Twentieth Century Mann

Julian Jebb

As the 20th century reaches its end, the great novelists of the time take on a new proportion. Proust, Kafka and Joyce,

the innovators in language and form, have settled into the timescape, and already seem as familiar as Dickens and Balzac were 100 years ago. It is too early to say what posteri- ty will make of Saul Bellow, Patrick White or V. S. Naipaul. And will history condemn Nabokov as a technicoloured conjurer or recognise him as the cleverest giant of them all? What has already become clear is that the writers whose lives straddled both this and the preceding century, whose work was broadly traditional — that is to say whose primary concern was the delineation of character within the narrative form Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Thomas Mann — take on mountainous proportions.

What did they share? An obsessive in- terest in the ironies of self-knowledge; an unflagging creative energy; a passionate concern about the balance between order and ecstatic apprehension as part of the creative process which became a metaphor of life itself. It is Mann who grows most steadily in stature. He appears most • copiously and heroically to have understood the times he lived through, and to have transformed his responses into a durable, immensely varied, testimony to our century.

Richard Winston died in 1979, so we shall only have this, the first volume of his il- luminating and gracefully written biography. It takes us from the year of Mann's birth to 1911, the year of the com- pletion of Death In Venice, his most popular but far from his best work. But what a prodigious artist he had already become! The dominant themes both in his life and work are graphically presented by Mr Winston. The complex rivalry between Thomas and his elder brother Heinrich, also a novelist; the isolation of the artist set against the cultivated and benevolent family life on the Baltic, both in Ltlbeck and Tavermunde, the beloved seaside resort of childhood; the sense both of his intense Germanness and his equal attachment to European cultural traditions; and perhaps most telling of all, his love of music and the theatre.

We are shown how his childish obsession with inventing and acting out heroic dramas for his puppet theatre led to his near idolotrous attachment to the music of Wagner. All these elements appear both in his great early novel, Buddenbrooks and also in his stories such as Little Herr Friedemann, At The Prophet's and especially in the tragi-comic charm of his novella, Tonio KrOger, which is saturated by the rhythms of the sea.

Winston analyses beautifully the musical structure of Buddenbrooks, that perfectly organised saga of a prosperous merchant family gradually disintegrated by the encroachments of bohemianism. The novel's opening is built in short scherzo chapters, gradually yielding its more sonorous social and philosophical ideas, while the central drama of individual disillusion and domestic decay is never lost. Mann himself wrote of its composition:

... everything I thought I could treat as a

mere preliminary to the principal story assumed a highly independent, highly asser- tive form ... I was somewhat reminded of Wagner's experience with the Ring cycle, which had grown from the initial concep- tion of Siegfried Death into a tetralogy with an intricate fabric of leitmotifs'.

Winston achieves that special quality which might be termed objective identifi- cation which is the mark of a first rate biographer. He is able to explain sym- pathetically the curious paradox of the highly disciplined, self-conscious artist which dwelt within the same person who entertained a wildly romantic, pessimistic,

Mediterranean fascination with betrayal, dishonour and especially with death.

Everywhere there are illuminations on how some trivial experience would be noted minutely, stored, apparently forgotten, to emerge years later transformed into art. A sunset seen in Palestrina whilst staying there with his brother is summoned up in every

detail 40 years later in Doctor Faustus. Most extraordinarily, the events and characters of Death In Venice are drawn

precisely from life. Even Tadzio, the beautiful Polish boy for whom the writer von Aschenbach conceives a morbid obses- sion, turned out 50 years after the book's publication to be a Polish count. He had photographs of the Lido visit to prove it; he had been aware, he revealed, of 'an old man' (Mann was then 35!) always observing him on the beach. Incidentally the book

would be greatly improved by illustrations, something we can still surely expect at the price of £12.50. As it is there is only a fron- tispiece of a youngish Mann, and that is un- dated.

In this single portrait some of Mann's quizzical arrogance and his charm are ap-

parent. He was early convinced that he was

a considerable writer and would soon become a great artist. By the time Budden- brooks was about to be published he was writing shamelessly to his literary friends whom he thought might review the book,

not only asking them to do so, but telling them precisely what to say. It is a tribute to his powers of persuasion that at least one of them obeyed him almost to the letter! But always Mann is aware of his faults and mocks them. There is ambiguity in all things and irony in most. He wrote that: ... despite all the vanities we cannot shake off, ultimately we come round to regarding

ourselves as something highly dubious: "Thou comest in such questionable shape" '.

Some five years ago, in his enthralling joint biography of the brothers Heinrich

and Thomas, Nigel Hamilton laid to rest the myth of Thomas as the aloof dissector of human follies. The present book goes further to show that beneath the rigorous

devotion to his art and the colossal im- aginative energy, Mann was a devoted father and husband, a solicitous and loyal friend, a gay and stoical companion and an acute judge of character. One of his earliest and most perceptive admirers was Rainer

Maria Rilke. Mann's gratitude for his en- couragement never led to a mutual

sycophancy: 'Although there is no denying

that he attained extraordinary heights in poetry', Mann wrote later, 'his aestheticism, his aristocratic airs, his sanc- timonious preciosity were always an embar- rassment to me'. The present volume ends as Mann's world fame was beginning. Ahead 1MT The Magic Mountain, both world wars, tir", Nobel Prize, Joseph and his Bretheren and his long permanent exile from Germany. It

is a considerable loss that Richard Winston did not live to give us his account of these tumults. Perhaps his wife Clara, who col-

laborated on the excellent edition °I Mann's letters and provides a beautifully written afterword to the present volutne, should continue the task.