by Robert Musil
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 like mere people, and Diotima, her house filled with noise and high ideas, was disappointed. High-minded as she was, she was ignorant of that law of circumspection 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 heavy 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 knows whether it is in the morning 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 social activity. A truly great mind, she felt, should not care quite so much to mingle with the ordinary cultural 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 in the 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 connection 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 leaders of public opinion; he is the keeper of a 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 of a 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 best-seller of the year or the book of the month himself, as long as he doesn’t challenge this sort of evaluation, because it is he who sits on all the award committees, signs all the manifestos, writes all the introductions, delivers all the commencement 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 literary eminence represents not his country as a whole but only its vanguard, its great elite, which already almost constitutes a majority, and so he lives within a magnetic field of chronic intellectual tension. It is of course our present forms of social life that make culture a megaindustry, just as for its part our mega-industrial complex aims to control 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 itself is not enough (there is so much of it around that a little more or less makes no real difference; anyway, everyone thinks he has enough for his own needs), because our first priority is the struggle against stupidity, which means that intelligence must be displayed, made highly visible and operative, 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 visibly 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 certain 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 mountains; between the Austrian towns of Graz and St. Polten, 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 solitude, 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 remarkable 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 himself 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, depending 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 prefer a 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 delicate 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 conduct 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 of those unobtrusive talents made up of 49 percent ability and 51 percent inability, which, thanks to this mixture, are very good at everything that needs strength to get done but might be damaged by a strong personality, so that every one of them 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 Author alone. The proverb has it that nothing succeeds like success, and nowadays even an ordinary man of letters is likely to ha
ve an inordinate fuss made over him long before he has become a Great Author, when he is still a reviewer, columnist, radio scriptwriter, screenwriter, 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 we 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 remain a total outsider and have to withdraw from reality, with all the inevitable consequences?
This was, in any case, Arnheim’s opinion.
96
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 done 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 turn 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 evolution 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 of things from love to pure logic in the language of supply 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 finds himself in a difficult spot these days. To 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 believe 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 of replacing the immeasurable influence of greatness by the measurable greatness of influence. 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. Arnheim 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 greatness. 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 harming one’s intellectual quality, why shouldn’t it be possible to do the same for advertising? Can’t a man who wants to get something done get it done under these conditions as well? Arnheim 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 as 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 Arnheim felt, the very first Great Author his nation had ever produced. Arnheim 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 having spoken of the Deity and divine matters “grandly, but perhaps not with the proper decorum,” and went about his defense in an “impassioned” manner rather than extricating himself from the affair “in the smoothest possible way,” as the urbane master poet observes in his memoirs. Arnheim 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 historical irony, what he would also have called the Goethean irony of making 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 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 reputation, 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 examples at his disposal—illustrating the deep meaning of the first two: Napoleon. Heine in his Travel Pictures describes him in a manner in such perfect accordance with Arnheim’s views that we may as well cite his own words, which Arnheim knew by heart:
“Such a mind,” Heine wrote, 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 works, not intellectually, like our own, but intuitively. The knowledge that our intellect acquires by slow analytic study and laborious 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 aspects, Napoleon never acted in a purely revolutionary or counterrevolutionary manner but always in the spirit of both views, both principles, both tendencies, which in him came together, and so he always acted in a manner that was natural, simple, great, never fitful or harsh, always calm and temperate. He never had the need to indulge in petty intrigue, and his coups always resulted from his skill in understanding and moving the masses. Petty, analytical minds incline 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, but 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 Moosbrugger 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, appr
oximately, 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 Qualities. A man without qualities can’t be musical, of course; but he can’t be unmusical, either. . . .