by Allan Massie
Der Vulkan… His best novel? Perhaps. His most ambitious? Certainly. It sold only three hundred copies.
He gave himself another whisky. Why not? An old friend that kept the temptation of H at arm’s length.
Never mind. That novel brought him something worth more than sales: the Magician’s approval. He had never believed that his father did more than glance through his books – and that only because Mielein insisted he should read them. But this time the Magician wrote: “Well then: fully and thoroughly read it and it touched me and made me laugh. I enjoyed it and was really satisfied and more than once I was really moved. For a long time now people didn’t take you seriously – they saw you as the ‘sonof’ (T. Mann’s little boy), a spoiled brat. I couldn’t change that. But now it’s not to be denied that you are capable of more, more than most – therefore my satisfaction on reading and my other emotions rightfully stem from that too. In a word, I congratulate you sincerely and with fatherly pride…”
And, further on, reflecting on the passage in which Klaus recounted his hero’s cure in the sanatorium, the Magician wrote that he found it “so extraordinary a piece of narrative that I stopped thinking about Germany and morality, politics and struggle, and just read on because I had never read anything like it before.”
For a long time he carried that letter wherever he went, as you might wear a badge of honour. He had never had such praise from the Magician before, for even Mephisto had been met with a bland approval betraying a lack of real interest. In truth he hadn’t realised how much he needed his father’s praise, which in his reply he described as “a beautiful, comforting, and fortifying gift…”
But the cure itself – terrible, as he had written. Nights of agitation, brief sleep, disturbed by horrible and frightening dreams. When he woke sobbing, a nurse came and sat by him and spoke of her broken marriage. There’s misery everywhere, he thought. Later he spent two whole days asleep (with the help of pills), but when he woke, found himself not rested, but exhausted, hardly able to walk. Cries of anguish came from the neighbouring rooms. Did it help that others were suffering as he was?
At last letters arrived, from Erika, promising to be with him in person as she was in spirit, from Mielein, to whom he had confessed all in a letter written the day before he began the cure. Hers was full of sympathy, understanding and love. It made him weep. But tears came very easily in the room with barred windows. There were more when Tomski was at last permitted to visit and brought him roses and kisses. Left alone, night drawing on, he had moments of rebellion. “Je m’en fous,” he wrote in his journal. “My head is strangely empty of everything.”
He was ready to leave, but the doctors said no. A few days yet. You must be stronger, the poison completely eliminated. Tomski sat by the bed and held his hand or smoothed his brow. Gave him lemonade to drink. The boy himself veered between joy and despair. Like René, he thought, like René and Rikki.
When at last he was released after a month in the sanatorium, Klopstock and another doctor came to the station to see him off. “Don’t come back, Klaus,” they said. “You’ve given yourself another chance. Don’t come back.” In the train Tomski smiled and said, “Now we are truly together.” They spent that night in the Hotel Imperial in Vienna, in each other’s arms. Klaus wept, but they were tears of happiness.
He sat by the window, with his glass of whisky and the bottle of Johnnie Walker on the table by his side. No, he wouldn’t drug tonight. It was strangely peaceful watching the rain still falling. There had been good times with Tomski often, and over a number of years, but never as good as those first weeks together, when he asked himself time and again, can I love him enough? Of course he couldn’t. That was, as the English said, “the fact of the matter”. He couldn’t love anyone enough. His own need was too great.
Guy Probyn had set out to rile him, no question of that. Why? Not just to defend Gustaf, but also because there was something in Klaus himself which invited attack. Or was Probyn, with his attraction to soft boys whom he could dominate, merely malicious, full of the resentment of the man who would have been an artist and was now a manager? Klaus took hold of the bottle and smiled. Was it possible that Probyn was jealous of him? Ridiculous thought. He poured another whisky, but didn’t immediately drink it. Sufficient comfort to know it was there waiting, ready when his need became urgent.
There was a knock at the door. He didn’t answer at once. He hesitated because for a moment he had been close to happiness in his solitude and didn’t want it to be interrupted. But the knock was repeated and this time he called, “Come in.” It was Miki.
“I got held up on the boat,” he said. “The boss had insisted we put to sea.”
He came up behind Klaus, laid his hands on his shoulders and leant over him. He smelled of the rain and there was again aniseed on his breath.
“You OK, Klaus? They told me you’d been at the Zanzi. So I came on the chance. Are you pleased?”
Klaus emptied his glass, got up, turned round, ran his hands up the boy’s body under his shirt.
“I’m pleased,” he said, and kissed him on the mouth. Rainwater dripped down his neck from Miki’s hair.
“It’s good to see you,” Klaus said. “I was sad when I gave you up.”
IX
The sun was shining for the first time that month and Klaus’s spirits rose with it. He felt better than he had for days. Miki’s arrival had helped change his mood. Klaus was touched that the boy had sought him out. Of course he wanted money – it was rent after all – but Klaus persuaded himself there was affection there too. When the boy kissed him goodbye in the morning and said again, “you’re all right, Klaus,” he was able, almost, to persuade himself that the words were true.
He had an engagement: lunch with Mr Maugham at the Villa Mauresque on Cap Ferrat. Yesterday he had thought he would let it slip, though he had found the English novelist sympathetic when they had met in New York during the war. That was soon after he had seen the film made from Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage, starring Leslie Howard and Bette Davis. It hadn’t entirely convinced him; it wasn’t altogether plausible that the young man should have succumbed so completely to that monstrous woman. All the same he had noted in his journal that he found it interesting that, on the evidence of the movie – for Klaus hadn’t then read the novel – Maugham should have made this pathological submission to an inferior woman a symbol of the homosexual condition. For he had no doubts about Mr Maugham’s own sexuality; he was an unbridled Magician, and there was something demonic in his understanding of infatuation with an unsuitable object.
He took a train to Nice and then, unable to afford a taxi, a bus which deposited him at the bottom of the hill leading up to the villa. A butler wearing white gloves admitted him, and Klaus was conscious of the shabbiness of his suit and the fact that it hadn’t occurred to him to wear a tie. Then to his dismay he found there were other guests, an English couple, whose names he didn’t catch but they were Lord and Lady something, and a dark boy with loose lips who immediately gave him the eye. Not his type however, with willowy gestures which repelled. Very dry Martinis were served, and promptly at one o’clock the butler struck a gong to summon them to lunch. Klaus found himself beside Mr Maugham’s secretary-manager – former lover? procurer? – Alan Searle who talked about criminals he had known in an accent Klaus found hard to place. The food was bland – fish in a velvety sauce, followed by indifferent roast chicken. But the wine was good, though the supply was stinted. Maugham himself smoked, not only between courses, and picked at his food. Breaking a moment of silence, the English lady asked him what had been the happiest moment of his life.
“When I finally got rid of my wife,” he said, his stammer delaying the “finally” and the “got”, the last words “rid of my wife” emerging in a rush.
Klaus couldn’t think why he had been asked. He felt an imperative need for heroin. A popular American song of the twenties ran in his head: “I’m just a bird in a gilded cage.” Th
at, surely, was Mr Maugham. He longed for the moment of departure, but, when the other guests were at last ready to leave, after coffee had been served and the two Pekingese provided with sugared biscuits, Alan Searle sidled up to him and said, “He’d like you to stay behind, he wants the opportunity to talk. Please do. It will give me an hour to myself.”
The willowy boy lingered too, but was abruptly dismissed by Mr Maugham.
“Find something with which to amuse yourself, if you’re capable of that. You might even read a book.”
He took Klaus by the arm and led him on to the terrace and then down some steps to the pool where there were chairs and a table under an awning.
Maugham said, “One of the misfortunes of human beings is that they continue to have sexual desires long after they are no longer sexually desirable. That won’t have struck you yet…”
His stammer had difficulty with “desires” and “desirable”.
“Are you intending to start another magazine?”
Klaus sighed and said, “It’s impossible.”
“Your New York one was good. I was happy to contribute to it, though my essay was perhaps a bit dry.”
“It was an honour to publish it,” Klaus said, and wondered how soon he could take his leave without causing offence. He didn’t like speaking about that magazine – Decision. He had started it with such high hopes and it had fizzled out so ignominiously.
“And the other Germany, of which you and your sister wrote? Will that be realised? Is it a country you could live in again?”
Klaus shook his head. Germany was tainted, he said; he couldn’t look anyone in the eye there without seeing guilt.
“A pity,” Maugham said. “I spent two years of my youth in Heidelberg, you know. I discovered myself there and so I have always kept an affection for that Germany. It was the first place where I made friends who mattered to me. You understand?”
Yes, Klaus understood, but it was not something he thought he could speak of with this elderly Englishman who seemed on the brink of confidences which could only embarrass them both.
“Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. You know the quotation? What’s your opinion?”
Suddenly Klaus was close to tears. He remembered how when the magazine failed he had wished to die because he could no longer endure the mass of mediocrity and malice, and how writing down his long litany of complaint had somehow diverted him from the suicide he had that evening been planning. Now he felt that this wise old man understood him and had asked him here, not merely as a courtesy but because he had sensed, got wind of, his desperation and had something important to tell him.
“But can you divorce thought and feeling?” he said. “Make that clear distinction between them? Isn’t every thought a feeling too, every feeling a thought at least when you find words for it?”
“And so,” Maugham said, “tragicomedy… Of course, Faust is the great German myth, as both you and your father have realised. To sell your soul to satisfy your immediate desires. No Frenchman would do that without counting the cost, but then no Frenchman is a Romantic. Your father’s novel is remarkable. He must be very sure of himself to dare to bore the reader as he does. I would never have had the courage. But I preferred your Mephisto because it shows how easily a man may sell his soul, even for a low price. The Germans surrendered their souls to Hitler willingly, even eagerly, but how many of them really believed in his promises? They could do so only by suspending the critical and sceptical spirit. Yet they rushed to do that. You stood out against the mass delusion, but do you truly suppose that your words achieved anything?”
There was ancient malice in his voice, common sense in the words.
“No,” Klaus said, “I can’t believe that they did. But I couldn’t not have written them.”
“Has your novel been published in Germany?”
“You mean Mephisto? No, but I hope it may be soon.”
“It should be. Your compatriots – or should I say, your former compatriots? – need such books. I mean, books that open their eyes to the manner in which they surrendered to evil. Not, I fear, that people learn from books, or from experience. But they should be given the opportunity. You were in love once with the character you call Hendrik?”
“Yes,” Klaus said. He suddenly wanted to unburden himself.
“I thought so. Such hatred and contempt are born only from love that has turned sour.”
A cloud passed over the sun. The old man’s face darkened. Klaus thought he was looking into that cupboard under the stairs where unwanted memories are hidden away, but can’t be forgotten.
The willowy boy emerged from the house, descended the steps. He was wearing a dressinggown, which he slipped off without looking at either of them, and stood at the edge of the pool in ersatz leopard-skin trunks. He raised himself on his toes, then lay flat on his belly and pulled up first one leg, then the other, behind him.
Maugham said, “For many years I was ambitious to make a mark in the world. Now I regard that as futility. I still work every morning, but it is for my own amusement now, or simply because it is an occupation to stave off boredom. But I no longer look for applause.”
The boy stood up and dived into the water. When he surfaced he brushed his hair out of his eyes and looked towards Maugham. Or perhaps Klaus himself, he couldn’t be sure. Getting no response, he turned away, swam across the pool using the crawl stroke, climbed out and lay flat face-down on stone. The sun came out and the boy’s wet legs glistened.
“My nephew Robin left him here,” Maugham said. “He supposed I would be grateful. He was mistaken.”
Klaus said, “I’m afraid I must be off.”
He had in reality no reason to go, but he knew he couldn’t remain there a moment longer.
“You work in the morning,” he said, “for me the best time is late afternoon and early evening.”
Why did he always feel the need to make some excuse, offer some explanation?
“Just remember,” Maugham said, “nothing matters very much and most things don’t matter at all.”
Klaus looked at his watch.
“If I go now, I can just catch the next bus at the bottom of the hill.”
He thanked Maugham. They shook hands. As he turned out of the gate, he encountered Alan Searle. Searle was puffing, out of breath.
“You’re off then. Hope your little talk went all right. Is the old man alone?”
“He’s by the pool,” Klaus said. “The boy’s there, sunning himself.”
“Ah good,” Searle said. “I’m pleased to hear it. Willie doesn’t like to be left alone. Except when he’s working of course.”
X
He had sailed to America with Tomski only a few months after his release from the clinic. He wasn’t abandoning the anti-Nazi struggle, and yet part of him accused himself of doing precisely that. It was nonsense. He was a writer and he could carry on his war in words either side of the Atlantic. Moreover, Erika had secured an agent who would arrange a lecture tour for the pair of them. That was how they could immediately best serve the cause – by telling Americans the truth about what was happening in Germany and persuading them that they could not stand apart from the assault on democracy and civilisation.
So why did he feel like a deserter?
Because, even with the streets of American cities still bearing witness to the number of men whom the Depression had left without work, the US yet seemed to him a land of endless possibility, free of the gnawing anxiety you couldn’t escape in Europe.
Journalists and photographers met the ship. As Thomas Mann’s son he was news. A reporter from the New York Post asked him about his love life. Klaus looked him in the eye and recognised him as “one of us”. He can read what there is between me and Tomski, he thought, and in reply referred first to his broken engagement to Pamela and then in vague terms to an attachment to a girl in Switzerland – in reality Annemarie who had been Erika’s lover off and on for years.
“So you see,” Tomski said as soon as they were alone, “even in the Land of the Free, you can’t speak honestly.”
Later that night Tomski was still sulky. He made a scene. They had their first quarrel. It was absurd: Tomski was no more able openly to confess to their relationship than he could… In a few days he would be going home to his parents, whom he hadn’t seen for the three years he had been in Europe, and he certainly wasn’t going to tell them that he had travelled to the States with his lover, a thirty-year-old German called Klaus. And yet Klaus understood the boy’s resentment. They ought to have been able to say what they were. Instead, he found himself making excuses.
“If I confessed to being what I am nobody would listen to what I have to say about Hitler and the Nazis. They would dismiss me as a degenerate.”
“Is that what you think we are?” Tomski said.
“You know it’s not. Please don’t be silly.”
The quarrel went on for hours, and Klaus was the more hurt because he knew that Tomski knew his argument was ridiculous. He wondered if Tomski really wanted to find an excuse to break with him.
A couple of years later – he couldn’t remember exactly when – he had a similar conversation with Chris in California.
“You don’t understand,” Klaus said. “I’m not ashamed of being homosexual. It’s my nature and that’s all there is to it. But I’m not militant, I don’t need to shout it from the rooftops…”