Hugo von Hofmannsthal - a fictional letter to the English philosopher Francis Bacon: For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea. Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back – whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Lord Chandos Letter. Trans. by Joel Rotenber, NYRB Classics, 2012.



Hugo von Hoffmannsthal made his mark as a poet, as a playwright, and as the librettist for Richard Strauss’s greatest operas, but he was no less accomplished as a writer of short, strangely evocative prose works. The atmospheric stories and sketches collected here—fin-de-siècle fairy tales from the Vienna of Klimt and Freud, a number of them never before translated into English—propel the reader into a shadowy world of uncanny fates and secret desires. An aristocrat from Paris in the plague years shares a single night of passion with an unknown woman; a cavalry sergeant meets his double on the battlefield; an orphaned man withdraws from the world with his four servants, each of whom has a mysterious power over his destiny.
The most influential of all of Hofmannsthal's writings is the title story, a fictional letter to the English philosopher Francis Bacon in which Lord Chandos explains why he is no longer able to write. The "Letter" not only symbolized Hofmannsthal's own turn away from poetry, it captured the psychological crisis of faith and language which was to define the twentieth century.


The Lord Chandos letter is a fictional letter written by Philipp, Lord Chandos to the English philosopher Francis Bacon. Written by Hugo Von Hofmannsthal, it is one of the few prose pieces that Hofmannsthal wrote before giving up writing. In its brevity, style and general concerns, this short piece of prose writing shines on its own, conveying in a few pages what ordinary writers might take volumes to do. I only read it last night in silent admiration.
Let us examine this letter. Lord chandos laments his laziness in writing to Bacon of late but says that he might not be the same person Bacon knew before, one capable of rhetoric but what use is rhetoric for "it is not equal to getting at the heart of things"; he remembers projects that he had envisaged, literary ones but now "they dance before me like miserable mosquitoes on a dim wall no longer illuminated by the bright sun of a happy time". He speaks about his efforts in understanding mythic and fairy tales, "his wanting to disappear into them and speak out of them with their tongues". Lord Chandos' plan was to assemble a book that would negate all books, a collection of wisdom and "aphorisms, reflections and intellectual baubles and call it Nosce te ipsum".
Lord Chandos has lived a life where "the mental world is not opposed to the physical", a life where solitude and barbarism balance each other. However this has only led to the present "faintheartedness", which he initially thought was a symbol, perhaps a prelude to a religious experience. And then Lord Chandos declares his "inability to think or speak coherently. In brief, this is my case".
Lord Chandos writes that he has "lost the ability to use words" and construct and convey abstract thoughts, which instead "disintegrated in my mouth like rotten mushrooms". Dreading conversation altogether, he stopped speaking, as "everything broke into pieces". To avoid all this, Lord Chandos sought the stoics, Seneca and Cicero, but he felt "terribly lonely in their company".
These experiences have however led Lord Chandos to see what was formerly not sought, the ordinary things of life, the ones taken for granted, "a watering can, a harrow left in a field, a dog in the sun, a shabby churchyard" and so on. These ordinary things "present a sublime and moving aura", and what he actually felt was "Carthage in flames". Insignificant creatures, small things, his own feelings, his harmony have allowed an insight into his relationship with all of existence, "a feeling that cannot be conveyed in rational language". This new joy will come from "a lonely shepherd's fire and not from contemplating a starry sky". Lord Chandos has discovered "a feverish thinking, but thinking in a medium more fluid and passionate than words, leading to myself in some way, into the most profound peace".
What does the letter actually say? The most obvious one, an everyday one for ordinary mortals too, is the impossibility of conveying through words, the inner states of our experiences, the shifting sands, the hourly tidal movements in our minds. The most acute writer or the most sensitive minds even are unable to convey that which is inexpressible through speech. Conrad wrote that it is "impossible to convey the given life sensation of a single epoch of our existence....we live and we die alone". Thus words which mean a lot to us are mostly dry, bare of the actual meat of our innermost hearts.
This letter is usually seen as a symptom of literature sickness though that is an extreme generalization. Hoffmannsthal's letter is more than that. It is more reflective of a moral, a metaphysical crisis, an agonised cry at the loss of a previously loved object( I am not suggesting any classic psychoanalytic loss-object-love-hate complex), the loss is that of a moral rather than a physical symbol, the fragmentation and dissolution of life, lives, and for the comforting memory of former times which always seem better.
Hoffmannsthal was one of the Viennese intellectuals- Jung Wien- perhaps its most distinguished. This letter must be seen in light of the events that were unfolding in Vienna, the coming to the end of an empire, political and social changes, other tempests, soon to come mass concentration camps and war. Karl Kraus described those days as "the last days of the end of the world". This letter thus raises concerns that the most uncompromising intellect, like that of Kraus had already raised, a refusal to acknowledge a crisis stemming from change and an inability through language to speak about it. The other aspect was Hoffmansthal's whole enquiry whether art could exist for arts sake, for the aesthetic quality alone or whether any art form should be an instrument of social change. Without actually participating, expressing and then becoming a symbol of its times, any art form existing just for its own sake, in a vacant limbo, speaks of hypocrisy. This was the original critique that Kraus had shown of his contemporaries, which included the brilliant Hoffmansthal too.
Along with this letter, this collection has a few other prose pieces and they all express in a language that is extremely poetic, the concerns of this letter. There is an impending sense of doom, destruction and dissolution. Nothing concrete is expressed, no fears are clearly shown and yet, the atmospheric quality of his writing grips the reader in a mood of forlorn misgivings for within a few sentences, we expect breakdown, not only of language but of the inner mind. This is wonderfully captured in the Tale of the 672nd night, Tale of the veiled woman, The village in the mountains amongst others. One can clearly understand the influence of Hoffmansthal on the coming generation of Austrian writers, in particular Bernhard but without the latter's masochistic nihilism.
The fact that this letter was written after a crisis of language suggests that it was not a crisis of language but more a crisis of its meaning for the letter is simply brilliantly written.Lord Chandos' letter forces us to examine the deeper meanings of life......not just day to day psychological games or crimes of passion or artistic or political concerns but the heart of the matter, which is the concern of most metaphysical prisoners. However, what I want to know is why was the letter addressed to Francis Bacon? - by Kubla Khan    disquietthoughts.blogspot.com/2008/01/lord-chandos-letter.html 

 

“The Letter of Lord Chandos” is a fictional letter written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.  The work was published under the title “Ein Brief” (“A Letter”) in the Berlin newspaper Der Tag in October of 1902.  Regarded by critics as one of the first primary texts of the modern era, prominent German literary critic Walter Jens has called the work the first text of the German literary revolution of the early 20th century.^[1] The author of the letter is the fictional Lord Chandos, who writes to Sir Francis Bacon about a crisis of language.  In the letter, Lord Chandos claims that he is experiencing a crisis of language that has rendered him unable to write as he has written in the past.  A great deal of the analysis of the work has focused on the apparent paradox that, despite claiming to be unable to write, the author composes a letter of considerable length and never fully explains the source of the crisis of language.^[2]   The questions of how he can write despite his condition and why this condition has developed remain unanswered.
Plot Summary 
Chandos Explains His State 
The work begins with a single introductory sentence, most likely the work of an editor, explaining that the letter, written by Lord Philip Chandos, son of the Earl of Bath, and addressed to Sir Francis Bacon, will apologize for a lack of literary activity.
Lord Chandos acknowledges a letter that Bacon has sent him expressing concerns about Chandos’s mental state. Chandos, age 26, claims that he has been silent for two years, having previously established himself as a writer as early as age 19.  The author describes his early literary fame, which stemmed from two successful works.  He writes to Bacon, however, that he is unsure if he is “still the same person to whom your precious letter is addressed,” based on the fact that he is no longer writing as he previously did.^[3]
Chandos then proceeds to speak about the “various little projects I entertained during those days of rare enthusiasm,” which he has apparently shared with Bacon.  Discussing the plans and desires he had for future works, Chandos dismisses those ideas as having been conceived “in a state of continuous intoxication” (132).  He then bluntly describes his current state: “I have lost completely the ability to think or to speak of anything coherently” (133).
It is apparent to the reader, however, that Chandos’s inabilities are ultimately only literary; he is able to describe his condition coherently, and he indicates later in the essay that, even if he is no longer able to write as he used to, he continues to converse with his family and others.
The Development of a Crisis 
Chandos describes the stages that have led to his current state, beginning with an inability to speak on matters of philosophy or morality.  Then, he writes, he became unable to express opinions or judgments in regular conversation.  He states that he experienced a heightened consciousness in regular conversation: “My mind compelled me to view all things occurring in such conversations from an uncanny closeness. … I no longer succeeded in comprehending them with the simplifying eye of habit. For me everything disintegrated into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea” (134).
Chandos writes that he finally turned to the works of Seneca and Cicero for refuge — and perhaps therapy — in an attempt to end his crisis, but was unable to make complete sense of those works.  In the end, he abandoned the endeavor, and reached his current state of being.
Chandos laments that his current existence is “lacking in spirit and thought [even though it] differs little from that of my neighbors, my relations, and most of the land-owning nobility of this kingdom” (135). In short, he lacks the mental capabilities he professes to have previously had and is now just one person among many.
Epiphanies and Chandos’s Conclusion 
Despite his current state, Chandos explains that he does experience moments of heightened sensation or stimulation, which provide epiphanies of a higher being that overwhelm him.  In his own words, the feeling is like a “rising flood of divine sensation” (136).  He describes these instances as the highlight of his existence (one example is a detailed, sensory description of the death of cellar rats).  But he also writes that these moments are confusing and do no good to help his language crisis:
As soon, however, as this strange enchantment falls from me, I find myself confused; wherein this harmony transcending me and the entire world consisted, and how it made itself known to me, I could present in sensible words as little as I could say anything precise about the inner movements of my intestines or a congestion of my blood” (138).
Confusion plagues Chandos despite moments of heightened stimulation or transcendence, and he is still unable to write.
Chandos concludes that “neither in the coming year nor in the following nor in all the years of this my life shall I write a book, whether in English or in Latin” (140).  This conclusion is notable because Chandos details the common languages which he can no longer use, but leaves open the possibility that he could write or employ a new and different language.
Autobiographical Elements 
“The Letter of Lord Chandos” is occasionally mistaken for a nonfiction work of Hofmannsthal’s.  While it is fiction, many critics view the letter as a partly autobiographical document.^[4]
The letter’s composition marks Hofmannsthal’s departure from poetry and his entrance into other literary genres.  Having achieved fame throughout Germany by age 25 for his poetry, “Hofmannsthal the lyric poet ‘fell silent,’ just as did Chandos,” critic Thomas Kovach points out, noting the personal literary crisis Hofmannsthal experienced during this time (Kovach 86).
Hofmannsthal’s early works were primarily lyric poems, some of which he published as early as age 16.  He was counted among the Young Vienna literary circle from early on, joining the ranks of Arthur Schnitzler and Gerhard Hauptmann, among others.  His lyrical dramas “Der Tod des Tizian” (1893) and “Der Thor und der Tod” (1893), heavily influenced by Stefan George, the older German poet, were among Hofmannsthal’s more prominent works.  Hofmannsthal was considered an aesthete — all of his early works were predominantly aesthetic in concern.  Hermann Broch, among others, marks the publication of “The Letter of Lord Chandos” as Hofmannsthal’s break with aestheticism, and the start of a new phase in Hofmannsthal’s writing.^[5]
It is clear that Hofmannsthal experienced a turning point in his career around the turn of the century — prior to “The Letter of Lord Chandos” he had not published for three years — and much of the crisis Chandos describes is seen in Hofmannsthal’s letters and other personal documents.  Stefan Schultz writes: “Hofmannsthal’s own convictions and reflections are present in Lord Chandos’ words, while at the same time Stefan George’s shadow rises behind the recipient of the letter, Francis Bacon” (Schultz 2).  In fact, there are striking similarities between Chandos’s letter and concurrent letters from Hofmannsthal to Stefan George (Schultz 2).
Hofmannsthal — in contradiction to Lord Chandos’s proclamation that he will never write again — continued to publish after “The Letter of Lord Chandos,” although this later work is markedly different from his work prior to “The Letter of Lord Chandos.”
Influences & Concurrent Work on Crises of Language 
“The Letter of Lord Chandos” was influenced by works of many of Hofmannsthal’s contemporaries, including those of Ernst Mach and Sigmund Freud, and the piece also mirrors the work of his contemporary Ludwig Wittgenstein, who similarly worked on a crisis of language.
The impact of Ernst Mach’s “Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen” (1886) on Hofmannsthal is most evident. Thomas Kovach writes: “Mach’s systematic dissolution of the boundary between inside and outside, the self and the world, in favor of a mass of elements and perception, … is reflected in this [“The Letter of Lord Chandos”] and other writings by Hofmannsthal” (Kovach 89).  Indeed, Lord Chandos’ confusion about self and the outside world — seen in his moments of transcendence and heightened awareness — demonstrates the concepts Mach describes.
Freud’s “Traumdeutung” (“The Interpretation of Dreams”) (1900), which Hofmannsthal was familiar with, “was the first major statement of a view of the human psyche that proved to be far more wide-reaching in its impact” (Kovach 89).  Freud’s investigations of human mental processes can be seen reflected in Chandos’s descriptions of the epiphanies he experiences, and also in his description of the development of his current mental state.
Lastly, the most prominent parallels are seen between “The Letter of Lord Chandos” and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, especially his “Tractatus” (1921), viewed as the culmination of Wittgenstein’s investigations on language.  Hofmannsthal’s writing would be echoed by the work of Wittgenstein, whose work on the critique of language was foremost in the discussion on language during the period.

1. ↑ Walter Jens, “Der Mensch und die Dinge,” Die Revolution der deutschen Prosa, in Akzente 4 (1957): 319.
2. ↑ Michael Morton, “Chandos and His Plans,” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 62.3 (1988): 514.
3. ↑ Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Selected Prose, trans. Marry Hottinger (NY:Pantheon Books, 1952), 129. All subsequent references will be made in the body of the text.
4. ↑ Thomas A. Kovach, A Companion to the Works of Hugo Von Hofmannsthal (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), 86; H. Stefan. Schultz, “Hofmannsthal and Bacon: The Sources of The Lord Chandos Letter,” Comparative Literature 13.1 (1961): 2. All subsequent references will be made in the body of the text.
5. ↑ Hermann Broch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time: The European Imagination, 1820-1920, trans. Michael Steinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 124.

- Aaron Steiner 

This is without doubt one of the strangest books I’ve ever read from cover to cover! When I came across the book I was fascinated since I’ve long been interested in Vienna at the turn of the century (19th/20th), but had never read anything by Hofmannsthal himself.
The last piece in the book, the only non-fiction piece, is the title piece, The Lord Chandos Letter. The other offerings, 13 of them, are fictional pieces, all very short and most unfinished. It would seem that Joel Rotenberg, who chose these pieces, found some previously unpublished pieces from the quite young Hofmannsthal and put this book together. There is definitely something unsettling and disappointing in reading fictional pieces that are unfinished. However, despite my frequent frustrations with that limitation, some of the writing, sentence by sentence, even section by section, was simply marvelous bits of writing. Often aggravated by the unfinished nature of the fictional pieces I thought several times of just abandoning the book and moving on. However, it was those bits and pieces of gems of fictional writing that kept me going until finally I just said to myself: read on, paragraph by paragraph and enjoy the good writing when it comes. And so I did. Below I simply comment here and there about each piece, but it is important to keep in mind that virtually none of them are “finished.” Looking ahead, I will argue at the end of these notes that editor Rotenberg may have been more clever in this choice and order of these pieces than I knew until I read to the end and especially the Chandos Letter. Overall I would note that the young Hofmannsthal was fascinated by the romantic notions of the occult and even supernatural. What a very strange young man he must have been.
INTRODUCTION By John Banville
Hofmannsthal was part of the Jung Wien movement. At age 17 he began to use the pseudonym, Loris. He was born in 1874 to a Jewish-German-Italian family which converted to Christianity and assumed the “Von” to their name. The young Hofmannsthal abandoned the old esoteric “art for art’s sake” school and involved himself in the new movement where literature was “. . . a way of mediating between the life of the spirit and life in the world.” He was part of the movement of a critique of language (Sprachkritik) being founded in Vienna by Karl Kraus and Fritz Mauthner just at the turn of the century. This view held there were no universal timeless truths since all evidence is gathered by our senses and is thus contingent. In 1902 Hofmannsthal, just 28, published his “The Lord Chandos Letter” which gives this book it title. He rejected the notion of “truth” being embedded in words but “. . . it is as if my body consisted entirely of coded messages revealing everything to me. Or as if we would enter into a new, momentous relationship with all of existence if we began to think with our hearts.” Banville asks: “Can we ‘think with our hearts’?” This movement of which Hofmannsthal was a part preceded a great political collapse which Krauss called “the last days of the end of the world.”
A NOTE ON THE SELECTION
These works are written between 1892-1924. Most were not published in his lifetime.  
CAVALRY STORY
This is a short tale of a cavalry sergeant who is on a mission in Italy and has a sort of out-of-body experience while on duty and is soon shot to death by his own officer for disobeying an order. For me this story was not an auspicious beginning. I found it confusing and, in the end, virtually unintelligible.
DEATH DREAM
 This is a short sketch from 1892. It seems more like notes for an intended piece on the theme of the title.  
TALE OF 672ND NIGHT
A handsome and healthy young man finds himself alone after his parents die. He dismisses all but four servants and begins to live a solitary but active life, walking his city constantly, alive to all its beauty and mystery. He is well, handsome, not lonely but obsessed with death. The narrator tells us he has this privilege since he is quite healthy. He knew his four servants well, liked three of them and tolerated the fourth. Eventually in the heat of the summer he moved them all to his summer home where he would take long walks. After an interesting, even brilliant, opening section the story took a bizarre twist ending in an unbelievable horror. Very odd indeed. The title makes no sense whatsoever in relation to the story. I wondered if it was actually the number of story he had written.
THE GOLDEN APPLE (FRAGMENT)
What’s here, a part of a story concerning a golden apple with rare spices inside, a carpet merchant, his wife and young daughter, is beautifully written, mysterious, magical, yet terrifying. Alas, the story just breaks off with a death leaving this reader apprehensive and unfulfilled.  
THE ROSE AND THE DESK
A short one page thought. Nicely expressed, but not very profound.
TALE OF THE VEILED WOMAN
Entering his house he leaves no shadows, and his wife heard everything except him. This miner come home feeling some very strange things coming and the eventually he runs away from his wife and child. Very unsatisfying.  
THE VILLAGE IN THE MOUNTAINS
 There is a contrast between city visitors and locals. There really is no plot, but some wonderful descriptions.  
REFLECTION
This is a brief poetic reflection of a lover missing his beloved.
TWILIGHT AND STORM AFTER DARK
 Here we have a simple description of a boy following a servant woman, while fanaticizing about her. Well-written.  
AN INCIDENT IN THE LIFE OF MARCHALL DE BOMMOMPIERRE
Perhaps the most gripping, yet puzzling, story of the lot. Set in Paris, a wealthy man is attracted to a woman who is seemingly a shop keeper. He sets up a rendezvous with her and seeks a second. Nothing comes of it all, seemingly because of the then raging plague. However, the writing was gripping, brilliant, exciting . . . but the plot just drifted off into nothingness. Very curious, but riveting.  
MILITARY STORY
 The tale is a fairly long exploration of a soldier who was in a deep mental depression and is finally able to pull himself together. Again, little happens in a normal sense of “story” in my experience, but beautifully and grippingly written!
TIDE CREATURE – MUSSEL POEM
This is a single sentence piece, but alas, rather unintelligible to me. I can’t imagine the relationship between the title and the sentence.  
TALE OF TWO COUPLES
The two couples are the narrator and his partner, Anna and Clemens with his partner, Theresa who is dying. It is an eerie but beautiful and touching story of two couples, one where the woman is dying and her lover is at her side. The author, however, is falling out of love with his partner. We watch the development of these two sad things at the same time. The tale is beautifully told and touching.  
A LETTER
This is a “letter-story” in which Lord Chandor, a man of note in English society and politics, is writing to the famous Francis Bacon, apologizing for his abandonment of literary activity. Chandor, who is 26, can no longer write. Bacon tries to console him with a quote from Hippocrates: “One who is suffering from a severe illness yet feels no pain is sick in his mind.” Chandor is touched by this bluntness and opens himself to Bacon in the letter. He cites some of his past successes and allows he had many plans of things to write. He had been on fire with visions and ideas, but it was all too much and too false. “. . . my soul had to sink from such puffed-up arrogance to this extremity of faintheartedness and exhausting. . .” His old world of order and tradition, fittingness and such has evaporated. Now even the simplest object or experience can: “suddenly take on for me a sublime and moving aura which words seems too weak to describe.” He has developed an “empathy” with all manner of things not normally thought to be of value. His world has become: “. . . as if we could enter into a new, momentous relationship with all of existence if we began to think with our hearts.” He knows he will never write again. Yet it is in the very writing of this letter which was the best written and most intellectually satisfying and challenging of all Hofmannsthal’s writing that preceded it in this volume. Perhaps, too, it even clarifies some of the lack of plot in many of the earlier pieces – what if what Hofmannsthal seems to aim at is not to tell tales but to capture moments. Not super “special” moments or events, but everyday things and experiences which are important at that particular moment to those who experience them. It would seem to elucidate much of what preceded it in the volume. If this is the case, then the editor’s choice of ORDERING the pieces was brilliant. As my notes suggest, a second reading may well be called for and now, armed with Lord Chandor’s Letter, I may well be more open to give myself over to the plot-less experiences without thinking the author is failing us. Quite intriguing. -

Bob Corbett

To a certain kind of child, the Viennese ethos of Bildung must have felt so oppressive.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal at first appeared to be the perfect child of Viennese aestheticism, immediately recognized as the city’s greatest poet when he was seventeen.  A central theme of his work, though, was a critique of aestheticism, an inventory of its costs, many of which were presumably felt personally, although Hofmannsthal always wrote with so much distance that there is no way to tell.
In his 1902 story “The Letter” (or “The Lord Chandos Letter”), a writer explains his lack of literary production after a promising start.  It is a description of an aesthetic and linguistic crisis.  His plans to write a kind of “Key to All Mythologies” omnibook leads him into some sort of heightened aesthetic state (“In those days I, in a state of continuous intoxication, conceived the whole of existence as one great unit: the spiritual and physical worlds seemed to form no contrast, as little as did courtly and bestial conduct, art and barbarism, solitude and society…,” 132) which ends in an inevitable crash, but one that takes a strange form.   Words begin to separate from their meaning.  Any concept capable of verbal statement (“This affair has turned out well for this or that purpose”) seems false (“indemonstrable, as mendacious and hollow as could be”, 134).  The problem is with the words, not the concepts:
For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea.  Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back – whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void.  (135)
The narrator’s solution is to engage with the world, with the thing itself, and avoid words; his composition of the formal, elegant letter that is the text of the story might appear to be a contradiction,  but that is merely a form, almost a reflex, while his true language is “a language none of whose words is known to me, a language in which inanimate things speak to me and wherein I may one day may have to justify myself before an unknown judge” (141).
What part of this Hofmannsthal experienced himself is a mystery, but by the time he wrote “The Letter” he had abandoned poetry and to some degree fiction (he wrote but did not publish), and instead turned his attention to theater, opera, and essays, from private to public forms.  An enduring, eminently public,  achievement was co-founding the Salzburg Festival.
The “Lord Chandos” quotations are from Selected Prose, Bollingen, 1952, tr. Tania & James Stern.
Hermann Broch suffered a related crisis.  The Death of Virgil (1945) is the novel in which he abandons novels.  I should read it. - wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2013/03/writing-about-not-writing-hofmannthals.html

I just finished reading a slim volume of short stories by the Austrian author Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) wrote these stories in the last decade of the nineteenth century, so his language and style is at times in the vein of European Decadence. The stories have a dreamlike quality; the atmosphere seems vague and impressionistic. Also of note, many characters have no names; they are known as, for instance, “the miner’s young wife” in “Tale of the Veiled Woman,” or “a merchant’s son” in “Tale of the 672nd Night”.
But I want to talk about the title story, widely regarded as Hofmannsthal’s masterpiece in the genre. Informally known as “The Lord Chandos Letter,” its actual title is simply “A Letter.” Hofmannsthal’s vagueness is integral to his vision as a writer, and is explored in this story. Purported to be a letter written by Philipp, Lord Chandos, the younger son of the Earl of Bath, to Francis Bacon in 1603, the story explains to Bacon (and the reader) why Lord Chandos has not written to him in two years. In brief, the reason is because Philipp has experienced a rapturous experience, which has resulted in his perceiving a deep split between the mental and physical worlds, realizing that language does not actually unite the two. In seeing the vast gulf between the physical world and the world of his mind he realizes the failure of language to convey the true nature, the immediacy, the “thingness” of all the people, places, and things in the physical world. And this is what has paralyzed him and caused him to stop writing. He tells Bacon: Everything came to pieces, the pieces broke into more pieces,
and nothing could be encompassed by one idea. Isolated words swam
about me; they turned into eyes that stared at me and into which I
had to stare back, dizzying whirlpools which spun around and around
and led into the void (122). Although this seems terrifying, Philipp’s paralysis comes not from the terror of words being inadequate to their purpose but from the mystical feeling of fully comprehending the ineffable nature of all things, and of the origin of these things by extension. Philipp has discovered the Transcendent, the Eastern experience of the Self that is itself a Void, a form that is emptiness, and an emptiness that is form, which cannot be put into words, but which is found permeating all Creation, and has also been testified to by Christian mystics. Philipp writes that
. . . it is as if my body consisted entirely of coded
messages revealing everything to me. . . . But when this
strange bewitchment stops, I am unable to say anything about
it; I can no more express in rational language what made up
this harmony permeating me and the entire world, or how it
made itself perceptible to me, . . . (125). Philipp’s, and by extension Hofmannsthal’s, relationship to language is deeply embedded in the Aesthetic and Decadent movement which concerned itself with “art for art’s sake” and whose writers created fictions in which the ornamental, excessively descriptive language exposed the nature of language for what it is—mere artifice, and severed it from its function of trying to communicate the substance or meaning of an object, a person, a situation, or a place. In the middle of the nineteenth century the Symbolists planted the seeds for this development in their poetry, which invested objects with abstract thoughts, emotions, and sensations that could not be represented in other ways. The abyss between object, thought, or emotion and the language used to represent them began here, by focusing on the distance between them in the physical world and the mind, where language tries to conceal the inability of man to fully know the object or experience he is focused on.
For writers, this moment was the beginning of the end—for how can we continue to trust what we have blindly trusted throughout the history of writing to truly express the “thingness,” the “suchness,” of the people, places, things, and experiences we write about, if language can only hint at what is whirling about in the mind but not at the actual nature of what the mind desires to represent?
This brings me to a final point of interest that came up when reading this story: the subtle relation not just of the primarily Eastern philosophical experience of reality in general but of the Zen Buddhist understanding of language which relates to how Hofmannsthal represents it in his story. For Zen Buddhists, language cannot point at all to the real nature of any object in the physical world. The reality, as Watts’s The Way of Zen has definitively made it clear for me, is that we live in our minds; we can never truly “touch” the nature of the objects we describe so ambiguously and poorly because language is simply sounds and letters that have no relation to, and so cannot actually, factually represent, the “suchness” of the objects we see or interact with in the world. Hence, the Zen manner of pointing with the finger at something when asked what it is or to describe it. Without words, Zen Buddhism cogently makes it heard: the silence is deafening . . . and enlightening. - www.apoetsperspective.com/the-lord-chandos-letter-and-other-writings-by-hugo-von-hofmannsthal-nyrb-2005/

THE LETTER OF LORD CHANDOS  by Michael Gran

Graham Bradshaw: After “Disgrace”: Lord and Lady Chandos in CapeT own and Adelaide

 

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The Letter of Lord Chandos

THIS is the letter Philip, Lord Chandos, younger son of the Earl of Bath, wrote to Francis Bacon, later Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, apologizing for his complete abandonment of literary ac­tivity.

IT IS kind of you, my esteemed friend, to condone my two years of silence and to write to me thus. It is

more than kind of you to give to your solicitude about me, to your perplexity at what appears to you as mental stagnation, the expression of lightness and jest which only great men, convinced of the perilousness of life yet not dis­couraged by it, can master. 

You conclude with the aphorism of Hippocrates, "Qui gravi morbo correpti dolores non sentiunt, us mens aegro­tat" (Those who do not perceive that they are wasted by seri­ous illness are sick in mind), and suggest that I am in need of medicine not only to conquer my malady, but even more, to sharpen my senses for the condition of my inner self. I would fain give you an answer such as you deserve, fain reveal myself to you entirely, but I do not know how to set about it. Hardly do I know whether I am still the same person to whom your precious letter is addressed. Was it I who, now six-and-twenty, at nineteen wrote The New Paris, The Dream of Daphne, Epithalamium, those pastorals reeling under the splendour of their words-plays which a divine Queen and several over­indulgent lords and gentlemen are gracious enough still to remember? And again, was it I who, at three-and-twenty, be­neath the stone arcades of the great Venetian piazza, found in myself that structure of Latin prose whose plan and order delighted me more than did the monuments of Palladio and Sansovino rising out of the sea? And could I, if otherwise I am still the same person, have lost from my inner inscrutable self all traces and scars of this creation of my most intensive thinking-lost them so completely that in your letter now lying before me the title of my short treatise stares at me strange and cold? I could not even comprehend, at first, what the familiar picture meant, but had to study it word by word, as though these Latin terms thus strung together were meet­ing my eye for the first time. But I am, after all, that person, and there is rhetoric in these questions-rhetoric which is good for women or for the House of Commons, whose power, however, so overrated by our time, is not sufficient to pene­trate into the core of things. But it is my inner self that I feel bound to reveal to you-a peculiarity, a vice, a disease of my mind, if you like-if you are to understand that an abyss equally unbridgeable separates me from the literary works lying seemingly ahead of me as from those behind me: the latter having become so strange to me that I hesitate to call them my property. 

I know not whether to admire more the urgency of your benevolence or the unbelievable sharpness of your memory, when you recall to me the various little projects I entertained during those days of rare enthusiasm which we shared together. True, I did plan to describe the first years of the reign of our glorious sovereign, the late Henry VIII. The papers bequeathed to me by my grandfather, the Duke of Exeter, concerning his negotiations with France and Portugal, offered me some foundation. And out of Sallust, in those happy, stimulating days, there flowed into me as though through never~ongested conduits the realization of form-that deep, true, inner form which can be sensed only beyond the domain of rhetorical tricks: that form of which one can no longer say that it organizes subject-matter, for it pene­trates it, dissolves it, creating at once both dream and reality, an interplay of eternal forces, something as marvellous as music or algebra. This was my most treasured plan. 

But what is man that he should make plans! 

I also toyed with other schemes. These, too, your kind letter conjures up. Each one, bloated with a drop of my blood, dances before me like a weary gnat against a sombre wall whereon the bright sun of halcyon days no longer lies. 

I wanted to decipher the fables, the mythical tales be­queathed to us by the Ancients, in which painters and sculp­tors found an endless and thoughtless pleasure decipher them as the hieroglyphs of a secret, inexhaustible wisdom whose breath I sometimes seemed to feel as though from be­hind a veil. 

I well remember this plan. It was founded on I know not what sensual and spiritual desire: as the hunted hart craves water, so I craved to enter these naked, glistening bodies, these sirens and dryads, this Narcissus and Proteus, Perseus and Actaeon. I longed to disappear in them and talk out of them with tongues. And I longed for more. I planned to start an Apophthegmata, like that composed by Julius Caesar: 

you will remember that Cicero mentions it in a letter. In it I thought of setting side by side the most memorable say­ings which-while associating with the learned men and witty women of our time, with unusual people from among the sim­ple folk or with erudite and distinguished personages I had managed to collect during my travels. With these I meant to combine the brilliant maxims and reflections from classical and Italian works, and anything else of intellectual adornment that appealed to me in books, in manuscripts or conversations; the arrangement, moreover, of particularly beautiful festivals and pageants, strange crimes and cases of madness, descriptions of the greatest and most characteristic architectural monuments in the Netherlands, in France and Italy; and many other things. The whole work was to have been entitled Nosce te ipsum. 

To sum up: In those days I, in a state of continuous in­toxication, conceived the whole of existence as one great unit: the spiritual and physical worlds seemed to form no contrast, as little as did courtly and bestial conduct, art and barbarism, solitude and society; in everything I felt the pres­ence of Nature, in the aberrations of insanity as much as in the utmost refinement of the Spanish ceremonial; in the boorishness of young peasants no less than in the most deli­cate of allegories; and in all expressions of Nature I felt my-self. When in my hunting lodge I drank the warm foaming milk which an unkempt wench had drained into a wooden pail from the udder of a beautiful gentle~yed cow, the sen­sation was no different from that which I experienced when, seated on a bench built into the window of my study, my mind absorbed the sweet and foaming nourishment from a book. The one was like the other: neither was superior to the other, whether in dreamlike celestial quality or in physical in­tensity-and thus it prevailed through the whole expanse of life in all directions; everywhere I was in the centre of it, never suspecting mere appearance: at other times I divined that all was allegory and that each creature was a key to all the others; and I felt myself the one capable of seizing each by the handle and unlocking as many of the others as were ready to yield. This explains the title which I had intended to give to this encyclopedic book. 

To a person susceptible to such ideas, it might appear a well-designed plan of divine Providence that my mind should fall from such a state of inflated arrogance into this extreme of despondency and feebleness which is now the permanent condition of my inner self. Such religious ideas, however, have no power over me: they belong to the cobwebs through which my thoughts dart out into the void, while the thoughts of so many others are caught there and come to rest. To me the mysteries of faith have been condensed into a lofty alle­gory which arches itself over the fields of my life like a radiant rainbow, ever remote, ever prepared to recede should it occur to me to rush toward it and wrap myself into the folds of its mantle. 

But, my dear friend, worldly ideas also evade me in a like manner. How shall I try to describe to you these strange spiritual torments, this rebounding of the fruit-branches above my outstretched hands, this recession of the murmuring stream from my thirsting lips? 

My case, in short, is this: I have lost completely the abil­ity to think or to speak of anything coherently. 

At first I grew by degrees incapable of discussing a loftier or more general subject in terms of which everyone, fluently and without hesitation, is wont to avail himself. I experienced an inexplicable distaste for so much as uttering the words spirit, soul, or body. I found it impossible to express an opinion on the affairs at Court, the events in Parliament, or whatever you wish. This was not motivated by any form of personal deference (for you know that my candour borders on imprudence), but because the abstract terms of which the tongue must avail itself as a matter of course in order to voice a judgment-these terms crumbled in my mouth like mouldy fungi. Thus, one day, while reprimanding my four-year-old daughter, Katherina Pompilia, for a childish lie of which she had been guilty and demonstrating to her the necessity of always being truthful, the ideas streaming into my mind sud­denly took on such iridescent colouring, so flowed over into one another, that I reeled off the sentence as best I could, as if suddenly overcome by illness. Actually, I did feel myself growing pale, and with a violent pressure on my forehead I left the child to herself, slammed the door behind me, and began to recover to some extent only after a brief gallop over the lonely pasture. 

Gradually, however, these attacks of anguish spread like a corroding rust. Even in familiar and humdrum conversation all the opinions which are generally expressed with ease and sleep-walking assurance became so doubtful that I had to cease altogether taking part in such talk. It filled me with an in­explicable anger, which I could conceal only with effort, to hear such things as: This affair has turned out well or ill for this or that person; Sheriff N. is a bad, Parson T. a good man; Farmer M. is to be pitied, his sons are wasters; another is to be envied because his daughters are thrifty; one family is rising in the world, another is on the downward path. All this seemed as indemonstrable, as mendacious and hollow as could be. My mind compelled me to view all things occurring in such conversations from an uncanny closeness. As once, through a magnifying glass, I had seen a piece of skin on my little finger look like a field full of holes and furrows, so I now perceived human beings and their actions. I no longer suc­ceeded in comprehending them with the simplifying eye of habit. For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts; no longer would anything let itself be en­compassed by one idea. Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back-whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void. 

I tried to rescue myself from this plight by seeking refuge in the spiritual world of the Ancients. Plato I avoided, for I dreaded the perilousness of his imagination. Of them all, I in­tended to concentrate on Seneca and Cicero. Through the harmony of their clearly defined and orderly ideas I hoped to regain my health. But I was unable to find my way to them. These ideas, I understood them well: I saw their wonderful interplay rise before me like magnificent fountains upon which played golden balls. I could hover around them and watch how they played, one with the other; but they were concerned only with each other, and the most prof6und, most personal quality of my thinking remained excluded from this magic circle. In their company I was overcome by a terrible sense of loneliness; I felt like someone locked in a garden sur­rounded by eyeless statues. So once more I escaped into the open. 

Since that time I have been leading an existence which I fear you can hardly imagine, so lacking in spirit and thought is its flow: an existence which, it is true, differs little from that of my neighbours, my relations, and most of the land­owning nobility of this kingdom, and which is not utterly bereft of gay and stimulating moments. It is not easy for me to indicate wherein these good moments subsist; once again words desert me. For it is, indeed, something entirely un­named, even barely nameable which, at such moments, re­veals itself to me, filling like a vessel any casual object of my daily surroundings with an overflowing flood of higher life. I cannot expect you to understand me without examples, and I must plead your indulgence for their absurdity. A pitcher, a harrow abandoned in a field, a dog in the sun, a neglected cemetery, a cripple, a peasant's hut-all these can become the vessel of my revelation. Each of these objects and a thousand others similar, over which the eye usually glides with a natural indifference, can suddenly, at any moment (which I am ut­terly powerless to evoke), assume for me a character so exalted and moving that words seem too poor to describe it. Even the distinct image of an absent object, in fact, can acquire the mysterious function of being filled to the brim with this silent but suddenly rising flood of divine sensation. Recently, for instance, I had given the order for a copious supply of rat-poison to be scattered in the milk cellars of one of my dairy-farms. Towards evening I had gone off for a ride and, as you can imagine, thought no more about it. As I was trotting along over the freshly-ploughed land, nothing more alarming in sight than a scared covey of quail and, in the distance, the great sun sinking over the undulating fields, there suddenly loomed up before me the vision of that cellar, resounding with the death-struggle of a mob of rats. I felt everything within me: the cool, musty air of the cellar filled with the sweet and pungent reek of poison, and the yelling of the death cries breaking against the mouldering walls; the vain convulsions of those convoluted bodies as they tear about in confusion and despair; their frenzied search for escape, and the grimace of icy rage when a couple collide with one an­other at a blocked-up crevice. But why seek again for words which I have foresworn! You remember, my friend, the won­derful description in Livy of the hours preceding the destruc­tion of Alba Longa: when the crowds stray aimlessly through the streets which they are to see no more . . . when they bid farewell to the stones beneath their feet. I assure you, my friend, I carried this vision within me, and the vision of burning Carthage, too; but there was more, something more divine, more bestial; and it was the Present, the fullest, most exalted Present. There was a mother, surrounded by her young in their agony of death; but her gaze was cast neither toward the dying nor upon the merciless walls of stone, but into the void, or through the void into Infinity, accompanying this gaze with a gnashing of teeth!-A slave struck with help­less terror standing near the petrifying Niobe must have ex­perienced what I experienced when, within me, the soul of this animal bared its teeth to its monstrous fate. 

Forgive this description, but do not think that it was pity I felt. For if you did, my example would have been poorly chosen. It was far more and far less than pity: an immense sympathy, a flowing over into these creatures, or a feeling that an aura of life and death, of dream and wakefulness, had flowed for a moment into them-but whence? For what had it to do with pity, or with any comprehensible concatenation of human thought when, on another evening, on finding beneath a nut-tree a half-filled pitcher which a gardener boy had left there, and the pitcher and the water in it, darkened by the shadow of the tree, and a beetle swimming on the surface from shore to shor~when this combination of trifles sent through me such a shudder at the presence of the Infinite, a shudder running from the roots of my hair to the marrow of mv heels? What was it that made me want to break into words which, I know, were I to find them, would force to their knees those cherubim in whom I do not believe? What made me turn silently away from this place? Even now, after weeks, catching sight of that nut-tree, I pass it by with a shy sidelong glance, for I am loath to dispel the memory of the miracle hovering there round the trunk, loath to scare away the celestial shudders that still linger about the shrubbery in this neighbourhood! In these moments an insignificant creature-a dog, a rat, a beetle, a crippled apple tree, a lane winding over the hill, a moss-covered stone, mean more to me than the most beautiful, abandoned mistress of the happiest night. These mute and, on occasion, inanimate creatures rise toward me with such an abundance, such a presence of love, that my enchanted eye can find nothing in sight void of life. Every­thing that exists, everything I can remember, everything touched upon by my confused thoughts, has a meaning. Even my own heaviness, the general torpor of my brain, seems to acquire a meaning; I experience in and around me a blissful, never-ending interplay, and among the objects playing against one another there is not one into which I cannot flow. To me, then, it is as though my body consists of nought but ciphers which give me the key to everything; or as if we could enter into a new and hopeful relationship with the whole of exist­ence if only we begin to think with the heart. As soon, how­ever, as this strange enchantment falls from me, I find myself confused; wherein this harmony transcending me and the en­tire world consisted, and how it made itself known to me, I could present in sensible words as little as I could say any­thing precise about the inner movements of my intestines or a congestion of my blood. 

Apart from these strange occurrences, which, incidentally, I hardly know whether to ascribe to the mind or the body, I live a life of barely believable vacuity, and have difficulties in concealing from my wife this inner stagnation, and from my servants the indifference wherewith I contemplate the affairs of my estates. The good and strict education which I owe to my late father and the early habit of leaving no hour of the day unused are the only things, it seems to me, which help me maintain towards the outer world the stability and the dig­nified appearance appropriate to my class and my person. 

I am rebuilding a wing of my house and am capable of conversing occasionally with the architect concerning the progress of his work; I administer my estates, and my tenants and employees may find me, perhaps, somewhat more taciturn but no less benevolent than of yore. None of them, standing with doffed cap before the door of his house while I ride by of an evening, will have any idea that my glance, which he is wont respectfully to catch, glides with longing over the rickety boards under which he searches for earthworms for fishing-bait; that it plunges through the latticed window into the stuffy chamber where, in a corner, the low bed with its chequered linen seems forever to be waiting for someone to die or another to be born; that my eye lingers long upon the ugly puppies or upon a cat stealing stealthily among the flower-pots; and that it seeks among all the poor and clumsy objects of a peasant's life for the one whose insignificant form, whose unnoticed being, whose mute existence, can become the source of that mysterious, wordless, and boundless ecstasy. For my unnamed blissful feeling is sooner brought about by a distant lonely shepherd's fire than by the vision of a starry sky, sooner by the chirping of the last dying cricket when the autumn wind chases wintry clouds across the deserted fields than by the majestic booming of an organ. And in my mind I compare myself from time to time with the orator Crassus, of whom it is reported that he grew so excessively enamoured of a tame lamprey-a dumb, apathetic, red-eyed fish in his ornamental pond-that it became the talk of the town; and when one day in the Senate Domitius reproached him for having shed tears over the death of this fish, attempting thereby to make him appear a fool, Crassus answered, "Thus have I done over the death of my fish as you have over the death of neither your first nor your second wife." 

I know not how oft this Crassus with his lamprey enters mv mind as a mirrored image of my Self, reflected across the abyss of centuries. But not on account of the answer he gave Domitius. The answer brought the laughs on his side, and the whole affair turned into a jest. I, however, am deeply affected by the affair, which would have remained the same even had Domitius shed bitter tears of sorrow over his wives. For there would still have been Crassus, shedding tears over his lam­prey. And about this figure, utterly ridiculous and contempti­ble in the midst of a world-governing senate discussing the most serious subjects, I feel compelled by a mysterious power to reflect in a manner which, the moment I attempt to express it in words, strikes me as supremely foolish. 

Now and then at night the image of this Crassus is in my brain, like a splinter round which everything festers, throbs, and boils. It is then that I feel as though I myself were about to ferment, to effervesce, to foam and to sparkle. And the whole thing is a kind of feverish thinking, but thinking in a medium more immediate, more liquid, more glowing than words. It, too, forms whirlpools, but of a sort that do not seem to lead, as the whirlpools of language, into the abyss, but into myself and into the deepest womb of peace. 

I have troubled you excessively, my dear friend, with this extended description of an inexplicable condition which is wont, as a rule, to remain locked up in me. 

You were kind enough to express your dissatisfaction that no book written by me reaches you any more, "to compensate for the loss of our relationship." Reading that, I felt, with a certainty not entirely bereft of a feeling of sorrow, that neither in the coming year nor in the following nor in all the years of this my life shall I write a book, whether in English or in Latin: and this for an odd and embarrassing reason which I must leave to the boundless superiority of your mind to place in the realm of physical and spiritual values spread out har­moniously before your unprejudiced eye: to wit, because the language in which I might be able not only to write but to think is neither Latin nor English, neither Italian nor Spanish, but a language none of whose words is known to me, a lan­guage in which inanimate things speak to me and wherein I may one day have to justify myself before an unknown judge. 

Fain had I the power to compress in this, presumably my last, letter to Francis Bacon all the love and gratitude, all the unmeasured admiration, which I harbour in my heart for the greatest benefactor of my mind, for the foremost Englishman of my day, and which I shall harbour therein until death break it asunder. 

This 22 August, A.D. 1603

PHI. CHANDOS

Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, The Whole Difference: Selected Writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Princeton University Press, 2008.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal is one of the modern era's most important writers, but his fame as Richard Strauss's pioneering collaborator on such operas as Der Rosenkavalier and Die Frau ohne Schatten has obscured his other remarkable writings: his precocious lyric poetry, inventive short fiction, keen essays, and visionary plays. The Whole Difference, which includes new translations as well as classic ones long out of print, is a fresh introduction to the enormous range of this extraordinary artist, and the most comprehensive collection of Hofmannsthal's writings in English.

Selected and edited by the poet and librettist J. D. McClatchy, this collection includes early lyric poems; short prose works, including "The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two," "A Tale of the Cavalry," and the famous "Letter of Lord Chandos"; two full-length plays, The Difficult Man and The Tower; as well as the first act of The Cavalier of the Rose. From the glittering salons of imperial Vienna to the bloodied ruins of Europe after the Great War, the landscape of Hofmannsthal's world stretches across the extremes of experience. This collection reflects those extremes, including both the sparkling social comedy of "the difficult man" Hans Karl, so sensitive that he cannot choose between the two women he loves, and the haunting fictional letter to Francis Bacon in which Lord Chandos explains why he can no longer write. Complete with an introduction by McClatchy, this collection reveals an artist whose unusual subtlety and depth will enthrall readers.