Words and Music

...He paid me well, but what I did for him was beyond all payment,” Goldberg writes to his wife in a farewell note as the once-dedicated husband and father prepares to unencumber himself of family and civilization, a wild boy with inkwell embarking on the path of the true artist...

...I, alas, am a thinker...

...The challenge opens up reservoirs of virtuosity in Keller, enabling him to slowly draw his captive audience, weeping, back from the land of the living dead...

...Goldberg alternately casts himself impressing a Victorian royal court with his interpretation of John Donne’s “A Nocturnal Upon St...

...Drucker enables Keller’s music to shade the mood and atmosphere of the narrative...

...After all, no less than Vincent Van Gogh, the two Franzes (Schubert and Kafka), and John Kennedy Toole, to name a few, have shuffl ed off this mortal coil with little fanfare, only to fi nd posthumous praise and immortality...

...Unpacking Bach’s Partita in D Minor, for example, the neophyte novelist paints a portrait of note fl urries shifting “from urgency to repose and back again, never straying from its key, reworking the same harmonies in ever-shifting guises” slowly building into a piece “full of the joys and sorrows of this life, and a yearning for something beyond...

...When the commandant demands that the violinist “be an Orpheus” to the prisoners and “thaw their frozen souls,” he is fl attering him as an artist, and Keller chooses to believe the experiment must have some inexplicably positive end...

...Some prisoners jeer the violinist en route to their death, and he’s left with the commandant’s parting shot (“You really present no threat to the Third Reich...

...For the one our present civilization shows us the depths to which man can fall, for the other the heights to which he can rise...

...He spends his days serving the Wehrmacht, performing for ungrateful wounded soldiers...

...Then you do not hold with the theories of M. Rousseau, Hammond says, that it is to his exalted level that we should all aspire...

...And who can blame creators for believing so...

...By placing the words in the mouth of a madman, Goldberg maintains plausible deniability concerning the sentiment expressed...

...Keller is a sad-sack, go-along-togetalong type...

...Shawn Macomber is currently at work on a book about global class warfare...

...When a prisoner surreptitiously tells Keller he’s rekindled “the language of the heart” in prisoners’ souls, the violinist briefl y attains a transcendental sense of purpose and destiny, only to watch in horror as the commandant shortly thereafter orders a mass execution...

...It would simply keel right over...

...What can a wife, child, and gainful employment mean to a creator of worlds...

...In your heart . . . you’re an accomplice”) and the knowledge that his ultimate artistic achievement—his fi nally uncovered genius, really—provided essential accompaniment to a symphony of torture and murder...

...Soon enough, the co-opted violinist is passionately thundering through Paganini caprices before prisoners to “grab their attention, banish their listlessness with dazzling effects...

...Drucker dazzles, too, following the rote, ubiquitous writewhatyou-know advice while never alienating with his expertise...

...But as the novel progresses, and Goldberg’s stories become more assured and philosophical, it becomes clear he is beginning to accept the power of imagination...

...Yet it’s hard to shake the conclusion that only an extraordinarily accomplished musician and novelist, respectively, would be so bold as to portray their proven skills as powerful forces akin to a shotgun with the safety off...

...And it is not long before Goldberg turns on his employer...

...On the fl y and under pressure, Goldberg composes a series of interrelated stories—each, to borrow a snippet of Eugene Drucker’s beautiful prose, “reworking the same harmonies in ever-shifting guises...

...Not one world but a multitude of worlds have come into being and then passed away since I kissed you goodbye and got into Hammond’s carriage,” he adds, heralding his emergence as a great artist, above common concerns and responsibilities...

...He lives perhaps a bit too easily with the guilt of having failed to defend his best friend and the love of his life, both Jews, from prewar prejudice...

...The closest he comes to rebellion is practicing Bartok and Berg compositions: “There was . . . a kind of titillation, a furtive thrill as he closed all the windows and doors in his apartment, put on a heavy practice mute and tackled ‘degenerate’ music that had been banned from the concert stage...

...During the carriage ride to Westfi eld’s house—which may be a recounting or simply another tale composed on the fl y—Goldberg and the driver discuss a recently discovered “wild boy”—which is to say, a boy of the traditional trees-and-wolves wild, not a child star with a cocaine-dusted nose outside a Hollywood club: It does not take much, Goldberg says, to reduce us to his level...

...The catch is that Westfi eld, implausibly insisting he has read every worthwhile published story, demands the reading be a story composed that day, and he is not interested in any gripes about creativity on demand: “You are a writer, not a thinker,” Westfi eld tells Samuel Goldberg, the earnest author...

...But without it the whole world would fall over...

...Drucker and Josipovici both offer well-crafted worlds, full of affecting situations and characters...

...Lucy’s Day,” and then failing to hold the interest of a wife who adores the great artist she is sure resides within him, but is disenchanted by the self-absorbed brooding accompanying it...

...You get satiated, bored—especially when they don’t resist, when they no longer seem to feel what you’re doing to them,” the commandant muses when Keller begs for the collective life of his audience, adding, “If you can fi nd a way to raise their hopes, they’ll be at your mercy again...

...Both The Savior and Goldberg: Variations seem to suggest unheralded artistic heights may lead to the plummeting depths of civilization...

...M. Rousseau and his opponents all speak the same language, Goldberg says...

...As with Drucker’s Keller, Goldberg has realized his power—and, if not in such a dramatic, visceral fashion, it has likewise ruined his life...

...Goldberg: Variations opens with a poverty-stricken novelist’s fi rst encounter with Tobias Westfi eld, a belligerent, wealthy insomniac who has paid the author to read him to sleep nightly...

...At night he carefully places SS-praising red herring entries into his diary to appease any snooping authorities...

...What is there to choose between them...

...The violinist’s biggest gripe against the Nazis seems to be the party’s penchant for coarseness as enculturation and, thus, he is susceptible to the relative highbrow charms of the commandant running the camp...

...BY SHAWN MACOMBER The outside world’s impression of a given artistic endeavor will nearly always pale in comparison with the epic potency its creator’s mind attributes to it...

...That is why you can sleep but I cannot...

...The stakes are not nearly as high in Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations, yet the core theme of unrecognized artistic power and the novel’s title and structure—in homage to Bach’s 30 harpsichord pieces of the same title—make it almost a sister tome to The Savior...

...All the more reason why these two recent novels—The Savior, by the renowned violinist Eugene Drucker, and Goldberg: Variations, by the acclaimed British novelist Gabriel Josipovici—are so fascinating: Both tales center on artists who somehow fail, with profound implications, to fully recognize their own brilliance until under duress...

...Elsewhere in this series of diffi cult-to-follow stories, Goldberg’s poet-friend descends into a creatively impotent insanity when his muse departs: “You see, your Lordship, a comma, a tiny little comma,” the poet exclaims when he reads another’s verse...

...It works...

...Here is a Nazi authority fi gure who not only gives Keller permission to perform “degenerate” music, but conspiratorially derides Keller’s Wehrmacht audiences as men who “couldn’t possibly understand Bach...

...The story told by Drucker in his debut novel could not be darker: During the waning hours of World War II, young German violinist Gottfried Keller is compelled to perform at a concentration camp as part of a Nazi experiment to rejuvenate a select group of shell-shocked Jewish prisoners...