Man of Straw - Heinrich Mann

 The tricky thing with satire is drawing it out to fill a decent-sized novel.   Heinrich Mann pulls it off with Man of Straw.   Diederich Hessling is the ultimate New Man of turn-of-the-century provincial Germany, obsessed with the Kaiser, with being a Kaiser in his home, work and personal life.   Mann's first achievement is to make Diederich his hero (so many lesser satirists make the object of their dislike a secondary character).   The second is to humanize him.   We see what made Diederich a New Man: his childhood, sickly and frightened of everything; his awkward time at University in Berlin where he ultimately finds his place with the Neo Teutons whom he imagines will take over Germany; his army service, which he loves but which is cut short by ill-health.

In practice it is only Diederich who makes a success of Neo Teutonism.   Other members he encounters in later life are failures, oddballs.   Diedrich returns to Netzig to take over his father's paper factory.   He does the round of the great and good of the town.   Among them is his hero, Herr Buck. a man involved in everything and universally admired.   His is the position Diederich aspires to.   But Buck is a social reformer - a liberal by modern standards - and Diederich a royalist ultra-conservative.   His son, Wolfgang, whom Diederich befriended in Berlin, is ever so slightly decadent.

Diederich's progress is neither easy nor straightfroward.   He calls out Old Buck's son-in-law, Lauer, for derogatory comments about the Kaiser.   This is a criminal offence.   Diederich is the chief witness for the prosecution.   Wolfgang Buck leads the defence.   Diederich panics and tries to wriggle out of the situation.   But he can't.   Mann shows him writhing in the witness box, struggling to find an answer to Wolfgang's cross examination.   And in the pit of despair he finds a crumb of courage and responds.   To his amazement Lauer is convicted and imprisoned.   Deiderich has won.

The business is losing money.   Diederich in his pomp and ambition has overstretched himself.   He tries to cheat his suppliers and finds an unlikely ally in his machinist, the social democrat union man, Napoleon Fischer.   They become partners in fraud and politics.   Diederich joins the town council.    Fishcher ultimately makes it all the way to the Reichstag.

And alongside all this we have Diederich's personal life.   He has let a girl down in Berlin.   He wins the local hieress Guste from Wolfgang by starting a rumour that they are half-brother and sister, which perhaps they are.   He cheats one of his sisters, Magda, of her inheritance, but protects his other sister, Emma, when she is let down.

There are three tremendous episodes of pure farce in Man of Straw which anchor the theme.   The first, at the end of Chapter One, is in 1892 when Diederich is a student in Berlin and comes across a huge crowd of the unemployed protesting in Unter Den Linden.   The Kaiser comes to face them down.   He does not address them, he certainly doesn't give them the bread and work they demand.   He simply appears, on horseback, with his entourage.   He simply shows himself and the protestors are silenced.   Diederich is one of the cheering throng who run after the imperial retinue.   He finds himself in the park, on a bridle path.   He finds himself facing the Kaiser himself.   Diederich falls into a puddle.   The Kaiser laughs.

On honeymoon with Guste in Switzerland, Diederich spots the Kaiser again.   This time he follows him all the way to Rome where he keeps a sort of personal guard outside the Kaiser's hotel.   And finally, after the unveiling of the statue of the first Kaiser, Wilhelm I, in Netzig - Diederich's personal project, which has cost millions to achieve - turns into a total waterlogged disaster, Diedrich turns up at the Buck house and watches from the corridor outside Old Buck's sickroom as his first, fallen hero, the Kaiser of Netzig, dies.

The best and most challenging novel I have read so far in 2024. 

The Magician - Colm Toibin

 The only Toibin books I had previously read were Brooklyn and The Testament of Mary.  Both were interesting and definitely well written, but they were very short.  The Magician is substantial, almost 450 pages.   It is a novelisation of the life of Thomas Mann, which also includes his children, especially the two eldest, Erika and Klaus.   I am very interested in Thomas Mann, having found my way to him over the last twelve months or so.   I discovered Klaus as recently as last month.

I am therefore the ideal reader for The Magician.   Toibin is also clearly a huge fan and he has read a lot more Mann than I have.  Even so, it is clear that Toibin has chosen to write the novel in the cool, detached style of his hero.  It works brilliantly.  He has also been careful to avoid the trap into which so many novelists fall when writing novels about other novelists.  Mann used autobiographical elements in some but by no means all of his novels.   What he says about such elements in the books is not necessarily his opinion.   Toibin knows this.

Toibin structures the book by place, emphasising his concept of Mann as a lifelong exile.  This is especially effective at the end, when Mann visits Germany from America and ends up living in Switzerland.   The women in Mann's life, from his wife Katia to his three problematic daughters, his Brazilian mother and his two sisters who both commit suicide, are brilliantly evoked, all very different.   He is, I felt, oddly less successful with brother Heinrich and son Klaus, who I would have thought were grist to the mill of any novelist.  Perhaps he thought that because Thomas clearly didn't understand them, neither should the reader of a book about Thomas.   Nevertheless their deaths are touchingly handled.

One of the blurbs on the cover calls The Magician a masterpiece.   I'm not sure it is possible to write a masterpiece novel about another novelist.   Two of Mann's masterpieces, after all, feature composers rather than writers.  That said, Toibin and The Magician come very close.   It is a wonderful achievement, humane, empathetic, deeply considered.

Alexander - Klaus Mann

 Alexander (1929) was Mann's sixth novel which, given he was born in 1906, is a measure of whar a prodigy he was.   On the one hand he didn't exactly have to fight for publishers' attention, being the son of Thomas and the nephew of Heinrich.   On the other, he didn't get on with his father, being gay, a heavy user of drugs, and somewhat on the socialisr side politically.

Only Mephisto (1936) really remains in the literary consciousness, mainly on account of the film.   If Alexander is typical of his other work then this neglect is downright scandalous.   Had I not already looked up his dates I would have thought Alexander the work of much older writer.   Hesse's Siddhartha sprang to mind; Hesse was forty-five when he wrote it.   Alexander has something of the same episodic nature.   The battles are background matters as Mann focuses on the Macedonian prodigy's sexual problems and his inability to establish and keep friendships as his empite grows.   Essentially Mann's Alexander is a superhero in search of a secret identity.   He browses the cultures of the vanquished but only to see if he can fit himself in there.   He takes on the exotic, the freakish.   In every sense he is trying to determine how far he can go.

I was captivated.   This is a beautiful book that should be much better known.   I really like the presentation of this Hesperus edition.   The translation by David Carter seems stylish and fine, but the punctuation is too often disastrous.   Proof-reading required.   On the plus side, the management of notes is spot-on.

Tales From Hollywood - Christopher Hampton

This 1983 play is about the emigre German writers who found refuge from the Nazis in Hollywood: Brecht, for example, but mainly the Mann brothers, Thomas and Heinrich. Heinrich was the elder brother and was famous for his novels before Thomas but who was then eclipsed by his more conservative, deeper thinking sibling. By the time war breaks out both are in Hollywood but only Heinrich is reliant on Hollywood. Thomas tours universities and is tipped for the Nobel prize; Heinrich is spendthrift, bibulous and has a younger, lower-class wife, Nelly.

Our guide to this inversion of the Hollywood Dream is the Hungarian playwright Odon von Horvath, who is himself a dream in this story, given that he was killed by a falling tree in the Champs d'Elysees in 1938. But here he befriends Heinrich, pays reverence to Thomas, and responds a little too readily to Nelly's drunken flirting. The play ends badly for Nelly but not for Horvath, because he is already dead and finally, symbolically, realises it.

Hampton is one of the best writers of plays in English of the later Twentieth Century. In the Eighties it was basically between him and Stoppard, and after 1990 neither of them has written anywhere near enough. Both wear their book-learning as a badge of authority and neither has reflected deeply enough on the human condition, having both been successful from an early age. That does rather show in Tales From Hollywood.

What is it about? Displacement? Thomas Mann was permanently displaced; he wrote the bulk of his work outside Germany. Brecht wrote masterpieces like Galileo in exile and Heinrich's fame had already faded by 1940. Hovath, the child of an empire that had vanished during his lifetime, was a resident of nowhere - literally, in the context of the play. The only real displacement here is Nelly, who caught the roving eye of the man who thought up The Blue Angel and rose above her station. Tales of Hollywood is not about the writers who have no tales to tell about Hollywood, but about Nelly, who came to Hollywood with no dreams left and already out of place.

The famous writers are slightly two-dimensional, apart from our narrator, Hovath. He is a fantastic character and the best actors must yearn to play him: witty, self-deprecating, omniscient, playful, charming. And Nelly... a dream part, surely, for an actress just entering middle age. At the National Theatre in 1983 she was played by Billie Whitelaw. Casting that says it all.