The three marriages of Tony Buddenbrooks - or just one, really

The family saga is such a common form now that I at first did not notice how unusual Buddenbrooks was.  If Thomas Mann did not invent the genre, I suspect that he came upon it independently, since it is not likely that he had read Wuthering Heights or the most underrated English novel of the 19th century, John Galt’s The Entail, both of which contain central characters obsessed with the continuity of the family firm (real estate holdings) and sons incapable of running the business.

Perhaps Mann borrowed the idea from Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen operas, which he insisted were the source of his treatment of detail, or from Icelandic sagas, but if so he made an admirable leap of imagination squashing that stuff into a realistic novel.

Now the form is everywhere, in William Faulkner and James Michener, The Godfather films and the Dallas television series.  Buddenbrooks became a long-term bestseller.  It is strange to think that it is at the beginning of a chain leading to Mario Puzo and J. R. Ewing.

My understanding is that Mann’s ideas (not his writing) worked backwards – that he first envisioned a short novel about young, creative Hanno, the end of the family line, but then decided that he needed to show where Hanno came from, leading back to parents and grandparents.  How Mann knew where to stop, I do not know.

A strange result of this process is that much of the book is barely related to Hanno at all, but instead branches off from the main story:  the education, love affairs, and three marriages of his Aunt Tony.  I will bet that Tony’s story has more to do with making the book genuinely popular than anything else in it.  She sacrifices a chance for true love out of loyalty to her family (and as the result of bullying from her father).  This part of her story sometimes reads like an ironic commentary on Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1895).

She has terrible luck with husbands.  Almost absurdly bad luck.  Her “third marriage” is actually her daughter’s marriage, and again, she and her daughter have grotesquely bad luck.  Perhaps the relevant model is Greek tragedy, with the gods conspiring against her, except that Tony’s fate is not really tragic.  She is too resilient, too much fun.  It is a shame when the claims of other characters relegate her to the background in the last third of the novel.

It would make sense to describe Tony, but I will instead close with the man who becomes her second husband, Alois Permaneder, vulgar, obese – Mann is curiously obsessed with obesity – and most importantly, Bavarian.  Since he is a southerner, the translator transfers his thick Bavarian accent to the American South, to Savannah, say, or Nashville (“’You got another kind of gittup ‘n’ go up this way, damn if y’ don’t,’” 325).  His accoutrements, though, stay in Germany, his cane which is “topped by a curved, clawlike handle of deerhorn that measured a good foot and a half” and his “gold watch chain with an entire bouquet of charms, a glittering collection of silver, coral, bone, and deerhorn trinkets” (320).  It is as if a fat Davy Crockett comes to court Tony.  I do not really think of Thomas Mann as a comic novelist, but Permaneder had me laughing.

Perhaps this gives an idea about Tony’s character, too.  Why does she “daintily filet[] his herring for him” (324); what unfortunate combination of strengths and weaknesses of character lead her to marry this fool?