The Art of Flight

by Sergio Pitol

  13 JANUARY 1995

  I returned to Mann’s diaries; the first volume. They comprise two different periods: the years 1918–21 and 1933–37. I was only familiar with the Spanish edition, a selection focused above all on his personal affairs, where is evidenced an attempt to discover the dark aspects—and secret areas—of the author’s life, which were already a source of scandal in Germany when the diaries appeared. The English version emphasizes, on the other hand, Mann’s political tribulations and moral dilemmas during those two especially troubling periods of his life. I read one edition and then the other, following a strict chronological order. This arrangement allows me a completely new reading, much richer than the partial reading I had done in Lanzarote when the Spanish version appeared. The first period comprises the end of the war in 1914, the defeat and sanctions imposed by the Allies. Mann had just published Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, a book in praise of Prussia, of drunken nationalism. By that time Mann was a celebrated writer whose life seemed to be collapsing around him. The German defeat stuns him. His hatred for a “French-style” democracy is brutal, and he renews the conflict with his brother Heinrich, the democrat and, therefore, the victor. His scorn for the concept of democracy leads him to make unimaginable leaps, completely unexpected and incompatible with his world for the purpose of hitting his target. On 24 March, 1919, at a moment of extreme agitation, he writes: “Rejection of the peace terms by Germany! Revolt against the bourgeois windbags. Let us have a national uprising now that we have been worn to shreds by the lying claptrap of that gang—and in the form of communism, for all I care; a new August 1, 1914! I can see myself running out into the street and shouting, ‘Down with lying Western democracy! Hurrah for Germany and Russia!’”22 This represents, of course, a momentary outburst. It is natural that he would not be attracted to the Bavarian Soviet Republic; it celebrates Heinrich, his enemy brother, excessively; what’s more, its tinge is too plebeian and Judaizing (Katia, his wife, is Jewish, but because she belongs to a very rich family it is as if she were not). The notebooks that contain this portion of the diaries were saved by chance. Mann used them to recreate the period’s atmosphere while he was writing Doctor Faustus. Fortunately, he did not include them among the other notebooks that were burned during his stay in California. As it turns out, he did not want to leave any testament in his diaries of his behavior before 1933, the year in which his political exile began. I read this portion of his diaries with astonishment, lamenting that there no longer existed a bridge that connected this moment to the beginning of the author’s conversion to the abominable cause of which he later became an apostle: democracy.

  The diaries from both periods have something in common. In them we find the author in total defeat, lacking terra firma on which to stand. They are writings filled with turmoil and anger, with confusion, humiliation, and outbursts of irrational violence, physical and nervous illness. Mann is one of the authors whom I’ve read obsessively since adolescence. Calvino, in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, considers The Magic Mountain to be the book key to understanding our century, because it contains the issues and problems that continue to concern us today. The Magic… is for me the most difficult test to which the spirit can be subjected, the very camera with which to reproduce the spectrum of a way of thinking. The fool will lose himself in the folds of its prose and will believe that its thousand pages contain a degree of foolishness comparable only to his own. There will also be those who approach the work with priestly veneration and will be, in spite of whatever they may think, the least apt to understand the book. Their fatuous severity will prohibit them from understanding Mann, a fundamentally parodic writer; a thinker, yes, but one who subjected thought to the corrosive acid of relentless irony.

  24 JANUARY

  A little over thirty years ago I met the great Polish writer Jerzy Andrzejewski. We met for the first time in Warsaw in a café in the Hotel Bristol to resolve some doubts that had arisen in my work. I was translating The Gates of Paradise at the request of Joaquín Díez-Canedo. I had the impression that the author did not care if the translation was good or bad. It seemed strange to him that his novel, which related an obscure medieval episode—the fantastical children’s crusade that marched toward Jerusalem to rescue the Holy Sepulcher from impious hands—would interest anyone in Mexico. He dealt quickly with the questions relevant to the book, and we then began to talk about other topics. He asked me about my professional experience. I listed among my translations Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He seemed to perk up. He told me that the writers who most interested him were Joseph Conrad and Thomas Mann. Before the war, in his youth, he had become excited by a few French Catholic novelists, but the brutal experiences—the occupation, the destruction of Warsaw, everything that happened afterward—had erased that enthusiasm. He did not deny that Mauriac could be a competent storyteller, but thought his sermonizing was petty. Conrad and Mann had become giants for him during those dreadful years. Only the person who had read Doctor Faustus could understand the devastation to the soul caused by the German occupation. When he realized that I was able to speak with ease about those authors, Andrzejewski’s attitude changed. We went over the translation again, and he clarified a few things for me. And then he continued to talk about Conrad and Mann.

  26 JANUARY

  Kundera on The Magic Mountain: “Thus a vast background is meticulously depicted before which are played out Hans Castorp’s fate and the ideological duel between two consumptives: Settembrini and Naphta: the one a Freemason and democrat, the other a Jesuit and autocrat, both of them incurably ill. Mann’s tranquil irony relativizes these two learned men’s truths; their dispute has no winner. But the novel’s irony goes further and reaches its pinnacle in the scene where, each surrounded by his little audience and intoxicated by his own implacable logic, they both push their arguments to the extreme so that no one can any longer tell who stands for progress and who for tradition, who for reason and who for the irrational, who for the spirit and who for the body. Over several pages we witness an enormous confusion where words lose their meaning, and the debate is all the more violent because the positions are interchangeable.”23

  27 JANUARY

  Reading Thomas Mann’s diaries, his memories of his children, of his wife, at times produces an uncomfortable feeling: there is too much intensity in the family drama, excessive complexities, the more evasive the account becomes the more shadows it casts; each fissure, each silence, seems to conceal a torture, an upheaval. One has a feeling of scrutinizing characters through a keyhole. We see only a part of the action; everything else remains in the shadows. It embarrasses us to be pilfering through other people’s lives and at the same time we cannot help but do it. A few months ago I experienced the same feeling of sneaking into a world where I was not invited when I visited the residence where Mann lived for a little over a decade in Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, with Efraín Kristal, a close friend and expert on Mann. We took advantage of the goodwill of the army of Mexican gardeners who were pruning the trees near the garden; our common language served as our password. Strolling the lawns, being on the terrace I had seen so many times in photographs where Mann usually took coffee with his family and a handful of privileged visitors, seeing the grove that surrounded the house with such grandeur that one can only classify it as Wagnerian, overwhelmed me with emotion. I imagined the wonder that the son of the North must have experienced each time he arrived home and happened upon a landscape comparable only to the beginning of creation, which he had glimpsed during his childhood in the albums or stories of his Brazilian mother. In that house Mann finished the last volume of Joseph and His Brothers; it was there that he conceived, wrote, suffered, and finished Doctor Faustus.

  29 JANUARY

  During the day, I did nothing but read Mann’s diaries. His exile in Switzerland, the nervous crises that cause him to fear that he had plunged into madness. His comparison of the image of Germany and Germanness prevalent in th
e first section of the diaries (1918–21) and the second (1933–37) is rather interesting. On the 23rd of March of 1933, having just gone into exile, he writes: “At breakfast one of these necessarily unresolved talks with Katia about Germany and the terrifying side of its character.” The fact that Germany feigns possessing a different (and superior) fate than the rest of the world becomes an obsession for Mann. Already in the first section of the diaries he had written: “I am surprised to see that Jakob Schaffner had written that ‘the German people in the depth of their soul believe that its peculiarity in the world will never be understood or permitted; the German nation must exist in opposition to the world or it must cease to exist.’ This is exactly what I maintain in my Reflections, even though I express it differently.” This character of uniqueness defended in 1918 changes direction radically during his years of exile: “But this is the only nation in Europe that does not fear and abhor war; rather it deifies it,” he writes on 7 September, 1933. “Wretched, isolated, demented people, misled by a wild, stupid band of adventurers, whom they take for mythic heroes,” he notes on October 14 of the same year. “Rychner […] speaks of the isolation of Germany and her painful preoccupation with herself. For an analysis of this aspect of Germany, always out for different things from what the world needs, see Nietzsche,” he opines seven days later on October 21. That preoccupation, that rejection of the notion of a different fate for Germany, which he had so exalted in the past, will permeate Mann’s writing until his death. Germany’s loneliness in the world! The world’s inability to understand Germany! On January 11, 1934 he notes: “During our stroll at sunset I thought again about the novel about Faust. Such a symbol of the freedom of the character and fate of Europe will be, perhaps, not only happier but also more correct and adequate than an oratorical and condemnatory confession about the present.”24 Years later, he would add: “In the moving admiration of Leonard Frank [toward the first chapters of Doctor Faustus] I sensed a kind of warning, of avoiding contributing with my novel the creation of a new German myth, praising the demonic character in Germans.”

  30 JANUARY

  To understand the range of elements that bubble in Mann’s Faustian cauldron, one only need look at the fragments of the diary that Mann incorporates in The Story of a Novel, the account of how he wrote Doctor Faustus. The vigor and curiosity of the old writer in exile are worthy of a titan. Those pages are testimony to the complexity of his endeavor. The annotations correspond to different orders: geographic, political, theological, medical, historical, musical, in addition to references to the political news of the day and to the tribulations and joys of family life and of his intimate group of friends: “Read an excellent article in The Nation, a piece by Henry James on Dickens. […] Written in 1864 at the age of twenty-two. Amazing! Is there anything like it in Germany? The critical writings of the West are far superior… Extensive reading of Niebuhr’s book, The Nature and Destiny of Man… Till after midnight reading in its entirety Stifter’s wonderful Rock Crystal. […] The coal miner strike, serious crisis. Government takeover of the mines. Troops to protect those willing to work—which will be few…Read some curious things on the inglorious defeat of the Germans in Africa. Nothing of Nazi fanaticism’s ‘to the last drop of blood…’Talking in the evening with Bruno Frank on the new strike wave here and the administration’s responsibility for it. Concern about the North American home front… Heaviest bombing of Dortmund, with more than a thousand planes. All Europe in invasion fever. Preparations of the French underground organization. Announcement of the general strike. The garrisons in Norway are instructed to fight ‘to the last man’—which never happens. In Africa 200,000 prisoners were taken. Superiority of materiel in quantity and quality explains the victory…Expectation of the invasion of Italy. Undertakings against Sardinia and Sicily are in the offing…In the evening read Love’s Labour’s Lost. The Shakespeare is pertinent. It falls within the magic circle—while around it sounds the uproar of the world. Supper with the Werfels and the Franks. Conversation on Nietzsche and the pity he arouses—for his and for more general desperation. Meetings with Schoenberg and Stravinsky planned…Calculations of time and age relationships in the novel, vital statistics and names…On Riemenschneider and his time. Purchases. Volbach’s Instrumentenkunde [a handbook on musical instruments]. Notes concerning Leverkühn as musician. His given name to be Anselm, Andreas, or Adrian. Notes on Fascist ideology of the period. Gathering at the Werfels with the Schoenbergs. Pumped S. a great deal on music and the life of a composer. To my deep pleasure, he himself insists that we all must get together more often….On May 23, 1943, a Sunday morning little more than two months after I had fetched out that old notebook, and also the date on which I had my narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, set to work, I began writing Doctor Faustus.”25

  1 FEBRUARY

  Juan García Ponce published in 1972 an exceptional essay on Mann’s work: Thomas Mann Alive. It was published by Era. It is inexplicable to me that it has not been reissued. A book that critics, aspiring critics, everyone should study closely.

  2 FEBRUARY

  Mann’s anger is fierce, visceral, Olympian. He unleashes on a general target: Western democracies—particularly the French—during the first period; and Nazism during the second. He also returns to another topic in particular: the intellectuals who support these movements. During his exile he believes that the entire non-rationalist philosophical tradition is responsible for the tragedy Germany is experiencing. Even Bergson is accused of being a precursor of the Nazi model. Everything that sustains Mann’s work—instinct, the irrational, myth—ends up being frantically condemned by him in moments of desperation. Kundera says: “There is a fundamental difference in the way philosophers and novelists think. People talk about Chekhov’s philosophy, or Kafka’s or Musil’s, and so on. But just try to draw a coherent philosophy out of their writings! Even when they express their ideas directly, in their notebooks, the ideas are intellectual exercises, paradox games, improvisations, rather than statements of thought…”26 Indeed, there is an ongoing discussion in Mann’s great books—with others, with who he has been, and with who he is when he writes in his diary—but the novelist’s instinct transforms it, gives it another dimension, confers on it a different meaning. In a single diary entry he can state one idea and end up sustaining its opposite. All of this material, by the time it reaches the novel, will come out of chaos, will be coherent and cease being formless without losing the intensity it had in real life, that is, in the diaries.

  3 FEBRUARY

  All throughout the day I did nothing but read Mann’s diaries and take notes. Afterward, I read the autobiography of Klaus, his son, to compare each one’s version on certain episodes. I did not finish reading until after three a.m. Despite being tired, I was not able to fall asleep right away, so I took a higher dose of Lexotan than normal. The plot woven between their two lives overwhelmed me with sadness. The young Klaus’s thrilling ascent and his unhappy decline, his fragility, and the maddening upheaval of history are the elements of the story. The relationship between Klaus and his father is marked by darkness, bursts of passion, and distance. They seek and at the same time establish their distances. The son’s autobiography outlines his initial triumphs and his final anguish. The victories were short-lived; anguish, on the other hand, accompanied him for years. Let us consider Klaus’s diaries: “October 24, 1942: Terrible sadness. I want to die. October 25: I want to die. October 26: I want to die. How long will I be able to hold out? October 27: I want to die. I want to die. I want to die. Death seems the ideal solution. I would like to die. Life is unbearable for me. I have no desire to live. I want to die.” Five years later he would commit suicide after several failed attempts. In his diary, Thomas Mann embodies Settembrini, but also Naphtha. Sometimes both at the same time. What is remarkable is that he seems not to notice except in a chance moment, like when he reads the following words in an essay by Gide: “While in the war of 1914 the best of French thinkers fought alongside France
, the best German thinkers rebelled against Prussia…” Mann is surprised, as if this included him, but not entirely. “That I have attempted, in Reflections, to contribute to and fight in favor of Prussianism is something that will remain ambiguous and strange, like an odd paradox.” Gombrowicz commented that his mother claimed a number of virtues, firmly convinced that she possessed them in full, when the truth was that in real life she possessed defects that were antagonistic to those virtues. Mann often speaks of his modesty, his life as a recluse, his exclusion from the world, when in fact his life constitutes a daily and ongoing relationship with fame. The slightest sense of failure is unbearable for him; it causes him to become ill. Photos from his exile in Switzerland bear witness to the everyday drama. His face, like all his faces, possesses something demented, distraught; they are faces of vampires, of possessed men. They are marked by insecurity. Years later in California, restoration, embellishment, and supreme elegance will all be regained. His work discipline is exemplary, admirable, and heroic throughout his life. Knowing that he is the owner of a word that others are anxiously awaiting—a single word to awaken or reassure his flock—gives him in due course a sense of continuity.

  4 FEBRUARY

  His admiration for Kafka is constantly growing. In April 1935, Mann writes, “I resumed reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I would dare say that Kafka’s legacy represents the most brilliant German prose written in the past decades. Is there anything in German that is not mere provincialism alongside him?”

  5 FEBRUARY

  Mann’s characters embody the greatness of our species: Joseph, Jacob, biblical heroes; Goethe; a medieval pope who becomes a saint; Adrian Leverkühn, a composer who transforms contemporary music. They are all eagles who soar in the highest heaven. Kafka’s, on the other hand, barely have names, some only receive an initial. They move through streets as oppressive as the sewer drains. They move like moles, puppets, sleepwalkers. Mann is the subject of tributes attended by heads of state, crowned heads, hundreds of prestigious guests. Kafka meets with a few close friends in café Arco, a modest locale in Prague. The thought that someone might host a banquet in his honor could only occur to him in a fever-induced dream. Mann! Kafka! Everything between them would seem to belong to different worlds. But in the world of great literature profound coincidences are often recorded. Those differences that the idle and foolish delight in pointing out are almost always superficial. Art, when it is worthy of receiving that name, is a testament to having reached its ultimate limit, of reaching resolutely the goal that bears the sign of the extreme. Mann dixit.