The 40s: The Story of a Decade (61 page)

In appearance, Thomas Mann is
démodé
in the grand style. A disrespectful press photographer once said Mann looks like a well-carved, old-fashioned walking stick. His face has the ligneous angles of a museum woodcut. Beneath his properly tailored tweeds, he moves with the correct, erect, salon stiffness of an older Teutonic generation. His manners are a model. Strangers whom his poise alarms consider him a monster of politeness. He presents a kindly yet intimidating supercivilized surface which is partly the product of his native character and partly a deliberate construction of his own. Beneath this lies his air of inner preoccupation, illuminated by intermittent flashes of outward interest, and enlivened by the occasional, gentle boom of his Nordic baritone voice. In conversation (he doesn’t talk much, but at times he discourses) he contributes, at rare moments, a tardy, three-toned laugh, like an indulgent, superior spectre who has heard a delayed overtone of humor which the rest of the company’s duller ears have missed. For those he knows well, behind his courtly gestures and silences there are festooned affections and loyalties. When necessary, he goes out of his way very handsomely. There appears to be nothing even remotely casual in the whole complex Mann personality. In spirit, he is melancholy, ironic, weighty, and serene. He is used to his instinctive pessimism by now and it doesn’t upset him. He has no deistic conviction, but lately he has put a veneer of Christianity upon the lectures he has been giving on tour. With his profound interest in the fate of humanity, he might have become a religious writer if he had had any faith. Mentally, he is the perfect man of integrity; he is cautious, conservative, egocentric, and explorative. He moves slowly in a circle, or even consciously sidewise, toward a decision, does not bother to think of anything that he is not going to ponder recurrently, has the past on his mind, and suffers, profitably, from total recall. Socially, both as an upper-class European and a sensitive individual, he is skeptical of but not indifferent to this world’s gauds. He’ll usually choose the pure-silk people, a yard wide. As a young intellectual, he saw no reason a poet’s trousers and coat shouldn’t match, disliked bohemianism because he thought
it disorderly, and was a daydreamer, idle, vain, irritable, and scornful; he was impressionable and assimilative rather than ardent or generous. Today, no bad qualities show. This gives Mann an awesome psychological shape, like a large, unfamiliar figure seen from a distance.

· · ·

Though Mann has spent forty years as a novelist creating characters in print, on the whole he is devoid of interest in flesh-and-blood people. He views them as models rather than as mortals. He forgets both names and faces; he politely asks the dinner guest once again if she is married but will recall a curious ring she wore on her right hand a year before. He himself has noticeably well-sculptured hands; his books contain frequent descriptions of shapely fingernails. Of a handsome young woman, lunching for the first time at his Munich family table, he remarked to one of his daughters, with the abstract detachment of an author discussing a snag in a plot, “Strange. If your friend were a boy, she would be very beautiful.” A person’s appearance may fill Mann’s eye, but the suitable psychology to accompany this appearance he himself supplies, often in a subsequent short story. Like his rich mercantile forebears, he is less an inventor than a wise and thrifty manipulator. As a young author, his skill at borrowing his acquaintances as material for his writings led to his being accused not only of incorporating a certain neighbor in an acid short story called “Tristan” but also of peeking at him from a window with opera glasses. Mann declared that, as usual with his characters, he himself was mostly the Tristan in question, but he admitted using and enjoying the opera glasses. Indubitably, Mann’s lack of intimate interest in others has been compensated for by his conscientious and fecund concentration on himself as material for ten or more of his famous and varied characterizations. Whereas the narcissism of most romantic writers leads them to use themselves as heroes, Mann’s has led him to use himself as almost everything—as a hunchback, a swindler, a dilettante, as at least two overbred bourgeois youths, named Hanno and Hans, and as a regular bevy of authors, including Dr. Gustave Aschenbach, hero of
Death in Venice
, whom Mann describes as a European writer so great that “his antithetic eloquence led serious critics to rank it” with Schiller’s. (This is usually cited as one of Mann’s characteristic bits of humor, the joke, of course, being that Mann isn’t like Schiller but like Goethe.) Mann has recently even endowed the Biblical character of the young Joseph in
Joseph in Egypt
with some of his own psychology as a Nordic
youth. It is no joke to say that the greatest study of Mann is Mann. One of his children has said it is difficult not to see his writings as “a complex of family allusions.” Unconsciously, the Mann children speak of their father as if he were an edition.

· · ·

Ever since Thomas Mann began to write, he has written each morning from nine-thirty till noon. To his labors he says he gives “zealous preparation” and writes “with the patience which my native slowness laid upon me, a phlegm perhaps better described as restrained nervousness.” He writes about forty lines a day. His concentration is prodigious. He can work anywhere, under any conditions, in any environment. He has done his writing in his summer houses, his winter town homes, in trains, in hotels, on shipboard, in strange cities, in Italian fishing ports, in a beach chair on a Baltic dune, or as a weekend guest in an American garden—a man who will be “writing probably on his way to his own funeral,” as one astonished Connecticut host noted in his private correspondence, “and while being very much part of the world around him, in his quiet, courteous ways, writing as if that world did not exist.” Only once in Mann’s long career of writing has his habit of the daily stint been interrupted. That was in 1933, in Switzerland, when he realized that what had begun as a casual, pleasant holiday from Germany must continue as a painful exile. Here at last, for this deeply racial Teuton, was tragical material for motionless thought and grief rather than for some ever-growing manuscript.

He has no control over his literary mileage. The most popular of his works in America,
The Magic Mountain
, started out to be a
novella
and ended up as an enormous two-volume novel that took twelve years to complete.
The Beloved Returns
, last year’s full-length
vie romanciée
about Goethe, started as a short sketch.
Joseph in Egypt
, which has already run into a trilogy of novels and may become a tetralogy, since it is already going backward into the story of Jacob, began as a little preface he was asked to write for a folio of Biblical drawings by an artist friend of Frau Mann’s.

Mann writes his works in school notebooks, in longhand. His small, tight script is so difficult to read that he makes it an excuse for never writing anyone letters. His wife is his expert decoder. As part of her métier of devotion, built around his career of writing, she learned typing, and on their travels she carries a portable typewriter in order to keep
abreast of his voluminous manuscripts. Frau Mann, the family manager and businessman, is a small, volatile, articulate, personable lady with short gray hair and considerable worldly experience. It is unquestionably a tribute to her that there have been moments when publishers felt that Thomas Mann as a bachelor would have been easier to handle as an author.

Frau Mann was born Katja Pringsheim, of a rich, highly cultivated Jewish family, orginally from Oels in Silesia. Her grandfather built the railroads in the Upper Silesian industrial area and his Wilhelmstrasse mansion was notable as the Haus Pringsheim. Her father, Alfred Pringsheim, assembled a famous collection of Italian trecento and quatrocento majolicas which ranked as the finest in existence outside a museum and ran to four hundred items, supplemented by a two-volume illustrated catalogue. Frau Mann’s father was also a member of the Bavarian Academy of Science, a brilliant mathematician and lecturer, an acquaintance of Richard Wagner, a musicologue, a bibliophile, and an art-lover in general. He abandoned the faith of his fathers, married a Christian, Fräulein Hedwig Dohm, of a Berlin literary family, and made of their Munich home in Arcisstrasse a centre of the Bavarian capital’s social and artistic life during the reign of Ludwig II and the Regency. As a child, Fräulein Katja, like her four brothers, one of whom was her twin, possessed a private library of beautifully bound books and was brought up in the double luxury of an atmosphere that was both rich and brainy. Though Mann’s family had been well educated rather than intellectual, the author and his wife, who first met in Munich when he was in his late twenties, had much in common—mainly an elegance of background that was still traditional in big German mercantile and industrial families. To set against the Pringsheims’ gilded Renaissance salons, Mann possessed, at least in memory, the parquetry ballroom of his childhood, where, before the family lost its money, “officers of the garrison,” as he later contentedly wrote, “courted the daughters of the patriciate.” Against the imposing public funeral of the celebrated Munich artist Lembach, who had painted Fräulein Katja’s portrait and whose interment the very cultivated Pringsheims attended almost as though it were an artistic event, Mann could match the funeral of his father, “which in size and pomp,” as he later specified in his memoirs, “surpassed anything that had been seen in Lübeck for years,” his father having been so important a grandee that the Hanseatic troops dipped their colors to him as he passed them on the street.

Thomas Mann was thirty years old when, as he still sentimentally recorded twenty-five years later, “I exchanged rings with my fairy bride.” He had first seen her, and been attracted to her, in a more realistic vein, on a Munich tramcar, while she was having a victorious argument with the conductor. From this highly successful marriage have come six children and about two dozen volumes.

· · ·

Mann’s own family, whose decadence he even as a boy proudly accepted as evidence of its aristocracy, did indeed rank as tiptop. His great-grandfather established the clan in Lübeck, which, from the thirteenth through the seventeenth century, was head of the Hanseatic League, that shrewd alliance of rich traders controlling the maritime commerce of northern Europe. The great-grandfather wore powdered wigs and lace frills and was a Voltairian freethinker. Mann’s grandfather, who was Consul to the Netherlands, wore leg-o’-mutton sleeves and linen chokers, and ranked as a pillar in the family’s strict Protestant Church. He was what was then called, politically, a liberal, which at that moment in German history meant he considered the democratizing of the Lübeck Senate only a piece of bad taste. He spoke French and Low German around the house, where the family motto, “Work, Pray, Save,” was carved over the great front door, and he once drove his coach-and-four to south Germany, where he did a nice bit of business in wheat for the Prussian Army, which was just then preparing for Napoleon and Waterloo. Mann’s father was a senator of Lübeck and was also twice mayor; he died at an early age of blood poisoning, when his son was fifteen. Thomas’s mother, a pure exotic in this northern family, was Julia Da Silva-Bruhns, who was born in Brazil, the daughter of a resident German planter and his South American wife, who was in turn the offspring of a Portuguese-Indian union. This foreign Frau Mann was beautiful and musical. Thomas Mann had two sisters, both of whom died by their own hand. With his startling genius for appreciating every dramatic scrap of family material and also for invariably publishing it, he relates in his autobiography that his sister Clara was an untalented actress, unconventional, macabre, and refined, that she kept a skull and poison in her room, that she was betrothed to an Alsatian industrialist, that a doctor “used his power over her for his own gratification,” that the fiancé discovered he had been deceived, and that she then “took her cyanide, enough to kill a whole regiment of soldiers. The last that was heard from her,” Mann
adds with fraternal clinical accuracy, “was the sound of the gargling with which she tried to cool the burning of her corroded throat.” He has not yet set down the subsequent sad case of his other sister, Julia. “Her grave is too new,” he has written. “I will leave the story to a later narrative in a larger frame,” in all probability to be furnished by his publisher.

As a child, little Thomas had a happy, privileged, sheltered life. As a boy, he loathed school. As a youth in his late teens, upon the sale, after his father’s death, of the family mansion and the father’s share of the Mann grain business, which had long been running downhill, Mann moved with his mother to Munich, where he became an insurance clerk. Working at his job by day, at night he began to try his hand at short stories and, on having the first accepted, gave up business forever and entered the University of Munich, where he remained briefly. He afterward spent a scant year in Italy with his brother Heinrich, who, though he was later to become an author, was then studying to be a painter. Thomas, the young northerner, didn’t like the south; as he said, all that
bellezza
made him nervous. To stabilize himself amid the glories of Rome, he devoured Scandinavian and Russian literature in translation. The brothers spent much of their time playing dominoes in cafés and carefully made no friends.

Back in Munich, Mann, then in his early twenties, was taken on the staff of
Simplicissimus
, the weightiest, wittiest satiric magazine in Europe. When he was a book-loving child, his first literary stimulation had been received from Hans Andersen; when he was a boy, he had devoured Schiller, along with his afternoon plate of bread and butter. In his Munich twenties, he was subjected to two profoundly maturing influences. The first was the works of Nietzsche, from whom Mann, though disdaining the philosopher’s blond-beast doctrine, absorbed the dogma of victory over self. The second influence was Schopenhauer, a set of whose works he bought at a sale, for months left uncut, and then suddenly absorbed, reading day and night, as one reads only once in a lifetime. What Mann derived from Schopenhauer was, oddly enough, he has stated, “the element of eroticism and mystic unity” in the great pessimist’s philosophy.