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foundation had felt the influence of Dr Arnold’s Rugby, how much more agreeable still to think that Arthur Clough, once Arnold’s pet pupil (despite that ‘weakness in his ankles which prevented him from taking a prominent part in the games of the place’), should have been reduced to this menial role, conscientiously doing up brown paper parcels for Florence Nightingale. What fun Strachey had in drawing this malicious picture – and how one relished it. It was of course utterly inadequate. You couldn’t say Strachey was lying: not outright. There was always some evidence to justify his sneers. But Clough, as this admirable and judicious book makes clear, was really an unsuitable target for Bloomsbury’s mockery. He was after all the author of Amours de Voyage, an epistolary novel in verse which is so relaxed, accomplished, witty and dandyish that one might have expected Strachey to delight in it. Am I prepared to lay down my life for the British female? Really, who knows? One has bowed and talked, till, little by little, All the natural heat has escaped of the chivalrous spirit. Oh, one conformed, of course; but one doesn’t die for good manners … The novel, at once a love story and a travel book, is full of good things. The setting is Rome, in the last days of the short-lived Republic after the revolution of 1848, and a French army is advancing to restore the Pope. The narrator, Claude, warns his friend Eustace not to believe everything he reads in The Times: … although it was slightly in error When it proclaimed as a fact the Apollo was sold to a Yankee, You may believe when it tells you the French are at Civita Vecchia. The French advance comes closer. ‘Claude’s first intimation of battle is that in the Caffè Nuovo in the Via Condotti he cannot get milk for his coffee.’ So he goes out as a tourist to view the fighting. For some hours he watches and wonders, ‘but guessing is tiresome, very’. That is almost Stendhalian. So, ‘Weary of wondering, watching, and guessing, and gossiping idly’, he descends the Pincian, then After endeavouring idly to minister balm to the trembling Quinquagenarian fears of two lone British spinsters, Go to make sure of my dinner before the enemy enter. The man who could write like that, with such judgement and wit, did not deserve Strachey’s mockery. Fortunately, here now is Anthony Kenny to do justice to this remarkable poet and likeable man. This is a very good critical biography, and an admirable picture of the intellectual world of early Victorianism. To order this book at £xx, see order form on page xx

N IGEL J ONES

THE TORCH IS QUENCHED

K ARL K RAUS , A POCALYPTIC S ATIRIST : T HE P OST -W AR C RISIS ANDTHE R ISE OFTHE S WASTIKA

★By Edward Timms (Yale University Press 639pp £35)

T WENTYYEARSAGO , Edward Timms, a British academic, published a massive half-life of a figure little known to English readers, but familiar to the inhabitants of his native Mittel-Europa. Two decades on, Karl Kraus is still distinguished here by his obscurity, but Timms has completed his magnum opus – another huge and learned tome covering the remaining half of his hero’s life and turbulent times. Let me reassure Professor Timms at once that his titanic labours of love have not been in vain. In delineating Kraus’s world with such masterly care, he has illuminated a whole society – the lost culture of Central Europe in general, and its centre of excellence, Vienna, in particular. For Kraus was not just a hugely gifted, active and fertile author and journalist, he was the very

The British Academy British Academy lectures are freely open to the general public and everyone is welcome. The lectures take place at 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1 and begin at 5.30pm and will be followed by a reception at 6.30pm.

Autumn Lectures 2005

5.30pm, Friday 2 December 2005 Useful Knowledge Dame Marilyn Strathern, DBE, FBA University of Cambridge Isaiah Berlin Lecture

5.30pm, Tuesday 6 December 2005 What is Cornwall? Professor Charles Thomas, CBE, FBA Sir John Rhys Memorial Lecture

Further information and abstracts are available at www.britac.ac.uk/events Meetings Department, The British Academy 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1 Telephone:020 7969 5246 Fax:020 7969 5228 Email:lectures@britac.ac.uk

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embodiment of a distinct human type, once ubiquitous, now practically extinct: the Austrian café intellectual. Vienna in Kraus’s glory days – roughly the first thirty years of the twentieth century – was the city where you could consult Sigmund Freud or Alfred Adler about your psychological problems; witness Ludwig Wittgenstein lecturing on philosophy; to a concert composed – and conducted – by Gustav Mahler (and sleep with his amorous wife Alma afterwards, as Oskar Kokoschka, among very many others, was wont to do). You could watch a play by Arthur Schnitzler; read a poem by Rilke or Trakl; view a painting by Klimt or Schiele; enter a building designed by Adolf Loos; hear an unending work in progress by Robert Musil – and discuss it all the next day with any or all of these luminaries over a kleiner Brauner in one of Vienna’s many hundred cafés: the Central, the Griensteidl, the Museum, the Landtmann, or Dehmels. The city was, in short, the pulse, the beating heart of all that was most exciting and advanced in European culture, and much of that culture was indisputably Jewish, with Kraus as its quintessential figure. Less reputably, and some way down the social scale, Vienna was the one place, and just before the First World War the one time, when you could, just conceivably, rub shoulders with Hitler, Stalin and Trotsky on the same day. You wouldn’t want to rub up too closely to Hitler, of course, even before his gory days – he was a homeless tramp and probably verminous; not to mention the virulently toxic ideas that were festering beneath his long, threadbare coat. But it was the abrasive interface between these clashing cultures, and the devastating ultimate effect of the totalitarian ideology being incubated by this as yet unknown trio, that would concern Karl Kraus all his life, and would eventually engulf his world. The first volume of Timms’s work concerned the launching in 1899, as the century turned, of Kraus’s periodical Die Fackel (‘The Torch’); an idiosyncratic journal, written, edited and published (at irregular intervals, but roughly once a month) by Kraus alone. Die Fackel achieved a circulation of 30,000, equivalent to one of Vienna’s many ordinary newspapers and unheard-of for an unapologetically highbrow journal of politics and culture. Timms’s first volume also covered the writing of Kraus’s other great project – his sprawling, marathon, hugely ambitious theatrical extravaganza (‘play’ is far too pale a word), Die letzte Tage der Menschheit (‘The Last Days of Mankind’). Written and

Kraus, by Kokoschka

performed at the height of the First World War, the work was an enormous combustion of scenes, songs and an army of characters whose message, despite the complexity of its structure, was prophetically stark: the war was a catastrophe which would destroy not only the rickety structure of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but Europe itself. Kraus peered through the fog of war and saw the abyss that lay ahead. His personification of the Zeitgeist – and his encapsulation of it in his own magazine – made him an Austrian Dickens or Orwell – even a Dostoyevsky. Volume Two opens with the Apocalypse having arrived in 1918, and finds Kraus surviving amidst the ruins – still publishing Die Fackel and still as keen as ever to swim against the tide of received opinion. His most consistent posture was that of the contrarian. Born a Jew, he converted to Catholicism. As most of his fellow café intellectuals embrace the heady doctrines of Socialism and Communism, Kraus begins to espouse a cautious and essentially conservative position that leads him – as social and political tensions rip the fragile fabric of postwar Austria apart – to support the ‘Austro-Fascist’ clerical dictatorship of Engelbert Dollfuss, as the only available alternative to Hitler’s Nazis on the one hand, and Stalin’s Bolsheviks on the other. Kraus’s commitment to Dollfuss’s regime may have been logical – but it cost him the friendship of many of his fellow café intellectuals, outraged by Dollfuss’s destruction of parliamentary democracy and his ruthless repression of Socialists and Nazis alike. Kraus took his adoration to ludicrous extremes; even carrying in his wallet a picture of the diminutive dictator (Dollfuss’s lack of stature won him the nickname ‘Mini-Metternich’), which he was liable to whip out and moon over, asking companions if the titchy tyrant’s cherubic features did not resemble those of an angel. Despite his increasingly conservative stance (essentially a defensive reaction to the rise of Hitlerism), Kraus retained the respect of Marxists such as Brecht and Benjamin, for his spiky individualism and sheer intellectual integrity. Kraus’s piercing prophetic powers allowed him to understand the vile nature of Nazism and the threat it posed as early as the mid 1920s, when Hitler was still a ranting street-corner orator in Munich. He also anticipated the ideas of a contemporary historian of the movement, Michael Burleigh, in seeing Nazism as a political religion: Kraus described it as a modern pagan

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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