Passionate Spirit
Bloomsbury 496pp £26
The Week bookshop £19.99
“Muses still exist,” said Miranda Seymour in the FT, “but their glory days are past.” Few were more glorious than the alluring, sex-mad Alma Mahler, who displayed a remarkable talent for capturing the hearts of creative men. “All I love in a man is his achievement,” she announced. The first of her “three bewitched and tormented husbands” was Gustav Mahler: she married the composer in 1902, when she was 22 and he was 41, despite finding his music a “nerve-shattering din”. Mahler died nine years later, by which point she was already involved in a passionate affair with the handsome young Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, whom she married in 1915. Soon, she was “two-timing” him with the expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka; then, when Kokoschka took off to fight in the First World War, she embarked on an affair with the novelist Franz Werfel, author of The Song of Bernadette, who became her third husband. Over the years, other lovers came and went. “Lively” and “enjoyably juicy”, Haste’s book is a “genial romp”.
It’s also an attempt to rehabilitate its subject, said Rebecca Franks in The Times. Alma, who died in New York in 1964 (she and Werfel emigrated to the US in 1938), has often been labelled a “calculating seductress” who selected men purely on the basis of their artistic standing. Her meddlings with Mahler’s letters have also earned her the ire of music scholars. Yet Haste adopts a different tack: “I like Alma Mahler”, she declares, calling her a “modern woman”. She points out that Mahler didn’t set out to achieve fame as a muse; a talented musician, she wanted to be an opera composer. Mahler, however, knocked that ambition on the head, informing her that her role was to be “that of loving partner”. His domineering ways made her “prone to depression”, and the pattern, Haste suggests, repeated itself with each lover. Alma became “stuck in a well-worn emotional loop”.
That lets her off the hook far too easily, said Frances Wilson in The Sunday Times. From Alma’s self-serving diaries, it is clear that the “effect she had on men” was the thing that most interested her. She was also a lifelong anti-Semite – despite two of her husbands (Mahler and Werfel) being Jewish. Haste calls Alma a “woman of extraordinary contradictions”. In fact, the woman who emerges from these pages is rather simple: a “lachrymose drunk”, and a “piper with only one tune”.