I don’t remember when first I learned of Faust and the Faustian pact, but it was long before I’d read Marlowe, Goethe and Mann or heard Liszt’s Faust symphony or Gounod’s opera. I knew about gambling at quite a young age because my father used to go to the races, and he regularly enjoyed a game of poker with ‘the boys’ played on a card table set up in the living-room. So it was not surprising that my early understanding of the Faustian Pact was as a type of gambling: balancing loss and reward within a framework of risk.

As a child, I used to wonder what I would be willing to risk to be thinner, smarter, taller, more self-assured, relaxed, calmer. What would I be prepared to give up in the future to be the person I want to be NOW. Of course, for a child, the future is a vague and watery concept and not overly desirable: to be grown up is to be like the older people in your life – not an attractive prospect at all.

I was in my twenties when I read the Fausts of Mann, Goethe and Marlowe – in that order. I read the Mann first (it was during my Mann phase). and being first and also about a musician, it lodged firmly in me, far more so than the other versions. Through the various stations of my life – and at my advanced age there have been quite a few – there have been several re-readings of Mann and Goethe, and each time I have posed the same question: what would I be willing to do and to forfeit, to be or to have X, Y or Z?

The question has changed weight with the years. What was a simple equation of desire when younger has gained considerable moral complexity with age. After all, there are other people to consider and a world in flux; personal gain must be justified and deserved. Literature’s various Fausts paid little mind to broader moral concerns, in fact the contrary occurred in that each case can be seen as involving an exclusively egocentric desire/choice/decision, and like a child, none of them gave much thought to the pay-up time in 24 years.

My consideration of a Faustian Pact has tended to remain in the personal sphere – I’d like to think it was because of literary taste and intellectual curiosity, but I expect life’s dissatisfactions and disappointments provided if not a driving force, more than the occasional shove – but with the dominance of Trump and the surge in right-wing nationalism the notion of the Faustian Pact is being played out in the public arena. 

How on earth do those Republican congress people live with themselves, with their craven toadying, their bending the knee and tugging the forelock to Trump? And the praise they heap on him, fuelling his vanity (one cannot help but wonder at a grown man having such need). And this is all done because they fear the consequences if they cross him, and the consequent spoiling of their ambitions. But what is the role of a congress person if all they can do is agree with the great leader? This is not representing their constituents: the job they were elected to do, they are not doing. Of course they would say they are protecting their job in the future, but does that justify 4 years of neglecting the people who voted for them? 

It’s big business for the devil in Washington DC these days. Indeed, there’s so much work the devil has needed to co-opt a team of AI (the boys at Big Tech have been unsurprisingly obliging).

As for Trump himself, narcissism has no need of a pact, Faustian or otherwise. The narcissist only needs to please himself. Everything is his due. No payment, no pay up time. Corruption? It’s irrelevant to the narcissist; he takes what he wants, what is his right. He may pay some mind to his family, but I suspect none of them cross him – except perhaps Melania. 

No deals with the devil in the Executive Residence, so it’s fortunate there’s so much business elsewhere. 

And I cannot help but wonder what Mann would make of all this, Mann, who lived through the Nazi period, who went into exile to escape Hitler’s regime, who spoke out against Hitler, whose own Faust draws on and reflects upon those terrible years.