Death of Virgil

HERMANN BROCH
THE DEATH OF VIRGIL

Hermann Broch (1886–1951) was born in Vienna, where he trained as an engineer and studied philosophy and mathematics. He gradually increased his involvement in the intellectual life of Vienna, becoming acquainted with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud, and Robert Musil, among others. The Sleepwalkers was his first major work. In 1938, he was imprisoned as a subversive by the Nazis, but was freed and fled to the United States. In the years before his death, he was researching mass psychology at Yale University. The Death of Virgil originally appeared in 1945; his last major novel, The Guiltless, was published in 1950.

INTERNATIONAL

BOOKS BY HERMANN BROCH

The Spell
The Guiltless
The Death of Virgil
The Sleepwalkers

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JANUARY 1995

Copyright © 1945 by Pantheon Books Inc.
Copyright renewed 1972 by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1945.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Broch, Hermann, 1886–1951.

(Tod des Vergil, English)
The death of Virgil / Hermann Broch; translated by Jean Starr
Untermeyer. — 1st Vintage International ed.
p.    cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-81371-8
1. Virgil — Fiction. 2. Rome — History — Augustus, 30 B.C.-14 A.D. —
Fiction. I. Untermeyer, Jean Starr, 1886–1970. II. Title.
PT2603.R657T613    1995
883′.912—dc20    94-34712

v3.1

IN MEMORIAM
STEPHEN HUDSON

 … fato profugus …
VERGIL, Aeneis, I, 2

           ‘… Da jungere dextram,
da, genitor, teque amplexu ne subtrahe nostro.’
Sic memorans, largo fletu simul ora rigabat.
Ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum,
ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago,
par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno.

VERGIL, Aeneis, VI, 697–702

Lo duca ed io per quel cammino ascoso
    Entrammo a ritornar nel chiaro mondo;
    E, senza cura aver d’alcun riposo,
Salimmo su, ei primo ed io secondo,
    Tanto ch’io vidi delle cose belle
    Che porta il ciel, per un pertugio tondo;
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

DANTE, Divina Commedia
Inferno, XXXIV, 133–139

CONTENTS

Cover

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

I    WATER—THE ARRIVAL

II    FIRE—THE DESCENT

III   EARTH—THE EXPECTATION

IV   AIR—THE HOMECOMING

Translator’s Note

Sources

WATER—THE ARRIVAL

STEEL-BLUE AND LIGHT, RUFFLED BY A SOFT, SCARCELY perceptible cross-wind, the waves of the Adriatic streamed against the imperial squadron as it steered toward the harbor of Brundisium, the flat hills of the Calabrian coast coming gradually nearer on the left. And here, as the sunny yet deathly loneliness of the sea changed with the peaceful stir of friendly human activity where the channel, softly enhanced by the proximity of human life and human living, was populated by all sorts of craft—by some that were also approaching the harbor, by others heading out to sea and by the ubiquitous brown-sailed fishing boats already setting out for the evening catch from the little breakwaters which protected the many villages and settlements along the white-sprayed coast—here the water had become mirror-smooth; mother-of-pearl spread over the open shell of heaven, evening came on, and the pungence of wood fires was carried from the hearths whenever a sound of life, a hammering or a summons, was blown over from the shore.

Of the seven high-built vessels that followed one another, keels in line, only the first and last, both slender rams-prowed pentaremes, belonged to the war-fleet; the remaining five, heavier and more imposing, deccareme and duodeccareme, were of an ornate structure in keeping with the Augustan imperial rank, and the middle one, the most sumptuous, its bronze-mounted bow gilded, gilded the ring-bearing lion’s head under the railing, the rigging wound with colors, bore under purple sails, festive and grand, the tent of the Caesar. Yet on the ship that immediately followed was the poet of the Aeneid and death’s signet was graved upon his brow.

A prey to seasickness, held taut by the constant threat of its outbreak, he had not dared move the whole day long. Now, however, although bound to the cot which had been set up for him amidships, he became conscious of himself, or rather of his body and the life of his body, which for many years past he had scarcely been able to call his own, as an after-tasting, after-touching memory of the relief which had flowed through him suddenly when the calmer region of the coast had been reached; and this floating, quieted-quieting fatigue might have become an almost perfect boon had not the plaguing cough, unaffected by the strong healing sea air, begun again, accompanied by the usual evening fever and the usual evening anxiety. So he lay there, he the poet of the Aeneid, he Publius Vergilius Maro, he lay there with ebbing consciousness, almost ashamed of his helplessness, at odds with such a fate, and he stared into the pearly roundness of the heavenly bowl: why then had he yielded to the importunity of Augustus? why then had he forsaken Athens? Fled now the hope that the hallowed and serene sky of Homer would favor the completion of the Aeneid, fled every single hope for the boundless new life which was to have begun, the hope for a life free alike of art and poetry, a life dedicated to meditation and study in the city of Plato, fled the hope ever to be allowed to enter the Ionian land, oh, fled the hope for the miracle of knowledge and the healing through knowledge. Why had he renounced it? Willingly? No! It had been like a command of the irrefutable life-forces, those irrefutable forces of fate which never vanished completely, which though they might dive at times into the subterranean, the invisible, the inaudible, were nonetheless omnipresent as the inscrutable threat of powers which man could never avoid, to which he must always submit; it was fate. He had allowed himself to be driven by fate and now fate drove on to the end. Had this not always been the form of his life, had he ever lived otherwise? had the pearly bowl, had the halcyon sea, had the song of the mountains and that which sang painfully in his own breast, had the flute-tone of the god ever meant anything else to him than a circumstance which, like a receptacle of the spheres, was soon to draw him into itself, to bear him into immensity? He had been a peasant from birth, a man who loved the peace of earthly life, one whom a simple secure life in a village community would have fitted, one for whom because of his birth it would have been seemly to be allowed, even to be forced to abide there, but who in conformity with a higher destiny was not allowed to be free from nor free to stay at home; this destiny had pushed him out from the community into the nakedest, direst, most savage loneliness of the human crowd, it had hunted him from the simplicity of his origins, hunted him abroad into the open, to ever-increasing multiplicity, and if thereby something had become greater and broader, it was only the distance from real life, verily it was this distance alone which had grown. Only at the edge of his fields had he walked, only at the edge of his life had he lived. He had become a rover, fleeing death, seeking death, seeking work, fleeing work, a lover and yet at the same time a harassed one, an errant through the passions of the inner life and the passions of the world, a lodger in his own life. And now, almost at the end of his strength, at the end of his search, self-purged and ready to leave, purged to readiness and ready to take upon himself the last loneliness, ready to start on the inner journey back to loneliness, now destiny with all its forces had seized him again, had forbidden him all the simplicity of his beginnings and of the inner life, had deflected his backward journey once more, had turned him back to the evil which had overshadowed all his days, as if it had reserved for him just this sole simplicity—, the simplicity of dying. Above him the yards cracked in the ropes and betweenwhiles there was a soft booming in the sailcloth, he heard the slithering foam of the wake and the silver pour that sprayed out each time the oars were lifted, their heavy creak in the oar-locks, and the clapping cut of the water when they dipped in again, he felt the soft even thrust of the ship keeping time to the hundredfold stroke of the oarsmen, he saw the white-surfed coastline slip by and he thought of the chained dumb slave-bodies in the damp-draughty, noisome, roaring hull of the ship. The same dull rumbling silver-sprayed down-beat resounded from the two neighboring ships, from the next in line and the one following, like an echo which repeated itself over all the seas and was answered from all the seas, for so they plied everywhere, laden with people, laden with arms, laden with corn and wheat, laden with marble, with oil, with wines, with spices, with silks, laden with slaves, everywhere this navigation for bartering and bargaining, one of the worst among the many depravities of the world.