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Who Takes 60 Years to Write a Play? This Guy.
A new biography of Goethe approaches its subject through his masterpiece and life’s work, the verse drama “Faust.”
GOETHE: His Faustian Life, by A.N. Wilson
At what point does an aside become a tangent, a tangent a digression, a digression a meander, a meander a ramble, a ramble a circumlocution, a circumlocution an excursus and an excursus a cul-de-sac? The reader has time to consider such matters while reading A.N. Wilson’s elastic-waisted but hardly unintelligent new biography, “Goethe: His Faustian Life.”
Wilson is a prolific English biographer (of Darwin, Tolstoy, Milton and Queen Victoria, among others) and novelist whose books are usually worth attending to. Especially recommended is his bittersweet memoir “Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises,” from 2022. Two of his daughters, the classicist Emily Wilson and the food writer Bee Wilson, are inimitable writers as well.
Does the world need another biography of the German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), the author of the novels “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and “Elective Affinities” as well as “Faust,” his masterpiece, a tragic play in two parts?
It is not lacking in them. In fact, the biographer Nicholas Boyle is in the throes of completing his gigantic and long-in-the-making three-volume life. The first two volumes, published in 1991 and 2000, followed Goethe to the age of 54.
There also exists, to give a sense of the Goethe idolatry, an eight-volume chronicle titled “Goethe’s Life: From Day to Day.” Elvis Presley was treated to such a day-by-day account of his life; I can’t think of another cultural figure who has, though Bob Dylan’s is probably on the way.
What’s new to say? Wilson doesn’t try to sell his readers on new discoveries about Goethe’s life — a just-found cache of letters to his tailor, that sort of thing. This is good news. Often these “discoveries” are about as meaningful as the phrase “new and improved” on a tube of toothpaste.
