Death In Venice (2 page)

deal about an era by its most prominent literary characters. The twentieth century gave us Leopold Bloom, Clarissa Dalloway, Humbert Humbert, and Jay Gatsby, among others, and it gave us Gustav von Aschenbach. They are, on one hand, a rather motley crew. Here is Mrs. Dalloway buying flowers. Here is Gatsby staring at the green light on Daisy Buchanan's dock. And here is Aschenbach, our Icarus, flying too high, melting, and crashing down on a beach. For all their differences, though, these characters have a certain commonality. They are, all of them, small figures in an immense landscape. They are all undernourished, though the world has given them everything they need to survive, at least in terms of food and shelter. They are all on quests, and if the objects of their desire seem rather modest-one wants to give a perfect party, another wants his childhood sweetheart back-it is the very modesty of those wishes, conjoined with their unattainability that breaks our hearts. Most of the heroes of twentiethcentury European and American literature are striving not against marital constraints or humble origins or political systems, but against loss itself Some of them end up better than others, but none of them wins. Aschenbach is, to me at least, the most devastating of the lot. Like any enduring literary figure, he is both of his time and beyond it. He is descended from King [. ear, the most glorious of all misguided spirits, though before Him's translation we might not fully have understood that. By fine-tuning certain details, by reconsidering word choices, Heim's translation achieves a startling effect. It rescues Aschenbach from the realm of the cautionary and places him where he belongs, in the pantheon of fictive men and women whose impossible yearnings make them as deeply human as characters can be. It's a dark gift, what Heim has given us. Here we have an Aschenbach who is harder to dismiss, whose fate is larger and nobler, if not exactly more comforting. Here is an Aschenbach who is more clearly and unavoidably all of us, who wants more than life is willing to provide, whose defeat is so bound up with his heroism that the two can't be easily separated. That may or may not be exactly what Mann had in mind. There's no way of knowing. But it is, for my purposes at least, the grander and more humane book that Mann meant to give us all along.

ONE

Gustav Aschenbach, or von Aschenbach, as he had officially been known since his fiftieth birthday, set out alone from his residence in Munich's Prinzregentenstrasse on a spring afternoon in 19.. -a year that for months had shown so ominous a countenance to our continent-with the intention of taking an extended walk. Overwrought from the difficult and dangerous labors of the late morning hours, labors demanding the utmost caution, prudence, tenacity, and precision of will, the writer had even after the midday meal been unable to halt the momentum of the inner mechanism-the motus anImi continuus in which, according to Cicero, eloquence resides-and find the refreshing sleep that the growing wear and tear upon his forces had made a daily necessity. And so, shortly after tea he had sought the outdoors in the hope that open air and exercise might revive him and help him to enjoy a fruitful evening. It was early May, and after a few cold, wet weeks a mock summer had set in. The Englischer Garten, though as yet in tender bud, was as muggy as in August and full of vehicles and pedestrians on the city side. At Aumeister, to which he had been led by ever more solitary paths, Aschenbach briefly scanned the crowded and lively open-air restaurant and the cabs and carriages along its edge, then, the sun beginning to sink, headed home across the open fields beyond the park, but feeling tired and noticing a storm brewing over Fohring, he stopped at the Northern Cemetery to wait for the tram that would take him straight back to town. As it happened, there was no one at the tram stop or thereabouts. Nor was any vehicle to be seen on the paved roadway of the Ungererstrasse-whose gleaming tracks stretched solitary in the direction of Schwabing-or on the road to Fohring. There was nothing stirring behind the stonemasons' fences, where crosses, headstones, and monuments for sale formed a second, uninhabited graveyard, and the mortuary's Byzantine structure opposite stood silent in the glow of the waning day. Its fa�ade, decorated with Greek crosses and brightly hued hieratic patterns, also displayed a selection of symmetrically arranged gilt-lettered inscriptions concerning the afterlife, such as "They Enter into the Dwelling Place of the Lord" or "May the Light Everlasting Shine upon Them," and reading the formulas, letting his mind's eye lose itself in the mysticism emanating from them, served to distract the waiting man for several minutes until, resurfacing from his reveries, he noticed a figure in the portico above the two apocalyptic beasts guarding the staircase, and something slightly out of the ordinary in the figure's appearance gave his thoughts an entirely new turn. Whether the man had emerged from the chapel's inner sanctum through the bronze gate or mounted the steps unobtrusively from outside was uncertain. Without giving the matter much thought, Aschenbach inclined towards the first hypothesis. The man-of medium height, thin, beardless and strikingly snub-nosed-was the red-haired type and had its milky, freckled pigmentation. He was clearly not of Bavarian stock and, if nothing else, the broad, straight-brimmed bast hat covering his head lent him a distinctly foreign, exotic air. He did, however, have the customary knapsack strapped to his shoulders, wore a yellowish belted suit of what appeared to be loden, and carried a gray waterproof over his left forearm, which he pressed to his side, and an iron-tipped walking stick in his right hand, and having thrust the stick diagonally into the ground, he had crossed his feet and braced one hip on its crook. Holding his head high and thus exposing a strong, bare Adam's apple on the thin neck rising out of his loose, open shirt, he gazed alert into the distance with colorless, red-lashed eyes, the two pronounced vertical furrows between them oddly suited to the short, turned-up nose. Thus-and perhaps his elevated and elevating position contributed to the impressionthere was something of the overseer, something lordly, bold, even wild in his demeanor, for be it that he was grimacing, blinded by the setting sun, or that he had a permanent facial deformity, his lips seemed too short: they pulled all the way back, baring his long, white teeth to the gums. Aschenbach's half-distracted, half-inquisitive scrutiny of the stranger may have been lacking in discretion, for he suddenly perceived that the man was returning his stare and was indeed so belligerently, so directly, so blatantly determined to challenge him publicly and force him to withdraw it that Aschenbach, embarrassed, turned away and set off along the fence, vaguely resolved to take no further notice of him. A minute later he had forgotten the man. It may have been the stranger's perambulatory appearance that acted upon his imagination or some other physical or psychological influence coming into play, but much to his surprise he grew aware of a strange expansion of his inner being, a kind of restive anxiety, a fervent youthful craving for faraway places, a feeling so vivid, so new or else so long outgrown and forgotten that he came to a standstill and-hands behind his back, eyes on the ground, rooted to the spot-examined the nature and purport of the feeling. It was wanderlust, pure and simple, yet it had come upon him like a seizure and grown into a passion-no, more, an hallucination. His desire sprouted eyes, his imagination, as yet unstilled from its morning labors, conjured forth the earth's manifold wonders and horrors in his attempt to visualize them: he saw. He saw a landscape, a tropical quagmire beneath a steamy skysultry, luxuriant, and monstrous-a kind of primordial wilderness of islands, marshes, and alluvial channels; saw hairy palm shafts thrusting upward, near and far, from rank clusters of bracken, from beds of thick, swollen, and bizarrely burgeoning flora; saw fantastically malformed trees plunge their roots through the air into the soil, into stagnant, shadow-green, looking-glass waters, where, amidst milk-white flowers bobbing like bowls, outlandish stoop-shouldered birds with misshapen beaks stood stock-still in the shallows, peering off to one side; saw the eyes of a crouching tiger gleam out of the knotty canes of a bamboo thicket-and felt his heart pound with terror and an enigmatic craving. Then the vision faded, and with a shake of the head Aschenbach resumed his promenade along the gravestone cutters' fences. He had-at least since he could afford the advantages of traveling the world at will-regarded tourism as nothing but a hygienic precaution to be taken willy-nilly from time to time. Preoccupied with the tasks imposed upon him by his ego and the European psyche, overburdened by the obligation to produce, averse to diversion, and no lover of the external world and its variety he was quite content with the view of the earth's surface that anyone can gain without stirring far from home, and never so much as tempted to venture beyond Europe. Especially now that his life was on the decline and his fear of failing to achieve his artistic goals-the concern that his time might run out before he had accomplished what he needed to accomplish and given fully of himselfcould no longer be dismissed as a caprice, he had confined his external existence almost exclusively to the beautiful city that had become his home and the rustic cottage he had built for himself in the mountains and where he spent the rainy summers. Thus it was that the sudden and belated impulse which had come over him was soon restrained and redressed by reason and the self-discipline he had practiced from an early age. He had intended to reach a certain point in his work, which was his life, before moving to the country, and the thought of leaving his desk for months to go gallivanting around the world seemed too frivolous and disruptive to be taken seriously. Yet he knew only too well the source of the sudden temptation. It was an urge to flee-he fully admitted it, this yearning for freedom, release, oblivionan urge to flee his work, the humdrum routine of a rigid, cold, passionate duty. Granted, he loved that duty and even almost loved the enervating daily struggle between his proud, tenacious, much-tested will and the growing fatigue, which no one must suspect or the finished product betray by the slightest sign of foundering or neglect. But it made sense not to go too far in the other direction, not to be so obstinate as to curb a need erupting with such virulence. He thought of his work, of the point at which, yesterday and again today, he had had to abandon it since it had refused to yield to either patient attention or a swift bit of legerdemain. He had examined the passage anew, trying to shatter or diffuse his block, only to renounce the effort with a shudder of revulsion. There was no unwonted difficulty involved; no, he was paralyzed by the scruples arising from his distaste for the project, which made themselves felt in demands impossible to satisfy. Impossible demands had of course impressed the young man as the very essence and innermost nature of talent, and it was for them that he had bridled and cooled his feelings, knowing they are prone to make do with blithe approximations and halfperfections. Could it be that his indentured sensibility was now taking its revenge, abandoning him and refusing henceforth to bear his art on its wings, depriving him of all pleasure, all delight in form and expression? Not that he produced poor work: such at least was the advantage of his years that he felt serenely confident of his mastery. Yet, much as the nation might honor it, it gave him no pleasure: he felt it lacked those flights of fiery playful fancy, the product of joy, which more than any intrinsic content-great merit that it might havedelight the discriminating public. He dreaded the summer in the country, all alone in the cottage with the maid who cooked his meals and the man who served them; he dreaded the sight of the familiar mountain peaks and slopes that would once more encompass his torpid discontent. He needed a change of scene, a bit of spontaneity, an idle existence, a foreign atmosphere, and an influx of new blood to make the summer bearable and productive. He would travel, then; good, he was satisfied. Not too far, not all the way to the tigers. A night in a sleeping car and a siesta of three or four weeks at one of the internationally recognized holiday resorts in the friendly south... Such were his reflections as the clang of the electric tram reached him along the Ungererstrasse, and mounting the platform he decided to spend the evening studying maps and timetables. He thought of looking back to find the man in the bast hat, his companion during what had turned into a fateful wait, but he was unable to determine the man's whereabouts: he was neither at his previous location nor at the next stop nor in the tram.

TWO

The author of a limpid and powerful prose epic dealing with the life of Frederick the Great; the patient artist who in his boundless diligence had woven a rich tapestry of a novel, Maya by name, that brings together myriad human fates in the service of an idea; the creator of a trenchant tale entitled "A Wretched Figure" that had earned him the gratitude of the younger generation by showing it a path to moral fortitude existing even beyond the depths of knowledge; and lastly (here ends the list of his mature works) the thinker whose impassioned treatise, "Art and the Intellect," had led serious critics to rank him, on the strength of the work's rigorous logic and eloquent use of antitheses, alongside Schiller and his meditation "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry"- Gustav Aschenbach was born in L., a county town in the province of Silesia, the son of a senior official in the judiciary. His forebears had been officers, judges, and civil servants, men who led disciplined, decently austere lives serving king and state. A certain inner spirituality had manifested itself in the person of the only clergyman amongst them, and a strain of more impetuous, sensual blood had found its way into the family in the previous generation through the writer's mother, the daughter of a Bohemian bandmaster. She was the source of the foreign racial features in his appearance. It was the union of the father's sober, conscientious nature with the darker, more fiery impulses of the mother that engendered the artist-and this particular artist. Since his entire being was bent on fame, he proved himself if not quite precocious then at least, thanks to the resolute and precise persona he cultivated, mature and ready for life in the world before his time. Barely out of school he had acquired a name for himself In the space of ten years he had learned to perform his professional duties and manage his fame from his writing desk and to make every sentence of his correspondence gracious and pregnant with meaning (letters had to be brief, because the demands made on the staunch and successful are many). The forty-year-old, worn down by the strains and vicissitudes of his work, had to cope with a daily mail bearing stamps from all over the world. Equidistant from the banal and the eccentric, his talent seemed tailored to gain both the confidence of the general public and the demanding admiration of the connoisseur. Since boyhood he had been pressed from all sides to achieve-and to achieve the extraordinaryand thus had never known leisure, the carefree idleness of youth. When in about his thirty-fifth year he was taken ill in Vienna, an astute observer said of him in public, "Here is how Aschenbach has always lived"-and he made a tight fist of his left hand-"not like this"and he let his open hand dangle freely from the arm of his chair. That rang true, and what made Aschenbach all the more heroic and noble was that he was not robust by nature, that he was merely called to constant industry not born to it. Medical concerns had kept the boy out of school and dependent on private tutoring. He had grown up solitary and friendless and must have realized early that he belonged to a species for which talent was less a rarity than physical strength-the strength needed to make something of the talent-a species that tended to make the most of its powers early, seldom developing them into old age. But his motto was Durchhalten, "Persevere," and he regarded his Frederick-the- Great novel as nothing short of the apotheosis of this command, which he considered the essence of a cardinal virtue: action in the face of suffering. Then, too, he ardently desired to live to old age, for he had always believed that the only artistic gift that can be called truly great, all-encompassing, and, yes, truly praiseworthy is one that has been vouchsafed productivity at all stages of human existence. Wishing to bear on such frail shoulders the burdens imposed by his talent and wishing to go far, he had great need of discipline, and discipline was fortunately an inborn quality he had inherited from his father's side of the family. At forty at fifty and even when younger, at an age when others dissipate their talents, wax rhapsodic, or blissfully defer their grand projects, he would start his day early by dashing cold water over his chest and back; then, having set a pair of tall wax candles in silver holders at the head of his manuscript, he would spend two or three fervent, conscientious hours offering up to art the strength he had garnered in sleep. It was a forgivable error-indeed, it betokened a victory for his moral stance-that the uninitiated should take the world of his Maya or the epic background against which Frederick's feats unfolded as the product of prodigious strength and unending stamina, but in fact they grew out of daily increments of hundreds upon hundreds of bits of inspiration, and the only reason they were so perfect-overall and in every detail-was that their creator had held out for years under the strain of a single work with a fortitude and tenacity analogous to those Frederick had used to conquer his native province, and that he had devoted only his most vibrant and vital hours to its composition. For a major product of the intellect to make an immediate broad and deep impact it must rest upon a secret affini indeed, a congruence between the personal destiny of its author and the collective destiny of his generation. The people do not know why they bestow fame upon a given work of art. Though far from connoisseurs, they believe they have discovered a hundred virtues to justify such enthusiasm, yet the true basis for their acclaim is an imponderable, mere affinity. Once, in a less than conspicuous passage, Aschenbach stated outright that nearly everything great owes its existence to "despites": despite misery and affliction, poverty, desolation, physical debility, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstacles. But it was more than an observation; it was his experience, the very formula of his life and fame, the key to his work. Was it any wonder, therefore, that it likewise informed the moral makeup and external demeanor of his most representative protagonists? The new type of hero that he favored and that recurred in a variety of forms had been analyzed quite early by a shrewd critic, who said it rested on "an intellectual, adolescent conception of manliness," one that "stands by calmly, gritting its teeth in proud shame, while swords and spears pierce its flesh." It was all very beautiful, clever, and precise, though it erred on the side of passivity. Because composure in the face of destiny and equanimity in the face of torture are not mere matters of endurance; they are an active achievement, a positive triumph, and the Sebastian figure is the most beautiful symbol if not of art as a whole then certainly of the art here in question. What one saw when one looked into the world as narrated by Aschenbach was elegant self-possession concealing inner dissolution and biological decay from the eyes of the world until the eleventh hour; a sallow, sensually destitute ugliness capable of fanning its smoldering lust into a pure flame, indeed, of rising to sovereignty in the realm of beauty; pallid impotence probing the incandescent depths of the mind for the strength to cast an entire supercilious people at the foot of the Cross, at their feet; an obliging manner in the empty punctilious service of form; the life, false and dangerous, and the swiftly enervating desires and art of the born deceiver. Observing all this and much more of a like nature, one might well wonder whether the only possible heroism was the heroism of the weak. Yet what heroism was more at one with the times? Gustav Aschenbach was the writer of all those who labor on the brink of exhaustion, the heavy-laden, the worn-down who yet hold their heads high, the moralists of achievement who, though slight of stature and chary of means, manage to attain, for a time at least, the trappings of greatness by combining rapture of the will with clever management. They are legion; they are the heroes of the age. And they all recognized themselves in his work, found themselves validated, celebrated, glorified therein; they rendered him thanks and proclaimed his name. Young and green with the times and ill advised by them, he had stumbled in public, made false moves, made a fool of himself, violating tact and good sense in word and deed. Yet he eventually gained the dignity to which, as he maintained, every great talent feels instinctively drawn. One might even say that his entire development consisted in jettisoning the constraints of doubt and irony and making the conscious, defiant ascent to dignity. Lively, intellectually undemanding formulations are the delight of the bourgeois masses, while passionately unbending youth is excited only by the problematic, and Aschenbach was as problematic and unbending as any youth. He had overindulged the intellect, overcultivated erudition and ground up the seed corn, revealed secrets, defamed talent, betrayed art; yes, even as his works entertained, elevated, and animated the gullible reader, he, the youthful artist, held the twenty-year-olds in thrall to his cynical remarks about the questionable nature of art and artistic genius. Yet nothing would seem to dull a deft and noble intellect more swiftly, more surely than the sharp and bitter stimulant of erudition, and clearly the adolescent's melancholic and ever so conscientious thoroughness is shallow when compared with the profound resolve of the mature master to deny knowledge, disavow it, put it behind him, head high, lest it should in the slightest maim, discourage, or debase the will, action, feeling, and even passion. How is the celebrated "Wretched Figure" to be interpreted if not as an outburst of disgust with the indecent psychologizing of the age as embodied in the figure of a we and fatuous semiscoundrel who fashion, a destiny for himself by pushing his wife into the arms of a callow youth out of debility, depravity, or ethical laxity and then feels profoundly justified in committing base acts? The power of the word by which the outcast was cast out heralded a rejection of all moral doubt, all sympathy with the abyss, a renunciation of the leniency implicit in the homily claiming that to understand is to forgive, and what was under way here, indeed, what had come to pass was the "miraculous rebirth of impartiality," which surfaced a short time later with a certain mysterious urgency in one of the author's dialogues. Strange associations! Was it an intellectual consequence of this "rebirth," this new dignity and rigor, that at approximately this time critics observed an almost excessive intensification of his aesthetic sensibility, a noble purity, simplicity, and harmony of form that henceforth gave his artistic production so manifest, indeed, so calculated a stamp of virtuosity and classicism? But does not moral fortitude beyond knowledgebeyond disintegrative and inhibitory erudition-entail a simplification, a moral reduction of the world and the soul and hence a concomitant intensification of the will to evil, the forbidden, the morally reprehensible? And has not form a double face? Is it not moral and immoral at once-moral as the outcome and expression of discipline, yet immoral, even antimoral, insofar as it is by its very nature indifferent to morality; indeed, strives to bend morality beneath its proud and absolute scepter? Be that as it may, development is destiny, and should it not take one course if lacking in the glamour and obligations of fame and another if attended by the interest and trust of a broad audience? Only incorrigible bohemians find it boring or laughable when a man of talent outgrows the libertine chrysalis stage and begins to perceive and express the dignity of the intellect, adopting the courtly ways of a solitude replete with bitter suffering and inner battles though eventually gaining a position of power and honor among men. And what sport, what bravado, what pleasure there is in fashioning one's own talent! As time progressed, Gustav Aschenbach's creations took on an official, didactic tone: in later years his style lost its brashness, its fresh, subtle nuances; it became fixed and exemplary, polished and conventional, conservative, formal, even formulaic, with the result that the aging man-like Louis XIV, if we are to believe tradition-banned all prosaic words from his vocabulary. It was then that school officials began including selected passages from his works in the textbooks they prescribed. He found it only fitting that a German prince who had just ascended the throne should confer nobility upon the author of Frederick on his fiftieth birthday, and he did not decline the honor. After several restless years of testing this place and that, he eventually chose Munich as his permanent residence and led a solid bourgeois existence there, enjoying the respect that is in certain cases vouchsafed the intellect. The marriage he had contracted in his youth with a girl from a scholarly family was cut short, following a brief period of bliss, by the girl's death. It left him with a daughter, who was now married. He had had no son. Gustav von Aschenbach was of somewhat less than medium height, dark, and clean-shaven. The head seemed a bit too large for the almost dainty physique. The hair, brushed back, was thin at the crown but very thick and gray at the temples and framed a high, rugged, scarredlooking forehead. The gold frame of the rimless spectacles cut into the root of a strong, nobly aquiline nose. The mouth was large-now slack, now suddenly narrow and tight-the cheeks sunken and furrowed, the wellshaped chin slightly cleft. Important destinies must have passed through that head, which was often tilted dolefully, yet it was art-not, as is commonly the case, a hard and turbulent life-that had formed the physiognomy. The dazzling give and take of the interchange between Voltaire and the king on the subject of war had been conceived behind that brow; those eyes, wearily peering out through their lenses, had seen the gory inferno of the sick bays in the Seven Years War. On a personal level, too, art is life intensified: it delights more deeply, consumes more rapidly; it engraves the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventure on the countenance of its servant and in the long run, for all the monastic calm of his external existence, leads to self-indulgence, overrefinement, lethargy, and a restless curiosity that a lifetime of wild passions and pleasures could scarcely engender.