Sex and the Single-Minded

Arthur Schnitzler is not nearly so familiar to American readers as he should be, and this has led to starkly differing views of his literary stature. In a brief foreword to “Night Games,” John Simon places him “in the vicinity of Proust, Joyce, and Chekhov,” while Phyllis Rose, in the New York Times Book Review, dismissed him as “a relatively obscure Austrian writer.”

Indeed, Schnitzler has no “Ulysses,” no “A la recherche du temps perdu,” no “Cherry Orchard” to his credit. He considered himself (as Simon notes) an author of the second rank, and that is the level that is really appropriate to him, even though, in his time and after his death (he was born in Vienna in 1862 and died in Vienna in 1931), Schnitzler was as celebrated as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and more controversial, and enjoyed higher prestige, than Stefan Zweig.

This volume, containing nine Schnitzler stories, can do its bit in whatever revival of Schnitzler among American readers one can hope for. These tales, short and long, date from almost four decades, from 1894 to the year of Schnitzler’s death (it would have been helpful if the publisher had taken the trouble to give publication dates for each of them), and offer a fair sample of his preoccupations. The translation is competent, so that “Night Games” can build on the half-dozen or so collections of his work now available.

Schnitzler was the eldest child of an eminent Viennese nose and throat specialist of Jewish heritage and cosmopolitan, humanistic convictions. A good son in his individualistic way, he trained as a physician in his father’s specialty even though, as soon as Herr Professor had died and his literary ventures were beginning to find echoes, he abandoned his medical practice--what he had most enjoyed about it was the opportunity to meet pretty, eminently seducible patients--and became a full-time writer of novels, novellas, short stories and dramas.

His range was narrow, even though it widened around the turn of the century, when anti-Semitism had become an irritating, even frightening ideology in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Schnitzler’s most interesting play, “Professor Bernhardi” (1908), courageously tackled this unsavory subject. But even in his unpolitical years, Schnitzler’s psychological penetration could be impressive.

His favorite formula--we encounter it several times in this volume--was an adulterous affair and its consequences, which he served up, wittily, in an imaginative variety of ways. Often he capped his tales with a surprise ending but, being the sensitive psychologist he was, he should not be dismissed as a mere Austrian version of O. Henry. He experimented with stylistic innovations such as stream-of-consciousness and its near relative, the internal monologue. Several of the stories gathered here have principal characters talking to themselves, exhibiting subtle shifts of feelings and moods. More, he was blunt about sexual entanglements and about the social hypocrisy, the sheer cruelty, that turned so many of his dramas into tragedies, especially when the love affair crossed class lines. No wonder that Freud, that other Viennese explorer of contemporary sexuality, thought so highly of Schnitzler.

Yet their explorations were only superficially alike. Freud attempted to cover the entire menu of sexual desire, its failures and successes--impotence and frigidity, homosexuality and fetishism and other forms of gratification whereas Schnitzler shows little interest in the diversity of erotic pleasure. He has virtually no room for men who cannot, or women who do not want to, perform. What interests him most are the social conflicts and internal stresses that illicit love is bound to produce in a society that (at least officially) cherishes the marriage bond; he makes much of the clash between the demands of passion and the constraints of law and custom. In manipulating this cluster of themes, Schnitzler can appear as cold as a surgeon, as cynical as a worldly-wise roue.

The most remarkable instance of his preoccupation with sex without love is the play “Reigen,” written in the winter of 1896 and unplayable for years because of its “obscenity.” It is a brilliant parade of couples about to engage in, and commenting afterward about, sexual intercourse, with each episode featuring one of the partners from the previous one, until in the end, after 10 encounters, the erotic circle is complete and the round dance of sex is over (recently the play briefly appeared, under the title “The Blue Room,” on Broadway).

One adjective that may come to mind, then, as one reflects on Schnitzler’s sizable oeuvre, is “dated.” After all, since the end of World War II, our moral imperatives seem to have visibly shifted, with virginity less highly valued and class distinctions less clear-cut than before. But a more appreciative, and more accurate, verdict on Schnitzler would be, apart from the pleasure that his erotic imagination can give, the fascinating glimpses he provides into a world that has largely been destroyed in a century of wars and genocide. Love and sex and death wear many garments and can be interesting in them all, including the ones that Schnitzler dresses them in.

This perspective on Schnitzler should throw light on problems that (to my mind) diluted the effect of Stanley Kubrick’s much discussed film “Eyes Wide Shut,” closely based on a long Schnitzler story of 1926, contained in this volume and here called “Dream Story.” For reasons best known to him, Kubrick moved the dramatic date of this novella to the present and the scene from Vienna to New York. This gratuitous transformation destroyed the distance in time and place that would have made the film a self-contained historical tale unburdened by the question of verisimilitude--is this really New York? Do doctors make house calls any more?--that put off so many viewers. But it is about time we get over debating Kubrick’s last film, and about time, too, for the American reading public to get over thinking of Schnitzler as a relatively obscure writer.