The proper study of mankind is Mann

Dietmar Herz

THOMAS MANN by Ronald Hayman Bloomsbury, £20, pp. 618 THOMAS MANN: EROS AND LITERATURE by Anthony Heilbut Macmillan, 120, pp. 618 From time to time Thomas Mann could not sleep for ambition. On 6 November 1901 he wrote to his friend Grauthoff: 'At times my stomach churns from so much ambition.' Mann wanted to become an important novelist, Goethe's successor — he wanted fame and reputation, recogni- tion from the entire world. This goal was clear in his mind, but he had to search a while for the manner in which to pursue it. This included not only a rigidly ordained style of writing but also a certain lifestyle: bourgeois respectability, wealth and order in all areas of life. It was not easy to achieve. All manner of adversity had to be combatted. Marriage, too, had to fit in with these ideas. On 17 January 1906 he wrote to his brother Heinrich that he 'deigned to give himself a constitution'. The order in his life would from then on become complete — the idea of constitution is indeed a fitting metaphor. Mann had just asked for the hand of the 19-year-old Katia Pringsheim — and after some hesitation Katia had accepted him. Marriage to this beautiful and educated girl, whose parents were among the richest families in Munich, was the apex of order in Mann's life. From then on he was able to devote himself com- pletely to his literary tasks.

This accomplishment was painful and in the end made him a lonely person. He sub- ordinated his marriage, his family, and also his emotions to his work. His achievements stood for more:

To stand for many, by standing for oneself, to be representative — even that, it seems to me, is greatness in a small way. It is the steadfast fortune of princes and poets.

As a child, Thomas Mann had often imag- ined what it would be like to be born as a prince — born for the sake of representing an idea. As a man of letters, he realised this childhood dream. In the years of the first world war, during the Weimar Republic and the long period of exile, Mann was always — with varying omens — the representative of the literature of his epoch. Exiled, he proclaimed in the United States, not without pride, that wherever he was, German culture was, too. And at the end of his long life he remarked drily in his diary, on the occasion of his birthday, that he was among the most honoured persons of his time:

Every morning was filled with thanking people or with other such unproductive work in the course of my birthday, of which word has circulated that seldom or never has a per- son been so celebrated. Curious, curious. A strange thing, this life.

Shortly thereafter, on 12 April, 1955, Thomas Mann died in a Zurich hospital. He was prepared for death; his final diary entry spoke of an increasing degeneration in his health: I read Shaw's Hieraten all the way through. Am now reading Einstein's Mozart. Am leaving open how long this existence will con- tinue. Gradually it'll dawn. Am supposed to sit in a chair for a while today. Digestive problems and complaints.

After all, he had satisfied his ambition.

Since then, much has been written about Thomas Mann — praise, compliments, and some time after his death increasingly dis- paraging words. The critics now seem to agree that Thomas Mann is one of the most overrated authors of this century. He advanced to the rank of a boring classical writer whose work was treasured, but not discussed, in Germany. Required reading in grammar schools, but not more than that.

Then the diaries which Mann had meticulously kept throughout his life were published. Ten volumes, amounting to nearly 10,000 pages, with detailed annota- tions. Mann's image changed. The Old Guard novelist who had by then been called into question took on human form: plagued by worries about his health, full of doubt about his importance for posterity, and always haunted by the fear that some- one might — permanently and irrevocably — declare his work to be inadequate. Beyond that, his (often imagined) financial worries, his letters, things he read in the newspaper, his daily meal plan, and his lonely masturbatory experiences seemed worth writing about to him, together with other banal matters of everyday life. The diaries were marked by an unheard-of openness — offensive towards putative friends and colleagues, unfeeling towards even himself.

Above all, Mann's sexuality was a topic, his desires and their lack of fulfilment. As Mann destroyed all the diaries he had writ- ten before his exile, many things could only be understood in retrospect. Mann feared for a long time that the diaries would fall into the hands of those who wished to hurt him — in 1933 the Gestapo was in posses- sion of the notebooks, but couldn't make anything of what they took to be manuscripts and relinquished them. It was not until decades later that Mann regarded these diaries as part of his work — though 'without literary value' —and approved their publication 20 years after his death.

Overjoyed, biographers jumped at the chance to analyse them and began to exam- ine Mann's life and literary achievements from the new standpoints which emerged: sexuality and ambition are the reference points which have characterised Thomas Mann for the observer ever since.

In recent years, four new comprehensive biographies have appeared. With the exception of Donald Prater's introductory survey-style biography (Thomas Mann: A Life, Oxford 1995), Mann's sexuality is in the foreground of each interpretation. This is above all true of the two volumes dis- cussed here, Anthony Heilbut's to be pub- lished in June. First of all, both books give a straightforward and accurate account of Mann's life and present an interesting reading of his work, understood here as a life-long confrontation with his — ultimate- ly unfulfilled — sexuality. But is this really an adequate starting point? Is Mann's lit- erary accomplishment an attempt to tame 'the dogs in the basement'? At first glance some things lead to this interpretation. Mann wrote to his friend Grauthoff before the turn of the century:

Ultimately one is far too much an homme de lettres and psychologist to not be able to have one's incidental superior joy at such self- therapy. Any doubt would be nonsensical at your age. You have time, and the instinct for rest and self-satisfaction will put the dogs in the basement back onto their leashes already.

Mann battled with his sexuality; he succeeded in 'putting the dogs on their leashes'.

As far as that goes, the biographies do not offer any really new view of things. Heilbut's insistence on the autobiographi- cal nature of the works is not new. In his 1906 essay 'Base und ich', Mann comment- ed on the connection between reality and fiction, between his own experience and literary form: My idea, my experience, my dream, my pain? Not you are the subject, never — be comfort- ed by that — but rather I, myself. . .

Thus, as Heilbut emphasises throughout, is Mann's sexuality — and not sexuality in itself — also the subject. This is correct, but in the end commonplace. Of whom else should Mann write, if not himself?

Both biographies — on the basis of the detailed biographical material which they offer — elucidate some aspects of the work. At times, however, the fixation on sexuality blocks the perspective on other important topics. Mann's life might be the story of a 'profound erotic disappointment' as Heilbut insists, but it is also the story of a man who shaped his work himself as his own creator. In the novella Der Bajazzo, written in Rome in July 1987, Mann illus- trates this enthusiasm which he had so often professed: Indifference, I realise, would be a form of happiness . . . But I am not capable of being indifferent to myself; I am not capable of seeing myself with other eyes than with those of 'people', and I will perish as a result of my bad conscience — filled with innocence. . . Should a bad conscience never be anything other than festering futility?

Hayman and Heilbut — Heilbut more than Hayman — concentrate too much on Mann's homoeroticism: the relationship to the friends of his youth — unfulfilled and unlived — always predominates, even in unconvincing places. It is, however, as a look in the diaries shows, an important motif. The melancholy Scottish Lord Kil- marnock in Felix Krull, Potiphar's vainly desirous wife, the impossibility of love in Dr Faustus — are a series of self-portraits.

While revealing, these observations create a false image. The futility of human love is a motif of Mann's work which was placed subordinate to other motifs and which gained its importance through just that: Joseph is a story about the myth, the idea of humanity and of the human desire which must remain unfulfilled in the artist who makes himself subservient to his work. Thomas Mann indeed spoke of himself, but he understood himself as a representative. He subordinated his unfulfilled desire to his will of creative design — he shaped his work as he did his life and saw this image grow at the same time in the realisation of publishing his innermost thoughts.