“If the Duke continues to drink himself
to the point of illness then he will succumb to that illness, and
will not live long, instead of, as he claims, strengthening his body
with the drink ... The Duchess may continue to suppress her current
discomfort, due to her very manly way of thinking. But this
discomfort will turn into sorrow. And will she be able to suppress
that? Luise's [the Duchess's] sorrow! Goethe! -- ... ”
So wrote Hamburg poet Friedrich Klopstock
to Goethe in Weimar in 1777. At that time, Klopstock was still seen
as the fatherly head of all German language writers. Like Günter
Grass today, he had many detractors who enjoyed the sport of mocking
him, and yet nevertheless enjoyed a huge status. Goethe, 28 and
already a famous writer, was making news with his
rugby-player-after-five-pints sort of behaviour together with his
patron & close friend the Duke of Weimar, Karl August. They
slashed around themselves show-offishly on the market place with big
whips, jumped on their horses, and rode through the villages playing
sadistic practical jokes on the locals, knowing these people had no
means of redress against such actions. Klopstock gets to hear of this
in Hamburg and is incensed, it undermines his ideal of the poet as
someone who rises on the sublime above all such iniquities. He also
feels responsible, seeing Goethe as a promising but errant relative
of the family of poets which he presides over. And so the letter
continues:
“Goethe! -- no, do not drape yourself
in that glory, you do not love her as I do .... Up to know the
Germans have been right to complain about their rulers, because these
rulers haven't wanted anything to do with you scholars (=writers).
Your friendship with the Duke takes him straight away out of that
category. But if you continue to dance with the Duke to this old
tune, there's no limit to the excuses the other rulers would have to
make in their defence, [for not being interested in writers], if it
actually one day will have happened, that thing which I fear most?”
Klopstock asks Goethe to show the letter
to the Duke too. Whether Goethe did this or not we don't know, but we
do know that he only answered two months later, in a tone of clear
refusal: “Do spare us such letters in the future”, adding
casually that he'd have no time at all for himself if he responded to
all such letters and warnings.
Klopstock didn't like this not very
veiled insult at all: “And as you even threw my letter into
that category of 'such letters' or 'such warnings' – you express
yourself as strongly as that -- my letter, containing the proof
of my gift of friendship, then I declare you not worthy of that gift
I gave you.” i
The break between the two of them was final.
Goethe treated many people badly; and his
response to Klopstock shows him as a careerist, understanding art as
a career-ladder and the necessity of shoving people off the top of
that ladder, to make way for himself. Or, as Yeats puts it in his
poem, The Fisherman: “The
beating down of the wise / And great art beaten down.” If you
translated Klopstock's name literally into English you would get
Knock-stick. Knocking
his stick at Goethe didn't help Klopstock.
For those of you out there who want to get more into the Klopstock feeling, come along to the annual Hamburg "Poetry Slam in a Church" event, to be staged in what's known as the Klopstock-Kirche - the Christianskirche in Altona - where you can even see Klopstock's tomb. My Writer's Room colleague Hartmut Pospiech is hosting the evening (around the 3rd weekend in June.) My biggest question is whether Hartmut will allow sexually explicit or explicitly political poetry in the church - and how the vicar will respond. The fact that this is my biggest question seems proof of an infantile part of my mind, concerned with scandal & smut, a quality of mind that Goethe hung onto for a long long time, well into his late thirties.
i
For the original German version of the quotes from the letters from
Klopstock & Goethe, and for the historical background to the
above post, please see: Friedenthal, Richard. Goethe. Sein Leben
und seine Zeit. Piper, 1996,
Munich. p.190 – 191.