Faust in Prague

A few weeks ago I acquired a fascinating book entitled Opus Magnum (‘The Book of Sacred Geometry, Alchemy, Magic, Astrology, the Kabbala, and Secret Societies in Bohemia’). It was published in Prague in 1997 to accompany a major exhibition devoted to these esoteric subjects—the first event of its kind ever staged in the Czech Republic. The book comprises numerous richly-illustrated essays (in Czech, but with English translations in an Appendix), one of which, by D.Ž. Bor, is concerned with the several ways in which the Faust legend is connected with the city of Prague. Bor explains that one tradition asserts that the handbook used by Faust to conjure spirits was first published in Prague in 1509, a legend that was belatedly and fraudulently substantiated by a number of books and manuscripts purporting such an origin, and bearing titles such as Dr. Fausts großer und gewaltiger Höllenzwang…

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One such manuscript, dating from the eighteenth century, and now in the collection of the library of the National Museum in Prague, is the source of the present images. This manuscript, writes Bor, has a ‘peculiar atmosphere radiating from the text written in white on a black ground and from the naïve illustrations accompanying it.’ Pseudo-Faustian Höllenzwangs had been appearing since the early seventeenth century, and continued to exert a lasting fascination through the Age of Reason and beyond, as is indicated by a contributor to Notes & Queries in 1850:

Scheible, of Stuttgart, […] has just commenced a new Library of Magic, &c., or Bibliothek der Zanber-Geheimnisse-und Offenbarungs-Bucher. The first volume of it is devoted to a work ascribed to that prince of magicians, our old familiar, Dr. Faustus…

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…and bears the imposing title Doktor Johannes Faust’s Magia Naturalis et Innaturalis, oder Dreifacher Höllenzwang, leiztes Testament und Siegelkunst. It is taken from a manuscript of the last century, filled with magical drawings and devices enough to summon back again from the Red Sea all the spirits that ever were laid in it. It is certainly a curious book to publish in the middle of the nineteenth century.

And, even today, one may purchase a dreifacher Höllenzwang, courtesy of Amazon! The earliest printed accounts (ca. 1587) of Doctor Faustus’s ‘damnable life and deserved death’ included mention of the doomed Doctor having visited Prague:

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From [Vienna], hee went unto Prage, the chiefe Citie in Bohemia, this is devided into three partes, that is, olde Prage, new Prage, and little Prage. Little Prage is the place where the Emperours Court is placed upon an exceeding high mountaine: there is a Castle, wherein are two fayre Churches, in the one he found a monument, which might well have been a mirror to himselfe, and that was the Sepulchre of a notable Conjurer, which by his Magick had so inchanted his Sepulchre, that who so ever set foote thereon, should be sure never to dye in their beds. From the Castell he came downe, and went over the Bridge. This Bridge hath twentie and foure Arches. In the middle of this Bridge stands a very fayre monument, being a Crosse builded of stone, and most artificially carved.

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From thence, he came into the olde Prage, the which is separated from the new Prage, with an exceeding deepe ditch, and round about inclosed with a wall of Bricke. Unto this is adjoyning the Jewes Towne, wherein are thirteene thousand men, women, and Children, all Jewes. There he viewed the Colledge and the Garden, where all manner of savage Beasts are kept; and from thence, he set a compasse rounde about the three townes, whereat he wondred greatly, to see so mighty a Citie to stand all within the walles.

There was a folk tradition that Faust owned several houses in Prague: in time this association came to be transferred on to a building on Charles Square, still known as Faustův dům (‘Faust’s House’), which is currently used by Charles University’s Faculty of Medicine, and which stands on a site that had, at one time, been associated with the notorious charlatan Edward Kelley.

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Other stories claimed that Faust had, in fact, been of Czech origin: that he came from the Bohemian mining town of Kutná Hora, and that his given name was Šťastný (literally ‘fortunate, happy’ i.e. synonymous with the Latin Faustus). According to these narratives, Šťastný had been obliged to flee Bohemia during the Hussite riots of the 1420s, travelling to Germany, where he first began to sign his name as Faustus. Some of the exploits attributed to Faust, (writes Bor), had previously been associated with a legendary Czech magician named Žito, (quite likely the ‘notable conjuror’ mentioned above) who lived at the court of the Czech king Wenceslas IV. Click on the images above to see them enlarged, and click here to see the title-page of this particular Dreifacher Höllenzwang.

Denton Welch

Readers who have made the acquaintance of the works of both William S. Burroughs and Denton Welch, may yet be surprised to learn, as I was, that the former considered the latter to have been a strong and direct influence on his writing. It’s an influence that, to my eyes, remains far from obvious, but Burroughs seems to have repeated the claim many times, and I don’t doubt that he meant it sincerely. Curiously, Welch (1915-48), was one of three idiosyncratic 20th-century English authors (Mervyn Peake and J.G. Ballard being the others) to have been born in China. Like Peake (his near-contemporary) he was a talented visual artist too. There are already several fine profiles of Welch on-line, so I shan’t attempt another, and will be content to add my voice to chorus praising his prose…

The first thing that impressed me about Welch’s writing was its extraordinarily precise and clear (at times almost Proustian) deployment of recollected detail: his accounts of childhood sparkle like costly jewellery. Next, I picked up on how his prose (in the words of Jeremy Reed) ‘oscillates between moments of lyrical serenity and outbreaks of psychological disorder:’ Welch meticulously recounted his tantrums, perverse outbursts, peevishnesses, and capricious urges, taking pains to record, and, it seems, to magnify, the ‘flaws and inclusions’ in his character. Another constant undertone is that of sexuality: Welch was gay, and his novels and stories are suffused with ‘a queenly aura,’ but one that is seldom ‘campy or superficial.’

This characterisation of Welch by Ernie McLeod strikes me as just:

Some might accuse Welch of being an overly precious writer, which, in fact, he is. He’s the kind of obsessive queen for whom the perfect teacup, jam and biscuits are infinitely more important than, say, world peace. But beneath the preciousness is the fertile grit of humanness. Welch’s self-awareness rarely slips into self-indulgence because his pointed observational powers dissect everything and everyone in his path, narrow as it was. He was a literary psychologist with an equally keen eye for damaged china and hypocrisy.

What little I’ve seen of Welch’s paintings and drawings impresses me less than does his writing. His style has been described as one of ‘prettified surrealism.’ A few more of his artworks are shown here, here and here. Several more works are listed (alas, with only a single illustration) here. Welch also had a keen interest in, and love for antiques, and one tangible legacy of this takes the form of an eighteenth-century dolls’ house which he painstakingly and authentically restored from the decrepit condition in which he discovered it. The restored house is now part of the collection of the V&A’s Museum of Childhood.

All three of Welch’s novels are currently in print, courtesy of Exact Change, and the Enitharmon Press. Also, earlier this year, the Tartarus Press published a marvellous two-volume edition of Welch’s ‘Complete Short Stories and other Related Works’ under the title Where Nothing Sleeps. By way of conclusion, I have taken the liberty of copying a poignant one-page piece from this compilation for your reading pleasure: In the Autumn Weather.

Into the Wood

There are some places we have never visited whereof, nevertheless, we have in mind preconceived images, captured from movies, books, or conversations. Before I came to Sweden, my preconceptions of it were sketchy at best: the only piece of fiction set in this country that I can recall having read was a single, typically odd story by Robert Aickman (whose work I have briefly mentioned before), entitled ‘Into the Wood.’ The story’s protagonist, Margaret Sawyer, accompanies her husband Henry to Sovastad, a lakeside town in central Sweden, where he has been contracted to work in a project to build a ‘big, wide, dangerous, costly road … across the mountains into Norway.’

One Sunday, on a drive from the town up into the nearby mountains, Margaret catches sight of an isolated building, and, upon enquiring of it, is told by her Swedish hosts that it is a Kurhus or Sanatorium, albeit one ‘not only for the sick:’ a place for ‘rest cures.’ When Henry is called away to Stockholm for a series of meetings, Margaret, intrigued by its appealingly elegant façade, opts to stay at the Kurhus rather than at one of the town’s hotels. Rising from an uncharacteristic daytime nap after her arrival, she emerges into an all-but deserted building. and wanders it a little lost until, from its terrace, she sees a fellow-guest approaching from the surrounding forest: this happens to be another Englishwoman, who tells Margaret a good deal more about the Kurhus and its residents.

The Jamblichus Kurhus (named after the first of the ‘seven sleepers of Ephesus’ to rise) is an establishment for chronic insomniacs, some of whom are so severely afflicted that they never sleep at all. Such extraordinary sleeplessness makes its sufferers ill-suited to life in the wider world, and, as ‘sleepers cannot live for long with an insomniac … it is like living with something supernatural,’ many of them eventually resort to such specialist sanatoria. It is explained that the Kurhus is set in a special wood, through which run innumerable paths, which have been trodden by the sleepless for centuries. After resting through the afternoon, the insomniacs rise before dinner, and spend most of the night following these paths through the wood.

Margaret tries following one of these paths for herself, and, as she haphazardly pursues a criss-crossing way between the trees, she is struck by an epiphany of sorts: a simultaneous rejection of the things her roadbuilding husband and suburban neighbours stand for, along with a vaguely-felt yearning for transcendence, symbolized by the ‘empty but labyrinthine’ forest. To cut a short story shorter, Margaret returns to Sovastad (which, translated, literally means ‘Sleeptown’), to find herself feeling altogether out of place, and, inexplicably, quite unable to sleep. When the time comes for them to leave Sweden, Margaret persuades Henry to let her return to stay at the Kurhus indefinitely…

This story came back to my mind during our vacation last week, as the house where we stayed adjoined a very beautiful expanse of woodland: just one inlet, in effect, of what amounts to an all-surrounding sea of trees in that part of the country. Unlike the woods around Aickman’s Kurhus, these were clearly seldom traversed, being crossed here and there by old, low stone walls, by felled, mossy trunks, or blocked with thickets. Even so, it wasn’t hard for me to feel a faint something of that transcendence he hints at, as I stopped to admire a sunlit clearing after squeezing through mushroomy, spiderwebbed undergrowth.

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We enjoyed a fine, peaceful while at the house, whose walls were decorated with rusty old garden tools on one hand, but which was elsewhere adorned with images & figurines of ghosts: one felt that here perhaps were two decorative personalities locked in unresolved opposition. We explored the vicinites of Osby, Markaryd, and Älmhult; I finished reading Neil Kenny’s The Uses of Curiosity (see below), and skimmed rapidly through the three volumes of the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, before taking up Denton Welch’s short novel In Youth is Pleasure. I did some cooking, took a few photographs & slept like a log.

We enjoyed some hot, sunny weather at the start of the week, but then, on Wednesday, were overtaken by a storm-front bringing with it torrential rain, and trailed by cooler and cloudier days.

Dreams are misleading, because they make life seem real.—R. A.

Miscellaneity, etc.

‘I WRITE in praise of miscellaneity, and in particular of assortment and variousness in books; of motley volumes; of mixed-up, impure works which nevertheless accord with the mess & disorder of nature, of life.’ So began a short piece I wrote for a projected collaborative anthology which was never realised. Until recently, I had hardly ever paused to think about my sympathies with the miscellaneous and the curious, but a couple of books I’ve lately been reading have dredged these affinities out, blinking & shivering, from the back of my mind to its better-lit foreground. First of these was Neil Kenny’s The Palace of Secrets, Béroalde de Verville and Renaissance Conceptions of Knowledge, a title I’d bumped into while researching this recent entry about Del Bene’s Civitas Veri. ‘During the Renaissance,’ runs its blurb, ‘very divergent conceptions of knowledge were debated. Dominant among these was encyclopedism, which treated knowledge as an ordered and unified circle of learning in which branches were logically related to each other. By contrast, writers like Montaigne saw human knowledge as an inherently unsystematic and subjective flux.’

In the book, Dr. Kenny explores the distinctions and overlaps between these two worldviews, with a specific focus on the literary career of François Béroalde de Verville (1556-1626), an author whose name I had first heard as the author of Le Moyen de Parvenir (‘The Way to Succeed’) a supposedly near-unreadable, and sporadically obscene work, somewhat reminiscent of Rabelais, that had been first translated into English by a young Arthur Machen. Béroalde was also responsible for a French version of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, entitled Le Tableau des riches inventions, to which he added a ‘Steganographic’ preface, packed with alchemical imagery, which purports to expound on the symbolism of the book’s frontispiece (above). Béroalde, by the way, defined steganography as ‘the art of representing plainly that which is easily conceived but which under the coarsened features of its appearance hides subjects quite other than that which seems to be represented…’

Dr. Kenny explains how, in his first books, the polymathic Béroalde was an exponent of the encyclopædic school of thought, but that in his later works he moved away from this position to one which instead exemplified a Montaignesque relish for the miscellaneous, the uncategorisable, and the uncontainable. Until I read The Palace of Secrets, it simply hadn’t occurred to me to think of ‘miscellanism’ as any kind of valid philosophical outlook, and I suppose I’m still not quite convinced that it is, even though it isn’t a bad fit, in many respects, for my own outlook on life. Anyway, impressed & intrigued by Dr. Kenny’s writing, I ordered a second, more recent book of his which also concerns a subject close to my heart, that of Curiosity. I’m still making my way through The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany, which, fortunately, seems to be picking up steam after a decidedly stodgy opening section.

I’ll be away on vacation for a week, from tomorrow, and will probably disable comments here for the duration, in case there’s an outbreak of spam during our week off-line by a lake in the woods… Posted by misteraitch at 09:34 AM | Comments (5)