Arthur Schnitzler: Selected Short Fiction trans. J.M.Q. Davies Angel Books 220pp, £8.95 in UK
Schnitzler the playwright had a revival in English-speaking countries during the Sixties and Seventies, when his brittle, bitter-sweet, self-consciously sophisticated tone hit the taste of the time as it had hit the mood of Vienna early in the century. He was, of course, one of the pioneer writers of modern sexual enlightenment, or sexual freedom, or simple amorality - call it what you will. The fact that he was a medical doctor in early life presumably added to his analytic bent, and Freud is said to have spoken of him as his mirror-image. Schnitzler was also Jewish, in a culture where Jews were not persecuted but had only limited social acceptability.
His fiction took second place to his plays, and some of the stories included in this selection were only published posthumously. Schnitzler was, nevertheless, a considerable short-story writer, as well as a skilled practitioner of the Novelle which has been such an essential form for German and Austrian writers. His best-known piece of fiction is probably the story "Lieutenant Gustl", one of the first genuine antihero tales in 20th-century literature, and one in which Schnitzler employs a kind of stream-of-consciousness technique to enable the central character to lay himself bare psychologically. It adds up to a ruthless piece of self-analysis, even though the tone is generally one of self-justification by the young officer trapped and condemned by the iron laws of etiquette.
Gustl (familiar form of Gustav, equivalent to Gussie in English) is a young officer in his early twenties, leading a conventional life-about-town in Vienna insofar as his military duties allow him. He is an habitue of cafes, a chaser of women in a predictable, muted way, self-indulgent, not over-bright or cultured, and totally controlled by the social and behavioural code governing his caste. One evening he attends a concert in Vienna, mainly because a fellow-officer has given him a free ticket, and on the way out attempts to bully a civilian who, he thinks, has delayed him in collecting his coat from the cloakroom. The civilian, a master-baker whom he recognises from seeing him in his favourite cafe, grasps the hilt of Gustl's sword and threatens to pull it out and break it publicly (a major humiliation for a soldier), then report him to his superior officer. According to military ritual Gustl ought to beat him with the flat of the blade, but he is so taken aback that he allows the baker to walk away unchallenged. This, in itself, merits expulsion or resignation from the army, and though nobody appears to have witnessed the incident, Gustl is so shaken in his self-esteem that he decides to shoot himself. He is already due to fight a duel with swords with a doctor the following afternoon, but a dishonoured man - as he feels himself to be - is not eligible for an Affair of Honour. (He had, he admits, been rather on edge because his mistress had ducked a meeting and he had also lost money at cards.) In a daze he walks the city streets, falls asleep on a bench in the Prater, and after waking up miserably at dawn, decides that since condemned criminals usually eat breakfast before execution, he might as well do the same.
So when he finds his usual cafe just opening for the day, he enters it and orders coffee and rolls. The waiter serving him mentions casually that the baker who lived just across the street, and whose rolls Gustl is eating, had died of a stroke during the night. The doomed lieutenant is reprieved, and is in a delirium of joy which he carefully conceals. It is a banal little story, but Schnitzler's masterly psychology strips the rather hollow, puerile young man down to his psychic skeleton. His mental and emotional narrowness, his utter subjugation to outer form, his lack of character and inner resource are all laid bare. And yet he also reveals some human and likeable qualities - for instance, his horror at what his mother and sister will think when they hear of his suicide, his regret at deserting his regiment, and his determination to settle his few small debts before he dies. It is a Small Man's requiem for his own short, colourless life, with only his uniform to give it identity.
A similar technique is used in the story "Fraulein Else", in which Schnitzler's sympathetic insight into feminine psychology is brought to bear on a disturbed young woman who is more or less told by her parents to sacrifice herself to an ageing roue, in order to recoup her father's gambling losses. Adultery is a frequent theme of the remaining stories, and the duel - one of the social realities of the time - figures prominently too. "The Prophecy" is a macabre tale of how a play performed by amateurs at a nobleman's home ends in tragedy, while "Success" is an almost burlesque story of how a hitherto unsuccessful young policeman makes his first arrest by charging his fiancee with using insulting language to him in the public street.
SCHNITZLER is almost entirely a writer of a certain time and milieu, fin-desiecle Vienna - a place and epoch which is not shown as gemutlich or folksy, but artificial and stuffily hieratic, dominated by social ritual as stylised and exclusive as a ballet. In this inbred, stratified society even the war of the sexes is subject to chilling conventions and inhibitions, and several of his characters betray an emotional coldness, even emptiness, that may mirror the streak of coldness which Schnitzler noted in his own personality. But he is too human, observant and humorous to allow the atmosphere of his tales to become purely narcissistic or cerebral, and his highly visual depictions of the Austrian countryside are as vivid as his evocation of Vienna itself, its streets, parks, cafes, sounds and smells. Though not every story in the book is an individual masterpiece, collectively they show the fingerprints of a master hand.