Last Friday most people commemorated the 70th
anniversary of the D-Day invasion of northern France. But it was also the 141st
birthday of German author Thomas Mann.
Like a lot of German intellectuals he spent the war years in
the US; opposition to the Nazi regime and a Jewish wife made this a necessity.
While here he wrote what is considered his magnum opus Doktor Faustus: the Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as
told by a Friend. Usually seen as a description of Germany’s descent into
political madness in an allegorical retelling of the original Faust story, my
slow reading of John Woods more recent translation has made me think that,
while the traditional interpretation is a valid one—it was the one pushed by
Mann himself—there is something else in the novel, something a bit more
personal for the author, and that is his attitude toward writing and the
creative process.
Stylistically this is a dense book, quite unlike Buddenbrooks, the novel which was the
main reason for his getting the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. Long
descriptive passages have replaced the dialog of Buddenbrooks, and the vocabulary is a lot more immense. I can read
passages in the earlier novel in German without too many trips to the
dictionary; not so with the later one—and that’s not including the “Pact Scene”
with its faux 16th century diction. As I said, a dense book.
But as I made my way through the story, I was getting a
feeling that there was something else going on, that the grand allegory of
Germany’s descent into the Hell of the Third Reich wasn’t all of it. A couple
of things triggered this.
(1) The
admission by Mann that the narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, is a parody of himself.
(One parallel: Mann played the violin; Zeitblom plays the somewhat archaic and
obsolete viola d’amour.)
(2) That
to achieve the level of genus that he wants, Leverkühn deliberately sleeps with
a prostitute that he knows has syphilis, and he knows because she told him. I
found this part really annoying because it inverts the usual portrayal of a
Muse as, if not chaste like Dante’s Beatrice, at least not at the opposite end
of the moral scale. This prompted a rude marginalia at p. 166: “Fuck you, Paul Thomas Mann; the creative Muse
is NOT a diseased whore!!”
I’m not about to claim that this is an original
observation—the secondary literature on Mann and Doktor Faustus is pretty immense and I’m not about to even try to
go through it—but if this be a correct observation, then it represents a
peculiar situation for Mann: doing something for a living that he does well but
doesn’t like doing.
There are no doubt other examples, probably a lot, of people
in this situation, in all kinds of jobs. But not many have a Nobel Prize.
(Posted on 11 June for 6 June: besser spät
als nie.)
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