What It Is To Be Rich

In case you were wondering:

Every human nose instantly smells the subtle scent of independence, the habit of command, the habit of always choosing the best of everything for oneself, the whiff of misanthropy, and the unwavering sense of responsibility that goes with power, that rises up, in short, from a large and secure income. Everyone can see at a glance that such a person is nourished and daily renewed by quintessential cosmic forces. Money circulates visibly just under his skin like the sap in a blossom. Here there is no such thing as conferred traits, acquired habits; nothing indirect or secondhand! Destroy his bank account and his credit, and the rich man has not merely lost his money but has come, on the very day he realizes what has happened, a withered flower. With the same immediacy with which his riches were once seen as one of his personal qualities, the indescribable quality of his nothingness is now perceived, smelling like a smoldering cloud of uncertainty, irresponsibility, incapacity, and poverty. Riches are simply a personal, primary quality that cannot be analyzed without being destroyed.

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities I 456 (Vintage International ed. 1996)

Arnheim Plots a Future for Soliman

Arnheim is fabulously wealthy. He is also a great man of letters. The State refused him a commission in the Austrian army because he was a Jew, and he is too grand to have served as an NCO. He has taken into his household a black boy named Soliman whom he first intends to educate, but later ignores. Just before the following excerpt, he has been soliloquizing in the presence of Soliman about the inadequacy of the old aristocracy, and the unsuitability of the new business class.

He wondered whether he had not allowed his mood to trick him into going too far. What if Soliman missed his master’s meaning and misunderstood the words to suggewst that he was entitled to think less highly of the upper classes? But something unexpected happened. Soliman had been fidgeting on his seat for a while and he now interrupted his master with a question.

“If you please, sir, Soliman asked, “about my father: Is he a king?”

Arnheim gave him a startled look. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said, still somewhat sternly, though inwardly a little amused. But as he gazed at Soliman’s serious, almost resentful face, he found it touching. I pleased him to see he boy asking everything so seriously. He is a dimwit, he thought, and a really tragic case. Somehow he equated witlessness with a heavy feeling of well-being. In a gently didactic manner, he went on to give the boy something more of an answer to his question. “There is hardly any reason to assume that your father is a king. More likely he had a hard living to earn, because I found you in a troupe of jugglers on a beach.”

“How much did I cost?” Soliman persisted.

“My dear boy, how can you expect me to remember that today? It couldn’t have been much. But why worry about that now? We are born to create our own kingdom. Next year sometime I may let you take a commercial course, and then you could make a start as a trainee in one of our offices. Of course it will depend on you what you make of it, but I shall keep an eye on you. You might, for instance, aim at eventually representing our interests in places where the colored people already have some influence. We’d have to move with care, of course, but being a black man might turn out to have certain advantages for you. …

—Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities 593-4 (Vintage Paperback ed. 1995)

Mini-Review: Robert Musil

They say that Robert Musil is the Viennese Proust. But I’ve never heard anyone say that Marcel Proust is the Parisian Robert Musil. Perhaps no one dares: Musil’s Man Without Qualities surely ranks high on the list of unread masterpieces in world literature.

I took a copy of Volume 1 of the two-volume Vintage edition of MWQ on my Eastern European excursion. What with two transcontinental plane flights, plus a 12-hour layover in the Frankfurt hauptbanhof (don’t ask--but see at right) I actually got through it.

Short verdict: Proust it’s not. It’s a an absorbing, probably even an important, book. It bears some noteworthy similarities to Proust. Each is long; each was the lifework of an author, left incomplete at the author’s death, which perhaps would never have been completed even if the author had lived. Each attempts to comprehend the whole of a society. And perhaps most important, each is perhaps not so much a novel as a section of loosely-connected essays, individually inspired by commonplace incidents.

But from there on, the comparison becomes somewhat invidious. For Musil, whatever his merits, isn’t nearly the artist that Proust is. A good many of his mini-essays are suave and subtle. Others are simply too clever by half, and others just fall flat. Many of the best of them verge on the edge of satire; the worst come closer to sarcasm, and pretty leaden, at that.

Many have remarked on Musil’s skill at characterization. On this score, I’d say that Musil does offer one really remarkable achievement: his portrayal of Moosbrugger, the brute and half-wit who kills a prostitute. It’s the kind of challenge that puts a novelist on his mettle: the main point of someone like Moosbrugger is that he is inarticulate, and the novelist is last person in the world equipped to deal with the inarticulate. I suppose you could say that Russell Hoban did it in Riddley Walker. Or maybe the more apt comparison is what Tolstoi did with the wolf in War and Peace. Anway, it’s a rare achievement and for Musil, a real one.

Aside from that, I’d say he is less successful. The general is well realized, but again, pretty much on the level of satire. Soliman the black servant is original and arresting. Rachel the house maid is sympathetic and convincing, but not nearly so richly textured as Proust’s Françoise. Others, particularly the women, tend to blur.

A more devastating criticism addresses the larger matter of atmosphere. When you read Proust, you feel Paris (or at least a slice of it) in your blood and bones. I read about Musil’s Vienna partly in Vienna, and it still isn’t as vivid to me as Proust’s Paris can be.

I shouldn’t go overboard here. I tend to be distrustful and impatient with novels; unless they catch me fairly early, I tend to set them aside (I don’t really finish very many). I hung on here for 725 pages, so I must have found something worth my while. Indeed when I found something that impressed me, I noted a page number on the back flyleaf: I filled a page with those little chicken scratches: it looks like I have 40 or more.

But this is only the first 725 pages. There are another 400 pages in the other volume, not to mention a full 640 pages of “posthumous papers.” I don’t think I’ll be getting to all them real soon. On the other hand, if I’m ever again stuck in the Frankurt hauptbanhof…

The Tragedy of Math IgnoranceAmong Literary People

“Believe me, income has dropped by twenty percent and prices have gone up by twenty percent, that’s a total of forty percent!”

—Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities II 729
(Vintage Paperback ed. 1995)

Hm, one plus twenty percent = 1.2. One minus 20 percent = 0.8. (1.2/0.8)-1=0.5 = fifty percent.

[Or maybe that was the joke, and I didn't get it?]