Pierre Loving: Time Robs Schnitzler of Anatole, 7. 12. 1929

Time Robs Schnitzler of Anatole
Dramatist Saddened by Tragic Death of Daughter
Disavows Gayety
By Pierre Loving
A brief letter from Arthur Schnitzler, who appeared in the news columns recently as a tragic figure bowed over the deathbed of a beloved child, served to recall to me the tender relation between daughter and father which I had witnessed in the dramatist’s home several years ago, although my friend’s communication touched on another, a less personal matter. As I glanced at the words I conjured up the (for me) memorable visit to his home on Sternwartestrasse in the fashionable new cottage section of Vienna, and the admonition, kindly and sage, and afterward long pondered, which he then gave me.
I had invited the »finest portraitist of the old Austrian regime,« as Dr. Schnitzler has often been called, to furnish an introduction to a charming racy book of memoirs by Countess Hermynia zur Muhlen, who is a sort of runaway princess, a niece of Archduke Ferdinand, who was assassinated at Sarajevo. Countess zur Muhlen is always witty and engaging, acerb and thoroughly objective in her revelations of pre-war Austria and Russia, into which country she married; and a tone of indulgent irony permeates her easy style. This being so, it was but natural to call on Arthur Schnitzler, also gentle and ironical and tout-a-fait Viennois, to supply an introduction to the American edition of the book.
Dr. Schnitzler in reply to my request pleaded the urgency of other work, although he admitted that he was strongly tempted. He was, of course, familiar with the milieu and the characters involved, but his role was that of the creative artist. He declined gracefully. To the production of novels and plays he must, he felt, henceforth exclusively devote himself, as in the past. Behind his prosaic words I glimpsed the phantasmal outline of his grief over a dead daughter.
His Spirit Crushed
That daughter, it will be remembered, had but recently married an Italian nobleman, and a few weeks after her wedding she committed suicide in Venice. Dr. Schnitzler chartered a special plane and flew to her bedside, but it was too late. The girl was dead. Broken in spirit, his face older and more tired, his eyes sadder, Schnitzler returned to Vienna and withdrew more and more deeply within himself. Of course, he still has his only son, a promising young actor, whom he sees nowadays from time to time. I cannot forget his sigh when he said: »It is hard to work in peace nowadays, free from crushing anxiety. . . .  It is not like before the war.« And I sometimes wonder if old age and a consciousness of great work well done will at last bring him the healing gift of millennial peace.
Circumstances had, of course, been relentless toward him, as toward many others, during the spare and bitter war years and during the inflation of the Austrian crown and the German mark. His work was practically at a standstill. The royalties from the output of a lifetime – about twenty volumes of novels and plays in all – amounted to exactly  5. This was his income from the Fischer verlag, his German publishers.
Turkenschanz Park, near Schnitzler’s home, is one of the loveliest spots in Vienna. As the name indicates, the Turks, during their prolonged investment of the city, had built a fort there.
A short, stout man with curly brown hair and beard, profusely dusted with gray, came to meet me. His forehead was narrow, lined, his nose long and well modeled, his lips thick and full. But his most arresting feature was his eyes – they were deep-sunk and had penumbra; they where by no means cynical, as one might perhaps expect from some of his plays, but weary, self-effacing, asking little of people and things. He was well past sixty.
Thirty Years After »Anatole«
He greeted me cordially. The room, oblong in shape and not very large, was lined with rows of beautifully bound books. Near the window stood a tall desk with a sloping top like a shutter, surmounted by a porcelain figure of Goethe in Schlafrock. At this desk, he later told me, he had done most of his writing, standing up. Fully thirty-two years had elapsed since »Anatole,« subtitled a Comedy of Seduction, had been first produced, and more than thirty years since he wrote »Reigen,« that devastating cycle of dialogues concerned with the disillusions of love.
Since that time his irony has grown gentler and more mature, but he never gave up his role, which he filled in those two youthful works, of a subtle diagnostician of men and women, never shallow, never witty for wit’s sake alone. Except in »The Green CockatooSchnitzler has never proved himself a scintillating dramatist steeped in the waters of the eighteenth century. He had written »Professor Bernhardi,« »Light of Love,« »The Country of the Soul,« »Bertha Garlan,« »Lieutenant Gustl,«, »The Road to the Open,« »Casanova’s Homecoming« – innumerable plays, novels and short stories, a small handful of which I had the pleasure of translating into English when I was something under twenty, and each one dealing with this or that phase of love of man’s weakness and man’s inevitable illusions of pride, love and ambition.
He sketched his beginnings as a writer for me: how, far back in the eighties and nineties, he and the late Hugo von Hofmannsthal were closely associated, Von Hofmannsthal writing exquisite Parnassian poetry and Schnitzler emerging as a realistic satirist, witty and graceful, softening the naturalist current which had reached Vienna via Berlin and Paris.
»I owe my recognition,« he said, »to a young journalist on the Neue Freie Presse. He at once perceived the importance of the new movement and my relation to it. He pointed out that I gazed into the human soul and made people speak as though they were under the influence of Professor Charcot, the French psychologist, who at that time used hypnotism in his cures. Professor Charcot’s experiments affected me deeply and set me thinking, as they also did Professor Freud, who was, I believe, his assistant in Paris then. The direct outcome of this influence may be seen in ›Anatole,‹ where hypnotism is employed as a dramatic device. Both as an artist and a physician, however, I felt that hypnotism was inadequate in the long run. But it did help me in some way to get an insight into the inner life of my characters. ›Reigen‹ was written as a series of case histories. Does this surprise you? The question I asked myself was this: Clinically speaking, how do certain people, drawn from all classes, act under the stress of sexual passion? I have been accused of having produced a kind of sublimated joke. Ah, not at all. The ›Hands Around‹ idea was best fitted to carry out my purpose.«
»As a poet he is unequaled, but I find his plays a little lacking in humanity. Von Hofmannsthal is the modern counterpart of Ben Jonson – if you will make huge allowances for the differences of temperament and age. You must remember that his prose comedies have no kinship with his verse. But he is scholarly, even wonderfully erudite, and he is quick to see the humors in people. This is what concerns him most and in this trait he comes closest to the Elizabethan. He is a good example of the playwright of humors; but realistic comedy, when all is said and done, is not his special field. He is essentially a poet, a great dramatic poet, as his librettos written for Strauss’s music show, and one of the finest Austria has ever produced.«
Since these words were spoken, the two lifelong friends, as everybody knows, have suffered kindred tragedies, tragedies of fate with nothing less than a Sophoclean touch, in their own lives. Schnitzler’s daughter and Von Hofmannsthal’s young son committed suicide within a short period of each other. In Von Hofmannsthal’s case the shock of the catastrophe was the immediate cause of the poet’s death.
After talking to Schnitzler for a half hour or so, I said to him:
»This is not an interview, Herr Doktor. I shall not use it unless –«
»You may use whatever I say,« he replied, smiling. »But if you are wise you will wait several years. Interviewers have come to me from all over the world – and misrepresented me most horribly. I should like somebody who really knows me to write an interview. Now take this, for example« – and he strode over to his desk and drew out a newspaper clipping – »here is an interview from a New York newspaper. It states, to begin with, that I am a man-about-town, that I attend all the redouts, that I am invariably to be seen at first nights and all important social functions; that I am to be seen at Sacher’s every single night, drinking champagne or smoking an after-dinner cigar. This, as you know, is simply tissue of colorful lies. Of course I may now and then attend a first night – but then I am a dramatist. For me the main difference between the pre-war period and the present is this: Previously I had leisure and peace in which to work. Now, due to the state of social and political unrest, I am a good deal distracted, as any writer living in Vienna must be.«
As I rose to leave I turned to my host and asked: »Why is it, do you think, that your books have not had a steady sale in America
»I believe I am appreciated in America,« he replied, »but so far I do not think I have had a fair chance. But the situation is about to change. The American public is waking up to the value of a psychological method in the delineation of character. Of course, it is easier for any audience to swallow light raillery or gay cynicism rather than ripe irony. Irony implies, as you know, a certain amount of intellectual sophistication. Perhaps this explains why my Vienna and Budapest colleagues are more successful on the New York stage than I am. . . .  While wandering about Vienna,« he called after me as I was going out, »don’t forget to read Stifter and Grillparzer
Shortly afterward I called on a well-known Viennese lady who had figured brilliantly in pre-war society. I inquired about the authenticity of Dr. Schnitzler’s characters.
»In Schnitzler,« I said, »there is always delicate charm, light amour and so on. Did the sex game, as his plays imply, once take up a good part of the lives of the Viennese
The lady laughed, her eyes suddenly grown youthful and gay. »Oh, Schnitzler is very, very clever,« she said, extending toward me a platter heaped up with rich pastry. »He’s profound, and, of course, almost any woman will recognize herself in one, at least, of his characters. I hear he’s been translated into every language. And he deserves to be, for he is universal – a great writer.« She paused. Her eyes glistened. »But,« she went on »you mustn’t take him too literally. Most of us women, you know, dream all our lives of those gay infidelities which he so delicately portrays. But, alas! they never come to us. Ah, well!« she sighed.