Immortality Read online

  This is approximately how Bettina herself recorded the scene, which probably had no sequel and remained in the midst of their story, more rhetorical than erotic, the sole exquisite jewel of sexual arousal.

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  fter their parting, the traces of that magic moment stayed with them for a long time. In the letters that followed their meeting, Goethe called her Allerliebste, dearest of all. Yet this did not make him forget what was at stake, and in the very next letter he informed her that he was beginning to write his memoirs, Poetry and Truth, and that he needed her help: his mother was no longer among the living and nobody else was capable of summoning up his youth. Bettina had spent much time in her presence: let her write up what the old lady had told her and send it to him!

  Didn't he know that Bettina herself hoped to publish a book of recollections dealing with Goethe's childhood? That she was actually negotiating with a publisher? Of course he knew about it! I would bet that he asked her for this service not because he needed it but only to prevent her from publishing anything about him herself. Disarmed by the magic of their last meeting as well as by the fear that her marriage to Arnim might estrange Goethe from her, she obeyed. He succeeded in rendering her harmless the way a time bomb is rendered harmless.

  And then, in September 1811, she arrived in Weimar; she arrived with her young husband, and she was pregnant. Nothing is so pleasant as meeting a woman we once feared and who, disarmed, is no longer threatening. Yet even though she was pregnant, even though married, even though lacking any possibility of writing a book about him, Bettina did not feel disarmed and had no intention of giving up her battle. Understand me well: not a battle for love; a battle for immortality.

  It can readily be assumed that Goethe, in view of his situation in life, thought about immortality. But is it possible that Bettina, an unknown

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  young woman, also thought about it, and at such an early age? Yes, of course. One starts thinking about immortality in childhood. Furthermore, Bettina belonged to the generation of the Romantics, who were dazzled by death from the moment they first saw the light of day. Novalis didn't live to see thirty, and yet in spite of his youth nothing inspired him as much as death, death the sorceress, death transmuted into the alcohol of poetry. They all lived in transcendence, they surpassed themselves, stretched their arms far out into the distance, to the end of their lives and far beyond their lives, to the outer reaches of nonbeing. And as I have already said, wherever there is death there is also immortality, her companion, and the Romantics addressed death as familiarly as Bettina addressed Goethe.

  Those years between 1807 and 1811 were the most beautiful time of her life. In 1810 she went to Vienna and called, unannounced, on Beethoven. She suddenly became acquainted with the two most immortal Germans, the handsome poet as well as the ugly composer, and she flirted with both. That double immortality intoxicated her. Goethe was already elderly (in those days a sixty-year-old was considered an old man), exquisitely ripe for death, while Beethoven, even though he was only forty, was actually five years closer to death than Goethe. So Bettina stood between them like a gentle angel between two giant black tombstones. It was so beautiful that she did not in the least mind Goethe's almost toothless mouth. On the contrary, the older he got, the more attractive he became, because the closer he was to death, the closer he was to immortality. Only a dead Goethe would be able to grasp her firmly by the hand and lead her to the Temple of Fame. The closer he was to death, the less willing she was to give him up.

  That's why, in that fateful September of 1811, though married and pregnant, she played the child with even greater abandon than ever before, talked in a loud voice, sat on the floor, sat on the table, on the edge of the dresser, on the chandelier, climbed trees, walked as if dancing, sang when everyone else was engaged in weighty conversation, made sententious pronouncements when everyone else wanted to sing, and tried as hard as she could to be alone with Goethe. But she managed to accomplish this only once during that entire two-week

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  period. According to her account, it happened more or less this way:

  It was evening, and they sat by the window of his room. She started talking about the soul and then about the stars. At that moment Goethe looked out of the window and pointed out a big star to Bettina. But Bettina was nearsighted and didn't see anything. Goethe handed her a telescope: "We're lucky! That's Jupiter! This autumn it shows up beautifully!" Bettina, however, wanted to talk about the stars of lovers, not the stars of astronomers, and so when she put the telescope to her eye she deliberately failed to see anything and declared that the telescope wasn't strong enough for her. Goethe patiently went off to fetch a telescope with stronger lenses. He forced her to look through it again, and again she insisted that she couldn't see a thing. This gave Goethe an opportunity to discuss Jupiter, Mars, other planets, the sun, and the Milky Way. He talked for a long time, and when he finished, she excused herself and without any urging, of her own free will, went off to bed. A few days later she declared at the art exhibition that all the pictures on exhibit were impossible, and Christiane knocked her glasses to the floor.

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  Bettina experienced the day of the broken glasses, the thirteenth of September, as a great defeat. At first she reacted to it belligerently, announcing all over Weimar that she had been bitten by a crazy sausage, but she soon realized that her indignation would cause her never to see Goethe again, which would change her great love for an immortal into a slight episode destined to be forgotten. That's why she made kindhearted Arnim write a letter to Goethe in which he attempted to apologize for her. But the letter remained unanswered. The young couple left Weimar, and then stopped there once again in January 1812. Goethe refused to see them. In 1816 Christiane died, and shortly afterward Bettina wrote Goethe a long letter filled with apology. There was no response from Goethe. In 1821, in other words ten years after their last meeting, she again visited Weimar and announced her presence to Goethe, who was receiving guests that night and could not very well prevent her from entering his house. However, he didn't say a single word to her. In December of the same year she wrote to him once again, without receiving any answer.

  In 1823 the town council of Frankfurt decided to put up a monument to Goethe and commissioned a sculptor by the name of Rauch to execute the work. When she saw a model of it, Bettina didn't like it; she realized immediately that fate was offering an opportunity that she mustn't waste. Even though she had no drawing skill, she set to work that very night and produced her own sketch for the sculpture: Goethe was seated in the position of a classical hero; he held a lyre in his hand; a girl representing Psyche stood between his knees; his hair resembled flames. She sent the drawing to Goethe and something quite surprising happened: a tear appeared in Goethe's eye! And so after thirteen years (it was July 1824; he was seventy-five and she thirty-nine years old) he

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  received her at his house, and even though he was very stiff he nevertheless indicated that everything was forgiven and that the time of scornful silence was behind them.

  It seems to me that in this phase of the story the two protagonists arrived at a coolly clearheaded understanding of the situation: both knew what the other was about, and each knew that the other knew it. By her drawing, Bettina characterized for the first time in an unambiguous way what the game had been all about from the beginning: immortality. Bettina did not pronounce this word, she merely touched upon it silently, the way we touch a string and set it into long, silent vibration. Goethe heard. At first he was only foolishly flattered, but gradually (after wiping away a tear) he began to grasp the real (and less flattering) significance of Bettina's message: she was letting him know that the old game was continuing; that she had not surrendered; that she was the one to sew the ceremonial shroud in which he would be exhibited to posterity; and that nothing
he could do would stop her, least of all his stubborn silence. He reminded himself of something he had known for a long time: Bettina was dangerous, and it was therefore better to keep her under benign surveillance.

  Bettina knew that Goethe knew. This is evident from their next meeting, in the autumn of that year; she describes him in a letter sent to his niece: soon after receiving her, writes Bettina, "Goethe began to quarrel with me, but then he again caressed me with words so as to regain my favor."

  How could we fail to understand him! He felt with brutal urgency that she was getting on his nerves, and he was angry with himself for having interrupted that glorious thirteen-year silence. He began to quarrel with her as if he wanted to rebuke her at one stroke for everything he had ever held against her. But he quickly pulled himself up short: why the sincerity? why tell her what he was thinking? The important thing, after all, was to stick to his resolution: neutralize her; pacify her; keep her under surveillance.

  At least six times during their conversation, Bettina recounts, Goethe left the room under various pretenses and secretly drank some wine, which she detected on his breath. At last she laughingly asked him why he was drinking on the sly, and he took offense.

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  Bettina's behavior is more interesting to me than Goethe's tippling: she did not act like you or me, for we would have merely watched Goethe with amusement, keeping discreetly and politely silent. To say to him what others would never dare ("I smell alcohol on your breath! Why are you drinking? And why secretly?"), that was her way of stripping him of some of his intimacy, of coming into closer touch with him. This kind of aggressive indiscretion, to which in the name of childhood Bettina had always claimed a right, suddenly reminded Goethe of the Bettina he had thirteen years before decided never to see again. He silently rose to his feet and picked up a lamp as a signal that the visit had come to an end and that he was about to lead his visitor down the dark hallway to the door.

  At that moment, continues Bettina in her letter, in order to prevent him from leaving the room, she knelt down on the threshold and said, "I want to see whether I am able to stop you and whether you are a spirit of good or a spirit of evil, like Faust's rat; I kiss and bless this threshold, which is crossed every day by the greatest of spirits and my greatest friend."

  And what did Goethe do? I again quote Bettina word for word. He supposedly said, "I will not tread on you nor on your love, in order to pass; your love is too dear to me; as far as your spirit is concerned, I will slip by it" (and he indeed carefully bypassed her kneeling body), "because you are too wily and it's better to stay on good terms with you!"

  The sentence that Bettina put in his mouth sums up, it seems to me, everything that Goethe had been silently saying to her in the course of their meeting: I know, Bettina, that your drawing of the monument was a brilliant ruse. In my wretched senility I allowed myself to be moved by the sight of my hair turned to flames (alas, my pitiful, thinning hair!), but I soon understood that what you wanted to show me was not a drawing but a pistol that you are holding, aiming far into my immortality. No, I didn't know how to disarm you. That's why I don't want war. I want peace. But no more than peace. I will pass by you carefully, and I won't touch you, I won't embrace or kiss you. First, I have no desire for it, and second, I know that anything I may do will be turned by you into ammunition for your pistol.

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  wo years later Bettina returned to Weimar; she saw Goethe almost every day (he was seventy-seven at the time), and toward the end of her stay she committed one of her charming bits of effrontery when she tried to gain an entree to the court of Karl August. Then something unexpected happened: Goethe exploded. "That annoying gadfly," diese leidige Bremse, he wrote to the Archduke, "passed on to me by my mother, has been extremely troublesome for years. Once again she is returning to the old tricks that suited her when she was young; she talks of nightingales and chirps like a canary. With Your Highness's permission, I will forbid her, like a stern uncle, to cause any further annoyance from now on. Otherwise Your Highness will never be safe from her fawning."

  Six years later she again appeared in Weimar, but Goethe did not receive her. The comparison to an annoying gadfly remained his last word on the whole story.

  Strange. At the time he received the sketch for the monument, he resolved to keep peace with her. Even though he was allergic to her very presence, he tried to do everything possible (even at the cost of smelling of alcohol) to spend an entire evening with her "on good terms." Why was he now willing to let all that exertion go up in smoke? He had been so careful not to depart for immortality with a rumpled shirt, so why did he suddenly write that terrible sentence about the annoying gadfly, for which people will still reproach him a hundred or three hundred years from now, when Faust or The Sorrows of Young Werther will have been forgotten?

  It is necessary to understand the dial of life:

  Up to a certain moment our death seems too distant for us to occupy

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  ourselves with it. It is unseen and invisible. That is the first, happy period of life.

  But then we suddenly begin to see our death ahead of us and we can no longer keep ourselves from thinking about it. It is with us. And because immortality sticks to death as tightly as Laurel to Hardy, we can say that our immortality is with us, too. And the moment we know it is with us we feverishly begin to look after it. We have a formal suit made for it, we buy a new tie for it, worried that others might select the clothes and tie, and select badly. This is the moment when Goethe decides to write his memoirs, his famous Poetry and Truth when he summons the devoted Eckermann (strange coincidence of dates: that same year, 1823, Bettina sent him her sketch for the monument) and lets him write Conversations with Goethe, that beautiful portrait produced under the benevolent control of the one portrayed.

  This second period of life, when a person cannot tear his eyes away from death, is followed by still another period, the shortest and most mysterious, about which little is known and little is said. Strength is ebbing, and a person is seized by disarming fatigue. Fatigue: a silent bridge leading from the shore of life to the shore of death. At that stage death is so close that looking at it has already become boring. It is again unseen and invisible, in the way objects are when they become too intimately familiar. A weary man looks out of the window, sees the tops of trees, and silently recites their names: chestnut, poplar, maple. And those names are as beautiful as being itself. The poplar is tall and looks like an athlete raising his arm to the sky. Or it looks like a flame that has soared into the air and petrified. Poplar, oh poplar. Immortality is a ridiculous illusion, an empty word, a butterfly net chasing the wind, if we compare it to the beauty of the poplar that the weary man watches through the window. Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.

  And what does a weary old man watching a poplar do when a woman suddenly appears and wants to sit on the table, kneel on the threshold, and deliver sophisticated pronouncements? With a sense of inexpressible joy and a sudden surge of vitality he calls her an annoying gadfly.

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  I am thinking of the moment when Goethe penned the words "annoying gadfly." I am thinking of the pleasure he experienced, and I imagine him suddenly coming to a realization: in his whole life he had never acted as he wished to act. He considered himself the administrator of his immortality, and that responsibility tied him down and turned him stiff and prim. He was afraid of all eccentricity even though it also strongly attracted him, and when he committed some eccentricity he subsequently tried to trim it down so as to keep it within the bounds of that sunny equanimity which he sometimes identified with beauty. The words "annoying gadfly" did not fit into his work, nor into his life, nor into his immortality. Those words were pure freedom. They could only have been written by someone who already found himself in the third stage of life, when a person ceases to
minister to his immortality and no longer considers it a serious matter. Not everyone reaches this furthest limit, but whoever does reach it knows that there, and only there, can true freedom be found.

  These thoughts passed through Goethe's mind, but he forgot them at once, for he was old and weary and his memory was bad.

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  us recall: she first came to him in the guise of a child. Twenty-five years later, in March 1832, when she heard that Goethe was seriously ill, she sent her own child to him at once: her eighteen-year-old son Sigmund. On his mother's instructions, the shy boy stayed in Weimar six days with no inkling of what it was all about. But Goethe knew: she was sending him her ambassador, who was to let him know by his mere presence that death was impatiently waiting behind the door and that Bettina was about to take Goethe's immortality into her own hands.

  Then death did indeed walk through the door. Goethe struggled for a week, by March 22 lay dying, and a few days later Bettina wrote to Goethe's executor, Chancellor von Mullen "Goethe's death certainly made an indelible impression on me, but not a sorrowful impression. I cannot express the precise truth in words, but it seems to me I come closest to it when I say that it was an impression of glory."

  Let us note carefully Bettina's emendation: not sorrow, but glory.

  Shortly thereafter she asked the same Chancellor von Miiller to send her all the letters she had ever written to Goethe. When she read them she was disappointed: her whole story with Goethe seemed a mere sketch, perhaps a sketch for a masterpiece but a sketch all the same, and a very imperfect one at that. It was necessary to set to work. For three years she kept correcting, rewriting, adding. Dissatisfied as she was with her own letters, those from Goethe pleased her even less. When now she reread them she was offended by their brevity, their reserve, and even, at times, their impertinence. At times he wrote to her as if he took her childlike mask literally, as if he were bestowing mildly indulgent lessons on a schoolgirl. That's why now she had to change