The Private Thomas Mann
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing THE PRIVATE THOMAS MANN BY PEARL K. BELL The stern, forbidding image of Thomas Mann the man has always seemed curiously separate from the imaginative and intellectual presence...
...Looking elsewhere is a fruitless undertaking...
...One might have expected that gap to be filled by the wealth of personal documents, journals, letters and notebooks, gradually being made available, but it turns out to be not that simple...
...It is interesting primarily for what is revealed of Mann's devouring intellectual curiosity, and his unself-conscious willingness to be instructed by experts in such matters as Kerenyi's field of classical mythology, which he sought to incorporate into his narrative structures...
...As fellow-exiles in America, moreover, they shared complicated European feelings of gratitude and condescension toward their new-found land...
...After years of resistance, Katia Mann was recently persuaded to set down some fragments of her long life (she is now 90) in Unwritten Memories (Knopf, 164 pp., $7.95), whose anecdotal thinness is considerably mitigated by her undiminished mental vitality and mettlesome forthrightness...
...From these letters one catches a charming glimpse of Mann's crucial dependence upon physical continuity...
...But by 1952, when the McCarthy hysteria had soured Mann's ambivalent pleasure in the United States, he longed "to return to the old earth whose son I am and in whose womb I should like to rest some day-not here...
...Later, in Pacific Palisades, he luxuriates in the fact that "everybody is here, you know"-Stravinsky, SchSnberg, Rubinstein...
...Yet, as their correspondence movingly demonstrates, for all their differences the two men shared the profoundly tormenting view that their common bourgeois heritage had turned to ashes by the end of the 19th century, and they both felt it their sacred trust, particularly after the Nazis had come to power, to preserve those humanistic values that defiantly transcended Germany's rigid nationalism and authoritarianism...
...Yet his philosophically ambitious work, from Buddenbrooks through the final, playful Felix Krull, Confidence Man, frequently reveals a personality far from Apollonian in its obsession with death and aberration, its guilt-ridden division into the elegantly successful bourgeois and the tortured artist...
...they would gladly murder anyone who tries to turn them away from their soulful hogwash...
...I am determined to continue my life and work with maximum persistence, exactly as I have always done, unaltered by events which injure me but cannot humiliate me or turn me from my purpose...
...Indeed he could, and it appeared in the New York Times under his father's name...
...The two men were on more intimate (and even first-name) terms, having lived not far from one another in Munich, Zurich and Princeton...
...Mann's letters, on the other hand, are filled with his indefatigable travels, his incessant public appearances, his man-of-the-world visits with Nehru, Roosevelt, Pope Pius, Charlie Chaplin...
...Unfortunately, Kerenyi's anfractuous Jungian style is a strain for lay readers, and often induced an equally taxing pomposity in Mann's replies...
...But aside from such tidbits, Unwritten Memories discloses astonishingly little of the inner man...
...This June, the centenary of Mann's birth in 1875, three volumes of his voluminous correspondence were published, along with a charming improvisation by his widow...
...driven with sirens howling through all the lights...
...When Adorno asked Mann to do him the favor of reviewing a new study he had brought out with Max Horkheimer, the novelist told his son Golo, "I don't understand anything about this...
...With childlike glee he reports that, on arriving in San Francisco for a visit, he was "fetched from the airport by a police guard and...
...Writers & Writing THE PRIVATE THOMAS MANN BY PEARL K. BELL The stern, forbidding image of Thomas Mann the man has always seemed curiously separate from the imaginative and intellectual presence in the novels...
...If, unlike the gamy memoir of Paul Tillich's widow, Frau Mann's little book predictably yields no scandals or surprises, she does tell some fascinating stories about the Magician, as his children mischievously called him...
...The tensions between the Magician and his children, for example, can be subtly discerned in the novella "Mario and the Magician," about a night-club hypnotist who unscrupulously manipulates his audience...
...Everything that we seek to know about the man was converted into his art...
...Perhaps only in the disguises he assumed for the purposes of his stories...
...Frau Mann also sticks pins in the high-flying vanity of the sociologist Theodor Adorno, who, because Mann consulted him about some technical problems in music for Doctor Faustus, afterward claimed he had "written" large sections of the book...
...A less formal side of the writer emerges from his correspondence with the cultural historian Erich Kahler in An Exceptional Friendship (Cornell, 186 pp., $12.50...
...Of course I am not speaking of Germany...
...In contrast to the often dismal careers of other great modern authors, his unruffled, orderly life appeared to move in a line of unwavering ascendancy, and he attained the stature of a classic master long before his death at 80, in 1955...
...The public Mann became a celebrated figure early, making a phenomenally successful and polished debut with Buddenbrooks at the age of 26...
...Thus, in the richest of the collections, The Hesse-Mann Letters, edited by Anni Carlsson and Volker Michels (Harper & Row, 256 pp., $10.00), the two Nobel laureates, friends for over half a century, never abandoned the formal pronoun or lapsed into the unbuttoned familiarity of first names...
...Mann was outraged, even after World War II, by the "truth-despising" Germans, who "love vapor and gush, putrid, self-pitying, brutal feeling,' and even today...
...Mann often made free use of living models, even persons he had met superficially...
...that has not made its way, often in identical form, into the published works...
...Personal pain had, at all costs, to be kept tightly under wraps...
...Ironically, though, when dealing with an entirely unpolitical calamity like the suicide of his son Klaus in 1949, Mann shrouded his emotion with a chillingly detached analysis...
...The newly translated volumes of letters show a similar paucity, in large measure because Mann, as he pompously declared in 1916, had "long been used to attending to [correspondence], both conscientiously and considerately, as part of [my] duties as public person...
...In character and lifestyle the two authors were as different as Mann's north Germany and the southern province of Swabia where Hesse was born...
...Not here...
...He rarely left his mountain home, and lived in poverty and neglect until 1946, when he won the Nobel Prize...
...Where, then, is the private Thomas Mann to be found, if not in his wife's memoirs or in his correspondence...
...He saw no point in 'wasting' his private observations...
...He writes, after settling in Princeton in 1938, that "now . my desk stands in my study with every item arranged on it exactly as in [Switzerland] and even in Munich...
...While Mann wholeheartedly embraced his responsibilities as the Representative Man of European Destiny, Hesse remained a dreamy recluse who jealously guarded his intellectual solitude and seclusion, and who disdained all the trappings of bourgeois gentility that were indispensable to Mann's sense of order...
...As Mann's most astute critic, Erich Heller, recently pointed out: "There is hardly one important thought to be found in Mann's letters and notes...
...The least personal of the three volumes is Mythology and Humanism: The Correspondence of Thomas Mann and Karl Kerenyi (Cornell, 223 pp., $12.50...
...Hesse, a lifelong pacifist and a passionate student of Oriental religion, was frequently on the verge of breakdown...
...Though he had a single, very brief encounter with the Hungarian Marxist critic George Lukacs, it was enough to provide him with the character and appearance of Leo Naphtha, the Jew turned Jesuit in The Magic Mountain...
...Except for the Nazi cataclysm, which sent him into exile from Germany in 1934, nothing ever went destructively wrong, no general catastrophe or domestic tragedy ever interfered with his quotidian discipline-so many hundred words issuing smoothly from his pen each morning into steadily more complex masterpieces...
...Between the Thomas Mann who, in his organ-tone pronouncements on public issues, spoke as the oracle of history and the Thomas Mann who, in his novels, was unscrupulously observant and dangerously reflective, bending everything and everyone to the iron will of his imaginative audacity, there is a huge and mysterious gap...
...The son of a wealthy Lubeck grain merchant and a half-Brazilian mother, Mann made a brilliant marriage -one that endured for 50 years-to the daughter of a socially prominent Munich professor of mathematics, sired six lively, gifted children, and seemed instinctively endowed with the urbane, cosmopolitan assurance that it behooved a living monument to possess: He received the inevitable, highly deserved honors and awards, the international acclaim, and the material signs attendant upon the world's veneration, with the serene confidence that these were, after all, no more than his due...
...Couldn't you write the review...
Vol. 58 • July 1975 • No. 15
