A Man in Love

by Martin Walser

  Ulrike jumped up. “Ah, your Excellency,” she said, “how much has been wrecked by the Revolution!”

  He answered offhandedly, “I want to say quite unpresumptuously that I’d like to spend time only with you.”

  “I don’t yet know,” she said, “what I should have against that.”

  “The way you talk to me,” he said, “awakens something in me. I can’t quite name it—don’t want to, since it’s barely stirred. But it feels invigorating.”

  She said she had to go over and give her mother the unpresumptuous suggestion.

  “Yes, go. Every second in your presence is … a … revolution. I’m afraid.”

  She gazed at him, said nothing.

  “Now your eyes are green,” he said. “Pure green.”

  “Being afraid isn’t so bad,” she said in a loud, harmless, throwaway, casual tone.

  And he: “It would be lovely to have someone who feels exactly the same fear as oneself. That would be closeness. The very essence of proximity.”

  “Oh,” she said, “that’s one of your sentences again. Having someone who feels exactly the same fear as oneself. May I say what I think, Excellency?”

  “Whoever doesn’t tell me what she thinks insults me,” he said.

  “Another one of your sentences. To me, they always have such a finality about them. No more thinking possible or necessary. It is as it is, or rather, as you’ve said it is. Physics and chemistry are my favorite subjects; they’re the most interesting because things happen in them. They yield results because there’s an experimental protocol. What if we—only you and I, of course—were to experiment with your sentences, or any sentences, that have that authoritative ring? Would that be forbidden or interesting?”

  And he: “The more forbidden, the more interesting.”

  “Another one of those majestic sentences!” said Ulrike, but laughed merrily. Then she said, “Well, before you decree any further decrees (perhaps you’ve been a minister of state too long?), I’m going to propose that all these sentences are just as valid when you turn them around.”

  Goethe was able to reply with no less merriment that Ulrike’s sentence far exceeded all of his in its apodictic urgency.

  “However,” said Ulrike, “I shall immediately offer evidence that the opposite sounds just as valid. I don’t say it is, but it sounds like it.”

  “If you please,” he said.

  She: “It would be lovely to have someone who precisely does not feel the same fear one suffers from.”

  He: “Don’t stop!”

  She: “Whoever tells me what he thinks insults me. And please, Excellency, don’t consider if that corresponds to your experience, but only if it sounds just as valid as its opposite.”

  “Ulrike,” he said, “you’re starting to get dangerous in the most desirable way. And please, don’t turn that sentence around. That’s enough for today.”

  “Are you angry with me, Excellency?”

  “Ulrike,” he said, “at the moment I could consider my life bungled because I didn’t have you.”

  Ulrike said that sounded heartwarming without having to be true.

  Goethe remembered two years ago, bringing a copy of the just-published Journeyman Years to Marienbad for Ulrike and inscribing it “In friendly recollection of August 1821.” And they met here last year, were meeting again this year, and she had never even mentioned the book. He knows what that means but doesn’t want to spell it out. But it spells itself out inside him. For Ulrike, the Journeyman Years are unreadable. And if they’re unreadable for Ulrike, they’re altogether unreadable. He’s got to be able to think that.

  Ulrike said there was something else that couldn’t be put off. As a reader of his work, she knew that he didn’t allow situations to pass without having exploited them pedagogically, and that’s why she was going to imitate him and for fun, offer him something instructive.

  He made a gesture inviting her to continue.

  She said that yesterday her ever lively sister Amalie had made the mistake of asking him how he liked her dress.

  “Yes,” said Goethe, “and I said it was very pretty.”

  And Ulrike: “‘But Ulrike’s is prettier,’ you added.”

  And Goethe: “To which your sister replied, ‘I didn’t even need to ask that. Everything about Ulrike is always prettier.’”

  “It wasn’t necessary,” said Ulrike.

  “But it was true,” said Goethe.

  “‘True’ is no excuse for an embarrassment.”

  “Another one of those majestic sentences!” he cried.

  “The assumption was that I would imitate you. If you criticize me now, you’re criticizing yourself.”

  “I capitulate,” he said.

  “Please don’t forget that Amalie is sixteen,” she said.

  “Barely, or already?” Goethe asked.

  “Barely and already,” said Ulrike.

  And he: “I have to admire you, Ulrike.”

  “So many things one has to do!” she said. “But I’m glad. Of course. Very glad. Adieu.” And left.

  Leaning against the curtain, he watched her cross the street. Watched how she walked, how she seemed about to become airborne with every step. She walked as if walking uphill, but with utter ease. She was enormously light. Since he could not call after her to say what he felt, he got out the poem he had written her a few days ago because they had missed each other on the promenade. When he went to give it to her, she said she would like to hear him read it first. And he did:

  Beside the warm spring, there you pass your days.

  But that is troubling and unclear.

  For since I hold you wholly in my heart,

  I cannot fathom that you’re there and here.

  “Lovely,” she had said.

  And he: “Do you think so?”

  And she: “It’s lovely to be addressed like that.”

  He’d called her du in the poem, not the formal Sie.

  Then she’d said, “We’ll have to miss each other more often.”

  Now he sat down at his desk and wrote, “The loveliest of all the loveliest dancers.” And had the pleasant feeling of having outdone himself again.

  Chapter Three

  NOW HE WAS never to be seen without her, nor she without him. Everyone saw it. And Goethe saw that everyone saw him with Ulrike on his arm. He enjoyed their looks, the heads bent in whispering, and he always saw to it that Ulrike and he were talking to each other. He presented himself and Ulrike as a couple in discussion, a couple always enthused about something, a couple with more to say to each other than all other couples on earth. It had to be clear to anyone who, glass in hand, had an eye out for someone to chat with on the promenade that this couple was so caught up in conversation that they must not be disturbed. Goethe, however, had not only to demonstrate their inviolability but also be on the lookout for someone showing up among the strollers to whom he could serve up Ulrike, simply because the person was so important or so famous that it spoke well of Goethe to serve Ulrike to such a celebrity. Last summer, he and Countess Strachwitz had tried this out as a game. He told her that she and he would now promenade while conversing so animatedly that no bored stroller would dare disturb them. That had been a game. Now it was serious.

  Since she, a pupil in a Strasbourg boarding school, was interested in all things French, he began to talk about her situation when he spied the Count of Saint-Leu approaching. This was Napoleon’s brother, Louis Bonaparte. He used to be King of Holland, but after a falling-out with his brother he was then the Count of Saint-Leu. He’d been devoted to Goethe for years because he made poems and every summer waited to see what Goethe thought of his newest productions. Goethe thought them not bad at all, and so he admitted the count to their conversation, said something friendly about the poems, and asked for permission to show them to Fräulein von Levetzow soon, who as a boarding-school Strasbourger had more sympathy for French literature than for German. But Goethe also saw to it that such
tolerated intruders didn’t stay very long. When they had bidden Count Saint-Leu adieu, Goethe told Ulrike that his secretary John was currently at work compiling a list of all his writings since 1769 for the count, who was going to have them translated into French. He would then be very eager to hear her opinion of them. Of course, Ulrike wanted to hear about Napoleon himself more than about the poet and former King of Holland. Goethe was happy to oblige. On the day of the Battle of Leipzig, a plaster relief of Napoleon that hung in his study in Weimar fell all by itself from its nail. And Napoleon’s eyes, had he mentioned them? Napoleon’s gaze that everyone feared? It was said to be penetrating and sharp, piercing, that gaze. In his three encounters with the Corsican, Goethe had not found that to be the case at all. “He had a steady gaze,” Goethe said, looking at Ulrike. “He didn’t blink, ever, as if his eyelids were made of stone. Yours are certainly not like that, Ulrike, but you have that steady gaze, too. You never blink. And the ancients relate that that’s how you can tell the difference between gods and men. Men blink, the gods don’t.” And he looked at her, and she looked at him, on the promenade, a hundred paces from the Kreuz Spring.

  She broke the spell. She said, “But he was always friendly to you.”

  “Yes,” said Goethe. Napoleon had purportedly read Werther seven times. And of course, he’d found something to criticize.

  “What could that have been?” asked Ulrike. “I’m all ears.”

  “He said I had mixed Werther’s motives,” said Goethe, “to have one reinforce the other. Werther’s not just unhappy in love, his pride and ambition have also been wounded. One unhappiness reinforces the other, and Napoleon thought that was an error. He found it unnatural. It weakened the figure of Werther, who ought to be unhappy as a lover. Love, unrequited love, should have been the only reason for his ruination.”

  “I agree,” said Ulrike.

  He said he hadn’t just disagreed with Napoleon, but had also told him that the artist needed to be concerned with the effect, and heightening—exaggeration—was called for.

  “But Napoleon was right,” said Ulrike. “The fact that Werther was also unhappy in his career means that as an unhappy lover, he wasn’t so unhappy that he had to kill himself because of it. It makes him smaller, more mundane, less interesting.”

  “But more believable,” said Goethe. “He’s easier to identify with.”

  “And that’s a shame,” said Ulrike. “He should be a flagrant miracle of unhappiness from nothing but love.”

  “In fifty years,” he said, “no one in all of Europe has seen that except Ulrike von Levetzow and Napoleon I.”

  “Napoleon had an unconditional character,” she said. “Better no effect at all than a predictable one.”

  To inflate his importance for Napoleon, Goethe said that at any rate, the emperor had ordered a Brutus-tragedy from him. “His thought was probably to get a thorough besmirching of regicide.”

  “Napoleon,” she said, “made it to St. Helena himself, without Brutus.”

  Goethe had to add that Napoleon had named him officier de la Légion d’Honneur, which offended his dear, respectable Germans.

  Ulrike asked why he never wore his medal.

  “Should I?” he asked in return.

  “No,” she said.

  Such agreements were always sealed with a silent exchange of glances. He felt that with no other person on earth would he find such concurrence. A graybeard had just greeted them in passing, and Goethe told her that he had been a quartermaster in Champagne, and when Ulrike wrinkled her forehead in inquiry, he added: “Campaign of 1792.” When he realized that that information had no perceptible effect, either, he added that it had rained for the entire campaign in France. That still made no impression. And so he went on to say that he had mostly been busy writing in his diary. Sometimes one just can’t do anything right. After two more sentences in which he described himself as a darling of fate, but then found that excessive, he heard himself say without transition that he’d never had any enemies, but many adversaries. All contemporary physicists rejected his theory of colors and simply parroted Newton. And then had to give her a lecture about how his adversaries dissected light and the eye although in reality, they never occurred apart. He left light and the eye in place as the precondition of his theory of colors. Since he had celebrated Ulrike’s eyes on that first day on the promenade, he thought she could still be won over to his point of view. On the other hand, when he listened to himself complaining about his miseries with the theory of colors, he knew he could not do himself greater harm than with these querulous remarks about the injustice of the world.

  Then luckily, a thunderstorm began and so she learned from him what Seneca had written: that people struck by lightning always lay on the ground faceup. When Ulrike was amazed at how much he knew, he said he had heard about victims of lightning from Chief Detective Superintendent Grüner in Eger, whom he visited every year on his way from Weimar to Bohemia, and again on the way back. He’d climbed practically every single knoll, hill, and mountain around here with him, looking for unusual stones. Who else but this police official could have told him that the shawm was forbidden under Louis XIV because the Swiss were dying of homesickness when they heard it. And as soon as he stepped through Grüner’s door, his first sentence was always: Well, my good fellow, what are your newest acquisitions? And Grüner would reply: Everything at your service, Excellency. I owe it all to you.

  “Ach ja, Ulrike, if only one always associated with people who owed one everything.”

  And Ulrike: “What would that get you?”

  “You could say,” said Goethe, “whoever’s grateful to me, I’m more grateful to him for being grateful to me than he could ever be to me.”

  “You always want to outdo everyone,” said Ulrike.

  “Only because I don’t want to be outdone,” he said.

  “Only because you know you always outdo everyone.”

  “Ulrike,” he said, “the way I can talk to you here and you to me—can you recall last year and the year before in the deep valley of Karlsbad, were we ever able to talk like this to each other?”

  “There’s something American about Marienbad,” she said.

  He didn’t get it right away.

  “Just look at this wide pastureland. Up there at its highest edge, where the forest begins—one hotel next to another. Three, four gigantic hotels plopped down in the middle of a green wilderness. Four years ago, that’s all there was here: green wilderness.” That’s what she thought was American.

  “The Klebelsberg palais,” he said, “is itself a provocation. Four stories with a hundred rooms and a magnificent façade fifty meters wide. Can that end well?”

  “Excellency, if something must end well, it will,” she said like a strict teacher. In his tone of voice, actually.

  Goethe marveled at her and asked whom he was hearing when she talked like that.

  “Me,” she said. But whereas he got all his information about lightning victims and Seneca from a certain chief detective superintendent in Eger, she got everything having to do with Marienbad from her future father-in-law, Count Klebelsberg, and her grandfather, Baron Broesigke. The privy councilor ought to hear those two going at it some evening: Marienbad, the greenest wilderness in Europe that always got bypassed by Europe’s rich and famous on their way to Karlsbad. Klebelsberg—whose main occupation was, after all, to be the Austrian minister of finance—and her grandfather Broesigke were calculators. Her grandfather had also built a house here. And by the way (she said it only to let Goethe know that her family also included more elevated as well as older members), her mother’s father was a godchild of the great Prussian king, Frederick.

  “Ah,” said Goethe, “what a lovely bridge: from the great Frederick to the American Marienbad.”

  She said she was sure her grandfather would be pleased to show Goethe the certificate of godparenthood if he’d like to see it.

  And Goethe: “I really would like to see it.�
� Apropos, he said, at the end of one of his novels when the hero had the choice of investing money in Russia or America, he had him choose America.

  “Change of topic, Excellency!” she announced.

  And he: “What’s this now?”

  She said she’d just been trying to show off with America, but for him it was nothing new; he’d checked it off long ago!

  “But sadly, only in a novel,” said Goethe in his most melancholy tone.

  Of course, Ulrike had figured out that Goethe was proud to be seen walking with her. And she understood that it was important to demonstrate to the Marienbad audience through lively conversation and all its accompanying gestures that they were simply not to be interrupted. That Ulrike appeared in a different dress every day pleased Goethe as much as if he had invented those dresses himself. All her clothes probably came directly from Vienna, from Count Klebelsberg, her mother’s friend. All the Levetzow women dressed more vibrantly and indeed, with more thought than the other women, never in a piece of clothing that made its wearer into that piece’s presenter. His daughter-in-law Ottilie could learn something from them. But he already knew that if he ever described the velvet and silk, wool and leather of the Levetzow women in Weimar, Ottilie would react with an explosion of nerves, i.e., she’d get sick or angry. Or both. Ottilie’s sister Ulrike von Pogwisch had just written him a letter to say how things were going in Weimar. She had heard, she wrote, that Goethe was paying special attention to a namesake of hers. She wasn’t the least bit pleased that her name was Ulrike. Back in Weimar, whenever he heard that name he would always think of the other, distant, pretty, amiable Ulrike. In a letter to his son, he had made friendly mention of the Levetzow family. He already had to treat Ottilie more like his own wife than his son August’s. Because he was long since familiar with society, he was aware that he and this Ulrike here were known as a couple in rumors, gossipy letters, and diary entries from Zurich to Hamburg. A spa like this was a pot in which rumor was cooked and then shipped out to the whole world. He could imagine which ladies from the promenade wrote hither and yon to which other ladies about him and Ulrike. Out in the world, the rumors then get honed by their recipients. Bettina von Arnim will see to it that no address of any importance is overlooked: Goethe, seventy-four, a von Levetzow, nineteen, her mother, twice widowed and currently chasing a wealthy Viennese career politician who even accompanies himself on the piano. And just a touch—but only a touch—more genteel: Caroline von Wolzogen, the sister of Schiller’s widow Charlotte von Lengefeld and the author of thoroughly charming novels. She will report to her friend Caroline Number Two, wife of the great Wilhelm von Humboldt, in her purposefully ambiguous style, that while on one hand Goethe was no longer quite right in the head, on the other it was still quite impressive he still had enough of his wits about him to fall in love. The particular woman had never mattered much to him; he could always find one to trick out with his fantasies. These gossipy letters will say that the Levetzow women have the knack of staging themselves to their own advantage. And then some correspondent or other will show off with an ethical balancing act: Now that everyone was pouncing on Goethe with universal gossip, wasn’t it more original to spare him, to make it a habit to defend Goethe? Maybe some woman in Frankfurt will see him as a natural phenomenon lacking in character. And one of the Carolines will write back saying much the same thing, but with a bit more subtlety.