No More Learning

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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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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DIOTIMA'S NIGHTS
Diotima wondered how Arnheim could stand all these people, visibly enjoying himself, when her own feelings corresponded all too Closely to what she had expressed a number of times in saying that the world's business was no more than un peu de bruit autour de notre ame.
There were times when she looked around and saw her house filled with the cream of society and culture-and felt bewildered. It reduced the story of her life to nothing but that extreme contrast be- tween the depths and the heights, between the young girl's anxiety inside a tight middle-class world and now this blinding life at the summit. Already poised on a dizzily high narrow ledge, she felt the call to lift up her foot once more, toward an even greater height. The risk was seductive. She wrestled with the resolve to enter into a life where action, mind, soul, and dream are one. Basically she no longer fretted over the failure of a crowning idea for the Parallel Campaign to emerge; nor did her vision of a World Austria still mat- ter quite so much; even her discovery that for every great projection of the human mind there was an equally valid opposite had lost its terrors fo. r her. The really important movements of life have less to do with logic than with lightning and £Ire, and she had grown used to not trying to make sense of all the greatness by which she felt sur- rounded. She would gladly have dropped her campaign altogether and married Amheim, as a little girl solves her problems by forget- ting all about them and leaping into her father's arms. But the in- credible ramification of her project had her trapped. She could take no time to think. The outer chain of events and the inward one ran on independently side by side, even as she tried in vain to link them up. Just like her marriage, outwardly appearing happier than ever, when in fact everything was inwardly dissolving.
Had Diotima been able to act in character, she would have spoken
frankly with her husband; but there was nothing she could tell him. Was it love she felt for Amheim? What they were to each other could be given so many names that even this trivial one occasionally sur- faced among her thoughts. They had never even kissed, and an ut- most intermingling of souls was something Tuzzi would not understand even if such a thing were confessed to him. Diotima her- self sometimes wondered at the fact that nothing more reportable was going on between herself and Amheim. But she had never dropped her good-girl's tendency to look up, ambitiously, to older men, and she could more easily have imagined something at least describable ifnot actually tangible going on between herselfand her cousin, who seemed younger than herself and upon whom she looked down just a little, rather than with, the man she loved and who seemed so to appreciate her ability to dissipate her feelings into gen- eral reflections on the loftiest plane. Diotima knew that one had to let oneself tumble headlong into radical changes in one's circum- stances and wake up amid one's new four walls without quite know- ing how one got there, but she felt exposed to influences that kept her wide awake. She was not entirely free from the distaste the typi- cal Austrian of her period felt toward his German kin. In its classical form, which has become a rarity in our day, this distaste corre- sponded more or less to an image of the venerated heads of Goethe and Schiller planted guilelessly on bodies that had been fed on sticky puddings and gravies, and shared something of their nonhuman in- wardness. And great as Amheim's success was in her circle, it did not escape her that after the first surprise certain resistances made them- selves felt, never taking on form or coming out into the open, yet·by their whispering presence undermining her self-assurance and mak- ing her aware of the differences between her own bias and the reser- vations felt by many persons upon whom she had been accustomed to model her own conduct. Now, ethnic prejudice is usually nothing more than self-hatred, dredged up from the murky depths of one's own cpnflicts and projected onto some convenient victim, a tradi- tional practice from time immemorial when the shaman used a stick, said to be the repository of the demon's power, to draw the sickness out of the afflicted. That her beloved was a Prussian troubled Di- otlma's heart with further terrors, of which she could form no clear
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image, so she was surely not quite unjustified in perceiving her wav- ering condition, so sharply different from the brute simplicity of her married state, as a passion.
Diotima suffered sleepless nights, during which she was tom be- tween a Prussian industrial autocrat and an Austrian bureaucrat. In the state between trance and dream, Amheim's great, luminous life passed in parade before her. She saw herself airborne at this adored man's side through a heaven of new honors, but it was a heaven of a distasteful Prussian blue. Meantime, in the black Austrian night, the yellow body of Section Chief Tuzzi still lay beside her own. She was only dimly aware of this, as of a black-and-yellow symbol of the old Kakanian culture, though he had little enough of that. It was backed by the Baroque fa~ade of ~er noble friend Count Leinsdorf's great town residence, and the shades of Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn, and of Prince Eugene of Savoy, Austria's liberator from the Turks, hovered over it, like homesickness anticipating actual exile. Diotima could not make up her mind to take such a step outside her own world, just like that, even though she almost hated her husband for being the obvious obstacle. Inside her beautiful big body, her soul felt helplessly trapped as in a vast landscape in full flower.
"I mustn't be unfair," Diotima thought. "The government official, the man given over to his work, may no longer be awake and open and receptive, but in his youth he might have been capable of it. " She remembered certain moments when they :were still engaged to be married, though even then Section Chief Tuzzi had been no lon- ger exactly a youth. "He achieved his position and his personality by hard work and devotion to duty," she thought tolerantly, "and. he has no suspicion that it has cost him his own personal life. "
Ever since she had achieved her social triumph she thought more indulgently of her husband, and so she now made him yet another inward concession. "No one is a born rationalist' and utilitarian," she reflected. ''W e all start out as a living soul. But ordinary, everyday existence silts us up, the usual human passions go through us like a firestorm, and the cold world brings out that coldness in us that freezes the soul. '' Perhaps she had been too reticent to force him into facing up to this. How sad it was. It seemed to her that she could never summon up the courage to involve Section Chief Tuzzi in the
scandal ofa divorce, such a shattering blow to anyone as wrapped up as he was in his public role.
"Even adultery is preferable! " she· suddenly told herself.
Adultery was what Diotima had been considering for some time. To do one's duty in one's appointed place is a sterile notion; quan-
tities of energy are poured out to no purpose! The right course is to choose one's place and shape one's circumstances deliberately. Ifshe was going to condemn herself to staying with her husband, there still remained a choice between a useless and afruitful martyrdom, and it was her choice to make. So far Diotima had been hampered by the moral sleaziness and th! 'l unattractive air of irresponsibility that were inseparable from all the stories of adultery that had ever come her way. She simply couldn't imagine· herself in such a. situation. To touch the doorknob of a certain kind of hotel room seemed tan- tamount to diving into a cesspool. To slip, with rustling skirts, up s o m e s t r a n g e staircas~a c e r t a i n m o r a l c o m p l a c e n c y o f h e r b o d y r e - sisted the thought. Hasty kisses went against her grain, as did clan- destine words of love. Catastrophe was more in her line. Those last walks together, choked good-byes, torn between a mother's duty and love, were much more her style. But owing to her husband's thrifty disposition she had no children, and catastrophe was precisely the thing to be avoided. So she opted, if it should come to that, for a Renaissance model. A love that had to live with a dagger through the heart. While she could form no very clear image of this, there was something decidedly upright about it, with a background of classic ruins under fleeting clouds. Guilt and its transcendence, passion ex- piated by suffering, trembled in this image and filled Diotima with an unutterable intensity and awe. "Wherever a person finds her highest potential and the richest field for her energies is where she belongs," she thought, "because it is'there that she can do the most to intensify life as a whole! "
She looked at her husband as best she could in the dark. Just as the eye does not register the ultraviolet rays of the spectrum, so this ra- tionalist would never notice certain emotional realities of the inner life!
Section ChiefTuzzi was breathing evenly, suspecting nothing, cra- dled by the assumption that during his well-earned eight hours of
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mental absence nothing of importance could be happening in Europe. Such tranquillity did not fail to impress Diotima, and more than once she pondered the idea: Renunciation! good-bye to Am- heiml great, noble words of anguish, heaven-storming resignation, leave-taking on the scale of a Beethoven; the powerful muscle of her heart tensed up under these demands made on it. The future bil- lowed with conversations full of a tremulous, autumnal brilliance, the pPignancy of far-off blue mountain ranges. But could renuncia- tion coexist with the double marriage bed? Diotima started up from her pillows, her black hair flying in wild ringlets. Section Chief Tuzzi's sleep was no longer the sleep of innocence but rather that of a serpent with a rabbit in its belly. She came dangerously close to waking· him up and, in view of this new dilemma, shrieking in his face _that she must, she must and would, leave him! Such a flight into hys- teria in her conflicted situation would certainly have been under- standable, but her body was too healthy for that; she felt that it simply did not react with the requisite horror to Tuzzi's proximity. She faced the absence of this horror with a dry shudder. No tears succeeded in running down her cheeks, but oddly enough it was the thought of Ulrich that gave her a certain comfort in this particular situation. These days she normally never gave him a thought, but his peculiar remarks about Wl;Ulting to abolish reality, while 1\mheim overestimated it, had a mysterious overtone, a hovering note Di- otima had ignored at the time, only to have it surface in her mind during these night watches of hers. "All it means is that one shouldn't wony too much about what is going to happen," she told herselfirri- tably. "It's the most commonplace idea in the world! " Yet even as she phrased this thought so badly and simplistically, she re! llized that it contained something she did not understand, the very thing that acted on her like a sedative, paralyzing her despair along with her consciousness. Time flitted away like a dark shadow line, as she com- forted herself that somehow her inability to muster a lasting despair might also redound to her credit; but this consoling thought no lon- ger took hold.
At night thoughts keep flowing through alternately bright and dark patches, like water in high mountains, and when they quietly reap- peared after a while Diotima felt as though she had merely dreamed all that earlier frothing. The boiling little stream behind the dark
mountain range was not the same as the quiet river she slid into at the end. Anger, loathing, courage, fe! ll", all had drained away, there must be no such feelings, they didn't exist: In the soul's struggles with itself there is no one to blame! Ulrich, too, slipped back into oblivion. All that was left now were the ultimate mysteries, the soul's eternal longings. Their moral worth does not depend on what one does. It does not depend on the movements of consciousness or of passion. Even the passions are only un peu de bruit autour de notre arne. Kingdoms may be won or lost while the soul does not stir, and one can do nothing to attain one's destiny; in its own time it grows out of the depths of one's being, serene and everyday, like th! 'l music of the spheres. Tht=ln Diotima lay awake more than ever, but full of confidence. Such thoughts, with their final period somewhere out of sight, had the beauty of putting her to sleep very quickly, even on the most sleepless nights. Like a velvety vision, she felt her love fusing with the infinite darkness that reaches out beyond the stars, insepa- rable from herself, inseparable from Paul Arnheim, immune to all schemes and set purposes. She hardly found the time to reach for the tumbler of sweetened water she kept on her little night table for her insomnia but used only at the very last moment of consciousness, be- cause it always slipped her mind when she was agitated. The soft sound of her drinking purled, like lovers' whisperings behind a wall, beside her husband's sleep, unheard by him; then Diotima lay back reverently on her pillows and sank into the silence of unconscious being. ·
95
THE GREAT MAN OF LETTERS: REAR VIEW
It is almost too familiar a phenomenon to be worth mentioning: Once her celebrated guests had realized that the seriousness of her campaign did not call for any great effort on their part, they behaved
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like mere people, and Diotima, her house filled with noise and high ideas, was disappointed. High-minded as she was, she was ignorant ofthat law ofcircumspection which makes a man's conduct in private the opposite of his professional conduct. She did not know that politicians who had called each other liars and crooks in the assembly hall went amicably to lunch side by side in the dining hall. 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.
97
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. It was a sound without re- straint or scruple, but it had never surfaced again. She put down the mirror and looked around warily, touching everything with her eyes to assure herself that she was alone. Then she felt with her fingertips through her robe, searching for that velvety-black birthmark that had so strange a power. There it wac;, in the hollow of her groin, half hid- den on the inside of the thigh and close to where the pubic hairs somewhat raggedly made room for it; she let her hand rest on it, made her mind a blank, and waited for the sensation she remem- bered. She felt it at once. It was not the gentle streaming of lust, but her arm grew stiff and taut like a man's arm; she felt that if she could just lift it high enough she would be able to smash everything with it! She called this spot on her body the Devil's Eye. It was the spot at which her father had stopped and turned back. The Devil's Eye had a gaze that pierced through any clothing and "caught" men's eyes and drew them to her, spellbound but unable to move as long as Cla- risse willed it. Clarisse thought certain words in quotation marks, with special emphasis, just as she heavily underlined them in writing; the words thus emphasized tensed up with meaning, just as her arm·
was tensed up now; who would even have supposed that one could really "catch" something, someone, with the eye? Well, she was the first person who held this word in her hand like a stone to be flung at a target. It was all part ofthe smashing force in her arm. All this had made her forget the whimpering sound she had started out to con- sider; instead, she thought about her younger sister, Marion. When she was four years old, Marion's hands had to be tied up at night, to keep them from slipping, in all inn? cence, under the covers, only be-
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. cause they were drawn toward a pleasing sensation like two baby bears drawn to a honeycomb in a hollow tree. And some time later Clarisse had once had to tear Walter away from Marion. Her family was possessed by sensuality as vintners are by wine. It was fated, a heavy burden she had to bear. Just the same, her thoughts went on wandering in the past, the tension in her arm relaxed, and her hand rested obliviously in her lap. In those days she had still been on terms of formality with Walter. Actually, she owed him a lot. It was he who had brought the news that there were modem people who insisted on plain, cool furniture and hung pictures on their walls that showed the truth. He read new things to her, Peter Altenberg, little stories of young girls who rolled their hoops in the love-crazed tulip beds and had eyes that shone with sweet innocence like glazed chestnuts. From that time on Clarisse knew that her slender legs, still a child's legs, she had thought, were quite as important as a scherzo by "some- one or other. "
At the time, they were all staying in a summer place together, a large group; several families of their acquaintance had rented cot- tages by a lake, and all. the bedrooms were fllled up with invited friends, male and female. Clarisse had to double up with Marion, and around eleven Dr. Meingast sometimes dropped by ~n his secret moonlight rounds, for a chat. He--who was now a famous man in Switzerland-had then been the life of the party and the idol of all the mothers. How old was she then? -between fifteen and sixteen, or maybe fourteen and fifteen? -when he had brought his student George Grosch! along, who was only a little older than Marion and Clarisse. Dr. Meingast had been somewhat absentminded that eve- ning, rambling a little about moonbeams, parents who slept through everything and didn't care, and people with a modem outlook; sud- denly he was gone, as if he had come only to leave stocky little George, his great admirer, behind with the girls. George was silent, probably too shy to talk, and the girls, who had been talking to Mein- gast, also kept quiet. But George n:tust have clenched his teeth in the dark and stepped over to Marion's bed. A little light fell into the room from outside, but in the comers, where the qed stood, impene- trable masses of shadow loomed, so Clarisse could not make out
what was going on, except that George seemed to be standing up- right beside the bed, looking down at Marion; but he had his back to
Clarisse, and there was not a sound from Marion, as though she were not in the room at all. A long time went by. But in the end, while Marion remained motionless, George detached himself from the shadows like a murderer; for a moment his shoulder and side showed pale in the bright patch ofmoonlight in the middle ofthe room, as he moved toward Clarisse, who had quickly lain down again and pulled the covers up to her chin. She knew that the secret thing that had been going on at Marion's bed would now happen again and was rigid with suspense as George stood silently by her bedside. His lips seemed pressed unnaturally tight together. Finally his hand came, like a snake, and busied itself with Clarisse. What else he was doing she had no idea, and could make no sense of the little she perceived of his movements, despite her excitement. She herself did not feel aroused-that came later-but at the moment felt only a strong, in- definable, anxious excitement; she kept still like a trembling stone in a bridge over which a heavy vehicle is passing so slowly there seems no end to it; she felt unable to speak, and let it all be done to her. After George had let her go he disappeared without a word, and nei- ther of the two sisters could be sure that the other had experienced the same thing as herself; they had not called to each other for help or asked for sympathy, and years went by before they exchanged a word about the incident.
Clarisse had recovered her apple, gnawed off a little piece, and chewed on it. George had never given himself away or made any ac- knowledgment of what had happened, except perhaps at first to make stonily portentous eyes now and then. By this time he had turned into a smart rising young lawyer in government service, and Marion was married. Much more, however, had happened with Dr. Meingast. On going abroad, he had shed his cynicism and become what is called, outside the universities, a famous philosopher, always surrounded by a throng of students of both sexes. Walter and Cla- risse had recently received a letter from him to the effect that he was about to visit his nativ. e land in order to get some work done, undis- turbed by his followers. Would they be able to put him up? He had heard that they were living "on the border between nature and the big city. "
This news might in fact have been what had triggered Clarisse's line of thought that day. "Oh Lord, what a weird time it was! " she
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thought, and realized, too, that it had been the summer before the summer with Lucy. Meingast had taken to kissing her whenever he felt like it. "Ifyou please, I shall kiss you now," he said politely before he did it, and he also kissed every one of her girlfriends; there was one ofthem whose skirt Clarisse had never again been able to look at without having to think of eyelids lowered in false modesty. Meingast had told her about it himself, and Clarisse, who was only fifteen, after all, had said to the fully adult Dr. Meingast, when he told her of his exploits with her young friends: ''You're a pig! " She got a kick out of calling him such a crude name to his face-if felt like being booted and spurred-though it did not prevent her from being afraid that she would not be able to resist him either, in the end, and when he asked her- for a kiss she did not dare refuse, for fear of seeming silly.
But when Walter kissed her for the first time, she said gravely: "I promised Mama never to do this kind of thing. " And that was the difference in a nutshell. Walter talked like an angel and he talked a lot, he was swathed in art and philosophy like the moon swathed in a broad bank of clouds. He read aloud to her. But what he mostly did was look at her constantly, only at her among all her friends, that was all there was between them at first; it was just like having the moon look down on you: all you do is fold your hands. Actually, holding hands was the next step, quietly clasping hands without a word spo- ken, and what an amazingly strong bond it was! Clarisse felt her whole body purified by the touch ofhis hand; ifhe happened to seem absentminded and cool in taking her hand, she felt destroyed. "You can't imagine what it means to mel" she said pleadingly. By that time they were very close, in secret. He taught her a new appreciation of mountains and beetles; all she had ever seen in nature before was a landscape that Papa or one of his colleagues would,. paint and sell. Now all of a sudden she began to regard her family with a critical eye; she felt all new and different. ·
Suddenly she had a clear recollection of that business with the scherzo. ''Your legs, Miss Clarisse," Walter had said, "have more to do with real art than all of your papa's paintings. " There was a piano in the house where they were staying that summer, on which they used to play duets. Clarisse was learning things from him; she wanted to rise above her girlfriends and her family; none of them understood how anyone could spend such lovely summer days playing the piano
instead of going out boating or swimming; but she had pinned her hopes on Walter, she had already, even then, decided she would be "his mate," she would marry him, and when he snapped at her for playing a wrong note, she would be boiling inwardly, but her plea- sure outweighed the hurt. Walter did snap at her sometimes, in fact, because the spirit is uncompromising; but only at the piano. Music apart, it still happened sometimes that Meingast kissed her, and on one moonlight expedition, when Walter was rowing, she nestled her head on Meingast's chest quite of her own accord as they. sat in the stem together. Meingast had such a way with him in these matters, she had no way of knowing what would come of it, while Walter, the second time he grabbed her, right after their piano lesson, at the very last moment when they had already reached the doorway and he pounced on her from behind and kissed her hard, had only given her the unpleasant feeling that she had to struggle for air, to tear herself away from him. Nevertheless, her mind was made up; no matter what happened between her and the other one, she must never let go ofthis one.
It was a funny thing, all that, anyway; there was something about Meingast's breath that made all resistance melt away-it was like pure, light air that makes you feel happy for no reason-while Wal- ter, who suffered from a halting digestion, as Clarisse had known for some time, just like the halting way he had of making up his mind about anything, had a stuffy kind of breath, a little too hot, a little musty and paralyzing. Such psychosomatic factors had played a
strange part all along, and Clarisse could take it in stride, because nothing seemed more natural to her than Nietzsche's saying that a person's body is the soul. Her legs had no more genius than her head, they had exactly as much, they were her genius; her hand, at Walter's touch, instantly released a stream of intentions and assur- ances that flowed from head to toe, without a word; and her youth- once it had come to know itself-rebelled against all the convictions and other foolishness of her parents with the simple freshness of a hard young body that despises all the feelings remotely connected with the voluptuous marriage beds and lush Turkish carpets so popu- lar with the morally strict older generation. And so the physical con- tinued to play a part she understood differently from the way others might see it.
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But here Clarisse broke off her reminiscences, or it was rather her reminiscences that on the instant, with~ut the bump of a landing, dropped her back into the present. It was all this, and what was to follow, -that she had wanted to tell her friend, the Man Without Qualities. Perhaps there was too much of Meingast in it, who had after all disappeared soon after that exciting summer. He had fled abroad; that incredible inward transformation of his had begun ·that was to make a famous philosopher out of the frivolous womanizer; and thereafter Clarisse had seen him only in passing, when neither of them had been reminded of the past. But as she saw it, her own part in his transformation was perfectly clear to her. A good deal more had happened between them in the weeks before his disappearance. In Walter's absence--and in his jealous presence too, cutting Walter out and driving him to outdo himself-she and Meingast went through emotional storms and even crazier times, in those hours before a storm that can drive a man and a woman out of their minds,, followed by the hours after the storm, all passion spent, that are like green meadows after a rain, in the pure air offriendship.