HEml UIU3AHN DEJAURECUI
95
symbolism of his life. He assured his brother that his joy was too much
"akin to experience, nloycment and discovery, too little akin to peace and
too closely to suffering" for it ever to become "a lasting danger" to his art.
It certainly couldn't; the joy that was truly capable of diverting him fi-om
the charted course was not
to
be had "from woman." And so it was that
his desire to have a certain kind of life, to create in a certain way, drove him
to enter into a selfish and calculated marriage. Katja Pringsheim was an
attractive, educated young woman. That she was wealthy didn't hurt his
plans . It seems that she consented wholeheartedly to her role behind the
scenes and that it gave her a sense of fulfillment. Her grandmother, the
Berlin women's rights activist Hedwig [)ohm, was scarcely justified in her
disappointment over the early marriage of the promising mathematics stu–
dent. As a mathematician's assistant, her granddaughter could have made a
worse name for herself than that of Katja Mann, or rather "Frau Thomas
Mann," as she sometimes proudly called herself. Thomas Mann's daughter
repons that the author displayed deep emotion-a depth of emotion
where he became unsure of his voice-only two or three times at private
appearances: once during a re;lding of
DOktor Faustus,
and once while giv–
ing a speech on the occasion of his wife's seventieth birthday.
With supreme confidence Thomas Mann erected the scaffolding onto
which, as his diary clearly shows, the distressing "experiences of the sens–
es" attached, even into his old age. He was a true successor to Goethe, save
that the agents of distress in his case were always young men. At seventy–
seven he asked himself in dismay if he still had his power to create, now
that love had deserted him; he was convinced that only that which was
"taught by Eros" could shine in art. In
Ocat"
ill VCllicc
he describes how he
would have
f~lred
had he abandoned the rigid guiding principle of his
life- the deeply bourgeois doctrine of renun ciation . One detects the
strains of Platonism: "And so, in fact , it is generally neither Eros nor any
of love's activities which are noble and worthy of praise but rather that
thing which knows how to loyc nobly." And how does one love "nobly"?
Even the twenty-one year-old knows the answer: "I am tormented by my
sexuality... we must separate love from the lower abdomen." Aschenbach,
the protagonist in
01'111"
ill 11-lIicc,
attempts to separate them as he takes up
the role of Socrates and begins to wax philosophic. And it is true that giv–
ing love a soul and depth Inight work-for a while. Aschenba ch is able to
manage it for "a page and a half of choice prose" before the whole enter–
prise begins to collapse. 13ut Thomas Mann was 1110re practical than
Aschenbach with regard
to
his work and was, as he faithfully recorded, in
the habit of sorting out 111attcrs- lower abdominal matters-on his own.
He did thi s, incidelltally, wi thollt any of that " cOIlSciousness of sin" which
his son Kbus had f()Ulld so irritating in his father.
