by Thomas Mann
I still hear him speaking, or murmuring, with a sinister humour which I answered as lightly; with some misgiving as usual in my heart, along with silent admiration for the whimsical relish he knew how to extract from the pressure obviously resting on him. It was this that made me agree to his rejecting the proposal which Dr. Kurbis at that time in duty bound put before him: he recommended or asked consideration for a consultation with a higher medical authority; but Adrian avoided it, would have none of it. He had, he said, in the first place full confidence in Kiirbis; but also he was convinced that he, more or less alone, out of his own nature and powers, would have to get rid of the evil. This corresponded with my own feeling. I should have been more inclined to a change of air, a sojourn at a cure, which the doctor also suggested, without, as we might have expected, being able to persuade the patient. Much too much was he dependent on his elected and habitual frame of house and courtyard, church-tower, pond, and hill; too much on his ancient study, his velvet chair, to let himself in for exchanging all this, even for four weeks, for the abomination of a resort existence, with table d’hote, promenade, and band. Above all, he pleaded for consideration for Frau Schweigestill, whom he would not wish to offend by preferring some outside, public care and service to hers. He felt, he said, far and away better provided for here, in her understanding, humanly wise and motherly care. Really one might ask where else he could have what he had here, with her who brought him according to the new regimen every four hours something to eat: at eight o’clock an egg, cocoa, and rusk, at twelve a little steak or cutlet, at four soup, meat, and vegetable, at eight o’clock cold joint and tea. This diet was beneficial. It guarded against the fever attending the digestion of hearty meals.
The Nackedey and Kunigunde Rosenstiel came by turns to Pfeiffering. They brought flowers, preserves, peppermint lozenges, and whatever else the market shortages allowed. Not always, in fact only seldom were they admitted, which put neither of them off. Kunigunde consoled herself with particularly well-turned letters in the purest, most stately German. This consolation, true, the Nackedey lacked.
I was always glad to see Rüdiger Schildknapp, with his Adrian-eyes, at my friend’s retreat. His presence had a soothing and cheering effect; would it had oftener been vouchsafed! But Adrian’s illness was just one of those serious cases which always seemed to paralyse Rüdiger’s obligingness; we know how the feeling of being urgently desired made him jib and refuse. He did not lack excuses, I mean rationalizations of this odd psychological trait: wrapped up in his literary bread-winning, this confounded translation, he could really scarcely get away, and besides, his own health was suffering under the bad food conditions. He often had intestinal catarrh and when he appeared in Pfeiffering—for he did come now and again—he wore a flannel body-belt, also a damp bandage in a gutta-percha sheath, a source of bitter wit and Anglo-Saxon jokes for him and thus a diversion for Adrian, who could raise himself with no one so well as with Rüdiger above the torments of the body into the free air of jest and laughter.
Frau Senator Rodde came too, of course, from time to time, crossing the road from her over-furnished retreat to inquire of Frau Schweigestill about Adrian’s health if she could not see him herself. If he could receive her, or if they met out of doors, she told him about her daughters, and when she smiled kept her lips closed over a gap in her front teeth, for here too, in addition to the hair, there were losses which made her shun society. Clarissa, she said, loved her profession and did not falter in pursuit of it, despite a certain coldness on the part of the public, carping critics, and the impertinent cruelty of this or that producer who tried to distract her by calling “Tempo, tempo!” from the wings when she was about to enjoy a solo scene. The first engagement in Celle had come to an end and the next one had not carried her much further: she was playing the juvenile lead in remote East Prussian Elbing. But she had prospects of an engagement in the west, in Pforzheim, whence it was but a step to the stage of Karlsruhe or Stuttgart. The main thing, in this profession, was not to get stuck in the provinces, but to be attached betimes to an important state theatre or a private one in a metropolis. Clarissa hoped to succeed. But from her letters, at least those to her sister, it appeared that her success was of a more personal, that is erotic, kind rather than an artistic one. Many were the snares to which she saw herself exposed; repulsing them took much of her energy and mocking coolness. To Inez, though not to her mother directly, she announced that a rich warehouse-owner, a well-preserved man with a white beard, wanted to make her his mistress and set her up extravagantly with an apartment, a car, and clothes—when she could silence the regisseur’s impudent “Tempo!” and make the critics fall in line. But she was much too proud to establish her life on such foundations. It was her personality, not her person, that was important to her. The rich man was turned down and Clarissa went on fighting her way in Elbing.
About her daughter Institoris in Munich Frau Rodde talked in less detail: her life was not so lively or eventful, more normal and secure—regarded superficially, and Frau Rodde obviously wanted to regard it thus. I mean she represented Inez’s marriage as happy, which was certainly a large order of sentimental superficiality. The twins had just been born, and the Frau Senator spoke with simple feeling of the event, of the three spoilt little darlings, whom she visited from time to time in their ideal nursery. Expressly and with pride she praised her older daughter for the unbending willpower with which she kept her housekeeping up to the mark despite all contrary circumstances. You could not tell whether the Frau Senator really did not know what the birds on the house-tops talked about, the Schwerdtfeger affair, or whether she only pretended. Adrian, as the reader knows, knew of it from me. But one day he received Rudolf’s confession—a singular business indeed.
The violinist was most sympathetic during the acute illness of our friend, loyal and attached; yes, it seemed as though he wanted to use the occasion to show how much store he set by Adrian’s favour and good will. It was even my impression that he believed he could use the sufferer’s reduced and as he probably thought more or less helpless state to exert his quite imperturbable ingratiatingness, enforced by all his personal charm, to conquer a coolness, dryness, and ironic withdrawal which annoyed him, on grounds more or less serious, or hurt him, or wounded his vanity, or possibly some genuine feeling on his part—God knows what it was. In speaking of Rudolf’s inconstant nature—as one has to speak of it—one runs a risk of saying too much. But also one should not say too little, and for my part this nature and its manifestations appeared to me always in the light of an absolutely naive, childish, yes, puckish possession, whose reflection I sometimes saw laughing out of his so very pretty blue eyes.
Suffice it to say that Schwerdtfeger zealously concerned himself with Adrian’s condition. He often rang up to inquire of Frau Schweigestill and offered to come out whenever a visit might be tolerable or welcome. Soon afterwards, on a day when there was an improvement, he would appear; he displayed the most winning delight at the reunion, and twice at the beginning addressed Adrian with du, only the third time, as Adrian did not respond, to correct himself and be satisfied with the first name and Sie. As a sort of consolation and by way of experiment Adrian sometimes called him Rudolf, though never Rudi, as everybody else did, and he dropped this too after a while. However, he congratulated the violinist on the great success he had recently had in a Nuremberg concert, and particularly with his playing of Bach’s Partita in E major for violin alone, which had received the liveliest commendation from public and press. The result was his appearance as soloist at one of the Munich Academy concerts in the Odeon, where his clean, sweet, technically perfect interpretation of Tartini pleased everybody extraordinarily. They put up with his “small tone.” He had musical and also personal compensations to make up for it. His rise to the position of leader in the Zapfenstosser orchestra—the former holder having retired to devote himself to teaching—was by this time a settled thing, despite his youth, and he looked considerably younger
than he was, yes, remarkably enough, younger than when I first met him.
But with all this, Rudi appeared depressed by certain circumstances of his private life; in short by his liaison with Inez Institoris, about which he relieved himself in private to Adrian. “In private” is even an understatement, for the conversation took place in a darkened room, each being aware of the other’s presence only as a shadowy outline; and that was, no doubt, an encouragement and easement to Schwerdtfeger in his confidences. The day was an uncommonly brilliant one in January 1919, with sunshine, blue sky, and glittering snow, and Adrian, soon after Rudolf appeared and the first greetings took place, out of doors, was seized with such severe head pains that he asked his guest to share with him at least for a while the well-tried remedy of darkness. They had exchanged the Nike salon, where they had sat at first, for the Abbot’s room, shutting out the light with blinds and hangings, so that it was as I had known it: at first complete night to the eyes, then they learned to distinguish more or less the position of the furniture and perceived the weakly trickling shimmer of the outer light, a pallid gleam on the walls. Adrian, in his velvet chair, excused himself many times into the darkness on account of the inconvenience, but Schwerdtfeger, who had taken the Savonarola chair at the writing-table, was entirely satisfied. If it did the other good—and he could well understand how it would do so—then he preferred it that way too. They talked with lowered voices, partly on account of Adrian’s condition, partly because one tends to lower one’s voice in the dark. It even produces a certain inclination to silence, to the extinction of speech; but Schwerdtfeger’s Dresden upbringing did not tolerate any pauses. He chatted away over the bad patches, in defiance of the uncertainty one is in under such conditions about the other party’s reactions. They skimmed over the desperate political situation, the fights in the capital, came to speak of the latest in the musical world, and Rudolf, in the purest tone, whistled something from Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain and Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola, and harp. Fie whistled the bourree from Love’s Labour’s Lost too, precisely in the right pitch, and then the comic theme of the weeping little dog from the puppet play Of the Godless Guile, without being able to judge whether Adrian cared for it or not. At length he sighed and said he did not feel like whistling, but on the contrary was heavy-hearted, or perhaps not that so much as angry, vexed, impatient, also worried and not knowing what to do, and so, after all, heavy-hearted. Why? To answer that was not so easy and not even permissible, or at most among friends, where you were not obliged to be so careful about this man-of-honour attitude that you must keep your affairs with women to yourself. He was accustomed to observe it, he was no chatterbox. But he was not merely a man of honour either, people mistook him when they thought so, a shallow amoroso and man of pleasure: that was loathsome. He was a man and an artist; he had no use for this man-of-honour attitude; and certainly Adrian knew, for everybody did, what he meant. In short, it was about Inez Rodde, or rather Institoris, and his relations with her, which he could not help. “I can’t help it, Adrian, believe me! I never seduced her, but she me, and the horns of little Institoris, to use that silly expression, are altogether her work, not mine. What do you do when a woman clings to you like a drowning person and simply will have you for her lover? Do you leave your garment in her hands and flee? No, people do not do that now, there are other man-of-honour rules, you are not to say no, especially if the woman is pretty, though in rather a fatal and suffering way.” But he was fatal and suffering too, a nervous and often afflicted artist, he wasn’t a young light-head or sonny-boy, whatever people thought. Inez imagined all sorts of things about him, quite falsely, and that resulted in a crooked sort of relationship, as though such a relation in and for itself were not crooked enough, with the silly situations it was always bringing about and the need for caution every minute. Inez got round all that better than he did, for the simple reason that she was so passionately in love; he could say that because she was so on the basis of her false imaginings. He was at a disadvantage because he was not in love: “I never have loved her, I admit it openly, I always just had friendly and brotherly feelings for her, and that I let myself in with her like this and the stupid thing drags on because she clings to it, that is just a matter of duty and decency on my side.” But he must in confidence say this: that it was awkward, yes, degrading, when the passion, a really desperate passion, was on the woman’s side while the man was just doing his knightly duty. It reversed the possessive relation somehow and led to an uncomfortable preponderance on the part of the woman so that he must say that Inez behaved with his person and his body as actually and rightly a man behaves with a woman, added to which her morbid and feverish jealousy, quite unjustified anyhow, had to do with the undivided possession of his person; unjustified, as he said, for he had enough with her, in fact enough of her and her clinging, and his invisible auditor could scarcely conceive what a refreshment for him, under these circumstances, was the society of a man so highly placed and by him very highly esteemed, the sphere of such a one and conversation with him. People mostly judged him falsely; he much preferred having a serious, elevating, and worth-while talk with such a man to going to bed with women; yes, if he were to characterize himself, he thought, after detailed self-examination, it would be as a platonic nature.
And suddenly, as it were in illustration of what he had just said, Rudi came to speak of the violin concerto which he so greatly wished to have Adrian write for him, if possible with all rights of performance reserved. That was his dream. “I need you, Adrian, for my advancement, my development, my purification, in a way, from all those other affairs. On my word, that is the way I feel, I’ve never been more in earnest about anything, about what I need. And the concerto I want from you, that is just the most concrete, I mean the most symbolic expression for this need. And you would do it wonderfully, much better than Delius or Prokofiev—with an unheard—of simple and singable first theme in the main movement that comes in again after the cadenza. That is always the best moment in the classic violin concerto, when after the solo acrobatics the first theme comes in again. But you don’t need to do it like that, you don’t need to have a cadenza at all, that is just a convention. You can throw them all overboard, even the arrangement of the movements, it doesn’t need to have any movements, for my part you can have the allegro molto in the middle, a real ‘Devil’s trill,’ and you can juggle with the rhythm, as only you can do, and the adagio can come at the end, as transfiguration—it couldn’t be too unconventional, and anyhow I want to put that down, that it will make people cry. I want to get it into myself so I could play it in my sleep, and brood over it and love every note like a mother, and you would be the father—it would be between us like a child, a platonic child—yes, our concerto, that would be so exactly the fulfilment of everything that I understand by platonic.”
Thus Schwerdtfeger. I have in these pages spoken many times in his favour, and today too, when I go over it all again I feel mildly towards him, to a considerable extent touched by his tragic end. But the reader will now understand better certain expressions which I applied to him, that “impish naivete” or childish devilry in his nature. In Adrian’s place—but there is really no sense in putting myself in his place; I would not have tolerated some of the things Rudi said. It was distinctly an abuse of the darkness. Not only that he repeatedly went too far in his frankness about his relations with Inez—but also he went too far in another direction, culpably and impishly too far, betrayed by the darkness, I might say, if the notion of any betrayal is in place and one ought not to speak instead of an impudent intrusion of familiarity upon solitude.
That is in fact the right description of Rudi Schwerdtfeger’s relation to Adrian Leverkühn. The plan took years to carry out, and a certain sad success cannot be denied to it. In the long run the defencelessness of solitude against such a wooing was proved, certainly to the destruction of the wooer.
CHAPTER XXXIV
Not only with the littl
e seamaid’s knifelike pains did Leverkühn at the time of his worst state of health compare his own torments. In conversation he had another parallel, which he visualized with remarkable clarity. I called it to mind when some months later, in the spring of 1919, the illness lifted like a miracle from off him, and his spirit, phoenixlike, rose to its fullest freedom and most amazing power, in an unchecked, not to say unbridled, anyhow an unintermitted flow of almost breathless productivity. But just that very thing betrayed to me that the two states, the depressive and the exalted, were not inwardly sharply distinguished from each other. They were not separate and without all connection, for the present state had been preparing in the former one and to some extent had already been contained in it—just as indeed, on the other hand, the outbreak of the healthy and creative epoch was by no means a time of enjoyment, but rather in its own way one of affliction, of painful urgency and compulsion… An, I write badly! My eagerness to say everything at once makes my sentences run over, hurries them away from the thought they began by intending to express, and makes them seem to rush on and lose it from sight. I shall do well to take the reproof from the reader’s mouth. The way my ideas tumble over themselves and get lost is a result of the excitement generated by my memory of this time, the time after the collapse of the authoritarian German state, with its far-reaching accompanying laxity, which affected me as well, laying siege to my settled view of the world with new conceptions hard for it to digest. I felt that an epoch was ending, which had not only included the nineteenth century, but gone far back to the end of the Middle Ages, to the loosening of scholastic ties, the emancipation of the individual, the birth of freedom. This was the epoch which I had in very truth regarded as that of my more extended spiritual home, in short the epoch of bourgeois humanism. And I felt as I say that its hour had come; that a mutation of life would be consummated; the world would enter into a new, still nameless constellation. And moreover this feeling of mine, riveting my attention, was a product not only of the end of the war but already the product of its beginning, fourteen years after the turn of the century. It had lain at the bottom of the panic, the awful sense of destiny which people like me felt at that time. No wonder the disintegration of defeat increased this feeling to its highest pitch, no wonder either that in a defeated country like Germany it occupied the mind far more than among the victorious nations, whose average mental state, precisely on account of victory, was much more conservative. They by no means felt the war as the massive and decisive historical break which it seemed to us. They saw in it a disturbance, now happily past, after which life could return to the path out of which it had been thrust. I envied them. I envied in particular France, for the sanction which, at least apparently, had been vouchsafed by the victory to its conservative bourgeois intellectual constitution; for the sense of security in the classic and rational, which it might draw from its triumph. Certainly, I should at that time have felt better and more at home the other side of the Rhine than here, where, as I said, much that was new, alarming, and destructive, which none the less my conscience obliged me to take stock of, urged itself upon my world-picture. And here I think of the distracting discussion evenings in the Schwabing apartment of a certain Sixtus Kridwiss, whose acquaintance I made at the Schlaginhaufens’. I will come back to those evenings presently, only saying for the moment that the gatherings and intellectual conferences, in which I often out of pure conscientiousness took part, set about me shrewdly. And at this same time with my whole deeply stirred and often dismayed soul I was sharing intimately in the birth of a work which did not fail of certain bold and prophetic associations with those same conferences; which confirmed and realized them on a higher, more creative plane… When I add that besides all this I had my teaching work to perform and might not neglect my duties as head of a family, it will be understood that I was subject to a strain which together with a diet low in calories reduced me physically not a little.