18 The New York Review
It Had to Be Her
Cathleen Schine
Passionate Spirit:
The Life of Alma Mahler
by Cate Haste.
Basic Books, 351 pp., $32.
Like the stories of most notorious
women, Alma Mahler’s is one of sex and
power. She had a liking and a talent for
both. Trailing a legacy of innuendo, an-
ecdotes, and off-color jokes, she steers
any biographer, however serious, to the
enjoyable, lascivious path of the gossipy
celebrity biography—but with better
gossip and much better celebrities. She
married or had affairs with so many
important figures of early modernism
that she has become, herself, a figure in
the history of twentieth- century music
(through her relationship with Gus-
tav Mahler), art (Oskar Kokoschka),
architecture (Walter Gropius), and
literature (Franz Werfel). Born in Vi-
enna in 1879, during the last hurrah
of the Austro- Hungarian Empire, she
died in New York City in the 1960s.
Because she was an ambitious young
woman who longed to be a great com-
poser but became instead a great muse
to great men, there is a temptation to
view her as yet another female victim
of cultural oppression. Because she
was anti-Semitic, narcissistic, boastful,
and untruthful, there is a temptation to
dismiss her altogether.
Even in her lifetime, she was both
adored and reviled. Was she an art-
ist stunted by society’s restrictions on
women who channeled her genius to
become the inspiration for the men she
consorted with? Or was she a grandi-
ose groupie, expropriating the fame of
her husbands and lovers? In a new bi-
ography, Passionate Spirit, Cate Haste
leans toward the former view. “I like
Alma Mahler,” she writes. “I particu-
larly like the modern young woman
who emerges from the pages of her
early diaries.”
The Alma Schindler of her early
diaries, which she began in 1898, is, in-
deed, appealing. They reveal an ebul-
lient teenager full of serious opinions
and enthusiasms, a flirtatious young
woman giddy with the attentions of
the cultural elite in culturally elite fin-
de-siècle Vienna. Alma writes about
crushes and kisses and assignations on
the Ringstrasse, about vigorously prac-
ticing the piano and earnestly studying
composition, about attending the opera,
about buying dresses and fighting with
her mama. She is a girl—a splendid girl
in a splendid city at a splendid time.
She is vain and unsure of herself, self-
aggrandizing as only a serious, deter-
mined, sensitive young person can be.
The early diaries, published in En-
glish in 1998, end in 1902, just before
she married Gustav Mahler. Alma
lived for another sixty-two years, years
of vainglorious strutting, scheming, and
disloyalty, years chronicled by her own
memoirs and by her later diaries (which
have not been translated into English).
Mahler scholars have a name for the
challenge that arises from her unreli-
able tendencies: the Alma Problem.
“She is routinely accused of massaging
the facts to serve her own legacy,” Haste
writes, “of suppressing or editing her
husband Gustav Mahler’s published let-
ters to remove critical references to her,
for instance—acts seen, particularly by
Mahler scholars (for whom she was for
some time their principal source), as
tampering with the archive.”
There are in addition the many
unsympathetic memoirs and letters
written by those around her. Some con-
temporaries, like Elias Canetti, simply
loathed her. Others, like Bruno Walter,
were baffled by her vindictive nature.
Alma Mahler certainly had her fans.
Thomas Mann found her amusing even
after she orchestrated an ugly feud be-
tween him and Arnold Schoenberg.
Nevertheless, when Haste proposes a
reassessment of A lma’s “legacy, to view
her free from the screen of skepticism
and the harshly judgmental tone of pre-
vious commentators on her life,” she
has her work cut out for her.Haste does not tackle each instance
of mythmaking; she says, rather, that
the dishonesties in Alma’s version of
her life with Mahler have “been exag-
gerated into the prevalent view that
anything written by Alma is bound to
be inaccurate or self-serving, which in
my view considerably undervalues her
witness to her own life and the history
she lived through.”
It is ironic, then, that Haste, like
Alma, uses the men in this extraordi-nary life as milestones. But how could
she not? After all, what men! The first
of Alma’s men was her father, the emi-
nent landscape painter Emil Jakob
Schindler, whom Haste calls Alma’s
artistic “guide, mentor, and polestar.”
When Alma was born, Schindler was
still a struggling artist trying to support
his wife, Anna.
Watching her father paint, Alma
was stirred to revere both art and the
artist, acquiring “an intuitive sense
of the process and struggle of artistic
creation” on the one hand, and nurtur-
ing fantasies of patronage on the other.
“I dreamed of wealth merely in order
to smooth the paths of creative per-
sonalities,” Alma wrote. “I wished for
a great Italian garden filled by many
white studios; I wished to invite many
outstanding men there—to live for
their art alone, without mundane wor-
ries—and never to show myself.” This
passage comes from Der Schimmernde
Weg, an unpublished manuscript writ-
ten between 1944 and 1947. In And the
Bridge Is Love, a florid, ghostwritten
memoir published a few more de-
cades into her mythmaking, when she
was seventy-eight, Alma romanticizes
even debt: her father was “always in
debt, as befits a person of genius.” In
contrast, the younger Alma’s diary is
open, full of appealing simplicity, as inthis memory of “the debts—and Papa,
who, when things were at their worst,
would simply roll over on his stomach
and sleep round the clock.”
Schindler’s career picked up, how-
ever, and with recognition came stu-
dents. One of them was Carl Moll, a
young man who became Schindler’s
assistant “and a fixture in the house-
hold.” Haste in her gentle way adds
that “Moll’s devotion extended to
Anna, and with utmost discretion they
became lovers.” There seem to have
been earlier instances of such discre-
tion, a word that takes on a whole new
meaning in Alma’s world. Alma’s sister
Greta was born in 1880, and “the fa-
ther was almost certainly [Schindler’s]
painter colleague Julius Berger, who
had shared the flat with Emil since be-
fore his marriage.”
Schindler died in 1892, and in 1895
Anna and Carl were married. Haste,
like other biographers, attributes much
in Alma’s later life to a need to redis-
cover the father she idolized. Alma did
not find him in Moll, the cofounder of
the Viennese Secession. But the other
cofounder, Gustav Klimt, became her
first romantic infatuation.
Her mother warned her that Klimt
was having an affair with his sister-in-
law. Alma was too good to be just his
plaything, she said. But when he spilled
a glass of schnapps on Alma’s white
dress, Alma wrote in her diary,he took my skirt on his knee, and
himself washed the stain out of my
petticoat. Both his legs and mine
were hidden under the skirt, and
inevitably they touched. Although
I kept withdrawing—for I consider
such behavior vulgar—I did so
with reluctance and was overcome
by such a strange, sweet sensation.At one point, after a kiss he attempted
to put his hand “on [her] heart” be-
neath her blouse. At another, Klimt
suggested “complete physical union.”
Alma’s response is wonderful, an indi-
cation of both her savvy and her inno-
cence: she held a volume of Faust and
quoted from it: “Do no favors without a
ring on your finger.”
This was Alma Schindler’s world—
feverish with art and music and genius
and sex. This is Freud’s world before
anyone thought to view themselves
in Freudian terms—a time, judging
from Alma’s account, of unbridled
passion for culture and occasionally
bridled physical passion. When Moll
finally convinced Klimt to leave his
step-daughter alone, Alma was devas-
tated. She was such a committed flirt
that when, in mourning for Klimt, she
stopped flirting for a while, her mother
consulted a doctor (an anatomist, the
husband of a friend; one wonders what
his diagnosis could possibly have been).
But Alma, returning to the whirl of Vi-
enna social life, was young enough to
fall in love again six months later with
Joseph Maria Olbrich, architect of the
Secession building. She then embarked
on a rather public flirtation with Erik
Schmedes, the Vienna Opera’s star hel-
dentenor, which ended when his wife
made a scene at a party. Alma contin-
ued to feel the urge to “fall at someone’sAlma Mahler, circa 1908Austrian^National^ Library/Alamy