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A SKETCH OF MY LIFE by Thomas Mann (Secker & Warburg.)

LETTERS TO PAUL AMANN by Thomas Mann (Secker & Warburg.)

Mann died in 1955 and he is beginning now to undergo the usual denigration (though he may take consolation from the fact that his fellow-passengers in the same boat at the moment include André Gide and Bernard Shaw). To some extent, in the case of Mann, this critical disapproval is directed against the man of letters rather than the novelist: but, since the persona of the literary figure existed at all only to give weight and substance to the novelist that Mann quintessentially was, an attack on the bourgeois liberal façade is, by implication, an attack on the novels written by the more complex personality that sheltered behind that façade. One reviewer of A Sketch of My Life has managed to give the impression that, because Mann was not in his early years possessed of great political wisdom, the novels are probably lesser works than we once thought them to be. And another reviewer criticized the same book for stopping short at 1930 (thus deliberately suppressing information about its author’s activities in Nazi Germany, no doubt). Surely not so grievous a fault for a book that was written in 1930.

     A Sketch of My Life is, in fact, a short autobiographical essay that does little more than skim over the facts of Mann’s career. If the early pages about his childhood in Lübeck seem particularly thin, this is no doubt because he had used up that period of his life in such close detail in Buddenbrooks which is, in its way, as autobiographical in emotional truth as anything in A La Recherche. Fortunately, the Munich days when he surprisingly played Gregers Werle with the University Dramatic Club in the first German performance of The Wild Duck, and the year spent in Italy with his elder brother Heinrich, during which he began to write Buddenbrooks, are dwelt on at greater length. And when he discusses the authors that he admires, it becomes clear that Mann not only knew who his influences had been, but was able to define the exact nature of the influence in a curiously objective way:

     In a word, what I saw above all else in Nietzsche was the victor over self. I took nothing literally; I believed him hardly at all; and this precisely made my love for him a passion on two planes — gave it, in other words, its depth. Was I to take him seriously when he preached hedonism in art? When he played off Bizet against Wagner? ‘What to me were his ‘blond beast’ and his philosophy of force? Almost an embarrassment. His glorification of ‘life’ at the expense of mind — that lyricism that turned out so disastrously for German thinking — I could assimilate in only one way: as self-criticism. True, the blond beast haunts my own youthful work; but it is, on the whole, divested of its bestial character, there is not much left of it but the blondness and the lack of mind — objectives of that erotic irony and acceptance of the conservative, in which the mind, as it was quite well aware, did not give away too much.

     Paul Amann, the addressee of the Letters, was an Austrian philologist who emigrated to America after the Anschluss. The correspondence began in 1915 when, lying in a military hospital in Vienna, he read an article by Mann, Gedanken im Kriege, and felt impelled to write to the author, disagreeing violently with much in what Mann himself later called ‘that last great rearguard action of the romantic middleclass mentality in the face of advancing modernity’. Mann replied at length, and their correspondence and eventual friendship continued for nearly forty years. Amann’s letters have not been preserved: Mann’s are polite, discursive, trivial, pompous, charming, revealing, occasionally misleading (‘I hate democracy,’ he writes in 1916, ‘and so I hate politics, for it is the same thing’) but nowhere, I fear, are they of any great importance to the student of Thomas Mann the novelist.