Scholarly Legacies (some name-dropping)

From Musil to Adolf Frisé to Burton Pike....to me....to....

The last few weeks have been rather obsessive around here, revising, shortening, checking, smoothing the draft of my Musil biography to ready it to send out to some reader-friends. It occurs to me how wild it is that I have somehow ended up writing this book, which will be the first English-language biography of Musil. It’s a rather large responsibility, which frightens and excites me. Of course, I didn’t really know what I was doing and had to sort of throw myself in and get all tangled up in the different primary and secondary sources in a deeper or different way (even after about 25 years of working with Musil) and let the book develop organically, find its shape, its emphases, its recurring motifs and patterns. I cried at the end last night, but it was probably just because I was tired.

I had worked for about 12 hours straight (with a small break in between), moving from the cafe to my house, where I sat in the same chair as the night grew dark, switching from coffee to wine. I read the last few chapters, in which the young scholar Adolf Frisé meets Musil and writes an admiring article about him and then, after his death, after Martha’s death too, he approaches Annina, Martha’s daughter, who was the overseer of Musil’s literary remains, to ask if she might agree to an edition of The Man Without Qualities published by Rowohlt, even though Rowohlt had rudely left Martha waiting previously in a hotel in Switzerland for a few weeks, without word, presumably because he didn’t have the money at the time to publish such a large book. Annina said yes, and the rest is history. (If you don’t know, he edited all of Musil’s works for Rowohlt over the years.)

Here’s a wee bit about it from the biography draft:

The young Adolf Frisé, twenty-two years old at the time, had written to Musil in 1931 and after the publication of the first part of Volume II, he visited Musil at Pension Stern. Frisé described the apartment as “an insular retreat against the outside world, a work cell.” Musil showed the gracious face he often wore with young men: he was “free of all pretension, nothing like the ‘Great Man of Letters’ whom he had mocked ... markedly disciplined, austere, measured even in the movement of his hands, a man of natural, unforced self-control, not someone who would claim to be right or to know better.” It was the only meeting between Musil and the young scholar who would devote his life to ensuring his legacy.

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I met Frisé once, in Saarbrücken. I think I was still a graduate student, studying with Burton Pike in New York, and had given a talk at a conference there, where the Musil archive used to be, on the chapter, Attempts to Love a Scoundrel. Frisé missed it, but someone told him it was good, so he came and talked with me. He was 90 or 92 at the time, and very kind and gentlemanly. We wrote back and forth a few times and he even “proposed marriage” to me, which of course was a joke, because he was married to someone else, the writer, Maria Frisé. (At one point, after he died, I was going to translate one of her stories, called “Scenes from a Marriage,” about living with a man who was obsessed with his scholarship. But it somehow never happened.)

If I had married him, I would have been almost in Musil’s family. (I have met some of Martha’s family, her son and grandson, the Rosenthals.) Karl Corino, Musil’s eminent German biographer, never came close to proposing, but I did meet him a few times, the first being at that same conference. He was wearing dark sunglasses, I recall, and had a certain celebrity status about him. I remember asking him—because Mark Mirsky had begged me to—about whether Musil had given Herma Dietz syphillis. I don’t remember, though, if I got a straight answer. He has been very helpful to me since though, giving me a photograph of Lina Loos once long ago and, more recently, answering my many emailed questions about this or that detail of Musil’s life. Lately he has stopped answering, but I hope he’s doing alright.

Burton Pike was my Doktorvater, and I wish he were still here to guide me and to vet my book before anyone else sees it. He wrote the first book in English about Musil, in 1961, and in the 90s he presided over the historic 2-Volume Knopf edition of The Man Without Qualities, editing the whole thing (and surely going over every word) and translating the posthumous papers brilliantly. When he was working on the translation he gave a reading at the CUNY Graduate Center (where he was teaching and I a student) from the book-in-progress, the scene where Walther and Clarisse are playing piano like a train shooting out of a station. I was just floored, and started reading the book. It was unlike anything I ever had read and at first I didn’t know how to take it…the irony mixed with the earnestness; the cynicism and the idealism….

Of course Burton was the best possible guide and I ended up writing my dissertation about Musil—and mysticism.

It was finished back in 2001 and it took ten years to turn it into a book because I was busy doing puppet shows and falling in love in Vermont. I think it was because my heart was broken that I started revising it and eventually published it as The World as Metaphor (2012).

In between there was local politics, painting, and then about ten years of publishing Musil translations with Rainer at Contra Mundum Books.

Burton died last year, while we were working on a Festschrift for him: https://centerforthehumanities.org/event/a-celebration-of-burton-pike/

Burt was 92. A prince among men. A deep and sensitive thinker, a generous and fascinating teacher, a fine scholar, and a kind, wise, charming, real, wry, genuine Mensch.

Years ago, he gave me his Musil notes, thinking he wouldn’t be using them anymore (some quotes from them are in my introduction to the Festschrift) and after he died I was given most of his Musil books. I guess I also inherited his never-flagging passion for our Musil—his emails would be titled “Musil, What Else” or “Musil again,” or “More Musil”….And he always signed off with some species of “Excelsior!”

I miss him very much.

I hope there is someone somewhere to whom I can give my Musil books when I die.