Books: Paradoxical Poet

HEINRICH HEINE: PARADOX AND POET -Louis Untermeyer -Harcourt, Brace (Two vols. $6).

Poet Heine, lover of paradox, led a life full of contradiction. Born in Düsseldorf,1797 he grew up in a period when libertarianismalternated with the fiercest repression. There was revolution in France, in Germany there were pogroms. Since Heine was a Jew and passionately self-conscious about it, the uncertainty of the atmosphere led to unpredictable twists in his character, making him by turns suspicious and open-spirited, free-hearted and crabbedly vindictive. Artistically the most German of Germans, he spent the major part of his creative life in exile. A gallant, he fell finally in love with, and married, a woman whom he admitted to be not only unattractive, but unlettered and shrewish to boot.

His august contemporary, Goethe, studying with Olympian detachment Heine’s twisted mixture of harshness and tenderness, irony and romantic feeling, concluded that “Heine has every gift— except love.” Psychoanalyst Freud more justly attributes Heine’s acerbities to a defense mechanism, functioning with doubled power because he was not only a poet, but a Jew. Author Untermeyer, Jew and poet also, and a lifelong admirer of Heine’s works, adopts in general the Freudian view, fills it out with consistent sympathy and understanding. If he errs in ascribing a more-than-probable importance to a bit of blighted calf love, skims perhaps too lightly over episodes in which the poet’s sharp temper led him into really unsavory actions, these must be taken as no more than traces of that basic partisanship which every good biographer must have. Heinrich Heine—of which one volume contains the Life, and the other the translated Poems—ranks as the definitive biography of Heine in English.

Heine’s placid father wanted him to be a comfortable merchant; his mother had more ambitious, vaguely social plans. As a result, the boy shuttlecocked from a Jewish cheder (rabbinical school) to a more aristocratic Jesuit Gymnasium, then back to a matter-of-fact business college, and finally to the University of Göttingen, where a wealthy uncle sent him to study law. He got his degree but never practiced. Instead, he hurried to Berlin, published there in 1822 a juvenile volume of poems, the Junge Leiden (Young Sorrows). “I got forty free copies.” he wrote later, “and not a penny out of it.”

Success did not come till four years later, when his Reisebilder (Pictures of Travel) appeared, a bookful of prose sketches and verses on the German scene. Fame did nothing to soften his contrariety. An increasing bitterness crept into his writings; his attacks on German bigwigs, literary and political, grew sharper and more open. A subsequent volume brought denunciations, threats of libel suits. The next was proscribed throughout Germany. Heine, one jump ahead of the police, fled to Paris.

That was in 1831 and the trip was intended as no more than a temporary visit. It turned out to be a permanent exile. In Paris he met his odd mate, Mathilde Mirat (“the loving creature, who has been at my side and with whom I have been quarreling every day for the last six years”). And there he plunged into the quasi-Bohemian, quasi-revolutionary circles with which Paris was awhirl in the days of the Commune. Heine made German enemies by his polemical bitterness, French friends by his personal charm, contributed briefly to a radical weekly edited by Karl Marx. In Paris, at 58, he died—crying “Paper! Pencil!” The wonder was that he had lived so long. A syphilitic infection, contracted in his university days and never diagnosed, had progressively lamed his left leg, crippled his left arm, and in his last years reduced him to almost helpless invalidism.

Even in the midst of his affliction the outpouring of his verse continued, pure, strong-rhythmed, smooth-flowing and simply lyrical as no German verse had been before. The wit that had made him one of the century’s greatest epigrammatists remained undiminished. When he made his will, leaving everything to his wife Mathilda, he stipulated that she must marry again immediately after his death. “In that way, I shall be sure at least one man is sorry I am no longer alive.” Heine would have appreciated the joke which time has played on him. When the Nazi censors expunged his works, along with those of all other non-Aryans, from the roster of German literature, they were confronted with the unfortunate fact that he was the author of “Die Lorelei”—a song without which no German beer party is complete. The poem perforce remains in Nazi songbooks. its author blandly listed as “unknown.”

*A much-amplified revision of Untermeyer’s Poems of Heinrich Heine (1917).