His Wildest Book

He called it his wildest book and expressed his surprise that a man could write his wildest book at his age; he was approaching sixty-nine when he started work on it. The attribute might be appropriate in multiple respects. Firstly, it is a book in which the devil makes an appearance, a wild book per se, and perhaps even more so when a conversation with the devil turns out to be a monologue, with the nonetheless veritable pact with the devil and the verdict imposed upon the self never to love another person. Next, it is a wild book because it tells a true story against a backdrop of wild times, granting insights into the horrific reality in the years of its advent, with the German war defeat looming ever more clearly, and the increasing ravages and final pointless blows against all of humankind that accompanied it. It is also a wild book »as autobiographical literature, as a deeply turbulent work of religious confession that almost cost me my life,« as the author evaluates it himself, that is, as a self-interrogation by an artist weighing up how cold he must be to create the heat necessary for his work. But for Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus must of course and above all have been a wild book because the highly reflective novelist becomes aware, at an advanced age, of possibilities for the novel that once again expand the form, appearing to lie outside the genre’s core territory, somewhere in the never precisely defined margins, overlapping and intersecting area of facts and fictions that seems standard to us in the present day, and which compels surprising realizations from one of the great master novelists, as if he had not himself been encroaching between the fronts for years before.

It is fascinating to read how Mann, on completing the last volume of the Joseph tetralogy, immediately sets about positioning himself, or warming up, if you like, for a new novel, beginning by clearing his desk and emptying its drawers, with only apparently random reading, which he quickly realizes is not random but targeted, as soon as the target has been established. There’s this Faust material in which he saw a possible project all of forty-two years previously, with the strange knowledge or intention of the then young writer at the start of his career that the Faust book was to be his last book. Is it better, then, to postpone it all and turn to other material—he has no shortage of ideas—or to take the risk and challenge fate? No writer ever wants to write their last book, only ever the next, perhaps defeating death once again. One might almost think Thomas Mann himself entered into a pact with the devil when writing Doctor Faustus, and success or failure would have decided whether he was granted another novel afterwards, but by that point he is already in the midst of it, everything long since aimed only at one thing, all life, all reading tumbling into the same giant funnel, put in place, and there is no going back, the thing must be »driven onwards« or »facilitated,« to use his words.

On May 23, 1943, the German writer Thomas Mann, at that point Czechoslovakian by nationality but soon to be an American citizen, at his desk in Pacific Palisades, California, writes the first lines of his novel Doctor Faustus: »The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend,« as its subtitle reveals, and on that very day (in the novel’s reality) that very friend, Serenus Zeitblom by name, sits down in his study in Freising and begins to tell the story. The central knot is thus tied, as obvious as it is ingenious, and the machine is thus set in motion, in which facts and fictions can ignite one another. In exile for more than ten years, the writer chooses as his narrator a rather stolid, old-fashioned scholar living in interior exile and afraid from the outset that his manuscript might fall into the wrong hands, beginning with his sons, both of whom »serve their Führer,« and ending with Serenus Zeitblom considering having his book published in America first, in English translation. It is, from the first, a book that some, perhaps many, do not want in this form, not the worst starting point for a writer, and which is to tumble into a world where culture has so thoroughly destroyed itself that there can be no environment and no possibilities for such books. Where Serenus Zeitblom’s biography of Adrian Leverkühn will be published, we do not know, but we do know that Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus was published in 1947 by the Bermann-Fischer Verlag, based in Stockholm, and that too is part of the novel’s history and the history of Germany.

What to make of Thomas Mann’s claim that it was his wildest book in terms of form? We can examine Serenus Zeitblom’s statements on poetics, which crop up here and there in the novel and attest to the scholar, as he grapples with highly advanced music theory, rather conventional ideas as to the possibilities and impossibilities of narration. He also begins very conventionally, by expanding upon his hero’s forefathers, and then proceeds chronologically, in classic biographer mode, interrupts himself several times and apologizes to the reader when he does interrupt the temporal linearity and leaps ahead to later events. On multiple occasions, he objects to long passages and justifies himself simultaneously for these passages when he wants to do justice to his subject, once even blaming the devil when he could in fact lay the blame on his creator, if he were only aware of him, and emphasizing several times that what he is writing is not a novel, only to sigh once again that one ought to be a novelist. He states that »it was ill-judged of me to try to set down all the trifling minutiae which were the harvest of my observant eye,« because they are not »worth printing,« and then complains of his »eagerness to say everything at once,» which makes his sentences »run over« and causes him to »write badly.« He asks the right questions when he justifies himself to his readers: how he knows everything when he sometimes was not present, but he tends, in his answers, to be less clear, going as far as claiming he was there in one scene although he was not, could at least plausibly say so and repeat what was said in the scene although he had not heard it—if, indeed only if, and that is the conventional aspect of his attitude, he were not a biographer but an omniscient novelist. Thus, he both overestimates and underestimates the possibilities of the novel, which is aware of its obligations to a different kind of truth.

It is one thing when Serenus Zeitblom, writing a biography, insures himself multiply against the traps of verbosity and the falsely fictitious by saying he is not writing a novel; it is a very different matter when Thomas Mann, who is of course writing a novel, what else, claims he were writing a »biography with all its characteristics,« albeit an invented biography. He speaks of »reality transformed into fiction, fiction that absorbs the real, and thus a strangely protean and attractive mingling of the spheres,« notes »a mental alacrity for appropriating what I felt to be my own,« that is, »what belonged to me, that is, to the ›matter,‹« and then finds himself startled after all, »startled by the unnovelistic, strangely biographical quality of what is after all fiction.« And yet he ought to be startled instead by the expectation of the novelistic in a novel, because a development has begun there that ends with the judgement that a novel is novelistic being among the most destructive things that can be said about it.

The writer is in any case much more advanced than his narrator, albeit not as far gone as the devil in the novel, who rejects all fiction; »permissible« is »only the non-fictional, the unplayed, the undisguised and untransfigured expression of suffering in its actual moment,« and Thomas Mann is in the middle of writing his Doctor Faustus when his half-open eyes seem to open all the way, on reading Harry Levin’s James Joyce. Initially, he is concerned that, »alongside Joyce’s eccentric avant-gardism my work was bound to seem like lukewarm traditionalism,« but then he expresses the conviction that they are closer than they may appear in their intention of leaving a certain kind of realism behind them. If Joyce’s novels are not actually novels, or »novel[s] to end all novels,« as he quotes from the book, then the same must apply, in his opinion, »no less to The Magic Mountain, Joseph, and Doctor Faustus.« He links this with the question, in fact more of a conclusion, of »whether it did not look as though, in the territory of the novel, only that comes into question today which is no longer a novel,« and then cites Harry Levin: »The best writing of our contemporaries is not an act of creation, but an act of evocation, peculiarly saturated with reminiscences.« Little or nothing has changed about that to this day.

His wildest book? Perhaps. Certainly, an insane thing with visible weaknesses in its meandering, but with yet more clearly visible strengths in its attempt to abandon narrative conventions and go to extremes, »[the] utmost,« as he demands of all art. His daughter Erika, having pressured him to make cuts throughout the book’s genesis, telegraphed him, as befits a magician, after reading the manuscript: »Read all night. Shall go into newyear reddened eyes but happy heart. Wondering only how on earth you do it. Thanks, congratulations, etc.,« wonderful English in the lasting German night directly after the war. All this can be read in Thomas Mann’s The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, translated by Clara and Richard Winston, and it also contains what Charlie Chaplin allegedly said to the writer at a party, after he’d told him about his novel: »›That's fascinating!‹ he said. ›That may happen to be your greatest book,‹« having read not a single line of it. One could of course dispute that, but one does not necessarily have to.