Doctor Faustus (63 page)

I set down here what I know of this extraordinary being. Mme de Tolna was the wealthy widow of a dissipated nobleman, who however had not died of his excesses but in a racing accident. She was left childless, the owner of a palace in Budapest, a vast estate a few hours south of the capital, near Stuhlweissenburg, between the Plattensee and the Danube, and besides these a castellated villa on the same lake, Balaton. The estate, with its splendid, comfortably modernized eighteenth-century manor-house, comprised enormous wheat-growing tracts and extensive sugar-beet plantations, the harvests being manufactured in refining works on the property itself. None of these residences—palatial town house, manorial estate, or summer villa—did the owner occupy for long at a time. Mostly, one may say almost always, she was travelling, leaving her homes, to which she obviously did not cling, from which restlessness or painful memories drove her away, to the care of managers and major-domos. She lived in Paris, Naples, Egypt, the Engadine, attended from place to place by a lady’s maid, a male official something like a courier and quartermaster, and a body-physician for her sole service, which made one suspect that she was in delicate health.

Her mobility however seemed not to suffer; and combined with an enthusiasm resting on instinct, intuition, knowledge, sensibility—God knows what!—mysterious perception, soul-affinity, she commanded most unusual resources. It turned out that this woman had been present, mingling unobtrusively in the audience wherever people had been bold enough to perform any of Adrian’s music: in Lubeck, at the much-ridiculed premiere of his opera; in Zurich, in Weimar, in Prague. How often she had been near him in Munich and so near to his lodging, without revealing herself, I would not know. But she also—it came out by accident—knew Pfeiffering; had secretly made acquaintance with the setting of Adrian’s activity, his immediate surroundings; had, if I am not mistaken, stood under the window of the Abbot’s chamber and gone away unseen. All that is thrilling enough; but even stranger, summoning up the image of the devout pilgrim is a fact which I learned long afterwards and also more or less by chance: she had actually gone to Kaisersaschern, was acquainted with Oberweiler and the Buchel farm itself, and thus was aware of the parallel—to me always faintly depressing—between Adrian’s childhood setting and the frame of his later life.

I forgot to say that she had not omitted Palestrina, the village in the Sabine Hills. She spent some weeks in the Manardi house and, it appeared, made quick and close friends with Signora Manardi. When in her half-German, half-French letters she mentioned the Signora, she called her Mere Manardi. She gave the same title to Frau Schweigestill, whom, according to her own evidence, she had seen without being seen or noticed. And herself? Was it her idea to attach herself to all these maternal figures and call them sisters? What name fitted her in relation to Adrian Leverkühn? Which did she want or claim? A protecting deity, an Egeria, a soul-mate? The first letter she wrote, from Brussels, was accompanied by a gift sent to him in homage: a ring the like of which I have never seen—though in all conscience that does not mean much, since the present writer is little versed in the precious material things of this world. It was a jewel of great beauty and—to me—incalculable value. The engraved hoop itself was old Renaissance work; the stone a splendid specimen of clear pale-green emerald from the Urals, cut with large facets, a glorious sight. One could imagine that it had once adorned the hand of a prince of the Church—the pagan inscription it bore was scarcely evidence to the contrary. On the hard upper facet of the precious beryl two lines were graven in the tiniest Greek characters. Translated they ran somewhat like this: What a trembling seized on the laurel-bush of Apollo! Trembles the entire frame! Flee, profane one! Depart!

It was not hard for me to place the lines as the beginning of a hymn to Apollo, by Callimachus. They describe with unearthly terror the sign of an epiphany of the god at his shrine. The writing, with all its tininess, was clear and sharp. Rather more blurred was the sign carved beneath, like a vignette. Under a glass it revealed itself as a winged snakelike monster whose tongue was clearly arrow-shaped. The mythological fantasy made me think of the sting or shot-wound of the Chrysaean Philoctetes and the epithet AEschylus has for the arrow: “hissing winged snake”; I recalled too the connection between the arrow of Phoebus and the ray of the sun.

I can testify that Adrian was childishly delighted with this considerable gift, speaking of a sympathetic someone in the background. He accepted it without a thought, though he never, in fact, showed himself to others wearing it, but instead made a practice—or shall I say a ritual?—of putting it on for his working hours. I know that during the writing of the whole of the
Apocalypse
he wore the jewel on his left hand.

Did he think that a ring is the symbol of a bond, a fetter, yes, of possession? Obviously he thought no such thing; seeing in that precious link of an invisible chain, which he stuck on his finger while he composed, nothing more than a sort of bridge between his hermit state and the outside world; as a mere cloudy symbol of a personality, about whose features or individual traits he evidently inquired far less than I did. Was there, I asked myself, something in the woman’s outward appearance that might explain the fundamental condition of her relations with Adrian, the invisibility, the avoidance, the rule that they should never set eyes on each other? She might be ugly, lame, crippled, disfigured by a skin ailment. I do not so interpret it; but rather think that if some blemish existed it lay in the realm of the spirit and taught her to understand every sort of need for consideration and scrupulous tact. Adrian never once sought to break that law; he silently acquiesced in the bounds set to the relationship within the realms of intellect and spirit.

I use unwillingly this banal phrase. There is something colourless and weak about it, not consistent with the practical energy characteristic of this care, concern, and devotion, remote and shrouded though it was. During the composition of the Apocalypse the two carried on an exchange of letters altogether objective in their content, hers evincing a serious and solid European culture, both musically and generally speaking. My friend’s correspondent knew how to give him suggestions for the textual structure of the work, from material not easily accessible. It turned out, for instance, that that old-French metrical version of the vision of St. Paul had come to him from the “outer world.” The same outer world was constantly, if by round-about ways and through intermediaries, active on his behalf. It was “the world” which instigated that stimulating article in the
Anbruch
, certainly the only publication where enthusiasm for Leverkühn’s music could get a hearing. It was “the world” which saw to it that the “Universal Editions” had secured the oratorio while it was still being written. In 1921 it put at the disposal of the Platner marionette theatre, privately, so that the source of the gift was left vague, considerable sums for the expensive and musically adequate production of the Gesta in Domaueschingen.

I must dwell a little on this point, and the sweeping gesture accompanying it, this “putting at the disposal of.” Adrian could have no shadow of doubt that he might command any and every resource of this woman of the world who had become the recluse’s devotee. Her wealth was obviously a burden on her conscience, although she had never known life without it and probably would not have known how to live. To lay on the altar of genius as much of it as possible, as much as she ever dared to offer, was her confessed desire; and if Adrian had wished, his whole manner of life might have changed from one day to the next on the costly scale of that gem, adorned with which only the four walls of the Abbot’s chamber ever saw him. He knew it as well as I did. I need not say that he never for a moment seriously considered it. Differently constituted from me, for whom some intoxication had always lain in the thought of vast wealth lying at his feet, which he need only grasp to secure himself a princely existence, he had certainly never actually come to grips with such an idea. But once, when by exception he had left his Pfeiffering nest on a journey, he had had a fleeting glimpse, tasted an experimental sip, of the almost regal form of life which privately I could not help wishing might be permanently his.

That is twenty years since, and came about when he accepted the standing invitation of Mme de Tolna to live for as long as he chose in one of her residences—that is, of course, when she was not there. He was then, in the spring of 1924, in Vienna, where in the Ehrbar Hall and in the setting of one of the so-called Anbruch evenings Rudi Schwerdtfeger at last and finally played the violin concerto written for him. It was a great success, not least for Rudi himself. I say not least, and mean above all; for a certain concentration of interest on the art of the interpreter is inherent in the intention of the work, which, though the hand of the musician is unmistakable, is not one of Leverkühn’s highest and proudest effects, but at least in part has something complimentary and condescending, I might better say affable about it which reminded me of an early prophecy from lips now forever mute.—Adrian declined to appear before the applauding audience at the end of the piece and left the house while we were looking for him. We found him later, the producer, the beaming Rudi, and I, in the restaurant of the little hotel in the Herrengasse where he stopped alone, Schwerdtfeger having thought it due to himself to go to a hotel in the Ring.

The celebration was brief—Adrian had headache. But it seems the temporary relaxation of his plan of life led him to decide next day not to return at once to the Schweigestills’ but to please his friend of the outer world by visiting her Hungarian estate. The condition that she should be absent was complied with, for she was at the time in Vienna, though invisible. He sent a wire to the estate making announcement of his visit, and hasty arrangements were made by messages to and fro. He set off, not accompanied by me, for much to my regret I could scarcely spare time even for the concert. This time it was not Rüdiger Schildknapp either. The like-eyed one did not exert himself to go to Vienna—probably he did not have the money. No, quite naturally it was Rudi Schwerdtfeger, who was already on the spot and free. Moreover, he had just collaborated successfully with Adrian in their common enterprise, and his indefatigable self-confidence had been crowned with success—a success heavy with fate.

In this company, then, Adrian was received on the estate as though he were the lord of the manor come home from abroad.

The two spent twelve days in stately domesticity in the dix-huitieme salons and apartments of Castle Tolna, in drives through the princely estate and along the gay shores of the Plattensee, attended by an obsequious retinue, some of whom were Turks. They might use and enjoy a library in five languages; two glorious grand pianos stood on the platform of the music-room; there was a house organ and every conceivable luxury. Adrian said that in the village belonging to the property the deepest poverty prevailed and an entirely archaic, pre-revolutionary stage of development. Their guide, the manager of the estate, himself told them, with compassionate head-shakings, as a fact worth mention, that the villagers only had meat one day in the year, at Christmas, and had not even tallow candles, but literally went to bed with the chickens. To alter these shocking conditions, to which habit and ignorance had rendered those who saw them callous—for instance the indescribable filth of the village street, the utter lack of sanitation in the dwelling-hovels—would have amounted to a revolutionary deed, to which no single individual, certainly not a woman, could bring herself. But one may suspect that the sight of the village was among the things which prevented Adrian’s invisible friend from spending much time upon her own property. But I am not the man to give more than a bare sketch of this slightly fantastic episode in my friend’s austere life. I was not at his side and could not have been, even had he asked me. It was Schwerdtfeger, he could describe it. But he is dead.

CHAPTER XXXVII

I
should do better to deal with this section as I did with some earlier ones: not giving it a number of its own, but treating it simply as a continuation. To go on without any marked caesura would be correct, for the subject of the narrative is the same: “the outer world,” and the history of my departed friend’s connection or lack of connection with it. At this point, however, all mystery, all delicacy, all discretion are abandoned. No longer is “the world” embodied in the figure of a shrouded tutelary goddess showering priceless symbolic gifts. In her place we have the international business man and concert agent, naively persistent, profuse of promises, rebuffed by no reserve, certainly superficial, yet for all that to me even an engaging type. We met him in the person of Herr Saul Fitelberg, who appeared in Pfeiffering one lovely day in late summer when I happened to be there. It was a Saturday afternoon, and Sunday morning early I was returning home as it was
my
wife’s birthday. For at least an hour he amused Adrian and me and made us laugh; and then, with his business unaccomplished—in so far as there had been anything so concrete as business about it—he departed with complete equanimity. It was the year 1923; one cannot say that the man had waked up very early. However, he had not waited for the Prague and Frankfurt concerts; they belonged to a future by then not very distant. But there had been Weimar, and Donaueschingen, aside from the Swiss performances of Leverkühn’s youthful works: it took no extraordinary intuition to guess that here was something to prize and to promote. And the
Apocalypse
had appeared in print, and I think it quite possible that Monsieur Saul was in a position to study that work. In short, the man had picked up the scent, he wanted to make a kill, to build up a reputation, discover a genius and as his manager introduce him to a social world always and above all avid for new things. Such were the motives that led him to force his way so blandly into the retreat where genius created and suffered.