Lineaments of Faith
So far Manniana is merely trickling out. It will hardly achieve the flood proportions of Rilkcana. It is intellectually more austere, at times orotund, partaking of the GOM and even the paterfamil- ias. It lacks the slightly gamey flavour of those Rilkean side-dishes on which an odd sort of customer has gorged to satiation. Why struggle with the Duino Elegies when you can get the 'essence' of them, together with a hint of the spices of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, in the Letters to Merline? Manniana is less likely to distract attention from the main courses, but some clangor of misrepresentation still remains. Why boater with the massive meticulousness of The Magic Mountain when you can find the 'theme' sum- marised in a few sentences from one of the author's early letters?
The chief effect of the Letters to Paul Amann
is to inspire sympathy for the recipient, an Austrian Jew, philologist and cultural historian. Amann's correspondence with Mann originated in a disagreement with an essay of Mann's, 'Thoughts in War,' which appeared in the New Rundschau for November, 1914. Amann dis- sented from Mann's view of Germany as the victim of ignorance and ill will on the part of her opponents, especially of France, 'a naughty child who cries out for a whipping.' Amann felt, to put it crudely, that Germany was reactionary. Mann replied, 'I do not share your love for revolution.' The editor of these Letters, writing from the Municipal Library of Lubeck, in a spirit of universal good will and doubly post-war under- standing, tells us that Amann's attitude derived 'from a somewhat exaggerated sense of justice' (careless fellow!) and 'his deep sympathy with French culture and the democratic ways of life in France.' Well, Amann's own chief work, Tradition and Welikrise, was published in Berlin in 1934 and 'unfortunately' (as the editor puts it) seized by the authorities the following year. In 1939 he fled to Europe, then to America, and (as the editor puts it) 'for years had a hard struggle.' He wasn't, unfortunately, one of the more distinguished intellectual refugees of the time. The later Mann—who, as the editor nicely phrases it, 'had swung over to unconditional affirmation of liberalism and parliamentary democracy'—would certainly dislike the tone of this editorial introduction. He had been forced to realise that his earlier 'non-political' meditations were in fact political, if only because they flattered the worse of the embattled parties, the one which ruined his beloved country. Mann himself suffered the transformation of his politi- cal views, as Doctor Faustus testifies. This editor- ial introduction is far too casual : a lot of other people's blood has run between its cosy lines.
Mann's patriotism was always decent. His mistake--a common one--was to devote his learned and subtle attention so completely to one enemy (in this case, 'our radical literati, the "intellectuals" par excellence') that he failed to perceive a more sinister enemy looming up over his shoulder. Literary men, wittily attacking the politics of other literary men, tend to forget that real politics go on elsewhere, among unliterary thugs busily sharpening their knives. It is pathetic to read of Mann's vision of a new Germany emerging from the First World War, freed from political Prussianism, 'stripped of her gloom without becoming shallow,' and thus equipped to 'lead the way to a democratic world culture— for the leadership must not fall to America.' Yet one can recognise the lineaments of this youthful patriotism in the fire-scarred and schooled pat- riotism of Doctor Faustus some thirty years later.
A Sketch of My Life, first published in 1930 in a limited edition, covers much the same ground as the Letters to Paul Atnann—or rather, like the Letters, skims over it. The trouble with both books is that their most interesting pas- sages concern Mann's Meditations of a Non- Political Man, which I find the least interesting of his works and the most thoroughly superseded by his fiction : superseded as early as 1924 by The Magic Mountain. In the Sketch Mann describes Germany's experiences in the First World War as 'frightful and yet, taken all in all, wholesome and furthering its maturity, and growth.' Again, it is touching and frightening to see Mann, a good German, identifying with himself and his own growing maturity a 'good Germany' which only existed in the form of scattered good men, men like himself, though not necessarily alike in political views. For all their intelligence, Mann's essays and speeches often have a Herr-Doktoral or institu- tional tinge about them. This is the case with the Sketch. He tells us how, at a meeting of the Berlin Academy of the Arts and Letters in 1925, he spoke with approval (and despite cheap sneers) of 'the official recognition of literature as an organ of the national life, its correlation, not to say its "elevation," into the official.' One should bear in mind that Mann was then enjoying official honours: The Magic Mountain had just been published, and the Nobel Prize was soon to follow. Later on Mann was to find out more about 'the official recognition of literature.' One should also remark that his views at that time were less simple than they might seem, as is indicated a few pages further on, when he talks of his early reliance on literary models. 'With time I have come to feel that the whole essence of art is in their deliberate abandonment, in the leap in the dark, the possibility of achieving the new.' At the best of times there is little reason to suppose that officials of the State actually approve of national organs leaping about in the dark.
These two books relate chiefly to a remote age when 'political' could be taken to mean 'republi- can.' Much of what they tell us has been rendered pathetic by recent history or redundant by Mann's own creative work. Taken by them- selves they would give a false and unfortunate impression of this great, permanently and inter- nationally valid writer.
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