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18 September 2024

How Goethe sold his soul to Faust

A new biography by AN Wilson shows how the playwright, poet, scientist and statesman poured himself into his greatest work.

By John Banville

Some biographers, perhaps more than we know of, come to resent, despise and, in extreme cases, loathe their subjects during the long process of writing about them. Not so AN Wilson. He approaches Goethe with an almost Goethean fervour. His book is a double biography, since it is as much concerned with the conception, development and difficult birth of the drama Faust as it is with the life and doings of the play’s magisterial and tirelessly self-regarding author. Indeed, an alternative title for this work could be Faust: His Goethean Life.

It is not a biography in the accepted sense, nor is it intended to be, and is all the better for it. At the outset we are spared the usual wearying trudge through the ancestral foothills; instead, in the opening pages we encounter Goethe towards the end of his life, receiving at his house in Weimar a delegation proposing to put on a production of Faust to mark his 80th birthday the following year, 1829. The delegates got a dusty response; the great man was not in an accommodating mood.

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