Comment
Thomas Mann
The splendid new biography of Thomas Mann by
Ronald Hayman is illuminating and exhaustive, perhaps too exhaustive
and detailed, but this is the current mode in biography. The work is es–
pecially revealing since Mann's diaries have just been opened up, and
there is fresh material about his homosexuality that was known but only
slightly. Now it is revealed to have been a powerful impulse - one that
haunted Mann all his life and affected his marriage. As a result of this
new information, it becomes quite clear that Mann's respectability,
passion for privacy, and the demeanor of a disciplined life were his means
of controlling and concealing his secret urges.
The diaries also indicate that Mann had an enormous yearning for
fame - perhaps not unusual among writers. But there is, too, some
indication that he instructed reviewers to write more favorably about
him and his work, something more common among lesser talents.
In addition, the biography provides the material for relating the
themes and compulsions of Mann's life to those of much of his fiction .
His three masterpieces,
The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice,
and
Tonio
Kroger,
particularly display the main ideas that were both personal to
Mann and at the same time were embedded in the intellectual
atmosphere of the period. Many of these beliefs and attitudes were inher–
ited by Mann especially from Nietzsche. But they also were developed in
Mann's family history. Thus his polarities between north and south, ;ea–
son and passion, light and dark, health and disease, bourgeois and artistic,
come from his family as well as from ideas that were in the air. In addi–
tion, his association of love with death, underground passion with ex–
traordinary persons, came from his personal experiences as well as the
aura of decadence in contemporary thought. And these are the themes
that pervade much of Mann's fiction and motivate his characters. They
provide the thematic structure of
Death in Venice
and are suffused
throughout
The Magic Mountain.
This masterly novel is built on the di–
vide between ordinary life down below and the extraordinary world of
death, disease, and forbidden love, and the life of the mind in the world
above. Similarly, in
Joseph and His Brothers,
the experience of the unusual
person, the outsider, is thrust back into the biblical era.
What is most intriguing is the fusion of all these concepts in the
imagination of a supreme talent. Thus the tensions of homosexuality are
identified with sickness, death, Mediterranean_indulgence, and superior
VlSlon.
