Thomas Mann's Farewell
Dupee, F.W.
Thomas Mann's Farewell Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. By Thomas Mann. Knopf. 384 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by F W. Dupee Associate Professor of Literature, Columbia University; author,...
...He spent his last years expanding the tale into a sizable affair...
...One knows all the time that it doesn't mean a thing...
...Hatfield, is "the artist as mountebank...
...While reading it, one consents to generally play the Zarathustran as one might consent, at a costume party, to dance the bunny-hug in a ballroom conscientiously furnished with specimens of Art Nouveau...
...He bestows his name, his rank, and his ample letter of credit on the willing Krull, who then sets off for South America...
...His career is a succession of amiable ruses, thefts and seductions...
...Mann's is the kind of picaresque story which tends to complete itself as it proceeds...
...Further chapters were added some ten years later, and the resulting fragment has long been familiar to us by reason of its inclusion among Mann's shorter writings in Stories of Three Decades...
...No doubt the present volume will be the last...
...Even now, we have only the first installment of a narrative which could have continued more or less indefinitely, provided that the author had lived to continue it...
...And barring the scenes of passion--the frisky sensuality of the aged Mann seems pretty indigestible--his contrivances are almost always brilliant...
...How inventive, to the last, was Thomas Mann...
...And presently something of this kind offers itself...
...Thus Krull's later adventures are more broadly farcical than his earlier ones, and the atmosphere of psychological motivation and meaning has definitely thinned...
...Mann's works, like his days, have ended...
...At the same time, the spirit of pastiche has grown franker...
...Krull is now reminiscent by turns of Rousseau, Casanova, Mr...
...By consenting merely to simulate creation, Mann accomplished in Felix Krull something like the real article...
...He even enacts a sick man--and docs it so enthusiastically that his draft board is fooled into rejecting him for the German Army...
...But it doesn't matter that Felix Krull is still formally incomplete, that the hero, impersonating the Marquis de Venosta, has yet to embark on his projected world travels...
...Come to think of it...
...In his authoritative little book on Mann, Henry Hatfield observes that the original Felix Krull belonged in Mann's gallery of portraits of the artist...
...A Scottish lord, smitten in his way by Krull, seeks to adopt him and make him his heir...
...How inventive life is...
...The familiar young man, from Lubeck or Hamburg or the land of Canaan, who takes leaves of his family, breaks with his confining native circumstances and fares forth into the big alien world, is reincarnated in Felix Krull, though with less than the usual solemnity...
...When Krull, posing as the Marquis, writes a long dutiful letter to the real Marquis's mother, and receives from her a lengthy reply, full of a serene and pedantic nobility, the writing is equal to Mann's in his heyday...
...It had been gestating in the novelist's mind for many years...
...declares the hero...
...The early chapters were written as far back as 1911...
...Rameau's Nephew and several other classic scamps of autobiography and fiction...
...The author himself seems to have felt this upon taking up Felix Krull again in his old age...
...author, "Henry James" Another substantial volume in black and gold has been added to the long shelf-full of such volumes which make up Thomas Mann's work for American readers...
...Young or old, he was always intelligent, always resourceful...
...Yorick...
...although the exhibit is clearly contrived by a wax-worker of genius...
...Finding work in a fashionable Paris hotel, he is by turns the perfect elevator boy, the perfect waiter, the perfect thief, the perfect lover...
...and it is a part of the book's endless game of impostures that the aged Mann is wilfully impersonating the younger Mann...
...His intellectual paraphernalia of masks and roles, the ironic glitter of his accomplished naughtiness, declare him to be a contemporary of Shaw's Don Juan, Gide's Lafcadio and other heroes of that Nietzsche-haunted age...
...And with the reappearance in full dress of his old theme there is a resurgence of his old special skills and knowledges...
...Mann has even seen to it that he writes his confessions in a sober, sententious prose which recalls that of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister...
...Mann's hero is the occasion for some admirable episodes, but he is not very interesting in himself...
...He seems a little dated...
...Above all, it is a series of impersonations, for Krull is disgusted with his own identity and constantly seeks to exchange it for that of others...
...He seems to be saving himself for something--for the perfect adventure, as it appears...
...For the later Mann, however, this hero seems to have been largely a pretext for abandoning himself to the pleasures of sheer invention...
...And for old devotees of his work there is a fascination in the way he returns in Felix Krull to his well-known themes and preoccupations...
...Tussaud's...
...But Krull disengages himself from the insistent poetess and refuses the enamored lord...
...Krull, says Mr...
...A young Luxembourgian nobleman whose parents wish him to make a world tour has his reasons for preferring to remain in Paris...
...They form a sort of animated Mine...
...One last time he rejoices in what he knows of the ways of hotels and restaurants, the rituals of travel, the feel of foreign places, the forms of class behavior and racial manners, the whole comedy of cosmopolitanism...
...True to its tradition, Felix Krull is the story of a rogue's progress...
...Krull and his adventures are not so much dated as simply historical...
...A gushing poetess whom he has robbed of some of her jewels finds him so remarkable a bedmate that, on learning of the theft, she gives him the rest of her jewels...
...They have ended well: Felix Krull is an amusing comedy of ideas, a richly documented historical fantasy, and Mann's finest performance since Doctor Faustus...
...It was a notable age, but to return to it by way of Mann's belated fantasy is to feel that it is distinctly distant and that the book itself is a period-piece...
...From small beginnings as the offspring of a ruined Rhineland family, the hero goes on to cut a figure in the great world of Paris and beyond...
Vol. 38 • December 1955 • No. 49
