A Man in Love

by Martin Walser

  He asked how she knew so much about him.

  “From Franz. He’s the one who invited him. He lives here in the hotel, in the second-biggest suite.” By which she meant that the grand duke was in the biggest. “What’s curious is that he’s a man without a given name. There is much speculation about that.”

  With the prelude “May I take the liberty of joining you for a moment?” the Duke of Leuchtenberg plopped down on Ulrike’s empty chair. “We have an appointment,” he began.

  “I know,” said Goethe.

  “That’s all right then,” said the duke. “So I haven’t ridden my coach up to Marienbad from Rome for nothing. The fact that you recall our conversation, Herr Privy Councilor, gives me reason to hope. It was right here in this house, almost exactly a year ago—we were still complaining about all the hammering going on. And now? All finished, a fairy-tale house. What a fellow this Klebelsberg is! My congratulations, dear Lady … That you remember, Herr Privy Councilor, tells me that we’re going to keep going: The Rhine–Danube Canal will be built! I’m an Austrian—forgive me, a Bavarian by marriage—and you and I, Herr von Goethe, shall give birth to the idea. Others will build it …”

  Goethe interrupted the voluble fellow: As impolite as it was, there was nothing he could do at the moment, he said, but watch everyone dancing at the Viennese command. Weimar was still dancing to the tune of the ancien régime and he felt it his duty as a retired Weimar minister of state to act as its spy here. While he spoke, he did not take his eyes off Ulrike and Herr de Ror for even a second. There was nothing for the Duke of Leuchtenberg to do but also turn his attention to the dancers. Goethe continued to play the schoolmaster. He thought it would be foolish, he said, to pass up, for inconsequential reasons, a proffered opportunity to learn something. “There, look at that.”

  And everyone looked. De Ror was positively slinging Ulrike around. At times, he was holding her with just one hand and her free arm flew freely through the air. Again, the fabulous independence of all her joints was observable. Her head itself seemed to fly along its own orbit on her long, slim neck. And Herr de Ror was the gentleman making it fly, while remaining comparatively still himself. Gradually, more and more people were watching this couple. Even couples still dancing gave up, stopped, and watched. Then a rather stocky young man stepped into their path and tried to cut in. But Herr de Ror ignored him, so the stocky man tried to trip him. Herr de Ror jumped over the other’s leg and amazingly enough, took Ulrike with him, preventing them both from falling. He continued to hold Ulrike with his left hand, but with his right fist, he gave the interloper such an uppercut that he fell backward and didn’t get up again. The orchestra struck up a brisk imperial march and couples returned to their tables with playfully military step, while four waiters carried the unconscious man out of the ballroom and Dr. Rehbein trotted along behind them.

  “The poor man,” said the Ulrike-mother.

  “Do we know his name?” asked Goethe.

  “The count gave him a lift from Vienna in his carriage today. He’s his protégé, a young poet.”

  “A poet,” said Goethe.

  “Braun von Braunthal,” she said.

  Goethe jumped up, looked toward the door where the young poet had just been carried out. Braun von Braunthal, the gushing enthusiast whose hymnic description he had just reread. Braunthal wanted to reclaim Ulrike—for us. Goethe sat down and reproached himself for not doing anything for the felled young man.

  Herr de Ror returned with Ulrike. Since Napoleon’s stepson didn’t realize whose chair he was sitting on, Ulrike now sat down next to Herr de Ror.

  Ulrike said, “I’m so sorry for that man.”

  And de Ror: “The rule is always, that if you want to cut in, you wait until they finish the piece they’re dancing to. Or doesn’t that count anymore?”

  Everyone confirmed that was still the rule.

  Ulrike repeated how sorry she was for him.

  Fortunately, Count Klebelsberg had sat down at the piano and attracted everyone’s attention with a few virtuoso glissandi. Now in his lovely voice he announced that he was going to perform the newest setting of one of the most beautiful poems of our master here, since he assumed—knew for certain, in fact—that no one here had yet heard what Franz Schubert had done with Goethe’s “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt.”

  Only the yearning know

  How much I suffer!

  Alone and cut off

  From every joy,

  I gaze at the firmament

  In that direction.

  So far away is he

  Who knows and loves me!

  My head is spinning and

  Inside I’m burning.

  Only the yearning know

  How much I suffer!

  At first, there was utter silence. Then suddenly, as if a conductor had given the entrance, everyone broke into thunderous applause. For Count Klebelsberg first, but then for Goethe. He stood up, bowed, and raised his clasped hands in thanks to the singer. He had no defense against that voice. He saw that Ulrike had tears in her eyes, and her mother, too. He thought of Zelter’s setting of the poem. Schubert—that name was now often mentioned by Viennese visitors or others who had been there. He was perfectly happy with Zelter’s settings. As far as he was concerned, his poems didn’t need to be set to music. And now he begin to feel some irritation after all. It was going a bit far, what they’d made of him.

  Count Klebelsberg announced that he would sing the Erlkönig next, and whoever wasn’t carried away by this song belonged in a museum among the rubble from the pyramids.

  Laughter. He began to sing and Goethe felt defenseless. It wasn’t right that this music could so usurp the text that the words became merely the occasion for enormous, truly demonic gestures. Tonal gestures. A frenzy of pain. Again, he thought of Zelter’s straightforward serviceability. Zelter strove to perform the text. This Schubert fellow was trying to tear your soul out of your body, and the text was nothing but a convenient excuse.

  “One more time,” called Klebelsberg, “at the urgent request of a number of ladies who have never before heard such a thing, ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt.’”

  Very clever, thought Goethe. The effect was ten times as strong as after the first performance. Some women were openly weeping and embracing one another. Goethe again pumped his clasped hands cordially in Count Klebelsberg’s direction. The applause went on and on.

  “What now, Excellency?” asked Amalie von Levetzow.

  Goethe nodded, gestured toward Ulrike, who now sat farther away than before. But it was clear enough that she had tears in her eyes. Then to dispel the heavy mood, he said, “He certainly has a voice—like seven celestial swarms of bees.”

  “You make me happy,” she said. She would tell the count as much and he would probably die of pride and joy.

  The Hohenzollern princess was standing by their table and from partly behind the glistening gold Japanese fan for which she was famous, she asked for the pleasure of waltzing with him if another waltz was to come.

  He agreed with gestures learned in the previous century.

  Napoleon’s stepson had withdrawn with the declaration that he would continue to dog the heels of Herr Privy Councilor. Goethe had not been able to react appropriately, he was so eager to know what was being said at the other end of the table. Ulrike did not return to her now empty chair and sit across from Goethe. She stayed turned toward Herr de Ror and the men he was debating with. Even Amalie von Levetzow, who was sitting right next to Goethe, showed that now she was concentrating on de Ror and the others. And Ulrike! Like a sunflower, not just her head but her entire upper body—even her entire existence—has turned toward this newest sun. He can still just see her, half from behind. They were talking about literature, that much he could make out. Only two names mattered, whether in Vienna or in Marienbad: Byron and Scott. Everyone agreed. Byron and Scott were the only authors people still read.

  Frau von Levetzow interrupted the conversatio
n to say, “And what did Byron say, gentlemen, about our Goethe? He called him the undisputed sovereign of European literature.”

  Herr de Ror thought it a two-edged compliment. Sovereigns were the ones who had fallen asleep on their thrones while Byron went to Greece to join the fight for independence from the Turks although—no, because his inferior government used its veto at the Congress of Verona to prevent the European nations from supporting the Greeks’ war of independence against Ottoman authority.

  “Byron just dedicated his Sardanapalus to Goethe,” said Frau von Levetzow bravely.

  “No question about it, Excellency. You are the most vivid monument that ever dominated an era.” Everyone applauded this declaration of de Ror’s.

  Goethe found it necessary to say another word about the veneration for Walter Scott. “His magic, gentlemen, comes from the grandeur of the three kingdoms of Great Britain and the richness of their history. And what do we have to show between the Thuringian forests and the sandy wastes of Mecklenburg? Nothing. In Germany, a good novel will always be an exception. For my Wilhelm Meister I had only the most wretched subject matter: a troupe of vagrants staging plays for the provincial nobility.”

  No one contradicted him, but no one wanted to continue with the topic, either. Goethe was immediately annoyed at himself for tracing the fame and brilliance of Scott’s novels to circumstances for which the author was not responsible. And then, too, for his laughable attempt to make his own novel great; look at what I accomplished with the miserable subject matter Germany had to offer. Nor had he said it in a tone that could continue to be played like a ball.

  Without the least transition, Herr de Ror began to talk about being in the theater in Vienna day before yesterday: “The leading man enters, slowly removes his splendid helmet and places it on a table. The actor playing the hero is more than elderly. You could see the hands that had just released the helmet, and they were trembling, but then he raises them into the air, and of course they’re still trembling. And to his left and right, the lovers both raise their own hands in the air and what do they do? They tremble. But wait, the best is yet to come: The hero’s confidant slinks forward to stand beside the other three, raises his hands in the air—and of course, they’re trembling—and so we end up with eight trembling hands in the air.”

  Now everyone at the table was laughing. Herr de Ror pretended he wasn’t responsible for the laughter he’d just produced. His head reminded one of the Orient, but you wouldn’t consider him an Oriental. A face on the brink of being adult, a manly face above all, a considerable nose, hardly the trace of a mouth, hair cropped close to his skull, dark eyes, a gaze that established distance—in sum: fairly insipid, although vouching for power. This still-young man will never immerse himself in others. He will remain self-contained. Such were the polemics racing through Goethe’s head. He could not resist. At once he lost himself imagining de Ror. He had to leave. His gaze said mostly that he would still need to deal with the fellow, but not here. High time to leave!!!

  “Until tomorrow,” whispered Goethe into the Ulrike-mother’s ear. “Many thanks for a lovely evening,” and pressed her gently onto her chair so she would stay seated and not make a fuss over him. And he was outside before they had finished laughing about the eight hands trembling in the air. Ulrike had laughed, too, laughed along with the others, in all innocence, so to speak. Was he intending to prescribe what she was permitted to laugh about? Yes, said a voice within him. He tried to take it back and felt like a hypocrite. A last observation: In the meantime, Herr de Ror had laid his arm on the back of Ulrike’s chair. Only on the chair? Or was it already around her back or her waist? In his self-imposed hurry, he hadn’t been able to ascertain that. But he did hear what he said to her, as heedless of the volume as if they were alone. “Il-y-a quelque chose dans l’air entre nous.” And he’d leaned his face toward hers as if she were the doctor checking to see how bad the infection was. That’s how overbearing his pantomimed proffer was. The last sentence Goethe heard was another of the theater-lover Herr de Ror’s declarations, to the effect that the worst play was still better than the best boredom. That was Vienna for you. Then Goethe was outside and quickly across the street and up to his room.

  What now? What to do? Where to go? Staying here was out of the question. Stadelmann was asleep and so was John. Should he pack himself?

  To know exactly what was to be done and yet not do it, that was the catastrophe.

  He knew every second of the day, but in no second did he admit to himself, that this could never be. Never, never, never. He was already lost after that first year. That certain something that is nothing and will always be nothing, and which, the longer it is nothing, becomes more and more important until it becomes what’s most important, all-important, the only thing, and fills you up, defines you, makes you blissfully happy, lifts you up to any height only to hurl you down all the more cruelly. His heart was pounding in his chest, throbbing in his throat. He had to throw open a window, inhale fresh air, move his arms. He sensed that there were thoughts that can suffocate you. He could not inhale as much air as he needed. His breathing was short and shallow. His time-tested maxim when some slippery slope, something uncontrollable, some gravitational pull into impossibility made itself felt: Where is your foothold, the well-rehearsed fear of falling into lurid poverty? Nothing impoverishes like unlucky love. Write that down. A god gave you the power to say how much you suffer. What a miserable advantage; you have to be able to shoot yourself. It’s torture to have to say how much you suffer. Lotte took the pistol down off the wall for your Werther, cleaned it carefully, and handed it to her Albert, so he could give it to Werther, so he could put an end to his filthy condition with a pistol cleaned by Lotte. Suffering is filthy, makes you filthy. When things get desperate, there’s no other way to clean them than with death. You escape by writing…. You have never, ever suffered. Till now it was always the others who suffered. Frau Berlepsch: the twenty-page letters she’s been writing you for twenty years. It’s been a long time since you could stand to read one. The letters of a poor, tedious woman besmirched by suffering who claims to have been born to love you and awaits a response from you—if only for a second. Compassion is closely related to disgust. Now you can write a twenty-page letter to Ulrike von Levetzow and threaten her with further twenty-page letters, since you have to write instead of shooting. That fellow without a given name speaks seventeen languages. He must look down on you in every respect. The size of a guardsman, six feet two at a guess. Slim, but not in the least scrawny. And a face neither wide nor slender, where bones, not flesh, predominate. A massive chin balanced by a sweeping mustache on the rather modest upper lip. An almost too powerful nose, unenlivened by even the slightest curve. Derisively raised eyebrows. A green gemstone in his violet scarf, probably an emerald. The color of her eyes. How fitting. As soon as they’re alone, both of them will remark it, celebrate and applaud it. You look handsome today—that’s what she said day before yesterday when he came to fetch her for their walk on the promenade. She didn’t say, You are handsome. He has stayed in shape, looks good. You can read in a hundred newspapers how good he looks. And yet, the way they’re amazed and excited about his appearance is also a blatant insult. Even louder than the paeans to his still fabulous shape he can always hear, You still look pretty good for such an old scoundrel. At your age, any talk about how you look is always an insult. And not just about how you look. Think of Byron and Scott, who dominate the scene. You’re vieux jeu. But there’s nothing either new or bad about that. Bad maybe, but not lethal. You don’t die just because you’re old. Write it down. What’s bad is not being permitted to love anymore. But you are allowed to love. You just have to get used to no longer, never again being loved. Write to Frau Berlepsch—Isolde, that’s her name—write her that now you understand her, now you know how you’ve tortured her with your disregard and pity bordering on disgust. To love without being loved—it shouldn’t be allowed. He’d never before suffered
this most vicious blow of fate for which Ulrike von Levetzow was born and raised. It’s not the only reason for her existence. In Europe she will be a brilliant success as Frau de Ror. And before that, she will have incidentally had the function of teaching you what many have learned from you: how it feels to love without being loved. Once as a cheeky greenhorn you wrote, “No one is currently in love with me and I’m not in love with anyone. Only death stands in the corner.” The fact that no one is in love with you is only cruel when you are in love with someone and your love is not returned—or worse, it’s rejected. If Creation was ever interested in making the earth and human life on this earth tolerable, then missing in the instructions the Lord gave to mankind via Moses was the most important of all: Thou shalt not love. That is Commandment Number One. Moses was probably so exhausted from climbing the 7,362 feet to the top of the Mountain of Legislation that he didn’t hear the first commandment issued by the Lord, a tragic failure that can never be made good. If Moses had brought this commandment down from Sinai, mankind would be missing out on nothing except tragedy. The source of every tragedy has always been love. And how easy it would have been to get along without love! It has never been necessary for reproduction, so what is it for? So we notice we don’t live in Paradise anymore. So no human life gets by without suffering. Not one. The Lord was clever enough. I am a jealous God, was his commentary.

  Goethe needed to take his clothes off and throw them as far away as he could. He’d have to burn all the clothes he’d ever worn in Ulrike’s presence. You look handsome today. This single sentence in three years. He had seen every time, and enthusiastically confessed to her, how lovely she looked in that dress and that dress and that dress. In the years 1821 and ’22 he was already dressing with more thought than ever before in his life. With loving thoroughness, he had assembled his vests and scarves, tailcoats and jackets. She never saw it. And now, this arrant sentence: You look handsome today. Yes, yes, yes, she didn’t just say You look handsome, but You look handsome today. God forbid he should think he always looks handsome, to say nothing of being handsome. But a seventy-four-year-old is not handsome under any circumstances. And if he cannot live without being handsome or at least found to be handsome, then he shouldn’t take refuge in writing, i.e., whining, but just go ahead and shoot himself.