Doctor Faustus

by Thomas Mann

  But to be frank, this disillusioned masterpiece of orchestral brilliance already bore within itself the traits of parody and intellectual mockery of art, which in Leverkühn’s later work so often emerged in a creative and uncanny way. Many found it chilling, even repellent and revolting, and these were the better, if not the best sort, who thus judged. All the superficial lot simply called it witty and amusing. In truth parody was here the proud expedient of a great gift threatened with sterility by a combination of scepticism, intellectual reserve, and a sense of the deadly extension of the kingdom of the banal. I trust I have put that aright. My uncertainty and my feeling of responsibility are alike great, when I seek to clothe in words thoughts that are not primarily my own, but have come to me only through my friendship with Adrian. Of a lack of naivete I would not speak, for in the end naivete lies at the bottom of being, all being, even the most conscious and complicated. The conflict—almost impossible to simplify—between the inhibitions and the productive urge of inborn genius, between chastity and passion, just that is the naivete out of which such an artist nature lives, the soil for the difficult, characteristic growth of his work; and the unconscious effort to get for the “gift” the productive impulse, the necessary little ascendancy over the impediments of unbelief, arrogance, intellectual selfconsciousness: this instinctive effort stirs and becomes decisive at the moment when the mechanical studies preliminary to the practice of an art begin to be combined with the first personal, while as yet entirely ephemeral and preparatory plastic efforts.

  CHAPTER XIX

  I speak of this because, not without tremors, not without a contraction of my heart, I have now come to the fateful event which happened about a year after I received in Naumburg the letter I quoted from Adrian; somewhat more than a year, that is, after his arrival in Leipzig and that first sight of the city of which the letter tells. In other words, it was not long before—being released from the service—I went to him again and found him, while outwardly unchanged, yet in fact a marked man, pierced by the arrow of fate. In narrating this episode, I feel I should call Apollo and the Muses to my aid, to inspire me with the purest, most indulgent words: indulgent to the sensitive reader, indulgent to the memory of my departed friend, indulgent lastly to myself. to whom the telling is like a serious personal confession. But such an invocation betrays to me at once the contradiction between my own intellectual conditioning and the colouration of the story I have to tell, a colouration that comes from quite other strata of tradition, altogether foreign to the blitheness of classical culture. I began this record by expressing doubt whether I was the right man for the task. The arguments I had to adduce against such doubts I will not repeat. It must suffice that, supported on them, strengthened by them, I propose to remain true to my undertaking.

  I said that Adrian returned to the place whither the impudent messenger had brought him. One sees now that it did not happen so soon. A whole year long the pride of the spirit asserted itself against the injury it had received, and it was always a sort of consolation to me to feel that his surrender to the naked instinct that had laid its spiteful finger on him had not lacked all and every human nobility or psychological veiling. For as such I regard every fixation of desire, however crude, on a definite and individual goal. I see it in the moment of choice, even though the will thereto be not “free” but impudently provoked by its object. A trace of purifying love can be attested so soon as the instinct wears the face of a human being, be it the most anonymous, the most contemptible. And there is this to say, that Adrian went back to that place on account of one particular person, of her whose touch burned on his cheek, the “brown wench” with the big mouth, in the little jacket, who had come up to him at the piano and whom he called Esmeralda. It was she whom he sought there—and did not find her.

  The fixation, calamitous as it was, resulted in his leaving the brothel after his second and voluntary visit the same man as after the first, involuntary one; not, however, without having assured himself of the place where she was now. It had the further result that under a musical pretext he made rather a long journey to reach her whom he desired. It happened, that the first Austrian performance of Salome, conducted by the composer himself, was to take place in Graz, the capital of Styria, in May 1906. Some months earlier Adrian and Kretschmar had gone to Dresden to see its actual premiere; and he had told his teacher and the friends whom he had meantime made in Leipzig that he wanted to be present at this gala performance and hear again that successful revolutionary work, whose aesthetic sphere did not at all attract him, but which of course interested him in a musical and technical sense, particularly as the setting to music of a prose dialogue. He travelled alone, and one cannot be sure whether he carried out his ostensible purpose and went from Graz to Pressburg, possibly from Pressburg to Graz; or whether he simply pretended the stay in Graz and confined himself to the visit to Pressburg (in Hungarian, Pozsony). She whose mark he bore had been hidden in a house there, having had to leave her former place for hospital treatment. The hunted hunter found her out.

  My hand trembles as I write; but in quiet, collected words I will say what I know, always consoled to a certain extent by the thought to which I gave utterance above, the idea of choice, the thought that something obtained here like a bond of love, which lent to the coming together of the precious youth and that unhappy creature a gleam of soul. Though of course this consolation is inseparable from the other thought, so much more dreadful, that love and poison here once and for ever became a frightful unity of experience; the mythological unity embodied in the arrow.

  It does look as though in the poor thing’s mind something answered the feeling which the youth brought to her. No doubt she remembered that fleeting visit. Her approach, that caressing of his cheek with her bare arm, might have been the humble and tender expression of her receptivity for all that distinguished him from the usual clientele. And she learned from his own lips that he had made the journey thither on her account. She thanked him, even while she warned him against her body. I know it from Adrian: she warned him—is not this something like a beneficent distinction between the higher humanity of the creature and her physical part, fallen to the gutter, sunk to a wretched object of use? The unhappy one warned him who asked of her, warned him away from “herself”; that meant an act of free elevation of soul above her pitiable physical existence, an act of human disassociation from it, an act of sympathy, an act—if the word be permitted me—of love. And, gracious heaven, was it not also love, or what was it, what madness, what deliberate, reckless tempting of God, what compulsion to comprise the punishment in the sin, finally what deep, deeply mysterious longing for daemonic conception, for a deathly unchaining of chemical change in his nature was at work, that having been warned he despised the warning and insisted upon possession of this flesh?

  Never without a religious shudder have I been able to think of this embrace, in which the one staked his salvation, the other found it. Purifying, justifying, sublimating, it must have blessed the wretched one, that the other travelled from afar and refused whatever the risk to give her up. It seems that she gave him all the sweetness of her womanhood, to repay him for what he risked. She might thus know that he never forgot her; but it is no less true that it was for her own sake he, who never saw her again, remembered; and her name—that which he gave her from the beginning—whispers magically, unheard by anyone but me, throughout his work. I may be taxed with vanity, but I cannot refrain from speaking here of the discovery which he one day silently confirmed. Leverkühn was not the first composer, and he will not have been the last, who loved to put mysteries, magic formulas, and charms into his works. The fact displays the inborn tendency of music to superstitious rites and observances, the symbolism of numbers and letters. Thus in my friend’s musical fabric a five- to six-note series, beginning with B and ending on E flat, with a shifting E and A between, is found strikingly often, a basic figure of peculiarly nostalgic character, which in differing harmonic and rhythmic ga
rb, is given now to this part now to that, often in its inversion, as it were turned on its axis, so that while the intervals remain the same, the sequence of the notes is altered. It occurs at first in the probably most beautiful of the thirteen Brentano songs composed in Leipzig, the heart-piercing lied: “O lieb Madel, wie schlecht bist du,” which is permeated with it; but most particularly in the late work, where audacity and despair mingle in so unique a way, the Weheklag of Dr. Faustus, written in Pfeiffering, where the inclination shows even more strongly to use those intervals also in a simultaneous-harmonic combination. The letters composing this note-cipher are: h, e, a, e, e-flat: hetaera esmeralda.*

  [*The English B is represented in German by H.]

  * * *

  Adrian returned to Leipzig and expressed himself as entertained and full of admiration for the powerful and striking opera he was supposed to have heard a second time and possibly really had. I can still hear him say about the author of it: “What a gifted good fellow! The revolutionary as a Sabbath-day child, pert and conciliant. How after great expense of affronts and dissonances everything turns into good nature, beer good nature, gets all buttered up, so to speak, appeasing the philistine and telling him no harm was meant… But a hit, a palpable hit!” Five weeks after he had resumed his musical and philosophical studies a local affection decided him to consult a physician. The specialist, by name Dr. Erasmi—Adrian had chosen him from the street directory—was a powerful man, with a red face and a pointed black beard. It obviously made him puff to stoop and even in an upright posture he breathed in pants with his lips open. The habit indicated oppression, but it also looked like contemptuous indifference, as though the man would dismiss or intended to dismiss something by saying “Pooh, pooh!” He puffed like that during the whole examination, and then, in contradiction to his pooh-poohing, declared the necessity for a thorough and rather lengthy treatment, on which he at once embarked. On three successive days Adrian went to him. Then Erasmi arranged a break of three days. Adrian was to come back on the fourth. When the patient—who was not ailing, his general state of health being entirely unaffected—returned at four o’clock on the appointed day, something utterly unexpected and startling confronted him.

  He had always had to ring at the door of the apartment, which was up three steep flights of stairs in a gloomy building in the old city, and wait for a maid to open. But this time he found both outer and inner doors open, that to the waiting—room, the consulting-room, and facing him a door into the living-room, the so-called “best room” with two windows. Yes, there the windows were wide open too, and all four curtains blew in and out in the draught. In the middle of the room lay Dr. Erasmi, with his beard sticking up, his eyes fast shut, in a white shirt with cuffs, lying on a tufted cushion in an open coffin on two trestles.

  What was going on, why the dead man lay there so alone and open to the wind, where the maid and Frau Dr. Erasmi were, whether perhaps the people from the undertaking establishment were waiting to screw on the lid, or were coming back at once—at what singular moment the visitor had been brought to the spot, was never made clear. When I came to Leipzig, Adrian could only describe to me the bewilderment in which he, after staring for a moment, had gone down the stairs again. He seems not to have inquired further into the doctor’s sudden death, seems not to have been interested. He merely thought that the man’s constant puffing and blowing had always been a bad sign.

  With secret repugnance, struggling against unreasoning horror, I must now relate that Adrian’s second choice also stood under an unlucky star. He took two days to recover from the shock. Then he again had recourse to the Leipzig directory, chose another name, and put himself in the care of a certain Dr. Zimbalist, in one of the business streets off the Marktplatz. On the ground floor was a restaurant, then a piano warehouse; the doctor’s house occupied part of the upper storey, a porcelain shield with his name on it being downstairs in the lobby. The dermatologist’s two waiting-rooms, one reserved for female patients, were adorned with growing plants, palms and house trees in pots. Medical books and magazines lay about, for instance an illustrated history of morals, in the room where Adrian for the first and the second time awaited his treatment.

  Dr. Zimbalist was a small man with horn spectacles, an oval bald spot running from the brow to the back of the head between two growths of reddish hair, and a moustache left growing only immediately under the nostrils, as was then the fashion in the upper classes and would later become the attribute of a world-famous face. His speech was slovenly and he inclined to bad masculine jokes. But one had not the impression that he felt very jolly. One side of his cheek was drawn up in a sort of tic, the corner of the mouth as well, and the eye winked in sympathy; the whole expression was crabbed and craven to a degree; he looked no-good, he looked odious. Thus Adrian described him to me and thus I see him.

  Now this is what happened: Adrian had gone twice for treatment; he went a third time. As he mounted the stairs he met, between the first and second storeys, the physician coming down between two sturdy men wearing stiff hats on the backs of their heads. Dr. Zimbalist’s eyes were cast down like those of a man taking heed to his steps on the stairs. One of his wrists was linked with the wrist of one of his companions by a bracelet and little chain. Looking up and recognizing his patient, he twitched his cheek sourly, nodded at him, and said: “Another time!” Adrian, his back to the wall, disconcerted, faced the three and let them pass; looked after them awhile as they descended and then followed them down. lie saw them mount a waiting car and drive off at a fast pace. Thus ended the continuation of Adrian’s cure by Dr. Zimbalist, after its earlier interruption. I must add that he troubled himself as little about the circumstances of his second bad shot as about the extraordinary atmosphere of his first one. Why Zimbalist had been taken away, and at the very hour for which an appointment had been made—he let that rest. But as though frightened off, he never took up the cure again after that and went to no other doctor. He did so the less in that the local affection healed itself without further treatment and disappeared, and as I can confirm and would sustain against any professional doubts, there were no manifest secondary symptoms. Adrian suffered once, in Wendell Kretschmar’s lodgings, where he had just presented some studies in composition, a violent attack of giddiness, which made him stagger and forced him to lie down. It passed into a two days’ migraine, which except for its severity was not different from other earlier attacks of the same kind. When I came back to Leipzig, once more a civilian, I found my friend unchanged in his walks and ways.

  CHAPTER XX

  Or was he? If during our year of separation he had not become a different person, at least he was now more definitely that which he was, and this was enough to impress me, especially since I had probably a little forgotten what he had been. I have described the coolness of our parting in Halle. Our reunion, at the thought of which I had so rejoiced, was not lacking in the same quality, so that I, put off, both amused and dismayed, had to swallow my feelings and suppress whatever surged upwards into my consciousness. That he would fetch me from the station I had not expected. I had even not let him know the hour. I simply sought him out in his lodgings, before I had looked out any for myself. His landlady announced me, and I entered the room, calling him in a loud and joyful shout.

  He sat at his desk, an old-fashioned one with a roll top and cabinet, writing down notes. “Hallo!” said he, not looking up. “Just a minute, we can talk.” And went on for some minutes with his work, leaving it to me to remain standing or to make myself comfortable. The reader must not misinterpret this, any more than I did. It was evidence of oldestablished intimacy, a life in common which could not be in the least affected by a year’s separation. It was simply as though we had parted the day before. Even so I was a little dashed, if at the same time amused, as the characteristic does amuse us. I had long since let myself down in one of the armless upholstered chairs flanking the book-table, when he screwed the top on his fountain-pen and approached me,
without particularly looking me in the face.