On an Infuriating Novel

For some reason, I didn’t take German as a ninth-grader in High School.  All the college-bound kids were enrolled, but I wasn’t.  In fact, I think I may have elected Industrial Arts or Shop as it was, then, called.  Needless to say, I was completely inept in Industrial Arts, terrified of the machinery, menacing blades and planing devices designed to flay the skin from your arms and hands, and, so, maladroit that I couldn’t cut a board in two or suture wood together to save my soul.  I don’t know what I was trying to prove and so, I think, I enrolled in a second year of industrial arts.  Finally, before my junior year in High School, a kindly counselor, after looking at my aptitude scores, insisted that I take a Freshman level German course – by this time, I was in 11th grade and like an old, perverse uncle to the younger boys and girls in the class-room.  I had a gift for language and, of course, I excelled in German.  I learned the language easily, at least, at the High School level, and enjoyed the class work, even, excelled at pronunciation and imitating the language’s prosody.  I took another year of German when I was a senior and, then, at the University of Minnesota, continued my studies.  Everything went well, so well, indeed, that in my Junior year at the U, a German professor suggested that I enroll in a several month-long course conducted in Berlin.  I was tempted but my father wanted me to become a lawyer and, in any event, I didn’t have the money and couldn’t expect that my parents would finance such a frivolous excursion.  So I turned down the proposal, continued reading German, but never learned to speak the language.  I was so dull-witted at that time that I took a perverse pride in not being able to speak German.  The spoken word was a kind of athletic endeavor, competitive even, and I had no time for sport – I had taught myself to read with some proficiency, but couldn’t utter more than a phrase or so. 

The way that I learned German was private, even a bit secretive.  At the University of Minnesota, in those days, Winter break lasted from the first few days of December until the second week in January – there was a hiatus in classroom learning for about six weeks.  During my second year at the University, I rode to campus every day with my father – he worked at Honeywell about two miles north of the school and could let me out of his car each morning around 7:45 near campus.  I walked across the long bridge over the Mississippi, installed myself in the reading room of the Wilson Library, thirty feet or so from the six or seven aisles of German books.  I think I began by reading Kafka, sitting for hours in a carrel with my German dictionary at hand.  When I tired, I would find an art book and page through the pictures or go outside and walk around the West Bank campus.  Following this routine for six weeks, I taught myself how to read literary German.  It was a happy experience for me, something that I enjoyed doing and for which I had a certain aptitude.

During law school, I worked at a motel and rode a bus, sometimes for two to three hours a day depending upon traffic.  On the bus, I read Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg – this took me about a year.  I also read Gunter Grass’ Der Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) and Hundejahre (Dog Years).  (I have read Grass for most of my life – in the last decade I read his memoir Haeuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), Krebsgaenge (Crabwalk) and the second volume of his memoirs Grimms Woerter (Grimm’s Words), this latter book a particular favorite.)  During the first five or six years practicing law in Austin, I was busy learning my craft and didn’t have much time to read in German.  Now, at the end of my law career, I try to read German about five or six days a week if possible, if only four or five pages at a time.

It’s frustrating to make this admission but more than 45 years study of German hasn’t amounted to anything like mastery of the language.  I’ve traveled to German-speaking countries three times, but still would never dare attempt a conversation in that language.  In fact, spoken German continues to baffle me.  And, furthermore, I’m not sure that I have made much progress in reading the language since those long bus-rides during which I pored over Mann’s elaborate sentences or Grass’ surrealistic, and, therefore, often impenetrable prose.  Today, when I read a novel, I generally have to look up one or two words every three pages.  It’s irritating, as well, that the words that force me to the dictionary are generally expressions on which I have previously consulted the dictionary, attempted to commit to memory and promptly forgotten again.  When I read German poetry, the syntax often eludes me and, when checking my translation with an English version, I often find that I reversed the meaning – something is not doing something to something else, rather the something is, itself, being acted upon.  Colloquial idioms often defeat me, although not always – modern German is heavily indebted to English and has adopted many expressions in idiomatic English in equivalent forms in German.  The most frustrating aspect of the language is its agglutinative character –German forms longer, more complex, words from shorter, simpler, and more concrete terms.  A good example, I am ashamed to admit, are the constellation of words grouped around the German verb geben (“to give”) – a reader will frequently encounter formations derived from the phrase such as eingeben, begeben, vergeben, and most annoying ergeben. The first three verbs mean something like “to enter” (“in-give”?), betake oneself (“be-give”?), and “to award” (“to give with particular emphasis” – this, I think I can see).  Ergeben is generally translated as “to result” although the word literally means something like  to “to give decisively, even, fatally”.  In Martin Walser’s novel about Goethe’s last love Ein Liebenden Mann (A Man in Love), the old poet obsesses over the way that his teenage girlfriend signs her letters: she writes Ihre ergebene Freundin, Ulrike – this means “Your (formal) devoted (female) friend, Ulrike”.  So how is it that ergeben which means “to result” here has the meaning, in adjective form, “devoted”?  As you will see, these definitions can’t necessarily be established by tacking the typical meaning of the prefix on the verb form geben (“to give”).  The really irritating fact about the word ergebene (the adjective form of ergeben) is that I have probably looked-up this word one-hundred times or more and, yet, I can’t ever remember what it means.  I know that an Ergebnis is  “result”, but my mind is too logical (logic is very bad thing in the study of languages) to figure out that ergebene is just a polite formula in the early 19th century for “devoted” – something like “your humble servant.”

All of this is preface to the admission that it has taken me the better part of five months to read, albeit with lengthy periods of respite from the damned thing, Walser’s Ein Liebenden Mann (hereinafter ELM).  The book is only 281 pages long, but the prose is difficult and, except for the Covid-19 virus, which has authorized me to read an hour or so at work, my guess is that it would have taken me even longer but for this current health crisis.  And the unfortunate thing is that I have now concluded, pretty much irrevocably, that the book wasn’t worth the effort.  Since failure is as interesting as success – and, in some ways, even more instructive, I will amplify on my distaste for the novel. 

Walser is an old man and still alive as far as I know.  He has won every reward possible in the German-speaking world, many instances of literary prizes vergeben.  Born in 1927, Walser now lives on Lake Constance, the location where his most famous work, the novella Ein Fliehende Pferd (A Runaway Horse – I’ll call this Horse) is set.  Horse, was published to vast acclaim in 1978, and its so famous now that it merits a Suhrkampf Verlag Basis-Bibliothek volume – this means that the text is taught in literature classes in German High Schools and Colleges.   

Horse is about 100 pages long, an account of a mid-life crisis suffered by its hero, Helmut.  I read the book in the Basis Bibliothek text annotated for bright German literature students functioning at about a Junior College level.  (Basis Bibliothek editions are peculiar.  The notes pedantically annotate a casual reference to Napoleon with his date of birth, principal accomplishments, including a chronology of battles and wives.  A page later some bizarre reference to alchemy phrased in an exotic local dialect will occur without any note at all.  A particularly annoying feature of these books for an English reader is that every American idiom that appears is provided with a detailed Teutonically-complete philological explanation – the exact thing that I don’t need to assist me in interpreting the text.  Based on my experiences in Germany, where most people use English better and with more nuance than American native speakers, it’s hard for me to believe that Germanistik students in that country really need to be told what phrases like “hot dog” mean.)  In the novella, Helmut, who is a school-teacher, with his wife, Sabine, are enjoying a holiday in a house on the Bodensee (Lake Constance).  I use the word “enjoy” advisedly because Helmut is anhedonic, someone who finds ways to make his life complicated and unhappy.  Sexual relations with his wife have deteriorated to next to nothing and he spends his afternoons morosely reading Kierkegaard.  (His wife, who is longing for a little more spice in her life, reads Richard Wagner’s diaries.)  The couple encounter the obnoxious Klaus Buch and his much younger trophy wife, Helene.  Klaus was once Helmut’s school-chum and seems to genuinely admire his old playmate’s intellect and eccentricity.  But he shows his affection by challenging poor, introverted Helmut to increasingly dangerous and problematic feats of boldness, exhorting him to adventures for which he is ill-suited.  Helmut and Sabine dislike the couple at first, but, later, find themselves increasingly obsessed with them – predictably Helmut is entranced by the beautiful, free-spirited Helene and Klaus seems to be making a play for Sabine.

Klaus recounts in embarrassing detail some memories of mutual masturbation involving the boys at their school.  (German adolescents, apparently, have some pretty depraved habits with respect to jerking-off.)  He boasts loudly and often about sex with Helene and asks poor Helmut about his conjugal relations – not a good topic for the reserved and sexually dysfunctional school teacher.  In some respects, the sexual elements of the book, all surprisingly graphic, resemble Philip Roth on a bad day.  While hiking in the country, the two couples encounter a runaway horse.  Implausibly, and with great aplomb, Klaus subdues the horse and, even, rides it – by contrast, Helmut is terrified.  Everything seems to be building toward a calamitous experiment in wife-swapping, although the story, ultimately, doesn’t progress to that point.  Instead, the two men go for a sail on the big lake on Klaus’ catamaran.  A sudden squall sweeps over the big lake and Klaus is pitched overboard.  The reader is happy to see the manic and obnoxious character disposed-of in this fashion.  Unfortunately, Klaus has somehow survived and he re-appears as husband and wife are consoling poor distraught Helene, a scene also with distinct sexual overtones.  The two couples go their separate way and Helmut is reinvigorated – if I recall correctly, the book ends with him having sex with his wife. 

Walser is a fine prose stylist, although he writes in a fussy manner with elaborate and extravagant metaphors.  The novella is somewhat over-written after the German manner – every detail is oriented toward some meaning and the whole enterprise is given mythic overtones; it’s a bit like a petite bourgeois heterosexual version of Death in Venice, although the story also has some resemblance to the demise of the German professor in von Sternberg’s Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) – in that tale, based upon the novel Professor Unrat by Thomas Mann’s brother, Heinrich, a school teacher is subjected to sado-masochistic abuse on the vaudeville stage as a consequence of his ill-fated mid-life crisis and, literally, dies of humiliation.  By contrast, Walser’s tone is cool, sardonic, and amoral.  Yet, the story dramatizes a characteristically German theme: one step off the straight and narrow dooms you irrevocably.

Horse was published in 1978 when Walser was about 50 and the book, possibly, carries some autobiographical meaning, although this is pure surmise on my part.  Ein Liebender Mann (ELM) appeared when Walser was 81.  (He is 93 today).  The two books are related: Horse is about a mid-life crisis with sexual implications; ELM chronicles a geriatric crisis, also romantic in nature. 

ELM is insanely ambitious.  The novel is about twice the length of Horse but it feels much, much longer.  In ELM, Walser narrates the story of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s last great love, the poet’s doomed obsession with the 17 year old Ulrike von Levetzow.  At the time that he encountered the teenage girl, Goethe was 72 and a world-famous figure.  The novel tells us that he had met Napoleon three times, an ironic detail since Ulrike’s father was killed fighting Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo.  The story takes place over an eighteen month period, ending apparently in the Spring of 1824.  Goethe’s infatuation with the young woman is well-known, a historical fact, and Walser is treading on sacred ground in his fictional account of the abortive romance. 

Germans are taught the sequence of Goethe’s love affairs in High School.  This is because the great poet and thinker possessed the sort of creative imagination that required that his work be dedicated to some female muse.  In this respect, Goethe is similar to Picasso – students chart his inspiration on the basis of the women that he embraced (or wished to embrace).  Therefore, every high-school educated German will be familiar to some extent with the great man’s dalliance with the spirited and beautiful Ulrike. Furthermore, Goethe is a figure whose pre-eminence in German culture can’t be overstated –he is the cultured German as cosmopolitan citizen of the world par excellence and his aphorisms condense the way that the people who speak that language view the world.  (The only figure comparable in English is Shakespeare, but that writer is a bit remote from our world, and we view him with more detachment than German’s bring to Goethe – furthermore, Goethe is a cultural hero to the Germans not only with respect to literature but, also, in fields relating to engineering and the natural sciences, particularly botany and geology (although he was also once known throughout the world for his Farben Lehre – that is, his ostensibly scientific, if now discredited, studies in optics).  For Germans, Goethe is like Shakespeare with the scientific prestige of Sir Isaac Newton.)

Walser’s tinkering with Goethe’s biography is not unprecedented in German literature.  There is a fine if melancholy book by Eduard Morike called Mozart on the Way to Prague.  Morike is a great poet and his novella is a sweet, inconsequential account of Mozart and his wife traveling to Prague where the composer will direct the world-premiere of his opera The Magic Flute.  Mozart didn’t have much time to live and the gentle romance, presented by Morike with rococo delicacy, is shadowed by the imminence of the great composer’s death – indeed, the novella ends with one of the very greatest lyric poems presaging death in German (or any other language for that matter).  Thomas Mann, the most ambitious writer in German literature, fictionalizes one of Goethe’s most famous romances, in Lotte in Weimar.  This novel recounts Goethe’s romance with Charlotte Buff (another lady whose name German Gymnasium students are required to memorize.)  Charlotte was the original for Lotte the heroine in Goethe’s famous novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (incidentally, Napoleon’s favorite book).  Mann’s novel, which bears the subtitle, “The Beloved Returns” involves Charlotte’s return to Weimar in Goethe’s old age.

Furthermore, Ulrike’s flirtation with Goethe resulted in a literary monument, the aged poet’s Trilogie der Leidenschaft (“Trilogy of Passion”), three late poems dedicated to the young woman, including the majestic “Marienbad Elegy”.  These are among Goethe’s most celebrated verses and Walser’s book includes the Elegy in its complete form together with an account as to how the poem was written.  Further, Walser even imitates the famous writer’s prose-style.  About a third of the book consists of letters ostensibly written by Goethe to Ulrike.  Walser had free rein composing these letters.  Ulrike, who never married, kept Goethe’s correspondence until her death in November 1899.  Walser reports that before the old woman died, she had the letters ceremoniously cremated with the ash deposited in a silver casket that was placed beside her body when her coffin was closed for the last time.  No one knows the exact content of those letters and so Walser has latitude to invent pages and pages of prose that he ascribes to Goethe.  This demonstrates audacity on the part of Walser that verges on megalomania.  At the very least, Walser’s temerity shows a high-degree of arrogance – but he is a writer who has won every prize that you can attain for achievements in German literature; indeed, the man has even written film scripts.

ELM begins with Goethe taking the waters at Marienbad.  He is lodging at an Inn called “The Golden Grape” near where the Levetzow family, a wealthy widow and her three daughters, have taken rooms.  At Marienbad, everyone strolls along a promenade sipping from glasses of mineral water.  The objective is ceremonial, an upper class ritual of seeing and being seen.  As it happens, he teenaged Ulrike sees Goethe and catches his eye before he has noticed her.  This is characteristic – in the flirtation that follows, Ulrike seems to be the aggressor. 

At first, the novel proceeds in a sprightly manner.  Ulrike is portrayed as the kind of character that the young Katherine Hepburn played in screwball comedies made in the thirties.  She’s beautiful, witty and high-spirited.  When Goethe deploys some of his trademark aphorisms on her, she notes that these are sentences that are amphibolous – they mean, more or less, the same thing if you invert them.  She even draws a clever distinction between how the words sound and what they really mean – klingt (sound) versus ist (is – that is “to be”).  Goethe observes that her eyes defeat his Farbenlehre (theory of light and colors) – they seem to change color from hour to hour.  Goethe and young woman become inseparable.  All of Europe’s greatest families, and gossips, see them strolling together on the Marienbad promenade.  Ottilie von Goethe, the old poet’s daughter-in-law, and his chief nemesis in the book, warns him that the entanglement will result in misery and that he is making a fool of himself.

The course of true love doesn’t run true.  Goethe’s courtship of Ulrike is complicated by the appearance of a smarmy jewel-merchant, Herr de Ror.  This man affects Byronic airs – he’s swarthy, either a Greek or Turk.  De Ror is interested in Ulrike and a man of action, not a dreamy Denker.  When someone tries to “cut in” on Ulrike on the dance-floor, he knocks the interloper to the ground.  Ulrike seems to interested in de Ror, who is without a first name; he has announced that he will disclose his first name only to the woman that he marries.  He spends an evening with Ulrike, probably at the behest of the girl’s scheming mother – she is aiming to make good marriages for all of her daughters.  Goethe is madly jealous of de Ror and spends the greater part of the next 30 pages raging against his rival and considering suicide.  He even strips down and inspects himself naked, a scene in which Walser indulges himself in contemplating Goethe’s penis.  (Ten years earlier, an admirer of Goethe described his form as like a figure of Zeus carved from Parian marble – he is apparently fantastically beautiful even as an old man.)   Goethe considers himself old-fashioned.  He is “rococo” and not a Romantic figure (in the literary sense) like the Byronic de Ror.  Always highly self-centered, Goethe equates his love for Ulrike with his obstinacy in defending his anti-Newtonian optics – despite all evidence to the contrary, he will not abandon his passion.  Appearances to the contrary, Ulrike disdains de Ror and tells Goethe she isn’t interested in the jewel merchant.  The two of them invent a name for him: Velocifer, a portmanteau word that means Lucifer acting swiftly, that is with “velocity.” 

The highlight of the Marienbad social season is a costume ball.  After agonizing as to what he will wear, Goethe attends the dance dressed as Werther, the hero of the novel that made him an international sensation almost fifty years earlier. (The novel was such a literary sensation that Mary Shelley portrays Frankenstein’s monster reading The Sorrows of Young Werther.)  Ulrike appears at the ball dressed as Lotte, Werther’s beloved.  Goethe is astonished – he and Ulrike did not discuss their costumes with one another and the poet believes that their garb at the dance demonstrates an uncanny affinity.  Nonetheless, all doesn’t go well.  Goethe stumbles and falls at the costume ball and gashes his forehead badly.  He lacerates his temple at exactly the location where his first novel describes the self-inflicted bullet-wound that killed Werther.  After the costume ball, Goethe proposes marriage to Ulrike through an intermediary.  He receives an equivocal response that he interprets as composed by Ulrike’s mother. 

The gay convalescents at Marienbad, then, travel to Karlsbad in Bohemia for another round of therapy augmented by the medicinal spring water there.  At Karlsbad, Goethe and Ulrike attend a concert.  Goethe finds most music distasteful but he discovers that he can enjoy concerts by watching Ulrike’s obvious delight in the performance.  He becomes increasingly obsessed with the young woman.  The novel’s prose heats up:

(Considering that he has been missing some intangible something all his life, Goethe thinks:) Love.  Now it is here.  There is such a thing.  Love isn’t just a game with words.  It is the most extreme certainty possible.  It is the thing most remarkably at hand.  That which fills you up.  The greatest security...He surrendered to Ulrike’s nonchalant objectivity.  Is captured by it.  The conclusion is: He can dispense with everything in the world, but not her.  He is nothing more than his love for her.  A declaration of love: When hats are at issue.  When one sees women with ostentatious hats, in his mind he tests those hats with Ulrike.  Every one of those hats, even the most outrageous, is only lovely when Ulrike wears it.  The German is ambiguous – love is a word with feminine gender; thus there is a question in several of these declarations as to whether Goethe is thinking about Ulrike in this stream-of-conscience or “love” itself as an abstract concept.  Of course, Walser’s point is that it doesn’t matter – Ulrike has come to embody the entire concept of love for the old man. 

At Karlbad, Goethe hikes with Ulrike through the woods to a hut dedicated to the virgin huntress Diana.  This excursion will mark the apex of his relationship with the girl.  Walser provides all the romantic accoutrement in this episode – it even rains and the couple get soaking wet.  Goethe puts his lips in close proximity to Ulrike, but their lips don’t touch. The forest and the scenic path will be the subject of memories both tender and tormenting in last third of the book.  Ulrike describes the woods as the Du-zone – that is, the terrain where the lovers address one another with the word “thou.”  In early September 1823, Goethe departs Karlsbad for his home at Weimar.  The family Levetzow leave for their residence in Stuttgart.   

This summary describes the first 181 pages of the novel.  So far so good – although I don’t ordinarily like lengthy accounts of love affairs, the book has been tolerably interesting and perceptively written.  Ulrike is not too insufferable as a character.  Goethe is obviously flawed and self-deceiving, but he also is fairly engaging.  The portrait of the spas and their habitues is well-done and Walser’s mildly satirical (and ironic) prose style deployed to describe various sycophants in Goethe’s circle is amusing.

But the rest of the book is pretty much intolerable.  The last hundred pages are mostly epistolary – a disastrous decision, I think, by Walser.  The writer imagines a series of the poet’s letters dispatched to Ulrike and, then, presents these writings as evidence of Goethe’s utter dismay and paranoia as the obvious becomes evident to him – Ulrike is not going to marry a man almost 55 years older than her.  The first two thirds of the novel, although frequently overwrought, is anchored, nonetheless, in a recognizable objective reality – the milieu of the baths with their ritual concerts and soirees and balls.  The last third of the book is maddeningly subjective: Goethe rants for a hundred pages, becomes increasingly and demonically possessive of the young woman and, then, the novel just ends.  Of course, in the middle of this torrent of self-destructive passion, Goethe writes the great Marienbad Elegy and sends it to Ulrike.  Embedding the elegy in the over-heated prose comprising the last part of the book doesn’t increase our esteem for the verse.  In fact, it has the opposite effect: Walser trivializes the dignified, if passionate, language of the elegy but flanking it with the poet’s idiotic harangues.  He actually succeeds in diminishing the beauty and fascination of one of the German language’s most important monuments. 

It’s not true that nothing really occurs in the last third of the novel – the book’s paralyzed style simply causes the reader to feel that way.  In fact, Goethe quarrels, at length, with Ottilie, who resents his interest in the girl.  He writes the elegy and sends it to the teenager (who effusively professes to admire it.)  Goethe gets sick and almost dies.  Alexander von Humboldt, the great explorer and scientist, reads the elegy and admires it.  The obnoxious “Velocifer”, Don Juan de Ror (as Goethe imagines his first name) appears in Stuttgart and campaigns for Ulrike’s affections in the most vulgar way imaginable – he offers her gemstone earrings for her lovely ear-lobes and gives her an emerald necklace as well.  When Ulrike writes that she is going on a date with de Ror, Goethe flies into a titanic rage and this seems to weaken him so that he becomes ill and almost perishes.  When he recovers sufficiently, he re-initiates his letter-writing campaign, accusing Ulrike of all sorts of wickedness in the most self-pitying manner imaginable.  It’s all very distasteful: Germany’s greatest poet as a kind of stalker. 

Here’s a glimpse of what this stuff looks like:

In a letter, Goethe says that the world is full of charming young women: (But) for me none of them are unique.  Perhaps, I am the only one who experiences your uniqueness.  It’s not really imaginable.  But I’m glad to think it.  If I’m the only one who experiences you as unique and singular, then you must be mine.  This is most charming, a most Platonic fairy-tale to imagine: each person is only singular for a single human being.  And you are that for me.  I won’t tally your unique features or the color of your hair.  If you are the only one for me, then, it remains to ask: am I the only one for you?  I’m not.  If I were truly singular, you would have come to me long ago.  Broken out, climbed up to me even in rain and storm, without any regard for orderliness and good morals, without regard for any opposition.  You are nonetheless unique as far as I am concerned.  This asymmetry between us is the shears by which I measure my misfortune...

The German word repeatedly used for “unique” is Einzigarten – singular/unique (literally “one of a kind.” ) Of course, the fictional Goethe’s bad faith is staggering.  If Ulrike’s so important to him, why doesn’t he go to her?  Why does this young girl have to rescue him?  The diction suggests that Goethe is like the poor maiden confined in her tower.  The poet wants her to “climb up” to him in the raging tempest.  A little of this trash goes a long way and the book ends with a hundred pages of it.

Furthermore, Walser’s imagery can be breathtakingly vulgar.  Consider this embarrassing passage:

It was in evening as they sat before the “Golden Bouquet”and the moon rose over the Dreikreuzberg (at Karlsbad).  And with her at the Sprudel (a sort of geyser), he (Goethe) gazed wordlessly at the jet of water shooting high in the air, water that just didn’t spray monotonously above them as if standing as a lofty water column there in the arcade, but rather jerks upward, shoots up, pauses for a quarter second, then, spasms, shooting again high over them.  As he, with Ulrike and all the other spa-guests, stood there, he didn’t know what they were all thinking as they beheld this lofty-spewing water-wonder.  And he found that it was all going awry!  Why couldn’t one express, why shouldn’t one express what one so powerfully felt?   He sensed the rhythm in his member, that so wished to be everything to him.  And Ulrike?  And all the others? When he and Ulrike on the way back touched a little, he felt completely happy.  But never again would he and Ulrike see the Sprudel twitching...

This is pretty awful on all levels.  First, Walser doesn’t need to spell out what the throbbing cloud of white frothy water and steam means.  Anyone can figure this out without recourse to the road map that the writer provides.  Second, the whole thing is disingenuous.  Goethe is never showing making an attempt to act on his desires (probably mercifully given the way Walser writes about sex.)  Furthermore, the description of Goethe’s penis as his “member” (the German word Teil, or “part”) is simply risible.  If you’ve spent much time engaged with German popular culture, the use of “part” as an euphemism will trigger (unavoidably I think) fond recollections of the Rammstein song “Mein Teil.”  This heavy metal anthem narrates the story of the German masochist who advertised in the lonely heart’s columns for someone who would be willing to eat him.  The masochist located Mr. Right who invited him to his kitchen, cut off his penis and served it nicely sliced, sauteed and with garlic.  Rammstein’s lyrics ingeniously pun on the German word Teil which in a culinary context might mean “my portion”.  My problem is that the Rammstein song, a catchy tune in its own bombastic way, overwhelms Walser’s prose and makes it unintentionally laughable.       

There’s a term applicable to Walser’s novel invoked by Vladimir Nabokov in his critical work, particularly his book-length essay on Gogol.  The word is poshlust denoting pretentious kitsch in bad taste.  ELM veritably defines poshlust by example.  Nabokov argues that the Germans are particularly susceptible to this failing.  He illustrates this contention by an anecdote involving a robust and lusty young German who longed to make love to a beautiful maiden.  The girl lived in a home next to a lake. The enterprising German swain swam naked in the lake daily, exhibiting his lithe form to the young woman.  But, still, she paid no attention to him.  A couple of swans frequented the lake and the lovelorn bather interfered with them in some way – Nabokov doesn’t specify exactly what he did, but his efforts with the fowl caught the young woman’s attention.  Promptly, thereafter, she fell in love with the boy and, apparently, married him.  This little narrative, Nabokov maintains exemplifies poshlust.  And so does Ein Liebender Mann.

Writers are competitive by nature and its clear that Walser’s instincts with respect to his great forebear’s last love affair are tinted with jealousy, envy, and a not inconsiderable quantum of Schadenfreude.  But Walser is too decorous to mount a frontal attack on the Great Man.  A really bold novel would knock Goethe into bed with his betrothed and relish his sexual inadequacy.  Walser seems intent on vandalism with respect to conventional portraits of Goethe – but the best he can do is to scribble a moustache on his hero’s upper-lip.  He makes Goethe look vaguely ridiculous but doesn’t really draw blood.