Adonis of the Lido
Francis King
THE REAL TADZIO by Gilbert Adair Short Books, £4.99, pp. 104, ISBN 1904095070
Iread this elegantly nuanced essay on Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and the boy, Wladyslaw Moes. who inspired it, while travelling on a crowded train to Brighton. The young couple seated opposite to me passed the time, no doubt even more enjoyably than I did, in a lot of embracing and kissing. At one point the man exclaimed in a voice so loud that standing passengers around us turned their heads, 'My God, you're so beautiful?'
Since the woman in question had an over-large nose, a muddy complexion and crooked teeth, this at once confirmed the conclusion that I had just reached after studying the photographs of the child Wladyslaw accompanying Gilbert Adair's text: beauty is not merely in the eye but also in the imagination of the beholder. At the age of ten, when Mann first spotted him, Wladyslaw looked, with his pudgy face, pronged fringe and wavy hair falling over his ears, like a diminutive Katherine Mansfield.
Adair, aware of the disparity not merely between the ages of Wladyslaw and of his fictional counterpart. the 14-year-old Tadzio, but also between their looks, rightly observes that, just as there are fashions in clothes, so there are fashions in beauty. But if one accepts that Tadzio is a youth of almost supernatural beauty only in Mann's and the ageing Aschenbach's imaginations, then that gives to the deathly obsession at the heart of the novella an even more devastating irony and therefore tragedy.
Adair describes the fictional Tadzio as Wladyslaw's 'mythic twin'. But, in fact, the story is one of triplets — if we add, as we surely must, the 15-year-old Swedish schoolboy, Bjorn Andresen, whom Visconti at once recognised as the perfect Tadzio for his film. For the whole world Andresen then, in effect, became Tadzio, embodying all the beauty that Mann and his alter ego Aschenbach had found in the lumpish. prepubescent Polish boy so many years before. Sadly, as Adair briefly recounts it, Andresen's is not an altogether happy story. Having received precisely $5,000 for his universally acclaimed performance, he had become a virtual has-been by his early twenties. Soon, he was hating his beauty — 'I can't wait to age. I was born with a face I didn't ask for.' Something similar happened to the no less beautiful Hurd Hatfield, Hollywood's Dorian Gray.
Wladyslaw and his childhood friend Jan Fudakowski (the Jaschiu of the novella, with whom Talzio fools around on the beach) met again near the close of lives constantly disrupted and all but destroyed by the tribulations endured by the Polish aristocracy in the aftermath of the second world war. They then shared recollections of 'an elderly man' who, all those years ago, had repeatedly stared at them. But since at the time Mann was in his mid-thirties, one wonders if this is not an example of the kind of false memory, created out of what its victim is expected to recollect, all too familiar to biographers.
It was only after Mann's surviving diaries had begun to appear that the erotic charge that he derived from young boys — among them, his own son, Klaus — was irrefutably disclosed. But the language of this paedophilia was usually one not of words but of looks. So it is that in Death in Venice, except on one final occasion, Aschenbach/Mann addresses the object of his infatuation only through the eyes that he fixes on him. The final consummation of this voyeurism was to be achieved in the creation of a great work of art.
One can imagine the verbosity with which some academic drudge might have doggedly spun out this account. Adair has made of it a perfect miniature.
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