March 26, 2020 39
Musil’s Infinities
Michael Hofmann
Intimate Ties : Two Novellas
by Robert Musil,
translated from the German and
with an afterword by Peter Wortsman.
Archipelago, 207 pp., $16.00 (paper)
Agathe, or, The Forgotten Sister
by Robert Musil,
translated from the German and with
an introduction by Joel Agee.
New York Review Books,
362 pp., $17.95 (paper)
If you like difficult amusements and
find yourself with a month or two to
spare, I would urge you to try (if you
haven’t yet read it) The Man Without
Qualities by the Austrian writer Rob-
ert Musil (1880–1942). Yes, it’s unfin-
ished (“inherently endless,” as Max
Brod said of Kafka’s Amerika), and in
its published and translated form takes
up the thick end of 1,800 pages, by the
end of which its knots have started fray-
ing into experimental variants and the
poor author’s frantic Post-its to him-
self, as Musil introduced further char-
acters, adding new factorial numbers of
delays and complications and possible
outcomes—but it will change your life.
It will teach you patience and relish and
tolerance, give you a floaty gait and a
long view and a permanent half-smile,
and acquaint you with a gentle and
rather superior form of suspense that
you’ll wonder how you ever managed
without. Truly, it’s huge fun and the re-
cent translation by Sophie Wilkins and
Burton Pike is excellent.
It has been plausibly said that “no
one has ever read all of The Man With-
out Qualities.” That is because no such
thing exists: it goes beyond what is
Gutenberg-possible. Then again, the
whole interconnected extent of the
bolus (in the German original) makes
it a natural for the Internet and hyper-
text. Call it an omniscript. The new
digital edition is said to top 11,000
pages. Musil himself would rather not
have published any of it before he pub-
lished all of it (or whatever he would
have chosen to preserve of it), which
one can understand, but it didn’t hap-
pen that way, and besides, he needed
money. The first volume was published
in 1930; a second installment, with
greater difficulty, and by subscrip-
tion, in 1932 (this part, give or take, is
Agathe); and a third was being read-
ied for publication in 1938 when Musil
pulled it. (That same year, the book
was banned by the Nazis.)
Since then, publishers have sought to
ply readers with some kind of leaner al-
ternative. A kind of Musil-Lite. There
might be his first novel, and one finan-
cial success, The Confusions of Young
Törless (from 1906), set among youths
at an Austrian military academy. There
might be the three excellent novellas
called Three Women (from 1924), es-
pecially the very moving To n k a. Or the
two books now under review: Intimate
Ties, which is a translation, by Peter
Wortsman, of Vereinigungen, a book
of two novellas that bombed in 1911,
and that the author himself later found,
except in homeopathic quantities, un-
readable; and last and likeliest, Joel
Agee’s new translation of those-latter-
parts-of-The-Man-Without-Qualities-
involving-Ulrich’s-sister-Agathe, and
published in a so far English- language-
only project as Agathe, or, The Forgot-
ten Sister.
Intimate Ties is one of those regret-
table publications that hurts the repu-
tations of everyone connected with
it: Musil’s own, the translator’s, and
even the luckless publisher, Archi-
pelago. The novellas themselves are
very strange: very slow, very interior,
minutely analytical, and revolving
around frankly pornographic subjects:
being sodomized by a stranger in
“The Culmination of Love,” a child-
hood recollection of bestiality in “The
Temptation of Silent Veronica.” But we
are not talking Anaïs Nin here. Musil’s
overall effect is about as untitillating
as the contemporary paintings of Gus-
tav Klimt (themselves described as so
unerotic, they were an argument for
chastity), and indeed the author might
have set himself the challenge or exer-
cise of rendering such material opaque,
decorative, somehow theoretical. His
lens is so thickly smeared with verbal
Vaseline that if there is any “action,”
the reader can barely follow it.“The Culmination of Love” is the
more grounded or earthed piece. The
now blissfully married Claudine takes
a train by herself to visit her thirteen-
year-old daughter Lilli—the product
of a chance encounter with an Ameri-
can dentist—in her boarding schoolin presumably the Austrian provinces
somewhere. In her unaccustomed
solitude Claudine is taken back to her
rather wayward youth. Arrived in the
small, snowbound town, she is finally
overcome by her own mixture of ex-
posed vulnerability and desire. She
interprets her depraved surrender as
a gift to her all-unknowing husband,
back in the city.
This is positively Dickensian or
Balzacian—envelope of circumstance!
minor characters! background de-
tail!—in comparison to the other story,
“The Temptation of Silent Veronica,”
which is set in a house where Veronica
(of undetermined age) lives with an
old aunt. There is a looming neigh-
bor or tenant or fellow dweller by the
name of Demeter, and a suitor called
Johannes. In the end, she discharges
them both—Johannes to a possible sui-
cide—in favor of conjuring the unfor-
gotten attractions of a large dog from
her childhood.
What interests Musil in the two no-
vellas is very slowly pushing his female
protagonists into situations of extreme
erotic degradation—or initiative?—
while keeping up a steady stream of
explanation and clarification. Acts of
great grossness are ushered toward us
in prose of extreme delicacy and sub-
tlety; events for which there are no or
low justification are reinterpreted as
somehow generous or idealistic. This
could be that oft-evoked “style that
made writing impossible,” finicky withalmost molecular detail, pointillism, a
weather map of swirling consequences.
There is one memorable trope com-
mon to both stories: the description of
a nude or partially clad woman waiting,
quivering, behind a door:And a long while later it seemed as
if a cautious finger were once again
groping for the latch, and she knew
the stranger was standing listen-
ing outside her door. She felt dizzy
with the desire to crawl to the door
and unlock it. [“The Culmination
of Love”]But the most elusive feeling was
that there was something of her
outside too, as a frisson of her being
slipped through the tiny keyhole
and the trembling of her hand must
have flitted through and stroked
the clothes of the passerby. [“The
Temptation of Silent Veronica”]This sort of detail is studded, re-
lieved, occasionally firmed up with
elaborately clever similes. Musil was an
admirer and onetime publisher of the
poems of Rilke; he spoke at his memo-
rial celebration in 1927. The experience
of reading Intimate Ties is like reading
Rilke’s poems patched together—the
salon pieces in New Poems, moments of
anagnorisis, little miracles, little swings
of psychology. The “thens” and “sud-
denlys” and “as ifs,” the hyper-acute bits
of noticing, the drastic likenings, the
subjunctives and conditionals, all put
one in mind of such poems as “Piano
Practice,” “The Shako,” “Before Sum-
mer Rain.” Hence perhaps Musil’s de-
clared willingness later to read his own
book in suitably tiny doses.
One might describe Intimate Ties
as weird, finical, oversubtle, probably
misconceived, and in the end barely
readable, one of the stranger and chill-
ier blind alleys in literature. It is also
shockingly badly translated. This is the
more upsetting as Peter Wortsman is
not a beginner but an experienced op-
erator. (He has even translated a book
of Musil’s before: Posthumous Papers
of a Living Author, back in 1987.) I am
not talking about the rather mealy-
mouthed title—Conjunctions or As-
sociations would have been quicker
and better—or the numerous grace-
less anachronistic idioms (“knotted
up inside,” “got antsy,” “all bent out
of shape,” “strutting their stuff,” “fire
herself up”), all of them obviously and
totally out of sympathy with the author
and instantly and pervasively destruc-
tive of his endeavor. Nor am I talking
about the persistent use of that most
vulgar of supposedly poetic effects,
alliteration: “the muffled murmurs
emanating from the drained dregs of
a life,” “lastingly have lifted her out of
the mundane muddle, living had just
become a little less vivid,” “animals
terrifying in the threat of their ugly
onslaught, but their piercing pupils
dripped with dumb droplets of forget-
ting,” “filled with foreboding at the un-
ceasing life of this thing that restlessly
roamed through all the rooms as she
lay awake listening.”
No, I am talking about mistakes. Ev-
erybody makes mistakes occasionally,Robert Musil