38. Doctor Faustus - chapter XXXV-XXXVI

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[Clarissa Rodde, the actress wanna-be who has dropped into the story erratically and, so far, for no obvious reason, in a moment of weakness loses her virginity to, “a peudo-Mephistopheles, a Pforzheim petticoat-chaser, back-stage hanger-on and provincial roue, by profession a criminal lawyer.” When Clarissa finds someone who wants to marry her, despite the disapproval of his family, her seducer blackmails her and then tells the family anyway. Clarrissa kills herself with a massive dose of cyanide. A funeral and burial in the Munich Waldfried cemetery is contrived to which everyone in their circle attends including Rudi Schwerdtfeger who has recently dumped Inez. Inez is supported in her grief by her small circle of female morphine abusers.

And that concludes chapter XXXV

Chapter XXXVI

p388 O Germany, thou art undone! And I am mindful of thy hopes. Those hopes, I mean, which you aroused (it may even be that you did not share them) after your former relatively mild collapse and the abdication of the Empire. The world then placed on you certain hopes; and you seemed... for some years to be about to justify, to some extent those hopes.

I’m tempted to skip over some of this as not being essential to the story, but I can’t recall ever reading anything about life during the Weimar Republic, so I’m going to be indulgent.

True, the fantastic improprieties of that period, a deliberate attempt to make faces at the rest of the world, were really not unlike what we have seen since 1933 and of course since 1939. On a smaller scale they too were monstrously incredible and exaggerated; the scene displayed of the same vicious san-culottism. [an extreme revolutionary movement (the sans-culottes {“without breeches”} were a lower-class radical group in the French Revolution that embraced the Terror)] But the debauch on ‘change, the bombast of despair did one day come to an end; the face of our economic life lost its distorted, insane grimace and assumed a look of returning sanity. An epoch of psychological convalescence seemed to be dawning. [This would be what the Wiki entry called the “Golden Era”] There was some hope for Germany of social progress in peace and freedom; of adult and forward-looking effort; of a voluntary adaptation of our thoughts and feelings to those of the normal world. Despite all her inherent weakness and self-hatred, this was beyond a doubt the meaning and the hope of the German republic -- again, the hope I mean she awakened in the world outside. It was an attempt, a not utterly and entirely hopeless attempt (the second since the failure of Bismarck and his unification performance) to normalize Germany in the sense of Europeanizing or “democratizing” it, of making it part of the social life of peoples. Who will deny that much honest belief in the possibility of this process was alive in the other countries? Who will dispute the existence of a hopeful movement, plain to see on every hand among us Germans, save in this or that unregenerate spot -- for instance typically in our good city of Munich?

One of the many interesting topics in the wonderful A Nervous Splendor (by Frederic Morton about Vienna at the time of the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolph) concerns what we would today view as a neo or proto-nazi, at any rate rabidly anti-semitic, movement in rural Austria represented at the time by Georg Ritter von Schönerer. While it is so easy to view both the Hohenzollern and Habsburg dynasties as reactionary anachronisms, one could also view them, like Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath party in Iraq in a later era, as mostly civilizing forces striving to contain influences far worse than themselves. Or at least imposing a degree of order where chaos could easily breakout. Bismarck is a perfect example of this: not a pleasant man but he was able to keep the Hohenzollerns and Europe out of trouble for 20 years.

But also, as I edit this in June of 2015, it is easy to see Russia here as well. After "glasnost" it seemed that Russia was going to finally join the European community. Today it looks like she is returning to her old ways, the same paranoia and us-against-the-world psychology that Mann describes for Germany under both the 2nd and 3rd Reichs.

I am speaking of the twenties of the twentieth century, in particular of course of their second half, which quite seriously witnesses nothing less than a shift of the cultural centre from France to Germany. [Here we get details of the rare performances of Adrian’s music. Which leads to mention of his new publisher, “the ‘Universal Editions” in Vienna, whose youthful editor Dr. Edelmann was scarcely thirty years old but already played an influential part in the musical life of central Europe.” Edelmann had been made aware of Adrian by yet another influential person, Frau von Tolna.]

p390 I am about to do something that would, in a novel, break all the canons: I mean to introduce into the narrative an invisible character. This invisible figure is Frau von Tolna and I cannot set her before the reader’s eye or give the smallest idea of her outward appearance, for I have never seen her and never had a description of her, since no one I know ever saw her either...

p391 ...his [Adrian’s] relation to the Hungarian noblewoman lacked any personal contact; I may add that by mutual consent it was always to lack it, to the end. It is another matter that for a long time they had carried on a correspondence, in which she showed herself the shrewdest and most initiate connoisseur of his work, the most devoted friend, confident, and counselor, unconditionally and unfailingly at his service; while on his part he went to the furthest limits of communicativeness and confidingness of which a solitary soul like his is capable... [This, his 3rd female acolyte, has attended, without him ever seeing her, every performance of his music. A bit of a stalker, she had even stood under his window at Pfeiffering and visited both Palestrina and Kaisersaschern.]

I set down here what I know of this extraordinary being. Mme de Tolna was the wealthy widow of a dissipated nobleman, who however had not died of his excesses but in a racing accident. She was left childless, the owner of a palace in Budapest, a vast estate a few hours south of the capital, near Stuhlweissenburg, between the Plattensee and the Danube. The estate, with its splendid, comfortably modernized eighteenth-century manor-house, comprised enormous wheat-growing tracts and extensive sugar-beet plantations, the harvests being manufactured in refining works on the property itself. None of these residences -- palatial town house, manorial estate, or summer villa -- did the owner occupy for long at a time. Mostly, one may say almost always, she was travelling, leaving her homes, to which she obviously did not cling... to the care of managers and major-domos. She lived in Paris, Naples, Egypt, the Engadine, attended from place to place by a lady’s maid, a male official something like a courtier and quartermaster, and a body-physician for her sole service, which made one suspect that she was in delicate health.

p392 ...What name fitted her in relation to Adrian Leverkuhn? Which did she want or claim? A protecting deity, an Egeria, a soul-mate? The first letter she wrote, from Brussels, was accompanied by a gift sent to him in homage: a ring the like of which I have never seen... It was a jewel of great beauty and -- to me -- incalculable value. The engraved hoop itself was old Renaissance work; the stone a splendid specimen of clear pale-green emerald from the Urals, cut with large facets, a glorious sight. One could imagine that it had once adorned the hand of a prince of the Church -- the pagan inscription it bore was scarcely evidence to the contrary. On the hard upper facet of the precious beryl two lines were graven in the tiniest Greek characters. Translated they ran somewhat like this:

What a trembling seized on the laurel-bush of Apollo!

Trembles the entire frame! Flee, profane one! Depart!

It was not hard for me to place the lines as the beginning of a hymn to Apollo, by Callimachus. They describe with unearthly terror the sign of an epiphany of the god at his shrine... Rather more blurred was the sign carved beneath, like a vignette. Under a glass it revealed itself as a winged snakelike monster whose tongue was clearly arrow-shaped. The mythological fantasy made me think of the sting or shot-wound of the Chrysaean Philoctetes and the epithet Aeschylus has for the arrow: “hissing winged snake”; I recalled too the connection between the arrow of Phoebus [Apollo and his sister Artemis can bring death with their arrows. The conception that diseases and death come from invisible shots sent by supernatural beings, or magicians is common in Germanic and Norse mythology.[47]] and the ray of the sun.

I can testify that Adrian was childishly delighted with this considerable gift... He accepted it without a thought, though he never, in fact, showed himself to others wearing it, but instead made a practice -- or shall I say a ritual? -- of putting it on for his working hours. I know that during the writing of the whole of the Apocalypse he wore the jewel on his left hand.

Did he think that a ring is the symbol of a bond, a fetter, yes, of possession? Obviously he thought no such thing; seeing in that precious link of an invisible chain, which he stuck on his finger while he composed, nothing more than a sort of bridge between his hermit state and the outside world; as a mere cloudy symbol of a personality, about whose features or individual traits he evidently inquired far less than I did...

p394 ...It turned out... that that old-French metrical version of the vision of St Paul had come to him from the “outer world.” The same outer world was constantly, if by round-about ways and through intermediaries, active on his behalf...

In the spring of 1924 Rudi Schwerdtfeger finally gets to perform, at the Ehrbar Hall in Vienna, the violin concerto Adrian has at last written for him. Adrian and Rudi accept Frau de Tolna’s invitation that Adrian should make himself at home on her Hungarian estate while she is away (in Vienna of course, to hear Adrian’s music, but still unseen). Zeitblom has other commitments and Rudiger has not made the trip, so Rudi gets some alone time with his Adrian.

p395 In this company, then, Adrian was received on the estate as though he were lord of the manor come home from abroad. The two spent twelve days in stately domesticity in the dix-huitième salons and apartments of Castle Tolna, in drives through the princely estate and along the gay shores of the Plattensee, attended by an obsequious retinue, some of whom were Turks. They might use and enjoy a library in five languages; two glorious grand pianos stood on the platform of the music-room; there was a house organ and every conceivable luxury. Adrian said that in the village belonging to the property the deepest poverty prevailed and an entirely archaic, pre-revolutionary stage of development. Their guide, the manager of the estate, himself told them, with compassionate head-shaking, as a fact worth mention, that the villagers only had meat one day in the year, at Christmas, and had not even tallow candles, but literally went to bed with the chickens. [It took me a moment but I think this means that they go to bed as soon as it gets dark and rise with the sun. I’ve actually heard this recommended as a cure for sleeping disorders] To alter these condition, to which habit and ignorance had rendered those who saw them callous -- for instance the incredible filth of the village street, the utter lack of sanitation in the dwelling-hovels -- would have amounted to a revolutionary deed, to which no single individual, certainly not a woman, could bring herself. But one may suspect that the sight of the village was among the things which prevented Adrian’s invisible friend from spending much time upon her own property.

Why have I included this passage which seems to have nothing to do with the story or the ideas that are the foundation of this book -- and also of The Magic Mountain? I mention the later because I’m increasingly seeing Doctor Faustus as The Magic Mountain: take two with the rise and fall of the 3rd Reich thrown in as a bonus.

After all the talk we have heard about and against the bourgeois, all the mocking of the bourgeoisie, this is, to the best of my recollection, the first view we have been given of what could be termed the pure Tory world order. So I am including Parade’s End and even The Passion of Michel Foucault in this indictment. I will grant that Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina did show glimpses of this world, but he is so keen to show the proper relationship between gentry, if I may use that term in this all-inclusive sense, and tenants that even Vronsky, his villain, is trying too hard to improve the lot of his tenants. Tolstoy’s Russia ends up resembling Jane Austen’s England.

Here we see a more realistic and believable picture of everyday life for the average man in the pre-bourgeois world. You also get glimpses of this world in books about the Irish Famine or the Highland Clearances. People living in filth while dependent on the potatoes they raise for sustenance.

While the condition of the common man in later centuries may well have been made worse by the need of their landlords for cash -- to support themselves, and also to participate in an increasingly bourgeois world -- one would have to have a very idealistic view of human nature to imagine that life in the Middle Ages was really as delightful as some would have us believe. Unfortunately, the only people who would have noted (and written about) conditions at the time would also have been invested in the status quo.

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