Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

POSTHUMOUS PAPERS REVISITED

“What matters to me,” Robert Musil wrote in a diary notation dated 1910, “is the passionate energy of the idea.”

What matters to us is the product of that passion tapped like a fermented sap from his overripe mind, a blend of deeply felt thoughts and dispassionately reasoned feelings filtered through vivid metaphors rooted in a life from which Musil maintained a lifelong remove. Steeped in military science, engineering, mathematics, philosophy and behavioral psychology, each sentence is a poetic treatise unto itself, taking aim like a sharpshooter’s rifle, whirring like a well-oiled engine, fitted with the perfect balance of a theorem, a rigorously reasoned philosophical substrata, and keen psychological insight, the whole capped off with the mysticism of a skeptic. It’s a rich dish indeed, the mark of a true Dichter, that untranslatable German composite of poet and philosopher with a sprinkling of the prophet and a touch of the fanatic.

What are we to make, for instance, of the following sentence from “Flypaper,” the first piece in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, a dark meditation on flies stuck fast to the stuff of their undoing? Imagining the insect’s conundrum on first fathoming its fastened state, Musil puts himself (and us) in its place:

It’s a very quiet, disconcerting sensation, as though while walking in the dark we were to step on something with our naked souls, nothing more than a soft, warm, unavoidable obstruction, and yet something into which little by little the awesome human essence flows, recognized as a hand that just happens to be lying there, and with five ever more decipherable fingers, holds us tight.

Consummate Musil, it’s a sentence replete with grammatical subordination and plenty of Kant, in which the abstract melds inscrutably with the particular, a sentence in which Aesop meets Nosferatu, in which the physical suddenly turns meta, the real sur-real, conjuring up a vivid, albeit unimaginable, picture, an indissoluble capsule of seeing and feeling and thinking. It’s as if Kant himself, impersonating an anthropomorphic fly for the edification of imagined progeny, got trapped in the telling of a Grimm fairy tale and never made it past the once-upon-a-time.

Born in the provincial town of Klagenfurt, Austria, in 1880, the son of a “clear-headed,” albeit rigid, academic engineer and a “curiously muddled mother, like slumbering hair upon a handsome face,” (according to another diary notation), Robert Musil took a circuitous educational path, attending military boarding school and, to his parents’ great chagrin, promptly abandoning a career in the military, only to pursue and drop studies in mathematics, engineering, philosophy and behavioral psychology, respectively. Conscripted as an officer in the Imperial Austrian army during World War I, he edited a military newspaper. A brief stint as a drama critic after the war was one of his last attempts at gainful employment before finally settling into the uncertain life of an independent author.

While his first book, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (Young Törless), a novel published in 1906, was an immediate and smashing success, subsequent works were less well received. Two volumes of short fiction, Vereinigungen (Unions), 1911, and Drei Frauen (Three Women), 1924, received respectable notice but did not sell well. A play, “Die Schwärmer” (The Enthusiasts), 1921, was honored with the prestigious Kleist Prize two years later, but bombed at the box office. Another play, “Vincenz und die Freundin Bedetuender Männer” (Vincenz and the Girlfriend of Influential Men), 1923, didn’t do much better. Undaunted, Musil devoted much of the rest of his waking consciousness for the remainder of his days to the composition of his epic novel, Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities), a work often compared in its breadth of vision and innovative structure to James Joyce’s Ulysses and Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Time Past). The first volume was published in 1931 to much acclaim but modest sales, followed by another installment in 1933, the same year Hitler came to power — an inauspicious year for serious intellectual endeavors in the German language.

Though essentially apolitical, Musil was constitutionally averse to the philistinism of the Third Reich. His wife Martha’s Jewish parentage added another complication. The Musils, who resided in Berlin at the time, moved back to Vienna, and thereafter, following Austria’s annexation to the Reich, fled to Geneva, where Musil died in 1942. His widow released the unfinished conclusion of his magnum opus in 1943. The entire work was finally issued in three volumes, as edited by Adolf Frisé, from 1952 to 1957. Sophie Wilkins’ and Burton Pike’s landmark English translation was published in New York in 1995.

In 1935, while laboring on his masterpiece in poor health in destitute Swiss exile, Musil reluctantly allowed the Humanitas Verlag in Zürich to issue a slender compilation of previously published occasional writings. The ironic title he picked, Nachlass zu Lebzeiten (Posthumous Papers of a Living Author), reflected the author’s profound ambivalence at presenting this reheated platter of this and that while the world he knew was going under and he himself was going nowhere. “To publish nothing but little tales and observations amidst a thundering, groaning world,” he wrote in the foreword, “to speak of incidentals when there are so many vital issues; to vent one’s anger at phenomena that lie far off the beaten track: This may doubtless appear as weakness to some, and I will readily admit that I had all kind of doubts regarding the decision to publish.”

He called it “mein kleines Lückenbüsser Buch” (my little stop-gap book), grudgingly acknowledging that “the little parts of which it was to be constructed. . were after all more durable than I had feared.” But anyone who has ever indulged in a Viennese Jause, or high tea, knows the refined finesse of a Viennese finger sandwich, and no one could prepare and pepper them quite like Musil. If anything, Posthumous Papers has aged well. History confirmed the dark prophetic poetry of his parables on dying anthropomorphic flies and the sadistic simian doings on a monkey island at the Roman zoo, so uncannily like a concentration camp:

Then the long, indifferent gaze nails its arbitrary victim [. .] With the release of a scream, the others rush apart on down the ditch; they flicker dimly about like the damned souls in the flames of purgatory, and gather chattering cheerfully as far from the scene as possible.

In the mini-essays that comprise part two, “Ill-Tempered Observations,” Musil takes aim at many of the sacred cows, theories and conceits of his time. He dispels the idyll of peaceful Nature so dear to the Teutonic heart:

Are there no seasoned naturalists from whom we can learn that the stalwart oak, today a veritable epitome of solitude, once spread in hordes [. .] That the spruce [. .] was a relatively recent interloper [. .] and where a variety of trees seem to conjure up an image of happy coexistence, they are really scattered combatants, the surviving remnants of enemy hordes crowded together, too tired and exhausted to continue battle! (“Who Made You, Oh Forest Fair. .?”)

He reveals the indecorous truth about the innate invisibility of monuments of which Vienna was so fond:

. . they are impregnated with something that repels attention, causing the glance to roll right off, like water droplets off an oilcloth, without even pausing for a moment. (“Monuments”)

He even dares poke piercing fun at the panacea of psychoanalysis:

If ancient man had his Scylla and Charybdis, so modern man his Wasserman test and Oedipus complex; for if he succeeded in eluding the former, and effectively setting a little offspring on its own two feet, he can be all the more certain that the latter will catch up with his son. (“Threatened Oedipus”)

Part three, “Unstorylike Stories,” includes a narrative nugget, “A Man Without Character,” from the seed out of which the novel erupted like a magic beanstalk.

Musil wraps up the book with a long short story, “The Blackbird,” arguably one of the eeriest, most exquisite works of German speculative writing, a product of what the author called “taghelle Mystik” (daylight mysticism). In three memories of strange visitations recounted by the narrator to a fictional friend — the first, the flight of a bird, prompting his leaving his wife; the second, a close scrape with death in the form of an aerial dart whizzing his way on the battlefield in World War I; the third, the reappearance of the fateful bird which now identifies itself as the reincarnation of his dead mother — the author manages seamlessly to bridge the great divide between “Wirklichkeitssinn” (sense of reality) and what he postulated as “Möglichkeitssinn” (sense of possibility), leaving the reader dangling over the abyss of doubt:

I had no thoughts of the kind that are supposed to come at death’s door, but all my thoughts were rather focused on the future; I can only say that I was certain that in the next second I would feel God’s proximity close up to my body — which, after all, is saying quite a bit for someone who hasn’t believed in God since the age of eight. (“The Blackbird”)

And while Musil did not invent the form of Kurzprosa (short prose), he managed to put his own original spin on it, with echoes of Nietzsche, Hoffmann and Poe. Bits and pieces of the book, alternately characterized as prose poems, fairy tales, fables, or just plain prose, subsequently found their way into various anthologies.

Having first shepherded English language readers up the foothills of Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author in preparation for the more arduous trek up the intellectual Everest of The Man Without Qualities, I would like to deflect a flicker of attention to celebrate this third edition of my translation. In so doing, I admit to feeling a bit like the overlooked Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay at Sir Edmund Hillary’s salute, a bit like a graying gigolo flaunting an old love affair with Norma Jean before she became Marilyn Monroe.

Originally published in the U.S. in 1988 as Volume One of the splendid, albeit short-lived, Eridanos Library, Posthumous Papers was reissued in the U.K. by Penguin, and, now, a little more than a decade later, has once again been lovingly resurrected on this side of the Atlantic by Archipelago Books.

Musil’s little book already enjoyed a considerable following elsewhere, admired as it was in Italy, Spain, and particularly in France, where it had been expertly rendered by the Swiss poet-translator Philippe Jaccottet in 1965.

Still it took some prodding to pry open the American clam. Having published an excerpt in the literary journal Antaeus, and a longer selection entitled “Pictures,” as a workshop project of the Coalition of Publishers for Employment at Cooper Union, both in 1983, I amassed a slew of laudatory rejection letters from various and sundry editors and resolved to bury the translation in a heap of unwanted manuscripts at the bottom of a drawer. Then one day the telephone rang. It was a Mr. Juan Garcia calling from the remote mountain hamlet of Hygiene, Colorado. Mr. Garcia proceeded to inform me that he and his business associate, Andrea Nasi, had selected my translation to launch their new publishing venture. This on the urging of Juan’s father, the Mexican novelist Juan Garcia Ponce, who knew and admired the text in Spanish translation and had even published his own re-writing of “The Blackbird,” and on the advice of Ledig Rowohlt, principal of the German publisher Rowohlt Verlag, who knew my English take. And while translations as a rule do poorly in the American literary marketplace, the hot potato that nobody had thought marketable turned out to be a runaway literary hit.

Such acclaim for his “little stop-gap book” would have surprised no one more than Musil himself, for whom it was a mere afterthought to his monumental work. But afterthoughts can have a rich afterlife and monuments, as the author himself suggested in a text of the same title, risk invisibility. And whereas big books are often admired from afar and have a way of gathering dust, little books are more readily plucked off the shelf and stuffed into handbag and backpack, from whence they have a pretty good crack at the unconscious.

Peter Wortsman