146
PARTISAN REVIEW
most representative modernist figure, and it is precisely his almost
obsessive concern with the nature of the artist that has been taken to
be characteristic of modernism. Like many of his contemporaries,
but even more programmatically, Mann played with and agonized
over the fate of the chosen man. There seems to be little doubt that
the age of modernism is over, though some of its currents still persist
in ways that have still to be adequately identified and defined.
In
any case, writing today has in the main dissolved the nineteenth–
century idea of the problematic existence and status of the artist–
the elite personality-into the more prosaic conventions of common
experience . But at the center of the modernist mind was the dialogue
as well as the conflict between the underground of art and the pre–
vailing mores of society. For Mann, the complexIties and inversions
of this idea took many forms.
One of the accomplishments of Winston's sketch of Mann's
early life is the interweaving of Mann's major themes with the
events and the personal relations that helped form his thinking. We
see his early awareness of himself as both a person apart and one
grasping for the common elements of experience , as one torn
between the pull of the forbidden, represented by his dark, artistic
mother, and the burgher discipline of his Nordic father. This tension
was also illustrated throughout Mann's life in his attraction to and
repulsion by his brother Heinrich. Winston tracks down in Mann's
dealings with his family and his youthful friends those mixed feelings
about duty and pleasure that were elaborated into the polarities
between the moral and the esthetic spheres of thinking and acting.
And Winston does this in a low-keyed manner that lifts the story of
Mann's life above a simple narrative and at the same time lowers the
pitch of the sweeping observations about the human condition in
Mann's writing.
For example, Winston traces some of the influences that came
together in
Tonio Krueger,
a story in which many of Mann's major
themes are made explicit. Nietzsche, Wagner, German estheticism,
middle-class restraint, the identification of art with Southern dark–
ness and sensuality and of Northern lightness with the Protestant
ethic-all these are merged with his boyhood friendships in the crea–
tion of the blond, blue-eyed symbols of health and stability, and the
dark adventurers who live on the edge of art and disease. Tonio is a
fictional surrogate for Mann himself, in his wavering between the
poles in Mann's extreme formulation of the modernist creed . Simi-
