A Man in Love

by Martin Walser

  In the study, which contained only the bare necessities, he sat down at the desk. He could not go to bed yet. He dreaded the very sight of his bed. Not because it was as plain as a soldier’s cot, but because it was a bed. He had to write. It was too late for further work on the elegy. He was too tired. And so, since he couldn’t address Ulrike directly in the poem, he wrote to Frau von Levetzow. She had stage-managed the days and nights in Karlsbad so that he had walked around and sat around like a man in chains. But if he was going to write, he had to thank her. Any other register was out of the question.

  Whatever he wrote, he was always sure to write that he was writing. The writer shouldn’t act as if what he is writing gets committed to paper all by itself. Especially when he wasn’t dictating but writing with his own hand, the writer also had to talk about his writing. Whenever the necessity to write was as unmistakable as it was in Jena on the night of September 13th to 14th, 1823, the writer felt secure in that necessity. The condition he was in can be called innocence or lack of hesitation or freedom.

  From the outset, he openly confessed to the Ulrike-mother how much he had to say and how little he was able to say. How much he had to thank her for this summer and especially for the last few days. He couldn’t enumerate it all, but he knew she would know what he meant. And he wrote to the mother what he wrote to the daughter but was not allowed to write to her. He was in the same state with the daughter as with the mother. The daughter knew the state he was in, knew his state of mind by heart, so that if he occurs in her thoughts from time to time, she can tell herself everything better than he can in his present condition.

  “… in my present condition …” That’s exactly what he wrote. And because that said more than he wanted, he switched to a frivolous tone. Her daughter would know that it’s a pleasant business, being loved, even if her friend sometimes breaks his stride. Everywhere he goes he hears how good and healthy he looks and how cheery he is. They both knew what elixir he’d been taking.

  He mentioned Bertha and Amalie in a way they would find satisfactory if the letter was to be read aloud. Given what Frau von Levetzow had told him about her life—for instance, about her contact with Madame de Staël in Geneva—he felt closer than ever to the family. And she should please tell her daughter that the more he got to know her, the more he liked her. He would like to personally prove to her that he knows what pleases her and what displeases her. And so he is hopeful. At the end as in the beginning.

  “Your faithful and devoted servant G.”

  Then he realized he was unable to stop. Writing to Ulrike’s mother was now his only chance to talk to Ulrike, so on a new page he admitted at once that he now saw he couldn’t stop writing to her.

  The only thing that immediately occurred to him was to send greetings to Count Klebelsberg and thank him for the surprising variety of provisions for their journey he had carefully packed and delivered to Stadelmann. And then he stopped. And then he couldn’t stop. He started in again. He had not taken leave of the Broesigke grandparents in Marienbad. She should please convey his best wishes and tell them that if his luck held, he would like to be their guest again next year. By which he hinted that he would like to stay in their palais again. He stopped. He started again. There was one more important thing, he wrote. He implored her to let him know in case the Levetzows relocated, and to where. To emphasize this point again after all that N-C-O-L-W-N nonsense was superfluous. But now they had it in writing.

  Now there were already four postscripts, each one signed as if it was the last.

  And he began again: the glass with the three names wreathed in ivy was standing on the table in front of him. That beautiful day of open secrets. He made his meaning clearer: the sight of the glass makes him happy but it doesn’t console him.

  Bed was still impossible. He couldn’t write anymore. This was going to be a constant problem. As long as he wrote, if only to the mother, he was with Ulrike. If he was too tired to write, where was he then? Every day in the coach he had continued to work on the elegy, always as early in the morning as possible, as soon as they had set off. Now he took out his travel diary and read what he had written but not yet found a place for in the elegy.

  And hear a word, the loveliest to bind you

  As you have left me, just so you will find me.

  And is surprised to find out that the sun

  Does not stand still for her.

  And even after the last kiss she ran

  To press yet one more kiss upon my lips—

  What we had, where has it gone?

  And what we have now, what is that?

  Tomorrow, he thought, as soon as he was in Weimar, he would write the elegy down and revise it so that he had it. He would not show it to anyone. To Ulrike of course, at once. But since he cannot send her anything her mother will not see, he cannot send the elegy to her, its sole addressee. And so what now begins within him will never come out. And he will cheat the world out of what is happening within him now.

  Whenever his thoughts behaved like this, he always submitted them, complete, to Ulrike. He always needed to know what Ulrike thought of what he had just had to think. Fortunately, she was so present within him that when he confided in her, he never went unanswered.

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  Weimar, October 7, 1823

  Dear Ulrike,

  When I asked you if I was permitted to write you when I couldn’t stand not to, you said, “But of course.”

  When you say yes, you say YES. If I didn’t sense that so keenly, I could not write to you. It helps that I don’t know if I’ll be able to send what I write immediately. Partly because I also fear that Ottilie has persuaded or enchanted or bribed or threatened our postman not to let anything of mine leave Weimar without showing it to her first. She would immediately confiscate a letter from me to you. Ever since I returned from Bohemia, she has been ill. Obviously, more than we could have imagined had been reported from Marienbad. It seemed that she and I had barely greeted each other properly when she took to her bed. I was not allowed to visit her, said Little August, since I was the malady she was suffering from. My Dr. Rehbein added that there was a promising new therapy that prescribed treating a malady with the same malady and so curing it. He managed to get me visiting privileges. How long it had been since I was last in the mansard apartment that is her realm! Even Son August sometimes jokes that he’s only a transient up there (in the mansard). It was ghastly how she lay there, staring at the ceiling. Her face, always inclined to tense up, was tense to the breaking point. Her nose, always too prominent for her rather small face, now dominated it brutally because that little face had practically disappeared. Her lips, never substantial, were gone. Her arms lay feebly at her sides but the hands were clenched into fists. She granted me not a glance from her black eyes. Fortunately. I’ve become accustomed to other eyes. We remained silent a long time. There was nothing I could say. I tried once to lay my hand on her fist and she screamed, a scream of pain, a scream of resistance, a leave-me-be scream. But then suddenly, the tirade poured forth. Aimed at you, Ulrike. What names she called you, you and all Levetzows. A gang of social climbers, occupying the spas and on the lookout for the juiciest morsels (an image that doesn’t fit me). I cannot repeat the images she dragged in to describe you. Not yet. Perhaps we can have a correspondence that allows me to say more than is allowed. All Europe knows that you, Ulrike, are an ambitious whore. Just so you know what I have to put up with here. I’ve visited her every day since then. Dr. Rehbein says that before I visited her she lay there, didn’t utter a peep, and ate nothing at all. I don’t believe the latter. Making all that known is part of the war she’s waging against me. And no war has ever been caused by one person. For a war you need at least two. My war guilt: for all these years, I put up with, participated in, and was responsible for Ottilie feeling as if she were married to me. Between us, Little August was part of a game she had to play to get to me. Of course, all this was always
couched in a humorous vein, but the banter only served as the disguise required by propriety for an improper feeling, which for its part grew stronger the more it had to be disguised. It didn’t bother Little August, for it legitimized his own erotic excursions.

  That’s the situation I always left to come to Bohemia. Then there was you and your sisters and your mother, a family that encountered the world effortlessly. You will have noticed I’m not a laugh-out-loud person, but nowhere have I laughed more than in your circle. I will confess that without you, I’m unimaginable in any cheery family. Wieland, the poet and sage (you’ve heard of him) had an ever-ready good mood he called humor. Smart as a whip he was, and he regaled me splendidly for hours on end with lectures concerning humor. That’s how I know I’m not funny. Everyone who is funny … I just don’t believe that anyone can be funny: everyone who would be funny is pretending. A funny person is cheating life of its seriousness. Its terrible seriousness. Little August said Goethe was rococo. The truth is that my entire life before I was allowed to meet you was rococo. The seriousness that entered my life through you, the laughing one, makes everything before that seem like rococo. If Wieland were still alive (he died because when he paid me a visit one winter, he waded home on foot through snow and ice from Weimar to Ossmannstedt, against my urgent advice, shod only in little patent-leather shoes and silk stockings and wearing velvet pants and a thin little coat: pneumonia, gone), if he were still alive I could offer him a lecture on why humor is a greater fraud than that which made history under the name rococo. Rococo was always a fraud that knew it was fraudulent. Rococo never took itself seriously. Humor takes itself seriously, but it’s not serious, so it’s the real fraud. My pedagogical vein is running strong again. Forgive me. I just meant to say that you have brought a previously unknown seriousness into my life. Rococo was no match for you.

  That’s what I publicly announced in Bohemia. The fact that my love for you was then passed on and arrived here, untempered and even distorted by the most malicious tones, made Ottilie into the fury that she is. Everyone’s a fury under the right circumstances, and they’re certainly the right ones here. It may be a universal law that if person A is happy, it makes person B just as unhappy as A is happy. It keeps the world in balance. At Dr. Rehbein’s insistence I must visit her bedside regularly and let her scream at me and call me a dirty old man, a sycophant, a groper, a pedophile, and worse. Now I am a monster, too. I present the world with a noble façade, but in reality, I am crueler to those nearest me than Nero was to his enemies. Ottilie’s suffering is great. So is mine, I could say. But when I am with her, I have nothing to say. Nothing at all. I cannot say (and it’s only this that I would like to say, that I would have to say), I cannot say that I love Ulrike and how I love her and that there is nothing, nothing, nothing I can do about it. I have to dissemble. I have to say: Marienbad, Karlsbad—nothing but summer flings. That’s the kind of nonsense I have to dose her with. I have to be interested in getting her on her feet again. I am a business enterprise, among other things. Do you have any idea how many coworkers I have? Stadelmann, John, Meyer, Riemer, Kräuter, Eckermann. And almost every day, my bosom confidant Chancellor von Müller, who will be the executor of my estate. I have the greatest trust in his kindness. I consider him loyal. Weimar—and that means the world—has access to me through my staff. And that’s how people find out what goes on here. Then the unending procession of persons and personalities highly eligible to call on me. Should I be indifferent to the fact, dear Ulrike, that I now appear as a dirty old man—the foul name that gores me the most—and a monster? Or am I one in fact? Please, please, please tell me. Permit me the non-exaggeration that I have infinite confidence in your ability to see and judge. If even a whisper within you is for calling me so, please do it. The appalling thing is, if you would call me that, were compelled to call me that, it would not touch me at all, would not insult, vex, or even upset me. And I’m easily upset, as you saw in Bohemia. Please, give it a try. Call me names as seriously as you can.

  You gave me permission to write to you. As soon as I arrived in Weimar, I began to struggle with this letter-writing permit. Every day for twenty-four hours—for even in my dreams I struggled—I did everything to not have to write you. I survived more than one sudden letter-writing attack and, however wounded I was, I controlled myself, i.e., forced myself to accept what had to be: no letter. A letter to you, what can it be besides continual deception? I am not reaching you at all, only prolonging the pain of stretching out my hands in your direction. Will I have the courage to send you what I must write? How can I? Ottilie has certainly long since made a conquest of Postmaster Leser as well as Postal Secretary Steffany in the Alexanderhof. I could assign Stadelmann the task of mailing the letter from Kranichfeld or Blankenhain or Buttelstedt, assuming Ottilie hasn’t already corrupted all the postal officials in the vicinity. I’m justified in feeling persecuted even if the post office is not yet prejudiced against me, persecuted by supervision from a thousand quarters. Every sort of custom, morality, habit, propriety, and orderliness has been bundled into a unified supervision to tell me in every way that I am impossible. Because I love you, Ulrike. I’ve taken to calling this conspiracy of all legitimate society against me “dramaturgy.” It is an organization in which no one need consult anyone else, yet all conspire in a single goal. The goal is me, or more exactly, the demonstration of my impossibility. Which I know better than my dramaturges. The distinction, the absolutely decisive difference between the supervision I call “dramaturgy” and myself: those spontaneously united in my supervision oppose my impossibility by all means, cultural and societal, while I commit myself to my impossibility. They will do everything they can against my impossibility. I do nothing against my impossibility, but do everything for it. Everything I can. One could call it a life-and-death struggle, if one wanted to be completely theatrical.

  Dear Ulrike—and I say this to you, only to you, and I can only say it to you because I don’t know if I will ever send you what I say in this letter—I am sick. Lovesick. For you. And can only tell you in a letter I shall never mail! What a world! After how many millennia of cultural practice in becoming humane! But I do have practice in this: although I won’t very soon see you again, although I certainly cannot send you this letter tomorrow, although I probably will never send you this letter, writing to you is still something. As long as I write, I’m talking to you. I see you. You listen to me. I tell myself that I know how you will react to this sentence or that. And I incorporate your reactions into my letter. I read in your listening face a heartfelt, yes, even a sympathetic approval of my letter-writing. You remember that my Werther is a novel in letters. I cannot commit suicide. I still overestimate the value of the world, that is, the people around me. I begrudge them the derision they would unleash in their papers if they could report, What a pity, he’s finally killed himself. Headline: The Sufferings of Old Werther. Perhaps my impossibility will increase so much that these people will soon be indifferent to me. Then I’ll do it, Ulrike. And now the most serious thing must be said. I can only do it if you agree. Don’t rush to say, Never! Wait and see if I can make my impossible life so comprehensible to you that you say—for my sake, for the sake of ending my suffering—Yes, do it. That would be the moment to return to the du-zone. I’ll draw you quickly into the greatest inner proximity. Did we not talk about this once in Marienbad? That to leave the end of every life to so-called nature is to remain mired in barbarism? Nature doesn’t care how much we suffer. We care. In a precarious case, we have the right to decide not to allow some cultural veneer to make the unacceptable seem acceptable. Period.

  If my love for you would establish itself in me as hopelessness, something I am now resisting day and night, I would have to cease to exist. And not even a Napoleon would be able to nitpick about mixed motives weakening the plot. Even though Herr XY has earned much more money with his parody of my Journeyman Years than I have with the original, not even a Napoleon could discover in my
suicide, if it were to happen, a trace of professional grievance. It would happen out of love and nothing but love. I admit it: that amounts to saying I still have hope. But I know it’s hopeless. But I don’t believe it’s hopeless. I have to confess that I still have an obligation to finish the second part of Faust and revise the Journeyman Years. But what is an obligation compared to a hopeless love! Fortunately, hopelessness is a goddess one can appeal to. I negotiate with her day and night. She is cunning and I am not without ideas myself. In any given moment, I’m not thinking everything I could be thinking. One must not do hopelessness that favor. Dear Ulrike, I am only just beginning but already coming to realize I shouldn’t make any demands on myself. For now. Everything could be wrong. If one sentence should be considered more important than another, then always the sentence that says the least. For now: one rises above adversity by acknowledging its necessity, but that’s all. For now. You once said admiringly that Napoleon had an unconditional character. Ah, if only you thought I had one, too!

  I am only just beginning. Julie von Egloffstein, the painter, her sister Linchen, the singer, Adele Schopenhauer—as smart as she is beautiful—and Ottilie’s sister Ulrike von Pogwisch (she is always tripping on things from pure hunger for life and whenever she forces herself into my thoughts I refer to her only as the Pogwisch woman)—they all hang around wanting to comfort me. There’s been far too much talk about a dismayingly beautiful girl who must have been the privy councilor’s most eager listener, most witty interlocutor, and most devoted escort. They were inseparable, day and night…. Yes, yes, YES, the chatter is still going on. Chancellor von Müller, my bosom confidant, goes the furthest. He prefers sitting with me to playing the chancellor over at court. Chancellor von Müller leaned over to me so I told him things that could be taken as a confession and used against me. But nothing can turn the chancellor against me. Ottilie and Little August can turn all the rest into traitors. Only the men, of course. Not all the men, but all the men who make poems. And all the men around me make poems. To anyone who writes poems, his poems are the most sacred thing. Everything else is negotiable. However, even here the exception proves the rule. Chancellor von Müller, who naturally also makes poems, will never betray me, not to anyone. Riemer, John, Stadelmann, Eckermann, and Kräuter are a different story. If Ottilie takes pity on the poems of these men, she can do with them what she will. She cannot do anything with Meyer, my Johann Heinrich Meyer, a non-poetry-maker par excellence and thus incorruptible. Ah, Ulrike, there would be a friend for you if you came. Won’t you come? Privy Councilor Meyer, known as Art-Meyer, shared a bed with me in Rome. I lured him over to Weimar, a painter, Ulrike, who doesn’t paint, a Swiss painter in Weimar—hence inconsolable. You MUST know that I divide my friends into hopers and despairers. Hoper Number One is Chancellor von Müller, Despairer Number One is Meyer. I don’t need to say a word to him and he knows everything. I shall draw sustenance from him.