Devil’s Jig on Hallowed Ground

Abstract

In The Making of Doctor Faustus (Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus), that fascinating book which affords the curious a look into a magician’s laboratory, Thomas Mann describes how he spent March 14, 1943 in emptying desk drawers and book shelves of the prodigious mass of material which had gone into making Joseph, much in the manner of a sick man who after a long illness is able to leave his sickroom for the first time. The final volume of Joseph and his Brothers had witnessed profound changes in its author’s life as well as in the world in which he lived. After Lübeck, Munich, Palestrina, the regions of the North as well as the Baltic Sea, Switzerland and New Jersey, Mann had chosen the Pacific Ocean coast and the Far West as his home. More important: the World War, dormant in its beginnings, had gathered fury; the powers of darkness continued to gain strength on the seas and on the continent until they were assembling their forces on the plains outside of Moscow. To many, perennial optimists among them, it seemed that the strength of democracy was rapidly crumbling and that the Age of Tyranny was dawning on the horizon.

Naked and alone we came into exile.

In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. Which of us has known his brother?

Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

thomas wolfe