Diotima answered at random: “What lovely ideas you indulge in.”
“But don’t you see, I have known what it feels like, myself, though it was a long time ago. And there have been very respectable persons who claimed that this was precisely the way life should be on earth.”
“Then it’s your own fault if you don’t act accordingly,” Diotima interrupted. “Besides, there’s no need to make it look so ridiculous.” She had remembered that her adventure with Arnheim eluded classification and made one long for a life without social differences, where action, soul, mind, and body would all be one.
Ulrich did not answer. He offered his cousin a cigarette. She accepted it. As the cramped little room filled with smoke, Diotima wondered what Rachel would think when she sniffed the evidence of this intrusion. Should they open the window? Or should she explain to the little servant in the morning? Oddly enough, it was precisely the thought of Rachel that decided her to stay; she had been on the point of putting an end to this increasingly awkward tête-à-tête, but the sense of her intellectual superiority and the cigarette smoke that would mystify her maid somehow coalesced into something she was rather enjoying.
Ulrich was watching her. He was surprised at himself for having spoken to her as he did, but he went on with it; he felt a need for companionship. “I’ll tell you,” he resumed, “under what conditions I might be so seraphic—seraphic is probably not too grand a term for not merely enduring another person but feeling that person if I may put it like this—under his psychological loincloth, without a shudder.”
“Unless the other is a woman,” Diotima said, in view of her cousin’s dubious reputation in the family.
“Not even excepting that.”
“You’re right. What I call loving the human being in a woman is a great rarity.” Diotima felt that Ulrich had been, for some time now, expressing views closer to her own, and yet there was always something amiss and whatever he said never came quite close enough.
“Seriously now,” he said stubbornly, leaning forward, his forearm resting on his muscular thighs, his gloomy gaze fixed on the floor. “We still say, nowadays, I love this woman, and I hate this man, instead of saying I find that person attractive or repellent. It would be a step closer to the truth to say that it is I, myself, who arouses in the other the capacity for attracting or repelling me, and even more accurate to say that the other somehow brings out in me the requisite qualities, and so on. We can never know where it begins; the whole thing is a functional interdependence, like the one between two bouncing balls or two electric circuits. We’ve known all that for a long time now, but we still prefer to regard ourselves as the cause, the primal cause, in the magnetic fields of emotion around us; even when someone admits that he is merely imitating someone else, he makes it sound like an active achievement of his own. And this is why I ask you again whether you have ever been uncontrollably in love, or furious, or desperate. Because it is at such times that you can see clearly, if you are at all perceptive, that in such an overwrought state we behave no differently from a bee on a windowpane or an amoeba in poisoned water: we are caught in a storm of movement, we dash off blindly in every direction at once, we beat our brains out against brick walls, until, by some lucky chance, we find an opening to freedom, which we promptly attribute, as soon as our consciousness has crystallized again, to a calculated plan of action.”
“I must say,” Diotima objected, “that this is a dismal and demeaning view of emotions that have the power to decide a person’s whole life.”
“Are you thinking of the boring old argument about whether or not we are masters of our own fate?” Ulrich replied, with a quick glance upward. “If everything is determined by a cause, then no one is responsible for anything, and so on? I must confess that I’ve never given as much as fifteen minutes of thought to that question in my whole life. It belongs to a period that became obsolete while nobody was looking. It comes from theology, and apart from jurists, who still have a lot of theology and the smell of burning heretics in their nostrils, the only people who still think in terms of causation are those members of your family who are likely to say: ‘You are the cause of my sleepless nights’ or ‘The sudden drop in the price of wheat was the cause of his misfortune.’”
Diotima drew herself up. “Why are you always talking about criminals? Crime seems to hold a special fascination for you. What do you suppose that means?”
“Oh no,” her cousin said. “It doesn’t mean a thing. A certain degree of excitement, at most. Our ordinary state is an averaging out of all the crimes of which we are capable. But now that the word ‘theology’ has come up, let me ask you something. . . .”
“Whether I’ve ever been madly in love or jealous, again?”
“No. Think about this: If God has ordained whatever happens and always knows what will happen, how can a human being commit a sin? It’s an old question, but it’s still as good as new. What kind of trickster God would it be who sets us up to commit offenses against him, with his own prior knowledge and consent? He doesn’t merely know in advance what we are likely to do: there are plenty of examples of such resigned love; oh no, he makes us do wrong! That’s the situation in which we find ourselves today, with respect to each other. The self is losing its status as a sovereign making its own laws. We are learning to know the rules by which it develops, the influence of its environment, its structural types, its disappearance in moments of the most intense activity: in short, the laws regulating its formation and its conduct. Think of it, cousin, the laws of personality! It’s like talking of a trade union for lonely rattlesnakes or a robbers’ chamber of commerce. What with laws being the most impersonal thing in the world, the personality becomes no more than the imaginary meeting point of all that’s impersonal, so that it’s hard to find for it that honorable standpoint you don’t want to relinquish. . . .”
So he spoke, and Diotima took occasion to object: “But, my dear friend, surely one ought to do everything as personally as one can. . . .” Finally, she said: “You really are being very theological today; I’ve never known that side of your character.” Again she sat there like a tired dancer. Such a strong and handsome woman! She somehow felt this herself, in all her bones. She had been avoiding her cousin for weeks, perhaps even months by now. But she rather liked this man of her own age. He looked dashing in evening dress, in the dimly lit room, black and white like a knight templar; there was something of the passion of the Cross in this black and white. She glanced around the modest little bedroom. The Parallel Campaign was far away, she had gone through a great emotional struggle, and here she was in this little room, as plain as duty itself, with only the grace notes of some pussy willows and the unused picture postcards stuck in the frame of the mirror—so it was between these, framed by images of the great city, that the little maid saw her face in the glass! Where did she wash, come to think of it? Ah, in that narrow cupboard, there must be a basin under the lid, Diotima now remembered, and then the thought crossed her mind: “This man wants to and yet he doesn’t want to.”
She looked at him calmly, with the air of a friendly listener. “Does Arnheim really want to marry me?” she asked herself. He had said so. But then he had not persisted. There was always so much else to talk about. But her cousin too, instead of going on and on in that impersonal fashion, should have asked her: How are you doing, then? Why didn’t he ask? She felt that he would understand if she could tell him all about her inner struggles. “Is it a good thing for me?” he had asked her, all too predictably, when she told him how she had changed. The insolence! Diotima smiled.
Both of these men were a bit peculiar, come to think of it. Why did her cousin never have a good word to say for Arnheim? She knew that Arnheim wanted his friendship; but Ulrich too, judging by his own irritable remarks, had Arnheim much on his mind. “And how totally he misunderstands him!” she thought again. There was nothing to be done about it. Besides, at this point it was not only her soul that mutinied against her body,
married as it was to Section Chief Tuzzi, but at times her body mutinied against her soul, made to languish, by Arnheim’s hesitant and high-strung love, at the rim of a desert where what she saw ahead was perhaps a mirage, only the quivering reflection of her yearning. She would have liked to confide her misery and her helplessness to her cousin. She liked the decisive, one-track mind he usually showed on such occasions. Arnheim’s balanced many-sidedness certainly rated higher, but at a moment of decision Ulrich would not waver so much, despite his theorizing, which tended toward an absolute suspension in uncertainty. She sensed this, without knowing why; it was probably part of what she had felt for him from their first encounter. If at this moment Arnheim felt like a huge effort, a royal burden laid upon her soul, too much to bear in every sense, then everything Ulrich was saying tended toward a single effect, that of losing responsibility as one contemplated hundreds of interactions, so that she felt suspiciously free. She suddenly needed to make herself heavier than she was; she couldn’t say how, but was immediately reminded of an incident when, as a young girl, she had carried a little boy away from some danger, and how he had kept hitting her in the belly with his knees to make her let him go. The force of this memory—which had occurred to her as unexpectedly as if it had suddenly come down the chimney into this lonely little room—quite threw her off balance. “Madly in love?” she thought. Why did he keep asking her that? As if she were incapable of really letting herself go. Her mind had wandered from what he was saying, so, without any idea whether it would be apropos or not, she simply interrupted him and told him once and for all, without regard to anything he might have been saying, with a laugh (unless her sense of laughing as she spoke was not quite reliable in the sudden, heedless excitement of it): “But I am madly in love!”
Ulrich openly smiled at this. “You’re quite incapable of it,” he said.
She had stood up, her hands on her hair, staring at him in amazement.
“In order to lose control,” he specified calmly, “one has to be quite precise and objective. Two selves, aware of how dubious a thing it is these days to be a self, cling to each other—or so I imagine, if it’s love at any price and not merely the usual kind of thing and they become so enmeshed with each other that the one feels like the cause for the other one’s existence, as they feel themselves changing into greatness and begin to float like a veil. It is incredibly hard, in such a state, to make no false moves, even though one has been making all the right moves for some time. It is simply very hard to feel the right thing in this world! Quite contrary to the general preconception, it almost calls for a certain pedantry. Incidentally, that’s just what I wanted to say to you. You flatter me, you know, when you say I could be expected to behave like an angel. A human being would have to be wholly objective—which is almost the same as being impersonal, after all—to be wholly a personification of love. This means being all feeling and sensibility and thought. Now, all the elements that make up a human being are tender, since they yearn toward each other; only the human being itself is not. So being madly in love is something you might not even want for yourself. . . .”
He had done his best to speak as casually as possible; he even lit another cigarette to keep his face from looking too solemn as he spoke, and Diotima also accepted another from him to hide her embarrassment. She made a comically defiant face and blew the smoke high into the air, to show her independence, because she hadn’t quite understood what he was talking about. But their situation as a whole was having a strong effect on her: that her cousin was suddenly saying all these things to her, in this room where they were alone together, without making the slightest move to take her hand or touch her hair, a move so natural in the circumstances, even though they were feeling the magnetic attraction their two bodies exerted on each other in this confined space. What if they . . ., she wondered. But what could one do in this maid’s room? She looked around. Act like a whore? But how does one do that? Suppose she started blubbering? Blubbering: that was a schoolgirl expression that had suddenly come back to her. Suppose she suddenly did what he had talked about before, took off her clothes, put her arm around his shoulder, and sang . . . sang what? Played the harp? She looked at him, smiling. It was like being with a wayward brother, in whose company one could do anything that came into one’s head. Ulrich was smiling too. But his smile was like a blind window, because now that he had indulged himself in this sort of talk with Diotima he merely felt ashamed of himself. Still, she had an intimation of the possibility of loving this man; it would be something like her idea of modern music, that is, quite unsatisfying and yet full of something excitingly different.
And even though she took it for granted that she was more aware of all this than he was, the thought of it as she stood there facing him sent a hidden glow up her legs, which made her say rather abruptly to her cousin, with the face of a woman who feels the conversation has been running on too long: “My dear, we’re really being quite impossible. Do stay here a bit longer while I go ahead and show myself to our guests again.”
102
LOVE AND WAR AMONG THE FISCHELS
Gerda waited in vain for Ulrich’s visit. He had, in fact, forgotten his promise to see her, or remembered it only when he had other things to do.
“Forget about him,” Clementine said, whenever Director Fischel grumbled about it. “We used to be good enough for him, but he’s probably setting his social sights higher these days. If you go after him you’ll only make matters worse; you’re much too clumsy to carry it off.”
Gerda missed this older friend. She wished he would come and knew that if he did come, she would wish him away. For all her twenty-three years, nothing had yet happened in her life other than the cautious wooing of a certain Herr Glanz, who had her father on his side, and her Christian-Germanic friends, whom she sometimes regarded as schoolboys rather than real men. “Why doesn’t he ever come to see me?” she wondered, whenever she thought of Ulrich. Among her friends, the Parallel Campaign was seen as beyond any doubt the opening salvo in the spiritual destruction of the German people, and she felt embarrassed by Ulrich’s involvement in it; she longed to hear his side of it, however, hoping that he would be able to exonerate himself.
Her mother said to her father: “You missed your chance to be in this affair. It would have been a good thing for Gerda, and she’d have had something else to think about; a lot of people go to the Tuzzis’.” It had come to light that he had neglected to respond to His Grace’s invitation. Now he had to suffer for it.
The young men whom Gerda called her spiritual comrades in arms had settled down in his house like Penelope’s suitors, debating what a young man of German blood should do about the Parallel Campaign.
“A financier must be able, at times, to act in the spirit of a Maecenas,” Frau Clementine exhorted her husband when he fumed that he had not hired Hans Sepp, Gerda’s “spiritual guide,” as a tutor, for good money, only to have this situation come of it.
Hans Sepp, the graduate student, who had not the slightest prospect of being able to keep a wife, had come into the household as a tutor but, owing to the conflicts that were tearing the family apart, had become its tyrant. Now he was discussing with his friends, who had become Gerda’s friends, at the Fischels’, how to save the German aristocracy from being ensnared by Diotima—of whom it was said that she made no distinction between persons of her own race and those of an alien race—and caught up in the nets of the Jewish spirit. While in the presence of Leo Fischel this sort of talk was usually tempered with a certain philosophic objectivity, he still heard enough of certain terms and principles for it to get on his nerves. They worried that such a campaign, which was bound to lead to total catastrophe, should have surfaced in an era not destined to bring forth great symbols, and the recurrent expressions “deeply meaningful,” “upward humanization,” and “free personhood” were enough by themselves to make the pince-nez quiver on Fischel’s nose every time he heard them. He had to stand by while there proliferate
d in his own house such concepts as “the art of living thought,” “the graph of spiritual growth,” and “action on the wing.” He discovered that a biweekly “hour of purification” was held regularly under his roof. He demanded an explanation. It turned out that what they meant by this was reading the poems of Stefan George together. Leo Fischel searched his old encyclopedia in vain for the poet’s name. But what irritated him most of all, old-style liberal that he was, was that these green pups referred to all the high government officials, bank presidents, and leading university figures in the Parallel Campaign as “puffed-up little men”; then there were the world-weary airs they gave themselves, complaining that the times had become devoid of great ideas, if there was anyone left who was ready for great ideas; that even “humanity” had become a mere buzzword, as far as they were concerned, and that only “the nation” or, as they called it, “folk and folkways” still really had any meaning.
“The word ‘humanity’ is meaningless to me, Papa,” Gerda said, when he tried to reason with her. “The life seems to have gone out of it. But ‘my nation’—now, that’s a physical reality.”
“Your nation!” Leo Fischel began, meaning to say something about the biblical prophets and his own father, who had been a lawyer in Trieste.
“I know,” Gerda interrupted, “but my nation in a spiritual sense is what I am talking about.”
“I’m going to lock you up in your room till you come to your senses!” Papa Leo said. “And I won’t have those friends of yours in my house. They’re undisciplined characters who spend all their time brooding over their consciences instead of going to work and making something of themselves.”
“I know, Papa, how your mind works,” Gerda replied. “Your generation feels entitled to humiliate us just because you’re supporting us. You’re all patriarchal capitalists.”