Night Games: And Other Stories and Novellas

Translated from the German by Margret Schaefer

With a Foreword by John Simon

Foreword by John Simon vii

Night Games 3

The Dead Are Silent 83

Blind Geronimo and His Brother 101

A Farewell 125

The Second tot

Baron von Leisenbohg's Destiny 161

The Widower 179

Death of a Bachelor Igo

Dream Story 202

TIME WA s when unrecognized geniuses were the order of the day. One almost had to die in relative obscurity before the world discovered one's importance. Today the reverse obtains. In a twinkling, some young hotshot is declared absolutely indispensable; then, in the time it takes for the media to start pumping up the next one, our purported genius is historyalbeit not history of art, music, or literature.

There remains, though, to this day the odd undervalued genius, not so much undiscovered as neglected. A prime example of this is the Austrian novelist, short-story writer, and playwright Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931). Although he thought of himself as of the second rank, and although his fame has faded somewhat even in German-speaking countries (while his popularity in France is considerable), I do not doubt that he will in time be recognized as the master he was, the equal or superior of such other Austrian geniuses-even if they came from Prague or some other part of the far-flung Austro-Hungarian Empire- as Kafka, Musil, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Horvath, and Roth, to name only the most obvious ones.

For me, Schnitzler belongs in the vicinity of Proust, Joyce, and Chekhov. Like Proust, he can analyze psyches down to their subtlest, most secret tremors and convey this in complex, refined, and chiseled language. Like Joyce, and well before him, he put the stream of consciousness to supremely character-revealing use while also evoking the atmosphere and essence of a big city. And like Chekhov-both in drama and narrative-he brought to pulsating immediacy any number of dash ingly histrionic or shadowily marginal lives, bestowing on most of his characters a fine compassion never veering into sentimentality, patronization, or special pleading.

These Schnitzler characters, on page or stage, speak a language that blends near-scientific naturalism with a soaring, but never uncontrolled, poetry (in the fiction, of course, located more often in the descriptions). Schnitzler is the lyricist of mundane existence, the comically or cuttingly ironic observer, the nonbeliever in any transcendence who nevertheless flirts with mysticism and searches in the nooks and crannies of vanity, greed, concupiscence, hypocrisy, and even banality for that which might still deserve the designation Soul.

Although Eros and Thanatos, sexual love and death, were his chief concerns, he was alert to all the strange, irrational, indeed extraordinary vagaries and pitfalls of so-called ordinary life. Grist for his exceedingly fine mill were the transience of love, the mysteries of contempt and hate, the dark forces toying with human behavior, the fragility, brevity, or futility of lives. Though the exercise of any, even the most trivial, kind of power matters greatly to Schnitzler's characters, erotic fulfillment is an equally consuming pursuit, even if-as these stories illustrate-bliss is pitifully short-lived, often lasting no longer than one night or just a single hour.

But this melancholy evancescence and its accompanying frustrations are examined with the scientific rigor of a physician, which Schnitzler for many years was. His eminent laryngologist father coerced Arthur to follow in his footsteps, though the youth's heart was in aesthetic and bohemian pleasures for which the Vienna of that period was ideally suited, and which Arthur did not wholly give up. An empire in its decline is the breeding ground for both a heartbreakingly true art and for epicurean, even convulsively decadent, pursuits. The close proximity of nonchalant wealth and throttling poverty (and the easy fall from one to the other through various kinds of gambling) made for, among other things, the kind of sexual exploitation by idle young gentlemen to which pretty but impecunious young women readily exposed themselves. And not only they: also well-off but underoccupied young housewives, the targets of artists and minor but indulged aristocrats, usually members of the officer class.

It was a snake-filled Eden. As the distinguished historian Golo Mann put it: "Why did Austrian statehood that exhibited so many tolerant traits nevertheless end up becoming so culpable? Alas, there was much hatred in old Austria, and Vienna itself, golden Vienna, spawned it as a marsh does feverish diseases. Hate of the little folks for the Jews (of whom there were numerous and affluent ones in the capital), stirred up by demagogues but extending even to major political parties; hate of the burgers for the Social Democrats; hate of the constituent nationalities, Germans and Slavs, for each other; hate of the unsuccessful for the more prosperous: Hate."

As the literary historian Ernst Alker observed: "If much of [Schnitzler's writing] may now feel like curiosities of an inconceivably idyllic era whose people, despite favorable living conditions, had a knack for being very unhappy, the fact remains that a vanished epoch here achieves its literary expression." Or, to quote another scholar, Reinhart Muller- Freienfels, we have here "the finally vain attempt of [Schnitzler's] characters to escape the comfortless reality of their existence into fantasies and self-deceptions, into art, into the attitude of the distanced spectator, even into suicide; at last also into concentration on the immediate, unmediated moment."

So there was Dr. Schnitzler (even if literary success had made him relinquish medical practice), the cool-eyed diagnostician of the age's excesses-including his own; and Arthur the poet, several of whose plays are indeed in polished verse, and all of whose prose is suffused with a poet's hypersensitive perceptions. In short, a hard-nosed realist and elegiac post-romantic in the same skin. Perhaps the greatest tribute Schnitzler received was from his erstwhile colleague and friend Sigmund Freud, who subsequently stopped associating with him for fear-supreme com- pliment!-of falling too much under his influence. Even so, Freud wrote Schnitzler in t 9o6: "I often asked myself in amazement where you could have gotten this or that secret knowledge I had to acquire through painstaking investigation of the subject, and I eventually got to the point of envying the writer whom I otherwise admired." And again in 1922, on Schnitzler's sixtieth birthday, "At the root of your being, you are a psychological depth explorer as honestly unprejudiced and unafraid as anyone ever."

To repeat, then, in no other writer is the febrile polarity Love (or Sex) and Death more powerfully ubiquitous than in Arthur Schnitzler, scion of the dying Habsburg Empire. Why is it that periods that so thrill to sex are also thrall to death? Is it identification with threatening social change? Or is the post-coital animal triste in a state of exhaustion and blankness that presages annihilation? Or is the swift waning of ecstasythe death of passion-the foreshadowing of death itself?

In his bachelor days as junger Herr, the handsome Schnitzler was less successful than others with the siisse Madel (sweet young girls). His most enduring affair was with Jeanette (actually Anna) Heger, a needleworker with whom he fell into instant reciprocal love. About a previous girl he had written: "I could not seem to be completely happy with her. I don't think I am wrong in ascribing the blame for this to the hypocritical element in my nature and the capital of mistrust that went with it, which paid dividends in the form of self-torture and the desire to torture others; but I was also irked that I was wasting my time, my thoughts, my finest emotions on a basically insignificant creature."

Eventually the fine passion for Jeanette took a similar turn: "Now we were together evening after evening, yet somehow couldn't be happy. I tormented her incessantly with my jealousy, strangely enough not in connection with the months just gone by but with the more distant past. She wept, kissed my hands humbly, yet couldn't assuage me. Sometimes-and not under the influence of some baseless hypochondriac mood or other-I felt on the verge of despair and filled with dread as I realized the futility and irrevocable passing of the years."

In these passages, as in countless others from Schnitzler's letters and memoirs, you recognize the traits of the typical Schnitzler hero and some of his female companions. It may be that what made the writer such a keen dissector of neurotic relationships was that he was his own best physician as well as neediest patient.

It is no accident that of the nine stories herein included, eight re volve wholly or in large measure around a death.