"A man of knowledge knows that nothing is true and that the whole truth will be revealed only at the end of time."

After last week's back-and-forth on vice and virtue among Samuel Johnson, William Blake, and Thomas De Quincey, I couldn't very well not share the discussion of vice that I encountered later that day in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities (1933). Ulrich, the protagonist (and Musil's mouthpiece), arguing with his sister about her forging of their late father's will, says

We're looking to justify what you did. We have established that respectable people are deeply attracted to crime, though of course only in their imagination. We might add that criminals, to hear them talk, would almost without exception like to be regarded as respectable people. So we might arrive at a definition: Crimes are the concentrated form, within sinners, of everything other people work off in little irregularities, in their imagination and in innumerable petty everyday acts and attitudes of spite and viciousness. We could also say: Crimes are in the air and simply seek the path of least resistance, which leads them to certain individuals. We could even say that while they are the acts of individuals who are incapable of behaving morally, in the main they're the condensed expresion of some kind of general human maladjustment where the distinction between good and evil is concerned.

Ultimately, Ulrich doesn't in that conversation quite succeed in convincing either his sister or himself that he actions were acceptable. He does, however, offer a memorable observation about the dangerously disruptive powers of art--those powers that caused Plato to ban artists from his perfect city:

And art? Doesn't it amount to a creation of images that don't correspond to the realities of life? . . . But think of a real work of art: have you never had the feeling that something about it is reminiscent of the smell of burning metal you get from a knife you're whetting on a grindstone? It's a cosmic, meteoric, lightning-and-thunder smell, something divinely uncanny!

It's the sort of line that crops up regularly in The Man Without Qualities and makes slogging through the occasional dull patches in its 1,100 pages worthwhile.

The Man Without Qualities

I spent far too much time tonight making a pizza to write a proper post, but I can at least share a couple of standout passages from The Man Without Qualities (1930). First, an arresting image from a description of Bonodea, the past and future love of Ulrich, the book's focus (and Robert Musil's stand-in):

She was once again the dear old Bonadea whose curls hung down over her none-too-wise brow or were swept back from it, depending on the dictates of fashion, and in whose eyes there was always something reminiscent of the air rising above a fire.

That sort of piercing image--so perfect as to bring the reader up short--turns up reliably in The Man Without Qualities, and, along with a plethora of aphoristic expressions, completely makes up for the occasional longuers of Ulrich's indecisive overthinking. To be fair, Musil himself seems to know that Ulrich's mental and emotional crises needs a gentle deflation at times. During what Ulrich views as "the worst crisis of his life," which sees him boiling the entire question of his life down to,

A man who wants the truth becomes a scholar; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?

--Musil, while clearly supportive of Ulrich's quest, offers this description:

If one wants to imagine how such a man lives when he is alone, the most that can be said is that at night his lighted windows afford a view of his room, where his used thoughts sit around like clients in the waiting room of a lawyer with whom they are dissatisfied.

And then there's the interleavings of satire, aimed at all sorts of humbuggery and self-importance in the ruling class of prewar Vienna. Here's Section Chief Tuzzi, an official in the foreign affairs ministry:

Tuzzi was laconic on principle. He felt that pun and the like, even if one could not do entirely without them in witty conversation, had better not be too good, because that would be middle-class.

I love the offering of puns as the antithesis of laconicism, as if more expansive conversation doesn't even exist beyond wordplay. Or take this account of Ulrich's Aunt Jane's whispered-about first husband:

He had of course been an artist, although, because of the rotten luck of small-town, provincial circumstances, only a photographer. But a short time after they were married he was already running up debts like a genius and drinking furiously. Aunt Jane made scarifices for him, she fetched him home from the tavern, she wept in secret and openly at his knees. He looked like a genius, with an imperious mouth and flamboyant hair, and if Aunt Jane had been able to infect him with the passion of her despair, he would have become, with his disastrous vices, as great as Lord Byron.

By informing us that Aunt Jane "wept in secret and openly at his knees," Musil transforms what could be straight comedy into something greater, reminding us that what is ridiculous to us remains all too real to those we're chuckling at. He doesn't manage that synthesis as often as Proust, and the various strands of thought in the book overall don't cohere as organically as Proust's themes--but at times he can be both as funny and as perceptive. A book this capacious also has room for occasional flights of beautifully observed visual detail, and I'll close with one. To end a chapter that has seen Walter and Clarissa, married friends of Ulrich, engaged in a brutal verbal battle, Musil essentially borrows a move from cinema, pulling the camera back to reveal the darkening room, suffused with emotion, as the pair quietly feels the unexpectedly renewed power of their union:

Dusk had fallen. The room was black. The piano was black. The silhouettes of two people who loved each other were black. Clarisse's eyes gleamed in the dark, kindled like a light, and in Walter's mouth, restless with pain, the enamel on a tooth shone like ivory. Regardless of the greatest affairs of state occurring in the world outside, and despite its vexations, this seemed to be one of those moments for which God had created the earth.

Phil Harris, Jack Benny, and . . . Robert Musil?

Monday night's post about Michael Lesy's Murder City wasn't what I had intended to write when I plopped down with the old laptop. But as I flipped through the book's pages, I kept coming across lines that were too good not to share . . . and an hour later, I had a whole post.

All I'd intended to do was extract a single pair of sentences about the soon-to-be-murdered rake Herbert Ziegler, from the testimony of a woman with whom he danced early on that fatal evening:

Herbert was so drunk that, when he did ask Mrs. Lewinsky to dance, he could barely stand. After three minutes on the dance floor, Herbert's knees buckled.

Why those lines? Because they give me a chance to tell my favorite Phil Harris joke from The Jack Benny Program. Harris, who led the band on Benny's show, played himself as an uneducated, smooth-talking wild man with an overly developed sense of his powers of attraction, intellect, and humor--a man so self-regarding that his young daughter always asked for "Hotshot" when she called for him on the phone. "Oh, that's cute. Is that what your mother calls him?" Jack asked once. "No," she replied. "That's what he calls himself."

Harris's band was a motley assortment of ex-cons and drunkards, with the worst of the tipplers his trumpet player, Frankie Remley. That gets me to the joke that started all this, which comes after Phil has explained to Jack that he had to wake Remley up and drag him out of a trash barrel to get him to rehearsal:

BENNY

Now tell me, Phil: why on earth would Frankie be sleeping in a trash barrel?

HARRIS

Jackson, when your knees buckle, you ain't always over a featherbed!

My delay in posting this was unexpectedly fortunate, because in the interim I found another reminder of Jack Benny--much to my surprise--in The Man Without Qualities. Appearing in a jailhouse rumination by the Simenon-esque sex murderer Moosbrugger, this passage could easily be describing Jack's experiences with a certain recurrent nemesis:

In a bad mood, he could tell by a fleeting glance at a man's face that here was the same man who always gave him trouble, everywhere, no matter how differently he disguised himself each time. How can anyone object to this? We all have trouble with the same man almost every time. If we were to investigate who the people are we get so idiotically fixated on, it is bound to turn out to be the one with the lock to which we have the key.

Non-Benny fans may be confused, but those in the know surely just recognized their cue to turn and bellow, "Yeeessss?"

If only I'da known!

One of the advantages the internets have over print media is the ease with which they allow for the addition of postscripts after publication--which is good, because one of the consequences of spending a lot of time reading and a lot of time writing about that reading is that the two don't always match up just right: frequently I learn something new and interesting about a topic long after I've hit the Publish Post button.

But whereas print media would leave me with little recourse, with a blog all I have to do is spend a few minutes typing and tagging my new discoveries, and presto!--my account, however incomplete or questionable it may remain, is instantly more rich and expansive.

Here, for example, are three things I came across today alone that I wish I'd known a while back.

1 If, last night when I was writing about Steven Millhauser, I had already begun reading Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities (1930), I would have used this passage to help explain Millhauser's work:

To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames. This principle, by which the old professor had always lived, is simply a requisite of the sense of reality. But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility.

Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not. The consequence of so creative a disposition can be remarkable, and may, regrettably, often make what people admire seem wrong, and what is taboo permissible, or, also, make both a matter of indifference. Such possibilists are said to inhabit a more delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood. Children who show this tendency are dealt with firmly and warned that such persons are cranks, dreamers, weaklings, know-it-alls, or troublemakers.

Not, mind you, that I think Musil and Millhauser are necessarily all that congenial--I imagine Musil would casually dismiss Millhauser as far too playful--but the passage nevertheless serves well as a description of Millhauser's method.

2 If, two weeks ago when I was writing about the joy of reading collections of letters, I had remembered this scene from Ivy Compton-Burnett's Manservant and Maidservant (1937), I would have surely have used it to open my post:

"People do like to read letters," said Marcus, "especially those that are written to someone else."

"They do that sometimes when they are not supposed to," said Tamasin. "They must like it very much."

3 Finally, if, when I wrote about Ring Lardner back in the fall, I had already read Elizabeth Hardwick's brief essay about him, I would have drawn on it for this:

Out of a daily struggle to make a living by literary work of various kinds, Lardner produced many short stories and some longer works of great originality. These stories were also immensely popular and nothing touches us more than this rare happening. In a country like ours where there will necessarily be so much journalism, so much support of the popular, the successful, we are complacently grateful when we find the genuine among the acceptable.

And I probably wouldn't have been able to resist including this as well:

Vanity, greed, and cruel humor are the themes of Lardner's stories. The lack of self-knowledge is made up for by a dizzy readiness with cheap alibis. No group or class seems better than another; there is a democracy of cheapness and shallowness. Lies are at the core of nearly every character he produces for us. The only fear is being caught out, exposed to the truth. love cannot exist because the moment it runs into trouble the people lie about their former feelings. Because of the habit of lying, it is a world without common sense. The tortured characters are not always victims. They may be ruined and made fun of, but they have the last word. They bite the leg that kicks them.

And what, tomorrow, will I wish I had known today? Well, that's one of the reasons we keep reading, isn't it?