Death in Venice and Other Stories (42 page)

That was the end of the business, and the man could once more breathe easily. He laid his weapon down beside him on the bank, took his knapsack from his shoulders, stuffed his kill inside, strapped it on again and, happy with the additional weight, climbed peacefully back up the scree toward the brush, using his rifle as a walking stick.

Well, he's got something for tomorrow's grill, I thought with a mixture of approval and resentment. “Come, Baushan! Let's go now. It's all over.”

Baushan got up. But after turning completely around, he sat back down again and continued to stare at the opposite bank, even though the man had already made his exit and disappeared through the bushes. I wasn't about to call him twice. He knew where we lived, and he could sit there for hours gawking after the show was over and there was nothing more to see, if that was what he wanted. It was a long way home, and I for one meant to get going and put it behind me. With that he followed.

He clung to my heels for the whole uncomfortable walk home, not once giving chase. Instead of running ahead at an angle as was his wont whenever he wasn't rummaging around and tracking some scent, he trotted to my rear and put on the kind of face I couldn't help noticing when I happened to glance back. I might well have let that go: it's not so easy to get to me. On the contrary, I was much more inclined to laugh and shrug the whole thing off. But every forty or fifty steps he
yawned
. That was what enraged me. It was that unabashedly rude, jaw-unhinging yawn of boredom, with the guttural squeak that clearly expressed the following sentiment: “A fine master I have! A fraud, this master! A pathetic excuse for a master!” I can never hear this sound without taking it personally, but this time it was enough to shake the very foundations of our friendship.

“Go on then!” I said. “Go! Go and join your master over there with the blunderbuss. He seems not to be in possession of a dog, and maybe he can use you in his
sporting endeavors. He's just some common fellow in Manchester, not a gentleman, but in your eyes he probably is a gentleman, just the sort to be your master. So I sincerely advise you to go follow him, since he seems to have set ideas nagging at your flea-bitten head. Not that you could tell the difference.”

Having gone that far, I continued: “We won't ask for his hunting license. It might well cause trouble if one day someone catches you two at your respectable sport, but that's your business and I repeat, I mean my advice sincerely. You, a hunter! Of all the hares I let you chase, did you ever bring one back for my kitchen? It's not my fault you don't know how to double and end up plowing the ground with your nose like a fool precisely when you need to be clever! Or a pheasant—that would be no less welcome in these lean days! And you yawn! Go, I tell you. Go follow your master with the square gaiters. Go and see whether he's the man to stroke your neck and make you laugh—I bet he hardly knows how to laugh, and if so, only at coarse jokes! If you think
he
will submit you to medical observation, whenever you decide to have occult hemorrhages, or that
his
dog will be pronounced tense and anemic, then go follow him! Maybe you overestimate the regard such a master would have for you. There are things for which such rifle-toting types have a fine sense of distinction and a sharp eye. Just so there's no misunderstanding: I mean inborn qualities and flaws, ticklish matters of genealogy and pedigree, which not everyone has the compassion and humanity to overlook. I hope I've made myself
clear
. So the first time you fall out with your exciting new master, and he reproaches you with your beard and calls you all sorts of ugly names, I hope you think about me and what I've said today . . .”

Such were the cutting words I addressed to Baushan on the way home as he slunk along behind me. And though I only spoke them silently to myself, so as not to be overly dramatic, I'm convinced that he understood exactly what I meant and was able to follow my line of thinking. The long and short of it was that we were
profoundly at odds, and when we arrived home, I deliberately let the front gate fall into its latch before he could slip through, making him jump up and climb over it. Without even a glance back, I went into the house, and when I heard him whimper at the scrape on his belly, I just shrugged my shoulders in spite. —

However, that was a long time, more than six months, ago, and the whole thing passed just like the clinic incident. Time and forgetting have covered it over, and our lives go on atop their swampy ground, which is the ground of all life. Baushan, after a few days' moping, regained his innocent enthusiasm for hunting mice, pheasants, hares and aquatic fowl and anxiously awaits our next walk as soon as we return home from the previous one. On my front-door landing, I always glance back at him one last time. This is his signal to take the steps in two great leaps and stand upright with his front paws against the door, so that I can give him a farewell pat on the shoulder. “'Til tomorrow, Baushan,” I tell him, “assuming I don't have to go out into the world.” And then I hasten to slip out of my hobnailed boots, for supper is on the table.

Thomas Mann was born on June 6, 1875, in Lübeck, North Germany. He was the second of five children; his parents were Senator Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann and his wife, Julia, née da Silva-Bruhns. His mother had been born in Brazil of a German father and a Brazilian mother but moved to Germany at the age of seven after the death of the mother. She was an exotic woman, of artistic (and especially musical) gifts; her husband was a prosperous merchant and an important figure in the government of the city-state of Lübeck. (It is worth noting that mixed parentage of one kind or another recurs as a theme in Thomas Mann's work—one thinks particularly of “Tonio Kröger” and
Death in Venice
.) His father died when Thomas was sixteen, having in his will decreed the liquidation of the family business; and he did so, it seems, without bitterness, because he realized that the two elder sons (Heinrich and Thomas) who would have been expected to take over the business were committed to a literary career.

The family then moved to Munich, and South Germany was to remain Thomas Mann's home for the next thirty years or so. In 1896–98 he was in Italy; and–intriguingly it was there, in a world very different from his birthplace, that he began work on
Buddenbrooks
, which appeared in 1901. It is a superb novel that chronicles the decline of a family from the 1830's to the 1870's in what is recognizably (although the town is never named) Lübeck. Many of the foreground concerns of the novel—the emergence of reflectivity and artistic sensibility in a high-bourgeois, patrician family—are close to the circumstances of Thomas Mann's own early years. But the novel is no mere autobiography writ large, for the psychological, sociological, and economic changes at
work in the Buddenbrook family are symptomatic of general historico-cultural processes and patterns. It was not to be the only time in his career that Mann's concentration on seemingly personal matters—his own struggles and self-doubts—proved to be amazingly and complexly representative of larger concerns.
Buddenbrooks
was followed swiftly by “Tonio Kröger” and “Tristan.” By 1905, when he married Katja Pringsheim, the daughter of a Jewish professor of mathematics in Munich, Thomas Mann was, though young, a firmly established writer.

Seven years later,
Death in Venice
appeared. It is a magnificent and complex story that traces the decline of a revered and respectable author, a man of stern self-discipline (in that respect not dissimilar to Thomas Mann himself), who goes on holiday to Venice and there becomes infatuated with a very beautiful fourteen-year-old boy. At one level the story concerns the hazardous nature of the artist's quest for beauty; at another level it speaks as a psycho-cultural allegory for Europe, which in 1914 was to cast restraint to the winds in the name of confronting higher, more exacting experiences. Those experiences were, indeed, exacting—they exacted a terrible toll on a whole generation of young men. When the war came, however, Thomas Mann was an enthusiastic supporter of the German cause, and he was outraged by the liberal, democratic, Western views of his elder brother, Heinrich. The crowning work of Thomas's polemically conservative stance is “The Reflections of a Non-political Man,” which appeared in 1918, in the year of Germany's defeat, and gave ammunition to the forces of reactionary resentment that were to exert such a baleful influence on the Weimar Republic that was set up after the war. But in the early years of that republic, Thomas Mann began to revise his political allegiances. The “unpolitics” of “The Reflections” (which had, of course, been an intensely political work) gave way to the politics of Republicanism. Thomas defended the Weimar Republic against precisely those forces that disparaged it in the name of that spiritualized conservatism that he himself had defended so fiercely in 1918.

One of the fruits of that change of heart is the great novel
The Magic Mountain
, which appeared in 1924. It is at one level a profound narrative of human development, one that upholds the value and dignity of a gradual process in which the life of the mind is allowed to grow and expand and discover itself. At another level it is an historical novel about the ideologies of pre-1914 Germany and Europe, and it concludes in the carnage of the trenches. It is a demanding and complex work; yet in context its polemical force was clear (perhaps clearer then, in Germany, than it is to us now). Thomas Mann had changed sides politically, and his public—particularly his adversaries—knew it.

From this point on, politics rarely relinquished its hold over him. The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 confirmed his status as a public figure of great note. His opposition to National Socialism, his marriage to a Jew, his lectures in the 1920's and 1930's, which increasingly voiced criticism of the anti-Enlightenment tendencies within German culture—all these factors conspired to make him the object of virulent attacks. From 1933 to 1938, he stayed away from Germany, living in Switzerland. In 1936 he was deprived of his German citizenship, and not long thereafter, his honorary doctorate from the University of Bonn was revoked. The writing was on the wall, and he emigrated to the United States in 1938, initially to the East Coast and then to Pacific Palisades in California. During the war he was a very high-profile spokesman who was prepared to work with the British and American authorities on anti-Hitler essays, talks, and broadcasts. In 1947 he published the novel
Doctor Faustus
, an anguished reckoning with the awful fact that all the profundity of German culture had been powerless to check the country's slide into unspeakable barbarism. He returned to Europe in 1952, to Switzerland, settling in Kilchberg above Lake Zurich. It was here that he died on August 12, 1955.

Three matters need to be highlighted as salient features of Mann's life. One is that he very much saw himself
(even from his early years) as a high-bourgeois, indeed “classic” writer. Many of the photographs we possess of him display a degree of self-stylization—as the orderly figure, often wearing a three-piece suit, the respectable writer and grand paterfamilias surrounded by the tokens of substantial success. Yet—and this is the second strand I want to highlight—that orderliness was hard won; and it had to be defended against multiple inroads that threatened to bring turbulence and disarray. The publication of his diaries has made clear that Mann was, latently at any rate, homosexually inclined. The point of saying this is not to advocate the release of a set of interpretative search parties in quest of “queer themes” in his work. Rather, it is to suggest that Mann's sexual proclivities tell us a good deal about his understanding of covert emotion, repressed feelings, hidden desires—and above all about his sense that such repression could generate a sublimated outlet in terms of inward, imaginative, spiritual creativity. The third strand, and again it is one that threatens to bring turbulence into his life of willed orderliness, was politics. By temperament Mann was, as both creative writer and discursive essayist, chiefly interested in questions of aesthetics and philosophy. Yet, almost in spite of himself, he found himself having to engage with the political implications of certain ideas, concepts, and values that were dear to him. And such was the historical turmoil of Germany in the first half of the twentieth century that public events would not leave him alone.

When we come to explore the stories in this volume, we need to register at the outset that Thomas Mann, as a writer of short prose, was able to draw on a particular tradition within German prose writing that provided a narrative and structural correlative for the tensions of his complex personality. I have in mind the so-called “Novelle,” a genre that in both theory and practice had claimed the attention of major German literary talents from Goethe onward. Two aspects of this tradition need to be highlighted, in my view, and they can most readily be defined with reference to the work that is so often
hailed as the original model for the “Novelle”—Boccaccio's
Decameron
. (Goethe in fact borrowed the formal and thematic universe of Boccaccio's masterpiece for his first collection of Novellen—
The Conversations of German Emigrants
[1795]—which very much inaugurated the genre in Germany.) Boccaccio puts before us a world in which all social and moral order has disintegrated because the plague has broken out in Florence. Ten young people, of impeccable social breeding, seven women and three men, flee from the chaos and seek refuge in a country estate. There, in order to repair the shattered fabric of their lives, and to pass the time in a seemly way, they agree to tell stories. Every day all ten participants offer a tale: the ten days, with ten narratives each day, give the “decameron” of the title. Often the stories acknowledge the experiences that have all too vividly imprinted themselves on the minds of these young people—the frightening swiftness and ease with which order can collapse into chaos. Yet the form of the telling—the courteousness and ceremony with which the ten days are organized, the actual narrative tone that is adopted with reference to the listeners—all these instances of storytelling as socializing performance produce a climate of civilized self-discipline. It is almost as though the act of narration can be made to contribute to a restitution of decency and decorum.

The legacy of this narrative model, as mediated by Goethe, to German letters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a potent one. That legacy expresses itself in both thematic and stylistic terms. Thematically, the “Novelle” lives from and worries at the interplay of order and chaos in human affairs. Stylistically, it foregrounds the narrative mode itself; the narrative draws attention to itself—indeed often it moves into self-consciousness and self-reflectivity. When, then, we read (at one end of the historical spectrum) the
Decameron
and (at the other) Thomas Mann's
Death in Venice
—both works concerned with the inroads of a plague—we are made acutely aware of what the process of storytelling amounts to. We are, in other words, made aware of
the narratively mediated relationship between the world of which the story tells and the world to which it is told.

In the stories collected in this volume, Thomas Mann manages to combine real vividness of human interest, a sharp focus on characters, their psychological tensions and conflicts, with a sustained register of narrative reflectivity and thoughtfulness. Time and again, as we shall see, the experiential foreground becomes transparent against a background of ideas and concepts; upon the currents and countercurrents of mental life.

I want to begin by briefly looking at the stories in thematic terms. Our collection opens and closes with two works that explore the relationships between human beings and animals (especially dogs). The later work—“Man and Dog”—is a charming personal memoir in which Mann talks (and the text does indeed have a spoken feel to it) with great affection about his dog Baushan. It is an agreeable and in many ways lightweight work (it is called an idyll)—engaging and surprising given that it comes from the pen of a writer who is often criticized for being too intellectual by half. But it does touch on issues that will concern us throughout Mann's oeuvre—most particularly the relationship between human beings, with all the many rules and regulations of their socialized lives, and the natural vitality, anarchy even, of animals. (And, by implication, the story touches on the understanding that human beings have of the nature within them.) The early story “Tobias Mindernickel” is a disturbingly detached, claustrophobic little tale about an oddity, an outsider, who finds through acts of pity a kind of self-confidence, even (in the shocking ending) violent self-assertion.

The majority of stories in the volume explore the theme of art and the demands that it can make on those who create it and respond to it. Mann is careful to sustain a level of psychological argument throughout. We can feel this most readily in “Tonio Kröger,” which is, at one level, a superlative study of the pains of adolescence, which derive from the hurtful mismatch between emotional needs on the one hand and intellectual,
imaginative growth on the other. The story captures very finely the oscillations in Tonio's self-awareness between the wish to be ordinary and the pride of not being ordinary. Similarly, at one level,
Death in Venice
is unforgettable as a study of the idiocy of the holiday romance, of the infatuation that occurs when a middle-aged man casts aside the constraints and disciplines of ordinary practical living and answers the call of youth, beauty, of what he takes to be Life with a capital L. There is, of course, much more to the story than that. But it is remarkable how richly Mann explores the psychological theme. One example must suffice. For much of the story Aschenbach deludes himself about the nature of the attraction that he feels for Tadzio. Drawing on a tradition from Greek philosophy, he tells himself that beauty is the only absolute that is perceivable by the senses, and that, therefore, his rapt contemplation of the boy is the expression of his spiritual mission as an artist. Yet such thoughts, although they do indeed partake of a powerful tradition of Western metaphysical thought, are, in the psychological frame of the story, merely pretentious self-delusion.

To make the point in slightly different terms: in Thomas Mann's art, the psychological issue is made also to articulate philosophical and epistemological themes, themes that address the interplay of Geist (spirit) and Leben (life). German philosophy from Kant onward, via Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, has constantly explored the rival claims of (to put the matter at its most simple) knowing and living. Two of these thinkers are especially pertinent to our reading of Thomas Mann's stories—Nietzsche and Freud. Both of them address the glory and the blight of human self-consciousness. For Nietzsche the critical spirit is supremely the agency that unmasks and debunks the crudity and mindlessness of the life force. Yet at the same time he condemns that agency as effete, sick, questionable in its inability to engage with the tumultuous authority of life. For Freud, the emergence of human identity is essentially a drama of tragic separation from the mother. Selfhood is, then, a pained condition, one made of trauma
and repression and transgression. Repression produces both the revelatory creativity of great art and the malign creativity of neurosis. The tensed condition of human identity is precarious; the dangers are omnipresent and threaten at every turn to make inroads into the desperately defended territory of civilized living. These issues can be heard in “Tristan,” in the battle between Spinell and Klöterjahn for the soul of Gabriele, in Tonio Kröger's lament for the curse of knowingness, in Aschenbach's eerie dream at the cemetery in Munich, when images of tumultuous, abundant, teeming life harbor the death threat (the glistening eyes of the tiger) in their midst.