Further Gleanings

Dispatches from the Depth of the Years

Die Strudlhofstiege

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
The Four Quartets, East Coker

I, too, am not ready for thought. The demands of teaching, and of directing the school play, continue to overwhelm me during the week, leaving me too exhausted on Saturday mornings to wake up, caffeinate, and write for three hours — my usual Substack routine. I have, however, continued to read, as I insisted in my last post. Consider this, therefore, another round of gleanings.

The Finished

I finally finished The Strudlhof Steps, my second gargantuan German novel this year.¹ Whereas Buddenbrooks conspired with Turgenev’s Smoke to provoke three of my all-time favorite essays, Doderer’s bizarre masterpiece has left me in a daze. Even if I were ready for thought, I’m not sure I’d know what to say about it.

Doderer’s novel doesn’t fit well into the limits of the category offered by Lionel Trilling in The Liberal Imagination, on which I drew so heavily in my critique of Noah Smith’s view of literature. Trilling insists that all of the “golden age” European novels integrate realism with the same myth, the Young Man from The Provinces who gains mysterious entry to high society, conveniently furnishing the author with an outsider’s perspective on the mores under scrutiny.² The Young Man’s encounter with society makes him question not only society’s claims, but those of his provincial extraction, forcing him into a spiritual crisis which he strives to resolve by falling in love, acts of self-sacrificial heroism, and so on.

There is no corresponding figure in The Strudlhof Steps. Melzer and Stangeler, the characters who most approximate to the protagonists of the book, grow up and remain in distinct social classes, one middle class and the other petty noble. And while their respective character arcs may offer some commentary on the relative virtues and vices of those respective classes, that commentary clearly isn’t the thrust of his purpose — making it an ersatz novel, as far as Trilling’s definition is concerned.

But perhaps that’s not entirely true. The Strudlhof Steps may lack an exact analogue to the Young Man from the Provinces, but it’s still very much about a spiritual journey — several, in fact. But even if it is true, it’s not true in any easygoing way that would comport with Trilling’s take. The objective, leisurely, clinical style³ in which Doderer recounts these journeys makes me wonder whether he didn’t deliberately sever the Young Man myth from its attendant spiritual journey. The Young Man is typically earnest, and naturally inclined to spiritual searching: Trilling adduces Julien Sorel of The Red and The Black, as well as Pierre Bezukhov of War and Peace, as quintessential examples. In Melzer and Stangeler, by contrast, Doderer divides these qualities of earnestness and spiritual searching.

Stangeler is the natural seeker, but he is afflicted by a kind of cold self-consciousness that makes him congenitally incapable of being earnest: his hyper-awareness, both of others and himself, intrudes on his interactions with people, making it almost impossible for him to reach out to others, in the manner of the Young Man. In consequence, he thinks and talks a lot, but there’s a vacuity to his eloquent rambling that reminds me, in places, of Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet. Worst of all, Stangeler — ever self-aware — is aware of this tragic condition, and doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. Even the peace he makes with his fiancée at the end of the book felt — to me — more like settling than an act of love.

Melzer is a weirder case. He is undoubtedly earnest — he’s the only character in the book whom every other character admires, in one way or another. But his interior life is strangely bifurcated. Like us all, he has a kind of surface interiority, the realm of habit and passive choice, and a subterranean interiority, where his fears and desires roil like molten lava, now and then bubbling up to and affecting the surface. Like us all, he dwells at the surface while remaining aware of the subterranean tectonics in his heart. He is unique, though, in being a human seismograph: Melzer is hypersensitive to the movements of his heart and mind, but he lacks not just the ability to formulate those movements in words, but the self-awareness to realize that formulating them is even something he could or should do with them. He broods without brooding; he is perpetually bemused without realizing it. Things happen to him, but he rarely acts.

Put like this, I think I’m coming to a partial idea of what Doderer might be up to in The Strudlhof Steps. Without spoiling anything — it’s immensely worth reading purely from the standpoint of style, if you have the time — the conclusion of this complicated, borderline plotless story about these two protagonists who between them would add up to the one mythical Young Man of the classic European novels suggests a critical attitude toward that novelistic tradition as a whole. Stangeler’s and Melzer’s respective arcs imply an immediate judgment about the relative value of the Young Man’s defining qualities — his earnestness and his spiritual searching — and a remote judgment about their compatibility in any one person. I’ll leave it to you to figure out just what I mean — I don’t quite know myself. I’m not ready for thought, you’ll recall.

A final word about The Strudlhof Steps. I read a lot of while I was in Japan — it and The Adventures of Arsène Lupin were the only two books I brought with me. Reading about Doderer’s fascinating, self-effacing reflections on the form-driven, punctilious Austrian character, expressed in and by the bizarre figure of Julius Zihal, resonated profoundly in Japan, where punctilious dedication to rituals has somehow survived the spiritual vitality of the rituals themselves. Shinto festivals have 90% turnout, for example, but only about 1-2% of Japanese actually believe in anything remotely resembling Shintoism, with Buddhism faring little better, and Christianity far worse… one of the great, if double-edged, charms of reading is how much the circumstances under which you ingest a book can affect your digesting it. Perhaps that’s an implicit argument for re-reading the classics often, to guarantee that what you love is, in fact, the classic and not the atmosphere in which you encountered it.

Accusers and Old Friends

As usually happens after finishing a big book, I’ve had a hard time settling into anything for the last few weeks. I had almost finished Nabokov’s Pale Fire in the spring, but put it down for some reason in March. I finished that⁴ in Wyoming a few weekends back — and immediately fell back into the rut of not knowing what to read. I have two books actively in progress (i.e. they sit on coffee tables and countertops, accusing me, by their being anywhere but in my hand, of wasting time) and a few more passively so (i.e. they sit on shelves like old friends whom one can go years without seeing, only to pick up right where you left off).

The Accusers

I picked up Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi shortly after Pale Fire, because it’s been sitting on my shelf for years and I’ve heard so many good things about it from people I trust. I’m a little less than halfway through, but I have to admit, I don’t get it. The ‘crazy inventive’ world of the book which those vocal-fry folks at NPR and The New Yorker praised to the skies is little more than a badly-lit version of the Backrooms, and the contrast between Piranesi’s narration and implied authorial commentary is so glaring that it feels intrusive — and preachy, given the subject matter. It’s as if C.S. Lewis had rewritten (and ruined) House of Leaves. I’ll finish it, but I doubt it’ll top any of my lists.

Far more engaging is Giorgio de Maria’s The Twenty Days of Turin, which I read about on a Substack post I haven’t been able to find again. (Given the book, that’s oddly fitting.) It’s a 1977 Italian novel about a journalist trying to make sense of a (fictional) “phenomenon of mass psychosis” that occurred in Turin in 1967. What happened? Hard to say, since I’m only a third into the book. The mass psychosis centered around an institution called the Library, in which citizens can place their diaries for other citizens to read and comment on. Otherwise upright folks confess all kinds of dark, horrific thoughts and desires in their diaries, which attract all kinds of readers. Somehow, out of this exchange of dark thoughts, the patrons of the Library develop collective insomnia; eventually, one night in high summer 1967, numerous insomniacs wind up dying in gruesome ways, with no one remembering who killed them or how. The Substack post mentioned The Twenty Days as a prophecy of what social media would do to the human psyche, and it’s certainly that, but it’s also a magnificent atmosphere piece. A pervasive dread seeps from the hot walls and busy streets of “modern” Turin, and from the interviewees themselves, each vastly different but all haunted by something they can’t talk about directly. It’s perfect reading for foggy October nights.

(Who knows, though? Perhaps when I’m finished with both, I’ll be a Piranesi partisan and totally forget The Twenty Days… though I doubt it.)

The Old Friends

I have too many “old friends” to name them all. Suffice it to say, I can always pick up Sir Isaiah Berlin’s The Proper Study of Mankind and Karl Marx, Simon Leys’ The Hall of Uselessness, Ray Bradbury’s The October Country, and Harry Kessler’s Journey to the Abyss and yield something profitable. But it’s the old friends who will see me through to December, when the curtain falls on the school play and nothing stands between me and a few weeks of leisure but a stack of finals.

1. Perhaps I should specify, my second German novel finished this year. In fact, I started reading Buddenbrooks sometime early last October and chipped away at it over several months, between shorter, more manageable works. It was among my fiercest accusers (see above) during those interims.

2. Trilling’s thoughts on the Young Man from the Provinces appear in his essay “The Princess Casamassima”, if anyone is interested.

3. I quoted multiple sections of the novel in my last post. As far as style goes, The Strudlhof Steps reads like Mervyn Peake writing as a self-loathing repentant Nazi turned Catholic: the subject matter is deeply serious, but written with the same byzantine eloquence and sarcastic detachment that make the Gormenghast novels such strange and singular delights.

4. Pale Fire is a gorgeous read solely from the standpoint of the style, but I can’t decide if it’s a masterpiece or overrated. A re-read is probably in the offing.