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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
One September evening in 1887, Arthur Schnitzler, a young doctor with literary aspirations, was out walking with a friend on the Ringstrasse, the grand new boulevard encircling the old city of Vienna. A pretty young woman caught his eye, and Schnitzler suggested that they all go back to his place, where he kept a bottle of cognac handy for just this sort of occasion. Jeanette Heger was twenty-two and made a living doing needlework in a modest apartment she shared with her sisters. The next afternoon, she visited alone. She found the doctor playing the piano and sat down at his feet. Her presence made it hard to use the pedals but easy for him to move his fingers from the keys to her blond hair. "This little prelude," he later recalled, "was soon over."
For rudderless young men from good families, fin-de-siecle Vienna offered many distractions. There were afternoons spent betting on horses or playing billiards in cafes, and evenings spent at the theatre or in the arms of girls like Jeanette. Schnitzler made his name capturing this aimless, pleasure-seeking atmosphere in plays and stories that drew on his own aimless, pleasure-seeking existence. "It ought to provide some pretty memories," he noted casually in his diary a few weeks after meeting Jeanette. Five years later, in Schnitzler's first theatrical success, "Anatol," the eponymous dandy echoed this sentiment--or, rather, lack of sentiment--adding a glaze of nostalgia in the process:
There I was at the piano. She--was at my feet. So that I couldn't use the pedal. Her head was in my lap. Her tousled hair reflected the green and red from the lamp. I was improvising at the piano. But only with my left hand. She was pressing my right hand to her lips. . . . I felt at that moment I was passionately loved. I felt surrounded by it. . . . And again I had the stupidly divine thought "You poor--poor child!" The episodic nature of the experience came very clear to me. While I felt her warm breath on my hand, I had the sensation that I was remembering it all from a distance. As though it were already past.
"Anatol" established Schnitzler as the sardonic, amoral voice of his generation. His early plays discussed sex with unprecedented candor: a woman reminisces about losing her virginity, a man makes hopeless excuses for his impotence, young unmarried couples conduct affairs without a thought for the mores of their elders. Audiences were scandalized, censors agitated, and critics outraged. Schnitzler's name became a byword for licentiousness. His literary friends teased him about being a pornographer, and some of his plays were more famous for being banned than for being performed.
The trouble with notoriety, however, is that it doesn't last. Schnitzler's literary reputation has now declined to the point where--at least outside Austria and Germany--he is little more than a name. Though he still interests critics and cultural historians, they tend to discuss him as a specimen of something larger--as Viennese, as proto-Freudian, as Jewish, as a thread in the gaudy fabric of fin-de-siecle culture. The result is to render him so much a man of his time that he disappears into his context. A case in point is Peter Gay's recent study "Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 1815-1914" (Norton; $27.95). Gay, who treats Schnitzler as Exhibit A in a polemic asserting that Victorians were not the prudes we take them for, is far more interested in Schnitzler the philanderer than in Schnitzler the writer. Meanwhile, Schnitzler's own works pop in and out of print every thirty years or so, as if governed by some sort of literary Kondratieff wave. "Night Games," a selection of Schnitzler's fiction in new translations by Margret Schaefer (Ivan...
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