Doctor Faustus (81 page)
Authors: Thomas Mann
* * *
Reverence forbids me to describe Adrian’s condition when he came to himself after the twelve hours’ unconsciousness into which the paralytic stroke at the piano had plunged him. No, not to himself did he come; rather he found himself as a stranger, who was only the burnt-out husk of his personality, having at bottom nothing to do with him who had been called Adrian Leverkühn. After all, the word “dementia” originally meant nothing else than this aberration from self, self-alienation.
I will say this much: that he did not remain in Pfeiffering. Rüdiger Schildknapp and I assumed the hard duty of conveying the patient, treated by Dr. Kurbis with sedatives for the journey, to Munich and a private hospital for nervous diseases, in Nymphenburg, directed by Dr. von Hosslin. There Adrian remained for three months. The prognosis of the specialist stated without reservation that this was a disease of the brain which could only run its course. But in the measure that it did so, it would pass through the present crass manifestations and with suitable treatment arrive at quieter, though unfortunately not more hopeful phases. This information it was which after some consultation determined Schildknapp and myself to delay our announcement of the catastrophe to Adrian’s mother, Elsbeth Leverkühn at Buchel. It was certain that on the receipt of such news she would hasten to him; and if more calmness might be hoped for, it seemed no more than human to spare her the intolerable, shattering spectacle of her child before that was in any measure improved by institutional treatment.
Her child! For that and nothing more was Adrian Leverkühn again. She came one day, the old mother, when the year was passing into autumn. She came to Pfeiffering, to take him back to his Thuringian home, the scene of his childhood, to which his outward frame of life had so long stood in such singular correspondence. She came to a helpless infant, who had no longer any memory of his manhood’s proud flight, or at most some very dark and obscure vision buried in his depths; who clung to her skirts as of yore, and whom as in early days she must—or might—tend and coax and reprove for being “naughty.” Anything more fearfully touching or lamentable cannot be imagined than to see a free spirit, once bold and defiant, once soaring in a giddy arc above an astonished world, now creeping broken back to his mother’s arms. But my conviction, resting on unequivocal evidence, is that the maternal experiences from so tragic and wretched a return, in all its grief, some appeasement as well. The Icarus-flight of the hero son, the steep ascent of the male escaped from her outgrown care, is to a mother an error both sinful and incomprehensible: in her heart, with secret anger she hears the austere, estranging words: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” And when he falls and is shattered she takes him back, the “poor, dear child,” to her bosom, thinking nothing else than that he would have done better never to have gone away.
I have reason to believe that within the blackness of his spirit’s night Adrian felt a horror of this soft humiliation; that an instinctive repulsion, a remnant of his pride was still alive, before he surrendered with gloomy relish to the comfort which an exhausted spirit must after all find in complete mental abdication. Evidence of this compulsive rebellion and of urge to flight from the maternal is supplied, at least in part, by the attempt at suicide which he made when we had succeeded in making him understand that Elsbeth Leverkühn had been told of his illness and was on her way to him. What happened was this: After three months’ treatment in the von Hosslin establishment, where I was allowed to see my friend only seldom and always only for a few minutes, he achieved a degree of composure—I do not say improvement—which enabled the physician to consent to private care in quiet Pfeiffering. Financial reasons too spoke for this course. And so once more the patient’s familiar surroundings received him. At first he continued under the supervision of the attendant who had brought him back. But his behaviour seemed to warrant the removal of this precaution, and for the time being he was attended by the family, particularly by Frau Schweigestill. Gereon had brought a capable daughter-in-law into the house (Clementine had become the wife of the Waldshut station-master) and the mother was now retired, with leisure to devote her human feeling to her lodger, who after all these years had become, though so much above her, something like her son. He trusted her as he did no one else. To sit hand in hand with her in the Abbot’s room or in the garden behind the house was obviously most soothing to him. I found him thus when I went for the first time to Pfeiffering. The look he directed upon me as I approached had something violent and unbalanced about it, quickly resolved, to my great grief, in gloomy repugnance. Perhaps he recognized in me the companion of his sane existence, all memory of which he rejected. On a cautious hint from Frau Else that he should speak “nicely” to me, his face only darkened still more, its expression was even menacing. There was nothing for me to do save in sadness to withdraw.
The moment had now come to compose the letter which should as gently as possible inform his mother of the facts. To delay longer would have been unfair to her, and the answering telegram announcing her arrival followed without a day’s delay. As I said, Adrian had been told; but it was hard to know if he had grasped the news. An hour later, however, when he was supposed to be asleep, he escaped unnoticed from the house. Gereon and a farmhand came up with him by the Klammerweiher; he had removed his outer clothing and was standing up to his neck where the water deepened so abruptly from the bank. He was just disappearing when the man plunged after him and brought him out. As they were bringing him back to the house he spoke repeatedly of the coldness of the water and added that it was very hard to drown oneself in a pond one had bathed and swum in often as a boy. But that he had never done in the Klammer pool, only in its counterpart at Buchel, the Cow Trough.
My guess
, which amounts
almost to certainty
,
‘is that a mystic
idea of salvation was behind his frustrated attempt to escape. The idea is familiar to the older theology and in particular to early Protestantism: namely, that those who had invoked the Devil could save their souls by “yielding their bodies.” Very likely Adrian acted in this sense, among others, and God alone knows whether we did right in not letting him so act up to the end. Not all that happens in madness is therefore simply to be prevented, and the obligation to preserve life was in this case obeyed in scarcely anyone’s interest save the mother’s—for undoubtedly the maternal would prefer an irresponsible son to a dead one.
She came, Jonathan Leverkühn’s brown-eyed widow with the smooth white head, bent on taking her lost and erring son back into childhood. When they met, Adrian trembled for a long time, resting his head on the breast of the woman he called
Mutter
and
Du
. Frau Schweigestill, who kept out of the way, he called
Mutter
and
Sie
. Elsbeth spoke to her son, in the still melodious voice which all her life long she had refrained from song. But during the journey north into central Germany, accompanied fortunately by the attendant familiar to Adrian, there came without warning or occasion an outburst of rage against his mother, an unexpected seizure, which obliged Frau Leverkühn to retire to another compartment for the remainder, almost half of the journey, leaving the patient alone with his attendant.
It was an isolated occurrence. Nothing of the sort happened again. When she approached him as they arrived in Weissenfels he joined her with demonstrations of love and pleasure, followed her at her heels to Buchel, and was the most docile of children to her who expended herself on his care with a fullness of devotion which only a mother can give. At Buchel, where likewise for years a daughter-in-law had presided and two grandchildren were growing up, he occupied the upstairs room he had once shared with his elder brother, and once more it was the old linden, instead of the elm, whose boughs stirred in the breeze beneath his window and whose marvellous scent he seemed to enjoy. They could confidently leave him free to sit and dream the hours away on the round bench where once the loud-voiced stable-girl had taught us children how to sing canons. His mother took care that he got exercise: arm in arm they often walked through the quiet countryside. When they met someone he would put out his hand; she did not restrain him, and they would all exchange greetings in turn while standing.
As for me, I saw our dear man again in 1935, being by then
emeritus
. I found myself at Buchel, a sorrowful gratulant on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. The linden was in bloom, he sat beneath it, his mother beside him. I confess my knees trembled as I approached him with flowers in my hand. He seemed grown smaller, which might be due to the bent and drooping posture, from which he lifted to me a narrow face, an Ecce-homo countenance, despite the healthy country colour, with woeful open mouth and vacant eyes. In Pfeiffering he had wished not to recognize me. Now there was no doubt at all that, despite reminders from his mother, he connected with my appearance no memories whatever. Of what I said to him about his birthday, the meaning of my visit, he obviously understood nothing. Only the flowers seemed to arouse his interest for a moment, then they lay forgotten.
I saw him once more in 1939, after the conquest of Poland, a year before his death, which his mother, at eighty, still survived. She led me up the stair to his room, entering it with the encouraging words: “Just come in, he will not notice you!” while I stood profoundly moved at the door. At the back of the room, on a sofa the foot end of which was towards me, so that I could look into his face, there lay under a light woollen coverlet he that was once Adrian Leverkühn, whose immortal part is now so called. The colourless hands, whose sensitive shape I had always loved, lay crossed on his breast, like a saint’s on a mediaeval tomb. The beard, grown greyer, still lengthened more the hollow face, so that it was now strikingly like an El Greco nobleman’s. What a mocking game Nature here played, one might say: presenting a picture of the utmost spirituality, just there whence the spirit had fled! The eyes lay deep in their sockets, the brows were bushier; from under them the apparition directed upon me an unspeakably earnest look, so searching as to be almost threatening. It made me quail; but even in a second it had as it were collapsed, the eyeballs rolled upwards, half disappearing under the lids and ceaselessly moving from side to side. I refused the mother’s repeated invitation to come closer, and turned weeping away.
On the 25th of August 1940 the news reached me in Freising that that remnant of a life had been quenched: a life which had given to my own, in love and effort, pride and pain, its essential content. At the open grave in the little Oberweiler churchyard stood with me, besides the relatives, Jeanette Scheurl, Rüdiger Schildknapp, Kunigunde Rosenstiel, and Meta Nackedey; also a stranger, a veiled unknown, who disappeared as the first clods fell on the coffin.
Germany, the hectic on her cheek, was reeling then at the height of her dissolute triumphs, about to gain the whole world by virtue of the one pact she was minded to keep, which she had signed with her blood. Today, clung round by demons, a hand over one eye, with the other staring into horrors, down she flings from despair to despair. When will she reach the bottom of the abyss? When, out of uttermost hopelessness—a miracle beyond the power of belief—will the light of hope dawn? A lonely man folds his hands and speaks: “God be merciful to thy poor soul, my friend, my Fatherland!”
END
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It does not seem supererogatory to inform the reader that the form of musical composition delineated in Chapter XXII, known as the twelve-tone or row system, is in truth the intellectual property of a contemporary composer and theoretician, Arnold Schonberg. I have transferred this technique in a certain ideational context to the fictitious figure of a musician, the tragic hero of my novel. In fact, the passages of this book that deal with musical theory are indebted in numerous details to
Schonberg’s
Harmonielehre
.
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