At what point does an aside become a tangent, a tangent a digression, a digression a meander, a meander a ramble, a ramble a circumlocution, a circumlocution an excursus and an excursus a cul-de-sac? The reader has time to consider such matters while reading A.N. Wilson’s elastic-waisted but hardly unintelligent new biography, “Goethe: His Faustian Life.”
Wilson is a prolific English biographer (of Darwin, Tolstoy, Milton and Queen Victoria, among others) and novelist whose books are usually worth attending to. Especially recommended is his bittersweet memoir “Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises,” from 2022. Two of his daughters, the classicist Emily Wilson and the food writer Bee Wilson, are inimitable writers as well.
Does the world need another biography of the German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), the author of the novels “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and “Elective Affinities” as well as “Faust,” his masterpiece, a tragic play in two parts?
It is not lacking in them. In fact, the biographer Nicholas Boyle is in the throes of completing his gigantic and long-in-the-making three-volume life. The first two volumes, published in 1991 and 2000, followed Goethe to the age of 54.
There also exists, to give a sense of the Goethe idolatry, an eight-volume chronicle titled “Goethe’s Life: From Day to Day.” Elvis Presley was treated to such a day-by-day account of his life; I can’t think of another cultural figure who has, though Bob Dylan’s is probably on the way.
What’s new to say? Wilson doesn’t try to sell his readers on new discoveries about Goethe’s life — a just-found cache of letters to his tailor, that sort of thing. This is good news. Often these “discoveries” are about as meaningful as the phrase “new and improved” on a tube of toothpaste.
Instead, Wilson views the man almost entirely in terms of the making and meanings of “Faust,” the play Goethe began in his early 20s, while still a law student, but completed only when he was in his 80s. Today it’s considered one of the greatest works of German literature in history.
“Faust” tells the story of a scholar named Heinrich Faust and the deal he makes with Mephistopheles, a representative of the devil, to exchange his soul for knowledge and pleasure. Above, below and beyond that, “Faust” is stuffed to its limits with philosophical and earthy meditations on nearly every aspect of human existence.
Reviewing a long-ago book by Gay Talese, the New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote that Talese “suffers from the Switzerland Syndrome. You ask him what time it is, and he tells you the history of Switzerland.” Wilson has a touch of that, too.
Goethe, the human being, fades from view while Wilson picks up and chews on topics such as the history of the Faust legend, the nature of the bildungsroman, freemasonry, suicide, anatomy (Goethe was an accomplished scientist), the inclinations of courtiers, the arts scene in Weimar when Goethe was young, Hume and Kant and the crisis of the Enlightenment, and so on.
Wilson’s book is engaging about Goethe’s influence on Freud. Goethe’s deep soundings of the self in “The Sorrows of Young Werther” were a forerunner of Freud’s concept of the unconscious.
Good, too, are the sections on Hitler’s obsession with “Faust,” in part for its great themes of ambition and striving for greatness and for its sense of tragic heroism. Goethe seemed to hold the German soul in his hands, Wilson writes, and Hitler sought to plug into that. The dictator’s readings were misreadings of the play’s ambiguities. Wilson notes that Goethe loathed German nationalism.
China’s authoritarian leader Xi Jinping is also an admirer of “Faust.” Wilson suggests that Goethe’s writing is like the Bible in the sense that its words “become the possession of any ideologue who was prepared to lay claim to them.”
Wilson communicates his passion for Goethe by urging the writer’s works upon us, as if reading them were a moral duty. Thomas Carlyle implored his readers to “Close thy Byron! Open thy Goethe!” Wilson thinks this motto needs updating:
Close thy Wikipedia, close thy Google, close thy Bible Fundamentalism and thy Richard Dawkin’s reductionism, close thy Culture Warriors on either side, close thy popular press and thy unpopular press, close thy BBC and thy New York Times, close thy mad distortions (both by Islamophobes and by the radicalized fanatics) of the beautiful sayings of Islam, and open thy Goethe, who so revered the Prophet and his writings!
Whew! I was willing to be sold. Alas, the quotations Wilson provides from “Faust” do not send the reader rushing to pick it up. He admits that Goethe “loses in translation more than any poet I have ever tried to read”and that “none of the translations of ‘Faust’ are really adequate.”
By the end, he is urging us to try to read Goethe in the original German. He neglects to mention that Mark Twain, in “A Tramp Abroad,” wrote that the reason God invented eternity was “to give some of us a chance to learn German.” Twain knew a man who would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
Goethe wrote more than 15 plays (and directed dozens of others). He also wrote poetry, novels, short stories, scientific treatises, autobiographies, books of nonfiction and thousands upon thousands of letters. He had, as Boswell said of Johnson, a “ludicrous fertility.” All along, he carried “Faust” in his mind, even when he wasn’t actively working on the manuscript.
Goethe is more of a storm system than a human being in “Goethe: His Faustian Life.” The clouds threaten to edge out the sun. One recalls what are reputed to be Goethe’s last words: “More light, more light!”
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