Friday, July 12, 2013

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?

13 comments:

  1. Oh, that rendering of Bavarian into a regional American drawl really pains me. It's things like that which make me so glad to be able to read German...

    ReplyDelete
  2. What solution do you recommend? Lowe-Porter's is to ignore the dialect, the Plattdeutsch, the Bavarian, all of it. Woods takes a run at it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A good question - I've just read a new-ish translation of a Guimarães Rosa story in which the translator also opts for adopting the dialect of the U.S. South, which seems to invite an element weighted with external significance for American readers. I found it nearly unbearable, but then I can never read Southern dialect without thinking of James Thurber's devastatingly satirical "Bateman Comes Home" (which concludes "If you keep doing this long enough it turns into a novel"). It seems a little like that old Hollywood convention of using a British accent to represent foreigners of whatever European nationality - a convenient solution, sure - but the right one?

      Delete
    2. I figure the translator, like any artist, needs to choose his poison.

      Delete
  3. A friend has recommended this book a zillion times. I haven't read it because I've not come across one.

    ReplyDelete
  4. A possible forbear of Buddenbrooks was the first volume of The Forsyte Saga, which is individually named The Man of Property. It's been a while since I read it, but I think the family saga is already fully present.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Scandinavians think that Alexander Kielland's novel, Garman & Worse, was the direct inspiration for Buddenbrooks. It relates the story of a Hanseatic merchant family from Norway; the author's own family were shipping merchants from Kristiansand.

    Georg Brandes, a Danish critic and the transmission belt for Ibsen into Germany, may have oerformed a similar favour for Alexander Kielland.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Isn't Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovlyov Family a family saga written in a realist style predating Buddenbrooks? And Zola's L'Assommoir too, come to think of it (along with its associated Lantier novels, if not the entire Rougon-Macquart cycle).

    (Forsyte Saga was written after Buddenbrooks, but certainly matches it in terms of boredom).

    ReplyDelete
  7. These are great. How close did I get to saying Mann invented this form? Mmm, pretty close, but still on the safe side, I think.

    There are two separate strains here: 1. the history of the family saga and 2. what Mann read. Thus Zola is a clear contributor to 1. but apparently not to 2., as I see from a letter on p. 103 of Richard Winston's Thomas Mann: The Making of an Artist, 1875-1911, where Mann insists he had not read Zola until after the writing of Buddenbrooks, but instead attributes the similarities to an obscure Goncourt brothers novel.

    Similarly, Galsworthy belongs in 1. The Nobel literature committee sure dug family sagas, didn't they?

    The biography does not mention Kielland, but the connection certainly sounds plausible. Your qualifier, "Scandinavians think," is amusing. It seems I do not have the languages to pursue this idea too far, although here we have and 1885 English translation.

    Nana, if I find the energy I will complain about Buddenbrooks a bit later today, although I doubt I will be dissuasive.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Kirjasto.sci.fi/kiella.htm has the Norwegian side of the story.

      Delete
    2. Kirjasto is invaluable for infomation about Scandinavian writers - others, too.

      Delete
  8. Was there something in the historical atmosphere of the time? George Douglas Brown's The House with the Green Shutters- another family saga- appeared in 1901 too.

    ReplyDelete
  9. It is just a semantic distinction, but I do not think of The House with the Green Shutters as a family saga. There is no transition across generations. The cast of characters is the same at the beginning as at the end.

    Setting that aside, I suspect there is something in the air, a shift of interest back into the family, perhaps as the result of changes in the field of psychology, or perhaps just from writers looking around for a new subject. "Society" - that has been done.

    ReplyDelete