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p160 ...he [Adrian] began to talk about the Church modes and the Ptolemaic or “natural” system, whose six different modes were reduced by the tempered, i.e. the false system to two, major and minor; and about superiority in modulation of the “pure” scale over the tempered one. This he called a compromise for home use, as also the tempered piano was a thing precisely for domestic consumption, a transient peace-pact, not a hundred and fifty years old, which had brought to pass all sorts of considerable things, oh, very considerable, but about which we should not imagine that everything was settled for eternity. He expressed great pleasure over the fact that it was an astronomer and mathematician named Ptolemy, a man from Upper Egypt, living in Alexandria, who had established the best of all known scales, the natural or right one. That proved again, he said, the relation between music and astronomy, as it had been shown already by Pythagoras’ cosmic theory of harmony...
[Speaking of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Op. 132] ...Only it is vexatious, if you don’t want to call it gratifying, that in music, at least in this music, there are things for which one cannot scare up, out of the whole rich realm of language, do what you like, any properly characterizing epithet or combination of epithets. I have been tormenting myself over that these days: you cannot find any adequate term for the spirit, the attitude, the behaviour of this theme. For there is a lot of behaviour there. Tragic? Bold? Defiant, emphatic, full of elan, the height of nobility? None of them is good. And ‘glorious’ is of course only throwing in your hand. You finally land at the objective direction, the name: Allegro appassionato [fast, lively, with passion]. That is the best after all.”
I confess I quoted that last paragraph because it reminded me of what I said about music being like smell in being impossible to describe... though, in truth, Mann was going someplace else.
Almost the whole of the remainder of this chapter is taken up with the vivid and altogether excellent description of a new character, Rudiger Schildknapp -- and I want to quote almost all of it. I haven’t repeated any of the character description so far because I don’t think it usually makes much of a difference and I usually don’t pay much attention anyway... but this is so vivid. Not only can I see the man but I know what to expect from him. A classic character.
Unfortunately, the description is also very long and I’m going to skip it for now.
chapter XXI
[Talk of the current state of the World War in Europe. In this case a revival of the U-boat offensive in the Atlantic] p172 ...We owe this success to a new torpedo of fabulous properties which German technicians have succeeded in constructing, and I cannot repress a certain satisfaction over our ever alert spirit of invention, our national gift of not being swerved aside by however many set-backs. It stands wholly and entirely at the service of the regime which brought us into this war, laid the Continent literally at our feet and replaced the intellectual’s dream of a European Germany with the upsetting, rather brittle reality, intolerable, so it seems to the rest of the world, of a German Europe. But my involuntary satisfaction gives way to the thought that such incidental triumphs as the new sinkings or the splendid commando feat of snatching the fallen dictator of Italy from his prison can only serve to arouse false hopes and lengthen out a war which in the view of any reasonable and sensible man can no longer be won...
...I may say that the times are not precisely favourable to the steady pursuance of such a work as this. And, moreover, just during the Munich disorders and executions, [I had never heard of The White Rose. The detail I find most striking, in these days of Islamic State atrocities, is that the six leaders were beheaded by the Gestapo.] I got an influenza with fever and chills, which for ten days confined me to my bed and necessarily affected for some time the physical and mental powers of a man now sixty years old. It is no wonder that spring and summer have passed into autumn, and now autumn is now well advanced, since I committed to paper the first lines of this narrative. Meanwhile we have experienced the destruction of our noble cities from the air, a destruction that would cry to heaven if we who suffer were not ourselves laden with guilt. As it is, the cry is smothered in our throats; like King Claudius’s prayer, it can “never to heaven go.” There is outcry over these crimes against culture, crimes that we ourselves invoked; how strange it sounds in the mouths of those who trod the boards of history as the heralds and bringers of a world-rejuvenating barbarism, reveling in atrocity. Several times the shattering, headlong destruction has come breath-takingly near my retreat. The frightful bombardment of the city of Durer and Willibald Pirkheimer [Nuremberg] was no remote event; and when the last judgement fell on Munich too, I sat pallid, shaking like the walls, the doors, and the windowpanes in my study -- and with trembling hand wrote on at this story of a life. For my hand trembles in any case, on account of my subject; it cannot much matter to me that it trembles a little more due to terror from without.
[Talk of reverses on the Eastern Front] p173 ...With profound consternation we read of the landing of American and Canadian troops [an odd way of putting it. There was one Canadian Infantry Division and one Canadian Tank Brigade but also five British Divisions plus three more British Brigades] on the southeast coast of Sicily, the fall of Syracuse, Catania, Messina, Taormina. We learned, with a mixture of terror and envy -- pierced by the knowledge that we ourselves were not capable of it, in either a good or a bad sense -- how a country whose mental state still permitted it to draw the foregone conclusion from a succession of scandalous defeats and losses relieved itself of its great man, in order somewhat later to submit to unconditional surrender. That is what the world demands of us too, but to consent to it our most desperate situation would still be much too holy and dear. Yes, we are an utterly different people; we deny and reject the foregone conclusion; we are a people of mightily tragic soul, and our love belongs to fate -- to any fate, if only it be one, even destruction kindling heaven with the crimson flames of the death of the gods!
By this time (after September 1943) the war was going badly for both the Germans and the Japanese, while the American and Soviet war machines were still just starting to build momentum. Any sane person could see how this was going to end, and yet human psychology is such that the worst of the fighting -- no matter how pointless -- was still to come. Logically there was no point to it, but would it have been better for the war to have ended with Germany comparatively undamaged and the Japanese home islands essentially untouched? Could one wish that those who had sown the wind, would not reap the whirlwind -- even if it meant the saving of thousands or tens of thousands of Allied lives?
When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 a generation (at least) of regional conflict was "baked in the cake," as the saying goes. Similarly, the Götterdämmerung which befell the world -- but especially Germany and Imperial Japan -- in 1944 and 1945 seems to have been an inevitable result of decisions made in the 1930s. In both cases the "true believers" only regretted that the "flames of the death of the gods" ended when it did. Admiral Matome Ugaki responded to the preservation of what was left of Japanese culture -- the consequence of the Imperial surrender -- by flying out to sea and crashing his plane into the waves. I don't believe it is widely known that many Kamikaze pilots likewise chose a symbolic death to actually attacking the enemy. The important thing was to sacrifice your life in a glorious way.
It is worth noting that, at the very end in Berlin, the last defenders of Hitler's Führerbunker were the few survivors of the French "Charlemagne" Waffen SS division. This isn't quite the same thing as these men expected to be (and in fact often were) executed when captured.
p174 [Of the collapse of the Dnieper defensive line] ...For it belongs in the realm of the fantastic, it offends against all order and expectation that Germany itself should become the theatre of one of Germany’s wars. Twenty-five years ago at the very last moment we escaped that fate. But now our increasingly tragic and heroic psychology seems to prevent us from quitting a lost cause before the unthinkable becomes fact... [Reverses in Italy and rumors of action in France]
...we are lost. In other words, the war is lost; but that means more than a lost campaign, it means in very truth that we are lost; our character, our cause, our hope, our history. It is all up with Germany, it will be all up with her. She is marked down for collapse, economic, political, moral, spiritual, in short all-embracing, unparalleled, final collapse. I suppose I have not wished for it, this that threatens, for it is madness and despair. I suppose I have not wished for it, because my pity is too deep, my grief and sympathy are with this unhappy nation, when I think of the exaltation and blind ardour of its uprising, the breaking-out, the breaking-up, the breaking-down; the purifying and fresh start, the national new birth of ten years ago, that seemingly religious intoxication -- which then betrayed itself to any intelligent person for what it was by its crudity, vulgarity, gangsterism, sadism, degradation, filthiness -- ah, how unmistakably it bore within itself the seeds of this whole war! My heart contracts painfully at the thought of that enormous investment of faith, zeal, lofty historic emotion; all this we made, all this is now puffed away in a bankruptcy without compare. No, surely I did not want it, and yet -- I have been driven to want it, I wish for it today and will welcome it, out of hatred for the outrageous contempt of reason, the vicious violation of the truth, the cheap, filthy backstairs mythology, the criminal degradation and confusion of standards; the abuse, corruption, and blackmail of all that was good, genuine, trusting, and trustworthy in our old Germany. For liars and lickspittles mixed us a poison draught and took away our senses. We drank -- for we Germans perennially yearn for intoxication -- and under its spell, through years of deluded high living, we committed a superfluity of shameful deeds, which must now be paid for. With what? I have already used the word, together with the word “despair” I wrote it [madness?]. I will not repeat it: not twice could I control my horror of my trembling fingers to set it down again.
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p175... I have re-read it all [the chapter to here]; Adrian’s dramatic wishes and plans, his earliest songs, the painful gaze that he had acquired during our separation; the intellectual fascinations of Shakespearean comedy, Leverkuhn’s emphasis on foreign songs and his own shy cosmopolitanism; then the bohemian Cafe Central club, winding up with the portrait of Rudiger Schildknapp, given in perhaps unjustifiable detail. And I quite properly ask myself whether such uneven material can actually make up a single chapter... I can only repeat that paragraphs and asterisks [as above] are in this book merely a concession to the eyes of the reader, and that I, if I had my way, would write down the whole in one burst and one breath, without divisions, yes, without paragraphing or intermissions. I simply have not the courage to submit such an insensate text to the eyes of the reading public.
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p176 ...Not for nothing, in that first letter, had he expressed his sympathy for Chopin’s lack of adventurous spirit, his “not wanting to know.” He too wanted to know nothing, see nothing, actually experience nothing, at least not in any obvious, exterior sense of the word. He was not out for change, new sense impressions, distraction, recreation. As for the last, he liked to make fun of people who are constantly having “a little change,” constantly getting brown and strong -- nobody knew for what. “Relaxation,” he said, “is for those to whom it does no good.” He was not interested in travel for the sake of sightseeing or “culture.” He scorned the delight of the eye, and sensitive as his hearing was, just so little had he ever felt urge to train his sight in the forms of plastic art. The distinction between eye-men and ear-men he considered indefeasibly valid and correct and counted himself definitely among the latter. As for me, I have never thought such a distinction could be followed through thick and thin, and in his case I never quite believed in the unwillingness and reluctance of the eye. To be sure, Goethe too says that music is something inborn and native, requiring no great nourishment from outside and no experience drawn from life. But after all there is the inner vision, the perception, which is something different and comprehends more than mere seeing...
p181 ...I have heard him say:
“The work of art? It is a fraud. It is something the burgher wishes there still were. It is contrary to truth, contrary to serious art. Genuine and serious is only the very short, the highly consistent musical movement. . . .”
How should that not have troubled me, when after all I knew that he himself aspired to a “work,” and was planning an opera!
Again I have heard him say: “Pretense and play have the conscience of art against them today. Art would like to stop being pretense and play, it would like to become knowledge.”
But what ceases to conform to his definition, does that not cease to exist altogether? And how will art live as knowledge? I recalled what he had written from Halle to Kretschmar about the extension of the kingdom of the banal... these later criticisms, leveled against pretense and play, in other words against form itself, seemed to indicate such an extension of the kingdom of the banal, of the no longer permissible, that it threatened to swallow up art itself. With deep concern I asked myself what strain and effort, intellectual tricks, by-ways, and ironies would be necessary to save it, to reconquer it, and to arrive at a work which as a travesty of innocence confessed to the state of knowledge from which it was to be won!
My poor friend had been instructed one day, or rather one night, from frightful lips, by an awful ally [hint], in more detail on the subject here touched upon...
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