Royal Highness - Thomas Mann

 Royal Highness was written in 1909.  The royal in question is Prince Klaus Heinrich, second son of the Grand Duke of an unnamed grand duchy somewhere in central Germany.   Klaus Heinrich is born with the exact same disability (an underdeveloped left hand) as Wilhelm II, Kaiser Bill, who had been emperor of Germany for twenty years when Mann wrote this romantic comedy.

Klaus Heinrich is very much not Kaiser Bill.  Klaus Heinrich is one of the good guys, trained from birth to reflect well on his autocratic and aloof father and sickly older brother.  So Klaus Heinrich learns to hide his hand and become loved by the people.  He does a good job.  He is only twenty or so when his father dies and his brother Albrecht is recalled from the healthier south to succeed.  By this time the grand duchy is heavily in debt and the rural population is quietly starving.

Duke Albrecht is too highly bred to do anything about such things.  His sister Ditlinde has already married an aristocratic princeling with a talent for modern business, so it falls to Klaus Heinrich to try and fumble his amiable way to a solution.

An American millionaire of German ancestry visits the city to partake of its spa waters.  He likes the place and buys one of the many redundant royal palaces.  He has an only daughter, Imma, who is of mixed heritage (as was Mann through his mother), who is intellectual, sarcastic, and beautiful.  She will inherit all her father's riches.  Klaus Heinrich is genuinely in love with her and all too willing to do his obvious regal duty.  But before he can win Imma's heart, he desperately needs to do something about measuring up to her mind.

Royal Highness is what I didn't entirely expect from Thomas Mann - a joy.  The themes of liberating modernity clashing with stifling tradition are common to the works of his I have previously read (Death in Venice and The Holy Sinner, both reviewed on this blog) but here everything is enlightened by eccentric and oddly charming characters.  The court master of ceremonies with his brown toupee, Klaus Heinrich's tutor and friend Raoul Uberbein who commits suicide the day Klaus Heinrich becomes engaged, and Imma's batty companion Countess Lowenjoul who thinks prostitutes are conspiring against her.

The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles - Giorgio Bassani

 Our unnamed narrator is a nineteen/twenty year-old student who lives in Ferrara and commutes to Bologna with a group of fellow students.  The gold-rimmed spectacles belong to Dr Athos Fadigati, a popular ENT specialist with a clinic in Ferrara.  He too is taking a course at Bologna, mainly for something to do on his day off, and gradually becomes involved with the much-younger students, many of whom have passed through his clinic.

The 'star' of the group is the promising young boxer Eraldo Deliliers, who seems to hold Dr Fadigati in the utmost contempt.  But, come the holidays, where the middle-class Farrarese decamp en masse to Riccione on the Adriatic coast, Fadigati and Deliliers turn up together, openly a couple.   Everyone is outraged, but too polite to say anything.  Meanwhile, this is 1937 and our narrator and his family have other problems to contend with.  Fascist Italy is debating whether to implement a Nazi-style race law, and our lead family is Jewish, albeit Papa has been a Fascist from the early days and nobody seems to be actually practicing their faith.  Our narrator, by the way, is an atheist.

It's only a hundred-page novella, on the face of it a take on Death in Venice, but in fact The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles is so much more.  Bassani wrote autobiographical fiction, all of which combines into what became known as The Novel of Ferrara.  The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles is the second book; the first is a collection of five shorter stories.  Thus he spends as long creating the detail of the town as he does the creation of his characters.  They are one - and yet our hero and Dr Fadigati are outsiders, by race in one case, by sexuality in the other.  Our hero and Fadigati are true friends, supportive of one another.  In an ideal world they belong together.  A lesser novelist might have tried to arrange it thus.  Not Bassani.  He tells it how it was.

A twentieth century classic.  Magnificent.

The Holy Sinner - Thomas Mann

 It's a long way from Death in Venice to The Holy Sinner, nearly forty years in fact, so you'd expect them to be different.  They are very different.  There are similarities, of course, and contrasts.  Instead of suppressed homosexual paedophilia, here we have fraternal incest in no way suppressed.  Instead of extreme contemporary realism, here we have a magical medieval world in which the bells of Rome ring out without human agency and a penitent endures seventeen years chained to a rock in the middle of a lake by turning himself into a hairy hedgehog.  Magical realism twenty years before its time, perhaps.

Mann took his story from the 12th century Minnesinger Hartmann von Aue.  The twins Wiligis and Sibylla, only children of Duke Grimald of Flanders, are brought up together to the extent that they share sleeping quarters.  After inheriting the dukedom, Wiligis crosses the bedroom and has sex with his sister.  She becomes pregnant.  Wiligis, not essentially a bad man and still very young, immediately heads off on crusade, leaving Sibylla to govern in his place.  She secludes herself in the fortress of the wise knight Eisengrein.  She gives birth to a beautiful healthy son but can take no joy in it because news arrives of Wiligis's death.  Sibylla is beyond distraught and submits to Eisengrein's advice.  Leave the child's fate to God.  The baby is sealed in a barrel and cast into the North Sea along with a tablet explaining that he is a child of sin but his parents are noble; if he is found, raise him accordingly; there is money in the barrel with which to do so.

Poor fishermen find the barrel and take it back to their base on the island of St Dunstan.  Abbot Gregory opens the barrel and finds the child.  He entrusts him to one of the fishermen whose wife has just given birth.  He gives the child his own name.  Ultimately the child is raised as a novice monk - until he discovers the secret of his birth.  At seventeen he sets off as a knight errant with the aim of finding his parents.  Instead he marries Sibylla, becomes Duke of Flanders de jure uxoris and father's two daughters by her.

Then he finds out the truth a second time.  He immediately renounces his dukedom and becomes a beggar, ending up on the rock.  The Lamb of God (literally) tells wise men in Rome that their next pope is tethered to a rock in a lake in the north - it is their God-given mission to go and find him.  Thus Gregory the child of sin becomes a very good pope.  He is reunited with Sibylla whom he prudently decides to refer to as his sister.

It is actually very entertaining.  Mann writes in a cod medieval style using the authorial voice of the Irish monk Cormac, who is visiting the monastery of St Gall (where so many ancient manuscripts were later found), who provides us with much commentary.  I raced through The Holy Sinner, which is absolutely my cup of tea.  I'm no Mann scholar - indeed, I had never heard of The Holy Sinner - and the only novel by him I had previously read was the aforementioned Death in Venice (reviewed on this blog).  That didn't inspire me to discover more.  The Holy Sinner definitely has.

Death in Venice - Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann is one of those literary greats I have often wondered about but never actually read, I bought this novella when it came out, as a film tie-in, in 1971. It has waited, unread, on my shelves ever since. I've never even bothered to see to the Visconti movie, or the Britten opera.

Well, now I've read it. It dates from 1912, more or less the middle of Mann's life. He was too young to be the hero Gustave von Aschenbach, and all bar one of his major works were yet to be written, Buddenbrooks (1902) being the single exception. Nevertheless, in terms of sexuality, Aschenbach is an extreme version of the author. Mann's bisexuality only became known when his diaries were published long after his death. He married and had several children. Aschenbach is alone, having sacrificed all semblance of a private life for his highbrow literary art.

One evening in Munich, he is overwhelmed by the need to break his rigid routine and take a holiday. He begins in Trieste, which doesn't suit, and ends up in Venice. Staying in the same hotel is a Polish family - a mother, presumably widowed, several straitlaced daughters and young Tadzio, a pubescent boy of extraordinary beauty. Aschenbach is entranced. He observes the boy from a distance, interest becomes an obsession, obsession becomes infatuation.

And at that moment of self-recognition, cholera breaks out in Venice. Aschenbach knows he should leave but cannot tear himself away from the daily sight of Tadzio in his sailor suit. He wonders if Tadzio is a sickly child who will not live to be an adult. He allows the hotel barber to dye his hair and pluck his eyebrows and rouge his cheeks to try and mask the vast difference in age - but Aschenbach, of course, is the one who is sick, who cannot accept that the boy's beauty will one day coarsen and fade.

Reading the novella today, you have to wonder to what extent this is paedophilia. In 1971 we would never would have. Hard as it is to believe today, in the age of free love we never countenanced such transgression. How then did Mann view his protagonist in 1912? He is well aware of the corruption, of course. That is why he chooses Venice, all facade for the tourists, literally plastering over the corruption and decay that hides behind. That is the meaning of the cholera outbreak, which the hoteliers, of course, pretend isn't happening - only a British man working in a German bank tells Aschenbach the truth.

Is it also, I wonder, the reason for the overly-elaborate writing, the various passages of high-minded pontification on the subject of Eros and love. Is he really saying to us that in the ends it's all about sex, and that literature that considers itself above or better than humanity is pointless?