Doctor Faustus

by Thomas Mann

  I will not lose myself further in these speculations, to my mind as idle as they are agitating. I will only add that the word “historic” fits with a far more sinister emphasis the time in which, than about which, I write. In these last days the battle for Odessa has been raging, with heavy losses, ending in the recapture by the Russians of the famous city on the Black Sea—though the enemy was not able to disorganize our retreat. The case will be the same with Sebastopol, another of our pledges unto death, which the obviously superior antagonist appears to mean to wrest from us. Meanwhile the terrors of almost daily air raids upon our beleaguered Fortress Europa grows into incredible dimensions. What does it avail that many of these monsters, raining down ever more powerful, more horrible explosives, fall victim to our heroic defence? Thousands darken the skies of our fiercely united continent, and ever more of our cities fall in ruins. Leipzig, which played so significant a part in Leverkühn’s development and tragedy, has lately been struck with might and main; its famous publishing quarter is, I hear, a heap of rubble, with immeasurable destruction of educational and literary property: a very heavy loss not only for us Germans but altogether for the world which makes culture its concern, but which in blindness or in even-handedness, I will not venture to say which, appears to pocket up the loss.

  Yes, I fear it will prove our destruction that a fatally inspired policy has brought us into conflict with two powers at once: one of them richest in man-power and revolutionary 61an; the other mightiest in productive capacity. It seems, indeed, that this American production-machine did not even need to run to capacity to throw out an absolutely crushing abundance of war material. That the flabby democracies did know after all how to use these frightful tools is a staggering revelation, weaning us daily from the mistaken idea that war is a German prerogative, and that all other peoples must prove to be bunglers and amateurs in the art. We have begun—Monsignor Hinterpf ortner and I are no longer exceptions—to expect anything and everything from the war technique of the Anglo-Saxons. The fear of invasion grows: we await the attack, from all sides, with preponderance of material and millions of soldiers, on our European fortress—or shall I say our prison, our madhouse? It is expected, and only the most impressive accounts of our measures against enemy landings, measures that really do seem tremendous, and are, indeed, designed to protect us and our hemisphere from the loss of our present leaders, only these accounts can preserve our mental balance and prevent our yielding to the general horror of the future.

  Certainly the time in which I write has vastly greater historical momentum than the time of which I write, Adrian’s time, which brought him only to the threshold of our incredible epoch. I feel as though one should call out to him, as to all those who are no longer with us and were not with us when it began: “Lucky you!” and a fervent “Rest in peace!” Adrian is safe from the days we dwell in. The thought is dear to me, I prize it, and in exchange for that certainty I accept the terrors of the time in which I myself continue to live on. It is to me as though I stood here and lived for him, lived instead of him; as though 1 bore the burden his shoulders were spared, as though I showed my love by taking upon me living for him, living in his stead. The fancy, however illusory, however foolish, does me good, it flatters the always cherished desire to serve, to help, to protect him—this desire which during the lifetime of my friend found so very little satisfaction.

  * * *

  It is worthy of remark that Adrian’s stay in the Schwabing pension lasted only a few days and that he made no effort to find a suitable permanent dwelling in the city. Schildknapp had already written from Italy to his former abode in the Amalienstrasse and arranged to be received there. But Adrian was not thinking either of returning to his old place at Frau Senator Rodde’s or even of remaining in Munich. His resolve seemed to have been taken long since and silently; he did not even go out to Pfeiffering near Waldshut to look over the ground again and close the bargain, but did it all by one telephone conversation and that a brief one. He called up the Schweigestills from Pension Gisela—it was Mother Else herself who answered the call—introduced himself as one of the two bicyclists who had been privileged to inspect the house and farm, and asked whether and at what price they could let him have a sleeping-chamber in the upper storey and in the day-time the Abbot’s room on the ground floor. Frau Schweigestill let the price rest for the moment—it proved to be very modest—but was concerned to find out which of the two earlier visitors it was, the writer or the musician. She obviously laboured to bring back her impressions of the visit and realize which was the musician; then she expressed some misgiving, though only in his own interest and from his own point of view. Even this she put only in the form that she thought he must know best what suited him. They, the Schweigestills, she said, did not set up to be pension-keepers as a business, they only took in occasionally, so to speak from case to case, lodgers and mealers; that the gentlemen had been able to gather the other time from what she said, and whether he, the speaker, represented such an occasion and such a case, that she must leave him to judge, he would have it pretty quiet and dull with them, and primitive as far as conveniences went, no bathroom, no W. C., just a peasant makeshift outside the house, and she did wonder that a gentleman of—if she had heard aright—not yet thirty, given to one of the fine arts, wanted to take quarters in the country, so far away from the centres of culture, but wonder was maybe not the right word, it was not hers and her husband’s way to wonder, and if maybe it was just that he was looking for, because really most folks did wonder too much, then he might come, but it better be thought about, especially since Maxl, her husband, and she set store by an arrangement not made just out of some quirk and giving notice after they tried it a bit, but meaning from the first to bide, you understand, net wahr, gellen’s ja? and so on.

  He was coming for good, answered Adrian, and he had considered a long time. The kind of life that awaited him he had tried within himself, found it good and espoused it. On the price, a hundred and twenty marks a month, he was agreed. The choice of bedroom he left to her, and was looking forward with pleasure to the Abbot’s room. In three days he would move in.

  And so it was. Adrian employed his brief stay in the city in making arrangements with a copyist recommended to him (I think by Kretschmar), first bassoon in the Zapfenstosser orchestra, a man named Griepenkerl, who earned a bit of money in this way. He left in his hands a part of the partitur of Love’s Labour’s Lost. He had not quite finished with the work in Palestrina, was still orchestrating the last two acts, and was not yet quite clear in his mind about the sonata-form overture, the original conception of which had changed very much by the introduction of that striking second theme, itself quite foreign to the opera, playing so spirited a part in the recapitulation and closing allegro. He had besides much trouble with the time-markings and so on, which for extended stretches he had during composition neglected to put in. Moreover it was clear to me that not by chance had the end of his Italian sojourn and the end of the work failed to coincide. Even if he had consciously striven for such a coincidence, an unconscious intuition had prevented it. He was far too much the man of the semper idem, of self-assertion against circumstances, to regard it as desirable to come to the end of a task pursued in a former scene at the actual moment when he changed it for a new one. For the sake of the inner continuity it would be better, so he said to himself, to bring with him into the new situation a remnant of the old occupation, and only to fix the inward eye on something new when the outward new should have become routine.

  With his never heavy luggage, to which belonged a brief-case with his scores and the rubber tub which in Italy too had furnished his bath, he travelled to his goal from the Starnberger station on one of the local trains, which stopped not only in Waldshut but ten minutes later in Pfeiffering. Two boxes of books and some oddments had been left to follow by freight train. It was near the end of October, the weather, still dry, was already raw and gloomy. The leaves were falling. The son of the hou
se of Schweigestill, Gereon, the same who had introduced the new manure-spreader, a young farmer rather disobliging and curt but obviously knowing his business, awaited the guest at the little station, on the box of a trap with a high frame and stiff springs. While the luggage was put in, he let the thong of his whip play across the backs of the team of sturdy brown horses. Not many words were exchanged on the drive. Adrian had seen from the train the Rohmbühel with its crown of trees, the grey mirror of the Klammer; now his eyes rested on these sights from close at hand. Soon the cloister-baroque of the Schweigestill house came in sight; in the open square of the courtyard the vehicle rounded the old elm in the middle, whose leaves were now mostly lying on the bench beneath.

  Frau Schweigestill stood under the gateway with the ecclesiastical coat of arms; beside her was her daughter Clementine, a brown-eyed country girl in modest peasant dress. Their words of greeting were drowned in the yapping of the yard dog, who in great excitement stepped into his food basin and almost dragged his straw-strewn kennel from its moorings. It was no use for mother and daughter, and even the stable-girl, Waltpurgis, helping to hand down the luggage, her bare feet caked with dung, to shout at him: “Kaschperl, hush your noise, be quiet!” The dog raved on and Adrian, after he had watched awhile smiling, went up to him. “Suso, Suso!” said he, not raising his voice, in a certain surprised and admonishing tone, and behold, probably from the influence of the soothing monotone, the animal became almost immediately quiet and allowed the magician to put out a hand and stroke his head, scarred with old bites, while the creature looked up at him with deeply serious yellow eyes.

  “Courage you’ve got! My respects,” said Frau Else when Adrian came back to the gate. “Most folks are feart of the beast and when he takes on, like now, one don’t blame them, the young schoolmaster from the village who used to come to the children, oh, my, he was a poor body, he said every time: ‘That dog, Frau Schweigestill, I’m just feart of him.’ “

  “Yes, yes,” laughed Adrian, nodding, and they went into the house, into the pipe-tobacco air, and up to the upper storey, along the white, damp-smelling walls, where the goodwife showed him his bedroom with the gay clothes-press and the high-piled white bed. They had added something extra, a green reclining-chair with a knitted rug for the feet on the pine floor. Gereon and Waltpurgis brought up the bags.

  Here and on the way downstairs they talked about arrangements for the guest’s comfort, continuing in the Abbot’s room, that characteristically patriarchal chamber, of which Adrian had long since mentally taken possession: about the large jug of hot water in the morning, the strong early-morning coffee, the times for meals; Adrian was not to take them with the family, they had not expected that, their hours being too early for him. At half past one and at eight he was to be served, preferably in the big front room (the peasant salon with the Nike and the square piano), Frau Schweigestill thought. It was always at his disposal. And she promised him light diet, milk, eggs, toast, vegetable soup, a good red beefsteak with spinach at midday, and afterwards a medium-sized omelet, with apple sauce—in short, things that were nourishing and agreeable to a delicate stomach like his.

  “The stummick, my lord, it ain’t mostly the stummick at all, eh, it’s the head, the pernickety, overstrained head, it works on the stummick, even when it ain’t nothing wrong with it, like the way it is with seasickness and sick headache aha, he sometimes has it pretty bad?” She thought so already, from his looking so hard at the blinds and curtains in the bedroom; darkness, lying in the dark, night, black, especially no light in the eyes, that was the right thing, as long as the misery went on, and very strong tea, real sour with lemon. Frau Schweigestill was not unacquainted with migraine—that is, she had never had it herself but her Maxl had suffered from it periodically when he was younger, in time it had gone away. She would hear no apologies from the guest on the score of his infirmity, or his having smuggled a chronic patient into the house, so to speak; she said only: “Oh, get along with you!” Something of the sort, she thought, one would have guessed, for when anyone like him from over there where culture is going on came out to Pfeiffering like that, he would have his reasons for it, and obviously it was a case that had a claim on the understanding, Herr Leverkühn! But he’d come to the right address for understanding, if not for culture, eh?—and so on and so on, good woman that she was.

  Between her and Adrian, as they stood or walked about, arrangements were made, which, surprisingly perhaps to both of them, were to regulate his outward existence for nineteen years. The village carpenter was called in to measure the space beside the doors in the Abbot’s room for shelves to hold Adrian’s books, not higher than the old panelling under the leather hangings; also the chandelier with the stumps of wax candles was wired for electricity. Various other changes came about through time, in the room that was destined to see the birth of so many masterpieces to this day largely withheld from public knowledge and admiration. A carpet almost covering the floor, only too necessary in winter, soon hid the worn boards; and to the corner bench, the only seat in the room besides the Savonarola chair in front of the work-table, there was added after a few days without any fastidious regard for style, which was not in Adrian’s line, a very deep reading and easy-chair covered with grey velvet, from Bernheimer’s in Munich, a commendable piece, which together with its separate stool, a tabouret with a cushion, deserved the name of chaise-longue; it took the place of a divan, and did its owner almost two decades of service.

  The purchases—the carpet and chair from the furnishing shop in the Maximiliansplatz—I mention partly with the aim of making it clear that there was convenient opportunity for communication with the city by numerous trains, some of them fast ones which took less than an hour. So that Adrian did not, as Frau Schweigestill’s way of talking would lead one to think, bury himself in solitude by settling in Pfeiffering, cut off from “culture.” Even when he visited an evening entertainment, an academy concert or the Zapfenstosser orchestra, an opera performance or an evening company—and that too did happen—there was an eleven-o’clock train for him to travel home in. Of course he could not then count on being fetched from the station with the Schweigestill cart; in such cases he arranged beforehand with a Waldshut livery, or even, to his great satisfaction, returned on foot, on clear winter nights, by the road along the pond to the sleeping courtyard of the Schweigestill house. On these occasions he gave a sign to Kaschperl—Suso, at this hour free of his chain, that he might not rouse the house. He did this with a little metal pipe tuned by means of a screw, whose higher notes were of such an extreme vibration that the human ear could scarcely hear them from close by. On the other hand they had a very strong effect and at a surprising distance on the quite differently constituted ear-drum of the dog, and Kaschperl kept mum as a mouse when the mysterious sound, heard by no one else, came to him through the night.

  It was curiosity, but it was also a power exerted by my friend, whose cool, reserved person, shy despite his haughtiness, was far from unattractive, that brought people out to visit him in his retreat. I will give Schildknapp the precedence which he did actually possess: of course he was the first to come, to see how Adrian did in the place they had found out together. After that, especially in the summer-time, he often spent the week-end in Pfeiffering. Zink and Spengler came on their bicycles, for Adrian, on his shopping tours in town, had paid his respects to the Roddes in Rambergstrasse and the two painters had heard from the daughters of Adrian’s return and his present address. Probably Spengler’s was the initiative in the visit, for Zink, more gifted and active as a painter than the other, but much less fine as a human being, had no instinctive sympathy for Adrian and was certainly only present as Spengler’s inseparable: flattering, in the Austrian manner, with kiss-the-hand and disingenuous “Marvellous, marvellous!” at everything he saw, while at bottom unfriendly. His clownishness, the farcical effects he could produce with his long nose and the closelying eyes which had such an absurdly hypnotic effect on women, ma
de no play with Adrian, however grateful the latter always was for being amused. Vanity detracts from wit; the knavish Zink had a tiresome mania of attending to every word, to see whether he could not get a double entendre out of it, and this, as he probably saw, did not precisely enchant Adrian.

  Spengler, blinking, a dimple in his cheek, laughed, or bleated, heartily at such little contretemps. The sexual interested him in a literary sense, sex and esprit lying with him very close together—which in itself is not so far wrong. His culture—we know indeed, his feeling for what was subtle, witty, discriminating—was founded on his accidental and unhappy relation to the sphere of sex, the physical fixation on it, which was sheer bad luck, and not further characteristic of his temperament or his sexuality. He smiled and prattled, in the language of that now vanished cultural and aesthetic epoch, about events in the world of artists and bibliophiles; retailed Munich gossip and dwelt very drolly on a story of how the Grand Duke of Weimar and the dramatic poet Richard Voss, travelling together in the Abruzzi, were set upon by genuine bandits—of course engaged by Voss. To Adrian, Spengler made clever politenesses about the Brentano song cycle, which he had bought and studied at the piano. He delivered himself at that time of the remark that occupation with these songs ended by spoiling one, quite definitely and almost dangerously. Afterwards one could hardly find pleasure in anything in that field. Said other quite good things about being spoiled, of which the needy artist himself was in the greatest danger, it seemed: it might be disastrous for him. For with every finished work he made life harder for himself, and in the end impossible. Spoilt by the extraordinary, his taste ruined for anything else, he must at last deteriorate through despair of executing the impossible. The problem for the highly gifted artist was how, despite his always increasing fastidiousness, his spreading disgust, he could still keep within the limits of the possible.