by A. N. Wilson
Therese Weiss had been the daughter of a court musician and a woman who had been something between a nursemaid and a governess to one of the royal children of one of the Princes in Dresden. When her mother suffered an early apoplectic stroke, Therese Weiss took over her mother’s duties. When the Princes grew too old for her, a position was found, as ‘lady’s companion’ to an ageing noblewoman. Her thirst for knowledge was satisfied in the library of the old lady’s late husband – her cultivation and good reading immediately impressed Christian Gottlob Heyne when they met. The other thing which impressed him was the fact that, during a bout of illness, she had been visited by her elderly lady’s Lutheran chaplain, and been converted to Protestantism. It was an act of great courage, since it cut her off from all her surviving Catholic relations, who were horrified by her choice. Not only did Heyne share her faith, he admired her courage, and moral admiration, fuelled by amorous attraction, made her everlastingly his femme idéale.
She for her part had admired Christian Heyne’s intellectual integrity and tenacity. Born in Chemnitz he was a year older than she was. His father was a linen weaver who found it difficult to make enough to feed his family, but who was generous enough to recognize his boy’s remarkable intellectual gifts. Money was somehow borrowed to pay for books, and paid back by ingenious means. Christian made money as a schoolboy composing funeral speeches, Latin epitaphs, dinner-speeches to celebrate the achievements of local big-wigs. He found a free place, with board, at a local school. His excellent Latin became more than excellent, prodigious. He studied Law at Leipzig but the attorney’s office or the Bar were never to be his métier. It was Latin that was his passion. One of the Saxon Gort ministers at Dresden, Count Brücht, took him on as household librarian and Latin tutor to his children. He was in this position when he met the love of his life. Within a year or two of his marriage to Therese Weiss he was offered the Chair of Languages and Antiquities at Göttingen University, and his career as a great philologist began – he laid the foundations not only of Latin but also of Germanic Philology, identifying the cognate forms of Old High German, Gothic, Norse and Old English.
There was time enough as he laboured over his grammars and dictionaries, and prepared his dry as dust lectures, for his wife’s love for him slowly to die. Therese, their third child, watched the process with her too-observant squinting gaze. True, whenever he emerged from his study his first act would be to seek out his wife. Even in company he could not resist holding her hand possessively, stroking her arms, expressing endearments: but anyone could see her sinking into depression.
Frau Heyne was not a housekeeper. The maids were idle. The Professor’s house was live with bugs, mice, even rats. Klauss, the half-mad butler, sat all day in his little boxroom next to the kitchen. Beside him on the small round table were his spectacles, a yellowing old copy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a flask of schnapps, and a small dish containing bread pellets, lumps of stale cheese and the like. If a rat stuck his nose out of the wainscotting or poked his head through a hole in the floorboards, he would be rewarded with a little snack.
Upstairs, Therese remembered, her mother’s little boudoir was never tidied. Piles of clothes gathered dust: and to the dust was added powder, some of it sweet-smelling talc, some of it the rice powder she used for dressing her wigs. When these wigs were removed, the daughter, whose own hair, young and springy, fell into ringlets on her shoulder, would note the oily coils which clung to the elder Therese’s never-washed skull. Behind the pungent French scents with which her mother soaked her clothes and her bedding, there were other earthier smells, sometimes the acrid scent of armpits strong as cat pee, or that other rodenty smell which came from Frau Heyne’s head when she took off her wig. Careless as she was about housekeeping and – as such – personal hygiene, the Professor’s lady would take immense care in the application of beauty-spots and lead-based cosmetics to her face when she was expecting a visit from an admirer. Once the Professor was known to be safely fixated on his folio of Saxo Grammaticus or Einhard, his lady would tie a once-white yellowing handkerchief in her window as a signal for the admirers to pay court. These included the toothy, vivacious writer Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter, and a Law student named Johann Nikolaus Forkel – later well known as a musicologist and especially as expounder of the genius of Bach. Sometimes little Therese, literate from the age of four, adept at cut-out figures, precocious and conceited, would be allowed to sit as the little salon formed itself in Frau Heyne’s dusty quarters. Later memory made the daughter suppose that a salon was what, principally, it was, where Geller, Haller, Klopstock, Young (‘Night Thoughts’) and Richardson would be eagerly discussed. Sometimes, however, if Frau Heyne had a solitary gentleman visitor, the intrusive Therese, bursting in to show him a folded paper which she had cut out, and which unfolded would reveal a row of dancing figures hand in hand, would be aware that her presence was unwanted, and the gentleman, on his knees and holding Mama’s hand as she sat in her little nursing chair, would tell her to ‘run along’.
Göttingen – the small society of intellectuals, of the Prince’s Court, of University and professional folk – the couple of hundred who were entertained in one another’s houses, and who attended Baron Munchausen’s ‘evenings’ – took an indulgent view of Frau Heyne’s dalliances, even went so far as to say there was nothing improper about them. She does no more than accept devotion – she is like Petrarch’s Laura, or like the female aristocrats of Medieval Provence, accepting the chaste worship of the troubadours. Even if ‘more’ took place – Heyne had only himself to blame. This was ‘Göttingen’s’ view – he had risen, the linen weaver’s boy, in part by his own endeavour, but largely through patronage – Therese had bestowed a favour on the young Professor by marrying him. The Baron had granted Heyne the privilege and title of Hofrat soon after he had arrived at the University. Yet he persisted in absenting himself from society – thinking his ‘work’ came first. What had he, the foremost philologist in the history of Europe, to do with powdered wigs, embroidered coats, touching lace-mittened aristocratic paws with his new-shaven lips as the fools pretended to play cards, and in the background, unheeded, a string quartet played Mozart? Their ‘discussion’ of the latest books or ideas seldom rose above the level of dinner-table tittle-tattle. They met so often to gossip about one another. Well, let them! So he had dismissively instructed his wife when she had implored him to go with her to the court.
Baron Munchausen – a cousin of the purveyor of tall stories – died, to be replaced by one Brand, a smooth-faced fellow with a pretty daughter. Frau Heyne sickened. They’d known, she and her husband, long before ‘Göttingen’ knew, and certainly before the truth dawned on Therese, what the coughing of blood, the flushed cheeks, the fevers and the sweats foreboded. She died when her daughter Therese was eleven. There was not much attempt by the sluttish maids to tidy the little boudoir in which they laid out the body: so when they gathered round the open coffin, and looked at their mother’s still marbly waxen face, it was as if there was a ghostly presence. The closet, carelessly stuffed too full of unwashed clothes, burst open, and a cascade of linen fell on to the dusty carpet as they stood there beside their mother’s corpse. Marianne, who was crying, immediately became their father’s enemy – fights between them became frequent – Christian striking her face with the back of his palms. Carl who also quarrelled openly with his father soon left to join the army. (He perished in the Russian campaign in ’94.) Little Therese, inside her head acting the role of Rousseau’s Sophie, became the submissive model. Women – Jean Jacques taught this – make men into what they want. With the Universitätsmamsellen she whispered about the Rights of Women and the non-existence of God. (‘Since I have been able to think I have been unable to pray.’) All the father saw was an obedient little squint-eyed Mädchen trilling Gellert’s pious song as she sat at the fortepiano – O Lord My God!
Secretary Brand’s daughter Georgine married the widower Heyne. He was a grieving, bungling,
bad-tempered man in his late forties: she was a briskly efficient twenty-five. There was never even the suggestion, the polite fiction, that it was a love match. She had the status of a Professor’s wife, and a position in Göttingen. He had a much younger woman who kept house far more efficiently than the woman he had loved, and who appeared to enjoy the bedroom intimacies. Mimi was born in ’79, Nette in ’80, Philipp Eduard in ’82, Frize-Friedente in ’83. By then Therese, dispatched to her insufferable boarding school, had planned her escape. It could only be through marriage.
So these were their pasts, George’s and Therese’s, as they rumbled eastward to Vilnius, their childhood and adolescent experiences, like the luggage strapped to the bulk of the diligence, weighing them and swaying them, as the wheels slithered over sandy roads, as the landscape became ever flatter, ever more boring. At length, they approached the little city, fringed with dunes and flat-topped pines, past hovels on the outskirts of town which they both at first took for pigsties until they saw the round hostile Polish faces peering out of their doorways, past several churches with white towers and onion-domed cupolas, and into the cobbled main square. The apartment which had been assigned to the Professor and his bride was the central floor of a brown-stuccoed, flat-faced house in the middle of the square. Dabrowski, the University administrator, was there to welcome them – to arrange for the stowage of their luggage, to introduce them to two servants, a married pair called Kuminski, who bowed and smiled and spoke bad German to them. Dabrowski supervised dinner for them at the inn, told them how excited the Faculties were by their arrival, how eager for George’s inaugural lecture. George thought he’d start by talking about the botany of the Pacific Islands.
It was only a matter of minutes, when the meal had been ordered, and, famished, they had begun to devour a delicious dish of cabbage stuffed with ground meat and a vegetable sauce, before Dabrowski – an earnest young man with straw-coloured hair and sore-seeming pink eyes – had asked George the inevitable,
—Please share with me, if you could bear it, sir – what was it like to sail with Captain Cook? Naturally, we have all – all – read your Voyage Round the World!
Therese, too hungry to mind, filled her mouth with mashed potato and the melting meaty cabbage, wondering if all meals for the rest of her life would be like this – people eagerly asking about the Captain.
That evening, left alone together in a bed whose sunken straw mattress made their two bodies slither together in its declivity, neither Therese nor George had ever felt so alone in their lives. Neither of their mouths dared say it, or ask it, but their bodies asked it, whether this was the most fundamental mistake of which two human beings are capable, marrying the ‘wrong’ person. Both were so miserable and, suddenly, under inadequate blankets, so cold, that when they both wept, they held one another out of pity.
George’s way of dealing with the mistake which was their marriage was to be out much of the day, teaching at the University, chairing meetings of his colleagues, putting his miscellaneous writings in order. Therese’s way of dealing with the mistake was to behave, by a supreme act of will, as if it were no mistake. She learnt rudimentary Polish. She had an ‘evening’ to which the Forsters invited University husbands and wives. They played music. She made George twelve shirts. She re-read much of Rousseau. The worst thing about the ‘mistake’ was the extent of their anger with one another. She said,
—Since everyone wants to know, why not write another book about the Captain? Your work on botany could wait? Cook the Discoverer – there’s a good title!
To which he, furious, replied,
—What do you know?
Behind her apparently harmless suggestion – and it was a good suggestion and one he acted upon – was her rage. She actually dated the moment when doubts about George had turned to hatred. It was after they had become engaged. On his last visit to Göttingen, her doubts had been suspended: they had talked of Lessing, of Herder, of English novels – she had imagined that this was how their future relationship would be. And then, a few days after he’d left to see his younger brother, working for a bookseller in Berlin, one of her father’s colleagues, Herr Böttiger, had told her how much he was enjoying reading ‘Über den Brodbaum’, an article which George had given him just before he left.
—It is an essay on the most fascinating question of all – causation. Origins. Where do the different species in Nature come from – are they affected by environment? Is Goethe right, does all life stem from one single cause?
And Therese had felt a stab in her stomach which was as painful as if she’d heard George had screwed her best friend Caroline Michaelis. He’d been prepared to talk to the little woman about novels of sentiment: but there was another world which was only suitable for the chaps – the real voyage of discovery into an ocean of new knowledge. This was to be conducted on a shipload of males. The sting of hatred she felt for George, seeing ‘Über den Brodbaum’ in Herr Böttiger’s hand, was something which never entirely left her. She tried all manner of methods – pretending it did not matter was quite inefficacious. Trying to make him talk about his paper on the Breadplant as a way in to discussing the origin of species themselves. This merely made him clam up: for, he sensed her anger, felt her ‘making too much of it’, so the subject became verboten between them. So she fell back on the Rousseau method. She became Sophie, made shirts, kept the apartment neat, resolved to pretend to enjoy herself in bed, in the hope that, in sexual matters, pretence could turn into something real, or almost real.
In that mid-terrace, upper storey apartment in that brown flat-faced building in the square not far from the University, their first child, another Therese always known as Rose, was conceived. In that apartment, while Therese sewed those dozen shirts, and as they inhaled the pungent cooking smells from Maria’s kitchen, George wrote what Therese considered his best book – Cook the Discoverer. During short winter days, so reminiscent for George of childhood days not so far away in Danzig, when iron-hard ice and snow lay under foot for five months, when it was so cold it hurt to breathe, when Vilnius, its little streets, its wooden houses, and its Romish churches always full of people at prayer, lay under a grey damp blanket of winter mist, he revisited in his mind the warmth, the bright colours, of Dusky Bay. Gliding to the University – you couldn’t walk, skates were worn at all times outside – to give his lectures, and feeling the flecks of icy hail sting his cheeks, he would recollect the strange primitive sculptures of Easter Island and the bright cerulean sky behind them; and as day ended at three in the afternoon, and Herr and Frau Professor Forster ate their dinner together, usually in silence with a book propped open at their plates – trying to avoid one another’s gaze – he would involuntarily recall the spontaneous welcome given to the sailors of the Resolution by the smiling, round-bosomed girls of Tahiti.
The pathos of their lives together, their loneliness, their shame at having got themselves into this thing, when it now seemed so blindingly clear that they were ill-matched, their almost constant catarrh, and stomach pains, the smelliness of their apartment, the discomfort of the furnishings – not one settle or chair where the body felt truly comfortable – above all the awkward discomfort of the bed – these horrors would often make them weep. Sometimes if they were drunk the sheer awfulness of it all made them laugh sorrowfully. In such moods they would hug one another. In these sad clinches sometimes they both wept, sometimes one wept while the other groaned with cynical laughter; in one such clinch, after several months of marriage, coition, for the first time, actually worked. He had become reconciled to the fact that he would never enter her – that however hard he tried to force or persuade her, Nature would not allow it to happen. And then, beneath the blanket, in the candlelight, while she still read Jean Jacques, it happened. She put down her book on the little round table beside the bed. It would be putting matters too strongly to say that she gave the impression of enjoyment, but her petulant, spoken interruptions —Hey, hey, not so fast – I’m not a hors
e – you don’t need to canter . . . Hey, stupid – not there – here – implied at least the possibility of improvement. Then, after a few days, it was back to normal. He would be rejected with a jab of her elbow —Not now. No, no – George.
She only ever used his first name when she was correcting him or upbraiding or denying him.
After the entry, however, the penetration of the ice floes, it seemed possible to his male optimism that ‘things’ would improve between them. They began to talk to one another, as they had done in the days of courtship at Göttingen, about books. Lowering her guard, and in desperate need of talk – how she missed Assad, how she missed Caroline – she would ask him to read aloud to her. He read from Cook the Discoverer, my God it was good. And she read to him from Emile. And she would carefully avoid the subject of science and Philosophy and she would feel unexpressed fury for him as he avoided it too.
If they spoke of Goethe it was not of his colour theories or his idea of the origin of species, but of The Sorrows of Young Werther.
—I remember coming to London after the voyage – and everyone you met was talking about it. Has there ever been a book quite like that?
—It starts with such joy – and neither Werther nor the reader can guess what an emotional precipice he is standing upon!
She wanted to go through the story letter by letter, to talk of the terrible despair which love brings with it – but he said,