Stories

by Susan Sontag

  Twenty years? Obviously. But that was easy and, we agreed, too good to hope for. Twenty years granted to the ancient homely person we saw Stravinsky to be—that was simply an unimaginably large number of years to the fourteen-year-old I was and the sixteen-year-old Merrill was in 1947. (How lovely that I.S. lived even longer than this.) To insist on getting Stravinsky twenty more years in exchange for our lives hardly seemed to show our fervor.

  Fifteen more years? Of course.

  Ten? You bet.

  Five? We began to waver. But not to agree seemed like a failure of respect, of love. What was my life or Merrill’s—not just our paltry California-high-school-students’ lives but the useful, achievement-strewn lives we thought were awaiting us—compared to making it possible for the world to enjoy five years more of Stravinsky’s creations? Five years, okay.

  Four? I sighed. Merrill, let’s get on.

  Three? To die for only three additional years?

  Usually we settled on four—a minimum of four. Yes, to give Stravinsky four more years either one of us was prepared right then and there to die.

  Reading and listening to music: the triumphs of being not myself. That nearly everything I admired was produced by people who were dead (or very old) or from elsewhere, ideally Europe, seemed inevitable to me.

  I accumulated gods. What Stravinsky was for music Thomas Mann became for literature. At my Aladdin’s cave, at the Pickwick, on November 11, 1947—taking the book down from the shelf just now, I find the date written on the flyleaf in the italic script I was then practicing—I bought The Magic Mountain.

  I began it that night, and for the first few nights had trouble breathing as I read. For this was not just another book I would love but a transforming book, a source of discoveries and recognitions. All of Europe fell into my head—though on condition that I start mourning for it. And tuberculosis, the faintly shameful disease (so my mother had intimated) of which my hard-to-imagine real father had died so long ago and exotically elsewhere, but which seemed, once we moved to Tucson, to be a commonplace misfortune—tuberculosis was revealed as the very epitome of pathetic and spiritual interest! The mountain-high community of invalids with afflicted lungs was a version—an exalted version—of that picturesque, climate-conscious resort town in the desert with its thirty-odd hospitals and sanatoriums to which my mother had been obliged to relocate because of an asthma-disabled child: me. There on the mountain, characters were ideas and ideas were passions, exactly as I’d always felt. But the ideas themselves stretched me, enrolled me in turn: Settembrini’s humanitarian élan but also Naphta’s gloom and scorn. And mild, good-natured, chaste Hans Castorp, Mann’s orphaned protagonist, was a hero after my own unprotected heart, not least because he was an orphan and because of the chastity of my own imagination. I loved the tenderness, however diluted by condescension, with which Mann portrays him as a bit simple, overearnest, docile, mediocre (what I considered myself to be, judged by real standards). Tenderness. What if Hans Castorp was a Goody Two-Shoes (appalling accusation my mother had once let fly at me)? That was what made him not like but unlike the others. I recognized his vocation for piety; his portable solitude, lived politely among others; his life of onerous routines (that guardians deem good for you) interspersed with free, passionate conversations—a glorious transposition of my own current agenda.

  For a month the book was where I lived. I read it through almost at a run, my excitement winning out over my wish to go slowly and savor. I did have to slow down for pages 334 to 343, when Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat finally speak of love, but in French, which I’d never studied: unwilling to skip anything, I bought a French-English dictionary and looked up their conversation word by word. After finishing the last page, I was so reluctant to be separated from the book that I started back at the beginning and, to hold myself to the pace the book merited, reread it aloud, a chapter each night.

  The next step was to lend it to a friend, to feel someone else’s pleasure in the book—to love it with someone else, and be able to talk about it. In early December I lent The Magic Mountain to Merrill. And Merrill, who would read immediately whatever I pressed on him, loved it, too. Good.

  Then Merrill said, “Why don’t we go see him?” And that’s when my joy turned to shame.

  Of course I knew he lived here. Southern California in the 1940s was electric with celebrity presences for all tastes, and my friends and I were aware not only of Stravinsky and Schoenberg but of Mann, of Brecht (I’d recently seen Galileo, with Charles Laughton, in a Beverly Hills theatre), and also of Isherwood and Huxley. But it was as inconceivable that I could be in contact with any of them as that I could strike up a conversation with Ingrid Bergman or Gary Cooper, who also lived in the vicinity. Actually, it was even less possible. The stars stepped out of their limos onto the klieg-lighted sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevard for the movie-palace première, braving the surge of besieging fans penned in by the police sawhorses; I saw newsreels of these apparitions. The gods of high culture had disembarked from Europe to dwell, almost incognito, among the lemon trees and beach boys and neo-Bauhaus architecture and fantasy hamburgers; they weren’t, I was sure, supposed to have something like fans, who would seek to intrude on their privacy. Of course, Mann, unlike the other exiles, was also a public presence. To have been as officially honored in America as Thomas Mann was in the late 1930s and early 1940s was probably more improbable than to have been the most famous writer in the world. A guest at the White House, introduced by the vice president when he gave a speech at the Library of Congress, for years indefatigable on the lecture circuit, Mann had the stature of an oracle in Roosevelt’s bien-pensant America, proclaiming the absolute evil of Hitler’s Germany and the coming victory of the democracies. Emigration had not dampened his taste, or his talent, for being a representative figure. If there was such a thing as a good Germany, it was now to be found in this country (proof of America’s goodness), embodied in his person; if there was a Great Writer, not at all an American notion of what a writer is, it was he.

  But when I was borne aloft by The Magic Mountain, I wasn’t thinking that he was also, literally, “here.” To say that at this time I lived in Southern California and Thomas Mann lived in Southern California—that was a different sense of “lived,” of “in.” Wherever he was, it was where-I-was-not. Europe. Or the world beyond childhood, the world of seriousness. No, not even that. For me, he was a book. Books, rather—I was now deep in Stories of Three Decades. When I was nine, which I did consider childhood, I’d lived for months of grief and suspense in Les Misérables. (It was the chapter in which Fantine was obliged to sell her hair that made a conscious socialist of me.) As far as I was concerned, Thomas Mann—being, simply, immortal—was as dead as Victor Hugo.

  Why would I want to meet him? I had his books.

  I didn’t want to meet him. Merrill was at my house, it was Sunday, my parents were out, and we were in their bedroom sprawled on their white satin bedspread. Despite my pleas, he’d brought in a telephone book and was looking under “M.”

  “You see? He’s in the telephone book.”

  “I don’t want to see!”

  “Look!” He made me look. Horrified, I saw: 1550 San Remo Drive, Pacific Palisades.

  “This is ridiculous. Come on—stop it!” I clambered off the bed. I couldn’t believe Merrill was doing this, but he was.

  “I’m going to call.” The phone was on the night table on my mother’s side of the bed.

  “Merrill, please!”

  He picked up the receiver. I bolted through the house, out the always unlocked front door, across the lawn, beyond the curb to the far side of the Pontiac, parked with the key in the ignition (where else would you keep the car keys?), to stand in the middle of the street and press my hands to my ears, as if from there I could have heard Merrill making the mortifying, unthinkable telephone call.

  What a coward I am, I thought, hardly for the first or the last time in my life; but I took a few moments, hyp
erventilating, trying to regain control of myself, before I uncovered my ears and retraced my steps. Slowly.

  The front door opened right into the small living room, done up with the Early American “pieces,” as my mother called them, that she was now collecting. Silence. I crossed the room into the dining area, then turned into the short hall that went past my own room and the door of my parents’ bathroom into their bedroom.

  The receiver was on the hook. Merrill was sitting on the bed’s edge, grinning.

  “Listen, that’s not funny,” I said. “I thought you were really going to do it.”

  He waved his hand. “I did.”

  “Did what?”

  “I did it.” He was still smiling.

  “Called?”

  “He’s expecting us for tea next Sunday at four.”

  “You didn’t actually call!”

  “Why not?” he said. “It went fine.”

  “And you spoke to him?” I was close to tears. “How could you?”

  “No,” he said, “it was his wife who answered.”

  I extracted a mental picture of Katia Mann from the photographs I’d seen of Mann with his family. Did she, too, exist? Perhaps, as long as Merrill hadn’t actually spoken to Thomas Mann, it wasn’t so bad. “But what did you say?”

  “I said we were two high-school students who had read Thomas Mann’s books and would like to meet him.”

  No, this was even worse than I imagined—but what had I imagined? “That’s so … so dumb!”

  “What’s dumb about it? It sounded good.”

  “Oh, Merrill …” I couldn’t even protest any more. “What did she say?”

  “She said, ‘Just a minute, I’ll get my daughter,’ ” Merrill continued proudly. “And then the daughter got on, and I repeated—”

  “Go slower,” I interrupted. “His wife left the phone. Then there was a pause. Then you heard another voice …”

  “Yeah, another woman’s voice—they both had accents—saying, ‘This is Miss Mann, what do you want?’ ”

  “Is that what she said? It sounds as if she was angry.”

  “No, no, she didn’t sound angry. Maybe she said, ‘Miss Mann speaking.’ I don’t remember, but, honest, she didn’t sound angry. Then she said, ‘What do you want?’ No, wait, it was ‘What is it that you want?’ ”

  “Then what?”

  “And then I said … you know, that we were two high-school students who had read Thomas Mann’s books and wanted to meet him—”

  “But I don’t want to meet him!” I wailed.

  “And she said,” he pushed on stubbornly, “ ‘Just a minute, I will ask my father.’ Maybe it was ‘Just a moment, I will ask my father.’ She wasn’t gone very long … and then she came back to the phone and said—these were her words exactly—‘My father is expecting you for tea next Sunday at four.’ ”

  “And then?”

  “She asked if I knew the address.”

  “And then?”

  “That was all. Oh … and she said goodbye.”

  I contemplated this finality for a moment before saying, once more, “Oh, Merrill, how could you?”

  “I told you I would,” he said.

  Getting through the week, awash in shame and dread. It seemed a vast impertinence that I should be forced to meet Thomas Mann. And grotesque that he should waste his time meeting me.

  Of course I could refuse to go. But I was afraid this brash Caliban I’d mistaken for an Ariel would call on the magician without me. Whatever the usual deference I had from Merrill, it seemed he now considered himself my equal in Thomas Mann worship. I couldn’t let Merrill inflict himself unmediated on my idol. At least, if I went along I might limit the damage, head off the more callow of Merrill’s remarks. I had the impression (and this is the part of my recollection that is most touching to me) that Thomas Mann could be injured by Merrill’s stupidity or mine … that stupidity was always injuring, and that as I revered Mann it was my duty to protect him from this injury.

  Merrill and I met twice during the week after school. I had stopped reproving him. I was less angry; increasingly, I was just miserable. I was trapped. Since I would have to go, I needed to feel close to him, make common cause, so we would not disgrace ourselves.

  Sunday came. It was Merrill who collected me in the Chevy, at one exactly, in front of my house at the curb (I hadn’t told my mother or anyone else of this invitation to tea in Pacific Palisades), and by two o’clock we were on broad, empty San Remo Drive, with a view of the ocean and Catalina Island in the distance, parked some two hundred feet up from (and out of sight of) the house at 1550.

  We had already agreed on how we would start. I would talk first, about The Magic Mountain, then Merrill would ask the question about what Thomas Mann was writing at present. The rest we were going to work out now, in the two hours we’d allotted to rehearse. But after a few minutes, unable to entertain any idea of how he might respond to what we were considering saying, we ran out of inspiration. What does a god say? Impossible to imagine.

  So we compared two recordings of Death and the Maiden and then veered to a favorite notion of Merrill’s about the way Schnabel played the Hammerklavier, a notion which I found wonderfully clever. Merrill seemed hardly to be anxious at all. He appeared to think that we had a perfect right to bother Thomas Mann. He thought that we were interesting—two precocious kids, minor-league prodigies (we knew neither of us was a real prodigy, which was someone like the young Menuhin; we were prodigies of appetite, of respect, not of accomplishment); that we could be interesting to Thomas Mann. I did not. I thought we were … pure potentiality. By real standards, I thought, we hardly existed.

  The sun was strong and the street deserted. In two hours only a few cars passed. Then, at five minutes to four, Merrill released the brake and we coasted silently down the hill and re-parked in front of 1550. We got out, stretched, made encouraging mock-groaning sounds to each other, closed the car doors as softly as we could, went up the pathway, and rang the bell. Cute chimes. Oh.

  A very old woman with white hair in a bun opened the door, didn’t seem surprised to see us, invited us in, asked us to wait a minute in the dim entryway—there was a living room off to the right—and went down a long corridor and out of sight.

  “Katia Mann,” I whispered.

  “I wonder if we’ll see Erika,” Merrill whispered back.

  Absolute silence in the house. She was returning now. “Come with me, please. My husband will receive you in his study.”

  We followed, almost to the end of the narrow dark passageway, just before the staircase. There was a door on the left, which she opened. We followed her in, turning left once more before we were really inside. In Thomas Mann’s study.

  I saw the room—it seemed large and had a big window with a big view—before I realized it was he, sitting behind a massive, ornate, dark table. Katia Mann presented us. Here are the two students, she said to him, while referring to him as Dr. Thomas Mann; he nodded and said some words of welcome. He was wearing a bow tie and a beige suit, as in the frontispiece of Essays of Three Decades—and that was the first shock, that he so resembled the formally posed photograph. The resemblance seemed uncanny, a marvel. It wasn’t, I think now, just because this was the first time I’d met someone whose appearance I had already formed a strong idea of through photographs. I’d never met anyone who didn’t affect being relaxed. His resemblance to the photograph seemed like a feat, as if he were posing now. But the full-figure picture had not made me see the sparseness of the mustache, the whiteness of the skin, the mottled hands, the unpleasantly visible veins, the smallness and amber color of the eyes behind the glasses. He sat very erectly and seemed to be very, very old. He was in fact seventy-two.

  I heard the door behind us close. Thomas Mann indicated that we were to sit in the two stiff-backed chairs in front of the table. He lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair.

  And we were on our way.

  He talked without pr
ompting. I remember his gravity, his accent, the slowness of his speech: I had never heard anyone speak so slowly.

  I said how much I loved The Magic Mountain.

  He said it was a very European book, that it portrayed the conflicts at the heart of European civilization.

  I said I understood that.

  What had he been writing, Merrill asked.

  “I have recently completed a novel which is partly based on the life of Nietzsche,” he said, with huge, disquieting pauses between each word. “My protagonist, however, is not a philosopher. He is a great composer.”

  “I know how important music is for you,” I ventured, hoping to fuel the conversation for a good stretch.

  “Both the heights and the depths of the German soul are reflected in its music,” he said.

  “Wagner,” I said, worried that I was risking disaster, since I’d never heard an opera by Wagner, though I’d read Thomas Mann’s essay on him.

  “Yes,” he said, picking up, hefting, closing (with his thumb marking the place), then laying down, open again, a book that was on his worktable. “As you see, at this very moment I am consulting Volume IV of Ernest Newman’s excellent biography of Wagner.” I craned my neck to let the words of the title and the author’s name actually hit my eyeballs. I’d seen the Newman biography at the Pickwick.

  “But the music of my composer is not like Wagner’s music. It is related to the twelve-tone system, or row, of Schoenberg.”

  Merrill said we were both very interested in Schoenberg. He made no response to this. Intercepting a perplexed look on Merrill’s face, I widened my eyes encouragingly.

  “Will your novel appear soon?” Merrill asked.

  “My faithful translator is at work on it now,” he said.

  “H. T. Lowe-Porter,” I murmured—the first time I’d actually said this entrancing name, with its opaque initials and showy hyphen.

  “For the translator this is, perhaps, my most difficult book,” he said. “Never, I think, has Mrs. Lowe-Porter been confronted with such a challenging task.”

  “Oh,” I said, having not imagined H. T. L.-P. to be anything in particular but surprised to learn that the name belonged to a woman.