A Man in Love

by Martin Walser

  P.S. It would suffice if you would write: My mother, who thinks of everything, writes you now and then, Excellency. She will write that you should not write to me. She has a policy. Then write me in secret, girl.

  Weimar, October 17, 1823

  List of Precautions and Things to Avoid.

  Which Situations Are Dangerous and Likely to Provoke Attacks and Ambushes?

  Every look out the window conjures up the windows of the Golden Grape. Every glass in your hand calls up the promenade. Every mention of Napoleon. Every mention of poetry translations. Every mention of the words “given name” as well as the words “palais,” “spring,” “Kreuz,” and “chocolate.” No more saying that all carriage rides are boring now and thereby letting people know that a certain person with whom they would not be boring is absent.

  Know in advance when the church bells will ring, so that the shock of yearning doesn’t again bring on a trembling fit. Always at about six, back from the promenade and still on the terrace, suddenly the church bells would start ringing, and we looked at each other in silence as long as they rang.

  During sudden rainfalls, do not immediately recall that in Marienbad, on the path from the Kreuz Spring up to the Klebelsberg palais, you twice got soaked to the skin.

  If the conversation turns to dancing, no angry, suppressed denigration of all the dances on offer here because Ulrike danced better than all the women in Weimar.

  Caution: no commentary on the color BLUE.

  Never begin a sentence to Julie v. E. with the words, If you were my daughter …

  Great caution when someone mentions who is laying over in Weimar on their way from Dresden to Paris, like the composer Lecerf recently.

  Great caution when the conversation turns to music and whether music heals wounds of the heart or makes them worse. Big mistake day before yesterday to thank Madame Szymanowska for the healing power of her magnificent piano concerto. The looks Ottilie exchanged with August.

  Biggest mistake yesterday, when at dinner, the Egloffstein mother raised a harmless, innocent toast to recollection. Then my angry outburst against that word, against re-collection, as if that were necessary when everything is already collected within us, and how! A foolish word, re-collection! My outburst betrayed everything I’ve been carefully concealing. Exchange of glances around the table.

  Greatest restraint on the topic of jewelry. Neither pro nor con.

  A dangerous moment recently. The young poet Platen quoted a passage from the Journeyman Years: the traveler with a borrowed name. He liked it, although such a thing would surely never occur. I could not suppress the fellow without a given name, who certainly had nothing to do with the topic. Chancellor von Müller: the only one who perhaps suspected something. All the others puzzled.

  As soon as someone starts in about engravings, I’m no longer present because Ulrike’s mother once clearly said that she found it most lovely when Ulrike and I would sit next to each other and look at engravings from the days of Raphael.

  Riemer yesterday: It’s too much to ask that we know something for certain and behave accordingly. That was aimed at me. And Ottilie at once tried to get me involved. I dodged the issue: we weren’t that simply put together. Knowledge guides us less than faith. Ottilie pursed her—in any case—nonexistent lips.

  Dangerous: when fog hangs over the woodlands as in Marienbad after a night of rain. How can I not recall saying to Ulrike, It looks like the tops of the fir trees are swilling in a sea of fog. Ulrike had never heard the word “swill” before. Which I had anticipated. I have to be cautious when there’s fog after a night of rain.

  Caution: don’t let your loathing of couples get the upper hand.

  As soon as the word “cushion” is mentioned, use all your strength to blur the memory of that afternoon that will thrust itself upon you: how she sat down on the sofa and then, with an unnecessarily wide sweep that ended with a gentle landing, laid her left arm on the large yellow cushion.

  Caution! Your mouth! Whenever I pass a mirror, I see that my lips are pursed, the left corner of my mouth contorted. Move your lips in a regular way. Relax every part of your mouth. Nothing so poorly befits a pose of noble renunciation as that mouth twisted down to the left.

  Be careful when news arrives that has something to do with getting married! Make trebly sure that you don’t repeat that embarrassment with Knebel! It wasn’t Knebel, your senior by five years, who was getting married. It was his son!!!

  Weimar, October 19, 1823

  Dear Ulrike,

  A Man in Love.

  When we were allowed to say du to each other in the forest glade, I picked you a lupine that had been waiting there for us. From among the blue and red lupines, I picked that one, a red one. I love that dark, glowing lupine red. Before I could give it to you, you walked out into the glade. When you walk through the grass, you don’t trample anything down. I watched you bend down, saw how lightly you bent to pick your favorite flowers. And you came back with a bouquet of wolfsbane and opened up that dense, yellow bouquet for my lupine, whose dark red was drowned in your torrent of yellow. We laughed. Not loudly, but we bore the faces of laughers as we marched back into the world called Karlsbad.

  What can I do except say how it was? Listen, you cannot know, so I have to tell you what the abbé, my pedagogical pigeonhole number one in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, says: “Everything is relative.” You will see that after all the absolutist, dogmatic, nationalistic, and humanistic blather, a few cool heads will recall that sentence. The sentence is incomplete; that doesn’t make it any less useful, however. But whoever experiences its incompleteness should say so. Otherwise the sentence is more valid than it ought to be. Everything is relative except for love, that is my experience. My experience through you. You will have to accept my telling you so. You are unique, and with your uniqueness, you have control over me, day and night. Are there not a thousand girls, a thousand women, of such and such a height, smiling thus and so, walking, dancing, looking—yes looking, too. Are there not miracles of girlish gazing, women’s eyes, deep fairy-tale lakes waiting for the storm that will bring their riches to the world? Perhaps, perhaps, it may be so. For me, none of them is unique. Perhaps I am the only one who sees your uniqueness. I can’t imagine that but I like to think it’s so. If I’m the only one who recognizes your uniqueness, then you must be mine. That is the most beautiful, Platonic, fairy-tale idea: each person is unique, but only for a single, unique other person. And that is what you are for me. I do not need to specify what a characteristic is, or hair color. If I am the only one for whom you are unique, then it only remains to ask if I am unique for you. I am not. Or you would have been here long since, would have broken in, climbed through the window amid rain and wind, without regard for any kind of opposing orderliness. Nevertheless, you are unique for me, and this asymmetry is the calipers that measure my misfortune. But that is how I know what love is. I was too hasty in describing the admittance to Paradise in the West-Eastern Divan. Life had blinkered me: I boasted pretentiously:

  No lesser man it is you’re choosing!

  Take my hand, that day by day,

  On your gentle fingers musing,

  Count eternities I may.

  Now that flirtatious certainty has been shattered. I curse such cultural daydreaming. But cannot a utopia accomplish anything? Whenever it becomes abundantly clear that you are absent, I end up with the New Héloïse or something similar and whisper to myself, “And sitting at the feet of his beloved, he will break hemp today, tomorrow, the next day, and indeed, for the rest of his life.”

  Will he do that? Tell him. Soon.

  Paradise exists: two for each other. Hell exists: one is missing.

  Dearest Ulrike, I expect of you what I cannot expect of the poor people of my acquaintance here, numbed as they are by unnatural traditions. On the promenade in Karlsbad, where people passed one another in closer proximity, a fellow who saw us strolling arm in arm joked as he passed: “You must be
rehearsing your immortality.” That’s cultured prattle. You think and never mimic, so I can tell you what I know because I’ve observed it. Some experience a repeated puberty, while others are young only once. It’s not a privilege of artists or a gift of nature. It has to be earned through hard work. And the work is free of morality, like musculature, vision, hearing, voice, or heartbeat. Hufeland calls it life capacity. Thus ends the epistle about what is real.

  Chapter Three

  A letter from Ulrike.

  Ulrike’s letter fell from his hands. He had not been able to read it to the end, and now it lay before him on the floor. A letter on glossy blue paper with a border. He must not bend over. Stadelmann. He came at once. Goethe pointed to the letter. Stadelmann picked up the letter and left the room with obvious deference. He had brought Goethe the lavender blue letter with the rest of the day’s mail. In Marienbad and Karlsbad, he had often had lavender blue letters to deliver. Goethe saw that his hands were shaking. His heart was pounding. He needed air. His breath did come on its own, but not until it was too late. Then he gasped for air. Again, nothing more until it was too late. He tried to breathe before he had to gasp again. He could only do so very shallowly. Walk up and down, yes, he walked up and down, fairly quickly, in fact. He hurried. He had to decide if he was able to finish reading Ulrike’s letter. He had read up to a sentence that contained the news that Herr de Ror was expected to be in Strasbourg on October 31st. In Ulrike’s style, short and sweet and without embellishment. This piece of information had been preceded by an explanation of how it came to this visit. Count Klebelsberg and Ulrike’s mother had seen to maintaining contact with Herr de Ror and now de Ror had announced either directly to her mother or again via the Herr Finance Minister that he wanted to show them a sensational collection from Brazil. Gems of a kind never before seen in Europe. He could bring them to Paris, Vienna, Dresden, or—why not?—to Strasbourg. And her mother or Count Klebelsberg or both—probably both—say: Strasbourg. And report it to Ulrike as already decided. Surely she can’t have anything against them seeing one another again. And what cordial greetings Herr de Ror sent everyone, especially to the beauty named Ulrike. He still hoped to awaken in Ulrike a positive feeling for jewelry. It was a sin to neglect her aphrodisiacal neck and plump earlobes …

  That was when the letter fell from his hands. Stadelmann had picked it up, waited for a second to see if he should return the letter to his master’s hands or put it on the table, and had quickly decided to put it on the table. Where it now lay. The brisk walking up and down had helped. His breathing had returned to normal. He modified its speed. As he read the letter he had still thought, despite its contents, isn’t that just like Ulrike. Like the notes she had written him in Marienbad: an unadorned language. And that brought him back to her neck and her earlobes. Her aphrodisiacal neck. He found that even more vacuous than the plump earlobes. Naturally, the eyes of a jewelry salesman would discover what wasn’t there. But that Ulrike harbored an anti-jewelry-affect because her mother always ran around like a jewelers’ trade fair on two legs—that was something a Herr Velocifer wouldn’t understand.

  He needed to walk up and down. He needed to increase the tempo again. He needed to go fast enough that his attention was taken up by catching his breath. And when he trotted up and down like this, he also knew why his heart was pounding against his chest wall and throbbing in his throat. His heart, a caged animal; he, the prison guard. With what clock could he count the seconds between today and October 31st? Today, October 24th. He would not finish reading the letter today. He went to his desk where the third volume of Adelung’s Dictionary of the High German Dialect lay. Reflexively he reached for the thick, heavy book and laid it on top of the letter. Could he breathe more easily? Yes. He heaved a sigh. Laughable, but one lived from such notions. It almost did him good to think of the letter lying under that big, heavy book. In a way, it felt like revenge. The only important thing was that lavender blue was gone from the room, from the world. And he remarked what a stupid thought that was. The big, heavy Adelung was a monument to the letter lying beneath it. The presence of that letter in this room could not be demonstrated with any more clarity than by this gigantic book. But although Adelung might remind him of nothing but the lavender blue letter, it is not the lavender blue letter. No matter what reminds him of what: if he doesn’t see the lavender blue letter, it will be easier to not finish reading it. There was no reason to finish reading it. If he were to pick it up again and find the place where he had stopped reading, he would have to reread more than one of those terrible sentences, or would at least encounter words while skimming the contents: the plump earlobes, the aphrodisiacal neck, the beauty named Ulrike.

  Before he could even touch the letter, he had to understand how it had been possible for Ulrike to write him such a letter. The letter begins harmlessly, even fondly. Enchantingly is how it begins. His heart had at once begun to beat faster as he read how Ulrike depicted her experience of the elegy. It was the heartbeat of revival, of an immediately perceptible increase in life. He had become lighter than he’d ever been as he read how she had read the elegy! Read it, reread it, read it until she knew it by heart. She writes that she read the elegy not just with her eyes but with her whole body. With body and soul she had read it. Reading that, he had felt happier than he had ever been in his life. Never had he been so light, so alive, so destined for every height, so capable of every height. She writes that she had walked up and down the elegy’s verses, that this poem cannot be read, it must be walked, celebrated as one celebrates a holiday. There could not be another poem, another piece of language that so touched the heart and contained an entire destiny. Difficult as what happened in and through this poem was, the poem made it beautiful. And becoming beautiful is obviously the highest thing that can happen to pain. She loved every line, the dark and the bright ones, all the same. She confessed that she was proud to feel a bit like the poem was addressed to her. And proud because she knew that no one in a thousand years would understand this poem as intensely as she did. It was her poem. Her life. Her destiny. Her poem.

  So how could his heart not have beaten faster! How could these Ulrike-sentences not have allowed him to fly to any height! Then the turn, the fall. Her mother is already in Strasbourg, the count is supposed to arrive the following day, and on October 31, Herr de Ror. On account of gems from Brazil …

  If only he could read the first pages of the letter without the following ones. Ask Stadelmann. No, that won’t work. Whatever you do now can be the wrong thing. Must be the wrong thing. Just run back and forth so fast you can barely still do it. That you can do. Or go outside, let them hitch up the horses. Have Stadelmann drive off faster than ever. Get away from this house where the letter is lying, from this house where they apparently expect him to accept everything that can happen to him in this house. Ran to the table, lifted off the book, took the letter, ran into his bedroom, felt right away that this was the right decision, called for Stadelmann: not to be disturbed! Then he collapsed into the wingback chair Countess Egloffstein had given him, almost forgetting to feel the little protest at the designation “grandpapa-chair” that he almost always had to brush aside whenever he sought refuge in this chair. Since she had given him the chair to celebrate the birth of his grandson Walther, the name he didn’t like had remained. Ottilie had probably made sure it persisted. Ah yes, and October 31, Herr de Ror’s day, is Ottilie’s birthday. Twenty-eight. What dramaturgy! It’s going to be a day that looks interesting as long as it remains unimaginable.