By Alexander Lernet-Holenia, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, with a foreword by Patti Smith.
80 pages. New Directions. $13.95.
Note: I am not one to mention spoiler alerts in my reviews, but due to the shortness of the book under consideration in this newsletter, and the delight a reader will take in the unfolding of its plot, I am compelled to announce in advance that I will reveal some key details about its conclusion in this review.
If you’re in a writing workshop and you hear someone say of your story, “Nobody in this acts like a real human being” – then you know you have received one of the harshest criticisms imaginable. And yet, many of the finest works of literature rely on their characters behaving unlike real human beings – either they are more noble than human beings (those kings of Shakespeare who give penetrating soliloquies on all matters of existence, when in historical reality they were likely not much more than crude mob leaders) or more beastly than human beings (the deranged murderers of Dostoevsky, or the literally beastly characters of Kafka). It is paradoxically this portrayal of both what is lesser and what is greater than human that makes literature so sympathetic with us.
Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s Baron Bagge is a novella in which no character is quite like a human being. Its protagonist is a strange combination of wistful romantic and disillusioned military man; his love interest is a young woman who speaks in metaphysical riddles; the protagonist’s fellow soldiers include a Kentuckian who, for unclear reasons, decided to join the Austrian army; and these soldiers are lead by an awkward, reserved man who somehow compels his soldiers to undertake reckless, unorthodox military maneuvers. All the characters seem to be led not by their own interests or impulses, but by a mysterious force of fate. Baron Bagge is a novella where everyone and everything is out of place, and yet every element of the story fits together perfectly.
Perhaps the strangest event in the novella occurs at the very beginning, in the brief one-paragraph introduction, though it takes us a minute to realize why it is so strange. At a government reception in Austria, Baron Bagge is loudly denounced by an impetuous young man, who forbids Bagge from talking to his sister. Reeling from the insult, Bagge asks for seconds – is a duel in the air? No, Bagge’s seconds negotiate a peaceful end to the dispute. But they are still confused about the rumors swirling around Bagge’s private life. To satiate his friends’ curiosity, Bagge relates a story of his life from the First World War, which he says explains his behavior. The rest of the novella is occupied with Bagge’s telling of this story.
It is worth dwelling on this short introduction a little longer. What is so strange about it is that the inciting incident seems to come out of the glory days of the nineteenth century, where a harshly-spoken word at a ball could lead, a few days later, to pistols at dawn. But given this is some time after the end of World War One, the incident must take place in the late 1920s or early 1930: the era of automobiles, office buildings, and the League of Nations. We are firmly in the twentieth century, when dueling was even more of an antiquated practice than candle-lit dinners.
Then again, the ghosts of old Europe are everywhere in this short work, and Baron Bagge himself is a man out of time. He embodies the calm intelligence and stalwart values of an aristocratic age, but nobody else he meets seems to even recognize his nobility. In any case, Bagge is far from the center of the action: when the war breaks out he is traveling in Central America, and his entry into the war takes him to a desolate corner of Hungary. He is accompanied by an odd assortment of fellow officers, from the aforementioned Kentuckian to a thin, boyish young man clearly unready for war, all of whom only underline how far Bagge is from the aristocratic military commanders of a previous age.
As Bagge’s division travels across the wintry landscape of rural Hungary, it stumbles into a brief clash with some Russian horsemen. The conditions do not seem favorable for the Austrian division, yet the Russians quickly retreat, with minimal casualties on the Austrian side. The soldiers are left in a small village that is nevertheless filled with people, all of whom are happy to provide quarters for the division. Bagge is worried that staying in the village leaves them dangerously exposed to an enemy attack, but multiple scouting parties find no Russian soldiers within miles of the village. For a few days, the soldiers stay in the village.
Among the villagers is a young woman named Charlotte who had known Bagge’s mother. Bagge remembers that his mother had thought that Charlotte could be a potential wife for him, though he had never met her and forgotten all about her after his mother died. Yet Charlotte recognizes Bagge on sight – she had seen a photograph of him – and soon she is insisting that they get married. Bagge, improbably, agrees, and in the less than 72 hours the soldiers spend in the village, a wedding is prepared and conducted for the couple.
Charlotte is the most fascinating of all the novel’s characters. In one respect, she is something of a male fantasy: the beautiful yet meek virginal country woman who is willing to devote herself to a heroic military man. But she is much more than that, she has a whole interior life of her own. In a strange way she resembles Hamlet – like the Danish prince, she is the spawn of a powerful family who is pressured by her duties, and who responds by communicating in long philosophical disquisitions. Charlotte’s monologues are ostensibly directed to Bagge in answer to his questions about the strange situation he has found himself in, but they frequently enter into a world of their own: “We are always only pretexts for one another, nothing more. Pretexts for hatred or for love. But love and hatred arise within us; they operate in us and pass away again solely within ourselves.”
Unlike Hamlet, Charlotte seems to embrace her duties, and at the same time directs the other characters to her will. She is the most active of all the persons in the novel, and in her monologues recognizes, in her own way, the absurdity of her situation: “I would have thought about you even if I had known no more than that you had existed. Perhaps I would even have conceived of you in dreams if you had never been. Isn’t it said that we always dream only of beings who do not exist?”
Shortly after Bagge and Charlotte’s wedding, there is a surprise ending – and now I’m really getting into spoiler territory. I have avoided calling the atmosphere of Baron Bagge dreamlike not only because it would be a cliche, but because it is revealed at the end that the story literally takes place during a dream. The twist ending that it was all a dream is another thing that will get you savaged in a writing workshop, but the ending works because Baron Bagge’s dream is a dream that is not at all a dream. It is something much richer, something I will not reveal in this review.
For a brief, brilliant period, Austria was home to a collection of some of the world’s greatest writers: Musil, Broch, Roth, and Zweig, among others. During the two decades where Austria was an independent nation, between the collapse of Austro-Hungary and the Nazi Anschluss, its authors produced fiction that contained a longing but critical look at the multi-ethnic empire of the past and a foreboding of the hate and carnage ahead. Baron Bagge cannot be said to predict the horrors awaiting Europe, but it does contain in its ending a way of putting some consolation on the misery and brutality of the First World War. Though of course the myth that Baron Bagge imparts does not provide the literal truth of the war, given the lies that were being told about the First World War in Lernet-Holenia’s time, I wish his myth had been the one Europe attached itself to.