Why not earlier? Why at such cost? - Goethe's Italian study abroad

For all of Goethe’s status, for all of his writing, all of his learning, Italian Journey is a chronicle of firsts.  His first view of the sea, for example, which occurs in Venice:

Now, at last, I have seen the sea with my own eyes and walked upon the beautiful threshing floor of the sand which it leaves behind when it ebbs. (96)

He collects shells and watches, “for hours” the “bizarre and graceful performance of” of the crabs as they try and fail to hunt limpets (100).

Goethe has his first encounter with a Roman ruin, and with a Palladio building, and with any number of other things he had only read about.

I have spent the day looking and looking.  It is the same in art as in life.   The deeper one penetrate, the broader grows the view.  (109)

The trip really is something like Goethe’s college study abroad in Italy, a German major with a minor in art history, except that he is a highly non-traditional student.

How different all this is from our saints, squatting on their stone brackets and piled one above the other in the Gothic style of decoration, or our pillars which look like tobacco pipes, our spiky little towers and our cast-iron flowers.  Thank God, I am done with all that junk for good and all.  (95)

And Goethe has only reached, at this point, Venice!  Italian Journey has a great deal of interest as a pure travel book, especially its middle third covering Naples and Sicily, but the intellectual core of the book is in the fifty pages about Goethe’s first visit to Rome.  Everything about the classical world, Renaissance art, and to some degree living Catholicism creates a tumult.  Every idea is shaken.

Everything in me is suddenly beginning to merge clearly.  Why not earlier?  Why at such a cost?  (173)

Goethe is described a crisis point in his own development, his Bildung.  “I am not here simply to have a good time, but to devote myself to the noble objects about me, to educate myself before I reach forty” (137).  In his own work, the ideas from Italian Journey are most clearly expressed in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-6), where Italy is given enormous symbolic power as the nearly mythical “land of flowering lemon trees,” as Christopher Middleton translates the “Mignon” poem – go to p. 28 of Italian Journey to see Goethe meet Mignon and the harpist in the flesh – the land of fulfilment, aesthetic, intellectual, and sexual.  German readers thus knew about all this twenty years before Italian Journey itself was published; thus we see versions of the idea appear in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixir (1815-6), for example.

The Goethean juxtaposition of Italy and the repressed north recurs many times, and not just in German literature.  It is amusing to read E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908) in this context, with the heroine finally able to cast off her Victorian chains via the influence of lively Italian murders and violets.  It took longer for Goethe to free himself, and the result was replacing a pursuit of fulfillment with an embrace of renunciation – classicism in place of romanticism, realism in place of idealism, and on like that.  German literature would never be the same.

Introducing Goethe's Italian Journey by means of a throat-clearing introduction to the whole Goethe thing

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had had two previous opportunities to visit Italy.  He swerved away, though.  Italy was too symbolically powerful.  One of those opportunities was replaced with Goethe’s installation as the friend and right-hand man of the Duke of Weimar when Goethe was twenty-six and perhaps the most famous writer in Europe.  The Duke had recognized, through Goethe’s celebrity, his enormous cognitive abilities.  Sometimes I think he must have been the smartest person in literary history.  In literature, smarts only gets ya so far.

After his thirty-seventh birthday party in 1786, Goethe sneaks away to Italy, informing only the Duke.  He stays for a year and a half – a little more.  His account is in Italian Journey, published thirty years later in 1816 as a strange hybrid book of letters, diaries, memories, alterations, and elisions.  Why thirty years later?  Because, in the last twenty years of his life, Goethe was kind of emptying his desk into books.  Plus, he had been publishing his memoirs.

Goethe financed his extended leave of absence through the advance on an eight-volume collected edition of his works.  His published works, at this point, amounted to four volumes.  Four volumes would contain new work.  This is how enormous Goethe’s stature was – four volumes, unwritten, no problem.  Of course eventually Green Henry spends forty days reading a fifty-volume set of Goethe.  Long way to go.

I had been able to send the first four volumes to the publisher and was intending to send the last four.  Some of their contents were only outlines of works and even fragments, because to tell the truth, my naughty habit of beginning works, then losing interest and laying them aside, had grown worse with the years and all the other things I had to do. (Sep. 8, 1786, p. 34)

Thus Faust, Part I, which is mentioned in Italian Journey as something Goethe will finish up any minute now, does not appear in print for another twenty years.  Part II is published twenty-five years after that!

One irony is that the Italian journey kills Goethe’s literary production for almost a decade, until he meets Friedrich Schiller.  It takes him that long to absorb everything.  Goethe’s life often feels like he planned it with the knowledge that he would live to eighty-two.  Take a decade off of literature – no big deal.  There will still be fifty volumes by the end.  Skip two chances at Italy – no worry, he’ll go when the time is exactly right.

What is Goethe absorbing?  Classical and Renaissance art history.  The fact that art has a history, even.  Architecture, Christianity, the sea, a long growing season for plants, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.  Sex – the great omission from Italian Journey is Goethe’s Roman girlfriend, a waitress and widow.  But he had written about her in the warm Roman Elegies (1795).

It is such a pain dealing with Goethe.  In the years before Wuthering Expectations, when I spent my time in the 18th century, I read maybe ten volumes of Green Henry’s fifty, and I have trouble writing about any given work of Goethe’s without addressing the enormous phenomenon of Goethe.

Tomorrow, then, I’ll just dive into the book.  Goethe’s study abroad in Italy.

Quotations are and will be from the Penguin Classics edition, translated by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer – mostly the latter, I think.

Two exciting readalong opportunities - Goethe's Italian Journey and the ghost stories of Henry James

So exciting I expect no participants at all.  But if these sound interesting, please, by all means.

First, it is the bicentennial of the publication of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Italian Journey, his account of his momentous stay in Italy from 1786 to 1788.  It was meant to be a long vacation but turned into something more significant.

For November’s German Literature Month, courtesy of BeautyIs a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy’s Literary Life, I will revisit Goethe’s book, among his most genial.  Some of the book is typical 18th century tourism, but other parts, especially the long stay in Rome, turn in to something much deeper.  This is the central text on the neurotic Northern vision of Italy, the idea that Italy is the place to really live.

I slipped out of Carlsbad at three in the morning; otherwise I would not have been allowed to leave.  (Sep. 3, 1786, p. 23)

Goethe had deliberately avoided two previous chances to visit Italy because, I don’t know, his Bildung was not sufficient or something.  This time, he plunges.

I will read the W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer translation (Penguin Classics), which is just under five hundred pages and is lightly abridged.  The other translation seems to have a similar page count.  Maybe it is also abridged?  I expect the book will take me a month to read, at least.  What’s the hurry?  My German Literature Month plans otherwise mostly involve plays – Wedekind, Hofmannsthal, Mann.

Second, for October, the ghost stories of Henry James.  Is this more or less them?

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)
The Ghostly Rental (1876, what a scary title)
Sir Edmund Orme (1891)
The Private Life (1892)
Owen Wingrave (1892)
The Friends of the Friends aka The Way It Came (1896)
The Turn of the Screw (1898)
The Real Right Thing (1899)
The Third Person (1900)
The Jolly Corner (1908)

Look, already I learn something interesting.  James was not so interested in the ghost story, and then for ten years he was quite interested.  My understanding is that the turn to ghosts was partly commercial – a boom in the interest of magazines – but I just read “The Private Life” and there is no way that that is the kind of ghost story The Atlantic Monthly was dying to publish.  The ghosts are highly conceptual and highly Jamesian, literalizations of the metaphor of people being different in private than they are in public.  Surprise, it’s also a story about a writer!

I wonder about the completeness of the list.  “The Altar of the Dead” (1895) has nothing supernatural, but how is it not a ghost story – the two characters are obsessed with one particular ghost.  Maybe “The Aspern Papers” is a ghost story for similar reasons.  Everything everyone does is to please a dead poet.

I do not plan to read all of these stories.  I will do “The Turn of the Screw,” certainly, since it has been twenty-five years or more since I read it.

I plan to write about these stories as the spooky Halloween impulse strikes.  If you write about one I have not read, I will jump to it.

I read “The Private Life” today just to double-check, I guess – will this be fun?  Sure, sure.

2016 plans - some readalongs, some American literature

First, planting some flags:

The long Spanish novel La Regenta (1886) by Leopoldo Alas aka Clarín in July.  I remember that there was some interest in a readalong.  Please see seraillon for more on this tempting novel – “belongs with the greatest of psychological novels,” “something memorable on nearly every page,” etc.

Goethe’s travel memoir Italian Journey (1816) in November.  A subtly strange book, with a Goethe quite unlike the one known by readers who for some reason think The Sorrows of Young Werther is “autobiographical.”  For one thing, the author of Italian Journey is alive.  This book may also belong with the greatest of psychological novels, even if it is not a novel.

Maybe I will follow along with The Little Professor’s Nineteenth-century Gothic literature course, at least the texts I have not read.

Second, the American literature non-Challenge:

For several years, I have picked some easily and narrowly defined literary tradition to read around in and attached to it a phoney baloney, parodic “challenge,” which mostly involved me reading books I wanted to read anyways.  But as I approach the end of the 19th century – the chronological creep of my reading is obvious, right? – I see that many of the books that I want to read soon are American – the United States kind of American – and from the 1880s and 1890s or a bit later.  Books I have never read, or last read in college, or even, like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, since my childhood.

I have never had any particular interest in American literature, which in a way is a shame.  It is my tradition, the one in which I live, the one in which I do not need to learn everything from scratch as I have done with Russian and French literature and even English literature.  Pounds and shillings, dukedoms and baronetcies, Suffolk and Norfolk, rotten boroughs, that sort of thing, rather than the deeper understanding I could have of American literature (rereading this sentence - who am I kidding?).

My college American Lit II class and its assigned Norton anthology served me well, too.  There are good arguments against worrying too much about “coverage” in literature survey courses, but boy did coverage ever work for me, in the sense that I crammed in a little bit by a lot of American writers which later allowed me to read magazine articles with a reasonable level of understanding.  Go ahead and refer to Vachel Lindsay or Hamlin Garland, I’ve read them.  A poem, a story, something.

Well, I am ready to do better.

In practice this means a lot of Mark Twain and Henry James.  I will test my appetite for both writers.  Say The Bostonians (1886), What Maisie Knew (1897), another short 19th century novel, and one of the three long late novels.  A good sampling of the tales.  That sounds like a lot of Henry James.  We’ll see.

A commenter suggested I save James’s ghost stories for an October readalong.  What a good idea.  Yes, let’s do that.

Twain is easier.  Huckleberry Finn (1885), Connecticut Yankee (1889), Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), the Joan of Arc novel (1895), some of the later, darker works, lots of his shorter stuff, stories and speeches and throwaway jokes.  Maybe another travel book besides Life on the Mississippi (1883), which I am reading now.

A William Dean Howells novel.  The Awakening.  Lots of Stephen Crane.  More Edith Wharton – I’ve read nothing but Ethan Frome.  The Damnation of Theron Ware.  Finish Parkman’s history of Quebec.  More so-called Naturalists – Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London.

Poetry is a problem.  The 1880s and 1890s saw the Great Winnowing of the American Poets, with the deaths of Bryant in 1878 and then Lanier (1881), Emerson and Longfellow (1882), Dickinson (1886), Melville (1891), and Whittier and Whitman (1892).  Some were retired; others, like Melville, were still writing good poetry.  Much of the next generation of talent died young, like Crane.  The casualty rate of poets born in the 1870s is horrifying.

I want to get to know Edwin Arlington Robinson and Paul Laurence Dunbar better.  Any opinions about George Santayana’s poetry?  Things get really interesting in the 1910s, but I doubt I will get that far.  I’ll mostly look elsewhere for poetry.

I am looking forward to reading some high proportion of these books, but I cannot suppress the suspicion that the result will be the most boring year of Wuthering Expectations.  Or most boring nine months, or six months, or however long before I can’t stand it anymore and want to gorge myself on French weirdos.

If anything here looks interesting, let me know and we can coordinate.  A lot of these books are mercifully short.  Suggestions for more books are perpetually welcome.

He often doubts the existence of the present - E.T.A. Hoffmann idealizes

In some important ways, E. T. A. Hoffmann was an original, but he was not what I would call a thinker.  His work is full of philosophical ideas, but they have already been filtered through literature, especially that of Goethe, who was working on Kant and subsequent thinkers directly.  The real and the ideal, that is the big issue. Like Hoffmann, I find them a lot easier to handle when they have been converted into imagery.

“Be my own true love, and rule with me over the trivial world of puppets which gyrates around us.”  (69)

Especially when the imagery is funny.  That is not the narrator-monk but his evil girlfriend, who thinks he is his double disguised as a monk.  She is on to something.  But if it is a world of puppets, is she not then one of them?  Is there a way – passionate love, for example – to escape that world, to find the ideal, or to become real?

I had contrived to introduce a fictitious character who could in future represent either the escaped Medardus or Count Victor, whichever the situation required.  (177)

Now this is the narrator, who is Medardus but at this point is presenting himself as his double Count Victor, who at this point is wandering about in the costume of a monk, calling himself Medardus.  Or vice versa.  The introduction of an additional, fictional double of the doubles is a brilliant move.

Hoffmann was a composer of distinction.  Music, formal but abstract, is to him a kind of reach for the ideal.  Prose, even fiction, even Hoffmann’s fiction, is more over in the real.  Perhaps it can provide a glimpse behind the veil, but not much more.  In The Devil’s Elixir, the wizard / composer figure is a religious painter, possibly a ghost, who appears in mysterious and unlikely circumstances.  He has an earthly counterpart, my favorite character, the barber Peter Schönfeld / Pietro Belcampo – he contains his own double.

As a barber he physically transforms people.  But his one self tells his other “do not be such a fool as to believe you actually exist” and enumerates his sins:

“This evil creature, who calls himself Belcampo, Sir, commits all manner of crimes: amongst other things he often doubts the existence of the present, gets horribly drunk, starts fights and ravishes beautiful virgin thoughts.”  (105)

It is an unusual list of sins.  It is also parodies the behavior of the narrator, who murders, (attempts) rapes, and drinks the devil’s elixir, which is wine or blood or both.  “Ho, ho, ho!  I am king and shall drink your blood!”  (227).

Belcampo, who is also linked to tailoring, another source of transformation, is the inspiration for a considerable amount of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, which was a desperate attempt to convert Hoffmann and German Romanticism into English prose.

Please note that the character has a German and an Italian identity.  A good part of the structure of the novel is built on a journey to Italy, that great Goethean obsession.  Rome, in the novel is the center of civilization but also completely rotten, nothing but corrupt, murderous Papal conspiracies, just like in The Portrait of a Lady.  Any hope for atonement and transcendence will have to take place back in Germany.

I was tempted to write about the chapter satirizing Goethe’s Weimar.  I’m telling you, Goethe, German literature just radiates out from Goethe.

Goethe's Roman Elegies - Most annoying to me, nights spent alone in my bed

Goethe is about as hard a figure for me to grasp as any truly major European writer.  I think this is part of why he has had not had a position in English literature commensurate to his stature in German, which is almost unfathomable.  What if the works of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Samuel Johnson had been produced by a single writer?  That gives an idea of Goethe’s place in German literature.

He wrote masterpieces  over the course of sixty (60!) years in numerous forms – first-rate novels, plays, lyric poems, epic poems, memoirs, and I forget what else.  But it is not just Goethe’s scale and scope that are so daunting.  Victor Hugo had a sixty year career and wrote successfully in many forms.  The difference is that every Hugo work is quickly and easily identifiable as Hugo’s – his books are drenched in eau de Hugo – while Goethe’s personality is more distant or detachable from many of his works.  So if it is not immediately obvious that The Sorrows of Young Werther (1773) and Faust, Part II (1832) are written by the same person, sure, they are sixty years apart.  But I do not think it is obvious that Faust, Part I (1808) and Elective Affinities (1809) share an author.  This is what I mean by “hard to grasp.”  The key word is “hard.”

This is all a preface to a glance at one of Goethe’s most charming, most immediately graspable works, the 1795 Roman Elegies, a series of poems in long-lined elegiac couplets about a sexual affair with a widowed waitress during the poet’s long stay in Rome.

One thing I find more annoying than anything else, but another
      Is abhorrent to me, so that each fibre revolts
At the thought of it merely. What are they? My friends, I’ll confess it:
      Most annoying to me, nights spent alone in my bed…
That is why in Faustina my happiness lies; she most gladly
      Shares my bed, and requites strictly my faith with her own.  (from XVIII)

How damning is the phrase “daring for its time”?  Poem XIVa is a prayer  to the classical Roman gods for protection against venereal disease and perhaps pregnancy.  Daring for its time.  “Always protect my own little garden, ward off, I implore you / Every evil from me.”

The widow presumably shares these concerns, and she also has her own history and worries, including the uncle who is her landlord and boss at the osteria.  She even has a personality, most charmingly in poem XV.  The affair is a secret from the uncle, so the poet is visiting Faustina at work, as a customer.

Raising her voice rather more than do ladies in Rome, she took up the
     Bottle, looking at me, poured, when the glass was not there,
Spilling wine on the table, and then with her delicate fingers
       Over the table-top drew circles in liquid, and loops.
With her own she entwined my name; and attentively always
     Those small fingers I watched, she well aware that I did.

Finally, she forms a “IV,” the hour the poet should sneak into her room.  The rest of the poem begs the sun to set quickly (“Eagerly seek the sea and plunge in”), although the poet actually passes the time writing this poem, abandoning it just after three in the morning, Amor taking precedence over the Muses.

They are swept by the wind, but their power endures - a bit of Goethe's West-Eastern Divan

Théophile Gautier begins his 1852 Enamels and Cameos by invoking Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan (1819), so I thought it was time to reread it, or at least as much as Michael Hamburger translated in Roman Elegies and Other Poems & Epigrams (in the 1996 Anvil Press edition, although the translations are also available elsewhere).

Gautier says he is writing his trifles in the face of the cannons of 1848, so that “stifled art might breathe again.”  Goethe began writing his poems in 1814, after twenty years of intermittent war.

North and West and South are breaking,
Thrones are bursting, kingdoms shaking:
Flee, then to the essential East…  (from “Hegira”)

Goethe is responding to the great German Persianists and Arabists who were working on Asian languages and literature and translating classical poets like Hafiz.  Goethe’s poems are not just about poems, but about translations.

Gingo Biloba

This tree’s leaf that from the East
To my garden’s been entrusted
Holds a secret sense, and grist
To a man intent on knowledge.
Is it one, this thing alive,
By and in itself divided,
Or two beings who connive
That as one the world shall see them?
Fitly now I can reveal
What the pondered question taught me;
In my songs do you not feel
That at once I’m one and double?

In an earlier poem, “Found” (1813), a transplanted flower stands in for the poem.

Then whole I dug it
Out of the loam
And to my garden
Carried it home…

Another poem as plant in the garden.  On the other hand, Goethe was a botanist – Goethe was too many things – so when he says the gingko biloba is a source of knowledge, he can also mean that literally.  By the way, I have no idea why Goethe spells it “gingo”; the translator is faithful to Goethe here.

I have no idea, really, what is original and what is borrowed from Hafiz and others, what conceits are simply conventions of Persian verse that Goethe stuffed into a German poem and Hamburger later bent into English.  In “On Laden Twigs,” the poems have become fruit.

The casing bursts, and joyful
Each one breaks loose from its trap;
So too my songs are dropping
Profusely into your lap.
That one is also, it turns out, kind of dirty.

Shield the eyes of any innocent youngsters nearby.

No longer on sheets of silk
Symmetrical rhymes I paint,
No longer frame them
In golden arabesques;
Imprinted on mobile dust
They are swept by the wind, but their power endures,
As far as the centre of the Earth,
Riveted, bound to the soil.  (from “Hatem to Zuleika”)

Then, after this wonderful conceit inverting the idea of writing poems on dust, the poem turns to Zuleika, the poet’s lover and the poem becomes mildly erotic (“And your limbs, too, roused from their languor, thrill”).

It is not true that all of the poems in West-Eastern Divan are about poetry and sex, but it is possible that they are nearly all about poetry.

Admit: the poets of the East
Are greater than we of the West.
But the one thing in which we leave them behind
Is detestation of our own kind.

From that hour I did not leave the couch, and I read for forty days on end - Goethe, Stifter, Goethe, Keller, Goethe

I have not written about the literary tradition of Indian Summer.  It is a Bildungsroman, a novel of personal growth, of which Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796) is not the first but for a long time the most read, the most important.  Certainly the center of the German tradition.  So that is the tradition.

R. J. Hollingdale, in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Essays and Aphorisms, argues that “the overwhelming presence of Goethe” crushed nineteenth century German-language literature and channeled the “most original” thought into philosophy, a field “Goethe had not harvested” (9-10).  Hollingdale is not wrong.

The existence of Indian Summer and other German literature would seem to refute Hollingdale, if it were not for passages like this, where a mother is giving her son, who is maybe twelve, a gift:

“You’ve been asking me for them for a long time, which I’ve had to refuse since you weren’t yet ready.  They are the Works of Goethe.  They belong to you.  A great deal in them is for a more mature age, indeed, the most mature.  You can’t choose which books you’ll now take in hand or which ones you’ll save for later days.  Your Foster Father will add that to the many kindnesses he has shown you; he’ll choose for you, and you’ll obey him in this, just as you have in everything up to now.”  (144)

The mother has given her son her personal set, full of her notes and underlinings.  Her son protests, but she insists, and anyway “Since I will probably still want to read the works of this remarkable man sometime during the remainder of my life I am going to buy a new set of books.”

With Goethe you do not simply read a book, but rather a fifty volume set, tied up in string.  Or that is what Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry does:

As if I had all these threads [of association] together in the clumsy knot of the string, I fell upon it and hastily began to untie it, and when at last it came loose, the golden fruits of his eighty years of life fell apart gloriously, spread over the couch and tumbled over the edge on to the floor so that I had my hands full, trying to hold the riches together.  From that hour I did not leave the couch, and I read for forty days on end, during which time the winter returned, and the Spring came back, but the white snow, whose shining I saw but heeded not, passed me by like a dream. (Green Henry, tr. A. M. Holt, III.1, p. 312).

Now that is a serious reader.  Green Henry (1854-5/1879-80) is yet another jumbo-sized Bildungsroman, although with an entirely different flavor than Stifter’s novel.  Where Stifter’s Heinrich has two father figures, poor Green Henry has no father at all; where Heinrich moves smoothly from one stage of growth to the next, Henry stumbles from mistake to mistake, eventually, in an inversion of Stifter, rejecting an artistic vocation and entering the Swiss civil bureaucracy.

Henry does not even get to keep his set of Goethe.  His mother takes it away because of its dangerously addictive properties.  Goethe was the Angry Birds of the nineteenth century.  But readers of Stifter know that Goethe needs to be read under proper adult supervision.

Both Indian Summer and Green Henry are drenched in Goethe.  There are constant allusions and references to Goethe, or at least Goethe’s work is so all-encompassing and inescapable that the later novels appear to be constantly referring to Goethe. Keller, Stifter and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (and its 1821 sequel, Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering) share a common ethos.  They are all novels of idealism, Kantian ideas worked out through fiction.  Stifter is in a way the most radical of the three, with the most abstract characters inhabiting the most “realistic” landscapes.

Eh, I should do some sort of massive re-reading of Goethe.  I do not know how to convey what a titan he was.  And in the context of Stifter’s and Keller’s novels, he had only been dead for twenty years!

One thing he did not understand, and that was how anyone could approach this matter in such a long-winded way. - in which I identify with young Törless

The title of The Confusions of Young Törless suggests a relationship with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774), and it would not be too hard to pull together some parallels.  There is a trick, though.  Musil’s actual title is Die Verwirrungen des Zoglings Törless.  My German does not have to be very advanced to note that “Zoglings” is capitalized and is therefore not an adjective but a noun.  The Confusions of the Student Törless is closer, or “cadet” maybe.  Now people who actually know German can get to work on alternatives to “confusions” and additional associations of “Zoglings.”

To add to the confusion, the 1966 Volker Schlöndorff film adaptation is called Der junge Törless, or Young Törless.  I cannot just blame the English translators.

Goethe will reappear in a minute.

When I left Törless, he was passively watching his supposed friends bully and torture another student, meanwhile having sex with the victim.  When I left Törless before that, he was being taunted with an unspecified book by Immanuel Kant.  This was supposed to calm his anxiety, but instead it put him “in a state of inward upheaval” (114).  Törless has never read Kant yet knows him well:

Now, in Törless’s hearing the name Kant had never been uttered except in passing and then in the tone in which one refers to some awe-inspiring holy man.  And Törless could not think anything but that with Kant the problems of philosophy had been finally solved, so that since then it had become futile for anyone to concern himself with the subject, just as he also believed there was no longer any point in writing poetry since Schiller and Goethe.  (115)

It gets worse:

At home these men’s works were kept in the bookcase with the green glass panes in Papa’s study, and Törless knew this book-case was never opened except to display its contents to a visitor.  It was like the shrine of some divinity to which one does not readily draw nigh and which one venerates only because one is glad that thanks to its existence there are certain things one need no longer bother about.

Part of the story of Musil’s novel, however circuitously he goes about it, is how Törless gets out from under the crushing weight of German culture, how he cultivates “a longing for quietness, for books” (195).  Even his failures are helpful, as when, stung by the math teacher, he tries to read Kant:

But with all its parentheses and footnotes it was incomprehensible to him, and when he conscientiously went along the sentences with his eyes, it was as if some aged, bony hand were twisting and screwing his brain out of his head.  (118)

He makes it through three pages, with teeth clenched and “sweat on his forehead.”

I do not usually write about how I identify with this or that imaginary bundle of words, but at this point I strongly identified with poor Törless.  I have felt that hand.

I still need a title for my post.  This is appropriate:

One thing he did not understand, and that was how anyone could approach this matter in such a long-winded way.  (78)

Invent your own context, please.

Longfellow's translations - We shall have to pass through the dewy grass

Henry Longfellow was one of the greatest American translators of poetry.  I am browsing through a 1902 edition of his Complete Poems in order to see what I have missed, and the answer is a lot, obviously, but I have read enough to make a judgment.  He had a staggering gift with languages matched or exceeded his skill with versification, and the beauty of translation is that the poetic conceptions, the ideas, are mostly the other guy’s problem.

The great limit on Longfellow’s translations is that he did not do enough of the poets I wanted him to do.  He only seems to have translated two Goethe poems, for instance, the “Wanderer’s Night Song” and this one from 1780:

Night Song                                                   Ein Gleiches

O’er all the hill-tops                                      Über allen Gipfeln
    Is quiet now,                                               Ist Ruh,
In all the tree-tops                                        In allen Wipfeln
    Hearest thou                                               Spürest du
Hardly a breath;                                            Kaum einem Hauch;
    The birds are asleep in the trees:       Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde,
    Wait, soon like these                                Warte nur, balde
      Thou, too, shalt rest.                             Ruhest du auch.

Longfellow  finds a solution for every essential element, including the sentiment, the rhymes, and the rhythm, including the power of the short but variable line lengths.  I suppose he cannot completely  match the strange effect of the two syllable “Ist Ruh,” although he catches the way the stillness and pace are communicated to the reader.  Shhh, slow down.  Look at the way Goethe suggests his reader (the vocal reader) pause for breath on the word “breath.”  Showoff.

When I look at more of Longfellow’s German poems, I find Simon Dach and Gustav Ofizer and Johan Ludwig Uhland where I wish I could find Theodor Storm and Eduard Mörike, but unfortunately Longfellow had little interest in translating his contemporaries.  He was always drawn to medieval and early modern traditions, and to the side of the Romantic tradition that aped the Middle Ages, that wrote ballads to lyrics.  So his Dante is still, in a crowded field of Dante translations, still readable, and his version of the 15th century Las Coplas by Jorge Manrique, an elegy for his heroic father that is also a humanistic exploration of what makes a meaningful life, is an unsurpassed masterpiece.  I wrote about that one almost five years ago, and will just point the curious there for some samples.

And then there is Longfellow’s Michelangelo, but I want to save that for tomorrow.

The 1902 collection contains a single Portuguese poem, a good one by Gil Vicente, so from the late 16th or early 17th century.  I’ll end with it, eight lines that suggest a longer story.

Song

If thou art sleeping, maiden,
    Awake, and open thy door.
‘T is the break of day, and we must away
    O’er meadow, and mount, and moor.

Wait not to find thy slippers
    But come with thy naked feet:
We shall have to pass through the dewy grass,
    And waters wide and fleet.

The Best Books of the Year - 1811 - I shall not cease from Mental Fight

I love Best of the Year lists, and believe that they are valuable, even if they do not quite do what they think they are doing.  For example: let us look back 200 years and catalog the Best Books of 1811.

As usual for the first couple of decades of the 19th century, the bulk of the Top 10 action is in German literature, where three major, long-lasting books were produced:

1.  The second volume of Heinrich von Kleist’s short stories, which included his longest piece of fiction, the novella Michael Kohlhaas.  Kleist ended the year by shooting himself in the chest.

2.  The novella Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué.  Aside from the difficulty of the author’s preposterous name, I do not know why this story, among the greatest fantasies of the century, is so little known in English.  Fantasy stories are still popular, I believe.  This one, about a water spirit who falls in love and becomes more or less human for a while, is light and fluid and not burdened with allegories of Kant or Masonic flimflam like some fairy stories I could mention.  George MacDonald called it the ideal fairy tale, which it is.

3.  The first volume of Goethe’s autobiography, Poetry and Truth.  I do not remember how far he gets in the first part.  The childhood section is a marvel, even delightful.  Much of the recent movie Young Goethe in Love is presumably drawn from this memoir.  Goethe was 62 or so when this book was published.

German “Top 10 of 1811” lists, if there had been such things, would have regularly included these three books.  Kleist would be more common on the lists of young firebrands, who might well omit Goethe to declare their independence from orthodoxy.  The omission of Undine by the avant or rear-garde would simply have been a failure of judgment.

What else was going on in 1811?  Napoleonic France was for some reason bad for literature, so I do not know of anything there.  American literature, by which I mean lasting literature, had not quite been born yet, although I am sure a number of highly praised poems about Niagara Falls were published.

I wonder what the English Top 10 lists would have looked like?  Novels were not quite respectable yet, and crackpot visionary poets much less so, so the two greatest works of the year would have been omitted.

The image atop the post is the title page of William Blake’s Milton: a Poem.  One might note the 1804 in the lower left and wonder why I place the poem here.  My understanding is that Blake had been working on the poem since 1804, and that complete versions of these extraordinary handmade objects did not exist until 1810 or 1811.  And then I am arbitrarily picking the latter.  This is as good a place as any to remind myself that although I do double-check dates and so on, these year-end wrap-ups likely include some pretty grim errors.

Milton: A Poem is among the less complex of Blake’s mythological poems, which does not mean that I remember it well , or that the summaries I have used to jog my memory have been much help.  The spirit of Milton enters Blake’s foot and is united with his Female Principle?  ???*  Even if the entire poem is rarely read, the preface is the source of a genuinely famous poem, “Jerusalem” (see left):

I shall not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

As famous now, more famous, is the only English novel of the year whose title or author mean a thing to me.  Sense and Sensibility, by “A Lady,” was published in 1811, and I amuse myself thinking of how baffled all but a few readers of the time would be at the book’s life, that it is not only read 200 years later, which is rare enough, but hugely popular, both beloved and esteemed, while so many books that got so much more attention have been forgotten.

Which 2011 Top 10 list includes our contemporary Sense and Sensibility?

The Blake images are borrowed from the Milton page of the William Blake Archive.

*  ?????

Coming up: weird German playwrights for German Literature Month

German Literature Month, so designated by Lizzy’s Literary Life and Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat, approaches.  At either link, you will find an orderly, well-defined schedule for the month.  My understanding is that it is should be followed only in spirit, although the schedules for the readalongs of Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest and Heinrich Böll’s The Silent Angel might have more meaning.

I have written before, if I am not imagining it as the result of a wine and tobacco induced E. T. A. Hoffmann-style dream, about my bewilderment and irritation at the poor status in the English-reading world of pre-20th century German-language literature.  Goethe, a titan, the equivalent, in English terms, of Shakespeare, Johnson, and Wordsworth combined in a single person, shrivels down to the author of Faust (part I only) and the “autobiographical” Sorrows of Young Werther.  German poetry is hopeless, despite numerous fine translations; German fiction, the rich line of novellas, is too weird.  Theodor Fontane can be credited with bringing Flaubert into German, Frenchifying German fiction, so I hope many readers in the “too weird” crowd will enjoy Effi Briest a lot. The business with the crocodile and Chinese servant is still a little weird.

Weirdest of all, though, is the startling German dramatic tradition.  The strange and wonderful things one found on the German stage.  That stage might well be imaginary – I am thinking of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, “finished” (by his death) in 1837, published in 1879, performed in 1913.  Large parts of Faust seem unstageable, too, although they have all been staged.

My point here is actually to pin up my German Literature Month reading list, except that I have not really decided yet.  I will mess around with some of the late 19th century playwrights, that’s all I know, the three almost exact contemporaries – Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Frank Wedekind.  (Sorry – Wedekind’s first name must be Franz, not Frank.  Let me look that up.  Ah, his full name is Benjamin Franklin Wedekind.  Of course.)

Wedekind is most famous, I think, for Spring Awakening, which was recently bent into a Broadway musical, and the two Lulu plays.  Schnitzler’s best known play is Der Reigen / La Ronde.  Hauptmann won the Nobel Prize in 1912, but seems to now be the least known in English, meaning: the titles of his plays do not ring bells for me.

I am tempted, too, by some younger playwrights, like Hugo von Hofmannsthal, lively poet, librettist for the dreary Richard Strauss – someday I hope to be able to spell Hofmannsthal’s name correctly without looking it up.  Or I might try the Expressionist Georg Kaiser, author of Gas and also Gas II.  The titles alone attract my interest.  I’m not going to read all or even much of this in November, though.

This piece must be among the most ignorant I have ever written for Wuthering Expectations.  Speculative might be a kinder word.  Corrections, admonitions, and recommendations are most welcome.

Oh, there will also be some of this in November:

That’ll be fun, right?

Elizabeth Gaskell's German Idyll

Given the constraints, North and South is a stunning artistic achievement.  The constraint is that authorial nightmare, weekly serialization.  Charles Dickens wrote, I think, four of them – The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Hard Times, and A Tale of Two Cities, and I would pick the middle two as his two weakest novels, and as fond as I am of The Old Curiosity Shop, it’s not so far from the bottom, either.  I mean, weak Dickens is pretty dang strong!

How difficult it must be to maintain any coherent sense of anything but the main thread, and how impossible it must be to set the delightful little traps that will only be sprung a hundred pages later, to develop the harmonies when you are scrambling to keep the melody intact.  Gaskell actually suffered from an additional constraint, perhaps as bad, continual interference from her annoying know-it-all editor.*  Given all this, I am surprised the novel is as good as it is, but not at all surprised that my favorite chapter is one Gaskell added later, when North and South was published as a book.**

In Book II, Chapter 21, “Once and Now,” our heroine Margaret returns to the childhood home, the village of Helstone, that she was forced to abandon three hundred pages earlier.  If it does nothing else, the chapter reinforces the “South” half of the title’s division, but it does much more, and is finely written, or about half of it is.  The second half is used to tinker with some plotty stuff that Gaskell must have thought was insufficiently explained in the serial.  She knew that train station recognition-manslaughter scene I complained about was a mistake and kept fussing with it, trying to fix it.***

The Helstone chapter is filled with flowers.  Roses, myrtle, lavender, honeysuckle.  It reminded me of German Idylls.  Margaret, too: “[The scenery] reminded Margaret of German Idylls – of Hermann and Dorothea – of Evangeline.”  Evangeline is not German, but it also once reminded me of a German idyll, so I see why it is here.  Hermann and Dorothea is Goethe’s 1797 domestic epic.  Gaskell, moving her characters to a different scene, has also gently slipped them into a German novella, with continual echoes of Goethe.  This is the “renunciation” chapter, the Bildungsroman chapter, where Margaret, having suffered any number of setbacks, begins to accept the loss of her past.  Margaret even includes a truly German uncanny element – sensitive readers, avert thy gaze! – the roast cat, which Margaret actually tries, unsuccessfully, to expel from the novel through reason.

Characters multiply, characters who obviously cannot be used again.  An entire vicar’s family, a crowded schoolroom, the staff of an inn.  Who are these people:   “a spectator or two stood lounging at nearly every station, with his hands in his pockets, so absorbed in the simple act of watching, that it made the travelers wonder what he could find to do when the train whirled away” – we know that once the train is gone, these marionettes are wrapped in paper and returned to their imaginary boxes.

Another anonymous gentleman, though, does return later.  Gaskell is able to set a retrospective trap, which she springs on the last page of the novel, a page she had already published.  Please note the association of the gentleman with roses, a “real” connection on the last page, a novelistic one in this chapter.  The innkeeper, speaking of roses, is for some reason reminded of the gentleman.  Only on the last page do we discover why.

One character is inanimate: “a straw-hat forced down upon a rose-tree as on a peg, to the destruction of a long beautiful tender branch laden with flowers, which in former days would have been trained up tenderly, as if beloved.”  I suspect Gaskell of employing symbolism, and look, there are the roses again.

The things a great novelist can do under maddening constraints!  The greater things a great novelist can do with time and reflection!

* Although Dickens had the same editor.

** See Dorothy W. Collin, “The Composition of Mrs. Gaskell’s North and South” in the Norton Critical Edition.

***  Actually, hang on.  So the hapless dead man is named Leonards, and Margaret and her godfather hash over his death in the dining room of the Lennard Arms, a name and place Gaskell invented in this new section, a little tribute to the martyr to her plot.

An unbearable little cry, in which distress and satisfaction were equally mixed - the slimy, tattered little doll and The Goethean Meaulnes

Goethe has distracted me from Alain-Fournier.  I had hoped to pursue the Goethean thread, but I am not sure many people would understand what I was talking about, and I am less sure that I would understand it, either, so perhaps that should wait for another day.

I’ve wondered if a Goethe re-read is in order.  Goethe was a titan, but I am not sure any single work conveys his capaciousness.  He was, among other things, almost beyond form, meaning that his novels and memoirs and plays and poems do not look quite like novels and plays and so on should look, except that “should” is then demonstrably wrong.

Generations of German-language writers have benefitted from Goethe’s expansion of literary form.  Judging by the most recent German novel I read, a Jenny Erpenbeck novel that takes its title from Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering (1821), they are not yet free of him.

Alain-Fournier borrows liberally from Goethe – form, theme, scenes, and, I suspect, images.   This is what I mean – I should go back to those Wilhelm Meister novels, and Elective Affinities, and [insert long list here].  Le Grand Meaulnes works within, for example, Goethe’s all-encompassing “renunciation” framework.  This is how I cope with the mass of Goethe, by the way – I reduce him to one word that I barely understand.  Goethe = renunciation.

I detected Goethe most strongly in Alain-Fournier’s theatrical interlude, right in the center of the book, where I picked up whiffs of the theatrical troupe arguing about Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and young Goethe or young Wilhelm, or both, staging puppet spectaculars.  But I do not quite remember the equivalent of the clown’s “falling act” in Goethe:

And every time, as he fell, he gave a little cry, different every time, an unbearable little cry, in which distress and satisfaction were equally mixed.  At the climax of the act, climbing on a heap of chairs, he made a tremendous, very slow fall, and his shrill, agonized wail of triumph lasted as long as the fall did, accompanied by gasps of terror from the women in the audience. (II.7.)

That may well be an act Alain-Fournier witnessed himself, but whatever its source, it is powerfully strange, as uncanny as Adalbert Stifter at his woozy best.  What does it mean?  It must mean something, yes?

This act is followed by a puppet show – I had known, per Goethe, that there would be puppets – although this puppet is actually “a little doll, stuffed with bran” that the falling clown has had hidden in his sleeve the entire time:

In the end, he made all the bran that was inside her emerge from her mouth.  Then, with doleful little cries, he filled her up with porridge and, at the moment of greatest concentration, when all the spectators were watching open-mouthed and all eyes were on the poor pierrot’s slimy, tattered little doll, he suddenly grasped her in one hand and threw her with all his strength into the audience…

Suddenly, I forget where I got the idea that Le Grand Meaulnes is much like Proust, or Hoffmann, or Goethe, or any other book ever written.

The Best Books of the Year - 1809

The year-end lists are upon us.  I love year-end lists.  I do think more humility would be helpful (although Enumerations does sound like a genuinely great book).  It's the rhetoric that's off.  Most of the books on the lists, good books, valuable books, are our books, which is far from nothing.  But.   

The Napoleonic Wars were a bad time for Western literature.  Understandably.  Still, 1809 was especially thin.  One book has survived, really survived: Elective Affinities, by the sixty year old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.  It was Goethe's third novel, and umpteenth book.  Note that the Best Book of 1808 was Faust, Part I.  Note that among the Best Books of 1819 was Goethe's East West Divan (I give the 1819 laurel to Byron - Don Juan, Cantos I and II).  Goethe was a giant.

Elective Affinities is a mysterious book, not quite a novel in the English sense, intellectualized and formal in some ways, but warm and lovely in others. I recommend litlove's post for more details.  I see traces of it many later writers - in Thoreau, in Stifter and Storm, in Charlotte Brontë.

The literary event of the year in England was Lord Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a topical literary satire, readable, but basically dead.  The Penguin Book of English Verse skips the year completely. 

The United States began to inch into literature with Washington Iriving's A History of New York from the Beginning etc.  The title just wore me out.  More satire, swell.  Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon is one of the Best Books of 1819.  I haven't read A History of New York.  Maybe it's better than it sounds.

If you like Laurence Sterne, which you do, Jean-Paul Richter's novella Army Chaplain Schmelzle's Jouney to Flatz is worth a look.  It's what it sounds like, and still fairly funny.  Schmelzle!  Flatz!

Now this is unusual - one of the few classics of 19th century Chinese literature dates from 1809, Shen Fu's Six Records of a Floating Life, a memoir of a love affair, I think. I should read it.

Anyone want to make the case for Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming?  I mean, for the book, not the title.  What's François-René de Chateaubriand's The Martyrs like?  What I'm trying to say is, I could be wrong.  Let me know.

The other thing I'm trying to say is, yes, in Western literature, exactly one book of permanent value dates from 1809.  I'm not saying I think the same is true of 2009.  There's reason to think otherwise.  And in an important sense, which of our books are read in 200 years is not a problem of much consequence.  But.

The painting, my Favorite of 1809, is Caspar David Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea.  One might guess that the monk has something on his mind besides the dearth of immortal books.

The bitter lemons printed with your teeth - another Chimera

Delphica

Do you recognize, DAPHNE, the old refrain,
At the sycamore's foot, by the white laurels, below
The olive, myrtle or the trembling willow,
The love-song . . . always starting up again!

Remember the TEMPLE, its endless colonnade,
The bitter lemons printed with your teeth?
And, fatal to rash visitors, the cave
Where sleeps the conquered dragon's ancient seed.

They will come back, those gods you always mourn!
Time will return the order of old days;
The land has shivered with prophetic breath . . .

Meanwhile the Sibyl with the latin face
Still sleeps beneath the arch of Constantine:
- And nothing has disturbed the austere porch.

The Chimeras consists of only twelve poems, all sonnets, just 168 lines. Five are a single sequence, "Christ on the Mount of Olives." Seven are like yesterday's "El Desdichado," or this one. These seven form a sequence, too, although if they tell a story, I missed it. Naples recurs, for example, and Virgil, and Pompeii - "suddenly ash blanketed the sky" ("Myrtho"). "Delphica"'s TEMPLE is apparently a Temple of Isis in Pompeii. That link is made clearer in "Horus," about dying gods, I think, in which Isis is a character. "Put out his squint eye, tie his twisted foot -\ He's king of winters, the volcanoes' god!" she says.

"Anteros" ends "I sow \ Again at her feet the teeth of the old dragon," a reference to the Cadmus myth. The next poem is the one I have here. The teeth and the dragon are separated by a line, but after the previous poem, the association is inescapable, although that would make the lemon-biting woman a dragon as well. The Cadmus myth (the dragon's teeth grow into warriors, who, after a battle with each other, help found a city) fits in with the poem's conception of the return of the old pre-Christian, pre-Constantine gods, the old oracles, "the order of old days."

Richard Holmes devotes an entire essay in the Peter Jay translation to that amazing line, "Et les citrons amers où s'imprimaient tes dents?" It reminds me of Goethe's "Mignon" (1795), although I worry that I'm jumping to Goethe too much.

Or maybe not. I just looked up Christopher Middleton's version of "Mignon." It begins "Knowst thou the land of flowering lemon trees," in other words, Italy, as I know from the poem's context in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. That's what I was remembering. But then there's "Calm the myrtle, high the laurel grows \ Knowst thou it still?" and later "a cave, \ And in it dwells the ancient dragon brood." And then Middleton adds "This translation is dedicated to the memory of Gérard de Nerval."

I feel like I should start this post over. Seriously, that lemon line is fantastic. Discuss amongst yourselves.

If it but herald death, the vision is divine! - Emily Brontë's fantasy world

Gérard de Nerval, from Aurélia, part 2, chapter 1 (1855): "if only we can identify the missing letter or the obliterated sign, if we can resolve the dissonance of the scale, we shall learn a great deal about the spirit world."

Emily Brontë's works, her poems and Wuthering Heights, present the same temptation that poor, mad Nerval saw in the Kabbalah and other esoteric pursuits, the possibility that there is a key to the lock that allow us entry to the inner core of Brontë's world.

Gondal, that's the key for some people, the Byronesque fantasy world created by Emily and Anne, not to be confused with Charlotte and Branwell's Angria. The Angria stories survived and can still be read. All that's left of Gondal are Emily's poems.

This is why a substantial number of the poems have titles like "A.G.A. to A.S." or "The Death of A.G.A." or, my favorite, "Written in the Gaaldine Prison Caves to A.G.A." No, sorry, my favorite title is "From a Dungeon Wall in the Southern College." That's a good, rigorous college!

I could not care less about the Gondal business as such. I'm looking at an article by Rosalind Miles ("The Creative Dynamism of Emily Brontë's Poetry") in which she comes this close to saying that she would rather have the Gondal material than "the novels of Jane Austen's middle age" or "the poems of Keat's full maturity" - nutty, just nutty.*

What amazes me about all this is that, aside from a few names, most of the Gondal poems look just like Brontë's other poems. They're set in a fantasy world, spoken by or to unknown characters, but they're not simply about that world. She, and her sister, created this entire, complicated world, and one way Emily used it was as a frame or inspiration for her original poems.

I think many poets do something like this, although rarely so explicitly. William Blake and Friedrich Hölderlin are extreme cases, sometimes seeming to live in their own mythical world, and meine Frau reminds me that some of the best poems of many German poets - Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, Goethe - were first found surrounded by prose. "Mignon," from Wilhem Meister's Apprenticeship, is a perfect example - "Knowst thou the land of flowering lemon trees?" But Brontë's efforts are in their own category.

Emily Brontë returned to the same themes again and again. There are a cluster of parting poems ("O wander not so far away! \ O love, forgive this selfish tear.") Half a dozen prison poems - good examples of what I'm trying to say. In the Gondal world, the poem is about a person in an actual prison; in our world, with no Gondal, the prison is metaphorical. The poem is no worse off.

I'll end with some stanzas from one of them, "The Prisoner. A Fragment," from the 1846 Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. I'm skipping to the end; the prisoner, a young woman, is speaking:

"Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels:
Its wings are almost free--its home, its harbour found,
Measuring the gulph, it stoops and dares the final bound,

"Oh, dreadful is the check--intense the agony
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

"Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less;
The more that anguish racks, the earlier it will bless;
And robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine,
If it but herald death, the vision is divine!"

She ceased to speak, and we, unanswering, turned to go--
We had no further power to work the captive woe:
Her cheek, her gleaming eye, declared that man had given
A sentence, unapproved, and overruled by Heaven.

I can't really say that I like this much. But it's intense, passionate, a little crazed: Emily Brontë. No, revise that - the third stanza, "And robed in fires of hell," etc. I like that just fine.

* Rosalind Miles, "The Creative Dynamism of Emily Brontë's Poetry" in The Brontës, ed. Harold Bloom, 1987, p. 72. Really helpful article, actually. I seem to have picked out the one silly thing in it.

Best Books of the Year - 1808

1808 was an unusual year for literature. I have not been able to find many enduring books from this year, but one of them happens to be among the greatest masterpieces ever written.

Goethe had been working on his version of the Faust story for thirty years before he published Faust, Part I, in 1808. Goethe was 59. He would finish Part II in 1832, 24 years later. Unbelievable.

Faust was immediately considered, in the German-speaking world, a masterpiece. It would have topped the Top 10 lists in Germany, if there had been such things. I don't know much about it's reception elsewhere. My impression is that German-readers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge were just as enthusiastic. It would still be a consensus candidate for greatest German work of all time, like Hamlet in English.

That should be enough for one year. What else was there? A lot of Heinrich von Kleist, the plays Penthesilea and The Broken Jug, as well as the ethically disturbing novella The Marquise of O. I remember nothing about Penthesilea, but The Broken Jug is a favorite, still quite funny.

The big literary news in England seems to have been Walter Scott's Marmion, a big drop from Kleist, much less Faust. A lot of major Wordsworth poems date from the previous year, which doesn't mean there was nothing this year. Coleridge, Crabbe, Landor, a young Byron - maybe there was something. The Penguin Book of English Verse covers the year with a single Thomas Moore poem.

The polyglot, pan-European literateur of 1808, making bets about what would survive, would probably have picked Marmion as a more significant work than The Marquise of O. Well, he would have gotten Faust, Part I right. That was an easy one.

In a way, I'm amazed anything was published in 1808. Not anything of value, anything at all. I put my favorite portrait of Napoleon, the only one I really like, up at the top, the 1808 Antoine-Jean Gros painting "Napoleon on the Battlefield of Eylau", now in the Louvre. That's what was going on in 1808.

A lovely travesty at the Vienna Staatsoper

Meine Frau and I saw a production of Massenet’s Werther (1892) in the legendary, historic, blah blah blah, Vienna Staatsoper. The production, although not insane, included the usual attention deficit disorder- induced decisions (set the story in the 1950s, put a working television on stage, why not?) They were in keeping with the main curtain or drop which had images of Popeye and the Incredible Hulk on it.*

The story, the adaptation, of The Sorrows of Young Werther was unbelievable, a disgrace, the creation of someone who apparently actively hated Goethe’s story and wanted to destroy it. A bizarre and inappropriate Christmas theme runs through the entire opera. Charlotte is given a younger sister who has a crush on Werther. And the entire last act is the final meeting between Werther and Charlotte, after (after!) Werther has fatally shot himself. That last act is a travesty, really.

But that last act (most of the previous act as well), a long duet between the two leads, was also a sort of pure flow of song that was basically as beautiful as any opera I know. I was best off ignoring the subject, ignoring the words entirely, just luxuriating in the singing.

Werther was sung by the young Spaniard Rolando Villazón. He was not the most forceful tenor I’ve ever heard, but he had an amazing clarity, a perfect tone. The Viennese audience applauded him as soon as he came to the fore of the stage, before he had sung a note, which I found weird, but he’d earned the applause by the end. Sophie Koch was Charlotte, almost as good.

Opera fans put up with a lot of nonsense. Maybe that’s true of fans of anything, 19th century literature included.

*In general, Vienna felt genuinely elegant. So I can’t explain this lapse.