by Mark J. Mirsky

April 05, 2021

As a novelist, I read one way, and as I suspect as a teacher, I read another. There is a third way I occasionally read—as an editor. (I once was privileged to read as a critic, but since a change of editors at The Washington Post’s Book World and the extinction of Partisan Review, and various other publications whose editors knew me, I have lost a ready access to a soapbox.) Every now and then, however, some stunning stupidity, in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, or The New Yorker takes my breath away. The last one that made me howl in outrage was a critic who claimed that Isaac Babel’s story “Guy De Maupassant” was a failure, whereas I would bet one of my remaining wisdom teeth on it being one of the best stories of the last century. Still, Isaac Babel’s reputation needs no help from me and so I let it pass. I think only when a wound is personal, when a critic who has a national platform to make pronouncements says something that I find at best, disappointing—but possibly not just wrong in my opinion, but obtuse, so much so that against all common sense, I find myself writing to the editors—in this case the mighty Ivory Tower. Of course, The New Yorker has better things to do than pay attention to the reputation of Robert Musil, whom their editors have a long tradition of ignoring, but I edited Musil’s Diaries in English. And as readers of Fiction know, I have been publishing work of Musil’s that didn’t find a home elsewhere for many years in the magazine as its Editor in Chief.

What led to this outburst was that a few weeks ago, I detected in what otherwise seemed like a lucid review of the The Copenhagen Trilogy of Tove Ditlevsen, by Hilton Als, an outrageous sneer directed toward Robert Musil’s magnum opus, The Man Without Qualities, I felt like it was personal assault. (I admit that it is a pleasure to feel that a critic can be so wrong that one can howl as my teacher in those dreary Hebrew School classes we marched to after Public School, a white haired lady whose face screwed up into a sneer, would, screaming, “Mirsky you idiot!”

What made it particularly painful was that I was drawn to reading Hilton Als’s review of Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy because I knew Ditlevsen from a single short story translated for me by a Danish friend in the 1970’s. I had asked about what Danish writers I might be interested in having translated and published in Fiction and my friend obliged me by recommending Ditlevsen and at my request translated a story of hers. I liked it immediately and tried to get permission from Ditlevsen’s Danish publisher to run it in the magazine, or look for another piece, but I never received a response, or my friend didn’t.

Hilton Als in The New Yorker (February 15 & 22, 2021)—probably reaching for some way to place Ditlevsen’s work in the European pantheon, the grim life detailed in her memoir compares it to Musil’s fiction, but is condescending to the latter. Als describes Musil’s prose in The Man Without Qualities as a “dissolute romantic voice.” Als is misreading Musil, trying to link the Austrian writer to Ditlevsen’s stark portrayal of her dismal world. To dismiss Musil speaking through the voice of his protagonist Ulrich, in the novel, as a “dissolute romantic,” is to ignore that both the author and his character have as their goal a mystical quest: to enter “the other world” through the breaking of taboos. This is true of what many consider Musil’s finest short story, “The Completion of Love,” (newly translated by Genese Grill, in issue 64 of Fiction and also in Unions, Contra Mundum Press, 2019) which ends with the praise of God and the heroine’s mystifying sense of sexual and spiritual happiness—after submitting to a bleak moment of adultery with a stranger. The sexual adventures detailed in The Man Without Qualities, run parallel with chapters on the political, industrial and social world of Europe, and the psychology of anti-Semitism, but the north star by which his major work steers is the hope of finding another dimension of existence, the “dissolution” with which Dante ends his Commedia.

Hilton Als is not alone in misreading Musil and misrepresenting him. Even critics aware of Musil’s political acumen in The Man Without Qualities can obscure the mysticism of Musil and his broad sympathies. I was particularly struck both in his Diaries and The Man Without Qualities by his fascination with the world of the Jews, not just his wife Martha’s assimilated identity, but the world of the children of Jews who married gentiles, and the world of religious Orthodoxy that the cosmopolitan Jews of Vienna had come from, but also figures like the assassinated German industrialist and political figure, Rathenau, whose barely disguised fictional identity is the principal foil to the protagonist of The Man Without Qualities, Ulrich.

Musil a “dissolute romantic?” Wow! This is “cancel culture.” It is the rare critic who can hear the laughter of a great novelist, or follow him or her into the far reaches of a dimension beyond this world into another.