A Man in Love

by Martin Walser

  “Learned it by heart, you must say,” she interrupted.

  “… learned it by heart, makes me happy without knowing why.”

  She replied quite carelessly, “When you know why you’re happy, you aren’t happy anymore.”

  “Well then, now I’m very happy,” he said.

  “I’ve infected you, Excellency,” she said.

  “I’ve infected you,” he said.

  “We’ve infected each other,” she said.

  He whispered, “The fact that you always have to have the last word makes me happiest.”

  “However,” she whispered in return, “since you can’t let anything go without comment, you’ve had the last word.”

  He pantomimed that now she’d had the last word after all.

  On their way back down the mountain, Ulrike said that before they found themselves back in the terrain of formal address she had to tell him why she’d had to learn the passage with the walnut trees by heart. In those sentences, Goethe had become clearer to her than in anything else of his she had read. He had once suggested that he was Lotte just as much as he was Werther. That produced the ambiguity that made it hard for her to pin him down. But not in this passage. If someone is mourning another person, we are not as sad as the mourner because we don’t know the other person. But we know the walnut trees! They are as close to us as they are to Werther. We don’t mourn with him, but like him. Whenever in this world nut trees—or trees in general—are chopped down, we will recall Werther mourning for his nut trees and we will feel him more intensely than any other literary hero. And now she finally feels Goethe completely. The question, Who is he? has vanished from the world.

  As they emerged from the last bit of forest into the evening light framed by clouds, heat lightning flickered across the western sky. They had to stop and watch the excited and exciting display.

  Ulrike stepped up to him, took his hands, raised them, and said, “N-C-O-L-W-N.”

  And he replied, “W-A-T-F.”

  Then their mouths approached each other, came closer than they ever had, and stayed there until, with a shrill cry, a magpie shattered eternity.

  “Ah, Excellency,” she said.

  “Ah, Ulrike,” he answered.

  When they saw below them the crowded ranks of Karlsbad’s buildings stretching along the river, she said that as long as they were still in the du zone, she had a confession to make.

  He said he looked forward to whatever it was, but it was a drier announcement than he had expected.

  She could only tell him if he promised that no punishment or disciplinary action would ensue.

  He promised.

  She assumed that he knew that down there in town, his wonderful Stadelmann was selling the hair he regularly harvested from Excellency’s head.

  Goethe nodded in concern. He said he had put a stop to that in Weimar but he didn’t know that the business had relocated to Bohemia.

  So she had ordered hairs from Stadelmann, at least three, and had gotten seven in a little decorative tin. She was very happy to possess those seven lovely long hairs of his. She needed to tell him, and as promised, no punishment?

  Goethe: “As promised.”

  As they passed the spring and the Golden Ostrich came into view, she said, “Here ends the du zone. Ah, Excellency.”

  And he replied, “Ah, Ulrike.”

  “But,” she brightly cried, “it was the most beautiful afternoon of the summer.”

  “Agreed,” he said.

  An exchange of glances and they walked the last few yards as if they were both equally cheerful.

  And because in his room he still felt cheerful, he had to write to Frau Isolde Berlepsch at last—in a quatrain, of course:

  But I’m ashamed of having rested.

  To suffer with you is my gain.

  Because the anguish you have tasted

  Makes you greater than I am.

  “Herr John, you have the twenty letters from Frau Berlepsch. Please send her this reply.”

  You could never tell what his secretary Herr John thought about a task he’d been assigned.

  Chapter Four

  WHEN HE REPORTED back—not without irony—to Frau Head Warden, Amalie and Bertha took over the job of evaluating the report. They had been waiting for the pair of walkers. The plan had been to pay a visit to Count Taufkirchen’s shop, for they’d done almost no shopping yet this year. So off they went to town to see Count von Taufkirchen, whose shop had everything you didn’t need but were all the more eager to buy. Goethe came along and bought earrings of Bohemian garnet for Amalie, a bracelet of enameled lozenges for Bertha, and a tiny golden ginkgo leaf on a slender chain for Ulrike. She bought a silver ivy leaf on ditto for him. The sets of wooden and stone building blocks reminded him that he hadn’t yet purchased anything for his grandchildren in Weimar. But he couldn’t bring himself to play the grandfather now, in the midst of the Levetzows and with Ulrike’s eyes upon him. The family bought glassware, cups, coffeepots, a Chinese tea service, black wooden teacups with lacquered gold interiors, a Persian blanket with Persian letters, blouses, scarves, skirts and stockings, and sandals (also Persian). Goethe looked on and rendered an opinion when asked.

  Count Taufkirchen delivered it all to their rooms in the Golden Ostrich and unfortunately stayed all evening. Since he encountered customers from all over the world here, he had much to tell. Goethe sought Ulrike’s eyes, but he realized she was engrossed in the conversation this evening, as if there were a hundred such evenings still to come. He also managed not to have anyone ask him if he wasn’t feeling well.

  And today, the last breakfast together. Then the real farewell. He had told Stadelmann to have the fully packed carriage ready at nine o’clock near the spring in front of the Golden Lion. Goethe did not want to be remembered as a hand waving from a carriage window. On the other hand, it was unthinkable that he would walk away from the Golden Ostrich alone as the family watched him go. But none of that planning was necessary. When the breakfast had become the last breakfast, Count Sternberg was the first to rise from the table and say with utter nonchalance, “I’ll be waiting downstairs” and to the family, “We’ll see one another again. Adieu.”

  Now the farewell embraces, nothing but comic theater, the Uncle as Nephew, with a good deal of commotion permitted and the most incredible phrases uttered. The two younger girls played along, probably without perceiving the ambiguity of this scripted farce. Frau von Levetzow welcomed the jolly tumult. Not until the very end, as Goethe was raising his head from kissing her hand and their eyes met, did she become serious. Although she imitated the abbreviation language of her daughters and said “N-C-O-L-W-N,” it sounded more pleading than playful. Equally earnest, Goethe repeated “N-C-O-L-W-N.” He kissed the younger two. He extended his hand to Ulrike and said, “Well then.” She said it, too, “Well then,” but her Well then was not an echo of his Well then. Then you turn away and marvel that you’re able to. From the door, a final comedic wave.

  The count was waiting downstairs. He takes Goethe—there’s no other way to say it—under his wing. The count is at least as tall as the fellow without a given name. Goethe could not fend off that thought, which suddenly befell him. Both have a moustache, but what the count has is no sneering pencil line but a delicate, well-disciplined shrub. Even when they strolled the promenade together over in Marienbad, Goethe had always felt that he was in something like the armpit custody of the count. Now in Karlsbad on the sunny morning of September 5, 1823, he would not have been able to walk from the Golden Ostrich to the Golden Lion without the count. Not that he clung miserably to that big, handsome man, but he lent him his left arm to link with his right arm; they walked along in balance. He could feel it. And there was no need to chat to protect themselves from passersby. Goethe felt it and knew that the count felt it, too: they could not be disturbed. Goethe even felt that watching them from the window, the family had to be watching their exit without commentary. And before he climbed
into his elegant conveyance, he told the count, “You are always welcome at my house.” And added, “To the very end.” A mutual nod. No hand-waving.

  The weather couldn’t be better. Stadelmann took to the road for all it was worth and maybe even a little more. And since it had been so dry for days, the dust billowed up, reddish-brown in the sun, and then sank back down behind them.

  Which thoughts should he allow to enter his mind now, which should he keep out? As if that were something you could decide. But you have to act like you can, otherwise you’re a team of horses racing along and ignoring all commands. And you know how that ends.

  As soon as the town was out of sight, he returned to the final scene. More than once he replayed it in his mind, and each time only to get to Ulrike’s “Well then.” Ulrike’s Well then had been brighter than his Well then. Braver. With more trust in the future. More challenging. More adorable. He was ashamed of his broken-wing Well then. How much future rang in Ulrike’s Well then! Every time he got to this Well then, he heard that it was a Well then that challenged him to create the future. Which meant writing. And he began to write—in the coach, in his rocking carriage with the fabulous springs, he wrote in pencil in his travel diary in which each date filled only half a page. The decision to make it an elegy had already been reached before he wrote the first line.

  Marienbad Elegy. That was what it would be called.

  By the time he climbed out in front of Grüner’s house in Eger, the first six lines were written down in his diary. He did not show his friend Grüner the six lines. The Marienbad Elegy grew from those six lines, from one stop to the next. From Eger to Jena via Gefell, Schleiz, Kahla, and Pössneck. The elegy was no express letter from his soul. It was an exercise in visualization so that as long as he was writing, Ulrike would be less absent, or not absent at all.

  The following morning when they parted—Goethe was already in his coach—Grüner called up to him, “I’ll venture to hope for a reunion next year. We still have to make our excursion to the menilites.” At that point, waving was called for, by both of them. But when Goethe waved, he could never help but feel that waving minimized the farewell. But perhaps that’s the point of waving.

  Grüner remained in his thoughts a while. Goethe reproached himself for getting impatient the previous day when they were in Grüner’s mineral collection and he was expected to stop and look at some newly acquired fossils in bituminous coal from England. “That will interest Count von Sternberg,” he had said somewhat nervously. Even worse, when Grüner noticed that he couldn’t interest his friend in minerals today, he had begun to describe the terrible famine in the Erzgebirge range. Goethe forced himself to look sympathetic. What’s that, how’s that? The world is cruel? Yes, of course, but what’s the point of participating?

  And now in Zwotau, he got the news of a catastrophic fire in Hof—Hof, entirely consumed. At once he told Stadelmann to detour around Hof. Stay as far away as possible. Bad enough that the baggage cart he’d sent on ahead with five crates full of minerals and six cases of Kreuz Spring water must be in Hof this very minute, perhaps tipped over in the panic, crates of minerals and Kreuz Spring bottles lost. He drew the curtains. The elegy was calling.

  Since they stayed in Gefell that night where they had never stayed before, Stadelmann first checked the bedroom doors in the inn to make sure the hinges were oiled. If not, he always had some oil along and didn’t summon his master until the doors swung silently. Next day to Schleiz, where people knew this visitor and his coachman. However, Goethe was awakened toward five in the morning by the cooing of doves and then had to listen because he’d never been so close to cooing doves or heard them for so long. He drew a staff and entered what he heard.

  That was the husband.

  That was the wife.

  The husband was in one of the trees fairly close to the window, the wife more distant. They went on for an hour. Then the wife came nearer. The husband flew to meet her. Energetic beating of, probably, four wings. Then quiet, but for only a quarter hour at most. Then the cooing began again. He nearby, she farther off. Goethe closed the window. The cooing was now muted, but unmistakably cooing. If he could write Ulrike a letter now, tell her what was happening here in the treetops outside his window, then everything would be good! But no! The elegy was waiting.

  Through Pössneck to Kahla, with Jena already looming. He had to secure the elegy as if it were a bastion that could protect him and Ulrike from Jena and from what must follow Jena. Jena was the mundane business even now deployed against him, against Ulrike and him. On this last day before Jena, as he was writing in the swaying coach as always, he had the feeling that he was on his knees, writing. And as soon as he stopped writing even for a moment, he again heard himself uttering brief little cries. They were pitched much too high. They were ridiculous little cries. But he needed them.

  Stadelmann called to him that they were in Kahla. He pulled back the curtain, climbed out, let himself be led to his room, sat down at the table, and worked on revising today’s strophe. Stadelmann was able to report that the baggage cart had passed through Hof unharmed, had arrived here yesterday already, and had left early this morning for Weimar.

  They reached Jena the following day. By the botanical garden that he had designed, in the inspector’s house where he had an apartment furnished for his visits to Jena, his son August was waiting for him. Goethe was dismayed. He did not recall his son being this fat. He would have liked to begin the conversation by recommending the Hahnemann diet he himself followed. But he knew his son took pride in the fact that everything tasted good to him. He held epicureans in contempt and thought special diets were a malicious invention of greedy doctors. One of his favorite sayings was “Everything complicated is foreign to me; Napoleon wasn’t complicated, either.” August was an admirer of Napoleon.

  He had gotten himself and his father invited to dinner by Goethe’s dear friend Knebel. That pleased his father. Besides Zelter, Knebel was the only person he addressed with the intimate du. It was almost fifty years ago that Knebel, the court tutor of Duke Carl August, had brought him together with Goethe in Frankfurt. Knebel and Goethe had become and had remained fast friends. To be sure, Goethe had not been able to prevent his friend from falling into negativity and becoming more and more of a critic and condemner of everything. They set off for Knebel’s house. For the length of one evening, it was always superb. But if on the following evening Knebel was the slightest bit negative, Goethe would give up on him again for a while. But this time, Knebel greeted him with, “What have they done to you?”

  Goethe: “They’ve made me happy.”

  Knebel: “You’ve been to the valet for rejuvenation you employed in ‘The Man of Fifty.’”

  Goethe: “People who love me notice.”

  Knebel: “It sounds better the other way around: Whoever doesn’t notice doesn’t love you.”

  Goethe: “Agreed.”

  Knebel: “Goethe agrees with me? What an evening it’s going to be!”

  Then the topic for this evening: the students had staged protest marches against Goethe because they’d heard from somewhere that he was coming to Jena for a few days. Pereat Goethe! and Down with Goethe! all evening long. August reported that an investigation of the ringleaders was already underway.

  Knebel said it was what came from being liberal and constantly giving in. Expel all the marchers from the duchy immediately!

  Goethe asked what they were protesting.

  August had already found that out. They were softheaded nationalists who hated and scorned Goethe ever since his meeting with Napoleon.

  “Idiocy never dies,” said Knebel.

  Then it could have turned into a congenial evening except that August came out with the news that Dr. Rehbein had left for his home town of Eger at five this morning to fetch his bride and they were to be married almost immediately.

  That was a blow for Goethe. He praised the bride in the most glowing tones but called the rushed marriage
a stupid trick. An extempore engagement was all well and good, but a wedding on the spur of the moment? Horrors. Love always arises instantaneously. But marriage is a synthesis of the impossible. It needs some thought first.

  Goethe was furious. He was eager to leave. Afterward he sat with August for a bit in the inspector’s house. It was impossible to overlook the fact that August would have liked to talk further about the topic of weddings. Goethe sensed that August was waiting for him to say something about Ulrike von Levetzow.

  August said how much they had heard all through the summer. And how it had pained Ottilie. That shouldn’t surprise his father, given the special relationship between him and her.

  For his part, Goethe felt it impossible at this time to tell his son the news that August could then send to Weimar by courier this very night. When August realized that his father would not mention the name Levetzow, he dropped any further trick questions.

  Then he announced his plans for the next three days. Goethe was scheduled to visit everything he had founded: museums, libraries, the school of veterinary medicine, the botanical garden, the observatory, the new building for the veterinary hospital. Then August handed him the letter he had been charged to deliver from the grand duke, wishing Goethe a happy return. The letter ended with the sovereign’s urgent wish that Goethe at once be named trustee of the University of Jena. He hoped Goethe would not deny his friend this wish. Especially in light of recent student unrest, it was obvious how important it had become to have Goethe as a trustee in Jena.

  Goethe folded the letter and said he was genuinely exhausted. Until tomorrow, dear August.

  August still wanted to hear: yes or no?

  Goethe said nothing, but shook his head more energetically than usual.