WHAT SHALL WE do with all this? The reader might well say that the author should have asked the question before taking two chapters to discuss it. One thing at least is clear: even if a deus malignus saw to it that in all doubtful aspects of the diary affair, the apparently less plausible possibility was in fact always the correct one, the problem would still remain to explain why this chain of motifs runs so densely and forcefully through Thomas Mann’s entire work. What seems to prevail here is the compulsion to confess, the stubborn and ultimately imploring will to be heard; the muted knocking that someone locked in might give, if he believes himself surrounded by enemies and has to be cautious. And it is impossible to shake off the impression that the guilt which time and again seeks to make itself known is guilt of a non-hypochondriac kind.
What if Mann actually did mean what he said? If what has always been taken as metaphor should instead be understood literally? The secret of his life would then be concealed in similar fashion to Poe’s purloined letter, dangled before all eyes yet unseen thanks to this most subtle of all disguises. And if the unthinkable is in fact thought for a moment, does not everything suddenly appear in a new light?
Let us for a moment play Devil’s advocate – the Devil that appeared to him in Palestrina. We can venture the thought experiment that if Thomas Mann had committed an actual crime and sought to give an account of it in his work, this work would not have taken a very different form than it actually has. What more could he have done? How many more confessions need he smuggle in, how often should he repeat yet again that everything is strict and undisguised autobiography, that he only ever speaks of himself and has never invented anything?
The converse certainly does not immediately follow. But let us stick for a moment to the assumption that what is confessed in art rests on an actual misdeed. Could this deed then be pinned down: in kind, in place and in time? When and where would it have occurred?
In Little Herr Friedemann the rage that flares up is still directed against the ‘Mann’ himself. The story dates from before the author’s second trip to Italy. In Tobias Mindernickel, ‘T.M.’ already has the untellable behind him. The title emerges for the first time in a letter of July 1897.1 Before this date, therefore, something may have happened that Mann elaborates in this work, in a first phase of coping with it, when he seeks, still rather awkwardly, to remove some traumatic event from his body by writing it down.2
The response to the question, therefore, as to the latest date of the event, would be spring 1897. But what would be the earliest date? That is harder to determine, as it is difficult to assess the delay at which literary treatment followed experience. Nonetheless, a dividing line seems to have been Mann’s second visit to Naples in November 1896. On 8 November he writes to Grautoff of ‘taxing and tiring experiences’ on which he had spent a regrettable amount of energy. These experiences, taxing but clearly not traumatic, probably took place in Munich, for they strengthened his inclination to leave Germany and ‘make off to the furthest and most alien south … ‘ That is precisely where he now finds himself, and he compares the imperial profile of Rome with the charming rabble of Naples, the fine-eyed physiognomy that had attracted his attention for the last four days: ‘its sensuous, sweet, southern beauty grabs me ever more.’3 This sensuous portrait leads on to the poison of sexuality, to the procurers who would not be shaken off and offer him not only young girls, and to the rice diet which he had almost decided upon. The tone of the letter is mixed, but in no way gloomy or guilt-laden.
On his return from Naples, however, the tone changes; not dramatically, but perceptible nonetheless. In his next long report from Rome on 13 January 1897, he describes himself as ‘tetchy, sombre and tired’.4 Two weeks later, he says that he is growing ever more accustomed to ‘feeling at home in the dark …’, which even without the ellipsis would not sound very reassuring.5 In April he writes of his ‘unkempt nerves’, which he is trying in every way to strengthen; he drops the phrase of the Augean stable of his conscience.6 Before June, he is once more in Rome and Naples, as a tour guide for Count Vitzthum.7 In July he finished Little Lucy, which he characterized as a strange and ugly tale, ‘as befits my present view of the world and its people’.8
At the same time, however, he is happy that since Little Herr Friedemann he has been freed of ‘certain chains’.9 In April he was already facing his future work with pleasure and confidence, and in the summer he started to draft Buddenbrooks. The triumph of art at the very moment when within he was dark and heavy of conscience – is that not reminiscent of the pact with the Devil in which only a sinful act can bring the ‘breakthrough’?
It was in the summer of 1897 that Thomas Mann had his encounter with the uninvited guest: a vision that, if you want to be clinical about it, seems a not unusual symptom of posttraumatic stress. In Leverkühn’s case the trauma is the contact with the hetaera whom he followed to Hungary when he was twenty-one. Thomas Mann was himself twenty-one when he made his second journey to Naples. The previous year he had visited there briefly in the company of his brother Heinrich. Was he also affected then by the tinge of seduction that drove him to return a second time, free from his brother’s supervision?10 This would be the reason why he later drew on the Nietzsche legend and had Leverkühn, touched by the arm of Esmeralda, first flee but return a year later under the sway of this first contact; and Serenus Zeitblom would speak for his master when he seeks to report this part of the story in as tactful a fashion as possible, tactful also towards himself, ‘to whom the telling is like a serious personal confession’.11
Leverkühn in any case returns to the place where the naked drive spitefully touched him, and follows the seductress to Hungary. What does Hungary have to do with Italy, or is ‘Hungary’ only a cipher and password in some homosexual code?12 On a couple of occasions in Doctor Faustus there are discreet connections; Adrian meets Hungarians in the Roman salon that he visits, and the Hungarian noblewoman Frau von Tolna also travels to Naples.13 The love teacher of Felix Krull, whom he meets in the café where he drinks a glass of punch14 while others are playing dominoes, is also from Hungary: this being, as the reader of A Sketch of My Life and Doctor Faustus will recall, both Mann’s and Leverkühn’s evening occupation during the Roman winter.15
Between Hungary and Italy there are evidently secret connections, and the half-way point is Vienna. This is where Rosza ends up on her way through the brothels,16 and it is likewise where Thomas Mann, at the age of twenty-one, made a stop in June 1896 before travelling on to Italy. Thirty years later he wrote about this short visit, saying that in three days he had managed to fritter away 200 gold marks; ‘even though,’ he adds – whether in amusement or deliberately cryptically – ‘I only stayed at the good old Hotel Klomser on the Herrengasse’.17 This is also the street where Leverkühn alights after the first performance of his fateful violin concerto, which Mann has take place in Vienna. The concerto is a love token to which Adrian has been persuaded by his pressing friend, the Platonic child that Schwerdtfeger wants from him.18 From Vienna he travels with his friend, not to Naples, but to Madame de Tolna’s Hungarian estate, where Schwerdtfeger’s urgency attains its non-Platonic goal. And in this way, in the logic of the novel, the arrow of revenge is already placed on the bowstring.
Leverkühn’s act of revenge is highly indirect and mediated; at which point, and after this long extended moment, we can return to speculate as to what the content of the possible deed might have been. We cannot conclude that a crime actually took place simply from the fact that Mann’s work would not appear very different if he sought to confess an actual crime. We should not deceive ourselves here; we are adrift in a sea of uncertainties, between the reefs and maws of over – and under-evaluation, with just a few islands of increased plausibility. Such a spot of more or less firm ground is the supposition that the traumatizing act must have been an offence in the realm of desire, and that a mere visit to a prostitute would not have been sufficient to explain the burning guilt and trail of blood. Anything more specific, as in the case of Svidrigalov, has to be left to the more or less willing imagination of the reader.
This speculative imagination, however, is not needed to focus on the most extreme point, which the biographer Donald Prater unknowingly indicates when he notes that The Wardrobe ends with a sexual murder.19 It would be too much to say that Thomas Mann could not hurt a fly; he whipped Bashan, and his depictions of dog chastisement, which take years to grow somewhat calmer, betray how his blood could rise in violent temper.20 After the Second World War, quite the injured narcissist, he wanted to see a million Germans eradicated.21 Yet it is simply impossible to think of him venting his wrath in murderous violence. If that strikes the reader as just a lack of imagination on my part, the following cool considerations may suffice. Assume that Thomas Mann had fled Naples with a freshly committed murder on his hands, would he then have returned the following spring, in no matter how troubled a state? Would he have spent a further year in Italy if anything actionable had occurred, would he not rather have made his way home as quickly as possible? Quite apart from the fact that there was no unexplained murder in either Rome or Naples at the time in question: at least none recorded in the archives.22 Wouldn’t the expression ‘voluptuousness and hot guilt’ also be rather too weak a designation for an act of boiling – let alone deadly – violence? And conversely, might not someone who saw himself as a ‘lover’ because he exchanged a shy kiss also understand by murder something much more trivial?
‘Hell is for the pure,’23 explains the narrator in Joseph, and it is quite likely that a crime almost committed, or only indirect participation in a crime, would have sufficed to plunge the life of this sensitive moralist into a guilt feeling that had to be reworked time and again. A moralist such as Thomas Mann might well experience as crime what for a stupid blockhead would be only a misdemeanour. Judah, Leverkühn, the Holy Sinner or the fisherman in that story, feel guilty even though they are so only in a very indirect sense, only ‘caught up in the action’ as Zeitblom says of Adrian. Christian Buddenbrook is possibly not even caught up, but only a witness – yet perhaps it is sufficient to have been present and not to have intervened, to be swept up in the whirl of events that also seized the dreaming Aschenbach?
Not the least difficulty with this speculation is that we do not know whether we are lumping together things that should actually be kept distinct. The diary speaks of secrets in the plural, not just of one. Perhaps there was a whole series of incidents. There are the thematic chains of dogs, of knives, of pimps, of rape, and also of impotence; there are the supposedly good reasons that the girl in The Wardrobe mentions and that indicate an act of defence, of just revenge, or a violent reaction to deep humiliation. In Doctor Faustus the action divides into a hot and a cold story: the hot one of the encounter with Esmeralda which sets off the trauma, the cold one of the indirect murder of the lover, for more or less good reasons; in between the story of the guilt at the death of the beloved boy, which even if imagined is experienced as inner reality. It is difficult, if not impossible, to break through the veils and masks to the living kernel. If there was someone to whisper it to us, if a reliable and solid spirit tapped the message on a dinner plate, for instance, that in a Naples park Mann had witnessed a bloody act between hustlers – or in the mala vita quarter he followed a young girl, proved impotent and flared up when she made fun of him – or if he fell prey to an attempted rape and took revenge – the evidence would immediately jell together. But in each case the evidence is different, and something is always left over. Or might it be significant that at the turn of the century southern Italy was the centre of European Satanism, as a professor of ethnology informed me after the German edition of the present book was published – the centre of Satanic circles in which homosexual initiation rites as well as animal sacrifice were customary, and which even tourists were taken to see? This would throw an even darker and perhaps impenetrable light on the presumed events, while it might help to explain the chain of ritual animal slaughters as well as the overwhelming, if clandestine, role of the Devil in Mann’s oeuvre from the very beginning of Buddenbrooks (starting from the exclamation ‘Well, devil take it!’) through to his last short story The Black Swan – this bird being traditionally considered a diabolic symbol.24
But perhaps everything, like the Devil in Palestrina, is just imagination? This would be the thesis at the other end of the scale: a thesis for which a certain case can be made, even if with some difficulty. It would run more or less as follows. We need no further assumptions, all that is needed is the combination of posing, topos and fantasy. With this triad the riddle can be solved. The holy or unholy face of the criminal – beloved of so many authors of the time! It was precisely the bourgeois scions who liked to see themselves beset with demons – so typical of the turn of the century and its ecce homo gestures! Mann was not exactly unique with his child-women, crimes of lust and unspeakable debauches – the most conventional literary topoi of his generation. Where would we end up if every author who likes to let blood flow was accused of personal involvement? The author of Lulu would certainly have been threatened with immediate imprisonment. And conversely, is there not an extremely effective guilt that rests solely on the imagination? Proust believed himself to blame for the death of his mother, a feeling that played a great part in the genesis of his work, even if Madame Proust might not have lived a single day longer without her wayward son. A powerful imagination can be sufficient source for an oceanic work. And there is no better example of this than Doctor Faustus itself. There evidently were fantasies of revenge and murder that Thomas Mann transposed to Schwerdtfeger from the Ehrenberg episode. Yet while the violinist was shot, Paul Ehrenberg lived to a ripe old age. The imaginative power of the writer should not be undervalued, his ability to make a mountain out of a molehill; it was not only something real, but also something forcefully imagined, that could cast a shadow covering his life’s work.
This is all well and good, but it is not completely convincing. What starts with Tobias Mindernickel and is paraded for almost sixty years has nothing to do with a pose. What the still unknown Thomas Mann thought of in Rome was not posing and ecce homo gestures, but simply how to convey his experiences to the public – not his dreams or imaginings. The nickname of his last sinful hero was Credemi; this could well be inscribed above Mann’s entire work. He makes use of literary topoi when they suit him; but he writes always of himself. The first tale of murder bears the signature T.M., and as well as steering all sources discreetly in one direction, he also placed recognizable autobiographical markers at times when abjection was no longer the literary fashion. The theme is not only too obsessive to be a mere stylistic pose, it is often too concealed; a poser does not place himself at a scarcely visible margin.
So could the act to be confessed be merely imaginary? Thomas Mann insisted that he did not invent anything. And, hand on heart, is it credible that a fantasy could traumatize him so severely that he has to turn it round and round for the rest of his life? It is unlikely that the secrets of his life could bear only on the imaginary, and just as unlikely that in the diary affair Thomas Mann should have considered suicide for the sake of such imaginings. ‘All actuality is deadly earnest’,25 and conversely, the deadly secrets actually happened. The deep and heavy guilt, and the themes of violence and confession that cannot be read away, however much they may also be the work of an exaggerating imagination, cannot owe their origin to this, for what should such imagination crystallize around if not a kernel of experience?
What this kernel precisely was – ‘something real with a bloody issue’,26 as Johnny Bishop put it – we do not know. The truth lay in the early diaries and was buried with their ashes. And so we must content ourselves with establishing that a great unknown remains in Mann’s biography; a shadow that is cast by a real phantom; a fuzzy spot on an X-ray image.
What would he have become without this unknown? ‘One must only need to more than the rest, then one makes oneself a name among men.’27 Guilt provided the necessary stimulus for Mann’s work, but this is not all it did. Without it, Thomas Mann would not have become the great psychologist of world literature that his readers honour. We can go further and not flinch from the apparent paradox: he would not even have become the great humorist. The sense of guilt gives both humour and spiritual insight a depth that is not afforded to the innocent. Without this substratum, his art would remain flat; this is the inner truth of the pact with the Devil.
‘It is as well,’ so Mann wrote in Death in Venice, ‘that the world knows only a fine piece of work and not also its origins’; these ‘would often confuse readers and shock them, and the excellence of the writing would be of no avail’.28 But in this case perhaps the outcome is different – perhaps Mann’s work actually gains in this way. It has certainly not altered the least part of it. And yet for all that it is no longer quite the same. The lighting changes, and what was invisible suddenly leaps to the eye. Blood streams into the life mask of the man who was serious when he asked, in the words of his beloved Platen, that the world should know him in order to forgive him.