by Karl Kraus
“There’s certainly something to the last claim. Kraus showed no inclination for tracking how historical events unfold over time, or for figuring out how complex webs of factors produce them. You could say that he analyzed key features of his age in a series of aphorisms, some funny and some not, which he supported with thousands of pages of commentary and painstaking, often breathtaking work with the evidence, but which he didn’t try to put into meaningful narrative contexts (see ‘Heine and the Consequences’). For me, what’s striking about The Third Walpurgis Night isn’t so much the lack of humor or effective satire as the absence of aphoristic insights. This absence, incidentally, may explain the book’s odd shape. Without such insights to ground him (he often built upon the aphorisms that he inserted into his essays), Kraus appears to be at sea. He goes on and on: The Third Walpurgis Night is probably five times longer than Kraus’s second-longest essay. Of course, much of what Kraus writes in it has merit. The book is, indeed, ‘clear-eyed.’ It contains detailed accounts of Nazi violence, and it forcefully calls out cultural authorities—men such as Gottfried Benn and Martin Heidegger—whose support helped legitimate the Nazi movement by conferring upon it the cachet of poetry and philosophy in the country that fancied itself the land of Dichter und Denker. But Kraus’s performance nevertheless feels ‘wrong-footed,’ to use James’s word. Liberally translated, Kraus’s opening line reads ‘No ideas about Hitler occur to me’ (‘Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein’), and it proves to be an apt warning. Kraus wasn’t able to muster for Nazism the kinds of provocative aphoristic distillations that serve as the basis for so much of his work. The closest he gets in The Third Walpurgis Night is that famous first sentence.”
Right. The wit of Kraus’s aphorisms was grounded in a comprehensible world and was always therefore, at some level, optimistic. To say that “shadows now throw bodies” is not only to invoke a former world in which bodies threw shadows but to imply that this proper relation could be restored if people would stop swallowing the media’s manipulation of reality. Nazi ideology was beyond any such redemption—there was no way to flip it over, via paradoxical aphorism, into something potentially meliorable.
I might add that James not only propagates a smallening cliché about Kraus but implicitly buys into an aggrandizing cliché about Saddam Hussein—namely, that his threat to the world bore comparison with Hitler’s. Bad journalism may not have caused the Iraq invasion (which James seems to believe was a necessary response to Hitler-level evil), but Judith Miller’s shoddy reporting on WMDs, in the Times, did do a lot to neutralize opponents of the war. Her WMD shadows threw bodies.
17. In other words, Heine is more “important” than Nestroy. Kraus means this ironically, as the following sentences make clear.
18. “Calabrian hats (Kalabreser) were the felt hats favored by the revolutionaries of 1848.” —PR
19. I.e., people like Heine.
20. Kehlmann, the Viennese and major Kraus fan: “I have no idea what he means with this phrase. It doesn’t make sense to me.” Nor to me. But the sense of the sentence as a whole is that the originality of Nestroy’s spirit matters more than the non-originality of his plots.
21. Untranslatable wordplay in here. In the original, “humor” is Humor and “hardy-har-har” is Hamur, which was Viennese slang for “humor.” The implication is that Viennese audiences would forgive genuine wit in a playwright only if he or she also gave them comforting, earthy, low-class laughs.
22. “For all Kraus’s dismissiveness toward literary historians, his relations with them weren’t all bad. Otto Rommel, who was the leading Nestroy scholar in Kraus’s day, publicly stated how much he admired Kraus; and when, in private, Rommel told Kraus that he had made it possible for him to understand Nestroy, Kraus proudly reported this acknowledgment in the Fackel.” —PR
23. I invite the reader to skip over the second half of this sentence. As Kehlmann says, “The sentence is overinstrumented. Basically Kraus is saying that Nestroy lived in better times, which is to say less apocalyptic times, and so he was spared the feeling of finality and didn’t have to use form (the satirical brilliance of the sentences) to revenge himself on his content (the things he was writing about). Not a great sentence of Kraus’s, I don’t think. But the next sentence belongs with it and helps make sense of it.”
24. Kehlmann again: “My guess about what Kraus means by ‘onceness’ is that an audience hears a stage line only once and can’t go back and reread it, which means that you have to be simple and immediately understandable when you write for the theater.”
25. There’s a whole little outbreak of subpar sentences in here. Kehlmann’s best guess about this one: “It’s possible that Kraus means that Nestroy achieves rhetorical effects so strong that they function independently of the quality of the actor.” Reitter adds: “On second (or fifth) thought, I’m not so sure. I think that KK is still referring to Nestroy the actor here. His point is that, as an actor, Nestroy had a particular talent for the rhetorical part of the performance. This creates another link between Nestroy and Kraus, since Kraus’s public readings were essentially rhetorical performances whose success wasn’t a function simply of his writing but of his voice and delivery as well.”
I must say that it’s a relief to see Kehlmann and Reitter struggling with Kraus’s language. I first started translating Kraus in 1983, entirely on my own, and because so many of his sentences yielded beauty and meaning if I engaged in sufficient solitary struggle with them, I naturally assumed it was my fault when some of them didn’t; I wasn’t a native German speaker, after all. But this is the dangerous thing about literary difficulty: the farther the writer moves away from transparent, readily graspable language (and you can’t move much farther away than Kraus did and still hope to convey coherent thoughts), the greater the temptation to cut corners. I don’t think Kraus himself cuts very many, but once you start writing sentences that are deliberately opaque on first reading, the door is open to writing sentences that remain opaque on the hundredth reading. There’s a kind of moral hazard here—literary difficulty inclines readers to excuse the writer, since negative statements (“There is no conceivable way to make sense of this”) are notoriously resistant to proof—and it’s one that less scrupulous avant-gardists still exploit in a big way.
26. “Accused by Franz Werfel of letting a Yiddishism slip into his prose, Kraus responded that the word in question wasn’t actually a Yiddishism, and even if it were one, so what? ‘My style screeches with all the noises of the world,’ Kraus boasted elsewhere. Something like that statement goes for Nestroy’s style as well, in Kraus’s reading of it.” —PR
Kraus, whose own specialties were aphorisms and glosses, is making a rather outrageously self-justifying claim in this sentence: “If Nestroy were writing now, he’d be doing what I’m doing.” Or, conversely, “If I’m not writing plays like Nestroy did, it’s because I live in more urgently bad times.” Kraus did, to be sure, write one monumental play, The Last Days of Mankind, a satire of Austrian corruption and lies and self-deceptions in the First World War, but it’s remarkably lacking in conventional drama. Its backbone consists of vertabim quotation and exaggerated mimicry of a remarkable variety of sources, along with glosses and aphorisms provided by the character of the Grumbler. It’s quite a presumption to imagine that this is the kind of thing Nestroy would have written if he’d been born seventy-five years later.
And yet, says Kehlmann, “I completely agree with Kraus about Nestroy’s particular gifts as a writer. It’s true that his plays are fully conventional from the standpoint of story, but his linguistic creativity, his wit, and his aphoristic power are tremendous; at their best, they really are comparable only to Shakespeare’s. Nestroy isn’t a born dramatist, à la Schiller—that he wrote for the stage was really more a matter of circumstance, and it’s hard not to think that under different circumstances he might well have produced aphoristic prose. Of course Kraus is being self-serving here, but what he’s saying about Nestroy
isn’t so unreasonable or far-fetched.”
To thrive as a man, you need to find ways both to admire your father and to surpass him. If the kinship is literary, which is to say metaphorical, you may also need to deny false paternity, as Kraus does in “Heine and the Consequences.” Because Heine is the famous and widely beloved Kraus precursor, Kraus tries to annihilate him, highlighting the differences between Heine’s work and his own and pointing toward Heine’s fundamentally bad character: if Heine had been born seventy-five years later, he would still have been a feuilletonist. Because Nestroy, on the other hand, is the neglected and undervalued Kraus precursor, Kraus praises him, stresses his kinship with him, and posits that different times would have made him a different kind of writer. Kraus may conceivably have had submerged assimilationist motives in choosing a Gentile as a literary father, but the really important argument he’s making is that Nestroy was a great writer uncomfortably stuck in the wrong genre—thus leaving the son (Kraus) free to find the right genre and fulfill his potential. To champion Nestroy is at once to make him a more satisfactory father and to demonstrate the champion’s own superior strength. Nestroy in 1912 needed Kraus’s help, and Kraus needed to provide it.
When I went to Berlin, in the fall of 1981, I was actively seeking literary fathers. In a college playwriting workshop, I’d spontaneously generated a story about a conspiracy in my hometown, and my theater professor, Lee Devin, had said I’d better take a look at Pynchon (also, curiously, at the thriller writer Richard Condon). Because I intended to turn my story idea into a novel in Berlin, I took along Gravity’s Rainbow—a brick of a paperback that might have been a brick of firecrackers, so deliciously full of explosive potential did it seem.
(Somewhat random aside: I loved fireworks, and so did my father. Every Fourth of July morning he took me out past the county line into a jurisdiction where they were legal. He bought himself a brick of firecrackers, half of which he would save for setting off in our front yard on New Year’s Eve, and we went down to a gravel bar on the Meramec River, where he worked through the other half of his brick while I ignited bottle rockets and smoke bombs. For the first few years we were accompanied by a neighbor of ours, a colleague of my father’s at the railroad, and by his pyromaniacal son, Fred. I remember Fred’s father lighting firecrackers with the cigarettes he chain-smoked. He died of lung cancer when I was only eight or nine. His name was Karl Kraus.)
In my last semester of college I’d read some essays of Harold Bloom in which there was a lot of talk about “strong” and “weak” poets. Since I was going to be writing novels anyway, I figured it would be much more fun and satisfactory to be a strong one. Of course, the whole thing was preposterous, since Bloom’s theory was steeped in Freud and turned on the literary ephebe’s willful but unconscious misreading of his (always his, never her) strong precursor’s work: my Unconscious would have to have been awfully feeble if reading some literary criticism had been all it took for me to stage direct it. But I was impressed by how smart Bloom and the other theorists were. For a while, I believed that studying them would help me produce the kind of texts that they considered good, as if they were Julia Child and I wanted to master the art of French cooking. I hoped they’d show me shortcuts to becoming a strong novelist, so that I could avoid the suffering of various agons (which sounded highly unpleasant) and the embarrassment of being unconscious of motives that any halfway competent Bloomian critic would be totally conscious of. I was like Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, who is under the impression that all you need to be able to read Latin is the trick of decoding it into English, and who is stricken to learn that each Latin word and conjugation has to be laboriously memorized.
When I started reading the Pynchon, in the suburban basement of the family that hosted me for my first five weeks in Berlin, I was simultaneously reading Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, as if Pynchon were a deadly virus and literary theory the hazmat suit that would let me safely handle it. But the suit did not avail. Pynchon still made me ill, both literally and figuratively. To compound my literary self-consciousness, I was spending between two and six hours every day typing letters to my secret fiancée, V. Before I left for Berlin, V and I had agreed that our letters to each other would double as journals; our innermost thoughts would be communal property. And so I made a carbon copy of every page I wrote to her, partly to create a journal but partly also on the crazy presumption that our correspondence would eventually be seen as one for the ages; what bound me and V together, more than anything else, was our literary ambition.
it’s like the bitter irony of my picking up Gravity’s Rainbow when I can’t write these days, oh what a mess, I find Bloom’s style revolting in hindsight, his Manifesto a travesty like late Nietzsche, but I recognize Pynchon as my major precursor, the better he is the more I want to hate him but the less I can, a strange state of affairs, such as my reading list of novels in the last five years respectably large yet somehow managing to avoid all Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Austen, Stendhal, Mailer, my God, you’d think I’ve hardly read a thing, what fear what fear, my suitcase stuffed with more irony, you name—Derrida, Bloom, Burke, Jameson twice, Lacan, Marcuse, Lukacs, Barthes—it, but how many novels? just one, of course, cover reading “The most important work of fiction yet produced by any living writer,” influence, why fight it? does Irving? well, it hardly matters with Irving, but there’s almost nothing he does in Garp that Pynchon doesn’t do better, or Heller, and it seems that Pynchon’s Irving is just one among a dozen tricks the book is pulling off, how can you write in America anymore? how keep going without big genius? well, I hear you saying, who knows that one or both of us isn’t a genius, who says you have to be the best?
[…]
You scowl from my picture of you in your black tank top, arms as fluid and smooth as air, a coffee cup in one hand, a cigarette in the other. I hope you’re thinking, oh come on Jon, take it easy now, it’s all the same letter (call it V., title of Pynchon’s oh god great first novel, how could he? how could he?—“THOMAS PYNCHON is known almost exclusively through his writing. In all other respects, he craves and guards his privacy. The public facts about his life are few and far between”—from the blurb About the Author at the back of Bantam Book #0-553-14761-7, His Most Highly Praised Novel.) You still scowl. I know, I know.
[…]
I’d almost swear that this is a Pynchon toxin numbing my spirit. Why else do I want to go back to p. 321, where I left off reading after lunch?
A year earlier, my departmental adviser had suggested that I apply for a Fulbright grant for study in Germany. My chances of getting one were good: the German government, understandably intent on promoting international cooperation after the Second World War, contributed heavily to the Fulbright program, which, as a result, gave nearly as many fellowships for Germany as for the rest of the world combined. To make sure I went to Germany’s most interesting city, Berlin, I crafted a proposal, consisting almost entirely of bullshit, to use certain archives in Berlin to study expressionist theatrical productions. My letter of acceptance arrived on the same day and in the same mailroom where V, with whom I was falling in love and would soon be sleeping, got her letter of rejection from the Fulbright people. She’d applied to go to Italy—unlike Germany, Italy was cool!—but so had a thousand other people.
I don’t remember what prompted me to propose to V, six months later. Probably I’d said something wrong (I was always saying the wrong thing that summer) and wanted to make her feel better. We were living with throngs of cockroaches in a sublet at the corner of 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, in New York; I’ve still never seen thicker Lucite security partitions than the ones in the liquor store downstairs from us. To throw my mother off the scent of my relationship with V, I’d told her that a whole bunch of my college friends were living in the apartment, not just V and me. My mother had met V only once, at our college graduation, and had conceived an intense disapproval of her. (“She’s very intellectual” was the n
icest thing she ever managed to say about her.) To my lie about our living arrangements I soon added concealment of our engagement and of my intention to spend my Berlin year working on a novel; my mother considered the idea of my becoming a novelist a dangerous and irresponsible fantasy. I pretended to her that my Fulbright would set me up to be a journalist, a lawyer, an international banker, or, at the very least, a German professor. She, for her part, hoped that, while in Germany, I would develop a taste for blond, sharp-cheekboned, un-V-like women along the lines of the daughters of her good Austrian friend, Ilse.
Where was my father in this? He was retiring, that summer, at the age of sixty-six and a half, from his forty-year career as a civil engineer. Admiring him was not a problem for me, but surpassing him was: I’d heard it said that he was the best railroad bridge and track engineer in the United States. I also had a troubling sense of false paternity. My father was a formidable intellectual arguer and a good, clear writer, but he knew and cared nothing about literature. He was a tower of honesty and integrity, whereas I was an inveterate concealer of pertinent information, sometimes even an outright liar, and was intending to make a career of writing stories that weren’t factually true. My best near-term option for surpassing him was to be more deferential to a woman, more solicitous and sympathetic, than he was to my mother. Longer term, I would have to become the nation’s best at what I did—hence the insane magnitude of my literary ambitions at twenty-two. To get anywhere with the long-term project, I needed the example of a different kind of father.
A few days after I left for Berlin, my mother was hospitalized with a near-fatal pulmonary embolism. I now think that it’s a mistake to metaphorize illness, and certainly my mother’s long troubles with blood clots weren’t aggravated by her emotions the way other of her ailments were, but back then the timing of her hospitalization seemed to me inescapably significant. Her youngest child had just flown the nest for good, and for the first time in her life she had my father at home with her, being depressed and generally forcing all the marital issues that his busy work life had allowed them to suppress. I was constituted to feel responsible for this, and I began to make the argument, first privately and then to V, that I couldn’t break the news of our engagement until my mother’s health was better, for fear of worsening it with the shock of the news.