Two Novellas by Arthur Schnitzler

Late Fame

In Late Fame, Eduard Saxberger is an unmarried civil servant in Vienna; he's approaching seventy. His life is quiet, but he has a few friends he meets regularly at his favorite restaurant.

Forty years ago he published a book of poetry The Wanderers which sank without notice; but in the 1890s, young poet Wolfgang Meier finds the book again, loves it, hunts down the aging Saxberger, and draws him into his circle of young literati. Late Fame has come to Saxberger.

At first it's nice. None of his restaurant regular friends knew he once had aspirations to poetry; he scarcely believed it himself anymore, but now Meier and his circle are telling him he's inspirational. Fräulein Gasteiner, the actress in the group, flirts with him, and the circle organize a reading and wouldn't he write something new to be the star of the evening?

Of an earlier draft, Schnitzler wrote in his diary, "...end not sad enough." You'll have to see if you think the end is now sad enough, but it's not as sad as it possibly could be, and there's definitely humor in the middle parts.

The younger characters in the novella in the novella are partly caricatures of the Jung-Wien group of the 1890s in Vienna, of which Schnitzler himself was a young member. But the novella's artists are a little more hapless than the Jung-Wien group, which did have some notable successes among its members: Schnitzler himself as well as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and (for a while) Karl Kraus.

The novella was written at the time it was set for a weekly magazine Die Zeit (not connected as far as I can tell to the current German newspaper) but it was deemed too long for that and so it never appeared while Schnitzler was alive. His papers were rescued with the help of the British embassy in the aftermath of Anschluss; otherwise it would have been lost. It came out in English in 2015 and is translated by Alexander Starritt with an afterword.

Fräulein Else

Else is a nineteen-year-old girl staying a vacation spot in the Italian Alps; she's chaperoned by an aunt and her cousin is also present, but her parents are at home in Vienna. A nice life, right? Well, not entirely.

A letter arrives from her mother--written at the instigation of her father--asking Else to ask Herr von Dorsday for money. The situation is desperate; her father, a society lawyer, has been caught pilfering from a trust he administers in order to feed his gambling habit; if the money isn't restored in a few days, he'll be taken up for embezzlement, which means dishonorable jail or an honorable-ish suicide. Hours later a telegram comes from her father saying even more money is needed.

Herr von Dorsday is ostensibly a friend of her father, if her father still has any friends; his gambling compulsion and consequent need to sponge is well-known in Viennese society. And worse, what everyone knows, including both Else and her father, is that Herr von Dorsday is an old roué, who can't keep his hands off the girls. Does her father want Else to ask because it's an emergency and the personal touch is better? Or does he figure the 'personal touch' is better and it's Else who will be touched?

The novel is told in stream of consciousness--Else's--and it follows every twist and turn of her thought throughout this impossible situation she's been thrown into. I found it very convincing, but also very painful. So, though it's impressive, you might want to be sure to save it for a moment you can bear to read such a thing. It is timely, though, as Harvey Weinstein (hopefully!) is going off to jail.

The novella came out in German in 1924. My copy is from Pushkin Press and is translated by F. H. Lyon.

Collected Arthur Schnitzler on the blog.

Unsettled times. Keep well!

Arthur Schnitzler's Casanova's Return To Venice

Casanova (yes, that Casanova) has been exiled from his home town of Venice for general bad behavior and he's now a middle-aged man of fifty-three; his looks show the fast life he's been living, as does his pocketbook. All he wants to do, he says, is get back to Venice. There's a chance his friends at home will be able to undo his exile, and he's living in a cheap inn in Mantua near to Venice waiting for what he hopes will be a favorable letter.

While he's waiting he runs into Olivo, an old friend and now a successful vintner, whom Casanova had helped to set up once upon a time and with whose wife, Amalia, he slept before Olivo and Amalia were married. Olivo invites Casanova to his vineyard estate at least for those days he's waiting for the letter. Casanova reluctantly agrees.

Casanova is an aging lecher who says all he wants to do his write his pamphlet against Voltaire and go home, but once in the country, there is Amalia, still longing for Casanova, Amalia's daughter, the neighboring Marchesa, and above all Amalia's niece to provide temptations and engender plots.

Schnitzler was an Austrian playwright and novelist with his first works appearing in the late 1800s. He's perhaps best known for his play La Ronde, with scenes in which A has just slept with B, B with C, and so on up to J, completing the circle at the end when we learn J has slept with A. It was made into a movie a couple of times. This earned him no friends in conservative circles, but Schnitzler was enormously successful at the time. Writing about Casanova hardly qualifies as a breach of taste for him.

This work has a melancholy charm to it that was appealing. Casanova is neither condemned exactly, nor praised. He is, however, left lesser than he started. He's thinking of a literary career, a polemic against Voltaire that will make his name, but which everyone knows will go nowhere. His famous work, yet to come at the time the novella is set, The Story of My Life, is alluded to. Without that, Casanova would probably be no more than a curious footnote instead of the catchword for his type.

The work came out originally in 1918. (This translation is from 1930 by Ilsa Barea.) I don't know what happened to Schnitzler during World War I, but I have to assume the melancholy tone is influenced by the time of its writing.

Near the top of my reading pile at the moment is Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, the story of someone else (Marco Polo) longing to return to Venice. It might make an interesting comparison.