World Literature

My world literature project has several aspects, one of which is  a series of essays on writers whose work elucidates Goethe's concept. The first of these, on the American poet Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753-1784), the first black woman to publish a book of poetry, appeared in the fall 2008 issue of The Yale Review.  (If you have access to a university or public library, you can read this electronically.)

My next essay in this series is on V.S. Naipaul, whose works I have read over the years, but, now that the New Year has arrived, it is time to get serious. Yesterday I began at the beginning, rereading Naipaul's first novel (though the third to be published, in 1959), Miguel Street, which is more a sequence of portraits, from the point of view of a boy living on that street in Trinidad. What astonished me was to find that everything that characterizes Naipaul's later work is laid down in Miguel Street: the mixture of races, the disillusionment, the desire to escape a small setting, the large ambitions, the outsized but ultimately absurd heroes, the men who beat women, the corruption. In the later works, there is little sentimentality in the portrayals, but in Miguel Street Naipaul still shows a certain fondness for his flawed figures.

One in particular is very touching. In Miguel Street a man arrives one day at the narrator's house asking to come into the yard and "watch your bees." The narrator's mother is suspicious, but since the man's English is so good she allows him to do so, but makes her son stay and watch him watching the bees. Here is the initial conversation between the boy and the man:

I said, "What you does do, mister?"

He got up and said, "I am a poet."

I said, "A good poet?"

He said, "The greatest in the world."

"What your name, mister?"

"B. Wordsworth."

"B for Bill?"

"Black. Black Wordsworth. White Wordsworth was my brother. We share one heart. I can watch a small flower like the morning glory and cry."

A later scene between the poet and the boy reminds me of the moment of Wilhelm Meister's encounter with the stars, mentioned in my New Year's posting. B. Wordsworth has treated the boy to the yellow mangoes that grow in his own yard. The boy eats six, staining his shirt in the process. When he returns home, his mother beats him badly for staining his shirt, and he runs away, vowing never to come back. When he arrives at B. Wordsworth's house again, he is so angry that his nose is bleeding. He and the poet go for a walk to the race course.

B. Wordsworth said, "Now, let us lie on the grass and look up at the sky, and I want you to think how far those stars are from us."

I did as he told me, and I saw what he meant. I felt like nothing, and at the same time I had never felt so big and great in all my life. I forgot all my anger and all my tears and all the blows.

When I said I was better, he began telling me the names of stars, and I particularly remembered the constellation of Orion the Hunter, though I don't really know why. I can spot Orion even today, but I have forgotten the rest.

Naipaul has been accused of condescension in his portraits of people in the Third World. It strikes me that it is less condescension than it is his bitter understanding of a milieu so narrow that people are incapable of realizing their ambitions. Imagine Wilhelm Meister in Pakistan, and he would appear even more ridiculous and absurd.

Goethe at New Year's

The first song in Goethe's collection Gesellige Lieder ("sociable/ convivial songs") is "Zum neuen Jahr" (On the New Year). When I was looking around on Google for information about this particular song, I found several English translations, at the end of which was appended "Composed for a merry party that used to meet, in 1802, at Goethe's house." Very intriguing. I'd like to know more about that party. According to the notes to WA I.1, "Zum neuen Jahr" first appeared in Taschenbuch auf das Jahr 1804, editors Wieland and Goethe. Here is the poem:

Zwischen dem Alten,

Zwischen dem Neuen,

Hier uns zu freuen

Schenkt uns das Glück

Und das Vergangne

Heißt mit Vertrauen

Vorwärts zu schauen,

Schauen zurück.

Stunden der Plage,

Leider, sie scheiden

Treue von Leiden,

Liebe von Lust;

Bessere Tage

Sammlen uns wieder,

Heitere Lieder

Stärken die Brust.

Leiden und Freuden,

Jener verschwundnen,

Sind die Verbundnen

Fröhlich gedenk.

O des Geschickes

Seltsamer Windung!

Alte Verbindung

Neues Geschenk!

Denk es dem regen

Wogenden Glücke,

Dankt dem Geschicke

Männiglich Gut,

Freut euch des Wechsels

Heiterer Triebe,

Offener Liebe,

Heimlicher Gluth!

Andere schauen

Deckende Falten

Über den Alten

Traurig und scheu;

Aber uns leuchtet

Freundliche Treue;

Sehet das Neue

Findet uns neu.

So wie im Tanze

Bald sich verschwindet,

Wieder sich findet

Liebendes Paar;

So durch des Lebens

Wirrende Beugung

Führe die Neigung

Uns in das Jahr.

I particularly like the phrase "des Lebens wirrende Beugung." The folks in Weimar were certainly lucky to have Goethe in their company.

The image above, of celestial fireworks (click to enlarge), is from the "Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar 2008." According to the legend, it shows the "ancient [!] open star cluster NGC 6791" taken in early 2008. Astronomers have uncovered three different age groups: two are burned-out stars called white dwarfs, of which this group of "low-wattage stellar remnants appears to be 6 billion years old." They are located 13,000 light years away in the constellation Lyra, NCG 6791, one of the oldest and largest open clusters known, containing roughly 10,000 stars. Visible between the crowded mass of stars are numerous distant galaxies far beyond our Milky Way.

I can't help wondering what Goethe would have thought about such a view of the universe, one unaided by the normal human eye but instead made possible by instruments, of which, as we know, he tended to be suspicious, intervening, as they do, with the directness of our perception of the sensible world. At the same time, the view might have confirmed his own "Naturansichten," as in the episode in the Wanderjahre (I.10) in which Wilhelm views the starry sky from the observatory and finds some confirmation of the famous statement of Kant: "Two things fill me with awe: the starry sky above and the moral law within."

Thanks to Hansjakob Werlen at Swarthmore for the convivial champagne image. A wonderful English translation of Goethe's New Year poem can be found at "Every Poet."

Goethe's Sonnets

Since my posting on Goethe's "Christmas-Box" poem, I have discovered that it was indeed occasion specific. The sonnet was sent from Weimar on 24 December 1807 to Minna Herzlieb, along with a box of home-baked Christmas sweets for the Frommann children. Though Minna is regarded as the immediate inspiration for Goethe's sonnet cycle, I have learned that caution is in order in identifying her with the female beloved in the cycle of poems. I went back to some of the early scholarship on the sonnets, to an article from the PMLA in 1896, by "J. Schipper." How I love this old scholarship, which still has much to offer. And how low in the world of scholarly writing has the PMLA sunk in the meantime! But that is another story.

Schiffer goes into the background of the sonnet tradition in Europe as well as the circumstances of Goethe's composition of the cycle in 1807/08. It seems that sonnets were scorned by a wide range of 18th-century German writers: Bodmer, Breitinger, Hagedorn, Klopstock, Lessing, and Schiller. This is surprising in Schiller's case, since his dramatic language clearly owes much to Petrarchan diction.

Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim (1719-1803), however, tried his hand at the form, but it was Gottfried August Bürger (here in the portrait by Tischbein, from 1771) who reignited interest, beginning in the late 1780s when he was teaching at the university in Göttingen. Schiffer calls his sonnets "formvollendete erotische Sonetten," but the few (e.g., "Molly und Liebe") I found seem hardly erotic in the conventional sense. From this 1771 portrait, Bürger would hardly seem to be in "utter want of moral balance" (as he is described in the 11th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica), nor does he look like a moral failure, a term often attached to him. No doubt, a complex heart is concealed by the formal dress and powdered wig: hardly the face of a man who would have written "Lenore." It was at the university in Göttingen that August Wilhelm von Schlegel met Bürger and began writing sonnets with Petrarchan form and content. He expanded his range in 1798 with "Geistliche Gemählden," on famous paintings in the Dresden galleries.

I mentioned in my earlier post the "sonnet competition" in the Frommann household in Jena at Advent 1807, but another female figure must be mentioned here, namely, Bettina Brentano (later von Arnim). Bettina deserves an entire posting of her own, but in connection with the sonnets, it need only be mentioned that in 1835, in Goethe's Correspondence with a Child, Bettina claimed that she was the inspiration for the sonnets and included them as well as correspondence between herself and Goethe in support of this claim. For instance, in a letter dated August 1, 1807, from Wartburg, she writes the following (in her own charming English translation of the Correspondence), clearly intimating that it was the source of sonnet no. 4 ("Abschied"):

"It was indeed a 'last kiss,' with which I was compelled to part, for I believed I must for ever hang up on thy lips; and as I drove through the walks and trees, under which we had wandered together, I thought I must hold fast by each trunk; but they disappeared; the green, well known spaces, melted i the distance, the loved meadows and they dwelling were long faded away, the blue distance seemed alone to keep watch over the enigma of my life. But even the distance was lost, and now nothing was left me but my ardent longing, and my tears flowed at this parting."

She then appends a letter allegedly from Goethe sending her the sonnet of which she provides an English translation. George Henry Lewes (among others), however, will have none of this. Of Bettina and her relationship to Goethe, he writes:

"I do not wish to be graver with Bettina than the occasion demands; but while granting fantasy its widest license, while grateful to her for the many picturesque anecdotes she has preserved from the conversation of Goethe's mother, ... the Correspondence is a romance." And further, "when one comes to think of it, the hypothesis of his using her letters as poetic materials does seem the wildest of all figments; for not only was he prodigal in invention and inexhaustible in material, but he was especially remarkable for always expressing his own feelings, his own experience, not the feelings and experience of others."

Well, there you have it. But Lewes (who was relying on the account of the sonnets' creation provided by Goethe's difficult and not entirely impartial colleague Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer) is mistaken in saying that the sonnets were written before Bettina visited Goethe in Weimar. From his diary, we now know that Goethe first met her there on April 23, 1807. Moreover, she was in Weimar for ten days, from November 1-10, thus right before Goethe reencountered Minna Herzlieb in Jena. We also know that Bettina and Goethe corresponded, though his (authentic) surviving letters to her are not in the warm tone of the Correspondence. Schipper is of the opinion that Bettina may have provided material for sonnets no. 4 ("Das Mädchen spricht"), 7 ("Abschied"), 8 ("Die Liebende schreibt"), 9 ("Die Liebende abermals"), 10 ("Sie kann nicht enden"), and even 1 ("Mächtiges Überraschen"). In these are reflected, according to Schipper, the "passionate, impulsive nature of the author of the Correspondence" as well as the figure of Luciane in Elective Affinities (with Minna perhaps serving as model for Ottilie in the novel), which Goethe began work on in 1808.

The distance between Bettina and Goethe and the later rupture of their relationship (rendered best by Milan Kundera in his novel Immortality, which, in a further case of artistic appropriation, steals much from Bettina's Correspondence as well as her other artistic enthusiasm, Beethoven) seem indicative of the rise of Romanticism and the quest for personal authenticity. The "experience," especially of love, which is often said to give rise to Goethe's poetry was not the subjectivity embraced by the German  Romantic writers. The women in Goethe's life have been the subject of much speculation in regard to his creativity, but Schipper suggests we regard the sonnets as "Stimmungsbilder" prompted by close encounters with two such different and attractive female figures as Minna Herzlieb and Bettina Brentano.

Post-Christmas Musings

Rick's aunt Micaela lives less than a mile down Riverside Drive from our apartment, so she is a frequent dinner guest, especially on celebratory occasions like Christmas and Chanukah. Every time she comes she brings (besides a bottle of champagne or a specially selected wine) some small object from her apartment. In the spring she gave me lovely mother-of-pearls earrings. This time it was a Merlot from Washington state, where her daughter and son-in-law live, and a copy of The New Yorker (click on image to enlarge) from January 29, 1938.

Yesterday, the day after Christmas, was a very lazy day. I spent some time reading the old New Yorker. There were some familiar names among the contributors: James Thurber, reporting on crime in Nice, and S.J. Perelman, being very cranky about the number of home-making magazines with articles "about a couple of young people who stumble across a ruined farmhouse and remodel it on what is inelegantly termed spit and coupons." If you've seen Mister Blandings Builds His Dream House (which I have, recently, a truly painful house restoration fantasy), you'll know what he is talking about. It wouldn't be the New Yorker if there wasn't an account of a lamentable social phenomenon, in this case the effects of unemployment on otherwise hardworking, decent (not only decent but also downright admirable) citizens. ("Why can't the government get things right?" is the implication.) It was by a writer named John McNulty, a byline not familiar to me. Then there was Genêt, the pen name of Janet Flanner, who wrote "The Letter from Paris" for half a century. During my first graduate school incarnation, several decades ago, this was my favorite feature of The New Yorker.

On January 29, 1938, Genêt reported on the appearance of three books. She began in the trademark New Yorker voice, that of a worldly, ironic, sensible "Yankee" : "To people who find Gertrude Stein difficult to read in English, it may be a relief to learn that her next book has been written in French, though as a matter of fact Miss Stein's French reads a great deal like her English." The book, in a series on French painters, was a homage to Picasso. Well, who else could write better on Picasso? Stein knew him well and, according to Genêt, had "lent about thirty of her Picassos for the recent great State exhibition." That sounds like she had a few more than thirty. Genêt also discusses André Malraux's L'Éspoir,  "a sort of novelized journal" of Malraux's experience of the Spanish War, "gained while serving as the head of the first international flying escadrille." I believe Genêt when she says it is "twice over a man's book."

What interested me was the report of a new story by Colette, "Bella-Vista," which I was not familiar with but which, Genêt claimed, "was ready for some future anthology of the world's great short stories." (Now that I think of it, Micaela resembles Colette.)

Back in that early graduate career I used to read a lot of Colette's novels and stories. It was the time (late 1970s) when I had my first apartment, in which certain objects began to accumulate: a mahogany desk; a bookcase for my German reference books, the sight of which gave me great pleasure; a collection of Bel Canto recordings; a bedspread from Mexico; a porcelain tea pot with a floral patten; a profusion of jade plants and ferns in colorful pots from Mexico (I was studying in Texas then, just a few hours from Piedras Negras); lace curtains on the windows. By the time I acquired my first cat, my surroundings were coming more and more to resemble the evocative interiors that play a supporting role in the novels of Colette. I didn't live in the Midi or have a garden in my backyard full of asparagus, tomatoes, and radicchio, but it seemed a kind of wisdom then to be concerned only about the pink cactus that was about to flower, or to appreciate the clink that the wine bottles make when they are being carried to the well to be stored for drinking later with dinner.

Indeed, it all sounds very much like a painting by Matisse, for instance, this one from 1905, entitled "Open Window." This in turn reminds me of the small book by Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just. Scarry is concerned about the attacks made by postmodernists against beauty, on the charge that it distracts us from concerns for justice. She makes an intricate argument for the way that Beauty trains us mentally to be more perceptive. She approaches the subject by elaborating on the experience we have all had in moving beyond youthful enthusiasms. Think of the tackiest paintings you loved at 18, say those by Walter Keane, which turn out to have been painted by his wife, Margaret.

With training, we leave such enthusiasms behind and grapple with more difficult paintings that, on first glance, might appear ugly. Scarry's example is Matisse's palm trees, which she always found ugly. But, then, one day she began to like those palm trees. And so, this process of intellectual self-correction can be applied to the moral world: we go, according to Scarry, from perception of "the fair" (lovely faces) to receptiveness to "fairness" (as in equal distribution of goods). Ingenious, as I said..

Some of the attractions of Manhattan, as advertised in the 1938 New Yorker, included The Women by Clare Booth at the Ethel Barrymore; Gertrude Lawrence in Susan and God ("A Comedy by Rachel Crothers," a revival of which I saw last year at the Mint Theater in Manhattan); Golden Boy by Clifford Odets; and A Doll's House starring Ruth Gordon. Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians were performing at the Roosevelt Grill at Madison and 45th Street. A two-page color insert featured "America's Fourmost Whiskies": Old Overhold, Old Taylor, Old Grand-Dad, and Mount Vernon. A full-page ad for Tiffany & Co. offered "Quality, Smartness and Variety Moderately Priced." I could go on, but enough for today.

Goethe at Christmas 2

Aside from the puppet theater, nothing was obvious to me of relevance to Christmas in connection with Goethe's life. I find this absence interesting because Goethe is otherwise so partial in his literary writing to portraying traditional customs and ways of life. Doing a Google search of "Goethe and Christmas," however, I discovered a number of sites linking to a poem in English called "The Christmas Box." Here is the English rendering (you can tell from all the apostrophes that it is a 19th-century translation):

This box, mine own sweet darling, thou wilt find

With many a varied sweetmeat's form supplied;

The fruits are they of holy Christmas tide,

But baked indeed, for children's use design'd.

I'd fain, in speeches sweet with skill combin'd,

Poetic sweetmeats for the feast provide;

But why in such frivolities confide?

Perish the thought, with flattery to blind!

One sweet thing there is still, that from within,

Within us speaks, that may be felt afar;

This may be wafted o'er to thee alone.

If though a recollection fond canst win,

As if with pleasure gleam'd each well-known star,

The smallest gift thou never wilt disown.

I admit that this poem was unfamiliar. I checked the index of first lines in my edition of Goethe's poems, but found nothing under "Weihnachten" (Christmas) or "Schachtel" (box). Since the translation gave a date of 1807 for the poem, however, I was able to locate it quickly among the sonnets that Goethe wrote beginning in Advent of that year. It is called "Christgeschenk."

As fluent as Goethe might seem to have been in all manner of poetic forms, he never tried his hand at sonnets before the year 1800. It was about this time that the Romantic poets reappropriated a poetic form that had fallen out of favor among 18th-century poets, who instead imitated and emulated classical meters of Greek and Roman poetry. August Wilhelm Schlegel wrote many and even dedicated one to Goethe, to which Goethe seems to have felt compelled to respond, though rather unwillingly, with two sonnets, one called simply "Das Sonett," the other "Natur und Kunst."

In late November 1807, however, he was a frequent guest in Jena at the home of the publisher Carl Ernst Fromann, who had published the sonnets of Petrarch the year before. Goethe and another guest, the Romantic poet Friedrich Zacharias Werner engaged in a sonnet competition. Sonnets are generally composed in cycles that explore aspects of love, including the relationship between lovers. The most famous are those of Petrarch and Shakespeare; other great sonneteers include John Donne and the German Baroque poet Andreas Gryphius, who wrote on religious themes. What prompted the poetic competition between Goethe and Werner seems to have been the presence in the Fromann household of Fromann's 17-year-old foster daughter Minna Herzlieb.

The poems are well regarded in Goethe's oeuvre. What could there not be to like when passion, renunciation, and spiritualization of love are combined? Still, to my ears, they are a too abstract, with very little of the sensuous detail of Petrarch's sonnets. The "Christmas Box" forms an exception and may have been inspired as much by the Christmas season during which it was composed as by Minna Herzlieb. It brings together sweetly (one has to use this word here) the baked delicacies of Christmas with the "Poetisch Zuckerbrot" (sweet nothings?) with which he would like to tempt the beloved.

The lovely picture at the top of this posting, from the late 19th century, is courtesy of Goethezeitportal. Click on the image to enlarge.

Goethe at Christmas

In the first chapter of his autobiography, Poetry and Truth (Dichtung und Wahrheit), Goethe describes the effect on him of the puppet theater presented to him and his siblings by his grandmother in 1753. (His little brother Hermann died in 1759.) This account is followed by Goethe's first biographer, the Englishman George Henry Lewes (1855), who wrote: "The dear old lady, proud as a grandmother, 'spoiled' them of course, and gave them many an eatable, which they would get only in her room. But of all her gifts nothing was comparable to the puppet-show with which she surprised them of Christmas eve of 1753, and which Goethe says 'created a new world in the house.'  The reader of Wilhelm Meister will remember with what solemn importance the significance of such a puppet-show is treated, and may guess how it would exercise the boy's imagination."

According to Metzler's Goethe-Lexikon, the puppet theater was an important source of "moral-didactic" entertainment from the 17th to the 20th century. In Goethe's time favorite themes were Old Testament stories and fairy tales. He probably also became familiar with such traditional German folk figures as Hanswurst, a frequently obscene stock character of comedies and other plays, and Doctor Faustus. His most famous play is based on the Faust legend, but in 1775  Goethe also wrote a drama fragment entitled Hanswursts Hochzeit oder der Lauf der Welt, which contains over 200 scatological terms and insults describing the wedding guests.

According to Nicholas Boyle's biography of Goethe, it was actually his father who gave the children the puppet theater. I think Boyle is correct in salvaging the reputation of Caspar Goethe, who could hardly have been the pedant he has been portrayed to be.

The charming picture above (click on image to enlarge), showing the boy Goethe peering from behind the stage curtain and judging the effect of his own puppet productions, is the work of Woldemar Friedrich (1846-1901), who illustrated many episodes from Goethe's life.

Goethe Portraits

This is a late portrait of Goethe by Joseph Karl Stieler (1781-1858), which I include here simply in order to link to this Youtube offering of the same portrait done by Martin Missfeldt, "a speed painter." Which is better? Judge for yourself.

Stieler, whose portraits are characterized by the intense focus of the sitter, is most famous for his portrait of Beethoven. As has been remarked of the many portraits painted of Goethe, however: the artists for whom he sat, passionate admirers of the poet, tended instead to project themselves onto the painting surface. The same has been said of Tischbein's famous portrait of Goethe, which heads this blog.