Late Fame by Arthur Schnitzler

Author:Arthur Schnitzler
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781681370859
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2017-07-11T04:00:00+00:00

AFTERWORD

A LONGING for late fame awakes in Eduard Saxberger at an advanced age, when the Wanderings, the lyrical work of the early years in which he wrote poetry, is discovered by the young literary circle “Enthusiasm.” Memories of the time when he himself was “one of the best and proudest in a circle of young people who [. . .] did not want to be anything but artists” make him aware of the tragedy of his “whole sorry life.” Elevated by his new devotees, by “Young Vienna,” to the status of idol and “maestro,” Saxberger readily adopts their idea of him as his own self-image: “I am a poet.” His life as a civil servant he now considers only a “mask” behind which he has had to hide for all these years.

As, however, he is quickly forced to realize that he has come a very long way from his days as a poet and become completely estranged from his early work, the story experiences its first crisis and turning point, an instance of peripeteia as described in Gustav Freytag’s theory of drama—and Schnitzler’s estate also contains a sketch with the title “On the venerable poet as a drama.”[1]

Even the scene of Saxberger’s former poetic inspiration, where the best verses had always come easily to him, the banks of the Danube canal, is no longer as it was: the “whistling of locomotives and the distant groaning of the steam trams,” the “tall factory smokestacks [that] stretched above them into the sky” and the “miserably dressed people” all belong to the backdrop of a modern city. Saxberger does not see himself as equal to the impressions of the modern world’s sounds and images—the aesthetic stimuli of a radical modernity—and so “the few poor thoughts he had already caught were fluttering off again.” The final crisis, however, and the “catastrophe” in Freytag’s sense, befalls the protagonist at an evening of recitals put on by the young literati, when, after some of his own poems have been read, he hears amid the thunderous applause someone in the audience say the words, “Poor devil.” Words that resonate constantly in his head and determine all his thoughts thereafter—very similarly to the “stupid boy” said by the baker in Schnitzler’s Lieutenant Gustl. The story’s downward spiral then takes its course inexorably.

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In this novella, Schnitzler also addresses the, for him sometimes so vexed, question of the negative dialectic between artistic work and the bourgeois life. “Med[ical] and poet[ic] worldviews are beating each other up in the most amusing fashion in my so-c[alled] soul,”[2] reads his diary entry on 17th April 1880, and at the beginning of that year he had already given himself this far from rosy prognosis: “If I were only as much of an artist as I have an artist’s temperament [. . .] my future will be: ending up a mediocre doctor!”[3]

The literary society “Enthusiasm” ’s self-imposed abstention from anything that smells of life, anything embarrassingly redolent of “monotonous employment,” is unmasked in the novella as merely a pose affected by young artists.

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