Consider the facts. He was a late child in a
prosperous, well-assimilated Jewish family whose business generated a large
enough and steady enough income to make him financial independent for life. This
in turn enabled him to publish Die Fackel
exactly as he wished, without making concessions to advertisers or subscribers.
He had a close circle of good friends and a much larger circle of admirers,
many of the fanatical, some of them famous. He was an electrifying public
speaker, capable of filling the largest theaters, which went a long way towards
satisfying his youthful ambition to be an actor. Although he never married, he
had some brilliant affairs and a deep, long-term relationship with Sidonie. He
seems to have suffered nothing like the conflicts with his father that Kafka
had with his, nor to have regretted not having children. His only significant
health problem was a curvature of the
spine, and even this had the benefit of exempting him from military service. So
how did a person so extremely fortunate become a Great Hater?
Kafka once diagnosed in German-Jewish writers a ‘terrible inner state,’ related
to a bad relationship with Judaism. A
bad inner state can certainly be discerned in Kraus’s agon with Heine, as in a
handful of other Kraus texts (including ‘He’s Still a Jew’ and his short play Literatur) and in his strikingly personal
vendetta against certain Jews, including the publisher of the Neue Freie Presse. But Kraus’s Jewish
problem seems to me at most a supporting element in his larger project – his exposure
of Austrian hypocrisies and corruption, his championing of language and
literature he considered authentic and underappreciated. And although there was
certainly plenty to be angry about in Austrian society; most people find ways
to keep their anger from consuming their lives. You could understand a Viennese
laborer with a sixty-hour work-week in bad conditions being enraged. But the
privileged and sociable Kraus?
I wonder if he was so angry because he was so privileged. In “Nestroy and Posterity,’ the Great
Hater defends his hatred like this: ‘acid wants a gleam, and the rust says it’s
only being corrosive.’ Kraus hated bad language because he loved good language –
because he had the gifts- both intellectual and financial, to cultivate that
love. And the person who’s been lucky in life can’t help expecting the world to
keep going his way; when the world insists ongoing wrong ways, corrupt and
tasteless ways, he feel as betrayed by it. He could have enjoyed a good life if
only the bad world hasn’t spoiled it. And so he gets angry, and the anger
itself then further isolates him and heightens his sense of specialness. Being
angry at newspapers beloved by the bourgeoisie was away for Kraus to say ‘I don’t
belong to you’ to a bourgeoisie whose upward striving was uncomfortably close to his own. His anger
at privileged writers who pulled strings to escape combat in the First World
War was a kind of homeopathic attack on the even greater privilege that he
himself enjoyed, the privilege of a morally pure medical excuse not to serve. He
was a journalist who savaged other
journalists, most of whom, unlike him, had to work for a living. Anger relieved
some of the discomfort of his own privilege, by reassuring him that he was also
a victim.
Kraus, like any artist, wanted above all to be an individual, and his anger can
further be seen as a violent shrugging-off of categories that threatened his
individual integrity. His privilege was
just one of these categories. As the scholar Edward Timms writes in his magisterial study of Kraus, ‘He
was a Jew by birth, an Austrian by nationality, a Viennese by residence, a
German by language, a journalist by profession, bourgeois by social status and
a rentier by economic position. Amid the ideological turmoil of
Austria-Hungary, all of these ascribed identities seemed like falsifications.’
For much of his life Kraus was defiantly anti-political; he seemed to form
professional alliances almost with the intention
of later torpedoing them spectacularly; and he was given to paradoxical utterances like ‘It is
known that my hatred of the Jewish press is exceeded only by my hatred of the anti-Semitic press, while my
hatred of the anti-Semitic press is exceeded only by my hatred of the Jewish press.’
Since it is also known that Kraus’s favorite play was King Lear, I wonder if he might have seen his own fate in Cordelia,
the cherished late child who loves the king and who, precisely because she’s
been the privileged daughter, secure in the king’s love, his the personal
integrity to refuse to debase her language and lie to him in his dotage. Privilege
set Kraus, too, on the road to being an independent individual, but the world
seemed bent on thwarting him. It disappointed him the way Lear disappoints Cordelia,
and in Kraus this became a recipe for anger. In his yearning for a better
world, in which true individuality was possible, he kept applying the acid of
his anger to everything that was false.
Let me turn to my own example, since I’ve been
reading it into Kraus’s story anyway.
I was a late child in a loving family that, although it wasn’t nearly
prosperous enough to make me a rentier, did have enough money to place me in a
good public school district and send me to an excellent college, where I
learned to love literature and language. I was a white male heterosexual with
good friends and perfect health, and beyond all this I had the immeasurably
good fortune not only to discover very early what I wanted to do with my life
but to have the freedom and talent to pursue it. I had such an embarrassment of
riches that I can barely stand to enumerate them here. And yet, for all my
privileges, I became an extremely angry person. Anger descended on me so near
in time to when I fell in love with Kraus’s writings that the two occurrences
are practically indistinguishable.
I wasn’t born angry. If anything, I was born the opposite. It may sound like an
exaggeration, but I think it is accurate to say that I knew nothing about anger
until I was twenty-two. As an adolescent, I’d had moments of sullenness and
rebellion against authority, but, like Kraus, I’d had minimal conflict with my
father, and the worst that could be said of me and my mother was that we bickered
like an old married couple. Real anger, anger as a way of life, was foreign to
me until one particular afternoon in April 1982. I was on a deserted train
platform in Hannover. I’d come from Munich and was waiting for a train to
Berlin, it was a dark gray German day, and I took a handful of of German coins
out of my pocket and started throwing them on the platform. There was an
element of anti-German hostility in this, because I’d recently had a horrible
experience with a penny-pinching old German woman, and it did me good to
imagine other penny-pinching German women bending down to pick the coins up, as
I knew they would, and thereby aggravating their knee and hip pains. The way I
hurled the coins, though, was more generally angry. I was angry at the world in
a way I’d never been before. The proximate cause of my anger was my failure to
have sex with an unbelievably pretty girl in Munich, except that it hadn’t actually
been a failure, it had been a decision on my part. A few hours later, on the
platform in Hannover, I marked my entry into the life that came after that
decision by throwing away my coins. Then I boarded a train and went back to Berlin
and enrolled in a class on Karl Kraus.
Paul Reitter kindly refines my theory and elaborates:
“Kraus hated his fellow German –Jewish writers for many reasons, not the least
of which was that they wasted what he himself was so determined to use:
privilege. Certainly many German-Jewish writers had money troubles, and Kraus,
to his credit, was quite sensitive to the problem of penury – he helped keep
the (German-Jewish) poets Peter Altenberg and Else Lasker-Schuler afloat. Yet a
lot fin de siecle Germa-Jewish authors were as Kraus saw it, like him: well positioned
to take some risks. Like him (and say Stefan Zweig), they were the children of
the newly emancipated and prosperous Grunderzeit
(industrial boom of the mid-19th century) generation. If their fathers
often tried to steer them into business, as Kraus suggests in his drama Literatur, there were resources to fall
back on, something that ultimately made turning to letters much easier. Nor was
there any lack of talent; Kraus always claimed that the German-Jewish literati
had an abundance of that. But despite having so many advantages, these writers
mostly chose to play it safe, reinforcing a bad paradigm of feutilletonism* or
parroting the latest style of expressionism, while treating such cultural
authorities as the Neue Freie Presse
with servile respect. The psychological needs and assimilationist tendencies
that drove German-Jewish authors to do this were of interest to Kraus: hence
the play Literatur, which Kafka
esteemed and which, in fact, inspired his famous meditations on the ‘terrible
inner state’ of German-Jewish writers. However, those needs and tendencies didn’t
excuse anything. As motives for bad linguistic behavior, they struck Kraus as
tawdry.
“Could there be similar dynamics – minus the Jewish element- operating in some
of our own contemporary literary scenes? The anecdotal evidence keeps piling
up. Let’s say that someone has given you a recent novel. You can’t recall seeing
reviews of this book, but it looks like a high-end production. The press that published
it was a very good one, and on its covers are blurbs from respected figures in
the world of letters. Would you be surprised to learn that the author of the novel
lives in Park Slope with a husband and two children? Would you be surprised to
read, on the author’s website, that she grew up in Lake Forest, was educated at
Brown, and teaches writing as an adjunct at the New School? When I encounter
such author information, I sometimes wonder how the economics work. Advances are
small, book sales are declining, teaching jobs don’t pay well, and Park Slope
is very expensive, as are kids. Maybe the family is just getting by. But in an
age of soaring college tuition and health insurance costs, not many people from
an affluent background are willing to take upon themselves the hazards of real,
open-ended downward mobility. Maybe, then, the husband is a lawyer or in
finance. Yet mixed couples aren’t the norm, I’m told. If the husband is a fellow
author, it may well be that the couple has gotten help from its baby-boomer parents.
And if that’s so, writing doesn’t, and probably won’t ever pay the bills.
‘Yet there is still the desire as well as the
pressure to succeed. For literati, as for professors of literature, the
increasingly steep straight path to recognizable signs of accomplishment is to
produce conventional work of high quality. I enjoy a lot of writing created on
this route, and I’m not about to echo Kraus’s apocalyptic condemnation of the
talented authors who take it. What feels sad, nevertheless, is that at a time
when a relatively small percentage of the New York literary scene appears to be
supporting itself through its writing, a high percentage of the scene is so very
cautious. Indeed, the scene routinely demands of itself and others both cautiousness
and the display of the most uncontroversial virtues (balance, moderation,
warmth, etc.). God forbid that a novelist should be a little mean to her
characters. Much more than in previous ward, we find such authorial harshness
framed as reason enough for a (cautiously)
negative review. Of course, sometimes the calls for niceness are themselves
nasty. But in the more august places, that’s
certainly not the norm. One can be generally for civility in reviewing and
still be alarmed by the fact of a measured, polite, unfavorable appraisal of
Joseph Anton, which appeared in The New York
Review of Books (and exhibits a particular dislike for the ‘egregiously
uncharitable treatment of exes in Rushdie’s memoir), could in notoriety as a
full-on ‘takedown’ job. Or consider that
a few years ago, the critic and novelist Dale Peck got a lot of attention
merely being rude to some well-known writers. Consider also that even as a
brilliant a reviewer as the late John Leonard has been posthumously taken to
task for the immoderation that was a function of his exuberance. So what if his
riffing and ranting wasn’t always comprehensible? It was unfailingly fun, and
the style was his alone. But it made Leonard’s Times reviewer ‘ yearn for a more straightforward or prioritized
analysis.’ Because, of course, critics should all sound more or less alike.’
I might add that the tyranny of niceness, in contemporary fiction, is enforced
by the terror of the Internet and is ninth-grade social dynamics. Writers
afraid of running a foul of the bloggers and the tweeters, of becoming universally
‘known’ as not a nice person, can defend themselves with laudable sentiments:
literacy and self-expression are good, bigotry is bad, working people are the salt
of the earth, love is more important than money, technology is fun, animals
have feelings, children are less corrupt than adults, and so on. To attempt a
harsh critique of the electronic system that reduces writers to these bromides
is to risk having it become common ‘knowledge’ that you’re a hater, a loner,
not one of us.
*The term feuilleton was invented by the editors of the French Journal des
débats; Julien Louis Geoffroy and Bertin the Elder, in 1800. The feuilleton has
been described as a "talk of the town", and a contemporary
English-language example of the form is the "Talk of the Town"
section of The New Yorker.
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