Books: To Die and To Become!

Emerson called him “the greatest writer who ever lived.” Claudel considered him a “great solemn ass.” Jung pronounced him “a prophet.” Evelyn Waugh dismissed him as a “wayward dabbler in philosophy.” Valery said he was “one of the luckiest throws that fate has ever allowed the human race to make.”

The enormous enigma of Johann Wolfgang Goethe has bewildered and fascinated two centuries of Western culture. In Germany he is worshiped as a demi-divinity; Albert Schweitzer, for instance, modeled much of his life on Goethe’s. Yet in the English-speaking world his works are very little read. The Goethe of transatlantic reputation is the plaster Zeus of Weimar who thundered at secretaries and toadied to princes (“Blessed are those who draw near to the great of this world!”). Of his works, only Faust is famous, largely because Charles Gounod made grand opera of it, and only a few of his finest lyrics have survived the assaults of 19th century translation.

Now at last Goethe’s long relegation to librarefied limbo may be ending. In 1962, Poet W. H. Auden published a handsome translation of his Italian Journey. In 1963, Poetess Louise Bogan collaborated with Elizabeth Mayer on a readable resetting of Elective Affinities. Poet Louis MacNeice, before his death, released a version of Faust that is uniformly the finest in the language. And Poets Robert Lowell, Stephen Spender and Randall Jarrell are all hard at work on English versions of Goethe’s verse.

Titan with Warts. What has been badly needed to give form and focus to the Goethe revival is an important new biography, and Critic Richard Friedenthal has now provided it. In his Goethe (World; $8.50), a best seller in German and the first major book about Goethe to be published in English in nearly 20 years, he takes a hard cold look at the legendary giant of German literature, and he sees, along with a startling collection of warts, a man of universal genius.

Goethe was a notable philosopher, a crack professional scientist, a successful political administrator, a stylist second to none in German literature, a major novelist and dramatist, and probably the most richly expressive lyric poet who ever lived—a genius who differed in kind but not in degree from Dante and Shakespeare. He wrote a hundred times more than either of them—his collected works fill 150 volumes—and consequently more of what he wrote is dated; The Sorrows of Young Werther, for instance, reads in this unsentimental century like soap opera written in gold ink. But his finest works—Iphigenia, Tasso, Elective Affinities—embrace a massive range of experience, and in them all the print still lies warm on the page. Finally there is Faust, a masterpiece more than 60 years in the making, in which Goethe presents a central image of Western civilization and a hero who still stands as the type and template of modern man.

Goethe’s greatest masterpiece, however, was Goethe. His character, though flawed, was a work of art; his life, though often desperately unhappy, was a singular achievement. Torn apart by huge and various talents that plunged like wild horses in all directions, he was driven by the threat of emotional dismemberment to seek the true center of his personality. The search for this “secret node” in which all conflicts could be reconciled was Goethe’s obsession, and in pursuit of it he broke open vast new tracts of the dark continent where Freud and Jung, a century later, made their greatest discoveries.

Prodigy & Breakdown. Goethe’s brilliance was evident early, and so were his problems. His mother, a gay young heiress with a wild gene of genius in her own disposition, strongly overstimulated the boy, and his father, a sober Frankfurt lawyer, gave little shape to his education. At seven, Goethe was proficient in six languages: German, English, French, Italian, Greek, Latin. At 16 he had a serious nervous breakdown. In desperation he began to write -“to say what I suffer.” Saved by art, he romantically vowed “to convert my entire life into a work of art.”

A brilliant new Goethe emerged from the first of his many metamorphoses. Deep-chested, and tall (5 ft. 11 in.) for his time, he had the body of an athlete and the head of a young god. His eyes, huge and black, blazed with intense intelligence. Powerful images, emotions “like great knotted snakes” overwhelmed him. Sometimes in his seizures he could not distinguish between past and present. Once, while walking through the woods, he saw a figure walking toward him, and as it passed he realized in terror that the figure was himself, his Doppelgänger.

Geyser of Words. Again, poetry saved his sanity. “Effortless and unpreventable,” it burst out of him like a geyser—three, four, a dozen poems a day. From the first his verse was simple, sensual, strong; though he rarely employed a metaphor, he continually induced his readers to produce their own images, to feel in their bodies what appeared on the page. At 22, in a violent convulsion of composition, he produced a five-act farrago called Götz von Berlichingen that read like second-rate Shakespeare but made him famous overnight as a leader in a new literary movement called Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress).

Two years later, Goethe suffered another creative commotion, and in less than three weeks produced The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel that swept across Europe “like the Blue Plague”—a reference to the blue frock coat that Werther wore and that millions of young men now affected. To the disgust of their elders, they also went in for such Wertherisms as poetry, suicide and (horror of horrors in 18th century Germany) nude swimming.

At 25, Goethe was one of the most famous writers in the world —and one of the most painfully confused. “I feel,” he wrote grimly, “like the rim of a wheel that goes round and round and never gets nearer to the axle.” Was marriage what he needed? He got himself engaged, but had nightmares in which his fiancee tried to shut him up in a sack. Was a job what he needed? Fate made him an offer, and he took it.

The Von Stein Affair. In November 1775, at the age of 26, Goethe packed up and headed east to become a cultural and political adviser to Karl August, the 18-year-old Duke of Weimar. The move was a decisive one. From 1775 until his death in 1832, Weimar was Goethe’s home, the site of his sufferings, triumphs and transformations.

The first of these transformations began soon after his arrival in the duke’s tiny rustic capital, and it was instigated by the most important woman in his life. Her name was Charlotte von Stein, and she was just what Goethe needed. She was married and had produced seven children—no danger of being put in a sack; and at 33, as Schiller noted later, “she was a truly singular woman, with a gentle seriousness and candour in her face.”

Within two months of their meeting, Goethe became vigorously active in the government of the duchy, and for the better part of a decade served as the duke’s first minister. He built roads, planned forests, reclaimed land, framed fiscal and foreign policy. In a year he made himself a competent geologist, and from stones he went to bones. During the next ten years, he made two important contributions to anatomical science: he demonstrated that the skull is an enlarged and specialized vertebra, and in a human skeleton discovered vestiges of the intermaxillary bone—which until that time had been observed only in the skeletons of lower animals.

The Italian Journey. At 36, after a ten-year pursuit of order, Goethe suddenly realized that order was cold, that Frau von Stein lacked animal warmth. He began to long for passion, for Italy -“the land where the lemons bloom!” Thus, in 1786, Goethe began his celebrated Italian journey. “The light, the colors, the forms!” he exulted in Florence. “Every day I cast a new skin! Every day I discover a new faculty!” In Rome he also found a new mistress, and for the first time experienced “true naked love.” “I see with feeling eyes.” he wrote, “I feel with seeing hands!”

Two years of this, and Goethe once more was changed profoundly. “Everything is coming together,” he wrote in wonder. “I see unity, the whole.” The whole that Goethe experienced was a mystical thing: it was himself, it was God, it was Nature. But to Goethe, a child of the Enlightenment, Nature was the ultimate reality. Man was a part of Nature and so was his art. “Great works of art are supreme works of Nature carried out in accordance with Nature’s laws.” God was a part of Nature, and in Nature he creatively evolved. To Goethe, the end and all of living was creation—”to die and to become!”—and to the task of creation he ruthlessly devoted all his energies during the last half of his life.

Tragedy of Christiane. Somebody was sure to get hurt by such a monomania, and somebody did. On his return from Italy, Goethe took up with a factory girl named Christiane Vulpius, a charming young thing of 23 who, as he once remarked, “made the mattress shake.” To Goethe, the affair was a convenience; to Christiane, it was a tragedy. The court of Weimar called her “Goethe’s pig,” and he did not allow her to share his table when company was present. As the years passed, Christiane took to drink and ran to fat. After 20 years, in a fit of remorse, Goethe married her; but the damage had been done. Christiane died at 50, a broken woman. Goethe’s problem, says Friedenthal, was one that commonly afflicts the creative temperament: he experienced every woman as a potential mother and himself as an eternal child. To the end, Goethe carried this trace of the infantile, a cold little core of narcissism that all his genuine passion and warmth could never quite dissolve. It accounts for the arrogance of his old age, but it also accounts for the surging incredible productivity of those years—the eternal child in Goethe was an unfailing source of creativity. In the last half of his life Goethe completed five major dramas, four long novels, a 12,111-line narrative poem, a six-volume treatise on color, a ten-volume autobiography, a three-volume edition of his Conversations with Eckermann, and several thousand short er poems.

The Last Masterpiece. “Under these white locks,” he bellowed when he was 73, “there is an Aetna!” And Aetna erupted to the end. At 82, three months before his death, Goethe summoned his last forces and completed the drama that, after La Commedia of Dante Alighieri, must be accounted the greatest single poem of the Western world: Faust.

Faust, as Goethe conceives him, is the image of Western man: man sundered, as Goethe was, by an intolerable antithesis of spirit and substance. Faust cries out: “Two beings ah! within my breast are fighting!” One clings to the earth, one “mightily thrusts upward to the sky.” Salvation, for Goethe, lies in man’s capacity to reconcile these opposites in creative activity. For creation, for a true birth, the feminine vessel is necessary as well as the masculine spark; but the problem of woman involves the problem of evil; and so Faust sells his soul to the Devil in return for the love of the loveliest woman alive. Seduced by the Devil, he seduces Gretchen, gets her with child, abandons her to a disgraceful death. At the end of Part One, Faust is doomed.

In Part Two—which differs from Part One as King Lear differs from Romeo and Juliet—the action shifts from the physical to the metaphysical plane. The hero descends into the creative unconscious (Die Mutter) to find the feminine principle (Helena) that can save his soul from damnation by inspiring him to creative activity. After many agonizing struggles, Helena is won and Faust is saved—at the moment of death, he is creatively reclaiming land out of the sea, consciousness out of unconsciousness.

The Final Statement. In the final lines of the drama, Goethe permits himself for the first time in his creative career to look beyond man’s earthly life and ponder man’s supernal condition:

All that is transient

Is but reflection;

The insufficient

Here finds perfection;

What never could be said,

Here it is done;

Eternal womanhead

Summons us on.

These are the last lines Goethe put on paper. Yet like Faust, he died in the act of creation, in an ultimate metamorphosis. On March 22, 1832, weakened by a painful inflammation of the lungs, the old man sat in an easy chair and stared into the darkening world. “More light!” he murmured. But the light could no longer reach him. As speech failed and his senses faded, he began to write with his forefinger on the quilt that covered his knees. Writing, he died.