Word: faustus
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...earnest study with deep displeasure. The deskbound undergraduate has been variously damned as a swot, a brown-bagger or a mug. Chemistry is still stinks, Thucydides is Thicksides, and studying education is doing Eddyoo. To be failed in an examination has traveled from being gravelled (after Marlowe's Faustus, who "gravelled the pastors of the German church") to being gulphed, ftoor&d, knocked out, pilled, pipped, ploughed or plucked...
Honorable mentions in the undergraduate division of the Bowdoin prizes went to Foote, who wrote a second piece, on "Father Hopkins: A Ritualist in Poetry"; Michael Roemer '49 for "Heartbreak House": and Walter S. Frank '49 for "The Tragic Equation: A Study of Marlowe's 'Faustus' and Goethe's 'Faust...
...biographer-friend knows, Adrian had but one sexual experience with a woman, a prostitute; but it leaves him with a disease that alternately retards and heightens his work and leaves him a senile wreck at the end. Perhaps the best and most readable section of Faustus describes Adrian's years in a rustic Bavarian retreat near Munich. Mann's description of Munich's cultural and pseudo-intellectual crowd between wars, and their stiff-necked, neurotic Kultur helps explain how an Austrian fanatic got them to eat out of his hand...
...Faustus will be considered a masterpiece by some, a bore by many. A good deal of it reads like Mann's heaviest formal essays. To those who look for it, however, the book offers a masterful explanation of those sides of the German character that welcomed Hitler. Most readers will see a symbolic parallel between Adrian's bargain with the Devil and Germany's similar sellout...
Mann himself doesn't think that parallel should be pushed too far. Said he in Los Angeles: "Both sold their souls to the Devil, but my hero is much more representative of the tragedy of the times." Mann, now 73, has been carrying the Faustus idea around for two-thirds of his life ("I wrote the first little note for it in 1901"). His preoccupation with illness goes back at least that far. Mann does not believe that illness is a source of artistic activity, "but if genius already exists, it stimulates it. It depends on who is sick...