Robert Musil, Master of the Hovering Life: A Study of the Major Fiction
Frederick G. Peters
New York: Columbia University Press
286 pages $16.50
He hated people who could not live up to Nietzsche’s words about “suffering hunger in the spirit for the sake of the truth”—all those who give up half-way, the faint-hearted, the soft, those who comfort their souls with flummery about the soul and who feed it, because the intellect allegedly gives it stones instead of bread, on religious, philosophic and fictitious emotions, which are like buns soaked in milk.
—Ulrich in The Man Without Qualities
The career of Robert Musil (1880–1942) excelled in disappointments and bitter ironies. Since his death—in exile and poverty—these disappointments and ironies have lived on; only now they are visited upon his readers, more accurately, his prospective readers. For with the exception of a current paperback reissue of Young Torless, Musil’s first published book, and the first volume of his gigantic, albeit unfinished, The Man Without Qualities, his works are impossible to find in this country. Volumes II and III of the latter work were published in the late 1950s only to be remaindered and, finally, pulped. For a time it was possible to obtain a volume of his stories, published variously as Five Women and Tonka and Other Stories, but even a glowing preface by the likes of Frank Kermode was not sufficient to keep the book afloat in the treacherous waters of public demand. It seems that even now, thirty-seven years after his death, the curse of obscurity still clings to Robert Musil.
If this were not indignity enough, there is still the fact that much of what Musil wrote waits to be translated. Two plays, Die Schwarmer and Vinzenz und Die Freundlin Bedeutender Manner, and a prose collection Nachlass Zu Lebzeiten lie undisturbed in their native language. The English title of this last might be: The Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, and is Musil’s comment upon his own obscurity. He was himself bitter and incredulous, and he deeply resented the reputations achieved by writers like Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch. Musil could only assume that history would vindicate him and that he would be discovered by readers of the future. His assumption was not entirely in vain, Musil can claim more dedicated readers today than he could inhis lifetime. But even so, the numbers are small. To the extent that this is owing to the neglect of the publishing industry, there is just no excuse. Such neglect is hardly excusable where lesser authors are concerned. But Musil is not a lesser author. He is one of the few great moderns, one of fhe handful who ventured to confront the issues that shape and define our time. To use a modern metaphor: He has a range and a striking capacity every bit as great as that of Mann, Joyce, or Beckett. The time is right for getting the whole of Musil translated and into print and for starting in on the work of clarifying his particular importance.
We must linger a moment longer on the subject of ironies and disappointments. Columbia University Press has recently issued Frederick G. Peters’s Robert Musil, Master of the Hovering Life. The book is subtitled A Study of the Major Fiction, and as such it fulfills its claims competently, if not always imaginatively. Peters goes through the works one by one, moving at all times with a narrowly adjusted focus and. a professorial gait. Appropriate, analogies from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the psychoanalytic thinkers (especially Jung) are supplied, and they help us to understand the range of Musil’s concerns. But we do not get any closer to the man, and we come away with little sense of what his struggle for vision involved. The impression one has is that the same tactics could have been applied to any other modern writer, with only a requisite adjustment of relevant theories and textual date. Occasionally, though, Peters will quote from Musil himself. It is at these moments that we glimpse the disparity between the writer’s and the critic’s enterprise.
Peters discusses, in order, Young Torless, the five stories, and The Man Without Qualities. Surprisingly, he does not disclose any information about the two plays or Nachlass Zu Lebzeiten. He dissects Musil’s various attempts at reconciling the rational and the mystical. This is a sound approach, perhaps the soundest, and Peters can be credited with the fact that he never takes off into improbable speculation. He is at all times close to his texts. What is interesting, however, at least to the contentious reader, is his final appraisal of The Man Without Qualities. While admitting that we cannot know for certain what Musil planned, Peters makes the conjecture (substantiated in part by Musil’s own notes) that the quest for reconciliation is doomed. He theorizes further that Musil could not finish the novel for that reason. The opposite view is highly arguable: that Musil would not finish so long as he could not find a truthful synthesis. That he was still working on the day he died suggests that he had not given up hope.
What is unfortunate is that the publication of this book will not promote a revival of interest in Musil. This should have been the occasion for a preliminary redress of balances, such as can be effected by a major biographical/critical study. But who can plan a literary revival? Had Peters felt that such a responsibility lay partially in his hands, he might have approached his task differently. He might have attempted the difficult kind of criticism: that which results from deep imaginative penetration into the thought and substance of his subject. But even the opening chapter—which attempts a survey of Musil’s life and career—supplies no information that is not.already available in one of the few other skeletal accounts of the man. (The most interesting of these is by John Simon and appears as an afterword to the current paperback reissue of Young Torless.) So, unless we come to the book with a thorough acquaintance with the bulk of Musil’s output, we stand to gain very little. The situation is not unlike that of being handed a fancy menu at a restaurant, only to be told that the kitchen is closed.
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