Doctor Faustus (6 page)

His brother George’s future was conditioned by his position as heir, and he had always felt in complete harmony with it. What should become of the second son was for the parents an open question, which must be decided according to the tastes and capacities he might show; and it was remarkable how early the idea was fixed in his family’s head and in all of ours that Adrian was to be a scholar. What sort of scholar remained long in doubt; but the whole bearing of the lad, his way of expressing himself, his clear definition, even his look, his facial expression, never left a doubt, in the mind of my father for instance, that this scion of the Leverkühn stock was called to “something higher”; that he would be the first scholar of his line.

The decisive confirmation of this idea came from the ease, one might say the superior facility, with which Adrian absorbed the instruction of the elementary school. He received it in the paternal home, for Jonathan Leverkühn did not send his children to the village school, and the chief factor in this decision was, I believe, not so much social ambition as the earnest wish to give them a more careful education than they could get from instruction in common with the cottage children of Oberweiler. The schoolmaster, a still young and sensitive man, who never ceased to be afraid of the dog Suso, came over to Buchel afternoons when he had finished his official duties, in winter fetched by Thomas in the sleigh. By the time he took young Adrian in hand he had already given the thirteen-year-old George all the necessary foundation for his further training as agronomist. But now he, schoolmaster Michelson, was the very first to declare, loudly and with a certain vehemence, that the boy must “in God’s name,” go to high school and the university, for such a learning head and lightning brain he, Michelson, had never seen, and it would be a thousand pities if one did not do everything to open to this young scholar the way to the heights of knowledge. Thus or something like it, certainly rather like a seminarist, did he express himself, speaking indeed of ingenium, of course in part to show off with the word, which sounded droll enough applied to such childish achievements. Yet obviously it came from an awed and astonished heart.

I was never present at these lesson-hours and know only by hearsay about them; but I can easily imagine that the behaviour of my young Adrian must sometimes have been a little hard on a preceptor himself young, and accustomed to drive his learning with whip and spurs into dull and puzzled or rebellious heads. “If you know it all already,” I once heard him say to the boy, “then I can go home.” Of course it was not true that the pupil “knew it all already.” But his manner did suggest the thought, simply because here was a case of that swift, strangely sovereign and anticipatory grasp and assimilation, as sure as easy, which soon dried up the master’s praise, for he felt that such a head meant a danger to the modesty of the heart and betrayed it easily to arrogance. From the alphabet to syntax and grammar, from the progression of numbers and the first rules to the rule of three and simple sums in proportion, from the memorizing of little poems (and there was no memorizing, the verses were straightway and with the utmost precision grasped and possessed) to the written setting down of his own train of thought on themes out of the geography—it was always the same: Adrian gave it his ear, then turned round with an air that seemed to say: “Yes, good, so much is clear, all right, go on!” To the pedagogic temperament there is something revolting about that. Certainly the young schoolmaster was tempted again and again to cry: “What is the matter with you? Take some pains!” But why, when obviously there was no need to take pains?

As I said, I was never present at the lessons; but I am compelled to conclude that my friend received the scientific data purveyed by Kerr Michelson fundamentally with the same mien, so hard to characterize, with which under the lime tree he had accepted the fact that if a horizontal melody of nine bars is divided into three sections of three bars each, they will still produce a harmonically fitting texture. His teacher knew some Latin; he instructed Adrian in it and then announced that the lad—he was now ten years old—was ready if not for the fifth, then certainly for the fourth form. His work was done.

Thus Adrian left his parents’ house at Easter 1895 and came to town to attend our Boniface gymnasium, the school of the Brethren of the Common Life. His uncle, Nikolaus Leverkühn, his father’s brother, a respected citizen of Kaisersaschern, declared himself ready to receive the lad into his house.

CHAPTER VI

A
nd as for Kaisersaschern, my native town on the Saale, the stranger should be informed that it lies somewhat south of Halle, towards Thuringia. I had almost said it lay, for long absence has made it slip from me into the past. Yet its towers rise as ever on the same spot, and I would not know whether its architectural profile has suffered so far from the assaults of the air war. In view of its historic charm that would be in the highest degree regrettable. I can add this quite calmly, since I share with no small part of our population, even those hardest hit and homeless, the feeling that we are only getting what we gave, and even if we must suffer more frightfully than we have sinned, we shall only hear in our ears that he who sows the wind must reap the whirlwind.

Neither Halle itself, the industrial town, nor Leipzig, the city of Bach the cantor of St. Thomas, nor Weimar, nor even Dessau nor Magdeburg is far distant; but Kaisersaschern is a junction, and with its twenty-seven thousand inhabitants entirely self-sufficient; feeling itself like every German town a centre of culture, with its own historical dignity and importance. It is supported by several industries: factories and mills for the production of machinery, leather goods, fabrics, arms, chemicals, and so on. Its museum, besides a roomful of crude instruments of torture, contains a very estimable library of twenty-five thousand volumes and five thousand manuscripts, among the latter two books of magic charms in alliterative verse; they are considered by some scholars to be older than those in Merseburg. The charms are perfectly harmless: nothing worse than a little rain—conjuring, in the dialect of Fulda. The town was a bishopric in the tenth century, and again from the beginning of the twelfth to the fourteenth. It has a castle, and a cathedral church where you may see the tomb of Kaiser Otto III, son of Adelheid and husband of Theophano, who called himself Emperor of the Romans, also Saxonicus; the latter not because he wanted to be a Saxon but in the sense on which Scipio called himself Africanus, because he had conquered the Saxons. He was driven out of his beloved Rome and died in misery in the year 1002; his remains were brought to Germany and buried in the cathedral in Kaisersaschern—not at all what he would have relished himself, for he was a prize specimen of German self-contempt and had been all his life ashamed of being German.

As for the town—which I refer to by choice in the past tense, since after all I am speaking of the Kaisersaschern of our youth—there is this to be said of it, that in atmosphere as well as in outward appearance it had kept a distinctly mediaeval air. The old churches, the faithfully preserved dwelling-houses and warehouses, buildings with exposed and jutting upper storey; the round towers in the wall, with their peaked roofs; the tree-studded squares with cobblestones; the Town Hall of mixed Gothic and Renaissance architecture, with a bell-tower on the high roof, loggias underneath, and two other pointed towers forming bays and continuing the facade down to the ground—all these gave a sense of continuity with the past. More, even, the place seemed to wear on its brow that famous formula of timelessness, the scholastic
nunc stans
. Its individual character, which was the same as three hundred, nine hundred years ago, asserted itself against the stream of time passing over it, constantly making changes in many things, while others, decisive for the picture, were preserved out of piety; that is to say, out of a pious defiance of time and also out of pride in them, for the sake of their value and their memories.

This much of the scene itself. But something still hung on the air from the spiritual constitution of the men of the last decades of the fifteenth century: a morbid excitement, a metaphysical epidemic latent since the last years of the Middle Ages. This was a practical, rational modern town.—Yet no, it was not modern, it was old; and age is past as presentness, a past merely overlaid with presentness. Rash it may be to say so, but here one could imagine strange things: as for instance a movement for a children’s crusade might break out; a St. Vitus’s dance; some wandering lunatic with communistic visions, preaching a bonfire of the vanities; miracles of the Cross, fantastic and mystical folk-movements-things like these, one felt, might easily come to pass. Of course they did not—how should they? The police, acting in agreement with the times and the regulations, would not have allowed them. And yet what all in our time have the police not allowed—again in agreement with the times, which might readily, by degrees, allow just such things to happen again now? Our time itself tends, secretly—or rather anything but secretly; indeed, quite consciously, with a strangely complacent consciousness, which makes one doubt the genuineness and simplicity of life itself and which may perhaps evoke an entirely false, unblest historicity—it tends, I say, to return to those earlier epochs; it enthusiastically re-enacts symbolic deeds of sinister significance, deeds that strike in the face the spirit of the modern age, such, for instance, as the burning of the books and other things of which I prefer not to speak.

The stamp of old-world, underground neurosis which I have been describing, the mark and psychological temper of such a town, betrays itself in Kaisersaschern by the many “originals,” eccentrics, and harmlessly half-mad folk who live within its walls and, like the old buildings, belong to the picture. The pendant to them is formed by the children, the “young ‘uns,” who pursue the poor creatures, mock them, and then in superstitious panic run away. A certain sort of “old woman” used always in certain epochs without more ado to be suspected of witchcraft, simply because she looked “queer,” though her appearance may well have been, in the first place, nothing but the result of the suspicion against her, which then gradually justified itself till it resembled the popular fancy: small, grey, bent, with a spiteful face, rheumy eyes, hooked nose, thin lips, a threatening crook. Probably she owned cats, an owl, a talking bird. Kaisersaschern harboured more than one such specimen; the most popular, most teased and feared was Cellar-Lise, so called because she lived in a basement in Little Brassfounder’s Alley—an old woman whose figure had so assimilated itself to popular prejudice that even the most unaffected could feel an archaic shudder at meeting her, especially when the children were after her and she was putting them to flight by spitting curses. Of course, quite definitely there was nothing wrong with her at all.

Here let me be bold enough to express an opinion born of the experiences of our own time. To a friend of enlightenment the word and conception “the folk” has always something anachronistic and alarming about it; he knows that you need only tell a crowd they are “the folk” to stir them up to all sorts of reactionary evil. What all has not happened before our eyes—or just not quite before our eyes—in the name of “the folk,” though it could never have happened in the name of God or humanity or the law! But it is the fact that actually the folk remain the folk, at least in a certain stratum of its being, the archaic; and people from Little Brassfounder’s Alley and round about, people who voted the Social-Democratic ticket at the polls, are at the same time capable of seeing something daemonic in the poverty of a little old woman who cannot afford a lodging above-ground. They will clutch their children to them when she approaches, to save them from the evil eye. And if such an old soul should have to burn again today, by no means an impossible prospect, were even a few things different, “the folk” would stand and gape behind the barriers erected by the Mayor, but they would probably not rebel.—I speak of the folk; but this old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being.

To return to those oddities of Kaisersaschern: there was a man of indefinite age who, if suddenly called to on the street, had a compulsion to execute a sort of twitching dance with his legs drawn up. His face was both ugly and sad, but as though he were begging pardon, he would smile at the urchins bawling at his heels. Then there was a woman named Mathilde Spiegel, dressed in the fashion of a bygone time: she wore a train trimmed with ruffles, and a
fladus
—a ridiculous corruption of the French
flute douce
, originally meaning flattery, but here used for a curious coiffure with curls and ornaments. She wore rouge too, but was not immoral, being far too witless; she merely rambled through the streets with her nose in the air, accompanied by pug dogs with satin saddle-cloths. A small rentier was another such freak; he had a bulbous purple nose, and a big seal ring on his forefinger. His real name was Schnalle, but he was called Tootle-oo, because he had a habit of adding this senseless chirrup to everything he said. He liked to go to the railway station, and when a freight train pulled out would lift his finger and warn the man sitting on the roof of the last car: “Don’t fall off, don’t fall off, tootle-oo!”

It may be that these grotesque memories are unworthy of inclusion here—I am inclined to believe it. Yet all these figures were, in a way, public institutions, uncommonly characteristic of the psychological picture of my native town, Adrian’s setting till he went to the university, for nine years of his young life. I spent them at his side, for though by age I was two forms beyond him, we kept together, apart from our respective class-mates, during the recesses in the walled courtyard, and also met each other in the afternoons, in our little studies: either he came over to the shop or I went to him in the house of his uncle at Parochialstrasse 15, where the mezzanine storey was occupied by the well-known Leverkühn musical-instruments firm.