He stood there in his dressing room before the floor-length mirror. The six lamps on the right and left once again provided the most favorable lighting. He was unable to find the naked man in this mirror repulsive or revolting in the least. He could not resist a sort of affection for this naked fellow. And the feeling was not at all for the person, only for the nakedness. Then, however, a storm arose, a nervousness, an impatience that almost shook him but in any case drove him from the mirror. He yearned for Ulrike to come. Nothing could be more grotesque than to wish Ulrike to come, her marvelous limbs swinging along fluidly, and stand beside this naked man whom someone—he couldn’t remember who—had described as a youthful old man. When she had walked beside him, she sometimes had hummed and this almost-singing had directed her movements. Actually, she was always dancing. Now she lay in her bed and the guardsman-sized fellow without a given name lay next to her or on top of her. He doubted she would sacrifice her virginity on the first night, but who knew? This Oriental need not follow the local customs and he might try to persuade her that they were both born to revel—or perhaps perish—in the joys of the Orient anyway. Since he always carried all sorts of jewelry in his luggage, when they had closed the door to his suite behind them he would first see which piece suited her best. The fact that Ulrike wore no jewelry—her considerable neck bare, bare her at least equally considerable earlobes—had to present a challenge to the Oriental non-Oriental. You need some color, dear girl, or perhaps fire—some diamonds. It’s clear he wouldn’t go to Ulrike’s room, but take her to his suite, the second largest in the Palais Klebelsberg. They’ve already passed the kissing stage. You great man. That’s what she said to him once when they were standing under the colonnades, but she probably only meant as a poet. Now she could say it with more conviction. You great big fellow. In case they were past the first kiss. The windows of the ballroom across the way were dark. Here and there in the upper stories, a lighted window. No room really illuminated any longer, only a hint of light promoting all possible actions. Il-y-a quelque chose dans l’air entre nous.
Once his breathing had become involuntary again, he returned to the mirror in his dressing room. Wasn’t it strange that he felt close to this naked man. He would have liked to caress him, but no, that would be going too far. But there between his soft loins longing to surrender: his genitals, which for his entire life had had the ambition to be all that mattered. His entire life he had had to tame the power-hungry ambition of this member, not always with equal success. There were times when that ambition possessed him more than he dared to admit, awakened by women, of course. He was supposed to wish for and perform solely what that organ wanted. And it had been like that right down to the present day. The fact that this member is not permitted to appear in the language in which life first becomes aware of itself—unless it be in Latin or corrupted—is a disgrace. A cultural disgrace, in fact, and one you’ve done nothing to overcome. Yes, yes, make excuses, boast of this or that act of linguistic liberation. But the genitals’ claim to expression—and that is their claim to life—was still eking out an existence in exile, in a stupid, cowardly dungeon, and that was a deficiency. He again apologized to his member. He extinguished the lights and sat in semidarkness. He felt he couldn’t go to bed. Anywhere now but bed. Into his study? No, into the salon. He sat down on the sofa where he sat when visitors came. Once without waiting for him to say where she should sit, Ulrike had gone over and sat down on the sofa. She was so easygoing, so ingenuous. He pressed his face into the golden yellow cushion with a pattern of pale pink birds that only flew in fairy tales. She had rested her arm on that cushion, but oh, how she did it: with a wide sweep ending in a gentle landing. He thought about Lucidor in Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years. Drowning in his sorrows, he had pressed his face into a cushion when he mourned his Lucinde. But then Lucinde was there, standing before him when he thought he had lost her. You are the only one I ever wanted to live with, he says. Lucidor, she replies, you are mine and I am yours. And she had embraced him and asked him to embrace her. Literatureliteratureliterature!
He took the cushion and hurled it into the farthest corner. From now on, read and write only books in which everything is as nasty as in real life. He longed for a novel where hopelessness reigned. Werther! No, he was able to kill himself and be released. He can’t even fall asleep, sleep for an hour, find release for an hour! Wide awake—what torture! To be awake is to think of her. Goethe is rococo. Who was it said that? Was it little August, his son, his errant seed? Goethe was rococo, he was nineteenth century. That’s what little August said. Ah, if only he were rococo. Ah, if that had never ended, that flirtatious terrain, that cordon of whim and jest, a fortress against the world. And so the world had to destroy it, so that only what was tolerable would occur. And then the Revolution with its slogans of happiness that made only the sloganeers happy while sending people down hopeful paths to disaster …
He was compelled to run through the moments he could recall from the years ’21 and ’22. Then their differences from the moments of the present summer. The result: If today’s Ulrike were still the Ulrike of back then, he wouldn’t be sitting here in the dark sorting moments like prehistoric artifacts. The Ulrike of last summer and the summer before had won him with her ingenuous vivacity, her carefree temperament, the irony with which she played mother to her two sisters. And frequently, when she’d again said something she thought clever, she almost made a parody of turning to him to ask if he thought what she’d said was good. It had become a charming habit, this turning to him and pantomiming the question, So—what do you think? Sometimes she was more explicit, “And Herr Privy Councilor, what does he think about it?” She even allowed herself little provocations: “Assuming Herr Privy Councilor was even listening, which we simple girls have no right to expect.” Whatever the topic of conversation, she invented occasions to show that for her, he was the most important person in the circle. That often happened to him, but nowhere had it been a girl who wanted not just to honor him, but had this charming and amusing, constant need to have a bit of risky contact with him. But it was a girl. She obviously thought she had to make sure he didn’t suffer even a second of boredom with her family. When her mother had told her that Goethe wished he had another son for whom he could train Ulrike to be an ideal wife, the next time they were together she said she was wondering why Herr Privy Councilor didn’t want to train his make-believe son for her, instead of her for his son.
“And what was your explanation?” he asked.
“Two possibilities,” she said. “Either Herr Privy Councilor thinks his son is in any case the ideal make-believe husband for any woman and any family, or,” and she had looked Goethe in the eye, spread her arms, and continued in a cheerful tone, “or it would simply amuse Herr Privy Councilor to try and figure out how to train a restless girl like me.”
Instead of answering, he turned first to her mother as if he hadn’t expected her to pass along to her daughter the wish he had spontaneously expressed.
Ulrike exploited the pause to say, “Word has gotten around what a passionate pedagogue you are. And who would not long to be trained by you? The third possibility is that Herr Privy Councilor thinks a von Levetzow has to receive special training to be worthy of a Goethe.”
Everyone laughed. Then Goethe began in a rather quiet voice to make what he himself called a confession.
“Why shouldn’t I confess,” he’d said, “that all that business with a son can have occurred to me only because I wanted to say something that would show me in a situation where I’d be constantly occupied with you.” He believed that both Ulrike and her mother had found this confession quite moving.
Of course, the ever alert sister Amalie had to remark at once, “And when Rike is trained, it’s my turn.”
And then Bertha, “What about me?”
At the end of the season, they bade one another farewell. On s’est promis de s’écrire.
All those hours had the effect of making
him eager for this summer to arrive. A little bit eager. And now this bolt from the blue. The new Ulrike, her gaze, her demeanor. And he thought he sensed in everything she said and did that she was continuing what had begun the previous year. She showed that she was. But now as a different Ulrike. As she had last year, she again turned to him in the middle of conversation, wanted his opinion, his reaction. But she did it as if quoting herself from the year before. What had he overlooked or misunderstood? Where did he get the impression that he and Ulrike were moving toward each other? Whence his insouciance about numbers? And that the possibly scandalous nature of his appearances with Ulrike wasn’t worth worrying about? Were there constraints or rebuffs he hadn’t noticed? He must have misinterpreted not just this or that detail, but everything. They had been living past each other. She would probably be appalled, and her mother, too, if they knew of the illusion he had worked his way into. He did not know how to find his way out, the same as it had been for years with his theory of colors, his anti-Newtonism. Practically every contemporary physicist makes fun of him or is concerned about his stubbornness. He cannot extricate himself from his color theory, however, which is more intuited than calculated. But he would much rather desert to Newtonism this very day and admit that his theory is a stubborn illusion than to accept the possibility that he could ever perceive Ulrike other than as he did. If she isn’t the way he imagines her, then he’s living in an illusion he cannot do anything about. He calls it love. He can feel it like a burn or an endless scream, or simply a total catastrophe. It isn’t yet clear what has collapsed, exploded, been destroyed, the heavens a ruin, no fellow man to be seen. He stood there balling his fists and pressing them against his eyes. And he cried for a time. A fairly long time. And heard himself singing. He sang, sang the Schubert lied to his text:
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!
He sang the line “Inside I’m burning” twice and drew out “know how much I suffer” into the upper register as if it would never end, just as Count Klebelsberg had done. He realized he was imitating him, and with the most intense involvement.
He went over and put on his white flannel nightshirt. Still, he could not get into bed, although sleep would have freed him from his obsessive thoughts. But he could not imagine lying down and waiting to find his way into sleep. If he lay down he would be the helpless prey of his worst imaginings. He had to sit down. Even better: Stand up, walk back and forth, hands clasped behind his back—his posture when on display. It had always helped him get through anything. He marched back and forth. These rooms were much too small for his backing and forthing. In Weimar, he had six rooms when he needed them, one after the other, doorless, a lane. But this imprisoned back and forth! When had he been so helpless, he’d like to know? He had to accept his thoughts. The stiffer his resistance to these thoughts, the more blatantly they dominated him. All right, stop putting up such a fight. What misery to have written it all out beforehand in a novel, like a smart aleck, for instance, that every qualification put in the path of our budding passions makes them all the keener instead of curbing them, and then, when it really happens to you, you’re nothing but a scrap of sorrow and helplessness.
He had to muster all his strength of thought and will to enforce his decision to stop looking across the way. But suddenly he found himself at the window again, opening it and almost leaning out in order to see more clearly that he could not see what was going on over there. Turn back, away from the window, tell yourself you mustn’t subject yourself any more to the disappointment that awaits you. And there he was at the window again, looking out. He realized it was foolish to ask the impossible of himself. He practiced lengthening the times between his trips to the window, hoping eventually not to have to go to the window at all. It suited him to require something of himself he could regard as requireable. The resolution NEVER AGAIN to go to the window was wrong. It was artificial, a resolution that was already a lie. That NEVER AGAIN makes you into a liar. But to remain seated a little longer each time was a program he could carry out with some prospect of success. After all, you were always interested in learning what was happening to you. Perhaps son August is right. He was rococo. Now, all of a sudden, it’s in earnest. To extinguish yourself like a lamp. That would have been the thing. The miserable preparations that need to be made: pistol, poison, noose. To extinguish yourself like a lamp. Puff. Too late for the howl of derision to reach your ears: So, he finally managed to imitate his Werther after all. You could always be sure of the ridicule of those who hadn’t experienced it, escaping into bushes, fishes, celestial unattainabilities. That will annoy them the most, that you have attained unattainability. Let it rain, Lord, even if it be fire. Let it rain on me.
Stadelmann was knocking. It must be five. Stadelmann had fetched water from the spring. He was in the habit of bringing it to his master’s bedside. Goethe called to him to leave the glass by the door.
If she is a woman now, what does that mean? He became aware of a fairly keen mistrust of women, supposedly based on experience. You can see what you did wrong from the fellow without a given name. You know it, too. Women—you’ve got to make a conquest of them. They want you to possess them, do with them whatever you please. A woman’s vulnerability is not submission, not a service to please you. It’s her idea of pleasure. You’ve only experienced such lack of reserve once: with Christiane. She passed her lack of reserve on to you. You became a man as others are perhaps born to it. You needed a Christiane—nonono, not a Christiane: You needed the Christiane, the one and only. But when she danced and more than danced with the Frenchmen, it was not pain but a mobilization of melancholy that was just waiting to be awakened.
When he again had been compelled to go to the window—and by now he went there without taking it amiss that he did—Stadelmann announced from the other side of the door that breakfast was served. He had fetched it from the catering house. Almost peevishly and louder than necessary, he called to Stadelmann to take it all away. Eating, drinking, giving the day its due—no, he had to sit down and try not to think, try to think nothing. All he was doing now was standing at the window. He couldn’t resist anymore. Actually, he had no desire to resist. He could feel he was in danger, but he didn’t know how to escape. He would stand at the open window and stare at the Klebelsberg palais until they came to take him away, wherever they wanted.
Then he was startled by a cry from the street. He looked down. It was Julie, the Hohenzollern princess he still owed a dance from yesterday. Since she made a pantomime of pleading, he replied with an elegant, practiced gesture that meant, Please, come on up, I’m so happy to see you. He was surprised that he was able to produce it so automatically. She came up, bringing a woman named Lili with her.
The princess launched into a humorous complaint that he had predicted good weather last week and since he was said to be an expert on clouds and weather, she had trusted him. And what happened? She got wet, that’s what.
Goethe said, “Last week I was still young, and hence cruel.”
“I’m bringing you a young lady from Berlin who has greetings for you from …?” She looked inquiringly at the pretty young thing who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.
“From Zelter, my voice teacher.”
“That’s it, Zelter,” said the princess.
“Perhaps the only friend I’ve ever had,” said Goethe.
“Zelter, Schubert—soon everybody will be singing only you,” said the princess. “But you resist Schubert,” she chattered on, “and I know why, too.”
Goethe pantomimed his great curiosity to hear why.
“Because he
wears spectacles, poor Franz, and such spectacles.”
“Dear Princess,” said Goethe, “you could wear ten spectacles and it would not bother me in the least.”
“Thank you!” she cried, which she always preferred to speaking.
Goethe urged them to please sit down on the sofa or on the chairs at the round table. The young woman named Lili sat on the sofa on the very same spot where Ulrike had sat a few days ago. But she could not rest her hand on the yellow cushion with the pale pink fairy-tale birds; he’d fired it into the corner. He was about to sit on a chair when the Lili woman unceremoniously said he must sit next to her. And he gave his standard reply that he wouldn’t dream of sitting anywhere else.
And obviously trying to stress that she hadn’t come here as a voice student but as an admirer, she said, “My name is Lili, but I don’t have a park.”
“Just wait, you will,” said Goethe, “just like in a pastoral play.” It always did him good when someone alluded to something he’d written long ago like “Lili’s Park.”
“What good does a park full of admirers do me,” she said, “if there’s no Goethe among the lovesick crowd? Do you recall the last line of your poem about Lili’s park?”
A Man in Love Page 6