WITHOUT THE DISTRACTION of a girlfriend, I did learn a lot of German in Munich. Goethe’s poetry particularly infected me. For the first time in my life, I was smitten with a language’s mating of sound and sense. There was, for example, all through Faust, the numinous interplay of the verbs streben, schweben, weben, leben, beben, geben[4]—six trochees that seemed to encapsulate the inner life of an entire culture. There were insane German gushings, like these words of thanks that Faust offers Nature after a really good night’s sleep—
Du regst und rührst ein kräftiges Beschließen
Zum höchsten Dasein immerfort zu streben[5]
— which I endlessly repeated to myself, half in jest and half adoringly. There was the touching and redeeming German yearning not to be German at all but to be Italian instead, which Goethe captured in his classic verse in Wilhelm Meister:
Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühn,
Im dunkeln Laub die Goldorangen glühn…
Kennst du es wohl?[6]
There were other lines that I recited every time I climbed a church tower or walked to the top of a hill, lines uttered by Faust after cherubs have wrested his spirit from the Devil’s clutches and installed him in Heaven:
Hier ist die Aussicht frei,
Der Geist erhoben.
Dort ziehen Frauen vorbei,
Schwebend nach oben[7]
There were even, in Faust, short passages in which I recognized an actual emotion of my own, as when our hero, trying to settle down to work in his study, hears a knocking on his door and cries out in exasperation, “Wer will mich wieder plagen?”[8]
But despite my pleasure at feeling a language take root in me, and despite the tightly reasoned term papers I was writing on Faust’s relationship with Nature and Novalis’s relationship with mines and caves, I still saw literature as basically just the game I had to master in order to get a college degree. Reciting from Faust on windy hilltops was a way of indulging but also defusing and finally making fun of my own literary yearnings. Real life, as I understood it, was about marriage and success, not the blue flower. In Munich, where students could buy standing-room theater seats for five marks, I went to see a big-budget production of Part II of Faust, and on my way out of the theater I heard a middle-aged man snickeringly offer his wife this “complete and sufficient” summary of the play: “Er geht von einer Sensation zur anderen — aber keine Befriedigung.”[9] The man’s disrespect, his philistine amusement with himself, amused me, too.
THE GERMAN DEPARTMENT’S difficult professor, George Avery, taught the seminar in German modernism that I took in my last fall at college. Avery had dark Greek eyes, beautiful skin, a strong nose, luxuriant eyebrows. His voice was high and perpetually hoarse, and when he got lost in the details of a digression, as often happened, the noise of his hoarseness overwhelmed the signal of his words. His outbursts of delighted laughter began at a frequency above human hearing — a mouth thrown open silently — and descended through an accelerating series of cries: “Hah! Hah! Hah! Hah! Hah! Hah!” His eyes gleamed with excitement and pleasure if a student said anything remotely pertinent or intelligent; but if the student was altogether wrong, as the six of us in his seminar often were, he flinched and scowled as if a bug were flying at his face, or he gazed out a window unhappily, or refilled his pipe, or wordlessly cadged a cigarette from one of us smokers, and hardly even pretended to listen. He was the least polished of all my college teachers, and yet he had something that the other teachers didn’t have: he felt for literature the kind of headlong love and gratitude that a born-again Christian feels for Jesus. His highest praise for a piece of writing was “It’s crazy!” His yellowed, disintegrating copies of German prose masterworks were like missionary Bibles. On page after page, each sentence was underscored or annotated in Avery’s microscopic handwriting, illuminated with the cumulative appreciations of fifteen or twenty rereadings. His paperbacks were at once low-priced, high-acid crapola and the most precious of relics — moving testaments to how full of significance every line in them could be to a student of their mysteries, as every leaf and sparrow in Creation sings of God to the believer.
Avery’s father was a Greek immigrant who’d worked as a waiter and later owned a shoe-repair shop in North Philadelphia. Avery had been drafted into the Army as an eighteen-year-old, in 1944, and at the end of basic training, in the middle of the night before his unit shipped out to Europe, his commanding officer shook him roughly and shouted, “Avery! Wake up! YOUR MOTHER’S DEAD.” Granted leave to attend her funeral, Avery reached Europe two weeks late, arriving on V-Day, and never caught up with his regiment. He was passed along from unit to unit and eventually landed in Augsburg, where the Army put him to work at a requisitioned publishing house. One day, his commander asked if anyone in the unit wanted to take a course in journalism. Avery was the only one who volunteered, and over the next year and a half he taught himself German, went around in civilian clothes, reported on music and art for the occupation newspaper, and fell in love with German culture. Returning to the States, he studied English and then German literature, which was how he’d ended up married to a beautiful Swiss woman and tenured at a fancy college and living in a three-story house in whose dining room, every Monday afternoon at four, we took a break for coffee and pastry that his wife, Doris, made for us.
5
You awaken and stir a powerful resolve / To strive, henceforth, for the highest form of being.
6
Do you know the country where the lemon trees bloom, / and the oranges like gold in leafy gloom …Maybe you know it?
7
Here the view is clear, / The spirit exalted. / Over there, moving past, / Women float skyward.