A Man in Love Read online

  Also by Martin Walser

  A Gushing Fountain

  Copyright © 2017 by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH

  English-language translation copyright © 2019 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First English-language Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously

  Originally published in Germany under the title Ein Liebender Mann by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Walser, Martin, 1927– author. | Dollenmayer, David B., translator.

  Title: A man in love: a novel / by Martin Walser; translated from the German by David Dollenmayer.

  Other titles: Liebender Mann. English

  Description: First English-language edition. | New York: Arcade Publishing, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019006902 (print) | LCCN 2019011255 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628728743 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628728736 (hardcover:alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749–1832—Fiction. | Levetzow, Ulrike von, 1804–1899—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PT2685.A48 (ebook) | LCC PT2685.A48 L5413 2019 (print) | DDC 833/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006902

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Cover illustrations: iStockphoto

  Printed in the United States of America

  For

  Ulrike von Egloff-Colombier

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  The Final Word

  Notes

  Part One

  Chapter One

  BY THE TIME he saw her, she had already seen him. As his eyes reached her, hers were already trained on him. That was on July 11, 1823, at five o’clock in the afternoon beside the Kreuz Spring in Marienbad. A hundred genteel guests were putting themselves on display, promenading while holding in their hands glasses of the water that was more extolled with each passing year. Goethe had nothing against being seen. But he wanted to be seen as deep in conversation rather than on promenade. In these July days, he was in constant conversation with Count von Sternberg, a naturalist a good ten years younger than Goethe. Although he couldn’t get used to it, Goethe had come to expect that nearly all natural scientists had at best only a smirking pity for his theory of colors. If he encountered one who did accept it, he was so moved and grateful he often could barely contain his amiability. Count Kaspar von Sternberg was just such a scientist. He had written a book about prehistoric flora, which meant he could read what had been preserved in stone. And by this time, stones had become Goethe’s favorite area of research. But now, in these July days, there was another circumstance quite apart from science that attracted Goethe to the count. The previous year they had both stayed in the palace run by Count von Klebelsberg as a spa hotel. And the Levetzows had stayed there, too. The two men had met in Amalie von Levetzow’s salon. “But we know each other already,” Goethe had exclaimed. “We’ve known each other from prehistoric times.” That was an allusion to the title of Sternberg’s book, and he had practically rushed over to embrace the count. People took notice because usually, when there was an acquaintance to be made, Goethe remained where he was and gave the other person—man or woman—the opportunity to approach him. “We both climbed the Donnersberg, Baroness, up by Teplitz, each from a different direction. And we both reached the pinnacle and wrote to each other about it.” The count had called them two travelers, coming from two different areas of the world and of history. Encountering each other and comparing their experiences, they had seen the advantage of arriving at one and the same goal in different ways.

  Now, on the promenade, Goethe asked Count Sternberg to tell him about the Swedish chemist Berzelius, who had just made the astonishing discovery that the volcanic rock in the Auvergne was closely related to the rocks here on the Kammerbühl.

  It was the kind of conversation that shields its participants wherever it takes place. Today, it was Goethe who more than once peered around while they talked. Goethe was nearsighted but loathed spectacles. In the circles he frequented, everyone who wore spectacles knew that and took them off when paying Goethe a visit. “Spectacles put me in a bad mood,” he had said, and whatever the famous writer said got passed on. At a distance, he would not have recognized the person he was keeping an eye out for, but Amalie von Levetzow and her daughters Ulrike, Amalie, and Bertha, who were nineteen, sixteen, and fifteen this year—this group he would have spotted at any distance, no matter how crowded the promenade. And that’s just what happened, although the relative heights of the four figures had shifted. Ulrike was now the tallest, clearly taller than her mother.

  Without interrupting the count’s discourse on the relationship of the stones in the Auvergne to those on the Kammerbühl, he steered himself and the count toward the group of Levetzows and met Ulrike’s gaze. She had discovered him when he had not yet discovered her.

  A motion, a wave, coursed through him, an inner storm. In his head, it was heat. He thought he might get dizzy. Exhaling, he tried to release and relax his forehead and eyes, which felt frozen. It surely wouldn’t do to celebrate this reunion—they hadn’t seen each other for a whole year—with a grimace of astonishment, pain, or dismay.

  There now, that’s better. The salutations. The young mother was clearly livelier than any of her daughters. Ulrike’s steady gaze—did he recall it from last year? Her eyes and his remained locked together. When they couldn’t keep it up anymore, when something had to be said at last, he said, “Please understand, dear onlookers, I study not just stones, but eyes as well. What causes more changes in the eye, a new light from without, or a different mood from within? Since in the blink of an eye (and what a delightful gift that phrase is: the blink of an eye), the weather has just now slid a dense cumulus cloud in front of the sun for us, Ulrike’s eyes are in the process of changing from blue to green. If the cloud stays, we’ll be dealing with a green-eyed Ulrike. Count Sternberg, this double phenomenon—whether the external or the internal cause predominates—should interest us. A cordial welcome to you, dear lady, and to you, the most agreeable trio in the world. Welcome.”

  Sixteen-year-old Amalie, whose quick tongue was most like her mother’s, said, “We’re not a trio at all. We’re individuals, if you please, Herr Privy Councilor.”

  “I’ll say it pleases me,” said Goethe and looked at Ulrike again. U
lrike was still gazing at him as calmly and steadily as when she first saw him. He stayed in her line of vision. He played at being the ocular researcher but wasn’t one. The others might believe it. Ulrike did not believe it. And he didn’t believe it, either. She looked at him only to show that she was looking at him. Before leaving the topic of looking, he said, “Ulrike, in the future some men will claim you have blue eyes. Others will say your eyes are green. I say: Don’t let yourself be pinned down.”

  Afterward, he took her gaze with him, back to his room. They had all eaten together, chatted, and talked back into life their memories of last year and the year before. That miserable stretch two years ago when it didn’t stop raining for a month! Without Herr Privy Councilor’s thousand and one ideas for things to do, they wouldn’t have been able to stand it! To be sure, his lectures about stones had scored a hit only with Amalie. He had a whole room with tables just for the stones his manservant Stadelmann had knocked together from all the surrounding country. To this day, Amalie was still a little insulted because Herr Privy Councilor put a pound of chocolate between the stones for Ulrike, to make them more enticing to her.

  “And fresh from Vienna it was, too, that chocolate,” said the Baroness, “from the famous confectioner Panel!”

  “And there was a poem with it,” said Bertha, who also had to get in on the conversation.

  “Ah,” he said, “a poem.”

  “She still knows it by heart,” said Frau von Levetzow.

  Before Goethe had time to say, Please tell it to me, Bertha recited what she called a poem with positively artistic flourish.

  “In your own way, this is for you to savor.

  If not as drink, may it as food find favor.”

  “I’d still like to know why there are blocks of granite around here with ocher-yellow veins running through them,” said Amalie, to draw attention back to her interest in stones.

  “Bravo,” said Goethe. “Bravo.”

  The count rose to go, saying he wanted to put into better order what he and Goethe had discussed earlier concerning Plutonism and Neptunism. Waved to everyone, bowed, and was gone.

  Goethe gazed after him. Two more like him and I would congratulate the dear Lord.

  “What is Plutonism?” Amalie interjected quickly, looking not at the person she was asking but at her sister Bertha, whom she had beaten to the punch.

  “And I want to know what Neptunism is,” cried Bertha, trying to outdo her sister, two years her senior, in everything.

  “And I’ll tell you all,” said Goethe. “The learned argue about whether the surface of the earth as we know it today was formed by fire (which then withdrew into the depths but still has volcanoes to remind us of its earlier role) or by water, which gradually flowed off to form the oceans.”

  “And you?” asked Ulrike. “What do you think?”

  “I think we shouldn’t decide what we can only conjecture about at present. But since one can’t help leaning one way or the other, I confess to being a vacillating Neptunist.”

  “That doesn’t give me much to go on,” Ulrike replied rather severely. She said it only to Goethe, and with that look again.

  Goethe asked if she wanted him to say more than he knew.

  She said that since it was a question about science and not poetry, one had the right to expect decisiveness.

  “Oh,” said Goethe, “our Ulrike is breaking a lance for the Critique of Pure Reason, no less.”

  Her mother: “You should know that in Strasbourg, they’ve started calling her Contresse Ulrike.”

  An opportunity for Amalie to prove she gets all their jokes: “Comtesse and contre, it’s all French in that school.”

  Goethe congratulated them on a school capable of such discoveries and confessed how happy it made him to be sitting and chatting in their family circle again. It was impossible at home in Weimar, where they were always lying in wait for him to say something profound.

  “For which Herr Privy Councilor has partly himself to blame,” said Ulrike.

  “Admittedly, Contresse,” said Goethe. “There, my life is more theater than life.”

  “And here?” asked Ulrike.

  “Here,” he said and nothing more, just looked at Ulrike.

  And she looked at him and said, “Yes? Here?”

  “Here,” he said, “I realize again that through two long Weimar winters I’ve been suffering from knowing too little about the Levetzows.”

  “Two years ago,” said the always talkative Amalie, “we knew even less about you. We mustn’t forget that in that first year, our older sister, who had already put seventeen springs behind her, confessed that she’d never read a line of Goethe. But—horrors!—quite a lot of Schiller.”

  “In German class in a Strasbourg boarding school,” said Ulrike, “they assign only the honorary citizen of the French Revolution, of course.”

  And Goethe: “I took the liberty of reminding you I’m less fit to be a model for the young than Schiller, Gellert, Hagedorn, and Gessner.”

  And Ulrike: “You also said the French were more for idylls and stylizations than nature and reality.”

  “Yes,” said Goethe, “that’s why Salomon Gessner is much better known there than here. That’s where he belongs.”

  “But so does Voltaire,” Ulrike said.

  “And it wasn’t my friend Schiller who translated him; it was me.”

  “Twice, in fact,” said Ulrike. “Zaïre and Mahomet.”

  “Not the greatest of plays,” said Goethe.

  “Since I’ve started reading your books,” said Ulrike, “I’m bothered by not knowing even for a moment who you are. They are always such high-flown tall tales. They’re full of wonderful talk, ideas, feelings, but who is he?” That’s what she wanted to know. For that was the effect of reading him: an increasing annoyance, a common curiosity to get to know him, himself, what he was really like. So that he would be in some way accessible, so that one could reach out and catch hold of him if one wanted. One would like to touch him. But who was he?

  “But you can do that with Scott!” Bertha broke in.

  “You’re right,” said Ulrike. “It doesn’t hurt not to make the acquaintance of Scott.”

  And Bertha, who obviously wasn’t sure what this conversation was about, said that as soon as it rained again this summer, they could read aloud to one another. Read Scott. She’d brought The Black Dwarf along.

  Her mother added that Bertha had been practicing and practicing what Goethe told her last year about reading aloud.

  Bertha turned to her sisters. “He called me a fair rising star and said when I read aloud, I should always begin deep and then rise.”

  “As we heard today,” said Goethe.

  And Bertha immediately started intoning again, “If not as drink, may it as food find favor.”

  “Yes!” Goethe exclaimed. “Since it’s the closing, don’t let ‘food find favor’ fall off, but carry it up and out, ‘food find favor,’ equally strong and higher than all the other words.”

  “Excellency did nothing but criticize me,” said Ulrike quite calmly. She never interrupted but always spoke up when she wanted to.

  “Yes!” Bertha cried, “You were supposed to work on developing more energy and a more animated presentation.”

  “I have no wish to be another Tieck,” said Ulrike.

  Amalie: “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  And Ulrike: “Another elocutionist.”

  Amalie regained the floor: “We’ve already figured out that the Privy Councilor is no model for the young.”

  Goethe said he could hardly wait to hear what came next.

  “Well, your game,” said Amalie. “One person suggests a theme and the next has to make a story out of it, but everyone has the right to put in a word that has to be incorporated into the story. And which word did you insert into Ulrike’s story? ‘Garter,’ Herr Privy Councilor. Rike blushed …”

  “Did not. It never got that far,” exclaimed Ulrik
e, “because when that word slipped out, Herr Privy Councilor immediately added ‘the Order of the Garter.’”

  “As if he’d never meant anything else,” said Amalie. “We know better.”

  Since he found it unjust to be regarded by this circle of promising daughters as an utterly unsuitable model, he started to murmur—more to himself than to the circle—that he’d never smoked tobacco, never played chess, and had avoided anything else that wasted his time.

  And Ulrike said, “That sounds like regret that you’ve lived such an exemplary life.”

  Since he had ended up in the bosom of the heavenly Levetzow family, he said, not everything he’d done could have been so wrong.

  And so it went.

  Actually, he had only been looking for opportunities to meet her eyes. He was aware of that, standing now across the street at the window of his modest rooms, which he loved, and looking over at the great mass of the Klebelsberg spa hotel, over to the windows in the third story behind which Ulrike now stood, sat, lay, read, thought…. How could he live with that gaze? Last year it was probably already too late. He’d been sick last winter, very ill. He had written to her, and she had answered. That was something, but only today did he realize what. The few letters she had written were already such that he couldn’t show them to anyone. Only half of each letter he wrote to her was dictated to his secretary John. He had to add something in his own hand to every one, something that could not have any real content but was meant to reveal what was being kept secret by its lack thereof. It had to be addressed never to Ulrike alone, but to her mother as well. And yet, and yet, it was all bearable. He could look forward to another summer of banter. And then that gaze that changed everything. It dredged up memories of Sesenheim and Friederike’s simple girlishness. Eyes full of passion, but everything changing so quickly, as if every mood had to be abandoned immediately in order to become clear. Friederike’s mouth knew so little of what it was doing that you yourself had to supplement her ignorance and inquisitiveness with your own. And Charlotte Buff, the great sentimentalist who held and extinguished the universe in a sigh. He had then taken what she awoke in him and augmented it immensely: Werther’s Lotte. Afterward, Charlotte rightly complained about what he had made of her in the novel. He himself was Werther’s Lotte just as much as he was Werther. And Christiane, the great emotion that was never too self-absorbed for every accommodation. There was no situation she couldn’t master through subservience. And then Marianne, who wanted to be a completely kindred soul and was able—with enormous spiritual energy—to adapt herself almost to the point of self-dissolution. But only as a costume ball, a cultural sensation, a splendid anecdote for the literary historians. And Ulrike. Two years of girlish enchantment composed entirely of entertaining indirection. Last year, still a delicate not-yet-awakeness, a lively desire to participate, always striving to do everything right—a landscape on which the sun had not yet risen. And now the sun is up, the landscape lives. Now, her gaze. There is no defense. And besides, what is there to defend against? You’ve been taken captive, a captive of that gaze.