35. Doctor Faustus - chapter XXXIV

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p352 Not only with the little sea-maid’s knifelike pains did Leverkuhn at the time of his worst state of health compare his own torments. In conversation he had another parallel, which he visualized with remarkable clarity. I called it to mind some months later, in the spring of 1919, the illness lifted like a miracle from off him, and his spirit, phoenixlike, rose to its fullest freedom and most amazing power, in an unchecked, not to say unbridled, anyhow an unintermitted flow of almost breathless productivity. But just that very thing betrayed to me that the two states, the depressive and the exalted, were not inwardly sharply distinguished from each other. They were not separate and without all connection, for the present state had been preparing in the former one and to some extent had already been contained in it -- just as indeed, on the other hand, the outbreak of the healthy and creative epoch was by no means a time of enjoyment, but rather in its own way one of affliction, of painful urgency and compulsion. . . . Ah, I write badly! [bipolar disorder?] My eagerness to say everything at once make my sentences run over, hurries them away from the thought they began by intending to express, and makes them seem to rush on and lose it from sight... The way my ideas tumble over themselves and get lost is a result of the excitement generated by my memory of this time, the time after the collapse of the authoritarian German state, with its far-reaching accompanying laxity, which affected me as well, laying siege to my settled view of the world with new conceptions hard for it to digest. I felt that an epoch was ending, which had not only included the nineteenth century, but gone far back to the end of the Middle Ages, to the loosening of the scholastic ties, the emancipation of the individual, the birth of freedom. [Couldn't this be said with equal justification of 1848 or 1866? Or almost.] This was the epoch which I had in very truth regarded as that of my more extended spiritual home, in short the epoch of bourgeois humanism. And I felt as I say that its hour had come; that a mutation of life would be consummated; the world would enter into a new, still nameless constellation. And moreover this feeling of mine, riveting my attention, was a product not only of the end of the war but already a product of its beginning, fourteen years after the turn of the century. It had lain at the bottom of the panic, the awful sense of destiny which people like me felt at that time. No wonder the disintegration of defeat increased this feeling to its highest pitch, no wonder either that in a defeated country like Germany it occupied the mind far more than among the victorious nations, whose average mental state, precisely on account of victory, was much more conservative. They by no means felt the war as the massive and decisive historical break which it seemed to us. [This sense of German uniqueness, which we've heard before, seems pretty baseless. The change of government on top of everything else would have shaken up the German and Russian psyche even more than the casualties and less extreme social change affected people in other countries, but I think you would have a hard time demonstrating that German Youth before the war, or the German populace after the war, were so unique in their thinking.] They saw in it a disturbance, now happily past, after which life could return to the path out of which it had been thrust. [Where does he get this? Italy was a "victor" in the war but social and political disorder there lead the rest of Europe -- if we exclude Russia. Spain was not involved in the war but was soon involved in civil war of a very political nature.] I envied them. I envied in particular France, for the sanction which, at least apparently, had been vouchsafed by the victory to its conservative bourgeois intellectual constitution; for the sense of security in the classic and rational, which it might draw from its triumph. Certainly, I should at that time have felt better and more at home the other side of the Rhine than here, where, as I said, much that was new, alarming, and destructive, which none the less my conscience obliged me to take stock of, urged itself upon my world-picture. And here I think of the distracting discussion evenings in the Schwabing apartment of a certain Sixtus Kridwiss, whose acquaintance I made at the Schlaginhaufens’. I will come back to those evenings presently, only saying for the moment that the gatherings and intellectual conferences, in which I often out of pure conscientiousness took part, set about me shrewdly. And at this time with my whole deeply stirred and often dismayed soul I was sharing intimately in the birth of a work which did not fail of certain bold and prophetic associations with those same conferences; which confirmed and realized them on a higher, more creative plane...

p353 ...I have already given expression to my regret that my zeal to communicate must here and there give an impression of flightiness. It is however a wrong impression, for I stick very well by my trains of thought, and have not forgotten that I intended to introduce a second striking and pregnant comparison, in addition to that with the little sea-maid, which Adrian made at the time of his utmost and torturing sufferings.

I think it’s Laurence Sterne that Mann reminds me of in passages like this one.

p354 “How do I feel?” he said to me. “Quite a lot like Johannes Martyr in the cauldron of oil. You must imagine it pretty much like that. I squat there, a pious sufferer, in the tub, with a lively wood fire crackling underneath, faithfully fanned up by a bravo with a hand-bellows... I am basted properly, like a roast, a hell-roast... In the background you see the towers and gables and pointed oriels of Kaisersaschern. . . .”

Of course he should have said Nuremberg. For what he described -- described with the same intimate confidence as he had the tapering of the nixie’s body into the fish-tail, so that I recognized it long before he got to the end -- was the first sheet of Durer’s series of woodcuts of the Apocalypse.

How could I not have recalled the comparison, when later Adrian’s purpose slowly revealed itself, though at the time it seemed far-fetched to me while immediately suggesting certain vague divinations. This was the work that he was mastering, the while it mastered him; for which his powers were slowly gathering head while they lay stretched in torments. Was I not right to say that the depressive and the exalted states of the artist, illness and health, are by no means sharply divided from each other? That rather in illness, as it were under the lee of it, elements of health are at work, and elements of illness, working genius like, are carried over into health? It is not otherwise, I thank the insight given me by a friendship which caused me much distress and alarm, but always filled me too with pride: genius is a form of vital power deeply experienced in illness, creating out of illness, through illness creative.

I suppose you could view pregnancy and child birth this same way.

p355 The conception of the apocalyptic oratorio, the secret preoccupation with it, then, went far back into a time of apparently complete exhaustion, and the vehemence and rapidity with which afterwards, in a few months, it was put on paper always gave me the idea that that period of prostration had been a sort of refuge and retreat, into which his nature withdrew, in order that, unspied on, unsuspected, in some hidden sanctuary, shut away by suffering from our healthy life, he might preserve and develop conceptions for which ordinary well-being would never summon the reckless courage. Indeed, they seemed to be as it were robbed from the depths, fetched up from there and brought to the light of day. That his purpose only revealed itself to me by degrees from visit to visit, I have already said... “Yes, there are holy horrors brewing; the theological virus, it seems, does not get out of one’s blood so easily. Without your knowing it, it leaves a strong precipitate.”

The hint confirmed suspicions that had arisen in my mind on seeing what he read. On his work-table I discovered an extraordinary old volume: a thirteenth-century French metrical translation of the Visions of St Paul, the Greek text of which dates back to the fourth century. To my question about where it came from he answered:

“The Rosenstiel got it. Not the first curiosity she has dug up for me. An enterprising female, that. It has not escaped her that I have a weakness for people who have been ‘down below.’ By below I mean in hell. That makes a bond between people as far apart as Paul and Virgil’s Aeneas. Remember how Dante refers to them as brothers, as two who have been down below?”

I remembered. “Unfortunately,” I said, “Your filia hospitalis [ “innkeeper’s daughter”; in student slang, a servant girl in a student boarding house -Dartmouth Guide] can’t read that to you.”

“No,” he laughed, “for the old French I have to use my own eyes.”

[At this time Adrian can’t read himself so the daughter of his landlady reads to him.] p356 ...she sat very stiff-backed in the Savonarola chair at the table and in touchingly plaintive, painfully high-German schoolgirl accents read aloud out of a discoloured old cardboard volume... it was the ecstatic narrative of Mechthild of Magdeburg. I sat down noiselessly in a corner and for some time listened with astonishment to this quaint, devout, and blundering performance.

I am equally fascinated and puzzled by German dialects. Most of what I know about this comes from superficial research on the Low German dialect mentioned in The Magic Mountain as having been spoken by the common workers in Hamburg. Mechthild deserves some fame in the history of the German vernacular for having written her “ecstatic” works in Low-German rather than in Latin. Her original writings were lost and what survives is her work translated into either Latin or “the Alemannic dialect of Middle High German.” I noticed this mostly because that is the dialect spoken in Baden-Württemberg (the German state just to the east of Bavaria) where my ancestors came from. Other works Adrian has read to him at this time include: Hildegarde of Bingen (very interesting in this context and just on her own), and a German version of Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum by the Venerable Bede.

...This whole ecstatic literature from the pre-Christian and early Christian eschatologies forms a rich fabric of tradition, full of recurrent motifs. Into it Adrian spun himself round like a cocoon, to stimulate himself for a work which should gather up all their elements into one single focus, assemble them in one pregnant, portentous synthesis and in relentless transmission hold up to humanity the mirror of the revelation, that it might see therein what is oncoming and near at hand.

p357 “And end is come, the end is come, it watcheth for thee, behold, it is come. The mourning is come unto thee, O thou that dwellest in the land.” These words Leverkuhn makes his testis, the witness, the narrator, announce in a spectral melody, built up of perfect fourths and diminished fifths, and set above pedal harmonies alien to the key; they then form the text of that boldly archaic responsorium, which they unforgettably repeat by two four-part choruses in contrary motion. These words, indeed, do not belong to the Revelation of St John, they originate in another layer, the prophecy of the Babylonian exile, the visions and lamentations of Ezekiel, to which, moreover, the mysterious epistle from Patmos, from the time of Nero, stands in a relation of the most singular dependence. Thus the “eating of the little book,” which Albrecht Durer also bodly made the subject of one of his woodcuts, is taken almost word for word from Ezekiel, down to the detail that it (or the “roll,” therein “lamentations and mourning and woe”) in the mouth of the obediently eating one was as honey for sweetness. 

So also the great whore, the woman on the beast, is quite extensively prefigured, with similar turns of phrase. 

In depicting her the Nuremberger amused himself by using the portrait study he had brought with him of a Venetian courtesan. In fact there is an apocalyptic tradition which hands down to these ecstatic visions and experiences to a certain extent already framed, however odd it may seem, psychologically, that a raving man should rave in the same pattern as another who came before him: that one is ecstatic not independently, so to speak, but by rote. Still it seems to be the case, and I point it out in connection with the statement that Leverkuhn in the text for his incommensurable choral work by no means confined himself to the Revelation of St John, but took in this whole prophetic tradition, so that his work amounts to the creation of a new and independent Apocalypse, a sort of resume of the whole literature. The title, Apocalypsis cum figuris, [Apocalypse with Pictures] is in homage to Durer and is intended to emphasize the visual and actualizing, the graphic character, the minuteness, the saturation, in short, of space with fantastically exact detail: the feature is common to both works. But it is far from being the case that Adrian’s mammoth fresco follows the Nuremberger’s fifteen illustrations in any programmatic sense. True, many words of the same mysterious document which also inspired Durer underlie this frightful and consummate work of tonal art. But Adrian broadened the scope both of choral recitation and of ariosa by including also much from the Lamentations in the Psalter, for instance that piercing “For my soul is full of troubles and my life draweth nigh unto the grave,” as also the expressive denunciations and images of terror from the Apocrypha; then certain fragments from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, today unspeakably offensive in their effect; and even remoter matter still, all of which must contribute to produce the general impression of a view opening into the other world and the final reckoning breaking it; of a journey into hell, wherein are worked through the visual representations of the hereafter, in the earlier, shamanistic stages, as well as those developed from antiquity and Christianity, down to Dante. Leverkuhn’s tone-picture draws much from Dante’s poem; and still more from that crowded wall, swarming with bodies, where here angels perform staccato on trumpets of destruction, there Charon’s bark unloads its freight, the dead rise, saints pray, daemonic masks await the nod of the serpent-wreathed Minos, the damned man, voluptuous in flesh, clung round, carried and drawn by grinning sons of the pit, makes horrid descent, covering one eye with his hand and with the other staring transfixed with horror into bottomless perdition; while not far off Grace draws up two sinning souls from the snare into redemption -- in short, from the groups and the scenic structures of the Last Judgement.

p359 Obviously and admittedly this man lived at the time in a state of tension so high as to be anything but agreeable. It was more like a constant tyranny: the flashing up and stating of a problem, the task of composition (over which he had heretofore always lingered), was one with its lighninglike solution. Scarcely did it leave him time to follow with pen the haunting and hunting inspirations which gave him no rest, which made him their slave. Still in the most fragile health, he worked ten hours a day and more, broken only by a short pause at midday and now and then a walk around the pond or up the hill, brief excursions more like flight than recreation. One could see by his step, first hasty and then halting, that they were merely another form of unrest. [mania, again] Many a Sunday evening I spent with him and always remarked how little he was his own master, how little he could stick to the everyday, indifferent subjects which he deliberately chose, by way of relaxation, to talk about with me. I see him suddenly stiffen from a relaxed posture; see his gaze go staring and listening, his lips part and -- unwelcome sight to me -- the flickering red rise in his cheeks. What was that? Was it one of those melodic illuminations to which he was, I might almost say, exposed and with which powers whereof I refuse to know aught kept their pact with him? Was it one of those so mightily plastic themes in which the apocalyptic work abounds, rising to his mind, there at once to be checked and chilled, to be bridled and bitted and made to take his proper place in the whole structure? I see him with a murmured “Go on, go on!” move to his table, open the folder of the orchestral drafts with such violence as sometimes to tear one, and with a grimace whose mingled meaning I will not try to convey but which in my eyes distort the lofty, intelligent beauty his features wore by right, read to himself, where perhaps was sketched that frightful chorus of humanity fleeing before the four horsemen, stumbling, fallen, overridden; or there was noted down the awful scream given to the mocking, bleating bassoon, the “Wail of the Bird”; or perhaps that song and answer, like an antiphony, which on first hearing so gripped my heart -- the harsh choral fugue to the words of Jeremiah:

Wherefore doth a living man complain,

A man for the punishment of his sins?

p360 Let us search and try our ways,

And turn again to the Lord. . . .

We have transgressed and have rebelled:

Thou hast not pardoned.

Thou hast covered with anger

And persecuted us:
Thou hast slain, thou hast not pitied. . . .

Thou hast made us as the offscouring

And refused in the midst of the people.

...Here or there he might look, seize his pen, throw it down again, murmur: “Good, till tomorrow,” and turn back to me, the flush still on his brow. But I knew or feared that the “till tomorrow” would not be adhered to: that after I left he would sit down and work out what had so unsummoned flashed into his mind as we talked. Then he would take two Luminol tablets to give his sleep the soundness which must compensate for its briefness. For next day he would begin again at daybreak...

While it is clever what he’s doing here, hasn’t everyone acted like Adrian when wrapped up in some exciting project? I know I have. The ideas seem to be cooking or breeding in the mind even as you try to go about your regular life, or as you sleep. How this actually works is an interesting question, of course, but I’m still not convinced that Mann and Gissing are correct in associating it with either disease or the devil. Mann has given himself some leeway here by making it clear that, even in a case of demonic disease, not any mind is up to the task. It takes an exceptional mind to be pushed to genius by the assistance of disease. Would Proust have written Lost Time... if he had been healthy? I would say no, and not just because his illness is one of his subjects. (Neither could he have written it had he been a cold fish like Adrian, unmoved by passionate games of interpersonal control that he deemed romance.) I think I keep coming back to this, and keep being disturbed by it, because of the connection Mann -- through Naphtha -- makes between disease and Christianity and the spiritual and the good. Like Settembrini, it makes me uncomfortable to see disease praised and preferred. Diane Ackerman (in A Natural History of the Senses) was fond of quoting Helen Keller who did indeed have a remarkable sense of smell and touch. She experienced and expressed things I could never experience or express myself. Her disabilities made her the exceptional person she was. I have no problem with people receiving compensations for disease or disability.

He lived in fear that the state of illumination with which he was blest -- or with which he was afflicted -- might be untimely withdrawn. And in fact he did suffer a relapse. It was shortly before he got to the end, that frightful finis, which demanded all his courage and which so far from being a romantic music of redemption, relentlessly confirms the theologically negative and pitiless character of the whole. It was, I say, just before he made port with those roaring brass passages, heavily scored and widely spaced out, which make one think of an open abyss wherein one must hopelessly sink. The relapse lasted for three weeks with pain and nausea, a condition in which, in his own words, he lost the memory of what it meant to compose, or even how it was done. It passed. At the beginning of August 1919 he was working again; and before this month, with its many hot, sunny days, was over, his task was finished. The four and a half months which I gave as the period of production are reckoned up to the beginning of the relapse. Including the final working period, the sketch of the Apocalypse had taken him in all, amazingly enough, six months to put on paper.  

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