FOR HERMANN HESSE ON JULY 2, 1962 WITH HEARTFELT RESPECT
Perhaps the occasion of a documentary exhibition, in which something of the spirit of the person being honored can appear only indirectly and only to someone already familiar with it, will justify me in saying a few private words about Thomas Mann rather than speaking about the work of which his life was the instrument. But contrary to what some of you may be anticipating, I do not want to present my recollections of Mann. Even if I were to overcome my disinclination to make a personal possession out of my good fortune in having had personal contact with Mann, and thereby divert a tiny bit of his prestige to myself, even unintentionally, it is certainly still too soon to formulate such reminiscences. And so I will limit myself to using my experience to combat some of the preconceived ideas that stubbornly persist in being attached to Mann as a person. They are not without consequence for the shape of his work, to which they are transferred almost automatically: they obscure the work by helping to reduce it to a formula. The most widely held is the idea of a conflict between the bourgeois and the artist in Mann, patently a legacy of the Nietzschean antithesis of life and spirit. Explicitly and implicitly, Mann used his own existence to exhibit that opposition. Much of what is expressly intended in his work, from Tonio Kröger, Tristan, and Death in Venice to the musician Leverkühn, who must forgo love in order to bring his work to completion, follows this pattern. But by the same token, it is patterned on a cliché concerning the man himself, who suggested that he wanted it that way and that he himself bore a resemblance to the idea and the conflict he elaborated in his novels and stories. However rigorously Thomas Mann’s oeuvre separates itself in its linguistic form from its origins in the individual, pedagogues, official and unofficial, revel in it because it encourages them to take out of it as its substance what the author put into it. This procedure is not very productive, of course, but nobody has to think very much, and it puts even stupidity on solid philological ground, for, as it says in Figaro, he is the father, he says so himself. Instead, however, I believe that the substance of a work of art begins precisely where the author’s intention stops; the intention is extinguished in the substance. The description of the cold shower of sparks in the tramway in Munich, or of Kretschmar’s stammer—“we know how to do these things,” Mann once said, fending off the compliment I tried to pay him—outweighs all the official metaphysics of the artist in his texts, all negation of the will to live, even the last boldface sentence in the snow chapter of The Magic Mountain. Understanding Thomas Mann: his work will truly begin to unfold only when people start paying attention to the things that are not in the guidebooks. Not that I would think I could stop the interminable string of dissertations on the influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, on the role of music, or on what is discussed in seminars under the rubric of “the problem of death.” But I would like to create a little discomfort with all that. It is better to look three times at what has been written than to look over and over again at what has been symbolized. Pointing out how much the writer deviated from the self-portrait his prose suggests is intended to help do that.
For there is no doubt that the prose does suggest it. All the more reason to doubt that Mann actually was that way and to suspect that the very suggestion originated in a strategy he may have learned from Goethe’s strategy of controlling his posthumous fame. Except that Mann was presumably less concerned with how he was remembered than with how he appeared to his contemporaries. The author of Joseph was not so mythical, and also had too much skeptical humanism in him to want to force his image on the future. Calm, proud but unpretentious, he would have submitted to the future; and the person who, in the Holy Sinner, had things to say about major figures in historical affairs of state that might have been written by Anatole France would not have found Hegel’s notion that world history is the last judgment so convincing. But there is no doubt that he disguised himself as a “public figure,” that is, from his contemporaries, and this disguise needs to be understood. Not the least of the functions of Mann’s irony, certainly, was to practice this disguise and at the same time negate it by confessing it in language. The motives for it were not merely private ones, and one is reluctant to practice one’s psychological acuity on a person to whom one is very attached. But it would certainly be worthwhile to describe the masks genius has worn in modern literature and to ask why the authors donned them. In doing so one would no doubt find that the stance of the genius, which emerged spontaneously toward the end of the eighteenth century, quickly acquired social legitimacy and thereby gradually became a fixed pattern whose stereotypical quality belied the spontaneity it was intended to emphasize. At the high point of the nineteenth century one wore genius like a costume. The Rembrandtian head, the velvet and the beret—the archetype of the artist, in short—were transformed into an internalized piece of the furnishings of genius. Thomas Mann will certainly have seen that in Wagner, whom he loved dearly. Embarrassment at his self-presentation as the artist, as the genius he dresses up as, forces the artist, who can never fully dispense with costume, to hide as best he can. Because genius has become a mask, genius has to disguise itself. The best thing the artist can do is to play himself up as a genius and act as though he, the master, were in possession of the metaphysical meaning that the substance of his age lacks. This is why Marcel Proust, whom Mann resisted, played the operetta dandy in top hat and cane, and Kafka played the run-of-the-mill insurance company employee for whom nothing is as important as the good will of his boss. This impulse was at work in Thomas Mann as well—the impulse to be inconspicuous. Like his brother Heinrich Mann, he was a student of the great French novel of disillusionment; the secret of his disguise was objectivity.
Masks can be switched and the many-sided Mann had more than one. The one best known is that of the Hanseatic, the cool and reserved senator’s son from Lübeck. The image of the citizen of the three Imperial Free Cities is itself a cliché that fits few of the natives. It is one Mann promoted through detailed descriptions in Buddenbrooks, and he coolly presented it on public occasions. In private, however, I never saw him stiff for a moment, unless one were to mistake his gift for polished speech, and his pleasure in it, something he shared with Benjamin, for affected dignity. As is the German custom, under the spell of the superstition of pure spontaneity, people have chalked up Mann’s sense of form, which is one with his artistic nature, to coldness and emotional incapacity. On the contrary, his demeanor was relaxed, with none of the dignitary in it; he was completely what he was and what he defended in his mature years—a man of letters, sensitive, open to impressions and hungry for them, talkative and sociable. He was far less inclined to exclusiveness than one would have expected in a famous and busy man who had to protect his capacity for work. He managed with a schedule based on the primacy of writing and providing for a long afternoon nap, but aside from that he was neither difficult of access nor fastidious in his relations with people. He had no sense at all of social hierarchy or the nuances of fashion. It is not only that he was above all that, whether because he had arrived or because his early childhood had been secure; his interests made him indifferent to it, as though the experience of such things had not touched him. Rudolf Borchardt’s capers, which Borchardt considered sophisticated, and Hofmannsthal’s aristocratic inclinations were a source of unmixed delight to Mann and Frau Katja. If anything was deeply ingrained in him, it was the awareness that the hierarchy of the spirit, if there is such a thing, is incompatible with that of external life. And he was not very fussy even with writers. During the emigration period, in any case, he spent time with writers who had little more to offer him than their good will, and with undistinguished intellectuals as well, without the latter having to feel that that is what they were. The reason for this indifference distinguished him sharply from other contemporary novelists. He was not a storyteller with a wide bourgeois experience of the world, but rather one who withdrew into his own sphere. In very Germanic fashion, he derived the content of his works from the same imagination as the names of his characters; he was little concerned with what is called, in the Anglo-Saxon term, the “ways of the world.” The fact that after a certain point—Death in Venice forms the caesura—ideas and their fates take the place in his novels of empirical human beings, in a kind of second-order concreteness, is connected with this, and this in turn gives further impetus to the construction of the cliché. Clearly, this configuration bears little resemblance to that of the man of commerce.
If Mann nonetheless presented himself to many people as though the solid citizen were at least one of the souls in his breast, he was putting a recalcitrant element in his character to work in the service of the illusion he mischievously sought to create. That element was the spirit of heaviness, akin to melancholy, something brooding and self-absorbed. He had no real desire to be part of the group. He was not very fond of decisions, and he distrusted praxis, not only in the form of politics but as any kind of commitment; nothing in him corresponded to what the hardcore philistine thinks of as the “existential man.” For all the strength of his ego, its identity did not have the last word: there were good reasons why he had two extremely different handwritings, which in the last analysis were of course one and the same. The artistic stance of detachment, the careful treatment he gave himself as his instrument, has been too hastily attributed to the obligatory reserve of the prosperous merchant. The spirit of heaviness sometimes brought him to the level of waking sleep. In parties, which did not bore him at all, he could seem glassy-eyed; he himself once spoke, in Royal Highness, of the mental absences of one of his characters. But precisely those intervals served as preparation for throwing off the mask. If I had to say what was most characteristic of him, I would have to cite the gesture in which he suddenly and surprisingly gave an involuntary start, a gesture one had to be prepared for with him. His eyes were blue or gray-blue, but in these moments when he suddenly came to consciousness of himself they flashed dark and Brazilian, as though something had been smoldering in his previous self-absorption, waiting to catch fire; as though some material thing had been accumulating in his heaviness, something he now seized hold of in order to test himself against it. The rhythm of his sense of life was order to test himself against it. The rhythm of his sense of life was unbourgeois: it was not continuity but rather an oscillation between extremes, an alternation of rigidity and illumination. That may have been irritating to friends who were not very close to him. For in this rhythm, where one state negated the other, the ambiguity of his character was revealed. I can think of scarcely a statement he made that was not accompanied by this ambiguity. Everything he said sounded as though it had a secret double meaning which, with a devilishness that went far beyond his ironic stance, he left it to the other person to figure out.
That a man of this kind should be dogged by the myth of vanity is shameful in his contemporaries but understandable; it is the reaction of those who want to be nothing but precisely what they are. You may believe me when I say that Mann was lacking in vanity, just as he dispensed with dignity. One might put it most simply by saying that in his dealings with people he never thought about the fact that he was Thomas Mann; what usually makes contact with celebrities difficult is simply that they project their objectified public status back onto their personal selves and their immediate existence. With Mann, however, interest in the matter at hand so much outweighed the private self that it left the latter completely free. It was not Mann who performed the projection but public opinion, which falsely imputed something in the work to the author. The imputation was truly false. For what people take as a sign of vanity in the work is the ineradicable scar of the efforts made to perfect it. Mann needs to be defended against the abominable German tendency to equate passion for the work and its integral form with striving for status; against an ethos of alienation from art that attacks the demand for coherent elaboration as though it were some kind of inhuman l’art pour l’art. Because the work is the work of the author, it is supposed to be vanity on his part to want to make it as good as possible; the only people who do not incur such suspicions are anachronistic stalwart craftsmen with leather aprons and stories of the wide world—as though the successful work still belonged to its author; as though its success did not consist in its becoming detached from him, in something objective being realized in and through him, in his disappearing into it. Since I knew Thomas Mann at his work, I may bear witness that not the slightest narcissistic impulse came between him and the object of his labor. There was no one for whom work could be simpler, more free of all complications and conflicts; no caution was necessary, no tactics, no groping rituals. Never did the Nobel Prize winner allude to his fame, however discreetly, or cause me to feel the difference in our public standing. Probably this was not even a matter of tact or humane considerateness; we did not even think about our private selves. The fiction of Adrian Leverkühn’s music, the task of describing it as though it really existed, provided no nourishment for what someone once called the psychological plague. Mann’s vanity would have had occasion enough to show itself there if it had existed. The writer is yet to be born who does not cathect the formulations he has polished for God knows how long and does not defend them against attack as though the attack were directed against himself. But I myself was too brutish in the matter, had thought out Leverkühn’s compositions too precisely to have given much consideration to that in the discussion. Once I had succeeded in getting Mann to agree that even if he became insane Leverkühn would at least be permitted to finish the Faust oratorio—Mann had originally planned it to be a fragment—there was the question of the conclusion, the instrumental postlude into which the choral movement imperceptibly makes a transition. We had thought about it for a long time, and one fine afternoon the author read me the text. I rebelled, no doubt in a somewhat excessive fashion. I found the heavily laden pages too positive, too unbrokenly theological in relation to the structure not only of the Lamentation of Dr. Faustus but of the novel as a whole. They seemed to lack what the crucial passage required, the power of determinate negation as the only permissible figure of the Other. Mann was not upset, but he was somewhat saddened, and I was remorseful. Two days later Frau Katja called and invited us to supper. Afterwards the author dragged us into his den and read, clearly excited, the new conclusion, which he had written in the meantime. We could not hide how moved we were, and I think that made him happy. He was almost defenseless against the emotions of joy and pain, unarmored as no vain man could ever be. His relationship to Germany was especially sensitive. He could take it too much to heart when someone accused him of being a nihilist. His sensitivity extended into the moral sphere; his conscience in spiritual matters was so delicate that even the crudest and most foolish attack could shake him.
Talk of Thomas Mann’s vanity completely misinterprets the phenomenon that gives rise to it. Such talk combines unnuanced perception with unnuanced verbal expression. Mann was as coquettish as he was not vain. The taboo on coquettishness in men has no doubt kept this characteristic and its enchanting quality from being recognized in him. It was as though the longing for applause, which cannot be completely eliminated even in the most sublimated work of art, affected the private self, which had so objectified itself in the work that it became playful with itself, the way the prose writer plays with his sentences. There is something in the gracefulness of the form of even an intellectual work of art that is related to the grace with which the actor takes his bow. Mann wanted to charm and to please. He took delight in trillingly admiring certain contemporary composers of minor genres whom he knew I did not think highly of and whom he in all seriousness did not think much of either, and underlining the irrationality of his own attitude; he brought in even the official conductors Toscanini and Walter, who would hardly have performed Leverkühn. He rarely mentioned the Joseph novel without adding, “Which you, I know, have not read, Herr Adorno.” What woman would still have had the coquettishness, undistorted by either ornament or dullness, that this highly disciplined man, almost seventy years old, brought with him when he got up from his writing desk? In his workroom hung a delightful photograph of his daughter Erika as a young woman, wearing a Pierrot costume. She resembled him physiognomically, and in the after-image of memory his own face takes on a Pierrot-like quality. His coquettishness was no doubt only a piece of unmutilated and indomitable mimetic ability.
But on no account should one picture Mann as a Pierrot Lunaire, a figure from the fin de siècle. The cliché of the person living in decadence is the complement to that of the solid citizen, just as bohemianism existed only as long as there was a solid middle class. Mann had no more of the Jugendstil in him than he had of the venerable old man; the Tristan of his novella is a comic figure. The “Let day give way to death” [of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde] was not an imperative he adopted. His tremendous playfulness, which nothing could intimidate, took on even death. In the last letter I received from him, in Sils Maria a few days before his death, he juggled with Rastellian freedom with death itself—about the possibility of which he did not deceive himself—as he did with his suffering. If death seems to form the center of his writings, a longing for death is hardly to blame, nor a particular affinity for decay, but rather a secret cunning and superstitiousness: fending off and banishing, precisely by doing so, what one constantly invokes and discusses. Mann’s genius, like his body, resisted death, that blind entanglement in nature. May the poet’s manes forgive me, but he was healthy to the core. I do not know whether he was ever sick in his earlier years, but only an iron constitution could have survived the operation the euphemistic account of which is contained in his novel about a novel. Even the arteriosclerosis to which he succumbed left his spirit unaffected, as though it had no power over him. Ultimately, what caused his work to emphasize complicity with death, a complicity people were all too eager to believe of him personally, was an intimation of the guilt of existing at all, of depriving something different, something possible, of its own reality by taking its place; he did not need Schopenhauer to experience that. Although he tried to outwit death, he still kept company with it, feeling that there is no reconciliation for the living but surrender—not resignation. In a world of high-handed and self-centered people, the only better alternative is to loosen the bonds of identity and not become rigid. What people hold against Thomas Mann, taking it for decadence, was its opposite, nature’s capacity to be mindful of itself as something fragile. Humanness is none other than that.