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lady, Winston points out how the thematics of life and art are con–
nected adroitly in
Doctor Faustus
and
Death in 'Uinice.
In discussing
Death in 'Uinice,
Winston also goes into the homosexual element , and
though he is quite open in his treatment of Mann's erotic tendencies
and attractions, of what Mann himself referred to as his "sexual
inversion ," he does not play it up either for its own shock interest or
as a clue to Mann ' s entire being.
There are many other things in the biography that round out
our picture of Mann, such as Mann ' s philo-Semitism, tempered
somewhat by his very Germanic sense of himself, his concern with
his health, his worldly awareness of his career and the reception of
his work by reviewers and readers. Mann was not known for his
modesty, and , after the success of
Buddenbrooks,
he said that this was
the first time that a German book entered the arena of European
literature . Apparently, he thought Goethe was more provincial . We
are also given a strong sense of how much Mann was part of the
intellectual traditions and the community of his time . Among the
figures with whom he had some contact were Wedekind, George,
Wasserman , Rilke , Freud , Hesse, Mahler, Bruno Walter. He was
also strongly influenced by Schopenhauer, Heine , Wagner, among
others. And, of course, he knew most of the editors and reviewers for
the leading journals.
One of the virtues of Winston's unrhetorical style is that it
deflates somewhat the ponderous image of Mann that we have
inherited.
It
almost makes him appear to be like any other writer,
which is not easy, considering the myths in which he has been
encrusted. Mann might have represented an extreme case of infla–
tion of an author's image , but there is also an inflationary tendency
today, rooted in our idea of art , that transforms writers into classics,
to be studied, embalmed, textually exhumed. Even if Mann does
not lend himself to such embalmment, it probably would have been
accomplished by the culture of the museum, the schools, and aca–
demic criticism, all of which work to separate the
study
of literature
from the
experience
of literature, by taking it out of its mundane ori–
gins, placing it in a pantheon , and making it part of a realm of
abstract, timeless thought. We are supposed to forget that
literature
was originally
writing,
that is , that it was created by writers strug–
gling over each work, alternately sure and unsure how good it is,
trying new subjects and styles, having to make it with every new
book . However important the ultimate product may be, it is good to
