Deaths in Venice

by Kitcher, Philip;

  150. The idea that one should be able to affirm one’s own life by declaring one’s willingness to repeat it is presented by Schopenhauer (WWV 1, book 4; 2:358, 405). Famously, Nietzsche takes it up; see, for example, §341 of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, NW 3:570.

  151. As Reed rightly points out, the theme of the breakdown of discipline produced by passion would have been sounded by the story Mann had previously envisaged, of the infatuation of the aged Goethe for a teenage girl (Reed 153).

  152. GKFA 8.1:512–513; LP 12–13, L 203–204, K 10–11, H 18–20.

  153. Why is she never named? Perhaps because the description used to identify her does so through her ornaments—of which Tadzio is the supreme example.

  154. GKFA 8.1:581; LP 66, L 255, K 55, H 124.

  155. GKFA 8.1:581; LP 66, L 255, K 56, H 125.

  156. As already remarked, Luke correctly diagnoses this as the moment of Aschenbach’s moral breakdown (L xli).

  157. The dream is presaged by the image that flashes into Aschenbach’s consciousness as he considers warning the lady of the pearls. As he envisages his return—to Munich, and to the bourgeois values he has defended—he sees again the mortuary chapel before which he had made his decision to journey to the south. That decision was accompanied by a vision of untamed growth, of seductive and undisciplined lushness, that prefigures the rites of the later dream.

  158. In a letter from 1915, Mann explains that he had originally thought to embed some of the major preoccupations that were to be taken up in Der Tod in Venedig in a story focused on “Goethe’s last love,” exploring the infatuation felt by the septuagenarian for a teenage girl—it was to have been an “evil, beautiful, grotesque, unnerving” story (Briefe 1:123). Mann went on to suggest the possibility that he might return to this material, but, by the time he felt ready to take on Goethe, his approach was quite different (and, to my mind, more subtle). For discussion of the vacillations of 1911, see dMM 2:141814–20.

  159. Wilde’s trial, condemnation, and subsequent suffering were sufficiently well known to make those with homosexual leanings extremely cautious. The response to Death in Venice shows how skillful Mann was in negotiating the presentation of desires he felt in himself. This aspect of the novella will come into prominence in the next chapter. “Somdomite” is, of course, the malapropism introduced by the Marquess of Queensberry in his challenge to Wilde.

  160. Briefe 1:90. The letter is from July 1911.

  161. Here I am in complete agreement with Reed, who describes it as “almost an obituary” (Reed 146).

  162. As we shall see in the next chapter, Britten’s opera uses this image to great effect, an achievement both of the libretto and the obsessive phrase the composer uses to set the words.

  163. Reed supposes that chapter 2 was written late and inserted into the previously completed draft (Reed 170). I see no compelling reasons either to accept or reject this hypothesis. Mann might have recognized very early that he would need a clear account of the state from which Aschenbach falls—or that might have come to him only as he worked out the details of the end of the novella. The considerations given in the text incline me to think that the placement of the chapter is compositionally well considered and not simply a matter of interposing some needed material where it won’t break the flow.

  164. As the surviving journals tell us, on June 20, 1944, Mann “began with the destruction of old diaries” (TB [1944–1946] 68). More detail about the process comes from an entry almost a year later. According to the later entry, diaries were burned on May 21, 1945: after his customary tea, Mann took the records of his early life out to an oven in his garden in Pacific Palisades. “Afterwards old diaries destroyed, the execution of a long-adopted plan. Burnt in the oven outside” (TB [1944–1946] 208). The surviving diary from the beginning of his exile (early 1933) makes Mann’s original decision very clear. The old diaries, which had always been carefully locked away, had been left behind in Munich, and Mann was very anxious that they not be read by the Nazis (who would, presumably, have used his amorous confessions for propaganda purposes). On April 7, 1933, his diary confesses “new worries because of my old diaries,” and the next day he formulates a plan to send the key to his son, Golo, so that the diaries may be packed up and sent on to him (TB [1933–1934] 40). The plan misfired, and the suitcase containing the diaries was confiscated, causing further alarm: the diary entry for April 30 contains an unusual reference to physical contact with his wife, Katia: “K and I sat much of the time hand in hand. She understands to some extent my fear on account of the contents of the suitcase” (TB [1933–1934] 66). May 2 brings some relief, in the form of news that the suitcase has arrived in Switzerland; on May 19, the suitcase was delivered to him, with the contents apparently intact, although going through them caused great anxiety. On May 20, he writes: “Today, after breakfast I continued with the unpacking, examination, and repacking of the contents of the suitcase. The wrapping paper seemed untouched, but the case was not locked, as it had doubtless been when it was sent off, and the contents, which could in any event have been rearranged by the transport, gives at least the impression of having been gone through” (TB [1933–1934] 88, 89). On May 21, 1933, Mann was in low spirits, and perhaps he formulated on that day his plan to destroy the early diaries—carrying it out on the twelfth anniversary of his decision?

  165. For some representative entries, see May 27, 1920 (TB [1918–1921] 440); June 29, 30, 1936 (TB [1935–1936] 323); April 7, 1938 (TB [1937–1939] 204); June 10, 1940 (TB [1940–1943] 94); February 2, 1946 (TB [1944–1946] 305); August 11, 1951; December 12–15, 1951 (TB [1951–1952] 90, 146–149); April 7, 1953 (TB [1953–1955] 46).

  166. November 14, 1944 (TB [1944–1946] 123).

  167. November 15, 16, 1944 (TB [1944–1946] 123, 124).

  168. “Even without sleep I shall write”: diary entry of October 7, 1946 (TB [1946–1948] 49).

  169. The pose of the figure suggests Hermes, an important motif in this novella and throughout Mann’s fiction. The features, especially the red eyelashes, link the stranger to other characters who play the role of adversary or tempter: for example, Esau (in volume 1 of Joseph) and the devil who appears to Adrian Leverkühn (Doktor Faustus).

  170. Reed takes discipline to be an all-or-nothing affair, remarking that “Aschenbach’s creative discipline is essentially broken at the very outset” (Reed 171). I see, instead, a gradual process. Hence, the decision to travel south is only the beginning.

  171. GKFA 8.1:597–598, 509; LP 8–9, L 200–201, K 7–8, H 11–13.

  172. Letter to Samuel Fischer of August 22, 1914 (shortly after the outbreak of the war!), translated at K 94.

  173. GKFA 8.1:515–516; LP 15, L 206, K 12, H 23.

  174. Compare GKFA 8.1:504, 583–584. LP 5–6, 68; L 197, 257; K 5, 57; H 6, 128–129.

  175. GKFA 8.1:519, 517. LP 17–18, 16; L 209, 207; K 15, 13; H 29–30, 26.

  176. GKFA 8.1:519, 517; LP 22–23, L 213–214, K 19, H 39–40.

  177. GKFA 8.1:529–530; LP 25, L 216, K 21, H 45.

  178. GKFA 8.1:532–533; LP 27–28, L 218, K 23, H 49.

  179. GKFA 8.1:538, 508. LP 32, 9; L 222, 200–201; K 27, 8; H 13, 57. I have followed the three most reliable translators (Luke, Koelb, and Heim) in rendering Wertzeichen as “postage stamps,” but I suspect Mann used this word rather than the more common Briefmarken to hint at the thought that the letters are “marks of worth”—so that Lowe-Porter’s translation, “tributes,” even though not literal, captures an important connotation.

  180. See, for a few among many examples, October 21, 1933 (TB [1933–1934] 229); July 14, 1938 (TB [1937–1939] 255); November 12, 1948 (TB [1946–1948] 329); September 27, 1949 (TB [1949–1950] 104); October 29, 1952 (TB [1951–1952] 291).

  181. GKFA 8.1:540; LP 34, L 224, K 28, H 61.

  182. GKFA 8.1:546; LP 38, L 228, K 32, H 69. For obvious stylistic reasons, none of the translations to which I have referred switches from past to present in translating
this paragraph. Interestingly, the original English translation—Lowe-Porter’s—does not even translate “Er will es und will es nicht.”

  183. “Denn die Schönheit, mein Phaidros, nur sie, ist liebenswürdig und sichtbar zugleich” (GKFA 8.1:555); Rudolf Kassner’s translation of the Phaedrus gives: “Nur die Schönheit ist zugleich sichtbar und liebenswürdig, beides” (Gastmahl/ Phaidros/Phaidon [reprinted in the series of Diederichs Taschenausgaben] 108).

  184. During his stay in Venice, Mann wrote a short piece on a question posed by a Viennese newspaper—“Auseinandersetzung mit Wagner.” The original manuscript was apparently written on the stationery of the Hôtel des Bains (Essays 1:150–153, 361).

  185. As we shall see in the next chapter, Britten appreciates the importance of this pivotal moment.

  186. “Schopenhauer, as psychologist of the will, is the father of all modern treatment of the mind”; Essays 4:301. Schopenhauer’s discussions of the sexual drive as important objectifications of Will and his repeated remarks to the effect that Will is either unsatisfied or satiated and bored trade on the ordinary conception of the will as a psychological phenomenon.

  187. For the metaphysical account, see WWV 1, book 2, §27, esp. 1:196, 197. Mann’s fullest interpretation of the internal conflict is given in the 1938 essay “Schopenhauer”; Essays 4:298, 299.

  188. WWV 1, book 4, §57; 2:392. See also 390.

  189. WWV I, book 4, §55; 2:368.

  190. WWV I, book 4, §§ 66, 68; esp. 2:461, 463–464, 470–471.

  191. GKFA 8.1:519, 536. LP 17, 30–31; L 208, 221; K 14–15, 26; H 28–29, 53–55.

  192. Zur Genealogie der Moral 3.5; NW 5:344.

  193. GKFA 8.1:513; LP 13, L 204, K 11, H 20.

  194. Citations to Nietzsche: Genealogie 3.5, 3.7; NW 5:345, 351. Citation to Mann: GKFA 8.1:506.

  195. This is to take on the role but to disagree with Nietzsche about the disease. Genealogie 3.15–17; NW 5:372–382.

  196. Genealogie 3.18; NW 5:382.

  197. Mann writes of Aschenbach’s turn away from “knowledge,” which I gloss as “scientific knowledge,” particularly of human motives and conduct; GKFA 8.1:513; LP 12–13, L 204, K 10–11, H 19–20. Nietzsche’s discussion of the fourth form of the ascetic ideal is Genealogie 3.23–28, NW 5:396–412; see also section 344 of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (from which Genealogie 3.24 quotes), NW 3:574–577. For James’s image, see note 122.

  198. GKFA 1.1:11.

  199. GKFA 1.1:624.

  200. GKFA 10.1:735.

  201. GKFA 10.1:733.

  202. GKFA 10.1:736–737. The reference to “Ecce Homo” alludes not only to the passion of Christ but also to the title of Nietzsche’s book, published shortly before his own collapse. Leverkühn’s contraction of syphilis, his breakdown, and long final state of helplessness are, of course, modeled on Nietzsche.

  203. Whatever we make of the dialogue between Leverkühn and the devil (Doktor Faustus, chap. 25) or the self-conscious decision to risk contracting syphilis (together with the consequent failures to obtain treatment), it seems impossible to resist the connection between the infection, the creativity, and the eventual collapse. To assess Leverkühn’s life, these must be taken as an organic whole—that is the minimal point of the title.

  204. For Zeitblom, Adrian Leverkühn is the central figure in his existence, one whose claims override any made by his profession as a teacher or by his family (even by his “good Helene”). Readers might be tempted to think Zeitblom’s own life obtains whatever value it has through his efforts to preserve Leverkühn’s artistic legacy—but that would be to overlook his moral standing in resisting Nazism and the possibility that his life’s worth is grounded quite differently than he takes it to be. Even by Mann’s standards, Doktor Faustus thrives on ambivalence and irony, and any serious interpretation must come to terms with its complex attempt to do justice both to the Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century reaction against it.

  205. The style of the obituary chapter subtly prepares the way for conclusions about the limitations of Aschenbach’s artistry. If you imagine that the author of this chapter is the moralizing “second narrator” (see note 103) who exults moralistically at Aschenbach’s collapse at the fountain, it is easy to read the praise lavished in chapter 2 as hollow—a setting-up of the protagonist for the fall to come later.

  206. GKFA 8.1:94; L 3.

  207. GKFA 8.1:111, 112; L 8.

  208. GKFA 8.1:118; L 27.

  209. GKFA 8.1:111; L 8.

  210. This claim will be elaborated and defended in the next chapter.

  211. Again, see Nehamas, The Art of Living, chap. 1.

  212. GKFA 5.1:751, 815.

  213. GKFA 5.1:629.

  214. GKFA 8.1:592; LP 74, L 263, K 62, H 141.

  215. In 1964, Wladyslaw Moes, a Polish baron, informed the Polish translator of Death in Venice that he had been the original for Tadzio. Apparently, Jaschu was also based on a real boy, the son of a friend of Moes’s mother (L xxxiv).

  216. GKFA 8.1:556; LP 46–47, L 236, K 39, H 86.

  2. BEAUTY

  1. Henrik Ibsen, Pillars of the Community, trans. Samuel Adamson (London: Penguin, 2005), act 1; the biblical reference is Matthew 23:27 (authorized [King James] version).

  2. A maxim Aschenbach rejects in his turn away from “sympathy with the abyss”: GKFA 8.1:513; LP 13, L 204, K 11, H 20.

  3. GKFA 8.1:312, 313; L 188.

  4. GKFA 8.1:311; L 186.

  5. GKFA 8.1:550, 551; LP 47–48, L 231–232, K 35, H 77–78.

  6. Symposium 189d–193d; PW 473–476.

  7. Briefe 1:160.

  8. Essays 1:42, 46, 47, 49. Cited in section 1 of chapter 1.

  9. GKFA 8.1:243, 317; L 135, 191.

  10. Birth of Tragedy §§5, 24. Nietzsche apparently thought the sentence good enough to warrant repeating it; NW 1:47, 152.

  11. Here I am in agreement with Reed (Reed 156ff.). Plato and Plutarch offer Mann a complex of ideas on which he can draw to explore the problems of reconciling the role of the artist with that of the citizen. Fundamental to this complex, as we shall see, is the Platonic link between beauty and virtue. A significant feature of the Platonic tradition—although not of Plutarch’s discussion—is the elevated character of homosexual love. My discussion will develop these points rather differently from the ways in which Reed does.

  12. That tradition runs from Plato through Rousseau and Mill to Dewey. The three later thinkers all view the arts, including literature, as playing a fundamental role in exploring and communicating the values, receptivity to which is the goal of education, properly conceived. Standard conceptions of the history of philosophy focus on different lineages, but it is interesting to think how philosophy—and education in philosophy—would look if the Plato-Rousseau-Mill-Dewey tradition were taken as central.

  13. John Dewey, Democracy and Education, vol. 9 of John Dewey: The Middle Works Volume 9 (Carbondale, Ill.: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1985), 338 (italics in original).

  14. See, for a representative passage, John Dewey, Experience and Nature, vol. 1 of John Dewey: The Later Works (Carbondale, Ill.: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1985), 304–305.

  15. The copy in the Zürich archive is marked with frequent underlinings and marginal annotations, particularly exclamation points.

  16. Schopenhauer als Erzieher §I; NW 1:339.

  17. Schopenhauer als Erzieher §I; NW 1:340.

  18. Schopenhauer als Erzieher §I; NW 1:341. Mann notates this passage in the margin of his copy with an exclamation mark.

  19. Schopenhauer als Erzieher §IV; NW 1:365. Again, Mann marks this passage with a marginal line, adding a word I was unable to decipher. The theme is elaborated at length on other pages Mann also annotated: for example, in §VI NW 1:384 (almost the entirety of which is marked by marginal lines) and in §VII NW 1:409 (decorated with a line and two exclamation marks in the margin).

  20. “A professional scholar can never be a philosopher: f
or even Kant couldn’t bring it off, but remained to the end, despite the innate pressures of his genius, a philosopher only in embryo.” Schopenhauer als Erzieher §VII; NW 1:409.

  21. In his early years, Mann seems to have adopted at least part of this conception of the role in application to himself, since he writes of the conditions under which a writer can be “of real service” (Essays 1:49).

  22. Schopenhauer als Erzieher §I; NW 1:341.

  23. Schopenhauer als Erzieher §III; NW 1:350.

  24. GKFA 8.1:515; LP 14, L 205, K 12, H 22.

  25. Notizbuch 2:112–113; cited in HarpM 1:195 and more fully in dMM 1:818.

  26. Schopenhauer als Erzieher §IV; NW 1:370–371. Mann marked this passage with a marginal line. Goethe’s late romance would thus have served as an apt alternative to the case of Aschenbach. Two decades later, Mann was ready for a different ironic treatment in Lotte in Weimar, where Goethe serves as absent but focal object for the early chapters and then as a disconcertingly intimate presence.

  27. GKFA 4.1:191–199.

  28. GKFA 8.1:562; LP 51, L 240, K 43, H 95. On my reading, this sentence poses severe translational problems, and it is unsurprising that translators gloss it in very different ways. Sinnlich might be the relatively chaste “sensible” or “sensory” or “of the senses,” but Mann allows for the possibility that the beauty in question is “sensuous” or even “sensual” (and permits us to wonder which connotations might be present in Aschenbach’s own awareness, as well as which pertain to the boy’s beauty). Nor can one avoid the issue, as Koelb and Heim both attempt to do, by opting for “physical beauty,” since, given the Platonic resonances that dominate the discussions of beauty, the range of types of beauty that can be sensed ought to be wider than the physical: we should recall the sentence from the Phaedrus Aschenbach has quoted and the further gloss that beauty is the only denizen of the world of transcendent forms our senses can perceive (GKFA 8.1:555; LP 45, L 235, K 38, H 84).