by Robert Musil
“…and soon she saw nothing by the never-ending rise and fall of his beard, the bobbing beard of a repulsive billy goat ceaselessly chewing, spitting out a whispered soporific stream of words.”
Translated from German by Peter Wortsman (he also contributes an Afterword), Intimate Ties (originally Vereinigungen), is in fact two novellas that were first published in 1911. The two stories were declared innovative works by a handful of early Expressionist writers but were vilified by critics as “chapter after chapter of abstract psychoanalyses” of two “hysterical” women presented in “thick patches of fog.”
Worstsman describes the book as “a soul-searching experiment”, written “in the wake of the stunning and popular success of his debut novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906), (The Confusions of Young Törless),” which was later adapted for the big screen as Der junge Törless. He warns one to “read at your own risk” as “those expecting a traditional narrative thread may well be frustrated by the near total absence of signposts and touchstones.”
It wasn’t so much a lack of signposts that frustrated me as the long, convoluted sentences that seemed to go on interminably and lead one down a whinging path to nowhere. Even the author admitted that he could only bare to “dip into one or two pages” at a time. He thought of it as a “verbal collage” but I found his prose pretentious, humourless and rather silly.
The first novella, The Consummation of Love, concerns a married woman’s romantic tribulations (her husband is too busy to join her on a journey) leading to her infidelity. The second, The Temptation of Silent Veronica, is about a troubled, sexually repressed young woman’s traumatic childhood memory of a near brush with a randy Saint Bernard dog and her indecision, bordering on madness, over which of two potential lovers to choose.
Musil’s stream of consciousness narrative attempts to portray the confusion of thoughts and emotions experienced by the women, but he’s no Joyce or Woolf – although, to be fair, he was an early precursor of the technique. His book also has its admirers: the Chicago Tribune called it “funny, sad and true”, and The New York Times Book Review declared it “virtuosic”. So, as I say, much depends on whether one is partial to obsessive, inward narratives that take themselves very seriously.
When first published, Intimate Ties was a commercial flop. Perhaps it will find a more sympathetic readership the second time round.
“She never had a clear consciousness of even the faintest trace of a sovereign self commanding inner restraint in her unhesitating surrender to others. But there was some unacknowledged psychic substrata underlying all these actual liaisons…”
Many thanks to Archipelago for providing an advance review copy of this title.