I knew this was an ambitious one, but as I have enjoyed such apparent stinkers as BOSWELL’S LONDON JOURNALS 1762-1763, I thought I would give it a go. I gave it a good two hundred pages but: yikes. The beginning is pretty interesting, when it is less about Goethe and more about Eckermann. Eckermann came from a really poor background – his family where subsistence farmers (and I mean for real; they only had one cow). He was clearly a bright and ambitious boy, and managed to get himself into school, where he has his socks blown off by what I can only call LITERATURE. You’d think coming from where he comes from, that he’d want to study e.g., law or e.g., medicine, something with money in it, but oh no. As he explains: “. . .I was dead set against undertaking a course of study simply for the purpose of getting a paid job.” However after a while he realizes he will have to at least appear to compromise, and agrees that he “would choose a course of study that led to a proper job, and devote myself to jurisprudence. My powerful patrons, and everyone else who cared about my worldly fortunes but had no idea how all-consuming my intellectual needs were, found this course eminently sensible.”
I just love that part, about his all-consuming intellectual needs. Poor guy. He drops out of university, and then makes a lot of generally bad financial choices of the kinds artists do make, but then luckily for him he meets Goethe. At this point, the book takes a turn for the dull. Goethe bangs on about a lot of stuff, mostly about how younger generations need to learn from him and his elderly compatriots and etc etc. Perhaps this dullness is not Goethe’s fault; maybe anyone whose conversation is recounted by someone who is a massive fan would seem boring. But in any case, I had to quit. One thing I did find oddly reassuring was how enormously famous Goethe did seem to be in his day, and how rather unfamous he is today. I guess it’s a comfort in its own way to know that no matter what you do, unless you get to Jesus or Hitler levels, history will not care.