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PARTISAN REVIEW
individualist mystique that upon scrutiny we would reject. Jews are
not to be given special praise for doing what they should anyhow
undertake to do always, that is, to do excellent work. The stamp of
the ego is not on the truth, but rather the image of God which is of
an altogether different order of individuality and expression.
Leave this be. Let us close with a single example of the direc–
tion that a Jewish creative genius, a consummate critic of his own
romanticism and an authentic voice of both modernist triumphalism
and modernist humility, has taken. I speak not of a literary man, but
of the composer, Arnold Schonberg, whose critique of modernism
moved him from a maker of music to a maker of music with
language, that is profoundly instructive (I should add that the no less
complex Jewish novelist, Hermann Broch, undertook much the
same kind of experiment in his novels
The Sleepwalkers
and
The Death of
Virgil,
where, if you will, the silence amidst his words
approaches to modern music).
Schonberg was born in Vienna in 1874, the first child of a poor
shopkeeper's family, his mother observant and conservative, his
father a free-thinking anarchist. Schonberg studied violin, but there
was no piano in his home . He began to compose at the age of eleven,
an undoubted genius, but without formal training; he was appren–
ticed to a bank from which he departed to take up his precarious
vocation as musician and composer in 1895. Born into a Jewish
household where matters of faith were strenuously argued by his
believing mother and skeptical father, Schonberg early declared
himself a nonbeliever, although he maintained a fierce affection for
the Bible. Unexplained, but seriously undertaken, Schonberg was
baptized into the Reformed Church as Protestant in 1898, like his
friend Gustav Mahler, who had become a Catholic the year before,
and yet, it is clear, Schonberg could affirm no differently than
Mahler, who had described himself "as a Bohemian among Aus–
trians, an Austrian among Germans, and a Jew among all the na–
tions of the world." The last cluster of biographical facts are these: in
1923, in response to a scandalous rumor (promoted it appears by
Alma Mahler, then the wife of Walter Gropius, architect and direc–
tor of the Bauhaus) that Vassily Kandinsky, the founder of the Blue
Four and an early champion of Schonberg's work as painter and
composer, was an anti-Semite, Schonberg wrote Kandinsky on May
4, "... when I walk along the street and each person looks at me to
see whether I'm a Jew or a Christian, I can't very well tell each of
them I'm the one that Kandinsky and some others make an excep-
l
