Mann acts
Hilary Spurling Unwritten Memories Katia Mann edited by Elisabeth Plessen and Michael Mann. Translated by Hunter and Hildegarde Hannum (Deutsch £3.95) Thomas Mann's widow, having stoutly resisted all requests for her memoirs until well into her eighties, reluctantly succumbed at last to the tape-recorder; and these charming, chatty, deceptively informal Memories are the result. Her own likes and dislikes (one gets the impression that the latter were apt to be strong) barely impinge on this evocative but strictly impersonal record of courtship and marriage. Portraits of the author in both phases (as Imma in Royal Highness and Rachel in Jacob and his Brothers) were left by her husband, and clearly Frau Mann feels no call to enlarge on either.
Ravishingly pretty, witty and pert, Katia Pringsheim was married at twenty-one in 1905 to a suitor who carried her off for all the world like the prince in the fairytale (when she was six and he was fourteen, Thomas Mann already had her picture pinned up over his desk though it was another fourteen years before he discovered her name); and both parties lived happilY ever after. Exile from Germany in 1933 dislocated their lives but drew them if anything closer together. Her courage matched her husband's during his years of opposition to, and persecution by, the Nazi party but danger, pain and loss are touched on very lightly. On the more practical aspects of exile in America among a colony of illustrious, ill-assorted, discontented, often agonisingly disoriented German refugees (nearly all on Hollywood contracts), she is at once shrewd and entertaining. Their friends and enemies in these years, from Schonberg to Einstein, Brecht to Chaplin, are deftly drawn.
But perhaps the most intriguing part of this book is its account of Thomas Mann's working habits, his prodigious powers of observation and memory, his habit of transferring people bodily from fact to fiction.
Cases of mistaken identity are sorted out, models identified, false claimants briskly dismissed. On the origins of Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain and the Krull family (`Oh, I once watched them for half an hour on a Rhine steamer'), Frau Mann IS invaluable.
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