Italian Journey (1786-1788) Book

General Introduction
This is a handsome edition that I was not planning to buy, however channelling Mr Toad I am enjoying it's canary yellow cover. I had intended to buy Elective Affinities after reading Issicratea's review and so thinking if would be good to return to, however Foyles on the day I visited didn't have a copy of Elective Affinities, but they had this, shrink wrapped and at Twelve fifty for a ten euro book which was acceptable to my bank balance. Between the cover the covers, one third of the 750 pages are given over to commentary and two-thirds to the Goethe - that broken up by black and white illustrations. It would be dishonest for me to oversell the qualities of this edition since I have already rubbed off the final 'e' in 'Goethe' off the front cover - I had no idea that my fingers were as abrasive as a cat's tongue. The Italian Journey had already been chalked up up on my mental
to read list, however with the sleeve of clumsiness I have since wiped that list clear and so am free to read what I please. It pleases me however to sit down with what I feel to be a substantial, and considerable book, like this, or previously Ulysses or On the Origin of the Species to see what the fuss was about. However with books like these I also feel that the first reading is not definitive, but rather like a dog in as forest new to them, more a question of marking out the territory.


Specific introduction

Goethe had grown up a little in the shadow of Italy, I am only mildly familiar with railway station and the airport in Frankfurt am Main so I can't say if that seems entirely understandable, his father had been to Italy and sung its praises and the young Goethe was allowed to play (very carefully) with the model gondola he'd brought back from Venice. More importantly after his earliest literary successes he's spent many years in the service of the Duke of Weimar as a senior administrator, so we can imagine a man whose capabilities and ambitions were tugging him in two not easily compatible directions. So this book, which is a kind of a chunk of autobiography, certainly more autobiographical than most travel books one picks up and reflective of Goethe's range of interests - his keenness for geology stood out for me particularly. So we can view this as the account of a burst for freedom, travelling semi-incognito, with it's search for 'completeness' and 'rebirth' as the:


Apotheosis of a mid-life crisis

ich zähle einen zweiten Geburtstag, eine wahre Wiedergeburt, von dem Tage, da ich Rom betrat (p147)

In this case not expressed as a longing for stylish Italian carriages capable of getting up to eight miles an hour in five minutes or so but in a passion for learning how to draw. He spends a lot of time attending drawing classes where a discussion of the Apollo Belvedere naturally and inevitably leads to the difficulty of finding a model with a sufficiently beautiful ear to use in envisioning the statue, leading to attempts to have some guy up against the wall so they can better have a go at drawing his ear, Goethe though believes he can, reworking his experiences in drawing class into Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.

THIs is something of a working holiday, at first Goethe is working on Iphigenie auf Tauris , then on Egmont, later he receives proofs of a complete edition of his collected works and reflects that those volumes aren't much to show for a life's work, he mentions Faust at one point -ever the optimist, imaging that he could complete it in twelve years.


Surprises

In many ways the book surprised me, the biggest perhaps his drive towards Rome and its significance in his imagination - for example in contrast to modern obsessions, he was only a few hours in Florence, however classical monuments including the coliseum, and the triumphal arch of Septimus Severus only get mentioned towards the very end of the book and then in passing. Yet for all his drive towards Rome , he finds that he prefers the climate and way of life around Naples. If his time in Italy did lead to a move towards Classicism in his work, it wasn't a classicism that needed much feeding it seems by the physical remnants of Roman antiquity. My impression was what attracted him was more the way of life or the potential for living as an Artist there, however he seems much more impressed by the way of life in and around Naples - already in those days though plagued by traffic problems.

The book can be beautiful as in this description of Venician houses growing towards the light:Nun drängten sich die Wohnungen enger, Sand und Sumpf wurden durch Felsen ersetzt, die Häuser suchten die Luft, wie Bäume, die geschlossen stehen, sie mußten an Höhe zu gewinnen suchen, was ihnen an Breite abging (p68). And as in his comment about without Scilly one cannot understand Italy, needlessly obscure - introducing and then dropping the idea of Italy as a mystery to be unlocked in a single sentence, though admittedly an evocative sentence. He spends much time with artists including Tischbein who paints Goethe in his new image

Naively, I didn't keep a tally of the artists discussed but it seemed to me aside from Tischbein, Raphael got the most mentions, followed by Michelangelo, however both were trumped by Leonardo d'Vinci who was esteemed as the best, even if he wasn't talked about as much. In this way, to read the book is to partake in 18th century intellectual life without needing to put on a powdered wig or even to buckle your shoe, down to Goethe tracking down the family of Alesandro Cagliostro on Scilly - a name perhaps familiar to readers of Foucaults Pendulum.

It is a curious combination of mid-life crisis and artistic development expressed through travel and discovery. The busy intelligence confronted by unfamiliar warmth, geology and habits, occasionally unmasked as the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Though he doesn't have to spend his saturdays with his second best quill signing the tear stained copies brought to him by suffering fans.