Books: Tale from the Vienna Woods

THE DEMONS (1,334 pp., 2 vols.)—Heimito von Doderer—Knopf ($13.50).

Vienna in the 1920s—with its coffeehouse society making a last whipped-cream stand against change, with the Franz Josef heel-clicks just receding and the Nazi jackboots faintly approaching—is both scene and protagonist of Heimito von Doderer’s two-volume, half-million word novel The Demons, which was 25 years in the writing and two years in translation. The American edition contains a publisher’s list of characters numbering 142, with 31 starred as principals.

The narrator is Georg von Geyrenhoff, a civil servant retired in early middle age who, from the vantage point of the 1950s, sets down the book’s events in reminiscence. The book peers into boudoir and bar, smart rendezvous and thieves’ kitchen, Vienna woods and Vienna sewers, museums, palaces, and slums. There are political riots, murder, sadism, Lesbianism, and varieties of amorous intrigue; but Von Doderer’s temperament triumphs over passion and violence to give the book a placid, mellow tone. In a series of tableaux vivants, Von Doderer has captured a moment of history, a few years between World Wars, when Vienna thought that tranquillity had been restored, past values retained, that life would move on and, therefore, up.

Two Realities in Amber. Like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the ancestor of most German philosophical novels, The Demons is a search for reality. The title refers to a medieval manuscript—discovered in the course of the story and included in toto—that implies that each man’s demon is a second, obsessive, false reality, which he must learn to discard or to unify with his true self.

But Von Doderer has failed to make his good document a novel, has done little more than preserve a number of variously interesting flies in an immense sea of amber.

The son of a well-to-do railway building contractor, Heimito von Doderer was born and has lived most of his life in Vienna, is considered Austria’s most eminent novelist. He was a prisoner of war in Russia in World War I, fought in Hitler’s Luftwaffe in World War II. Of his ten books of fiction and five other works, The Demons, meticulously translated by Richard and Clara Winston, is the first to see English.

Gravid Times. Von Doderer knows his city intimately and writes of a time when that city was politically gravid. Yet his people have virtually no political awareness. The two political riots in the book do not grow out of the book, they erupt into it. In fact, Von Doderer’s judgment on his people may be that, ignoring the urgencies of their time, they failed to safeguard the best things in it. But half a million is a lot of words in which to make that point obscurely. One wag has dubbed the book “the Ninth Symphony of Viennese gossip.” But it does not resemble Beethoven as much as it does another Viennese, Gustav Mahler. Like Mahler’s symphonies, the book is ambitious, traditional though not conservative, often beautiful, but long rather than large.