Doctor Faustus (34 page)

A connection of the three, brother of Signora Nella’s deceased husband, Dario Manardi, a mild, grey-bearded rustic, walking with a stick, lived with his simple, ailing wife in the family house. They did their own housekeeping while Signora Peronella provided for us seven from her romantic kitchen—the brothers, Amelia, the two permanent guests, and the visiting pair—with an amplitude that bore no relation to the modest pension price. She was inexhaustible. For when we had already enjoyed a powerful minestra, larks and polenta, scallopini in Marsala, a joint of mutton or boar with compote, thereto much salad, cheese and fruit, and our friends had lighted their government-monopoly cigarettes to smoke with the black coffee, she might say as one suggesting a captivating idea: “Signori, a little fish, perhaps?” A purple country wine which the advocate drank like water, in great gulps, croaking the while—a growth too fiery really to be recommended as a table beverage twice daily, yet on the other hand a pity to water it—served to quench our thirst. The padrona encouraged us with the words: “Drink, drink!
Fa sangue il vino.
” But Alfonso upbraided her, saying it was a superstition.

The afternoons were spent in beautiful walks, during which there were many hearty laughs at Rüdiger Schildknapp’s Anglo-Saxon jokes; down to the valley by roads lined with mulberry bushes and out a stretch into the well-cultivated country with its olive trees and vine garlands, its tilled fields divided into small holdings separated by stone walls with almost monumental entrance gates. Shall I express how much—aside from the being with Adrian again—I enjoyed the classic sky, where during the weeks of our stay not one single cloud appeared; the antique mood that lay over the land and now and then expressed itself visibly, as for instance in the rim of a well, a picturesque shepherd, a goat’s head suggestive of Pan? A smiling, slightly ironic nod was Adrian’s only response to the raptures of my humanistic soul. Artists pay little heed to their surroundings so long as these bear no direct relation to their own field of work; they see in them no more than in indifferent frame, either more or less favourable to production. We looked towards the sunset as we returned to the little town, and another such splendour of the evening sky I have not seen. A golden layer, thick and rich like oil, bordered with crimson, was on the western horizon; the sight was utterly extraordinary and so beautiful that it might well exhilarate and expand the soul. So I confess I felt slightly put off when Schildknapp, gesturing towards the marvellous spectacle, shouted his “
Besichtigen Sie jenes
.’” and Adrian burst out into the grateful laughter which Rüdiger humour always drew from him. For it seemed to me he seized the occasion to laugh at Helene’s and my emotion and even at the glory of nature’s magnificence as well.

I have already mentioned the garden of the cloister above the town, to which oar friends climbed every morning with their portfolios to work apart. They had asked permission of the monks to sit there and it had been benignly granted. We often accompanied them into the spice-scented shade of the not too well-tended plot surrounded by crumbling walls, where we would leave them to their devices and invisible to them both, who were themselves invisible to each other, isolated by bushes of oleander, laurel, and broom, spend the increasingly hot afternoon, Helene with her crochet-work, I with a book, but dwelling in my thoughts on the pleasurable excitement of the knowledge that Adrian was working on his opera close by.

On the badly out-of-tune square piano in the friends’ living-room he played to us once during our stay—unfortunately only once—from the completed sections, mostly already scored for a specially chosen orchestra, of the “pleasant well—conceited comedy 
Love’s Labour’s Lost
,” as the piece was called in 1598. He played characteristic passages and a few complete scene sequences: the first act, including the scene outside Armado’s house, and several later numbers which he had partly anticipated: in particular Biron’s monologues, which he had had especially in mind from the first, the one in verse at the end of the third act, as well as the prose one in the fourth: “They have pitched a toil, I am toiling in a pitch—pitch that defiles”; which, while always preserving the atmosphere of the comic and grotesque, expresses musically still better than the first the deep and genuine despair of the young man over his surrender to the suspect black beauty, his raging abandonment of self-mockery: “By the Lord, this love is as mad as Ajax; it kills sheep; it kills me, I a sheep”: this partly because the swift-moving, unjointed, ejaculatory prose, with its many plays on words, inspired the composer to invent musical accents of quite peculiar fantasticality; partly, also, because in music the repetition of the significant and already familiar, the suggestive or subtle invention, always makes the strongest and most speaking impression. And in the second monologue elements of the first are thus delightfully recalled to the mind. This was true above all for the embittered self-castigation of the heart because of its infatuation with the “whitely wanton with a velvet brow, with two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes,” and again quite particularly for the musical picture of these beloved accursed eyes: a melisma darkly flashing out of the sound of combined cellos and flutes, half lyrically passionate and half burlesque, which in the prose, at the place “O, but her eye—by this light, but for her eye, I would not love her,” recurs in a wildly caricatured way, where the darkness of the eyes is intensified by the pitch, but the lightning flash of them is this time given to the piccolo.

There can be no doubt that the strangely insistent and even unnecessary, dramatically little justified characterization of Rosaline as a faithless, wanton, dangerous piece of female flesh—a description given to her only in Biron’s speeches, whereas in the actual setting of the comedy she is no more than pert and witty—there can be no doubt that this characterization springs from a compulsion, heedless of artistic indiscrepancies, on the poet’s part, an urge to bring in his own experiences and, whether it fits or not, to take poetic revenge for them. Rosaline, as the lover never tires of portraying her, is the dark lady of the second sonnet sequence, Elizabeth’s maid of honour, Shakespeare’s love, who betrayed him with the lovely youth. And the “part of my rhyme and here my melancholy” with which Biron appears on the stage for the prose monologue (“Well, she hath one o’ my sonnets already”) is one of those which Shakespeare addressed to this black and whitely beauty. And how does Rosaline come to apply to the sharp-tongued, merry Biron of the play such wisdom as:

The blood of youth burns not with such excess As gravity’s revolt to wantonness?

For he is young and not at all grave, and by no means the person who could give occasion to such a comment as that it is lamentable when wise men turn fools and apply all their wit to give folly the appearance of worth. In the mouth of Rosaline and her friends Biron falls quite out of his role; he is no longer Biron, but Shakespeare in his unhappy affair with the dark lady; and Adrian, who had the sonnets, that profoundly extraordinary trio of poet, friend, and beloved, always by him in an English pocket edition, had been from the beginning at pains to assimilate the character of his Biron to this particular and favourite dialogue and to give him a music which, in suitable proportion to the burlesquing style of the whole, makes him “grave” and intellectually considerable, a genuine sacrifice to a shameful passion.

That was beautiful, and I praised it highly. And how much reason there was besides for praise and joyful amaze in what he played to us! One could say in earnest what the learned hair-splitter Holofernes says of himself: “This is a gift that I have, simple, simple: a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions: these are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion.” Wonderful! In a quite incidental, a ludicrous setting the poet there gives an incomparably full description of the artist essence, and involuntarily one referred it to the mind that was here at work to transfer Shakespeare’s satirical youthful work into the sphere of music.

Shall I completely pass over the little hurt feeling, the sense of being slighted, which I felt on the score of the subject itself, the mockery of classical studies, which in the play appear as ascetic preciosity? Of the caricature of humanism not Adrian but Shakespeare was guilty, and from Shakespeare too come the ideas wrenched out of their order in which the conceptions “culture” and “barbarism” play such a singular role. That is intellectual monkishness, a learned over-refinement deeply contemptuous of life and nature both, which sees the barbaric precisely in life and nature, in directness, humanity, feeling. Biron himself, who puts in some good words for nature to the sworn
precieux
of the groves of academe, admits that he has “for barbarism spoke more than for that angel knowledge you can say.” The angel knowledge is indeed made ridiculous, but again only through the ridiculous; for the “barbarism” into which the group falls back, the sonnet-drunk infatuation that is laid upon them as a punishment for their disastrous alliance, is caricature too, in brilliant style, love-persiflage; and only too well did Adrian’s music see to it that in the end feeling came no better off than the arrogant forswearing of it. Music, so I felt, was by its very nature called to lead men out of the sphere of absurd artificiality into fresh air, into the world of nature and humanity. But it refrained. That which the noble Biron calls barbarism, that is to say the spontaneous’and natural, celebrates here no triumph.

As art this music of my friend was admirable indeed. Contemptuous of a mass display, he had originally wanted to score for the classical Beethoven orchestra; and only for the sake of the bombastic and absurd figure of the Spaniard Armado had he introduced a second pair of horns, three trombones, and a bass tuba. But everything was in strict chamber-music style, a delicate airy filigree, a clever parody in notes, ingenious and humoristic, rich in subtle, high-spirited ideas. A music-lover who had tired of romantic democracy and popular moral Harangues and demanded an art for art’s sake, an ambitionless—or in the most exclusive sense ambitious—art for artists and connoisseurs, must have been ravished by this self-centred and completely cool esoteric; but which now, as esoteric, in the spirit of the piece in every way mocked and parodistically exaggerated itself, thus mixing into its ravishment a grain of hopelessness, a drop of melancholy.

Yes, admiration and sadness mingled strangely as I contemplated this music. “How beautiful!” the heart said to itself—mine at least said so—“and how sad!” The admiration was due to a witty and melancholy work of art, an intellectual achievement which deserved the name of heroic, something just barely possible, behaving like arrogant travesty. I know not how otherwise to characterize it than by calling it a tense, sustained, neck-breaking game played by art at the edge of impossibility. It was just this that made one sad. But admiration and sadness, admiration and doubt, is that not almost the definition of love? It was with a strained and painful love for him and what was his that I listened to Adrian’s performance. I could not say much; Schildknapp, who always made a very good, receptive audience, expressed the right things much more glibly and intelligently than I. Even afterwards, at dinner, I sat benumbed and absent at the Manardi table, moved by feelings with which the music we had heard so fully corresponded. “
Bevi, bevi!
” said the padrona. “Fa sangue il vino!” And Amelia moved her spoons to and fro before her face and murmured: “
Spiriti? Spiriti?
”

This evening was one of the last which we, my good wife and I, spent with the two friends in their novel quarters. A few days later, after a stay of three weeks, we had to leave and begin the return journey to Germany. The others for months still, on into the autumn, remained true to the idyllic uniformity of their existence between cloister garden, family table, campagna framed in rich gold, and stone-floored study, where they spent the evenings by lamplight. So it had been the whole of the summer before, and their winter way of life in the town had not been essentially different. They lived in via Torre Argentina, near the Teatro Costanzi and the Pantheon, three flights up, with a landlady who gave them breakfast and luncheon. In a near-by trattoria they took their dinner at charge of a monthly sum. The role of the cloister garden of Palestrina was played in Rome by the Villa Doria Pamfili, where on warm spring and autumn days they pursued their labours beside a classically lovely fountain where from time to time a roving and pasturing cow or horse came to drink. Adrian seldom failed the afternoon municipal concerts in Piazza Colonna. On occasion there was an evening of opera; as a rule they spent it playing dominoes over a glass of hot orange punch, in a quiet corner of some cafe.

More extended society than this they had none—or as good as none. Their isolation was almost as complete in Rome as in the country. The German element they avoided entirely—Schildknapp invariably took to flight so soon as a sound of his mother tongue struck on his ear. He was quite capable of getting out of an omnibus or train when there were “Germans” in it. But their solitary way of life-solitary
a deux
, it is true—gave little opportunity to make even Italian friends. Twice during the winter they were invited by a lady of indefinite origins who patronized art and artists, Mrae de Coniar, to whom Rüdiger Schildknapp had a Munich letter of introduction. In her home on the Corso, decorated with personally signed photographs in plush and silver frames, they met hordes of international artists, theatre people, painters, musicians, Polish, Hungarians, French, also Italians; but individual persons they soon lost sight of. Sometimes Schildknapp separated from Adrian to drink malmsey with young Britishers into whose arms his English predilection had driven him; to make excursions to Tivoli or the Trappist monastery at Quattro Fontane, to consume eucalyptus brandy and talk nonsense with them as a relief from the consuming difficulties of the art of translation.