Although he was to remember his friendship with painter
Paul Ehrenberg as the love of his life, in
1905 he married Katia Pingsheim, who came from a
well-to-do Munich Jewish family. He
remained married to her until his death 50 years
later. In marrying her, he sacrificed his natural
inclinations for social convention.
Mann found very young men beautiful, but his homosexuality
remained hidden for 50 years after
his death, when his diaries were released. These
revealed that he was prone to fits of nausea,
nervous, trembling and convulsive sobbing quite
at odds with his public image of elegant,
self-assured aloofness. He was fortunate that the
Nazis never discovered his secret.
-BBC
Education: Biography of Thomas Mann
The quote above is merely one of a number of similar sentiments that I found when I was looking for links for this review and I must admit, they completely mystify me. How could anyone read this story and not realize that Mann was an almost heroically repressed homosexual?
Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a German writer, who decides that he needs a holiday to relieve the stress of his "nerve-taxing" work. Eventually he arrives in Venice and conceives a passionate crush on a a fourteen year old boy named Tadzio. As he grows ever more obsessed with the boy, Aschenbach's mind becomes increasingly unbalanced. He takes to following the lad around and refuses to leave Venice despite an outbreak of cholera, virtually courting death in order to indulge his desires. Finally, as Tadzio frolics in the waves at the beach, Aschenbach dies quietly in a beach chair.
Just in case the reader hasn't gotten the hint, Mann helpfully provides Aschenbach one extended soliloquy:
For mark you, Phaedrus, beauty alone is both divine
and visible; and so it is the sense way, the
artist's way, little Phaedrus, to the spirit. But,
now tell me, my dear boy, do you believe that such a
man can ever attain wisdom and true manly worth,
for whom the path to the spirit must lead
through the senses? Or do you rather think-for I
leave the point to you-that it is a path of perilous
sweetness, a way of transgression, and must surely
lead him who walks in it astray? For you know
that we poets cannot walk the way of beauty without
Eros as our companion and guide. We may be
heroic after our fashion, disciplined warriors of
our craft, yet are we all the women, for we exult in
passion, and love is still our desire-our craving
and our shame. And from this you will perceive that
we poets can be neither wise nor worthy citizens.
We must needs be wanton, must needs rove at
large in the realm of feeling. Our magisterial style
is all folly and pretence, our honourable repute a
farce, the crowd's belief in us is merely laughable.
And to teach youth, or the populace, by means
of art is a dangerous practice and ought to be forbidden.
For what good can an artist be as a teacher,
when from his birth up he is headed direct for the
pit? We may want to shun it and attain to honour
in the world; but however we turn, it draws us still.
So, then, since knowledge might destroy us, we
will have none of it. For knowledge, Phaedrus, does
not make him who possesses it dignified or
austere. Knowledge is all-knowing, understanding,
forgiving; it takes up no position, sets no store
by form. It has compassion with the abyss-it is
the abyss. So we reject it, firmly, and henceforward
our concern shall be with beauty only. And by beauty
we mean simplicity, largeness, and renewed
severity of discipline; we mean a return to detachment
and to form. But detachment, Phaedrus, and
preoccupation with form lead to intoxication and
desire, they may lead the noblest among us to
frightful emotional excesses, which his own stern
cult of the beautiful would make him the first to
condemn. So they too, they too, lead to the bottomless
pit. Yes, they lead us thither, I say, us who
are poets-who by our natures are prone not to excellence
but to excess.
Mann, who had studied and was influenced by Nietzsche, here posits the artist as a Dionysian, drawn to the purely sensual. But at the same time he recognizes that this attraction to the non-rational realm is self destructive; yield to desire and you end up, like Aschenbach, first insane and then dead. The artist is counterpoised against the wise and rational citizenery, whom Nietzsche termed Apollonians (see Orrin's review of The Birth of Tragedy (1872)(Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900) (Grade: C). I've tried several times to read Mann's novels--Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus--and I have to admit I find them unreadable, but supposedly this struggle between reason and passion is a consistent theme.
Yet when Mann's diaries were published in the 1980's--revealing a man who, despite a successful marriage lasting half a century and producing six children, was continually smitten with young men, typically the waiters in his favorite restaurants--the critics claim to have been shocked by the revelation of his homoerotic yearnings. Significantly, there is no evidence that he acted on these impulses. He appears to have submerged his carnal appetite for boys in favor of a conventional family life. I simply do not understand why this should have surprised anyone; it seems perfectly consistent with the vision of this story that he would have chosen not to end up like Aschenbach himself.
This is not a terribly enjoyable story to read and there aren't really
any sympathetic characters. Nor do I find Mann's prose particularly
compelling; as I mentioned, I've found his other works to be pretty tough
sledding. But taken purely as a cautionary tale, it's at least mildly
worthwhile reading.
(Reviewed:06-Jun-00)
Grade: (C)
