Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

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As I listen to Leonard Bernstein's recording of he Sacre du printemps, something seems odd about the famous lyrical passage for E-flat clarinet in the 'Rondes print- anieres'; I turn to the score:

In Bernstein's performance, this becomes:

The novel charm of the passage above lies in the tension between the melodic lyricism and the rhythm, which is both mechanical and weirdly irregular; if this rhythm is not executed exactly, with clockwork precision, if it is rubatoed, if the last note of each phrase is stretched out (which Bernstein does), the tension disappears and the passage becomes commonplace.

I think of Ansermet's sarcasms. I prefer Stravinsky's performance, a hundred times over, even if he does push 'his music stand up against the podium rail… and counts time.'

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In his book on Janacek, Jaroslav Vogel, himself a conductor, discusses Kovarovic's alterations to the score of Jenufa. He approves them and defends them. An astonishing attitude, for even if Kovarovics alterations were useful, good, or sensible, they are unacceptable in principle, and the very idea of arbitrating between a creators version and one by his corrector (censor, adapter) is perverse. Without a doubt, this or that sentence of A la recherche du temps perdu could be better written. But where could you find the lunatic who would want to read an improved Proust?

Besides, Kovarovics alterations are anything but good or sensible. As proof of their soundness, Vogel cites the last scene of the opera, where, after the discovery of her murdered child and the arrest of her stepmother, Jenufa is alone with Laca. Jealous of her love for Steva, his half-brother Laca had earlier slashed Jenufa's face; now Jenufa forgives him: it was

out of love that he had injured her, just as she herself had sinned out of love:

The allusion to her love for Steva, 'as I once did,' is delivered very rapidly, like a short cry, in high notes that rise and break off; as if Jenufa is evoking something she wants to forget immediately. Kovarovic broadens the melody of this passage (he 'makes it bloom,' as Vogel says) by transforming it like this:

Doesn't Jenufa's song, asks Vogel, become more beautiful under Kovarovic's pen? And isn't it still completely Janacekian? Yes, if you wanted to fake Janacek, you couldn't do better. Nonetheless, the added melody is absurd. Whereas in Janacek, Jenufa recalls her 'sin' rapidly, with suppressed horror, in Kovarovic she grows tender at the recollection, she lingers over it, she is moved by it (her song stretches out the words 'love,' 'I,' and 'once did'). So there to Laca's face she sings of her yearning for Steva, Laca's rival-she sings of her love for Steva, the cause of all her misery!

How could Vogel, a passionate supporter of Janacek's, defend such psychological nonsense? How could he sanction it, when he knew that Janacek's aesthetic rebellion is rooted precisely in his rejection of the psychological unrealism current in opera practice? How is it possible to love someone and at the same time misunderstand him so completely?

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Still-and here Vogel is right-by making the opera a little more conventional, Kovarovic's alterations did contribute to its success. 'Let us distort you a bit, Maestro, and they'll love you.' But there comes a time when the maestro refuses to be loved at such cost and would rather be detested and understood.

What means does an author have at his disposal to make himself understood for what he is? Hermann Broch hadn't many in the 1930s and in an Austria cut off from Germany turned fascist, nor later on in the loneliness of emigration: a few lectures explaining his aesthetic of the novel; then letters to friends, to his readers, to his publishers, to his translators; he left nothing undone, taking great care, for instance, over the copy on his book jackets. In a letter to his publisher, he protests a proposal for a promotional line on the back cover of his novel The Sleepwalkers that would compare him to Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Italo Svevo. His counterproposal: that he be compared to Joyce and Gide.

Let's look at this proposal: what is actually the difference between the Broch-Svevo-Hofmannsthal context and the Broch-Joyce-Gide context? The first con-

text is literary in the broad, diffuse sense of the word; the second is specifically novelistic (the Gide of The Counterfeiters is the one Broch is claiming connection to). The first context is a small context-that is, local, Central European. The second is a large context-that is, international, global. By setting himself alongside Joyce and Gide, Broch is demanding that his novel be seen in the context of the European novel; he is aware that The Sleepwalkers, like Ulysses or The Counterfeiters., is a work that revolutionizes the novel form, that creates a new aesthetic of the novel, and that can be understood only against the backdrop of the history of the novel as such.

This demand of Broch's is valid for every important work. I can't repeat it too often: the value and the meaning of a work can be appreciated only in the greater international context. That truth becomes particularly pressing for any artist who is relatively isolated. A French surrealist, a 'nouveau roman' author, a naturalistic nineteenth-century writer-all were borne along by a generation, by a movement, known throughout the world; their aesthetic program preceded their work, so to speak. But what about Gombrowicz-where does he fit in? How are people to understand his aesthetic?

He left his country in 1939, at the age of thirty-five. For his credential as an artist, he brought with him only one book, his novel Ferdydurke, an ingenious work barely known in Poland, totally unknown elsewhere. He landed far from Europe, in Argentina. He was unimaginably alone. The great Argentine writers never came near him. Later, the Polish anti-Communist emigres had little curiosity about his art. For fourteen

years, nothing happened to him, and then in 1953 he began to write and publish his Diary. It doesn't tell us much about his life, it is primarily a statement of his position, a continuing aesthetic and philosophic self-interpretation, a handbook on his 'strategy'-or better yet, it is his testament; not that he was thinking, at the time, of his death: but as a last, definitive wish he wanted to establish his own understanding of himself and his work.

He demarcated his position by three key refusals: a refusal to submit to engagement in Polish emigre politics (not that he had pro-Communist sympathies but because the principle of politically engaged art was repugnant to him); a refusal of Polish tradition (one can make something worthwhile for Poland, he said, only by opposing 'Polishness,' by shaking off its heavy Romantic legacy); lastly, a refusal of the Western modernism of the 1950s and '60s-a modernism he saw as sterile, 'unfaithful to reality,' ineffectual in the art of the novel, academic, snobbish, absorbed in its self-theorizing (not that Gombrowicz was less modern, but his modernism was different in nature). That third 'clause of the testament' is most important and decisive-and is also doggedly misunderstood.

Ferdydurke was published in 1937, a year before Nausea.,