Thomas Mann's Farewell

by FREDERIC MORTON

1

IN THE window of a Vienna bookshop, Thomas Mann’s novels had been arranged with obvious haste into the form of a cross. On top of his last novel, The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, a card lay propped whose gothic letters said “In Memoriam.” That was how I first got the news of his death. It struck me hard and yet it had a wry significance in the way it came at me: through a solid middle-class plate-glass window, through a storekeeper’s homage combining the sincere with the sanctimonious and mercantile. Here was a display which might have been lifted out of Felix Krull itself. Here was one more flourish from the great theater of Europe’s society of bourgeoisie.

Mann’s final masterpiece gave me a number of such odd starts. I had closed its covers at Salzburg in the Goldener Hirsch, the very hotel where the master spent some time in the period of Felix Krull’s gestation. But the waiters there, bowing and pirouetting in their Laden tuxedoes, looked not like Mann’s models but his creatures. They took their stately rhythm from Krull’s vision, not from this world. A week before, I had read a few chapters of the story in Bad Gastein, possibly the ones Mann worked on during his own stay there in the early fifties. The same strange reversal occurred. The Gastein hotels, huge old Franz Josef giants, would appear to make the perfect research background for the dramatist of the fashionably old-fashioned. Yet, on the contrary, their placid stucco seemed to have been built according to Krull’s specifications.

In Felix Krull Mann has not only produced his most European fable, but he has also made Europe legendary. The top hats and the topazed amenities, the camel-hair waistcoats and the satin scarves, that swirl through his pages are more than the appurtenances of the myth Mann’s Krull creates; they compose the myth itself. For Krull is an archswindler who, just because he himself is nothing, is superb in assuming somebody else’s costumes. He has no central trait except a wonderfully selfcomplacent self-confidence in playing whatever trait he really doesn’t have.

His substance is manner. His story pantomimes a comedy of styles, a veritable epic of mannerisms. As in a Congreve play where the illusion would die if a single handkerchief were wrongly waved, so in this novel Krull’s career would be punctured by one misused fork. But of course that never happens.

Krull’s deportment never copies his condition. Indeed, the one opposes the other. So little Felix is the darling of the upper-class soirees of his native Rhine city for the simple reason that his parents dance on the rim of bankruptcy. He becomes, a little later, a knowing flâneur of Frankfurt’s streets because his father is now a suicide, his mother the operator of a boardinghouse. At an induction examination he conjures up a most horrifying fit out of the very pink of health. Still later, as a frequently invited guest to the boudoirs of Paris’s most elegant hotel, he can be an exquisite lover to his great ladies, a tantalizer sticking to vous instead of tu during the most intimate embrace, yet on rising from their beds he steps into the livery of an elevator boy.

And when in the final section of the book a Luxembourgian nobleman named de Venosta travels first class from Paris to Portugal, could the comme il faut crease of his flannel suit, the finely nuanced matching of his gray spats with black patent boots (smart but not dandyish), spring from the fact that he is not Marquis, not Comte, but Krull?

Now, it might be said that this naughty magnificence, this splendid embezzlement of gestures and textures, is typically an old man’s work. Krull could be interpreted as an attempt to stay the receding senses with the beguiling puissance of the world. It may also be a liberation from the introspective heaviness which has chained the post-war German novel, even Mann’s own Dr. Faustus, with a thousand subtleties and symbols. Possibly it is, too, a reflection of the exile back home. After fifteen comparatively simple American years Mann returned to a shower of European banquets, homages, and honorary citizenships. Mann’s as well as Krull’s life exploded hourly with bright etiquette. Perhaps the boundless, shapeless dynamism of the New World made the maestro all the more receptive to the pageantry of set pattern in which Continental life paraded past him.

The book itself offers evidence of such heightened susceptibility. That part of Krull which Mann produced as a septuagenarian breathes a much more direct awareness of pleasurable surfaces than the original novella-length fragment published in 1911. The circus scene in particular, a veritable gorging of sense impressions, is one of the most physical he has ever written. Even Krull’s character has changed in a more hedonistic direction. The first page speaks of the confidence man’s great fatigue, of the “errors and passions” he intends to confide to the reader. In the eighth chapter of Book I, still part of the novella fragment, Krull denies ever having exercised extensively his talent for the arts of love. “My difficult and dangerous life,” he explains with some regret, “made great demands on my powers of concentration— I had to be careful not to exhaust myself.”

Here the swindler becomes metaphor for the embattled artist. Both must lick the great problem of form before being able to put illusion before their public. In fact Krull’s plaint corresponds exactly to one voiced by an actual writer in Royal Highness. This novel is the only other full-length comedy by Mann, and it stems, significantly enough, from the same creative period as the early Krull fragment. Its scribbler explains his calling to his monarch in early-Krullian metaphysics: “Every important link to life, i.e. happiness, and love, is closed to us, since the dramatization of life requires all our powers.”

But the Krull of Mann’s late seventies is innocent of battle fatigue. Krull commits no errors. Almost all his acts have a purpose that succeeds. Nor does he spare his erotic energies in the slightest. Frankfurt, Paris, Lisbon, wherever he goes, his path is strewn with accessible bosoms and welcoming limbs.

Does this mean that Krull ceases to be an artist? The frivolous, miraculous answer Mann manages to give is: No! Our mountebank is, believe it or not, eupeptic while he is esthetic.

“I feed on contrasts,” Mann once told me. So do some other of his colleagues on Olympus. It is the sharpest response to the present which catapults Proust into an enchantment with the past. Weren’t all those pavilions of long-past remembrance unlocked by the hour-old madeleine? And if the Hemingway godling weren’t constantly buffeted by the death ballets of war, hunt, and the corrida, the taste of gin would not be so good on his tongue, nor the touch of his women so true.

This particular trade practice of genius has always been part of the Mann technique, illuminating the inner essence of bourgeois “normalcy” with the tensions of the artistic outsider. His heroes look in on the world through a keyhole — that most powerful of telescopes since no lens is as sharp as that of longing, no air so transparent as that of enforced distance. Thus glimpsed, the chaos of frictions and affinities, of compassions and cupidities, assumes a meaningful symmetry.

As to good and evil, the two words which confuse the world so, Mann’s outsider is not immune to them, but not fooled by them either. A Nietzschean craft transforms them into violin-anddrum harmonies that orchestrate the human spectacle instead of schematizing it into moral judgments.

2

AS I leaf through Mann’s works I see a whole gallery of anteroom figures who eavesdrop on life’s inner sanctum. There is, to begin with, Little Herr Friedemann. His humped back weighs him down upon the voyeur’s peephole, and he utters a cry everyone understands, for it is the secret little bit of crookedness that makes the straight ones human. There are the Buddenbrooks, their whole corseted and cravatted congregation peering hard into a kingdom which is every moment less theirs, and who articulate on their faces the poetic, painful truth of a tribe grown too old. There is Tonio Kroeger straining against the door which keeps him out of the golden life and yet constitutes the filter through which he distills revelation. There are Castorp, Claudia, and Settembrini of The Magic Mountain. The white padded doors of disease part them from the green universe, and yet they gain in the ache of their division sweeter love and better wisdom than the dumbly undivided. There is Joseph, shut out from among his brothers, a stranger in Egypt, yet using his loneness as his genic and his genius. There is Dr. Faust us belaboring the locked, tormenting portal which is also his creative pact.

Sometimes these divine have-nots do break through the barrier and seem to have, just like that, a cup of coffee with ordinary life. But I always sense something snatched about their scenes. The truth is that they carry their doors invisibly with them, and their peepholes are wherever their eyes happen to be.

Now there is finally, shockingly, Krull. Perhaps we should have been prepared for him, since his recent confreres, Joseph and “The Holy Sinner,” have had an air of tongue-in-cheek success about them. With Krull it is more than an air. True, he has his anteroom. But he doesn’t push against the curtain which leads into the great world. He redines before it on a kitchen stool. He doesn’t mind it here, for at any moment he may exchange his waiter’s pants for the fine gray flannels of the Marquis de Venosta and stride out there with lazy, manor-born ease. No, he likes his back room, for it furnishes him a frame for his entrances and exits, it gives him space in which to change costumes. The withoutness which lets Mann’s other figures only see more deeply, with such insightful pangs, helps Krull be more richly. Their prison is his stage door.

How does he manage to be so unembarrassed, so triumphant? His secret lies, oddly enough, in his abstemiousness. Krull does not indulge himself in devotion, passion, pride, avarice, or any other profane impulse. But he is fascinated with the proper way of yielding to them. Being honored by the monarch of Portugal gives the former dishwasher little prestige. What he savors enormously is the sheer ceremonial of the process. As elevator boy he opens the door to an assignation with the hotel’s grandest lady guest, not excited with the sexual prospect, but busy with the problem of giving his body just the right forward inclination — the exact angle in which civility and boldness will be implicit — while he murmurs, “You expressed the wish, madame . . .” At a souper the most delicious petit four is less a blessing to his palate than a challenge to his flair for grasping it with negligent delicacy and disposing of it, not by gross mastication, but by way of a genteel disappearance into a napkin and a causerie.

Thus a paradox emerges out of the recently completed part of the novel. Much smoother with worldliness than the conception of forty years ago, its hero is at the same time more dedicated to his abstract quest. The end of the volume makes it plain: our confidence man, who might have become a gourmand of good living, is now a gourmet of society. His expertise interests itself much less in the rewards of make-believe than in its choreography. He roams the rungs of the social ladder as Rubinstein does over the piano keys, recognizing, like Rubinstein, differences in tone, not in intrinsic value. Life is an everlasting opera to him, in which every class plays counterpoint to every other; low gains its piquancy from high, high its loftiness from low. Even the cosmos unfolds itself to Krull, under the amusing tutelage of Professor Kuckuck, as a quaint shadow play of galactic Gestalten.

Essentially indifferent to content, Krull is ever enamored of form. He has “need for good form.” He makes, for all his mundane virtuosities — or rather because of them — the least secular of Mann’s protagonists. Which is another way of saying that he is the most artistic.

We can hardly blame him for not being much of a human being. He has none of the emotional ambiguities with which Mann can so masterfully afflict his characters. Doubt, hesitation, despair, all the forces that define a face in depth, cannot touch Krull — or at least have not reached him yet in this first volume, which brings him to his early manhood. His psyche knows no soul-revealing twilight moments, for his aims are lucid, his every enterprise successful. But this shallowness of personality furnishes the novel with a deep source of comedy — its prose. Krull’s monolithic serenitypermits him to set down his reflections with a superhuman décor. Between the fraud of his life and the staid, rotund imperturbability with which he pictures it, there obtains a hilarious masterpiece of contrast. Luckily in Denver Lindley the novel has found a translator alert to the most delicate German shadings, usually resourceful in summoning their English counterparts.

And so The Confessions of Felix Krull is more than Dickens upside down: the young man making good by being bad; more than the newest, gayest theology of crime; more than an enrichment of the picaresque genre. It is more than a parodistic balance sheet of European fashions and follies; more than a bizarrely perverse view of Mann’s preoccupation with the artist, a caricature of the whole gamut of Mann’s favorite themes.

It is in the end also the smile the grand seigneur of Western letters smiled at himself. I don’t mean that Krull is a devious autobiography of Mann, though there are many literal analogies between the two: the failure of the parent house, the hatred of school and army life, the love of music and of dogs, the great success in inventing things that do not really exist.

I do mean something larger, if less palpable. Something that centers in the word repräsentieren. A difficult German word, it connotes less the ability to represent something than to present oneself. It conveys projection of a station or a rank, the playing of a role. For the last thirty years Mann had been constantly playing a role. He was an imperially affable presence at his lectures. Patiently he read, dutifully he lauded the books young authors sent him; devoted himself to their works somewhat as a monarch will devote himself to citizens’ petitions. At his home he received admirers and disciples with a fine warm spontaneity that was also tempered with some protocol. He maintained a huge correspondence, friendly to the handful who were almost his peers, even friendlier to all those who were not.

I watched him on lordly occasions and detected more than once a sly modification of the famous gray mustache. I always suspected it was a grin. Now I am quite sure of it. Through Krull, Mann was laughing at his own “need for good form.” And the wonderful thing for us is that he was not merely making merry with his magic, but was making magic out of his merriment.