Classics Revisited
Man of many opinions
By Ravi Vyas
The Letters of Thomas Mann, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, 1970, Secker & Warburg, Price Not Stated.
Thomas Mann, Ronald Hayman, Bloomsbury.
ALL great writers have many selves which, all too often, live in a state of tension with each other. The greatness of a writer lies in the ability to hold two (or more) opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and yet retain the ability to function. No writer of the last century since Tolstoy exemplified this quality better than Thomas Mann.
A man's passions
With his conservative outlook, dignified bearing and great reputation, he still had much to hide. That he was attracted to good looking boys was no secret: his story Death in Venice, about the tragic end of a writer, irresistibly attracted by a young boy he had seen in the dining room of a hotel for the first time was, according to his friends, autobiographical. What many of his close friends did not know was that there was also an incestuous side to his passion as he was in love with one of his own sons, Klaus. Probably because he had recorded all his inner feelings, he was discreet enough to destroy a thousand pages of his diary before his death. To know what made Mann tick the closest we can come to is his two volumes of Letters, written to close friends and relatives.
Was Mann's sexuality the motor that drove him or was it a symptom of the rot at the heart of modern life, which he deals with in his classic work, The Magic Mountain? Of course, we would never know despite the fact that by 1929, when he received the Nobel Prize at the age of 54, he had written Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, Tonio Kroger, Tristan and many other novellas and short stories. And as he grew older, he got better, with his two best books, Doctor Faustus and Felix Krull, written in his seventies.
Illuminating letters
The last two gave an indication of his fantastic creative energies: Doctor Faustus is still the most illuminating book on the political and intellectual fanaticism of our times. His Letters provide the fullest self-portrait, far surpassing in scope all his writings and his own brief and premature autobiography or his account of writing Doctor Faustus. Perhaps it is a mistake to seek too direct a connection between the artist and his art: in between there is the magic of genius. All the same, letters and private correspondence provide a cue about what turned Mann on because the intellectual guard is down as he is writing straight from the heart without considering what others might think.
Mann says that his favourite device is "a parody, not cynical but affectionate, of tradition. Such may well be the attitude of a writer who in an age of endings and transitions finds himself at once playing the part of a straggler, consummating and completing the past, and the part of an innovator undermining and dissolving it. It is the role and situation of the ironic conservative...The fact is that I consider myself primarily a humorist... Humour, I am inclined to think, is an expression of amiability and comradeship toward those with whom we share this planet... "
Yet, it is Mann's attitude towards death and suicide that is revealing of the qualities that "turned him on" and made him a great novelist. His mood when he wrote at his best is best captured in a letter he wrote to his brother, Heinrich, telling him that, "my innate predilection for death is growing stronger... and my concern always gravitates towards decay".
Extraordinary family
The Letters offer a glimpse of Mann's extraordinary family, particularly his wife Katia and their brilliant daughter Erika who forfeited a career of her own to work as her father's researcher, editor and best critic. They are also fascinating on many levels, not least as the record of a famous public figure whose life encompassed several critical historical periods and whose changing political attitudes characterise the sad history of the 20th century — two World Wars, The Cold War, the Bomb and so on. On all these "turning points of history", Mann had something to say. In bitter opposition to his brother, Mann welcomed the First World War. And then turned turtle as a tireless anti-Nazi and fervent admirer of America as a defender of western civilisation. "I don't think", he wrote to the Czech president, Eduard Bene{scaron} upon giving up his Czech passport in 1944 to become an American citizen, "that I shall turn my back upon this country whose libertarian traditions and humanely beneficent atmosphere I sincerely appreciate". But in 1952 he returned to Europe and settled in Switzerland, having come to see America as "supporting the old, worn-out, rotten and corrupt forces throughout the world", as a power which "in a time of inexorable change plays the policeman of the status quo". It still does!
As Mann's reputation and achievement grew, so did the attacks upon him from all sides for his failure to take a "proper stand" on many issues. He was too famous to be left alone. As these Letters show, fame is a lot of work and trouble; it simply wears you down. Mann was more than a great writer (he was better as a literary critic, if you read his Last Essays which deal with Nietzsche, Chekhov and others), he became a symbol, and an idol.
There is a great deal of correspondence with critics, editors, columnists and professors who kept up his reputation yet were ready to pounce on him if he failed to live up to their literary, political or moral expectations. Mann's responses show that he had a great deal more integrity than other "greats" who succumbed to the powerful and the influential. How much easier, he reflects, it was for unrecognised geniuses like Stendhal or Italo Svevo to say exactly what they thought and felt! Because it did not matter: no one gave a damn what they wrote, except for a few close friends. Failure in one's lifetime can be a kind of luck, as long it does get you down permanently!
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