How it's going

Dispatch from the Writing Trenches

I thought I would self-indulgently schmooze a little bit about how the writing process is going, what obstacles and struggles, what successes and excitations are coming up lately. Mostly because I am having a difficult time this morning getting going, finding a way in (sometimes it feels like leaping into a jump rope that has already been looping). There is a moment when Musil, in the persona of a character he calls “Gray-Eyes,” says that he lacks the hooks that other people have with which to felt into the wool of others. It reminds me of the challenge of felting into the wool of a work-in-progress. Sometimes it all seems so disjointed, just a mess of details and facts; I get bored of the whole thing; often I am sick of my voice, my clever segues, the words I use over and over.

It is always so much about making connections, of finding through lines, Goethe’s “red thread”. They are always there if one looks long enough, or if one looks in the right way (sometimes with a loosened gaze; allowing for the subconscious to rise).

I am suddenly surprisingly far along, despite many interruptions and periods of working a good deal less than I had hoped over the last half year. It’s one of those home truths about work: if you do it bit by bit, suddenly one has done a whole lot. Except of course, if you are Musil, or Ariadne (with whom he compares himself somewhere I think), you go back and unwind, unweave, unwrite the whole thing once it approaches completion. I’m not really like that, so I can announce that the rough draft is now on Chapter 11 of 12 chapters (plus introduction and epilogue). Instead of unravelling the whole thing, once I do reach the end of 12 (hopefully in 2 months), I will go back and start polishing, filling in, correcting, adding, and of course subtracting (since I am only allowed a certain number of words, approximately 125,000 and I have many many more already). I may put the excised bits up here on Substack, so those fanatics who want every little bit can read them. Perhaps someday there will be an expanded, longer edition that could include more!

The last few months I have been deep in the 1930s, the rise of Totalitarianisms, and Musil’s really debilitating struggles with the political situation, with bearing witness, with his increasingly bad health, with the uncertainty of everyday life (money and safety), and his attempts to complete his novel amid all of this madness. It’s been distressing in light of our own current political situation, but also reading about his times has given me—I think, I hope—more insight into what Musil saw as mankind’s perennial desire to be led, to rally round a leader, and to easily relinquish basic rights and basic humanitarian values we once claimed to hold dear. What is clearer and clearer to me is that Musil had a particularly useful vision about what had gone wrong and why—one that is too little considered it seems. It has to do with the relationship between art and politics, between ethics and aesthetics, between the free-realm of non-conscripted thought, embodied by Schiller’s “play,” by the importance of the individual voice, by what art can do and the tendency of humans—especially when afraid or in desperation—to shut down or delimit, to generalize and simplify into slogans, into lazy assumptions, into mob mindset. Basically, while many before and since Musil have seen the realm of art as frivolous and even somehow opposed to essential political values such as freedom, honesty, fairness, openness, clarity, truth, for Musil the preservation of the realm of art—the realm of ethics and essayism, of irresolvable conflict—was a prerequisite for a free and just society. When art—and the voice of the individual fostered by art—is threatened, Totalitarianism follows. Too many of Musil’s contemporaries (and many people today) strove to replace one Totalitarianism with another system of control, to sacrifice the voice of the individual, to sacrifice art to rigid political allegiances and messages. He saw that this was a mistake and tried to articulate it. Some of his contemporaries criticized him for it at first, but found out first-hand (by being crushed by the boot of Stalinism) that he had been prescient. This is something that I have intuitively believed my whole life, but I have rarely found it so explicitly articulated as in Musil.

Something else I am thinking about as I work on the book is the question of how much to reveal Musil’s bad qualities (and those of his wife, Martha). This subject came up a bit in talking with

Samantha Rose Hill

last night about translating and publishing Arendt’s private poems. Is it a betrayal, Sam asked, to reveal the poems, to try to render them in English? She said very wisely, I think, that one can only betray someone if one loves him or her. And I do love Robert and Martha. They often behave badly—but they both have self-knowledge about their missteps, feel remorse, apologize. I suppose I want to paint a full, true picture, so I am including the good with the bad; but it is an odd position to be in: what to highlight, what to suppress, what to apologize for or justify, what to condemn. As it is my firm belief that all people are mixed and that the good parts are hardly imaginable separated out from the bad, I hope readers will end up loving my Musil and his Martha, too, despite their occasional bratty or resentful moments.

Okay, I’ve talked enough about myself. How are you all doing?