Orpheus dissembling.

Simon, John

Hugo von Hofmannsthal was--besides poet, playwright, essayist, librettist, and fiction writer--a universally admired sensitive soul, the kind imperial Austria seemed to specialize in. It may be that empires, with their hierarchies, traditions, and social stability, contribute to this Feinfuhligkeit (a wonderful German word for delicacy of feeling). Certainly growing up in a great European capital like Vienna encourages urbanity, culture, and cosmopolitanism, which were plentiful in Hofmannsthal (1872-1929).

That his poetry, aside from occasional pieces, was sparse and came early has also been accounted to his benefit as a man who knew when his youthful lyric gift was exhausted, and turned to prose. His plays, though translated into English, are seldom if ever produced hereabouts, but his librettos for Richard Strauss keep him in our purview.

In Europe, especially in the Germanspeaking countries, he is an established classic. He has been written about, analyzed, and lauded ad infinitum, if not ad nauseam. Now comes Ulrich Weinzierl with Hofmannsthal: Skizzen zu seinem Bild (Sketches for His Portrait). (1) It is a remarkable, engrossing, concise book--230 pages of text, plus seventy-eight pages of notes and bibliography--about not the work but the man, revealed in his abundant weaknesses.

What is the point of such a debunking? It should be obvious to most people that good, even great, artists are not necessarily admirable human beings. Some, indeed, are spectacularly the opposite: Wagner, for example, or Brecht. But neither of those was revered for his hypertrophic sensitivity. The Austrian people, wrote the exquisite Annette Kolb, "are of such a sympathetic character that one is seduced into considering them better than they perhaps are." Hofmannsthal was lyrical like Rilke and analytical like Proust. His sentences are etiological scalpels, dissecting people and things to their hidden cores, down to the last, often paradoxical, seemingly ineffable mystery. As Weinzierl points out, namenlos (nameless) is one of Hofmannsthal's favorite words; he might have added unbenannt (unnamed) and unnennbar, the proto-Beckettian unnamable.

From such a mystagogic writer of utmost sensitivity and sensibility--who, moreover, insists on morality--we do not expect the figure that emerges from Weinzierl's book: hypocrite, liar, part-Jewish anti-Semite, closet homosexual in denial and aghast at anything homoerotic. Further, neglectful father and often callous husband, deluded hero worshipper of some worthless men, and frequent deliberate offender of his best friends. A man easily censorious of others and indulgent of his own egotistical needs, capable of abject apologies as further proof of his delicacy. Weinzierl does adduce some virtues, as well, such as helping out friends in dire financial straits.

One can only wonder at Weinzierl's scholarship. He seems to have read everything by and about his subject, published or unpublished, in several languages. He cites obscure legal documents in dusty files, letters from people only marginally concerned with Hofmannsthal, observations about persons Hugo was involved with from people who never knew the poet, and a good deal about his ancestry and offspring. His concise interjections are subtly witty; his terse conclusions, just but humane.

There is no question of Hofmannsthal's artistic achievement, no minimizing of his literary importance. Perhaps indeed, considering their muddy source, the writings emerge more astonishingly crystalline, more transcendent. The book is a testament to human complexity and unpredictability, contradictoriness and contrariness, some of what we all partake of, albeit on nowhere near so grand a scale.

To understand the importance and impact of Weinzierl's revelations, let me cite some exalting testimonials. The great historian Ernst Robert Curtius wrote of Hofmannsthal as "a spiritual-moral authority," of his "aristocratism [sic] of the blood and the instincts." The poet Rudolf Alexander Schroder invoked upon his friend's demise "the twilight of a world become empty" "the shock that grips an entire nation at this bier," in a speech from which Weinzierl also quotes.

Schroder eulogized "the greatness of this pious and self-abnegating, this manly and heroic life." "Here was a poet whose destiny it was to bear the world's burden on frail human shoulders through the stream of time" Further: "We know where his chair stands ready: with the primal fathers, the helpers, the demigods" Such appeared to be the feelings not only of the poet's friends, but also of all friends of poetry.

The distinguished Swiss critic Max Rychner wrote: "He wanted to bear responsibility not only for a mere part, but for the whole.... Placed in the middle, equally close to all, equally distant from all, he was allied to all in direct relationship. It is the position of one who served as a sovereign." Rychner quotes from a Hofmannsthal letter: "My supreme moments of happiness [were] always in total loneliness, without relation to a woman, or altogether to a single being, but equally near to all as at the center of a sphere."

Discussing the play The Difficult One, whose hero is clearly a self-portrait, Rychner wrote, "Count Karl Buhl is difficult because he has an overdelicate conscience in all human matters, which almost paralyzes him in action." He then quotes a remark about Buhl in the play about "a certain something of superiority that encircles the Count."

It is in contradiction of such hagiography that the book distinguishes itself. The Austrian idol is evenhandedly sized up (or down) by Weinzierl, a fellow Viennese, with occasional ironic interjections, but without preconceived animus or resultant Schadenfreude. The aim is not a full-scale biography but, as his subtitle indicates, sketches for a portrait.

The poet ranted against what he called "lappischer Biographismus"--fiddling or foolish biographism (note the derogatory coinage)--and grew enraged at the arrogance of would-be biographers. "He was" Weinzierl begins, "a master in that discipline Hermann Broch called 'total self-concealment,'" where Ich-Verschweigung literally means silence about oneself. The result has been no Hofmannsthal biography in the strict sense to this day.

Weinzierl acknowledges that not everyone was a Hofmannsthal idolator. He quotes Elias Canetti: "Hofmannsthal, who never meant anything to me, whom, on the contrary, I consider immeasurably overrated." And Gottfried Benn, arguably as important as Hofmannsthal, in a letter: "His early poems--wonderful, a lyrical event without question. But he seems not to have got beyond that. He actually experienced nothing. Endured nothing either. An operator, banker's son, with very much borrowed stock."

Over against the poet's contention that a man is to be known only in his writings, Weinzierl quotes the end of the libretto of Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow), which invokes "the eternal secret of the concatenation of everything earthly" of which he proposes to give us an inkling. In the "How," we learn from the Rosenkavalier's Marschallin, there lies the whole difference. "Conceal your life" an entry in Hofmannsthal's Aufzeichnungen (Notes or Jottings), was Hugo's program. "To us," writes Weinzierl, "it is a challenge."

Three aspects, the author tells us, stand in his subject's foreground. The first he calls "the phantasm of Jewish blood," the problem of someone even only a quarter Jewish in Vienna's anti-Semitic society. And society, in another sense, is the second problem: Hofmannsthal's desperate need to be an aristocrat and mingle with the nobility that, rightly or wrongly, he favored. Such adulation, Weinzierl remarks, carries with it the stigma of snobbery and the danger of reactionarism, both of which charges some of Hofmannsthal's deeds and words merited.

The third problem, the biggest, Weinzierl avers, is the mystery of friendship and love, the delicate and vehement, voiced and ineffable feelings between man and woman, man and man, children and parents. When Franz, his eldest son, committed suicide, Hofmannsthal, age fifty-five, died getting ready for his burial. Karl Wolfskehl, a member of the George Circle, exclaimed upon the poet's death, "To die of one's own son, what a symbol of the Europe of yesterday."

This pertinent saying needs elucidation. Hofmannsthal was in love with that Austria, that Europe, that even in his day was already the world of yesterday. When Franz, after a friendly family lunch on a stormy day, shot himself at four in the afternoon--he had been unsuccessful at every undertaking and wanted to avoid being a drain on his father--something more than Franz died with that bullet. The father may have felt that he himself couldn't sustain the kind of future Franz couldn't cope with. It may have meant that there was no room for aesthetes, aristocrats, men with higher aims than looking after a wretched, unemployable son. The days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were indeed over, despite Hofmannsthal's reactionary speechifying about a conservative revolution. The barbarians were at the gates and most of Hugo's beloved aristocrats were set to welcome them.

Though he did not hide his remote Jewish ancestry, Hofmannsthal understandably played it down. But, as Weinzierl quotes Sartre, "A Jew is a man whom the others consider a Jew." Typical is the poet Richard Dehmel's admonition to Hofmannsthal: "I also know about your drop of Jewish blood. It is of great worth to you; I love your wise mind. But not too witty, my dear! Not just witty" In the German, there is wordplay on Geist (mind) and geistreich (witty).

Hofmannsthal's Jewish great-grandfather introduced silk industry and large-scale potash production into Austria, earning him the title Edler, low-level nobility. His son, working for the company's Milan branch, converted early and married a Catholic Italian widow. About the legitimacy of their son, also named Hugo, there is some doubt. There is none about Hugo, Jr., properly Hugo Laurenz August Hofmann Edler von Hofmannsthal. No wonder Octavian, the poet's alter ego in Rosenkavalier, has difficulty remembering his names. Hugo seems to have been conceived during his parents' honeymoon, on which his father learned of his bankruptcy.

That may have contributed to the pathology of the poet's mother, Anna, to whom Hugo was excessively close until her aggravated condition caused his revulsion. He believed that her birth during a revolution, and his own in the sign of potential poverty, were the causes of his becoming a poet.

The book adduces any number of anti-Semitic remarks of Hofmannsthal's. Most damning of them is a letter to the German culture maven Rudolf Pannwitz, whose unworthiness didn't dawn on Hugo till long after initial hero worship. In its throes, he wrote Pannwitz warning him against "a certain intellectual Viennese Jewish milieu" in what Weinzierl calls a tirade close to rant. These "circles, groups, cliques" he wrote, "were for me the worst of the worst."

The rest of the letter, taking up several paragraphs, omits no anti-Semitic stereotype, Weinzierl notes, even as Hofmannsthal admits to his variously mixed blood "with true hatred and horror" as evidence of knowing whereof he speaks. "Fatally" Weinzierl continues, "he who so thundered against Jewishness was always considered a Jew by those whose good opinion he prized." And we are offered numerous examples.

Particularly revelatory is Katia (Mrs. Thomas) Mann's account of Hugo's behavior at the Munich premiere of The Tower, a major work. "He comes across as a comedy figure, an uninterruptedly chattering maitre de plaisir, who all day long restlessly flits from one person to another, in the first place of course from one of the many present aristocrats, ambassadors, attaches, Romanian princesses etc. to another. Truly sad and undignified! And withal he looks--grown stouter and eyeglass-bedizened--altogether like a Jewish lawyer."

Strikingly, we read, all those who praised his aristocratic aura (how proud Hugo was of his von!) were themselves no aristocrats--indeed, most of them were of Jewish descent. In Hofmannsthal's best, though overlong, play, The Difficult Man, as Arthur Schnitzler, an off-and-on friend, remarked, "Hugo's lifelong ailment, snobbishness, comes to its most vehement literary outburst." In another context, commenting on a party, Schnitzler wrote, "Hugo was very amusing, malicious, amiable, false--as usual."

During World War I, after pulling strings to get himself off the front into a safe office job, Hofmannsthal wrote, "For me, it was a real martyrdom not to be on the battlefront." Under the circumstances, even Schnitzler found his jingoism repellent. His worship of Germany was boundless: "Such a people cannot be defeated." In proclaiming Germany's nonmilitaristic spirit, he reached, Weinzierl says, "the level of theater of the absurd."

For himself and his wife Gerry (the subsequently baptized scion of rich Jewish brewers), Hugo acquired by way of permanent domicile a small palace in Rodaun outside Vienna. It was, naturally, in the baroque style; at dinner, you had to wear tails. Hugo's taste in art was reactionary, despising "the horribly perfumed Klimt ... the half-swindler Kokoschka, the vulgar swindler Schiele ... a gruesome gang."

The affluent connoisseur and litterateur Count Harry Kessler--noted diarist and himself of Jewish origin and recent nobility, not to mention closeted homosexuality--was another sometimes close friend, sometimes proscribed foe. Of Hugo, Harry remarked, "he has to earn 5-10,000 Marks to add to the 30 he has. Otherwise he can't write.... The richest of my artist friends, [he] continually mentions and complains about money, evidently a curious remnant of his Jewishness." Perhaps as an ultimate denial of this, Hugo wished to be buried in the garb of a Franciscan monk, and, most likely, was.

There are many witnesses to young Hugo's girlishness. Thus from the novelist Jakob Wassermann: "There was so much femininity in his nature--even delicate womanliness." From another novelist, Hermann Bahr: "Confiding girl's eyes, in which something brooding, hopeful, and questioning commingles with a naive coquetry.... On top of that, the soft, cajoling, unconsciously caressing hand of the great amoureuses." Hofmannsthal's openly homosexual friend Leopold von Andrian styled the young man "of the sensibility of a hysterical woman."

The involvement--unconsummated and grotesque--of teenage Hugo with the older poet Stefan George is well evoked in the book, but known enough not to require quoting here. Needing detailed attention (but requiring way too much space) are the quasi-amorous involvements and correspondences with a succession of young men, which make fascinating reading. After the end of intimacy with the extremely handsome Georg von Franckenstein, known as Bubi (little boy), who was to him "of all things that which binds me to the present most strongly and happily" Hugo smoothly segues into deep affection for the naval officer Eberhard von Bodenhausen, tragically married and an early suicide.

To Bubi, Hugo exalted friendship between men as "the purest and strongest thing that life contains." But to Andrian he wrote, "What often offends me about you is what I formerly was, intensely so, but no longer am" which Andrian disbelieved. Arresting is a letter about the gay British music critic Edward Dent and his followers, "offensive to the spirit" of the Salzburg Festival, which Hofmannsthal helped initiate. "The gentlemen of this sort," he fulminates, "are great gossipmongers, catch in every place whatever is in the air, are informed about everything but never quite correctly, and are above all boundlessly vain." He considered it a great relief when they transferred their activities to Venice, and concluded by dubbing them impotent aunties.

Hofmannsthal's relationship with women, Kessler noted, was that of "a very delicate spectator, a voyeur." The poet's ability to create female figures derives "intuitively from the feminine in his own nature [plus] the externals about women he had observed." Hugo kept trying to marry off male friends to female ones, regardless of their being already married, extolling the virtues of marriage.

He got into quite a nasty squabble with Kessler, whose assistance with the libretto of Rosenkavalier he tried to downplay in the work's dedication to Harry, which the latter understandably resented. After much correspondence, Hugo finally acceded to Harry's wording. Kessler was also instrumental in the plotting of the ballet Josephslegende, for which Hofmannsthal was to claim sole authorship.

Hofmannsthal, the book points out, "was the most sensitive imaginable human barometer. Climate changes irritated him to the point of incapacity to write." After Bodenhausen's death, the young writer Carl J. Burckhardt becomes the chosen friend. Hugo quickly realizes that "we belonged to each other." Carl's nearness "suffuses all my thoughts" and makes the air more breathable. "Intimate and yet very secret to me is what connects us."

Perhaps the most appealing correspondence of Hugo's was with Ottonie Countess Degenfeld-Schonburg. Though platonic, this relationship was the closest Hugo ever came to a love affair, but "Lovingness without monkey love" was his proclaimed motto. Ottonie was the model for the Marschallin and, later, Ariadne, but the erotics remained epistolary.

To his patiently understanding wife, Hugo wrote, "I ponder this incomprehensible alien evil in me that so often torments and annoys you, the dearest thing I have in the world." And also: "To me, marriage is something exalted, truly a sacrament--I wouldn't want to conceive of life without marriage."

He was not much of a father to his children. His younger son, Raimund, successful playboy and adventurer on several continents, twice married upward; his daughter Christiane, widowed by the India scholar Heinrich Zimmer, became in America a popular social worker beloved by all, including me, who occasionally met her. On his elder son Franz's suicide, the father commented, "The poor child could never express himself. His departure, too, was silent." On which Elias Canetti commented, "If only the coldheartedness and indifference expressed in those words had remained unspoken!"

Like a good wife, Getty insisted that Hugo's fatal stroke on the way to Franz's funeral had nothing to do with their son's suicide; Weinzierl calls that "consolatory self-deception." Christiane's comment was, "That doesn't accord with us at all.... That's like a fate from the House of Atreus."

"Only he who creates the most delicate thing can create the strongest" is a thought I find in Hofmannsthal's Jottings. Maybe so, but powerful work can emanate, as this valuable book documents, from a very frail and fallible individual.

(1) Hofmannsthal: Skizzen zu seinem Bild, by Ulrich Weinzierl; Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 318 pages, EUR 21,50.