Specific Gravity

By Melvin Maddocks

THOMAS MANN: THE MAKING OF AN ARTIST, 1875-1911 by Richard Winston Knopf; 325 pages; $17.95

He had the hubris to advance a world view, to rewrite the Bible in his Joseph novels, to devise the great metaphor of Europe as a sanatorium full of the walking wounded in The Magic Mountain. Was Thomas Mann ever unsure of himself, writing his quota of pages day after day in the comfort of a Germany he was later to renounce for exile in California? Was he ever young?

The answer seems to be yes--just barely--on the basis of the rich evidence assembled by Richard Winston, editor of Letters of Thomas Mann and a distinguished translator, who died at 62 in 1979 after reaching only the 36th year in Mann's life.

The young writer isolated here was hardly a flaming rebel. His favorite form of truancy as a boy was listening to his half-Brazilian mother play the piano and sing Brahms. Papa was a senator of the Baltic seaport town of Luebeck and a prosperous grain merchant: the perfect bourgeois figure for a young artist to revolt against.

By the time he was 23, Mann had already struck his friends as "grave." The brief period he spent as editorial assistant on the satirical magazine Simplicissimus only seemed to increase his specific gravity. The summers he spent in Italy seemed to make him even more German. To go south in a Mann story became a symbol for going to the devil.

Once he began writing in earnest, Mann managed his career as though it were the family business. Friends about to review his first novel, Buddenbrooks, a story of materialistic decline and youthful awareness, received detailed instructions from the author, who was 26. Comparisons to Dickens and the "great Russians" were recommended. About himself, the noted ironist was seldom ironical.

He was also seldom wrong; within two decades he was to be on the shelves with Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Even so, he knew at the start that his sense of invention could not equal his powers of observation. As Winston notes, "A symbolic fiction must be provided with the most realistic of foundations. This was an article of faith with Mann from the outset of his career." And where was he to find those foundations? In the lives of his colleagues and contemporaries, no matter how vulnerable they were; art was everything. Aschenbach, the enfeebled aesthete of Death in Venice (1913), for example, was modeled after Gustav Mahler, who was dying at the time. "Nothing is invented in [the story]," Mann boasted,as if the confession added to his stature as an artist.

It is fitting that this biographical fragment ends with Death in Venice. In that work Mann learned to treat death, madness, self-destruction at the level of genius. Yet when the artist stood up from his desk to talk about his work, he could barely survive his own respectability. For, as The Making of an Artist subtly reveals, Mann may have loved his Latin mother, but he became his Teutonic father. Winston might have concluded the life with out edging any closer to the man. At 36, Mann was complete. --By Melvin Maddocks

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