Category Archives: The Last of the Blacksmiths: A Novel

I’ve been reading Goethe — most recently his novella Elective Affinities.

Never heard of it? No surprise there. The introduction to the translation I’m reading (Goethe: Collected Works, Volume 11, ed. by David Wellbery, transl. by Victor Lange and Judith Ryan, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988) says: “Elective Affinities never really gained entry into the American reader’s canon of favorite literary masterpieces.”

What’s up with that, I’m wondering as I begin the story. I’ve already read The Sorrows of Young Werther, the first of the two collected works in this volume, which reads like a 19th century novel. (If you ever read George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, which ends with a brother and sister floating down a river in each other’s arms and drowning, you’ll see what I mean. That book ends badly, as does Moby-Dick.) Writers of this era were not at all shy of tragedies, and Sorrows, naturally enough, ends with poor young Werther dying of a broken heart.

Elective Affinities begins with the upper class, not unlike a Jane Austen novel. But in sketching the social manners of the day, Goethe is not nearly so prim and proper. No sirree. Already by Chapter 13, a Count and a baroness, each currently wed to others, meet at the good Edward and Charlotte’s estate for a tryst. Edward and Charlotte, bless them, are married to each other, but they are seriously pursuing inappropriate sexual affairs with other houseguests.

The United States might have been the land of the free, but they were devout, temperance-loving puritanical prigs as well, certainly not of a mind to condone some German tale of rampant promiscuity. That’s my theory about why it never “gained entry”. Puritanical snubbery.