From: Vivian Droptrou
Category: Amis
Date: 8/5/99
Time: 7:13:33 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.118
FROM *THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS* BY JOHN SIMON:
An archetypical Viennese of Jewish extraction, he was equally proficient and prolific as playwright, novelist, and short-story writer. Originally a physician, he became so interested in Freud's ideas that Freud perceived him as a doppelgänger and felt compelled---respectfully---to avoid him. Schnitzler eventually quit medicine and devoted himself entirely to writing.
In the shattering novella *Sterben* (*Dying*) the tubercular Felix has one year left to live. His healthy mistress, Marie, promises to join him in death when the time comes. With clinical and psychoanalytic accuracy, Schnitzler describes Felix's physical and psychic deterioration. As the fear of death increases, so does the frenzied clinging to life and love. With frightening subtlety, Schnitzler traces Marie's gradual, quite unconscious estrangement; though she is faithful, loving, and dedicated to the dying man, a creeping revulsion invades and permeates her. In a grueling final scene, Felix demands that Marie fulfill her promise, even seems to try to strangle her. The frantic girl escapes into the night as Felix, clutching the chair she sat in, dies alone.
In 1906, Freud wrote to Schnitzler: "I often asked myself in amazement where you could have gotten this or that secret knowledge, which I had to acquire through painstaking exploration of the subject, and I eventually got to the point of envying the poet whom I otherwise admired." In a 1922 letter, Freud went even further: "At the root of your being, you are a psychological depth explorer, as honestly unprejudiced and unafraid as anyone ever."
There is more, much more, to Schnitzler than *Anatol*, *La Ronde* (*Reigen*), and *The Green Cockatoo*, his best-known works hereabouts, good as they are. In the novella *Lieutenant Gustl* he stunningly anticipated Joyce's stream of consciousness; in the novel *The Way into the Open* and in the drama *Professor Bernhardi* he, first among our writers, fully confronted the problem of anti-Semitism.