In 1950, a Briefly Noted reviewer in this magazine made short work of “The Thomas Mann Reader,” an anthology culled from the German novelist’s vast prose output: “The total impression created by this three-hundred-thousand-word monument is that Mann is a major writer, but perhaps not all that major.” A New Yorker subscriber in Los Angeles, residing at 1550 San Remo Drive, in Pacific Palisades, was annoyed. “Yes, I may well be a ‘major author,’ ” Thomas Mann wrote to a friend, “ ‘but not that major.’ ” The creator of “Tonio Kröger” and “Death in Venice” was at the summit of his fame, yet many younger critics dismissed him as a bourgeois relic, irrelevant in the age of bebop and the bomb. Another commentator numbered Mann among those “literary monoliths who have outlived their proper time.”
In Germany, that verdict did not hold. Circa 1950, Mann was a divisive figure in his homeland, widely criticized for his belief that Nazism had deep roots in the national psyche. Having gone into exile in 1933, he refused to move back, dying in Switzerland in 1955. Over time, his sweeping analysis of German responsibility, from which he did not exclude himself, ceased to be controversial. More important, his fiction found readers in each new generation. The accumulation of German-language literature about him and his family is immense, approaching Kennedyesque dimensions. Whatever resistance Mann inspires—Bertolt Brecht voiced the standard objection in calling him “the starched collar”—his chessboard mastery of German prose is not to be denied, nor can a certain historical nobility be taken from him. It is impossible to talk seriously about the fate of Germany in the twentieth century without reference to Thomas Mann.
In America, however, one can coast through a liberal-arts education without having to deal with Mann. General readers are understandably hesitant to plunge into the Hanseatic decadence of “Buddenbrooks” or the sanatorium symposia of “The Magic Mountain,” never mind the musicological diabolism of “Doctor Faustus” or the Biblical mythography of “Joseph and His Brothers.” There was an upsurge of interest in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when the publication of Mann’s diaries revealed the pervasiveness of his same-sex desires. Four biographies appeared, and Knopf released fine new translations of the major novels, by John E. Woods. Then the aura of worthy dullness settled back in place. Two recent books—Colm Tóibín’s novel “The Magician” (Scribner), an absorbing but unchallenging fantasia on Mann’s life; and a problematic reissue, from New York Review Books, of Mann’s conservative manifesto “Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man”—probably won’t disturb the consensus.
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. It is in the nature of monoliths not to grow old.
The Magician was a nickname bestowed on Mann by his children, and it conveys the distance he maintained even with those closest to him. Tóibín’s novel of that title is a follow-up to his previous meta-literary fiction, “The Master” (2004), which delves into the shadowy world of Henry James. Tóibín, with a style as spare as Mann’s is ornate, brings a measure of warmth to an outwardly chilly figure. Tóibín’s Mann is a befuddled, self-preoccupied, not unlikable loner, pulled this way and that by potent personalities around him, the most potent being his wife, Katia Pringsheim Mann, the scion of a wealthy and cultured Jewish family.
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. Mann liked to say that he found material rather than invented it—a play on the verbs finden and erfinden.
Mann’s most dizzying self-dramatization can be found in the novel “Lotte in Weimar,” from 1939. It tells of a strained reunion between the aging Goethe and his old love Charlotte Buff, who, decades earlier, had inspired the character of Lotte in “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” Goethe is endowed with Mannian traits, flatteringly and otherwise. He is a man who feeds on the lives of others and appropriates his disciples’ work, stamping all of it with his parasitic genius. Mann, too, left countless literary victims in his wake, including members of his family. One of them is still with us: his grandson Frido, who loved his Opa’s company and then discovered that a fictional version of himself had been killed off in “Doctor Faustus.”
It is only fitting, then, that Mann should fall prey to his own invasive tactics. The early chapters of Tóibín’s novel re-create the crushes on boys that Mann endured in his youth, in the North German city of Lübeck. We meet Armin Martens, with whom Mann took long, yearning walks. Tóibín writes, “He wondered if Armin would show him some sign, or would, on one of their walks, allow the conversation to move away from poems and music to focus on their feelings for each other. In time, he realized that he set more store by these walks than Armin did.” The question is how much this adds to the parallel narrative of “Tonio Kröger,” which was bold for 1903: “He was well aware that the other attached only half as much weight to these walks together as he did. . . . The fact was that Tonio loved Hans Hansen and had already suffered much over him. Whoever loves more is the subordinate one and must suffer—his fourteen-year-old soul had already received this hard and simple lesson from life.”
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 most memorable sequence of Tóibín’s novel, sexuality and politics are interwoven, with gently wrenching consequences. In the spring of 1933, Mann, then a few months into his exile, was agonizing over the fate of his old diaries, which had been left behind at the family house, in Munich. Because he had renounced right-wing nationalism in the previous decade, the Nazi regime viewed him as a traitor—Reinhard Heydrich wanted to have Mann arrested—and the diaries could have been used to ruin his reputation. Mann’s son Golo had packed them in a suitcase with other papers and had them shipped to Switzerland. For several weeks, nothing was delivered. “Terrible, even deadly things can happen,” Mann wrote in a diary entry in late April. Decades later, it became known that a German border officer had waylaid the suitcase but had paid attention only to a top layer of book contracts. The contracts were sent to Heydrich’s political police, examined, and sent back, whereupon the suitcase was allowed to proceed.
Tóibín vividly evokes Mann’s panic when the diaries went missing. In a wonderful detail, the protagonist asks a Zurich bookshop for a biography of Oscar Wilde: “While he did not expect to go to prison as a result of any disclosures, as Wilde did, and he was aware that Wilde’s life had been dissolute, as his had not, it was the move from famous writer to disgraced public figure that interested him.”