W.H. Auden on Goethe

Goethe by David Levine (NYRB 2/9/67)

Beginning with George Henry Lewes in 1864, English-language scholars have written acclaimed bios of Goethe. Presently these include Nicholas Boyle and Ritchie Robertson, who are recognized among German scholars today as representing the state of the art. Boyle’s work, not yet complete (two volumes have appeared), is one for the ages. Robertson’s is a “very short life” (as per the title of the Oxford series in which it appears), but it manages in 117 pages of text to hit all the bases. Likewise another earlier small biography (114 pp.) by T.J. Reed. Jeremy Adler's new Goethe life is a "critical" one, as per the title of Reaktion’s series on major modern figures in which it appears. I will not say any more about Adler's bio here, as my review of it is to appear in the Times Literary Supplement.

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)

By then, as Auden writes, Goethe had become an international tourist attraction, and it was among these visitors that Goethe became "a sage and an oracle." With Henry James in mind, Auden compares the prose in which we "hear" Goethe's words to talking "like a good book. ... His spoken words have characteristics which we normally expect to find in words written to be read. The thought unit is the paragraph rather than the sentence: the sentences issue from his lips without hesitation, each syntactically perfect. He is one of the very few person in history whose talk one wishes could have been tape recorded rather than reproduced from memory by others."

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