The Merry Widow
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The Merry Widow
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A fictionalized autobiography of the life and many loves of Alma
Mahler.
By SARAH BOXER
THE ARTIST'S WIFE
By Max Phillips.
252 pp. New York: A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt & Company. $23.
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Is the novel as good as the song? You know the one I mean, about
''the loveliest girl in Vienna'': ''Alma, tell us / All modern
women are jealous. / Which of your magical wands / Got you Gustav
and Walter and Franz?''
The answer is yes. Max Phillips's second novel, which is based on
the life of the talented muse and musician Alma Mahler (1879-1964),
who married, in succession, the composer Gustav Mahler, the Bauhaus
architect Walter Gropius and the writer Franz Werfel, is as good as
Tom Lehrer's song.
Phillips has gotten inside Alma's head and made her sing. She is
selfish, restless, witty and mean. Her fictional memoir, told from
the other side of the grave, is, like Nabokov's ''Speak, Memory,''
a kind of sad and insolent poetry: ''Death, also, I find to be a
disappointment. . . . Your own little cupful is emptied out into
the general ocean, you vanish as a drop of blood vanishes in the
cool sea, and after that, you swim through all the moments that
ever were, the way water swims through water. Your second husband
addresses his egg with a butter knife and thinks, Whore, the wind
lifts the corner of your page and you smooth it back with a child's
fat hand.'' In death Alma sees her own cruelties as clearly as she
sees the frailties of the men and children in her life. (Women,
starting with her mother, seem not to exist for her.)
Although Phillips, the author of a previous novel, ''Snakebite
Sonnet,'' warns in a note that his Alma novel ''is not a work of
scholarship,'' many of the bare facts check out. Even the clipped
tone seems right. Phillips lists the quotations he lifted from
Alma's published diaries, including, ''We all ran around with our
hair loose, like holy women'' and ''We lay on this little bed and
stabbed each other with our knees.'' The rest of the book matches
their comic matter-of-factness.
Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel inspires both rancor and awe. People
wonder: How could she? And how did she? Alma's father, Emil Jakob
Schindler, a famous Viennese landscape painter, doted on his
talented, spunky daughter and died when she was 13. Phillips's Alma
remembers seeing her dead Papi: ''a swollen red thing in the bed,
eyeless, like a newborn puppy, and dressed in my father's
pajamas.'' Although some scholars suspect it was Alma's unfinished
adoration for her father that led her to a lifetime of bedding
geniuses, this fictional passage imagines something else. Horror.
Alma was stunned by her father's death into a hard, cool
intelligence that was irresistible -- and irresistibly attracted --
to very original men.
In the novel, beautiful, voluptuous Alma is vain beyond belief --
she is always showing off her throat -- but also unsparing with
herself. She says, ''I screeched all the Wagner roles until I
ruined a good mezzo-soprano voice.'' She records her self-loathing
in her diary, ''I drank five seidels of punch once and woke up in
the night with vomit on my bodice, and wrote, I'm utterly vulgar,
superficial, sybaritic, domineering and egoistic!''
She is just as unsparing with great men. And they love it. She
flirts with the director of the Burgtheater, Max Burckhard, who
brings her books by Plato, Darwin and Nietzsche and tries to seduce
her. (She thinks of dogs copulating and fends him off.) She models
for Klimt and rips up an unflattering drawing he makes of her. She
toys with her music teacher, the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky,
a ''tiny man, chinless and frog-eyed,'' without allowing him to
unbutton his trousers.
''I think I was in some ways more like a man than a woman, because
everything got very clear for me after love, clear and a bit
shabby,'' Alma thinks. It's amazing that the stumbling amorous
efforts of a few old men do not keep her from marrying one of them.
The portrait of her first husband, Gustav Mahler, in bed is
especially harsh. Alma narrates his beetle-like struggles. ''It was
obvious what he was trying to do.'' And to top off the small
tragedies in bed, he forces her to give up her music, which turns
her into a resentful, Benedictine-addicted housewife.
Their marriage survives, though, and two girls are produced. The
novel has a funny portrayal of their first daughter, Putzi, who
rejects her mother and adores her father. ''Putzi remained,
standing with straddled legs, just like a little Colossus of Rhodes
or a little Mahler.'' When Putzi dies a terrible death, the
marriage sours.
At a spa, Alma meets her Aryan prince, Walter Gropius. Soon her
anti-Semitism blooms. Sexually and reproductively, she feels,
Gropius is a better match. ''If I made a baby with that man, it
wouldn't die.'' She arranges to have both Gropius and Mahler in her
life, or, as Phillips's Alma puts it, to have ''both a bed-husband
and an art-husband.'' Eventually, Mahler dies, leaving Alma a rich
and famous widow, free for Gropius. The problem is, Alma is
beginning to think, ''What a boring man.'' She finds his designs
ugly, too.
At the age of 32, she takes up with a wild and frighteningly
possessive painter named Oskar Kokoschka, who is 26. She taunts
him, telling him she'll marry him only if he produces a
masterpiece. He waves pear cores at her. In 1914, Alma finally
slips his noose, marches Kokoschka off to war and decides to marry
Gropius while he is on leave. When Kokoschka returns, shellshocked
from the war and Alma's rejection, he has a life-size Alma doll
made for him. He takes it to restaurants and eventually decapitates
it at a party. In the novel Alma doesn't take it personally. ''They
tossed me, headless, purple with wine, into the dustbin.''
As it turns out, Alma doesn't get too attached to Gropius either.
Once she has what she wants from him -- a gorgeous child -- she
takes up with a Jewish writer named Franz Werfel.
''The Artist's Wife'' drags a bit in the Werfel years. Alma's merry
anti-Semitism really begins to grate. Hitler bears down on the Jews
in Europe, Alma bears down on Werfel to become a Catholic, and
Werfel keeps churning out novels like ''The Forty Days of Musa
Dagh.'' Alma's wit disappears with her looks. She knows she won't
have another husband. She begins to sound like Ayn Rand. In the
end, she outlives practically everyone, including three of her four
children. She attends no funerals.
How can a reader stand so much irritation from one plump, drunk,
narcissistic woman? Perhaps even Alma wondered. She fiddled with
her diaries until the end of her life, until there was almost
nothing reliable there. She left the field wide open for a novelist
to imagine her inner life. While the biographers of Alma see her as
cruel, vain and smart, all are mystified about her magical wand.
Well, Phillips has found it. It was Alma's gimlet wit that got her
''Gustav and Walter and Franz.''
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Sarah Boxer is a reporter for the Arts & Ideas pages of The Times.
Her first book, ''In the Floyd Archives: A Psycho-Bestiary,'' will
be published next month.