Can a bad economy make for great poetry? Hugo von Hofmannsthal thought so.
Indeed, he saw his own gift for lyrical writing and reflection as being, in
a way, a consequence of the stock market crash of 1873. This
self-understanding starts with the fact that Hofmannsthal was conceived at
the very moment of the bust. His father, a banker, got word of it soon after
arriving in Naples for his honeymoon. Cutting his trip short, he hurried
back to Vienna, where he was able to confirm that the family fortune, which
stemmed from his silk-trading, noble “von”-earning, devoutly Jewish
grandfather, had evaporated. But even harder hit, Hofmannsthal believed, was
his mother. She already suffered from weak nerves; according to him, the
cause was the tumultuous context of her own birth: the revolutions of 1848.
When financial worries came, she dealt with them poorly. In Hofmannsthal’s
view his mother’s stress imprinted itself on him in the womb. Its mark was
the special sensitivity of the poet.
Clearly, Hofmannsthal liked to spin myths about himself. Yet in treating his
talent as a phenomenon that demanded a back story, he was merely
acknowledging what was plain to see. Even Karl Kraus, who loathed
Hofmannsthal and seized every opportunity to debunk him, acknowledged that
Hofmannsthal was a great writer. In a fin-de-siècle Viennese literary scene
famously well stocked with brilliant poets and thinkers Hofmannsthal stood
out. It helped that he entered the scene so young. He was still in high
school when, under the pseudonym “Loris”, he began placing essays and poems
in literary journals. His precociousness as well as his virtuosity and the
refinement of his observations were unrivalled. Here is Arthur Schnitzler
evoking his impression of a reading Hofmannsthal gave in 1892, at the age of
eighteen:
"After a few minutes we riveted our attention on him, and exchanged
astonished, almost frightened glances. We had never heard such verses of
perfection, such faultless plasticity, such musical feeling, from any living
being, nor had we thought them possible after Goethe. But more wondrous than
this unique mastery of form (which has never since been achieved in the
German language) was his knowledge of the world, which could only have come
from a magical intuition in a youth whose days were spent sitting on the
school bench."
If Goethe is an apt point of comparison, so is Mozart, as Hermann Broch once
suggested. Hofmannsthal, too, had a father for whom aesthetic education was
the priority. As an adult, Hofmannsthal would depend on the revenues his
writings generated, but his patrician father stressed the arts as a way of
life, rather than as a means to an end. In an environment where gifted
authors were finding inspiration in French Symbolism, this upbringing helped
to produce a poet whose incandescence was more sunset than sunrise. In the
words of Carl Schorske, the young Hofmannsthal’s language “glowed darkly
with purple and gold, shimmered with world-weary mother-of-pearl”. Schorske
might have had in mind, in forging this description, these lines from the
poem “An Experience” (1892):
What wondrous flowers had bloomed there,
cups of colors darkly glowing! And a thicket
Amidst which a flame like topaz rushed, Now
surging, now gleaming in its molten course.
All of it seemed filled with the deep swell
Of a mournful music. This much I knew,
Though I cannot understand it – I knew
That this was Death, transmuted into music,
Violently yearning, sweet, dark, burning,
Akin to deepest sadness.
Not everyone was enamoured of this style. An avid collector of porcelain who
contributed poems to Stefan George’s rarefied Blätter für die Kunst,
Hofmannsthal attracted the charge of aestheticist decadence. Kraus mocked
him as a gatherer of precious “gems”, who “flees life” while worshipping
“the things that prettify it”. The criticism stuck, but it was hardly fair.
From the start, in fact, Hofmannsthal expressed doubts about the very
tendencies that Kraus associated him with. Indeed, he once spoke of how
being “modern” meant displaying “new neuroses and old furniture”. And while
escape from the world is an important theme in his works from the 1890s, it
is dramatized as a problem, rather than as an ideal.
Hofmannsthal first brought the new instabilities under the heading “das
Gleitende” (drift) in 1905. But his interest in such processes had begun at
least a decade earlier. We find it, for example, in the short story “The
Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” (1895). Here a wealthy young man
decides to withdraw from social interaction. Like his late, businessman
father, only more so, the unnamed protagonist surrounds himself with
beautiful things. He spends his days gazing at them, becoming a figure much
lionized in symbolist writing. Indeed, the young man sees “how all the
shapes and colors of the world lived in his artifacts”. Yet for all its
structural simplicity, his life is not free of complications. Of the four
servants who live in his house, two are adolescent girls, one of whom
harbours an ominous resentment towards him, while the beauty of the other
awakens in him an unwelcome “longing”. It is the sole male servant, however,
who sets the young man’s undoing into motion. The young man has grown
attached to this “mulberry-colored” person, who used to work for the local
envoy of the Persian king. So when that former employer sends a letter in
which he accuses the servant of committing an “abominable crime”, the young
man is disquieted in the extreme.
Determined to clear up his Eastern problem, he goes to the envoy’s house. But
the envoy is not there, and the young man soon finds himself wandering in a
shabby part of town at once new to him and oddly familiar. At first, the
oddly familiar effects are comforting, even vaguely arousing. The young man
sees objects that make him think of things that, in turn, he associates with
both his motherly older female servant and the delicate body of the
attractive young one. Soon enough, though, the uncanniness of the situation
becomes menacing. Having drifted into a greenhouse that evokes his own
beloved garden, the young man notices a child who has the same face as his
hostile female servant. She is staring at him with unconcealed hatred, and
this unnerves him utterly. He attempts to placate the girl by giving her
money, but she rejects his offering, dropping it at his feet. As his coins
slip through cracks in the floor, the feeling of groundlessness induced by
all the doubling is coupled with a sense of powerlessness, and the young man
further loses composure, so much so that he flees. But flight only makes his
situation worse. In his frantic search for a back exit, he wrecks the
greenhouse. We know by now that the protagonist’s crisis can have only one
outcome: the young man will soon be fatally kicked in the groin by a horse.
Well, perhaps we don’t yet know that, but we do have the sense that there is
no escape. Lying in great pain, aware that he is dying, the young man
becomes increasingly bitter. He blames his servants for his demise; hates
his life for having ended prematurely; and he renounces “everything once
dear to him”. Then the “handsome” young aesthete “brings up bile and blood”
and dies alone “with deformed features”, his final expression a hideous
grimace.
In 1902, Hofmannsthal wrote what would become his most famous meditation on
the themes of withdrawal, drift and crisis, “The Brief des Lord Chandos”
(“The Lord Chandos Letter”). Chandos, once a promising writer in Elizabethan
England, stops working and pulls back because of a crisis that has to do
with a sudden inability to perceive order in the world. What he calls his
“disease of the mind” seems to entail a breaking down of his
synthesizing faculties. As Chandos explains, in his letter to his friend
Francis Bacon, he had formerly “conceived the whole of existence as one
great unit”, but then “everything disintegrated into parts, and those parts
into parts again”. The result is that all description feels hopelessly
inadequate: “no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one
idea”. Words now taste stale in Chandos’s mouth; they are like “moldy
mushrooms” on his tongue. Gone, too, in the face of so much of “das
Gleitende” are the relationships among verbal units that enable language to
function as a coherent system. The effect is frightful: “single words
floated around me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into
which I was forced to stare back – whirlpools which gave me vertigo and,
reeling incessantly, led into the void”.
Although Hofmannsthal’s own productivity remained steady, the “Chandos Letter”
has often been viewed as an “autobiographical confession”. The case for this
reading, which J. D. McClatchy advances in his introduction to The Whole
Difference, turns largely on the fact that Hofmannsthal’s career changed
course not long after the “Chandos Letter” was published. Hofmannsthal
“abandoned his lyrical isolation”, McClatchy asserts, and sought in the
public forms of drama and opera the things for which Chandos longs: “a
hopeful new relationship with the whole of existence”. For McClatchy,
Hofmannsthal moved from “the mystic to the moral”. By operating in a “social
context that restores language to community”, he simultaneously overcame his
lingering aestheticism and his “language skepticism”. Here, then,
Hofmannsthal’s biography has a heroic arc. Indeed, McClatchy sweepingly
presents Hofmannsthal as a great humanist in dark times. He even declares –
without any supporting exposition – that Der Rosenkavalier (for which
Hofmannsthal wrote the libretto) has, thanks to its “similarity to Mozart’s
Nozze di Figaro and Wagner’s Meistersinger”, a “rare place among the most
humane works of art ever conceived”. The motivation for hazarding such
claims seems to be a perceived need to sell Hofmannsthal. As McClatchy
notes, Hofmannsthal is known in the English-speaking world mostly for his
libretti, and he is read – and admired – much less than other Central
European modernists. It may be for the same reason that McClatchy sketches
Hofmannsthal’s personality in the most positive terms, minimizing or
omitting his subject’s ambivalences and troubling sides.
This does not serve its cause well. In fact, in McClatchy’s hands the story of
Hofmannsthal’s life and work becomes nobler, but also less complex and
therefore duller, than it was. Take the post-Chandos turn. It is true that
Hofmannsthal began to write plays and, in collaboration with Richard
Strauss, operas a few years after the publication of the Letter. And it is
also true that Hofmannsthal tried to make theatre into a means of
community-building. But it is hardly the case that a resolute humanism
prompted and guided his efforts. Indeed, the politics of Hofmannsthal’s
involvement with the Salzburg Theater Festival, which he helped to resurrect
after the First World War, has long been a controversial topic.
One historian, for example, recently described Hofmannsthal’s play Das
Salzburger grosse Welttheater (Salzburg’s Great World Theater) as having “a
tendency to cultural totality”, and thus as having been, in effect, a
proto-fascist spectacle. In trying to make this sort of argument,
commentators have drawn heavily on Hofmannsthal’s essays and speeches from
the wartime and interwar years, because in them his “conservative
imagination”, as McClatchy calls it, can have a far-right feel. More
specifically, as Hofmannsthal struggled to define post-Habsburg Austrian
identity, he exalted the authentic character of Volk culture at the expense
of what he termed “the intellectuality of the educated”. Hence the line:
“When one considers the strongest representatives of our literature, one can
speak of a poetry of peasants”.
Along with this thinking went a regard for non-rational, mystical states: “In
the depths of nature where the Volk has its being, just as in those dark
depths of the individual, where the border between the mental and the
somatic grows hazy, reflection and knowledge are out of place, and only
desire and faith are at home”. Coming from a mind as urbane as
Hofmannsthal’s, such effusions can have an overdetermined feel, and we do
not have to dig very deep to find further motives for it. It is likely that,
by identifying with Austria’s peasant soul, Hofmannsthal was trying to alter
his public image. For despite the fact that he had a non-Jewish mother, and
grandparents whose Konfession was some form of Christianity, he was widely
seen as a “Jewish artist”. It was a perception spread from several sides.
Jews – both Zionist and anti-Zionist – proudly designated Hofmannsthal as a
fellow Jew, as is the case in Moritz Goldstein’s essay “The German-Jewish
Parnassus” (1912) and the volume Jews in German Literature (1922).
Meanwhile, the anti-Semitic press was subjecting him to its smears. The
Deutsche Volksruf, for example, appraised Salzburg’s Great World Theater as
a work “very much in the spirit of his race – everything is distorted by
filth”. That characterization was probably all the more threatening for
being close to some of Hofmannsthal’s own ideas. His estimation of Viennese
Jews was, on the whole, nasty, especially during the last part of his life –
or from the beginning of the First World War until his death in 1929. In
1900, when Hofmannsthal was about to marry a (soon-to-be-baptized) Jewish
woman, he merely worried that the “trait of Jewish hyper-cleverness” would
manifest itself in his children. In 1917 we find him taking it upon himself
to warn a non-Jewish friend about “the educated Viennese Jews”, a group he
now purported to regard “with genuine hatred and disgust”. For him, these
“lemurs of a parasitical existence” were the “worst of the worst”. Having
“no substance, no respect” and “no piety”, they went around “touching
everything, licking everything, disintegrating everything, discussing
everything to death”. This is not to suggest that Hofmannthal turned into a
bigoted churl. He remained, in some regards, a warm person (the
German-Jewish novelist Jakob Wassermann said about him that he was “made for
friendship like no one else”). And neither is it to imply that Hofmannthal’s
dramatic works lack a “humane” perspective. The point, again, is that
McClatchy buries meaningful tensions underneath prettifying impressions,
such as that his author “occasionally engaged in the casual antisemitism
that was so common at the time”.
Still, The Whole Difference has substantial merits. McClatchy, himself an
acclaimed poet, offers a fine account of Hofmannsthal’s particular gift for
lyric form. He has also rendered seven of Hofmannsthal’s poems beautifully:
witness the lines from “An Experience” cited above, which come from
McClatchy’s translation. But his renderings seem to be the only new
translations in the entire volume, and the quality of the old ones – some of
which date back to the 1940s – is mixed, with several of the important
works, e.g., the “Chandos Letter”, being among the least competently done.
So while it is certainly handy to have English samples of Hofmannsthal’s
poetry, essays, short fiction and plays, The Whole Difference feels, in the
end, like not enough.
J. D. McClatchy, editor
THE WHOLE DIFFERENCE
Selected writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal
500pp. Princeton University Press. £24.95 (US $35).
978 0 691 12909 9
Paul Reitter is Associate Professor of German at Ohio State University.
He is the author of The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish
self-fashioning in fin-de-siècle Europe, 2008. He is currently working on a
book about Jewish self-hatred.
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