by Karl Kraus
Of course, being twenty-two, I typically thought about my parents only when I felt obliged to write them a letter; they were mostly a distraction from the important subject of me. But my daily anxiety levels were very high. I self-medicated with cigarettes, a habit I not only concealed from my parents but was attempting to hide from my host family by sneaking around outside their house. In the great tradition of Fulbright anxiety (a phenomenon treated most comically in Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station), I felt anxious about the weird impression I was making on my host family, anxious about concealing my engagement, anxious about chaining myself to my portable typewriter and writing self-referential letters instead of improving my German and gathering exotic material, anxious about committing myself to marriage before I’d sampled the charms of blond, sharp-cheekboned women, anxious about the new buildup of tactical nuclear weapons on both sides of the German border, anxious about being a smoker, anxious about my laziness as a scholar, anxious about finding a place to live in the extremely tight low-end Berlin housing market, anxious about the many ways in which I half knew that V and I weren’t right for each other, and anxious about the badness of the story I was writing as an exercise, a fluffy confection that concerned a young man named Wallace Wallace Wallace and was so steeped in my recent reading of John Irving that there was even a bear in it.
Harold Bloom, however, was telling me I was supposed to be anxious about Pynchon:
I’m a great sublimator. Not finding an apartment, the simple raw fear, becomes not finding an apartment when you and I are poor, in two years. This fear gives way to the worry that you’re not the Practical Type. Worry about Practical Types practically stops the typing: how can I sit in here when my thoughts should be flooding outward? But what is this worry, if not pynchon-anxiety? since pynchon appears to have done almost everything in the world, he’s just bursting with details that can be had only through experience. But why pynchon-anxiety? Why decide he’s the Major Precursor? Because of the style-crisis I’m locked in with the Wallace story and with these letters. As you’ve been seeing, I’m to the point where I’ll destroy style rather than imitate someone else’s. But style-destruction is, if only momentarily, a very anti-literary thing to do to oneself; it sounds like it might be connected to the doubts I’ve been having about our neat lives as authors.
Gravity’s Rainbow seemed to me a novel of dizzying capability. Its melding of the gonzo and the literary was so effortless and brilliant it felt inevitable, and it dealt squarely with the two contemporary issues that weighed on me the most: the nuclear peril and the impenetrably complex modern System that rendered individuals powerless. Pynchon’s narrative voice was scarily authoritative the way my father’s was, and the street wisdom of his entropic proto-hippie antihero, Tyrone Slothrop, was like that of my much older brother Tom, whom I revered. I was doubly a little pisher, and the book pushed all my buttons in this regard.
To defend myself against it, all I really had was my engagement to V. The engagement was conventional, for one thing, and I already had some awareness that I was destined to live and work within convention, both because it had served me well (I’d known how to play the game of getting a Fulbright) and because I’d seen how my brother’s unconventionality had estranged him from my parents. The engagement was also predicated on achieving a relationship of equals with V, one that fully respected her subjectivity. Gravity’s Rainbow was an absolute boy-novel, a rockets-and-erections book, its female characters fundamentally sex objects. When, in subsequent letters to V, I experimented with riffs that mimicked the novel’s raunchy tone and attitudes, she wrote back sharply to register her moral distaste, and the lesson I drew was that you couldn’t write like Pynchon and sustain an I-Thou relationship with a woman. I had to reject Pynchon’s sexism the way I rejected my father’s. It also quickly became apparent that Pynchon’s turn on novelistic convention—reading every coincidence as evidence of conspiracy—was a trick without a future. Pynchon wholly owned it, and there was no point in competing with him on his turf:
What astounds me is how easy it is to make up a plot like that, and that no one before pynchon ever did it. But now no one else can do it. He is, as Lee Devin told me two and a half years ago, the Master of Paranoid Conspiracy.
[…]
The pynchon-anxiety has diminished, by the way, since Sunday morning (yesterday); the anxiety that remains is strangely antipynchonesque: ominous coincidences, but no chance of a conspiracy behind them. For instance, the end of a sentence near the bottom of page 404: “… a repulsive black gob of the foul-smelling substance wrapped in a scrap torn from an old Enbeski Qazaq for 17 August of last year.” Not the best spot of writing in the book, but at least all the details seem reasonable, except for the date [August 17 is my birthday], which appears nowhere else in the first 535 pages, which seems to have been planted as a sign for watchful me, a message from pynchon to the effect, “I KNOW YOU’RE READING THIS AND I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.” I have come to expect coincidences like this, though.
[…]
I haven’t given up on this idea of how susceptible we, or at least I, are to the toxins in the things we read. I only read GR for about two hours yesterday, three at most. But the whole night was filled with it. It really is as Weasel Bloom describes it: influenza. And far more dangerous when it happens with a novel than with a critical theory. It could cripple you for life. So to read, or not to read? “He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all.” This is why I’m having such a hard time with the man. Heller or Vonnegut I can live with, because they’re about as stylistically interesting (or annoying) as a translation of Chekhov. But not pynchon—who also provides us with a tour de force through every sexual act ever dreamed of (shit-eating, piss-drinking and incest included (hardly appealing, you say, but—)), who wants us to know he knows exactly what a brick of hash looks like, exactly what WWII Europe was like, down to the minutest detail (V[ ], he was two when the war started, eight when it ended), exactly what it feels like to have destroyed yourself with cocaine, exactly how much chemistry, math, physics, and Pavlovian psychology he has mastered—it goes on and on, stealing names, phrases, techniques and making them so totally his own that the universe of possibilities seems distinctly smaller for his having written one book, one lousy book. It’s so BIG. That’s the problem.
Rereading these letters, with the aim of quoting from them at embarrassing length here, I’m struck by how much more authentic and persuasive my cries of pain were than the resolution I arrived at. I don’t know if this is an effect of hindsight, but I have the same feeling about the passages in my letters where I reaffirm my love of V and promise her that everything is going to be okay with us. The anxieties sound real, the optimism somewhat pat:
I’ll get over Pynchon somehow. Maybe through criticism, some discontinuity, some dialectic, that will enable me to forget him. It’s still only faith, but it hasn’t been destroyed: Novels aren’t called novel for nothing: they’re about the times and about time. That’s the pun that Thomas Mann thought he invented, calling Der Zauberberg a Zeitroman. […] You watch Mann do his numerological/philosophical/historicosymbolic tricks and it’s as exciting as Star Wars, just vastly clever, and done in full seriousness too. And then you see the same themes, sometimes even the same phrases and sentences, popping up in Kafka, Rilke, Mann and Döblin, popping up unintentionally, where not even Bloom could make a case for Influence, positive or negative—and suddenly it’s all right again: these guys aren’t talking about the Problem of Falling (which Bloom maintains is always the same problem for poets, whose task of finding new solutions grows harder by the generation), they’re talking about how lousy it is to see the moral individual dying off in the face of advancing modern society, or something like that. It’s all about time.
And that seemed to be the end of it. I stop
ped talking about Pynchon in my letters, and soon after that, having been shamed by V’s criticisms, I expunged all traces of his gonzo style. My engagement to V was a freely chosen clampdown, a truncator of anxious-makingly open-ended trains of thought, a bulwark against the boy-novel phallicism I’d found so dangerously attractive in Gravity’s Rainbow. At a Thanksgiving dinner hosted by the Berlin coordinator of the Experiment in International Living, Frau Heilgendorff, I was deep in a flirtatious conversation with the prettiest woman at the table, a blond and high-cheekboned German, when Frau Heilgendorff swooped down and said pointedly, “Jonathan, how is your fiancée? When is your fiancée coming over to see you?” End of conversation. Besides being annoyed, I felt obscurely that the word “fiancée” misrepresented me. And yet in the weeks and months that followed, as my fear of giving my parents the news of my engagement mounted to excruciating heights, I persisted in thinking that I was afraid of exposing a truth that I’d been lying about, rather than of exposing something false that I was trying to will into truth. To distract myself from my fear, I took my best rational, conscious shot at one-upping Pynchon and began to write a novel of my times in which the conspirators themselves were sympathetic characters; in which, indeed, the lead conspirator was female. A decade later, when I found myself in mortal literary struggle with the problem of Pynchonian postmodernism, amid the wreckage of my marriage, the Bloomian laugh was on me.
27. “In 1904, Hofmannsthal had reinterpreted Sophocles’s Electra, to much acclaim.” —PR
It happens that I studied Hofmannsthal in Berlin. To keep Fulbright funds flowing, I had to present evidence that I’d completed at least one class at the Free University, and after rejecting a course in the modern English novel because the level of critical discourse seemed hopelessly crude by my new standards, I enrolled in a Hofmannsthal seminar; he’d at least written some plays in the period I was supposedly in Berlin to study.
Enrollment in the seminar was sparse. Because West Berlin was still controlled by the Allied militaries, its residents were exempt from German military service, which was compulsory elsewhere in the Federal Republic. As a result, the city was a haven for peaceniks and deadbeats, who needed to take some classes to preserve their student status but were none too keen on doing actual schoolwork. The seminar’s leader, Professor Wohlleben, required work, and Hofmannsthal was too much an aesthete and too little a politician to interest young leftists.
Every American student of German reads some Hofmannsthal, because his language is elegant and because his habit of raiding literary history for material, which Kraus makes fun of here, lends itself to elementary classroom discussion. He was a prime example of what literature had meant to me (well-wrought texts whose meaning I decoded and abstracted to get good grades in class) before I’d been converted to a more personal and religious experience of literature by his contemporaries Kafka and Rilke.
In my boredom with Hofmannsthal, I became a lit-theory crank turner. I applied doctrinaire structuralism to his famous “Letter of Lord Chandos,” which I’d conveniently already studied in college, and then I did a twenty-page Bloomian close-textual reading of his verse play Death and the Fool, which he’d written at the age of sixteen. Although I avoided the terminology of “strong” and “weak,” the strong poet in my scheme was Goethe, and I was pleased to find an essay in which Hofmannsthal is open about his love/hatred of him and blames him for the suicide of Kleist:
Yes, who killed the soul of Heinrich von Kleist, who then? Oh, I see him, the old man of Weimar …
Oh, I see him, and what a shivering thrill it is to see him. I see him where he lives, where his life is: in the thirty or forty volumes of his work, not in the laundry of his biographers.
Hofmannsthal, whose professional specialty was the modern reminting of archaic texts, seemed to me an ephebe who had archetypically struggled and failed to come to terms with Goethe. His play is about an aristocratic aesthete, Claudio, who has looked for life in works of art, rather than having a real life, and then is visited by Death. Hofmannsthal dresses up the text in ways that make it feel pre-Goethean, so that instead of sounding like an echo of Faust it might read like something that Faust echoes, and by comparing lines of the play with lines of Faust I was able to argue that this desperate swerve (“clinamen,” in the Bloomian parlance that I was carefully avoiding) does Hofmannsthal no good. He loves Goethe’s text so much that it kills him as an artist. Unable to resist the still-vital power of Goethe’s rhymes and meters, he throws himself metaphorically (and Claudio literally) into the embrace of death. Says Claudio: Da tot mein Leben war, sei du mein Leben, Tod! (Even a literal translation, “Since dead my life was, be you my life, Death!” fails to capture the line’s suffocatingly palindromic feel, since “dead” and “death” are homonyms in German but not in English.) I concluded by noting that after he wrote this short play, which amounted to his sole, youthful head-to-head confrontation with his major precursor, the only original writing that Hofmannsthal did for the stage was engagement-comedies (including the very elegant and subtle Der Schwierige). It seemed to me no coincidence that engagements and comedy writing were two of the very few fields in which Goethe had not excelled: the old man of Weimar drove poor Hofmannsthal into the only scrap of living space still available.
I don’t remember feeling as if any of this had personal application to me. I was making a borrowed argument about a play I didn’t care about, so that the Fulbright people would fund me for another semester, and meanwhile I was doing my best to construe my own engagement as a happy ending, not an embrace of death, and spending my days much as Claudio does: alone in my room appreciating art rather than plunging into the life of Berlin.
28. Kraus’s quotations from newspapers, too, are a pretext for his texts. He’s really pushing the kinship angle here.
29. According to Kehlmann, “Wenzel Scholz was Nestroy’s main comic actor-partner, the slow and fat counterpart to quick and thin Nestroy. Nestroy wrote his best parts not for himself but for Scholz.”
30. “Kraus liked to contrast the raw force of the offerings in Vienna’s less prestigious theaters with what he saw as the stuffy, overly ornate productions of the (imperial) Hofburgtheater. For example, in his essay ‘The Last Actors’ (1912), he declares that a dialect-speaking troupe of Jewish actors—the Budapester Orpheumgesellschaft—is ‘the only real theatrical pleasure’ left in Vienna. He goes on to propose that ‘the Budapesters’ should play on Vienna’s most famous stage instead of outside the center of town.” —PR
Vienna was and is arguably the most stagestruck city in Europe, and the depth of its attachment to theater is perhaps the main saving grace of its backward-looking culture. When I came to Kraus, I had two preexisting associations with Vienna, both of which probably attracted me to a writer who excoriated the city’s supposed charms. One was my reading of John Irving, who’d set some of his fiction there and whose model of literary success I was hoping to emulate and surpass. The other was my mother, who romanticized the city above all others. She loved its Sacher torte and its Lipizzaner horses, and when I was in high school she’d somewhat creepily given me a sixth-grade photograph of her friend Ilse’s pretty older daughter, which I’d somewhat creepily carried in my wallet through my first two years of college. My mother’s mother’s people were Catholics from the eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and her forging of a close friendship with an Austrian, through a business connection of my father’s, was intensely meaningful to her.
During both of my years in Germany, I made pilgrimages to Vienna and stayed with Ilse’s younger sister, Elisabeth, to please my mother. My father had once helped talk Elisabeth out of her relationship with a good-looking playboy, and she’d now settled down and married a nice businessman who’d been a champion table-tennis player. From my first, Christmastime, visit to them, I remember mainly the many plastic crates of half-liter beer bottles in their basement, the breathless credulity of their young daughter at the visitation of the “Christ ch
ild” (not Santa Claus) with presents for her, and the sorrows of my college friend Ekström, who’d come to meet me in Vienna so we could travel on to Spain together. He was so depressed by the city that he left on an earlier train.
On my second visit, from Berlin, in late autumn, Elisabeth and her husband took me out to dinner and to a Schnitzler play, introduced me to people my own age, and were generally gracious hosts, but I needed to tell Elisabeth that my fiancée was cheating on me and that I’d recently suffered a small psychotic break, and I found it strange and damning that Elisabeth wasn’t interested in hearing about it; I blamed it on the bourgeois life choices she’d made. Back in Berlin, I sent a letter, ostensibly of apology, in which I continued to attack her with my emotional distress. How horrible it is to be twenty-two. I’d rejected Young Werther as an appalling embarrassment when I’d read the Goethe novel, and now I couldn’t help behaving like him.
It was twenty-five years before I returned to Vienna, to give a reading at one of its theaters. After the reading, the city’s cultural-affairs councillor hosted a dinner for me and a bunch of local journalists who were there for the free food and drink. The spectacle of their implacable swigging and masticating was Krausian. Thankfully, there was also a goofily friendly, immensely well-read young man who apologized for the journalists and was eager to talk to me about Karl Kraus. His name was unfamiliar, but his novel Measuring the World was about to become one of the bestselling fiction titles in German publishing history. This was Kehlmann.