by Thomas Mann
This too I say only to characterize the fleeting, insecure times we lived in; certainly not to direct the reader’s attention upon my inconsiderable person, to which only a place in the background of these memoirs is fitting. 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 seamaid, which Adrian made at the time of his utmost and torturing sufferings.
“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, and in the presence of Imperial Majesty who looks on from close by. It is the Emperor Nero, you must know, a magnificent big Turk with Italian brocade on his back. The hangman’s helper in a flowing jacket and a codpiece pours the boiling oil over the back of my neck from a long-handled ladle, as I duly and devoutly squat. I am basted properly, like a roast, a hell-roast; it is worth seeing, and you are invited to mingle with the deeply interested persons behind the barrier, the magistrates, the invited public, partly in turbans and partly in good old-German caps with hats on top of them. Respectable townsfolk—and their pensive mood rejoices in the protection of halberdiers. One points out to the other what happens to a hell-roast. They have two fingers on the cheek and two under the nose. A fat man is raising his hand, as though to say: ‘God save us all!’ On the women’s faces, simple edification. Do you see it? We are all close together, the scene is faithfully filled with figures. Nero’s little dog has come too, so there shan’t be even a tiny empty space. He has a cross little fox-terrier face. 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 which 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 geniuslike, 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.
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. He wrote, sketched, collected, studied, combined; that could not be hidden from me, with inward satisfaction I realized it. Anticipatory announcements came out, from week to week, in a half-joking half-silence; in a repulse that out of fear or annoyance protected a not quite canny secret; in a laugh, with drawn brows; in phrases like “Stop prying, keep your little soul pure!” or “You always hear about it soon enough!” or, more frankly, somewhat readier to confess: “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 Vision 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 can’t read that to you.”
“No,” he laughed, “for the old French I have to use my own eyes.”
At the time, that is, when he could not have used them, as the pain above and in their depths made reading impossible, Clementine Schweigestill often had to read aloud to him: matter indeed that came oddly enough but after all not so unsuitably from the lips of the kindly peasant girl. I myself had seen the good child with Adrian in the Abbot’s room: he reclined in the Bernheim chaise-longue while 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 too had probably come into the house through the offices of the keen-nosed Rosenstiel: 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.
So then I learned that it was often thus. The brown-eyed maiden sat by the sufferer, in her modest Bavarian peasant costume, which betrayed the influence of the parish priest: a frock of olive-green wool, high-necked, with a thick row of tiny metal buttons, the bodice that flattened the youthful bosom ending in a point over the wide gathered skirt that fell to her feet. As sole adornment she wore below the neck ruche a chain made of old silver coins. So she sat and read or intoned, in her naive accents, from writings to which surely the parish priest could have had no objection: the early Christian and mediaeval accounts of visions and speculations about the other world. Now and then Mother Schweigestill would put her head round the door to look for her daughter, whom she might have needed in the house; but she nodded approvingly at the pair and withdrew. Or perhaps she too sat down to listen for ten minutes on a chair near the door, then noiselessly disappeared. If it was not the transports of Mechthild that Clementine rehearsed, then it was those of Hildegarde of Bingen; if neither of these, then a German version of the Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum by the learned monk known as the Venerable Bede: a work in which is transmitted a good part of the Celtic fantasies about the beyond, the visionary experiences of early Irish and Anglo-Saxon times. 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.
“And end is come, the end is come, it watcheth for thee, behold, it is come. The morning is come unto thee, O thou that dwellest in the land.” These words Leverkühn 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 boldly 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 ecstatics 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 Leverkühn 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, 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 recitative 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 in; of a journey into hell, wherein are worked through the visional 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 structure of the Last Judgment.
A man of culture, such as I am, when he essays to talk about a work with which he is in such painfully close touch may be pardoned for comparing it with existing and familiar cultural monuments. To do this gives me the needed reassurance, still needed even as it was at the time when I was present with horror, amaze, consternation, and pride, at its birth—an experience that I suppose was due to my loving devotion to its author but actually went beyond my mental capacities, so that I trembled and was carried away. For after that first period when he repulsed me and hugged his secret, he then began to give the friend of his childhood access to his doing and striving; so that at every visit to Pfeiffering—and of course I went as often as I could, and almost always over Saturday and Sunday—I was allowed to see new parts as they developed, also accretions and drafts, of a scope at times fairly incredible. Here were vastly complex problems, technical and intellectual, subjecting themselves to the strictest law. Contemplating the mere manufacture of the work a steady-going man used to a moderate bourgeois rate of accomplishment might well go pale with terror. Yes, I confess that in my simple human fear the largest factor was, I should say, the perfectly uncanny rapidity with which the work came to be: the chief part of it in four and a half months, a period which one would have allowed for the mere mechanical task of putting it down.
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 lightninglike solution. Scarcely did it leave him time to follow with the 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 round 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. 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 its proper place in the whole structure? I see him with a murmured “Go on, go on!” move to his table, open the folder of 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 distorted 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?
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 refuse in the midst of the people.
I call the piece a fugue, and it gives that impression, yet the theme is not faithfully repeated, but rather develops with the development of the whole, so that a style is loosened and in a way reduced ad absurdum, to which the artist seems to submit himself—which cannot occur without reference back to the archaic fugal forms of certain canzoni and ricercari of the pre-Bach time, in which the fugue theme is not always clearly defined and adhered to.
