The things Altenberg writes, we already know them anyhow! - Vienna's perfect Bohemian

Yesterday I wrote about Stefan Zweig, who was loathed by his writerly peers like Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Thomas Mann.  Today, Peter Altenberg, who was adored by the same crowd.

Altenberg was a Viennese Bohemian, the artistic kind, not the Czech kind, the artist who hangs out in cafés with the other Viennese writers, wears shabby clothes, and always seems to have just changed his abode.  Altenberg published a twenty five year stream of odd little newspaper pieces – prose poems, sketches, stories, fantasies.  Charles Baudelaire is the useful but insufficient predecessor.  On the basis of Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg (2005), enthusiastically translated by Peter Wortsman, Altenberg is not nearly as weird or outrageous as Baudelaire.

I wonder if the Austrian artistes were simply thrilled to have their very own flaneuring Bohemian – “just like you read about in the Paris newspapers!”  Arthur Schnitzler or Karl Kraus, early supporters of Altenberg, are saying that, or so I imagine.  Franz Kafka called Altenberg a “genius of nullifications,” which sounds exciting but, to pick a representative quotation, “Art is art and life is life, but to live life artistically; that is the art of life” is just the sort of thing I expect an 1890s aesthete to say (quoted from Carl Schorske, p. 306).

Now I sound as if I am complaining.  Oh no no.  The fragments and images and overheard conversations and attitudes Wortsman collects in this attractive Archipelago Books edition are enjoyable and edifying.  How could I not like a list of “My Ideals” like this:

The adagios in the violin sonatas of Beethoven.
Speckled tulips.
Franz Schubert.
Solo asparagus, spinach, new potatoes, Carolina rice, salt sticks,
Knut Hamsun,
The blue pen “Kuhn 201.”
The condiment: Ketchup. (87)

Not to be confused with the composer: Ketchup, although he was quite good, too.

Altenberg gave me a tour of his Vienna.  Sitting in a “champagne pavilion,” someone in his party recognizes a celebrity – Gustav Klimt! – but no one is impressed until someone else says “But that’s the guy who paid for twelve bottles of Charles Heidsieck champagne at the Casino de Paris last winter!” Now everyone is impressed.  In a note, Altenberg confesses that the champagne was actually a different brand, but he has hopes that the Charles Heidsieck company will compensate him for the endorsement.  See p. 26.

Altenberg goes to the cabaret, chases women in the big amusement park, and not only visits the Ashanti Village, an appalling living anthropological exhibit, but over the course of a series of pieces makes friends with the exhibited Africans and treats them as if they were human:

“We’re supposed to represent savages, Sir, Africans.  It’s completely crazy.  We’d never go around like this in Africa,  Everybody would laugh at us” (65).

Altenberg is on to me, way ahead of me:

“The things Altenberg writes, we already know them anyhow!”

Because he writes in such a way as to give you the impression that you’ve always known it anyhow.  (55)

Maybe so, maybe so.

Austria, what a naïve place you are!

That cheerful thought is courtesy of Peter Altenberg, the archetypal Viennese coffeehouse Bohemian, who spent his life wandering from café to café and writing Baudelaire-inspired prose poems or articles of short fiction or whatever they are.  As collected in the 2005 Archipelago book Telegrams of the Soul, his importance seems more historical than literary, but that is a thought I hope to sketch out some other time.  For the title line in context, see p. 120.

A greater writer, a greater figure, is the Diogenes of Vienna, Karl Kraus, who moved from journalism to founding his own paper Die Fackel (“The Torch”) in 1899 to writing every word of its contents for twenty-five years:

I no longer have collaborators.  I used to be envious of them.  They repel those readers whom I want to lose myself.

Kraus is highly quotable.  This one is from In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader (Carcanet, 1984, p. 5).  It is amusing to joke that this or that old timey writer, Montaigne or Dr. Johnson or what have you, would now be a blogger.  Not a joke with Kraus.

Along with his articles, jokes, vitriol, parodies, shivs, and bile, Kraus also sometimes presented one-man performances of Shakespeare plays which must have been a sight.  Somewhere along the way he wrote an enormous play-like object titled The Last Days of Mankind, published 1918-19, of which a fraction has been translated.  Perhaps if we all read it someone will translate the whole thing!  I will do my part.

What other Austrian books might I try to read?

I am in the middle – no, closer to the front – of a long, tedious, magnificent Adalbert Stifter novel, Der Nachsommer (“Indian Summer”, 1856).  I have written plenty about Stifter before and recommend him strongly to patient readers, but anyone who introduces himself to Stifter with this novel is insane, no offense.   His subsequent novel, Witiko (1867), is reputed to be even more boring, which if true is an achievement.

Another mid-century writer who should have no existence in English is the comedic playwright Johann Nestroy, but one of his Viennese dialect comedies was adapted by Thornton Wilder and eventually turned into the 1964 musical Hello, Dolly!  That exclamation point is in the title of the show, but I also lay claim to it – what, really?  More appealing to me is that the same play was adapted by Tom Stoppard as On the Razzle (1981).

The young Salzburg poet Georg Trakl I read in November.  I should revisit him.  The other major poet of the period is Rainer Maria Rilke whom I should also revisit (after fifteen years).

If I stick to the kind of cutoff date I used in previous reading projects, say something around 1919, I will then stop before I get to Rilke’s best-known works, the Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies (both 1923).  I thus also cordon off most Robert Musil, all Joseph Roth, most Stefan Zweig, most Ernst Weiss, etc. etc.  Unwise, perhaps, but it is a guideline, not a rule.

An important exception: Young Törless (1906) is Robert Musil’s first novel, a story of boarding school sadism with a humanist turn.  It also features a long monologue about the meaning of imaginary numbers.  I have read it twice and will likely read it again.  A fine readalong book, but c’mon, The Last Days of Mankind, right?

Perhaps it is clearer why what once seemed like a project of wide scope has come to seem a bit narrow.  Valuable reading but less fun for more casual participants.

Tomorrow:  some supplementary or alternative paths that may well be more fruitful than anything I have mentioned so far.