714
PARTISAN REVIEW
Hennann Broch, in his introduction to this volume,
is
emphatic on
Hofmannsthal's 'conversion' and reads its main features correctly. But the
essay is written
too
thickly and unduly encumbered with jargon borrowed
from depth psychology. It also misses the social stresses which, during
those critical years, worked on the poet, steadying his balance and, in a
measure, defining his course. According to Broch, Hofmannsthal's sole
problem-as well as his sole theme, endlessly varied in his works-was
ego identification; and to this, even if we did not have the author's own
word for it, no one would wish to demur. But while developing the
notion with great skill, and convincingly, into an inner progression (early
identification; renunciation of the lyrical 'christening' act; suspension
between the I and not-I in the mature prose works and plays) Broch
fails to extend that notion to his author's ambience: the social struc–
ture in which he was reared, his family situation, his early associations
and pieties. It would have been well for the Jungian mystagogue to
move slightly to the left, at least once in a way: Marx and Freud
might have offered additional illumination-indispensable in this case, I
think-and of critics, T. W. Adorno, whose analysis of the George–
Hofmannsthal correspondence is probably the soundest exposition we
have of both the man and the work.
If
we wish to understand a writer,
we cannot afford to stay planted on the threshold of his consciousness
or his parental home. No matter how shrewdly we peer in either direc–
tion, the limits of our stance will also be those of our vision.
Though it preceded the collapse of the Austrian empire by more
than a decade, Hofmannsthal's breakdown (and subsequent break–
through) is strictly co-ordinate with the chain of events that led to the
democratization, and liberation, of the Hapsburg conglomerate. Rather
than mere prophecy we find here a full pre-enactment, suffered by the
structure's greatest representative, of the fate ready to overtake
that
structure. Hofmannsthal's divinatory powers were remarkable and so
was his range of emotional and intellectual apprehension.
HIs
vast
knowledge of history-though he wore it lightly-very early became a
byword among his friends; also his gift of second sight, and his capacity
for suffering, as well as withstanding, experience. His biographers have
pointed out that he was not ready for the collapse of the old order, that
he never 'got over it,' and in a sense they are right. But only
in
the
sense that the trouble had been so thoroughly anticipated, and endured
in advance, that when he came to face the actual mess Hofmannsthal's
immediate response was that of a man unnerved, spent. But he soon
rallied. Much had been lost, and for good-savings and revenue,
social
rank and prestige, to say nothing of his role as the empire's cultural
