The fortunes of Faust: AN Wilson’s ‘Goethe’

In the learned and stimulating Goethe: His Faustian Life (Bloomsbury Continuum, £25), A.N. Wilson states that his book “is written very much from the perspective of Goethe the author of Faust . . . . He is, surely, among all the truly great writers of this world, the least read in the English-speaking world.”  He believes Faust is “one of the most exciting reading experiences which it is possible to have,” and wants “to read Faust and persuade readers to do so too.”

Goethe (1749-1832) was a “scientist, engineer, administrator, poet and mystic” with conflicting sides of his character: “In his one personality, beside the exquisite lyricist, the passionate scientist, the soulful lover, the conservative statesman, there was also a wild man, obscene and out of control, foul-mouthed, coarse and alcohol-fuelled.”  Like Faust, he was “cold, yet passionate; cynical, yet intensely serious and devoted to Love, to Nature, and to the spiritual quest.”  A dazzled contemporary noted, “He has a knowledge, a living wisdom, which you could say was completely unequalled.  I have never come across such many sidedness!”  Edmund Wilson is the modern equivalent of the polymath Goethe.  Wilson’s interests ranged from literature, history and politics to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Iroquois Indians.

Goethe’s  house in Weimar “was a cabinet of curiosities, a stage set in which the great man could display his cleverness in legendary conversations.  The chief exhibit was Goethe himself.”  In contrast to Faust’s dabbling in magic, “when Goethe died, his house contained over 18,000 geological, botanical and zoological specimens, many scientific instruments with which to conduct experiments in electricity and optics.”  He wanted to plumb the depths of knowledge and wrote, “My nature is not meant—alas, I feel it! / On the broad waves to loll and swim.”  By contrast, the scientist Stein in Conrad’s Lord Jim uses the same metaphor to describe life as a tragic struggle: “ The way is to the  destructive element  submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.” 

Goethe’s sex life was as complicated as his character.  He was, according to Wilson, undoubtedly bisexual and had a serious homosexual love affair with Friedrich Jacobi.  Goethe exclaimed, “it is a joy to me to be the object of your love.”  Jacobi rapturously replied, “you sought me in the darkness—I became as a new soul.  From that moment on, I could not leave you.”  In a witty Venetian Epigram the poet confessed pleasure in sodomy, “Boys loved I too, while much preferring girls, / When I’ve had my way with her as a girl, I can always turn her round and treat her as a boy.”

 He composed most of Elective Affinities in his head before he dictated a single word to his secretary, and his biographer Nicholas Boyle calls it “the first direct representation of sexual relations in the history of the novel that is neither comic nor pornographic but wholly serious.”  In Goethe’s “Roman Elegy,” written at a time when women wore elaborate costumes and complicated layers of dress, he slyly assumes the role of benevolent nursemaid to cover his seduction of a young girl and hurries to have sex with her:

The little woolen dress is undone in no time,

So, as the friend unfastens, it slips down to the floor.

Hastily, he carries the child, in her light linen dress,

As befits a good nursemaid, he jokingly takes her to bed.

 In a letter to Frau von Stein, he slyly describes the female sexual organ as a “a magic oyster over which there pass mysterious waves.”

Wilson is especially good on Goethe’s friendship with Friedrich Schiller, a more sympathetic character and greater playwright.  The distinguished critic Erich Heller said 

Schiller tried “to civilize, educate and discipline what seemed to him a luxurious production of genius.”  In the 19th century tuberculosis killed Schiller, Novalis and John Keats.  (In the 20th century that disease continued to kill writers, including Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence and George Orwell.)

The most readable books by and about Goethe  are The Sorrows of Young Werther , which had a “reputation for wickedness that was only rivaled in the next century by the reputations of Byron and Baudelaire,” and Johann Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, which Wilson calls “the most scintillating conversations ever heard since the death of Socrates”. But theatrical audiences were bored by some of his plays, Iphigenie and Torquato Tasso on the insane Italian poet.

Wilson quotes what he considers some of Goethe’s best lines, which seem sinking and dull. The poet addresses the mountain: “You stand, your bosom unexplored.”  Egmont contains the dud line: “the sun-steeds of Time draw on our Destiny’s flimsy chariot.”  One of his finest lyrics, “Happy Yearning”—“After our act of love, begetting in the place we were begotten”—is neither sensual nor thrilling.  Goethe writes in “Welcome and Farewell”: 

But oh, already with the rising sun,

The farewell pain had pressed against my heart.

How happy were your kisses—every one—

But how your eyes were sad that we must part.

Byron’s superior poem on the same subject avoids these sentimental effusions.  Since his lover has already captured his heart, he must leave part of it with her forever:

Maid of Athens, ere we part,

Give, oh, give me back my heart!

Or, since that has left my breast,

Keep it now, and take the rest!

The great lines quoted by A.N. Wilson are nowhere as good as the great lines in English:

“Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”  (Shakespeare, Sonnet 73);

“A bracelet of bright hair about the bone” (John Donne, “The Relic”);

“Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold” (T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land ).

Wilson notes that Goethe’s heavy consumption of alcohol—half a bottle of Madeira, a whole bottle of wine, a bowl of punch and another bottle of wine every day—“explains why so many of his literary and theatrical projects were left half finished [like those of Leonardo and Franz Kafka], why he worked in fits and starts.”  But he was also like Titian, Verdi and Picasso, who continued to create great works until the end of their long lives.

A novelist as well as a biographer, Wilson includes witty remarks and amusing digressions.  Frances Yates, the scholar of Renaissance mysticism, was “herself a little bit witchy”.  When visiting Germany, he notes that “Leipzigers who in youth seem to start mousy, thin and bespectacled and then, after a decade or so of grown-up life, respond to the diet of beer, dumplings and potatoes by turning into Michelin men and women.”

But he has a few faults: “sat” should be “set” (p19), Carl Jung’s forename is misspelled, Frederika was not the daughter of the Vicar of Wakefield and Adele was not Arthur Schopenhauer’s brother.  Wilson all-too-frequently repeats himself, and has some clunky sentences: “By saying that Schelling’s mind was organized according to the newest fashion, Goethe conveyed that he was a follower of Fichte.”  Worst of all is his disastrous four-page digression into Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Fantasia .  In a notably absurd comparison, Wilson claims that in Doctor Faustus Thomas Mann chose, “like Disney”, to retell the story in musical terms.  It’s equally ludicrous to add that “Goethe had more in common with Walt Disney than he did with Thomas Mann, who was possessed of a profound tragic sense.”

The core of this book is Wilson’s passionate analysis and defence of Faust .  Mephisto, the name of the demonic tempter, means “hostile to light” and is related to the word “mephitic” or noxious.  “Far from offering him the capacity to ‘strive’ to higher realms of intellectual capacity,” Mephistopheles distracts Faust with alcohol and the lure of sex.

Faust has two great weaknesses and succumbs to temptation.  Both frivolous and cruel, he’s a nasty piece of work.  Wilson observes that his hero commits a series of atrocities: “he has seduced a girl who is not much older than fourteen.  He has given a sleeping draught to her mother to ensure that the seduction will not be interrupted.  He runs a dagger through her soldier brother, who is denouncing her for becoming a whore.  She kills their baby in an attempt to hide her shame.  She pays the price in prison, where she awaits the death penalty.  In an insufferable, arrogant neglect of Gretchen’s suffering, Faust does nothing to help her and gets off scot-free.” 

 The Gretchen story was inspired by an outrageous event in Frankfurt in 1772.  Goethe had watched a woman, who’d killed her own child “to escape the shame and condemnation of other people,” executed with a sword.  In 1783, as Privy Councillor in Weimar, he cruelly agreed with others to condemn a woman, who’d committed the same crime, to be beheaded with a sword by the public executioner.

Wilson admits some serious weaknesses in Faust.  He notes that Goethe “could be windy and nebulous in his aim to be all-inclusive.” Goethe includes “the two unfunniest ‘funny’ scenes in world drama—Mephistopheles hoodwinking the student by dressing up in Faust’s academic gown, and the drunken debauch in Auerbach’s Cellar.”  The work also contains many lines that could fill hot-air balloons: “From place to place she floats her rapturous way / We are one wing-beat behind her—behind us—what ages!”  Wilson claims that Faust is “not really stageable.”  But in the film Mephisto (1981) Klaus Maria Brandauer brilliantly shows how it could be acted on stage.

The gross structural flaws in Part Two Act IV are the source of the conflict between readers who thought the poem has a unified theme and those who saw it as a series of brilliant parts; between scholars who, after Goethe had worked on Faust for 60 years, “believe they have found a coherent unity or message, and those who have found it to be those pearls on a string which has been randomly named Faust .”  

Goethe himself perceived a major thematic weakness in the poem: “that the devil loses the wager, and that a man continually struggling from difficult errors towards something better should be redeemed is an effective thought.”  But he admitted that this dominant idea was not clearly related to every scene or to the whole poem.  Despite this radical flaw, Erich Heller called Faust “the representative of a whole epoch of history, its lust for knowledge, for power over nature, its intellectual and emotional instability, its terrible failure in love, humility and patience.”

The conclusion has also inspired conflicting interpretations.  Goethe declared: “A good man in his darkest stress / Is yet aware of righteousness”—but Faust does not act righteously.  Wilson declares: “The salvation of Faust comes about as a result of, not in spite of, his divided self, his carnality, his catastrophic moral failings. . . . It is entirely fitting that Faust should be wafted into a kind of emblematic Heaven at the end. . . . He will be led onwards, after death, into a glimpse of the Eternal Feminine,” the elusive ideal woman.  Destined for hell but launched to heaven, he’s saved by grace and redeemed in the poem.

But Faust would have been punished in real life and the unconvincing ending is an artistic failure.  The operas of Hector Berlioz (1846) and Charles Gounod (1859) emphasise The Damnation of Faust .  He should surely be damned to Hell, like Christopher Marlowe’s tragic hero and Mozart’s Don Giovanni, for his brutal and outrageous behaviour, and should not escape through the loophole of moralistic, celestial and womanly salvation.

Note : “The nuclear bombardment of Japan” was not, as Wilson claims, an atrocity.  It ended the war after the bloody battle of Okinawa, when the Japanese refused to surrender and swore to defend their islands until the last man.  It saved thousands and thousands of  soldiers’ lives, not only  American and British, but also Japanese. It also showed the destructive power of the nuclear bomb, which has not been used since then.

Jeffrey Meyers has published Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes , and essays on Schiller, Nietzsche, Freud, Rilke and Kafka.

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