The World of Yesterday (8 page)

As for Rilke, he represented a different kind of encouragement to us, and he reassuringly complemented Hofmannsthal. The idea of competing with Hofmannsthal would have appeared blasphemy to even the boldest among us. We knew he was an incomparable, inimitable miracle of early perfection, and if we, at sixteen, compared our verses with those famous specimens that he had written at the same age we felt frightened and ashamed, just as we felt humbled by the eagle flight with which he had soared through intellectual space while still at grammar school. Rilke too had begun writing and publishing poetry young, at seventeen or eighteen, but compared to Hofmannsthal’s and even in the absolute sense, those early works of his were immature, childish and naive verses. There were a few golden traces of talent to be found, but you had to make made allowances. Only gradually, at twenty-two and twenty-three, did that wonderful poet, whom we loved beyond measure, begin to form his personal style, and that was a great consolation to us. So it was not essential to be perfect while still at grammar school, like Hofmannsthal; you could feel your way like Rilke, make attempts, create a structure for your work and enhance it. There was no need to give up at once because for the time being your work was inadequate, immature, irresponsible. Despite the Hofmannsthal miracle, you could emulate the quieter, more normal rise of Rilke.

For naturally we had all, long ago, begun writing prose or poetry, making music, giving readings; after all, it is unnatural for
young people to be passively enthusiastic; it is in their nature not just to absorb impressions but to respond to them productively. For young people, a love of the theatre means at least wishing and dreaming of working in or for the theatre in some way themselves; ecstatic admiration for talent in all its forms leads them irresistibly to look at themselves, wondering whether they can perhaps detect a trace of that sublime essence in their own unexplored bodies or still partly unenlightened minds. In line with the Viennese atmosphere and the circumstances of that time, the drive to artistic production in our class at school was a positive epidemic. We all looked for some talent in ourselves and tried to develop it. Four or five of us wanted to be actors. They imitated the diction of the Burghof actors, they were always reciting and declaiming, they secretly took drama lessons and, during break at school, improvised whole scenes from the classics, dividing out the parts between them, while the rest of us formed an interested but severely critical audience. Two or three were very well trained musicians, but had not yet decided whether they wanted to be composers, virtuoso performers or conductors. It is to them that I owe my first acquaintance with modern music, which was still strictly excluded from the concerts given by the Philharmonic. The musicians, in turn, asked us to write texts for their lieder and choruses. Another boy, the son of a society painter who was famous at the time, drew in our exercise books during lessons, portraying all the future geniuses of the class. But far the strongest trend was towards literary endeavour. In spurring each other on to ever swifter achievement, and by dint of mutual criticism of every single poem, the level we reached at the age of seventeen was well above that of mere amateurs, and some of us approached genuine achievement, as was witness the fact that our work was published not merely in obscure provincial papers but by leading journals of the modern generation, and was even paid for, the most convincing of all proofs of merit. One of my
friends, Ph A, whom I idolised as a genius, shone in
Pan
, the de luxe literary journal, in the company of Dehmel and Rilke; another, A M, writing under the pseudonym of August Oehler, had made his way into the pages of the most inaccessible and eclectic of all German reviews, the
Blätter für die Kunst
—Leaves for Art—in which Stefan George usually published only the work of his canonised circle of writers. A third, encouraged by Hofmannsthal, wrote a drama on the subject of Napoleon, a fourth came up with a new theory of aesthetics and some important sonnets. I myself had something published in
Gesellschaft
—Society—the leading journal of modern literature, and Maxmilian Harden’s
Zukunft
—Future—a weekly journal prominent in the political and cultural history of modern Germany. When I look back today, I must say perfectly objectively that the sum of our knowledge, the refinement of our literary technique, and our artistic level was really astonishing for boys of seventeen, and can be explained only by the inspiring example of that fantastic early maturing of Hofmannsthal which, if we were to hold our heads high in each other’s company, meant that we had to exert ourselves to the utmost. We mastered all the tricks and extravagances and audacities of language, we had tried the technique of every verse form, making countless attempts at all styles from the Pindaric ode to the simple diction of the folk song, we showed our writings to each other every day, discussing the most fugitive of discrepancies and every metrical detail. While our worthy teachers, unaware of any of this, were still marking our school essays in red ink, pointing out missing commas, we criticised one another with a severity, artistic expertise and attention to detail greater than any of the official literary pundits of our great daily papers applied to the classic masterpieces. In our final years at school, our fanatical enthusiasm meant that in our expert judgements and stylistic ability to express ourselves, we were far ahead of famous critics in established positions.

This account of our literary precocity, which is genuinely faithful to the facts, might tempt one to think that we were a particularly talented class. By no means. The same phenomenon of fanatical enthusiasm and the same precocious talent was to be found at a dozen neighbouring schools in Vienna at the time. It could not be chance. There was something especially favourable to it in the air, something nurtured by the fertile artistic soil of the city, by the apolitical period and all the interlinking new literary and intellectual directions around the turn of the century. By a kind of chemical reaction, all this created in us the kind of desire to create literary works that is almost a compulsion at that age. At puberty every young person writes or feels the urge to write, although admittedly in most cases it is just a fleeting impulse, and it is rare for such an inclination, being a symptom of youth, to survive youth itself. None of our five would-be actors at school became an actor on the real stage. After that amazing initial surge of creativity had petered out, the young contributors to
Pan
and the
Blätter für die Kunst
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became staid lawyers or civil servants, and perhaps smile over their former ambitions with melancholy or irony today. Of them all, I am the only one in whom the creative passion has lasted, has become the meaning and core of my whole life. But I think back very gratefully to our comradeship. It helped me so much. Those fiery discussions, that hectic competition, that mutual admiration and criticism exercised my hand and my nerves at an early date, giving me a view of the intellectual cosmos, and their inspiration raised us all above the bleak and dismal atmosphere of our school.
Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden
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… whenever I hear that immortal Schubert song I have a kind of three-dimensional vision in which we are sitting on those unpleasant school benches, shoulders hunched, and then going home with radiant, excited faces, reciting, criticising poems, forgetting time and space in our passionate enthusiasm, truly transported to a better world.

Such a monomaniac obsession with art, setting store on aestheticism to the point of absurdity, was of course bound to take its toll on the normal interests of young people of our age. If I wonder today where we found the time to read all those books, crammed as our days already were with lessons at school and private coaching, it is clear to me that it must have been mainly at the expense of our sleep and so our physical health. Although I had to get up at seven, I never put down whatever I was reading until one or two in the morning. Incidentally it was then that I acquired the bad habit of always reading for an hour or two before going to sleep, however late it is. So I do not remember ever setting off to school feeling as if I were well rested, and I used to set off in haste, eating my breakfast of a buttered roll on the way, after a mere lick and promise of a wash. No wonder that for all our high-flying intellectuality we cut a poor figure, looking as green as unripe fruit, and we were rather carelessly dressed. Every penny of our pocket money went on the theatre, concerts or books, and we did not feel it was important to appeal to girls when our minds were bent on impressing higher authorities. In fact going out with girls seemed to us a waste of time, since in our intellectual arrogance we regarded the opposite sex as intellectually inferior by their very nature, and we didn’t want to spend our valuable time in idle chatter. It would be quite hard to get a modern young person to understand the extent to which we ignored and even despised all sporting activities. In the last century the wave of enthusiasm for sport had not yet spread from Britain to the continent of Europe. As yet there were no stadiums where a hundred thousand spectators roared with enthusiasm at the sight of one boxer landing a mighty punch on another boxer’s jaw; the newspapers were not yet sending reporters off to fill columns with Homeric accounts of a hockey game. Wrestling matches, athletics clubs, heavyweight records were regarded in our time as spectacles fit only for the outer suburbs of the
city, with the spectators consisting of butchers and porters. The nobler and more aristocratic sport of horse-racing might at most tempt high society to the racecourse a couple of times a year, but not us, since all physical activity struck us as a sheer waste of time. At thirteen, when I first caught our literary and intellectual infection, I stopped going ice-skating and spent the money my parents gave me for dancing lessons to buy books; at eighteen I still couldn’t swim, dance or play tennis; to this day I can neither ride a bicycle nor drive a car, and in my general knowledge of sport any ten-year-old puts me to shame. Even today the differences between baseball and football, hockey and polo are not at all clear to me, and the sports section of a newspaper, with its mysterious symbols, might as well be written in Chinese. As for sporting records of speed or skill, I am still in the position of the Shah of Persia who, when it was suggested that he might go to a horse race for amusement, asked with oriental wisdom, “What’s the point? I know that one horse can run faster than another, but which horse does it is a matter of indifference to me.” Wasting time playing games seemed to us just as contemptible as physical training; chess was the only game to find some favour with us because it required intellectual effort. And even more absurdly, although we considered ourselves budding or at least potential poets, we took very little notice of nature. Throughout my first twenty years of life I saw almost nothing of the wonderful surroundings of Vienna; indeed, the hottest and most beautiful summer days, when the city was deserted, were particularly attractive to us because we could get our hands more quickly on a wider choice of newspapers and journals in our coffee house. It took me years, even decades, to get my sense of a proper balance back, and make up to some extent for my inevitable physical awkwardness, the result of overstraining myself in this childishly greedy way. But on the whole I have never regretted the enthusiasms of my time at grammar school, when I lived only through my eyes and my
nerves. It gave me a passion for the things of the mind that I would never wish to lose, and all that I have read and learnt since then stands on the solid foundation of those years. One can make up later for neglecting to exercise the muscles, but the mind can be trained only in those crucial years of development to rise to its full powers of comprehension, and only someone who has learnt to spread his intellectual wings early will be able to form an idea of the world as a whole later.

The truly great experience of our youthful years was the realisation that something new in art was on the way—something more impassioned, difficult and alluring than the art that had satisfied our parents and the world around us. But fascinated as we were by this one aspect of life, we did not notice that these aesthetic changes were only the forerunners of the much more far-reaching changes that were to shake and finally destroy the world of our fathers, the world of security. A remarkable process of restructuring was going on in sleepy old Austria. The quiet, obedient masses who for decades had left power to the liberal bourgeoisie were suddenly becoming restive, organising themselves and demanding their own rights. In the last ten years of the century, politics disturbed the serene calm of comfortable Austrian life with keen gusts of a changing wind. The new century called for a new order, a new time.

The first of these great mass movements in Austria was the Socialist movement. Until now, what was misleadingly called the ‘universal’ franchise had been confined to prosperous citizens who could show that they paid a certain amount of tax. However, the lawyers and landed gentlemen whom this class elected sincerely and genuinely believed that they spoke for the people and represented their interests in parliament. They were very proud of being cultivated and even, where possible, academically educated men; they set store by dignity, correct
manners and good diction, and as a result parliamentary sessions resembled an evening debate at a good club. Thanks to their liberal belief in a world that had become infallibly progressive, through tolerance and reason, these middle-class democrats honestly thought that they served the good of all Austrian subjects best by making small concessions and gradual improvements. But they had entirely forgotten that they represented only the fifty thousand or a hundred thousand prosperous men of the big cities, not the hundreds of thousands, even millions of people in the entire country. By now machinery had done its work and the working classes, once widely scattered, had gathered around the industries. Under an eminent leader, Dr Victor Adler,
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a Social Democratic Party formed in Austria to carry through the demands of the proletariat, which wanted truly universal suffrage for every man. As soon as that was granted—or rather, forcibly introduced—it became clear what a small if useful part of society had been represented by Liberalism, and with it conciliation too disappeared from public political life; interests now clashed harshly, and the battle began.