GERHART HAUPTMANN

“Primarily in recognition of his fruitful, varied, and outstanding production in the realm of dramatic art”.

It was cold and raining.  We had a scenic ride across the lake from Lausanne but it seemed Geneva was not anxious to have us.  It seemed we walked for hours finding no lodging within our budget.  We settled for shabby if pricy accommodation and vowed to be on our way the next morning.   For no particular reason we set our next stop as Lugarno, a small city on a lake in the south east of Switzerland.  It proved to be one of the most beautiful and enjoyable spots on our trip.  I was there again walking the mountains and looking down on the lake from the Chapel of San Salvatore as I read Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Heretic of Soana.   Agreed, I had been there so mental depiction was easy, still Gerhart Hauptmann has the uncanny ability to place the reader in a vivid setting to hear a gripping story. 

After the fantasies of Kipling, Lagerlöf and Maeterlinck it is perfectly reasonable that the Swedish academy should take an 180˚ turn to the father of German naturalism.   It is not surprising that this youngest son of a Silesian innkeeper should write works which shocked both the German Kaiser and the Catholic Church.  His homeland moved from one sovereignty to another throughout his life.  He was born a German in a land which was to become a part of Poland and The Czech Republic.  After a youth in which he explored careers as a sculptor, agriculturalist, and historian, a bout of sickness sent him to his desk.  His short stories Carnival and Lineman Thiel drew attention.  In 1888 he went to Zurich to study psychology.  While there he wrote the play Before Dawn which made him famous over night.  He became “Hauptmann (captain) of the wild band of naturalists.”  There followed a long string of dramas, his masterwork The Weavers became famous throughout Europe.  The characters of his plays spoke in the appropriate dialect.  Scenes were set in environments recognizable to the people in the seats.  Often this was not a pleasant entertainment.  The Weavers shows the grinding poverty and exploitation of the people who weave cotton webs.  The weavers are shown as real people with all the dreams, loves, and faults of our specie.  When pushed too far the destitute rebel and the privileged react.  Far too often, as in Hauptmann’s depiction, the reaction results in the death of the innocent. 

After reading The Heretic of Soana I was hooked on Hauptmann’s yarns.  I use that term deliberately as he draws you in with a storyteller’s skill and keeps you there.  The Heretic of Soana is a story within a story set in an Alpine paradise.  The writer goes into the mountains where he meets a very primitive goatherd wearing glasses.  This incongruity struck me as odd but I put it aside.  Very shy about visitors, this man of the mountains prefers to live with his charges in a hidden cave on the side of the mountain.  On first meeting the goatherd he was surprised when the conversation turned easily to Seneca, the Argentine, and Swiss politics.  On the last visit the hermit asked if he could read a manuscript entitled “The Mountain Shepherd’s Tale”.  This story is of a young priest, recently assigned to local parish, who was pressured by his bishop to minister to a clan of goatherds on a remote mountainside.  When he met the family he was horrified to discover that not only were they not baptized, it was an incestuous relationship, the parents of the children being siblings.  He tried to draw them into the church but the mayor of the town would not have “these wicked, mangy beasts” in his town.  The bishop directed the young priest to go to the mountains and take personal cognizance of the situation.  The bishop did not know of the beautiful daughter who had captured the young priest’s heart.  A large part of the middle section of the tale is the besotted cleric’s denial, struggle, and rationalization with this threat to his vow of celibacy.  So she might complete the necessary catechism class, the girl enrolls in the school at his church.  One evening as he accompanied her home the inevitable happens in beautifully written detail.  The next few paragraphs are an equally vivid depiction of the young priests struggle.  His calling and his love are at direct odds.  The manuscript ends “He felt terrible piercing pains until, when it grew dark, he set out, inwardly shouting with happiness, on the road to the same small island world that had united him yesterday with his beloved and on which he arranged a new meeting with her.”  The visitor was outraged that the tale stopped short.  What had happened to the two lovers?  Did their affair remain secret or become known in the community?  The stream of questions was interrupted by the sound of a child’s singing.  The song was answered by the equally lovely singing of what could only be the child’s mother.  A beautiful blond girl leads her goats around the hillside followed by her mother.  “Was this not the man-woman, the Virgo, the Syrian goddess, the sinner who fell out with God to yield herself wholly to man, her husband?”  The former priest, now the heretic of Soana, smiled as he greeted his wife and daughter. 

Carnival, Lineman Thiel, and The Apostle are three novellas about madness.  Each draws the reader into a vivid scene which is as natural as the snow falling outside my window as I write this.  Carnival is the madness of youth and irrational self-assurance.  A young sail-maker and his wife are the life of every party in their community.  They have sufficient for the day and thanks to a miserly mother who lives with them they are confident of future resources.  One night, crossing a frozen lake on a sled returning from a masquerade party, they become lost in the fog and fall through the ice to their death.  Simple, if tragic, story you think?  Not the way Gerhart Hauptmann tells it.  This man builds the tension from the first sentence.  You know something terrible is going to happen by hint after hint until the ending has all of the shock value of anything written by the likes of Poe.

The Lineman Thiel is a different kind of madness.  We meet Thiel, a conscientious, quiet, hardworking railroad employee responsible for a section of track and a crossing not far from the village where he lives.  His first wife died leaving him a retarded son on whom he dotes.  To care for his son he marries a local milkmaid who turns out to be a shrew who misuses the boy.  One day she brings their baby and the boy out to the section of track to till a nearby garden patch.  Ignoring the boy he gets onto the track and is run over by the train.  Pushed beyond sanity by grief Thiel murders his wife and child then sits n the track waiting for the next train.  One paragraph is not nearly sufficient to describe the beauty in this tragedy.  Please if you have time for Hauptmann try this one. 

The apostle tells from the inside the decent into madness of a person too deeply immersed in religion.  It is also beautifully written, the reader is drawn into the madness.  It is far too easy to see in this allegory persons I have known.

Gerhart Hauptmann’s naturalism is a breath of fresh air.  It is all there but done in such a way as not to insult the intelligence.  I did not read enough of his plays to get a good picture of this work.  I did very much enjoy his novellas.  I can see why he received the 1912 Prize.

Now, for the first time, we leave Europe and travel to India.  Rabindranath Tagor was a Bengali poet, novelist, short-story writer and playwright.  It is time for curry and Darjeeling tea.

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

“In appreciation of his many-sided literary activities and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy which reveal, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration, while in a mysterious way they appeal to the readers’ own feelings and stimulate imaginations”

As I started reading The Blue Bird it struck me I was looking at The Nutcracker in reverse.  The play opens in the cottage of a woodcutter.  They are not poverty stricken but far from rich.  It is Christmas Eve and Mummy Tyl has just tucked her son, Tyltyl, and daughter, Mytyl, in for the night.  Of course, as soon as she leaves the room the children start to talk about Christmas.  They are drawn to the window where they can look across the street into the home of some rich children at a lush Christmas party.  Maurice Maeterlinck writes it so well you can see the magnificent Christmas tree gleaming in their eyes and feel their mouths water over the sweets and cakes.  Clara and Councilor Drosselmeyer could easily be across the street.  Obviously, I was on my way into another fairy tale.  It then occurred that I had been encountering a lot of fairy tale type fantasies recently.  Kipling’s Jungle Book fits as does Selma Lagerlöf’s The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.   In alternating years (1907 Kipling, 1909 Lagerlöf, and 1911 Maeterlinck) the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to spinners of fantasy yarns. In the United States one of our greatest story tellers, Mark Twain, gave us A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court (1889), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), and The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896). Why?

The history of the period may hold a clue.  In 1909 Albert Einstein was invited by the University of Zurich to the newly created Chair of Theoretical Physics.  His 1905 Special Theory of Relativity along with Max Planck’s introduction of quantum theory shook Newtonian physics and introduced randomness.  With modern art, Darwin and Freud uncertainly, probability and mystery were introduced to the people of the early 20^th Century.  The Wright Brothers and German Zeppelins were active; the idea of humankind soaring above the ground had moved from fantasy to reality.   In 1909 the Vatican beautified Joan of Arc setting her on her way to sainthood.  The next year they imposed a compulsory oath against “modernism” on all priests.  And to top all of that in 1910 the Earth passed through the tail of Halley’s Comet.  The horizon for humankind was moved to infinity.  It was a time to glory in imagination.  In his plays Maurice Maeterlinck delighted in taking us to enchanted places. 

Born to a middle class family on August 29, 1862, he was sent off to be educated as a lawyer.  Having a weak voice and ascetic bent he was unsuited for the bar and soon went to Paris to write poems.  His mysterious drama Princess Maleine, which made his name on the Paris stage, was followed by a string of mystical dramas.  So popular was his work Claude Debussy composed music to fit the magic.  The Blue Bird (1911) is regarded as the peak of his career.  With its performance in Paris, Maeterlinck was mentioned as the Francophone Shakespeare.  

The Blue Bird is a morality play.  While the children are delighting in their imaginings of the Christmas party across the way a fairy enters and asks for a blue bird which she needs to cure her daughter.  Mytyl tells her that her brother has a turtle dove in a cage.  Tyltyl objects and becomes possessive.  The fairy refuses the bird as not sufficiently blue.  She puts a little green hat with a diamond in the cockade on Tyltyl’s head.  She instructs him to turn the diamond so he can see the past or the future.  In the world they enter inanimate objects come alive and their pets are humanized.  It is easy to see that Maurice Maeterlinck was a dog lover; his characterization of the family bulldog is absolutely delightful.  I am sure if a dog could talk this would be what it would say. The cat is a sly and conniving sneak; my opinion of all cats.   The children’s guide is Light who takes them into a shadow world in search of the Blue Bird which the fairy demands.  Along with Dog and Cat they are accompanied by Bread, Sugar, Fire, Water, and Milk all humanized and with the characteristics animate forms of these substances might take.  On their quest they meet their deceased grandparents, Trees (each specie with a different personality, all resenting them as the children of a woodcutter), Animals (again with specific personalities), The Luxuries (actually the vices), The Happinesses (the virtues), and Children preparing to be born (they are required to prepare their own destiny).  All the while they are subject to the machinations of the various characters, usually with the cat as the primary schemer.  Maeterlinck gives very detailed costuming and stage directions.   The sets are very vivid and should be executed by Marc Chagall or Salvador Dali.  At the end of the play Tyltyl and Mytyl are back in reality and the fairy is their neighbor Berlingot whose daughter is sick.  All of the birds they gathered on their quest either died or turned the wrong color so Tyltyl offers his captive turtle dove.  This bird turns a bit bluer and the girl experiences a miraculous cure.  Everybody lives happily ever after. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this play.  There is a 1918 silent and a 1940 Shirley Temple film version of the play available on Netflix.  I have them both on my list and am looking forward to watching them.  I imagine the 1918 film will be closer to the real thing.  And yes, it is from this play that the expression “Blue Bird of Happiness” emanates. 

As Maurice Maeterlinck aged he came to prefer nature to the company of his fellowman.  He fled Paris for the countryside where he took a keen interest in birds, insects and flowers.  These inspired some of his most beautiful pieces.  In 1900 he published The Life of the Bee.  This was followed by The Intelligence of Flowers (1907), The Life of the Termite (1927), and The Life of the Ant (1930).  I remember well my father’s uncle who kept bee hives in the yard adjacent to the house where I now live.  My sixth grade teacher was an avid apiarist.  When my brother proposed keeping bees I enthusiastically joined in.   After several years the rest of my life got in the way.  My brother remains committed; I feel guilty.  With that background I enjoyed every minute of The Life of the Bee.  I liked it so much I bought a better copy which I gave to my brother as a Christmas present.  Maeterlinck makes it clear that he is not writing a “how-to” book.  To his mind those have been written.  He is writing a philosophy of the life of the bee.  In an awestruck voice he describes the complex community of the honey bee.  He speaks of “the spirit of the hive” and “the spirit of initiative” to be found among these vital insects.  After presenting two theories on the queen’s role in controlling the gender of the larva he says, “… Though I do not for a moment pretend to decide which is the more correct; for indeed, the further we go and the more closely we study, the plainly is it brought home to us that we merely are waifs shipwrecked on the ocean of nature; and ever and anon, from sudden wave that shall be more transparent than others, there leaps forth a fact that in an instant confounds all we imagined we knew.”  Such humility speaks to the nobility of the man.  Maurice Maeterlinck is on my list of writers to which I will return. 

Get out the beer, sausages and Beethoven; we are back in Germany with Gerhart Hauptmann, playwright and novelist. 

PAUL JOHANN LUDWIG von HEYSE

“As a tribute to the consummate artistry, permeated with idealism, which he has demonstrated during his long productive career as a lyric poet, dramatist, novelist, and writer of world-renowned stories”

Well into his 80’s when he received notice of the Nobel Prize, Paul Heyse said he was pleased because he could say without too much pride: “What I have done cannot then be entirely bad”.  To my mind his humility is well founded.  He wrote numerous books of poetry, seven novels, forty plays, one hundred and fifty novellas, translated the complete poetic works of five Italian poets, and edited anthologies of Italian and Spanish songs.  From this sizable opus I was able to find two novellas which were translated to English.  On reading them I understand why he slipped into obscurity.  To my mind his greatest honor is he laid the ground work for Danielle Steele, Nora Roberts, and hundreds of anonymous Harlequin writers. 

One of the commentators cited L’Arrabbiata (the Angry Woman, 1853) as among his best work.  While a student he visited Italy where he met a beautiful dark-haired girl named Sorrento whom he transformed into Laurella, his first and best known heroine.   She is beautiful, composed, and self-sufficient.  She makes a living for herself and her mother by weaving silk and spinning yarn which she sells to noble women on the island of Capri.  Her mother is invalided as the result of beatings received from her now deceased father.  Having witnessed this abuse she has decided that a man shall never be a part of her life.  On this occasion she shares a boat from the mainland to the island with a priest on his way to visit a heavy contributor to his parish.  It is through her conversation with the priest that we get the background.  We meet Antonino, the oarsman, but he remains in the background until he carries the priest from the boat onto the beach.  When he returns for Laurella she has already hitched up her skirts, jumped into the water and waded ashore.  God forbid that the handsome, bashful, caring, and smitten boatman should lay a hand on her.  The priest plans to spend the night on the island.   Laurella instructs Antonino to return to the mainland, she will find her own way home.  Antonino waits all day in the hot sun.  When she arrives and they set off he offers her some oranges, as she has had nothing to eat.  She resolutely refuses.  When he proposes she take them for her mother.  She claims they have plenty of oranges, thank you!  Antonino is overcome and declares his passion reaching out to touch Laurella.  She reacts by biting his hand, ripping the flesh so badly blood gushes onto the floor of the boat.  She then jumps into the sea and begins to swim for shore.  Antonino knows it is too far to shore for her to swim.  He apologizes for his impulsiveness and pleads, for the sake of her mother, she get back into the boat.  She does and he rows her to shore where she jumps out and heads home.  The wound is deep but Antonino is too contrite to seek help.  He returns to his humble cottage where he is soon in the throws of a fevered sleep as the result of the infection.  Very late on the moon lit night he awakes to soak his pounding hand when he hears someone at the door.  Standing outside is Laurella with a basket of healing herbs she collected from the mountain.  She cleans and dresses his wound.  She is leaving when Antonino observes tears on her cheeks.  Afraid he had offended her Antonino begins to apologize but Laurella sobs, rushes into his arms and declares her undying love for this honest boatman.  I think we are to assume they married, had sixteen children, and lived happily ever after. Gag!

The Wine Guard is much longer and way more complicated but it follows the form.  The handsome and honorable Andree is forced to guard the vineyards because he is hated and spurned by his mother, the Black Lassie.  His beautiful sister, Lassie, loves him dearly and visits him surreptitiously.  The ten o’clock Masser (assistant priest, the one who holds the second Mass) is wise and loved by all.  The noble family of the area is headed by Joseph Hirzer.  They own the vineyards and have influence in the valley.  Joseph has a drunken loutish son, Franz, who wants to marry Lassie, and a pure and chaste daughter, Rosine, who is Lassie’s best friend.  Also living with Joseph is Anna, his saintly sisters revered by the whole community, who is a friend and adviser to Andree and Lassie.  The major problem for the wine guard is local soldiers who steal grapes and damage vines.  One night in the course of his duties Andree strikes a soldier with his halberd and leaves him for dead.  Racked with guilt and fearing reprisals, he commits himself to a local monastery.  A few years later, when the Black Lassie died, Lassie comes to the monastery pleading with her brother to reenter the secular world to care for her.  After much soul searching he leaves the monastery and they disappear together.  The whole community tries to find them but they seem to have dropped off the face of the earth.  A year later Andree appears at the home of the ten o’clock Masser asking if he is truly the son of the Black Lassie.  He had heard that his mother brought him down from the mountain and he is a foundling.  On this information he ran away with Lassie and they married.  When she became pregnant she was racked with guilt and insisted on returning to their home and confessing their sin.  Oh, the angst is overwhelming.  When Franz hears that his desired is married to her “brother” he gets drunk and rouses the community to attack the sinners.  And now the truth comes out.  His aunt, the saintly Anna, was involved with a Lutheran gentleman (Oh, the shame) whom she was forbidden to marry.  Her friend, the Black Lassie went with her into the mountains where the baby was delivered.  On returning to town the Black Lassie and her husband claimed the child as their own.  At this crucial moment the saintly Anna claimed her son and, confessing herself as the greatest of sinners, she went to the church arm in arm with her son and her new daughter-in-law where the ten o’clock Masser declared everything to be in order and of course they lived happily ever after.

Did you get the idea this was not my favorite author?  I suspect the sheer mass of his work or some political pressure was involved in this award.  My advice; don’t bother.

Now for the first time to Belgium, specifically Flanders.  I am not sure why but the name Maurice Maeterlinck rings a bell.  I must have seen or read one of his plays sometime in the past.  Claude Debussy composed music to accompany one of his most successful plays.  That makes choice of background easy.  As to snacks it will be gauffers, Belgium waffles served with whipped cream and fruit.  (I will need to spend a bit more time in the gym)