
Colm Tóibín’s latest novel The Magician, a fictional biography of the German writer Thomas Mann, is a very timely book, prescient of these times of pathological violence served on Ukraine and the Ukrainians by Putin. It was published towards the end of last year then won the Rathbone Folio Prize in March, exactly a month after Putin started his invasion. It is not only the obvious comparisons of the present with the horrors of WW1, then the unimaginable atrocities ordered by Hitler, then the fleeing of the Mann family first to France then Switzerland then America, but mostly the way Tóibín allows us into the lives of the Mann family, into the streets they lived on, into the rooms, the very furniture in the many houses they lived in, and into their most intimate dreams and conversations… intimate in a way the camera now records the innards of the torn and blasted apartments and streets of Kyiv, Mariupol, Bucha, Irpin, and so on and on. But Tóibín does not take a missile or bomb to the Mann family, he is very gentle to them, especially Thomas, and at times very funny. It is a book about a large, diverse and extraordinarily gifted family that had their fair share of successes and tragedies in those most tragic of times; with three suicides, one drowning at sea while fleeing to America, morphine and other addictions, as well as destructive snobbery and mental instability. [The photograph above is of Katia Mann and their six children.]
Mann, soon after the publication of his first book is feted by writers and politicians alike, then is lucky to survive the purge of pro nationalists by the left wing Munich Revolutionaries soon after Germany’s defeat in WW1. He observes at a distance the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, not believing it possible that they can become a threat and is slow to write and speak out against them. He wins the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, his books sell well all over the world and he becomes a very successful bread winner for his family; though at this time his two eldest children Erika and Klaus are possibly more famous for their theatre productions and life style that openly express their homosexuality and love of excess.
Tóibín allows us into Thomas Mann’s own inner life very early on in the book, when Thomas is a boy and infatuated with the beauty of another boy at the same school. He writes with incredible veracity and beauty about all his infatuations, the direction of glances and shy touches, the imaginative undressing of his object of desire; as well as writing coldly about advances by men Thomas feels no attraction to. These infatuations occur throughout Thomas’s life and act mostly as a creative spur for his writings, sometimes disguised, sometimes not. There are few secrets in the Mann household and his admiration for male beauty is not one of them.
We rub shoulders in the book with Albert Einstein who sailed with them on a refugee boat to New York, and who like Mann was welcomed by Princeton University. We enter the White House and get a fly on the wall view of Roosevelt and his wife. At dinner parties, private meetings, and during many phone calls we learn to dislike the pushy Agnes Meyer and her rather sinister husband Eugene, the owner of the Washington Post. Though it must be said that it was only due to Agnes’ insistence that all of Mann’s family were allowed into America. We meet the two, up-themselves and bitchy old queens WH Auden and Christopher Isherwood, but yet again it needs to be said that it was Auden who agreed to marry the eldest daughter Erika, a lesbian, just so she could get a British passport. We also meet the deplorable Alma Mahler, married twice to Jewish husbands yet an unrequited anti-Semite and appalling snob. But most of all I think we get to admire Thomas Mann’s wife Katia. If there was ever a patient, firm, capable, but oh so kind and understanding power beside the thrown it was her. Tóibín conjures up a remarkable woman, and one is never in doubt that he shows her as she really was.
Talking about conjuring, Thomas, or the Magician as his children named him, is as elusive as he is a man of habit. His dress is always formal and immaculate, his mornings always spent writing in his study, and if I remember correctly at the same desk that he carted around the world. He over thinks things, weighing up his response to the politics and violence of his time for what one feels often shockingly pragmatic reasons until corrected by his wife and children. Yet his inner life seems to have been filled almost entirely with erotic fantasies and of course the lives and stories of his characters. And I believe he was saved, both as a man and a writer, by inheriting a very un-Germanic spark from his mother Julia who was born in Brazil. The book opens with her, and one knows from the second page, from these lines below, that this is going to be a wonderful, beautifully written read.
“In the evenings, if the senator were at a meeting, or in the time when Thomas and Heinrich, having done their violin practice and eaten their supper, were in their nightclothes, their mother would tell them about the country of her birth, Brazil, a place so vast, she said, that no one knew how many people were there or what they were like or what language they spoke, a country many, many times the size of Germany, where there was no winter, and never any frost or real cold, and where one river, the Amazon, was more than ten times longer than the Rhine and ten times as wide, with many small rivers flowing into it that reached back deep into the forest, with trees higher than trees anywhere in the world, with people whom no one had ever seen or would see, since they knew the forest as no one else did, and they could hide if an intruder or an outsider came.
‘Tell us about the stars,’ Heinrich would say.
‘Our house in Paraty was on the water, Julia would reply. It was almost part of the water, like a boat. And when night came and we could see the stars, they were bright and low in the sky. Here in the north the stars are high and distant. In Brazil, they are visible like the sun during the day. They are small suns themselves, glittering and close to us, especially those of us who lived near the water. My mother said you could sometimes read a book in the upstairs rooms at night because the light from the stars against the water was so clear. And you could not sleep unless you fastened the shutters to keep the brightness out. When I was a girl, the same age as your sisters, I really believed that all the world was like that. The shock on my first night in Lübeck, was that I could not see the stars. They were covered over by clouds.”
And when the Mann’s move to California and chose a piece of land In Pacific Palisades, close to Santa Monica, to have a house built for them, it is a single pomegranate tree growing at the back of the garden, and the memories of his mother that it conjures up that prove vital to him choosing this particular plot.
“He knew how to open a pomegranate and fill a bowl with the rich, red seeds. If that was all he had learned from his mother, it would be enough, he thought…He loved the dry edge that mingled with the sweet taste of the pomegranate, and he loved the colour. But now it was his mother’s gaiety that he recalled, her voice, her pleasure at the news that a fresh consignment had arrived from Brazil, her assertion that a small piece of home, perhaps the best piece, had reached out to her across the ocean and would delight her days.”
But by the time America is eventually drawn into WWII, Thomas feels that their life in California has begun to sour. He had felt for a while that the house, designed by a well-known architect, was too ostentatious for a German émigré. He feels too exposed and used by Agnes and Eugene Meyer, both of whom have the ear of the President, by being told what to say and write so as to show gratitude for American hospitality to him and his family. One of the speeches he gives in Chicago is so rousing in defence of freedom and democracy, so aimed to get Congress and the American people behind the country declaring war that it must have surprised him as much as it did me. A later scene in his home, during a string quartet performance by one of his sons and three other beautiful young men, of Beethoven’s Opus 132, captures the constant pull he must have felt between being a writer but also a celebrated ‘man of letters’.
“To move from the bombast of the symphonies to the unearthly loneliness of this quartet, he thought, must have been a journey that even Beethoven himself could not easily comprehend. It must have come through as some strange, tentative, shivering knowledge emerged suddenly into clarity.
Thomas wished he had been able to do this as a writer, find a tone or a context that was beyond himself that was rooted in what shone and glittered and could be seen, but that hovered above the world of fact, entering into a place where spirit and substance could merge and drift apart and merge again.
He had made a great compromise. As he sat, perfectly washed and shaved, in his grand house, in his suit and tie, his family all around, his books arranged on the shelves in his study with the same respect and order as his thoughts and his response to life, he could have been a business man.”
I want to end by showing you two brief passages that made me think again very hard about Ukraine. It is 1949, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Goethe, and Thomas Mann returns to Europe to give a series of lectures ‘trying to connect the thinking of Goethe with the needs of the contemporary world. He could, he thought, preach, using Goethe’s example that in public as much as in private the world should recoil from single ways of seeing things, and begin to think in myriad ways. Goethe’s paradigm could be nourishing to a world threatened by a savage clash of ideologies.’
He and Katia are being driven through the ruins of Frankfurt when “Thomas grips Katia’s hand as they came to a crossing where they could see buildings that were half ruined. Somehow, this sight was more direct and graphic than the scene of total destruction. What had survived, even though the windows were blown out and the roofs fallen in, gave them a sense of what had once been there. He studied a building whose whole front wall had been blown away leaving each floor visible as though for some elaborately layered theatre performance. He could see the radiators still attached to the wall on the first floor, like a parody of their pre-war purpose.’
The book ends where it begins, in his birthplace Lübeck, still partially in ruins, with Thomas recalling another story his mother had told him and his siblings when they were children. It is a story about the most famous musician and composer from that city, Buxtehude, and about the young Johann Sebastian Bach. Briefly, the story is of Bach walking through wind and rain to learn the secret that he feels only Buxtehude knows. It is like a fairy tale and maybe is, because Bach is so travel worn that a kind women lends him clean clothes so he can present himself to the master. The weary traveller eventually arrives in Lübeck, finds the master and is recognised by him by the light behind him, “the light Bach has carried all the way, something glowing in his spirit.
‘But what is the secret?’ Thomas asked.
‘It is called Beauty,’ his mother said. ‘The secret is called Beauty. He told him not to be afraid to put Beauty into his music. And then for weeks and weeks and weeks, Buxtehude showed him how to do that.
Did Bach ever give the woman back the clothes? Thomas asked. Yes he did. On his way home. And on her piano, he played music for her that she thought came from heaven.”