Thomas Mann's World PDF
Preview Thomas Mann's World
THOMAS MANN'S WORLD By JOSEPH GERARD BRENNAN NEW rORK RUSSELL & RUSSELL· INC THOMAS MANN'S WORLD Copyright 1942 COL'UMBIA UNIVERSITY PREss, NEW YORK PUBLISHED, 1964', BY RUSSE!.I. «< RUSSELL, INC. BY ARRANGEMENT WITH COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS L. C. CATALOG CARD NO: 61-13770 PRD1TRD IN THE l"NITED STATES OF AMERICA To ELFORD CAUGHEY whose reading of The Magic Mountain was the beginning of this book ACKNOWLEDGMENTS MANY PEOPLE have helped in the making of this little volume. I am deeply in debt to Horace L. Friess, without whose searching yet kindly criticism this study would have lacked even the imperfect organization it now possesses. James Gutmann and Hugh W. Puckett gave me the benefit of their scholarship. I derived stimulus from Houston Peter son and encouragement from Wm. Pepperell Montague (Dionysus and Prometheus I ). Jeffrey Smith contributed some thoughtful suggestions. Hennann Weigand's study Thomas Mann's Novel 'Der Zauberberg' first suggested to me what a wealth of material for analysis lay in Mann's work. Merrill Moore, M.D., read and criticized the chapter on Disease. Thomas Mann himself graciously read the manuscript and supplemented his kind words with a wel come to his home. Alfred A. Knopf granted pennission for extensive quotation from the English translations of Mann's works. Matilda Berg of the Columbia University Press gave me invaluable editorial guidance. My dear wife Mary helped to make the writing of this book a pleasant task, one which was doubly a labor of love. J.G.B. New Rochelle, N. Y. July, 1942 INTRODUCTION is more than an eminent novelist. He is one THOMAS MANN of those representatives of German culture whose writings reveal a speculative imagination of far-reachirig dimensions that has the quality of synthesis. His genius reachcs out into the realms of music, of morals, of politics; it raises funda mental questions as to the function of art, the nature of humanity. Mann stands at the close of the Gennan cultural tradition which stems from Goethe on the one hand, from Schopenhauer through Nietzsche, Wagner, and Freud on the other. In its quality of synthesis, Mann's artistic direc tion is kin to the creative drive of his predecessors. Trans muting the influences of these Kulturmenschen within an intensely personal art and critique, Mann's achievement not only stands at the end of this cultural tradition, but is also a commentary upon it, a recapitulation, a summing up. But Thomas Mann's work does not merely point back ward into the past. He himself counts it· most significant that all his predecessors, from Goethe to Freud, had an eye toward the future. In Mann's stem critical evaluation of the tradition to which he belongs, in his effort to bridge the gap between the problems of the nineteenth and twentieth cen turies, in his own passionate hope for the futurc, there is revealed that forward nisus so often found in a creative genius of the first rank. It is not the purpose of this study to abstract from Mann's writings a systematic aesthetic, although judgments con cerning the nature and function of art are to be found in x INTRODUCTION his works, nor a systematic metaphysic, although his books contain philosophic implications. In Death in Venice, Mann asks, "Who shall unriddle the problem of the artist nature?" The present study takes as its point of departure an exami nation of that problem. But Thomas Mann's attitude toward art and the artist cannot be considered as an element sepa rate and distinct from other themes in his work. He himself has said that art is the quintessence of humanity and the artist the most human of men. The impossibility of detach I ing Mann's own view of art and the artist from his vision of life and humanity bears out that statement. As Mann's genius matured, his interest in art and the artist shaded over into concern with the broadest human problems. But it is impossible to point out just where the fonner leaves off and the latter begins. One implies the other and neither can be conceived apart from the other. Thus, in atte~pting to fix on Mann's doctrine of the artist nature, we find our selves compelled to follow to their farthest limits various strands of thought which enclose his world view. Our survey is not simply a compendium of what Thomas Mann says about the artist and his relation to life; it is also an analYSis of Mann's own artistic personality as it stands revealed in his work. The problem is scanned against the background of nineteenth century German culture; Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner, and Freud stand out as dominant influences. Specifically, our investigation of Mann's work examines the problem of the artist nature in reference to certain definite factors: its social environment, its deyjation from the nonnal in personality and health, its reaction to questions of morals and politics, its relation to the kingdoms of music and metaphysics. Since Plato, who observed that the poet's creative activity is akin to madness, it has become a commonplace to say INTRODUCTION xi that genius is never "normal." The divergence of the artist nature from the usual pattern of human life has fascinated Thomas Mann, and this theme is prominent in his work from "Little Herr Friedemann" to The Beloved Return~.: The solitude to which the artist is condemned because of his fatal gift of insight, his consciousness of the gulf which separates him from his fellow men, his longing for that familiar ordinary world from which he feels himself cut off-these are notes in the motif of "isolation" which runs through the introspective early stories. Mann's treatment of the artist's isolation is strongly colored by elements drawn from personal experience which sharply reflect the character of the environment in which he grew up-that is, nineteenth century German bourgeois. Mann's consciousness of the bourgeois residue in his own personality has led him to reflect at length upon the effect produced by such a heritage .., on the character of an artist and the quality of his art. Mann has incorporated into his creative work the polarity between bourgeois diSCipline and creative elan-and he has used it as the basis of drama tic conflict. Probably the most personal and characteristic of Thomas Mann's reflections on art and life is his concept of the rela tion between disease and genius. Upon an intuition that illness can be more human than health, Mann bases his conviction that genius often finds the direct and open ap proach to life barred, that its path must skirt perilously close t? the dark realms of disease and death. We come upon numerous instances of this in his works. In a German town on the Baltic coast, Hanno Buddenbrook, a musical son of a proud merchant father, dies when his tender genius can no longer cope with the pattern of life into which he is being forced. By the sultry lagoons of Venice, the lonely writer Gustave von Aschenbach is driven to death by the xii INTRODUCTION conHict within his soul. In a tuberculosis sanatorium high in the Alps, young Hans Castorp finds his way to self-fulfill ment amid the poisonous exhalations of sickness and cor ruption. Through parable and through open declaration our analysis follows the development of Mann's conviction that the artist, that humanity itself, has a spiritual as well as a physical bond with disease and death. It is the romantic artist, Mann tells us, who seems most sensitive to the exhausting effects of artistic production. Ro mantic art has an equivocal character, an inclination to decadence. The music of Richard Wagner affected Mann profoundly; he calls the composer the "Arch-romantic." Re flections on Wagner lead to the question of the link between music and the romantic. Against the background of German romanticism, we arrange Mann's own romantic tendencies his love for the nocturnal and his emphasis on feeling, his passion for music and his absorption of its technique into his own art. For all his romantic sympathies, we discern in Thomas Mann a vein of antiromantic criticism; we follow the development of his Nietzschean conviction that too much emphasis on feeling and "music"- particularly in the case of the Gennan people-generates a certain danger which may carry over from art into life, and stand as a threat to humane values. Just as it diverges from social and organic nonns, so too the direction of the artist nature does not move wholly within the bounds of ordinary morality. Genius, Mann says, finds its morality not in cold sel£-conb'ol, but rather in aban donment, in yielding to the hurtful and the forbidden. The artist .and the criminal have something in common. It is suggestive to place this dark view in conjunction with Mann's late insistence on the connection between art and morality in the common ground of truth.
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