by Colm Toibin
Erika and Klaus were increasingly at sea in the new Germany. Klaus began to work in films, collaborating briefly and painfully with Roberto Rossellini. Someone who worked with him in these years said: ‘He was a restless man. He had so many ideas and so much energy … I don’t think he could sit still for two minutes. He had a cigarette perpetually in his mouth and was in constant movement. You could feel the vibrations of his energy.’
It should have been possible for Klaus’s books, especially Mephisto and The Turning Point, which had been published during his exile, to begin appearing in the new Germany. But the new Germany was strange. Gustaf Gründgens was back on the stage, as popular and successful as he had been when he had Goering to protect him. Weiss reports that having with difficulty secured a ticket for a sold-out performance, Klaus ‘was speechless to discover that Gründgens, stepping onto the stage during the first act, received a show-stopping standing ovation’.
In response he wrote an article suggesting that Emmy Sonnemann, the actress who married Goering, should also have her career revived. ‘Perhaps someone gassed at Auschwitz,’ he wrote, ‘left behind some stage piece in which the esteemed woman could make her second debut. The good woman surely knew nothing about Auschwitz – and besides, what does art have to do with politics?’ When the German edition of The Turning Point appeared in 1952, Gründgens demanded that sections of the book that damaged his reputation be removed. They were. Mephisto appeared in German in 1956 but only in the GDR: no West German publisher would touch it, even after Gründgens’s suicide in 1963. Erika brought the case to the West German Supreme Court, which ruled in favour of suppressing the book, preserving Gründgens’s posthumous reputation. After a long wait, a paperback version finally appeared in West Germany in 1981, as well as a film adaptation.
In 1946, as his ex-lover and current nemesis was being applauded on the stage, Klaus decided to return to America for an extended visit. Since he had nowhere else to go, he planned to make his way to Los Angeles, where his parents were installed in a large and splendid house in Pacific Palisades; but his father had been diagnosed with lung cancer and was being operated on in Chicago. Erika flew from Nuremberg to be with her father. She never again left his side. For the next nine years she was Mann’s secretary and chief confidante. Just as she and Klaus had once been inseparable, now she and her father were never apart. Years later, Elisabeth Mann remembered:
She returned home, because she had exhausted her career, and so devoted herself to the work of her father … Erika was a very powerful personality, a very dominant, domineering personality, and I must say that this role that she played in the latter part of her life as manager of my father was not always very easy to take for my mother, because she had been used to doing all of that.
Among other tasks, Erika set about cutting the final manuscript of Doctor Faustus by forty pages; her father believed she had improved the book.
Klaus wrote to his mother suggesting that a cottage be found for him near his parents’ home and since he could not drive, he would also need ‘an old Ford and a young driver … The driver must also be able to cook a bit and have a pleasant appearance.’ His mother replied immediately. ‘A house to rent and a car and a driver who can cook, who also was attractive! With a lot of luck, one can get a room from upwards of one hundred dollars … This is democracy!’ Klaus arrived in Los Angeles at the end of July but was back in New York by the early autumn. He was once more in exile, this time from his family as well as his country. He had lost his sister to his father and had used up his mother’s patience. In 1948 he said: ‘It is only the parts of my life in which she [Erika] shares that have substance and reality for me.’
Klaus now moved between New York, Paris, Zurich, Vienna and Amsterdam. When he returned once more to Los Angeles, his parents asked him to leave after a month as other siblings and cousins were coming to stay. Klaus, with Erika’s help, found a place nearby. Six days after moving in, he attempted suicide by slitting his wrists, taking pills and turning on the gas. He was hospitalized and the incident was reported in the press. His father didn’t visit. Mann wrote to a friend: ‘My two sisters committed suicide, and Klaus has much of the elder sister in him. The impulse is present in him, and all the circumstances favour it – the one exception being that he has a parental home on which he can always rely.’ His mother, when she heard the news, is reported (by Elisabeth) to have snapped: ‘If he wanted to kill himself, why didn’t he do it properly?’ Erika wrote to a friend: ‘As you may have read, Klaus – my closest brother – tried to do away with himself which was not only a nasty shock but also involved a great deal of time-devouring trouble.’ On 1 January 1949 Klaus wrote in his diary: ‘I do not wish to survive this year.’ In April, in Cannes, he received a letter from a West German publisher to say that Mephisto couldn’t appear ‘because Mr Gründgens plays a very important role here’. The following month he succeeded in killing himself. He was forty-two.
Mann was in Stockholm with Katia and Erika when he heard the news. ‘My inward sympathy,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘with the mother’s heart and with E. He should not have done this to them … The hurtful, ugly, cruel inconsideration and irresponsibility.’ He wrote to Heinrich: ‘His case is so very strange and painful, such skill, charm, cosmopolitanism, and in his heart a death-wish.’ He wrote to Hermann Hesse: ‘This interrupted life lies heavily on my mind and grieves me. My relationship with him was difficult and not free of guilt. My life put his in a shadow right from the beginning.’ He decided not to attend his son’s funeral or interrupt his lecture tour. Of all the family, only Michael, the youngest sibling, on tour with the San Francisco Symphony, attended the funeral; he played a largo on his viola as the coffin was lowered into the ground.
Later, Elisabeth would say of Erika: ‘When Klaus died, she was totally, totally heartbroken – I mean that was unbearable for her, that loss. That hit her harder than anything else in her life.’ Erika returned with her parents to the US and sought citizenship only to find that she was once more under investigation by the FBI. By 1950 there was even a move to deport her for being a Communist. Before it went any further, she decided to leave, taking her parents with her. They had become close enough for her father to write in his diary about his concern for Erika: ‘she could so easily follow her brother. Certainly she does not want to live any longer than us.’ They sold the house in Pacific Palisades in June 1952 and moved to Switzerland. Thomas Mann died three years later at the age of eighty.
Erika fought with her other siblings; she and Elisabeth didn’t speak for a decade. In 1961 her mother wrote to her brother: ‘What is ruining … my old age, is the more than unfriendly relationship of all my children towards the good, fat, eldest.’ Erika was busy editing a three-volume edition of her father’s letters, fighting the case for Klaus’s book in the West German courts, and battling with her first husband after all these years. When two German newspapers insinuated that she had had an incestuous relationship with Klaus, she sued and won. She died in 1969 at the age of sixty-three, leaving some of her assets to Auden, whom she had not seen for years.
Her mother lived until 1980. Monika, whose husband drowned in front of her when their ship crossing the Atlantic was torpedoed in 1940, moved to Capri in 1953 and died in 1992. Golo, who returned to Germany in the late 1950s and became a historian, died in 1994. Michael committed suicide in 1977. This left Elisabeth, who lived until 2002. She devoted most of her life to the study and protection of the ocean. In her later years, she made herself available to interviewers and biographers. In a series of television drama-documentaries made for German television about the family, she appeared as a figure of calm and melancholy wisdom. (‘When you get past the age of 30,’ she had told Golo, ‘you should stop blaming your parents for what you are.’) There was a strange, dry, serene resignation about her appearance as she returned to the places where the Manns had lived, commenting to the camera on the damage that had been done with a sort of acceptance and a sense that nothing
had escaped her.
Borges: A Father in His Shadow
On 9 March 1951 Seepersad Naipaul wrote from Trinidad to his son Vidia, who was an undergraduate at Oxford: ‘I am beginning to believe I could have been a writer.’ A month later, Vidia, in a letter to the entire family, wrote: ‘I hope Pa does write, even five hundred words a day. He should begin a novel. He should realise that the society of the West Indies is a very interesting one – one of phoney sophistication.’ Soon, his father wrote again to say that he had in fact started to write five hundred words a day. ‘Let me see how well the resolve works out,’ he wrote. ‘Even now I have not settled the question whether I should work on an autobiographical novel or whether I should exhume Gurudeva.’ Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales had been privately published in Port of Spain in 1943. It would be Seepersad Naipaul’s only book. He died in 1953 at the age of forty-seven.
For writers and artists whose fathers dabbled in art and failed there seems always to be a peculiar intensity in their levels of ambition and determination. It is as though an artist such as Picasso, whose father was a failed painter, or William James, whose father was a failed essayist, or V. S. Naipaul, sought to compensate for his father’s failure while at the same time using his talent as a way of killing the father off, showing his mother who was the real man in the household.
Jorge Luis Borges was in Majorca in 1919, writing his first poems as his father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was working on his only novel, which, like Seepersad Naipaul’s book, was printed privately. (Borges’s mother later told Bioy Casares that she had spent her life with ‘dos locos’, two madmen – her husband and her son.) The novel, called El Caudillo, published in 1921 when the author was forty-seven and his son twenty-two, was not a success. Seventeen years later, as his health was failing, Borges Senior suggested that his son rewrite the book, making clear that Jorge Luis, or Georgie as he was known in his family, had been consulted during its composition. ‘I put many metaphors in to please you,’ he told his son, asking him to ‘rewrite the novel in a straightforward way, with all the fine writing and purple patches left out’.
The longest work of fiction Jorge Luis Borges ever produced was quite short: a mere fourteen pages. It was called ‘The Congress’ and first published in 1971, although it had been on his mind for many years. Edwin Williamson, in his biography of Borges, writes about the parallels between the story and El Caudillo. Borges sought in his story, according to Williamson, not only to mirror the novel his father wrote but also ‘to transcend it … The basic structure and plot of the two works are identical: there is a powerful chieftain poised between civilisation and barbarism.’ There are many other close connections between the plots of the two stories.
Thus the literary legacy handed to Borges was clear: he would have to fulfil ‘the literary destiny’ that his father ‘had been denied’, as Williamson puts it. The ironies and absurdities of this were not lost on him. In the months after his father’s death he wrote one of his great serious spoofs, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’, a meditation, using a straight face and no ‘fine writing’ or ‘purple patches’, on the idea of rewriting as an inspired enterprise, and on the concept of the writer as a force of culture imprisoned by language and time to such an extent that plagiarism becomes innovation, and reading itself a form of literary experiment.
It may also not have been lost on Borges, and it is not lost on the reader, that ‘The Congress’ is not only a version of El Caudillo but a parody of Borges’s earlier work, playing with all his old tricks, using a deadpan narrative, full of recondite facts and obscure references, to coax a shadow universe into pure existence. It was obviously written by someone who had read Borges. By 1971, however, Borges was clearly not himself. In ‘Borges and I’, he wrote:
I must remain in Borges rather than in myself (if in fact I am a self), and yet I recognise myself less in his books than in many others, or in the rich strumming of a guitar. Some years ago I tried to get away from him: I went from suburban mythologies to playing games with time and infinity. But these are Borges’s games now – I will have to think of something else.
With Borges it is always dangerous to infer that biographical material – his love life, his jobs or his relationship with friends or family – inspired the tone and content of certain works. Although there may be ample evidence for such a reading, especially in his poems, there is a real possibility that the books he read mattered much more to Borges than the events of his life. Six months before his father’s death, Williamson points out, Borges wrote a book review for an Argentine magazine that is much more likely to have offered the inspiration for ‘Pierre Menard’ than his father’s vain request. The book was Paul Valéry’s Introduction à la poétique. Williamson writes: ‘The same text, according to Borges, could mean different things to different readers in different periods, and he quoted a line from a poem by Cervantes to show that a reader in the 20th century would derive a different sense from the very same words.’ Borges wrote: ‘Time – a friend to Cervantes – has corrected the proofs for him.’
While his father’s example offered him a bookish future and literary ambitions, Borges’s mother’s legacy was more ambiguous and difficult and perhaps more powerful. She was acutely conscious of her family’s history and status in Argentina. She was pure criollo, of Spanish descent born in South America, descended from the early settlers, men involved in the creation of an independent Argentina. Her grandfather led the cavalry charge at the battle of Junín in 1824, the second last battle in the liberation of South America. Later, after the battle of Ayacucho, he was promoted to the rank of colonel by Simón Bolívar. The heroic deeds done by members of her family made her proud, and she spoke of them constantly.
From his mother, Borges heard a great deal about old glories and fame that had faded, with the implication that he somehow could restore the family to its former level of importance. ‘As most of my people had been soldiers,’ he wrote, ‘and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action.’ Yet the presence of his ancestors’ swords in the house and their lives as men of action obsessed him all his life. He wrote about knife fights and daggers and swords with a relish that only the truly sedentary can feel: ‘In a desk drawer, among rough drafts and letters, the dagger endlessly dreams its simple tiger’s dream, and, grasping it, the hand comes alive because the metal comes alive, sensing in every touch the killer for whom it was wrought.’
Borges’s grandfather on his father’s side was also a colonel who fought in battles. He married an Englishwoman, Fanny Haslam, leaving her a widow with two sons three years after their marriage, when he was shot in one of the many internal feuds that beset Argentine affairs. (‘The bullet which shot dead Francisco Borges’ is mentioned in ‘Things’, one of Borges’s best poems.) Fanny and her sons spoke English at home; Fanny ran the household as though they were in England. Borges was attached to his grandmother; her version of England was as influential as his mother’s account of the family’s former splendour. Fanny travelled to Europe with the Borges family and lived close to them in Buenos Aires until her death in 1935, at the age of ninety-three.
The Buenos Aires that Borges loved and celebrated was not the new, rich city teeming with immigrants from the south of Italy or from Galicia. It was the old city of the criollos that his mother had known, and the area around Palermo in the north of the city, down on its luck, where his father built a house beside Fanny Haslam’s house and where Jorge Luis and his sister, Norah, were brought up. Close to Palermo was open countryside. A city both half imagined and half built (‘Only one thing was missing – the street had no other side’) replaced in Borges’s imagination ‘the greedy streets/jostling with crowds and traffic’. He and his sister did not play with children who were rough. Since his mother had contempt for the new rich of the city and no time for the new immigrants, it was easier to keep the children secluded.
Borges was taught to read Spanish by his
mother and English by his grandmother. Later, an English tutor was employed. Once Borges could read he was free, even though he was sickly and solitary. ‘If I were asked to name the chief event in my life,’ he wrote, ‘I should say my father’s library.’ He did not go to school until he was eleven. He must have been a strange sight, small, bookish, precocious, full of stories about heroic ancestors. He was bullied by other boys from the beginning until he was withdrawn from the school. ‘One of his recurrent nightmares as an adult,’ Williamson writes, ‘was of being tormented by dwarfs and little boys.’ Three years later he was sent to secondary school, but not for long. In 1913 his father decided to take the family to Europe the following year and educate the children in Geneva, where he could be treated by a famous doctor for an eye disease from which he suffered.
Thus, early in 1914, the Borges family rented out their property in Buenos Aires and began wandering in Europe. Like the James family, they would be dragged by a restless father from city to city, from hotel to rented quarters. As with William and Henry James, this life apart from his peers would be the making of Borges as an artist, though it would mean that his life, when he later returned to Argentina, would be more complicated. Once more, school in Europe was a nightmare since he did not speak the same language as his classmates; once more, as his ability to read French improved, he found that the only comfort available was in books. He read Carlyle in English, and soon began to read philosophy in German. In 1917, when he was eighteen, he began a friendship with someone his own age, Maurice Abramowicz, who also loved books and poetry. It was the first of many such sustaining literary friendships.