Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man - Thomas Mann

 A disappointment, I'm sorry to say, this final, unfinished work, published in 1954, a few months before Mann's death.   The idea is fair enough - the impoverished son of a failed champagne-maker hauls himself from the lowest level of employment (unpaid lift-boy in a Paris hotel) by virtue of his good looks, educated manners, and total lack of principles.   It purports to be a comic novel and there are parts that reminded me of Royal Highness (reviewed on this blog).   There are genuinely comic moments - the examination for military service which Felix must at all costs fail - but the writing has the common failing of new and relatively new comic writers.   It is hugely, disastrously overwritten, as if Mann is hoping that endless wordplay equates somehow to humour.   On the plus side there is an excellent sex scene in Paris (something else Mann was still experimenting with as he closed in on turning eighty) and the final twist in what we must remember was only meant to be part one of the Krull confessions, is a good one.

Mephisto - Klaus Mann

 Superb - unbelievably good, without doubt the best book I have read all year.   Mephisto is a psychological study of how so many of us come to terms with the evil around us.   Mann doubles down on the theme of self-delusion because his protagonist is an actor.  Very cleverly, the actor makes his name with his portrayal of Mephistophiles, the Devil's agent in Goethe's Faust (which cunningly also references the author's father's take on the classic theme) but has to face ultimate failure with his inability to cope with the complexity of Hamlet.

What really drives the narrative, though, is the fact that the real Mephisto was Mann's former brother-in-law, the second rate actor and Nazi favourite Gustaf Grundgens.   Albeit published in exile in Amsterdam in 1936 and banned in Germany until the 1980s, there can have been little doubt at the time who the original was.   'Hendrik Hofgen' isn't much of a disguise, especially given the pretentious alteration of the first name - the 'd' added to Henrik, the 'f' for the common 'v' of Gustav.   Mann is much kinder with the fictional version of his adored sister Erika.   Both of Erika's marriages were farcical - she was lesbian, and after Grundgens she married the extremely gay W H Auden.   Klaus Mann, of course, was gay, and when Erika and Gustaf got engaged, he went through a similar farce with Erika's lover Pamela Wedekind.   This was the avant garde life in Weimar Germany.   Similarly, in the novel, this is the sort of life Hendrik Hofgen enjoys in the Twenties - a Communist who wants to start a revolutionary theatre whilst tap-dancing for his whip-weilding black paramour.

A clever touch is that the key Nazis are not given names.   Hofgen's protector (Goering) is simply the Prime Minister or the fat giant, Goebels the limping dwarf, Hotler the Fuhrer or the Dictator.   The physical description of the latter, in his one and only encounter with Hofgen, would be sufficient to get Mephisto banned in most rightwing countries in 1936.   Did Mann perhaps feel that these monsters would have been forgotten by, say, the end of the century, or did he realise that they were monsters for all time?

A Twentieth Century classic which should be much better known than it is.   Even from major online booksellers I had to have two goes at getting a decent copy.   Finally a word for the translator, Robin Smyth.   That word, again, is superb.   I cannot recall reading a translation, particularly from the German, when nothing ever seems to have been lost.

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.

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 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.

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.

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?