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their tone: where he called her "my dear friend" she put "my dear heart," she toned down reprimands with flattering postscripts and added sentences that acknowledged Bettina's power over the fascinated poet as his inspiring Muse.
Of course, she rewrote her own letters even more radically. No, she didn't alter the tone, the tone was just right. But she altered, for example, their dates (to erase the long pauses in their correspondence, which might deny the constancy of their passion), she discarded many unsuitable passages (for example, the one in which she begged Goethe not to show her letters to anyone), she added other passages, dramatized various situations, expanded to a greater depth her views on politics, on art, and especially on music and Beethoven.
She finished the book in 1835 and published it under the title Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde, Goethe's correspondence with a child. Nobody questioned the authenticity of the correspondence until 1920, when the original letters were discovered and published.
Alas, why didn't she burn them in time?
Imagine yourself in her place: it isn't easy to burn intimate documents that are dear to you; it would be like admitting to yourself that you won't be here much longer, that tomorrow you may die; and so you put off the act of destruction from day to day, and then one day it's too late.
Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.
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Now, perhaps, when the end of our century provides us with the proper perspective, we can allow ourselves to say: Goethe is a figure placed precisely in the center of European history. Goethe: the great center. Not the center in the sense of a timid point that carefully avoids extremes, no, a firm center that holds both extremes in a remarkable balance which Europe will never know again. As a young man Goethe studied alchemy, and later became one of the first modern scientists. Goethe was the greatest German of all, and at the same time an antipatriot and a European. Goethe was a cosmopolitan, and yet throughout his life he hardly ever stirred out of his province, his little Weimar. Goethe was a man of nature, yet also a man of history. In love, he was a libertine as well as a romantic. And something else:
Let's recall Agnes in the elevator that shook as if seized by Saint Virus' dance. Even though she was a cybernetics expert, she didn't have any idea what was going on in the head of that machine which was as strange and impenetrable to her as the mechanism of the various objects with which she daily came into contact, from the small computer next to her phone to the dishwasher.
In contrast, Goethe lived during that brief span of history when the level of technology already gave life a certain measure of comfort but when an educated person could still understand all the devices he used. Goethe knew how and with what materials his house had been constructed, he knew why his oil lamp gave off light, he knew the principle of the telescope with which he and Bettina looked at Jupiter; and while he himself could not perform surgery, he was present at several operations, and when he was sick he could converse with the doctor in the vocabulary of an expert. The world of technical objects was completely
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open and intelligible to him. This was Goethe's great moment at the center of European history, a moment that brings on a pang of nostalgic regret in the heart of someone trapped in a jerking, dancing elevator.
Beethoven's work begins where Goethe's center ends. It is located in the moment when the world starts gradually losing its transparency, darkens, becomes more and more incomprehensible, rushes into the unknown, while man, betrayed by the world, escapes into his self, into his nostalgia, his dreams, his revolt, and lets himself be deafened by the voices inside him so that he no longer hears the voices outside. That cry from inside sounded to Goethe like an unbearable noise. Goethe hated noise. That's a well-known fact. He couldn't even bear the barking of a dog in a distant garden. It is said that he disliked music. That's an error. What he disliked was the orchestra. He liked Bach because Bach still conceived of music as a transparent combination of independent voices, each of which could be distinguished. But in Beethoven's symphonies the voices of individual instruments dissolve in an amalgam of clamor and lament. Goethe couldn't bear the roar of an orchestra just as he couldn't bear the loud laments of the soul. Bettina's friends among the younger generation saw the divine Goethe stop up his ears and look at them with distaste. This they couldn't forgive him, and they attacked him as an enemy of the soul, of revolt, and of feeling.
Bettina was the sister of the poet Brentano, wife of the poet Arnim, and she venerated Beethoven. She belonged to the Romantic generation, and yet she was a friend of Goethe. Nobody else could claim such a position: she was like a queen ruling over two kingdoms.
Her book was a magnificent tribute to Goethe. All her letters were but a single song of love to him. Yes, but because everyone knew about the glasses that Mrs. Goethe had knocked to the ground and about Goethe's infamous betrayal of the loving child in favor of the crazy sausage, that book is at the same time (and to a much greater extent) a lesson in love given to the dead poet, who on coming face-to-face with great emotion behaved like a cowardly philistine and sacrificed passion to the miserable tranquillity of marriage. Bettina's book was at the same time an homage and a thrashing.
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The year Goethe died Bettina wrote a letter to her friend Count Hermann von Puckler-Muskau, describing an incident that had occurred one summer, twenty years earlier. She said she had had the story straight from Beethoven. In 1812 (ten months after the black days of the broken glasses), Beethoven visited the Teplitz spa for a few days, and there he met Goethe for the first time. One day he went out for a walk with him. They were walking down an avenue when suddenly they came upon the Empress with her family and entourage. As soon as Goethe saw them, he stopped listening to what Beethoven was saying, stepped to the side of the road, and took off his hat. Beethoven, on the other hand, pulled his hat even farther over his forehead, frowned so that his thick eyebrows shot out another two inches, and kept on walking without slowing his pace. And so it was up to the courtiers to stop, stand aside, and make their greeting. It was only after he had passed them that he turned and waited for Goethe. And he told him just what he thought of his servile, lackey-like behavior. He bawled him out as if he were a snot-nosed schoolboy.
Did this scene actually take place? Did Beethoven make it up? From beginning to end? Or did he only add some color? Or did Bettina add some color? Or did she make it up from beginning to end? Nobody will ever know. But one thing is certain: when she wrote her letter to Piickler-Muskau, she realized that the anecdote was priceless. Only this story was capable of revealing the true significance of her love with Goethe. But how to make it known? "Do you like the story?" she asked Hermann von Piickler-Muskau. "Kannst du sie brauchen?" Can you use it? The Count did not intend to use it, and so Bettina considered the possibility of publishing her correspondence with him; but then some-
thing much better occurred to her: in 1839 she published in the journal Atbendum a letter in which the same story is told by Beethoven himself! The original of this letter, dated 1812, has never been found. All that remains is a copy in Bettina's handwriting. It contains several details (such as the precise date) which show that Beethoven never wrote it, or at least that Beethoven hadn't written it the way Bettina copied it. But whether the letter is a forgery or a semiforgery, the anecdote enchanted everyone and became famous. And everything suddenly became clear: it was no accident that Goethe gave preference to a sausage over a great love; while Beethoven was a rebel striding forward with his hat pulled down over his forehead and his hands behind his back, Goethe was a servant humbly bowing by the side of the road.
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Bettina studied music, she even wrote a few compositions, and so had some basis for understanding what was new and beautiful about Beethoven's music. Nevertheless, I ask this question: was it Beethoven's music that captivated her, its notes, or was i
t rather what the music represented, in other words, its vague affinity to the ideas and attitudes that Bettina shared with her generation? Does love for art really exist and has it ever existed? Is it not a delusion? When Lenin proclaimed that he loved Beethoven's Appassionato, above all else, what was it that he really loved? What did he hear? Music? Or a majestic noise that reminded him of the solemn stirrings in his soul, a longing for blood, brotherhood, executions, justice, and the absolute? Did he derive joy from the tones, or from the musings stimulated by those tones, which had nothing to do with art or with beauty? Let's return to Bettina: was she attracted to Beethoven the musician or Beethoven the great anti-Goethe? Did she love his music with the quiet love that draws us to a magical metaphor or to the harmony of two colors on a painting? Or was it rather the kind of aggressive passion that makes us join political parties? Be that as it may (and we will never know the actual truth), Bettina sent into the world the image of Beethoven striding forward with his hat pulled down over his forehead, and this image has kept on marching down the centuries.
In 1927, a hundred years after Beethoven's death, the famous German journal Die literarische Welt asked the most notable contemporary composers what Beethoven meant to them. The editors had no inkling what a posthumous execution this would turn out to be for the man with the hat pulled over his forehead. Auric, a member of the Paris Six, stated in the name of his whole generation: they were so indifferent to
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Beethoven that he wasn't even worth criticizing. Could he possibly be rediscovered one day and reevaluated, as was the case with Bach a hundred years before? Out of the question. Ridiculous! Janacek, too, confirmed that he had never been thrilled by Beethoven's work. And Ravel summed it up: he didn't like Beethoven because his fame was based not on his music, which is obviously imperfect, but on the literary legend built around his life.
Literary legend. In our case, it is based on two hats: one is pulled over the forehead with the giant eyebrows; the other is in the hand of a deeply bowing man. Magicians like to work with hats. They let objects disappear in them or they make flocks of pigeons fly from them to the ceiling. Bettina released from Goethe's hat the ugly birds of his servility, and from Beethoven's hat she caused to disappear (surely unwittingly) his music. She prepared for Goethe what was given to Tycho Brahe and what will be given to Jimmy Carter: ridiculous immortality. But ridiculous immortality lies in ambush for everyone; to Ravel, a Beethoven with his hat over his eyebrows was more ridiculous than the deeply bowing Goethe.
It thus follows that even though it is possible to design, manipulate, and orchestrate one's immortality in advance, it never comes to pass the way it has been intended. Beethoven's hat became immortal. The plan succeeded. But what the significance of the immortal hat would turn out to be, that could not be determined in advance.
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"You know, Johann," said Hemingway, "they keep bringing up accusations against me, too. Instead of reading my books, they're writing books about me. They say that I didn't love my wives. That I didn't pay enough attention to my son. That I punched a critic on the nose. That I lied. That I wasn't sincere. That I was conceited. That I was macho. That I claimed I had received two hundred and thirty war wounds whereas actually it was only two hundred and ten. That I abused myself. That I disobeyed my mother."
"That's immortality," said Goethe. "Immortality means eternal trial."
"If it's eternal trial, there ought to be a decent judge. Not a narrow-minded schoolteacher with a rod in her hand."
"A rod in the hand of a narrow-minded teacher, that's what eternal trial is about. What else did you expect, Ernest?"
"I didn't expect anything. I had hoped that after death I would at last be able to live in peace."
"You did everything you could to become immortal."
"Nonsense. I wrote books. That's all."
"Yes, precisely!" laughed Goethe.
"I have no objection to my books being immortal. I wrote them in such a way that nobody could delete a single word. To resist every kind of adversity. But I myself, as a human being, as Ernest Hemingway, I don't give a damn about immortality!"
"I understand you very well, Ernest. But you should have been more careful while you were still alive. Now it's too late."
"More careful? Are you referring to my boastfulness? I admit that when I was young I loved to blow my own trumpet. I loved to show off
in front of people. I enjoyed the anecdotes that were told about me. But believe me, I wasn't such a monster as to do it on account of immortality! When I realized one day that this was the point of it all, I panicked. From that time on I must have told people a thousand times to leave my life alone. But the more I pleaded the worse it got. I moved to Cuba to get out of their sight. When I won the Nobel Prize I refused to go to Stockholm. Believe me, I didn't give a damn about immortality, and now I'll tell you something else: when I realized one day that it was holding me in its clutches, it terrified me more than death itself. A man can take his own life. But he cannot take his own immortality. As soon as immortality has you aboard, you can't get off, and even if you shoot yourself you'll stay on deck along with your suicide, and that's horrible, Johann, that's horrible. I was lying dead on the deck and I saw my four wives squatting around me, writing down everything they knew, and standing behind them was my son and he was scribbling too, and that old dame Gertrude Stein was there writing away and all my friends were there blabbing out all the indiscretions and slanders they had ever heard about me, and behind them a hundred journalists with microphones jostled one another and an army of university professors all over America was busy classifying, analyzing, and shoveling everything into articles and books."
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Hemingway was trembling and Goethe clutched his arm: "Calm down, Ernest! Calm down, my friend. I understand you. What you've just been telling me reminds me of my dream. It was my last dream; after that I had no more, or else they were confused and I could no longer distinguish them from reality. Imagine a small puppet theater. I am behind the scenes, I control the puppets and recite the text. It is a performance of Faust. My Faust. Did you know that Faust is at its most beautiful when performed as a puppet play? That's why I was so happy that no actors were present and I alone recited the lines, which on that day sounded more beautiful than ever before. And then I suddenly glanced at the seats and saw that the theater was empty. That puzzled me. Where was the audience? Was my Faust so boring that everyone had gone home? Was I not even worth booing? Bewildered, I turned around and I was aghast: I expected them out front, and instead they were at the back of the stage, gazing at me with wide-open, inquisitive eyes. As soon as my glance met theirs, they began to applaud. And I realized that my Faust didn't interest them at all and that the show they wished to see was not the puppets I was leading around the stage, but me myself! Not Faust, but Goethe! And then I was overcome by a sense of horror very similar to what you described a moment ago. I felt they wanted me to say something, but I couldn't. My throat felt locked tight; I put down the puppets and left them lying on the brightly lit stage that nobody was watching. I tried to maintain a dignified compo-sure, I walked silently to the coatrack where my hat was hanging, I put it on my head, and without a glance at all those curiosity-seekers, I left the theater and went home. I tried to look neither to the right nor to the left and especially not behind me, because I knew they were following. I
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unlocked the heavy front door and slammed it behind me. I found an oil lamp and lit it I lifted it with my shaking arm and went to my study, hoping that my rock collection would help me to forget this unpleasant episode. But before I had time to put the lamp down on the table, I happened to glance at the window. Their faces were pressed against the glass. Then I realized that I would never get rid of them, never, never, never. I realized that the lamp was lighting up my face, I saw it by those wide-open eyes that were scrutinizing me. I put out the lamp and yet I knew that I shouldn'
t have done so; now they realized that I was trying to hide from them, that I was afraid of them, and this was sure to incite them all the more. But by now my fear was stronger than my reason and I ran off into the bedroom, pulled the covers off the bed, threw them over my head, stood in the corner of the room, and pressed myself against the wall..."
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Hemingway and Goethe are receding down the roads of the other world and you ask me what was the point of bringing the two together. After all, they don't belong together at all, they have nothing in common! So what? With whom do you think Goethe would like to pass his time in the other world? With Herder? With Holderlin? With Bettina? With Eckermann? Just think of Agnes. Think of her terror when she imagined that she might have to hear once again the hum of women's voices that she hears every Saturday in the sauna! She does not wish to spend her afterlife with Paul or with Brigitte. Why should Goethe long for Herder? I can tell you, though it's practically blasphemy, that he didn't even long for Schiller. He would never have admitted this to himself while he was alive, because it would make for a sad summing-up not to have had a single great friend in one's lifetime. Schiller was undoubtedly the person dearest to him. But the word "dearest" only means that he was dearer to him than all others, who frankly speaking were not so very dear to him at all. They were his contemporaries, he hadn't chosen them. He hadn't even chosen Schiller. When he realized one day that he'd have them around him all his life, he felt a pang of anxiety. There was nothing to be done, he had to come to terms with it. But was there any reason for being with them after death?