I said: “Sad that beauty is only for a moment. In a couple of years, he will be so like his father, that it will have quite disappeared.” To which K. responded, to my comfort: “Why? Maybe his mother is a beautiful woman.”178
Aschenbach, of course, lacks any similar helpful presence.
Mann’s awareness of that help was fleeting—although sometimes he became conscious of how little notice he had taken of his wife or of their marriage. On February 11, 1945, his diary entry begins: “Cooler weather. K. had to remind me that today is our 40th wedding anniversary. Ended the article for Free World to my satisfaction …”179 Celebrations of her birthdays often seem centered on his own projects: “K.’s 56th birthday. In the morning on the beach I finished the seventh chapter of Lotte in Weimar on p. 104 with a short dialogue, and on the subsequent walk I turned my attention to the eighth chapter…. In celebration of the day, I read K. the last 20 pages of the seventh chapter.”180
Yet his frequent moments of depression, self-doubt, and unrest make his debt to her apparent to us—as it was to him. “Sleepless until 3 a.m. and longer. A whole Phanodorm [a sleeping medication Mann commonly used in this period] with only belated effect. Some time in K.’s room in the chair. Walk around the room. Towards morning a few hours of rest.”181 “Tired and sad. Sat on the sofa, my head on K.’s shoulder.”182
Occasionally, his gratitude became public, as when, on her seventieth birthday, he declared that “she would live on,” by his side, in any posthumous celebration of his work.183 Most of his audience would not have known how much lay behind the conventional praise—maybe not even Katia herself, whose famous remark, “Never in my life have I been able to do what I would have liked to do,” is made as if this is simply a social fact about the condition of daughters, wives, and mothers (at least in her period and milieu).184
If she signed on to the Manngesellschaft as a willing partner, the sacrifices demanded of the six children were less obviously voluntary. External clues already raise questions about their parents’ success in equipping them to live worthwhile and independent lives of their own. There were two suicides—Klaus, the second child and first son, and Michael, the third son and last of the six.185 Klaus’s death came after a previous attempt had failed: in July 1948, he had been visiting his parents in California and tried to gas himself. As Mann’s diary records, Katia went immediately to the hospital and gave her husband a report on her return. The next day, Erika visited her brother, and Katia seems to have gone back and forth between hospital and home. The diary entry continues: “Distracted work, interrupted by reports from K. Drove out with her a little to Santa Monica. Handwritten letters to (Lavinia) Mazzuchetti, Adorno, and others. Heinrich to dinner.”186 The following afternoon, Mann accompanied his wife to visit Klaus in the home of the Bruno Walter family. He was “touched” by his son’s “sensitive” nature—and very, very tired after the visit.187
The entries for the subsequent days reveal that the work (interrupted or not) went on: he continued to write his account of the composition of Doktor Faustus.188 A month after the incident, when Klaus was ready to return to Europe, Mann’s primary thought seems to have been that his son might undertake a mission on his behalf. “Evening with Klaus to say goodbye before his departure to Amsterdam. Good wishes. Emphasis on my interest that he should work with Marton and Korda in London on the Magic Mountain project [a proposed film that never materialized].”189 Was the emphasis on participation in one of his father’s artistic ventures meant as encouragement? Were the “good wishes” accompanied by expressions of how Mann felt about the near-loss of his son? We cannot know, but there is an odd tone to this farewell, the conspicuous absence of any expressed concern that a vulnerable young man might try again—and succeed.190
When Klaus did just that, his father, mother, and elder sister were on a speaking tour in Scandinavia. After a discussion among them, they decided to continue with a reduced version of the engagements planned—Mann would deliver the promised lectures but would cancel the social events. Katia and Erika were evidently more affected than Mann himself, and he records his “sympathy” with them and his attempts to comfort them.191 Almost three weeks after Klaus’s death, Erika few to Nice and went on to Cannes, the scene of his suicide. The only one of the family who had been there before her was Michael, who was fortuitously in Europe at the time and who played a viola solo at the funeral.
It has sometimes been suggested—although the idea has been sharply challenged—that Klaus suffered from three great burdens: he was a drug addict, he was homosexual, and he was the son of Thomas Mann, and that the greatest of these was the shadow cast by his father.192 Certainly, Klaus’s own diaries sometimes complain of paternal coldness, and, in a letter to Herman Hesse, Mann acknowledged the “shadow” he felt he had cast on his son.193
The relation between father and youngest son was also difficult. Before Michael’s birth, Mann had meditated on the merits of having a sixth child. His diary dispassionately considers the economic and cultural situation of postwar Germany, and the deliberation concludes: “Apart from considerations of K.’s health, I really have nothing against it [allowing the pregnancy to continue to term], except that the experience for ‘Lisa’ [Elizabeth, the fifth child] (she is, in a certain sense, my first child) might be influenced and diminished by it.”194 After the birth of the new baby—known initially within the family as Beisser (biter) and later as Bibi—Mann confessed his emotional distance: “I continue to feel estrangement, coldness, even dislike towards our youngest, about the arrangements for whose baptism I wrote yesterday to the parson who teaches Erika religion.”195
Although his early career as a violist was apparently successful, Michael decided, shortly after his father’s death, to obtain a Ph.D. in German literature. In 1975, Mann’s diaries were finally available for others to read, and his youngest son, now a professor at Berkeley, read the passages just quoted, apparently during a visit to Europe where he was participating in celebrations of his father’s centenary.196 His reading probably confirmed what he had already felt.197 The suicide came a year later.
Despite Mann’s sense that his fifth child was really his first, that with the birth of Elizabeth he had discovered paternity, his diaries show significant interest in and admiration for his eldest daughter. In the early weeks of the Manns’ exile, Erika showed the organizational skill and helpfulness that would be so thoroughly developed later—and Mann also showed paternal pride in her writing.198 At that stage, Erika was very much an independent force in the cultural world—her satirical cabaret, Die Pfeffermühle (The Peppermill) had won considerable acclaim for its witty attacks on Nazism. The independence occasionally led to sharp differences between father and daughter, especially concerning the ways in which the German writers who had emigrated should publish their work. An early dispute in 1933 was much amplified in 1936, when Erika wrote her father a critical letter about his “Protest,” published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.199 At this stage, she was very much aligned and allied with Klaus, to whom she had always been close. During the next two decades, she was increasingly drawn into orbit around her father, especially after the Second World War, in which she had played an active role as a correspondent. The visits to California became longer, and her intelligence, organizational skill, and command of English proved especially valuable. The diaries reveal her deftness in turning Mann’s German into speeches and lectures for an English-speaking audience and in coaching her father on his delivery.200 Her advice in fashioning and refashioning his writings, articles, lectures, and Doktor Faustus was constant and much appreciated.201 Gradually, she took over the role of principal sounding board and managing director of the Manngesellschaft. Three days before Klaus’s suicide, Mann could write of “the priceless help of Erika and K.”202
As the sibling to whom he had been closest became ever more involved in his father’s work and life, Klaus may have experienced a sense of betrayal. After his suicide, Erika’s principal intellectual en
deavors were divided between service to a living father and to a dead brother. The independent voice of her youth became an amplifier—a most valuable amplifier, to be sure—of the work of others.
The youngest of the three daughters, Elizabeth (“Medi”), through whom Mann discovered paternal love and to whom he wrote his hexameters (Gesang vom Kindchen), did achieve independence. She married, suddenly and young, Giuseppe Borghese, a man thirty-six years older than herself. Her father found the wedding day painful and oppressive, nor did his view of the marriage improve.203 After the death of her husband in 1952, she embarked on a successful career as a political scientist, with special interest in environmental issues, raising two daughters who went on to professional lives of their own.
The diaries record Mann’s continued affection for Medi, although, with the years, her primacy is undermined by his increasing gratitude toward and love for Erika and his enchantment in his grandson Frido.204 They also reveal shifting attitudes toward the two middle children, often overlooked and almost always less prominent. Monika, the fourth child and second daughter, initially appears as one among many, only occasionally distinguished—as on Christmas Eve 1918, when she was particularly pleased with her presents.205 Her birthday (the day after her father’s) in 1920 rates a perfunctory mention but goes unnoted in the following year.206 By the time the extant records resume, “Moni,” now in her twenties, has clearly become a problem, making difficulties for her mother.207 So it continues. There are discussions of Moni’s “oddness,” of the “Problem Moni.” She remains in her room during the Christmas Eve sharing of gifts—yet it is “the happiest Christmas and New Year for years.”208 After 1940, Monika’s difficulties increase: married in 1939 to Jenö Láni, she settles with him in London; during the blitz, the couple resolves to travel to America, but the ship is torpedoed and, while she looks helplessly on, her husband drowns. The parental home provides little sanctuary: her presence is a problem requiring bright ideas from parents and siblings; Mann has to bridle his “bitterness about her existence.”209 Her intellectual efforts are slighted—“Manuscript from Moni, embarrassing”; “Wrote critically to Moni about her little manuscript.”210 After her father’s death, however, she does manage to achieve some personal happiness and, contrary to his judgment, even some success as a writer.
Then there is Golo—Angelus Gottfried Thomas, to give him his full name—the only one of the siblings for whom the family nickname became the public appellation. Teased, possibly even tormented and humiliated by his elder brother, he figures early on as a cross between gnome and clown in the family drama, careful, it seems, to avoid too much parental scrutiny or parental discipline.211 Through the 1930s and 1940s, his father’s diaries show Golo’s stock rising. Unlike Monika, he is a serious partner for serious conversation; although never achieving the intimacy allowed to Erika (or even to Klaus), he earns his father’s respect. After Mann’s death in 1955, his own career as writer, academic, and intellectual begins to flourish, as if he were finally liberated. He becomes a distinguished man of letters in his own right—in my judgment, the only one of the siblings whose works would be widely read if their authorship were entirely unknown.212
His personal life was shrouded from public view. Golo never married, although he adopted a son, and he spent his final year in the home of his widowed daughter-in-law. If as is often supposed, he was homosexual, he was far less open about his preferences than those—Britten among them—with whom he once shared a house in Brooklyn. It seems probable though not certain that he never found fulfilling romantic love. Eventually, he inherited his parents’ last house, in Kilchberg just outside Zürich, and, like them, he is buried in the Kilchberg cemetery. In accordance with his explicit instructions, his grave is placed at the maximum distance from that of Thomas and Katia Mann.
9
There was probably no moment in Mann’s life at which he intentionally did something that caused serious harm to his wife or to one of his children or when he deliberately acted to limit the value of their lives. In that respect, he is quite unlike Mut or Vere. Nevertheless, a review of the lives of his children cannot avoid raising questions about the costs imposed by the disciplined life he led: this is not a matter of ascribing blame—that would be pointless and silly—but of recognizing that the achievement of some kinds of value puts others in jeopardy. The Manngesellschaft produced wonderful things, masterpieces of world literature that continue to illuminate, delight, and even transform those who read them. Yet the conditions of production cannot simply be wished away or ignored.
Whatever the strains he felt in uniting the roles of artist and citizen, Mann succeeded as the Artist-Erzieher he aspired to become. The discipline imposed on himself had costs, but they are trivial in comparison with the triumphs—as Goethe’s imitations of the serpent, his “energetic wormings,” although by no means poetic, do not detract from his life—the discarded novella about his late infatuation ought to have been a comedy.213 The more serious problem comes when other lives are conscripted, joined to a larger enterprise without any reflective choice, when those lives are confined or truncated or blossom only when the period of conscription is over. For all Mann’s commitment to reading Nietzsche ironically, the achievement of the Manngesellschaft recapitulates the Nietzschean thought about the proper relationship between birds of prey and lambs—sacrifices are needed for the full triumph of what is noble and strong.214 Whole lives are devoured in bringing about a greater end.215
With the enduring quality of Mann’s fiction clearly established, its artistic eminence fully recognized, those whose lives felt the impact of the efforts required in accomplishing it—however the losses are finally identified and the causes finally understood—might well retrospectively acquiesce in the contributions they made or even in the interferences with their own development. Katia and Erika apparently did exactly that. As the events recede into history, the perceived costs to individuals diminish. Looking back, grateful readers do not worry about the conditions of production—or, if they do, they focus on the aesthetic balance in the life of the author: was Mann’s life justified as an aesthetic phenomenon?
From the beginning of this chapter, the central concern has been with parallel questions about Aschenbach. Does he succeed in fitting the disparate elements of his identity together? Is his life invalidated by his capitulation to the lure of beauty? Must the artist inevitably succumb to that lure? For Mann, these were crucial questions, and the creation of Aschenbach was part of his long exploration of them, part of his lifelong endeavor to put himself on trial. Juxtaposing Mann’s Aschenbach with Britten’s, with Mut and with Vere, and with Mann himself may lead us to wonder if these are the right—or the only—questions. Aschenbach, so far as we can tell, does no serious harm. There is nothing to suggest that his marriage curtailed another life or that he cast a long shadow on his daughter. As I suggested earlier, the novella simplifies the philosophical predicament precisely through leaving other human relations unaddressed—on the one hand we have Aschenbach’s austere discipline, resolutely maintained for more than two decades, and the literary accomplishments it has made possible; on the other, the brief final lapse, the entrapment by the lure of beauty, personified in Tadzio. No baneful effect on others complicates the picture. Assuming that the literary triumphs are comparable to Mann’s own, Aschenbach’s life appears easier to vindicate.
The maxim he rejects—“To understand all is to forgive all”—overstates a sound thought, that understanding may lead sometimes to forgiveness. We can “see life foully,” in Joyce’s apt phrase, and reconcile ourselves to it. In the wake of Klaus’s suicide, Mann invoked a similar thought, as his distraught daughter quarreled with an old friend: “Her bitter distortion of things, including what concerns Klaus and his life. Humiliating in its rigor, and even more in its half-truth. But too much character makes one unjust. Of course, tolerance is probably not allowed today.”216
I read these words as a half-articulated defense against a charge
Erika never made explicitly, one Mann was inchoately conscious of but would not look fully in the face. The perspective is quite contrary to Aschenbach’s official stance—even though considering it would be valuable for him as he sits, slumped and humiliated at the fountain. Equally it is apt for us readers as we think about Aschenbach—and about his creator.
THREE
Shadows
1
In the spring of 1912, Thomas Mann wrote to congratulate his brother Heinrich on the completion of a play, adding: “I would be glad to report something similar about my novella, but I cannot find the ending.”1 What exactly was the difficulty? Could Mann have been uncertain about whether Aschenbach should live? Was he torn between cleaving more closely to the actual events of his own visit to Venice and the version in which his protagonist dies there? Almost certainly not. The premonitions of death, the shadows that fall across Aschenbach, are already marked in the earliest pages of the story, and there is no reason to think that these were added at a late stage in writing, after Mann’s thoughts had settled on an ending—his constant method was to work slowly and steadily, almost doggedly, making only small revisions.2 Furthermore, an earlier letter to Heinrich makes it evident that death itself could not have been the issue, since the novella already bears the title—Der Tod in Venedig—by which we know it.3 By the time of the letters, he had clearly reached the final chapter, for, despite his surmise that Heinrich might not approve of the whole, he expected his brother to warm to parts of it, citing, in particular, the “classical chapter” (“ein antikisierendes Kapitel”; chapter 4). The problem he faced could not have been that of deciding if Aschenbach should die but rather how. The difficulty was to discover the right death for his protagonist, a death that would show what it—and the life that preceded it—meant. Perhaps Mann wondered if the story should continue after the collapse at the fountain—and solved his problem by writing the coda?
Deaths in Venice Page 16