Stories

by Susan Sontag

  “A deep knowledge of German is required, and much ingenuity, for some of my characters converse in dialect. And the Devil—for, yes, the Devil himself is a character in my book—speaks in the German of the sixteenth century,” Thomas Mann said, slowly, slowly. A thin-lipped smile. “I’m afraid this will mean little to my American readers.”

  I longed to say something reassuring, but didn’t dare.

  Was he speaking so slowly, I wondered, because that was the way he talked? Or because he was talking in a foreign language? Or because he thought he had to speak slowly—assuming (because we were Americans? because we were children?) that otherwise we wouldn’t understand what he was saying?

  “I regard this as the most daring book I have written.” He nodded at us. “My wildest book.”

  “We look forward very much to reading it,” I said. I was still hoping he’d talk about The Magic Mountain.

  “But it is as well the book of my old age,” he went on. A long, long pause. “My Parsifal,” he said. “And, of course, my Faust.”

  He seemed distracted for a moment, as if recalling something. He lit another cigarette and turned slightly in his chair. Then he laid the cigarette in an ashtray and rubbed his mustache with his index finger; I remember I thought his mustache (I didn’t know anyone with a mustache) looked like a little hat over his mouth. I wondered if this meant the conversation was over.

  But, no, he went on. I remember “the fate of Germany” … “the demonic” and “the abyss” … and “the Faustian bargain with the Devil.” Hitler recurred several times. (Did he bring up the Wagner-Hitler problem? I think not.) We did our best to show him that his words were not wholly lost on us.

  At first I had seen only him, awe at his physical presence blinding me to the room’s contents. Now I was starting to see more. For instance, what was on the rather cluttered table: pens, inkstand, books, papers, and a nest of small photographs in silver frames, which I saw from the back. Of the many pictures on the walls, I recognized only a signed photograph of F.D.R. with someone else—I seem to remember a man in uniform—in the picture. And books, books, books in the floor-to-ceiling shelves that covered two of the walls. To be in the same room with Thomas Mann was thrilling, enormous, amazing. But I was also hearing the siren call of the first private library I had ever seen.

  While Merrill carried the ball, showing that he was not entirely ignorant of the Faust legend, I was trying, without making the divagations of my glance too obvious, to case the library. As I expected, almost all of the books were German, many in sets, leather-bound; the puzzle was that I could not decipher most of the titles (I didn’t know of the existence of Fraktur). The few American books, all recent-looking, were easy to identify in their bright, waxy jackets.

  Now he was talking about Goethe …

  As if we had indeed rehearsed what we would say, Merrill and I had found a nice, unstrained rhythm of putting questions whenever Thomas Mann’s glacial flow of words seemed to be drying up, and of showing our respectful appreciation of whatever he was saying. Merrill was being the Merrill I was so fond of: calm, charming, not stupid at all. I felt ashamed that I’d assumed he would disgrace himself, and therefore me, in front of Thomas Mann. Merrill was doing fine. I was, I thought, doing so-so. The surprise was Thomas Mann, that he wasn’t harder to understand.

  I wouldn’t have minded if he had talked like a book. I wanted him to talk like a book. What I was obscurely starting to mind was that (as I couldn’t have put it then) he talked like a book review.

  Now he was talking about the artist and society, and he was using phrases I remembered from interviews with him I had read in The Saturday Review of Literature, a magazine I felt I’d outgrown since discovering the fancy prose and convoluted arguments of Partisan Review, which I had just started buying at the newsstand on Hollywood Boulevard. But, I reasoned, if I found what he said now a little familiar it was because I had read his books. He couldn’t know he had in me such a fervent reader. Why should he say anything he hadn’t already said? I refused to be disappointed.

  I considered telling him that I loved The Magic Mountain so much that I had read it twice, but that seemed silly. I also feared he might ask me about some book of his which I had not read, though so far he hadn’t asked a single question. “The Magic Mountain has meant so much to me,” I finally ventured, feeling that it was now or never.

  “It sometimes happens,” he said, “that I am asked which I consider to be my greatest novel.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Merrill.

  “I would say, and have so replied recently in interviews …” He paused. I held my breath. “The Magic Mountain.” I exhaled.

  The door opened. Relief had come: the German wife, slow-gaited, bearing a tray with cookies, small cakes, and tea, which she bent over to set down on a low table in front of the sofa against one wall. Thomas Mann stood up, came around the table, and waved us toward the sofa; I saw he was very thin. I longed to sit down again, and did, next to Merrill, where we’d been told to sit, as soon as Thomas Mann occupied a wing chair nearby. Katia Mann was pouring tea from a heavy silver service into three delicate cups. As Thomas Mann put his saucer on his knee and raised the cup to his mouth (we followed, in unison), she said a few words in German to him in a low voice. He shook his head. His reply was in English—something like “It doesn’t matter” or “Not now.” She sighed audibly, and left the room.

  Ah, he said, now we will eat. Unsmiling, he motioned to us to help ourselves to the cakes.

  At one end of the low table that held the tray was a small Egyptian statuette, which sits in my memory as a funerary votive figure. It reminded me that Thomas Mann had written a book called Joseph in Egypt, which in the course of a cursory browsing at the Pickwick I’d not found enticing. I resolved to give it another try.

  No one spoke. I was aware of the intense, dedicated quiet of the house, a quiet I had never experienced anywhere indoors; and of the slowness and self-consciousness of each of my gestures. I sipped my tea, tried to control the crumbs from the cake, and exchanged a furtive glance with Merrill. Maybe it was over now.

  Putting down his cup and saucer, then touching the corner of his mouth with the edge of his thick white napkin, Thomas Mann said that he was always pleased to meet American young people, who showed the vigor and health and fundamentally optimistic temper of this great country. My spirits sank. What I had dreaded—he was turning the conversation to us.

  He asked us about our studies. Our studies? That was a further embarrassment. I was sure he hadn’t the faintest idea what a high school in Southern California was like. Did he know about Drivers’ Education (compulsory)? Typing courses? Wouldn’t he be surprised by the wrinkled condoms you spotted as you were darting across the lawn for the first period (the campus was a favorite nighttime trysting spot)—my own surprise having revealed, the very first week I entered, my being two years younger than my classmates, because I’d witlessly asked someone why there were these little balloons under the trees? And by the “tea” being sold by a pair of pachukes (as the Chicano kids were called) stationed along the left wall of the assembly building every morning recess? Could he imagine George, who, some of us knew, had a gun and got money from gas-station attendants? Ella and Nella, the dwarf sisters, who led the Bible Club boycott that resulted in the withdrawal of our biology textbook? Did he know Latin was gone, and Shakespeare, too, and that for months of tenth-grade English the visibly befuddled teacher handed out copies of the Reader’s Digest at the beginning of each period—we were to select one article and write a summary of it—then sat out the hour in silence at her desk, nodding and knitting? Could he imagine what a world away from the Gymnasium in his native Lübeck, where fourteen-year-old Tonio Kröger wooed Hans Hansen by trying to get him to read Schiller’s Don Carlos, was North Hollywood High School, alma mater of Farley Granger and Alan Ladd? He couldn’t, and I hoped he would never find out. He had enough to be sad about—Hitler, the destr
uction of Germany, exile. It was better that he not know how really far he was from Europe.

  He was talking about “the value of literature” and “the necessity of protecting civilization against the forces of barbarity,” and I said, yes, yes … my conviction that it was absurd for us to be there—what, all week, I’d expected to feel—at last taking over. Earlier, we could only say something stupid. Actually having tea, the social ritual that gave a name to the whole proceeding, created new opportunities for disgrace. My worry that I would do something clumsy was driving out of my head whatever I might have ventured to say.

  I remember beginning to wonder when it would not be awkward to leave. I guessed that Merrill, for all the impression he gave of being at ease, would be glad to go, too.

  And Thomas Mann continued to talk, slowly, about literature. I remember my dismay better than what he said. I was trying to keep myself from eating too many cookies, but in a moment of absent-mindedness I did reach over and take one more than I had meant to. He nodded. Have another, he said. It was horrible. How I wished I could just be left alone in his study to look at his books.

  He asked us who our favorite authors were, and when I hesitated (I had so many, and knew I should mention only a few) he went on—and this I remember exactly: “I presume you like Hemingway. He is, such is my impression, the most representative American author.”

  Merrill mumbled that he had never read Hemingway. Neither had I; but I was too taken aback even to reply. How puzzling that Thomas Mann should be interested in Hemingway, who, in my vague idea of him, was a very popular author of novels that had been made into romantic movies (I loved Ingrid Bergman, I loved Humphrey Bogart) and wrote about fishing and boxing (I hated sports). He’d never sounded to me like a writer I ought to read. Or one my Thomas Mann would take seriously. But then I understood it wasn’t that Thomas Mann liked Hemingway but that we were supposed to like him.

  Well, Thomas Mann said, what authors do you like?

  Merrill said he liked Romain Rolland, meaning Jean-Christophe. And Joyce, meaning Portrait of an Artist. I said I liked Kafka, meaning Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony, and Tolstoy, meaning the late religious writings as much as the novels; and, thinking I must cite an American because he seemed to expect that, I threw in Jack London (meaning Martin Eden).

  He said we must be very serious young people. More embarrassment. What I remember best is how embarrassing it was.

  I was still worrying about Hemingway. Should I read Hemingway?

  He seemed to find it perfectly normal that two local high-school students should know who Nietzsche and Schoenberg were … and up to now I’d simply rejoiced in this first foretaste of the world where such familiarity was properly taken for granted. But now, it seemed, he also wanted us to be two young Americans (as he imagined them); to be, as he was (as, I had no idea why, he thought Hemingway was), representative. I knew that was absurd. The whole point was that we didn’t represent anything at all. We didn’t even represent ourselves—certainly not very well.

  Here I was in the very throne room of the world in which I aspired to live, even as the humblest citizen. (The thought of saying that I wanted to be a writer would no more have occurred to me than to tell him I breathed. I was there, if I had to be there, as admirer, not as aspirant to his caste.) The man I met had only sententious formulas to deliver, though he was the man who wrote Thomas Mann’s books. And I uttered nothing but tongue-tied simplicities, though I was full of complex feeling. We neither of us were at our best.

  Strange that I don’t recall how it ended. Did Katia Mann appear to tell us that our time was up? Did Thomas Mann say he must return to his work, receive our thanks for granting this audience, and take us to the study door? I don’t remember the goodbyes—how we were released. Our sitting on the sofa having tea and cakes cross-fades in my memory to the scene in which we are out on San Remo Drive again, getting into the car. After the dark study, the waning sun seemed bright: it was just past five-thirty.

  Merrill started the car. Like two teenage boys driving away after their first visit to a brothel, we evaluated our performance. Merrill thought it was a triumph. I was ashamed, depressed, though I agreed that we hadn’t made total fools of ourselves.

  “Damn, we should have brought the book,” Merrill said as we neared my neighborhood, breaking a long silence. “For him to sign.”

  I gritted my teeth and said nothing.

  “That was great,” said Merrill as I got out of the car in front of my house.

  I doubt we spoke of it again.

  Ten months later, within days of the appearance of the much-heralded Doctor Faustus (Book-of-the-Month Club selection, first printing over a hundred thousand copies), Merrill and I were at the Pickwick, giddily eyeing the piles of identical books stacked on a metal table in the front of the store. I bought mine and Merrill his; we read it together.

  Acclaimed as it was, his book didn’t do as well as Thomas Mann expected. The reviewers expressed respectful reservations, his American presence began to deflate slightly. The Roosevelt era was really over and the Cold War had started. He began to think of returning to Europe.

  I was now within a few months of my big move, the beginning of real life. After January graduation, I started a term at the University of California at Berkeley, luckless George started doing his one-to-five at San Quentin, and in the fall of 1949 I left Cal and entered the University of Chicago, accompanied by Merrill and by Peter (both of whom had graduated in June), and studied philosophy, and then, and then … I went on to my life, which did turn out to be, mostly, just what the child of fourteen had imagined with such certitude.

  And Thomas Mann, who had been doing time here, made his move. He and his Katia (who had become American citizens in 1944) were to leave Southern California, returning to the somewhat leveled magic mountain of Europe, for good, in 1952. There had been fifteen years in America. He had lived here. But he didn’t really live here.

  Years later, when I had become a writer, when I knew many other writers, I would learn to be more tolerant of the gap between the person and the work. Yet even now the encounter still feels illicit, improper. In my experience deep memory is, more often than not, the memory of embarrassment.

  I still feel the exhilaration, the gratitude for having been liberated from childhood’s asphyxiations. Admirations set me free. And embarrassment, which is the price of acutely experienced admiration. Then I felt like an adult, forced to live in the body of a child. Since, I feel like a child, privileged to live in the body of an adult. The zealot of seriousness in me, because it was already full-grown in the child, continues to think of reality as yet-to-be. Still sees a big space ahead, a far horizon. Is this the real world? I still ask myself that, forty years later … as small children ask repeatedly, in the course of a long, tiring journey, “Are we there yet?” Childhood’s sense of plenitude was denied me. In compensation, there remains, always, the horizon of plenitude, to which I am borne forward by the delights of admiration.

  I never told anyone of the meeting. Over the years I have kept it a secret, as if it were something shameful. As if it happened between two other people, two phantoms, two provisional beings on their way elsewhere: an embarrassed, fervid, literature-intoxicated child and a god in exile who lived in a house in Pacific Palisades.

  I

  I am going to China.

  I will walk across the Luhu Bridge spanning the Sham Chun River between Hong Kong and China.

  After having been in China for a while, I will walk across the Luhu Bridge spanning the Sham Chun River between China and Hong Kong.

  Five variables:

  Luhu Bridge

  Sham Chun River

  Hong Kong

  China

  peaked cloth caps

  Consider other possible permutations.

  I have never been to China.

  I have always wanted to go to China. Always.

  II

  Will this trip appease a longing?


  Q. [stalling for time] The longing to go to China, you mean?

  A. Any longing.

  Yes.

  Archaeology of longings.

  But it’s my whole life!

  Don’t panic. “Confession is nothing, knowledge is everything.” That’s a quote but I’m not going to tell who said it.

  Hints:

  —a writer

  —somebody wise

  —an Austrian (i.e., a Viennese Jew)

  —a refugee

  —he died in America in 1951

  Confession is me, knowledge is everybody.

  Archaeology of conceptions.

  Am I permitted a pun?

  III

  The conception of this trip is very old.

  First conceived when? As far back as I can remember.

  —Investigate possibility that I was conceived in China though born in New York and brought up elsewhere (America).

  —write M.

  —telephone?

  Prenatal relation to China: certain foods, perhaps. But I don’t remember M. saying she actually liked Chinese food.

  —Didn’t she say that at the general’s banquet she spit the whole of the hundred-year-old egg into her napkin?

  Something filtering through the bloody membranes, anyway.

  Myrna Loy China, Turandot China. Beautiful, millionaire Soong sisters from Wellesley and Wesleyan & their husbands. A landscape of jade, teak, bamboo, fried dog.

  Missionaries, foreign military advisers. Fur traders in the Gobi Desert, among them my young father.

  Chinese forms placed about the first living room I remember (we moved away when I was six): plump ivory and rose-quartz elephants on parade, narrow rice-paper scrolls of black calligraphy in gilded wood frames, Buddha the Glutton immobilized under an ample lampshade of taut pink silk. Compassionate Buddha, slim, in white porcelain.

  —Historians of Chinese art distinguish between porcelain and proto-porcelain.