Old Masters (6 page)

That
Stifter,
he said yesterday, an author I myself had always so enormously revered that it became more like artistic addiction, is just as bad a writer on closer examination as Bruckner, on intensive listening, is a bad if not a lousy composer. Stifter writes in a terrible style, one which grammatically is beneath contempt, and Bruckner has similarly slipped the reins with his chaotically wild, and even in old age, religiously pubertal intoxication of sounds. I have revered Stifter for decades without actually concerning myself with him accurately or radically. When, about a year ago, I did concern myself accurately and radically with Stifter, I could not believe my eyes and ears. Such faulty and bungled German or Austrian, whichever you prefer, I had never before read in my whole intellectual life in an author who is, of all things, famous today for his precise and clear prose. Stifter's prose is anything but precise and it is the least clear I have come across, it is packed with distorted metaphors and faulty and confused ideas, and I really wonder why this provincial dilettante, who at any rate was an inspector of schools in Upper Austria, is today revered to such an extent by writers, and above all by the younger writers, and not by any means by the least known or least noticed ones. I believe that none of these people has ever really read Stifter but they have always only venerated him blindly, that they have always only heard of him but never really read him, like myself. As I was truly reading Stifter a year ago, that
grandmaster
of prose writing,
as he is called, I felt disgusted with myself for ever having revered this bungler of a writer, or indeed loved him. I had read Stifter in my youth and my memory of him had been based on these reading experiences. I had read Stifter between the ages of twelve and sixteen, at a time when I was totally uncritical. After that I never reexamined Stifter. For very long stretches of his prose Stifter is an unbearable chatterbox, he has an incompetent and, which is most despicable, a slovenly style and he is moreover, in actual fact, the most boring and mendacious author in the whole of German literature. Stifter's prose, which is reputed to be pregnant and precise, is in fact woolly, helpless and irresponsible, and pervaded by a
petit-bourgeois
sentimentality and a
petit-bourgeois
gaucherie that turns one's stomach at the reading of
Witiko
or
The Papers of My Great-grandfather. The Papers of My Great-grandfather,
in particular, is, from the very first few lines, an attempt to present a recklessly spun-out, sentimental and boring prose full of internal and external mistakes as a work of art, when it is nothing but a
petitbourgeois
concoction from Linz. But then it would be quite inconceivable that a
petit-bourgeois
provincial dump like Linz, which has, since the days of Kepler, remained a provincial hole veritably crying out to high heaven, which has an opera house where they cannot sing, a theatre where they cannot act, painters who cannot paint and writers who cannot write, should suddenly give birth to a genius — and Stifter is universally described as one. Stifter is no genius, Stifter is a philistine living a cramped life and a musty
petit
bourgeois
and schoolmaster writing in a cramped style, who did not even meet the minimum requirements of the language, let alone was able to produce works of art, Reger said. All in all, he said, Stifter is one of the greatest disappointments of my artistic life. Every third or at least every fourth sentence of Stifter's is wrong, every other or every third metaphor is a failure, and Stifter's mind generally, at least in his literary writings, is a mediocre mind. Stifter in fact is one of the most unimaginative writers who ever wrote anything and one of the most antipoetical and unpoetical ones to boot. But readers and literary scholars have always been taken in by that man Stifter. The fact that the man, towards the end of his life, killed himself changes nothing about his absolute mediocrity. I do not know any writer in the world who is such a dilettante and a bungler, and moreover so blinkered and narrow-minded as Stifter, and so world-famous at the same time. Things are much the same with Anton Bruckner, Reger said; with his perverse fear of God and his obsession with Catholicism he left Upper Austria for Vienna and totally surrendered himself to the emperor and to God. Bruckner was no genius either. His music is confused and just as unclear and bungled as Stifter's prose. But whereas Stifter today, strictly speaking, is only the dead paper of German literary scholars, Bruckner is moving everyone to tears. Bruckner's surge of sound has conquered the world, one might say, sentimentality and false pompousness are celebrating triumphs with Bruckner. Bruckner is just as slovenly a composer as Stifter is a slovenly writer, both of them share that Upper Austrian slovenliness. Both of them make so-called devout art which in fact is a public danger, Reger said. Kepler, of course, was quite a lad, Reger said yesterday, but then he was no Upper Austrian but from Württemberg; Adalbert Stifter and Anton Bruckner ultimately only produced literary and musical refuse. Anyone appreciating Bach and Mozart, and Handel and Haydn, he said, must reject people like Bruckner as a matter of course, he need not despise them, but he must reject them. And anyone appreciating Goethe and Kleist and Novalis and Schopenhauer, must reject Stifter but he need not despise Stifter. Whoever loves Goethe cannot at the same time love Stifter, Goethe made things difficult for himself, Stifter always made them too easy for himself. The most despicable thing, Reger said yesterday, is that Stifter, of all people, was a feared school official, moreover a school official in a superior position, and that he wrote in such a slovenly manner as none of his pupils would have been allowed to get away with. One page of Stifter, submitted to Stifter by one of his pupils, would have been totally massacred by Stifter with his red pencil, he said, that is the truth. Once we start reading Stifter with a red pencil there is no end to our correcting mistakes, Reger said. This is not a genius taking up his pen but a woeful incompetent. If ever there was such a concept as tasteless, dull and sentimental and pointless literature, then it applies exactly to what Stifter has written. Stifter's writing is no art, and what he has to say is dishonest in the most revolting fashion. It is not for nothing that Stifter is read mainly in their homes by the wives and widows of officials yawning with boredom at the passage of their day, he said, and by nurses during off-duty hours and by nuns in their convents. A genuinely thinking person cannot read Stifter. I believe that the people who estimate Stifter so highly, so enormously highly, have no idea of Stifter. All our writers nowadays, without exception, speak and write enthusiastically about Stifter and follow him as if he were the literary god of the present age. Either these people are stupid and lack all appreciation of art, or else they do not understand anything about literature, or else, which unfortunately I am bound to believe, they never read Stifter, he said. You must not talk to me about Stifter or Bruckner, he said, certainly not in connection with art or with what I understand by art. The one is a prose blurrer, he said, the other a music blurrer. Poor Upper Austria, he said, really believing that it has produced two of the greatest geniuses, while in fact it has produced only two boundlessly overrated duds, one literary and the other musical. When I consider how the Austrian schoolmistresses and nuns have their Stifter lying on their bedside tables, as an art icon, next to their combs and next to their toe-nail clippers, and I when I consider how the heads of state burst into tears while listening to a Bruckner symphony, I feel quite sick, he said. Art is the most sublime and the most revolting thing simultaneously, he said. But we must make ourselves believe that there is high art and the highest art, he said, otherwise we should despair. Even though we know that all art ends in gaucherie and in ludicrousness and in the refuse of history, like everything else, we must, with
downright self-assurance,
believe in high and in the highest art, he said. We realize what it is, a bungled, failed art, but we need not always hold this realization before us, because in that case we should inevitably perish, he said. To return to Stifter once more, he said, there are a large number of writers today who invoke Stifter. These writers invoke an absolute dilettante writer who throughout his life as a writer has done nothing but abuse nature. Stifter can be accused of absolute abuse of nature, Reger said yesterday. He wanted to be a seer as a writer but in actual fact he was a blind man as a writer, Reger said. Everything about Stifter is officious, virginally gawky; Stifter wrote an unbearable provincial raised-finger kind of prose, Reger said, nothing else. Stifter's descriptions of nature are always extolled. Never has nature been so misconstrued as in Stifter's descriptions, nor indeed is it as boring as he makes us believe on his patient pages, Reger said. Stifter is nothing but a literary fuss-pot whose artless pen paralyses nature and hence also the reader, where in reality and in truth nature is vital and eventful. Stifter covered everything with his
petit-bourgeois
veil and all but stifled it, that is the truth. In reality he cannot describe a tree, nor a song bird, nor a torrential river, that is the truth. He tries to bring something to life for us and only paralyses it, he wants to produce brilliance and only dulls it, that is the truth. Stifter makes nature monotonous and his characters insensitive and insipid, he knows nothing and he invents nothing, and what he describes, because he is solely a describer and nothing else, he describes with boundless naïveté. He has the quality of poor painters, Reger says, who for God knows what reasons have come to fame and who are hanging on the walls everywhere also in this institution, you need only think of Dürer and of those hundreds of mediocre products of which their frames are worth a lot more than they are. All these paintings are admired, but the admirers do not know why, just as Stifter is read and admired without his readers knowing why. The most mysterious thing about Stifter is his fame, Reger said, because his literature is anything but mysterious. As for the so-called great ones, we dissolve them, disintegrate them in time, and reduce them, he said, the great painters, the great musicians, the great writers, because we cannot live with their greatness, because we think, and think everything through to the end, he said. But Stifter was and is not great and therefore he is no example of this process. Stifter is merely an example of an artist being venerated as great for decades, and indeed loved, by a person, in fact by a person
addicted
to veneration and love, without ever having been great. In the disillusionment we experience upon discovering that the greatness of the one we have venerated and loved is no greatness at all and never was such greatness, but only an imagined greatness and is in fact pettiness, and indeed baseness, we experience the merciless pangs of the deceived. We quite simply pay the price, Reger said, for having lent ourselves to blindly accepting an object, moreover for years and decades and possibly for a lifetime, and even to venerating and loving it, without time and again putting it to the test. If only, let us say, thirty or even twenty years ago, or fifteen years ago, I had put Stifter to the test I should have saved myself this late disappointment. Altogether we should never say this or that person is the thing, and will then remain the thing for all time, we should again and again put all artists to the test, because we keep developing our art scholarship and our artistic taste, that is unquestionable. The only good thing by Stifter are his letters, Reger said, everything else is worthless. But literary scholarship will no doubt continue to concern itself with Stifter for a long time to come, after all it is obsessed by such literary idols as Adalbert Stifter who, even if they do not go down into
eternal prose,
will
long help these scholars to earn their crust of bread in the most agreeable way. Once or twice I took the trouble of giving various people, very clever and less clever people, very perceptive ones and less perceptive ones, a book by Stifter to read, such as
Colourful Stones, The Condor
or
Brigitta,
or
those
Papers of My Great-grandfather,
and then questioned those people as to whether they had liked what they had read, demanding an honest answer. And all these people, compelled by me to give an honest answer, told me they had
not
liked it, that they had been
infinitely disappointed,
that basically it had said nothing, but absolutely nothing, to them, they were all simply amazed that a person who wrote such brainless works, and moreover had nothing to communicate, could become so famous. That
Stifter
experiment
amused me again and again for some time, he said, the fact that I conducted this
Stifter
test,
as I called it. In exactly the same way I sometimes ask people if they really like Titian, for instance the
Madonna with the Cherries.
Not a single person I asked ever liked the picture, they all admired it solely because of its fame, it did not really say anything to any of them. But I do not wish to say that I am likening Stifter to Titian, that would be quite absurd, Reger said. The literary scholars are not only infatuated with Stifter, they are crazy about Stifter. I think the literary scholars apply an absolutely inadequate yardstick where Stifter is concerned. They write more about Stifter than about any other author of his period, and when we read
what
they write about Stifter we have to assume that they have either read nothing of Stifter or else have read everything only quite superficially. Nature is now enjoying a boom, Reger said yesterday, that is why Stifter is now enjoying a boom. Anything to do with nature is now very much in vogue, Reger said yesterday, that is why Sri fter is now greatly, or more than greatly, in vogue. The forest is now greatly in vogue, mountain streams are now greatly in vogue. Stifter bores everybody to death yet in some fatal manner is now greatly in vogue, Reger said. Sentimentality altogether, that is the terrible thing, is now greatly in vogue, just as everything else that is kitsch is now greatly in vogue; from the mid-seventies to this day in the mid-eighties sentimentality and kitsch have been greatly in vogue — greatly in vogue in literature, in painting, and also in music. Never before has so much sentimental kitsch been written as now in the eighties, never before has there been so much kitschy