The Wildest Book

If there is one person who has become a standard term, then it is surely Thomas Mann. He is synonymous with the great writer, great family, great novel, great novella, great discipline, and greatly complicated sexuality. He was great during his own lifetime, even his nearest and dearest referring to him as “Z.,” an abbreviation of “der Zauberer” – the magician. Small wonder, then, that I had many vague but great ideas about Thomas Mann as I pulled the yellowed Fischer paperbacks off my parents’ shelves before ever reading a line. I think I expected back then, still at school, for his work to lift me into intellectual spheres that I would unlikely access of my own accord. And was then amazed at how entertaining Felix Krull was, how accessible Death in Venice. I was very glad of Gladius Dei. Though the novella was almost a hundred years old when I read it, I felt it described the city where I grew up with wonderful precision. Munich was “luminous” before me in that paperback, its spine already broken.

As you can tell by the above, I first ventured to read Thomas Mann’s shorter works. After I finished school, no longer living with my parents and their bookshelves no longer at my disposal, I wanted to change that. One of Thomas Mann’s thicker tomes, that was my plan, a book with a character more challenging than following a content thread. I went to a bookstore, and although I do not believe in such great things as providence, it was nonetheless a pleasant coincidence that a new limited special edition of Doctor Faustus happened to be on display. Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain would have been the more obvious choices, but Doctor Faustus suddenly seemed a good idea. Not quite as uber-famous in my eyes, but still with sufficient pages to meet my competitive reading goal; I was interested in its approach to the Faust motif.

In the bookstore back then, I had no idea that Doctor Faustus was the Thomas Mann novel that would speak to me like no other. Born into an operatic family, I had long since abandoned my vague composing ambitions. I wanted to write but I wrote very little; nothing, in fact. I just wanted, wanted so much that the wanting alone burned up all my energy. Had the devil appeared to me and suggested a pact, saying I’d have twenty-four years of productive authorship ahead of me if I renounced love, I would have taken the same route as Mann’s protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn – I would have leapt at the chance.

At that time, reading was my substitute for writing. Doctor Faustus was an extremely gratifying substitute. I found it easy to identify with the narrator Serenus Zeitblom. As Zeitblom reports on his best friend Leverkühn’s fate, he is constantly questioning the quality and form of his protocol. I wished I could hear the passages describing Leverkühn’s compositions set to music. Yet more than the novel itself, what fascinated me was how it had come about. Thomas Mann had the idea for the material forty years before he began writing Doctor Faustus. He read composer biographies in preparation, devoted himself to reading musical theory. He corresponded with Stravinsky and Hans Eisler to learn the foundations of composing. Conversing with Schönberg, he familiarized himself with twelve-tone technique, only to claim in Doctor Faustus – one can safely say audaciously – that Adrian Leverkühn had invented this new composing process. After discussions with Adorno, Thomas Mann reworked the novel’s “musical” passages. Nietzsche was one of the models for the composer character.

I was impressed by the idea of researching and collaborating in this way. The dispute between Mann and Schönberg, who felt spied on by the writer, betrayed in fact, and became a vocal critic of Doctor Faustus after its publication, seemed an exciting anecdote. Secretly, I also found consolation for my early-onset writer’s block, unable ever to put down words on paper. Thomas Mann gave me hope of at least perhaps having some kind of inspiration I might turn into a book by the year 2040.

It didn’t take quite that long in the end for me to formulate my first ideas, thankfully without assistance from the devil. One novel is published, the next almost finished the next time I pick up Doctor Faustus. Not as naively this time; with reservations, in fact. Recent debates questioning the literary canon have left their mark on me, changed my reading practice. And though I certainly didn’t intend to judge a book completed in 1947 and published in 1949 by today’s standards, it is not easy to set aside that critical filter. I had also stumbled across a quote from W.H. Auden, who had entered into a marriage with Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika: “Who’s the most boring German writer?” he once asked in a letter, delivering the answer then and there: “My father-in-law.”

My second reading of Doctor Faustus did indeed get off to a rocky start under these new circumstances. The music passages dragged on. Leverkühn seemed like an unapproachable enigma of a protagonist. Zeitblom remained the awkward biographer doubting his own abilities, which cannot hide the fact that the novel has weaknesses not down to the narrator. The passages dealing with wartime Germany seem particularly wooden. It feels almost tangible that they were written in faraway southern California. From the temporal distance of the 21st century, we can still discuss at length whether it was justifiable in 1947 to conjure up a Germany, even by means of a fictional narrator, that had been overcome by some kind of inexplicably evil power. The representation of the Jewish characters is problematic; even Mann himself later saw the “risk of an anti-Semitic effect.”

The hurdles to summoning up the same enthusiasm for the book as on first reading were not small, in other words. Yet then I realized, admittedly to my own surprise: even now, I would still give my younger wannabe-writer self Doctor Faustus. We often learn far more from an imperfect novel with problematic aspects than from what we call masterpieces, almost perfect works that are therefore hermetically sealed to us. We can admire them, but they don’t sharpen our perspective for our own writing nearly as well.

It is not only a focus on content flaws that trains the writerly eye, in this case. En passant, in Doctor Faustus Thomas Mann exposes the skeleton upon which novels are built. Usually, this skeleton is concealed beneath the flesh of the plot: the citations, the sources, the reinterpretations of motifs. In Doctor Faustus, however, Thomas Mann has his narrator reflect on his own sectioning and chapter length. All these bones, which the writer consciously puts on display, are useful material and tools for writing a novel.

But my re-reading also went beyond such hands-on insights. With every newly read page, I discovered a dimension of the novel that had previously remained concealed from me. Is it possible, I wondered, that Thomas Mann is narrating his way in seven-mile-boots into the postmodern, in Doctor Faustus? There are certainly indications: the novel’s almost unbounded intertextuality, Zeitblom’s narrative voice interwoven with metafictional elements, the dissolution of the concept of genius in the story, the transfer of the mythical Faust material into a specific psychosis, which in turn is triggered by a sexually transmitted disease, the sudden change in style to dialogue between Leverkühn and the devil – an alleged written record by the protagonist himself, which the narrator “cites” for many pages, the subtle irony, which Thomas Mann said he used to “cheer up the dark material.”

Can it be, then, that Thomas Mann – at a time when he might have rested on his laurels – ventured a form of writing for which an epochal term was yet to be created? Did he sense as much when he wrote in his essay “The Writing of Doctor Faustus” of having written his “wildest” book so far at the age of seventy?

Wildness. Perhaps not the most obvious association with Thomas Mann. All the more impressive, then, that he still had the will to try out something new in his penultimate work, after decades of writing. Such a leap into the unknown, the courage to experiment, to work on hard-to-grasp material—that is the spirit that inhabits Doctor Faustus. That is the reason why the novel maintains its significance for me, to this day. That is something we can imitate: constantly challenging ourselves anew to write the wildest book.