TO read this fine new biography of Thomas Mann is to realise again that the age of the Great Man (no pun intended, honestly) has passed. Great Men in the sense intended here we may define as those figures who because of their achievements ink an intellectual discipline - literature, music, science, etc. - were assumed to be wise in general, and consequently would be called upon to pronounce judgment on everything from child rearing to the problem of nuclear weapons. The breed flourished throughout the 19th century, and only really died out in the 1960s, with the dawning of a new age of cynicism - or healthy scepticism, if you like. T.S. Eliot once delivered a speech in a St Louis baseball stadium to an audience of 30,000. In the 1940s, Hemingway could command a fee of $75,000 for a "think piece" for the Saturday Evening Post (imagine an Ernest Hemingway think piece). Andy Mann himself was treated throughout Europe excepting, of course, Germany in the years 1933-45 - and the United States, as if he were Zeus come to earth to move among mortals, dispensing wisdom as he went.
The odd thing is, as Donald Prater emphasises, that while Mann gloried in his lofty pre eminence in the world of men (women didn't really count), at the same time he admitted, repeatedly, and in public, that like all artists, and, in fact, more so than most, he was a charlatan and a poseur, deeply insecure about the quality of his work, hopelessly confused in his sexuality, and unhealthily interested in the good things of this world, mainly money.
No one listened. Prizes were heaped upon him, including the Nobel, of course, while publishers showed a remarkable and uncharacteristic desire to press cash into his hands (he turned down one commission that would have earned him the equivalent of the Nobel Prize money imagine a writer of his seriousness today being in a position to turn down a St million deal). In the 1930s, when he changed his politics from reactionary nationalism to liberal socialism, and the Nazis forced him to go into exile, he was regarded by the world as the living embodiment of the "real" Germany, the Germany of Goethe and Schiller, of Wallenstein and Frederick the Great, of Kant and Hegel. Gravely he consented to be thus considered, and at one point in the second World War he made the famous declaration, "Where I am, there Germany is." (To be fair, the quotation is usually taken out of context; what he was saying was that even in exile he carried his own version of his native land with him - but as was usual with Mann, the ambiguity in this instance was most likely intentional.) His children nicknamed him "The Magician"; one suspects a touch of Mannian irony.
Mann was born in 1875 in Hanseatic city of Lubeck, in north Germany. The Manns were a solid and prosperous burgher family, but Thomas had South American blood on his mother's side, to which he attributed his romantic and exotic element in his character. He had little formal education (a fact which probably accounts for his insatiable appetite in later life for prizes and medals and honorary degress), but began to write very early, and had a tremendous success with his first novel, The Buddenbrooks, a very long and intricate Bildungsroman based largely on the history of his own family, which was published when he was only 25. This was followed by the novellas Tonio Kroger and the famous but, I believe, greatly overrated Death in Venice. In 1924 he published what many consider his magnum opus, The Magic Mountain, set in a Swiss TB sanatorium, the inmates of which represent the various conflicting strands of a European culture hurtling towards annihilation in the disaster of the first World War.
At this time Mann worked for many years on a turgid political treatise, Reflections of a Non Political Man, in which he set out his Wagnerian, neo barbarian nationalist views, views which put him into conflict with his brother Heinrich, a novelist (Professor Unrat, on which the film The Blue Angel was based) and active communist. Later, when Thomas had changed his politics, the two sought a reconciliation, but they were never to be at ease with each other, though Heinrich showed a level of charity and forbearance which is admirable, considering not only Thomas's worldly success but also his intolerant and petty responses to his brother's overtures.
Mann was a cold fish, and knew it. His attitude towards his numerous children is chilling: even when his son Klaus committed suicide the father allowed it hardly to ruffle the surface of his working life. How, Mann asked, could the creative artist, obsessed with his work and almost inhuman in his concentration, ever be a congenial fellow being for those around him? It was not life that interested him, but life mediated through art. Prater quotes the critic Marcel Reich Ranicki: "one might say that [Mann] experienced practically nothing but described almost "everything". When in the early 1940s an American admirer wrote to him of her worries that his writing abilities might be affected by his feelings about the war, he assured her that his work had no connection with his emotions (to be fair, any artist would say the same, if he or she were honest, and not afraid of offending potential audiences).
It is doubtful that Mann would have achieved all that he did had it not been for the lifelong, loving care of his wife, Katia. She was a formidable woman, with a clear sense of her mission in life, which was to be the companion and help meet of a great artist, She indulged Mann's weakness for beautiful young men (he looked, but never touched), and endured his coldness, his relentless dedication to work, his hypochondria, his rare but impressive rages, his ceaseless need for adulation and reassurance. (The age of the Great Woman will never pass, but that is another subject altogether.)
In the 1940s the Manns settled in Pacific Palisades, in California, among an extraordinary emigre colony that included Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Klemperer, Bruno Walter, and a dozen others. Like of the exiles, he fell hopelessly in love with the cinema, and although he had no creative success in the genre, he managed to make a lot of money from the studios. When Harvard and Princeton were vying to lure him into the groves of academe, he wrote to his son: "I'd really prefer the movie mob." In the end, however, he left America, which in the McCarthy era he believed was in danger of going over to fascism, and returned to end his days in Switzerland. In 1955 he died, as he had lived, impressively, decorously, and with ease.
Mann said of himself that he was not a genius, and had at most "a certain intimacy with greatness", and it is hard to disagree. He, was an essentially middlebrow writer, with a touch of the vulgarian (perhaps an essential trait for a novelist), yet capable of marvellous things. I believe that he will be remembered not for The Magic Mountain but for the masterful novel Doctor Faustus, his meditation on art and the artist, on music, and on the fate of Germany and, hence, of Europe, in this century. He insisted that "humour" ("my so called humour is actually the child of despair") was the most important component of his work, something which English speakers cannot judge, for none of the translations manage to capture the particular brand of irony and straight faced, grotesque comedy which German speakers assure us is there in abundance.
Prater's book is measured, perceptive, painstaking, and beautifully written, with a dry wit that is worthy of his subject: "Long indeed his life was to prove, his death gentle enough; as to happiness, that he would always find in diligent labour, the success and comparative wealth it brought him, and the well being a hypochondriac can be relied on to ensure for himself." His estimation of Mann's work, in a startlingly negative epilogue, is perhaps a little harsh, but it is hard to disagree with his opinion that readers in the 21st century may feel that Mann's "classic" works have little to say to them (this assumes, of course, that there will be readers in the 21st century). Certainly, we shall, not see his likes again; and this is probably a good thing. As his fellow countryman, Bertolt Brecht, put it (contradicting Mann's role model, Goethe), "Woe betide the land that needs heroes."