Doctor Faustus (2 page)

CHAPTER II

M
y name is Serenus Zeitblom, Ph.D. I deplore the extraordinary delay in introducing myself, but the literary nature of my material has prevented me from coming to the point until now. My age is sixty, for I was born A.D. 1883, the eldest of four brothers and sisters, at Kaisersaschern on the Saale, in the district of Merseburg. In the same town it was that Leverkühn too spent his school-days; thus I can postpone a more detailed description until I come to them. Since altogether my personal life was very much interwoven with that of the Meister, it will be well to speak of them both together, to avoid the error of getting ahead of my story—which, when the heart is full, tends to be the case.

Only so much must be set down for the nonce, that it was in the modest rank of a semi-professional middle class that I came into the world. My father, Wohlgemut Zeitblom, was an apothecary, though the first in the town, for the other pharmacy in Kaisersaschern never enjoyed the same public confidence as the Zeitblom shop of the “Blessed Messengers” and had at all times a hard struggle against it. Our family belonged to the small Catholic community of the town, the majority of its population of course being of the Lutheran confession. In particular my mother was a pious daughter of the Church, punctually fulfilling her religious duties, whereas my father, probably from lack of time, was laxer in them, without in the least denying his solidarity, which indeed had also its political bearing, with the community of his faith. It was remarkable that besides our priest, Eccl. Councillor Zwilling, the rabbi of the place, Dr. Carlebach by name, used also to visit us in our home above the shop and laboratory, and that, in Protestant houses, would not have been easy. The man of the Roman Church made the better appearance. But I have retained the impression, based principally, I suppose, upon things my father said, that the little long-bearded, cap-wearing Talmudist far surpassed his colleague of another faith in learning and religious penetration. It may be the result of this youthful experience, but also because of the keen-scented receptivity of Jewish circles for Leverkühn’s work; but I have never, precisely in the Jewish problem and the way it has been dealt with, been able to agree fully with our Führer and his paladins; and this fact was not without influence on my resignation from the teaching staff here. Certainly specimens of the race have also crossed my path—I need only think of the private scholar Breisacher in Munich, on whose dismayingly unsympathetic character I propose in the proper place to cast some light.

As for my Catholic origin, it did of course mould and influence my inner man. Yet that lifelong impress never resulted in any conflict with my humanistic attitude in general, my love of the “liberal arts” as one used to call them. Between these two elements of my personality there reigned an unbroken harmony, such as is easily preserved if like me one has grown up within the frame of “old-world” surroundings whose memories and monuments reach back into pre-schismatic times, back into a world of unity in Christ. True, Kaisersaschern lies in the midst of the native home of the Reformation, in the heart of Lutherland. It is the region of cities with the names of Eisleben, Wittenberg, Quedlinburg, likewise Grimma, Wolfenbüttel and Eisenach—all, again, rich with meaning for the inner life of the Lutheran Leverkühn and linked with the direction his studies originally took, the theological one. But I like to compare the Reformation to a bridge, which leads not only from scholastic times to our world of free thought, but also and equally back into the Middle Ages, or perhaps even further, as a Christian-Catholic tradition of a serene love of culture, untouched by churchly schism. For my part I feel very truly at home in that golden sphere where one called the Holy Virgin
Jovis alma parens
.

But to continue with the most indispensable facts in my
vita
: my parents allowed me to attend our gymnasium, the same school where, two forms below me, Adrian was taught. Founded in the second half of the fifteenth century, it had until very recently borne the name of “School of the Brethren of the Common Life,” finally changed out of embarrassment at the too historical and for the modern ear slightly comic sound of this name. They now called themselves after the neighbouring Church of St. Boniface. When I left school, at the beginning of the present century, I turned without hesitation to the study of the classic tongues, in which the schoolboy had already shown a certain proficiency. I applied myself to them at the universities of Giessen, Jena, Leipzig and from 1904 to 1906 at Halle, at the same time—and that not by chance—as Leverkühn also studied there.

Here, as so often, I cannot help dwelling on the inward, the almost mysterious connection of the old philological interest with a lively and loving sense of the beauty and dignity of reason in the human being. The bond is expressed in the fact that we give to the study of the ancient tongues the name of the
humaniora
; the mental co-ordination of language and the passion for the humanities is crowned by the idea of education, and thus the election of a profession as the shaper of youth follows almost of itself out of having chosen philology as a study. The man of the sciences and practical affairs can of course be a teacher too; but never in the same sense or to the same extent as his fellow of the
bonae literae
. And that other, perhaps more intense, but strangely inarticulate language, that of tones—if one may so designate music—does not seem to me to be included in the pedagogic-humanistic sphere, although I well know that in Greek education and altogether in the public life of the
polis
it played an ancillary role. Rather, it seems to me, in all its supposedly logical and moral austerity, to belong to a world of the spirit for whose absolute reliability in the things of reason and human dignity I would not just care to put my hand in the fire. That I am even so heartily affected to it is one of those contradictions which, for better or worse, are inseparable from human nature.

This is a marginal note. And yet not so marginal; since it is very pertinent to my theme, indeed only too much so, to inquire whether a clear and certain line can be drawn between the noble pedagogic world of the mind and that world of the spirit which one approaches only at one’s peril. What sphere of human endeavour, even the most unalloyed, the most dignified and benevolent, would be entirely inaccessible to the influence of the powers of the underworld, yes, one must add, quite independent of the need of fruitful contact with them? This thought, not unbecoming even in a man whose personal nature lies remote from everything daemonic, has remained to me from certain moments of that year and a half spent by me in visiting Italy and Greece, my good parents having made the journey possible after I had passed my state examinations. When from the Acropolis I looked down upon the Sacred Way on which the initiates marched, adorned with the saffron band, with the name of Iacchus on their lips; again, when I stood at the place of initiation itself, in the district of Eubulus at the edge of the Plutonian cleft overhung by rocks, I experienced by divination the rich feeling of life which expresses itself in the initiate veneration of Olympic Greece for the deities of the depths; often, later on, I explained to my pupils that culture is in very truth the pious and regulating, I might say propitiatory entrance of the dark and uncanny into the service of the gods.

Returned from this journey, the twenty-five-year-old man found a position in the high school of his native town, where he had received his own education. There, for some years, I assumed by modest stages the teaching in Latin, Greek, and also history, until, that is, the twelfth year of the present century, at which time I entered the service of the Bavarian Department of Education and moved to Freising. I took up my abode there as professor in the gymnasium and also as docent in the theological seminary, in the two fields, and for more than two decades enjoyed a satisfying activity.

Quite early, soon after my appointment at Kaisersaschern, I married: need for regularity and desire for a proper establishment in life led me to the step. Helene, born Oelhafen, my excellent wife, who still accompanies my declining years, was the daughter of an older colleague at Zwickau in Saxony. At the risk of making the reader smile I will confess that the Christian name of the budding girl, Helene, those beloved syllables, played not the least considerable role in my choice. Such a name means a consecration, to its pure enchantment one cannot fail to respond, even though the outward appearance of the bearer correspond to its lofty claims only to a modest middle-class extent and even that but for a time, since the charms of youth are fleeting. And our daughter, who long since married a good man, manager at the Regensburg branch of the Bavarian Securities and Exchange Bank, we also called Helene. Besides her my dear wife presented me with two sons, so that I have enjoyed the due to humanity of the joys and sorrows of paternity, if within moderate limits. None of my children ever possessed a childhood loveliness even approaching that of little Nepomuk Schneidewein, Adrian’s nephew and later idol—I myself would be the last to say so. Today my two sons serve their Führer, the one in civil life, the other with the armed forces; as my position of aloofness vis-a-vis the authorities of the Fatherland has made me somewhat isolated, the relations of these two young men with the quiet paternal home must be called anything but intimate.

CHAPTER III

T
he Leverkühns came of a stock of superior hand-workers and small farmers, which flourished partly in the Schmalkalden region and partly in the province of Saxony, along the Saale. Adrian’s own family had been settled for several generations at Buchel, a farm belonging to the village community of Oberweiler, near Weissenfels, whence one was fetched by wagon after a three-quarters-hour journey by train from Kaisersaschern. Buchel was a property of a size corresponding to the ownership of a team and cattle; it was a good fifty acres of meadow and ploughed land, with communal rights to the adjoining mixed woodland and a very comfortable wood and frame dwelling-house on a stone foundation. With the lofts and stalls it formed an open square in the centre of which stood a never-to-be-forgotten ancient linden tree of a mighty growth. It had a circular green bench round it and in June it was covered with gloriously fragrant blossoms. The beautiful tree may have been a little in the way of the traffic in the courtyard: I have heard that each heir in turn in his young years, on practical grounds, always maintained against his father’s veto that it ought to be cut down; only one day, having succeeded to the property, to protect it in the same way from his own son.

Very often must the linden tree have shaded the infant slumbers and childhood play of little Adrian, who was born, in the blossom-time of 1885, in the upper storey of the Buchel house, the second son of the Leverkühn pair, Jonathan and Elsbeth. His brother, George, now long since the master of Buchel, was five years his senior. A sister, Ursel, followed after an equal interval. My parents belonged to the circle of friends and acquaintances of the Leverkühns in Kaisersaschern and the two families had long been on particularly cordial terms. Thus we spent many a Sunday afternoon in the good time of year at the farm, where the town-dwellers gratefully partook of the good cheer of the countryside with which Frau Leverkühn regaled them: the grainy dark bread with fresh butter, the golden honey in the comb, the delicious strawberries in cream, the curds in blue bowls sprinkled with black bread-crumbs and sugar. In Adrian’s early childhood—he was called Adri then—his grandparents sat with us still, though now retired, the business being entirely in the hands of the younger generation. The old man, while most respectfully listened to, took part only at the evening meal and argued with his toothless mouth. Of these earlier owners, who died at about this time, I have little memory. So much the more clearly stands before my eyes the picture of their children Jonathan and Elsbeth Leverkühn, although it too has seen its changes and in the course of my boyhood, my schoolboy, and my student years glided over, with that imperceptible effectiveness time knows so well, from the youthful phase into one marked by the passiveness of age.

Jonathan Leverkühn was a man of the best German type, such as one seldom sees now in our towns and cities, certainly not among those who today, often with blatant exaggeration, represent our German manhood. He had a cast of features stamped as it were in an earlier age, stored up in the country and come down from the time before the Thirty Years’ War. That idea came into my head when as a growing lad I looked at him with eyes already halfway trained for seeing. Unkempt ash-blond hair fell on a domed brow strongly marked in two distinct parts, with prominent veins on the temples; hung unfashionably long and thick in his neck and round the small, well-shaped ears, to mingle with the curling blond beard that covered the chin and the hollow under the lip. This lower lip came out rather strong and full under the short, slightly drooping moustache, with a smile which made a most charming harmony with the blue eyes, a little severe, but a little smiling too, their gaze half absent and half shy. The bridge of the nose was thin and finely hooked, the unbearded part of the cheeks under the cheekbones shadowed and even rather gaunt. He wore his sinewy throat uncovered and had no love for “city clothes,” which did not suit his looks, particularly not his hands, those powerful, browned and parched, rather freckled hands, one of which grasped the crook of his stick when he went into the village to town meeting.

A physician might have ascribed the veiled effort in his gaze, a certain sensitiveness at the temples, to migraine; and Jonathan did in fact suffer from headaches, though moderately, not oftener than once a month and almost without hindrance to his work. He loved his pipe, a half-length porcelain one with a lid, whose odour of pipe tobacco, peculiar to itself and far pleasanter than the stale smoke of cigar or cigarette, pervaded the atmosphere of the lower rooms. He loved too as a night-cap a good mug of Merseburg beer. On winter evenings, when the land of his fathers lay under snow, you saw him reading, preferably in a bulky family Bible, bound in pressed pigskin and closed with leather clasps; it had been printed about 1700 under the ducal licence in Brunswick, and included not only the “
Geist-reichen
” prefaces and marginal comments of Dr. Martin Luther but also all sorts of summaries,
locos parallelos
, and historical-moralizing verses by a Herr David von Schweinitz explaining each chapter. There was a legend about this volume; or rather the definite information about it was handed down, that it had been the property of that Princess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel who married the son of Peter the Great. Afterwards they gave out that she had died, and her funeral took place, but actually she escaped to Martinique and there married a Frenchman. How often did Adrian, with his keen sense of the ridiculous, laugh with me later over this tale, which his father, lifting his head from his book, would relate with his mild, penetrating look and then, obviously unperturbed by the slightly scandalous provenance of the sacred text, return to the versified commentaries of Herr von Schweinitz or the “Wisdom of Solomon to the Tyrants.”