in de ligne
eoffrey Wheatcroft
Sitting in a cafe in Naples, I think of Vienna. Just before leaving London I caught up with the National Theatre's production of Arthur Schnitzler's Undiscovered Country Was Weite Land) adapted by Tom StopPard, and as much Stoppard as Schnitzler, I susPect, from the title on, but that is by the Way. Once again I was struck by the extreme fascination which that place at that time _fluids: Vienna in the last decades of the tiabsburg monarchy (Undiscovered Country was first produced in 1911). Of course, it is a fascinating era for anyone to look back on. Half of 20th-century culture comes from Austria-Hungary, a Point which George Steiner tried to make in a recent New Yorker review. (Unfortunately, I had to give up reading the piece ," i alf-way through when he spoke of the school of Mahler and Bruckner', which s rather like speaking of the school of Wilde and Shaw: after all, they were contemPoraries, Dubliners and playwrights. Never intod that Mahler's and Bruckner's symPhonies are about as like one another as The hflportance of Being Earnest and Heart"teak House are. Has there ever been a man quite as clever and as silly as Dr Steiner, who has known so much to so little purPose?) nut there is more to it than that. There is ,,flot just the spell still cast by the city where expressionism, psychoanalysis and atonal asic all came from. For an Englishman ',wing in the last quarter of the 20th century `o look back on late Habsburg Vienna Produces an intense feeling of identification. As with all parallels, it can be stretched t,_°0 far, but it is there. Like the Austrians we have managed to combine artistic creativity „,WIth febrile social life and with political decadence One shouldn't bask in collective nity, but it is perfectly true to say that ,ttglish cultural life is in a healthy state. The London theatre has more to offer than the `New York or Paris theatre: our art galleries are full; London is the musical capital of the ,W.orld, as Vienna was 70 years ago (though the claim is less true for London today than a decade ago). At the same time social life in London is quite close enough to Schnitzler's world for os to be able to identify closely with his Characters The code of conduct is not quite the same, of course. Quarrels are not resolved by duelling, though how far the way we esnlve them is an improvement on those ss(t)icieties where the duel flourished I'm not at re. Once it vvas pistols at six, now it's QCs eleven. (Poor Lensky: if he was an Englsiult journalist living today he could just have L_ ed Onegin.) Like those days in Vienna, reondon life is a mixture of ennui and bad Riper, with the same consolation of food and drink and music and sex. In Mush's novel, The Man Without Qualities, they are preparing for the great celebration of Francis Joseph's 60th jubilee, in the knowledge that it is all sham, all a farce. The country is breaking up around them. Is it fanciful to see a parallel there, too? British royal occa sions have become a great national institu tion. I doubt if even members of the Socialist Workers Party could have watched the Mountbatten funeral, or the Silver Jubilee, completely unmoved. Yet there is something sinister and depressing here. The royal illusion from the press obsession with the Prince of Wales's sex life (let us hope there is no Mayerling) to television coverage of Trooping the Colour is a way of taking our minds off what we know to be the truth, that we are running downhill all the way.
Admittedly, the sensation of impending doom isn't quite as strong as it was a short while ago. In Harold's years I had the feeling of living through Auden's poem 'The Fall of Rome'. As he nearly wrote, Marcia's double bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes 1 do not like my work On a pink official form.
Maybe the sense of catastrophe is not quite so strong today but, all the same, anyone who really believes in, rather than hopes for, the possibility of recovery has a more sanguine temperament than mine. Admittedly, we have resolved, for the time being, the nationality problems which recently gave an even stronger sense of identification with 014 Austria: the Scotch were our Czechs and the Welsh our Slovenes. But that was never the real problem, anyway. Our crisis is not dynastic and national, it is social and economic. And the British working man has responded to the crisis in the true spirit of the Good Soldier Svejk.
Are we downhearted? Well, yes and no, or yes, but. . . There is something about our predicament which makes it impossible to be too despondent. In England today, as in the classic joke of Habsburg Vienna, the situation is hopeless but not serious. With these reflections I take my leave from this column to roam gloomily around the front half of the paper on my return.
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