“Not at all, I’m grateful to you,” he said, throwing back his shoulders so he was much straighter than before.
And then there was the recital. Since he didn’t understand how to hear the music, he watched the listeners, especially Linchen von Egloffstein. But even she couldn’t compare with Ulrike as a listener. At the dinner afterward, Ottilie was putting on airs with the demonic youth at her side. He had pulled his long black hair back tightly and held it in place with a huge bow of gold silk ribbon. But later it showed what it was when not held in check: a black explosion. Everything Ottilie said and did, she said and did for him. To celebrate him. Boasted that she was translating Byron’s Don Juan. She would read from it tomorrow for anyone who wanted to listen. Charles, the eighteen-year-old friend of Byron’s, was of course the most desirable listener of all. He was witty and took it all in stride. With fluent flippancy, he pocketed what was on offer. As a parody. But Ottilie didn’t notice. Goethe found Ottilie hollow, empty, loveless. Avid only to make an impression but without the capability to impress. But most important: the love she was playacting was a sham, a sham, three times a sham. Love was probably foreign to her. He had to get out of here. His heart was knocking at his chest, trying to get out. You cannot deny your heart anything. It is older than you. He was proud of how he managed to transform his inner haste and hurry and neediness into a cordial farewell. And then he sat down at his desk and wrote and wrote:
A Man in Love
The time has come. How long you have moped around, suffering, pretending to suffer, it was always Frau Berlepsch who really suffered, a god always told you how you suffered or what it was from, it was all an elegy, throw it into the fire, cultural swindle, a practiced forgery, the time has come, midnight with the new or old or in any case the ultimate name, which then she will wear like a diadem, jewelry at last, jewelry forever, the time has come, come at this very moment, now they are doing, in this second they are doing what you may not do, what is forbidden to you, forbidden by the whole world’s scorn and derision, they’re doing it, the time has come, you did not envisage it, could not picture it, for weeks and months like the stupidest bumblebee you flew against the invisible wall of glass, bumbled into it, fell to the ground, but at once flew up again and again against the glass wall called impossibility, you could not admit that they’re lying next to each other, on top of each other, above each other, beneath each other, through each other, in each other, yes, now they’re lying in each other at the furious summit of love, the time has come, you could not picture it, suddenly you can picture it, must picture it, cannot picture anything else but them in their finally unleashed fury of love, the time has come, now, to what peak will this baseness drive you, an earthquake, an earthquake all along the Rhine, Strasbourg collapses, the cathedral where it all began, it was all for naught, all banter, a game, pretense, a cocky somersault, without commitment, necessity, destiny, then this, then her, the first, the only, the time has come, at this very second they are still doing it, who will stop first, you two there or you here, you have to write it down until you no longer can, until the earthquake comes, Strasbourg, where my heart grew sore, collapses, the Rhine takes care of the rest, there’s no help for you without a catastrophe, it’s too late to weep, the time to curse is coming, you can weep, curse, it makes no difference when you’re alone if you weep or curse, being alone has no echo, just throw the elegy away, the pseudo-solitude, into the flames with it so the earth is free of the cultural lie, of noble illusion, of the pretense that it’s possible to live on paper, the time has come, the elegy unmasked, a buzzing, the most fraudulent limp in the world, claims to be a dance and is a limp, the time has come, the elegy had no consequence except more buzzing, weeping without tears, replaced by words, the time has come, they are with each other, you are alone, you could have known everything, you did know everything, you are the greatest self-deceiver, seducing others to delude themselves, bear their misery, then the time comes, after the catastrophe, now, you cry out, Elegy, where are you, what are you doing, nothing, nothing, nothing, they’re lying next to each other without the need for an elegy, life needs no elegy, life despises the elegy, the time has come, how far are they now, right now, yes, I want to know, see, hear, feel, smell, how far now, you two, just in this second and this second and this second, don’t feel yourself involved in what is happening there, they are not laughing at you, they are not talking about you, they don’t know you exist, and you don’t exist, the time has come, there’s only him lying in bed with her, raging through the tenderest ruthlessness in the world, the time has come, now there is only the greatest possible pain, my existence is like the greatest possible pain in and of itself, I’m a day weaker than yesterday, I could use a lie from Strasbourg, how much more valuable would a lie be now than this dominant truth which is that they know nothing of me in Strasbourg, I can invoke you just as people invoked God, he doesn’t exist either, many found it a help to invoke him, you exist as God never existed, I’ve rehearsed every defense, then in a second you appear from a direction where you never appeared before, I’m assaulted from behind by imagination, under all circumstances I permit myself to survive, the fact that you’re still writing this down is the reason for your next defeat, don’t be surprised, she will never get to read it, the only reader you have left is the Devil’s grandmother, the tenderest woman in what is—as far as tenderness goes—a failed Creation, she is the darling of the futureless, the lonely, the stupid bumblebees bumbling against the transparent glass wall called impossibility, colliding and falling and flying right back up again, the world is abuzz and the Devil’s grandmother the only being ready to take over and rule the world immediately, she ridicules elegies, they nauseate her, the time has come, at last you are writing for the audience you should always have written for, for the Devil’s grandmother, the tenderest woman in the world, the Devil’s grandmother lives from a single sentence, My heart-and-soul sentence, says the Devil’s grandmother, is the sentence Nothing ends up having no effect! She is my guarantee, the guarantee of those who wish for something more, those done in by the iron-clad world of morality, however, if a certain someone would write a lavender blue note of pure midnight with a sentence on it, a single sentence, a single word would be enough, nothing but her name, in her hand, would suffice, if she would send off a courier to ride three horses to death so that he would get here before noon, hand over the note, and then fall down dead along with the fourth horse, then …
I hope never to hope again, never to fool myself again. If you ever wait again, you should be shot—you should shoot yourself. Tell yourself if you ever wait for her again, expect something from her, you will be doomed, executed with no further ado (to be sure, in the forest), it’s trying to start over again, the time has come, nothing will start over again, the time has come, definitely, why was there this word, the time has come, finally, definitely, I expect nothing more … And am not master of myself, I promise everything and don’t keep the promises. The Devil’s grandmother takes me in her arms: pay no attention to the bleating of the know-it-all world, do what’s improper, what no one understands, not even yourself. The Devil’s grandmother has class I can only admire, class that is not of this world but would do the world good. Without the Devil’s grandmother, I would be as impossible as I am. I would have to die of myself as one dies of an illness, I am the illness that does not want to be cured, the Devil’s grandmother doesn’t believe a word I say, that is why I can still write, the Devil’s grandmother knows no pain, nothing ends up having no effect she says, that suffices, she just doesn’t know how it is when two people are lying in Strasbourg still in bed, still in bed, I know all about it, she only knows that nothing ends up having no effect, if the effect is an earthquake that crushes Strasbourg that’s fine with me, but otherwise I would remain and wouldn’t know how to …
Chapter Four
Weimar, December 17, 1823
Dear Ulrike,
There is no such thing as a pact or a contract with
memory. You can haggle with it for days and nights and agree that for certain locations and times you will only permit blurred, indistinct images and perceptions. You feel that yes, it might work. I can live with this degree of indistinctness and blurriness; it feels like peace. And then you turn around, a door slams, and you hear and see how Ulrike ran from the room in Karlsbad after saying the angriest sentence to her mother and banged the door behind her. All present and sharp again, all bloody again. The whole strategy of avoidance is self-deception.
If I owe your letter not merely to the circumstance that I haven’t died yet, I am happy that you wrote to me. Mon mal n’était pas purement physique. However, once an illness has assumed command, it doesn’t care how it came to power. It starts harmlessly enough, but we know all about such harmlessness. You never have an illness for the first time. This slight cough that behaves as if it’s controllable. A day later, it has seized power. Then only the armchair helps. Sit up straight. The straighter you sit, the harder it is for the tickle to clamber up to your throat. The ticklish beast crawls up inside you like an insect and won’t leave you alone until it’s sitting in your throat and you have to let the cough break out. The cough shakes you, convulses you through and through, throws your hands in the air and your head back. Why doesn’t it just tear you apart? What a pointless function of nature, to unleash this storm of coughing that brings not the slightest improvement. Dry, pointed, sharp. Sitting with your legs drawn up. Night has long since fallen. Your chest: a block of heat, a heat carapace. Your breath must struggle against it. The carapace doesn’t react. This must be what it was like two thousand years ago in Sicily, when the tyrants baked their enemies in red-hot iron pipes. You have it better than that. At some point, it begins in your armpits, on your chest, and soon there is no place where water is not welling up. Then you’ve become a broad terrain where a thousand tiny springs pour little streams down your sides. For two or three hours, you think your body is weeping, then it stops. You ring for Stadelmann. He dries you off: the purest sense of well-being. Stadelmann is barely out the door when the heat carapace has you in its grip again. And everything repeats. Three or four times a night. You breathe toward the coming day. As soon as daylight occupies your room, the miserable sweating stops. But as long as you’re sweating, you’re not coughing. Only once you’ve stopped sweating does the cough return, the cough that wants to tear you apart but never can. You are able to stand it only because there’s someone you can think of. Every second is dedicated to you, Ulrike. Thus, I am not alone. Dr. Rehbein attends me day and night, forbids me visitors. Except for Herr von Humboldt, please. He brought Humboldt, warned us against conversing since speaking aggravates the convulsive cough. I had the elegy brought in, gave it to Humboldt, and said, “Tomorrow.” Humboldt left. Me in the armchair, half asleep half awake. Then Humboldt again. Ulrike, I’m only writing for this reason: Humboldt said he would speak but I wasn’t to speak. The elegy—that very night he read it twice. He was amazed, amazed, amazed. Three times he said he was amazed. Such youthful feeling. Such intellectual and imaginative power. Such vitality. These truly heavenly verses. This gripping passion. There is simply nothing as great, he said, than to completely capture a feeling in poetry. I said that so far, I’d shown the elegy only to one other person. I saw he could imagine who that person is. He couldn’t say it, nor could I. A curse upon enslavement to convention. But as Humboldt saw how invigorated I was by what he said, he told Dr. Rehbein who was overseeing the entire visit, “He needs the right kind of company. You mustn’t allow him to waste away in the monotony of Weimar.” He sounded very stern. Dr. Rehbein started to defend himself, then came the next coughing fit. Humboldt waited until it was over. Dr. Rehbein let him know through gestures that he had to leave now. He took my hand and said, “A divine poem. Not even you have ever written anything better.” Cough-free, I replied, “We should leave readers to guess the poet’s year of birth. However,” I continued, “it will not be printed—perhaps never.” And he cried, “Herr Dr. Rehbein, after hearing this I cannot leave.” I forbade the doctor to get mixed up in this discussion, pressed to my breast the poem Humboldt had returned, and said without coughing, “I confess I’ve had to read it so often I know it by heart.” Humboldt departed and the nasty cough assaulted me. It got worse. One Humboldt a day, that would have been the right medicine. Instead: fourteen nights in the chair with swollen feet, fever, no fever, leeches and bloodlettings till I couldn’t go on, until I screamed for them to give me Kreuz Spring water. Anything but that, they insisted. Nothing but that, I cried. And no more of that awful medicine with anise. Wolfsbane tea? At once! If I’m going to die, then let me die my own way. That worked. They obeyed. I drank a whole bottle of Kreuz Spring at one go. And then a cup of wolfsbane tea. And slept the whole night through again for the first time. After that, Kreuz Spring every day. Afterward they said that my death had already been reported on Sunday. Even in French: Le Voltaire d’Allemagne est mort. I hope that charming prematurity didn’t reach you, Ulrike. Now I hear that I didn’t behave myself at all as a patient. No hero. A whiner who mistreated poor Dr. Rehbein. He wouldn’t allow my friend and most gracious sovereign Carl August in to see me. That’s how badly things stood. I sent a dispatch over to the palace, however: if I had been His Serene Highness, I would have swept all opposition aside to stand at the sickbed of my friend, possibly for the last time. And as it began to seem that I might recover although I could have had a reversal at any time, my dear Zelter finally came from Berlin. Got the news and hurried here.
“Aha, so you’re still alive,” he cried, and hauled me entirely back to life with his cheerfulness and love.
He, too, was permitted to keep the elegy overnight. I asked him to read it aloud to me. He did—and how! So cautiously, and then suddenly boldly, and then cautiously again, so that it was a joy to see him being directed by the elegy. When he had read it aloud for the third time—he’d asked to read it to me three times—I said, “You read well, old man.”
And he replied, “It’s a love poem made of blood and bravery, fire and ire. And I read it well because line for line I was thinking of my beloved. Of her hundred kisses, she told me, fifty were for you. I am supposed to tell you that she was at your side during a state of ecstasy she’d never experienced before or after.”
“I feel it. I swear I do. I have the power.” That’s what I said. Then I said I’d heard tell that all I want to hear are things that flatter me. Everything else leaves me cold.
“Is it true?” asked Zelter.
“Yes,” I said.
“Then everything is fine, dear fellow. We do not need to be against ourselves like everyone else.”
Zelter stroked my arm. After he left, the cough, the fever, the chest and kidney pains didn’t stand a chance.
This illness! Of course: Marienbad, Karlsbad, and the L. family! I could read it in all their faces. My show of renunciation had failed. So he is still suffering from XYZ. Otherwise, how to explain that after forty-nine days of nothing but recovery, he suddenly relapses? Dr. Rehbein, whom I had finally persuaded to read Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland’s The Art of Extending Human Life, started plying me with Hufeland quotes. He’s trying to cheer me up with Hufeland sentences, sentences that might please my lover of machines. “The business of thinking itself,” quotes Dr. Rehbein in his best Jena lecture-hall voice, “as actuated in the human machine, is organic.” With a sentence like that, he says he is appealing to my capacity for life, which is, he claims, enormous.
We can come together, you and I, in sentences like that, Ulrike. Hufeland! Do you recall our game in the reading room, that rainy summer? In what year was the author of this sentence or this poem born? I contributed the sentence, “Sweet life! The beautiful, amiable habit of being and acting!—must I leave you?” Your mother and sisters hadn’t a clue but you, off-handedly, as if you had hoped for something harder: “1749.” “Goethe,” cried your mother, “really?” I then told you all, not without some pride, that the i
nfluential Hufeland had used that quote as the epigraph for his book The Art of Extending Human Life. Ah, Ulrike. When I think of you, I’m always shaken by bouts of weakness and strength. The balance I’ve long been proud of is gone. I confess to a particularly nasty weakness: the desire to do something.
If you don’t get everything, how much is enough to make you content? You don’t know how much would be the best you could get, but clearly less than everything. How much less? What is the least you should accept without being so ridiculous that she doesn’t dare offer it to you anymore? The only person you can bargain with is yourself.
What I could use now, Ulrike, is your practice of turning wise sayings on their heads. Accepting inconvenience by acknowledging its necessity. So I acknowledge once and for all that you need to be in Strasbourg. It is necessary. For you. By my acknowledging its necessity, the inconvenience that you are unreachable has only become sharper. Please turn the sentence around so that something I can live with comes out. I’m playing the role of a man who is beyond it all, heroic and now and then, sentimental. It works. I’m playing the renunciant. I have to, after all. You will recall The Journeyman Years or the Renunciants. I’m telling the truth. Comedy doesn’t lie, it’s just not interested in the truth. On the other hand, I am told that I’m pathologically peevish. You disregarded my question as to whether the Master of First Names thought or felt or knew quelque chose. So how could I not be peevish? I am a house of cards that claims to be a fortress. Under observation, I was permitted to look at little almanacs and engravings with you, and that was all!
Dr. Rehbein asked if we should already be preparing for Bohemia next year. I said they should. But do I believe it? I cannot imagine the spruce forest around our blissful valley without you. Four hundred fifty steps is what you said we walked from the colonnades to the spring. I thought you were listening a little as I was talking about how, when Stadelmann brings me the next quill pen, I can only write if it is absolutely indistinguishable from the one I just wore out—I’m talking about how writing is loyalty in practice—and you’re counting our steps. And you add that on average, it took us 450 steps, but sometimes it was 430 and other times 470. It depended completely, you said pointedly, on whether you agreed or disagreed with me.
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