A “sexual” reading of Death in Venice is too simple because it ignores a primary way of coming to terms with the “love that dare not speak its name,” one elaborated in the poetry and in the life of a writer who spoke intimately to Thomas Mann.
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Yet Platen’s example—as well as Mann’s own—should prompt a deeper response to the charge that “elevated” philosophical references are solely cover for more elemental impulses. In supposing that the complex of ideas about beauty and the role of the artist are parts of Aschenbach’s attempt to hide his own sexuality from himself, and equally parts of Mann’s concealment of his central theme from censorious readers, an over-simple picture of human psychology is taken for granted. We are invited to think of a drive that is in place, fully formed quite independently of the ambient social environment, a drive that cannot be faced directly and is masked by complex cultural constructions. Nietzsche falls victim to this picture when he supposes that the task of the educator is to liberate the “real self,” the “true original sense and fundamental substance of your being,”82 as if there were something completely formed before any educator had gone to work. Platen is less sure, even about the direction of his longings: he wonders if he might have been attracted toward women if his early environment had been different, had he not been sent to military school and grown into adolescence in an all-male society.83 Reasonable skepticism about that particular hypothesis is compatible with appreciating a more general point: cultural complexes of ideas—the cluster of themes about “higher beauty,” for example—might play a double role, giving direction to a more elementary, previously unformed impulse and, at the same time, providing a guise in which that impulse could be accepted. Aschenbach deceives himself when he supposes his fascination with Tadzio stems merely from his apprehension of higher beauty, embodied in the boy—but that does not mean that his homoerotic yearnings are not shaped by a conception of higher beauty and of some ideal relation to it.
What exactly does Aschenbach want from Tadzio? If we assume that he wants, though he dare not admit it, full homosexual relations with the boy, then the self-deception of the Greek idyll is complete. Classical allusions and Socratic paraphrases are just cover for something more carnal. There is, however, an alternative. We may consider whether the same disciplined restraint of his sensibility to beauty, the restraint that underlies his two decades of success as a mature artist, is also felt in the shaping of his erotic yearnings. In the novella, Aschenbach makes increasingly strenuous efforts toward two goals, to observe Tadzio and to elicit from him glances and smiles of recognition. Those goals might be viewed as intermediate aims, first steps toward some more intense intimacy. Or they might not. We can think of Aschenbach as someone whose desire is simply for the sight of Tadzio and for the pleasure, the intoxicating pleasure, he receives when the boy smiles at him. Like (the young) Platen, he may want no more than to be able to gaze on the beloved, to exchange confidences and tears, to give and receive the occasional embrace, to “touch lips” on parting.
Death in Venice records Aschenbach’s daily routine but does not show it. We know that the writer’s life was mostly solitary, but it involved a daily walk, and we can presume that he sometimes encountered youths whose beauty attracted him—hübsche Jungen, as his creator would have called them. Should we suppose the pleasure those visions gave him went unnoted or, at least, was left unanalyzed? Not necessarily. We can imagine him attributing to himself an ambiguous desire, the wish to place a hand on head or shoulder, say, to stop for casual conversation—just the intentions formed when he thinks of “normalizing” relations with Tadzio. Perhaps, on the lido, the attraction is more intense, engendering a sudden recognition of what the ambiguous gesture would mean for him—a recognition brought about in part by Tadzio’s exceptional beauty, in part from the loosening of Aschenbach’s severe discipline.
Aschenbach’s literary development is only sketched, and his psychosexual development must be a matter of complete conjecture. One hypothesis, however, merits exploration. Imagine the young Aschenbach, delicate and intellectually precocious, educated at home, growing into adolescence without many opportunities to play with other children.84 His incipient sexual feelings are directed toward other boys, whom he sees from a distance but with whom he can have little contact, and the desires he forms are pervaded by the pious discipline of his family and the classical education he receives. He forms a synthesis of ideas, combining elements from bourgeois orthodoxy and the Platonic tradition, and the synthesis defines the human relations he wants: a respectable and respectful marriage, without passion; love in the contemplation of beauty—or, at most, in modest contact with it. Aschenbach is a homosexual—we can apply that label if we choose—but his homosexuality takes a specific form, one dominated by the wish to ft his unformed yearnings into orthodox culture, to transcend the split between artist and citizen. That form is as central to his “true original sense” as the first springs of attraction toward those distant boys.
Why should we take that particular hypothesis seriously? For a variety of reasons, some of them resting on clues in Mann’s fiction, some stemming from the form of sexuality revealed in the surviving diaries. Let’s begin with two examples from the fiction.
Death in Venice was, as already noted, a replacement for a novella about Goethe’s late infatuation with a teenage girl. Mann was to return to Goethe later, and, when he did, he avoided the depiction of passion in favor of ruminations on the expression of love. For the first two-thirds of Lotte in Weimar, Goethe is the absent presence, dominant in the conversations of the other characters but offstage. Charlotte Kestner (née Buff), the alleged original for “Werther’s Lotte,” now a widow in advanced matronhood, arrives in Weimar to visit one of her sisters, an event that causes a furry of visits to her in the Hotel Elephant—in the manner of Tristram Shandy, the Main Event, the reunion apparently envisaged by everyone, is deferred for six (out of nine) chapters, as the kindly and tolerant Frau Kestner is unable to escape the hotel.85 At the very end of her final interview—with the poet’s son—the young man remembers the reason for his visit and issues the invitation with which he has been sent. So, at last, we come to Goethe.
We meet the great man in the early morning, in bed, as he muses to himself, in a long chapter punctuated by conversations with a servant and with his son. The Meister-Erzieher meanders through large thoughts, present aspirations, and past events until the smell of raspberries elicits a connection:
It’s a truly lovely aroma and the berries are charming, swelling with juice under the velvety dryness, warm from the fire of life, like women’s lips. If love is the best thing in life, so too in love the best is the kiss—the poetry of love, the seal of ardor, sensual and platonic at once, the middle of the sacrament between the holy beginning and the carnal end, a sweet act, completely in a higher sphere than that [the consummation in intercourse], and with the pure organs of breath and speech—spiritual because still individual and thoroughly differentiated—between your hands the unique head, tipped backward, under the lashes the smiling serious evanescent look into your eyes, and the kiss says “You I love and adore, you lovely unique creature, expressly in the whole creation, you!”—for copulation is anonymous and animal, fundamentally without choice, and night properly covers it. The kiss is happiness, copulation debauchery, God gave it to the serpent. To be sure, you imitated the serpent [du würmtest] energetically at times, but your proper métier is rather happiness and the kiss—the fleeting touch of self-aware passion on evanescent beauty. It is also the difference between art and life, for the abundance of life, of humanity, the making of children, is not a thing of poetry, of the spiritual kiss on the raspberry lips of the world …86
Mann’s Goethe, citizen and artist,87 offers a view of restrained fulfillment we might easily ascribe to the character who replaced him in the early novella. Goethe adds to the complex of ideas about higher beauty the thought that the truly spiritual erotic response is individualized,
concentrated on this being, here and now, in which beauty is, for the moment, most forcefully realized. Tadzio is almost the only human figure in Aschenbach’s field of vision who receives a name.88 Tadzio is the focus of that vision, the object of the gaze, Goethe’s “holy beginning” of the “sacrament.” The writer who gazes might share with the character he displaced the view that the sacrament would be fulfilled in a kiss.
Or consider a much earlier work, the immediate predecessor of Death in Venice. Königliche Hoheit is rightly seen as a fairy tale, one that retells the story of Mann’s courtship of Katia Pringsheim. Mann himself figures as the prince, Klaus Heinrich, born with a withered arm that he tries, with disciplined determination, to conceal; Katia becomes the heiress Imma Spoelmann, the daughter of a wealthy man who has made his home in America but who returns to the declining principality because its mineral waters seem good for his health. The prince woos and wins, convincing Imma to give up her mathematical studies89 to join him in discharging his royal duties, and the old gypsy prophecies are fulfilled: that a prince with one hand would “give more to the nation than others could with two” and that, on a day of great jubilation, the old stock of roses will no longer bloom with a scent of mould and decay but will give off “the most natural and the loveliest” fragrance.90
If we take Mann seriously in claiming that the elite writer puts himself on trial, it is not hard to recognize aspects of the Manns’ long marriage—its successes as well as limitations—behind the fairy tale. A pivotal moment in the relation between Klaus Heinrich and Imma is his admission to her of his deformity. As he stands in front of her, with his usual oblique stance so that the withered arm and hand can easily be concealed behind his hip, he observes the direction of her gaze:
“Have you had that from birth?” she asked quietly.
He went pale. But with a sound, that seemed a sound of release, he sank down before her, while he embraced the strange [seltsam: singular] figure with both arms.91
Imma’s “singularity” at this moment is less odd than the phrase Klaus Heinrich utters at a moment of apparent redemption: he calls her “little sister.”
Those words have come to the prince earlier, as a private designation of Imma92—and they will recur, in the conversation when she accepts his courtship—a “strange” agreement to marry: “‘Little sister,’ he said with a serene expression, and held her a little more tightly in the dance, ‘little bride.’”93 Even as she goes to the altar on her wedding day, that description resonates not in the prince’s words but in those of the narrator: “Her strange little child’s face (Kindergesichtchen) was pale as mother-of-pearl.”94 Imma is taken as a partner, a wife … but not, it appears, as a fully grown woman.
The sexlessness of this relationship is reinforced by the mode through which Klaus Heinrich wins his bride. His first proposals are resisted, as Imma confesses her sense of the distance that the pomp of royalty—in which the prince has been so carefully coached—conveys to her, the coldness he radiates. In true fairy-tale style, he is set a quest, but, faithful to the character of their situation and of his courtship, it is a prosaic one: he is to learn to immerse himself in the affairs of his people. Full redemption comes to Klaus Heinrich through a course of study, particularly in economics, in which Imma participates. He is to become a different kind of prince, one attuned less to protocol than to the issues and policies that affect his subjects. Romance is even subtracted from the fulfillment of the gypsy prophecies. The prince gives greatly to his people because the dowry paid by Imma’s father frees the country from the economic disorder of the recent past. The roses yield their true scent when they are replanted outside the confining mold-infested walls of the palace courtyard, when they are given light and sun.
This marriage may provide happiness, a “severe” or “demanding” happiness, as the final words of the novel suggest,95 but that happiness is founded in respect, in cooperation, in commitment to a wider duty. That is no bad foundation. It might have served a more fortunate—or more venturesome—Platen. It might have been the marriage Aschenbach had, a disciplined partnership unfortunately truncated by his wife’s premature death. It seems to have been a marriage of the sort the Manns lived through their five decades together.
At the core of Klaus Heinrich’s marriage is the moment of revelation, of release, of redemption, when his inborn disability (Hemmung) is disclosed and Imma accepts it. Katia came to terms with the secret her husband took pains to conceal—a secret that plainly tormented him during the period of threatened exposure96—the fact of his attraction toward young men. Her memoirs touch lightly on the visit to Venice during which Mann was struck by the “charming, picture-pretty (bildhübsch)” boy: “He had an immediate weakness for this boy, who pleased him beyond measure, and he always observed him on the beach with his playfellows. He didn’t pursue him around Venice, that he didn’t do, but the boy fascinated him and he thought about him often.”97
The surviving diaries are even clearer about the extent of Katia’s knowledge and acceptance. On October 17, 1920, Mann recorded his appreciation of his wife’s understanding: “Gratitude towards K., because she is not in the least disconcerted or troubled in her love, when she is finally unable to arouse any desire in me and when lying beside her cannot equip me with desire—that is, complete sexual desire—for her. The peace, love, and equanimity with which she accepts this is truly admirable, and thus I do not have to be unnerved by it.”98 That entry was written shortly after Katia had returned after an absence of nearly two weeks—on an evening when Mann had seen his elder son, Klaus, naked, and had been confusedly aroused.99
A few weeks earlier, after celebrating his mother-in-law’s birthday, the couple had come home late, and an attempt at intercourse had failed. Mann had apparently visited his wife’s bedroom.
I am not completely clear about my condition in this respect. It can hardly be called real impotence, but more a matter of the usual confusion and unreliability of my “sex life.” No doubt it’s an annoying weakness, brought about by wishes that are directed “to the other side.” How would it have been if a boy “lay before me”? In any event, it would be unreasonable if I let myself be depressed by a failure, whose grounds are not new to me.100
Several months later, in the spring of 1921, Mann again expresses his appreciation for Katia’s acceptance of him. After an evening out, “… embraces with K. My gratitude for the great kindness in her response to my sexual problems is deep and warm.”101
It is not hard to understand how, at the time of his great distress over the possible publication of the earlier diaries—possibly even more ardent and candid than those of 1918 through 1921—he could be comforted by sitting for hours with Katia, hand in hand, or how through the years for which we have records, his sleeplessness, whether bound up with self-doubt or unwelcome sexual stirrings, could lead him to her room, perhaps to place his head on her shoulder, perhaps to sit by her bed in a chair.102
Yet it is worth asking: what if a boy had lain before him? With the exception of the diaries from 1918 to 1921, all those that remain belong to a period after the threat of exposure, and prudence may have made the later records of his longings less vivid.103 Nevertheless, the entries do not conceal Mann’s sexual proclivities, although they do give it a particular form. They recapitulate the vision-centered restrained expression of homosexual desire hypothesized for Aschenbach. Here is one extensive explanation of a common type of incident. On his daily walk, Mann was gripped by a vision; he saw with “great joy”
a young lad at work in the garden-shop, a little cap on his head, very pretty [hübsch], naked to the waist. The uplift I felt at this so ordinary, so everyday and natural “beauty,” the chest, the swell of the biceps, led me to think again afterwards about the unreal, illusory, and aesthetic character of this inclination, whose aim, it seems, lies in looking on [“gazing”] and “adoration,” and, although it is erotic, neither reason nor the sense aims at any sort of further consummation. It probably con
sists in the influence of the sense of actuality on the imagination, which allows delight, while holding it fast to the visual image.104
Again and again, through the years of the surviving diaries, young men who attend Mann’s lectures, or who come to interview him, or who are children of friends or friends of his children—or who are simply seen on his walks—stir his visual imagination. More than a decade after the observation of the youth at the nursery, he records an unwelcome sexual excitement, partially caused by medicines but partly the result of an “image by the wayside.”105 That phrase was first used several months earlier, when on a walk he had been “captivated by an image at the way-side”—on subsequent days, he saw the “image at the wayside, dressed” (“Das Bild am Wege, dressed”), the “image, undressed,” and the “image, in bright colors.”106 The southern California climate was conducive to these welcome opportunities—as was the seaside.
It is impossible to know the character of the sexual expression Mann wanted or allowed himself in his early romantic attachments, but the diaries do contain comparisons among episodes. Early in 1934, he read the records he had kept in 1927, when, on a family holiday to the island of Sylt, he had made the acquaintance of the seventeen-year-old Klaus Heuser. The Heuser and Mann families encountered one another on the beach, and Mann was sufficiently charmed to invite the youth for a visit to Munich. Recalling these events he finds himself “excited, touched, and captivated” by the memory, viewing them as occasions on which he attained what is truly rare in human life, Happiness. Reflecting on his earlier amorous adventures, he understands them as “taken up in the late and astonishing fulfillment,” so that his previous loves are “consummated, expiated, and made good” in this (last) episode.107 The (apparently positive) effects of his evening reading of passages in his diaries, recording the time Klaus Heuser had spent in the house in Munich, were still felt the next morning.108
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