Books
THE SUFFERINGS AND GREATNESS OF SELF-LOVE
\\soMETIMES I HAVE days," Tonio Kroger says, and Mann has quoted
the words of himself, "when I would rather state things in gen–
eral terms than go on telling stories." It is this inner compulsion to
escape from fable to statement that motivates these essays.* They are
not essays in literary criticism, though most of them deal with creative
writers; in general, they regard the writer as the Hero, the worK of
art as an event, biographical or historical, both as occasions for formu–
lating views that have threatened the structure, music, or even the
fate of one of Mann's creative works. The novels, stories, and essays
(the "political" ones in
Order of the Day
as well) cohere in an ultimate
composition of which they are the mere forms, the artist's composition
of himself.
Goethe is for Mann the exemplar of the self-composed life and there
is not one of these essays in which his name is not invoked, for the
subject,
as well as the end, of these pieces is that process by which the
writer (the compound of
Dichter
and
Schriftsteller
for which German
has no word) creates out of himself the Man-God.
N obility of the Spirit,
Mann calls this collection in the German
edition,
Sixteen Essays on Humanity,
but it is easy to misunderstand
what he means by "humanity." It would be more illuminating to call
these
Sixteen Essays on Self-love.
The romance between a man and
himself, born with the Renaissance and culminating in idolatrous excess
in the nineteenth century, seems, perhaps, a little alien to us. Self–
distrust, if not humility, is the order of our day; our view of ourselves
is bathetic: "I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.... " But
for Mann there is a pathos of self-adulation; "darling" is his chosen
epithet for himself, and, in the end, we are charmed despite ourselves
by the irony ·and variety, the tenderness of his self-regard. All the world
loves a lover.
But we must pass first the style, often turgid, self-indulgent, de–
manding. We must allow Mann to repeat shamelessly his favorite anec–
dotes, to fondle every insight to weariness, to tell us he likes grapefruit,
dislikes tomato juice. In return, we will get a sort of sentimental history
of the nineteenth century; the Beatrice and Dante of the period just past
turns out to be not Faust and Margaret, not Tristan and Isolde–
but the Artist and Himself, Mann and Mann, or to use his own modest
screen, Mann and Goethe.
*EssAYs OF THREE DECADEs.
By
Thomas Mann . Knopf.
$4.00.
