THOMAS MANN

My first experience of Thomas Mann came not, as might be expected, through one of his books but, rather, through the film-adaptation of Death in Venice, starring Dirk Bogarde, and I have to confess that, despite some breath-taking scenery enhanced by some no-less beautiful music, I was profoundly bored and only too glad when the tragic dénouement came and we were released from the gruesome clutches of what seemed to me a disastrously pretentious scenario. My only gratification was to witness the beach-scene humiliation of the young boy with whom the leading protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach, had suffered the misfortune to fall in love, and which now brought about his overdue demise through, if memory serves me well, a love-provoked heart attack. My chief regret was that I hadn't chosen to visit the studio next-door instead, where an adaptation of Henry Miller's Quiet Days in Clichy was simultaneously showing. But I suppose the fact that I was in my reserved stepfather's company had precluded me from doing so - largely, I suspect, on his account!

Hardly surprising, therefore, that my opinion of Thomas Mann remained for several years less than enthusiastic, even though I eventually got round to reading some of his novels, the most memorable undoubtedly being Dr. Faustus, which, despite its pretentious stylization and overmodest chapterization (the narrator-protagonist seemingly afraid to bore the reader with long chapters), I found quite educative, and, following that, Felix Krull - Confidence Trickster, a more entertaining and, on the whole, enjoyable novel which, so far as the above-named protagonist's endeavour to avoid being drafted into the German army was concerned, had more than a little in common with D.H. Lawrence's Kangaroo - the tale, in part, of someone who got himself passed unfit for military service by faking ill-health.

And so I wasn't altogether indisposed to Mann when, compliments of the local library, I eventually got my hands on the Diaries 1918-39, apparently a first instalment of his total output in this subjective direction, and read through them with a certain amount of aesthetic pleasure not unmingled, it transpired, with mounting contempt for and finally exasperation at his bourgeois lifestyle, socialist pretensions, anti-Nazi vituperations, literary projects, and snobbish upper middle-class socializing - all of which construed to place him on a pedestal of cultural elitism and political aloofness.

Of course, he had good reasons to be anti-Nazi. For his work on the Joseph sequence of novels, dealing with the Biblical account of Joseph and his brothers, could hardly have endeared him to the Nazis, with their rampant anti-Semitism. But it is doubtful, on the other hand, that he would have welcomed a communist revolution in Germany either, particularly in view of his own upper middle-class sympathies and contacts. Essentially, he was a theoretical Social Democrat for whom people's revolutionaries were so many riffraff.

No, I didn't enjoy the Diaries 1918-39 which, though quite promising at first, became ever more conservative and reactionary the further they progressed. It was almost as though, following the débacle of the Great War, Mann had been a proto-Nazi in his socialistic nationalism before the advent of National Socialism, but then became violently anti-Nazi afterwards. A curious paradox perhaps, though proof enough that he was no people's champion, but a bourgeois reactionary and incorrigible democrat!