by Susan Sontag
You don’t feel sorry for the too susceptible young man?
Oh, she said, yes. But … but I feel more sorry for Lotte. She was trying to do what was right. She meant no harm.
I feel sorry for my hero, said the poet. At least I did. All that is very remote to me now. I was only twenty-four when I wrote it. I am not the person I was then.
The young woman, who is only twenty-two, cannot imagine the man standing before her ever to have been someone her own age. He must be about the same age as Charles. Strange what happens to men. They don’t care for being young.
And was it a true story? she asked politely.
Everyone asks that, said the poet. Actually, everyone asks if it is my story. And, I confess, I did lend myself—but, as you see, I am still here.
I’m sure your friends are very glad, the young woman said.
I think Werther’s death was my rebirth, the poet said solemnly.
Oh.
The poet was always—would always be—in the process of being reborn. Definition of a genius?
To her great relief she saw the Cavaliere approaching. I was just congratulating Madame Hart on the vivacity of her performance, said the poet.
Surely the brilliant Cavaliere would be a match for this ponderous visitor. The men would talk to each other, and she could watch.
But, as it turned out, the conversation between the Cavaliere and the poet was not much more successful than that between the Cavaliere’s protégé and the poet. Neither greatly appreciated the other.
The Cavaliere had never read the notorious lachrymose novel about the lovelorn egotist who shoots himself; he suspected he would not like it. Luckily, his illustrious guest was not only one of the most famous writers on the continent and the principal minister of a small German duchy but had scientific interests, particularly in botany, geology, and ichthyology. So they talked about plants and stones and fish.
The poet began to unfurl his theory of the metamorphosis of plants. For some years I have been examining the leaves, pistils, and stamens of many species, and this study has led me to postulate a model from which it would be possible to construct an infinite number of plants, all of which could exist and many of which do. Walking along the seafront here, I had a new thought. You could say that I had an illumination. I am convinced that this Primal Plant does exist. When I leave Naples, I shall go to Sicily, which I am told is a botanist’s paradise, and where I have hopes of finding a specimen. &c, &c, &c.
I am making an English garden on the grounds of the palace at Caserta, said the Cavaliere, ever eager to herborize, as soon as the poet had finished. Caserta may indeed rival Versailles, but I have persuaded Their Majesties that they need not yield to French fashion in the matter of gardens. At my suggestion they have engaged the most eminent landscape gardener in the English style, and this garden when completed will contain flora of the most enjoyable variety.
How disappointing the Cavaliere was. The poet changed the subject to Italy.
I have been completely transformed by Italy, he said. The man who left Weimar last year is not the same man who arrived in Naples, and whom you see before you now.
Yes, said the Cavaliere, not any more interested in self-transformation (the poet’s favorite subject) than he was, for all his knowledge of gardens and the volcano, in botanical or geological theory. Yes, Italy is the most beautiful country in the world, I suppose. And truly there is no city more beautiful than Naples. Allow me the pleasure of showing you the view from my observatory.
Beauty, thought the poet scornfully. What a simple-minded epicurean this Englishman was. As if there were no more to the world than beauty! Here was a man incapable of delving deeply into what interested him. A mere dilettante, he would have called him, had dilettante not been then a term of praise.
Transformation, sighed the Cavaliere. Here was a man incapable of not taking himself seriously. He reflected that the poet undoubtedly exaggerated the extent to which he had been transformed by his Italian journey and that this concern with self-transformation was a rather overbearing piece of egotism.
And both were right. But the poet’s convictions are more valuable to us; his vanity more pardonable; his sense of superiority more … superior. With genius, as with beauty—all, well almost all, is forgiven.
Thirty years later, in his Italian Journey, Goethe will write that he had a delightful time at the Cavaliere’s assembly. He was not telling the truth. He was young enough then, restless enough, to have not enjoyed himself very much at all. To have minded that he learned nothing from any conversation that evening—for he felt himself undernourished mentally as well as under-appreciated. I am bent on my own improvement, the poet was writing his friends. Pleasure, yes—that too. I have pleasures and these quicken and enlarge my ability to feel. How superior he had felt to these people. And how superior he was.
* * *
In most of the stories in which a statue comes to life, the statue is a woman—often a Venus, who steps off her pedestal to return the embrace of an ardent man. Or a mother, but then she is likely to remain in her niche. Statues of the Virgin and of female saints do not become ambulatory; there is movement only in compassionate eyes, a tender mouth, a delicate hand—speaking or gesturing to the kneeling supplicant, to console or to protect. Rarely does a female statue come to life in order to take revenge. But when the statue is a man, his purpose is almost always to do or to avenge a wrong. A male statue who wakens—in the modern version, a machine given human form and then animated—comes to kill. And his being-really-a-statue packs him full with the martial virtue of single-mindedness, makes him unswervable, implacable, immune to the temptations of mercy.
It’s a dinner party. Sophisticated people who have dressed up in handsome and revealing clothes are enjoying themselves in the atmosphere in which such dedicated partygoers enjoy themselves best—something of both brothel and salon, minus the exertions or risks of either. The food, whether chewy or delicate, is bountiful; the wine and champagne are costly; the lighting is muted and flattering; the music, and the aromas of flowers on the table, enveloping and suffusing; some sexual tomfoolery is taking place, both of the wanted and of the other kind (“We’re just having fun,” says the would-be Don Juan, interfered with by the one who notices him relentlessly pressing his unwanted attentions on some woman); the servants are efficient and smile, hoping for a good tip. The chairs are yielding, and the guests profoundly enjoy the sensation of being seated. There are treats for all five senses. And mirth and glibness and flattery and genuine sexual interest. The music soothes and goads. For once, the gods of pleasure are getting their due.
And in comes this guest, this alien presence, who is not here to have fun at all. He comes to break up the party and haul the chief reveler down to hell. You saw him at the graveyard, atop a marble mausoleum. Being drunk with self-confidence, and also a little nervous about finding yourself in this cemetery, you made a joke to your sidekick. Then you halloed up to him. You invited him to the party. It was a morbid joke. And now he’s here. He’s grizzled, perhaps bearded, with a very deep voice and a lumbering, arthritic gait, not just because he is old but because he is made of stone; his joints don’t bend when he walks. A huge, granite, forbidding father. He comes to execute judgment, a judgment that you thought outmoded or that didn’t apply to you. No, you cannot live for pleasure. No. No.
He reaches out and dares you to shake his hand. The earth below rumbles, the floor of the partying room gapes open, flames start to rise—
Perhaps you are having a dream and you wake up. Or, perhaps, you are experiencing this in a more modern way.
He enters, the stony guest. But he is not going to kill you, and he’s probably younger, even young. He is not coming to take revenge. He even thinks that he wanted to go to a party (he can’t be a monument all the time) and he is not above wanting to enjoy himself. But he can’t help being himself, which means bringing along his higher idea, his better standards. He, the stony guest, reminds the r
evelers of the existence of another, more serious way of experiencing. And this, of course, will interfere with their pleasures.
You did invite him, but now you wish you hadn’t, and if you don’t take the necessary precautions, he will break up the party.
After meeting a few of your guests, he starts giving up on the evening. Too quickly, perhaps. But he’s used to scything through such matters. He doesn’t think your party is all that much fun. He doesn’t dissemble—mingle. He keeps to corners of the room. Perhaps he looks at the books, or fingers the art. He doesn’t resonate with the party. It doesn’t resonate with him. He has too much on his mind. Bored, he asks himself why he came. His answer now: he was curious. He enjoys experiencing his own superiority. His own difference. He looks at his watch. His every gesture is a reproach.
You, one of the guests—or, better, the host—make light of this scowling presence. You try to be charming. He refuses to be charmed. He excuses himself and goes for something to drink. (Is he moping or getting ready to denounce you?) He returns, sipping a glass of water. You turn away and make common cause with the others. You make fun of him—he’s easy to make fun of. What a prig. What an egotist. How pompous. Doesn’t he know how to have a good time.
Lighten up, stony guest!
He continues to contradict what is said to him, to make plain that he is not amused. And he can’t really get your attention. You flit from guest to guest. For a party is not a tête-à-tête. A party is supposed to reconcile its participants, to conceal their differences. And he has the bad manners to want to expose them. Doesn’t he know about the civilizing practice of hypocrisy?
You can’t both be right. The fact is that if he is right, you are wrong. Your life is revealed as shallow, your standards as opportunistic.
He wants to kidnap your mind. You won’t let him. You tell yourself that frivolity is a noble pursuit. That a party, too, is an ideal world.
Sooner or later he leaves. He shakes your hand. It’s chilling. You settle back. The music is louder again. What a relief. You like your life. You’re not going to change. He is pretentious, overbearing, humorless, aggressive, condescending. A monster of egotism. Alas, he’s also the real thing.
* * *
On another visit, the poet asked the Cavaliere to recommend one of the lava dealers in Naples, so that he could take back with him a proper range of specimens.
To travel is to shop. To travel is to loot. No one who came here left without a collection of some sort. Naples made amateur collectors of everyone. It made a collector even of the Marquis de Sade, who, fleeing arrest in France, had arrived eleven years earlier under a pseudonym—though his false identity was unmasked by the French envoy, and he had to submit to being presented at the Neapolitan court under his true, already infamous name. When Sade left the city five months later to return to France, he sent ahead two huge chests filled with antiques and curiosities.
Before leaving for Sicily, the poet paid several more visits to the royal museum at Portici, which he proclaimed the alpha and omega of all collections of antiquities. He visited Paestum and avowed himself irritated by the stumpy Doric columns. (After his return from Sicily, on a second visit, he was able to appreciate them.) He did not, however, return to Pompeii and Herculaneum, which he had toured rapidly soon after arriving and had disliked. Better to observe the movements of crabs in the breakwater. What a delightfully splendid thing is something living, he wrote. Better to stroll in the garden at Caserta of which the Cavaliere was so proud, and look at the rose bushes and camphor trees. I am a friend to plants, he wrote. I love the rose. And he felt a wave of health and self-approval sweep over him. How pleased I am to keep up my little study of life in all its multifarious forms. Away with death—this hideous mountain, these cities whose cramped dwellings seem to foretell that they would become tombs.
He wrote letters back to his sovereign and to his friends in Weimar. I carry on looking. I am always studying. And, again: You will not recognize me. I scarcely recognize myself. This is why I came to Italy, why I had to abandon my duties. He had finished the final version of his Iphigenia, and added two scenes to the ever-unfinished Faust during his sexually revelatory stay in Rome. He had made many observations of plants and Palladio. To stave off the temptations of nostalgia for the lost classical past, he took notes on the picturesque behavior of common people in the streets. He had made progress with his drawing. He was not disappointed in himself. This productivity was yet another sign of his well-being.
It was important not to appreciate too much. Once one takes it upon oneself to go out into the world and enters into close interaction with it, he wrote to one of his friends, one has to be very careful not to be swept away in a trance. Or even to go mad.
He was getting ready to go back. Naples is for those who only live, he wrote—thinking of the Cavaliere. Beautiful and splendid as it is, of course one couldn’t settle here. But I look forward to remembering it, he wrote. The memory of such sights will give savor to a whole life.
People saved every scrap of paper on which the poet set down words. His fame had made him an instant antiquity—to be collected by his admirers. This great poet whose thirst for order and seriousness has led him to live as a public official, a courtier, is already one of the immortals. He was performing in public, being a work of art himself. He felt the echo of eternity in every one of his utterances. Every experience was part of his education, his self-perfecting. Nothing could go wrong in a life so happily, so ambitiously, conceived.
What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive. Words of the poet. Words of wisdom. A wisdom and a brand of felicity unavailable to the Cavaliere, and which he would never miss.
* * *
Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed—that is the modern view. Even the alchemist’s projects seem plausible now. The Cavaliere was not trying to understand more than he already did. The collector’s impulse does not encourage the lust to understand or to transform. Collecting is a form of union. The collector is acknowledging. He is adding. He is learning. He is noting.
The Cavaliere commissioned a suite of drawings of twelve of the Attitudes from a local German artist. Drawings Faithfully copied from Nature at Naples, they were titled. But they conveyed nothing, the Cavaliere thought, of the seductiveness of these performances.
And he commissioned someone to take notes on and to draw the mountain’s poses and performances.
Conscientious as the Cavaliere was, he could hardly be a full-time observer. For some years now, ever since the great eruption of 1779, he had been subsidizing a studious reclusive priest from Genoa, who lived alone and servantless near the foot of the mountain, to keep a diary of whatever he saw. This Father Piaggio never left his hermit’s post—a mountain is a solicitation to hermits—rising at dawn and performing his observations, regular as devotions, at fixed intervals several times in the day. From the window of his tiny house he had a perfect view. He had already filled four manuscript volumes with his earnestly legible notations on the mountain’s behavior and with fluent pencil drawings of the downward splaying and spreading of lava streams, the upward curling and soaring forms of the crater’s effusions of smoke.
Much in these notes and drawings was repetitive. How could it be otherwise? Who could change the mountain? The Cavaliere particularly relished a story the priest told him about the natural philosopher from Prague who had arrived at the court forty years ago when Charles of Bourbon, the present King’s father, was still on the throne, with a detailed plan for rescuing the villages surrounding Vesuvius from the danger that loomed above them. His various specialties, which he named as mining, metallurgy, and alchemy, had led him to study the volcano for many years in his laboratory in Prague. There he had devised his solution. It was to reduce the mountain to a mere thousand feet above sea level, and then open a narrow channel from its filled-in summit down to the shore, so that if the mountain explodes again, what remains of its fire will
be concentrated and run directly into the sea.
Considering the magnitude of the task, the work force he would require was not large, the man from Prague pointed out. Give me twenty-nine thousand men, Majesty, he said, and in three years the monster will be decapitated.
Was the man from Prague just another charlatan? Possibly. Should he be allowed to try anyway? The king, who liked bold projects, consulted with his ministers. They were appalled by the plan. To alter the mountain’s shape, they declared, would be a sacrilege. An anathema was read out in the cathedral by the cardinal.
Since this was a new age, with new thoughts, new machines—people were discovering new forms of leveling, making shapely—it was not surprising that the project had been recently revived by a local engineer, armed with a more solid technology, who presented his drawings for the royal couple’s inspection. The Queen, who fancied herself a patron of enlightenment, aware of the need for judicious reforms in politics and manufacture, put the proposal out to be studied by competent ministers and local savants. Exclude the thought of sacrilege, she instructed them; think only of feasibility.
The answer came back: Yes, it is feasible. Did not the people of ancient times, without any of our wonderful modern means at their disposal, build higher and with greater precision than one would have thought possible? And to dismantle is easier than to raise up. If a human machine of many tens of thousands of laborers could erect that marvel, the Great Pyramid at Giza, a similar mobilizing of energies and obedience by a visionary ruler could achieve another marvel, the lowering of Vesuvius. But changing the shape, scaling it down, would not alter the mountain’s nature. It would not deter an eruption or make it easier to channel. The danger was not the mountain but what lay under the earth-pedestal on which the mountain was set, far below.