"The sad thing about Thomas Mann is that he really believed that he did not take himself seriously."

{Photo by Flickr user Libär of the Thomas-Mann-Haus in Lübeck. Used under a Creative Commons license.}

On the heels of a discussion with a friend over the weekend about the fact that, despite my love of Thomas Mann's other novels, I've never been able to scale the heights of The Magic Mountain, Maud Newton wrote about her recent decision to take up the novel again. She--and A. S. Byatt's introduction to the Modern Library edition, from which Maud quotes--just may have convinced me to finally give it another try.

Thinking about Mann sent me back to Elizabeth Hardwick's essay about him at his centenary, collected in Bartleby in Manhattan (1983). It's a perceptive essay, fundamentally admiring but not failing to note Mann's faults. The whole essay is worth seeking out, but its high point is this bit of potent analysis:

Mann has the rare gift of creating characters out of ideas, prejudices and cultural affectations. . . . Mann's artists and thinkers are marked by a sense of separateness, but they are also attacked from time to time by the rash of envy. Their great loneliness is a calling, and in solitude they honor that part of themselves Goethe called his "sacred earnestness." Nevertheless the exalted person will be brought down to envy the easy and unreflecting sexuality of the "normal." Mann's characters are cut off from love by illness, by a chastity that is either circumstantial or temperamental, by an overwhelming sublimation.

I also pulled down from my shelf Javier Marias's wonderful little volume of writers' lives, Written Lives, for I remembered that Marias loathed Mann as a person and a writer--and when Marias loathes someone, his vitriol is so pointed and unstinting that it becomes a thing of dark beauty. Take, for example, the opening sentence of his account of Yukio Mishima's life:

The death of Yukio Mishima was so spectacular that it has almost succeeded in obliterating the many other stupid things he did in his life, as if his previous non-stop exhibitionism had been merely a way of getting people's attention of the culminating moment, doubtless the only one that really interested him.

Of Mann he writes,

Any writer who leaves behind him sealed envelopes not to be opened until long after his death is clearly convinced of his own immense importance, as tends to be confirmed when, after all that patient waiting, the wretched, disappointing envelopes are finally opened. In the case of Mann and his diaries, what strikes one most is that he obviously felt that absolutely everything that happened to him was worthy of being recorded. . . . They give the impression that Mann was thinking ahead to a studious future which would exclaim after each entry: "Good heavens, so that was the day when the Great Man wrote such and such a page of The Holy Sinner and then, the following night, read some verses by Heine, that is so revealing!" It is perhaps harder to foresee the astonishing, revelatory impact of the prolonged reports on how his stomach is doing.

And Marias is just getting warmed up. Later, he writes,

The sad thing about Thomas Mann is that he really believed that he did not take himself seriously, when what leaps out at you, from novels, essays, letters and diaries alike, is his utter belief in his own immortality. One one occasion, in order to play down the merits of his novella Death in Venice, which an American was praising to the skies, all he could think of to bring his admirer down to earth was this: "After all, relatively speaking, I was still a beginner. A beginner of genius but still a beginner." . . . Speaking to an old school friend about death, he commented, "As immortalized by me in The Magic Mountain."

Still, much as I love gossipy biography, we read the work and not the man--thank god for Anna Karenina that such is the case!--so I've pulled The Magic Mountain off my shelf, and I'm considering attempting another ascent.

{Though the temptation remains simply to re-read Doctor Faustus instead. Of it, Hardwick writes, aptly:

It is very slow, hard, and yet it has the power to move the feelings in the odd way of something dense, muddy, thick and grandly real. It is very European, one of those moments of the fabulous, written one imagines in a heavy overcoat, amidst the cold stone and marble of the great libraries.

When I read it in my early twenties, over the course of mere days while living in a grotty house in London, it gave me chills.}

If only I'da known!

One of the advantages the internets have over print media is the ease with which they allow for the addition of postscripts after publication--which is good, because one of the consequences of spending a lot of time reading and a lot of time writing about that reading is that the two don't always match up just right: frequently I learn something new and interesting about a topic long after I've hit the Publish Post button.

But whereas print media would leave me with little recourse, with a blog all I have to do is spend a few minutes typing and tagging my new discoveries, and presto!--my account, however incomplete or questionable it may remain, is instantly more rich and expansive.

Here, for example, are three things I came across today alone that I wish I'd known a while back.

1 If, last night when I was writing about Steven Millhauser, I had already begun reading Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities (1930), I would have used this passage to help explain Millhauser's work:

To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames. This principle, by which the old professor had always lived, is simply a requisite of the sense of reality. But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility.

Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not. The consequence of so creative a disposition can be remarkable, and may, regrettably, often make what people admire seem wrong, and what is taboo permissible, or, also, make both a matter of indifference. Such possibilists are said to inhabit a more delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood. Children who show this tendency are dealt with firmly and warned that such persons are cranks, dreamers, weaklings, know-it-alls, or troublemakers.

Not, mind you, that I think Musil and Millhauser are necessarily all that congenial--I imagine Musil would casually dismiss Millhauser as far too playful--but the passage nevertheless serves well as a description of Millhauser's method.

2 If, two weeks ago when I was writing about the joy of reading collections of letters, I had remembered this scene from Ivy Compton-Burnett's Manservant and Maidservant (1937), I would have surely have used it to open my post:

"People do like to read letters," said Marcus, "especially those that are written to someone else."

"They do that sometimes when they are not supposed to," said Tamasin. "They must like it very much."

3 Finally, if, when I wrote about Ring Lardner back in the fall, I had already read Elizabeth Hardwick's brief essay about him, I would have drawn on it for this:

Out of a daily struggle to make a living by literary work of various kinds, Lardner produced many short stories and some longer works of great originality. These stories were also immensely popular and nothing touches us more than this rare happening. In a country like ours where there will necessarily be so much journalism, so much support of the popular, the successful, we are complacently grateful when we find the genuine among the acceptable.

And I probably wouldn't have been able to resist including this as well:

Vanity, greed, and cruel humor are the themes of Lardner's stories. The lack of self-knowledge is made up for by a dizzy readiness with cheap alibis. No group or class seems better than another; there is a democracy of cheapness and shallowness. Lies are at the core of nearly every character he produces for us. The only fear is being caught out, exposed to the truth. love cannot exist because the moment it runs into trouble the people lie about their former feelings. Because of the habit of lying, it is a world without common sense. The tortured characters are not always victims. They may be ruined and made fun of, but they have the last word. They bite the leg that kicks them.

And what, tomorrow, will I wish I had known today? Well, that's one of the reasons we keep reading, isn't it?