The Musil Diaries: Robert Musil, 1899-1942

In the ""Posthumous Papers"" section of Burton Pike's impressive two-volume edition of Musil's Man Without Qualities (1995) is a chapter titled ""Agathe Finds Ulrich's Diary."" One passage reads: ""The notes that she took up in her hands, with many things crossed out, loosely connected and not always easily decipherable, immediately imposed a slower tempo on her passionate curiosity."" This is likely to be the reaction of fans of this great Viennese modernist to his diaries. Although Musil briefly considered working these into publishable form, basically they were aide-memoires to books, a passing scene, a name, an archetype or the outlines of unrealized projects. Musil was immensely attuned to intellectual and artistic (and, to a lesser extent, political) currents, but he adapted everything to his own aesthetic, ethical system. While there are descriptions of sensory experiences (the smell of his mother's chinchilla is ""a smell like snow in the air mingled with a little camphor""), there is relatively little indication of his everyday life--his days in the cafe, for example, or his chronic financial troubles. The notebooks from his early 20s are those of a young Viennese intellectual infatuated with Nietzsche and eroticism, but over time Musil matured. In 1920, he bemoans the ""maliciousness of Fate that it gave Nietzsche and socialism to one and the same age,"" and eventually his sexual preoccupations are overshadowed by a lyrical wistfulness for ""the golden `fruit of the fig' on the white sheet.... The greenish-blue blanket beneath it. The gaslight.... The black hair on the white pillow."" In this evolution, and in his relentless self-appraisal, Musil's admirers can see the evolution of a truly ""ratioid"" man. (Nov.)