensed up under these demands made on it. The future bil- lowed with conversations full of a tremulous, autumnal brilliance, the pPignancy of far-off blue mountain ranges. But could renuncia- tion coexist with the double marriage bed? Diotima started up from her pillows, her black hair flying in wild ringlets. Section Chief Tuzzi's sleep was no longer the sleep of innocence but rather that of a serpent with a rabbit in its belly. She came dangerously close to waking· him up and, in view of this new dilemma, shrieking in his face _that she must, she must and would, leave him! Such a flight into hys- teria in her conflicted situation would certainly have been under- standable, but her body was too healthy for that; she felt that it simply did not react with the requisite horror to Tuzzi's proximity. She faced the absence of this horror with a dry shudder. No tears succeeded in running down her cheeks, but oddly enough it was the thought of Ulrich that gave her a certain comfort in this particular situation. These days she normally never gave him a thought, but his peculiar remarks about Wl;Ulting to abolish reality, while 1\mheim overestimated it, had a mysterious overtone, a hovering note Di- otima had ignored at the time, only to have it surface in her mind during these night watches of hers. "All it means is that one shouldn't wony too much about what is going to happen," she told herselfirri- tably. "It's the most commonplace idea in the world! " Yet even as she phrased this thought so badly and simplistically, she re! llized that it contained something she did not understand, the very thing that acted on her like a sedative, paralyzing her despair along with her consciousness. Time flitted away like a dark shadow line, as she com- forted herself that somehow her inability to muster a lasting despair might also redound to her credit; but this consoling thought no lon- ger took hold.
At night thoughts keep flowing through alternately bright and dark patches, like water in high mountains, and when they quietly reap- peared after a while Diotima felt as though she had merely dreamed all that earlier frothing. The boiling little stream behind the dark
mountain range was not the same as the quiet river she slid into at the end. Anger, loathing, courage, fe! ll", all had drained away, there must be no such feelings, they didn't exist: In the soul's struggles with itself there is no one to blame! Ulrich, too, slipped back into oblivion. All that was left now were the ultimate mysteries, the soul's eternal longings. Their moral worth does not depend on what one does. It does not depend on the movements of consciousness or of passion. Even the passions are only un peu de bruit autour de notre arne. Kingdoms may be won or lost while the soul does not stir, and one can do nothing to attain one's destiny; in its own time it grows out of the depths of one's being, serene and everyday, like th! 'l music of the spheres. Tht=ln Diotima lay awake more than ever, but full of confidence. Such thoughts, with their final period somewhere out of sight, had the beauty of putting her to sleep very quickly, even on the most sleepless nights. Like a velvety vision, she felt her love fusing with the infinite darkness that reaches out beyond the stars, insepa- rable from herself, inseparable from Paul Arnheim, immune to all schemes and set purposes. She hardly found the time to reach for the tumbler of sweetened water she kept on her little night table for her insomnia but used only at the very last moment of consciousness, be- cause it always slipped her mind when she was agitated. The soft sound of her drinking purled, like lovers' whisperings behind a wall, beside her husband's sleep, unheard by him; then Diotima lay back reverently on her pillows and sank into the silence of unconscious being. ·
95
THE GREAT MAN OF LETTERS: REAR VIEW
It is almost too familiar a phenomenon to be worth mentioning: Once her celebrated guests had realized that the seriousness of her campaign did not call for any great effort on their part, they behaved
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like mere people, and Diotima, her house filled with noise and high ideas, was disappointed. High-minded as she was, she was ignorant ofthat law ofcircumspection which makes a man's conduct in private the opposite of his professional conduct. She did not know that politicians who had called each other liars and crooks in the assembly hall went amicably to lunch side by side in the dining hall. That judges who, in their juridical capacity, have just imposed a heary fine on some unfortunate may press his hands in sympathy at the end of the proceedings she knew, but saw nothing out of the way in that. That female entertainers sometimes lead irreproachable domestic lives behind the scenes of their dubious public displays she had heard, and even found touching. She also saw a fine symbolism in princes laying aside their crowns on occasion to be simple human beings. But when she saw princes. of the cultural realm enjoying themselves as if they were just anybody, she found it hard to make allowances for such a double standard. What is. the underlying need, the psychological. law behind this common tendency that makes men turn their backs on who they are in their professional lives? Every man is two people, and one hardly ~ows whether it is in the morn- ing or in the evening that he reverts to his real self.
And so, however pleased she was to see her soul mate so popular with all the men of her circle, and in particular to see him singling out the younger men for his attention, it sometimes depressed her to see him so caught up in all this s'ocial activity. A truly great mind, she felt, should not care quite so much to mingle with the ordhiary cul- tural elite, nor be so ready to traffic in the fluctuating marketplace of ideas.
The truth was that Arnheim was not a great mind but only a great man of letters.
In our cultural landscape, the great man of letters has replaced the great mind just as the plutocrats have replaced royalty ~nthe political world. Just as the regal intellect and imagination had its place in the days of reigning princes, the great man of letters has his place in the days of great political campaigns and great department stores. The leading man of letters represents a special form of the connec- tion between the mind and all large-scale operations. The least one may therefore expect of a great author is that he should drive a great car. He has to be a great traveler, be received by high officials, give
lectures, and be a moral force not to be underestimated by the lead- ers ofpublic opinion; he is the keeper ofa nation's soul, the upholder of its humanitarian aspirations before the rest of the world; at home, he must receive notable visitors, and with all that, there is still his work to be done, which must be turned out with the agility ofa circus performer who never shows the strain of doing his act. A great author is by no means the same thing as a writer who makes lots of money. He need not necessarily write the b'est-seller of the year or the book ofthe month himself, as long as he doesn't challenge this sort ofeval- uation, because it is he who sits on all the award committees, signs all the manifestos, writes all the introductions, delivers all the com- mencement addresses, pronounces on all the important events, and is called in whenever it is necessary to demonstrate what new heights of progress have just been achieved. For in all his activities, the liter- ary eminence represents not his country as a whole but only its van- guard, its great elite, which already almost constitutes a majority, and so he lives within a magnetic field ofchronic intellectual tension. It is of course our present forms of social life that make culture a mega- industry, just as for its part our mega-industrial complex aims to con- trol culture, politics, and the public conscience; the two phenomena meet halfway. Which is why this description is not aimed at anyone in particular but serves only to represent a standard figure on the social chessboard, subject to rules and to making moves as they have evolved in the course of history. Our well-meaning contemporaries take the stand that having intelligence in itselfis not enough (there is so much of it around that a little more or less makes no real differ- ence; anyway, everyone thinks he has enough for his own needs), be-
cause our first priority is the struggle against stupidity, which means that intelligence must be displayed, made highly visible and opera- tive, and since the Great Author suits this purpose better than an even greater author whom the largest number might not find quite so easy to understand, everyone does his level best to make the visi- bly Great even greater.
With this understanding, no one could seriously hold it against Arnheim that he was one of the first, experimental, though already quite perfected embodiments of such a public figure, though a cer- tain innate fitness for the role was understood. After all, most writers would like to be Great Authors, but it is the same with them as with
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mountains; between the Austrian towns of Graz and St. PBlten, for instance, there are many mountains that could look exactly like Monte Rosa, if only they were high enough. The most indispensable condition for being a Great Author is always that one has to write books or plays that will do equally well for high and low. To effect the desired good, one must be an effective writer to begin with; this is the basic principle of every Great Author's life. It is a strange and wonderful principle too, a fine antidote to the temptations of soli- tude, Goethe's very own principle of effective action: if you will just get things done in a good world, everything else will fall into place. For once a writer has made his effect, his life undergoes a remark- able sea change. His publisher stops saying that a businessman who goes into publishing is a sort of tragic idealist because he could do so much better for l_limself by dealing in textiles or unspoiled paper. The critics discover him as a worthy subject for their labors, because critics are often not really bad people at heart but former poets who, because times are bad, have to pin their hearts to something that will inspire them to speak out; they are war poets or love poets, depend- ing on the nature of the inward gleanings for which they must find a market, so their preference for the work of a Great Author rather
than just any author is quite understandable. There is really only so much work a critic can do, and so the best of this limited output tends to be distributed over the annual publications from the pens of Great Authors, whose works consequently become the savings banks, as it were, of the national cultural economy, in that each of them brings in its train critical commentaries which are in no way mere explications but virtual deposits, and there is correspondingly less capital left over for all the rest. But where this really mounts up is with the essayists, biographers, and instant historians, who relieve themselves all over the great man. Meaning no offense, but dogs pre- fer ~ busy street corner to a lonely cliff for their calls of nature, so why should human beings who feel the higher urge to leave their names behind choose a cliff that is obviously unfrequented? Before he knows it, the Great Author ceases to be a separate entity. and has become a symbiosis, a collective national product in the most deli- cate sense of the term, and enjoys the most gratifying assurance life can offer that his prosperity is most intimately bound up with that of countless others.
This may also be why the Great Author is so often noted for his pronounced sense of good form. He resorts to open combat only when his position is threatened; in all other circumstances his con- duct is admirably serene and good-natured. He can put up gracefully with any number of trivialities uttered in his praise. Great men of letters do not lightly deign to discuss other writers, but when they do, they seldom flatter a man of true distinction but prefer to encourage one ofthose unobtrusive talents made up of49 percent ability and 51 percent inability, which, thanks to this mixture, are very good at ev- erything that needs strength to get done but might be da. maged by a strong personality, so that every one ofthem sooner or later achieves an influential position in the literary world. But with this description we may already have gone beyond what is peculiar to the Great Au- thor alone. The proverb has it that nothing succeeds like success, and nowadays even an ordinary man of letters is likely to have an inordi- nate fuss made over him long before he has become a Great Author, when he is still a reviewer, columnist, radio scriptwriter, screen- writer, or the editor of some little magazine; some of them resemble those little rubber pigs or donkeys with a hole in their back where you blow them up. ·
When we see our Great Authors carefully sizing up this situation and doing their best to mold it into an image of an alert population honoring its great personalities, shall w~ not be grateful to them? They ennoble life as they find it by their sympathetic interest in it. Just try to imagine the opposite, a writer who did none of the above. He would have to decline cordial invitations, rebuff people, assess praise not as a grateful recipient but as a critic, tear up what comes naturally, treat great opportunities as suspect, simply for being so great, and would have nothing of his own to offer in recompense other than processes going on inside his head, hard to express, hard to assess, merely a writer's achievement of which a time that already has its Great Authors has no great' need. Would such a man not re- main a total outsider and have to withdraw from reality, with all the inevitable consequences?
This was, in any case, Arnheim's opinion.
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THE GREAT MAN OF LETTERS: FRONT VIEW
A Great Author's problem arises from the fact that even a creative life has to be conducted in a businesslike way, but the language in which it is gone is traditionally idealistic, and it was this very blend of business and idealism that played so crucial a part in Arnheim's lifework.
Such anachronistic mixtures tum up everywhere nowadays. Even as our dead, for instance, are being trotted off to their resting place by internal combustion engine, we can't forgo dressing up the top of such a handsome motorized hearse with a medieval helmet and two crossed swords, and that's how it goes with everything; human evolu- tion is a long-drawn-out process. Only two generations ago business letters affected flowery turns of phrase, while today we can already state all sorts ofthings from love to pure logic in the language ofsup- ply and demand, security and discount, at least as well as we can in psychological and religious terms; however, we don't do that yet. That's because our new language is not yet quite sure of itself. The ambitious moneyman fmds himself in a difficult spot these days. T o place himself on a level with the established powers, he must dress up his activities in great ideas. But great ideas that command instant allegiance no longer exist, because our skeptical contemporaries be- lieve in neither God nor humanity, kings nor morality-unless they believe in all of them indiscriminately, which amounts to the same thing. So the captain of industry, disinclined to forgo greatness, which serves him as a compass, must resort to the democratic dodge ofreplacing the immeasurable influence ofgreatness by the measur- able greatness ofinfluence. So now whatever counts as great is great; but this means that eventually whatever is most loudly hawked as great is also great, and not all of us have the knack of swallowing this innermost truth of our times without gagging a little. Amheim had been trying conscientiously to find a way.
In such a fix a cultivated man might for instance be reminded of
the link between the world of learning and the Church in the Middle Ages. A philosopher who wanted to succeed and influence the thought of his contemporaries had to get along with the Church in those days, which might lead the vulgar freethinker to suppose that such constraints must have kept the philosopher from rising to great- ness. But the opposite was the case. Our experts assure us that the result was nothing less than an incomparable Gothic beauty of thought, and if it was possible to make allowances for the Church without banning one's intellectual quality, why shouldn't it be possi- ble to do the same for advertising? Can't a man who wants to get something done get it done under these conditions as well? Amheim was convinced that it was a sign of greatness in a man not to be overly critical of his times. The best rider on the best horse who is fighting it will not take his hurdles as smoothly a5 the horseman who manages to move as one with his mount.
Take Goethe, for another example: Now, there was a genius such as the earth is not likely to produce again, but he was also the knighted son of a prosperous business family and, as Amheim felt, the very first Great Author his nation had ever produced. Amheim modeled himself on the great poet in many ways. But his favorite story about him was the well-known incident when Goethe, while secretly sympathizing, left poor Johann Gottlieb Fichte in the lurch when the philosopher was fired from the University of Jena for hav- ing spoken of the Deity and divine matters "grandly, but perhaps not with the proper decorum," and went about his defense in an "impas- sioned" manner rather than extricating himself from the affair "in the smoothest possible way," as the urbane master poet observes in his memoirs. Amheim not only would have done exactly as Goethe did, but would have cited Goethe's example to try to convince all and sundry that this alone was the Goethean, the meaningful way to act. He would hardly have contented himself with the fact that, oddly enough, we are more likely to feel sympathy when a great man does the wrong thing than when a lesser man does the right thing, but
would have gone beyond it to point out that an obstinate insistence on principle not only is fruitless but shows a lack of depth and histori- cal irony, what he would also have called the Goethean irony of mak- ing the best of it with dignity, showing a sense of humor in action, a mode of conduct that time always proves to have been right in the
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end. Considering that today, barely two life spans later, the injustice done to the worthy, upright, and slightly excessive Fichte has long since dwindled to a private matter of no consequence to his reputa- tion, while the reputation of Goethe, despite his behaving badly, has suffered equally little in the long run, we must admit that the wisdom of time in fact accords with the wisdom of Arnheim.
And a third example-Arnheim always had quantities of good ex- amples at his disposal-illustrating the deep meaning ofthe first two: Napoleon. Heine in his Travel Pictures describes him in a manner in such perfect accordance with Amheim's views that we may as well cite his own words, which Arnheirn knew by heart:
"Such a mind," Heine wrqte, referring to Napoleon-though he might as easily have said it of Goethe, whose diplomatic nature he always defended with the acuity of a lover who knows deep down that he is not really in accord with the object of his admiration- "Such a mind is what Kant means when he asks us to imagine one that \. vorks, not intellectually, like our own, but intuitively. The knowledge that our intellect acquires by slow analytic study and labo- rious deduction, the intuitive mind sees and grasps in one and the same movement. Hence his gift for understanding his time and the moment and for cajoling its spirit, never crossing it, always using it. But since this spirit of the age is not merely revolutionary but is formed by the confluence of both revolutionary and reactionary as- pects, Napoleon never acted in a purely revolutionary or counterrev- olutionary manner but always in the spirit of both views, both principles, both tendencies, which in him came together, and so he always acted in amanner that was natural, simple, great, never fitful or harsh, always calm and temperate. He never had the need to in- dulge in petty intrigue, and his coups always resulted from his skill in understanding and moving the masses. Petty, analytical minds in- cline to slow, intricate scheming, while synthesizing intuitive minds have their own miraculous ways of so combining the possibilities held out by the times that they can take speedy advantage of them for their own ends. "
Heine may have meant that a little differently from the way his admirer Arnheim understood it, but Arnheim felt that these words virtually described him as well.
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CLARISSE'S MYSTERIOUS POWERS AND MISSIONS
Clarisse indoors . . . Walter seems to have been mislaid somehow, bqt she has an apple and her bathrobe. The apple and the bathrobe are the two sources from which an unnoticed fine ray of reality streams into her consciousness. What made her think that Moos- brugger was musical? She didn't know. Possibly all murderers are musical. She knows that she wrote a letter on this subject to His Grace Count Leinsdorf; she also remembers what she wrote, approx- imately, but she has no real access to it.
But was the Man Without Qualities unmusical?
As no good answer came to her, she dropped the question and passed on to other things.
After a while it did come to her: Ulrich is the Man Without Quali- ties. A man without qualities can't be musical, ofcourse; but he can't be unmusical, either. . . .
He had said to her: You are virginal and heroic.
She reiterated: Virginal and heroic! A glow came into her cheeks. She felt called upon to do something, but she didn't know what.
Her thoughts were driving in two directions, as in a hand-to-hand struggle. She felt attracted and repelled, without knowing toward or by what. This ended in a faint feeling of tenderness that was some- how left over from the struggle and that moved her to go looking for Walter. She stood up and put the apple down.
She was sorry that she was always tormenting Walter. She was only fifteen when she first noticed that she had the power to torment him. All she had to do was to say loudly and firmly that something he had said was not so, and he would flinch, no matter how right what he had said was. She knew he was afraid ofher. He was afraid she might go crazy. He had let it slip once and then quickly tried to cover up; but she had known ever since that it was in his mind. She thought it was really lovely. Nietzsche says: "Is there a pessimism ofthe strong?
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An intellectual leaning toward what is hard, horrifying, evil? A deep instinct against morality? A craving for the terrible as the worthy enemy? " When such words came to mind they gave her a sensual thrill in her mouth, gentle and strong as milk, so that she could hardly swallow.
She thought of the child Walter wanted from her. He was afraid of that too. Made sense, if he thought she might one day go mad. It made a tenderness rise up for him, though she violently fought it down. She had forgotten that she meant to go looking for Walter. There was something going on in her body. Her breasts were fllling up, the blood flow~d thickly through the veins in her arms and legs, there was a vague pressure on her bladder and bowels. Her slim body deepened inside, grew sensitive, alive, strange, step by step; a child lay bright and smiling in her arms; from her shoulders the Mother of God's golden cloak fell in radiant folds to the floor, and the congregation was singing. It was out of her hands: the Lord had been born unto the world!
But no sooner had this happened than her body snapped shut, closing the gap over the image, like a split log ejecting the entering wedge; she was her own slim self again, feeling disgust and a cruel merriment. She was not going to make it so easy for Walter. "Let it be thy victory and thy freedom that long for offspring": she recited Nietzsche to herself. ''Thou shalt build living memorials to thyself. But before that, thou must build up thine own body and soul. " Cla- risse smiled; it was her special smile, licking upward like a slender flame from a fire under a great stone.
Then she remembered that her father had been afraid of Walter. Her mind went back to years ago. It was something she was in the habit of doing; she and Walter would ask each other: "Do you re- member . . . ? " and the light ofthe past flowed magically from the far distance into the present. It was fun, they enjoyed it. It was perhaps like turning around, after having doggedly trudged along a road for hours, to see all the empty distance one has covered transformed into a grand vista, to one's genuine satisfaction; but they never saw it in that light; they took their reminiscing very seriously. And so it seemed to her incredibly titillating and curious that her father, the aging painter, at that time an authority figure in her life, had been afraid of Walter, who had brought a new era into his house, while
Walter was afraid of her. It was like putting her arm around her friend Lucy Pachhofen and having to say "Papa" to him, while know- ing that Papa was Lucy's lover, for that was going on during that same period.
Again Clarisse's cheeks flushed. She was intens·ely absorbed in try- ing to bring to mind that peculiar whimpering sound, that strange whimpering she had told Ulrich about. She picked up her mirror and tried to make the face, with lips pressed together in fear, that she must have made the night her father came to her bed. She couldn't manage to imitate the sound that had escaped from her breast in that state of temptation. She thought that the same sound must still be there, inside her chest, as it was then.