Joseph and His Brothers Read online

  SIXTEEN YEARS

  depart the next day with httle baggage for a trip to Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris, from which I was never to return to Germany.

  Hitler was already chancellor when I left Munich, but it was not until we stopped for a holiday in the mountains of Switzerland that disaster struck: the Reichstag fire, the Nazi Party's calamitous electoral victory, the establishment of a dictatorship, the "National Revolution." A brutal campaign unleashed against me in the press and on the radio because of my portrait of Wagner cut off all possibilitv' of my returning home. I have told the story of this chaotic epoch in my life elsewhere. For my work on Joseph it meant an interruption of several months. A brave daughter, who risked a return to our now confiscated house in Munich, found the manuscript left behind there and brought it to the south of France. Slowly, despite disjointed, provisional circumstances, I was able to resume work on the enterprise that was the sole guarantee of continuity in my life.

  Despite frequent and sometimes long interruptions, my labor on Joseph in Egypt came to an end at Kusnacht on the Lake of Zurich, to which we had moved in the fall of 1933, and the book was published in 1936 in Vienna, the temporary refuge of the Berlin publishing house with which I was under contract. It was the period of my expulsion from the German state and the revocation of my honorary doctorate (since restored), to which I responded in a letter, now translated into many languages, to the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Bonn. It was, moreover, the period when emigres in Zurich founded a periodical for free German civilization. Mass und Wert (Measure and Value), of which I was a signatory editor and which published large portions of 77?^ Beloved Returns, the Goethe novel I had meanwhile begun—once again intending only a brief intermezzo. At the time I was a member of the Comite Permanent des Lettres et des Arts established by the League of Nations and had taken part in meetings of this body in Geneva and Frankfurt am Main before the incursion of the Third Reich. For a discussion in Nice, which I did not attend in person, I contributed a memorandum of a political nature, which caused a certain sensation when it was read and was later included under the title 'Achtung, Europa!" (Europe, Beware!) in a collection of essays bearing the same name. I attended further sessions of the committee held in Venice and Budapest, and it was at an open meeting in the Hungarian capital that I was able to rouse myself to make an extemporaneous speech condemning the murderers of freedom and advocating militant democracy, a statement that — given the very academic nature of the

  JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS

  conference and, especially, the way everyone was tiptoeing around the fascist delegates—verged on tacdessness, but that was greeted with several minutes of applause by the Hungarian audience and that earned me the enthusiastic embrace of the Czech poet Karel Capek, who died of a broken heart when democracy betrayed his country

  By 1934 I had made contact with America. The travel diary "Voyage with Don Quixote" was the literary product of my first transatlantic trip. From then on I crossed the ocean almost every year, and the preponderance of my life began to shift to its farther shore. For America I wrote "The Coming Victory of Democracy," a lecture I delivered on a tour of fourteen cities of the United States during the winter of 1938. For America, too, I wrote an introduction to an abridged New York edition of my essay on Schopenhauer, the thinker who made such a deep impression on me in my youth. It can be found today in the collection Essays of Three Decades.

  My two essays on Freud, the second given as a lecture in Vienna to commemorate the great researcher's eightieth birthday, likewise come from those years of moving back and forth between Europe and the New World, as does my second Wagner lecture on the Ring of the Nibelung, which I was asked to deliver at the University of Zurich for a production of the entire colossal work—all of them interpolations into the work on my Goethe novel, which in turn was an interpolation into my chief epic enterprise, the stories of Joseph. It is no insignificant psychological burden to work with a system of boxes within boxes—inevitable, it would seem, if one wishes to economize one's productivity. A great work is set aside for the sake of a smaller one, whose demands could not be anticipated and which itself then devours years. One is forced to set it aside as well in response to the many demands of the day; one gives oneself over to secondary tasks, some of which require not weeks, but months, and, wouldn't you know, one is then required to insert still other smaller improvisations, without ever losing sight of one's larger and still larger concerns. But the result is that bit by bit one comes to bear on one's shoulders and in one's mind the entire burden, the weight of every task and concurrent task. Patience is all—an equanimity that, should a man not possess it by nature, must be wrested from a nervous constitution given to despair. Endurance, stamina, perseverance is all, and every hope bears the name "time." "Give me time" is one's prayer to the eternal gods "and it will all be done."

  It was in 1938, amid the most dreadful political circumstances, in the days of "Munich," when democracy capitulated to fascism, sacri-

  SIXTEEN YEARS

  ficing the Czech state and all political morality for "peace in our time," that we settled in Princeton, New Jersey. Out of profound despondency, which was not without outrage, I wrote "This Peace," a bitter indictment of how the policies of Western nations were being debased by a fear of Russian socialism. Despite the difficulty of acclimatizing myself to new surroundings, I continued work on The Beloved Returns. But the duties associated with a guest professorship at the university were light: I put together a series of public addresses and lectures for advanced students on Goethe's Faust and Werther, on Freud, on the history of the European novel, even on The Magic Mountain. We were still able to spend the summer of 1939 in Europe, in England, Switzerland, and Holland; and on the beach at Noordwijk I wrote an introduction to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina for Random House in New York—it, too, has been incorporated in both German and English collections of my literary essays.

  Caught by surprise in Sweden by the war—if one could speak of surprise—we embarked on our stressful, indeed perilous journey home, first by air to London and then on board the overcrowded Washington. I had with me a great many papers, lecture manuscripts, and books that became an object of tedious inspection at the camouflaged London airport well outside the city. An object of particular interest and misgiving in the inspectors' eyes was a sketch of the seating arrangements for a luncheon that Goethe gives for the sweetheart of his youth at his home on the Frauenplan in Weimar. It was suspected to be of strategic value, and I had to offer a brief lecture on my novel to convince these people that the sketch was completely harmless.

  At the time The Beloved Returns was nearing completion. That same year, while still at Princeton, I brought the book to its close with a ghostly conversation between Lotte and Goethe in a carriage, and now, after an interruption of some five years, I was free to begin the final volume oiJoseph and His Brothers. I was highly motivated to complete this narrative—which, surviving everything, had come with me from Germany—and my desire to do so was only strengthened by certain mythic memories, playful parallels not inappropriate to the subject matter. I stood where Wagner had once stood when, after the grand interpolation of Tristan and Meistersinger, he again took up work on his dramatic epic, the vast fairy tale of The Ring of the Nibelung. True, my method of dealing with myth was in essence closer to the humor of Goethe's "Classic Walpurgis Night" than to Wagnerian pathos; but the unanticipated evolution that the story of Joseph had taken had, I am certain, always been secretly influenced by memories

  JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS

  of Wagner's grand edifice of motifs, was a successor to its intentions. Playing with themes invented long before, I needed to reshape and elaborate them all for a crowning convergence and conclude my three previous fairy-tale operas with a Gotferddmmerung of high delight. I was looking forward to it—and yet I hesitated to begin.

  It was not that the clay had dried out after so many tumultuous years. Despite all those diversion
s, I had clung tooth and nail to the old task, and it was still alive in me. The reason for my timidity was simply that I feared an anticlimax, a lesser fourth volume in comparison to the third. For almost without question Joi^^/?/z in Egypt seemed to me the poetic high point of the work, if only because of my humane attempt to salvage a woman's honor by making a human figure of Potiphar's wife, by telling the painful story of her passion for the Canaanite steward of her pro forma husband. In my stock of characters I had no female who could match the Rachel of volumes i and 2, and the Mut-em-enet of 3—and it took a long time before I realized I did have one after all. It was Tamar, the daughter-in-law and seductress ofjudah, whom I turned into a disciple ofjacob, into an Astarte-like figure with added characteristics taken from the Book of Ruth, and, in the same semicomedic style that informs the whole, developed her into the prototype of historical ambition. In her, who then gave her name to an entire segment of the book, a self-contained novella, I found courage and a synthesis of the charms of all that remained to be told. Even today I do not think it an exaggeration to repeat what is said in the text: "If someone were to call her the most astonishing person in this entire story, we would not venture to contradict him."

  While still at Princeton and before resuming my main task, however, I wrote a "long short story," the Indian legend of The Transposed Heads. Then finally in Brentwood, California, where we spent the spring and part of the summer of 1940, I found the voice that I had not used for so long and began to sing my biblical saga again—and the first chapter oi Joseph the Provider was written.

  The story of the genesis of this volume, whose mood is the most translucent and cheerful of all, is no less tumultuous, indeed is even more so, than that of the other three and is filled with still more interruptions, to all of which I yielded unwillingly and yet with my whole heart. The story came into being under the awful tension of a war on whose outcome the fate of the world, of Western civilization, indeed of everything in which I believed, appeared to hang—of a war with such dark prospects at the start and into which, after the fall of

  SIXTEEN YEARS

  France, the country whose citizen I was about to become now entered, much like Achilles leaving his tent after the death of Patro-clus—of a war whose cause I constandy felt called to serve with my words. The impromptu essays that belong to the period spent writing the fourth volume oiJoseph deal with the war and the world it promised to create, texts like "This War," "The Problem of Freedom," and so forth, and I used them as the basis for the lectures that were part of my duties as a Fellow of the Library of Congress in Washington. Even before our move to California after my guest professorship at Princeton had come to an end, I had begun to compose radio speeches broadcast monthly to Germany by the British Broadcasting Corporation—there would be fifty-five in all by war's end. It was always twenty-eight days of Joseph, four weeks of freedom and mythical play—and then a day or two when I was no longer a novelist but, with all my soul, a herald in battle, when I could give free rein to my hatred of those who had corrupted Germany and Europe and then, in a state of excitement that comes not from art but only from life and the passion of the moment, record that hatred on a spinning disk. Then—back to the work of peace and my "temple theater," the unreal made real in the humorous detail of staging and discussion.

  My work proceeded beneath the blue of the California sky—so like that of Egypt—and to it my narrative surely owes much of its serenity and cheerfulness; and even while some alarmists were fleeing the West Coast for fear of a Japanese attack, we did the opposite, and at the last possible moment when construction was still feasible, we took heart and built our house in the hills above Santa yiomcdi. Joseph the Provider is the part of the work that was written in America, from first word to last, and there can be no doubt that it shares here and there in the spirit of this nation—and not only as the "success story" to which its nature predestined it, or even in the occasional Anglo-Saxon coloring that I gladly incorporated into its German voice. The spirit of this narrative—if anyone wishes to hear my mythic opinion—is an unrestrained spirit that borders on abstraction and whose medium is language per se, and in that sense it is language itself posited as an absolute, with litde regard for idioms and local linguistic gods. I have no problem with someone deciding, for instance, that the German in "Prelude in Higher Echelons" in Joseph the Provider is "not really German at all." I am satisfied that it is language, satisfied that what the entire opus ofTers, above all else, is a work of language in whose polyphony sounds of the ancient Near East arc blended with something very modern, with the accents of a fictive scientific

  JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS

  method, satisfied with how it delights in changing Hnguistic masks the way its hero changes the masks of his gods—the last of which has something strikingly American about it. It is, after all, the mask of an American Hermes, of a masterly messenger of cleverness, whose New Deal is unmistakably reflected in Joseph's magical administration of Egypt's economy.

  The year 1942 was well advanced when I came to the end. Eighteen years before, I had appended, not without a certain solemnity, the words "Finis operis^'io the last lines of The Magic Mountain. Style— it is a cordial but stubborn power, and determinative to the last! This time it led me to disguise my "finis" with a very old-fashioned narrative trick, so that I could make the tide of the whole, Joseph and His Brothers, the long-delayed phrase of the last sentence.

  Here, then, is the entire work between two book covers in Helen Lowe-Porter's admirable translation—an achievement of loyalty and dedication that this woman could not have managed W\houi faith in the worthiness of her task. Dare I share that faith? How will posterity^ view this work? Will it become a curiosity for archivists that quickly gathers dust, an easy prey to transcience? Or will its humor continue to delight those who come after us, its emotion still touch the emotions of later generations? Will it indeed be counted among the great books? I do not know, and no one can tell me. As the son of a merchant, however, I have an abiding faith in quality. What has helped so many products of the human hand to last through the ages and defy the centuries? What has induced humankind, even in the maddest of times, to protect them? Why, this quality. My song of Joseph is good, faithful work, done with the sort of sympathy to which humankind has always responded with fine feeling. Some measure of endurance, I think, is innate to it.

  JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS

  Prelude

  DESCENT INTO HELL 1

  Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?

  Indeed we should, if—in fact, perhaps only if—the past subjected to our remarks and inquiries is solely that of humanity, of this enigmatic life-form that comprises our own naturally lusty and preternaturally wretched existence and whose mystery is quite understandably the alpha and omega of all our remarks and inquiries, lending urgency and fire to all our speech, insistence to all our questions. And yet what happens is: the deeper we delve and the farther we press and grope into the underworld of the past, the more totally unfathomable become those first foundations of humankind, of its history and civilization, for again and again they retreat farther into the bottomless depths, no matter to what extravagant lengths we may unreel our temporal plumb line. The salient words here are "again" and "farther," because what is inscrutable has a way of teasing our zeal for placing it under scrutiny; it offers us only illusory stations and goals, behind which, once we reach them, we discover new stretches of the past opening up—much like a stroller at the shore whose wanderings find no end, because behind each backdrop of loamy dunes that he strives to reach lie new expanses to lure him onward to another cape.

  Thus some origins are of a conditional sort, marking both in practice and in fact the primal beginning of the particular tradition kept by a given community, people, or family of faith, but in such a way that memory, even when advised that the well's deeps can in no way be considered earnestly plumbed, may find national reassurance in some primal event and come to histor
ical and personal rest there.

  For example, for his part the young Joseph, son of Jacob and his beloved Rachel, who had departed into the West far too soon, Joseph in his day—when Kurigalzu the Kassite reigned in Babel, lord of the Four Regions, king of Sumeria and Akkadia, highly

  agreeable to Bel-Marudug's heart, a ruler both stern and extravagant, his beard's curly locks set in such artful rows that they resembled a division of shield-bearers in finest dress rank; when in Thebes, in the lower lands that Joseph was accustomed to call Mizraim or even Kemi, "the black land," there beamed, radiant upon the horizon of his palace. His Holiness the Good God, called Amun-is-content, the third of that name, the sun's very son, dazzling and delighting all those born of dust; when Assyria was waxing strong thanks to the power of its gods and when royal caravans, following the great highway by the sea, then ascending from Gaza to the passes of cedar-clad mountains, conveyed tokens of courtesy, contributions of lapis lazuli and stamped gold, back and forth between Pharaoh's throne and the court in the Land of the Rivers; when Amorites served As-tarte in their cities, in Beth-shan, Aijalon, Taanakh, and Urusalim, when at Sichem and Beth-lachem seven days of wailing resounded for the mutilated True Son and at Gebal, the city of books. El was worshipped, though needing neither temple nor cult—^Joseph, then, residing in the district of Canaan in the land the Egyptians called Upper Retenu, living in his father's family camp near Hebron, in the shade of terebinths and evergreen holly oaks, a young lad famed for his pleasing ways, pleasing because of the inheritance passed on to him by his mother, who had been handsome and beautiful as the moon when it is full and as Ishtar's mild star floating gently in the pure aether, but pleasing as well by way of his father, bearing his spiritual gifts, indeed in some sense surpassing him with their aid— so, for the last time now, Joseph (and we take satisfaction in naming his name a fifth and sixth time, for there is a mystery about that name and in possessing it we feel as if we have been given a sorcerer's power over the person of this boy, who, though now sunk deep in time's depths, was once so full of life and speech)—Joseph, for his part, was accustomed to seeing the beginning of all things or, better, of all things of personal importance in a southern Babylonian city called Uru, which in his dialect he called Ur-Kashdim, meaning Ur of the Chaldees.