Clothes and shoes, meat and drink, hearth and home, wife and child - detailed Buddenbrooks

“What does this mean. – What – does this mean….” (I.1, p. 3)

That’s a funny way to start a novel, isn’t it, as Thomas Mann starts his first novel, the long family saga Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901).  The dashes and ellipses are Mann’s; the page number refers to the 1994 Everyman’s Library edition, the John E. Woods translation.

It is a good question, and one I have puzzled over with no resolution.  I note, though, that in the mouth of the eight year-old Antonie (Tony) Buddenbrooks, it is not a question.  She has been asked by her grandfather, on whose knee she is sitting, to recite the Lutheran catechism, “newly revised and published under the auspices of an august and wise senate in this year of our Lord, 1835.”

That “august and wise” business, presumably sarcastic, belongs to the narrator, although it is the grandfather who “laughed in delight at being able to mock the catechism”:

“Including clothes and shoes,” she said, “meat and drink, hearth and home, wife and child, fields and cattle…”  But at these words, old Monsieur Johann Buddenbrooks burst into laughter […]  He inquired about Tony’s fields and cattle, asked how much she wanted for a sack of wheat, and offered her a contract. (4, bracketed ellipses mine) 

Grandpa Johann finds the child’s claim to fields and cattle so funny because he is a grain merchant, the Buddenbrooks one of the great merchant families of Lübeck, where I spent several days on my recent vacation.  As a little joke, Mann never mentions the name of the city, although it is clearly recognizable and he does mention specific streets, churches, and neighboring towns.  He does the same thing in the 1903 novella Tonio Kröger, which is a kind of theme and variations on the last part of Buddenbrooks.

I now see that Mann wants that line of the catechism because it describes so much of what he puts into the novel.  The opening chapters, for example, describe a housewarming party, celebrating the families purchase of a mansion worthy of their status, thus giving Mann a long scene to describe food and furniture, clothes and faces, family and neighbors, just the sort of scene used to such good effect by writers like Flaubert and Eça de Queirós.  It is not the entire novel in one long scene, but it contains a lot.

He wore a cinnamon jacket with broad lapels and leg-of-mutton sleeves that closed tight just below the wrist.  His fitted trousers were of a white, washable fabric and trimmed with a black stripe down each side.  (5)

I should look for a pair of those at the thrift shop.  Also for “the splendid inkwell – a black-spotted hunting dog of Sèvres Porcelain – that graced the secretary” (I.2., 11).  The “colossal smoked ham, brick-red and strewn with bread crumbs” (I.5., 23) and the raspberry pudding, “a layered mixture of macaroons, raspberries, ladyfingers, and custard” (I.6., 28) I can make for myself.  I have already described, in a post on Mann’s contemporary regionalist Sarah Orne Jewett, the landscape room, with its amazing and perhaps oppressive combination of painting, fabric, sculpture, and furniture, a Baroque survival that I now know was a standard component of Lübeck mansions of the time – please visit the Museum Behnhaus Drägerhaus for several examples.  The Buddenbrookhaus, which holds Thomas and Heinrich Mann archives and exhibits, also contains a reconstructed version of the landscape room and other rooms from the book, all inventions.  Buddenbrooks is fictional.  But it is thickly described.

This is one of the things the novel does well.  Maybe I will find one or two more before worrying too much about Tony’s question – “What does this mean.”