28
PARTISAN REVIEW
in a sterile equilibrium, and which achieves its only possible termina–
tion in death.
As
an artist the young Mann is able to transcend the
last of these conclusions through the act of the imagination by which
he makes the separate processes of the conflict his material and their
interplay his form. Art is still able to rise above death. It is able to
rise above death, with which it is nevertheless inextricably bound up,
through the intellect that has been able to perceive such relationships
in the first place. Through the intellect the artist can still enjoy that
sensation of an active and everchanging reality that rises from the rec–
ognition of the anomaly of his own role. Such a motive-power is
summed up in the complaint of Tonio Kroger a few years later, "I
stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in
consequence. You artists call me a
bourgeois,
and the
bourgeois
try to
arrest me."
For there must be an inescapable ambiguity in a writer who will
neither go the whole road to the graveyard of the artist
pur sang
nor treat the bourgeois with the proper degree of respect. Tonio
Kroger is a little Hanno who has enough conviction of the paradox
of his existence to make it also a sufficient reason. With all that long–
ing for "the bliss of the commonplace" that had characterized the first
desperate examples of
th~
type, he is able to carry on through the
sheer mOlllentum of the conflict. Here again "the blond and the blue–
eyed" are on the side of the bourgeois, the pathetic and grotesque
on the side of the artist, but the activity of intellect necessary to play
the one against the other is able to generate a sufficient self-perpetu–
ating warmth. And is there not also the hope of some far-off resolu–
tion in the letter which Tonio writes to his authentically Bohemian
friend, especially in the reference to "those shadows of human figures
who beckon me to weave spells to redeem them: tragic and laughable
figures, and some that are both together?" The desire to redeem is one
with the desire to love, and in the possibility of love lies Tonio's own
sole promise of redemption.
Of love there is indeed very little in
Tristan,
the other important
story of the same period, in which Mann appears to have relieved
himself once and for all of the contempt and disgust that he had come
to feel toward the unregenerate artist-type. Hysteria takes the place
of resolution. The ridicule heaped on the vain, pompous and altoge–
ther egoistic novelist-hero, who has taken up residence in a sanitarium
for the sake of its aesthetic atmosphere, is as unequivocal as the
mirthful squeals with which the bourgeois infant in the perambulator
greets the sight of his face. But in
Death in Vence,
published in 1911,
which deals with a quite different specimen of the artist-type, Mann
makes his first important step toward a complete resolution of his
problem.
