End of Christmas Season

I thought this picture would grab people's attention. Note the gal (click on image to enlarge) who has slipped in among the divers hoping to grab the cross in the icy waters on Epiphany Day in Sofia, Bulgaria.

January 8 was the day on which my parents traditionally took down our Christmas tree, marking the end of the holidays. For those of you who can't get enough of the season -- and I certainly did not hear enough caroling this year -- the "Big Picture" has more great photographs. Strange how few are from the U.S. Does this lack say something about our vexed relationship with religion these days?

Goethe's Working Method

Reviews reveal that Heinrich Meyer's "inner biography" of Goethe, subtitled Das Leben im Werk (the life in the work), provoked intensely negative as well as admiring responses on its publication in 1949, but I always find something of interest in it and dip into it as the mood strikes me. In a chapter of Goethe's poetic circle, he draws attention to a difference between Goethe and Schiller that gave me a new glimpse of Goethe.

According to Meyer, Schiller was so communicative about whatever he was working on that Goethe knew the plan of Demetrius so well that he probably could have completed it after Schiller's death in 1805. For Goethe, however, a work that had been communicated or discussed with another person was "finished" (erledigt); he wouldn't bother then to write it down.

Goethe's poetic memory was "determined by motif and mood" (motivisch und stimmungsmäßig bestimmt): he carried with him a theme for years, for half a century, reworked it in his mind, somewhat like a lawyer contemplating all possible questions and objections of an opponent and meeting them in advance. Once the matter, the scene, the person, the language had achieved form in his mind (I am paraphrasing Meyer here), then it was finished and had to be communicated. If it was not immediately dictated, Goethe lost the desire to carry it out. In Meyer's view Goethe could conceive a plan for a work, but it was impossible to reconceive it, to begin anew, which can be seen in his reworking of Götz.

Goethe did not like writing by hand. In his autobiography he describes how he began dictating already in his Frankfurt youth, taking advantage of the skills of a young man living in the Goethe family household. In Weimar he dictated his prose and his correspondence to servants, secretaries, friends. This method required immense discipline and concentration and tended to dampen expressions of intimacy. What about inspiration? In my view, Goethe had such "acoustic memory" that what he wanted to say was always at the tip of his tongue, so to speak, waiting to come together with the idea he carried around in his head. 

These two views of poets dictating -- Goethe with Johann August Friedrich John (1794-1854),  and John Milton with his daughters -- show very different temperaments. The drawing of Goethe and his amanuensis, however, by J.J. Schmeller, is contemporary, while that of the blind Milton dictating to his daughters (now in the New York Public Library) is by the Hungarian artist Mihály Munkácsy ( 1844-1900)

Sylvia Townsend Warner -- and Goethe!

When the house has cleaned itself at last

Of its diurnal human,

When the black man and the blind woman

Both have groped their way into the dark

And the dwindling watchman has gone by,

I have heard him waken, and sigh.

I have heard the bedstead twang and creak,

And the bed-curtains swaying,

And he sprawled down on his knees, praying:

O Jesu pie, salvum me fac!

Whether that same Jesu heard him or no,

My ears attended to his woe.

The above poem, "Dr. Johnson's Cat," is by Sylvia Townsend Warner (b. 1893), a writer who has long intrigued me. It is not untypical of Warner to write from the point of view of an animal or even a witch, as in her first novel, Lolly Willowes, when, Lolly, to escape the importuning of a well-meaning relative, turns herself into one. The opportunity to post something about Warner arrived with the current issue (January 2, 2009) of the Times Literary Supplement, in which Ali Smith, an English novelist and short story writer, reviews new editions of poems by STW. (Come to think of it, Ali Smith also writes from unexpected points of view, for instance, that of a dead person in Hotel World.)

There is often a hint of maliciousness in Warner's short stories, which can be delicious or off-putting. Suffice it to say that she is not predictable. One of my favorite stories is "A Widow's Quilt," in which a married woman begins making one while her husband is very much alive. On the other hand, I find Warner's stories about "fairy life," Kingdoms of Elfin, too whimsical for this Enlightenment scholar. Penelope Fitzgerald (who wrote a wonderful novel about Novalis, The Blue Flower) spoke of Warner's "affinity with whatever it is that defies control." Fitzgerald went on to say that she did not mean sin or magic, "for she [STW] regarded both of these as perfectly amenable, but what she liked to call 'the undesigned.'" Warner belongs in Thomas Hardy country, which I suppose has quite disappeared in England. As a young woman she worked as a musicologist, part of a committee that was searching and editing Tudor music, and she traveled alone throughout England collecting this manuscript material.

After reading Ali Smith's review, I went back to the letters between STW and the novelist William Maxwell, who had been her editor at the New Yorker, the magazine that published many of her short stories. Here is a short example of Warner's writing that is so appealing, from a report on a visit to the Villa d'Este:

We got there so early in the morning that we had it all to ourselves, painted rooms, and cypresses and fountains, and gardeners snipping at box-hedges. I realised that such fountains come out of the same vein of Italian genius as the immense crystal chandeliers that fly like swans in the roofs of baroque churches and hang in a ladder all the way up the transepts of St Peter's. The water that falls in a fringed curtain from the goblet fountain is not so much water-works as water-sculpture.

I never fail to check indexes for Goethe in whatever book I am reading, and, lo and behold, there were several entries. Here is what she writes, in November 1973:

What I love about Wilhelm Meister is what I loved about Werther and Elective Affinities -- that what seems like historical reconstruction is really just ordinary social detail to Goethe. Scenes, pictures, costumes, that remind me of paintings were to him simply the way things were. The beginning drags -- perhaps because I am reading it in the evening before bedtime, and I am not fond of Goethe's sermonizing [!], but I do like the people. I am at the place where he finds (Oh most unlikely device!) in the scarf that he tore from Marianne's neck the note from her elderly protector -- in short not very far along. Faust and the novels are the only works I haven't read in German, way back in my youth. Dichtung und Wahrheit was what I loved, though I also liked the plays. The eighteenth century love of generalities I find rather tedious unless they are Gibbon's generalities, in which case I have to lie down on the floor so I can laugh more comfortably. But I wouldn't dream of not finding out what happens to Wilhelm.

By the way, "the black man" in the poem about Dr. Johnson was Francis Barber, a Jamaican boy adopted by Samuel Johnson in the 1750s and to whom he, indeed, felt like a father. A novelistic account of their relationship can be found in Caryl Phillips Foreigners, which does a pretty good job of re-creating the 18th century.

New York Public Library

I am not a native New Yorker, but I try to make the best of it, living here. That's a joke! But in truth there are several places in the U.S. that I can imagine myself in. Mostly this has to do with domestic realities: large supermarkets! dishwashers! yards planted with flowers! barbecues on the patio! the sound of birds outside your window when you wake up in the morning!

But here I am, married to a real New Yorker (from the Bronx, at that). It's not bad at all.

We live half a city block from Riverside Park and the Hudson River, which is our back yard, particularly in summer, when we kayak a lot. (Central Park, says Rick, is for tourists, though we spend a lot of time there, too.) We are volunteers at the Downtown Boathouse Organization, which puts the public into kayaks on the Hudson in the summer. Yes, it really is clean enough to kayak. Last year, I even did a circumnavigation of Manhattan.

One of my favorite hangouts, however, is the New York Public Library, where I do most of my research on world literature. I have my own shelf and quiet work space in the Wertheim Room, named by Barbara Tuchman, who was a scholar at the Library, in honor of her father. The Library also holds exhibitions, including one last year on "John Milton at 400." I gave a talk in the accompanying lecture series, on the subject of Milton in Germany in the 18th century. 

So, whenever I want to take a break from work in the Wertheim Room, I wander down to one of the exhibitions, all of which draw on the rich resources of the Library. These days I am captivated by "Art Deco Design: Rhythm and Verve." The image above of the lady in the gorgeous evening dress, a photomechanical print by Paul Poiret from 1924, is from that exhibit. The intense colors of many Art Deco prints derived from a painstaking hand-applied technique, called pochoir, which used stencil plates. The hues were added separately until the composition attained the highly tactile look we associate with these prints. Interestingly, the term "Art Deco" was only coined in 1968. Manhattan of course is the city of Deco architecture, as in this decoration from Radio City Music Hall.

Ephiphany

A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices ringing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

No, that is not by Goethe, though he did write a poem, not his most inspired, on the subject of the Epiphany, today's feast in the Western and Eastern Catholic churches. For those who are interested, Goethe's poem is called "Epiphanias" and can be found here. Goethe did write about the three kings, "Die heiligen drei Könige," in another context, and on the occasion of today's feast I have looked into the background of that seemingly strange text, which appeared in Kunst und Alterthum in 1820 (see WA I, 41.1, 168-82 and 194). Goethe describes there in great detail a Latin  manuscript, dedicated to a bishop, "probably in Cologne." Goethe estimated that the manuscript was from the 15th century, but later discovered that it was by Johannes von Hildesheim, a Carmelite monk who died in 1372. John wrote on philosophical, theological, and literary subjects, but his 1364 Historia trium regum represented in the Middle Ages one of the major strands of the magi legend.  Goethe also later discovered that the Historia was executed at the behest of Domherr Florentius von Wevelinghoven on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the transposition of the relics of the three kings to Cologne from Milan in 1164.

Goethe obviously read the text very carefully, for in Kunst und Alterthum he describes the narrative in great detail. We get an indication of his interest in a letter to Sulpiz Boisserée on October 22, 1819:

Ich erwerbe zufällig ein altes Manuscript, klein Quart, 84 Blätter, mit Abbreviaturen, consequent und also leserlich geschrieben, wenn es mir glecih stellenweise noch Mühe macht. Es enthält die Legende der heiligen drey Könige und ihres Sternes, vom Ausgang der Kinder Israel aus Aegypten an bis zur fortwährenden Verehrung ihrer Reste in Cöln.

He goes on to describe his fascination with the contents of the manuscript:

Geschichte, Überlieferung, Mögliches, Unwahrscheinliches, Fabelhaftes mit Natürlichem, Wahrscheinlichem, Wirklichem bis zur letzten und individuellsten Schilderung zusammen geschmolzen, entwaffnet wie ein Mährchen alle Kritik. ... Weder Pfaffthum noch Philisterey noch Beschränktheit [important categories for Goethe!] ist zu spüren, die Art, wie der Verfasser sich Glauben zu verschaffen sucht und dann doch auf eine mässige Weise das Zutrauen seiner Hörer [!] missbraucht, ohne dass man ihn geradezu für einen Schelm halten kann, ist allerliebst; genug ich wüßte kein Volksbuch neben dem dieses Büchlein nicht stehen könnte.

Goethe's enthusiasm was merited, for it turns out that the Historia trium regum, with its fantastic, detailed, and expansive narrative was indeed one of the most widespread legends of the Middle Ages, becoming the model for the Legenda aurea. According to John of Hildesheim's account, the star of Bethlehem was first sighted in the forty-second year of the reign of Augustus from "Mount Vaus." An observatory had been built there by heathen astrologers, because of the Old Testament prophecy of Balaam, and for generations they had watched for a sign of the Messiah.

Unlike in accounts familiar to me, after reports of the star the three magi departed from different lands to follow it. Caspar, for instance, was the king of Tarsis; Balthasar was king of "Godolia and Saba"; while Melchior was king of Nubia and Arabia. (Is this why Melchior was frequently portrayed as black in medieval and Renaissance art, as in this painting by Jan Gossaert in the National Gallery in London? Certainly art historical research has revealed this already.) Each following his own path, they arrived at the outskirts of Bethlehem in thirteen days and were able to understand each other's language (a foreshadowing of Pentecost?). All this and more can be found in Goethe's summary of the manuscript. He also speculates that Mount Vaus should be Mount Kaus, perhaps referring to the Caucasus.

Despite the fame of the manuscript, it had been forgotten by the time Goethe came across it. He was responsible for the publication by Cotta in 1822 of an edition of with a translation by Gustav Schwab. This University of Cologne site details its transmission and publication history. Also of interest is the material provided by the Dutch Institute for "Natuur- en Sterrenkunde" (from which comes the image -- click to enlarge -- at the head of this post).

Let me allow T.S. Eliot to have the final word on the journey of the magi:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning.

Death in Venice etc.

My 2009 desk calendar is rapidly filling up with appointments and events. First among them in January is a series of lectures at Columbia University named in honor of Leonard Hastings Schoff. The speaker is Philip Kitcher, professor of philosophy at Columbia, who will give three lectures on the theme "Death in Venice: The Case(s) of Gustav (von) Aschenbach." (The parens in "Case" I understand, but am puzzled about the (von) before Aschenbach.) In the announcement for the series, Professor Kitcher writes that he wants "to examine Mann's intriguing novella (and to a lesser extent the opera and the film) from a philosophical perspective." He goes on to say:

It has always been clear to Mann's readers that there is a philosophical backdrop to the story -- the echoes and citations of Plato, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche are unmistakable. Nevertheless, critics have not taken Mann sufficiently seriously as a philosopher. I shall try to show that he (and Britten, and Mahler, whose music Visconti uses) addresses deep issues about the values central to human lives, the kinds of questions raised by Plato, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Those questions focus on the role of discipline in the life of citizens and of artists, the potential seductions and corruption of beauty, and the shadows cast by awareness of one's own, possibly imminent death.

Professor Kitcher, who has specialized in the history of science, was a 2008 Lannan Notable Book Award recipient for his work Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith. The lectures take place on January 26, February 2, and February 8 (all Mondays) at 8 p.m. in the Kellogg Center, International Affairs Building, Room 1501. Follow this link for the location of IAB on Columbia's East Campus.

Also of interest re Thomas Mann is the movie Buddenbrooks, which opened on Christmas Day in Germany. Reactions are mixed, although the story of the merchant family, according to newspaper headlines, struck a nerve in "recession-hit Germany." Stefan Falke, a German photographer living in Brooklyn, is responsible for most of the photographs in a recent book documenting the sumptuous costume drama. See his recent posting on the book published by S. Fischer. Until the movie appears stateside, you can sate yourself on images from it at Stefan's website.

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.