Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature

Description

Here is a groundbreaking biography of one of the century's most important writers. Anthony Heilbut has plumbed the posthumously-published Mann diaries to give us a fresh and engaging examination of Thomas Mann's life and to reinvigorate the themes of his great body of work. Review: Thank you, Mr. Heilbut; damn you, Mr. Heilbut - "Say WHAT?" I'd only been reading Thomas Mann in English and German for 50 years, when I happened to see the new (all RIGHT! 1990...) introduction to "The Black Swan" ("Die Betrogene") in the excellent translation by Willard E. Trask and I came, all unsuspecting--God knows how--across the following: `Mann's use of the swan's hermaphroditic image, with its long, phallic neck yet rounded, female body, also suggests his own erotic experience--his identity as a husband an father complicated by his homoerotic relationship with Paul Ehrenberg..." (N.P. Strauss) It was exactly as if someone had taken hold of (my) brain and with incredible force started swinging it in wide, concentric circles that grew smaller and smaller, so that it picked up speed, frightening speed, as it whirled around and around until at last it crashed with tremendous, brutal and merciless force against the stone-hard center of the circle. I knew it...all the time. (Sorry, the quotes key on my keyboard stopped functioning for a while.) Calling myself five kinds of idiot, I Googled "Paul Ehrenberg," found Alex Ross's excellent review of Eros and Literature, and read the book (while I was re-reading all of Mann). Almost only those who knew him well (and every homosexual who ever read his work)knew, before his diaries and notebooks started appearing in 1975 (1967 for the notebooks--who needs the diaries?...I did.) that: "Death in Venice" happened almost as it was written, except nobody died (forgive the slight exaggeration); when the 14-year-old Tonio Kroger says he loved Hans Hansen, he means it; Kai and Hanno were both 15 years old when Hanno dies, and Kai kisses his hands so many times; Mut-em-Enet's incredible passion for Joseph was...Thomas Mann's; almost all the things Inez Rhodde says to Zeitblom about Rudi Schwerdtfeger were observations Mann made in his Notebook 7 of Paul Ehrenberg (1901-03); Adrian Leverkuehn engineers Rudi Schwerdtfeger's death (he does NOT! Oh yes he does!) in revenge for Rudi's seducing him (he does NOT! Oh yes he does!), (the trollycar murder for which Mann seems to have invented electricity took place in Dresden in 1901--early 1902); Rudi Schwerdtfeger IS Paul Ehrenberg , 1900-1904 (um...sort of). Actually, I like Paul a little better than Rudi. Didn't get to know much of Mann's other love interests well enough to say. The original of Tadzio ("Death in Venice") seems to have been a pretty nice fella. One problem is that it's easy--no it's not easy, but possible--to appreciate Mann without knowing that he had a gay head. You ignore a little gorgeous prose here, bat your eyes a few times while reading Dr. Faustus, and Bob's your uncle. Ignore a few things in the short stories, the other novels--gee, how'd I do it? "Sexuality," says Alex Ross, "is not at the core of Mann's writing, but very close to it." Heilbut would have it at the very core. Thus one occasionally feels that Heilbut is stretching, or on the other hand ignoring, a point, to make this point. For someone with entirely homosexual sensibilities, fathering six children, as Alex Ross says, was a little above and beyond the call of duty (three of them were gay--that's a .500 batting average for someone.) Isn't homosexuality, insofar as it's genetic, which seems to be pretty far, supposed to go through the female line? (Have you ever read anything by his wife's grandmother, Hedwig Dohm? She was the greatest women's rights advocate of 19th and early 20th century Germany. She, too was married, with children.) But on the whole, the book is thorough, well-reserached and documented. Heilbut's work is loosely organized around Mann's life, jumping ahead here, back there, stopping for long looks at Buddenbrooks, "Death in Venice," The Magic Mountain, Joseph and his Brothers, and (very close to the beginning!) Dr. Faustus. Well, it IS organized around his life, not the publication dates of his works! Heilbut follows with great interest Mann's political development, injecting humor, discussing his relationships with friends, family, and enemies (there's a nifty obscene sonnet by Brecht in the "Postscript," to which he signed Mann's name--in jest--but Mann wouldn't have liked it. I...don't...think.) , his immediate and complete abhorrence of Hitler (prophet-like, Mann had written in his diary during WW1 that if Germany should lose the war, an enormous and all-encompassing power would arise in the state, excluding everything human, including himself), what he loved to read, what he loved to listen to, what he thought, felt and wrote during his exile, what he was working on when he died (a possibly major work on Mozart). Perhaps he could have paid a litle more attention to the indespensable help of Mann's wife, Katja, and his daughter Erika. Heilbut has a tendency to misquote--you don't have to read German to see this; English will suffice. (There's a guy over on Google who has two PAGES of Heilbut's misquotes.) Hanno does NOT draw a line DIAGONALLY under his name in the family book (he draws two lines straight under the last entry, as if he had just added a column of figures, or written an essay), the Little Herr Friedman does NOT "plunge" to his death (he creeps forward, untill his head is underwater); Joseph does NOT say to Mount-Kaw: Do not think that you must sleep; think that you "shall" sleep (the verbs are "must" and "may"--as in, you will allow yourself to slee--you, or the gods you believe in); Mann didn't advise Ehrenberg to read Nietzche; he advised him not to (letter, 1903). Sometimes, Heilbut acts as if he were the only one to have read any letters, diaries or notebooks from Mann, and occasionally, the principal works as well, and thus could quote them any way he likes. For--another--instance, as Mann prepares to write his essay on Michelangelo's Erotic, Heilbut quotes Michelangelo as saying "In your breath, I form my work." In 1949, Mann received from a friend some of Michelangelo's verse, in Italian, and translated into German. The above referred-to quotation was one Mann couldn't get out of his head. But it's "mie parole," and "mein Wort"--the whole line reading: "In your breath I form my word." It is not a typo in Eros and Literature, for Heilbut goes on to discuss a great building of Michelangelo's old age. Maybe he needs reading glasses. Since the publication of Heilbut's book, more and more people seem to be coming down on the side of, as far as Mann's homosexuality was concerned, "he probably never did anything about it." (Ross, "Mann in Love"). Heilbut's syllogism doesn't work, with "he was one of my greatest love-affairs" in the center of it. "Love affair," in Thomas Mann's mouth, doesn't necessarily mean a consummated one. There is perhaps a bit of hope (for someone who so passionately loved men, one has to say "hope") in his using the adjective "courageous" in describing Paul Ehrenberg in his dedication of part 9 of Buddenbrooks to him...in what other way was Paul Ehrenberg "courageous"? (Gee, he was a pretty nice guy. "Du! Tu dich fei' halten!"--Notebook 7; Dr. Faustus. Seems to mean "That's enough of that!"--I don't read Bayrisch.) The word Woods translates from is "tapfer"...well, "courageous" is listed under that German word, but only as a 4th choice. The "Diaries" are all available in English. Notitzbuecher 1-6, and 7-14, only in German, I think. 7-14 is the most astonishing book I ever read. I can still Mann's voice on my 33 1/3 longplaying record (he reads from the beginning of "Tonio Kroger," the part on the rock from The Holy Sinner, and a radio essay from 1952, three years before he died at 80, called "In Praise of the Transitory" which ends: "Whether this is so, or not so" (that the failure of mankind, through his own guilt, would mean the failure of "creation" itself), "it would be good if men acted as if it were." ...And curse you, Mr Heilbut, for your notes at the end of the book that told me where to find the sources of your quotations, and the...enormous amount of money I've sent to desertcart.deutschland (No, I don't want it back!) Review: This is a bio, a literary bio, not ... - This is a bio, a literary bio, not a work of fiction, but a very thorough account of his life, with a rich selection and understanding of his letters, which revealed much more of whom TM was than one would only be able to surmise from his fiction.