Thomas Mann's Young Joseph - "How well this clod of earth understands me!"

Young Joseph (1934) is the second novel of four in Thomas Mann’s biblical YA fantasy series Joseph and His Brothers.  It is the cute little one, just 270 pages in the German paperback, while the next book, Joseph in Egypt (1936) is more like 600 pages.  The fourth and final volume is also a monster.  It is going to require a little willpower to start those..

Compared to the source, Young Joseph is the least efficient volume, though, covering only Genesis 37.  Joseph dreams that the sheaves bow down to him; Jacob gives him the Coat of Many Colors; Joseph’s brothers toss him in a well, fake his death, and sell him into Egyptian slavery.

I am of the age where I learned the story of Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors at the exact same time that Dolly Parton’s 1971 song of the same name was frequently played on the radio – on country radio – so I have great difficulty not imagining Joseph’s coat as made of patchwork scraps.  But it is, in Mann’s telling, a complex and expensive veil covered with embroidered stories, more like Homer’s Shield of Achilles:

As the old man held it between restless arms, flashes of silver and gold merged at times with the quieter colors – with the purple, the white, olive, pink, and black of symbols and images of stars, doves, trees, gods, angels, human beings, and animals set in the bluish haze of the fabric.  (390, tr. John Woods)

Jacob was a fool to give this treasure to Joseph, and Joseph was a fool, the embodiment of arrogance, to wear it in front of his brothers.  Mann is superb with narcissistic teenage psychology.  Joseph is the world’s most annoying teenager, and many readers will I do not want to say approve of the later action of the brothers – the well, the slavery – but many readers will understand.  Mann had six children, the youngest two of whom were teenagers at the time this novel was written, so he had plenty of firsthand experience.  Mann’s children were all, like Joseph, amazingly accomplished people.  Any or all may well have been insufferable for some part of their teenage years, and thus good models for Joseph.

I am still a little puzzled by what Mann wanted with these books, what he was trying to do.  Sometimes, there is the conversion of myth to realism, the psychology of Joseph, or lines like:

The wind set up a light clatter in the wooden rings by which the ropes were attached to the tent roof.  (383)

The “realistic” novelistic method at work.

But other times, Mann is investigating myth, storytelling:

“Beg pardon,” the old man said, taking his hand from his robe to halt this flow of speech, “beg pardon, my friend and good shepherd, but allow your elder servant a remark concerning your words.  When I listen and attend to what you tell of your race and its stories, it seems to me that wells have played in them a role equally as remarkable and prominent as has the experience of journeying and wandering.” (492)

Yes, no kidding, I had also noticed all of the wells (but of course I did, since I knew Joseph’s story already).  Here, though, Mann explicitly turns the “well” theme into metafiction.

A couple of chapters are in an in-between mode (if I were a person who used the word “liminal,” it would fit here), novelistic scenes with fantastic or mythic elements.  Mann begins a section “We read that Joseph was wandering in the field” (435).  We read where?  In Genesis 37:19, where Joseph asks directions from, in the King James language, “a certain man,” a vague figure who Mann takes for an angel, possibly the one who wrestled Jacob, possibly Satan, the Satan of Job (a later chapter about the grief of Jacob for the presumed death of Joseph is an explicit rewrite of Job).  Nothing, strictly speaking, violates realism, but that “certain man” sure seems to know some things he shouldn’t.  The angel appears again a few chapters later, when a repentant Reuben goes to the well to free Joseph, a clever emendation of Genesis 37:29.

Mann employs more than one mode, is what I am trying to say.  What is he doing?  He is doing many things, and I am still trying to understand many of the many.

God, however, had kissed His fingertips and – much to the secret vexation of the angels – cried out: “Unbelievable, how well this clod of earth understands Me!” (352)

Well, no, not yet.

Young Joseph is just about the least German example of German literature I could have read, but it still counts for German Literature Month – in its tenth year! – so I had better go register.

Thomas Mann's The Stories of Jacob - we know the stories in which it all comes to pass

Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers (1933-43) is on the one hand a 1,500 page monster that decompresses roughly the second half of Genesis, and on the other hand it is four novels, the first two of which are not even especially long, published over a decade.  Four books, not one; I just finished the first one, The Stories of Jacob (1933).

Why did Mann want to tell these stories in modern novelistic form?  What does he want with sentence like this:

He [Joseph] ventured to step down to the old man [Jacob] and carefully placed an arm around his shoulders, convinced he had enchanted and placated him with his chatter; and Jacob, who had been standing there pondering his God and playing with the little stone cignet cylinder dangling at his chest, sighed and, yielding to the pressure, set one foot on the circular step and then sat down on the rim of the well, resting his staff against his arm, ordering his robes, and turning his face now to the moon, with its clear light brightening his gentle aging majesty, its gleam mirrored in his wisely worried chestnut-brown eyes.  (“At the Well,” p. 77, tr. John Woods)

The bit about the moon is thematic, part of the novel’s ideas.  But the rest – as if what was missing from Genesis was minutiae about where Jacob put his feet.  The final clause is especially klutzy.

Form aside, Mann is deeply interested in the stories themselves, their origin and repetition, their power.  Joseph and Jacob are discussing a story, Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac.  Jacob has retold the story, and Joseph is responding:

“But that is the advantage of these later days, that we know the great rounds in which the world rolls ever on, and the stories in which it all comes to pass and that the fathers established.  You could have trusted the voice and the ram.”  (“At the Well,” 81)

Someone – Mann, Joseph – has been reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which uses the Abraham and Isaac story as its exemplar.  Mann explores the way the stories are repeated as stories, and are then repeated by the characters themselves, with Jacob sometimes acting to repeat a story, say of something his grandfather Abraham did, or to avoid repeating a story, to prevent a repetition of the Cain and Abel story, especially if he would play the role of Abel.  Meanwhile Jacob generates new stories, some of them superb.  I was not surprised that Mann does interesting things whenever he brushes against the story of Jacob wrestling the angel, among the most sublime stories in the Hebrew Bible.  In the novel, it is a dream, perhaps, but what a dream.

The first forty pages of the book are a separate essay, “Descent into Hell,” a Key to All Mythologies that explains while dodging explanation.  Mann explicitly describes Joseph and His Brothers as what we now call a fantasy novel; he does this by denying that it is a fantasy novel:

The people there [at the bottom of the well, in the past] do not have horned armor or an eye in the middle of their foreheads, do not do battle with flying lizards, but are human beings just like us – allowing for a few easily pardoned dreamy imprecisions in their thoughts.  (40)

Mann is fascinated by the monotheists making their way in a polytheistic world, where their one God is at the same time one of many gods (the moon theme I mentioned above is used here – one God, or moon god, and what’s the difference, really).  He wants to understand the psychology of the monotheists.  Psychology, that is a novelistic project.

Side note, on a recurring Wuthering Expectations topic: Some fine cat mummies, “to which, weeping loudly, he would offer sacrifices of mice and milk,” on p. 122.  Once Mann gets Joseph to Egypt, there should be more, right?

Big Ironies with Musil, Roth, Mann, Tanizaki, and Gide - he says nothing but stupidities, speaking loudly, wrongly, and incessantly, all day long

Lately I have read a number of novels that depend on Big Historical Ironies.  The Big Irony is a big part of the point of the novel.  I mean “irony” in a simple sense – “I know, you know, the author knows, the characters do not know.”  As for “big,” I mean something like the line at the end of the first paragraph of The Man Without Qualities, the first volume published in 1930: “It was a fine day in August 1913” (tr. Sophie Wilkins).

The reader of September 1913, encountering that line in some other story, would not think much of it, but the reader of 1930, the Austrian reader, is immediately engulfed in a shadow that never lifts.  And Musil rubs it in, puffs it up.  Much of the action of the book takes place in a committee that is planning a jubilee celebration for the 75th year of the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph, in 1918.  The themes they pick are “Emperor of Peace” and the “Global Idea of Austria.”  Musil is not being subtle.  He wants Huge Irony.  The Biggest Irony.  He seems to want his reader to wince frequently.

Franz Joseph died in 1916, while the whole notion of an Emperor died in 1918.  There was also a major war.  The non-Austrian reader of 2020 may have to look up the former, but surely few readers pick up The Man Without Qualities who do not read “a fine day in August 1913” and think “Oh no.”

In The Radetzsky March (1932), Joseph Roth moves his cavalry officer protagonist to the frontier, right in the middle of the bloodlands, just in time for the war.  Occasionally, in a barracks scene, Roth notes that everyone in the room will be dead in a few months.  When war is declared, a bolt of lightning strikes the house where the officers are having a party.  Big, big, big irony, and no hiding it.

Thomas Mann began The Magic Mountain (1924) before the war.  The joke was on him, this time.  He did not know, and then he knew, and once he knew, there was really only one way for the novel to end.

I will save Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters (1946-8) for the next couple of days, but I am pretty sure that the same kind of Big Irony is at the center of that novel.  Look at those publication dates, then guess when it is set.

André Gide creates the same kind of effect in what passes for real life, in his Journal for summer 1914.  For context, first, The Vatican Basements has just been published, and Gide’s journals often take an odd turn post-book publication; second, Gide is realizing that his recent trip to Turkey was mere tourism and thus not going to give him anything to publish; and third, it is June 1914 and he reads the newspapers.  However, in the Journal he utterly suppresses #3 and writes extensively about his attempt to turn a foundling starling into a pet.

I had tried to put him in a cage, but he would die there; letting him have the freedom of the room, he dirties everything; within ten minutes, he leaves it does not matter where little liquid and corrosive droppings.  I give him bread crumbled in milk mixed with the yolk of a hard-boiled egg to eat, or some little earthworms, of which he is fond.  He flies form the table to my shoulder as soon as he sees me return.  (June 22, tr. mine, is it ever)

The experiment of keeping the starling in the house only lasts a couple of days.  On July 3, Jean T. arrives for a long visit.  He is a little boy who is related to Gide somehow.  Journal entries now alternate between the sparrow and the boy, who drives Uncle André insane.

I believe him to be intelligent; very intelligent even; but he says nothing but stupidities, speaking loudly, wrongly, and incessantly, all day long… (July 5)

All of this culminates in the amazing sitcom-like episode where little Jean the Menace locks Gide in the little aviary (July 8, a comic highlight).  I don’t know when Jean goes home.  The poor starling is finally “torn apart by the cats” on July 19.  Austria and Serbia mobilize for war on July 26, and the Journal shifts to a wartime footing, relieving my tension.  What was Gide supposed to do about the imminent war?  So he writes about his tame bird.  The war comes soon enough.

Mann's novel of Anti-Ideas - primal ideas of beauty turn into slack-lipped gibberish - "That didn't get us very far."

3. The Magic Mountain is a novel of Ideas.  A Dialectical Novel.  An Anti-Dialectical Novel.

Characters spend a lot of time, and pages, arguing, about revolution, religion, Jesuits, Freemasons, canning – you know, storing fruit in jars, canning.

“Preserves don’t have time, so to speak, but stand there on the shelf outside of time.  But enough about canning jars.  That didn’t get us very far.”  (6, “A Good Soldier,” 502)

There’s the time theme again.  That is just a portion of a paragraph about canning  from what is generally considered to be one of the most profound, most intellectual novels of the 20th century.  Curious that Willa Cather beat Mann to the novelistic use of preserved fruit in jars as mystical objects by six years.

I should have read The Magic Mountain decades ago, and I knew I should have.  But I had picked up an aversion to the Novel of Ideas, and I took Mann to be the leader of the field, so I put it off for thirty years.  The Magic Mountain is in fact highly essayistic, as in the excursions about time I mentioned yesterday, but also surprisingly dialectical.  Meaning, ideas are less often portrayed in essays, as the product of the thinking of the narrator, but in argument, two characters debating, often with our young, attentive hero literally in the middle, stuffing it all into his spongy brain.

Some of these debates are tedious beyond belief, and a number seemed to degenerate into gibberish.  Others degenerated into shouting, which is at least dramatic.

Confusion reigned.  “Objective reality,” shouted one; “The self!” cried the other.  Finally one side was talking about “Art!” and the other about “Criticism!”  And both constantly returned to “Nature!” and “Spirit!” and to which of them was more noble… (6, “Operationes Spirituales,” 457)

Early on in the novel, I blamed my aversion to Ideas for my difficulty with these passages, but at this point it finally sunk in that Mann was deliberately enacting much of the gibberish.  He is critiquing dialectic, the very notion of argument and of any possibility of synthesis.  The above exchange ends in a ludicrous duel, with firearms.

All of this is before the introduction, in the final book, of Mynheer Peeperkorn, a character who speaks almost entirely in a hash of rhetorical fragments that infects our hero Hans and the other residents of the sanitorium, perhaps in part because Peeperkorn is wealthy and generous with alcohol:

The party gave itself over to its own blissful idleness; they exchanged disconnected small talk, scraps of elevated emotions, which in their primal state as ideas had promised ultimate beauty, but on the way to being spoken turned into fragmentary, slack-lipped gibberish, some of it indiscreet, some of it incomprehensible… (7, “Vingt et un,” 561)

Peeperkorn’s presence makes argument useless.  He “neutralized intellect instead” (7, “Mynheer Peeperkorn (Continued),” 580).  His story climaxes when he throws a party at a waterfall, and gives a long speech, with dramatic gestures, that is made completely inaudible by the water.

Mann is not using the novel to express his Ideas as much as he is attacking the possibility of expressing Ideas.  Perhaps Peeperkorn give a more hopeful solution in his great speech; too bad that no one “understand[s] a single syllable of what he expressed” (612).

Why so many pages expended on blow-by-blow arguments if so much of it is gibberish?  It is just like the (novelistic) argument Mann makes about time.  The reader must experience the uselessness of the arguments, even participate in it by working through the Ideas, as if they were what mattered.

I am not so sure that Mann is right, that I really needed to read quite so much nonsense about the nature of progress and so on to get to his point, but I am pretty sure that is why he does it.

Not reading The Magic Mountain has been a useful defense against whatever overhyped, soon-forgotten nonsense became trendy.  “I can’t read that,” I would think, “ I haven’t even read The Magic Mountain!”  But now I have.  What will I do.

The Magic Mountain as a novel about time - Can one narrate time?

 2. The Magic Mountain is a novel about time.

Can one narrate time – time as such, in and of itself?  Most certainly not, what a foolish undertaking that would be.  The story would go: “Time passed, ran on, flowed in a mighty stream,” and on and on in the same vein.  No one with any common sense could call that a narrative.  It would be the same as if someone took the harebrained notion of holding a single note or chord for hours on end – and called it music.  (7, “A Stroll by the Shore,” 531)

I will direct Mann’s, and your, attention to this superb essay by Laura Glen Louis, in the Autumn 2019 Hudson Review, on her experience performing a choral version of Yves Klein’s Monotone-Silence Symphony (1947), which does not hold the note for hours but is in the ballpark.  Where would we be without the harebrained?  We live in a harebrained age.

I was so pleased with myself, figuring out that The Magic Mountain was in fact a novel about the narration of time, and then at the beginning of the final chunk, Book 7, see above, Mann just blurts it out, for four pages in the John E. Woods edition.  “[I]t is apparently not such an absurd notion to want to narrate about time” (532, emphasis Mann’s).

The novel simultaneously accelerates and decelerates.  The first short book describes a few hours, as Hans Castorp arrives at the sanatorium; the second hops like many novels hops back to his childhood, family, and education; the third, quite a lot longer, is one full day at the hospital, from breakfast to bedtime, in about 50 pages.  Then 90 pages cover the next three weeks; the next 150 pages covers – why am I describing this myself?

[T]he coverage of the next three weeks of the visit, however, will require about as many lines – or words, or even seconds – as the first three weeks required pages, quires, hours, and working days.  We can see it coming – we’ll have those three weeks behind us and laid to rest in no time.  (5, “Eternal Soup and Sudden Clarity,” 180)

Look at the standards of measurement.  Literal pieces of paper, counted two ways; words on the page; time measured two ways.  How long is a “working day” for Mann?  As The Magic Mountain expanded past the original conception as a novella, as years of writing passed, the subject of the book changed, and these meta-fictional comments, or occasionally essays, on time became a part of the experience of the book.

I am not convinced that Mann’s specific ideas about time are so deep.  Time is experienced subjectively, for example – I knew that.  What is new is that he explicitly moves the subjectivity onto his readers.  Time moves subjectively but in different flowing ways for the characters, for the author, and for the readers – and presumably in many different ways for different readers, who are often stubborn cusses, fighting with the author, reading perversely.  Mann gives us something new with which to fight.

Every piece of narrative writing works with time in some way or another.  Mann brings it to the front, so I can think about it.  He is not the only one.  I am thinking of the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), or the interlude in To the Lighthouse (1927), or maybe Benjy’s chapter in The Sound and the Fury (1929).  This is some of the high-level novelistic work of the age, making time do new things.

The chapter with the single day gives The Magic Mountain a pulse.  Once described, it is in the background, repeated endlessly without me having to read it endlessly.  Then there are the months, the seasons, the years, departures and deaths, a series of repetitions of varying intervals.  Mann is right, it is like music, with a lot of simultaneous cycles.  How does he keep the novel from being many simultaneous notes, played for hours but at varying intervals?  One answer is the usual novelistic stuff, characters and furniture and so on, see yesterday’s post, and the other answer is Ideas.  That’s for tomorrow.

The Magic Mountain, many novels in one - I chop it into a pasty hodgepodge - "Malice, sir, is the spirit of criticism"

“Malice, sir, is the spirit of criticism, and criticism marks the origin of progress and enlightenment.” (Ch. 3, “Satana,” 59)

Given that invitation, and the approaching end of German Literature Month, I had better write a bit about The Magic Mountain (1924), Thomas Mann’s comic tuberculosis-infected novel of ideas.  It is several novels in one.  I count at least three.  This helps me organize the long. complex novel, if nothing else.

1. The comic sanatorium novel, a novel about illness.  Illness, as we all know, is a useful metaphor.  Young Hans Castorp visits a Swiss sanatorium to spend some time with his cousin and somehow never leaves, not for years, until life finally intrudes too strongly (meaning, a world war breaks out).  As the director of the sanatorium says:

“First and foremost: there’s the air up here.  It’s good for fighting off illness, wouldn’t you say?  And you’d be right.  But it’s also good for illness, you see, because it first enhances it, creates a revolution in the body, causes latent illness to erupt…” (4, “The Thermometer,” 179)

The rest-cure that causes illness is pretty funny.  Sometimes the novel made me wonder what Kafka’s sanatorium novel would have been like, if he had lived to write it.  He certainly had enough experience with the institution.

The characters are mostly tuberculosis patients, so they are ill but active, with big appetites for food and life and sometimes sex.  The sanatorium is full of young, and less young, people in a world where some of the social rules are a bit relaxed.  Hans quickly falls for the lovely Frau Chauchat – one more reason he cannot bring himself to return to the outside world.  One of the comic high points of the novel is the chapter where he visits the director’s apartment, nominally to see his paintings but really to obsess over his crush.

The scene is packed with oddball sexual language.  The doctor owns an obscene coffee grinder, a gift from a patient, “an Egyptian princess” (“’Yes, that’s a tool for single gentlemen,” Behrens said,” Ch. 5, “Humaniora,” 258).  Hans, constrained from speaking directly about his lust, asks the doctor detailed medical questions about skin and fat, as if he is interested in science.

“I could easily have become a doctor.  The formation of breast milk… the lymph of the legs – it all interests me very much. The body!” he suddenly cried in a rapturous outburst.  “The flesh! The human body!  What is it? What is it made of?”  (261)

Hans uses this language to seduce Frau Chauchat (the italics signify that the conversation is supposedly in French):  “’Let me take in the exhalation of your pores and brush the down – oh, my human image made of water and protein, destined for the contours of the grave, let me perish, my lips against yours!” (5, “Walpurgis Nacht,” 537)

Death is never far from sex, or from anything, in The Magic Mountain.  It is not all comic.  But it is this side of the novel with all of the best little novelistic details, the kind of thing I enjoyed in Buddenbrooks, the cigars and furniture and food:

The room glistened with white from all the milk – a large glass at every place, a good pint of it at least. (3, “Clarity of Mind,” 66)

And fine minor characters:

At the next table on their left was an adolescent boy – still of school age, to judge by his appearance – whose coat sleeves were too short, and who wore thick, circular glasses; he chopped up everything heaped on his plate until it was a pasty hodgepodge, then bent over and wolfed it down, now and then pushing his napkin up behind his glasses to dry his eyes – it was unclear whether this was to wipe away sweat or tears. (3, “But of Course – a Female!,” 74)

My understanding is that Mann began The Magic Mountain as a comic counterpoint to Death in Venice – that was back in 1912 – but that the book expanded as he wrote it, turning into something more complex.  Thus, the second novel, the one about time. Tomorrow, that.

All quotations and page numbers are from the 1995 John E. Woods translation.

a sort of intoxication with his own identity - Thomas Mann and his dog

The last three novellas in Death in Venice and Other Stories form a “bourgeois trilogy.”  Thomas Mann, white-collar professional, an ordinary Municher with kids, a dog, and Italian beach vacations.  The most recent story, “Mario and the Magician” (1929), just uses the narrator and his family as a point of view.  Since the story is about a powerful hypnotist and his perhaps final melodramatic performance, I do not understand the need for this particular set of characters, but perhaps they were just at hand.   If Mann is going to send some Germans to Italy, why not make them a lot like those in “Disorder and Early Sorrow” (1925).

That one really is about the Mann-like family, with a college professor, a couple of teenagers who throw a party, and some littler kids who get to tag along, with tragic, in a very limited little kid sense, consequences.  That’s the “Early Sorrow.”  The “Disorder” is partly personal to the professor, partly a description of the party and its crazy jazz records, and partly the chaos of Weimar Germany – “the salary Cornelius draws as professor of history – a million marks.”  Pretty interesting.

Maybe the whole thing is a parable about Weimar.  I hope not.  But that Italian hypnotist in “Mario the Magician” is in some sense Mussolini.  What do I know.

“A Man and His Dog” (1918) is not a parable, is it?  A symbolic whatnot about the war?  What makes this novella or memoir the most guacamolesque piece of Mann’s, enjoyed by readers who otherwise have little patience with Mann’s symbolizing, is that it genuinely appears to be about Mann’s “short-haired German pointer” Bashan.  It is a great piece of dog writing.  Over seventy pages it is inevitably digressive, but the digressions are mostly about the dog, and the exception is a long description of the woods where the dog likes to hunt.

The story is warm, lightly humorous, a deep act of sympathy and imagination that gives the dog a lot of character without compromising his doggishness.  Maybe that’s the parable – maybe it’s about the core fictional act, the creation of a character who is not the author.  Bashan is very much himself.

And what do I say to him?  Mostly his own name, the two syllables which are of the utmost personal interest because they refer to himself and have an electric effect upon his whole being.  I rouse and stimulate his sense of his own ego by impressing upon him – varying my tone and emphasis – that he is Bashan and that Bashan is his name.  By continuing this for a while I can actually produce in him a state of ecstasy, a sort of intoxication with his own identity, so that he begins to whirl round on himself and send up loud exultant barks to heaven out of the weight of dignity that lies on his chest.

Maybe the hypnotist is not Mussolini but the author, making his characters do anything he wants.  Or maybe the hypnotist is his opposite – he suppresses his victims’ identities, while the author creates them and sets them loose on the world.

A writer can do a lot with a walk with a dog.

single words of the sentences shaped in his disordered brain - some progress with Thomas Mann

I last read Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories, the Vintage International collection of Thomas Mann’s novellas, when I was an undergraduate.  I read it with outstanding – perhaps even perfect – incomprehension.  Have I made any progress in thirty years?

Mann’s humor is still opaque to me.  “Felix Krull” (written 1911, pub. 1936) is a parody of autobiography, a parody of Goethe’s specifically, so even having read a lot more, including Goethe’s four-volume autobiography, I cannot hear the tone.  It is recognizably comic, with a pompous fool for a narrator; if only I found it funny.  The story is full of the grotesques that inhabit Mann’s early fiction – Felix’s obese father, for one, or this actor:

All this I might have borne.  But not the pimples with which Müller-Rosé’s back, chest, shoulders, and upper arms were thickly strewn.  They were horrible pimples, red-rimmed, suppurating, some of them even bleeding; even today I cannot repress a shudder at the thought of them.  I find that our capacity for disgust is in direct proportion to our capacity for enjoyment, to our eagerness for the pleasures which this world can give.

I believe that long ago I took this all more literally.  I suppose I attributed banal insight that the actor so sublime on stage is much less so up close and without his artificial aids, or the last bit of supposed wisdom, obviously false, to Mann himself.  But no, it’s a parody, meant to be funny, even.  All right.  At least I can see that now.

“Death in Venice” is the perfect chaser to The Horseman on the Roof, the 1832 cholera epidemic followed by the last gasp of cholera.  An esteemed writer, quite a bit older and narrower than Mann himself, vacations in Venice, where he totally crushes on a beautiful fourteen-year-old Polish boy staying in his hotel.  He becomes a stalker, harmless but creepy; meanwhile, here comes the cholera.  The whole thing is a riff on Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), a struggle between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, with the embrace of the Dionysian spirit meaning both ecstasy and death.

There he sat, the master; this was he who had found a way to reconcile art and honours; who had written The Abject, in a style of classic purity renounced bohemianism and all its works, all sympathy with the abyss and the troubled depths of the outcast human soul…  His eyelids were closed, there was only a swift, sidelong glint of the eyeballs now and again, something between a question and a leer; while the rouged and flabby mouth uttered single words of the sentences shaped in his disordered brain by the fantastic logic that governs our dreams.

A paragraph of such sentences follows, dream-stuff that I do not really understand (“’And now, Phaedrus, I will go’”), but more importantly I see that the author, “the master,” is or becomes another grotesque.  He is a parody, the ideas attributed to him not to be taken so seriously.  The one thing I have learned.

Now, here is something I still do not understand.  It is on the next-to-last page:

A camera on a tripod stood at the edge of the water, apparently abandoned; its black cloth snapped in the freshening wind.

There has not been a photography theme in the story, nor another camera.  It is on the beach that is a major setting.  “Here you go,” says Mann, “a symbol – enjoy!”  It is so detached from everything else.  Maybe it symbolizes death.

I don’t know how this looks to you, but to me it looks like progress.  Tomorrow I’ll look at “A Man and His Dog,” the most guacamolesque story in the collection.  Guacamolesque is my new favorite word.  It is French.

These are all T. H. Lowe-Porter translations, by the way.  They are dated in places.  A lot of “hither” and “thither” in “Death in Venice.”

save our treasures of beauty - Thomas Mann's "Death in Florence"

Long, long ago, when Thomas Mann was a living writer and his status in English literature was at a peak, a 1936 collection titled Stories of Three Decades, introduced by Mann himself, was the way to read “Death in Venice” and much else.  Over time, Helen Lowe-Porter’s translations have been revised and replaced, and the stories republished in many (shorter) arrangements, often with the earlier stories neglected and the complex later, longer novellas pulled together.

What I wanted to know was if there was anything in Stories of Three Decades that later anthologists had ignored, anything that I had missed.  There is, and surprisingly it is a play, Fiorenza (1906), although likely a closet drama.  I think the last act would work on stage, but otherwise I have doubts.

Fiorenza a character in the play, the only woman, but also Florence – so this is another example of a German in Italy – in 1492, the day before Lorenzo de Medici dies.  The last act is a confrontation between the dying Lorenzo, a demonstrably great man, especially in contrast to the pale idiots who surround him, and Friar Girolamo Savonarola, a fanatic, a madman, but very much alive, and on the verge of taking over Florence.

Lorenzo is the representative of art, beauty, and the Classical spirit of the Renaissance.  He recognizes, unlike the pale idiots, including his useless sons, that the Renaissance values he embodies are too abstract and empty.  His sycophants flatter his poems – better than Dante! – and “divine origins.

LORENZO:  That is poesy, poesy, my friend!  That is beauty, beauty – but neither knowledge nor consolation!  (239)

Not what a dying man needs to hear, even though Lorenzo embodies these values himself, however corruptly.  Too corruptly.  Some of the emptiness is a pagan hedonism.

LORENZO:  I was the state.  The state was I.  Pericles himself took the public money unhesitatingly when he needed it.  And beauty is above law and virtue.  Enough.  But when they rave against it, then Piero [useless son], save our treasures of beauty.  Rescue them.  Let all else go, but protect them with your life.  This is my last will.  (250)

But Piero, the perfect courtier, is hardly the man for that job.  The impulse to destroy these values, to burn books and slash art, as advocated and enacted by Savonarola and his followers, will have its moment of triumph.  As I understood the last act, Mann is entirely on the side of Lorenzo, but suggests that the refusal to curb the excesses of the pursuit of beauty, the embrace of decadence, inevitably created the counter-reaction of Savonarola.  The bonfires are not Lorenzo’s fault, but he is to blame for failing to imagine them.

So, not such a surprise that Thomas Mann, in 1936, thought it a good idea to include this old curiosity among his other stories, whatever he had meant by it in 1906.  German art, literature, and learning, however extraordinary, were no defense against modern Savonarolas.  They instead needed to be defended.

No one writes like that nowadays. Nowadays one writes much worse. - Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, and Samuel Beckett read Theodor Fontane

Three examples of Fontane’s influence or perhaps just presence, one predictable, another unusual, and the third hard to believe.

Thomas Mann must have grown up almost immersed in Fontane’s fiction.  Fontane is a rare case – he worked as a journalist, but did not turn to fiction until late, not publishing his first novel until he was almost sixty, and writing a string of masterpieces in his seventies.  Mann, who was a wonder kid whose publications began when he was, I believe, 18, would have been a teen in northern Germany when all of these radical new northern German novels were appearing.

Mann was always appreciative of Fontane.  “If I may be permitted the personal confession: no writer of past or present stirs in me that kind of sympathy and gratitude, that immediate, instinctive delight, that reflex gaiety, warmth, and satisfaction, which I feel reading any of his verse, any line of his letters, any scrap of dialogue.”

I found that in Phillip Lopate’s Irretrievable Afterword, p. 260; it is from the 1910 essay “The Old Fontane.”  Mann is a writer of many modes, most of them not especially evocative of Fontane, but it is hard to imagine Buddenbrooks (1901) without Fontane’s example.  The first part of the first scene is pure Fontane.  Little Tony Buddenbrooks is on her grandfather’s lap reciting her newly-memorized catechism; the grandfather gently mocks not her but the innovations recently introduced into it.  The grandfather is brought to life by this one little gesture based on a social change that a modern reader may not even be able to detect any more.

I have not read Günter Grass’s 1995 novel Too Far Afield.  I am not sure I could read it well.  It is about history and German unification, but it is also about Theodor Fontane, and not only about him but to some large degree composed of Fontane quotations.  Like a novelistic collage.  Good luck finding an English-language reviewer who was able to detect any of this.  The title, Ein weites Feld, is from a phrase Old Briest says repeatedly – in fact they are the last words of Effi Briest – a hugely famous quotation that not only means nothing to English-language readers but is not even recognizable to someone who has read Fontane in translation, since the two translations I know do not translate Briest’s words as “too far afield.”  Impossible.

The unlikely Fontane fan is Samuel Beckett.  I will quote extensively from Beckett’s Polish translator and collaborator, Antoni Libera:

Beckett arrived with his typical punctuality, at twelve on the dot, not a second later.  To a meeting that wasn't connected with any creative plans or projects he usually came "empty-handed", as he liked to put it.  This time he was holding a small book, which turned out to be an old, very well-thumbed copy of Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane.

Beckett's close friends and those who are experts on his work will know that it was one of his favourite novels, which he often went back to and which he also referred to in his writing.  "Let us hasten home", says Mr Rooney to his old wife in the radio-play All That Fall, "and sit before the fire. We shall draw the blinds. You will read to me. I think Effi is going to commit adultery with the Major."  And in Krapp's Last Tape, as he's making his recording, old Krapp muses: "Effi... Could have been happy with her, up there on the Baltic, and the pines, and the dunes" - because the action of the novel takes place near Stettin - a city which now, as Szczecin, belongs to Poland.

All of that is accurate, except for some reason in Krapp’s Last Tape the name is spelled “Effie”: “Scalded the eyes out of me reading Effie again, a page a day, with tears again”  (p. 25 of the Grove Weidenfeld edition).  Back to Libera and Beckett:

I plucked up the courage to ask the vital question:

"Why do you like that novel so much?"

There was a long pause before I got an answer.

"I used to dream of writing something like it.  And I still have a bit of that dream left.  But I never did.  I never did write it..."  He broke off.

"You never did write it?" I brazenly tried to drag the words out of him.

Another wan smile, and then, unfolding his hands, he said:

"For... I was born too late.  No one writes like that nowadays.  Nowadays one writes much worse."  He glanced at me and added jokingly:  "But don't worry.  The world is changing.  Perhaps you'll manage it."

Beckett seems to have actually lived in a Beckett play.  A page a day would be a strange way to read Effi Briest.  Still, what good company for reading Fontane.

“It’s all gibberish! They just want to trick us.” - the literary thing about Buddenbrooks

Reading Buddenbrooks and Thomas Mann’s early stories has led to questions, most of which do not have ready answers.  Turning to Mann himself has not been so helpful.  Mann invariably says things like this, found on p. xv of T. J. Reed’s introduction to the Everyman’s Library edition of the novel:

a Munich colleague asked him what he was working on, and he answered ‘in words more morose than cheerful: “Oh, it’s tedious, bourgeois stuff, but it treats decline – that’s the literary thing about it”.’

The aspects of the novel I have found the most impressive are the tedious bourgeois stuff, while I am skeptical about the decline stuff, which does not seem to support as much meaning as its author would like.  Thomas Mann thought he prefigured Max Weber, but I am not so sure that treating Buddenbrooks as a work of sociology does it a lot of good.  Mann disagrees.  Mann and I always seem to disagree.

The tedious, bourgeois stuff is what I think of as the Flaubert-like side of the novel – the parties and wallpaper.  Mann talked more in terms of Richard Wagner and leitmotifs.  I would love to read about some examples.  Perhaps I missed them.  Mann’s leitmotif method, as I see it, is a mechanical repetition of detail, more John Williams than Wagner, with the Darth Vader theme playing whenever the character appears.  So to speak.

It all appears to be much less intricate and sophisticated than the subtle patterns created by Flaubert, Joyce and Nabokov, but of course these patterns are almost entirely invisible on a first read of Madame Bovary or Pnin, and here I am complaining that I do not see them after one pass through Buddenbrooks.  Well, obviously.

Related is the mystery of Mann’s irony.  Mann is routinely described as being particularly, even uniquely ironic, but I am having trouble distinguishing his irony from that of, say, Anthony Trollope, another incessantly ironic writer who is given less credit for his stance.  So for example, Thomas Buddenbrooks would like to have more heirs, but only has one son who is unsuited to business.  Long ago, he had a fling with a girl who works in a flower shop before he married someone of the proper status.  The flower girl, over time, has many healthy children.  This is, in a sense, ironic, and is perfectly good novel writing, but I do not see how it is so unique to Thomas Mann.  I have wondered if Mann’s irony is the same thing as his detachment, admirably accomplished for a story so rooted in his own biography, but now we are back to Flaubert, who is similarly detached.

The post’s title can be found on p. 693, Part Eleven, Chapter 2, the longest chapter in the novel, Hanno’s school day, “one day in the life of little Johann,” as the chapter’s last line says.  At times reading Buddenbrooks, I sympathized with Hanno, although he is referring to Ovid in Latin.  The next line, beginning the next chapter, is “Typhoid runs the following course:” followed by a detailed, clinical description of the symptoms of the disease, three full pages of dismaying, repulsive symptoms with no reference to any of the novel’s characters aside from a doctor, the tone different from anything else in the novel, but in some ways resembling the surprising end of The Sorrows of Young Werther, where the one-sided epistolary novel transforms into a coroner’s report.

I suppose it is not all gibberish.  I have a full agenda for the next time I read Thomas Mann.

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?

Summarizing Buddenbrooks

What is Buddenbrooks?  In Erich Auerbach’s description, it is “the first great realistic novel [in German, he means], which, despite its complete originality, corresponds in its level of style to the works of the French nineteenth-century realists” (Mimesis, 1946, tr. Willard Trask, pp. 517-8).  I wish more reviewers summarized books like this.  It is what I want to know about a book.

Nevertheless, from here on out I will indulge in a little more plot detail than usual, so potential Buddenbrooks readers of a delicate temperament will want to avert their gaze.  Buddenbrooks is all about temperament.

The novel covers four generations and about forty years, 1835 to 1875 or just a bit later.  Thomas Mann was born in 1875, making Buddenbrooks a historical novel of the domestic variety, merely brushed by larger historical events, most prominently in Part Four when the Buddenbrooks patriarch defuses the anger of a mob of 1848 revolutionaries (“’it’s ‘cause of the gen’ral frenchies,’” 189).  See also Part Seven, Chapter 8, one of Mann’s occasional narrative experiments, in which the wars between Prussia and Denmark (Lübeck is in between) are summarized in a single distant page, more distant than usual:

In late autumn and winter the troops return victorious, are quartered in homes again, and then depart amid the cheers of relieved citizens.  Peace.  The brief peace of 1865 – the future gestates in its womb.  (427)

The Buddenbrooks family owes its fortune in the Napoleonic Wars, a good time for provisioners, twenty or thirty years before the novel begins.  Thus the peak in fortune in the first long scene; thus the decline.  The opportunities of war do not come along every day, and when they do, as in 1865 or 1870, the head of the firm is too risk averse, or, ironically, too committed to the reputation of the firm to prosper from them.

Almost all of the most important characters in the novel – a novel with hundreds of named minor characters – are present at the first party.  I mean the three children, the Buddenbrooks siblings, Thomas, who will take over the firm, Christian, who will flounder about, and Antonie, who will – well, her story is complicated.  The only character of similar importance is Hanno, Thomas’s son, off in the future, the boy with musical talent, bad teeth, and bad grades.  There is a fourth sibling, Clara, whose role is minor.

The four siblings between them produce two (or just possibly three) offspring and a single grandchild among them.  Here is the source of decline – this is a demographically unusual result for well to do Germans of their time.  They have bad luck with their marriages, and with their health.  I was expecting something more along the lines of a tragic flaw to appear in the Buddenbrooks family, or some sort of original sin, something more Shakespearian, or Sophoclean, or Faulknerian, but Mann is after something else.

After all, both he and his brother were children of artistic temperament who had no interest in taking over the old Mann merchant firm, causing their father to dissolve it upon his death.  What looks like a decline from one point of view is anything but from Thomas Mann’s.

Then the question is how, without much of a sense of doom and tragedy, a writer can find any dramatic interest in this material.  So that is the task for the next couple of days.

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.”

Thomas Mann's antidote to decadence - never had he lost himself in a book

This is the last pre-vacation post.  It is an odd one to have atop Wuthering Expectations for two weeks, but it provides a clue as to where I am going, so that’s all right.

To catch us all up, “The Blood of the Walsungs” is Thomas Mann’s story of Wagnerian decadence that ends in an eye-rolling act of unapologetic incest.  Twenty years ago or more, I found the whole thing repulsive.  Now it seems hilarious, narrow but successful as a satire, not decadent but a parody of literary decadence.

Thus the mannered speech of the brother and sister:

‘I should enjoy an ice,’ said she, ‘if they were not in all probability uneatable.’

‘Don’t think of it,’ said he.

Or the preposterous clothing:

She wore a Florentine cinquecento frock of claret-coloured velvet, too heavy for her slight body.  Siegmund had on a green jacket suit with a tie of raspberry shantung, patent-leather shoes on his narrow feet, and cuff-buttons set with small diamonds.

Or the abuse with which the poor fiancé, a sort of point of view character, is subjected.  These people are ridiculous and behave accordingly.

And thus the long description and theft from Wagner, the conceit that the characters in the story behave like other fictional characters whose name they happen to share, something I remember finding deeply irritating.  Couldn’t Mann come up with his own symbolic action?  Or couldn’t he make it less obvious?  But I now take this as Mann’s point, that the twins have become so corrupted by wealth and aestheticism that they are only capable of imitation.

The brother, Siegmund, while dressing for the opera is given a reverie, an internal wandering that is as close as Mann comes to directing sympathy towards a character.  Siegmund is aware of the emptiness in his life.

The preparation, the lavish equipment for what should have been the serious business of life used up all his energy.  How much mental effort had to be expended simply in making a proper toilette!  How much time and attention went to his supplies of cigarettes, soaps, and perfumes; how much occasion for making up his mind late in that moment, recurring two or three times daily, when he had to select his cravat!

Yes, admittedly, that exact problem may not be one many of us share, but at least Mann allows for some possibility of an alternative other than a Wagner-inspired sexual affair with his sister.  He does it most clearly in a description of a problem many of us do share:

Siegmund loved to read, he strove after the word and the spirit as after a tool which a profound instinct urged him to grasp.  But never had he lost himself in a book as one does when that single work seems the most important in the world; unique, that single work seems the most important in the world; unique, a little, all-embracing universe, into which one plunges and submerges oneself in order to draw nourishment out of every syllable.  The books and magazines streamed in, he could buy them all, they heaped up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him.  But he had the books bound in stamped leather and labelled with Siegmund Aarenhold’s beautiful book-plate; they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.

In other words, he behaves badly because of the size of his To Be Read pile.  And his life would be transformed if he could just find that one great book among the corrupting excess.

Back in a couple weeks.  I will have to juice up the bug zapper a bit while I am away, sorry.

I summarize the Thomas Mann story "The Blood of the Walsungs"

Thomas Mann, “The Blood of the Walsungs,” 1905.  A story in two scenes.

Scene 1:  Lunch with the Aarenhold family, massively wealthy Polish Jews who have become assimilated Prussians, so assimilated that the oldest son has become an Erich von Stroheim-like Prussian officer, “a stunning tanned creature with curling lips and a killing scar” and the youngest son and daughter, nineteen year-old twins, are named after Richard Wagner characters.

The aestheticized manners and grandiose wealth of the characters are a sight to see:  “With careful, skinny hands Herr Aarenhold settled the pince-nez half-way down his nose and with a mistrustful air read the menu, three copies of which lay on the table,” for example.  They are at home.  I am going to institute this practice.  Hand-written menus at every meal for every guest.  This will be easy because they will only need one word: BEANS.  And I can reuse the menus every night.

A more ordinary German has had the bad luck (“[t]owards the end of the luncheon [his] eyes were red and he looked slightly deranged”) of becoming engaged to the daughter.  He apparently has not noticed that she and her brother “were always hand in hand, heedless that the hands of both inclined to moisture.”

Scene 2:  The twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, are going to attend Die Walküre for the last time before her marriage.  He dresses, exchanging his “rose-tinted silk drawers and socks” for “black silk drawers, black silk socks, and heavy black silk garters with silver buckles.”  His sister joins him, and they make out (“They spent another minute on the chaise-lounge in mutual caresses”).

The next quarter or so of the story shows the twins at the opera.  Many pages present a detailed summary of the plot of the opera, focusing mostly on the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde who fall in love, discover that they are brother and sister, and behave in a manner that eventually produces the hero Siegfried:

Crouching on the bearskin they looked at each other in the white light, as they sang their duet of love.  Their bare arms touched each other’s as they held each other by the temples and gazed into each other’s eyes, and as they sang their mouths were very near…  In ravishment he stretched out his arms to her, his bride, she sank upon his breast – the curtain fell as the music swelled into a roaring, rushing, foaming whirlpool of passion – swirled and swirled and with one might throb stood still.

Rapturous applause.

Curiously, the “real” Siegmund has a white bearskin rug in his white room lit by “soft milky” light.

The twins return home, eat caviar sandwiches with red wine (“a combination offensive to good taste”), and copulate on the bearskin rug.  “Thus Mann has life imitate art” writes Peter Gay in Savage Reprisals (2002, p. 120) after his own summary of the story.

Gay is wrong.  Mann has art imitate art.  There is not a hint of life in any of this.

How I hated this story when I read it long ago; how it poisoned Mann.  On re-reading it, I have changed my mind, although without cleansing the story of its toxins – it is deliberately poisonous – but I will save the defense for the next post.

Ringing and shimmering, and giving hint of their infinite origin - I fail to make the case for Thomas Mann

It has been twenty years or more since I read Thomas Mann, in the old Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories collection.  I do not want to say that I read Mann well – I am sure I did not – but he left a bad taste so I never pursued the matter until recently.  I believe I have narrowed the offender to a single story, so perhaps the experience was like eating a bad clam.  Puts a fellow off clams for a while.  Buddenbrooks (1901) has turned out to be a tasty clam, thank goodness.

I want to postpone Buddenbrooks to sometime after my upcoming vacation and instead look at some of Mann’s early short fiction, most of it new to me.  The book at hand is Little Herr Friedemann & Other Stories, Minerva Press, 1997, the translator nowhere mentioned although I was able to figure out it is H. T. Lowe-Porter.  Eighteen short stories ranging from 1896 to 1911.

The last one I read, “A Weary Hour” (1905) is an internal monologue by Friedrich Schiller about the meaning of art and life and so on (Schiller’s name is never used).  It contains almost everything I find artless in Mann.  “And from his soul, from music and idea, new works struggled upward to birth and, taking shape, gave out light and sound, ringing and shimmering, and giving hint of their infinite origin – as in a shell we hear the sighing of the sea whence it came” – I was tempted to add “and hot gas” after “light and sound.”  So this is not the place to reconcile myself with Mann.  I note the year, the centennial of Schiller’s death so perhaps it is a special case, for a commemorative issue of a magazine.

Mann loved dogs.  The 1918 story “A Man and His Dog,” too long and late for this collection, contains little more than a man taking his dog for a walk.  I have not reread it recently, and remember it as a marvel, a wonderful piece of writing, so it has been a kind of mental cocklebur reminding me that Mann was worth another try.  A number of these stories have appreciative writing about dogs.  Sensitive dog lovers might want to avoid “Tobias Mindernickel” (1897), though, in which a grotesque misfit finds love in a dog, but for temperamental reasons should not own a dog.  Mann can be cruel, even to innocent dogs.

He is more cruel to people, especially the grotesques he returns to again and again, like the disfigured and bent hero of “Little Herr Friedemann” (1897), who as a baby was dropped by his drunken nurse.  After a life of self-denial he foolishly falls in love, is rejected, and drowns himself by force of will in shallow water.

Or how about Jacoby the lawyer:

He was stout, Jacoby the lawyer; but stout is not the word, he was a perfect colossus of a man!  His legs, in their columnar clumsiness and the slate-grey trousers he always wore, reminded one of an elephant’s…  The upper lip and the round head were covered with harsh, scanty, light-coloured bristles that showed the naked skin, as on an overfed dog.

His beautiful, evil wife and her no-good composer boyfriend bully Jacoby into performing  at a public theatrical.  They make him dress like a little girl and sing an insipid song (thus the title of the story, “Little Lizzy,” 1897).  He is killed by the F-sharp major chord on which the composer ends the song.  Mann is quite specific about that chord; he always is when he writes about music.

Humiliation, abuse, loneliness, death and more death.  I am not really making the case in favor, am I?  Tomorrow, the bad clam.  Let’s get it out of the way.

Castles on inaccessible crags - the view from The Country of the Pointed Firs with Buddenbrooks thrown in as a regionalist bonus

I am going to move on to curtains, but for more on pies, please visit Jam & Idleness, where I am interviewed, in a manner of speaking, while revealing as little about myself as possible.  The highlights of the interview are: 1) a legendary Dickens quotation about pie, 2) a fine joke from meine Frau, and 3) a fine joke stolen from John Malkovich’s Proust questionnaire. 

Now, curtains.  We are visiting the home of the herbalist’s mother, “one of the most adorable little old women I’ve ever encountered in any sort of book” as bibliographing wrote.  The antique but spry mother lives alone on an island with her oddball son,  while the daughter has chosen to live in town, on shore (“’I was married in this room,’ said Mrs. Todd unexpectedly”).

The narrator describes the little island house’s décor:

… the little old-fashioned best room, with its few pieces of good furniture and pictures of national interest.  The green paper curtains were stamped with conventional landscapes of a foreign order,--castles on inaccessible crags, and lovely lakes with steep wooded shores; under-foot the treasured carpet was covered thick with home-made rugs.  There were empty glass lamps and crystallized bouquets of grass and some fine shells on the narrow mantelpiece.  (Ch. VIII)

The word “crystallized” is an interesting puzzle, although the way it magically makes grass the bridge between glass and shells is clear.  But it was the curtains that caught my attention.  The narrator often describes the view of the islands, likely one of the reasons she is living in this particular town.  And of course she describes this island as part of her visit.  Later, the characters go herb gathering, which also gives them an excuse to enjoy the view, which is described using some typical indicators of the sublime:

… above the circle of pointed firs we could look down over all the island, and could see the ocean that circled this and a hundred other bits of island ground, the mainland shore and all the far horizons.  It gave a sudden sense of space, for nothing stopped the eye or hedged one in,--that sense of liberty in space and time which great prospects always give.

"There ain't no such view in the world, I expect," said William proudly, and I hastened to speak my heartfelt tribute of praise; it was impossible not to feel as if an untraveled boy had spoken, and yet one loved to have him value his native heath.

The “boy” is actually “elderly” and “gray-headed.”  I return to the other view that he sees every day, on the green curtains, the one taken from some Walter Scott novel.  Conventional taste side by side with the real Maine landscape.

By chance I ran into something similar in a novel contemporary with The Country of the Pointed Firs, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901).  The Buddenbrooks family have, in 1835, just bought and furnished a large home, including this showpiece:

They were sitting in the “landscape room,” on the second floor of the spacious old house on Meng Strasse…  The thick, supple wall coverings, which had been hung so that there was a gap between them and the wall, depicted extensive landscapes in the same pastel colors as the thin carpet on the floor – idyllic scenes in the style of the eighteenth century, with merry vinedressers, diligent farmers, prettily ribboned shepherdesses, who sat beside reflecting pools, holding spotless lambs in their laps or exchanging kisses with tender shepherds.  Most of these scenes were suffused with yellowish sunsets that matched the yellow upholstery of the white enameled furniture and the yellow silk of the curtains at both windows.  (I.1., tr.  John E. Woods)

I love visiting rooms like this in palaces and restored homes in Europe, since they make me happy I do not live in them.  Many of the most important scenes in the novel take place in this room, allowing Mann to insert lines like this, 250 pages later, during the reading of a will:

The painted gods atop their pedestals stood out white and proud against the sky-blue background. (V.1.)

Mannian irony, is what that is.

Both Buddenbrooks and The Country of the Pointed Firs are regionalist novels.  It is a curious pleasure to see them working some of the same ground with some of the same tools, as different as they are.

A villa, a carriage, a piano and a banjo - detail in James

The smart thing to do would be to expand – or, honestly, rewrite – yesterday’s business about how Henry James sometimes allows ambiguities that other writers telling similar stories would close off, whether to satisfy convention or to show off their cleverness.  I have a strong taste for writers in the latter group, so this is a reason I do not always read James so well.  I am looking for the wrong kind of clues and solving the wrong mystery.  Failing to solve, of course.  But I will save this for “The Figure in the Carpet.”

Now I will mention a characteristic of James that I think is related, his maddening physical vagueness, which unfortunately intersects another strong taste for the opposite.  Neither of these are merely tastes, but well-defined, justifiable aesthetic positions, but that is irrelevant for this whine about the difficulties of reading James.

The fixed observer of “The Pupil” is a tutor who becomes entangled with a slippery, almost devious family, the Moreens, rich enough to lounge around Europe as long as they occasionally skip town ahead of their creditors.  The tutor is not the narrator but is what D. G. Myers calls a “third-person onlooker,” an outsider who observes only pieces of the family’s eventful story and does not comprehend everything he does see.  The real story, the important one, is the deep friendship between the tutor and his sickly, sensitive pupil and the alliance they form against the boy’s horrible family, so of course the tutor’s point of view is perfect for all of that, even if it is a story taking place “backstage” in some sense.

A description of the chaotic family, part of it, early in “The Pupil”:

They lived on macaroni and coffee—they had these articles prepared in perfection—but they knew recipes for a hundred other dishes.  They overflowed with music and song, were always humming and catching each other up, and had a sort of professional acquaintance with Continental cities.  They talked of “good places” as if they had been pickpockets or strolling players.  They had at Nice a villa, a carriage, a piano and a banjo, and they went to official parties.  (718)

Now, there is a lot to like here, obviously.  Strolling players!  A banjo!  One of the marriageable daughters even strums it a bit later.  Henry James is not typically described as efficient, is he?  But this is pretty crisp.  The tutor “once found [the father] shaving in the drawing room.”  They all mix their French and Italian with “cold, tough slices of American.”  It takes just one long paragraph to pump the Moreens full of life.

But the description remains at this level.  Scenes are almost entirely conversation, sometimes but not always with a few words to establish the setting.  James is specific when generalizing, and general when specific.

Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901) begins with a long party scene in which Mann describes what every character is wearing, where they are sitting in relation to each other, the furniture they sit on, plus all of the other furniture, and also the paintings and wallpaper.

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.  The silk cravat wound around his stiff high-wing collar was fluffed to fill the broad, open neck of his multicolored vest.  (5, tr. John E. Woods)

Maybe this all becomes pointlessly fussy as the novel goes on, I don’t know.  Mann demands that I see that pair of pants; James rarely wants me to see anything.  He fills his fiction with imaginative blank spaces.  And he does it on purpose, he says so openly.  But that is “The Figure in the Carpet,” so it will have to wait until tomorrow.