Young Torless (2 page)

The master metaphor that Musil uses for all these incommensurabilities comes from Törless’s studies in mathematics. Living side by side with the real numbers, and somehow made to interlock with them by the operations of mathematical reasoning, are the imaginary numbers, numbers which have no referent in the real world. Adults, led by Törless’s teachers, seem to have no trouble in bringing together the domains of the real and the imaginary (to Törless the vertiginously unimaginable). In the euphoric speech he makes to the assembled teachers at the end of the book, Törless claims to have resolved this confusion in his mind (‘I know that I was indeed mistaken’) and to have emerged safely into young adulthood (‘I’m not afraid of anything any more. I know: things are things and will remain so for ever’). His teachers understand nothing of what he says: they have either never had experiences like his, or have tightly repressed them. Törless is unusual in the thoroughness with which he has faced - or been driven to face - the darkness within; whether or not we regard as self-betrayal his later adoption of the pose of what Musil as narrator calls the ‘aesthetically inclined intellectual’, he is certainly, in his confused youth (‘confusion’,
Verwirrung,
is a word Musil uses with continual irony), the figure of the artist in the modern world, exploring the remoter shores of experience and bringing back his reports. 

Despite the amoralism that makes
Young Törless
so much a product of its age, the moral questions raised by the story will not go away. Beineberg, the more intellectually inclined of Törless’s comrades, has a vulgar-Nietzschean, proto-Fascist justification for what they do to Basini: the three of them belong to a new generation to which the old rules do not apply (‘the soul has changed’); as for pity, pity is one of the lower impulses and must be conquered. Törless is not Beineberg. Nevertheless, his own particular perversity — making Basini talk about what has been done to him - is morally no better than the whippings the other two carry out; while in his own homosexual acts with Basini he is at pains to show the boy no tenderness. 

In a world in which there are no more God-given rules, in which it has fallen to the philosopher-artist to give the lead, should the artist’s explorations include acting out his own darker impulses, seeing where they will take him? Does art always trump morality? This early work of Musil’s offers the question, but answers it in only in the most uncertain way. 

Musil did not disown
Young Törless
. On the contrary, he continued to look back with surprise at what he had been able to achieve, even at a technical level, at so early an age. The master metaphor of the book, with its implication that the foundations of our real, reasonable, everyday world have no real, reasonable existence, continues to be explored in
The Man without Qualities,
though in a spirit more of paradox and irony than of anguish. ‘A person must believe he is something more in order to be capable of being what he is,’ suggests Ulrich, the central character. ‘The present is nothing but a hypothesis that one has not yet finished with.’ Musil’s work, from beginning to end, is of a piece: the evolving record of a confrontation between a man of supremely intelligent sensibility and the times that gave birth to him, times he would justly call ‘accursed’.

“In some strange way we devalue things as soon as we give utterance to them. We believe we have dived to the uttermost depths of the abyss, and yet when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pallid finger-tips no longer resembles the sea from which it came. We think we have discovered a hoard of wonderful treasure-trove, yet when we emerge again into the light of day we see that all we have brought back with us is false stones and chips of glass. But for all this, the treasure goes on glimmering in the darkness, unchanged.”

MAETERLINCK

It was a small station on the long railroad to Russia. Four parallel lines of iron rails extended endlessly in each direction, on the yellow gravel of the broad track-each fringed, as with a dirty shadow, with the dark strip burnt into
the ground by steam and fumes.
Behind the station, a low oil-painted building, there was a broad, worn dirt-road leading up to the railway embankment. It merged into the trampled ground, its edges indicated only by the two rows of acacia trees that flanked it drearily, their thirsty leaves suffocated by dust and soot.

Perhaps it was these sad colours, or perhaps it was the wan, exhausted light of the afternoon sun, drained of its strength by the haze: there was something indifferent, lifeless, and mechanical about objects and human beings here, as though they were all part of a scene in a puppet-theatre. From time to time, at regular intervals, the station-master stepped out of his office and, always with the same turn of his head, glanced up the long line towards the signal-box, where the signals still failed to indicate the approach of the express each time, which had been delayed for a long time at the frontier; then, always with the very same movement of his arm, he would pull out his pocket-watch and, then, shaking his head, he would disappear again: just so do the figures on ancient towerclocks appear and disappear again with the striking of the hour.

On the broad, well-trodden strip of ground between the railwayline and the station building a gay company of young men was strolling up and down, walking to right and to left of a middle-aged couple who were the centre of the somewhat noisy conversation. But even the blitheness of this group did not ring quite true; it was as if their merry laughter fell into silence only a few paces away, almost as if it had run into some invisible but solid obstacle and there sunk to the ground.

Frau Hofrat Törless-this was the lady, perhaps forty years of age-wore a thick veil concealing her sad eyes, which were a little reddened from weeping. This was a leave-taking. And she found it hard, yet once again, having to leave her only child among strangers for so long a period, without any chance to watch protectively over her darling.

For the little town lay far away from the capital, in the eastern territories of the empire, in thinly populated, dry arable country.

The reason why Frau Törless had to leave her boy in this remote and inhospitable outlandish district was that in this town there was a celebrated boarding-school, which in the previous century had developed out of a religious foundation and had since remained where it was, doubtless in order to safeguard the young generation, in its years of awakening, from the corrupting influences of a large city.

It was here that the sons of the best families in the country received their education, going on then to the university, or into the army or the service of the State; in all such careers, as well as for general social reasons, it was a particular advantage to have been educated at W.

Four years previously this consideration had caused Hofrat and Frau Törless to yield to their son's ambitious plea and arrange for him to enter this school.

This decision afterwards cost many tears. For almost from the first moment when the doors of the school closed behind him with irrevocable finality, little Törless suffered from frightful, agonizing homesickness. Neither lessons, nor games on the wide luxuriant grasslands of the park, nor the other distractions that the school offered its inmates, could hold his attention; he took almost no interest in these things. He saw everything only as through a veil and even during the day often had trouble in gulping down an obstinately rising sob; at night he always cried himself to sleep.

He wrote letters home almost daily, and he lived only in these letters; everything else he did seemed to him only a shadowy, unmeaning string of events, indifferent stations on his way, like the marking of the hours on a clock-face. But when he wrote he felt within himself something that made him distinct, that set him apart; something in him rose, like an island of miraculous suns and flashing colours, out of the ocean of grey sensations that lapped around him, cold and indifferent, day after day. And when by day, at games or in class, he remembered that he would write his letter in the evening, it was as though he were wearing, hidden on his person, fastened to an invisible chain, a golden key with which, as soon as no one was looking, he would open the gate leading into marvellous gardens.

The remarkable thing about it was that this sudden consuming fondness for his parents was for himself something new and disconcerting. He had never imagined such a thing before, he had gone to boarding-school gladly and of his own free will, indeed he had laughed when at their first leave-taking his mother had been unable to check her tears; and only later, when he had been on his own for some days and been getting on comparatively well, did it gush up in him suddenly and with elemental force.

He took it for homesickness and believed he was missing his parents. But it was in reality something much more indefinable and complex. For the object of this longing, the image of his parents, actually ceased to have any place in it at all: I mean that certain plastic, physical memory of a loved person which is not merely remembrance but something speaking to all the senses and preserved in all the senses, so that one cannot do anything without feeling the other person silent and invisible at one's side. This soon faded out, like a resonance that vibrates only for a while. In other words, by that time Törless could no longer conjure up before his eyes the image of his 'dear, dear parents'-as he usually called them in his thoughts. If he tried to do so, what rose up in its place was the boundless grief and longing from which he suffered so much and which yet held him in its spell, its hot flames causing him both agony and rapture. And so the thought of his parents more and more became a mere pretext, an external means to set going this egoistic suffering in him, which enclosed him in his voluptuous pride as in the seclusion of a chapel where, surrounded by hundreds of flickering candles and hundreds of eyes gazing down from sacred images, incense was wafted among the writhing flagellants ...

Later, as his 'homesickness' became less violent and gradually passed off, this, its real character, began to show rather more clearly. For in its place there did not come the contentment that might have been expected; on the contrary, what it left in young Törless's soul was a void. And this nothingness, this emptiness in himself, made him realise that it was no mere yearning he had lost, but something positive, a spiritual force, something that had flowered in him under the guise of grief.

But now it was all over, and this well-spring of a first sublime bliss had made itself known to him only by its drying up.

At this time the passionate evidence of the soul's awakening vanished out of his letters, and in its place came detailed descriptions of life at school and the new friends he had made.

He himself felt impoverished by this change, and bare, like a little tree experiencing its first winter after its first still fruitless blossoming.

But his parents were glad. They loved him with strong, unthinking, animal affection. Every time after he had been home on holiday from boarding-school, and gone away again, to the Frau Hofrat the house once more seemed empty and deserted, and for some days after each of these visits it was with tears in her eyes that she went through the rooms, here and there caressing some object on which the boy's gaze had rested or which his fingers had held. And both parents would have let themselves be torn to pieces for his sake.

The clumsy pathos and passionate, mutinous sorrow of his letters had given them grievous concern and kept them in a state of high-pitched sensitiveness; the blithe, contented light-heartedness that followed upon it gladdened them again and, feeling that now a crisis had been surmounted, they did all they could to encourage this new mood.

Neither in the one phase nor in the other did they recognise the symptoms of a definite psychological development; on the contrary, they accepted both the anguish and its appeasement as merely a natural consequence of the situation. It escaped them that a young human being, all on his own, had made his first, unsuccessful attempt to develop the forces of his inner life.

* * *

Törless, however, now felt very dissatisfied and groped this way and that, in vain, for something new that might serve as a support to him.

* * *

At this period there was an episode symptomatic of something still germinating in Törless, which was to develop significantly in him later.

What happened was this: one day the youthful Prince H. entered the school, a scion of one of the oldest, most influential, and most conservative noble families in the empire.

All the others thought him boring, and found his gentle gaze affected; the manner in which he stood with one hip jutting forward and, while talking, languidly interlocked and unlocked his fingers, they mocked as effeminate. But what chiefly aroused their scorn was that he had been brought to the school not by his parents but by his former tutor, a doctor of divinity who was a member of a religious order.

On Törless, however, he made a strong impression from the very first moment. Perhaps the fact that he was a prince and by birth entitled to move in Court circles had something to do with it; but however that might be, he was a different kind of person for Törless to get to know.

The silence and tranquillity of an ancient and noble country seat, and of devotional exercises, seemed somehow to cling about him still. When he walked, it was with smooth, lithe movements and with that faintly diffident attitude of withdrawal, that contraction of the body, which comes from being accustomed to walking very erect through a succession of vast, empty rooms, where any other sort of person seems to bump heavily against invisible corners of the empty space around him.

And so for Törless acquaintance with the prince became a source of exquisite psychological enjoyment. It laid the foundations in him of that kind of knowledge of human nature which teaches one to recognise and appreciate another person by the cadence of his voice, by the way he picks up and handles a thing, even, indeed, by the timbre of his silences and the expressiveness of his bodily attitude in adjusting himself to a space, a setting-in other words, by that mobile, scarcely tangible, and yet essential, integral way of being a human entity, a spirit, that way of being it which encloses the core, the palpable and debatable aspect of him, as flesh encloses the mere bones-and in so appreciating to prefigure for oneself the mental aspect of his personality.

During this brief period Törless lived as in an idyll. He was not put out by his new friend's devoutness, which was really something quite alien to him, coming as he did from a free-thinking middle-class family. He accepted it without a qualm, going so far as to see it, indeed, as something especially admirable in the prince, since it intensified the essential quality of this other boy's personality, which he felt was so unlike his own as to be in no way comparable.

In the prince's company he felt rather as though he were in some little chapel far off the main road. The thought of actually not belonging there quite vanished in the enjoyment of, for once, seeing the daylight through stained glass; and he let his gaze glide over the profusion of futile gilded agalma in this other person's soul until he had absorbed at least some sort of indistinct picture of that soul, just as though with his finger-tips he were tracing the lines of an arabesque, not thinking about it, merely sensing the beautiful pattern of it, which twined according to some weird laws beyond his ken.

And then suddenly there came the break between them.

Törless blundered badly, as he had to admit to himself afterwards.

The fact was: on one occasion they did suddenly find themselves arguing about religion. And as soon as that happened, it was really all over and done with. For as though independently of himself, Törless's intellect lashed out, inexorably, at the sensitive young prince; he poured out torrents of a rationalist's scorn upon him, barbarously desecrating the filigree habitation in which the other boy's soul dwelt. And they parted in anger.

After that they never spoke to each other again. Törless was indeed obscurely aware that what he had done was senseless, and a glimmer of intuitive insight told him that his wooden yardstick of rationality had untimely shattered a relationship that was subtle and full of rare fascination. But this was something he simply had not been able to help. It left him, probably for ever, with a sort of yearning for what had been; yet he seemed to have been caught up in another current, which was carrying him further and further away in a different direction.

And then some time later the prince, who had not been happy there, left the school.

* * *

Now everything around Törless was empty and boring. But meanwhile he had been growing older, and with the onset of adolescence something began to rise up in him, darkly and steadily. At this stage of his development he made some new friends, of a kind corresponding to the needs of his age, which were to be of very great importance to him. He became friends with Beineberg and Reiting, and with Mote and Hofmeier, the boys in whose company he was today seeing his parents off at the railway station.

Remarkably enough, these were the boys who counted as the worst of his year; they were gifted and, it went without saying, of good family, but at times they were wild and reckless to the point of brutality. And that it should be precisely their company to which Törless now felt so strongly drawn was doubtless connected with his own lack of self-certainty, which had become very marked in-deed since he had lost touch with the prince. It was indeed the logical continuation of that break, for, like the break itself, it indicated some fear of all over-subtle toyings with emotions; and by contrast with that sort of thing the nature of these other friends stood out as sound and sturdy, giving life its due.