Showing posts with label Thomas Mann. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thomas Mann. Show all posts

Sunday, November 06, 2022

James Family Values


Barry Sonnenfeld, dir.: Addams Family Values (1993)
June 17, 1905

Dear Mr. Johnson:

Just back from three months in Europe, I find your letter of May 16th awaiting me, with the very flattering news of my election into the Academy of Arts and Letters. I own that this reply gives me terrible searchings of the heart.

On the one hand the lust of distinction and the craving to be yoked in one Social body with so many illustrious names tempt me to say “yes.” On the other, bidding me say “no,” there is my life‐long practice of not letting my name figure where there is not some definite work doing in which I am willing to bear a share; and there is my life‐long professional habit of preaching against the world and its vanities.

I am not informed that this Academy has any very definite work cut out for it of the sort in which I could bear a useful part; and it suggests
tant soit peu the notion of an organization for the mere purpose of distinguishing certain individuals (with their own connivance) and enabling them to say to the world at large “we are in and you are out.”

Ought a preacher against vanities to succumb to such a lure at the very first call? Ought he not rather to “refrain, renounce, abstain,” even tho it seem a sour and ungenial act? On the whole it seems to me that for a philosopher with my pretensions to austerity and righteousness, the only consistent course is to give up this particular vanity, and treat myself as unworthy of the honour, which I assuredly am. And I am the more encouraged to this course by the fact that my younger and shallower and vainer brother is already in the Academy, and that if I were there too, the other families represented might think the James influence too rank and strong.

Let me go, then, I pray you, “release me and restore me to the ground.” If you knew how greatly against the grain these duty‐inspired lines are written, you would not deem me unfriendly or ungenial, but only a little cracked.

By the same token, I think that I ought to resign from the Institute (in which I have played so inactive a part) which act I herewith also perform.

Believe me, dear Mr. Johnson, with longing regret,
heroically yours,

WILLIAM JAMES

Cambridge, Mass.


- Quoted from Letters to the Editor. The New York Times (April 16, 1972)


R. W. B. Lewis: The Jameses: A Family Narrative (1991)


I think you'll agree that this is quite an odd letter to send to someone inviting you to join their organisation - all the more so given that William James had already agreed to be one of the founding members of the American Institute of Arts and Letters some years before.

What can have motivated it? Was it really an expression of humility on his part, or was it - as Leon Edel, in his immense, magisterial five-volume biography of Henry James (1953-1972), suggests - because his "younger and shallower and vainer brother" was already in the Academy: i.e. had been asked first?

It's important to stress that William James was 63 at the time, with a worldwide reputation as one of the most influential psychologists and philosophers then living. His "younger and shallower and vainer brother", Henry, was 62, and already seen as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, for which he was nominated in 1911, 1912, and 1916.

William himself, in context, characterises his own reaction to this insult - an Academy daring to offer priority to his younger brother - as "a bit cracked." His choice of words in describing the possible "James influence" on that institution as "too rank and strong" is also strangely visceral - as if there were something lurking in his family background which literally sickened him.

I've written elsewhere about the mountain of books by and about Henry James collected by me over the years. Which is yet another reason for being surprised at Williams' characterisation of this "Master of nuance and scruple" (in W. H. Auden's phrase), this "great and talkative man," as a "younger and shallower and vainer brother." Vain, yes, perhaps - younger, definitely - but shallow? The mind boggles.

The family tree of the Jameses was more or less as follows ("A shilling life will give you all the facts" - Auden again):

On July 28, 1840, [Henry James Sr. (1811–1882), an American theologican and Swedenborgian mystic], was married to Mary Robertson Walsh (1810–1882), the sister of a fellow Princeton seminarian, by the mayor of New York ... The couple lived in New York, and together had five children:
  1. William James (1842–1910), a philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States.
  2. Henry James Jr. (1843–1916), an author considered to be among the greatest novelists in the English language ...
  3. Garth Wilkinson "Wilkie" James (1845–1883) ...
  4. Robertson "Bob" James (1846–1910) ...
  5. Alice James (1848–1892), a writer and teacher who became well known for her diary published posthumously in 1934 ...
- Wikipedia: Henry James Sr.
[It could almost pass for a picture of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, couldn't it? The article I borrowed this image from is even entitled "Henry James’s Smarter Older Brother." And is it just me, or is there something a little territorial in the way William is trying to tower over his brother, while Henry obligingly tilts his head to try and look as small as possible? It's like two cats establishing precedence when they meet in the backyard.]
I guess what interests me most about the James family, though, is not so much the primeval struggle for dominance between the two eldest brothers - it's a psychological commonplace that a second child tries to distinguish him or her self as much as possible from their older sibling. No, it's how that pattern affects the other children that concerns me.

And, yes, I am the youngest in a family of four children: my eldest brother embodies scientific method and logic; the next brother down is completely dedicated to creative writing and the exercise of the existential will; the next down, my sister, was an invalid a little like Alice James, very gifted artistically but unable to deal with the stresses of the workaday world.

So what was left for me, the youngest child? The necessity of avoiding all of these prior choices - in part, or wholly - in order to construct my own independent existence. And how successful have I been? Well, I'm not really in a position to judge: but all I can say is that I believe that your place in the succession, from first to last, has a massive influence on your own individual process of individuation, especially in families with a very dominant ethos: like the Jameses, or the Manns, or (for that matter) the Rosses.


Viktor Mann: Wir waren fünf. Bildnis der Familie Mann [There were five of us: A Mann Family Album] (1949)
Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann (1840–1891), Lübeck merchant and senator, married Júlia da Silva Bruhns (1851–1923), a German-Brazilian writer. Together they had five children:
  1. [Luiz] Heinrich Mann (1871–1950), author, president of the fine poetry division of the Prussian Academy of Arts ...
  2. [Paul] Thomas Mann (1875–1955), author, Nobel Prize for Literature laureate in 1929 ...
  3. Julia Elisabeth Therese ['Lula'] Mann (1877–1927), married Josef Löhr (1862–1922), banker. She committed suicide by hanging herself at the age of 50.
  4. Carla [Augusta Olga Maria] Mann (1881–1910), actress. She committed suicide by taking poison at the age of 29.
  5. Karl Viktor Mann (1890–1949), economist, married Magdalena Nelly Kilian (1895–1962).
- Wikipedia: The Mann Family
[In this picture, taken around 1902, Heinrich seems still to be trying to assert dominance over Thomas. He was, after all, a well-known writer and cultural figure by this time. He'd already published a number of books. Thomas, by contrast, had only published one novel, but it was Buddenbrooks, a massively influential work which would eventually earn him the Nobel Prize. Is he already conscious, here, of biding his time?]
You see what I mean about the possible perilous effects of family dynamics? First Carla, then Lula, both sisters, both suicides. Carla was conscious that her acting career was not going as she'd planned: she had little hope left of rivalling her two elder brothers. Whatever miseries drove her to the final act, it cast a long shadow over the whole family. And, then, of course, Lula followed her example seventeen years later.

Thomas Mann's eldest son, Klaus, another writer, who'd striven all his life to get out from under his father's long shadow, would commit suicide in his turn in 1949. He, too, had lived much of his life in a closer-than-close conspiracy with his older sister Erika, a well-known actress married - for passport reasons - to homosexual poet W. H. Auden.

So what am I trying to say about this succession of family tragedies? Nothing to belittle or attempt to 'explain' them, I assure you. Let's return to the Jameses in an effort to make the point a little clearer.


Marie Leon: Henry and William James (early 1900s)


William and Henry had their intense rivalry, co-existing with a genuine love for each other, to keep them going. But what of the rest of the family?

You'll note that both brothers were just of an age to be eligible to join up for the American Civil War (1861-65) - William 19, Henry 18 - when it first broke out. Henry bowed out as the result of an 'obscure hurt', a phrase which generations of critics interpreted to mean some kind of debilitating accident in the genital regions: a little like the hero of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926). It explained a lot.

However, his biographer Leon Edel has deduced from careful sorting of the evidence that it was far more likely to have been a bad back. In any case, it was enough to spare him from joining the forces in any capacity whatsoever. Was it residual guilt over this that explains his rather patronising review of Walt Whitman's poetry book Drum-taps (1865), a record of the older poet's hospital visits and tending of wounded soldiers during the war? Certainly in later life Henry felt deeply ashamed at having so missed the merits of Whitman's work when he first encountered it.

William, by contrast, was already at Harvard, where he made sure he had enough to do in the scientific arena to make it quite impossible for him to find leisure to take note of the war. Nor was he alone in this. As was the case during the Vietnam war, very few university students in the North actually joined the colours. It was mostly those with manual jobs who marched off to the front.


Jane Maher: Biography of Broken Fortunes (1986)


It was Wilkie and Bob, their two younger brothers, who actually joined up. In her book Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilkie and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry, and Alice James, Jane Maher traces the sorry saga of their lives thereafter: their abortive attempts to be accepted on their own terms, their business and other failures. Wilkie went bankrupt, was left out of his father's will, and died at the early age of 38. "Unsuccessful at poetry and painting, Bob, an alcoholic with a violent temper, spent many years in asylums, and died at 63, not long before his brother William," as her blurb has it.

But that's not really the whole story. It's important to note here that both brothers were legitimate war heroes, men of honour and principle, and that many of their subsequent difficulties ought properly to be attributed to post-traumatic stress. Both volunteered to serve as officers in Massachusetts' newly-formed Black regiments. As Wilkie put it in a speech to Union Veterans many years later:
When I went to war I was a boy of 17 years of age, the son of parents devoted to the cause of the Union and the abolition of slavery. I had been brought up in the belief that slavery was a monstrous wrong, its destruction worthy of a man’s best efforts, even unto the laying down of life.
Wilkie subsequently took part in the heroic (if misguided) Union assault on Battery Wagner in 1863 - the subject of the 1989 civil war film Glory - and was only a few steps behind Colonel Robert Shaw when he died.
Gathering together a knot of men after the suspense of a few seconds, I waved my sword for a further charge toward the living line of fire above us. We had gone then some thirty yards ... Suddenly a shell tore my side. In the frenzy of excitement, it seemed a painless visitation … A still further advance brought us to the second obstruction … The enemy’s fire did not abate for this crossing, and here it was I received my second wound, a canister ball in my foot.
He did eventually recover from his wounds, but walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

Bob, too, saw action in the sea islands off coastal South Carolina and Georgia, and nearly died of sunstroke while campaigning in Florida. Little was done by their family after the war to assist them in their transition to civilian life.

When their father decided to buy some land in Florida which he intended to farm with the help of freed slaves, Wilkie was put in charge of the venture. Bob joined him just before local hostility and bad financial conditions put an end to the experiment. They eventually both ended up working for the same railroad in Wisconsin.

Were they failures? In the material sense, perhaps yes. But as Henry remarked (a little guiltily?) of Wilkie:
"He is not particularly successful, as success is measured in this country; but he is always rotund and good-natured and delightful."
- quoted in Carl Swanson, Milwaukee Independent (2021)
As for Bob, his alcoholism gradually estranged him from his family, and:
In 1885 he returned to Concord to become, in the quarter-century remaining to him, an amiable dilettante, painting, writing poetry and endearing himself as a conversationalist of remarkable powers.
- Edwin M. Yoder, The Washington Post (1986)
Henry James found this brother's conversation, too, "charged with natural life, perception, humor and color ... the equivalent, for fine animation, of William's epistolary prowess."


Alice James (1848-1892)


What, then, of Alice, the youngest of the James siblings? Well, in many ways she had the oddest destiny of all. She became a professional invalid in the High Victorian manner: like the sofa-bound Signora Neroni in Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857), or (for that matter), the crippled heir of Redclyffe in Charlotte M. Yonge's famous novel.


Alice James & Katharine Loring (Leamington Spa, 1890)


William, the psychologist, was largely unimpressed by her vapours, but empathetic Henry lavished her with attention. It was mainly for that reason that she shifted her residence to Britain after their parents' death. She also wrote an exceptionally subtle and (at times) acerbic diary, which has become a classic in its own right.

Subsequent biographers and critics, Jean Strouse and Susan Sontag among them, have veered between sympathy and impatience with "Alice-as-icon and Alice-as-victim". She did, however, at least for a time, succeed in putting herself at the centre of the family discourse - which is more than her other two brothers, Wilkie and Bob, ever managed to do.


Leon Edel, ed. The Diary of Alice James (1964)






Anne Ross: Poinsettia: A Mermaid's Tale (2013)


My own sister, Anne Mairi Ross (1961-1991), a gifted writer and artist, took her own life some three decades ago now. The rest of us rage on. Surviving such family conflicts can be a difficult thing to achieve, and it's therefore with more than an Academic interest that I pore over the histories of the Jameses and the Manns - as well as those of various other creative families, the Bells (Julian and Quentin), the Powyses (John, Theodore, Llewellyn and their eight siblings).

I'm not so naïve as to think that such analogues could ever account for the complexities of any human life, but I'm not sure it's really feasible to ignore the similarities in all these Freudian sibling dramas, either.

I'd like to conclude with a poem from my latest book, The Oceanic Feeling. This one comes from the section called "Family plot," which begins with the following epigraph:
These works of fiction, which seem so full of hostility, are none of them really so badly intended … they still preserve, under a slight disguise, the child’s original affection for his parents. The faithlessness and ingratitude are only apparent.

– Sigmund Freud, ‘Family Romances’ (1909)

Jack Ross: The Oceanic Feeling (2021)


Oh br/other!


My eldest brother is flying up

to Auckland
for the weekend
to see my mother

Bronwyn is flying down
to see her sister
in Wellington on Friday

coincidence? hardly
Bronwyn’s younger brother
arrives today

last time we stayed with him
I had a tantrum
and wouldn’t sleep another night

under his roof
I read a thesis recently
on placing far less stress

on Oedipus
the br/other was the term
the author coined

for his new theory
Luke, I am your father!
try your brother

then the sparks will fly  



Anne Ross: Poinsettia (2013)






Sunday, January 30, 2022

The Magician: Thomas Mann or Colm Tóibín?


Thomas Mann (1946)


I've spent a good deal of time these summer holidays rereading books by Thomas Mann. When I wasn't reading him, I was writing blogposts about him: on this site as well as my bibliography one. And when I wasn't reading or writing about him, I was ordering new items to fill (mostly imaginary) gaps in my Mann collection. I may have gone a bit over the top in that respect, in fact.

Even so, it came as a surprise when I saw how many of the people I mentioned him to already seemed to have a pretty comprehensive knowledge of the life and times of Thomas Mann. I hadn't realised his work was so much in the mainstream. Until the penny dropped. Their knowledge was not so much knowledge gleaned from reading Mann, as a reflection of the vogue of Colm Tóibín's recent biographical novel The Magician.


Colm Tóibín: The Magician (2021)


So what's wrong with that, you ask? Why, nothing at all. There's no reason why people shouldn't use biographies and even biographical novels to pick up information about authors they've never actually read. I've done it myself, and feel no compunction in admitting the fact.

It isn't quite the same as actually reading your way through Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain, mind you, but then who ever claimed it was? I guess any disquiet I feel over this - which I freely admit may be partially motivated by pique: there I was thinking I was something special because I'd ploughed through all these immense novels by some obscure old German, only to find that all his secrets were freely on sale in a far more convenient and readable form - is really based on a couple of other issues.




Murdo Macleod: Colm Tóibín (2018)


My first concern can be outlined more or less as follows. The Magician is certainly a very readable novel, but is it a good novel? There seems to be a kind of concensus among those who haven't actually read Mann that it is a pretty good novel - even such terms as 'masterpiece' have been bandied about (with a subtle implication that Mann is rather lucky that one so gifted should take him up at this late date in time).

I, too, think it a good novel: or at any rate a very entertaining one, which is perhaps not quite the same thing. But then I'm rather a fan of bio-fiction. In my teens I greatly enjoyed reading fat tomes by the likes of Irving Stone which gave overviews of the lives of worthies like Vincent Van Gogh (Lust for Life) or Michelangelo (The Agony and the Ecstasy) long before I'd seen the fine films based on these books.

I've provided a list of Irving Stone's books at the bottom of this post for anyone who'd like to follow up on his work. His later books on the likes of Darwin and Freud were perhaps less successful than the earlier ones, but there's no harm in such works (I think), especially given the lack of pretentiousness which surrounds them.

That isn't quite the tone people take when they talk of Colm Tóibín. After all, he's only written two such novels so far - about, respectively, Mann and Henry James - but he does appear to have won quite a reputation as a serious modern author with his (many) other novels.


Colm Tóibín: The Master (2004)


The Henry James novel, which I've also read, is interesting. Tóibín makes a concerted attempt to inhabit the style as well as the consciousness of James during one of the great crises of his life, the failure of his dramatic ambitions in the 1890s. It's a far more focussed, and perhaps more ambitious attempt to become the Master, than is his Mann.


John Singer Sargent: Henry James (1913)


On the other hand, the Mann book covers a whole half-century of his life and contacts in a series of neatly staged scenes, with an overarching theme. Such a task cannot have been easy. It might, in fact, have been easier to repeat his earlier success by doing a study of some particular aspect of his life in a prose-style pastiched from Death in Venice.




Luchino Visconti, dir.: Death in Venice (1971)


Which brings me to my second point. No-one's ever really been in any serious doubt about the homoerotic inclinations of either Henry James or Thomas Mann. True, the former may well never had had sex at all in the conventional sense. He certainly formed no longterm relationships, and kept his private life a well-guarded secret.

Mann, by contrast, was a married man, with a complex and turbulent family life, and a crowd of children and siblings who all seem to have been in varying states of rebellion at various times. But no reader of his work can fail to notice his obsession with male beauty and passionate same-sex friendships. Even if you didn't, critics and biographers have pointed it out ad nauseam. But did he ever actually have sex with a man? No-one knows. There are reasons to doubt it.

Tóibín's Mann certainly does. He's a good deal gayer than any previous version of Mann - which is, again, Tóibín's prerogative. Nor does this decision exactly come as a surprise, given the tenor of his other work. His James, too, is far gayer than (say) Leon Edel's.


Leon Edel: Life of Henry James (5 vols: 1953-72)


All that is certainly well within the bounds of fair comment. But Tóibín's Mann is also far more of a domestic tyrant and family autocrat than seems to come through in his surviving letters and diary - not to mention a bit of a sneak when it comes to hiding his rather hole-in-corner affairs.



There's a very apposite letter by Thomas Hardy once applied by the poet Elizabeth Bishop to a not dissimilar case:
Here is a quotation from dear little Hardy which I copied out years ago ... It's from a letter written in 1911, referring to "an abuse which was said to have occurred - that of publishing details of a lately deceased man's life under the guise of a novel, with assurances of truth scattered in the newspapers." ...

"What should certainly be protested against, in cases where there is no authorisation, is the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions. Infinite mischief would lie in that. If any statements in the dress of fiction are covertly hinted to be fact, all must be fact, and nothing else but fact, for obvious reasons. The power of getting lies believed about people through that channel after they are dead, by stirring in a few truths, is a horror to contemplate."
Which I guess is my point. 'If any statements in the dress of fiction are covertly hinted to be fact, all must be fact, and nothing else but fact, for obvious reasons.' In other words, interesting though many of Tóibín's conjectures about Mann certainly are, it's hard to know how to take them, exactly, without any real sense of the evidence they're based on.

Of course this could be used as a way of dismissing biographical novels in general as a viable literary form, but I'm not sure that it's necessary to go quite so far as that. Tóibín's novel strikes me - from my own knowledge of Mann's writing and from reading at least some of the other biographies - as unreasonably critical of his subject's bona fides in matters of the heart. He leaves Mann's rather more patchy political record largely to one side.



But all this leaves me dying to know where Tóibín got his information from. Out of his own head? Or are there substantive archives of material which give a sound basis for at least some of these suppositions? I don't suppose we'll ever know, unless he decides to give us a 'writing-of' book along the lines of Mann's own Story of a Novel, about the composition of Doctor Faustus; or David Lodge's The Year of Henry James, which gives an account both of his own James bio-novel Author, Author, but also of the various others - including Tóibín's - which appeared in that same year, 2004.


David Lodge: The Year of Henry James (2006)





Alex Ross (2010)


That's about as far as I'd got when I chanced upon a recent New Yorker article called "Thomas Mann’s Brush with Darkness" by their learned Germanophile music critic, Alex Ross. This was the first passage that caught my eye:
Because I have been almost unhealthily obsessed with Mann’s writing since the age of eighteen, I may be ill-equipped to win over skeptics, but I know why I return to it year after year. Mann is, first, a supremely gifted storyteller, adept at the slow windup and the rapid turn of the screw. He is a solemn trickster who is never altogether earnest about anything, especially his own grand Goethean persona. At the heart of his labyrinth are scenes of emotional chaos, episodes of philosophical delirium, intimations of inhuman coldness. His politics traverse the twentieth-century spectrum, ricochetting from right to left. His sexuality is an exhibitionistic enigma. In life and work alike, his contradictions are pressed together like layers in metamorphic rock.
Yep. What he said. I know what he means when he refers to his Mannophilia as an 'unhealthy obsession.' As a fellow-obsessive, I also understand the reservations he mentions below on the actual need for Tóibín’s project:
At first glance, Tóibín’s undertaking seems superfluous, since there are already a number of great novels about Thomas Mann, and they have the advantage of being by Thomas Mann. Few writers of fiction have so relentlessly incorporated their own experiences into their work. Hanno Buddenbrook, the proud, hurt boy who improvises Wagnerian fantasies on the piano; Tonio Kröger, the proud, hurt young writer who sacrifices his life for his art; Prince Klaus Heinrich, the hero of Royal Highness, who rigidly performs his duties; Gustav von Aschenbach, the hidebound literary celebrity who loses his mind to a boy on a Venice beach; Mut-em-enet, Potiphar’s wife, who falls desperately in love with the handsome Israelite Joseph; the confidence man Felix Krull, who fools people into thinking he is more impressive than he is; the Faustian composer Adrian Leverkühn, who is compared to “an abyss into which the feelings others expressed for him vanished soundlessly without a trace” — all are avatars of the author, sometimes channelling his letters and diaries.
He, too, feels some misgivings about the clash between Tóibín's imaginings and the existing documents:
Tóibín doesn’t adhere exclusively to the biographical record, and his most decisive intervention comes in the realm of sex. In all likelihood, Mann never engaged in anything resembling what contemporary sensibilities would classify as gay sex. His diaries are reliable in factual matters and do not shy away from embarrassing details; we hear about erections, masturbation, nocturnal emissions. But he clearly has trouble even picturing male-on-male action, let alone participating in it. When, in 1950, he reads Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, he asks himself, “How can one sleep with gentlemen?” The Mann of The Magician, by contrast, is allowed to have several same-sex encounters, though the details remain vague.
In the end, much though he relishes certain passages and aperçus in Tóibín's novel:
The Magician, deft and diligent as it is, ultimately diminishes the imperial strangeness of Mann’s nature. He comes across as a familiar, somewhat pitiable creature — a closeted man who occasionally gives in to his desires. The real Mann never gave in to his desires, but he also never really hid them. Gay themes surfaced in his writing almost from the start, and he made clear that his stories were autobiographical. When, in 1931, he received a newspaper questionnaire asking about his “first love,” he replied, in essence, “Read ‘Tonio Kröger.’ ” Likewise, of Death in Venice he wrote, “Nothing is invented.” Gay men saw the author as one of their own ...
Perhaps the real problem with The Magician, then, is that its author is not content to write a solid, unexciting Mann-and-water bio-novel in the Irving Stone mode, but isn't ready, either, to engage fully with the 'element of charlatanism' (Alex Ross's phrase) inherent in Mann's magpie methodology.

As a result, The Magician ends up falling between two stools. It provides a fascinating (though selective) reading of Thomas Mann's life, but not really of his art. Tóibín's muse seems more comfortable with the stylistic conventions of Henry James's day than with the oncoming juggernaut of twentieth-century Modernism. Mann's basic techniques of irony and sampling were foundational for post-modern writers such as Nabokov or Pynchon. Mann, after all, 'had always been haunted by the sense of being an empty shell, a wooden soldier.'
All along, the dubiousness of genius had been one of his chief motifs. In “The Brother,” his essay on Hitler, he wrote that greatness was an aesthetic rather than an ethical phenomenon, meaning that Nazi exploitation of Goethe and Beethoven was less a betrayal of German artist-worship than a grotesque extension of it. The Magician’s finest trick was to dismantle the pretensions of genius while preserving his own lofty stature. The feat could be accomplished only once, and it happens definitively in Doctor Faustus, when Leverkühn’s explication of his valedictory cantata spirals into madness. An immaculately turned-out personification of bourgeois culture stages its destruction.
So am I saying that you shouldn't read The Magician? Not at all. Tóibín is not alone nowadays in his return to the solider conventions of the realist novel. What I would advise, though, is tempering your reading of Tóibín with some study of Thomas Mann's own fiction: even just a few short stories if you don't have the patience for one of the novels. "Disorder and Early Sorrow" or "Mario and the Magician" will quickly convince you, if you needed the reminder, that we're not dealing here with an empty windbag but with a far subtler talent, a writer on a level with Chekhov or Joyce.







Getty Images / Hulton Archive: Irving Stone

Irving Tennenbaum ['Irving Stone']
(1903-1989)


    Fiction:

  1. Lust for Life: A Novel of Vincent Van Gogh. 1935. London: John Lane / The Bodley Head, 1940.
  2. Sailor on Horseback. [Jack London] (1938)
  3. Immortal Wife. [Jessie Benton Frémont] (1944)
  4. Adversary in the House. [Eugene V. Debs and his wife Kate] (1947)
  5. The Passionate Journey. [American artist John Noble] (1949)
  6. The President's Lady. [Andrew Jackson and Rachel Donelson Jackson] (1951)
  7. Love is Eternal. [Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd] (1954)
  8. The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo. 1961. Fontana Books. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1965.
  9. Those Who Love. [John Adams and Abigail Adams] (1965)
  10. The Passions of the Mind. [Sigmund Freud] (1971)
  11. The Greek Treasure. [Heinrich Schliemann] (1975)
  12. The Origin. [Charles Darwin] (1980)
  13. Depths of Glory. [Camille Pissarro] (1985)

  14. Non-fiction:

  15. Clarence Darrow for the Defence. 1941. London: The Bodley Head, 1949.
  16. They Also Ran. [Failed Presidential Candidates] (1943 / 1966)
  17. Earl Warren (1948)
  18. Men to Match My Mountains: The Monumental Saga of the Winning of America's Far West (1956)

  19. Edited:

  20. [with Jean Stone]. Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh. 1937. London: Cassell, 1973.
  21. [with Jean Stone]. I, Michelangelo, Sculptor: An Autobiography through Letters. Trans. Charles Speroni. 1963. Fontana Books. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1965.


Carol Reed, dir.: The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965)


Sunday, September 12, 2021

A Mann for All Seasons: The Magic Mountain



Hans W. Geissendörfer, dir: Der Zauberberg (1982)
[based on the novel by Thomas Mann]


As we move into the fourth week of our fourth COVID-19 lockdown up here in Auckland (still stuck at level 4, though the rest of the country has managed to escape into the relative comfort of level 2), I have to confess that I've been beguiling my enforced leisure rereading Thomas Mann's classic novel of sanatorium life, The Magic Mountain (1924).



Thomas Mann: Der Zauberberg (1924)


This is the third time I've read it. The first time (after a couple of false starts) was when I was still a teenager. I responded immediately to Mann's brilliant evocation of atmosphere in the opening couple of chapters, as his hapless hero Hans Castorp gradually succumbs to the charms of invalid life in the Swiss Alps.

After that, however, it got a bit more difficult. Each chapter was longer than the one before (no doubt by careful design on the part of the author), and the mass of detail about each of the characters and all of the footling ways they find to kill time up there in the rarefied, TB-intolerant air of the mountains, did rather drag at times.

Overall, though, I did feel a sense of achievement when I got to the finish - signalled, appropriately enough, by the outbreak of World War I. Nor was I blind to the allegorical significance of all of this elaborate life-avoidance given some of my other reading around the subject. It's the one thing everyone knows about The Magic Mountain, in fact - its function as a microcosm of the 'sick' society of pre-war Europe.



Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain, trans. Helen T. Lowe-Porter (1927)


Twenty-five or so years later I read it again. The occasion was my finding a second-hand copy which included the author's late postscript to the novel. I was anxious to see just what he thought it was about, but - being a completist by nature - I thought it necessary to plough right through the whole thing again, all 700-odd pages of it.

The result was, I must admit, a little disappointing: even the charm of those early chapters seemed to have evaporated, leaving only a vast talky expanse of fairly obvious symbolism. The crucial chapter 'Snow', where Hans Castorp, caught in a snowstorm, has a vision of the ideal life (or is it? He wakes up abruptly just as it's shifting into nightmare), fell particularly flat for me at that point.



Gore Verbinski, dir.: A Cure for Wellness (2017)
['inspired' by Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain]


I'm happy to report that that has not been the case this time round. Maybe it helps to be in the middle of a huge, collective, world-wide feverdream. The old attraction was back, though whether I'll ever feel inspired to take the long road to the Bergdorf again remains to be seen.

In particular, I was struck by Mann's plaintive appeal, in his late Postscript to the novel, that readers should reserve judgement until they've read it through twice. I must be unusually dumb, because it took me three readings - I do now, however, feel as if I have some kind of a fist on just what he had in mind.






Thomas Mann: Joseph and His Brothers (1978)


That's not to say that this was the whole extent of my reading of Thomas Mann. I had quite a taste for what were then regarded as modern German writers in my teens, and read Franz Kafka (first), Herman Hesse (second), and finally Thomas Mann in as much depth as I was able, given the translations available at the time.

In particular I read all four of Mann's great novels - Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (1924), Joseph and His Brothers (1933-43), and Doctor Faustus (1947). I also read the four shorter, 'interstitial' novels which have attracted so much less attention: the rather silly Royal Highness (1909); the more brilliant Lotte in Weimar (1939 - US title: The Beloved Returns); the weird, late Holy Sinner (1951); and finally the unfinished Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, begun as a short story in 1911, and completed and published as the first instalment of a much longer novel in 1954, just before the writer's death.



Thomas Mann: Death in Venice (1912)


Quite likely, though, there's only one thing you associate with the name Thomas Mann: Death in Venice. Or, rather, the wonderfully dreamy 1971 Visconti film about - in the immortal words of Monty Python's "Elizabeth L" sketch - "the elderly poof what dies in Venice."



John Ruane, dir.: Death in Brunswick (1990)


It also inspired an even more inspired spoof about a pitiful mother's boy (played by Sam Neill) in the rather grotty Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, whose series of comic misadventures culminate in an abortive attempt to poison her with a cup of tea as she listens to her favourite record, the slow movement of Mahler's fifth symphony - yes, that leitmotif which keeps going all through Visconti's masterpiece. You can listen to it here.






Helmut Koopman: Thomas Mann (2005)


So who exactly was Thomas Mann? In the picture above, taken in Munich in 1900, you can see him taking a rather subordinate position to his elder brother Heinrich, also a renowned writer. The two would soon change positions, though.

A year later Thomas published his first novel, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, still regarded by Germanists as his main claim to fame, given its importance as a chronicle of the decline of the great merchant families of Northern Germany. It was probably the decisive factor in earning him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929, and it certainly established him as something of a pundit among commentators on German culture and society.

All through the turbulent years of the First World War, the post-war famine, the Weimar Republic, and the turn to Right-Wing Nationalism in his native land, he continued to struggle with his complex fate: a bourgeois but also an artist, a patriot but also an internationalist.



Brother Heinrich, a thorough Francophile and critic of Prussianism - one of his early novels, Professor Unrat, was filmed as the Marlene Dietrich vehicle The Blue Angel (1930) - faced no such ideological struggles. So far as he was concerned, aggressive German nationalism was a form of mental illness, which needed to be exorcised thoroughly before Germany would be fit to take its place among the other nations of Europe.

In retrospect, it's hard to disagree with him, but the brothers fell out in 1914, and found it difficult to maintain more than an uneasy truce ever after, despite Thomas's eventual espousal of a not dissimilar position.

He wrote novels, short stories, and essays in abundance. Not all of them have been translated into English, but enough is available to give you a pretty good idea of his progress from Protestant Burger to ardent New Dealer. When Hitler came to power, Mann fled to Switzerland and subsequently to the United States, where he was welcomed with open arms as the embodiment of the purer manifestations of German Kultur.



This marble-monument version of Mann does not really do him justice, however. His work is both diverse and perverse - by the standards of the time, at any rate. Visconti did not misinterpret the underlying themes of perhaps his greatest work, the novella Death in Venice. It's only one in a series of works which associate artistic inspiration with illness and deformity - a kind of leprosy of the soul which is nevertheless necessary to achieve such great heights.



Heinrich Breloer, dir.: Buddenbrooks (2008)


Mann was, of course, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, and his ideas on the declining energies of great mercantile families - the first generation pirates and pioneers, the next generations consolidators and businessmen, and the generations after that neurotics and artists - were very much influenced by Freud's ideas on the debilitating tendencies of modern civilisation.

Among his other interests were psychic phenomena (he wrote an interesting essay called "Okkulte Erlebnisse" [An Experience in the Occult] about his own attendance at a séance with celebrated medium brothers Willi and Rudi Schneider). This, too, is one of the many influences which bore fruit in the later chapters of The Magic Mountain.

Is it his masterpiece? I would say so, yes. I greatly enjoyed reading the immensely lengthy Joseph and His Brothers, but it could be accused of a certain avoidance of contemporary phenomena. Amusingly enough, on one of my family visits to the UK, I discovered my 94-year-old Great-Aunt Morag ("It's a great age!") in the process of reading this vast, strange novel, which had been taken out of the library for her by my cousins under instructions to find her some religious books. She said she found it interesting, if a bit long-winded.



Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus (1947)


Nor have I ever been able quite to fathom the exact point of Doctor Faustus, which others tell me should be regarded as his greatest work. I hope to remedy my deficiencies in this respect when I'm finally able, quite soon, to get hold of a copy of his book-length explication of it, The Story of a Novel (1961), however.

One thing's for certain, The Magic Mountain has nothing whatsoever to do with the Gore Verbinski horror film A Cure for Wellness, despite the director and screenwriter's claims to the contrary. Much though I enjoyed this film, I couldn't honestly see any kinship between their respective projects, apart from the fact that both stories take place at sanatoria in the Swiss Alps.



Gore Verbinski, dir.: A Cure for Wellness (2017)


I certainly do recommend Thomas Mann, though. In certain moods - when one has a lot of time on one's hands - his complex, intertwined narrative style is just what the doctor ordered. And his subject matter is anything but predictable and traditional.

'Polymorphous perversity', Freud's term for infantile sexuality, fits most of his heroes better than other, more conventional descriptions. Mann himself, though on the one hand a bourgeois family man, had another side which required a series of passionate male friendships. Doing justice to these two aspects of himself explains a good deal of his oeuvre.

In the late 1930s his actress daughter Erika required an English passport, having run into difficulties as a 'stateless person' due to her left-wing political affiliations. At the recommendation of Mann family friend Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden was asked to marry her in order to secure her a passport. 'Delighted,' he telegraphed in reply, and British nationality for her was duly obtained.

Some years later a photograph of Thomas Mann and his extended family was being taken for a feature article in America, and the journalist enquired just what Mr. Isherwood's connection with the Manns might be? "Family pimp," growled Thomas.

If you do start into his labyrinth, beware!



Carl Mydans: Thomas Mann and family (1939)
l-to-r: Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, Erika Mann, Thomas Mann, Katia Mann, Monika Mann, Klaus Mann






Thomas Mann (1937)

Paul Thomas Mann
(1875-1955)




    Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks (1901)


    Novels:

  1. Buddenbrooks – Verfall einer Familie (1901)
    • Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family. 1902. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. 1924. London: Secker & Warburg, 1947.
  2. Königliche Hoheit (1909)
    • Royal Highness. 1909. Trans. A. Cecil Curtis. 1926. Rev. Constance McNab. 1962. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
  3. Der Zauberberg (1924)
    • The Magic Mountain. 1924. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. 1928. London: Secker & Warburg, 1948.
    • The Magic Mountain: With a Postscript by the Author on The Making of the Novel. 1924. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. 1928. London: Nationwide Book Service, 1979.
  4. Joseph und seine Brüder (1933-1943)
    1. Die Geschichten Jaakobs (1933)
    2. Der junge Joseph (1934)
    3. Joseph in Ägypten (1936)
    4. Joseph, der Ernährer (1943)
    • Joseph and His Brothers. ['The Stories of Jacob' (1933); 'Young Joseph' (1934); 'Joseph in Egypt' (1936); 'Joseph the Provider' (1943)]. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. 1948. London: Secker & Warburg, 1956.
    • Joseph and His Brothers. ['The Stories of Jacob' (1933); 'Young Joseph' (1934); 'Joseph in Egypt' (1936); 'Joseph the Provider' (1943)]. Trans. Helen T. Lowe-Porter. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
  5. Lotte in Weimar (1939)
    • Lotte in Weimar. 1939. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. London: Secker & Warburg, 1940.
  6. Doktor Faustus (1947)
    • Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. 1947. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. 1949. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
  7. Der Erwählte (1951)
    • The Holy Sinner. 1951. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. 1952. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
  8. Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Der Memoiren erster Teil (1911 / 1954)
    • Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: Memoirs Part I. 1954. Trans. Denver Lindley. 1955. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.



  9. Thomas Mann: Lotte in Weimar (1939)


    Short Stories:

    [Included in Stories of a Lifetime. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (1961);
    included in Six Early Stories. Trans. Peter Constantine (1997)]

  10. Vision (1893)
  11. Gefallen (1894)
  12. Der Wille zum Glück [The Will to Happiness] (1896)
  13. Enttäuschung [Disillusionment] (1896)
  14. Der kleine Herr Friedemann [Little Herr Friedemann] (1896)
  15. Der Tod [Death] (1897)
  16. Der Bajazzo [The Dilettante] (1897)
  17. Gerächt [Avenged] (1897)
  18. Luischen [Little Lizzy] (1897 / 1900)
  19. Tobias Mindernickel (1898)
  20. Der Kleiderschrank [The Wardrobe] (1899)
  21. Der Weg zum Friedhof [The Way to the Churchyard] (1900)
  22. Die Hungernden [The Hungry] (1903)
  23. Das Wunderkind [The Child Prodigy] (1903)
  24. Ein Glück [A Gleam] (1904)
  25. Beim Propheten [At the Prophet's] (1904)
  26. Schwere Stunde [A Weary Hour] (1905)
  27. Wӓlsungenblut [The Blood of the Walsungs] (1905)
  28. Das Eisenbahnunglück [The Railway Accident] (1907)
  29. Anekdote [Anecdote] (1908)
  30. Wie Jappe und Do Escobar sich prügelten [The Fight between Jappe and Do Escobar] (1911)
  31. Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull [Felix Krull] (1911 / 1922)

  32. Plays:

  33. Fiorenza [Florence] (1905)

  34. Novellas:

  35. Gladius Dei (1902)
  36. Tristan (1903)
  37. Tonio Kröger (1903)
  38. Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] (1912)
  39. Herr und Hund [A Man and His Dog / Bashan and I] (1918)
  40. Unordnung und frühes Leid [Disorder and Early Sorrow] (1925)
  41. Mario und der Zauberer [Mario and the Magician] (1930)
  42. Die vertauschten Köpfe – Eine indische Legende [The Transposed Heads] (1940)
  43. Das Gesetz [The Tables of the Law] (1944)
  44. Die Betrogene: Erzählung [The Black Swan] (1954)



  45. Collections:

  46. Die Erzählungen, Erster Band. 2 vols. 1975. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1981.
    1. Vision (1893)
    2. Gefallen (1894)
    3. Der Wille zum Glück (1896)
    4. Enttäuschung (1896)
    5. Der Tod (1897)
    6. Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1896)
    7. Der Bajazzo (1897)
    8. Gerächt (1897)
    9. Luischen (1897 / 1900)
    10. Tobias Mindernickel (1898)
    11. Der Kleiderschrank (1899)
    12. Der Weg zum Friedhof (1900)
    13. Gladius Dei (1902)
    14. Tristan (1903)
    15. Die Hungernden (1903)
    16. Tonio Kröger (1903)
    17. Das Wunderkind (1903)
    18. Ein Glück (1904)
    19. Beim Propheten (1904)
    20. Schwere Stunde (1905)
    21. Wӓlsungenblut (1905)
    22. Anekdote (1908)
    23. Das Eisenbahnunglück (1907)
    24. Wie Jappe und Do Escobar sich prügelten (1911)
    25. Der Tod in Venedig (1912)
  47. Die Erzählungen, Zweiter Band. 2 vols. 1975. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983.
    1. Herr und Hund (1918)
    2. Unordnung und frühes Leid (1925)
    3. Mario und der Zauberer (1930)
    4. Die vertauschten Köpfe – Eine indische Legende (1940)
    5. Das Gesetz (1944)
    6. Die Betrogene: Erzählung (1954)
    7. Fiorenza (1905)
    8. Gesang vom Kindchen: Idylle (1919)
  48. Stories of Three Decades. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. The Modern Library. New York: Random House, Inc., 1936.
    1. Little Herr Friedemann (1897)
    2. Disillusionment (1896)
    3. The Dilettante (1897)
    4. Tobias Mindernickel (1897)
    5. Little Lizzy (1897)
    6. The Wardrobe (1899)
    7. The Way to the Churchyard (1901)
    8. Tonio Kröger (1903)
    9. Tristan (1903)
    10. The Hungry (1903)
    11. The Infant Prodigy (1903)
    12. Gladius Dei (1902)
    13. Fiorenza (1904)
    14. A Gleam (1904)
    15. At the Prophet's (1904)
    16. A Weary Hour (1905)
    17. The Blood of the Walsungs (1905)
    18. Railway Accident (1907)
    19. The Fight between Jappe and Do Escobar (1911)
    20. Felix Krull (1911)
    21. Death in Venice (1912)
    22. A Man and His Dog (1918)
    23. Disorder and Early Sorrow (1925)
    24. Mario and the Magician (1929)
  49. Stories of a Lifetime: The Collected Stories. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. 1936. Vol. 1 of 2. Mercury Books 8. London: The Heinemann Group of Publishers, 1961.
    1. Little Herr Friedemann (1897)
    2. Disillusionment (1896)
    3. The Dilettante (1897)
    4. Tobias Mindernickel (1897)
    5. Little Lizzy (1897)
    6. The Wardrobe (1899)
    7. The Way to the Churchyard (1901)
    8. The Hungry (1902)
    9. Tristan (1902)
    10. Gladius Dei (1902)
    11. Tonio Kröger (1903)
    12. The Infant Prodigy (1903)
    13. A Gleam (1904)
    14. Fiorenza (1904)
    15. At the Prophet's (1904)
    16. A Weary Hour (1905)
    17. The Blood of the Walsungs (1905)
    18. Railway Accident (1907)
    19. The Fight between Jappe and Do Escobar (1911)
  50. Stories of a Lifetime: The Collected Stories. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. 1936. Vol. 2 of 2. Mercury Books 9. London: The Heinemann Group of Publishers, 1961.
    1. Death in Venice (1912)
    2. A Man and His Dog (1918)
    3. Disorder and Early Sorrow (1925)
    4. Mario and the Magician (1929)
    5. The Transposed Heads (1940)
    6. The Tables of the Law (1944)
    7. The Black Swan (1953)


  51. Thomas Mann: Six Early Stories (1997)


  52. Six Early Stories. Trans. Peter Constantine (1997)
    1. A Vision: Prose Sketch (1893)
    2. Fallen (1894)
    3. The Will to Happiness (1896)
    4. Death (1897)
    5. Avenged: Study for a Novella (1897)
    6. Anecdote (1908)



  53. Thomas Mann: Three Essays (1929)


    Non-fiction:

  54. Three Essays. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (1929)
    1. Friedrich und die große Koalition [Frederick and the Great Coalition] (1915)
    2. Goethe und Tolstoi [Goethe and Tolstoy] (1922)
    3. Okkulte Erlebnisse [An Experience in the Occult] (1924)
  55. Past Masters and Other Papers. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (1933)
  56. An Exchange of Letters. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (1937)
  57. Freud, Goethe, Wagner. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter & Rita Matthias-Rail (1937)
  58. The Coming Victory of Democracy. Trans. Agnes E. Meyer. 1938. London: Secker & Warburg, 1938.
  59. This Peace. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (1938)
  60. This War. Trans. Eric Sutton (1940)
  61. Order of the Day: Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, Agnes E. Meyer & Eric Sutton (1942)
  62. Listen, Germany! Twenty-Five Radio Messages to the German People over the BBC (1943)
  63. Essays of Three Decades. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. London: Secker & Warburg, 1947.
    1. Goethe's Faust (1938)
    2. Goethe's Career As a Man of Letters (1932)
    3. Goethe as Representative of the Bourgeois Age (1932)
    4. Goethe and Tolstoy (1922)
    5. Anna Karenina (1939)
    6. Lessing (1929)
    7. Kleist's Amphitryon (1926)
    8. Chamisso (1911)
    9. Platen (1930)
    10. Theodor Storm (1930)
    11. The Old Fontane (1910)
    12. Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner (1933)
    13. Richard Wagner and the Ring (1937)
    14. Schopenhauer (1938)
    15. Freud and the Future (1936)
    16. Voyage with Don Quixote (1934)
  64. Last Essays. Trans. Richard & Clara Winston and Tania & James Stern. 1958. London: Secker & Warburg, 1959.
    1. On Schiller
    2. Fantasy on Goethe
    3. Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Recent History
    4. Chekhov
    5. Appendix: 'A Weary Hour'. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (1905)
  65. A Sketch of My Life. ['Lebensabriß', 1930]. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (1960)
  66. The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus. Trans. Richard & Clara Winston (1961)
  67. Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man / Thoughts in Wartime / On the German Republic. ['Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen', 1918; 'Gedanken im Kriege' (1914); 'Von deutscher Republik', 1922]. Trans. Walter D. Morris, Mark Lilla and Cosima Mattner, Lawrence Rainey. Introduction by Mark Lilla. New York: New York Review Books, 2021.



  68. Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus / The Story of a Novel (1947 / 1961)


    Secondary:

  69. Diaries 1918-1939: 1918-1921; 1933-1939. Ed. Hermann Kesten. 1977-80. Trans. Richard & Clara Winston. 1982. London: Robin Clark, 1984.
  70. Winston, Richard & Clara, ed. & trans. Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-1955. Vol. I: 1889-1942. 2 vols. London: Secker & Warburg, 1970.
  71. Winston, Richard & Clara, ed. & trans. Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-1955. Vol. II: 1943-1955. 2 vols. London: Secker & Warburg, 1970.
  72. Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-1955. Ed. & Trans. Richard & Clara Winston. 2 vols. 1970. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
  73. Carlsson, Anni & Volker Michels, ed. The Hesse-Mann Letters: The Correspondence of Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann, 1910-1955. 1968. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Foreword by Theodore Ziolkowski. 1975. London: Peter Owen, 1976.
  74. Winston, Richard. Thomas Mann: The Making of an Artist, 1875-1911. Afterword by Clara Winston. A Borzoi Book. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.
  75. Hayman, Ronald. Thomas Mann: A Biography. 1995. Bloomsbury. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 1997.