THE WHITE HORSES OF VIENNA
by Kay Boyle, 1936

As an expatriate in Europe between the two world wars and after the fall of France, Kay Boyle wrote novels and short stories tinged with autobiography and colored by reportorial depictions of the European milieu and its striking personalities. In "Art Colony" she seems to be writing about her melancholy encounter with Raymond Duncan's group in Paris. In "Rest Cure" she draws on the terminal illness of D. H. Lawrence in Venice. In most of her writing of this period and later her sympathies were clearly liberal, her politics inclined to the left. It is something of a shock, therefore, to find in "The White Horses of Vienna" an admiration for Nazis and, by extension, Nazism.

To be sure, this is a period piece from an era when political colorations and patterns shifted with kaleidoscopic swiftness. Specifically, it is set in the time before the Nazis consolidated their control of Austria by the Anschluss and contains the pivotal event of the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss. The subject is the hope and anguish of those who, like the doctor, have made a choice for the man called The Leader and have found their idealism affirmed by the austere vision of those bearing the swastika. Even the Jewish character Heine is moved by the symbolism of those who set the brand of fire on the heights.

The physical setting, in the high mountains of northern Austria near the eternal glaciers on the peaks, is played upon to represent the ideals of self-reliance and removal from a decadent urban civilization. Up there one can breathe the air of liberty and aspiration.

The unnamed doctor and his wife, who is also his assisting nurse, appear as devoted to humanitarian service as to their political cause. After his years as a prisoner of war, it is the doctor's desire to withdraw from the festering life of cities. His responsiveness to Nazi ideology presumably has something to do with his choice to live among the peaks. But he has not entirely cut his ties with humanity. He serves the people of the mountain community until an injury severely restricts his practice. He means to continue meeting his patients' needs, though an assistant will now be required.

It is not clear that he received his injury while he was on the Nazi business of setting the fires that signal resistance to the incumbent government. But a remark by the Heimwehr leader makes it clear that the doctor is well known as a Nazi activist. It comes as a complicating shock, therefore, when the young doctor who arrives to assist him turns out to be a Jew.

The doctor's wife is anti-Semitic by ideology and no doubt from prejudices imbibed from the people around her. She speaks of how "everyone feels" up here in their community. The doctor gently tempers her hostility, saying that everything depends on how the young man does his work.

Heine does his work amiably and capably and with good grace. In spite of her initial shock and her qualms about having to take her meals with a Jew, the doctor's wife slips into a smooth working relationship with him, an almost motherly rapport, though fundamental disagreements remain. When, as a Viennese he speaks in behalf of art and science, she replies, "What about people being hungry? What about the generation of young men who have never had work?"

This contention—in fact, a microcosm of the great contentions tearing the modern world apart—is not so much resolved by the author as recapitulated by two stories within the story. The first is told by Heine, who makes a fable of the white Viennese horses, the Lippizaner stallions, who may indeed be taken to symbolize the elegance and achievement of centuries of European culture. The horses had long been the pride and the possession of Austrian royalty. After the fall of imperial splendor and prerogative, the horses remained "still royal … without any royalty left to bow their heads to." As the young man speaks passionately of them, they are transformed into much more than spectacle and the ostentation of the upper classes. "They were actresses, with the deep snowy breasts of prima donnas," he declares. They are beauty made flesh and flesh made beauty; they are dancers in the sublime sense celebrated by W. B. Yeats. They are an incarnation of a great city beyond the cavil of those who might call it, or all cities, wicked. The attempt by a maharajah to buy one of the horses resulted in a pitiable and senseless catastrophe.

The doctor's wife says bitterly, "Even the money couldn't save him, could it?" And of course this is unarguably true. The doctor responds with a fable of his own design, acted out by elegantly constructed marionettes put together by his cunning hands. There are just two characters in his show: a bumbling, stumbling nincompoop clown, representing the present political system, and a superlatively handsome, omniscient, and omnipotent grasshopper called simply The Leader. (Who can the leader be except the German führer, Adolf Hitler, architect and exponent of the "Leader Principle"?) The clown stumbles around carrying artificial flowers in case he comes upon a grave that needs them, including perhaps his own.

In a challenge resonant with inspiration the grasshopper demands of the clown, "Why do you carry artificial flowers? Don't you see the world is full of real ones?" The clown can only collapse before this virile onslaught, going down in fading confidence that heaven may save him.

After the fables of the dancing stallions and of the leader grasshopper have been set in antithetical confrontation, there is little for the remaining action of the story to accomplish. The authorities arrive to arrest the doctor, for Chancellor Dollfuss has been assassinated that afternoon, and all Nazi activists are being rounded up. There is nothing anyone can do to prevent the arrest, although Heine argues emotionally against it. He feels himself buoyed up by the grand passions stirred by both the royal horses who dance in his memory and the apparently natural authority of the great grasshopper.

Yet, although there is nothing that can conceivably be done to halt the foul and ruinous storm of politics and war about to strike the world, there are tokens of brotherhood and precious sympathy between the older and younger doctors. Heine may bring peaches to throw through the prison window when the older man is locked up. Here is a small true note in the blare of ideologies and vast rattling of armaments.

—R. V. Cassill