Goethe by David Levine (NYRB 2/9/67) |
Although he did not write a biography of Goethe, W.H. Auden published pieces on Goethe that not only reveal extensive familiarity with Goethe's oeuvre, but are also very insightful about Goethe himself. For instance, in the introduction to his translation (with Elizabeth Mayer) of the Italian Journey (1962), Auden offers a commonsensical — English, one might say — view of why Goethe remained in Weimar: for Goethe “a meaningful existence” meant a “curb of his subjective emotions which would come from being responsible for people and things other than himself, and this was precisely what Weimar offered.” In Rome, for the first time in almost fifteen years, he was free to choose his own company, even if it was to stick close to his fellow countrymen. This “artistic, somewhat bohemian, foreign colony in a great city gave him a freedom in his personal life” that was unobtainable in a provincial German court.
Unfortunately, as Auden points out, his correspondence back to Weimar reveals little of what was going on with him personally. “There is no reason to suppose that Goethe’s life in Rome was anything like Byron’s in Venice, but it is impossible to believe that it was quite so respectable, or so exclusively devoted to higher thing, as, in his letters home, for obvious resins, he makes it sound.”
The second Auden essay, which appeared in the New York Review of Books (Feb. 9, 1967), addresses this lack of self-revelation. It is a review of the translation by David Luke and Robert Pick of Goethe: Conversations and Encounters. I have not seen this book (and for obvious reasons cannot now access it). Its length (264 pp.) indicates that it is not a complete translation of Eckermann. Also, because of a reference to Riemer in the review, I am assuming that Conversations and Encounters also offers the witness of other contemporaries.
Auden notes the monologic character of Goethe's reported utterances. He references a passage from Goethe's autobiography that is quoted in Conversations and Encounters that testifies to Goethe's habit in his youth of imaginary monologues on subjects that were occupying him, which apparently became his modus operandi when faced with all the visitors to Weimar in the early decades of the 19th century: "Given a bottle of wine and an attentive audience he would hold forth on whatever was occupying his mind, not for the sake of his listeners, but for his own. He was seldom interrupted."
Schiller & Goethe in conversation (Getty Images) |
Like most of us, Auden laments that Goethe is seldom caught "off mike." If he said anything shocking, people kept what he said to themselves. As Auden writes, his auditors lived in an age that recognized a difference between what may be said in public and what should only be said in private.
Picture credit: New York Review of Books; Getty Images
2 comments:
I enjoy reading this blog and look forward to your new posts. Do you know this poem of Auden's:
TO GOETHE: A COMPLAINT
How wonderfully your songs begin
With praise of Nature and her beauty,
But then, as if it were a duty,
You drag some god-damned sweetheart in.
Did you imagine she's be flattered?
They never sound as if they mattered.
In the picture of the four men round the table, I assume Goethe is the one talking, although it doesn't look much like him. Maybe he's the one with his hand on his chin.
Happy Mother's Day!
Thank you immensely for the reference to the Auden poem. Your comment has led me to look further into the influence of Goethe on Auden, and I will probably post something on the subject after I do a little research. The person talking in the picture is Schiller. Goethe sits opposite him, with his hand on his chin. The other two figures are Humboldt and Fichte. I would hazard that the younger-looking one (standing) is supposed to represent Fichte. But which Humboldt: Wilhelm or Alexander? In any case, the image was for a Leibig product and reconstructs something that probably never happened! Still, it is charming. What impresses me about Auden is his intellectual range.
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