Doctor Faustus (26 page)

The impression was painful and, intentional or not, it wounded. But I quickly forgave him as we went on, and I heard the moving musical diction given to the parable in the Purgatorio of the man who carries a light on his back at night, which does not light him but lights up the path of those coming after. The tears came in my eyes. I was still happier over the altogether successful shaping of the address, only nine lines long, of the poet to his allegorical song, which speaks so darkly and difficultly, with no prospect of its hidden sense being understanded of the world. Thus, its creator lays upon it, may it implore perception if not of its depth at least of its beauty. “So look at least, how beautiful I am!” The way the music strives upward out of the difficulties, the artful confusion, the mingled distresses of its first part to the tender light of the final cry and there is touchingly resolved—all that I straightway found admirable and did not hide my delighted approbation.

“So much the better if it is good for something already,” said he. In later talks it became clear what he meant by “already.” The word had not to do with his youth; he meant that he regarded the composition of the songs, however much devotion he gave to the single task, on the whole only as practice for a complete work in words and music which hovered before his mind’s eye, the text of which was to be the Shakespeare comedy. He went about theoretically to glorify this bond with the word, which he would put in practice. Music and speech, he insisted, belonged together, they were at bottom one, language was music, music a language; separate, one always appealed to the other, imitated the other, used the other’s tools, always the one gave itself to be understood as substitute of the other. How music could be first of all word, be thought and planned as word, he would demonstrate to me by the fact that Beethoven had been seen composing in words. “What is he writing there in his notebook?” it had been asked. “He is composing.”

“But he is writing words, not notes.” Yes, that was a way he had. He usually sketched in words the course of ideas in a composition, at most putting in a few notes here and there.—Adrian dwelt upon this, it visibly charmed him. The creative thought, he said, probably formed its own and unique intellectual category, but the first draft hardly ever amounted to a picture, a statue in words—which spoke for the fact that music and speech belonged together. It was very natural that music should take fire at the word, that the word should burst forth out of music, as it did towards the end of the Ninth Symphony. Finally it was a fact that the whole development of music in Germany strove towards the word-tone drama of Wagner and therein found its goal.

“One goal,” said I, referring to Brahms and to the absolute music in the “light on his back.” He agreed to the qualification, the more easily because what he had vaguely in mind was as un-Wagnerian as possible, and most remote from nature-daemony and the theatrical quality of the myth: a revival of opera bouffe in a spirit of the most artificial mockery and parody of the artificial: something highly playful and highly precious; its aim the ridicule of affected asceticism and that euphuism which was the social fruit of classical studies. He spoke with enthusiasm of the theme, which gave opportunity to set the lout and “natural” alongside the comic sublime and make both ridiculous in each other. Archaic heroics, rodomontade, bombastic etiquette tower out of forgotten epochs in the person of Don Armado, whom Adrian rightly pronounced a consummate figure of opera. And he quoted verses to me in English, which obviously he had taken to his heart: the despair of the witty Biron at his perjured love of her who had two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes; his having to sigh and watch for “by heaven one that will do the deed, though Argus were her eunuch and her guard.” Then the judgment upon this very Biron: “You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day Visit the speechless sick, and still converse With groaning wretches”; and his cry: “It cannot be: mirth cannot move a soul in agony!” He repeated the passage and declared that some day he would certainly compose it, also the incomparable talk in the fifth act about the folly of the wise, the helpless, blinded, humiliating misuse of wit to adorn the fool’s cap of passion. Such utterance, he said, as that of the two lines:

The blood of youth burns not with such excess

As gravity’s revolt to wantonness flourishes only on the heights of poetic genius.

I rejoiced at this admiration, this love, even though the choice of matter was not quite to my taste. I have always been rather unhappy at any mockery of humanistic extravagances; it ends by making humanism itself a subject for mirth. Which did not prevent me from preparing the libretto for him when he was ready.

What I at once tried my best to dissuade him from was his strange and utterly impractical idea of composing the comedy in English, because he found that the only right, dignified, authentic thing; also because it seemed indicated, on account of the plays on words and the old English verse with doggerel rhyme. The very important objection, that a text in a foreign language would destroy every prospect of its appearance on a German stage, he did not consider, because he altogether declined to imagine a contemporary public for his exclusive, eccentric, fantastic dreams. It was a baroque idea, but rooted deep in his nature, combined as that was of haughty shyness, the old-German provincialism of Kaisersaschern, and an out-and-out cosmopolitanism. Not for nothing was he a son of the town where Otto III lay buried. His dislike of his own very Germanness (it was that, indeed, which drew him to the Anglicist and Anglomaniac Schildknapp) took the two disparate forms of a cocoonlike withdrawal from the world and an inward need of world-wideness. These it was made him insist on expecting a German concert audience to listen to songs in a foreign language—or, more realistically put, on preventing their hearing them. In fact, he produced during my Leipzig year compositions on poems by Verlaine and the beloved William Blake, which were not sung for decades. The Verlaine ones I heard later in Switzerland. One of them is the wonderful poem with the closing line: “
Cest l’heure exquise
”; another the equally enchanting “
Chanson d’Automne
”; a third the fantastically melancholy, preposterously melodious three-stanza poem that begins with the lines: “
Un grand sommeil noir Tombe sur ma vie
.” Then a couple of mad and dissolute pieces from the “
Fetes galantes
: “
He! Bonsoir, la Lune!
” and above all the macabre proposal, answered with giggles: “
Mourons ensemble, voulez-vous?
”—As for Blake’s extraordinary poesy, he set to music the stanzas about the rose, whose life was destroyed by the dark secret love of the worm which found its way into her crimson bed. Then the uncanny sixteen lines of “A Poison Tree,” where the poet waters his wrath with his tears, suns it with smiles and soft deceitful wiles, so that an alluring apple ripens, with which the thievish friend poisons himself: to the hater’s joy he lies dead in the morning beneath the tree. The evil simplicity of the verse was completely reproduced in the music. But I was even more profoundly impressed at the first hearing by a song to words by Blake, a dream of a chapel all of gold before which stand people weeping, mourning, worshipping, not daring to enter in. There rises the figure of a serpent who knows how by force and force and force to make an entry into the shrine; the slimy length of its body it drags along the costly floor and gains the altar, where it vomits its poison out on the bread and on the wine. “So,” ends the poet, with desperate logic, therefore and thereupon, “I turned into a sty and laid me down among the swine.” The dream anguish of the vision, the growing terror, the horror of pollution, finally the wild renunciation of a humanity dishonoured by the sight—all this was reproduced with astonishing power in Adrian’s setting.

But these are later things, though all of them belong to Leverkühn’s Leipzig years. On that evening, then, after my arrival we heard the Schaff-Gosch concert together and next day visited Wendell Kretschmar, who spoke to me privately about Adrian’s progress in a way that made me proud and glad. Nothing, he said, did he fear less, than ever to have to regret his summons to a musical career. A man so self-assured, so fastidious in matters of taste and “pleasing the public,” would of course have difficulties, outwardly as well as inwardly; but that was quite right, in such a case, since only art could give body to a life which otherwise would bore itself to death with its own facility.—I enrolled myself with Lautensack and the famous Bermeter, glad that I need not hear any more theology for Adrian’s sake; and allowed myself to be introduced to the circle at Cafe Central, a sort of bohemian club, which had pre-empted a smoky den in the tavern, where the members read the papers afternoons, played chess, and discussed cultural events. They were students from the conservatoires, painters, writers, young publishers, also beginning lawyers with an interest in the arts, a few actors, members of the Leipzig Kammerspiele, under strong literary influence—and so on. Rüdiger Schildknapp, the translator, considerably older than we were, at the beginning of the thirties, belonged, as I have said, to this group. As he was the only one with whom Adrian stood on terms of any intimacy, I too approached him, and spent many hours with them both together. That I had a critical eye on the man whom Adrian dignified with his friendship will, I fear, be evident in the present sketch of his personality, though I will endeavour, as I always have endeavoured, to do him justice.

Schildknapp was born in a middle-sized town in Silesia, the son of a post-office official whose position elevated him above the lower ranks without leading to the higher administrative posts reserved for men with university degrees. Such a position requires no certificate or juristic training; it is arrived at after a term of years of preliminary service by passing the examinations for secretary in chief. Such had been the career of the elder Schildknapp. He was a man of proper upbringing and good form, also socially ambitious; but the Prussian hierarchy either shut him out of the upper circles of the town or, if they did by exception admit him, gave him to taste humiliation there. Thus he quarrelled with his lot and was an aggrieved man, a grumbler, visiting his unsuccessful career on his own family’s head. Rüdiger, his son. portrayed to us very vividly, filial respect giving way before a sense of the ridiculous, how the father’s social embitterment had poisoned his own, his mother’s and his brothers’ and sisters’ lives; the more because it expressed itself, in accordance with the man’s refinement, not in gross unpleasantness but as a finer capacity for suffering, and an exaggerated self-pity. He might come to the table and bite violently on a cherry-stone in the fruit soup, breaking a crown on one of his teeth. “Yes, you see,” he would say, his voice trembling, stretching out his hands, “that is how it is, that’s what happens to me, that is the way I am, it is in myself, it has to be like this! I had looked forward to this meal, and felt some appetite; it is a warm day and the cold fruit dish had promised me some refreshment. Then this has to happen. Good, you can see that joy is not my portion. I give it up. I will go back to my room. I hope you will enjoy it,” he would finish in a dying voice, and quit the table, well knowing that joy would certainly not be their portion either.

The reader can picture Adrian’s mirth at the drolly dejected reproduction of scenes experienced with youthful intensity. Of course we had always to check our merriment and remember that this Avas the narrator’s father we were dealing with. Rüdiger assured us that the elder’s feeling of social inferiority had communicated itself to them all in greater or less degree: he himself had taken it with him, a sort of spiritual wound, from his parents’ house. Apparently his irritation over it was one of the reasons why he would not give his father the satisfaction of wiping out the stain in the person of his son, for he had frustrated the elder’s hope of seeing the younger a member of government. Rüdiger had finished at the gymnasium and gone to the university. But he had not even got so far as an assessorship, devoting himself to literature instead, and preferring to forfeit any assistance from home rather than to satisfy the father’s obnoxious wishes. He wrote poems in free verse, critical essays and short stories in a neat prose style. But partly under economic pressure, partly also because his own production was not exactly copious, he devoted most of his time to translation, chiefly from his favourite language, English. He not only supplied several publishers with German versions of English and American literary provender, but also got himself commissioned by a Munich publisher of de luxe editions and literary curiosities to translate English classics, Skelton’s dramatic moralities, some pieces of Fletcher and Webster, certain didactic poems of Pope; and he was responsible for excellent German editions of Swift and Richardson. He supplied this sort of product with well-found prefaces, and contributed to his translations a great deal of conscientiousness, taste, and feeling for style, likewise a preoccupation with the exactness of the reproduction, matching phrase for phrase and falling more and more victim to the charms and penalties of translation. But his work was accompanied by a mental state which on another plane resembled his father’s. He felt himself to be a born writer, and spoke bitterly of being driven by necessity to till another’s field, wearing himself out on work which only distinguished him in a way he found insulting. He wanted to be a poet, in his own estimation he was one; that on account of his tiresome daily bread he had to sink to a middleman’s position in literature put him in a critical and derogatory frame towards the contributions of others and was the subject of his daily plaint. “If only I had time,” he used to say, “if I could work instead of drudging, I would show them!” Adrian was inclined to believe it, but I, perhaps judging too harshly, suspected that what he considered an obstacle was really a welcome pretext with which he deceived himself over his lack of a genuine and telling creative impulse.

With all this, one must not imagine him as morose or sullen; on the contrary he was very jolly, even rather feather-headed, gifted with a definitely Anglo-Saxon sense of humour and in character just that which the English call boyish. He was always immediately acquainted with all the sons of Albion who came to Leipzig as tourists, idlers, music-students; talked with them with complete elective adaptation of his speech to theirs, chattering nonsense thirteen to the dozen and imitating irresistibly their struggles in German, their accents, their all too correct mistakes in ordinary everyday exchange, their foreign weakness for the written language: as for instance
Besichtigen Sie jenes!
when all they meant was:
Sehen Sie das!
And he looked just like them. I have not yet mentioned his appearance: it was very good, and—apart from the clothes, shabby and always the same, to which his poverty condemned him—elegant and gentlemanly, and rather sporting. His features were striking, their aristocratic character marred only by a soft, loose-lipped mouth such as I have often noticed among Silesians. Tall, broad-shouldered, long-legged, narrow-hipped, he wore day in, day out the same checked breeches, the worse for wear, long woollen stockings, stout yellow shoes, a coarse linen shirt open at the throat, and over it a jacket of a colour already vague, with sleeves that were a little short. But his hands were very aristocratic, with long fingers and beautifully shaped, oval, rounded nails. The whole was so undeniably “portrait of a gentleman” that in his everyday clothes, in themselves an offense to society, he could frequent circles where evening dress was the rule. The women preferred him just as he was to his rivals in correct black and white, and at such receptions he might be seen surrounded by unaffectedly admiring femininity.